Rone Shavers
Rone Shavers is co-editor of Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System (forthcoming this spring from the University of Alabama Press). Other portions of his novel-in-progress, titled The Codeswitchers, have appeared in ACM: Another Chicago Magazine, Warpland: A Journal of Black Ideas and Literature, and keepgoing.org. He has also published fiction in a previous edition of milkmag.org. Mr. Shavers is currently enrolled in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and he teaches in the School of Continuing Studies’ Masters in Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University.
Two Excerpts from The Codeswitchers: A Novel-in-Progress:
The Politics of Driving
Even though Charles responded with an extended middle finger and a—You really are an asshole, you know that?…in the grand scheme of things, his words were unimportant. No, they paled in comparison to the observation that they actually were at the crossroads, a junction between the private road Charles had previously traveled to the capital, and a public one, where traffic was a lot more chaotic, hectic. We mention this because it would only be weeks later before Charles realized exactly what the difference between traveling a public road and a private road really meant. That is to say it was weeks before Charles understood the subtleties, the nuances of something so simple as the politics of driving: That social status in Haiti was partially determined by not only what one drove, but where, or if one drove at all; that on private roads, it was quite possible to speed along drunk in an expensive car, but on public ones, anything less than riding in a fortified SUV meant one was taking one's life in one's hands; that an accident victim on a public road could disappear altogether, completely erased from civic memory; that bodies, like the cars that contain them, are machines which can be stripped, disjointed, reduced to their base components and recycled in the world's never-ending marketplace; that the only difference between a used battery, a kidney, a cornea, or a tire, is whether or not the item must be kept on ice until one reaches the Michelle Bennet Teaching Hospital nearby, or dragged off to the auto parts vendors of the Iron Market instead; that to drive along any of the national highways meant you had indeed acquired value, but that your value had absolutely nothing to do with your worth as a unique individual.
“Commodity Routes,” Charles would later go on to call Haiti's public roads, because of those who lived and gathered near them. Gleaners, willing to buy or sell anything at all, even salvaged roadkill, because what they couldn't sell, they could at least eat. Of course, there were also those roads of an entirely different nature altogether, what Charles dubbed “Security Routes.” These were the paths that enabled the leisurely drives Charles and Annika sometimes took, if only just to go to the coast at sunset, or escape the servants and their forever-gossiping mouths. But as Charles named it, Charles knew: The difference between private and public roads, Security and Commodity Routes, was the difference between accessing a life lived to its fullest, or life in nothing but parts.
Again, they were at the crossroads. The Rover began to jostle and swerve as its driver maneuvered National Route 1; passing, avoiding, and at times intimidating donkey carts, barely functional sedans, tap-taps, hitchhikers, camions, people randomly running across the highway, and the always-already accident-in-progress. But because the rest of the ride was much too bumpy, and the sound of the Rover traversing nine-inch potholes far too loud, combined with the fact that yes, both individuals were upset, the one with the other, they passed the rest of their drive in relative silence, Charles smoking only occasionally and staring out the window at the cluttered, unimpressive landscape beyond.
Town and Country, Part IIAs they rode the road up to Petionville, Charles gazed down on the festering city of Port-au-Prince in the valley below. From the hills it all looked so small, so contained, so like every other city he’d seen from above, save for its blanching sun, trenchant squalor, and pristine sea. “The Republic of Port-au-Prince,” Jean had called it, but it could be Galveston, or Oakland, or Vancouver with no skyscrapers, or any other number of numerous commercial seaports not quite comfortable with their role or civic identity. They were all, these types of cities, notable sites in what we’ll call “The Patchwork Republic”: cities that sought to establish themselves on the backs of buried and ignored histories; cities which proclaimed to look only forward, as if doing so would erase the more humble and embarrassing aspects of their past; cities that had completely imploded in some places, and had outgrown themselves, too fast, too soon, in others; cities that forever combined, destroyed, recombined and redefined their various sections and neighborhoods in order to force a schizophrenic sense of identity upon both itself and its citizens. Port-au-Prince was its own Republic all right, in that Port-au-Prince was a body that could neither sustain, nor control its state of constant flux.
Lavil is what we call it: the City. And it’s any city, but it’s always this city, the City. And upon leaving lavil, Charles found it all so strange. Despite his best efforts at escape, it was here that he found himself celebrated, whether as someone infamous or famous he wasn’t quite sure, but only when in a city did he feel rightly at home. Looking down on it all, and then back at his past, he knew exactly where he was. He had never left, had been there all along. He was anywhere en lavil. He could have been anywhere in the world and it would have been the same. So then, here he was, ready to field and deflect craft-related questions and fawning inquiries into his writing process, but this time he would smile, speak French, and try his best to be pleasant, all because more than anything, he wanted safe passage out, the chance to move from one conundrum to another. And if he could do that, trade country for country, one city for the same thing somewhere else, then he could possibly return to his normal, which goes to say, his infuriating, depressing, unfulfilling, constrained, and meager, fucked-up life.