Complex and powerful describe the essay "Action de Grace." This is also how Madison Smartt Bell describes Haiti and the process of writing about it.

The piece has a long and complicated history and one that Bell could not have predicted when he began this work. During his first trip to Haiti he was to do research for a piece of fiction. That was 10 years ago. At that time, he sought a journalistic assignment that would "protect my life and pay my expenses." A magazine called Swing, one that he had never seen nor read, gave him a contract. The editors ultimately "canned it" and the Hudson Review later published it.

His next assignment was for The New Yorker. Bill Buford was the new fiction editor and wanted a literary novelist to visit different cultures and write about the experience. As a result of this contract, Bell visited Haiti three more times. By the end of his third trip he had amassed hundreds of pages of text that posed several problems: whether or not he should make himself a character; how to manage the massive amount of cultural and anthropological information that he thought necessary as context; how to face the fact that what he was actually doing was creative nonfiction.

Bell came late in his writing career to this genre. Until 1995 he wrote fiction, book reviews, some literary journalism, some literary criticism and profiles of other writers. He believes that we have been through a phase of what he calls "pathography"--the biography or autobiography that plays on our "prurient interest" in the "salacious centerpiece" of a troubled childhood. He sees the genre moving more in the direction of using personal experience as a bridge to something interesting and unknown to readers. His Haitian essays fit this latter definition; balancing reportage and personal experience with fictional techniques.

The New Yorker never published the essay and Bell continued to struggle with creating a shape for the information he had collected. What he finally did was to arrange all of the experiences on the floor looking at each experience as a tableau or "plot bullet" that he fit into a matrix. He intended the reader to grasp its meaning intuitively, much like the experience of a poem and his experience of Haiti. "I thought I had found a strategy for arranging a lot of criss-crossing connections in a way that made them cohere without depending on logical convention." He speculates that this form resembles brain structure. To each modular and autonomous piece he then added a few linear cues. "It was important that the form of the text reflect the personally shattering nature of the experience. It was very liberating. I hoped even if you didn't have complete information to make linear connections that there would be enough energy to fire some synapses." Bell's hope was that we, as readers, would apprehend this piece as "an experience, not as a journey. "

Karen Rosica