A gang leader in Haiti is accused of massacring older people after his son falls ill and dies
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A gang leader who controls a key port in Haiti's capital is accused of massacring older people and Vodou religious leaders in his community to avenge his son's death, according to the government and human rights organizations that estimate more than 100 killed.
Reports on the number of dead in Port-au-Prince can vary wildly in a country where such killings often occur in gang-controlled, largely inaccessible areas.
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Hogs for the Cause, turtle parade and more things to do in New Orleans
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At the Gardner, Fabiola Jean-Louis summons ancient Vodou spirits
There's something vaguely holy about 'Lwa,' Fabiola Jean-Louis's softly menacing effigy of a Haitian deity posed in a flood of daylight at the Gardner Museum. The handful of steps leading up to its perch are dotted with candles, altar-like; the gothic arch that frames the piece echoes stained glass windows in any Catholic church, anywhere. Spiritual reference matters to Jean-Louis, who was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. But the sword in the figure's hands, offered to the viewer as though a sacred object, tells us the spirits conjured here are of a different sort. 'Lwa' is, in Haitian Creole, a Vodou spirit of both grace and vengeance. On the sword are the words 'PRAN TET,' loosely translated from Haitian Creole to mean 'take heads.' With its gilded robes, radiant crown, and gold-encrusted body, the figure is darkly beautiful — apt, perhaps, given the fractures of its land of origin. It's the centerpiece of 'Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom,' Jean-Louis's first major museum exhibition, just opened at the Gardner. Jean-Louis, who emigrated to Brooklyn as a child with her family and still lives there, was an artist-in-residence here in 2023; the Gardner proposed the exhibition shortly after, and Jean-Louis got to work. The show now occupies all three of the museum's temporary exhibition spaces, including its towering facade commission. Advertisement Left: Fabiola Jean-Louis, 'Govi Vessel Shrine,' (with niche) 2024, and 'Ode to Merab: Study of Ateni Sioni Frescos,' 2023. ©2024 Fabiola Jean-Louis. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Materially, Jean-Louis' work often has the presence of stony devotional objects, exhumed from the sea- bottom and crusted with coral and shell, an accretion of the ages. Their very nature makes it all the more astonishing to learn that she works almost exclusively with papier-mache, delicate and ephemeral; she crafts the weight of an ancient cosmology almost out of thin air. The wraithlike 'Peregrine,' 2024, sprouts flowers from one of its silty wings; poised somewhere between life, death, and resurrection, the piece is a loose self-portrait of Jean-Louis herself. 'Lwa,' made in 2021-22, is an exception to most of the 40-some pieces here; almost all were made in the past year, specifically for this show. The piece does, however, strike a tone. Jean-Louis went to Catholic school in the United States, but as an adult, she became more deeply entranced by her Haitian heritage. Its history carries broad symbolic weight: The first land to be colonized in the Americas, Haiti was also first to abolish slavery, in 1804, after more than a decade of enslaved revolt against the island's French colonists. 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Vodou is at the center of Jean-Louis's particular mythology, which she casts as ancient history: In an anteroom preceding the main gallery, earthy alcoves arrayed in a grid contain spot-lit objects, which evoke notions of a shrine replete with grave goods unearthed from watery tombs. Many are tiny vessels made, in Jean-Louis's imagining, to safeguard the spirits of the departed — ornate urns in dusty clay tones. Others evoke notions of mysteries lost to the ages; one alabaster-hued panel embeds a god-like figure amid crystals and shells, like a devotional to a household god. Fabiola Jean-Louis, "Out of Obsidian" (L) and "Peregrine," both 2024, in "Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom" at the Gardner Museum. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Mystery, I think, is a key to Jean-Louis's work. She proposes a holistic long-view composed of known fragments, with her imaginative framework as the connective tissue. Nothing is certain, as the country's own fractious story can attest; even now, amid an eruption of gang violence there, Jean-Louis's work is dream-like aspiration of something solid to cling to amid the chaos. Advertisement As much as they might seem like artifacts, her pieces evoke ideas unstuck in the material world. 'An Entry Point to Heaven' is the title of several pieces here, each of them tethered to the unknown depths of the sea. '#3,' with its undulating frame of what might be desiccated seaweed, glitters with rivulets of aquamarine studded with tiny shells; '#2,' beside it, cradles an opaque turquoise pool in its delicate embrace. Fabiola Jean-Louis, 'An Entry Point to Heaven #1,' 2024. ©2024 Fabiola Jean-Louis. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston Passageways are important to Jean-Louis, a notion she returns to again and again; a pair of sculptures towers at odd angles in the main gallery, almost like guardians for 'Lwa,' just beyond. Patterning them with shells, she imagines them as undersea sirens, beckoning to the other side. She calls them 'Mermaid Portals,' a loose term for figures that are only semi-human. They're stunning and enigmatic, much like the vision she's crafted for her homeland. In the Vodou faith, spirits of the ancestors — lwa , writ large — dwell in the deep sea, surfacing when called forth by the living for guidance — or vengeance. The abyss is their home; it calls to us all, eventually. Jean-Louis proposes a choice: Where it leads — to the endless deep, or somewhere beyond it — is a matter of faith, or lack thereof. WATERS OF THE ABYSS: AN INTERSECTION OF SPIRIT AND FREEDOM Advertisement Through May 25. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 25 Evans Way. 617-566-1401, Murray Whyte can be reached at
Washington Post
09-12-2024
- Washington Post
A gang leader in Haiti is accused of massacring older people after his son falls ill and dies
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — A gang leader who controls a key port in Haiti's capital is accused of massacring older people and Vodou religious leaders in his community to avenge his son's death, according to the government and human rights organizations that estimate more than 100 killed. Reports on the number of dead in Port-au-Prince can vary wildly in a country where such killings often occur in gang-controlled, largely inaccessible areas.
