Konbit Pou Ayiti

One of Haiti’s most valuable resources is the rich and varied art being created throughout the country. Although most Haitian artists operate outside the formal economy, their work is one of the country’s leading exports.

Throughout the Caribbean tourists purchase art that originates in one of the region’s most beautiful countries – Haiti. Haitian painters bring unparalleled intensity, complexity and color to the canvas as they speak to themes of struggle and celebration.

KONPAY is based in Jacmel, Haiti’s largest community of artists. During the festive carnival and Easter seasons the streets of Jacmel are filled with colorful papier-mache masks and art workshops line the side streets. Most artists in Jacmel are not able to make a living through their art and suffer from extreme poverty. Workshops lack basic equipment, materials, furniture and even walls to protect the artists and their art. Even though most artists are struggling even to send their children to school, most open their workshops and invite street children and other extremely poor people to work with them and learn the trade.

Papier mache is an integral part of carnival in Haiti, and Jacmel is Haiti's carnival capital. Papier mache allows the artist to create a masquerade larger than life, and utterly transforming. Carnival is a time to reverse or invert reality; humans dress as animals, animals dress as humans, men and women cross dress. It is also a time where satire and social commentary are performed unreservedly -- ultimately, Good and Evil battle at Carnival.

Jacmel 2001, "Carnival Country"

“During carnival Jacmel is not a town or a city. It is a country," Michelet Divers, Jacmel's best-known carnival expert, tells me over a tall glass of lemonade on the airy terrace of the Hotel de la Place, a three-story, white Victorian-style restaurant, bar, souvenir shop, and hotel in the Bel-Air section of Jacmel. The terrace has an eye-level view of a flamboyant-filled piazza, where young men straddle the low colonnaded walls to watch the bustling human and automobile traffic stream by. I am here for my first national carnival.

Since 1992, Divers explains, Jacmel has been hosting two carnivals on consecutive weekends, the national one, which draws people from all over Haiti and the Haitian diaspora, and the local one, which is primarily attended by the residents of Jacmel. Everyone I have spoken to about my intention to attend the national carnival festivities this coming Sunday has recommended that I first speak to Divers. A stocky forty-seven-year-old with dark, wide-rimmed glasses, Divers is a radio commentator and former school principal. He is quick to point out that he is not the one who came up with the idea of temporary sovereignty for Jacmel, but that other Jacmelians would like to see the image of the southern coastal town of ten thousand, the Riviera of Haiti, the Ibiza of the Caribbean--as the Haitian tourist guides say--detached from the one that outsiders have of the rest of the country, particularly the capital, Port-au-Prince: dirt-poor, politically troubled, and certainly lacking any celebrations.

"Jacmel is not like that," says Divers, "especially during carnival."

- After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival In Jacmel, Haiti by Edwidge Danticat