The Copenhagen climate summit offers abundant fuel for the contemporary apocalyptic imaginary. Officially entitled the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), the Copenhagen summit hinges on three main questions: 1) how much are industrialized nations willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?; 2) how much are major developing countries like China and India willing to do to limit their growing emissions?; 3) where will the money needed by developing countries to reduce their emissions and adapt to the impact of climate change come from and who will manage that money?
In the months leading up to the summit, officials in the Obama administration have been doing their best to dampen expectations that agreement will be possible on any of these counts. With a pathetically weak climate bill co-authored by the coal lobby mired in the Senate, U.S. negotiators have been returning to the blame China script. The prognosis looks bleak: according to a recent poll by The Guardian newspaper, 9 out of 10 climate scientists have given up hope that political efforts to restrict global warming to 2° Celsius will be successful, and believe instead that an average rise of 4-5° by the end of the century is far more likely given soaring emissions and political constraints. Such levels of emissions would disrupt food and water supplies, exterminate thousands of species of plants and animals, and trigger massive sea level rises that would swamp the land of hundreds of millions of people.
Outside the conference halls and official forums at Copenhagen, however, an increasingly militant movement for climate justice has been consolidating around a few key demands. At Klimaforum09, running parallel to COP15, this movement of movements has published an alternative declaration for "system change - not climate change" that highlights the political character of the crisis. Rather than seeing climate change as a purely environmental problem that can be dealt with through market mechanisms such as carbon trading and technological fixes, in other words, the climate justice movement focuses on the unjust economic model that has seen a small group of countries develop through intensive exploitation of the planet's resources. The movement is calling for rich nations to repay the climate debt they owe to the poor countries, communities, and people who have not benefited from fossil-fuel intensive development but who will bear the brunt of climate change. Equally important for the movement is the demand for the complete abandonment of fossil fuels within the next thirty years: keep the oil in the soil, the coal in the hole, the tar sand in the land. Rejecting market-oriented solutions such as carbon offsetting, the climate justice movement recognizes that a solution to the climate crisis will only come through acknowledging people's right to just development based on equitably shared green technologies and a transition to food, energy, land, and water sovereignty.
The success of this movement for climate justice may lie in the extent to which the demand for climate reparations resonates not simply with global civil society but with the delegates inside the negotiating halls in Copenhagen. Like the Battle of Seattle, in other words, victory may ultimately come through the mobilization of a broad coalition of civil society groups and officials in countries affected by the environmental and political legacy of uneven development. There are signs that such official leadership may be forthcoming. In a recent article on the movement for climate justice, Naomi Klein quotes a speech by Angelica Navarro, Bolivia's climate negotiator, whose call for a Marshall Plan for the Earth earlier this year resonated widely. As Navarro put it, ""Millions of people--in small islands, least-developed countries, landlocked countries as well as vulnerable communities in Brazil, India and China, and all around the world--are suffering from the effects of a problem to which they did not contribute."
Unlike past struggles for social justice, the movement for climate justice has a limited amount of time to turn the political tide before environmental feedback mechanisms that fuel runaway climate change kick in. Will the climate justice movement succeed in overturning climate apartheid and averting eco-genocide? In this forum, a distinguished group of commentators offer their assessments of the Copenhagen summit and advance their visions of the path towards a just and sustainable transition.
]]>Not to be outdone, the United States committed itself to a meager 3% reduction from Kyoto-mandated 1990 levels. In what can only be characterized as an effort to obfuscate and falsely inflate their commitment, the US reported its emission reduction as 17%, albeit based on 2005 emissions levels--which amount to the approximate 3% reduction from Kyoto-mandated 1990 levels.
Utopistics is the serious assessment of historical alternatives, the exercise of our judgement as to substantive rationality of alternative possible historical possibilities. It is the sober, rational and realistic evaluation of human systems, the constraints on what they can be, and the zones open to human creativity. Not the face of the perfect (and inevitable [utopian]) future, but the face of an alternative, credibly better and historically possible (but far from certain) future. It is thus an exercise simultaneously in science, in politics and in morality.[6]
Such (re)positioning has parallels across the north-south chasm: Sweden and Ecuador are exemplary in this regard.
To be sure, the plan has been attacked as making Sweden overly reliant on nuclear power sources, and recently, many note that, given center-right government shifts since 2007, the full ambit of the plan has been drastically curtailed. Notwithstanding these shortcomings, Sweden still leads the European Union in overall, verified emissions reductions.
CJA, CJN! and the Danish-based Climate Collective has decided to come together that day with the clear message that what we need is System Change - Not Climate Change!
Everyone is welcome to join this block with their own groups and message that is based on this. In the bloc there will be mobile stages from where people can speak, dance, play music and what else we think will fit into the 1-2 hours walk. [11]
The day before US President Obama arrived and spoke in Copenhagen, Evo Morales reacted to Hilary Clinton's suggestion "We can't look back; we have to look forward." For Evo,
Looking forward means that we have to review everything that capitalism has done. These are things that cannot just be solved with money. We have to resolve problems of life and humanity. And that's the problem that planet earth faces today. And this means ending capitalism. [14]
Accordingly, the principal Bolivian negotiator and Bolivia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Pablo Solon, called on the world to join Bolivians in April 2010:
[W]e want to organise a world-wide referendum in relation to climate change. And president Morales says lets think about the 22nd April - the international day of 'Mother Earth'. We want to see if we can organise this officially in some countries and with social movements and civil societies and environmentalists in the rest of the world. Because if we are able to demonstrate, in an action like a referendum, that we can mobilise fifty, one hundred million persons voting and saying 'this is the kind of agreement that we want' then the situation can change.[15]
These tendencies reflect the growing synergies between an increasingly powerful global grassroots movement for climate justice and clear breaks by a small but growing gaggle of states seeking people-inspired and -backed alternative proposals. Arguably these movements for climate justice from above and below represent a kind of double movement. One, on the one hand, demands and actively seeks a kind of poly-valent (re)construction and (re)theorization of political, economic and social forms of autonomy, as well as a veritable resistance against what I have elsewhere called "hegemonic forms of climate knowledge and power" that get exhibited variously by market proponents and ideologues, powerful state actors, and elites, particularly large, well-funded NGOs, primarily in the global North, but increasingly operating in the global South and across both spaces in the multilateral context. [16]
Climate catastrophe looms large on a near horizon. The World Health Organization, as of 2005--the latest available data--marks the 'climate-change body count' at 600,000 and growing. [17]
When taken together the collective outcome of the "official proposals" in Copenhagen could see more than four degrees centigrade of average planetary temperature increase. Such a fate could doom vast swaths of the planet to near permanent Dustbowlification,[18] potentially lock out half the planet from access to fresh water, possibly displace over a billion people and for the first time in history remove existing nations from the face of the planet, as sea levels rise to unimaginable levels. This grim specter of climate catastrophe unfolding is motivating bold proposals from above and below; notwithstanding elite foot-dragging.
I tell my story because, as I have looked for ways to make sense of my experience, of the unforgiving contradictions that have haunted my days and nights in the aftermath of the earthquake, I have noticed parallel contradictions among fellow Haitians in the Diaspora and in Haiti. From the scholars, who, like myself, have been called upon to comment and analyze in ways that require at least some measure of distance and objectivity when all we really want to do is weep, to the parents looking for ways to explain the incomprehensible to their children, to survivors questioning their good fortune, the contradictions abound. But perhaps the most compelling dissonance, at least for me, has to do with the struggle to make sense of this earthquake as part of a public conversation. The narratives of hope, rebirth, and rebuilding that surface amidst media images of orphaned children, mass graves, and unmitigated destruction are one response to what family therapist Pauline Boss has termed ambiguous loss--specifically, the variant of ambiguous loss known as "Leaving without good-bye." In this scenario, the loved one is psychologically present but physically absent: examples include soldiers missing in action and abducted children.
The power of ambiguous loss lies in the uncertainty it produces. The literature on grief and bereavement shows that closure is a characteristic feature of the mourning process. Even when death happens unexpectedly, as in the case of a fatal accident, the rites and rituals that accompany loss (wakes, funerals, sitting shivah, spreading ashes) help those left behind to make peace with the sudden absence of a loved one. Boss writes about how family dynamics are put in disequilibrium by ambiguous loss. I would add that in situations like the earthquake that rocked Haiti on January 12th, the disequilibrium is also collective, so the rituals we use to heal from this terrible tragedy ought to be collective as well. In many ways, the overwhelming desire to redeem the devastating and ambiguous losses leveled by the earthquake is a form of collective mourning.
The dynamics of such collective response, however, are made even more complex in light of a less theorized concept that Boss likewise deserves credit for developing--ambiguous gain. As the name suggests, this refers to an event or experience that is mostly positive, such as the birth of a child or a graduation that nonetheless marks an ending and represents entry into unknown territory. How does a mother celebrate surviving an earthquake that has left her homeless, without shelter for her young children? How does a brother celebrate escaping injury when he knows his sister will never walk again? How do members of the Diaspora come to terms with their own relative safety and security while their fellow Haitians are sleeping outside, reliving the trauma of the earthquake with every aftershock (more than 50 and counting)? And how do I make peace with my intense gratitude for every one of my family members whose lives were spared when thousands upon thousands have died? These contradictions of ambiguous gain and ambiguous loss in the Haitian experience compel us to dream of a brighter future with a renewed resolve to once again change the course of history, to no longer be defined by narrow labels that diminish our collective humanity: mystical boat people from the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, a nation plagued by AIDS. May we bury these labels, which take away personhood and actively reconstruct an ambiguous loss of self, beneath the rubble as a collective ritual of rebirth.
Fabienne Doucet is an assistant professor of early childhood education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at NYU Steinhardt. She is working on a book about the educational experiences of Haitian youth and their families in Boston, tentatively entitled On the Edge of Hope.
Jolting me from sleep, Françoise tugged the dusty backpack holding the last of my belongings from under my head and told me we had to run. There was a tsunami coming, and we had to go higher. We hurried up Bois Verna, trying to pull the kids along, while tripping over our bags and bedding. As we reached the end of the road, we heard a mass of people approaching us, claiming another flood was heading down the mountains. We paused, apparently sandwiched between a tsunami and a flood. Having nowhere to go, everyone just stopped in the middle of the crossroads. Here, at this intersection--where not a single siren could be heard, where the only lights shone from the screens of cell phones--a young man's voice began to blurt out from a megaphone. He called for us to stay calm and to go back to...well, where we had come from. He identified himself as a member of the Organization of Young People for the Development of Bois Verna and then later as a community police officer. He was certain that the dusty dryness meant no tsunami. With no other visible authority, we listened and returned to the car lot.
For the past two years, I have been researching the ways in which these forms of youth-based social organizations pair up with longstanding performance groups, known as "foot bands" (bann a pye), in order to construct an authority to govern in an emerging democracy wrought by extensive international intervention and weak state capacity: "We make the state" (Nou fè leta), as they say. Like the man with the megaphone leading us back to the shelter of huddles and song, Organization to Restore Bel Air (ORB), another youth organization headquartered closer to the site of my fieldwork, was also engaged in acts of policing and assistance, working to share with the homeless the meager supplies stored in a community restaurant and nearby warehouse. After I was evacuated to New York, they called me to fundraise on their behalf. They said they were unable to purchase the staples--such as, spaghetti and ketchup--to keep the Bel Air kitchen operating. They told me that aid was not being distributed in the area, but only to the masses at Champs Mars, and that they were overwhelmed by the demand. They stressed their attempts to fill the void left by the state, epitomized by their view from Bel Air's hilltop setting of the gutted National Palace below. One week after the quake, Bernard, the group's president, told me, "We don't have security. We don't have food or water. There is no government, no state, no NGOs. We only see their ashes. We are making the state for us."
While much news and political commentary following the earthquake has focused on the palpable limitations of the Haitian state, few have carefully considered what the phrase "weak state" might even mean. I do take issue with the presumption of some form of assessment by which states might be placed on a scale of relative weakness. Yet I want to focus here on how this inadequate characterization is complicated by the divergent meanings of the word "state" that occur in various social settings. Consider the different meanings of the term which surface when we compare the perspective of international news correspondents with that of Haitians engaged in grassroots political organizing, like Bernard. Whereas foreign commentary tends to posit the state as a decidedly national and hierarchical entity that has "failed" the people it serves, the politically engaged (angaje) residents of Bel Air tend to posit the state as something to be done; that is, the actual execution of a set of particular acts--namely, the making of order and the provisioning of services. As an idea accomplished by acts of governance, the state that emerges in Haiti is essentially constituted by a continuum of structures that range from the extensive NGO and UN network to the national ministries. Take, for example, access to water in Bel Air. Viva Rio, a Brazilian NGO, who collaborates with MINUSTAH--the (also Brazilian-led) UN stabilization mission--to execute neighborhood security and development initiatives, financially and materially supports the state water-distribution agency, Central Autonome Métropolitaine d'Eau Portable. This agency's administration of water at public fountains is then delegated to select community organizations whose local authority is seen as both a threat and an asset to the foreign-generated project.
For the residents of Bel Air, the idea of the state as a governing structure necessarily includes the work of such community organizations. Bel Air alone is home to over one hundred community organizations--more than half of them are registered with the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs. Together, they reflect the history of socio-political organizations, known as Popular Organizations (Òganizasyon Popilè), which were central to former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide's vast base of support. They have strategically evolved in recent times, becoming more skilled at managing national and international agents in order to solicit funds and resources for neighborhood initiatives. This is exemplified by ORB's dual effort to solicit funds for its performances from the Ministry of Culture and Communication, while securing financing for its social projects from various NGOs and national ministries and offices (including the Presidential Palace and Prime Ministry). Performing an intermediate level of citizenship by brokering between the state and the "public" (pèp), these organizations constitute a civil society that refuses a subordinate status to the state. Rather, this sphere is made up of social actors who contribute to defining a social contract that realizes and signifies the fragmented power of the state and its relation to the populace.
The legacy of state failure in Haiti made salient by the recent calamity results from the inability of governance structures to establish a certain sovereign power and clear parameters for how the Haitian people relate to this power. Both the consequence and the challenge of the concerted, yet disjointed Haitian civil society, this inability impedes performances of governance from effectively positing the state as national or hierarchical. Without dismissing the role or responsibility of national structures, I urge those of us committed to rebuilding a stronger political society in Haiti to heed the workings of these civic organizations when attempting to discern which state is failing, how it operates, and how it can be improved. Let us start by listening to the megaphones.
Chelsey Kivland is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, who was living and conducting her dissertation research in Port-au-Prince.
Instead, of course, 2004 was the year of the overthrow of Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which triggered a new moment of political conflict and violence in Haiti. It was a remarkable year, both within the historical profession - for several months, the scattered group of us who worked on Haiti suddenly saw one another nearly every week, and shared and pushed forward our collective projects - and for Haiti itself.
I had the good fortune during that year to meet Jean Casimir, who arranged for Avengers to be published in Haiti. This past May, when I visited for the release of the book, I was reminded of the way that Haiti constantly challenges the stories, categories, and certainties that govern so much thinking and talk about the current global order. While some consider Haiti to be trapped in the past, a historian of the Atlantic world might argue that, since the eighteenth century, there has been no place more "modern" than Haiti. A thriving plantation colony, covered with technologically advanced sugar processing machinery, populated by exiled and brutalized workers, Haiti's plantation system helped to produce France and Europe, not to mention North America. A nation born of slave revolution, it was a foundational pioneer in expanding and concretizing the language of universal rights, outrunning the American and French Revolutions by insisting that if all are born free and equal than none should be a slave. Haiti was never outside of "modernity," but rather at the center of it all.
What the Haitian Revolution represented, more than anything, was a refusal, on the part of the most brutalized victims of the nascent world order, to be human capital. Of course, it quickly contained, and the colonial order was never fully defeated, for it shaped both Haiti's struggle for diplomatic recognition and helped produced some of the competing visions of freedom and autonomy that have shaped the nation's history ever since. But if the promise of that revolution has never been completely fulfilled, it remains a powerful beacon of what is possible when people insist on their right to free.
Today, in a country born two hundred years ago out of the defeat of the armies of the Spanish, English and then French empires, you might find yourself in traffic jams populated largely, it seemed, by the trucks of the United Nations and NGOs. Jean Casimir jokes that living in the country has pushed him to imagine a new index of "under-development": experts per inhabitant. By this measure, Haiti might well be the world leader. There was, already in May, a number of projects underway that were carried out by deeply committed individuals from around the world. Now, in the wake of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, a new wave of aid has commenced . In the next months, indeed years, a massive wave of intervention and assistance will land in Haiti. What will it produce? Where will it end?
For much of the 20th century, particularly since the time of the United States Occupation from 1915-1934, outsiders have been working hard to "repair" Haiti. They have done so in many ways, and with heavy involvement and collaboration from a range of actors in different parts of the society. Whether the sentiment is accurate or not, many people conclude that these efforts have been largely fruitless, or worse: that they have in many cases actually deepened economic and political difficulties in Haiti. The country, you might even say, has consistently deconstructed various certainties about "development," though the response is often simply to conclude that Haiti is a hopeless case, an incurable patient.
I have great admiration and respect for the work of a range of groups committed to improving quality access to core social institutions in Haiti. At the same time, I sometimes worry about what these powerful commitments to change and progress lead us to believe about Haiti. On a recent flights, I sat next to a first-time visitor headed to her first mission trip, who exclaimed: "My god, there are trees!" She had been told that the island was entirely deforested, and had seen the famous pictures of barren land on the border between the Dominican Rebublic and Haiti. That, above Port-au-Prince, there are misty and forested hills with beautiful terraced gardens producing food for the city, might surprise many outsiders.
I often find myself, perhaps oddly, advocating for a more banal analysis of the country, one which allows for its diversity of experience, its ups and downs, its simultaneous capacity for absurdity and corruption, and for grace and brilliance. I occasionally have to tell my students as a counter-point the newspaper articles about political killings and people eating mud pies, people in Haiti don't usually wake up in the morning screaming: "Oh my God, I'm in Haiti!" They get up, say good morning, and enter the day. If too many do so burdened with hunger or sickness or want, they also do so with whatever mix of hope, fear, and faith that many people carry with them. What is striking about talking about Haiti is that one actually does have to remind people that this is, in fact, just a place, with people who work, eat, sleep, and dream, like us.
That said, it is of course a very special place. It has a complex and layered history, multi-national in both form and content, full of contradictions and uncertainties. A friend whose family lives in Martissant told me that even as news channels around the world trafficked in images of aid workers arriving to assist Haitians in desperate circumstances in the days following the January 12th earthquake, his mother didn't even know that any foreigners had landed in Haiti. No aid workers of any kind had surfaced in her neighborhood. People were finding their own ways of dealing with the catastrophe, drawing on their own forms of organization and solidarity. This raises one question, above all others, for us to ponder in the weeks to come. How will these diverse aims and organizations interact. Will they meet, dialogue, and come to an understanding? Will they ignore one another? Will they come into conflict? If so, how?
What we all need to do now, those of us who are or hope to be involved in Haiti in one way or another, is to stop and think--and think hard. We have to try, in the midst of the shock, horror, and devastation we feel, to find a space of reflection that might allow us to figure out what it means to think, and therefore act, with Haiti, rather than simply on its behalf.
Laurent Dubois is Professor of History and Romance Studies at Duke University, and author of Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (2004). He has recently completed Soccer Empire: The World Cup and the Future of France, which will be published this Spring by University of California Press.
]]>Why did the people of Koridò survive? And, in the aftermath, why are their lives hanging in the balance? My immigrant friends didn't explain how their relatives had managed to survive. The reasons are readily apparent to them but not obvious to those unfamiliar with their way of life. The ordinary habits of everyday rural life in the residential compounds of Koridò and beyond no doubt contributed to their survival. Most residents live outside--preparing meals, eating, washing, braiding hair, talking, playing, and laughing. People only stay indoors to sleep, when it rains, or if they are sick. Indeed a healthy person who stays inside during the day is assumed to be hiding something, or doing sorcery. At 5:00 PM on Tuesday, therefore, when their homes crumbled, most people would have been safely outdoors. As for the relative few who might have been indoors when the earth quaked, the modest style and scale of homes probably proved beneficial: most dwellings are small and there are multiple exits. Each room typically has its own door--a potential escape--to the outside. The older houses are made of wattle and daub with thatch or corrugated zinc roofs. The homes built since 1983 (virtually all financed by migrants) are made of cinder block. Pressure to keep up with the migrant-funded housing boom has accelerated the building of larger homes and even two-story structures. Many of these homes were damaged or destroyed by the January 12th earthquake. Subsequent quakes and tremors have forced many residents to stay outdoors.
Thus it is the quotidian practices of these rural poor families that, I believe, pulled them through the earthquake relatively unscathed. With tragic irony, the same adaptations to marginality are now threatening their survival. Kouri pou lapli, tonbe larivyè. Run to get out of the rain; fall into the river. This pèp lamizè ("people of poverty") did not store much food. They do not have cabinets, closets, or refrigerators to preserve food and to protect it from pests. People instead tend to buy food daily, usually in small quantities because that is what they can afford: a spoonful of tomato paste, one bouillon cube, a cupful of beans, rice or cornmeal.
Why do the humble residents of this lush coastal hamlet need to buy food? Its rich soil is cultivated, but produces little food. The main crop planted is not a source of nourishment but what Sidney Mintz (1971: 24) has termed a "drug food": sugar cane. The violent conquest of the island and labor of African slaves in Léogane and other plains of the colony once known as Saint Domingue, advanced the production of sugar cane, to be transformed into sugar, molasses and rum. These "proletarian hunger killers" managed to reproduce the burgeoning working classes of Europe. But, the increasingly desperate situation the people of Koridò now face is in part a legacy of that past. The empty calories survivors suck out of the sugar cane help to keep them alive for a while, but the cane harvest was nearly over when the earthquake hit, leaving little, if any sugar cane for local residents.
Why do the owners of these tiny plots interspersed between the large fields owned by outsiders continue planting sugar cane on their own tiny plots rather than food? Very few gardens are planted with beans, plantains, squash, sweet potatoes and peanuts. The labor to produce them exceeds the return on their sale. Sugar cane proliferates because it is a hardy plant, requiring little labor after the initial work to prepare the field and to conduct periodic weeding. It practically grows by itself. This pattern reproduces an economic system that has insufficient manual labor to cultivate more labor-intensive crops or to dig and maintain irrigation canals, where there is water. The abysmal return these sugar cane producers receive for their crop, despite the high price of refined sugar in Haiti, keeps them mired in poverty. This cycle just pushes their children to disdain farming, to prepare for an exit from their family plots of land. This contradictory process has transformed this society from producers of food to producers of migrants for export that generate wage remittances and channel imported food. Nature violently interrupted that fragile reciprocity on January 13th . There is no way to send money to those at home and no food for them to buy.
As I write, the people of Koridò are camped out in an expansive sugar cane field. In yet another irony, they are squatting on land they once controlled. Joseph Lacombe, a powerful elite businessman from Port-au-Prince, took the land from them in the early twentieth century in a series of "legal" swindles. Some of the wealth Lacombe siphoned from this rural section went toward building a chateau in the Pyrenees with the romantic name, Villa à Léogane. According to my godson Charlie's last harrowing report on January 20, he and the other "squatters" were staving off their hunger with breadfruit and sugar cane. Seven days after the quake, no one has yet offered them food or potable water. The near unilateral focus on "la République de Port-au-Prince" by foreign aid agencies and the media has exacerbated the neglect of people whose everyday practices got them out of the way of the earthquake but who now flounder perilously at the edge of the abyss.
Karen Richman is Director of Academic Affairs and Center for Migration and Border Studies at the Institute for Latino Studies at University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Migration and Vodou (2005), a multisited ethnography of a transnational Haitian community. She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters on Haitian and Mexican migration, religion, labor and expressive culture. Dr. Richman won the 2009 Heizer award for the best article in the field of ethnohistory for her article, "Innocent Imitations? Mimesis and Alterity in Haitian Vodou Art." She has worked as an advocate for refugees and immigrant workers in the United States.
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. Despite the voyeuristic sensationalism that colors US media about the earthquake, a complex web of factors contributed to the sheer scale of the disaster. Instead of rehearsing the range of factors that produced the catastrophe we are witnessing, I'd like to focus on the historical forces that have cohered in the image of Haiti as a place "beyond comprehension."
The obvious: Haiti came into being through a successful slave revolution. In 1804 Dessalines declared Saint Domingue independent from France. Taking as its name the indigenous term "Haiti," this state became the first nation in the Americas to realize a complete reversal of imperial hierarchies: slaves had become masters, disrupting on of the world's largest industries.
This was not supposed to happen, not in the slaveholding Atlantic where slaves were big business. Half the sugar and coffee consumed in Europe and the US were being produced in the territory of Saint Domingue, the Pearl of the Antilles.
This was not supposed to happen in a different sense, too: slaves cannot liberate themselves. Abolitionism is one thing, a successful revolution that slaves organized and executed is quite another. Slave owners throughout the Atlantic were forewarned: although they pretended that Haiti did not exist, they began to take precautions.
Needless to say, this was not a hospitable environment for the only post-slavery state. Haiti was ostracized, "el fantasma guarico" as they said in Cuba. France recognized Haiti in 1825 in exchange for an exorbitant indemnity. It took Haiti 100 years to pay back that debt. And, trying to rebuild the nation after a devastating revolution that may have killed as many as a third of the 500,000 former slaves took a huge toll on the economy. Meanwhile, Haiti struggled to gain recognition as a sovereign nation. The Vatican refused recognition until 1860, a fact of significant consequence since the church tended to be the institution in charge of education in most post-independence states in the Americas. The United States did not grant diplomatic recognition until 1862--significant because the nation had already been plunged into a Civil War that would ultimately help bring about the legal demise of slavery three years later. As Sidney Mintz once said, the surprising thing is not that Haiti fared badly, but that it fared at all. And actually, when we look at 19th century Haiti, the situation could have been far worse. Unlike most of Spanish America after independence, it was not consumed by fratricidal wars. There was a subsistence economy in place that seemed to work, and a liveable, though massively unequal, political arrangement between the old colonial elites (mostly light-skinned people) and the black masses.
But never mind the relative success of 19th century Haiti: much of the contemporary perception of Haiti continues to be shaped by a revolutionary history that was not supposed to happen: Haiti as a dark and dangerous place, fierce threat to Reason and the Rule of Law. A threat to international security.
You should be surprised by this. You should be saying, "How can that be? 200 years later! After the civil war to abolish slavery, after the civil rights struggles, after black power, after so much effort to overcome racial hierarchies and color prejudice."
There is of course a lot of history between the revolution and the catastrophe that befell Haiti on January 12th. But the role of religon as a cultural system is perhaps an especially intriguing line of inquiry given the many ill-advised statements that are circulating about the role that Vodun has played in Haitian history.
Here is how a website run by fundamentalist protestants in the US, whose stated mission it is to support "long-term missionaries" in Haiti, describes the Bois Caiman ceremony: "On August 14, 1791, many slave leaders of Haiti held a secret meeting at which they dedicated their country to Satan. Every year since then, witch doctors have met to rededicate the country to Satan, and President Jean-Bertrand Aristide--a Roman Catholic priest--renewed the vow in 2004. When the Haitians won their independence from Napoleon's armies in 1804, they attributed their victory to voodoo."
One wishes this website was unusual. Alas it isn't. Go here for a good selection of sites that peddle such nonsense.
Ok, you might say, these are some religious fringe groups. What does it have to do with contemporary views on Haiti? With CNN or ABC coverage? Well, Pat Robertson, a former republican presidential candidate has shared his version of the story recently with the US audiences: Haiti is cursed because it was founded with a devil's pact. But more troubling in some ways is a secular version of this view that has sneaked into the opinion pages of the New York Times. "Haiti, like most of the world's poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized."
The danger here is not merely that Haitians are viewed as wayward pagans, but that Vodun is, in the words of David Brooks of the New York Times "progress-resistant," a repressive cultural matric that keeps Haiti from joining the rest of us on the path of progress.
In fact, the Haitian Revolution started in 1791 with a religious ceremony led by a Jamaican born black man called Dutty Boukman. It is said that a pig was slaughtered. Participants were sworn to absolute loyalty in the struggle to kill all white planters and slaveowners. Historians continue to disagree about the exact nature of the event and its meaning. In the Haitian national imagination, however, it marks the beginning of the uprising in the north from where it soon spread through the entire colony. In commemoration of the events, there is now an annual pilgrimage to the site marked Bois Caiman, in the North.
Before going any further, let us just say that vodu is simply one of many syncretic Afro-Atlantic religions. Like Santería, like Candoblé. Much focus on community and healing, some evil spells, to be sure, but also a glorious way to celebrate abundance in conditions of scarcity. And, let us not forget, a living memory of the slave revolution of 1804.
Why is it that a mainstream commentator feels entitled to attribute "progress-resistance" to vodu? If they worry (quite wrongly) about fatalism, why aren't they worried about Calvinist notions of predestination?
One thing seems clear. In 1804 something happened that was not supposed to be possible. Slaves liberated themselves. It's the unthinkable, the slave owners worse nightmare. A nightmare, not reality. So, one concludes, it was possible only because of a pact with the devil: Bois Caiman. As another protestant fundamentalist site puts it: "From the time of its freedom, Haiti has been in chains" (cited in Elizabeth Eames's blog). A remarkable statement: Haitian freedom, freedom from slavery, is actually not freedom. It is because of vodu that insurgent slaves became masters; because of Haiti is irredemiably poor and "violence prone". Freedom then has to be secured by others: the US marines, Protestant missionaries, and development experts who understand that progress can only be made against the descendents of revolutionary slaves, not with them.
But to the extent that the Haitian Revolution shaped the modern meaning of freedom, its legacy is something that we all share.
This paper was originally delivered at "Haiti in Context: Perspectives on the Current Crisis" a roundtable/teach-in organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, NYU, January 20, 2010.
Sibylle Fischer is an Associate Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Africana Studies and Chair of the Department of Spanish & Portuguese. She is the author of Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution.
]]>After two decades of an endless transition, hope has faded away into pessimism and fatalism. Well before the recent earthquake that destroyed the capital city and decapitated the state, many Haitians had already begun to speak of the death of their country. For years, a common sentiment in Port-au-Prince has been Ayiti mouri, Haiti is dead. What does it mean to say that one's country, one's society is dead?
One explanation is rooted in the concrete experience of the destruction of the landscape. Haiti has one of the most degraded environments in the world. It is over 99% deforested, and has experienced extensive soil erosion. Many mountains are now bare, exposing the limestone rock underneath -- or what Haitians call the "bones" of the mountains. The material destruction of the landscape has gone hand-in-hand with the decline of the peasantry, the collapse of the agricultural sector, and successive waves of migration to Port-au-Prince in search of non-existent jobs. Urban migration has exacerbated deforestation, as the mountains around the capital have been cleared to make way for shoddily constructed houses.
Seen in this light, invocations of the death of Haiti express a deep sense of loss. It is a form of mourning attuned to the loss of the peasantry, the loss of land, and the loss of the symbolic and material ground of the nation itself. Mourning is a way of coming to terms with this loss. Often, it is through the social act of mourning that we find a richer faith in the continuity of life. It is a way of letting go of that which has already been lost. But how does one let go of a nation? Does the "death of Haiti" mean that there is no way out of mourning?
The proclamation of the death of Haiti speaks not just to the past and the present, but also to the future. It is a pessimism born of great despair. It is a fatalism that says "nothing will change," "nothing can be done." This sentiment is rooted in the sense of what in French one would call le futur sans l'avenir -- a future without positive content. While no one denies that time marches on, and there will be some future, to proclaim the death of Haiti is to proclaim that there will be no meaningful future. From that perspective, the sense of crisis that plagues the present would simply extend outward into an empty time, an endless now.
If the hope of the popular movement was utopian because it could not be realized in the present, then the hope of recent years is alienated because both hope and the future no longer appear as meaningful elements of historical development. The future is not ours to make, and hope is reduced to a slogan or an acronym for business as usual. The former can be seen in President René Préval's own party, which is called Espwa (Hope), but which has done little and promised even less. The latter can be seen in the HOPE act (Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement) passed in 2006 and extended in 2008 by the US government. Designed to provide tariff-free access to US markets for garments manufactured in Haiti, the HOPE act is but the continuation of the long-standing commitment to developing Haiti as a site for cheap labor and offshore manufacturing. Minimal government and neoliberal economic policies are both deemed to be the only possible historical trajectory. Hope is alienated, and the social process becomes externalized, governed by a hostile alien power.
Today, we have the chance to forge a new path. The terrible destruction wrought by the recent earthquake has highlighted the desperate need for a concerted and ambitious plan to rebuild both the Haitian state and Haitian society. This means that the question of the future has once again been opened up. What vision can we now have for the future? What would a transformed Haiti look like, in the coming years and decades? Can we reclaim hope as a political category and envision another Haiti?
I believe that hope for a radically transformed Haiti is no longer a utopian hope. We now possess the objective means necessary to change the country. The question before us is do we -- the global community -- have the political will and the imagination to engage in a bold, ambitious, and comprehensive plan to help build a durable, democratic Haiti? To do so would mean to claim a richer conception of progress, freedom, and autonomy. To, once again--in the great spirit of the Haitian Revolution--blast open the horizon of the future.
Greg Beckett is Collegiate Assistant Professor and Harper Fellow in the Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He studies environmental, urban, and political crises in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
Here
Here is the Haiti that far too many people became familiar with over the last thirty years: a political basket case perpetually an inch away from its political demise. Jean Claude " Baby Doc" Duvalier's ouster in 1986 ignited a scramble for power in Haiti from which it had only just started to recover. Along with enduring multiple United Nations and United States occupations since Duvalier's ouster, Haiti has also had to persevere through a litany of ad hoc civilian leaders, former priests, military officers, and governmental bureaucrats took office one after another. In spite of their efforts Haiti remained a debt ridden, poverty-stricken, disease infested rudderless nation that served as the consummate antithesis to a modern nation-state in the western hemisphere. Paradoxically Haiti's wretched of the earth status attracted thousands of non-governmental organizations hell bent on ridding this hemisphere's Babylon of its various social ills, thereby making Haiti the one place where no one wanted to go, but which we all needed to be.
There
There was also another Haiti emerging during this time, one where gains in expanding educational opportunity were being made and the islands native tongue Kreyol was adopted as the national language. Technological advances enabled improved communication between island residents and their brothers and sisters in the diaspora. This improved communication also laid a foundation for Haitian companies to export home grown products like peanut butter and kassav to homesick relatives in Miami, New York and Boston. There Jacmel was quickly becoming a Haitian equivalent to Jamaica's Negril, and Cap Haitien and Milot, the two towns adjoining Haiti's most famous landmark, the Citadel, were positioning themselves to become Haiti's version of Old San Juan, and as such the island was now on pace to developing a tourist economy that would eventually place it on par with its counterparts in the Caribbean. Finally, many of aforementioned homesick Jaspora, having grown tired of blustery northeasters, and anxious about prospects of being interned in retirement communities in Florida were considering spending their golden years in Haiti.
Never Again
Now, having been reduced to its capital city, which recently crumbled into itself, Haiti is neither here nor there. Political maneuvering that once made life here treacherous and progress elusive has come to a grinding halt. With countless members of Haiti's parliament presumed dead in the earthquake and its capital city in ruins there is barely anyone around and anyplace to carry out the political maneuvering that for many years had made public service a life-threatening occupation, the long-standing political ills that Haiti had once been synonymous with are no longer here nor there as everyone squarely focuses their attention on earthquake recovery and survival. There go the immediate hopes of the island's tourism board, retiring baby boomers, real-estate developers and investors who had elected to cast their buckets on this island.
That said, being neither here nor there might eventually work to Haiti's long-term advantage. From this moment forward January 12th will now stand alongside 1804's declaration of independence as a defining moment in the island's history. The year 1804 fashioned Haiti with an iconic legacy and a cluster of heroic figures worthy of their own Greek tragedies, Toussaint, Dessalines, Christophe and Petion to name a few. New leaders will emerge from amidst the rubble of January 12th to re-fashion Haiti and hopefully enable its history to pivot from the genre of tragedy to epic. And in order for this transition to occur Haitians--on the island and abroad--must be willing commit ourselves to never letting something like January 12th happen again.
Ferentz Lafargue is an Assistant Professor of Literary Studies at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts. He is currently working on a memoir entitled Neither Here, Nor There about the Haitian American immigrant experience in New York City. You can read more of his writing about Tuesday's earthquake here or on his blog.
There is no doubt that the dominant economic and political classes of Haiti bear great responsibility for the abysmal conditions in the country that exacerbated the impact of the earthquake (or of hurricanes or tropical storms). However, these local actors did not create these conditions alone but did so in close partnership with foreign governments and economic actors with long-standing interests in Haiti, principally those of the advanced countries--the United States, Canada, and France--and their international financial institutions (IFIs)--the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank. Since the 1970s and under various free market mantras, these international actors and institutions sought to and succeeded in transforming Haiti into a supplier of the cheapest labor in this hemisphere for foreign and domestic investors in the export assembly industry; in dismantling all obstacles to free trade; in privatizing public enterprises; and in weakening further the institutions of the state through policies that reinforced Haiti's dependence on foreign aid organizations--governmental and non-governmental.
These policies had drastic consequences for the Haitian economy. Locating the assembly industries primarily in Port-au-Prince encouraged migration from the rural areas to the capital city, contributed to its bloated population and sprawling squalor, and provided a never ending supply of cheap labor for those industries. At the same time, removing tariffs on food imports were detrimental to Haitian agriculture. Whereas in the 1970s Haiti produced most of the rice it consumed and imported only 10 percent of its food needs, by the end of the 1990s it was importing more than 42 percent of its food needs, had become the highest per capita consumer of subsidized US imported rice in the Western Hemisphere, and the largest importer of foodstuffs from the US in the Caribbean. Thus, US farmers benefitted at the expense of Haitian producers. These policies, too, propelled rural-to-urban migration, with Port-au-Prince as the primary destination, as well as emigration to the neighboring Dominican Republic, the Caribbean, and North America. Haiti is becoming increasingly dependent on remittances from its immigrants, which now represent 35 percent of Haiti's GDP.
What, then, is to be done? The response of the international community--from governments, the UN, and NGOs around the world--for medical treatment, food, water, temporary shelter, and road and communication repairs--has been immediate and massive, but will need to be sustained for a longer time span if it is to help Haiti recover economically in the short and medium term. Pressure is also mounting on bilateral and multilateral aid donors to cancel Haiti's debt of some $1.15 billion.
But to be effective and long lasting, future aid must be unconditional and be given more in the form of grants than loans. To that end, the Haitian people need to rethink how the country relates to the international community, in particular the major powers and the IFIs. Basically, I would argue, Haiti needs to break with the policies advocated by the major powers and IFIs that have proved disastrous for the Haitian economy. These policies are predicated on the belief that Haiti can develop only if it remains open to the world market, relies on its comparative advantage of low-cost labor to attract foreign investments in the export assembly industry, and prioritizes the production of selected agricultural goods, such as mangoes, for export. Despite the failure of these policies to generate sustainable development, reduce unemployment and improve the standard of living of the majority of Haitians, the major powers and IFIs continue to advocate them as the solution to Haiti's chronic underdevelopment and poverty. This is shown, for example, by the report written by former World Bank economist Paul Collier for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in 2008, and the latter's appointment of former US President Bill Clinton to spearhead that strategy in Haiti. Ignoring the evidence of the last 38 years, Collier's report calls for establishing a cluster of free trade zones for garment production beyond the two that currently exist in Port-au-Prince and Ouanaminthe, and creating such zones for the production and export of mangoes.
It is time for the Haitian people to mobilize as they did in 1990 to change the status quo, but this time by learning from the mistakes of the past and avoiding placing their faith in false prophets. As it did in 1990, an agenda for change would need to include the following:
1. Reject all the different versions of the structural adjustment policies of the IFIs that require that Haiti remove tariffs on food and other imports, privatize public enterprises, exempt foreign investors from taxes on their profits in the assembly industries, and curb social spending. Haiti could instead negotiate bilateral or multilateral agreements with those countries that are willing to provide aid without tying them to the implementation of specific economic or social policies.
2. Launch an immediate large-scale and national public works project to rebuild or expand Haiti's infrastructure, communication, transportation, public schools, public health facilities, and public housing. Here, too, Haiti could rely on bilateral or multilateral agreements to sustain this effort beyond the immediate post-crisis reconstruction now underway with foreign assistance that will focus primarily on the quake-ravaged areas.
3. Prioritize Haiti's food security and sovereignty by launching an agrarian reform, and subsidizing production for the local market as well as for export.
4. Promote the development of local and national agro-industries that use domestic inputs to produce consumer and durable goods; and support the national handicraft industry and promote its expansion on the international market.
5. Protect workers' rights, such as the right to form trade unions and the right to strike, and provide a living wage to all workers, especially in the export assembly industries.
It is obvious that these goals cannot be implemented all at once or immediately. But they must serve as the basis for a large scale popular mobilization to hold the elected representatives of the people to account and to renegotiate Haiti's relations with the international community.
Alex Dupuy is Class of 1958 Distinguished Professor of Sociology in Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. His books include Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700 (1989); Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution (1997); and The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti (2007). He has also authored more than 30 articles on Haiti and the Caribbean in refereed journals and anthologies.
]]>I write now from a space of contradiction and discomfort. Straddling the prickly worlds of the professional and personal, the theoretical and practical, I need space to grieve for a number of family and friends who were killed by the earthquake, time to figure out how my partner and I can possibly help a number of relatives who, like 1.5 million other Haitians, remain homeless at this moment. At the same time, my academic training and my position as a professor--which has prepared me to examine Haiti in its historical context and to critique the disturbing media images and commentary on Haiti that now bombard us--forces me to be distant, speculative and objective at times when I care not to be. This impasse, though maddening at times, ironically proves necessary for me to make sense of this tragedy.
What has become apparent over the past week is that the response to the earthquake in Haiti has produced another Pan American moment within global discourses of militarism and humanitarianism, international cooperation, and security. For many Haiti is often viewed within the West in similar ways to Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and the Congo as a failing or failed state, but without the mineral resources those nations possess. Pan Americanism, born from the routes of 19th century diasporic connections and migration patterns also maintains complicated roots in Caribbean and Latin American foreign policy: it has paradoxically proven useful for Washington officials in spreading a U.S.-styled democracy that stresses mutual cooperation, egalitarianism and non-intervention amongst American nation-states while implementing what Eric Roorda has called "gunboat diplomacy, military occupation and dollar diplomacy." Caribbean and Latin American intellectuals and state officials often deploy this ideology in order to access U.S. foreign assistance programs, challenge U.S. military aggression and political and economic intervention, and reframe the legacy of European colonialism in the region. In spite of a history of direct challenges to a U.S.-styled Pan Americanism by Caribbean and Latin American peoples, U.S.-based aid and credit organizations, policies and programs that are ideologically rooted in U.S. Pan Americanism (i.e. FDR's Good Neighbor Policy, Harry Truman's Point Four Program, NAFTA, Inter-American Development Bank and USAID) continue to shape economic aspirations in the region. These programs have indeed fostered some improvements in Haiti and other Caribbean and Latin American countries. For example, in August 2009 I volunteered at a summer camp in Petit Goâve, Haiti, which was sponsored by a Boston-based Haitian hometown association--the Haitian Organization for the Advancement of Petit Goâve (HOAP). I remember that the smooth wooden desks and benches at the school bared the stamp of USAID. However, it is critical to note that these same inter-American bodies easily found within the Washington D.C. grid of avenues named after U.S. states, often fail to critique U.S. foreign policy, structural loan programs and a history of underdevelopment due to U.S. occupation (Haiti 1915-34, 1991), military aggression, U.S. financial receivership and political meddling in the Caribbean and Latin America since the turn of the 20th century.
The world has responded to the earthquake that has devastated Haiti's capital city with a mammoth humanitarian effort, yet there is some concern by Haitians in the diaspora, leftist intellectual circles and even French state officials that humanitarianism is being supplanted by U.S. militaristic maneuvers and Washington interventionist politics. Why has the Obama administration opted to administer its humanitarian effort primarily through the Department of Defense (The Pentagon) instead of with non-military-based institutions? Why has the U.S. Air Force taken over the control tower at Toussaint L'Ouverture airport? Alain Joyandet, a French official who is leading relief efforts in Port-au-Prince, admitted to having an altercation with a U.S. Commander in the air-traffic control tower over the flight plan for a French evacuation flight, "This is about helping Haiti, not about occupying Haiti," he insisted. Meanwhile, the Swiss branch of Doctors without Borders (Medecins Sans Frontieres) echoed Joyandet's statements, concerned that "hundreds of lives were being put at risk as planes carrying vital medical supplies were being turned away by American air traffic controllers." Although there are reports of U.S. and Canadian military bringing unloaded weapons to Haiti, Canada's committed 2000 soldiers possess strict "rules of engagement to defend themselves as well as United Nations and local police" according to General Natynczyk, Chief of the Canadian Defense forces. What are these rules of engagement? What national security implications does this scenario in fact have for the U.S. and Canada? What repercussions do those directives have for members of the Haitian diaspora? In spite of moratoriums on deportation of Haitian illegal migrants in the United States and the Bahamas, one wonders what we can do about a pervasive culture of fear of Haitian migration in the U.S. and the Caribbean? These are some of the questions with hemispheric implications that continue to trouble me as I follow the tragic aftermath of the January 12th earthquake.
By the second week of 24 hour news coverage of Port-au-Prince and surrounding areas, I was tempted to turn off the television. I became convinced that the Anderson Coopers, the Katie Courics and the Sanjay Guptas of the world would continue to prove incapable of helping me manage the contradictions of US militarism and humanitarianism. What do we gain by following Dr. Gupta on Twitter? Nevertheless, I had to watch. I had to situate Haiti in its historical and its American context. My work on Haiti, along with a good support network and John Coltrane's music, is facilitating the healing process. At the same time, some of the incredible academic literature on Haiti has helped me to understand that it remains critical to deconstruct myths about Haiti, to critique the gruesome display of dead and wounded black bodies that proliferates in media coverage, and to move beyond the focus on Port-au-Prince as the singular focus of the devastation. The earthquake rocked cities further to the south like Léogâne, Jacmel and Petit Goâve, though these places are mostly ignored in televised news coverage. Finally, as I think about the earthquake in Haiti, international aid organizations and projects structured by newfangled forms of Pan Americanism, I hope that Haitian people--and people sympathetic to their plight--will work to compel US politicians--through transnational initiatives in education, diplomacy, health and business--to make good on the principles of mutual respect, cooperation, non-intervention and cultural exchange set forth so forcefully in their stated positions regarding Haiti.
This paper was originally delivered at "Haiti in Context: Perspectives on the Current Crisis"a roundtable/teach-in organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, NYU, January 20, 2010.
Millery Polyné is an Assistant Professor of African American and Caribbean Studies at New York University's Gallatin School of Individualized Study. His book, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, will be published in May 2010 by University Press of Florida.
Now, as Haitians suffer in the shadow of ruined government ministries charged with ensuring basic services; as individuals who have languished for years without trial walk free after their prison walls cracked open; and as the international community meets in northern capitals to plot Haiti's future, it's time to adopt a single rights-based standard for the recovery and development of Haiti. This time, it's crucial that the discourse of human rights not be used to defeat state-building and popular participation. As the budgets of large U.S.- and Europe-based humanitarian aid NGOs swell, the international community owes it to the Haitian people to adopt the same human rights standards for itself that it has used to critique the Haitian government. This rights-based standard--which requires capacity-building, transparency, accountability, and participation--should apply to all efforts to improve the situation in Haiti.
To ensure capacity-building and participation, the international community--donor states, large NGOs, and the United Nations--must partner closely with the Haitian government and the nation's people in its relief and rebuilding efforts. The aim should be to fortify and expand a public infrastructure that ultimately belongs to the Haitian people. Without this, NGOs may create privatized systems that are not accountable to the population. Rebuilding and construction should be based on plans designed with the participation of the Haitian population. Using the model of Zanmi Lasante (Partners In Health), which has successfully partnered with the Ministry of Health for decades, organizations should join with their counterparts in relevant ministries to improve public systems and invest in Haitian human capital. Food aid organizations should work closely with the Ministry of Agriculture to ensure that their aid does not displace local markets. Water assistance should be undertaken in cooperation with the Ministry of Public Works so that the management of new purification plants and kiosks are accountable to the Haitian people. New schools should be built in conjunction with the Ministry of Education and made available to children for free. The bulk of the work--and thus, the bulk of the salaries for this work--should go to Haitians, not volunteers or consultants from rich countries. When expertise is needed, it should be sought in Haiti; if it can't be located inside the country, Haitians in the diaspora should be recruited as a matter of priority, and investment should be made in training Haitians.
To ensure accountability, the international community, led by the United Nations, should commit to transparency from top to bottom. The United Nations Envoy to Haiti, former President Bill Clinton, should set up a monitoring body that would function openly--perhaps through an interactive website modeled on recovery.gov, coupled with popular means of communication in Haiti (like the radio)--where every single dollar of aid pledged to Haiti can be tracked. Analysts should be enlisted in donor states to ensure that their governments deliver on promised aid, and Haitian monitors should be employed to report on what is actually happening on the ground. Progress and obstacles alike should be made public, and human rights violations must be reported and redressed. A complaints system should be put in place to ensure that when things go wrong, some redress is available, no matter the identity of the perpetrator. This dual-direction transparency would go a long way toward fostering accountability for both donors and recipients.
Finally, recognizing that human rights principles must govern engagement with Haiti means that the international community should forgive Haiti's remaining international debt. Without complete debt relief, the Haitian government will be required to commit resources to loan repayment that could otherwise go to fulfilling the human rights of the population to food, water, and education. It also requires dismantling the unfair agricultural subsidies that northern states pay to their farmers, which have undermined Haiti's domestic and export agricultural markets. Removing the shackles of unfair trade and debt will allow Haiti to build an economy that serves its people instead of international creditors. The language of rights may have become hollow in recent years as advocates spoke past each other, but these principles can now guide the rebuilding of a ravaged nation founded on the idea that human rights could free us all.
This paper was originally delivered at "Haiti in Context: Perspectives on the Current Crisis" a roundtable/teach-in organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, NYU, January 20, 2010.
Margaret Satterthwaite is Associate Professor of Clinical Law and Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ) at NYU School of Law. Along with collaborators from CHRGJ, Zanmi Lasante, Partners In Health, and the RFK Center for Justice and Human Rights, she co-authored Wòch nan Soley: The Denial of the Right to Water in Haiti (2008). The same team is now collaborating on a project on the right to food in Haiti. Sattterthwaite worked for the Commission nationale de vérité et de justice in 1995 and has worked on human rights issues in Haiti in a variety of capacities since.
]]>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 emergence not as an independent but a dependent state was sealed with the payment of the massive indemnity to France. Recognition by France and later by the U.S. changed little and Haiti became the first instance of a neo-colonial dependence that would characterize post independence states in the 20th century.
Neo-colonial dependence not only dictated Haiti's position in the world but also structured Haiti on the inside, securing for the local elite control of the economy which grew rich off the import-export trade. The U.S. Occupation of 1915 firmly put Haiti within the U.S. sphere of influence. It consolidated the power of the Haitian elite and centralized the Haitian state in Port au Prince. If Haiti's capital is overcrowded and chaotic it goes back to the abandonment of the other (largely coastal) towns for Port-au-Prince. Haiti has effectively stood still since independence. As far as US policy goes, Haiti had some importance in 1915 because of the Panama Canal and the outbreak of World War II. Because of its proximity to communist Cuba, it was an important Caribbean ally in the Cold War. Haiti has low priority now, as the main concern of the U.S. is the exodus of refugees to Florida. If there is a U.S./Haitian policy it is one of containment or simply neglect.
Exceptionalism
Neo-colonial dependency has facilitated mythmaking about the Haitian people. They are loved or despised because they are seen as absolutely different. David Brooks writing in the New York Times can smugly tell us that Haitian culture is progress-resistant because of vaudou fatalism and poor child-rearing practices. He clearly has been reading Robert Rotberg's Haiti, the Politics of Squalor (1971) where both these issues are raised as an explanation for Haiti's backwardness. Haiti's history of dependency is never seen as the real cause of Haitian 'difference'. Similarly, in the New York Times Madison Smart Bell tells us that Haiti is mystical and that Haiti has an "extraordinary spiritual reservoir". Is Haiti more mystical that Jamaica or does it have a deeper spiritual reservoir than Barbados which must have more churches per square mile? The fact is that the Haitian mind is not irrational but whenever it collectively expresses itself it causes great consternation. When it expressed itself in 1804 it sent shock waves through the world. When it expressed itself in 1990 by democratically electing a popular president, it challenged the historic neo-colonial condition that had held Haiti immobile for 200 years. Haiti's seemingly unending post-Duvalier transition to democracy shows how hard it is to shed 200 years of neo-colonialism.
Amnesia
Forgetting the past comes easily in a Haitian crisis. We do not have to repeat the appalling nonsense of televangelist Pat Robertson who explained the disaster as the wrath of God visited on Haitians who swore a pact with the devil to get rid of Napoleon III. CBS Sunday Morning blithely told us that the U.S. was responsible for the removal of Duvalier. On the contrary, what the U.S. did was support the regime for more than two decades. When the angry mob was at the palace gates, the U.S. then helped provide safe passage into comfortable exile for Jean Claude Duvalier and family. The U.S. led intervention of 1994 under President Clinton was done after much hesitation and was primarily driven by the need to stanch the outflow of refugees and not to restore democracy. Under President George Bush, the bicentenary of Haiti independence was marked by the U.S. complicity in a coup that ousted President Aristide. Instead of removing Aristide constitutionally, a band of rebel soldiers, later called "freedom fighters" by the U.S. appointed interim President, was allowed to drive the elected President into exile. The U.S. ambassador at the time in his farewell address spoke of the support of the perpetrators of the coup by U.S. based organizations whom he called "the chimeres of Washington". Now that everyone laments the weakness of the Haitian sate no one remembers the extent to which lawlessness was encouraged in February 2004 when it suited the powers that be.
Baseballs
Lawrence Pezullo, the U.S. special envoy to Haiti in 1994, once declared "We were in Haiti for 19 years and it still strikes me that it is the only place in the Caribbean that does not play baseball". He clearly does not know that Caribbean very well. However, his point is that the US has had little lasting impact on its neo-colony. Indeed, instead of playing baseball, Haiti's sweatshops produced baseballs for the U.S. market. Ultimately, the U.S. does not have compelling national or security interests in Haiti and practices a politics of inattention. Intervention is usually motivated by self-interest and this invariably means keeping the Haitian poor from getting onto boats and heading for the U.S. mainland. The swift humanitarian response from the US is to be welcomed. The Whitehouse also wants to avoid another post-Katrina debacle. Long-term reconstruction must be rethought though. President Obama's appointment of Clinton and Bush to lead the U.S. effort is not encouraging.
Haiti after the earthquake in 2010 is comparable to Haiti after independence in 1804. Then a ruined country with a fledgling state attempting to survive faced the hostility of slave-owning states. Haiti today is a ruined country. It needs not a helping hand but to emerge from neo-colonial dependency. It means that there must be a new arrangement as far as who controls the rebuilding. If the past is any lesson, it should not be U.S. led. Canada, Brazil, CARICOM must be equal partners in this initiative. This is the only way to guarantee that the next two hundred years will not be like the last two centuries.
This paper was originally delivered at "Haiti in Context: Perspectives on the Current Crisis" a roundtable/teach-in organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, NYU, January 20, 2010.
]]>What was evident to us when she was done is that she is still in shock and is severely traumatized. Another Haitian faculty member in the audience broke in tears as soon as she began to speak. Those of us with especially deep connections to Haiti (including myself--I was born there and had been on a research trip a month prior) also showed signs of fracture.
In the immediate aftermath of the quake, I wrote the following: "Words are especially difficult to come by in a state of numbness. My response to the outpouring of calls and emails from concerned friends has become something of a mantra. No, still no news yet. We have not been able to make contact with anyone. To stay sane, I have resigned myself to accepting that my immediate family will not come out of this without loss. And even if we did, the lives of the already departed and sheer magnitude of the devastation is enough to keep me catatonic."
A week later, I penned that it was "still difficult to absorb the images. Though I have now heard from family members, I experience symptoms of trauma, mainly dissociation--my mind seeks sporadic distances from my body as this is simply too much for my psyche to bear. Unlike those glued to their screens, I turned off the television. I have that luxury. Yet, I keep thinking of those who cannot. If, with over 1600 miles between us, this is my reaction, then what must it be like for people who are in the thick of it in Haiti?"
Isolated in Middletown, CT and desperate for any information, I turned on the major news outlets the morning after the earthquake. One of the first reporters on the scene (a white female whose identity is truly insignificant here) was clearly overwhelmed by what she saw on the ground. She commented on the indifference of those roaming the streets, many of them were still covered in dust. Her explanation for their distressed and expressionless state was that perhaps, it is because they are so used to hardship that they are non-responsive.
This observation--an additional blow to the psyche--discursively reinforced the routine dehumanization of Haitians. As subjects of research and representation, Haitians have often been portrayed as fractures, as fragments--bodies without minds, heads without bodies, or roving spirits. These disembodied beings or visceral fanatics have always been in need of an intermediary. They hardly ever spoke for themselves. In the academy, they are represented by the social scientist. And on January 12 after the quake, enter the uninformed socio-culturally limited journalist.
In media coverage of the quake and its aftermath, some nuances of the dehumanization narrative have emerged that are particularly dangerous especially given their implications. In these, Haitians are either subhuman or superhuman. The sub-humanity stems from the dominant idea in popular imagination that Haitians are irrational-devil-worshipping-progress-resistant-uneducated-accursed-black-natives-overpopulating-this-god-forsaken-land. The superhuman characteristic is usually framed in terms of our resilience. The miraculous discoveries of those found still alive deep in the rubble nine to ten days after being trapped there are framed in such terms. No ordinary human being could withstand so much but for some reason, those Haitians can. There is an underlying subtext here about race. For Haitians are blackness in its worst form because simply put, the enfant terrible of the Americas who defied all European odds had to become its bete noir.
Some hours after the Hope for Haiti fundraiser held on Friday, January 22nd (which I could not bear to watch), Anderson Cooper was on the air speaking with a British journalist who was perturbed by the fact that people were not crying. He then told a story of a woman who survived the quake but lost family members including a young child. Reporter was surprised that this woman was forcing her way onto a bus to get out of Port-au-Prince. When he asked her what she had done with the recovered body of her child? She said "Jete"--His interpretation is that she threw him out. The only word he understood was jete (throw, fling, hurl). There was no mention of the prepositions that came before or words that came after. "Why don't you Haitians cry" the reporter asked those he encountered, stunned. Cooper tried to spark a conversation trauma and mentioned the word "shock." That angle did not gain any traction.
Yet another rhetorical blow to the psyche.
As I have written elsewhere the body--a reservoir of discursive, physiological, psychological and social memories--functions as an archive. Deposits were made on January 12th just before 5pm that will have impacts for years to come. Those who have experienced this moment at home or abroad will need to be tended to psychologically nurtured and supported because we have been fractured differently in so many brutal ways.
An Update of Sorts:
Two days ago, my nineteen year old cousin who lives on Route Freres, which as of the writing has seen no relief efforts because of security concerns, cited the rapper Nas on his first Facebook post since the quake, which read:
Heart of a king, blood of a slave!!!!!
Thu at 7:11pm · Comment · Like
His friends responded:
thank god ur ok ma dude ..stay up and stay in contact
Thu at 7:55pm
Blessed be the Lord!
Thu at 8:27pm
great to see you again. take care and keep in touch!!!!
Thu at 10:33pm
Really glad 2 know u r still standing brave heart never get away in
vain!!! peace & luv bro !! keep praying
Yesterday at 2:15am
still standing as this famous slave, we're gonna do it again "BWA KAIMAN"
Yesterday at 4:22pm
A version of this paper was delivered at "Haiti in Context: Perspectives on the Current Crisis" a roundtable/teach-in organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, NYU, January 20, 2010
Gina Athena Ulysse is an Associate Professor of Anthropology, African-American Studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT. She is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (Chicago 2008). She is also a poet/performer and multimedia artist.