“É Blanc!” (“Hey, white man!”) — would everyone call an awkward and thatchy European. Painter Sebastian Lörscher was born in Paris, grew up in Munich, lives in Berlin, and travels to such countries that you are hardly willing to visit even if you have seen them in the National Geographic. He speaks French, German, and English. But his drawings speak their individual languages to everyone. Haïti Chéri is an expressionistic palimpsest: its lines, colours, and choppy utterances produce an impression that is stronger than reality. You read and immediately feel the sun burning your skin. You hear a street preacher yelling something. You smell sweat in a crowded bus as bright as an LSD-induced hallucination. As you travel across Haïti Chéri so far from home, you find yourself. This is Haiti. This is Île-à-Vache. É Blanc, what are you doing here?
Year 2020 confined us in our apartments. “I love travelling more than anything else, says Sebastian Lörscher about himself. And I am drawing all the time. At night, in the pouring rain, in the snow and wind, among dancing people, at demonstrations. I like it when the world is in motion”. The energy of motion is the first thing you feel when reading his books. Back in 2012, he spent five months in Haiti where he taught English and drawing to children from the poor areas of Port-au-Prince. To make it more comfortable for me to deal with the book, Sebastian sends me an electronic copy — 220 pages of conversations overheard in the streets, exciting parties in the slums, and Voodoo rituals. I scroll them to find interesting details for an article before I suddenly find the chapter titled Batay kòk (Cockfight) and freeze.
Memory Awakens
It was ten years ago when I first saw cockfighting. It feels like it happened somewhere else. I was travelling across the Crimean peninsula with a friend of mine nicknamed Swede. This was the time when it was a foreign country. And people in Russia had not yet quarrelled about the goddamn symbolism of this piece of land. Swede just said: “Let’s go?” And I threw my backpack in the trunk of his car. We went there without any specific plan and we stopped wherever there was something interesting. On that day, we wanted to reach cave city Chufut-Kale but noticed a huge crowd on our way there. We looked at each other and pulled off the road. We ended up on a Tatar holiday known as Hederlez — the field that had been totally empty the day before was now crowded with thousands of people. The tables in the tents were laden with sweets. A row of chargrills frying meat stretched to the horizon.
I remember people on one of the meadows competing in Kurash: the wrestlers were trying to catch each other’s wide belts and pin each other down. Their belts were so bright-coloured! Red. And green. They had long tails dragging along the floor mat. Another meadow was equipped with an equestrian circle. But the most unsound tension came from a thick crowd aside. Men were packed so tight that it was impossible to see what they were looking at in the centre. Ultimately, I squeezed through and saw cockfighting for the first time in my life.
Two gamecocks were tattering each other. It is impossible to describe this poetically. Pieces of flesh. Lacerations. A low whistling sound produced by the air coming out of the weary birds’ throats. Bright-coloured blood. The winner’s hairless neck was covered with disgusting abrasions. The gamecock’s eyes looked frantic. The entire performance was filled with a strange sense of life. It was frightening indeed. But it also had a pulse of its own. I would say that Batay kòk is the core chapter of Haïti Chéri. Sebastian Lörscher devotes a few pages to preparing us for the battle scene. He talks about preparations. About the meaning of traditional cockfighting for Haitian men. His descriptions are thorough, and his drawing is full of detail. However, when it comes to the fight, the two birds turn into furious pencil zigzags. A pure abstraction that gives true-to-life reminiscences.
Music of the Drawing
Sebastian says that he draws inspiration from works by Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese) and Joann Sfar (Le Chat du Rabbin). However, when examining Haïti Chéri, I think about Le Photographe (Émile Bravo, Emmanuel Guibert, Frédéric Lemercier) and drawn reports from Russian rallies by Viktoria Lomasko. Lörscher’s drawing resembles a well-intoned piece of music. When preparing the reader for an emotional point, Sebastian may use a single bright emphasis. And such note sounds more intense than a whole symphony.
It would be interesting to trace the changes in the drawing style in various works by Sebastian. Making friends in Bangalore has more humour and caricature. Haïti Chéri comes closer to documentary journalism: so many people, so many stories, so many sensations. Following the stories and impressions, Sebastian’s comic tiny clouds and records literally tear the page apart and penetrate the reader’s reality.
Colour is equally important. The first bright exotic impressions (you must definitely see the chapter devoted to Haitian taxis — tap-tap!) give way to monochromatic deep personal stories by the interlocutors. “I use drawing as a means to open the door to people and their stories”, Sebastian says repeatedly.
To Have a Better Understanding
According to a common stereotype, people in such countries as Haiti, Cuba, Brazil are poor but happy. Sebastian Lörscher’s book is a simple illustrated travelogue only on its face. In fact, it is an all-out immersion into local life. It’s true that the author sees a lot of things from a foreign traveller’s perspective. But he managed to avoid a blinding fascination with exoticism. He chooses not to glamourize local residents’ simple and hard labour. And he is reluctant to use the slums as a nice background for his drawings: the character from Ray Bradbury’s Sun and Shadow would not send Sebastian off as he sent off the publicity photographer recording a fancy photo session in the favelas.
Sebastian is quite frank about his feelings in the author’s note: “Haiti is a country of opposites: miracles, mysteries, and cultural treasures. It abounds in bitter misery, crime, and intractable problems. It is a country on the brink of hope and depression, living and surviving”. However, the book does not produce a dismal impression. Instead, it encourages the reader to figure out the complex world we live in better. The complex personalities of our own selves and people around us. Travelling is an excellent tool for this task. Travelling and books similar to Haïti Chéri.
