KORIDÒ PRIZON FANM, I Remember…!

To El Pozo, to Matania… And to my son who played football with the children of Koridò Prizon Fanm! One day, in the middle of a conversation, my friend Daniel, his brow furrowed with the anguish of this faltering country, asked me, his voice calm, as if weighted with gravity: — Yves, tell me… Where did we slip to fall so low? I didn't answer right away. I let the silence settle, like laundry hanging in the wind of a wandering morning. Then, in a slow, almost whispered voice, I breathed to him: — Have you ever heard of Koridò Prizon Fanm? I was seven years old. It was the first time I was taken there. I was a child consumed by anxiety that gnawed at my nails. That's why often, my tongue was dotted with small lesions: silent stigmas of a childhood without peace. A child entrusted to an aunt, while his mother sought elsewhere in an exile too distant to heal the here, a little hope. For these lesions, my aunt would take me to Madame Bèstière, across from the old Bel-Air cinema, or to gran’n Yaya, at the very end of Koridò Prizon Fanm, between Rue des Remparts and Rue Saint-Martin. There, hope is drunk in bitter concoctions, and ancestral gestures replace diagnoses. But this corridor is not just a place. It is a concrete gorge where history rushes in. A one-kilometer-long gut, longer than the one leading to Fort National, older than the passages of Lakou Chato or Bruny combined. A corridor of shadows, misery, stifled cries, fleeting glances. It is Haiti in miniature. A country caught between two walls, where every step resonates like the clinking of invisible chains. A world in lockdown, where one survives amidst insults, chamber pots, urine stolen behind sheet metal, and sexes hanging in the soaked silence of a communal latrine. At eight in the morning, Koridò Prizon Fanm awakens in its cruel theater: a woman in a nightgown cries out her distress over a missing note, a modern slave child empties the night's filth, a girl, with a lost gaze, urinates shamelessly behind a neighbor's fence, as if to silently cry: « I am here. I exist. Without rights, without dignity. » It is also there that Anita and Asefi, women of the shadows, live. Maids in the villas above, mothers in the ghettos below. Their children attend an evening school, not far from Rue Porcelaine. Every day they cross invisible borders to catch a glimpse of the bosses' children. And in painful silence, they ask themselves: Are we, too, the children of this nation? Homesickness, Daniel, germinated there. For more than half a century, it has grown between these walls. Misery is its only fresco, its only alphabet. Here, children are born, live, and die without witness, without trial, without prayer. So, if you truly want to understand where we slipped, come walk this kilometer of corridor. You will see: it is the canvas of our collapse. And if we do not change our paradigm, we will continue to dig. No longer the ground… But our own disappearance. « Papa Loko is good, let me go.
We are butterflies, we will bring them news» Koridò Prizon Fanm is taken from an upcoming novel titled « Inventory of My Territories» Yves Lafortune