“Ida Ô Ida Ô Ida Ô Ida. Ida has always cradled me and the other man in me. And with her, we experienced many crossings, many oceans, many hotel rooms, many public squares, many cane fields, many escapades, many hot nights. But the streets were always our favorite. What will the streets say when they know our country is surrounded by water but still can’t swim?” IDA is an interrupted, sensitive song, all voice and echo, which paints a hallucinatory picture of its third island, where man, drawn into a spiral of self-destruction, turns out to be the gravedigger of his own utopia. This text explains the story of a man who grew up in the neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, exploring almost every corner of the capital. This sad, desperate man, who lived in Port-au-Prince with his wife, used her as an alibi to talk about his country’s pain. He took the opportunity to denounce the behavior of our leaders, who took advantage of their supremacy to plunder the state coffers while the majority of the population starved. Ida is a void in the heart of this despair in a city that is timidly disappearing, where each of us has left our footprints, our history, our mad laughter and our most mysterious moments in life. Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, now turned to fire and ashes. How many cities have disappeared like Port-au-Prince in bloody nights? This text was written by Guy Junior Régis and published in 2016. Was an X-ray of the city of Port-au-Prince and all those around it. Its staging has been presented several times in Port-au-Prince, France with different actors. Personally, I presented this text as part of the Rencontres Littéraires en Haïti festival, at the Deschapelles community library, the Centre Culturel Maurice Cadet in Delmas and the Centre Culturel Jhon Blair in Jérémie. “I was young, angry”, he (Guy Régis Jr) recalls of Ida. Yet the violent, insalubrious Port-au-Prince he described at the age of 23, where people starve and no longer think of dreaming, would still be the Port-au-Prince of today in the eyes of this polymorphous 39-year-old artist. In Ida, shouted rather than reflected, he depicts, in an incisive, concise and violent style, the destiny of a man whose love for a woman, Ida, fills him with hope in a country he no longer believes in. We’re in Port-au-Prince. An obscure city. It’s still on your tongue, Ida, the word of hope that will rekindle the day in my life.

This show is our ultimate way of expressing homesickness and also thinking of all the people lost, towns burned and women lost. In the end, it’s a way of saying that there’s still hope if we all pull together.

Bell