Jean Marseille was born in the Bahamas to Haitian parents in 1971 during Papa Doc Duvalier’s dictatorship. When Marseille was only six months old, his mother sailed to Florida.
Soon after, Marseille’s father “fixed up a little bed” in a box, put his baby son in it and hired a woman to take the box on a boat from the Bahamas to Cap-Haïtien on Haiti’s northern coast.
This was Jean Marseille’s first deportation.
A new book, The Four Deportations of Jean Marseille, is the story of a man who worked as a fixer for foreign journalists covering Haiti, and himself became the subject—and teller—of this remarkable narrative of displacement.
The assassination of Haiti’s President Jovenel Moïse in his own home in July of 2021 was an event that triggered even more extreme violence and an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in a country where Haitians have long endured a vulnerable existence.
Marseille and his family experienced this violence first-hand. He had been working for a call-center in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince to provide for his family members in Haiti and in the Dominican Republic. His home was taken over by gangs and his son was kidnapped. Marseille then moved from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic.
Laura Lampton Scott and Peter Orner first met Jean Marseille in 2013 when they began to collaborate on a book about the catastrophic events and aftermath wrought by Haiti’s magnitude 7.0 earthquake in 2010 that caused 300,000 deaths and displaced more than a million people.
They forged such a strong bond that they have kept in touch in the years since through email messages, phone calls and recordings Marseille made with a cell phone.
But the messages that began in 2022 were not sent just to keep in touch.
Jean Marseille was transmitting accounts of his own life—and they were also the stories of the extreme chaos and suffering happening all over Haiti.
Lampton Scott and Orner began to compile transcriptions of Marseille’s recordings that are now part of The Four Deportations of Jean Marseille—the first book in a series called Dispatches published by the nonprofit McSweeney’s and co-edited by Lampton Scott and Orner.
The first-person accounts by Marseille provide a unique sort of embedding of a reporter who Orner says in the book’s introduction is “a gifted journalist.” Writes Orner, “He may not have a degree in journalism, or any degree at all, but I’ve never in my life seen anybody as conversationally fearless—he’ll talk to anybody about anything, at any time.”
With this unique access, Marseille relays to us the realities of life on the streets, in the tent towns, and within an artifice of bureaucracy that emerges at the whims of gangs and foreign governments—to the detriment of the populace.
To read the dispatches in order offers a cohesive narrative as we follow the stressful, turbulent life of Marseille, his family and everyone around him. And we learn—so much–—about Haiti, yes, but also about the troubling ways that the world’s humanity diminishes in places that require it most. The situation is so out of control now; it’s hard to know what can help alleviate the pain in this complicated country.
What follows is one of Marseille’s dispatches. For context, consider that the U.S. contributed to a gun problem in Haiti, opened a Pandora’s box there, too. The flow of weapons surged there after the assassination of the president. There is no head of state. There is no government. We learn from Marseille about the lawlessness there. Haiti has become a trap the people cannot escape. The violence is powered by illegal guns.
DISPATCH: 11/7/22 Maybe stories about this place are too much. You don’t know where to start. Like today. A flood of people came running toward the Delmas 73 section—that’s the section where I’m staying now. They were running because of the massive killing that’s been going on in Canaan and those areas. Regular people, living in their homes with their kids. A woman came to my house— she was running with her kid and a few personal belongings. Her sister is a good friend of my wife’s. Some gang members were burning houses, chopping people up with machetes. And the people, they were just running.
Let me try to explain Canaan. In 2011, Sean Penn, the Red Cross, Oxfam, and many other organizations from all over the world got together to try and help all the people who were still homeless from the earthquake of January 12, 2010. A year after, tens of thousands of people were still living in camps in the city center and Delmas. This was when President [René] Préval was still in power. So the Haitian government and all these international organizations put their heads together and decided to build big camps for these people in the north part of the city, near the sea. These camps were supposed to be temporary, five years maximum. But it’s 2022, and guess what? They’re still there.
The Haitian people gave their own names to these places: Onaville. Jerusalem. Canaan. Names from the Bible. They called the area the Promised Land. Some people even built houses. Back in the day, it was a very beautiful place because it’s by the sea, near where the boats come in. But now Canaan is no promised land. It’s the dead land. It’s the people-dying land. What’s been happening is there’s a deputy minister—some deputy minister of something, and he’s responsible for Canaan and the surrounding areas—and he decided it’s time to get rid of everybody. I guess he wants the land. There are beaches up there. Maybe he thinks one day it could be like a tourist attraction or something.
And in Canaan you’ve got this gang leader operating, Izo. I told you about Izo and his gang, 5 Segonn. What I hear is that Izo is working with the deputy minister, trying to get rid of people. Izo’s doing the deputy minister’s dirty work. That’s how it works. Suddenly there’s lots of killings. Izo sends his group led by one of his guys, Jeff, some guy they gave power to, into Canaan and other camps, and they start slaughtering people. And these poor people, they have nowhere to go. They just start running. They lost their houses in the earthquake. The government made them all sorts of promises. They tried to make a life up there. And now they’re running again.
That’s what’s going on in Canaan, the Promised Land.
Was Marseille deported four times as the title of the book asserts? Incredibly—yes.
As described above—and as we learn from Orner’s introduction—Marseille was first displaced as a baby in Cap-Haïtien. His grandmother took care of him.
Later, when Marseille was 12 years old, his mother smuggled him into Florida. Life was not easy for him. He was an outsider and was bullied in school and endured the vicissitudes of adolescence in ways made more complicated by his background and home situation.
Eventually, he got into some very serious trouble with the law.
Under the Reagan administration’s 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, Marseille had legal status in the U.S. —a green card. However, soon after, under the Clinton administration, Marseille found himself in a federal detention center in Louisiana. He was flown back to Haiti “shackled to his seat on a plane.”
Orner contextualizes the rest of Marseille’s story in that detailed introduction describing the four deportations.
From Marseille’s own words—in the collection of entries recorded between 2022 and 2024—we glean a real understanding of Marseille, his street smarts, his acute intelligence, his industriousness, his affability—but also those moments when it is all just too much. The violence in Haiti that touches everyone in his family is described from the standpoint of a man who continues to be resourceful to find a way out—for himself and his family. We come to interpret his strength in the face of insurmountable odds but also his profound anguish at being separated from everyone he loves, his hunger, homelessness, the endless hustle.
In Marseille’s dispatch dated October 22, 2023, he was in the Dominican Republic and described painful situations regarding his wife back in Haiti. She had no phone, nothing to eat and no place to live. He heard that Kenyan forces would arrive to help control the violence in Haiti. A footnote points to the fact that Kenyan forces did not actually arrive until eight months later in late June 2024.
Lampton Scott’s poignant afterword rounds out this book— as do some postscript dispatches from Marseille that continue to elucidate the difficult denouement of his story.
Perhaps most in the U.S. have considered the Haitian diaspora only through the lens of the political brinkmanship in the media—news of the Biden administration's deportation of massive numbers of Haitians from the Texas-Mexico border and the more recent Trump campaign’s doubling down on demonizing Haitian immigrants and repeatedly spreading the stupefyingly cruel falsehood that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio were stealing and eating dogs and cats.
In early October 2024, the Dominican Republic said it planned to expel as many as 10,000 Haitians each week.
The UN reported that at least 3,661 people had been killed in Haiti during the first six months of 2024 in “senseless” gang violence.
The deportations persist while Haitian leaders have warned that the armed groups continue to carry out attacks and kidnappings across Port-au-Prince. More than half of the population—some 5.4 million people—faces acute hunger.
Those subject to oppression and injustice have a need to flee the place where they live. Removal—and a return to a failed state steeped in poverty, where the people are preyed upon and there are no laws and no ways to control the criminal violence— is a reality for many.
The Four Deportations of Jean Marseille brings us the story of one man speaking for those numberless people the world over who endure this fate every day.
“I’m giving up hope,” Jean Marseille said in a dispatch dated February 19, 2024. “Do you see how this all goes around and around?”
Laura Lampton Scott and Peter Orner are the editors of The Four Deportations of Jean Marseille. It's published by McSweeney's.
Find out more about The Four Deportations of Jean Marseille here.
