Emmanuel Elementary School, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Philadelphia, PA, USA
by Minjung Noh
Though the distance between missionary Brian Pak’s residence and Emmanuel Church is only about 8 miles (12 km), it took us nearly 40 minutes to get there by car. The road conditions were rough, there were occasional traffic jams, and we were forced to take alternative routes. Our Haitian driver, Serge, was driving proficiently through the chaotic streets of Port-au-Prince. Scooters, flamboyant tap-taps, overburdened trucks, and run-down cars were running on a wide road with neither marked lanes nor traffic signs. On top of that, the road was joined by roadside vendors approaching the cars to tap on the windows. People were burning trash everywhere, and black pigs roamed around the mountains of garbage. Pierre Bourdieu described the traffic at the Place de la Bastille or Place de la Concorde in Paris as “the extraordinary concordance of thousands of dispositions implied in five minute’s movement.”[1] Would he also see the same “concordance of thousands of dispositions” in the chaotic street traffic of Port-au-Prince?
Although it seems like a pandemonium rather than a concordance to an outsider, the streets of Port-au-Prince have their own rules. Drivers, vendors, and pedestrians yield, argue, exchange jokes, and make faces to one another. Although there are no traffic lanes drawn on the road, the drivers incessantly negotiate each others’ way, to find the most satisfactory way out of the traffic. Slowly, the traffic moves, and people find their ways to their destinations, with surprisingly few accidents – there is a concordance. As I was amazed by the seemingly chaotic but strikingly effective streets of Port-au-Prince, Bourdieu was astonished by the fact that “there are not more transgressions and subversions, contraventions and ‘follies’” in the streets of Paris, and further, in the world. Instead, there is an observance of the dominant order of the world, or doxa, and it is accepted as natural.
The Emmanuel Church was the second church built by Korean missionaries in Haiti. Built in 2004 and located in Duvivier, an area in northwest Port-au-Prince, it is one of my fieldwork locations. The Church later built Emmanuel Elementary school right next to the sanctuary. The cultural and religious logic and doxa upheld by these Korean evangelical missionaries in Haiti are the subject of my research. While conducting fieldwork in Haiti during 2017 and 2018, I faced many empty places where children, believers, and missionaries were temporarily on leave due to Christmas holidays, occasional social unrest, or lack of funds; some of the places were left empty permanently due to the deaths of the occupants, such as my (expected) main informant, “Korean mother” missionary Samsook Paek, who passed away two months before my first visit to Haiti. Hence, my writing research has primarily been a process of imagining what these empty places might have meant to the people I met – and those I was unable to meet.
When our car approached the schoolyard, the first thing I noticed was a large metal gate and a 10-foot-tall grey concrete wall around the school and the church. The gate was locked with metal chains and locks. It was early January, and the semester had not started yet. In addition, they only open the gate on Sundays - or when necessary. The schoolyard was spacious and empty. The soil was even, and free from debris and potholes. Students would play soccer in the yard during the semester, possibly a couple of different games simultaneously. There was a small flowerbed at the corner of the yard by the wall, though nothing was growing at the time. Across the flowerbed, there were two single-story buildings side by side. Both had sturdy concrete brick walls and slate roofs. The taller church building had a large cross erected at the top of the roof by the entrance. The school itself contained eight small classrooms and one teacher’s office. There was one hallway in the center of the building, and four classrooms were located on either side. Half of the hallway wall was painted a bright blue, but the paintwork was somehow incomplete. Each classroom had twenty to thirty shabby desks and chairs, with nearly no room between them. Dust permeated. Half-erased French words were written on the blackboards, and children’s drawings were hung on the wall or scattered on the floor. The teacher’s room, at the end of the hall, had a stove in the middle of the room and a couple of cabinets and desk sets by the wall. Even though it was a bright morning, all of the rooms were dim. There did not appear to be any indoor lighting in the building. Later, it was made clear that there was no electricity in the school building.
It has been nearly three years since I walked into the empty classrooms of Emmanuel Elementary school. Now under the COVID-19 crises, I find myself subject to #ShelterInPlace. I have been teaching online for seven weeks now and writing about my fieldwork in Port-au-Prince.
The more I spent time teaching virtual classes #ShelterInPlace, the more I was strongly reminded of the empty places I encountered in Haiti. There are odd similarities between the effect conveyed by the empty schoolyard and the lack of student presence in virtual classrooms. Teaching a “Religion and Film” course online while trying to provide my constant presence to students, I wonder if the magical viewing experience of a film can truly be reenacted on their laptop screens. I try hard to imagine (or divine!) their experience of a remote course. Staring at the blank squares with students’ names with their muted microphones, I talk, make jokes, and constantly try to see in my mind’s eyes what their reaction and thoughts would be. (I could have asked them to turn on cameras and microphones; but would that have vouched for the complete sense of their presence?) I am dealing with the ambiguity of students’ virtual presence – am I staring at empty places, or, are you there?
I often ask students how they watch the assigned films. Do you watch them on your laptop? On your Phone, TV, or projector? Do you wear headphones? Do you watch our films alone or with someone else? Through our Zoom-mediated conversations, I enjoy discovering small pieces of evidence that they are successfully building their own personal experiences of viewing films. At the same time, I further imagine their experiences through their daily film journals and papers, and it has become a personal and cautiously intimate dialogue between myself and the students. It also has become an informal ethnography and an oral history in my head to reconstruct and imagine the students’ affects and presence, not so different from what I do when I write about the empty schoolyard in Haiti.
What binds these places together is the fact that they provide exceptionally cinematic experiences, à la Robert Bresson (1901-1999). In one class session, I shared a short interview clip of the French filmmaker. Bresson says:
Art lies in suggestion. The great difficulty for filmmakers is precisely not to show things. Ideally, nothing should be shown, but that’s impossible. So things must be shown from one sole angle that evokes all other angles without showing them. We must let the viewer gradually imagine, hope to imagine, and keep them in a constant state of anticipation. We must let the mystery remain. Life is mysterious, and we should see that on-screen.[2]
The magic of filmmaking dwells in not showing things and leaving the empty places. From a limited view, viewers imagine (Bresson uses verb deviner, which also connotates the meaning of foretelling or divining) the empty place and are left “in a constant state of anticipation.” This act of imagination accurately describes my experience: thinking through the lack of physical presence of students in online teaching, and writing about an empty Haitian missionary schoolyard.
[1] Pierre Bourdieu, 2001. Masculine domination. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, pp. 1-2.
Minjung Noh (노민정) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Religion at Temple University. Her interdisciplinary research concerns transnational Korean evangelical Christianity and its gendered missions between North America and South Korea. Her dissertation, “Salvation, Salvage, and the Fashioning of Care in the Haitian Religious Field: A Study of Korean American Protestant Women Missionaries in Haiti” explores transnational Christianity in Haiti as manifest in the recent influx of Korean and Korean American Protestant missionaries in the Caribbean nation. It focuses on Korean American Protestant women missionaries and their practice of various forms of care while placing them in the historical context of Protestant Christianity in Haiti.