"During
the years of dictatorship in Haiti, the government gangs, known as the Tonton
Macoutes, roamed about the island killing dissenters, and ordinary and innocent
people, at their leisure. Not content with the slaughter of one person for
whatever reason, they instituted an especially cruel follow-through: no one was
allowed to retrieve the dead lying in the streets or parks or in doorways. If a
brother or parent or child, even a neighbor ventured out to do so, to bury the
dead, honor him or her, they were themselves shot and killed. The bodies lay
where they fell until a government garbage truck arrived to dispose of the
corpses -- emphasizing that relationship between a disposed-of human and trash.
You can imagine the horror, the devastation, the trauma this practice had on
the citizens. Then, one day, a local teacher gathered some people in a
neighborhood to join him in a garage and put on a play. Each night they
repeated the same performance. When they were observed by a gang member, the
killer only saw some harmless people engaged in some harmless theatrics. But
the play they were performing was Antigone, that ancient Greek tragedy
about the moral and fatal consequences of dishonoring the unburied dead." Make no mistake, this young writer said: art is
fierce." ~ Toni Morrison, The
Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations