PORT-AU-PRINCE: For gallery owner Toni Monnin, the loss of irreplaceable frescoes by the first generation of Haitian master painters is the most powerful symbol of the cultural devastation wrought by the January 12 earthquake.

“There was this explosion of art in Haiti after the Second World War like nowhere else in the world,” explained Monnin, a native Texan. “It is a country of painters and artists and it is a phenomenon that exists only here in Haiti.”

In the capital Port-au-Prince, a teeming mass of humanity fights to recover from unimaginable horror, but the backdrop is a wall of paintings, vibrant colors splashing canvas and somehow masking the smell of death and loss.

Haiti could lay claim to having a greater concentration of artists than any other country, but beyond them, it is the buildings, the history, the entire cultural heritage of the Caribbean nation that is at risk.

“What we have been trying to do with the minister of culture is raise awareness of the need to protect the heritage because once it is gone, it is gone,” Teeluck Bhuwanee, head of the UNESCO mission in Haiti, told AFP.

Recorded history dates back to 1492, when Christopher Columbus discovered the island – which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic – and named it La Isla Espanola, which became Hispaniola.

Artifacts from pre-Columbian times, the era of the Taino Indians, survived the quake largely unscathed at the National Museum of Art, fortuitously located underground.

But many important sites, born out of Haiti’s compelling history of slavery and revolution, were not so fortunate, and Bhuwanee fears culture has been forgotten in the government’s grand reconstruction plan.

“In Port-au-Prince, there are about 30 sites that have been identified as really in danger of total destruction or total extinction. Two of them have already been razed,” he said.

The capital is a graveyard of fallen cathedrals, libraries and cultural sites. Invaluable private collections were also decimated by the quake.

Not a single line on culture

Despite the extent of the loss, the word culture is absent from the draft Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) drawn up by the government in conjunction with the international community.

“We’ve been fighting to get the PDNA to include culture but when the executive summary came out, there was not a single line on culture, not a single dollar for the re-foundation of culture in this country,” Bhuwanee said.

There is an urgent need to protect damaged sites, many of which have been pillaged or, like the Eglise Saint Louis Roi de France, totally razed by the bulldozers that cleared the way for the capital to function again.

Haiti can lay claim, as the first black country to gain independence, in 1804, to being at the root of universal human rights and countless documents attesting to those fights and struggles may also have perished.

The country, however, has more pressing concerns – hundreds of thousands of quake survivors are still at risk, perched in camps on treacherous hillsides that could slide away into the abyss when the heavy rains come.

Sam Worthington, president of InterAction, which coordinates the work of dozens of US NGOs and their almost one billion dollars of American public money, has a clear priority list.

“It is the ability of children to learn to read, it’s the ability of an individual to walk through a camp and be safe and not face violence or rape, it’s the ability of someone to be able to set up their small business and get back to their life before the quake,” he said.

But he admitted that culture, too, is important. If properly marketed, Haiti’s heritage could be a tool to create jobs, to stir interest, to help get the country of almost 10 million people back on its feet again, according to Bhuwanee.

“We are saying ‘Let’s do something, let’s make culture at the root of the development of the country,’” he said.

Walking the ruins of Sainte-Trinite, it is easy to see this as a pipe dream, but one wall symbolizes hope, stubbornly standing against all odds and signed by the last living first generation artist, 87-year old Prefete Duffaut.

Monnin offered a short history. She spoke of Americans, DeWitt Peters and Selden Rodman, who discovered local talent like Hector Hyppolite, a voodoo priest who painted with chicken feathers and household paint.

Rodman’s vision produced this amazing collaboration on the walls of Saint-Trinite, a work that put Haitian art on the map – soon art lovers from all over the world needed a Duffaut or a Hyppolite to grace their collections.

“Works by the first generation artists are irreplaceable,” Monnin said, sadness in her eyes as she recalled the horrors of the fateful day.