In Champ Mars lies the remains of the crushed palace looking like a broken wedding cake along side which there are thousands and thousands of tents. The ones on the outer parameters facing the main boulevard have set up shop providing, barbers, beauty salons, seamstresses, vendors of food and other necessities. Rising above the devastation of Port-au-Prince in twisted irony, the three heros of the revolution remain standing – Toussaint L’Overture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henri Christophe. Do they speak of a fallen people or to a people on the verge of rising once again? The weirdest structure still standing is the “2004” cone tower soaring above the whole city and built by President Aristide. No one seems to know what exactly it represents but I take it to be a symbol of the “2nd Haitian revolution” – the flood of Lavalas. It speaks, you are trying to kill us but we are not dead yet, there is a 3rd revolution to come. In the now infamous recitation of Toussaint L’ Ouverture on his forced exile to France, Aristide spoke on his similar forced exile in January 2004
“In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty…..It’ll shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many” [quoted from “Create Dangerously by Edwidge Danticat]