Asking for donations and selling merchandise may be quick money-making strategies, but the lasting impact of an artistic performance can add something else to a fundraising enterprise.
Sillah said of the organizers of the benefit concert, “We were thinking overall that since there’s so much artistic talent at Harvard, [the arts are] a good way to engage the entire community.” Selling merchandise may be one way to raise funds, but one can buy a t-shirt alone. “Harvard for Haiti” filled Sanders Theatre as successfully as the convocation for the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy ’54, or the first lecture of the popular course Moral Reasoning 22: Justice.
Vicki E. Yeh ’12, the Kuumba Singers’ Director of Publicity, feels that art can inculcate compassionate altriusm in audiences. “You put on a t-shirt and you forget about it, but I feel art is really in the moment. You have to actually be there to experience it, and hopefully it’ll leave a lasting impression on those who attend, [and] you’ll continue to keep on giving.”
To this end, last Friday’s “Harvard for Haiti Benefit” was framed by speeches on the tragic recent events. Sebastian Velez, Assistant Resident Dean of Kirkland House, closed his speech with a quote from photographer Sebastiao Salgado: “How can we claim ‘compassion fatigue’ when we show no sign of consumption fatigue?” he said. The sentiment that we who are lucky should share our good fortune ran through the event. One particularly resonant image from the PIH slide show featured at the concert was a child amputee in a wheelbarrow, being pushed through the streets of Port-Au-Prince by a more fortunate Haitian man.
The event also emphasized the brutality of the earthquake’s aftermath. The slideshow was a stream of shocking pictures of earthquake victims. In one picture, a Haitian teenager lay on a thin blanket weighed down by large rocks in a makeshift hospital for the wounded; in another, a street was flooded waist-deep with bodies of the dead pushed aside to make room for cars. PIH made the suffering of Haitian earthquake victims manifest, and immediate, in order to inspire empathy.
But the focus of the benefit was not solely on grim realities. Though some pieces were not derived from the Haitian culture per se, the performers’ passion conveyed a profound sense of community with the people of Haiti. One of the most virtuosic displays by Ryu Goto ‘11 was a violin solo so ferocious that hairs from his bow broke off while he was playing.
Other performances, like The Drummers of the Pan-African Dance and Music Ensemble’s “Drum Call,” were directly influenced by Haitian art. In one thrilling performance, Sidi M. Camara paced back and forth across the stage while he drummed with inexhaustible charisma. The piece was a medley of vigorous Haitian rhythms, displaying the vitality of Haitian culture. While watching the performance, one got the irrepressible feeling that the energy that animates Haitian culture is still alive and well. Edwidge Danticat, as quoted by Dean Evelyn M. Hammonds, said of the Haitian people, “We are ill-favored, but we still endure. Every once in a while, we must scream this as far as the wind can carry our voices: we are ugly, but we are here! And here to stay.”
As Yeh had hoped, the event bolstered not only the sense in the audience that something must be done, but that much can be done. Put differently in an email from the Haitian Artists Assembly of Massachusetts Co-Director Charlot J. Lucien, “the authenticity and the emotion these works carry will help people around the world connect with Haitians as people, with their culture, and ultimately through this culture, engage Haitian friends in the rebuilding of Haiti for the long term.”
TO EASE THE PAIN OF THE LIVING
There remains, however, the issue of whether the reclusive or selfish impulses associated with artistry create a tension within those who perform at these public benefits. Sillah said that what truly mattered was the artists’ desire to thank the world that supports them: “we’re doing this because we know this is a good cause and this is our way of giving back.”
Poets for Haiti co-organizer Jim Henle said that, while it is unusual for typically solitary poets to make public appearances, it should happen more often. “I think it’s a good thing for the poetry community to think of itself as having a public face. We can play a role in helping people, in galvanizing sentiment, even action, around the world,” he said.
Henle identifies with a poetic tradition reaching from Walt Whitman’s concern with the Civil War to Allen Ginsberg protests during the Vietnam War. It is all the clearer now that the Harvard arts community too identifies with the artistic tradition in which these poets are situated, a tradition of involved artists who could take as their motto these words of compatriot Allen Ginsberg: “I’ll do the work—and what’s the Work? To ease the pain of living/ Everything else, drunken dumbshow.”
—Staff writer Mark A. Fusunyan can be reached at fusunyan@fas.harvard.edu.