By Mr. Nick Smith

I think about Gerard Chenet. You never heard of Gerard Chenet, if you are not a connoisseur of Haitian art. At least, I doubt if you have heard of him, but you should have heard of him. Here is a link to his obituary, if you have a translator, or you read french:

Why do I think about Mr. Chenet? He built the artist’s commune, resort, and restaurant where we ate dinner last night. He was a friend of Aaron Alter, and a man of vision, but that is not why I think of him. I think of him, because of his relocation to Senegal from Haiti. Haiti, or St. Domingue, as it was called as a French colony, was a particularly lethal place for slaves. Half of people taken there on slave ships died within the first twelve months after arrival. It took luck, strength, or God’s will to survive in the sugarcane fields that made St. Domingue the most valuable territory in the world. What makes Gerard Chenet’s relocation to Senegal so interesting to me is that his ancestors probably traveled to St. Domingue from Goree Island off the city of Dakar. The French Transatlantic Slave trade was much more concentrated than the English Transatlantic Slave trade, and thus, the vast majority of slaves taken to St. Domingue came through Dakar, and Goree Island, in particular. Looking out from the beautiful cliff Sobo Bade sits upon, Gerard Chenet could see Goree Island in the distance. His resort sits in the heart of Toubab Dialo, the Foreigner’s Hill, where Les Francais settled when they first colonized Senegal. So, Monsieur Chenet could sit in the heart of the locale of his captors, and look at the door through which his ancestors walked, never to return.

I hope some day my children will stand in Toubab Dialo and look out at Goree Island to see where the ancestors of their mother once walked through the door through which they never returned. I wonder what they will think knowing this: their mother’s ancestors walked through those doors, and were taken to the plantations not very different from those owned by their father’s ancestors.

The French their father speaks traces back to those very plantations in St. Domingue, just as the Creole their mother speaks does. And so, I think of Gerard Chenet. I wonder if he thought of the complexity of the history of this world, and the road his ancestors traveled to get him to his little paradise in Toubab Dialo. Hopefully soon, I will bring my children to this place, and I will give them the same opportunity to think about the cosmic route that delivers them as ancestors of slaves and masters to the same place.