Wyclef Jean was born from Haitian soil — literally. “When there was no food, we ate clusters of the red dirt that made up the floor of our hut,” he writes in his immensely readable new memoir, “Purpose: An Immigrant’s Story” (It Books, $26.99). This is common in Haiti. The dirt has some degree of mineral content to nurture you and the bulk of it fills you up when there is no meal to eat.”
Although he has spent most of his melodic life in an American spotlight — as the brash, and ultimately disruptive, leader of the Fugees and as a dynamic genre-splicing solo star — Wyclef and his brother Sam were raised by an aunt in the poor village of Croix-des-Bouquets, a few miles outside of Port-au-Prince. His mother and father, an intolerant preacher who called his son’s art “bum music,” fled to New York and New Jersey soon after his birth and wouldn’t fetch him for a decade.
Haiti is where Wyclef learned to be tough, smart, fast. It’s also where he learned a tragic, but painfully clear, lesson: “Mother Nature has never given Haiti a break.” The tell-all opens with a harrowing account of the January 2010 earthquake that ravaged Haiti, a 7.0-magnitude monster that Jean witnessed many years after he left. He was a global star, but suddenly that meant nothing.
“For the past fifteen years, Haiti was the one place in the world where I could never ever walk anonymously,” he writes. “That day Haiti was gone and Wyclef Jean was a ghost.” He was helpless; his Yéle Haiti charity, established to offer aid and education to his homeland, was rendered useless by the disaster. Chaos and crime ensued on the streets, death on top of death. “I lost all sense of logic and became consumed with purpose,” he writes.