It’s been a surreal week, beginning with a kind of exultation: an interview with Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott felt like an audience with an eternal unmatched greatness with footfalls of Homer, Virgil, Dante. He is the author of “Omeros,” the poet with the audacity to take on Homer, and in doing so, surpassed the Odyssey. (But that’s a story by itself) Then came the horror of Haiti, a natural disaster of unimaginable biblical proportions hurtling its long shadow of death, suffering and destruction. The death toll from Haiti’s earthquake is estimated at 50,000, with three million-plus people injured, homeless, living like ghosts among the dead, because of the fear of aftershocks, refraining from re-entering even habitable homes.

Finally, a reluctant and timorous hope. Derek Walcott’s one regret was that he had not conveyed forcefully enough the animation of our people, the jubilance that neither poverty nor loss could smother. I saw the animation Walcott spoke of, in young Trinidadian performers singing as sweetly as angels at the Prime Minister’s reception for journalists and saw two sides of our Caribbean coins. Even as the bodies of the thousands were lined up on the side of the road, as people screamed for their children, whose hollow voices rose up in anguished response, as the drains literally ran with blood, even as the streets were called the roads of the dead, where bodies lay putrefying, where some two million people wandered in a daze looking for their families, injured and homeless, with crushed legs and homes.

There were reports of the voices of men and women singing a “beautiful sound in the middle of a horrible tragedy.” It could not have happened to a more vulnerable country, poor, illiterate, ravaged by corrupt regimes and repeatedly lashed at by hurricanes. In a supreme twist of irony, despite being the country in the Western Hemisphere to have a successful slave revolution, it has a history of oppression by dictators, including Francois Duvalier, and of foreign intervention primarily from France and the USA.

Ravaged state

It is a buckled country, inhabited by some nine million people, in which half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, and as much as 70 per cent of the population is illiterate. (Which makes monetary aid meaningless for ordinary people, since the people will never be tooled to run their own country.) Haiti’s ravaged state is dramatically apparent from the air. The portion of the country, which it shares with the lush rain- forested Dominican Republic, is recognisable by its half—a shorn landscape, reduced to dust as Haitians in their poverty have cut trees, burnt coal, made space for shanty towns.

Tuesday, 12th January, 2010: The scenes of devastation after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake rocked Haiti were the worst in the country in 200 years, toppling buildings in and around the capital, Port-au-Prince. Here is a cobbled reconstruction from eyewitness reports. With the initial quake came a blanket of dust that completely covered the city and obscured it for about 20 minutes. Those few seconds eventually wiped out 50,000 lives. Thousands of buildings, from the National Palace and UN peacekeeping headquarters to humble stick-and-mud shanties, were destroyed by the quake which struck with no warning. By Wednesday, bodies lined the streets of Port-au-Prince as Haitians frantically searched for survivors in the rubble of their devastated capital city. People were buried and the injured crying for help.

Failed state

By Thursday, there were fears that many more would die of thirst. Water was more precious than gold. The roads were cluttered with hungry, homeless people. The failed state had collapsed completely, a ruined port and an overwhelmed airport. There were hundreds of crumpled buildings and little heavy machinery to pull out the injured and dying. Desperate survivors set up roadblocks of corpses in Port-au-Prince to protest the lack of emergency aid reaching them.