Haiti’s cultural heritage faces quake extinction
Brilliant colors shine through the ruins of the Cathedrale de la
Sainte-Trinite, fragments of wonderful murals that were the climax of
Haiti’s artistic explosion 60 years ago.
For gallery owner Toni Monnin, the loss of irreplaceable frescoes by
the first generation of Haitian master painters is the most powerful
symbol of the cultural devastation wrought by the January 12 earthquake.
|
Haiti in brief |
| * Poorest
country in Americas
* Country’s highest point is Pic
la Selle
* First independent nation in
Latin America
*First black-led republic in the
world
* Faced an earthquake on January
12.
* Reportedly more than 150,000
people were killed and buried later in mass graves |
“There was this explosion of art in Haiti after the Second World War
like nowhere else in the world,” explained Monnin, a native Texan. “It
is a country of painters and artists and it is a phenomenon that exists
only here in Haiti.” In the capital Port-au-Prince, a teeming mass of
humanity fights to recover from unimaginable horror, but the backdrop is
a wall of paintings, vibrant colors splashing canvas and somehow masking
the smell of death and loss.
Haiti could lay claim to having a greater concentration of artists
than any other country, but beyond them, it is the buildings, the
history, the entire cultural heritage of the Caribbean nation that is at
risk.
“What we have been trying to do with the minister of culture is raise
awareness of the need to protect the heritage because once it is gone,
it is gone,” Teeluck Bhuwanee, head of the UNESCO mission in Haiti, told
AFP.
Recorded history dates back to 1492, when Christopher Columbus
discovered the island which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic and
named it La Isla Espanola, which became Hispaniola.
Artifacts from pre-Columbian times, the era of the Taino Indians,
survived the quake largely unscathed at the National Museum of Art,
fortuitously located underground.
But many important sites, born out of Haiti’s compelling history of
slavery and revolution, were not so fortunate, and Bhuwanee fears
culture has been forgotten in the government’s grand reconstruction
plan.
“In Port-au-Prince, there are about 30 sites that have been
identified as really in danger of total destruction or total extinction.
Two of them have already been razed,” he said.
The capital is a graveyard of fallen cathedrals, libraries and
cultural sites. Invaluable private collections were also decimated by
the quake.
Not a single line on culture Despite the extent of the loss, the word
culture is absent from the draft Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA)
drawn up by the government in conjunction with the international
community.
“We’ve been fighting to get the PDNA to include culture but when the
executive summary came out, there was not a single line on culture, not
a single dollar for the re-foundation of culture in this country,”
Bhuwanee said.
AFP |
