The devastation inflicted on Haiti’s people by the January 12 earthquake is all too apparent. Now the nation’s cultural heritage—its museums and libraries and the vital record they contain—is at risk, too.
The Chronicle spoke on Wednesday with Patrick D. Tardieu, chief conservator at the Bibliothèque Haitienne des Pères du Saint Esprit, in Port-au-Prince, and director of the library at the University of Quisqueya. The Bibliothèque Haitienne, Haiti’s oldest library, was damaged in the quake, imperiling its contents. It houses a significant collection of colonial- and revolutionary-era books, pamphlets, newspapers, and governments records and what Mr. Tardieu described as “a very important collection about slavery,” including slave passports, records of human sales, and other primary-source material. It has documents signed by Toussaint Louverture and other key figures in the country’s history.
The library also holds scientific records of past quakes, which might prove important in understanding future risk.
Mr. Tardieu emphasized that helping people injured and displaced by the quake takes precedence over everything else. “Right now the priority is save people and rebuild,” he told The Chronicle. “Please note that now is a time for life, now is a time to give food. But we have to start to think about memory.”
Quisqueya’s library, too, has valuable material, including 200 years’ worth of Haitian legal records.
Mr. Tardieu was in Haiti during the earthquake. He and staff at the Bibliothèque Haitienne survived, but some lost family members in the disaster. Just how badly the library building was damaged he does not yet know, but he describes it as “endangered.” The collection appears to have survived, but items must be moved out and secured as quickly as possible, not just because of structural instability but also because of the impending rainy season, which begins in April or May. Climate-controlled storage at the library was nonexistent to begin with, and a damaged building is not much of a defense against the elements.
Soon after the disaster, the John Carter Brown Library, at Brown University, invited Mr. Tardieu to be a visiting fellow. “We were just trying to respond quickly to an emergency and to help a sister library,” says Ted Widmer, the Brown library’s director. “It’s a tragedy, but it has brought a lot of people closer together.”
‘Put the Books in Boxes’
Since he arrived at Brown, Mr. Tardieu has been working with the international library community, including the multi-institution Digital Library of the Caribbean, to figure out what can be done to assist Haiti’s libraries. He planned to return to Haiti on Thursday to assess the damage and figure out how best to safeguard the collections in his charge. He has heard that the national library survived, along with another major patrimonial library, but that the library of the foreign ministry was destroyed, although a good portion of its archives apparently were saved.
The Bibliothèque Haitienne has digitized some of its collections, but that work was not complete when the quake hit. Mr. Tardieu brought some of the digitized material with him when he left Haiti and has deposited it with the National Library and Archives of Quebec for safekeeping.
The first step in saving the library’s collection “is to put the books in boxes somewhere safe,” he said. “The second priority is to find a secure place for maybe three to five years” while rebuilding takes place.
The main worry now is getting the physical collection out of the damaged building and to a secure location, perhaps outside Haiti, while rebuilding takes place. That decision must rest with the people of Haiti and not with any outside group, Mr. Tardieu said. It is important “to guarantee that this library is the property of the Haitian people and will be returned when the time comes.”
He does not worry much that parts of the collection will be stolen. “People are aware that in a catastrophe like this, we have to secure papers as quickly as possible,” he said.
If the material in collections like the Bibliothèque Haitienne’s is lost, that inflicts another serious wound on the Haitian people. “A cultural library like the Bibliotheque can be interpreted as part of the personality of the people of Haiti,” Mr. Tardieu said. “How can you build a nation if you don’t protect that, if you don’t have your memory?”
How to Help
The Digital Library of the Caribbean has established a program called Protecting Haitian Patrimony to coordinate volunteers and donations to help Haiti’s threatened libraries, especially the Bibliotheque Haitienne and the other main patrimonial libraries in Port-au-Prince. The John Carter Brown Library has also set up a fund called Savings Haiti’s Libraries; it does not have a Web site yet, but checks can be sent to the library with the fund’s name noted on them.
