The epicenter of the earthquake that brought Haiti to her knees on January 12th, 2010 is located about seven or eight miles from my childhood neighborhood of Fontamara, just outside of Port-au-Prince proper. I was leaving my office at NYU, slipping on my coat to head home, when my mother, who lives in New Jersey, called to tell me about the catastrophe. I raced out of the building, desperate to get to a television where I could hear the details of the developing story, grateful that my commute home is a mere four-minute walk. Rushing through the door with the single-minded intent of locating the remote control, I found myself immediately wading in contradictions: joyful squeals of welcome from my...>>
Ayiti Kraze / Haiti in Fragments
For some, Haiti is the "poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere," a "failed state," long on the brink of collapse. For others, Haiti is a beacon of freedom, evidence of the only successful slave revolt in modern history. This forum brings together scholars from different fields of study, and different parts of the world, for a conversation about ways to think about challenges that Haiti has faced since independence, challenges that have been international in scope since this sovereign nation's sudden and unexpected debut on the world stage. Thus besides considering Haiti's vexed political history and pressing social problems, we are concerned with the way prevailing forms of diplomatic recognition and patterns of international exchange have served to worsen, rather than improve, social institutions and their capacity to serve the people of Haiti.
The title of this forum "Ayiti kraze" stems from a Kreyol expression that often surfaces in moments when political institutions splinter apart (as when Jean-Bertrand Arisitide was ousted in 1991 during a coup détat). But, the idea of Haiti in fragments also suits this effort to piece together critical insights concerning this tragic predicament. The catastrophic events of January 12, 2010 have already transformed the way many researchers relate to their work. Scholars who typically take years to develop articles and books have organized symposia and published essays in a matter of days -- this forum is but one example. We hope this critical practice will endure long after Haiti is re-built. -- Michael Ralph, dossier editor
Contributors:
Sibylle Fischer; Laurent Dubois; Ferentz Lafargue; Michael Dash; Greg Beckett; Alex Dupuy; Karen Richman; Meg Satterthwaite; Millery Polyné; Gina Ulysse; Fabienne Doucet; and Chelsey Kivland.
On the second seamlessly dark night after the 7.0 magnitude earthquake leveled Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010, I was lying against the unusually cold earth, and for the first time since that initial tremble, sleeping. Once packed into precarious dwellings of watery cement and leftover tin, the more than two million residents of Port-au-Prince found themselves living in the few spaces opened up between fallen and falling structures. A hundred neighbors and I sought rest in an open lot that on most days served as a car lot and auto-body shop. Located on the corner of a small side street and "Bois Verna," one of the long, central avenues leading up from the central square of Champs Mars, this lot...>>
In 2004, I published a history of the Haitian Revolution called Avengers of the New World. It told the story of how, in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, enslaved people organized to overthrow the slave regime, and in the process transformed the history of the world. I hoped that it would be a humane history, one that rendered this swirling epic comprehensible without relying on simple categories, and that would give multiple actors a kind of voice. It seemed like the right moment to publish the book: the 200 year anniversary of the revolution was to be celebrated with fanfare in Haiti and its diaspora. Instead, of course, 2004 was the year of the overthrow of Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide,...>>
Along with so many emigrant members of Koridò (Corridor), a rural community in Léogane at the epicenter of the earthquake, I anxiously endured the prolonged silence between the Outside and Inside of the transnational community. Until January 13, we had become accustomed to virtually instantaneous transnational communication, thanks to the proliferation of cell phones. The first good news came two days after the earthquake through a phone call lasting only a few seconds, long enough for a son to tell his mother that he and the rest of the family were alive. Each treasured piece of news spreads quickly to other families in the diaspora. By day four, the joyous news had confirmed that residents of Koridò and surrounding hamlets...>>
The catastrophe of January 12th is beyond human comprehension. In fact, it is beyond imagination, in the very precise sense that you cannot want to imagine it. But it is also produced as incomprehensible by the media: dead black bodies, wherever you look. People without names, without history, without location: mere bodies, all black, all shoveled into mass graves without much ado. So different from our protective sense of bodily integrity in the North; yet familiar, since it is Haiti: exposed to a gaze which at times borders on the pornographic, a country up for grabs.>>
Haitians have been struggling for decades to build what they call yon lot Ayiti -- "another Haiti." The popular movement of the 1980s, which helped end the Duvalier family dictatorship and launch the democratization of Haitian society, was based on the radical hope that the future was open and full of promise. Hope was thus a central political category, often intimately connected with suffering and misery -- the most common names for the stark reality of daily life.>>
As information regarding January 12th's earthquake in Port au Prince and its subsequent after shocks becomes available the staggering toll that this catastrophe will yield on Haiti is slowly starting to settle in. Each day the death toll--real and projected--rises to a new alarming height, the forecast for rebuilding this city, much less Haiti as a whole becomes incredibly daunting, and the lessons learned all the more grave. With over a century of political mismanagement one can lay this tragedy at the feet of any number of political administrations for not heeding repeated warnings that Port au Prince is at risk of suffering a major earthquake. In the coming weeks we shall discover details outlining precisely how to disperse this...>>
Long before the powerful 7.0 magnitude earthquake (and several aftershocks) struck Haiti on January 12 and leveled the metropolitan capital city of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, that city was already a disaster waiting to happen. With a population of more than 2 million in a city whose infrastructure could at best sustain a population of 100,000, the local and national public administrations simply abandoned the city to itself. Neither provided meaningful services of any kind--schools, healthcare, electricity, potable water, sanitation, zoning and construction regulations--and what they did provide was poorly administered, or primarily served the needs of the wealthier or better off sectors of the population who could afford to pay for them. Consider, for example, that only about 28...>>
I have been reading my page proofs for more than a week now. In a few short months my book, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, which examines diplomatic, commercial, cultural relations between the U.S. and Haiti through the lens of Pan Americanism, will finally arrive in select bookstores. Other copies will land on library shelves, ready to collect dust. I'll set aside a few more to give to my parents, Haitian immigrants who came to the United States in 1969 for a chance at a better life. I realize that the arrival of page proofs is a joyful moment that academics cherish, yet my heart is heavy. My hopes for a brighter future...>>
The human rights community has been sharply split over Haiti since the late 1990s. From one perspective, Haitians' main problems consisted of civil and political rights violations--brutal tactics used by leaders once beloved by all, corruption in ministries, and the withering of democratic ideals. From another point of view, the Haitian people were suffering grave violations of their economic and social rights as a result of the deliberate hobbling of the government by the international community's neoliberal policies and blocking of aid. Like most polarized discourses, this one held kernels of truth and also missed big parts of the picture. The fact is that the widespread, pervasive denial of the most basic economic and social rights in Haiti--to food, water,...>>
Neo-colonialism As some commentators have noted Haiti was devastated before the earthquake, which struck on Tuesday January 12. The present calamity that has befallen Haiti in 2010 forces us think back to the past 200 hundred years of Haitian history. What we find is that whereas we like to emphasize Haiti's heroic beginnings, in terms of the only successful slave revolt and the defeat of Napoleon's forces by ex-slaves, we tend to forget that Haiti has also had the longest experience of neo-colonialism in the capitalist system. The morning after independence in 1804, a ruined post-plantation society faced ostracism by all the great powers. The past two hundred years have taken Haiti from pariah state to failed state. Haiti's...>>
The Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York Universityheld a teach-in "Haiti in Context" on Wednesday January 20th to which I was invited to speak. After the panelists presented their perspectives on the current situation, a young Haitian female graduate student who had been there during the earthquake took the mike at the podium. Her account of the event and its immediate aftermath required the audience to be patient. Words crept sluggishly from her mouth as she dissociated frequently between incomplete sentences.>>
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