Auto tune pop music is sickening

Desperate Men. Sometimes things in your mind coalesce into clarity at really odd times. You can be trying to sleep in yet another hostel room, a memory will pop into your head, and suddenly what was really happening at that exact moment becomes crystal clear. The context, the colours and sounds, the diluting details wash away and a realisation of what was really happening hits you like a shot of rum on a hot day. Or maybe my brain is just ascribing meaning to something where meaning doesn’t exist. We’ll see.

There was a Haitian guy, I don’t remember his name, who used to hang out at Joe’s next to our base. He wasn’t one of the volunteers. He was friends with some of them and he tried to sell me pages of English words translated into Creole a few times, because I expressed an interest in learning some Creole when I first got to Haiti. The amount of time and effort to write a page of translations…it must have been an arduous task for a man who could barely write at all, let alone in English. I was tempted but laziness and a general tightness with cash prevented me from going through with it. But mainly, when I checked I discovered many of the translations were somewhat…flexible.

I should describe Joes since it was one of two main venues for relaxing we had in Leogane. There were a few smaller ones like Guttermans (situated in a gutter, later renamed Little Venice, I guess because of the picturesque canal running past it). We actually demolished and removed Gutterman’s house for him. There was also Toiletman, next to a toilet,, and more recently there was Left Bar, reached by turning left when you walked out of the base. It raised the bar for roadside bars (sorry) in Leogane, because he installed a tarp to sit under. He also initiated a price war, dropping his beers to 30 Ghoudes during the world cup soccer. Well, Joes is a basic place. It’s more or less an open square space, with the grey rendered walls of the HODR compound on one side, an L shaped veranda, with the fourth side open. There are square tables with plastic tablecloths and metal fold out chairs. At the corner of the L shape is a bar where can buy all sorts of drinks-Prestige beer, Barbancourt rum…and that’s it actually. Barbancourt rum sends you sideways. It sent me sideways literally. I could never walk straight on the stuff. Not ideal considering I lived on a rooftop with no fence. It‘s great stuff, brings out the obnoxious in you!

The veranda’s are lit with bright orange mood lights and there are murals painted on the wall. One thing Haitians do well is loud fucking speakers. The speakers in the bar are 5 foot tall and weigh about 90 kilo’s each and there are 6 of them. Huge woofers topped by giant horns. It’s not overkill, it’s overserialkill. These things are brutal. You don’t go to Joes to have a conversation because it is impossible, reggaeton or autotuned pop/rap music overwhelms everything.

As an aside, I can’t stand autotuned pop/rap/hip-hop music. If there is an aural equivalent to explosive mud guts, this is it. If auto-tuned music was a hamburger from McDonalds, the beef patty would have a pus pimple in it and there would a tangle of grey (or red!) pubes stuck to the pickle. Worse, they would have forgotten the cheese-I fucking hate it when that happens! I would definitely take that burger back, and as every respectable bulimic can tell you, at least you have the option of throwing up garbage food but you can’t unhear terrible music, ever.

It’s enough to make your ears bleed. Maybe it was the speakers and not the rum which sent everyone staggering all over the place. Let’s run with that. I’m sure there must be a law which restricts Haiti to only having 20 different songs in the entire country-although if it was a law it would be broken, so maybe it’s just a cultural thing-let’s only play twenty different songs this year! They would play reggae and rap all night every night, except for Wednesdays which was reggae night, and then they’d only play reggae. And every time they would finish on ‘No Woman No Cry’, the unofficial Haitian national anthem.

Thursdays was rap and hip hop night when the place filled up with gangsta’s and I felt daggy in my short footy shorts and y-fronts. Nobody saw the y-fronts of course but everyone can see a gangsta’s undies because his pants do up under his ass cheeks. Y-fronts wouldn’t cut it, especially the ones I wore because I bought them at Wal-Mart where the sizes are actually smaller than what they are in Australia, so they were a little snug shall we say. In fact they still are a little snug-I’m wearing a pair right now-it‘s more a squashed lunch than a cut lunch down there. Anyway that was all the music variations, except for Tuesdays now that I think about it, which is salsa night, when they play salsa tunes, and probably some reggae for good measure. Either way the repertoire of songs is very select. They definitely know what they like!

That all said I really enjoyed drinking at Joe’s, (probably in spite of the entertainment) and I really like Joe, they handsome chap who owns the bar. He is a top guy-very amiable and while I was suspended he let me sit on his veranda and gave me beers to drink in the sun for free, while I played the guitar and everybody else worked. He is Haitian and drove taxi’s in NYC for 25 years. He was in fact an award winning taxi driver, according to himself, which I find impressive in the extreme. He tapped into the fact the food at HODR base doesn’t quite qualify as gourmet and started making pizzas and selling them to all the hungry volunteers. Those pizzas were delicious, and made him a fortune. They were made in a bakery between the toolshed and the kitchen of the HODR base. I have great memories of that bar because of its unusual quirks and I miss it, and I most certainly miss the people I drank with there.

This Haitian guy was there every night. He was about six foot and athletic skinny, and had a brown fleck in the white of his left eye, like a blood speck that never filtered out. The whites were really more of a sallow yellow, and he spoke English to a reasonable degree. He would always ask me about the girls on base, especially brown Sarah, where is she what is she doing, so to get him to drop it I started telling him Sarah was my wife. The next day he started asking about someone else and I told him she was my wife too…and he nodded as if to say “I know something strange is going on here but I don’t know exactly what…”

Soon I was up to seven or eight wives. Since even the very concept of having seven wives was filling me with panic (and he was starting to regard every thing I said with suspicion) I told him I didn’t have a wife at all. He shook his in a disappointed, angry way. I had told him an untruth and more importantly diverted him from his infatuation with Sarah, who all the Haitian guys held in very high regard. Now he’d been daydreaming needlessly and unfaithfully about other girls for a couple of weeks.

These young men would hang around in the yard outside the bar, sitting on the fence watching the volunteers drink and be social inside. At first I found it a bit creepy, all these guys staring intently at us while we relaxed. Then it was strange and then I just ignored it all together. Some of them would venture inside to dance but the reason they sat and watched is because they couldn’t afford the 40 Goudes Joe charged for a beer. That’s about US80c. Over time, more Haitians came into the bar and partied with the volunteers. I think this was due to the local volunteer program which helped us integrate more with the Haitians.

When they did come inside to dance the result was spectacular. If it was rap or reggae they would form circles and have dance off’s. These Haitian guys can really break it down (I believe that‘s the term). The girls amongst the international volunteers also loved to dance so often the Haitian guys would round up all the women (come to think of it…it was usually the other way around!) and the dance floor would crank. There were two eleven year old Haitian boys. They could both dance as well as anyone I’ve ever seen-little Michael Jackson’s in training-and had no qualms about grabbing the young female volunteers and twisting, grinding, pelvic thrusting and doing various other lustful things that I almost certainly do not approve of...The girls, they absolutely loved it of course. I shudder to think what the reaction would be if I was dirty dancing with a ten year old girl, but anyway, they were talented little guru’s. They would have the most intent looks in their eyes as they sweat it up with the excited blancs, who’s shirts would cling to their bodies and hair would drip with perspiration, their skin shining in the lamplight. It’s easy to remember the grins on everybody’s face as they swirled in the humid night air.

It was great to watch, but never to participate in-I have a profound ego and as such there is no way I am engaging in any activity where a ten year old can completely disgrace me. Unless it‘s Xbox-then I don’t care. Plus I don’t like dancing of course.

The reason I described blood-fleck guy before is because I remembered his eyes when he spoke to me. Not the off-white colour of his eyeballs, but the earnestness in his face whenever he came to speak to me. He wanted to teach me Creole. He wanted to find out if I was staying long in Haiti, and if I liked his country. He wanted to know about the girls at HODR-did they know who he was? What he really, achingly wanted was for me, and the rest of the volunteers (especially the female ones I suppose), to see him as having some intrinsic value-to demonstrate that who he was and what his country has given him, made him into, was impressive or interesting to the international volunteers.

I was thinking of all of this the other day while lying in bed, over a month after I’ve left it all behind. I realised that maybe these young men were staring at us because they so keenly want, no, need the opportunity to be like us. Not to be like a privileged kid from Sydney’s leafy North Shore (like me) but to live in a society that allows them to at least contemplate their potential, or failing even that modest goal, to live in a country that lets them improve their lives, if that is what they want to do. They are desperate to be educated, to understand the concepts that we take for granted, to live the sophisticated existence that we enjoy in the West. We lead these lives without ever even thinking about how far our societies have come, and the prospects we’re afforded in them. Why do we have these opportunities which they don’t have? We can blasé about things they could never contemplate attaining.

I doubt these young Haitian males would articulate things like that. It’s probably not something they dwell on, perhaps in part because it would be a futile and frustrating line of thought. I could be completely wrong as well, who knows. I wonder what the other volunteers think.

As I lay in bed that night, Joe’s bar wafted through my consciousness, the people, nui’s and blancs dancing, drinking together, the ear puncturing music. It swirled through my mind amidst memories of the heat, the flies and mosquitoes, the ice cold beer and potent rum, the concrete wall of the HODR base and the murals of Haitian coastal panoramas. I was reminiscing about these things and the coloured lights along the veranda and the pitch black streets beyond Joe’s, when the truth revealed itself, coalescing out of the memories in my reverie. Blood-fleck’s eyes, his body language, his words, his persistence-his desire.

It seems obvious now-he was a desperate man. He was clinging to the hope and desire of a better life. The sort of existence that the international volunteers gave him a glimpse of when we celebrated finishing a days work in Joe‘s bar. A moment of insight and it was crystal clear, even though I never bothered thinking about it while I was there.

I don’t think it’s all of them or even most of them. There could be a dozen reasons guys like him behaved the way they did. That isn’t the whole story either. Most of the time he probably just wanted to be friendly. But I know what I saw in this guys eyes and in his actions and I know what was underlying his curiosity, a force just beneath the surface driving his behaviour. On reflection there were others like him.

Some people will read this and disagree completely. I think those that would show a lack of empathy. After all it is just blind luck that we were born to privilege and my Haitian mates were born to poverty.

Myself and the other volunteers became close to the Haitians we worked with because the only things we had to judge each other on was our work ethic, integrity and generosity. But this guy, he didn’t work with us and he didn’t know that. So he wondered about us and how we judged his countrymen.

Or maybe it’s just a conceit I have, a privileged rich kid from the West, thinking these people want to have the opportunities we do. That’s possible. But I doubt it. Who wouldn’t want to have the options we do? Perhaps only bead selling hippies from Guatemala would suggest it’s not good to at least have the options we do in the developed world. That makes them the human equivalent of autotune pop songs, inedible, like that burger with no cheese on it. Either way we should count ourselves lucky. I’ve seen, the HODR people have seen what the have-nots have. Mostly, it’s just hope and determination. It will be a long road for Haitians but we’ve seen who the Haitians really are. They can get there in the end.