Restavek: Faces of Modern Day Slavery by Jonathan Willis
on view February 20 - March 22, 2009.
STATEMENT BY THE PHOTOGRAPHER, JONATHAN WILLIS
I got the phone call in July. Two weeks later, I stepped off a plane into the shanty hills of Port Au Prince, Haiti. With my camera gear strapped to my back, I was ready to begin telling the story of the restavek children.
I had no idea what I’d find.
I am a father. On my second day in Haiti, I walked into a room filled with children given unknowingly into slavery by their own fathers and mothers. Seventy-five children and not a sound. The silence was unnatural and horrifying. Not a child made eye contact; they looked to the corners of the ceiling, to the ground. In their ill-fitting clothes—some in rags, some wearing the handed-down dresses of their owner’s legitimate children—they filed into a smaller room where my team asked them questions. If they were indeed restavek children, we asked if they wanted to go to school.
“Oui,” the child would answer. Yes. They knew school provided some escape.
The restavek system is a common Haitian practice, so the injustice is ignored. Parents are lured into sending their children to families in the city in hopes they’ll find a better future and education. But many children become an object of labor and abuse. Poverty breeds desperation. Lack of education breeds slavery.
This exhibition is filled with those restavek children. The story is in their faces, and it’s a consistent story. The same fear, confusion and detachment rises again, again and again. If there is any hope there, it is buried. If there is rescue there, it will happen through the people who look into their faces and see the injustice—and the beauty—and then act on it.
When I finished taking the portraits, I walked away from the building. Some of the restavek children were standing behind a pole, while other children—the parented—laughed at them. My heart broke. It is such a dark place.
I got back to my home in the United States and reached for my own children. In my bag, I had hundreds of photographs demanding I stay engaged with what I just left behind. I had taken those children into a vulnerable place by taking their portraits—by being an adult who smiled at them, said “bonjour” and “merci,” and didn’t strike them. It couldn’t stop with that.
“What will you do?” my wife asked.
“Take their stories out to others,” I said. “I won’t meet the restavek silence with my own silence.”
I invite you to speak to these children with me. www.restavecfreedom.org.
If you are a restavek child:
-You are one of an estimated 300,000 Haitian children enslaved in child labor.
-You probably come from an isolated, rural area of Haiti where there is no school, no electricity, no running water and few possibilities for the future.
-You probably now live in the city with a family who is not your own—not as a foster child, but as the servant.
-You probably are between the ages of 5 and 15 and missing out on your childhood.
-You are three times more likely to be a girl than a boy.
-You probably get up before dawn, before the family members, to begin preparing for their day and go to bed well after most children are asleep.
-You are probably responsible for preparing the household meals, fetching water from the local well, cleaning inside and outside the house, doing laundry and emptying bedpans.
-You probably don’t get paid for any of these activities.
-You rarely get to see your family. You might not even remember where they live.
-You rarely, if ever, go to school, depending on your owner’s financial situation and schedule.
-You may not get enough to eat or get food with enough nutritional value for someone who works hard all day.
-You may be subjected to physical, emotional or sexual abuse in addition to the various forms of neglect mentioned above.
-You never have all of your rights as a child respected.
J. Willis is all over the map. Whether shooting for clients like SubPop Records and IBM, or traveling to India to help fight against the child sex trade, Willis tells each person’s story with intimacy. Check out www.willisphotoart.com and see why Willis was named one of blackbook raw’s freshest and most cutting edge photographers to look out for this year.
