Squaring Off's blog

"The Invisible Wounds of Exile": Stones in the Sun Haitian director Patricia Benoît: Interview

Liza Béar: I assume you have lived in Haiti at one point.

Patricia Benoît: I left as a child in the sixties.

LB: How old were you when you left?

PB: Six.

LB: Did you go back a lot?

PB: I’ve been back, yeah. My family was exiled, but then about…13 years  after leaving I went back for a first visit and  [since then] I’ve been back a lot. I’ve done a lot of work in Haiti. I’ve done documentation work with grassroots groups. I’ve done theater in a school with kids in a sort of very disadvantaged neighborhood, and kids who were not in school.

The story that I’m telling had been brewing in my mind for a very long time.  And it’s a story that I felt I could only tell through fiction, because I wanted to talk about something that was…very intimate. And I don’t think I could have done that in a documentary.

One of the things that I wanted to talk about was  the invisible wounds of exile. And that’s something that I’ve lived with ever since I was little. There’s  that initial trauma that sends people out of their countries of origin. And I wanted to look  at how that trauma, the pain of that trauma sort of radiates, in small and large ways. And how it affects people in their intimate lives.

LB: Pain is something that everyone wants to forget. They don’t want to keep it in the social and civil society.

New York, November 2nd 2012--On Avenue C and Tenth Street in Loisaida, the power has just returned after four days of power outage following superstorm Sandy, which made landfall on the New Jersey shore on October 29. Compounded by a full moon and colliding with a low pressure system from the mid west, the storm sent a 14.5 foot surge up both the Hudson and East Rivers. According to Jerry the Pedler, featured in this video, immediately after the flood and power outage caused by the surge, resourceful squatters took their barbecue grills off the roof and emptied their refrigrerators of meat and other foodstuffs that might spoil and set up an open kitchen on the sidewalk. Other neighbors contributed and the ad hoc operation fed about 200 people everyday for four days. On Friday, the FEMA trucks finally showed up on Tenth Street between Ave C and D. However, in recognition of the local community effort, they passed on boxes of A Pack Emergency Rations, bottled water and soda to the street kitchen. Contributing the festivities on Friday evening were the Rude Mechanical Orchestra and two fire dancers.