The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development 9781452939599, 1452939594

Table of contents :
Contents

Introduction. To Make Visible the “Invisible Epistemological Order”: Haiti, Singularity, and Newness
Millery Polyné

I. Revolisyon/Kriz (Revolution/Crisis)
1. Haiti, the Monstrous Anomaly. Nick Nesbitt
2. Rethinking the Haitian Crisis. Greg Beckett
3. Remembering Charlemagne Péralte and His Defense of Haiti’s Revolution. Yveline Alexis

II. Moun/Demoun (Person/Dehumanized)
4. Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life. Sibylle Fischer
5. The Violence of Executive Silence. Patrick Sylvain
6. Religion at the Epicenter: Agency and Affiliation in Léogâne after the Earthquake. Karen Richman

III. Èd (Aid)
7. The Alliance for Progress: A Case Study of Failure of International Commitments to Haiti. Wien Weibert Arthus
8. Urban Planning and the Rebuilding of Port-au-Prince. Harley F. Etienne
9. Cholera and the Camps: Reaping the Republic of NGOs. Mark Schuller
10. From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History. Elizabeth McAlister
11. Twenty-First Century Haiti—A New Normal? A Conversation with Four Scholars of Haiti. Alex Dupuy, Robert Fatton, Jr., Évelyne Trouillot, and Tatiana Wah

Contributors
Index

Citation preview

The Idea of Haiti

Rethinking Crisis and Development

Millery Polyné, E d i t o r

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The Idea of Haiti

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The Idea of Haiti R ethinking Crisis and Development

Millery Polyné, Editor

U n i v e r s i t y o f M i n n e s o ta P r e s s minne apolis • london

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Chapter 4 was published previously as Sibylle Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” Small Axe 11, no. 2 ( June 2007): 1–15. Copyright 2007 Small Axe, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu. Parts of chapter 7 appeared previously as Wien Weibert Arthus, “L’aide internationale peut ne pas marcher: Évaluation des relations américano-haïtiennes au regards de l’Alliance pour le Progrès (1961–1963),” Journal of Haitian Studies 17, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 155–77. Copyright 2011, Journal of Haitian Studies. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Haitian Studies Association and Center for Black Studies Research, University of California, Santa Barbara. Chapter 10 was previously published as Elizabeth McAlister, “From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 41, no. 2 (2012). Copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-8166-8131-0 (hc) ISBN 978-0-8166-8132-7 (pb) Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13

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Dedicated to my parents, R aymond and L or na

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Contents

Acknowledgments

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Introduction. To Make Visible the Invisible Epistemological Order: Haiti, Singularity, and Newness xi M i l l e r y P o ly n é I . Revolisyon/Kriz (Revolution/Crisis) 1 Haiti, the Monstrous Anomaly Nick Nesbitt

3

2 Rethinking the Haitian Crisis Greg Beckett

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3 Remembering Charlemagne Péralte and His Defense of Haiti’s Revolution Yveline Alexis

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I I . Moun/Demounization (Person/Dehumanization) 4 Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life Sibylle Fischer

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5 The Violence of Executive Silence Pat r i c k S y lva i n

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6 Religion at the Epicenter: Agency and Affiliation in Léogâne after the Earthquake Karen Richman

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I I I . Èd (Aid) 7 The Alliance for Progress: A Case Study of Failure of International Commitments to Haiti W i e n W e i b e rt A rt h u s

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8 Urban Planning and the Rebuilding of Port-au-Prince H a r l e y F. E t i e n n e

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9 Cholera and the Camps: Reaping the Republic of NGOs mark schuller

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10 From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan: The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History Elizabeth McAlister 11 Twenty-First-Century Haiti—A New Normal? A Conversation with Four Scholars of Haiti A l e x D u p u y, R o b e rt Fat t o n J r . , É v e ly n e T r o u i l l o t , and Tat i a n a Wa h

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

This volume would not be possible without the important scholarship from the authors in this book. Furthermore, I would like to thank the following individuals, groups, and institutions for their friendship, work, and support of this project: Judy C. Polyné, Cedric Johnson, Chantalle F. Verna, Matthew Smith, Gina Ulysse, N. D. B. Connolly, Jose Perillan, Shawn Christian, George Shulman, Jack Tchen, Colin Palmer and the Scholars-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2012), Susanne Wofford and Linda Reiss at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, the Haitian Studies Association, the Center for Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, the Center for Africana Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, Nottingham Contemporary Museum, University of Rochester, Vassar College, Wheaton College (RI), City College of the City University of New York, SUNY, College at Old Westbury, Hofstra University, the editorial staff at University of Minnesota Press, and the amazing photography at Fotokonbit.

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Introduction

To Make Visible the Invisible Epistemological Order Haiti, Singularity, and Newness m i l l e r y p o ly n é

T

he title of this book may be misleading. There is not a sole idea, a singular approach or paradigm to what scholar Walter D. Mignolo deems the “geo-politics of knowledge” that constructed Haitians and the Haitian republic.1 Multiple designs exist. Its roots are rhizomorphic, maintaining local, national, and international strata, and also these ideas continue to be in conversation and in tension with one another. Furthermore, some specific knowledges occupy a more prevalent space in the psyche of laypersons and scholars, and within global communication apparatuses (for example, blogs, Tumblr, and print and television media). In some cases, an elision of Haitian history, particularly the case of French historical studies, is peculiarly apparent.2 Consider the thousands of newspaper reports about the earthquake in Haiti on January 12, 2010, and the subsequent global relief efforts to this day. Many different groups, institutions, and writers have generated ideas about the republic’s collective ethos, the lives and social relations of its citizens, and how the state governs itself.3 Historically, the Haitian peasantry and Haitian intellectuals have crafted a paradoxical narrative of the country’s beauty as well as modern cultural and intellectual contributions, its radical abolitionist history, its cooperative disposition illustrated by popular adages, including men anpil chay pa lou (when the hands are many, the burden is light), and its emphasis on the idea of the lakou (a spiritual, familial, commercial, and community nerve center).4 At the same time, Haitians highlight

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notions of the nation’s crab antics, intense political and economic corruption, and violence. More importantly, many Haitians construct the notion that Haiti exposes the deficiencies of a Western-style democracy and social and economic neoliberal principles. During the nineteenth century, several leading Haitian intellectuals, including Anténor Firmin, Demesvar Delorme, and Louis-Joseph Janvier, crafted an idea of Haiti that demonstrated its unassailable intellectual, cultural, and biological symmetry with Western Europeans. Firmin and others contended that it was the system of racial bondage that stifled the progress of Africandescended peoples, particularly in the Americas. Thus, Haitians and other African-descended peoples positioning on the evolutionary timeline may have lagged—and thus should not be compared with Europeans—yet “within the grand harmony of the human destiny . . . the actors are all equal in dignity. . . . This will continue until the time when all of them will fade away into a general whole.”5 In De l’Égalité des Races Humaines (1885), Firmin’s noteworthy nineteenth-century text that challenges French thinker Count Arthur de Gobineau’s racist assertions of European genetic and cultural supremacy, Firmin asserted: I strongly believe that the Black race of Haiti is destined to ameliorate itself, to grow continuously in beauty and intelligence. I consider any effort which contributes to its redemption doubly sacred, because it is consistent both with my scientific convictions and with my political and patriotic aspirations. It is worth pointing out once more, however, that there can be no regeneration if conditions do not allow people to think freely and great personalities to manifest themselves freely.6

Firmin’s liberal idea of Haiti proved auspicious and bright. He, like other esprits scientifques of the age, promoted a democracy governed by educated elite that would build a society where all Haitian citizens thrived. In spite of this vision, many of the leading male intellectuals of the nineteenth century neglected to challenge the place of class and gender hierarchy in the evolving ideas of Haiti.7 Historically, the perspectives of the majority, the rural denizens of Haiti, have been ignored by the Haitian elite and by foreign actors, particularly

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the governments and press corps of the United States, France, and Canada. France’s and North America’s idea of Haiti produced discourses that intensify the notion of a progress-resistant, deviant and childlike nation unaware of the material and ideological benefits of democracy and capitalism.8 Additionally, U.S. blacks and Dominicans played a significant role in constructing an idea of Haiti. From Haitian independence (1804) through the middle of the twentieth century, many U.S. African American artists, intellectuals, and workers deemed Haiti to be, at times, a wellspring of black potentiality within the realm of self-governance and revolutionary action, and at other moments an unfinished revolutionary project in need of fraternal and northern bourgeois influence.9 Contrary to U.S. African American visions, many Dominican elites’ and laborers’ conception of Haiti complemented Global North paradigms while simultaneously embracing indigenous aesthetics.10 Thus, in spite of the varied and multitiered conceptions of Haiti, which demonstrate that there is not a singular idea, what singularity in the Haitian context reveals is the notion of Haiti as inimitable and exceptional. “When we are being told over and over again” asserts Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “that Haiti is unique, bizarre, unnatural, odd, queer, freakish, or grotesque, we are also being told, in varying degrees, that it is unnatural, erratic and therefore unexplainable.”11 Thus, the perpetuation of an enigmatic Haiti, largely produced by the gravitational forces of North American and Western European ideologies of Christianity, capitalism, and whiteness, forms an infinite space of distortion—a space-time singularity, if you will—that warps one’s capacity to see, assess, and proceed.12 Despite assertions of what seemingly is a boundless state of misrepresentation, this volume of essays exemplifies one among several significant scholarly attempts to disrupt and contextualize the idea of the eternal Haitian crisis so as to potentially encourage more critical and comparative scholarship and popular writings on the Haitian republic. The Idea of Haiti is a book about remembering, historicizing, and contextualizing three central ideas—revolisyon (revolution)/kriz (crisis), moun (person, humanity)/demounization (dehumanization), and èd (aid)—that inform both an internal and external perception, and responses to Haiti and its affairs. These concepts work to organize the essays in the volume, to highlight predominate narratives that shape ideological discourses on the Haitian republic,

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and to help frame counternarratives to popular textual and pictorial representations of Haiti. Revolisyon/Kriz is a pivotal lens that many scholars, writers, and laypersons utilize to examine and understand Haiti. These moments of resistance, of violence, of political and economic power struggles are critical to understanding conflict within societies and across borders, in addition to being fundamental to selling the news—a disaster capitalism of the airwaves, if you will. Yet how does one complicate the idea of a nation’s struggles as irreducible, as a truth that is pure, severed from the body that is global politics? In response to historian Laurent Dubois’s assertion that media depictions of Haiti are frequently deemed as negative stereotypes, writer Mischa Berlinski claimed that Haiti’s suffering, its disaster and poverty, are the truth: “It is not the whole truth . . . but it is surely the most important truth.”13 Therefore, if it is the truth, are we able to discuss and think about Haiti without privileging the lens of crisis? This question is the focal point of Greg Beckett’s insightful essay. Beckett, as well as the other contributors in this section, pushes us to think about the evolution of crisis within the Haitian context and how it is inextricably linked to national and, more importantly, globalizing forces. The daily experience of domestic and international forces such as neoliberal capitalism, Western militarism, urbanization, and ecological blight impels one to examine how the person, the individual, the citizen is affected. In what ways have a people’s humanity—those who struggle to live, to work, to laugh, to love within these impacted spaces—been affirmed, questioned, or negated? Where does one locate their humanity at moments of conflict or despair? How have Haitians been represented or treated by executive leadership, foreign powers, or even cultural artists? How does one critically read images of Haitian life or textual representations when renderings have become more intricate, even unintentional? And what does one gain from this engagement of the most ubiquitous depictions of Haitians in the U.S. media, the moun andeyò—the marginalized Haitian masses. “Is it our desire for knowledge,” questions scholar Sibylle Fischer, whose chapter helps us grapple with understandings of humanity and dehumanization of the Haitian political subject. “Do we enjoy” these narratives or renderings, specifically Bruce Gilden’s 1996 photographs of Haiti, “because they make us understand the operations of power in Haiti?” Fischer is unconvinced that Gilden’s

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photographs and possibly other popular, “artistic[ally] complex” yet decontextualized cultural representations of Haitian subjectivity provide the audience with a more nuanced insight to Haitian life and affairs. The viewer is often locked in a perpetual state of “intense discomfort and enjoyment,” claims Fischer, a psychological chasm where it is difficult to assess one’s emotional and intellectual state. If one pursues an examination of how the Haitian political subject is affected by the aforementioned international forces—the process of humanizing and dehumanizing Haitian life—then it is also critical to interrogate how internal and external institutions respond to and seek to assist Haitians in need. The international discourse on development primarily focuses its attention on nations that possess a majority of African-descended peoples. This dialectic between largely European and U.S. American thinkers and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) produced a slew of books within the last two decades that analyze African and Caribbean governance, and the effectiveness of international aid programs.14 Billions of dollars have been pledged and donated, yet transformative change in many countries remains illusive. Furthermore, the cottage industry of development studies is financially well-heeled, with a myriad of global strategists. In the midst of this discursive space, many critical questions persist: In the postearthquake era, what can we learn from past instances of aid distribution between Haiti, foreign powers, and international nongovernmental institutions? What are some new development/aid strategies in place? How do these strategies depend upon or move beyond established Western modernizing practices? What are the empirical markers of success? The politics of aid or the ideas and practices that seek to improve the lives of marginalized peoples maintain material consequences, for better or for worse.15 Thus, within the Haitian context, if more than $3 billion in relief and recovery aid have been given to Haiti since 2010, but in actuality a preponderance of the funds remained in the coffers of foreign governments, international aid organizations, and for-profit corporations, or if there are resources that have yet to be administered or enjoyed, then what does that reveal about Haitian sovereignty and foreign conceptions of and intentions for the Haitian state and its people?16 The Idea of Haiti analyzes the geopolitics of knowledge that have been intensified since the 2010 earthquake. These geopolitics for centuries produced

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what scholar V. Y. Mudimbe calls “gratuitous systems of recollection,” “composite memories” that conjoin objects, knowledge, and encounters. “One might choose to emphasize certain aspects,” argues Mudimbe, “and, voluntarily or accidentally, to forget or, at least, to minimize others.”17 Within the context of foreign assistance, a history of rebuilding and renewal that precedes the moment of January 12, 2010, and the legacy of troublesome representations, violent treatment of Haitians in Haiti and abroad, this volume critically examines the politics of the past—its facts and fables—and how it illuminates our understanding of the domestic and transnational structures in place that have contributed to Haitian underdevelopment and cultural survival in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Moreover, the book examines the challenges and benefits of strategic recovery operations during the postearthquake period in Haiti. The essays in the anthology take into account that in spite of the recent efforts to rebuild Haiti and the proliferation of the reference of a new Haiti during 2010, the idea of a new Haiti is not particular to the aftermath of January 12. The notion of a new Haiti possesses historical roots and provides insight into understanding potential pitfalls and obstacles to current development plans, in addition to the key actors involved, such as NGOs, national and international state apparatuses, and diasporic Haitians. Development, as historian Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard have shown, maintains ideological, social, and technical components. The Idea of Haiti demonstrates the ways in which foreign actors articulate development within this current neoliberal context, similar to the imperial crisis of the 1940s, as a reassertion of the dominance of the Global North. At the same time, many Haitians, particularly the peyizan (peasant) majority, convey development as a rebuff of fundamental principles of Western hegemony in order to contribute in hemispheric affairs and “lay claim to a globally defined standard of living” that enables a fresh, modern, and different existence.18 Scholar Jennie M. Smith’s powerful ethnographic work on peasant workers and community organizers in southwestern Haiti demonstrates critical engagement with complex political and economic systems such as democracy and development. Through active civil institutions and chante-pwen (pointed songs) members of these organizations and cultural practitioners are “well aware that in this increasingly interconnected world, if they fail to gain the respect of those outside

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their communities, their hopes for a better society are in vain.”19 “We have to go show the blan-s [whites] that we are adults! We are not children!” exclaimed one representative of a Haitian peasant organization who was threatened by the actions of a co-optative foreign priest.20 Similar critiques by marginalized groups, mostly peasants or unskilled laborers in Latin America and the Global South, reflect the connective ideological and radical tissue sparked by a legacy of asymmetrical relations within formal political and economic systems. As stated earlier, the book examines the notion of new, in a new Haiti, and its implications—for even the concept of “new” possesses histories and meanings. The investigation of the new through the lens of history and literature, photography, urban planning, religion, and governance is in constant tension with the narratives and epistemologies of Haiti specifically and the Caribbean more broadly. For many observers, writers, and thinkers, the 2010 earthquake demonstrated structural deficiencies in these fields and practices, particularly urban planning methods, which exacerbated notions of difference or a counterdiscourse of resemblance to American nation-states and its relationship to modernity. Haiti has been fixed in alterity by hegemonic forces, specifically European metropolitan and colonial elites during the preHaitian independence era. However, there is important scholarship that highlights the ideas of Haiti from below—the enslaved, former bondspersons and free people of color (pardos) in the Caribbean and Latin America—men and women who understood Haiti to be a site of republican ideals, a nation by its own existence continuously “define[d] the boundaries of slavery and freedom, citizenship and rights.”21 Nonetheless, the United States, France, the Vatican, and many Latin American governments during the post-1804 period through the twentieth century rendered the black republic as a New World embarrassment ill-equipped for the intellectual, governmental, and cultural challenges critical to the advancement of modernity, such as mass literacy and media, industrialization, democratization, rationalization, and antitraditionalism. These nineteenth-century renderings are entrenched in the sphere of deviance, which has become more pronounced in the wake of Haitian reconstruction strategies and media coverage. For example, six weeks separated two watershed natural disasters in Haiti and Chile in 2010, which propelled critical observers to assess the tragedy’s

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impact on the nations’ citizenry, civil society and markets. Yet despite the cluster of crises in the Americas and perhaps globally (such as Pakistan in 2010, Australia in 2010–11, and Japan in 2011), there have been few investigations concerning the consequences of the history of race and development in relation to these earthquakes.22 With consecutive catastrophes of this magnitude, it is expected that comparisons will be drawn, reflective questions asked, and monetary and material aid pledged and dispensed quickly to survivors in need. However, although prevailing beliefs of earthquakes as a natural egalitarian force persist—as people prepare their bodies and minds for aftershocks and as discussions of rebuilding commence—one sees “preexisting [social], political and economic fault lines” that expose the fissures between state and nation and unveils the irregularities in gaining access to necessary provisions.23 Thus, some scholars have questioned: how natural are these disasters? How are environmental calamities socially constructed? What are these preexisting fault lines in calamity-stricken sites? And how does it inform reconstruction efforts or ideological and political discussions in the aftermath?24 As recovery operations and rebuilding plans manufacture a discourse on newness (for example, establishing a new education system and building codes in Haiti; new construction of upscale apartments in Santiago, Chile), how will additional tremors be generated? Furthermore, in what ways are current renewal strategies informed by past ideas about a nation’s people and its history, a nation’s complex relationship with political and economic institutions, in addition to perceptions about a nation’s ability to contribute in a transformative manner to an ever-shifting modern future? What is fascinating to me as a historian of the United States and Haiti who perused and participated in political radio programs and newspapers with empathy and shock is how easily intelligent people (including myself ) fall into the trap of using Haiti as an embodiment of alterity—exceptionally chaotic and incomprehensible. The average citizen in the Americas is accustomed to the hackneyed phrase of Haiti as the “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” as well as the double-edged cliché, a nation “plagued by political violence,” that introduces a conventional news story. These ubiquitous phrases are exhausting and reduce Haiti and its citizens to “insurrectional bodies, tortured bodies,” to contaminated and savage bodies.25 Even Haitians are not exempt. In moments of exasperation, many

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Haitians—native, diasporic, or second-generation Haitians, like myself— lose sight of context and history and wonder why tortured bodies haven’t been soothed and empowered. Historically, other Caribbean and Latin American countries, such as Cuba, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic, have used moments, histories, cultural, political, and economic systems and somatic particularities to further distinguish and distance itself from uncivilized paradigms in order to demonstrate its forward march through modernity.26 An analysis of print media within a year of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile demonstrated subtle distinctions made between the two nations—a semiotic code of development—that for some may simply speak to the reality of material advancement in Chile. At the same time, I believe it further entrenches the reader into a discourse of Haitian life as antimodern, violent, and perpetually ill-equipped if one properly situates Haiti in the historical and regional context of antiblack, anti-Haitian prejudice, and its relationship to Latin American elites. In the context of the Haitian revolution (1791–1804), historian Ada Ferrer asserts that the Cuban elite’s “firsthand experience” in Saint Domingue in the middle 1790s to “mobilize and contain armed former slaves in support of elite political goals” helps us to understand how the idea of Haiti has been “created, reformulated, sustained, and broken,” specifically in nineteenth-century Cuban archives.27 This form of archival power, to use Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s term, constructed several Haitis. First, Haiti has been created “as a place about which detailed, complex, dense, and unruly stories circulated . . . a brief cautionary (or inspirational) invocation,” as a site where “colonial and metropolitan authorities” refused to use the country’s new name for decades and did not permit Haitians to travel to Cuba.28 The Cuban example, which draws on the history of Haiti’s radical abolitionism, and Haiti’s systemic underdevelopment in relation to North American and European powers and other Hispanophone nation-states further cements Haiti within a narrative of the other, of violence, of disorder within the Americas. In response to multiple reports by the U.S. and Latin American press of postearthquake Chilean communities rife with looting, scholar Steven Volk argued that although these instances of unlawfulness may have been exaggerated, it “provided an immensely troubling narrative for a political class uniformly horrified by the highly unflattering comparisons to Haiti they

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engendered.”29 These references to looting are embedded with race and class implications, but also they lead to other, less obvious clues, particularly in the U.S. press, that underscores Chilean progress in lieu of descriptions about Haiti, such as the emphasis on Chile’s long-standing building codes; multistoried edifices; insurance claims; exhibition of technological and government power in the form of helicopters and boats; the estimated $30 billion in reserves to rebuild; the search for expatriates from G-7 nations like Japan and Britain; and last, how the prices of Chilean national commodities such as copper and even wine affected international markets.30 Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Junot Diaz also offered important reflections on the earthquakes. He argued in the Boston Review that the event, particularly in Haiti, was an apocalypse of revelation.31 Diaz’s “ruin-reading” effectively spurs the reader to refuse to “hide behind the veils of denials” and to bear witness to disasters that undoubtedly demonstrate human culpability—politically, environmentally, and economically. Although Diaz is concerned about how the superrich and the irresponsible are decimating our planet, there is still the use of Haiti as emblematic of a dystopia, as an exceptional tool that Diaz hopes will produce an enlightened group of the elites and masses that will not “transform . . . our planet into a Haiti.” “Haiti,” asserts Diaz, is “not only the most visible victim of our civilization—Haiti is also a sign of what is to come.” Diaz’s plea to the “we” of humanity to “stare into the ruins—bravely [and] resolutely” and to act is insightful and historically grounded. Yet I am concerned with how, for example, the donor, the writer, the policy maker—those who perceive themselves as redeemers—sees and remembers these ruins, and what tools are secured to see and to discern. Furthermore, I am interested in what markers or examples are used to understand the issue, the object, and the event that is in focus. Why is Haiti the exceptional case in the Americas, and perhaps globally to be feared and to be a foil? Can the black republic ever be seen as postexceptional, and is that state of postexceptionality a mere mimic of the West?32 Thus, if the narratives of Haiti continue to be mired in the discourse of deviance, how does that inform international relief efforts in the short term and reconstruction plans in the long term? Additionally, how are strategies to strengthen Haitian capacity in order to maximize its self-sufficiency also informed by these discursive practices? What is the idea of Haiti, and

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how does it inform competing visions of a new Haiti? How have Haitians responded to this idea? How do they challenge or reinforce these ideas? Embedded within the discourse of a new Haiti and newness are articulations of blueprints. Blueprints outline a detailed course of action and/or present a model of development. Often, blueprints denote originality, a prototype that can influence or inspire other artists, workers, intellectuals, politicians, and professionals to conceive of other renderings, possibilities—archetypes of change. Those who devise blueprints are believed to be experts in the field, skilled inventors, authorities who define the discourse and who are publishing in and providing commentary on key debates. During the history of Haiti, particularly the long twentieth century through the first decade of the twentyfirst century, there were many significant moments where Haitian political architects, sympathizers, and hegemonic structures mobilized to create blueprints for Haitian development. From the period between 1803 and 1806, specifically the moment of Haitian independence, the writing of the constitution, the process of land distribution, and even the naming of the nation, as scholar David P. Geggus asserts, many elite representatives of the country, some formerly enslaved, outlined a course for the nation that perhaps, contradictorily, “reject[ed] Europe and its colonial claims” and attempted to create a free, egalitarian society, although temporarily. Yet at the same time they chose a new name for the nation with Amerindian roots that resonated widely and also served the purpose of distinguishing powerful persons with mixed ancestry from the largely “alienat[ed] or marginaliz[ed] African-descended peasantry.33 Emanating from this three-year time period and for decades to come in the nineteenth century, divisions and tensions concretized between forced agrilaborers and landowners, an “uneducated black officer corps that controlled the army and the brown-skinned professional business class,” and a northern monarchical structure and southern republican government.34 An outcome of the brutal system of racial slavery, radical antislavery and independence, and domestic and international political and economic decision making crafted a nineteenth-century blueprint where class and color politics, in addition to the establishment of an authoritarian habitus, produced enduring conflicts and underdevelopment.35 Other key moments that highlight the politics of newness in Haitian affairs include the politics of nineteenth-century unification of Haiti’s north and

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south under Jean-Pierre Boyer in 1820; the U.S. military withdrawal from Haiti after nineteen years of occupation (1915–34); the second Haitian revolution of 1946, which ushered in a period of noiriste, or dark-skin rule; the tourist boom between 1947 and 1956; Haitian exile and anti-Duvalierist responses between 1957 and 1986; and the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. These significant events and periods brought about a reevaluation of ideas, boundaries, laws, and relationships critical to the formation of national identity. For the purpose of this introduction, I will concentrate on the post-U.S. occupation period because the similarities between this era and the postearthquake phase are compelling and may provide insight to the complexities of envisioning and developing a new Haiti—specifically the dilemmas and interconnectedness of foreign assistance and Haitian sovereignty. One reads in the historical record the expectations for reform by the Haitian peasantry and the radical elite once the U.S. military evacuated the country in 1934 and Haitian sovereignty was restored. The post-U.S. occupation era of Haiti, the period between 1934 and 1957, is an understudied and misunderstood period in the annals of historical research on Haiti, but also it was “modern Haiti’s greatest moment of political promise.”36 The two decades after the U.S. occupation brought about the establishment of a popular labor movement; the emergence of political parties; the contested yet vibrant ideological struggles; and a shift toward a conservative brand of Haitian black nationalism, noirisme, that not only defined a “feature of Haitian politics, but also prefigured similar developments elsewhere in the Caribbean region.” According to historian Matthew Smith, Haiti has long possessed a rich and organized radical culture in the twentieth century that has challenged the structures of political and economic power in Port-au-Prince. These radical Marxists, socialists, and black power activists, intellectuals, writers, and workers sought alternative systems of governance, overtly and covertly, in order to “sharpen the debate against the anti-democratic [Haitian] state.”37 Thus, similar to the optimism that followed the traumatic and violent event of the U.S. military occupation, embedded in the postearthquake literature is the idea that Haiti’s natural disaster holds a tremendous amount of promise for the nation. Billions of dollars were pledged, although not released, and newness manifested itself in primarily a north–south flow of aid workers,

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capital, and technical knowledge without adequately improving Haitian capacity. Although newness has much to do about the discourse on difference, one can also make the argument about its adjacent relationship to narratives on sameness—implementing programs that adopt Western modes of development—in the likeness of the West.38 Similarly, but sixty years earlier, after a nearly three-decade U.S. financial receivership of the black republic, Walter White, executive secretary of the NAACP, organized the Haitian–American Advisory Board for the Economic Development of Haiti, which sought to organize “new enterprises in Haiti on a basis which would protect the interests of Haiti and its people.” White, a believer in the promise of postoccupation, argued that “there [was] a reservoir of ability and goodwill in the United States” that could actualize such an institution.39 As a tireless defender of integration and U.S.-style democracy, as long as democratic theory remained consistent with practice, White understood the United States and an interracial body of U.S. specialists as particularly equipped to realize the technological and financial development of Haiti. The United States served as a model and center for economic development for less developed nations for many U.S. African American integrationists, social scientists, and policy makers. In fact, White was often criticized by the U.S. African American left, particularly W. E. B. Du Bois, for his political allegiance to President Harry Truman and his calculated conformity to Washington’s politics on U.S. domestic and foreign policy, particularly the Point Four program, during the early cold war period. Given U.S. influence in global affairs, White believed that the United States possessed the power to affect change in the periphery of the African diaspora—a view that many U.S. black intellectuals have held since the nineteenth century, particularly Frederick Douglass in the post-Emancipation period. One of White’s major achievements in Haiti was helping to organize a successful public relations (PR) campaign for the Haitian government between 1947 and 1955 that quintupled tourist arrivals to Haiti from 8,000 to 65,000.40 Walter White’s PR campaign paralleled U.S. policy objectives of PanAmericanism—mutual cooperation and financial and technical assistance in the Caribbean and Latin America. In spite of the secretary’s accord with U.S. policies, White confronted U.S. hegemony of Haitian affairs, believing that an economically empowered and politically stable Haiti could profoundly

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affect African American advancement in cold war America. However, despite his optimism and determination, White’s and Haitian officials’ focus on developing tourism as a main springboard of the public relations campaign proved ineffective to the advancement and training of the Haitian masses. The goals of the PR campaign were inspired and ultimately compromised by a program of racial uplift, foreign investment, and (under)development in Haiti. This same tourist model of development is occurring with an energy twist in the postearthquake period. Several U.S.-based and multinational corporations, including Eurasian Minerals Inc., Royal Caribbean, and Global Renewable Energy, a sustainable development corporation, maintain strong interest in capitalizing on the tourist potential in Haiti.41 Global Renewable Energy brought forth a plan to former president René Préval in 2009 to invest in the infrastructure of La Gonâve, an island of fewer than 100,000 inhabitants off the western coast of Haiti. The La Gonâve Development Authority project (LGDA), according to CEO Fred Rice, will “manage La Gonâve as a business and foster the development of the island by targeting the energy, cruise and tourism industries,” specifically establishing an oil refinery, food processing plants, petroleum product tank farm, residential and commercial projects, and a private industrial airport.42 The LGDA project proposes that more than 18,000 jobs will be created—employment that is unquestionably needed in a country where many Haitians participate in the informal economy. However, there are many questions about the tourist model of development and its ability to effectively aid struggling economies, particularly in its effort to pay Haitian workers a livable wage, to train them beyond the service sector, to produce a healthy, professional middle class, and to allow the state to make life-affirming decisions for its citizens without the threat of foreign control or foreign disinvestment.43 Undoubtedly, there are some valuable ideas to rebuilding Haiti, but how do these projects shift or decentralize power—economic power, political power, sociocultural power—out of Portau-Prince so that it can arrest the mass urban migration to the capital? Perhaps LGDA’s and Royal Caribbean’s investment out of the capital (La Gonâve and Labadie, respectively) and other ventures by influential corporations are an important piece of the dependency puzzle. Perhaps they are not.44 Methodologically, the essays in The Idea of Haiti build on the work of scholars who make visible the invisible epistemological order of perspectives

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and interpretations about a continent, a region or concepts with “unstable . . . social meanings” from dominant societies that have been constructed, disseminated, and institutionalized over time.45 What have been the effects of these hegemonic conceptions? How have colonized/oppressed peoples responded, created, and contributed to these ideas? The theoretical work of Caribbean/Latin American studies scholars, including the aforementioned Mudimbe and Mignolo, have pushed the boundaries of the production, exoticization, and repudiation of blackness, Haiti, and the Caribbean within the modern world.46 The Idea of Haiti’s contributors draw from their disciplinary training in history, literature, anthropology, urban planning, and sociology to explore how these historical discursive practices on race, power, class, and national development inform strategies to envision the republic anew. The Idea of Haiti engages these ideas by identifying four arenas of daily life that significantly structure the lives and politics of Haitian society in the twenty-first century: urban and rural planning; Vodou and Christian evangelism; local and national governance; and the politics of assistance (the present and future of NGOs in Haiti). Historically, these four areas have been marginalized or ignored in development strategies, while tourism and low-wage manufacturing industries have been privileged. These four fields shift the discourse, open up an array of new possibilities for Haitian society, and use multiple methodological approaches and interdisciplinary frameworks that explore the intersections of Haitian affairs in the United States and Latin America. Although scholarship on Haiti has existed for several decades, the pioneering work in Haitian revolutionary studies and its historical and intellectual connections to the age of revolution and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cuban, Dominican, and American studies have energized many scholars to consider the question of Haitian politics, literature, leadership, and history in questions on race, citizenship, universalism, globalization, and modernization. This is apparent in the proliferation of Haitian topics at academic conferences, as well as the increased attention university and trade presses are giving to Haitian studies manuscripts. These intellectual developments reflect demographic shifts of Haitian communities in urban centers throughout the Americas over the last thirty to forty years—from Montreal to Miami, Kingston to Santo Domingo. These changes, along with the migration of

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thousands of Haitians to these American spaces, provide the backdrop for current debates and demand research to understand and explore the convergences of past and present, the idea of Haiti, and the transformation of the nation. In Part I, the essays weave historical and theoretical frameworks that wrestle with notions of revolution and crisis as intrinsic to Haiti and its citizens. As scholar Greg Beckett argues, if Haiti is “cast in this light, the Haitian past becomes . . . a temporality defined by rupture and breakdown.” The putative rational methods of capitalistic systems and racial science coupled with historiographic and philosophic traditions of European Enlightenment nurtured the roots and paved the routes of a logic of power and modernity that simultaneously suppressed information of and contributions by Haitian revolutionaries in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.47 Additionally, this logic normalizes Haiti within paradigms of disaster that reproduces vulnerability and marginalization on the national and international stage. Nick Nesbitt and Greg Beckett identify and engage the discourse that generates the momentum of Haitian alterity within international relations. Both scholars locate the hub of this discourse rotating along a Western axis of shock and pain that unendingly constructs Haiti as delinquent—for Nesbitt, it is through his study of U.S.–Haiti relations, and Beckett’s research examines institutional roles in reproducing difference. Appropriately, Beckett asks, “What do we really mean by crisis, and what do we mean by crisis in Haiti?” Likewise, the brutal images of U.S. occupation oppositional leader Charlemagne Péralte’s bullet-ridden body during a particularly violent year of 1919, as Yveline Alexis demonstrates, highlights the ways in which interventionist forces sought to make Haitian defiance a crisis against U.S. nation building. However, Péralte’s wilted body, photographed by the American military, was surprisingly positioned like Christ on the cross, inevitably inspiring many Haitian patriots to refuse to give in to U.S. marines and Washington interventionist policies.48 From the perspective of Washington, years of political and economic instability in Haiti rendered it objectionable to democratic self-governance. Yet at the same time, Haiti’s authoritarian rule made the country politically and ideologically appealing to affirm U.S. dominance in the region. In this case, threats against Caribbean sovereignty, as per U.S. occupation and intervention in the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Trinidad, and

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Guatemala in the early to mid-twentieth century, are contingent on desirability—or rather what power and influence can be gained through interventionist politics. For Haitian oppositional forces during the U.S. occupation, specifically the cacos, the rewards included personal and political dignity, a return to self-rule so hard fought in the early nineteenth century, and perhaps a restoration of some forms of military and economic clientelism. Therefore, desire in this context operates in a way that political actors (for example, U.S. marines, U.S. state department officials, and rural working-class Haitians) must negotiate how power—internally or externally—is wielded. In Part II, scholar Sibylle Fischer analyzes representations of this crisis through a series of photographs from the 1990s that center the Haitian body. Astutely, Fischer challenges readers and those who claim to act or speak for those who suffer that they must watch their complicity in physical, structural, or symbolic violence (demounization). And in turn, they must aim to actively engage in an “historical, philosophical, or representational contextualization” in order to oppose one’s collusion in aggressive exploits.49 Transitioning from foreign or external forces that contribute to dehumanization to internal structures, Patrick Sylvain impels the reader to ask: What are the ways Haitian leadership create openings for or replicate discourses and systems that make the nation susceptible to harm? Given the media and popular criticism from Haitian citizens against former Haitian president René Préval’s muted and lack of leadership in the aftermath of the earthquake, what perceptions are reinscribed or structural vulnerabilities revealed between state and nation? Despite the nation’s structural vulnerabilities before and after the earthquake, one of the most important institutions for sustaining Haitian humanity (moun) has been the Vodou faith and the Christian church. Karen Richman’s work centers religion and faith in postearthquake Haiti and establishes that in spite of speculative claims about Vodou’s impact on the nation and the experiences of Haitians during this complex and arduous time, there remains a void in empirical scholarship regarding the religious implications of Haiti’s monumental seismic event. In what ways and to what extent have Haitian people’s faith, “an integrated spectrum of mystical techniques and strategies to hold illness and misfortune at bay,” shifted as a result of the tremors on January 12 and the days after? What can we learn historically, culturally, and politically about specific communities and their relationship to the state, civil

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society, and international organizations through a religious context? Richman centers the politics of religion and how it is being used by number of key Haitian and foreign actors in the discussion of a new Haiti and twenty-firstcentury reconstruction and healing strategies. The final section of the anthology illuminates the idea of vulnerability within contemporary Haitian governance and planning, foreign relations and aid, and diasporic citizenship. An analysis of these concepts and its varied aspects—asset, social, security, ecological, and psychological vulnerability— allows one to interrogate how inequality operates between individual and institutions and how resilience to asymmetrical material and social relations is both strengthened and stunted.50 It is this persistent and perhaps universal disparity that spawned the products of modernity (urbanization, industrialization) and furthermore allowed for the dichotomous construction of “victims and rescuers,” where often, according to Diaz, “recovery measures . . . further polarize the people and the places they claim to mend?”51 Weibert Arthus’s essay demonstrates the complexity of inter-American/ transnational affairs when states attempted to mold themselves to U.S. foreign policy strategies. An anticommunist Haiti proved to be insufficient for the Kennedy administration and the billions promised to Latin American and Caribbean governments for development projects and societal improvements. Authoritarian leadership, weak infrastructure, and the hurdles to reconcile nationalistic pride and international assistance illuminate the intricacies of sovereignty and the machine of global aid programs. These struggles continue to this day. Analyzing them may help us unpack the current issues in tent camps and other sites hit hard by the earthquake, and also help us assess policy and financial matters at the executive and local level, where nongovernmental and international organizations tend to dominate. In an effort to bridge the local and state deliberations, scholar Harley Etienne pushes academics and national and international leaders within the world of politics and social service to take seriously the discipline and practice of urban planning. Urban planners are critical components to the recovery effort because they coordinate policy, design, and resources to achieve longterm goals of urban growth, regeneration and economic development. Etienne asserts that the relationship between the country’s formal institutions (that is, legal and educational systems) and Haiti’s social organization and

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capacity for social service provision are relegated to secondary or tertiary roles in national planning strategies. Hence, in an effort to push the boundaries of the field, Etienne emphasizes that a broad, interdisciplinary spectrum of professionals—law, social work, civil engineers, public policy advocates—engage in a comprehensive and unified dialogue to produce durable urban and rural regeneration and offset popular pressures to rush the rebuilding process. Within the scramble to expedite necessary provisions, what are the potential complications and weakness of aid strategies? Does any form of immediate assistance outweigh the impending or actual damage? Anthropologist Mark Schuller examines social health risks in urban neighborhoods, specifically cholera, in which these health threats were amplified by measures taken by NGOs. The global discussions about the origins of the cholera outbreak in Haiti, where more than 300,000 people have been affected and 5,000 have died, dominate news desks and encourages the reader to think about the circulation of disparaging ideas about Haiti when foreign relationships are renewed in the wake of this tragedy.52 Schuller’s emphasis on Haitian women’s voices in this chapter and in his own academic and artistic work demonstrates a critical need to interlace and highlight women’s perspectives on Haitian social, political, intellectual, and economic affairs.53 In light of Haiti’s natural disaster, “it is women who are disproportionately affected,” asserts anthropologist Gina Ulysse. “As the potomitan of their families, women bear the responsibility of having to be present to care for their children, parents, and other dependent family members.”54 This volume falls short of an analysis centered on gender, or specifically an interrogation of women’s voices that complicates and challenges male-centered power that dominates Haitian social and political leadership. Yet all of the contributors seek to stimulate questions and counternarratives in order to disrupt historical frameworks that have led to the marginalization of the Haitian state and nation. I believe that the contributor’s efforts complement a feminist project to challenge hegemonic forces and provide more sustainable and egalitarian paradigms. As technical experts, businessmen, academics, and politicians devise blueprints to mend the gashes attributed to racial slavery, despotism, environmental degradation, and foreign intervention, there are many religious practitioners who believe they also possess the answers to the nation’s structural and

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systemic problems. Elizabeth McAlister’s chapter provides a much-needed lineage and analysis of the ideology and practice of Haitian and American Christian evangelicals who, in response to a burgeoning acceptance of Vodou under Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s administration, believed that Haiti’s political, economic, and social troubles could be ameliorated through a rededication to Christian values and the transforming power of Jesus Christ. The inclusion of McAlister’s chapter in the Éd section is particularly important and fascinating because it situates aid through a spiritual, textual, and oratorical lens. McAlister demonstrates that this commitment to Christ and Christian traditions by evangelicals and Protestants, who some scholars estimate compose a third of the Haitian citizenry, is influenced by colonial events, specifically the religious sacrifice of a pig by Vodou practitioners at the beginning of the Haitian revolution (August 1791). Furthermore, McAlister’s emphasis on the Spiritual Mapping movement, an “evangelical understanding” of global histories as an “ongoing battle between the devil and God,” centers the spiritual relief work of prayer warriors who are “on assignment” to fight Haiti’s putative curse by Satan. Thus, the work of religion and ritual in the years before and after the earthquake, according to McAlister, works to “renarrate Haitian history.” Additionally, the Christian evangelical movement reasserts the centrality of Jesus Christ in the spiritual, political, and historical space of Haiti—in effect suppressing non-Christian practices—and therefore “recast[ing] Haitian civil religion.” Last, Alex Dupuy, Tatiana Wah, Robert Fatton Jr., and Èvelyne Trouillot, four leading scholars on Haiti, engage in an enlightening conversation. Their examination of urgent and meaningful topics such as Haitian sovereignty, economic and cultural development, citizenship, urban planning, and Haiti’s relationship with the international community and its diaspora help anchor the volume’s themes. Given this exchange, particularly their discussion on Haitians living abroad, how will the recent change of the 1987 Haitian constitution in May 2011 that now grants Haitians living abroad dual nationality undermine or bolster notions of citizenship in Haiti and the diaspora? For those Haitian Americans, Haitian Canadians, and others who have been influenced by hypercapitalist and Global North modes of development, how will citizenship and increased access to property and voting privileges alter the idea of Haiti and their relationship to the nation-state?

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In April 2011, Haitian citizens elected Michel Martelly, a kompas singer, to the presidency. Martelly’s personal history, campaign, and election proved to be controversial and yet called into question the idea of Haitian sovereignty; it also cast another cloud over the nation and its executive office. His campaign manager held ties with the International Republican Institute, a U.S.-based organization that seeks to “support democracy and freedom” globally but is known to “fund . . . organizations to destabilize governments it deems to be a problem.”55 Additionally, the Organization of American States declared Martelly, a third-place candidate according to primary voting results, eligible for the second and final round of the presidential election, thus arbitrarily removing Jude Célestin, a candidate from the well-heeled Unity party.56 There are many questions about Haiti’s current leadership and its relationship to the international community, whose neoliberal policies are committed to low-wage manufacturing jobs and open markets for metropolitan goods and services.57 How does one reconcile a need to be an architect of one’s own affairs? At the same time, how does one confront the legacy of dependency and the need for foreign aid (that is, money and technical knowledge)? Is that narrative of need a myth? The Idea of Haiti is just the beginning of an important dialogue in the post–January 12 era. It examines history and asserts that scholars and students, corporate entities and workers, journalists and broadcasters ought to create new narratives that challenge enduring tropes of Haitian identity and affiliations; to recover and rethink local, national, and transnational histories and memories; and to highlight the creative activism, cultural production, and innovation emerging from Haitian peoples before and after the earthquake. Notes 1. Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), xi. 2. Scholar Alyssa Goldstein asserts that in metropolitan France, “both lay people and scholars shared what the late Yves Benot called a national amnesia (oubli) about the history of slavery. Textbooks do not cover the topic, and it barely appears even in university curricula.” See Alyssa Sepinwall Goldstein, “Atlantic Amnesia: French Historians, the Haitian Revolution and the 2004–6 CAPES Exam,” Proceedings of the Western Society for French History 34 (2006): 302.

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3. There are too many articles, reports, and blog entries to mention in this footnote. Yet although I commend a spirit of volunteerism and the efforts of those to remember, discuss, and help Haitians in need, I am concerned by the recent attention that U.S. fiction writers and aid workers have received considering their limited knowledge of the country, conceptual framing of their stories that often reify tragedy and mystery as Haitian truth and emphasize personal torment, confusion, shock, and annoyance with Haitians and the Haitian state. See Mischa Berlinski, “A Farewell to Haiti,” in New York Review of Books, March 22, 2012, 8, 10, 12, and Quinn Zimmerman, “Day 326: Questions and (No) Answers (The Aid Bitchslap),” These New Boots, April 22, 2012, http://thesenewboots.blogspot.ca. See also Zimmerman, “Aid Worker Leaves Haiti with a Sour Taste,” National Public Radio, Talk of the Nation, May 10, 2012, http://www.npr.org; Mac McClelland, “I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me on This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD,” Good, June 27, 2011, http://www.good.is. See also responses to McClelland by Gina A. Ulysse, “Why Context Matters: Journalists and Haiti,” Ms. Magazine Blog, July 8, 2011, http://www. msmagazine.com; and Edwidge Danticat, “Edwidge Danticat Speaks on Mac McClelland Essay,” Essence, July 20, 2011, http://www.essence.com. 4. Jennie M. Smith, When the Hands Are Many: Community Organization and Social Change in Rural Haiti (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 73. 5. Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought: The Historical Evolution of Caribbean Society in its Ideological Aspects, 1492–1900 (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 318–19. For more on an analysis of Haitian intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see also J. Michael Dash, “Nineteenth-Century Haiti and the Archipelago of the Americas: Anténor Firmin’s Letters from St. Thomas,” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (2004): 44–53; Magdaline W. Shannon, Jean Price-Mars, the Haitian Elite, and the American Occupation, 1915–1935 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996); Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, In the Shadow of Powers: Dantès Bellegarde in Haitian Social Thought (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1985). 6. Anténor Firmin, The Equality of the Human Races, trans. Asselin Charles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 313. 7. Lewis, Main Currents, 263. 8. See David Brooks, “The Underlying Tragedy,” New York Times, January 14, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com. 9. For more on Haitian and U.S. African American relations, see Millery Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti and Pan Americanism, 1870–1964 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010); Chris Dixon, African America and Haiti: Emigrationism and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000); and Léon D. Pamphile, Haitians and African Americans: A Heritage of Tragedy and Hope (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).

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10. For more on Dominicans’ embrace of indigenous aesthetics, see Ginetta E. B. Candelario, Black behind the Ears: Dominican Racial Identity from Museums to Beauty Shops (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 11. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean and the World,” Cimarrón: New Perspectives on the Caribbean 2, no. 3 (Winter 1990): 6. 12. Ibid., 7. 13. Berlinski, “Farewell to Haiti,” 8. 14. See Frederick Cooper and Randall Packard, International Development and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Politics of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Eforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom; Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa; Lindsay Whitfield, Politics of Aid: Africans Strategies for Dealing with Donors; Carol Lancaster, Aid to Africa; and Issa G. Shivi, Silences in NGO Discourse: The Role and Future of NGOs in Africa (Oxford: Fahamu, 2007). 15. See Mark Schuller’s chapter in this volume. 16. See Bill Quigley and Amber Ramanauskas, “Haiti after the Quake: Where the Relief Money Did and Did Not Go,” Counterpunch, January 3, 2012, http:// www.counterpunch.org. 17. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 212. 18. Frederick Cooper, “Modernizing Bureaucrats, Backward Africans, and the Development Concept,” in Cooper and Packard, International Development, 84–85. 19. Smith, When the Hands Are Many, 186. 20. Ibid., 187. 21. Ada Ferrer, “Haiti, Free-Soil and Antislavery in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” American Historical Review 117, no. 1 (February 2012): 43. See also Matt D. Childs, “A Black French General Arrived to Conquer the Island: Images of the Haitian Revolution in Cuba’s 1812 Aponte Rebellion,” 135–56, and Marixa Lasso, “Haiti as an Image of Popular Republicanism in Caribbean Colombia: Cartagena Province (1811–1828),” 176–90, both in The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. David P. Geggus (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001). 22. For more on the cluster of crises, see Gabriel Adkins, “Organizational Networks in Disaster Response: An Examination of the U.S. Government Network’s Efforts in Hurricane Katrina,” in The Handbook of Crisis Communication, ed. W. Timothy Coombs and Sherry J. Holladay (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010); and Marcello Pericoli, “A Primer on Financial Contagion,” Journal of Economic Surveys 17, no. 4 (September 2003): 571–608. 23. Steven S. Volk, “The Chilean Earthquake of 2010: Three Perspectives on One Disaster,” LASA Forum 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 3. See also Patricio Nava,

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“Small Earthquake in Chile: Not Many Dead,” LASA Forum 41, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 6–8. 24. Post-Katrina literature has been critical to our understanding of the historical conflicts exacerbating natural disasters. See Cedric Johnson, ed., The Neoliberal Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, Late Capitalism, and the Remaking of New Orleans (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); Chester Hartman and Gregory Squires, eds., There Is No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster: Race, Class and Hurricane Katrina (New York: Routledge, 2006); Kevin Gotham, Authentic New Orleans: Tourism, Culture and Race in the Big Easy (New York: New York University Press, 2007); Phil Steinberg and Rob Shields, What Is a City? Rethinking the Urban after Hurricane Katrina (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008). 25. See Sibylle Fischer’s essay in this volume. See also Laurent Dubois, “A Spoonful of Blood: Blaming Haitians for AIDS,” Science as Culture 6, no. 26 (Winter 1997): 7–43; Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Trouillot, “The Odd and the Ordinary,” 1–15. 26. For a concise history of how four Latin American countries used race and culture to distinguish and distance themselves, see Richard Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990). 27. Ada Ferrer, “Talk about Haiti: The Archive and the Atlantic’s Haitian Revolution,” in Tree of Liberty: Cultural Legacies of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Doris L. Garraway (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 34. 28. Ibid., 35. 29. Volk, “Chilean Earthquake,” 3. 30. See David Ciampa, “Quake Boosts Copper Stocks,” Australian Financial Review, March 2, 2010, 27. The Wall Street Journal reported that Chile’s earthquake “destroyed 32,500 gallons on wine, or almost 13% of last year’s production, with value of $250 million.” Also, refer to Matt Moffett, “Chile Winemakers Feel Quake Hangover,” Wall Street Journal, March 15, 2010, 19; Ginger Thomson and Marc Lacey, “Chile Says Rebuilding May Cost Tens of Billions of Dollars,” New York Times, March 2, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com; Carlos Eduardo Martin, “Riveting: Steel Technology, Building Codes and the Production of Modern Places” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1999). 31. Junot Diaz, “Apocalypse,” Boston Review, May/June 2011, http://www.boston review.net/. 32. See Philip Abbott, Exceptional America: Newness and National Identity (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 2; Trouillot, “The Odd and the Ordinary.” 33. David P. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 219. See also Deborah Jenson, “Nineteenth-Century Postcolonialités at the Bicentennial of the Haitian Independence,” Yale French Studies 107 (2005): 3–4.

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34. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 29. 35. See Robert Fatton Jr., Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2002), and David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (London: Macmillan, 1988). 36. Matthew J. Smith, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Confict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 2. 37. Ibid., 189. See also Millery Polyné, “To the Sons of Dessalines and Pétion: Radicalism and the Idea of a ‘New’ Haiti,” Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism 36 (November 2011): 164–72. 38. Michelle Ann Stephens’s current research on race, color, and origins of difference in the Americas has been helpful to think about newness. Refer to Stephens’s “Skin Talk: Race and Intimacy in the Cross-Cultural Americas,” lecture given at New York University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, March 28, 2011. 39. Walter White to Dumarsais Estimé, June 28, 1949, Walter F. White Papers, box 2, folder 61, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, New Haven, Conn. 40. See Millery Polyné, From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870–1964 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 143–45. 41. Since 2006, Eurasian Minerals Inc., a Colorado-based mining company, has explored and mined gold–silver and copper–gold deposits in northern Haiti. There has been much concern about how the Haitian people and the state will benefit from such a partnership. See “Who Will Gain from Haiti’s Gold Rush? Haitian Government Embraces U.S., Canadian Mining Firms,” Democracy Now, May 31, 2012, http://www.democracynow.org; Monica Clesca, “Haiti Hopes Gold Find Means Boom Times Ahead,” The Root, May 24, 2012, http://www.theroot.com/. 42. For more on Global Renewable Energy, see http://www.globalrenewable energy.org/gre/index.php; and see the following YouTube videos: “La Gonave, The Vision,” and “La Gonave Concert Video.” 43. See Luigi F. Girard and Peter Nijkamp, eds., Cultural Tourism and Sustainable Local Development (London: Ashgate, 2009); Maurice Burac, “The Struggle for Sustainable Tourism in Martinique,” in Beyond Sun and Sand: Caribbean Environmentalisms, ed. Sherrie L. Baver and Barbara D. Lynch (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 65–72; Steven Gregory, The Devil Behind the Mirror: Globalization and Politics in the Dominican Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 130–65, 209–33; George Gmelch, Behind the Smile: The Working Lives of Caribbean Tourism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003).

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44. Sarah Maslin Nir, “In Haiti, Class Comes with a Peek at Lush Life,” New York Times, May 3, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com. 45. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), xiv. 46. See Louis A. Perez, Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Richard Graham, ed., The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990); Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of “the Other” and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995). 47. See Mignolo, Idea of Latin America, and The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011); Fischer, Modernity Disavowed. 48. Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 102–3. 49. Fischer, this volume. 50. For more on vulnerability studies, see Martha Albertson Fineman, “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition,” Yale Journal of Law and Feminism 20, no. 1 (2008); Bryan S. Turner, Vulnerability and Human Rights (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2006); Peadar Kirby, Vulnerability and Violence: The Impact of Globalisation (London: Pluto Press, 2005); Katie Oliviero, “Vulnerable Sensations: Imperiled Citizenship, Intimacy and Personhood in 21st Century Social Change” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2010). 51. Diaz, “Apocalypse.” 52. See Jean Saint-Vil, “Haïti, au creux de la vague du Choléra?,” Journal of Haitian Studies 16, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 19–37; Charles H. Nicholson, “Chronology of Onset of the Haiti Cholera Epidemic: October and November 2010,” Journal of Haitian Studies 16, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 38–45; Deborah Jenson, “Le Choléra dans l’Histoire d’Haïti,” Le Nouvelliste, November 6, 2010; “Haiti’s Continuing Cholera Outbreak,” New York Times, May 10, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com. 53. See Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy, dir. Mark Schuller and Renée Bergan (Tèt Ansanm Productions, 2009). 54. Gina Athena Ulysse, “Pawòl Fanm Sou Douz Janvye (Women’s Words on January 12th, 2010),” Meridians 11, no. 1 (2011): 93. “The potomitan is the central pillar of a Vodou temple. There is an old saying in Haiti that states . . . women are the potomitan of their families” (97). For more on Haitian women’s voices after the 2010 earthquake, see Meridians 11, no. 1 (2011): 91–162.

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55. Greg Grandin, “Haiti’s Second Disaster,” Aljazeera English, May 4, 2011, http://english.aljazeera.net/. 56. Ibid. 57. See Alex Dupuy, “Disaster Capitalism to the Rescue: The International Community and Haiti after the Earthquake,” NACLA Report on the Americas, July/August 2011, 19.

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pa r t I

Revolisyon/Kriz (Revolution/Crisis)

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Haiti, the Monstrous Anomaly nick nesbitt En nommant les objets, c’est un monde enchanté, un monde demonstres, que je fais surgir sur la grisaille mal différenciée du monde; un monde de puissances que je somme, que j’invoque et que je convoque. By naming the objects, it is an enchanted world, a world of monsters, I emerge from the poorly differentiated dullness of the world; a world of powers I sum, that I invoke and that I convene. — A i m é C é s a i r e , La poésie . . .

T

he creation on January 1, 1804, of the first decolonized republic to have banned slavery, universally and immediately, should rightfully have shamed and terrified the neighboring Atlantic states, founded as they were upon the economic system of plantation slavery. If Haiti was perceived after 1804 by the slaveholding powers as a terrifying monstrosity, its revolution and subsequent independence systematically and repeatedly ridiculed, belittled, caricatured, refused, undermined, extorted, repressed, denied, and above all, as Sybille Fischer has argued, disavowed, this is testimony to the enormous exertions required to sustain and ideologically justify even the largest, most powerful slaveholding societies when confronted with the actual existence of this powerful affirmation of equality, a slave-free society founded on the formal abolition of slavery in the nineteenth-century world system. In what follows, I want to examine the fact of this terror, the objective monstrosity of denying and disavowing what by right should have been hailed, above all by those new nations such as France and the United States, claiming to be founded on the rights of man, as the most glorious dawn of a new era of justice and equality.

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Why We Need to Need Haiti As I write these lines, nearly two years after the 2010 quake, seven years after the most recent coup, twenty-four years after the fall of Duvalier, the question remains, more pressing than ever: What is to be done? Among the answers for those of us living outside Haiti in places like France, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States, political critique must surely remain as pressing as the immediate imperative of humanitarian interventionism. One might begin such a critique by first asking a deceptively simple but nagging question: Why Haiti?1 Why the repeated and by now extensively documented North Atlantic destabilization campaigns, invasions, extortions, feral pig genocides, coups d’états of democratically elected presidents from elections vetted by the U.N., the repeated suppression of democratic parties and candidates in favor of unknown or widely despised minoritarian representatives of a tiny elite? All to make a few baseballs or Disney T-shirts to underwrite an increasingly massive U.S. debt? It just doesn’t add up. So why? Surely (speaking as a U.S. citizen) one must continue to interrogate the role of the elected government acting in our name rather than displacing blame onto the hollow notions of a putatively failed state. Why spend so much time, effort, and money to systematically undermine Haiti and make sure it remains the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, economically dysfunctional in the face of every democratic aspiration and development? It seems we in the North Atlantic world have a problem, to which Haiti—a dysfunctional, impoverished, underdeveloped, barbaric, and undemocratic Haiti—has for two centuries offered us handy a solution. This “problem” is a void that lies at the core of our society; it eats away at its democratic foundations. Like any actually existing democracy, ours has its own singular contradictions, compromise formations, and oligarchies of interest. But what does that have to do with Haiti? Let me risk putting the matter in more speculative terms: from the very start in 1783, and even already in 1776, the institution of the rule of law, of a democratic American constitution, of a declaration of independence, of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, was built on the foundation of a system of dehumanizing violence. The United States, like the post-1789 French republic, was structured around a fundamental regime of violence, a void that

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held together in ignominy a new nation, suturing its diverse populations and various modes of production, to enable the American republic and its pursuit of happiness. This regime of violence was, of course, plantation slavery, a system that was not defeated, but rather reinforced and radically extended by the achievement of American independence. If it is true that all states necessarily found the rule of law around some disavowed core of violence, if all civilization is to some degree a testament to barbarism, it was Haiti’s glory and misfortune to have embarked alone to destroy this particular system of total violence and human debasement in 1804, on a tiny geographic speck on the periphery of the Atlantic world, what De Gaulle would have called a mere Caribbean poussière lost in the vast Atlantic economy of early modern plantation and slave-based capitalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If France and the young United States have vied repeatedly in their efforts over the preceding two centuries to undermine Haiti, and despite the many and varied immediate causes, interests, and motivations in these processes, Haiti’s independence, in the richest sense of the word, was from the start in some vital sense a threat to these more powerful country’s self-fashioning and identity—not so much a military, economic, or political threat but an ideological terror. The ever-renewed destruction of Haiti is no fact of nature or even of a vindictive and racist deity. Haiti has long constituted a poussière of terrifying antimatter at the core of the slaveholding Atlantic world system. The destruction of Haiti is thus strategic. Haiti must survive, but only on nongovernmental organization and U.N. life support, in a vegetative state. Without a doubt, the horrific death and destruction witnessed since the earthquake of January 2010 was no mere natural event but rather entailed a political catastrophe wrought from forcible underdevelopment and structural precariousness. Haiti cannot be allowed to disappear, no more than it can be allowed to flourish. Haiti must imperatively remain, for it is essential to the United States and its allies. The trauma of Haiti is a North American trauma, projected (through various operations from the ideological to the economic and military) onto the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Haiti, that dysfunctional, barbaric, undemocratic, and undemocratizable Haiti fatally prone to ever-renewed disasters, is a fantasy. It remains and returns endlessly, however, because this site has the misfortune of constituting an essential fantasy for Haiti’s big Other: the fantasy an eminently

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democratic, developed, and civilized nation. Haiti is the fantasy projection, the negative kernel of the real that so effectively sustains North American misrecognition and disavowal. Haiti is the repressed, traumatic core of a nation’s democratic fantasy. It is not just that the country has the misfortune of being impoverished; how many other sites around the globe could play that role? Haiti, in addition, is the image in negative, as void or absence, of the founding violence of the American and French democratic republics: slavery. If Haiti hadn’t existed as the ready-at-hand model for dysfunction and underdevelopment, we would have had to invent it (or perhaps that’s exactly what happened). If Haiti is actually at the very center of Atlantic modernity, it is not only because it precociously announced the coming destruction of slavery in the nineteenth century. Haiti is the impossible truth, the inadmissible real, of North Atlantic democratic self-identity. The scandal of Haiti is to have stood, not just from 1791 to 1804 and, arguably, from 1986 to 2004 and beyond, as the unthinkable, unfathomable democratic real of a spectral fantasy. Not only the Haitian revolution, but the defense of democratic empowerment, majoritarian economic, and agricultural autonomy, as well as the protection of these rights of the disenfranchised by all means available, casts the specter of rightful violence before the illegitimate violence of regime change, intervention, and the incursions of global capital. Haitian underdevelopment calls out for an ever-renewed process of critical, partial historiography, in every sense of the word. It is true historiography, and not mere fantasy, to recover in the broken pieces of history as what concretely, if only virtually, could have been the result of that eventful night of August 29, 1791, in northern Saint Domingue. The universal destruction of plantation slavery was from that night on no fantasy but a truth of Atlantic modernity, a truth actively disavowed over the following century, a nonetheless very real, virtual truth of 1791: universal emancipation, equality, autonomy, self-sufficiency, the democratization of democracy. The call of such a historiography must be to go beyond the fantasy projection of Haitian underdevelopment and barbarity, to illuminate Haiti as the vanishing mediator of Enlightenment radical democracy. This critical historiography would return to the founding enunciations of Haitian political subjectivation. To turn over these shards of a broken and incomplete sequence of universal emancipation is to reveal a process of

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radical, uncompromising political subjectivation, in which the subject is to be understood not as the persistence of selfsame identity through time, nor even as the recognition of the traumatic void or absence at the center of subjectivity that would foreclose the possibility of such an identity. If humans were to accept and limit subjective experience to the repeated recognition and traversal of this void or impasse and the contemplative and ultimately idealist recognition of our disavowed symptoms, political sequences such as Lavalas or the Haitian revolution would never have occurred. Only the exploration of the consequences of a momentary vanishing event such as the night of August 29, 1791, only the extensive, determined struggle to unfold within a world the implications of such an event, to transform the ontological parameters of what counts as true in a world, can itself count as the process of subjectivation. Not the unfolding of an essence, but the determined persistence in the wake of an event, a process in which absolutely anyone may come to count themselves as subject to a truth such as universal emancipation, a process in which a former slave—and indeed slave owner—can come to count her or himself as a subject of universal justice as equality, and to give a proper name to this process: Louverture. General emancipation is universal insofar as it traverses a world, breaking through its sedentary regimes of violence, to initiate a process of subjectivation that will only be followed through subsequent to this appearance or initial event, initially unthinkable, having no place in the world it must destroy. Above all, the appearance of a singular universal takes the form of a decision that breaks the regime of undecidability by which a world perpetuates its reign. After 1789, the new world of the French Revolution created novel transcendental, structuring coordinates, articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen: “Les hommes naissent et demeurent égaux en droits’; la résistance à l’oppression [est un] droit naturel.” Such statements of universal, eternal and infinite truth immediately create a situation of undecidability that would be fought over in coming years: who is the subject homme? Women? Jews? Mulâtres like Vincent Ogé? Slaves? The site of such a universal, then, is a point of decision on an undecidable question.2 First in 1789: it is the Tiers état, which is henceforth to be, we decide, tout. It is women, all women, declares Olympe de Gouges. It is mulâtres, says the revolutionary assembly, and then it isn’t, and then it is again in 1791.

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If the event of August 23, 1791, destroyed in the flash of a fire-filled night a world, a system, this vanishing event, the morning after, demanded to be followed through. And so Louverture’s appearance exactly two years later in August 1793 is the incipient sign, the word of the first consequences of this momentary event. The universal import of Haiti lies not in that night of 1791, only quantitatively different from the many Caribbean slave revolts that preceded it. The politics of Haitian universalism lie in the qualitative leap that followed that evanescent event, in the laborious struggle to follow through and develop the enormous, unfathomable, inadmissible and unthinkable consequences of 1791, beyond 1804, for all who are universally implicated in the consequences of this declaration of universal emancipation, beyond any constituted identity that situates such subjects before the universal. The world historical importance of this single utterance of Louverture’s was to constitute for the world, “pour l’univers entier,” as Louis Delgrès would reinterpret this event in Guadeloupe in 1802, the statement of the truth of an event. Liberté générale, “universal emancipation.” A statement to be reformulated again by Lavalas: “Tout moun se moun.” A declaration, a statement, a decision or axiom on an undecidable question in the post-1789 slaveholding world, an infinite network of consequences and a protocol of political subjectivation to unfold down to the present to invent the new world it implies. Is it possible still to believe the famous claim of Michel-Rolph Trouillot that the universal prescription of the Haitian revolution, of a slavery-free global order, was literally unthinkable as it unfolded? Was the slavery-free order invented in Haiti in 1804 simply a productionist, caporal agrarian modification of the ancien régime, or a radical break from that world? To affirm that universal emancipation was absolutely unthinkable prior to 1791 implies that a truth, prior to its articulation in a situation, is intransitive to all knowledge. In the slave regime of Saint Domingue, one knew how to make profit on sugar and coffee, how to make Africans labor, but for any and all inhabitants of this world, the truth of universal emancipation may indeed have been unthinkable, an absolute void in the ancien régime plantation order. But can one assert the utter intransitivity of these two worlds without falsely hypostatizing a conditional subjectivity back into a more radical priority, in a historicist version of the familiar old question, “If a branch falls in the forest with no one there to hear it . . . ,” which question of course illegitimately smuggles

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in the presupposition of the transcendental horizon of presentation as a conditional (“if there had been someone there to hear it . . . ”). What if the givenness of these singular forms of universality only appeared as a correlation between world and subject following the event of 1791?3 The stakes here are double: first, to assert (nondogmatically) the absolute possibility of a (politicohistorical) truth outside of its presentation to a (transcendental) production-based subject (say, the truth of justice as equality); and second, to assert the absolute contingency of any regime of (political) presentation, including that of production-based constituent subjectivity: from within any world (such as the ancien régime, plantation slavery) whose regime of presentation or countability appears unsurpassable, we assert not only the possible mutation/singularization of individuals (of mere cyclical, ontic change in which the pieces are moved around the chessboard, but the rules remain in place; or slaves purchase their individual freedom and we replace bad slave owners with kind ones while the world system of plantation slavery goes on unperturbed) but that the very regime of presentation, the rules of the game, are themselves absolutely contingent (another world is possible), though we have no way of knowing when or where or even whether they actually will mutate. There would then be (at least) two questions to ask if we are to significantly radicalize Haitian historiography. To do so requires, I would submit, an attempt to think a meaningful distinction between the empirical and transcendental nonexistence of the subject of universal emancipation prior to 1791. Can we actually distinguish the empirical and transcendental conditions allowing for the emergence of the universal? I think we can, quite easily. We know, for example, the empirical facts that allowed for the appearance of universal emancipation and the destruction of plantation slavery as a system or world in the Haitian revolutionary sequence, 1791–1804. These include the vast numerical disproportion between whites and blacks, a disproportion unmatched elsewhere in Atlantic slavery; the power vacuum in Saint Domingue after 1789; the white planter class’s bid for independence in 1790–91; the circulation of truth statements such as “les hommes naissent et demeure égaux en droits” throughout the Atlantic world, and Saint Domingue specifically, immediately from November 1789 on; the African declarations of universal human rights such as the Charte du Mandingue; and

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so on. The subject of universal emancipation appeared not so much dialectically but furtively, like sparks to kindling, sparks that were at first too few (Makandal’s failed revolt of 1750), but that, when the kindling was dry enough and the sparks sufficient, caught fire, and burned the cane fields and plantations of the Northern plain of Saint Domingue to the ground on the night of August 23, 1791. But, secondly, what are the transcendental conditions of the appearance of the subject of universal emancipation in Saint Domingue in 1791–1805? Might these include some sort universal reason or reasonability including illiterate African slaves, or a postulate of universal becoming/singularization? In other words, can one step back from the assertion of unsurpassability that grounds such a condition as constituent subjectivity, to understand the very emergence of the conditions for the taking place of the transcendentality of the universal citizen-subject? Or finally, taken another way, insofar as a transcendental subject of universalism implies the taking place of that subject (that is, its minimal condition being that there is such a subject), is it possible meaningfully to posit (speculatively) the existence of an ideal universal independently of its relation to a bodily support, without relapsing to metaphysical dogmatism? In other words, posed as a politicohistorical rather than purely ontological problem, can any other order take place than what the transcendental regime of presentation (of production under slavery) decrees? Not simply, can the order of sovereignty dialectically mutate, modulate from an ancien to nouveaux régimes of production as with Toussaint and Christophe, but can there appear an entirely new order of presentation and counting, say, that of the universal, ethnically, racially despecified citizen in 1804 or the moun andeyò as described by Jean Casimir and Gérard Barthélémy?4 Following Trouillot, taking him quite literally at his word, the radical singularity and absolute contingency—at an ontological level of the order of presentation—of a universal sequence such as the Haitian revolution would seem to depend on this distinction, to avoid collapsing what Sartre called historical intelligibility into a neo-Hegelian totality of univocal becoming. To think singular universality emphatically as Trouillot implicitly enjoins us would seem to imply the circumscription of transcendental critique, to posit the nondogmatic but absolute contingency of any truth politics.

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While this unthinkability may hold for the ancien régime, 1789 is in fact the determinate refutation of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s assertion.5 For Trouillot does not simply claim that this political sequence was effectively unthinkable prior to 1791. Nor does he merely document the degree to which the Haitian revolution remained misunderstood, if not actively stigmatized and debased, as it unfolded and in the two centuries since. While this is undoubtedly true, it remains a merely empirical claim, a carence that nearly two decades of intensive historiographic investigation of the Haitian revolution has to an important extent managed to address. Trouillot’s primary claim is of course a much stronger one, namely, “that the events that shook up Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1804 [ . . . ] were ‘unthinkable’ facts” that were never “accompanied by an explicit intellectual discourse.” The unthinkable, Trouillot tells us, refers specifically to “that for which one has no adequate instruments to conceptualize. [ . . . ] The unthinkable is that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives, that which perverts all answers because it defies the terms under which the questions were phrased.”6 In fact, those tools, those adequate instruments of thought were readily available, circulating throughout Saint Domingue in both printed matter (in colonial papers such as the Jacobin Créole Patriote) and oral debate, in the abstract, universalist, race-free axioms of freedom, equality, and the right to resist unjust regimes contained in the declarations of the rights of man and citizen of 1789 and 1793, as well as the debates and proceedings of the French Revolution as reported in both French and colonial journalism and through oral communication by subaltern sailors and other travelers from Europe.7 The Haitian revolution was in no sense unthinkable as its events unfolded; instead, there merely occurred a general failure to think through, on the part of the metropolitan revolutionaries, the simplest and most obvious implications of the universal truth that Tous les hommes naissent et demeure libres et égaux en droits. In light of this long history of disavowal, it is clear that ideological critique of the image of Haiti, though necessary, is not enough. It is not enough simply to traverse this fantasmatic structure, “mark[ing] repeatedly,” as Žižek says, “the memory of a lost cause” in an infinitely renewed cycle of journalistic desperation that can only mirror the ideological fantasy of ever-renewed,

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putatively natural Haitian submission to fate, Nature, or whatever other name the media would give the “poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.”8 Once we perceive the unactualized truths of 1791 and 1804 and 1991 and 2000, once we have written the umpteenth editorial telling the truth of Haiti’s systematic impoverishment and derailed democracy, what then? When we subtract ourselves from any active participation in the culture of nongovernmental organization and marine invasions, we still remain responsible for those acting in our place and name. Yet how can we force the restructuralization of the rules of Haitian engagement, such as those adopted by our humanitarians disguised in the uniforms of the U.S. marines or U.N. peacekeepers? One may rightfully support the recourse to violence at the last limit when defending democracy, the right to force one’s way to recover water, say, in a collapsed building when one is on the edge of life. But what form would an engaged forcing of the transcendental axioms of U.S.–Haitian foreign policy look like?9 If the Haitian revolution teaches any lesson, it is surely that there will never be a right moment to intervene to restructure the injustices of a system. Quite simply, what would be necessary to shift this U.S. policy from today’s all-too-familiar Clinton–Clinton–Obama promotion of Portau-Prince sweatshops, the continued destruction of rural agricultural selfsufficiency, passive support for the reinstitution of the Haitian army, which was Aristide’s greatest concrete accomplishment to have eliminated, and the continued and scandalous support of a conseil electoral provisoire whose only function seems to be to exclude popular parties and candidates and to promote unknown and/or unpopular candidates in Haitian elections? What would it mean to radically reorient U.S. policy to promote instead of elections of the elite what Chavannes Jean-Baptiste calls food sovereignty? The Monstrous Anomaly A hundred pages into the second, unfinished volume of his monumental study Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre makes another of his seemingly unending digressions in his defense of the intelligibility of historical struggle, to elaborate a fascinating analysis of the world systemic situation of the USSR in the 1920s. The situation of this fragile new state, as Sartre describes it, holds a remarkable series of parallels with the unheralded new nation that was Haiti in the immediate aftermath of 1804. Sartre focuses on the confrontation

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between Stalin and Trotsky in this period despite their shared objectives, including potential agreement on a range of basic issues from the objective necessity to pursue socialism as a global, rather than merely national, project, as well as the necessity of consolidating the shaky foundations of this new state by means of violent accumulation and modernization, before addressing the claims of equality and social justice inherent in the communist project by definition.10 For both Trotsky and Stalin, Sartre tells us, the immediate aftermath of the revolution would necessarily be defensive, a consolidation of the gains of the revolution in the face of a hostile world system, and constructive, delaying the immediate implementation of the egalitarian claims of communism to secure initially the very existence of that state that could subsequently hope to construct a just society. This fragile new state would necessarily be self-reliant, unable to expect resources and support from a hostile external world. Nonetheless, Sartre observes, these two figures entered into inevitable conflict. Sartre describes an intellectual Trotsky, a theoretician, a thinker whose political action as such would remain radical and uncompromising in its universalism. Marxism, like the antislavery of Toussaint Louverture, was above all for Trotsky universalist in its claims and pretentions. The scope of its address necessarily encompassed the entire world system; the persistence of injustice anywhere in the world, whether in its literal form as plantation slavery in 1804, or its metaphorical equivalent, the exploitation of labor after 1917, was absolutely intolerable. One thinks here of the famous proclamations and letters of Louverture to the French directory or of Louis Delgrès in Guadeloupe, addressed not to a government, a class, or a nation, but to l’univers entier.11 While Trotsky had argued forcefully that the vanguard of the revolution would rightly take place on the underdeveloped periphery of Europe, it was Haiti that, after the destructive fury of Thermidor, the subsequent rise of Bonaparte, and the consolidation and strengthening of North American slavery after 1787, stood as the sole remaining defender of the call for universal emancipation. In contrast to the idealist Trotsky, Sartre’s Stalin is the practical revolutionary, the opportunist, the long-suffering local militant who had for so many years received orders from the exiled intellectuals. It is Sartre’s Stalin who

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perceives most clearly the dangers at hand for the young state and whose strategic decisions were all guided by a single imperative: to save what had been achieved. This, Sartre writes, could only be accomplished by enacting a defensive strategy that would preserve the gains of the revolution to that point and avoid dispersing it to the winds in what he saw as a suicidal desire to internationalize its struggle.12 Suicidal because, in a context of general enmity in this sense parallel to the encirclement of Haiti by slaveholding states after 1804, any attempt to internationalize its struggle would have unnecessarily antagonized its more powerful, hostile neighbors. In this view, forced industrialization and collectivization were the exigencies of a situation, sacrifices for the preservation of the gains made to that point against a hostile world. If their ideologies differed, this same sacrificial logic in the name of conservation of the revolution and independence underwrote the forced-labor initiatives of Toussaint, Dessalines, and Christophe alike. Such clashes and contradictions, Sartre writes, give birth to monstrosities.13 The greatest monstrosity of all was undoubtedly the aberration known as “socialism in one country.” Such a formulation and the politics it implied went much further than a mere affirmation of self-reliance of a young nation in an unwelcoming world. It implied the negation and disavowal of the very universalism that had underwritten and justified the revolution itself. To refuse the internationalization of the struggle, whether for communism in the 1920s or for antislavery after 1804, meant deciding that the revolution was only universalist insofar as it remained ideal, and that once it became an existing political reality and independent state, that universality would be, necessarily and rightly, sacrificed on the alter of the nation.14 This meant, of course, that the actually existing state, whether the USSR or postindependence Haiti, existed to some degree as the living denial of the very universalist justification that helped to actualize their existence. Sartre rightly refuses any simplistic personalization of this clash, however, quickly moving beyond the Trotsky–Stalin doublet to examine the underlying social contradictions they personified. The dual monstrosities of “socialism in one country” and “antislavery in one country” are not to be understood as effects of the fundamental poverty and underdevelopment of these respective states, as a certain apologism might conclude. Sartre is uncompromising in his assertion that decisions for or against forced collectivization or

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modernization, again like that of the repeated return to forced plantation labor in Haiti, were the result of revolutionary practice—a practice that chose, correctly or not, the conservative revolutionary path of realism and preservation of what had already been gained.15 Haiti after 1804, like the USSR of the 1920s, shared a common threat: encirclement. The return of royalist governments in France, as Deborah Jenson has recently argued, meant a very real threat of invasion and recolonization, the result of which would of course have meant reenslavement in the period from 1802 to 1848. The poverty and underdevelopment of the new Haitian state were real social problems, but that same poverty had enormous consequences for the struggle against slavery itself; Haitian poverty made the internationalization of antislavery as a practical, political agenda literally suicidal. What’s more, as recent work on the impact of the Haitian revolution in the Atlantic world has shown, the actual success of the Haitian revolution and the founding of Haiti had in many cases a negative impact on the struggle for emancipation abroad, insofar as it divided abolitionists on the question of violence, radicalized conservative opposition, and forced antislavery underground in the United States in particular until the 1840s. As Sartre concludes, the “incarnation [of the revolution] was in direct contradiction with its universalization.”16 Instead of the Haitian revolutionaries’ example radicalizing the global struggle for emancipation, at least initially, it may have become a key factor in delaying emancipation. In both Haiti and the USSR, the relative strength of the liberal capitalist regimes surrounding it, combined with the weakness of those involved in the respective struggles for justice as equality, drove those regimes to a moderate policy of what Sartre euphemistically calls prudence.17 We all know what tragedy such prudence led to in Haiti’s case, including the U.S. trade embargo of 1806 and the scandalous extortion by royalist France in 1825 of the diplomatic recognition the new state could not live without, the 125 million franc ransom—more than twice the country’s GDP at the time, and a ransom whose payment bankrupted France for the rest of the century. In this situation, both countries were left to their own devices, politically as well as economically, and in this as well one should rightly conclude that even the antiegalitarian developments after 1804 (Christophe’s agricultural militarization and reinstitution of monarchy, Boyer’s Code rural) were due not to personal, antidemocratic aberrations but rather to the outrageous

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monstrosity of Haiti’s situation as the lone outpost of antislavery until 1848. In other words, the violence and inequities of Christophe and Boyer, in one sense the betrayal of the universalist revolution itself, were a consequence not, or at least not only, of a personal struggle for power, but they would never have occurred had the United States and France (as well as the United Kingdom, in its own highly conflicted way) stood as partners in the fight against slavery, rather than its declared enemies. Soviet and Haitian isolation were each monstrosities, the former an underdeveloped country on the eastern periphery of Europe that stunned the world in its passage from feudalism to incipient socialism without transition, and the latter a peripheral colony thought to be inhabited by savage Africans and dissolute colonists that presented to a stunned, uncomprehending world the unthinkable reality of a slavery-free nation—and on this fundamental score, the most politically advanced nation in the world in 1804. In this light, C. L. R. James’s postulation of a black Jacobinism in Haiti takes on a new light: as a univeralist politics of justice as equality, as historians such as Jean-Pierre Gross have shown, the short-lived Jacobin experiment not only invented what would become a century and a half later the Western welfare state (an initiative quickly dismantled by Thermidor and the directory in its threat to privilege), but exported, as an abstract political logic, the most uncompromising image of egalitarian justice at the very same time that it denied abolition in the name of economic survival. If the radical enlightenment, like Marxism two centuries later, first articulated its truths in Europe, it was in the farthest extremes of the capitalist world system that a singular enunciation of the truth of justice as equality would be first instantiated as political reality. This was perhaps so because both tsarism and plantation slavery, unlike the relatively benign forms of so-called servitude of Western Europe, sustained themselves with the most extreme forms of ultraviolence, as James and others famously narrate. The instantiation of both antislavery and Marxism in singular communities necessarily meant that each would morph into singular, unheralded forms at these peripheral sites. Before 1804 and 1917, antislavery and socialism were both abstract, theoretical struggles (as in the case of Condorcet and Les amis des noirs). After each revolution, their respective struggles became the lived experience of each community, the ontological substance of their novel social experiments. Both

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antislavery and Marxism were radically transformed in this passage, when they became the lived existence of Bossale former slaves in Haiti and workers, “so uncouth,” writes Sartre, “so hastily manufactured and so close to the peasantry,” full of “wild voluntarism and youthful barbarism.”18 Both countries were the incarnation of philosophical truth, imperfect in many ways, but in their very anomaly, beacons for their respective generations involved in the struggle for social justice. In this way, these uncivilized marginals of the time actually and actively subordinated the so-called enlightened Western intellectuals; Haiti, as Sartre writes of the USSR, thus became the “truth of the abstract universal.”19 It was these marginal sites that correctly understood the implications of the truth statements of the radical enlightenment and Marx. In the wake of these two unheralded revolutions, radical theory found itself revealed in the full poverty of its abstraction: Rousseau to the Encyclopédistes, Louverture to Napoleon, Dessalines to France, Lenin to Bernstein—each was uncompromising in the denunciation of the poverty of mere theory as such. Like the novel concept of socialism in one state, in which socialism, Sartre argues, gradually came to mean no longer communism itself but the intermediary situation between the former and capitalism, antislavery after 1804 no longer stood for the entirety of the struggle to end slavery, but came to signify the intermediary state between an inferior, idealist abolitionism and the fully instantiated reality of a slavery-free global order. And if Sartre unconvincingly tries to argue that the USSR “really was a socialist order,” perhaps the last point of comparison of these two examples is that in contrast to the fact that the communist hypothesis has, so far at least, been a failure in its various instantiations, monstrosity defeated by capital, Haitian antislavery was in fact one of the great successes of the modern era, a world historical revolution that, despite its initial quarantine, would decisively and actually transform the world system of slave-based labor, in 1838 in Britain, France in 1848, the United States in 1865, that largely succeeded within a century of 1804.20 Like the USSR in the twentieth century, Haiti inspired a general terror in liberal democracies of the nineteenth. That Haiti appeared to the outside world a monstrosity in this context was precisely the point. Dessalines’s famous declaration of independence should literally be understood as a restatement and tropicalization of the Jacobin terror. The point is quite rightly

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to strike terror into the slaveholding world. Moreover, one can say that insofar as Haiti was perceived as anything but a monstrosity by the slave-based world system, its truth was being actively disavowed. This is another way of understanding the precise nature of the tragedy that Césaire calls the Tragédie du roi Christophe. A great deal of energy in the play is exhausted demonstrating the relative absurdity of Christophe’s court of what Naipaul called “mimic men.” The true monstrosity ad tragedy is not the mimicry of Christophe’s courtiers (whom Césaire precisely describes in his notes as boufon and maladroit), the struggle to invent a world and imagine a slave-free nation (though this poverty of imagination was itself tragic), but that Haiti itself could only be perceived on the world stage as a mere caricature of Europe—in other words, devoid of legitimacy, political or otherwise.21 Of course this caricaturalization, the predominant trope of which is the racist stream of demeaning portraits of Louverture that appeared in endless variations through the nineteenth century from the fetid imaginations of Western apologists and detractors alike. The terror that an independent Haiti inspired, described in detail by Fischer and Jenson, demands further interrogation. For terror has stood as the principal referent in the disavowal of revolutionary action and its attendant violence since Burke’s famous, hysterical denunciations of the French Revolution. The ritualistic denunciation of revolutionary terror has become so banalized and reflexive, from Burke to Furet, that even relatively sympathetic historians of Jacobinism utterly misrecognize its meaning. Contemporary historiography no longer even equates Jacobinism with the Terror, which was a short-lived political intervention, limited in scope and intent, of the summer and fall of 1793, quickly abandoned, as Dan Edelstein has recently argued in his Terror of Natural Right, for a politics of deformalized, natural rights–based republicanism in the spring and summer of 1794. Yet Edelstein himself misrecognizes the nature of political terror, which was never a measure of subjective affect, of the fear felt by the Jacobins themselves, as Edelstein strangely claims. The Terror was, quite simply—and rightfully, if one believes the French Revolution progressed beyond the ancien régime in its destruction of feudalism and hierarchy—intended to terrify the forces of European counterrevolution. This necessarily limited its scope and relevance as a political agenda, as it called for no more than an affective block,

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unable to initiate any construction of a more just society. As such, it served its purpose in the execution of the king and was only briefly at the center of Jacobin politics. The related problems of the legitimacy of terror and violence go to the heart of our ability to understand the political radicality of both the Jacobin and black Jacobin revolutions. Had the French revolutionaries, like the slaves of Saint Domingue, capitulated to the voices of economic reason and moderation, the events of 1791 for the colony and 1792 for France itself would never have occurred, and France might be today a constitutional monarchy like its British neighbor, Saint Domingue, a colony of slave laborers. Hegel appears his most reactionary when he equates terror with abstraction in the Phenomenology. Far from limiting terror to those few months of 1793 and 1794, Hegel expands terror to make it the very definition of the revolution itself.22 As it had in the earlier master–slave dialectic, terror and dread are the affects that dissolve the reified solidity of an unjust world. If in the earlier passage this process was merely individual, in the later analysis of the French Revolution, terror is the mortal dread that seizes a moribund society, the ancien régime of feudalist iniquity and hierarchy. The terror is for Hegel “the destruction of the actual organization of the world,” and we have become so deadened by the repeated invocation of the famous description of the guillotine as “the coldest and meanest of deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of a cabbage,” that we universally and unthinkingly assume that Hegel’s conclusion is, as he writes, that the outcome of revolutionary Enlightenment as abstraction is “the death that is without meaning, the sheer terror of the negative that contains nothing positive, nothing that fills it with a content.”23 While the lines are famous, they are not in fact Hegel’s conclusion at all. The final analysis of the section actually continues for another page and a half in Miller’s translation. What Hegel does conclude of the Terror is that “the meaningless death, the unfulfilled negativity of the self, changes round in its inner Notion into absolute positivity. [ . . . ] What vanishes for it in that experience is abstract being or the immediacy of that insubstantial point, and this vanished immediacy is the universal will itself which it now knows itself to be in so far as it is a pure knowing or pure will.”24 As Susan Buck-Morss has urged us to do for the master–slave dialectic, we should read this passage as referring at least

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as much to Haiti as to France: the Haitian revolution is precisely this vanishing of the abstract critique of slavery, as well as the insubstantiality and inconsequentiality of the actually existing slaves of Saint Domingue, who come to know themselves as the truth of “pure knowing,” the “pure will” that was the creation of Haiti in 1804 against all historical odds and disbelief. Hegel, as commentators from Ritter to Rebecca Comay today have not tired of reminding us, pursued from the beginning to the end of his public career a philosophy of human freedom and unequivocally affirmed the French Revolution as the quintessential moment of that struggle for the modern world. Hegel’s terror, then, must be understood as much to be the violence of the Haitian revolution as that of the white Jacobins. Each progressed insofar as they forced what Hegel unambiguously calls “absolute freedom” to “remove the antithesis between the universal and the individual will.” In fact, reading the closing lines of Hegel’s analysis of “Absolute Freedom and Terror” in this fashion, it appears to Haiti that gains the upper hand in the struggle for human freedom, insofar as in this moment, Hegel tells us, “absolute freedom leaves its self-destroying reality” of Thermidorian France, that is, “and pass[es] over into another land of self-conscious Spirit where, in this unreal world, freedom has the value of truth.”25 If everything remained to be done in this morning of 1804 if Hegel’s affirmation of revolutionary terror as abstraction describes no more than the destructive event itself and not the painstaking unfolding of its consequences, this limitation points to the contradiction at the heart of Hegel’s equation of terror as abstraction with the entirety of the revolution itself. On the one hand, to simultaneously equate terror with abstraction, as Hegel does, is to negate the common cliché that both white and black Jacobins, Robespierre like Louverture, were bloodthirsty barbarians. But universalist terror does not a politics make. There is no such thing as a politics of affect, and on this count, terror must be unequivocally critiqued as anything more than a necessary, if defensive and initial, moment in the struggle for justice as equality. Politics addresses not sentiment but the criteria of inclusion, of who counts or does not count in a society, and even more, the determination of the transcendental criteria of such a count itself. In a political struggle for inclusion, so-called terror on the Jacobin and black Jacobin models can be no more than a liminal insurgence, the turning point in a state of general terrorization that stops

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terror in its tracks, the sublime terrorization of intransigent ancien régime violence itself. Against Edelstein’s wrongheaded assertion that the Jacobins were sentimental Rousseauians enacting a politics of conscience, attention to their speeches and letters shows white and black Jacobins alike to have undertaken a systematic politics of abstraction. The point of this politics of abstraction was precisely to abstract oneself from the world of feudalism, of ancien régime injustice in France, from the code noir and the ultraviolence of plantation slavery in Saint Domingue. This abstraction is manifest in the regular and recurrent assertion of a politics of principles in the primary texts of black and white Jacobinism alike, from Robespierre’s assertion of the justice of the execution of Capet based not on sentiment, but on what he calls “la vérité éternelle des principes” of justice and equality, as it is manifest in Toussaint’s intransigent letter to the reactionary Napoleonic directory, in which he expresses his hope that “France will not renounce her principles” of “liberty and equality.”26 The point of such actions is precisely to terrorize the terror (of monarchy, of the slave owner). If Jacobin terror, whether black or white, is by this measure right, just and necessary, Hegel is utterly wrong to assert that it constitutes the truth of the revolution in its entirety. A mere politics of affect may serve a strategic point at key moments of counterrevolution, as Fanon famously argued, but any politics beyond terror must be equated quite simply with principled fidelity to an undivided, universal, and immanent Truth.27 Among the great accomplishments of C. L. R. James’s Black Jacobins is to have mounted for the first time a vigorous defense and justification of the revolutionary violence and terror of the Haitian revolution. In the face of nearuniversal denigration of this event as the work of bloodthirsty savages, James affirms the unity of the struggle for justice as equality based on the universal, color-free principles of liberty and equality, and their pursuit in the revolutionary politics of abstraction of Louverture and Dessalines. And yet James’s defense of black Jacobin violence is punctual and even muddled, at odds with the systematically rationalist, colonial enlightenment thesis of the book. Three passages in Black Jacobins illustrate this shifting and somewhat uncertain defense. The first occurs early in the key chapter “The San Domingo Masses Begin,” which describes the initial mass uprising of August 1791. The

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passage initially affirms the “tireless” destruction of the insurgent slaves as an unspecified “salvation,” a thoughtless and reflexive lashing out against the immediate manifestations of oppression, human and material, before their eyes. “They were seeking their salvation in the most obvious way,” James writes, “the destruction of what they knew was the most obvious cause of their sufferings.”28 James’s enslaved masses are unthinking, with no understanding of the structural, systemic causes of their subjection and suffering. Their exertions short-circuit all rational reflection; they are immediately and simplistically reflexive: “if they destroyed much it was because they had suffered much.” This is no more than the most basic rationality of the if/then calculation of the most rudimentary computation. And yet the passage then affirms a minimal awareness and reflection that goes at least as far as the eye can see: “They knew that as long as these plantations stood their lot would be to labor on them until they dropped.” Still, this is only the most basic, binary form of reflection, projecting thought, imagination, and planning no further than the negative, binary erasure of such visible signs: “The only thing was to destroy [the plantations].” This mass violence, if legitimate in James’s eyes, is no more than the most primary justice of vengeful retribution. “From their masters they had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind.” This initial moment of the revolution was, James concludes, an unthinking “frenzy, in which ‘Vengeance! Vengeance!’ was their war-cry.” This initial reflex-based automatism is only the weakest defense of revolutionary violence and terror, and James hardly strengthens it by concluding, without evidence, the insurgents were relatively “moderate” insofar, inevitably, rather than reflectively so, James observes, because “the cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty.”29 Quite different is James’s presentation of Louverture’s call to a just revolutionary violence. Toussaint’s call to a war of total slash-and-burn guerrilla violence was invoked in his famous letter to Dessalines of February 8, 1801. The call to violence is no less total than that of the insurgent slaves of a decade before. “Do not forget,” Louverture writes to his lieutenant, “that we have no other resource than destruction and fire. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains,

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burn and annihilate everything in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of that hell they deserve.”30 If the invocation of violence is equally total, its defense unswerving and categorical, the logic of this defense is utterly opposed to that of the unthinking masses. For Louverture’s affirmation is not reflexive but proleptic. The visionary Louverture is not reacting, amoeba-like, to a painful stimulus against which he lashes out, but sees forward in time to a future reimposition of slavery. His imaginative vision encompasses by this, perhaps tragically late, point, understanding slavery as a world system. The consciously elaborated tactic of guerrilla violence is the result of all-knowing, enlightened calculation. Above all, Louverture invokes in his call to general violence a concept, an abstract universal, the full negativity of which perhaps he alone, in James’s narrative, is able to grasp: slavery. If this concept is inextricable as much from the lived experience of the lash and the general regime of plantation torture, Louverture crucially abstracts from this earlier experience, and possesses, moreover, a greater power of abstraction than all others involved in the struggle, above all the short-sighted Napoleon and his fellow strategists. If James goes on, in the final pages of Black Jacobins, to disparage the unjustified, merely reflexive retributive violence of Dessalines 1805 massacre of whites as mere revenge, a practice, James writes, that “has no place in politics,” as “purposeless massacres [that] degrade and brutalize a population,” the contradiction with his earlier defense of the masses’ 1791 uprising is blatant.31 It would only be irresolvable, however, if one were to retain the subject-centered phenomenology of revolutionary consciousness and the great leader that structures James’s entire narrative. If the Haitian revolution was a politics of principle from start to finish, the forms this rationality took in the long and twisted course of those years were many. If Toussaint, like his metropolitan Jacobin colleague Robespierre, was among the most articulate rationalist politicians of the 1790s, the idea of universal emancipation, of justice as undivided and immediate, immanent equality circulated throughout the Atlantic world in the form of asubjective, despecified truth statements such as “Les hommes naissent et demeurent égaux en droits.” Against any claims that the Haitian revolution was unthinkable in the midst of its unfolding, justice as equality was the asubjective idea that animated and legitimated the destruction of plantation struggle in Saint Domingue from the night of

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August 29, 1791, to its instantiation as a materialized, fully formed concept first in Toussaint’s inaugural 1801 constitution, and finally on the dawn of January 1, 1804. To reject James’s muddled defense of revolutionary violence without retreating to the cowardly Kantian shelter of the established and righteous rule of law, any law, without retreating to the Hegelian sleight of hand that affirms revolutionary terror as abstraction as the mere preparation for the coming of a (future) truth, one must assert that the idea of universal emancipation, that destroyer of worlds, moves beyond all limits. This idea of August 29, 1791, moves beyond all state-based attempts to monopolize so-called legitimate violence, beyond the confines of its formulation by any single subject, no matter how world historical, to reappear in any singular situation and any world, no matter how seemingly unfree or abject. This asubjective, eternal idea moves freely, timelessly, from Mali in 1222 (in the words of the Mande Charter: “Every human life is a life,” “Ko nin bèè nin”), to Paris in 1792, to Egypt or Zucotti Park today, or to appear as the principled, ultrarational Kreyòl affirmation of infinite justice as equality that remains in force at this moment as we witness the continued and systematic destruction of Haitian democracy: “Tout moun se moun.” Notes 1. On the necessity of a political critique of disasters such as the 2010 earthquake, see Peter Hallward, “Our Role in Haiti’s Plight,” Guardian, January 13, 2010, http:// www.guardian.co.uk. 2. Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2004), 149. 3. Although I think that Trouillot much too easily dismisses Diderot’s famous ancien régime passage from Raynal’s Histoire, already a call to the revolutionary destruction of plantation slavery grounded on universal natural rights. See MichelRolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 81. 4. Jean Casimir, in books such as Culture opprimée, has posited the existence of a counterplantation society in rural Haiti that since 1796 has consistently refused incorporation into the liberal and now neoliberal Atlantic capitalist modes of production. Barthélémy, in the remarkable book L’univers rural haïtien, adapted Casimir’s insights along with those of Pierre Clastres to describe Haitian rural society— the moun andeyò—as a system of stateless egalitarianism. The principal difference between Casimir and his disciple Barthélémy, to my eyes, is that of emphasis: Casimir

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describes a rural mode of production in predominantly economic terms, while Barthélémy focuses on the sociopolitical implications of this singular social form. 5. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 82. 6. Ibid., 82, 88. 7. On the circulation of the discourse of the rights of man throughout the oral and written public sphere of Saint Domingue by the fall of 1789, see Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 71–78. The Créole Patriote was published in Saint Domingue from September 21, 1792, to February 21, 1793—the key period when the initial slave revolt of August 1791 became radicalized into a universalist revolution for human rights and its consequent imperative to destroy slavery, immediately and without qualification. After the paper’s suspension in February 1993, its editor, Milscent, went on to publish in the paper Bulletin des Amis de la Vérité. Yves Bénot famously called attention to Milscent’s tropical Jacobinism, and more recently, Jean-Daniel Piquet has written in more detail about the evolution of the Créole Patriote’s critique of slavery. 8. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 272. 9. Such a question is made all the more compelling in light of the documents released by Wikileaks to the Brooklyn-based newspaper Haiti Liberte. These leaked documents, the paper showed, “reveal [an] obsessive, far-reaching U.S. campaign to get and keep Aristide out of Haiti. . . . The cables not only bolster existing evidence of U.S. involvement in the 2004 coup, but portray a sophisticated, globe-spanning campaign afterwards to marginalize Aristide and imprison him in exile.” See “This Week in Haiti,” Haiti Liberte, July 27, 2011, parts 1–4, http://www.haiti-liberte.com. 10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason (London: Verso, 2006), 2:99. 11. The proclamations of Louverture calling for the global and universal destruction of slavery such as that of May 18, 1797, are indicative of this as well. Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation, 28. 12. Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 101. 13. Ibid., 102. 14. Ibid., 103. 15. Ibid., 104. 16. Ibid., 105. 17. Ibid., 106. 18. Ibid., 109, 111. 19. Ibid., 109. 20. On the concept of a communist hypothesis that would transcend both the initial experiments of 1789–1871 and the struggles for political power of 1917–89, see Badiou, Theoretical Writings.

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21. Aimé Césaire, La Tragedie du Roi Christophe (Paris: Presence Africaine, 2000), 35. 22. Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2010), 76. Like so many authors, Comay’s fascinating book is fundamentally weakened by its initial moralistic presupposition that the actual Jacobin Terror was reprehensible and irredeemable, precisely the point that must be critically interrogated in any contemporary examination of the relation of revolutionary violence to historical progress, to reveal the singular political logic of 1792–94. 23. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of the Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 359, 360, 362. 24. Ibid., 363. 25. Ibid. 26. Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation, 34–35. 27. On such a politics of courage in opposition to all politics of anxiety and resentment, see Badiou’s astounding lecture of May 7, 1977, pitting Aeschylean courage and justice against the (Lacanian) terror and anxiety of Sophocles’ Antigone. Badiou, Theoretical Writings, 158. 28. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 88. 29. Ibid., 89. 30. Ibid., 300. 31. Ibid., 373.

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Rethinking the Haitian Crisis Greg Beckett

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s it possible to speak of Haiti without speaking of crisis? After all, the country seems mired in crises: deep poverty, environmental degradation, weak political institutions, disasters, catastrophes. Even a cursory reading of the scholarly material shows widespread agreement that crisis is a normal— that is, regular and recurring—aspect of the country’s social, political, and economic institutions. For some, crisis is not just a regular feature of Haitian society but a normative one, an inherent, inescapable condition that plagues the country and its people. But what do we really mean by crisis, and what do we mean by crisis in Haiti? To answer these questions, I begin with a brief overview of the idea of crisis itself, in order to show how the conceptual core of the term has remained remarkably consistent over centuries of extensive usage. I then turn to the three key ways in which crisis has been applied to Haiti: as a historical category that renders the country’s past as a story of decline rather than progress; as a political category that makes crisis a normative feature of the nation-state; and as a diagnosis by outside experts that is used to justify repeated foreign invasion and intervention. All of these applications suffer from the same problem: mistaking the symptom for the cause. In the final section of this chapter, I offer an alternative approach that treats crisis as a mode of embodied experience. This view can help us analytically understand how the country’s integration into a complex and contradictory world system produces symptomatic forms of suffering in the lives and bodies of many Haitians.

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The Idea of Crisis The word crisis is widely used to name just about any problem in social or natural systems. Thus, we speak of an identity crisis, an ecological crisis, an economic crisis, a political crisis, or a crisis of values, to name but a few examples. Yet what do we mean when we declare something to be a crisis? While its usage has been greatly extended in recent years, the word has retained a remarkably stable set of meanings. In order to understand how the idea of crisis has been applied to Haiti, it is first necessary to consider the most essential features of the concept. Crisis is etymologically related to the Ancient Greek verb krinein, “to decide” or “to judge.” This sense of judgment as a faculty of the mind was given a new meaning by Hippocrates, who used the word krisis as a clinical term to name the turning point in the course of a disease. In On Afections, Hippocrates defined crises as moments “in diseases whenever the diseases increase in intensity or go away or change into another disease or end altogether.”1 As a critical event in the life course of the patient, the medical crisis was defined by four essential properties. First, it was a disjuncture in which there were a range of logically possible but mutually exclusive future outcomes (the patient may live or die, but not both). Second, while the exact future outcome could not be known, the medical crisis required experts to make a diagnosis about the cause of the problem and a prognosis about the most likely result. Third, diagnoses were based on interpretations of symptoms, which meant there could be debate among experts as to the cause and consequences of the crisis. Finally, the medical crisis was a moment of decision that called for urgent action and intervention (although based on the varying diagnoses, the nature of that action could also be disputed). Although contemporary meanings have drifted far from Hippocrates’ usage in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, the core aspects of disjuncture, diagnosis, debate, and decision have remained at the center of our understanding of crisis. Modern historians have used the concept to name critical turning points that, in retrospect, made a significant difference in the historical process. Social scientists have borrowed, sometimes unknowingly, the medical language of pathology and cure, diagnosing social or political ills and prescribing policies that aim to cure them. The key analogy that made such an

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extension possible was that of the body politic, according to which societies were understood to be like organisms with functionally related, interdependent parts. If a society was like a body, then it could suffer crises that threatened it with death—social disorder or breakdown.2 The declaration of a crisis is an important moment, for it opens up debate about the possible actions that might be taken in response to it. But such debates are far from democratic or egalitarian, as those with the power to respond to crises hold considerable weight in the determination of the nature and extent of that response. Even more problematic are the unequal power relations according to which various actors are granted the authority to diagnose crises in the first place. Ulrich Beck, writing of the emergence of a world risk society, calls these the “relations of definition” of risks and defines them as “the rules, institutions and capabilities which specify how risks are to be identified in particular contexts.” As Beck astutely notes, definitions of risks— much like definitions of crises—entail and presuppose relations of power and domination.3 In light of this, we might question the specific power relations that lie behind the constant designation of Haiti as a country in perpetual crisis. A History of Crisis There has been no shortage of accounts that describe Haiti as a country with a long history of crisis. But such accounts are rarely offered only as descriptions. Rather, they seek to explain the country’s problems by treating crisis and disorder as intrinsic features of Haitian society. Cast in this light, the Haitian past becomes more than just a story of one crisis after another; it becomes a temporality defined by rupture and breakdown.4 Such a view presents Haitian history as a story of decline and marks it in stark opposition to the Western idea of linear development and historical progress. Haiti has always been intimately bound to the West. It was the site of the first European settlement in the New World and, like the rest of the Caribbean, it was a crucial node in the transatlantic triangle of trade that united Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the first truly global economic and political system. As Enlightenment philosophers wrote about the cultural, political, and economic progress of their own societies, the growth and development of Europe was being fueled by the exploitation of slaves working on

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sugar plantations. The emergence of Caribbean societies was thus a key part of the historical process by which the West became the West. The deep connection between Europe and the Caribbean (and other colonized regions) has been systematically excised from Western history, but this silencing has perhaps been strongest in the case of Haiti. The country has, at times, been cast out of modern history altogether.5 This dismissal of Haiti has its origins in the European response to the Haitian revolution, an event that was rendered impossible, even as it happened, by the very categories of Enlightenment philosophy.6 As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has argued, the revolution was “unthinkable” as a historical event because it occurred in a world predicated on colonialism, racism, and slavery. The inability of Europe to accept the revolution on its own terms was partly due to the antiblack racism of Caribbean planter society and partly to the fact that many Europeans had personal financial stakes in overseas plantations. But underlying both of these issues was a deeper problem that had to do with the values and concepts of the Enlightenment itself. Even the most liberal European philosopher could not accept the revolution on its own terms because the epistemological foundations of the West made a slave revolution categorically unthinkable. In short, the Enlightenment ideas of Man and Freedom simply did not allow for property or things—for that is what slaves were—to proclaim their own freedom.7 The response to the revolution is well known. It included political isolation, social exclusion, and a radical disavowal of its political content.8 For Caribbean planters and European philosophers alike, Haiti became a pariah, an example of the tragic consequences of slave revolutions.9 Perhaps the most famous example of this line of thought is Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau’s The Inequality of Human Races. De Gobineau combined the various strains of European racist thought into a single tome that became a key text for scientific racism, eugenics, and white supremacy. He argued for the innate inequality of races and characterized all African and African diasporic people as “brutal,” “savage,” and “incapable of civilization.”10 Writing fifty years after the revolution, de Gobineau often used Haiti as an example of the inferiority of the black race, arguing that the political and economic decline of the country proved that blacks were incapable of self-rule. This was hardly, however, a unique or new position. As Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze has shown, the idea

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of racial inequality was central to Enlightenment philosophy, which conflated theories of the geographical and racial basis of human difference with a philosophy of World History.11 The refusal to recognize Haiti as an independent political territory, which only increased the country’s isolation, was bolstered by descriptions of Haiti as a barbaric land. Thomas Carlyle described the country as a “tropical dog kennel and pestiferous jungle,” and James Anthony Froude expressed a similar disgust when confronted with the “ulcer” of Port-au-Prince.12 These are only two now famous examples of a general trend according to which foreigners, whether they visited Haiti or not, wrote about it as a place of decay and ruin. The physical descriptions of Port-au-Prince or the countryside were taken as signs of deeper problems, namely moral decline and historical backwardness. Soon enough, Haiti came to stand as an emblem for the ineluctable ruin that awaited any project of black emancipation in the region.13 Reactions to the revolution have always remained a key part of the rejection of Haiti from modern history. But in the mid-nineteenth century, a new, even more potent image of barbarism emerged in the foreign representations of Vodou. This view was solidified when the British consul general to Haiti, Spenser St. John, published an account of the 1864 trial, conviction, and public execution of eight men and women found guilty of the sacrifice and cannibalistic consumption of a child.14 The crime, known as the Bizonton Affair, became a touchstone for foreigners and for Haitian government officials alike. If the crime was a marker of the barbarity of some Haitians, then the government response was meant to demonstrate that the state, at least, governed according to modern principles of morality and legality. Thus, Haitian officials attributed the Bizonton Affair to Vodou, which they described as a “barbaric religion imported to us from some corner of Africa.”15 The strong reaction to the Bizonton Affair shows just how much Vodou had become a central concern for the government. It was no longer regarded as a symptom of the backwardness or superstition of the peasantry, but rather as the “unique source” of barbarism itself.16 While the Haitian state attempted to limit this barbarism by both attributing it to the peasantry and legislating it out of existence, some foreigners accused the government of supporting practices such as cannibalism and child sacrifice (neither of which have any factual basis as part of Vodou). In

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such views, barbarism ran deep and spoiled even the highest levels of administration, condemning the country to even further historical decline. One of the clearest statements of this position was offered by the American journalist Stephen Bosnal, who wrote the following: The real charge against Haytian civilization is not that children are frequently stolen from their parents and are often put to death with torture, and subsequently eaten with pomp at a Voodoo ceremony, but that Haytian officials, often the highest in the land, not only protect the kidnappers, but frequently take part in the cannibalistic rites which they make possible. This is the charge which I bring and which I am prepared to substantiate in every particular upon evidence which appears to me, and to many others to whom I have submitted it, to be absolutely unimpeachable.17

Bosnal’s comment appeared several decades after the Bizonton Affair. By that time, the discursive frame of backwardness and barbarism was well established in the foreign press.18 It would be easy enough to show that there was no factual basis to the foreign representations of Vodou, but the idea of Haiti as barbaric and backward was a fiction that was stronger than fact. Even apologists for Vodou reproduced the idea that Haiti did not exist in the same historical time or along the same temporal trajectory as the West. For example, in 1888, William Newell sought to counter the myths of Vodou by arguing that the condemnation of Vodou was similar to the witch hunts that had taken place in Europe and North America centuries earlier.19 For Newell, the similarity lay not just in the condemnation of these religions but in the religious practices themselves. Thus, he argued that Vodou was not even African—a position that accepted the general idea that African culture was barbaric—but was rather historically related to the European pagan rites of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was hardly a defense at all, because it too relied on an implicit historicism that equated the Haiti of the nineteenth century with European society of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. As Nicholas Dirks has noted, “History is surely one of the most important signs of the modern. We are modern not only because we have achieved this status historically, but because we have developed consciousness of our historical depths and trajectories.”20 Newell’s defense of Vodou, much like the

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rejections of both it and the revolution, deny Haiti this historicity. Haiti, it is claimed, has not yet achieved modernity. This dismissal is still prevalent today. When it is not blatantly racist, it appeals to more general problems, like culture or history. For example, Lawrence Harrison, who argued that underdevelopment was nothing but a state of mind, wrote that “culture is the only possible explanation for Haiti’s unending tragedy.”21 This amounts to saying that Haitians are to blame for their own problems, as if racism, colonialism, slavery, and imperialism never existed. More nuanced positions take this history into account, but only to argue that it is precisely the country’s crisisridden past that is an obstacle to progress and development.22 Today, the development paradigm reproduces the same historical logic of the Enlightenment, with its stages of progression and its telos of Western liberal states. In this context, portrayals of Haiti’s persistent poverty and chronic crises effectively cast the country outside of modern time. Against the taken-for granted norm of the West, Haiti is rendered pathologically stuck in a temporality of crisis, in a time that goes nowhere. A State of Crisis In the nineteenth century, Haitian intellectuals offered an alternative explanation of the country’s problems. Rather than defend Vodou or peasant culture, these intellectuals countered the dismissal of Haiti by stressing the country’s European roots (and by suggesting that all Haitians were French-speaking Catholics).23 The implicit claim was that Haiti was modern precisely because it was just like Europe. Or, at least, it ought to be just like Europe. Given the country’s shared history with France, it should have progressed along the same path of moral and social development.24 The problem was thus to explain why Haitian development had lagged behind. To answer that question, Haitian intellectuals turned to national historiography. The two great founders of Haitian historiography were Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin, both of whom sought to produce a history of the nation that could be used for educational purposes.25 Trained in the European mode of historical production, Madiou and Ardouin placed Haiti within a narrative frame of universal linear history that proceeded through successive stages of progressive development toward its end goal, a liberal state. In relation to this framework, which was the same framework that categorically

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made the revolution unthinkable, the country’s past was rendered pathological. Haiti suffered from a crisis history in which the sequential formation and eruption of crises displaced the normative ideal of linear development.26 While foreigners cast this history of crisis as a story of the country’s barbarism, Haitian intellectuals understood crisis not as a historical category but rather as a political one. The central problem, according to them, was located in the country’s social and political institutions. There was no denying the weakness of national institutions and the authoritarian trend in national politics. These were understood, however, not as signs of Haiti’s irredeemable barbarism but rather as symptoms of a deep cleavage that split the country along lines of color, class, and standing. For some, this division was fundamentally based on color differences, and the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806 symbolized the rivalry between noirs and mulattoes that was tearing the “Haitian family” apart.27 But for most intellectuals, the color question was nothing more than a fiction used by the economic and political elite to conceal the real source of social and political conflict—the stark schism between the elite and the vast majority of the population.28 Yet while intellectuals began to challenge the color question, it remained remarkably potent as a form of political ideology. Its success in displacing the structural relations of class and power was due primarily to the spatial and cultural separation of the peasantry and the elite, which helped to conceal the underlying relations of exploitation and domination that united them. The physical and social separation made it possible to imagine that the peasants were at least semiautonomous producers living and working on their own land. But in reality, Haitian peasants have always been enmeshed in national and global networks of commodities and cash. They grew food and made household goods, to be sure, but they also grew export crops that were bought and sold by licensed speculators who then traded them at the country’s major port towns. Haiti’s marginal and dependent position in the world system made peasant farmers vulnerable to changes in global demand, price fluctuations, and competition from other agricultural zones. This was problematic enough, but it was compounded by the internal relationship between peasant producers and merchant traders and the political elite who granted them exclusive licenses and trade monopolies. As peasant yields reached their limit in the mid-nineteenth century and then began to diminish, the political and

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economic elite—who lived off the profits of the system collected through monopolies, price fixing, and custom duties—became increasingly predatory. The state played a key role in this process, as political leaders sacrificed the peasantry in order to uphold their positions of wealth and power.29 The underlying social contradictions of this system spurred repeated conflicts and crises in the political arena. The country’s numerically small elite expanded as the yields from agriculture and other enterprises declined, causing increased factionalism among the most powerful and wealthy sectors of society. Although rural revolts were common in the second half of the nineteenth century, they rarely, if ever, led to a direct political struggle between the peasantry and the elite. At the national level, the political crisis remained a contest between various elite groups who were vying for control of the state (and who often used rural armies to seize power).30 By the end of the nineteenth century, these crises, which were really social and political conflicts, had become so commonplace that Haitians and foreigners began to see them as evidence of the total breakdown of the proper functioning of the country’s political institutions. For many Haitian intellectuals, the root cause of this breakdown was authoritarianism, although in retrospect, authoritarianism was a response to the crisis, not its cause. Authoritarianism itself was seen as a peculiarly Haitian pathology, and the calls for reform and remedy invariably appealed to Europe as the model for normal functioning states.31 Louis Joseph Janvier, for example, criticized the militarization of political authority and called for the institutionalization of a civilian public administration.32 By the early twentieth century, some writers argued that the social, economic, and political divisions in the country were so entrenched, and that political leaders and merchant elite were profiting so substantially from them, that it was no longer possible for Haitians to solve the crisis without some sort of foreign intervention.33 The idea that crisis in Haiti is really a political crisis of the state has been remarkably durable. To be sure, the Haitian state is riddled with problems, and those problems were made significantly worse by nearly thirty years of dictatorship followed by a democratic transition characterized by coups and political violence as much as by elections or government reform. The country’s difficult transition from dictatorship to democracy has bolstered the idea that the crisis is located in the state itself. Such an idea is rooted in the rather

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recent notion that the nation-state is the primary unit of political order in the world system, and that the task of any state (whether democratic or not) is to ensure security and stability within its borders. In recent years, the inability of the Haitian government to provide the political goods of security—let alone infrastructure, economic growth, or just about anything else—has led political scientists to classify it as endemically weak.34 In contemporary international relations theory, weak states fall along a continuum that includes normal states on one end and failed states on the other.35 In most cases, weak states are characterized by ethnic, religious, or communal conflict or by sudden economic decline with a corresponding deflation in standards of living (as in Argentina in 2002 or Russia in the 1990s). Although there remains a pervasive schism between the elite and the rural and urban poor in Haiti, this division has little in common with countries such as Rwanda or regions such as Northern Ireland, where political institutions were unable to contain ethnic and religious conflicts in a peaceful manner. Nor has Haiti suffered a particularly sudden drop in its economy. For international relations theorists, Haiti is thus an atypical case of a weak state, one in which persistent poverty has produced a state that is “enduringly frail.”36 Such classifications are problematic for two reasons. First, they are based on a normative theory of the state according to which the typologies of weak or failed states are defined in relation to the liberal-democratic states of North America and Western Europe. The assumption is thus that such states are abnormal or pathological—that is, that they suffer from internal structural deficiencies. But those countries that exhibit weak or failed states are usually the same countries that have been rendered marginal and dependent in the world system by sustained policies of colonialism, imperialism, and (more recently) structural adjustment. State weakness and failure are thus often caused by long-term political and economic relationships within the international arena. The second problem with such classifications is that they are used to justify and legitimate international military interventions. At the core of the state failure paradigm is a realist approach to international relations, according to which states are the only entities capable of ensuring security and stability in global politics. Beyond states lies anarchy, and weak or failed states thus become threats to normal states within the global order because they could potentially export disorder and insecurity.37

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The international response to such disorderly states has been varied, but in the Haitian case it has involved efforts to contain the crisis through, for example, the forced repatriation of Haitians fleeing violence and misery.38 The response has also included a range of forms of international intervention, including the following: a sustained humanitarian effort to help alleviate the worst suffering; decades of economic and political policies designed by the international community to integrate the country more tightly into the world system; and multiple foreign military interventions.39 The results are not good. While efforts such as food aid or humanitarian relief have undoubtedly saved lives, the cumulative effect of decades of foreign aid and intervention has been devastating. As the crisis has deepened, more intervention has followed, and it is now impossible to separate the Haitian crisis from the interventions meant to address it. Crisis and Intervention Politicians or other experts often declare a crisis in order to justify a particular kind of action, for once diagnosed, a crisis calls for a decision of some kind. Thus, in the wake of a natural disaster, the executive branch of a government can declare an emergency and, in the very process of making such a proclamation, can give itself extraconstitutional powers. As the political philosopher Carl Schmitt has famously shown, the ability of a government to decide on an emergency, or to declare what he called a “state of exception,” is a constitutive feature of sovereign power.40 Of course, emergencies are not limited to natural disasters. Indeed, declarations of a state of exception are more typically used to extend a government’s power during times of social or political unrest. But in the Haitian case, the power to declare a state of emergency has not been limited to the national government, as both foreign governments and international organizations have exercised the sovereign power to intervene in the face of a pressing crisis. The paradigmatic case of foreign intervention in Haiti is the military occupation of the country by the United States from 1915 to 1934. The U.S. occupation was hardly the first instance of foreign power interfering in domestic politics. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, France used external debt to exert an influence on national politics, and Germany and England used gunboat diplomacy to defend their national interests. But the occupation

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was the first time since independence that a foreign military invaded and ruled Haiti. Critics of the occupation have rightly noted that it violated international law and went against the United States’ own position on selfdetermination. Charlemagne Péralte, who led a short-lived revolt against the U.S. marines, even wrote a letter to the French government in which he characterized the occupation as an illegal and unjust invasion of a recognized independent state.41 Although the occupation was clearly part of a wider American project to extend its military and economic influence throughout the region, it is nevertheless important to understand the logic by which the United States justified its own actions. However paradoxical it may sound, the United States claimed that it was intervening in order to defend Haiti’s right to selfdetermination. The conceptual key to this position is the logic of political emergency. Haitian politics had been characterized by conflict for several years before the invasion, as a succession of leaders seized power with the use of personal armies. This was due to many factors, including regional factionalism, weak national institutions, and economic decline, all of which contributed to a political crisis in which control of the state, and especially the office of the presidency, became the primary means by which elites gained access to wealth and power. This crisis was of little concern to the United States until President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed by a mob. Sam was not the first president to be killed during the years of crisis, but the conditions surrounding his death were significantly different. Facing mounting protest and rebellion, Sam sought refuge at the French legation, although not before he ordered all political prisoners in the city jail to be executed. When his opponents learned of the massacre of their family members and loved ones, they stormed the legation, removed Sam, and killed him in the street.42 Sam’s death left the country without a legitimate government, but this itself was not the primary concern of the United States. According to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, the assassination and the lack of a ruling government were both important, but the crucial element in the decision to intervene was the fact that Sam had been killed after he sought refuge in the French legation.43 Thus Sam’s death not only threatened to bring about political instability but also a military response on the part of the French government, which might see the incursion into the legation as a violation of its territory

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and authority. It was the possibility of a French invasion, more than the possibility of instability in Haiti, that made intervention, in Lansing’s words, “a matter of urgent necessity.”44 Necessity is always the key word used to justify emergency powers. Sam’s death opened up a state of exception that called for a strong power to intervene and restore order. In Lansing’s view, The restoration of order and government in Haiti was as clearly the duty of the Government of the United States as was the landing of the marines. If the United States had not assumed the responsibility, some other power would. To permit such action by a European power would have been to abandon the principles of the Monroe doctrine. The United States had no alternative but to act, and to act with vigor.45

This same logic is invoked today by the United States, the United Nations, international financial institutions, and nongovernmental organizations to justify repeated instances of military and humanitarian intervention in Haiti. Emergencies caused by state failure, political violence, or natural disasters are all seen as threats to the stability of the global order, as failed states or disaster zones may become exporters of terrorism, violence, or refugees.46 At the same time, intervention in the face of emergency has become a central aspect of global governance, replacing cold war containment policies or colonialism and imperialism. The declaration of a state of emergency is now widely used by powerful states to supersede the doctrine of sovereign equality that prevents foreign military incursions in normal times.47 Powerful governments, international agencies, and nongovernmental organizations now use what Craig Calhoun calls the emergency imaginary to decide on the necessity of intervention. This paradigm unites a wide range of phenomena—from catastrophes and natural disasters to ethnic and civil conflict—under the rubric of emergency.48 The discursive formations and epistemological foundations of the emergency imaginary bear a striking resemblance to the conceptual core of crisis discussed above, in which the crisis is a decisive moment that calls for action. But there is a crucial difference between the kind of action called forth by the medical crisis and the international response to emergencies. In the former case, the doctor or expert intervenes to remove the underlying causes so that the patient may live and

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thrive. In the latter case, international organizations intervene to contain and manage crises in order to defend the stability of the global political and economic order. The rise of the emergency imaginary and the corresponding security paradigm have made crises into normal emergencies caused not by problematic social relations but rather by the complex interactivity of the global system.49 In the face of normal emergencies, systems of risk assessment are used to determine the probability of disasters or crises and may be used to justify preemptive intervention.50 The international response to normal emergencies is typically a hybrid of military and humanitarian intervention, making such interventions a form of biopolitics in which the logics of security and protection are conflated and the right to intervene in order to protect life itself is taken as an ethical imperative.51 But what if those who suffer and who live in the midst of emergencies want to do more than merely live a bare life? What if they want a response to the underlying conditions that cause them harm? What if they want to live well, to live a good life? For all the good it does (and it often does much good), the international emergency paradigm has a fatal flaw. In concept and action, the emergency paradigm reduces crises to periodic interruptions in the normal functioning of the world system. The response is thus equally geared to the timeframe of urgent but temporary problems. But in many places, and certainly in Haiti, crises are not abnormal or periodic interruptions. Rather, they are the expression of a general condition of human vulnerability, one that cannot be resolved by food aid, disaster preparedness, or military invasion. Crisis as Embodied Experience Writing on the meaning of crisis, Jürgen Habermas notes that “we would not speak of a crisis, when it is medically a question of life and death, if it were only a matter of an objective process viewed from the outside, if the patient were not also subjectively involved in this process. The crisis cannot be separated from the viewpoint of the one who is undergoing it.”52 Who, though, is the subject of crisis? When crisis is used as a historical or political category, it is treated as an objective process that has stricken a country or a nationstate. This has, in fact, become the standard usage of the concept when talking about Haiti, and most people inside and outside of the country now regularly

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speak of the Haitian crisis in this way. The situation is somewhat different, however, if we take crisis to be a category of human experience. Although there are many Kreyòl words that cover the semantic field of the English term crisis, the most direct translation is the word kriz. Kriz is etymologically related to the same Greek root as is its English counterpart, but its common meaning is much closer to the French crise, which is typically used to name an attack or a fit. This is a key difference. In English, the temporality of crisis has become its key feature, and we usually use the term to name a turning point or a time of intense difficulty. But the French and Kreyòl terms render crisis as an embodied condition that is rooted in the social and psychological experience of an individual. In Haiti, kriz afflicts people who are suffering from loss and trauma, although it can also be used to name the moment of possession when a Vodou lwa (spirit) mounts the head of an initiate. In either case, the kriz is a direct bodily response that is visible to others and that is accompanied by a loss or reduction of consciousness. Kriz is similar to sezisman (shock), which is also an emotional reaction to trauma, and both cause such symptoms as “dizziness, extreme weakness and collapse, and sensory dissociation (temporary blindness and deafness).”53 Kriz is also associated with extreme convulsions and muscular tension and it can result in seizures that cause one’s body to go rigid and lose all energy and collapse.54 As Paul Brodwin notes, both sezisman and kriz are “unmediated bodily responses to loss” that leave one’s body weakened and prone to illness or even instantaneous death.55 When Haitians use the term kriz to refer to a political crisis or the aftermath of a disaster, its meaning carries with it this sense of an unmediated bodily response to trauma. Kriz are always sudden interruptions in the proper functioning of one’s body and mind. Although these ruptures can bring about death on their own, they are more commonly thought of as conditions that leave one vulnerable to illness or death by other means. This sense of sudden rupture and vulnerability is at the core of a set of cultural categories that Haitians use to talk about suffering and misery. While kriz and sezisman name individual experiences, there are other forms of embodied suffering that are clearly social and political, such as gran gou (hunger), lavi chè (expensive life—referring to the high cost of living), and ensekirite (insecurity).56 As Erica James has shown in the case of ensekirite, these terms name both a specific

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experience, such as hunger, inflation, or political violence, and the general condition of living amid a constant state of possible crisis and rupture.57 This general condition is the result of the normalization of vulnerability, risk, and uncertainty, all of which have ceased to be aberrations and have become instead regularly occurring and expected aspects of everyday life. These conditions of extreme uncertainty erode the social foundations of trust, leaving instead what Anthony Giddens calls ontological insecurity.58 Ontological insecurity is defined most concretely by its opposite, ontological security. The latter is both a social and psychological condition in which individuals have, and feel as though they have, “an autonomy of bodily control within predictable routines.” It plays a key role in subject formation, as children learn to move through the world freely with trust and confidence. Ontological security is an integral aspect of social reproduction, as it is the primary means through which social practices become routinized in institutions and customs. Ontological insecurity thus threatens the very continuity of expected and desired forms of social life.59 If crisis is understood as an embodied experience and as a condition of ontological insecurity, then we must ask: What are the underlying social conditions that cause it? Sometimes ontological insecurity is the direct result of political domination, as it was under the Duvalier regime or under the military junta that ruled Haiti during the de facto period (1991–94). In both cases, the state, which ought to be one of the main pillars of social security, turned against the nation and used violence to kill, expel, and terrorize its citizens. But there is a more pervasive set of conditions that make rupture routine in Haiti. These conditions have been well documented, and they are well known by those who must live with insecurity. In Haiti, ontological insecurity is caused by the dislocation of peasants after the construction of a dam or an industrial park and by the desperate need to chache lavi, to “look for life” in the crowded slums of Port-au-Prince or in the cane fields of the Dominican Republic.60 It is also caused by the illnesses that befall those who become prostitutes so they can support their families or by fraudulent cooperative banking schemes in which the poorest members lose their meager but indispensable savings.61 All of these situations, and many more like them, are commonplace for the inhabitants of what foreign journalists so frequently call “the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.” Could it be that they all have a common basis?

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Karen Richman has provided one of the richest accounts of the transformation of Haitian peasants from agricultural producers to consumers of foreign goods and exporters of mobile migrant labor.62 For decades now, the very reproduction of peasant households has been structurally dependent on the wages remitted by migrant laborers working overseas. Transnational migration may be a necessity for many Haitian communities, but it is not something undertaken lightly, and it has enormous consequences both for migrants themselves—who make a dangerous journey over the Caribbean Sea only to take up a precarious life often on the margins of the law—and for their families. For example, Richman documents a family dispute in which a migrant named Ti Chini died a painful death from a “sent sickness” that many attributed to jealous family rivals. Near death, Ti Chini offered a different interpretation of his illness. Recounting Ti Chini’s position, Richman notes that in the final moments of his life he contends that the evil enemy is not a discrete person but rather a vast, sorcerous system that turns poor Haitian neighbors against one another. This system, in which suppliers of mobile labor like Haiti play an unequal and minor part, seems to reserve its cruelest sentences for migrants who cross nation-states’ borders to “pursue livelihood.”63

Haitians like Ti Chini experience the world system in a direct and unmediated way, as something that happens to them. In this sense, hunger, illness, violence, and death are the concrete ways in which people experience the effects of abstract systems such as capitalism. Haiti has always been dependent on and marginal to the world system. Decades of structural adjustment policies have only made the situation worse and the country poorer. Even today, in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, economists, politicians, and development experts continue to promote the country as a site of cheap, docile, and mobile labor. But this so-called comparative advantage is one of the most devastating outcomes of the underlying structural contradictions of neoliberal policies. Rural and urban Haitians have become, like the British farmers and artisans of the nineteenth century, free in the double sense—free to enter into wage-labor contracts and free from any other possible means of subsistence except wage labor.64 The complex and

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contradictory system of global capitalism produces societies and bodies that are riddled with crises.65 Kriz, gran gou, ensekirite, and the many other forms of embodied crisis that cause poor Haitians to suffer are thus the symptoms of a more general and much more complex and abstract problem, one that is ultimately located in the unequal social and economic relations of the world system. Notes 1. Randolph Starn, “Historians and ‘Crisis,’” Past and Present 52 (August 1971): 4. See also Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana Press, 1983), 85. 2. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); Reinhart Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts, trans. Todd Samuel Presner et al. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). For an extended discussion of the body politic, see David G. Hale, “Analogy of the Body Politic,” Dictionary of the History of Ideas (2003), 1:68–71. 3. Ulrich Beck, World at Risk, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 32. 4. Jean-Jacques Honorat, “Social Divisions,” in Haiti’s Future: Views of Twelve Haitian Leaders, ed. Richard A. Morse (Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center Press, 1988), 22. 5. See Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982). See also Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 6. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed; Trouillot, Silencing the Past. 7. Trouillot, Silencing the Past. 8. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed. 9. Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti,” Critical Inquiry 26, no. 4 (2000): 821– 65. See also James Anthony Froude, The English in the West Indies, or The Bow of Ulysses (New York: Scribner, 1897), and Gordon K. Lewis, Main Currents in Caribbean Thought (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 10. Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, The Inequality of Human Races, trans. Adrian Collins (New York: Howard Fertig, 1967), 48–53. 11. Decades before de Gobineau, Hegel had already dismissed the entire continent of Africa as irrelevant to world history and had declared African social and

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political forms as inherently antimodern because, he argued, Africans were not conscious of themselves as historical beings. See Emmanueal Chukwudi Eze, ed., Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997), 109–49. 12. Thomas Carlyle, Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (1853), http:// www.newschool.edu. See also Froude, The English in the West Indies. 13. Joan Dayan, “Gothic Naipaul,” Transition 59 (1993): 158–70. 14. Sir Spenser St. John, Hayti, or The Black Republic (London: Smith, Elder, 1884). 15. Le Monitor Haïtien, February 20, 1864. See also Laënnec Hurbon, Le Barbare Imaginaire (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1987), 116, and Kate Ramsey, “Performances of Prohibition: Law, ‘Superstition,’ and National Modernity in Haiti” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2002), 239. 16. Ramsey, “Performances of Prohibition,” 239. 17. Ibid., 257n51. 18. For an updated account, see Robert Lawless, Haiti’s Bad Press (Rochester, Vt.: Schenkman Books, 1992). 19. William W. Newell, “Myths of Voodoo Worship and Child Sacrifice in Hayti,” Journal of American Folklore 1, no. 1 (April–June 1888): 16–30. 20. Nicholas B. Dirks, “History as a Sign of the Modern,” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (1990): 25–32. 21. Lawrence Harrison, cited in Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, 3rd ed. (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), 285. 22. Mats Lundahl, “History as an Obstacle to Change: The Case of Haiti,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Afairs 31, no. 1/2 (Spring–Summer 1989): 1–21. 23. This position changed significantly in the 1920s. See, for example, Jean PriceMars, So Spoke the Uncle, trans. Magdaline Shannon (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1983). 24. Joseph Justin, Étude sur les Institutions Haïtiennes (Paris: Augustin Challamel, 1894), 1:9. 25. Thomas Madiou, Histoire d’Haïti, 8 vols. (Port-au-Prince: Éditions Henri Deschamps, 1991), and Beaubrun Ardouin, Études sur l’Histoire d’Haïti, 11 vols. (Port-au-Prince: François Dalencour, 1958). See also Catts Presoir, Ernst Trouillot, and Henock Trouillot, Historiographie d’Haïti (Mexico: Instituto Panamericano de Geografia e Historia, 1953). 26. See, for example, Justin, Étude sur les Institutions Haïtiennes, vii, where he decries the constant political coups and revolutions that had become a permanent fixture of national politics, arguing that it was “no longer the time for revolutions, but for progress.” 27. For a review of this position, see ibid., 9.

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28. See L. J. Marcelin, Haïti, ses guerres civiles, leurs causes, leur consequence futur et fnal. Moyens d’y mettre fn et de placer la Nation dans la voie du progrès et de la civilization (Paris: Arthur Rousseau, 1892). See also Mintz, Caribbean Transformations; and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990). 29. See Robert Fatton Jr., Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reiner, 2002); Honorat, “Social Divisions,” 23; Justin, Étude sur les Institutions Haïtiennes; Jean Luc, Structures économiques et lutte nationale populaire en Haïti (Montreal: Éditions Nouvelle Optique, 1976); Trouillot, Haiti, State against Nation; and Stenio Vincent, En Posant Les Jalons, vol. 1 (Portau-Prince: L’Imprimeur II, 1939). 30. On rural revolts, see Roger Gaillard, Le République Exterminatrice, vol. 1, Le Cacoisme Bourgeois Contre Salnave (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Le Natal, 2003); David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); and Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (London: Macmillan Education, 2000). See also Pierre-Raymond Dumas, “Legitimizing Politics,” in Haiti’s Future: Views of Twelve Haitian Leaders, ed. Richard A. Morse (Washington, D.C.: Wilson Center Press, 1988), 13–20; Justin, Étude sur les Institutions Haïtiennes, 13; and Vincent, En Posant Les Jalons. 31. See Léon Audain, Étude Sociale: Le mal d’Haïti, ses causes et son traitement (Port-au-Prince: J. Verrollot, 1908); Mark Baker Bird, The Republic of Hayti and Its Struggles (New York, 1869); L. J. Marcelin, Haïti, ses guerres civiles; and Vincent, En Posant Les Jalons. 32. See Louis Joseph Janvier, Du Gouvernement Civil en Haïti (Lille: Le Bigot Frères, 1905). For a critique of this position, and a defense of the militarization of politics in Haiti, see Frédéric Marcelin, Au Gré du Souvenir (Paris: Augustin Challamel, 1913). 33. See, for example, Audain, Étude Sociale. 34. Robert Rotberg, “The Failure and Collapse of Nation-States: Breakdown, Prevention, and Repair,” in When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, ed. Robert Rotberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 1–45. See also Maryle Gélin-Adams and David M. Malone, “Haiti: A Case of Endemic Weakness,” in State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, ed. Robert Rotberg (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute Press, 2003), 287–304. 35. Rotberg, “Failure and Collapse.” 36. Ibid., 19. 37. Nelson Kasfir, “Domestic Anarchy, Security Dilemmas, and Violent Predation: Causes of Failure,” in When States Fail: Causes and Consequences, ed. Robert Rotberg (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 53–76. See also I. William

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Zartman, Collapsed States: The Disintegration and Restoration of Legitimate Authority (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reiner, 1995). 38. For a discussion of the U.S. government’s response to Haitian migration, see Alex Stepick, “Haitian Boat People: A Study in the Conflicting Forces Shaping U.S. Immigration Policy,” Law and Contemporary Problems 45, no. 2 (1982): 163–96; Alex Stepick, “The New Haitian Exodus: The Flight from Terror and Poverty,” Caribbean Review 11, no. 1 (1982): 14–17, 55–57; and Alex Stepick, “Roots of Haitian Migration,” in Haiti: Today and Tomorrow, ed. Albert Valdman and Charles Foster (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1984), 337–49. 39. The most recent intervention began in 2004, when a coup d’etat against Aristide’s government prompted U.S. political scientists and policy makers to revise Haiti’s designation from weak to failed state. See Greg Beckett, “Phantom Power: Notes on Provisionality in Haiti,” in Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency, ed. John D. Kelly, Beatrice Jauregui, Sean T. Mitchell, and Jeremy Walton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 39–51. 40. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 41. Charlemagne Péralte, “Against the Yankees: Lettre,” in Libète: A Haiti Anthology, eds. Charles Arthur and Michael Dash, trans. David Nicholls (Princeton, N.J.: Markus Wiener, 1999), 221–22. 42. For a general discussion of the death of Sam and the U.S. occupation, see Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1971). 43. Robert Lansing, “Letter to Senator Medill McCormick, May 4, 1922,” in Inquiry into Occupation and Administration of Haiti and Santo Domingo, Hearings before a Select Committee on Haiti and Santo Domingo, United States Senate 67th Congress, S. res 112 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922), 1:31. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. See, for example, P. H. Liotta and F. Miskel, “Redrawing the Map of the Future,” World Policy Journal 21, no. 1 (2004): 15–21. 47. Craig Calhoun, “A World of Emergencies: Fear, Intervention, and the Limits of the Cosmopolitan Order,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 41, no. 4 (2004): 373–95. See also Beckett, “Phantom Power”; and Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, eds., Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions (New York: Zone Books, 2010). 48. Calhoun, “World of Emergencies.”

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49. For a related discussion, see Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999). 50. Beck, World at Risk. 51. Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi, “Introduction: Military and Humanitarian Government in the Age of Intervention,” in Fassin and Pandolfi, Contemporary States of Emergency, 9–25. 52. Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975), 1. 53. Paul Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti: The Context of Healing Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 87. See also Paul Farmer, “Bad Blood, Spoiled Milk: Bodily Fluids as Moral Barometers in Rural Haiti,” American Ethnologist 15, no. 1 (1988): 62–83. 54. See Jeanne Philippe and Jean B. Romain, “Indisposition in Haiti,” Social Science and Medicine 13B (1979): 129–33; and Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti, 210n18. 55. Brodwin, Medicine and Morality in Haiti, 101, 210n17. 56. See Beverly Bell, “Introduction: The Women of Millet Mountain,” in Walking on Fire: Haitian Women’s Stories of Survival and Resistance, ed. Beverly Bell (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), 1–22; Paul Farmer, Aids and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame, new ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Michel Hector, Crises et Mouvements Populaires en Haïti, 2nd ed. (Port-auPrince: Presses Nationales d’Haïti, 2006); Erica Caple James, “Haunting Ghosts: Madness, Gender, and Enserkirite in Haiti in the Democratic Era,” in Postcolonial Disorders: Refections on Subjectivity in the Contemporary World, ed. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Sandra Teresa Hyde, Sarah Pinto, and Bryan J. Good (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 132–56; and Drexel Woodson, “Lanmanjay, Food Security, Sécurité Alimentaire: A Lesson in Communication from BARA’s Mixed Methods Approach to Baseline Research in Haiti, 1994–1996,” Culture and Agriculture 19, no. 3 (1997): 108–22. 57. James, “Haunting Ghosts.” 58. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). See also Erica Caple James, Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 59. Giddens, Constitution of Society, 50, 61. 60. Farmer, Aids and Accusation. See also Samuel Martinez, Decency and Excess: Global Aspirations and Material Deprivation on a Caribbean Sugar Plantation (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Press, 2007), and Karen E. Richman, Migration and Vodou (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2005). 61. Farmer, Aids and Accusation; Kai Erikson, A New Species of Trouble: The Human Experience of Modern Disasters (New York: Norton, 1995). 62. Richman, Migration and Vodou.

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63. Ibid., 266. 64. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 1:874. 65. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, vol. 2, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1987).

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3

Remembering Charlemagne Péralte and His Defense of Haiti’s Revolution Yveline Alexis

T

he United States government illegally occupied the sovereign nation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. While U.S. presidents and marines promoted this act as an intervention and a humanitarian gesture toward their neighbor, Haitian nationalists such as Charlemagne Péralte interpreted the U.S. presence as a war of conquest. For Péralte, the idea of an occupied Haiti was an affront to the nation’s sovereignty. Thus, in his efforts to protect the nation, he turned to Haiti’s revolutionary past. Using the memory of Haiti’s rebellious origins as a strategic ideological weapon, Péralte deployed this method in warnings to the U.S. occupiers and as inspiration for Haitians to defend their revolution. From 1915 until his assassination in 1919, Péralte directed a revolt against the occupation. His actions had repercussions in the early twentieth century and remain significant in twenty-first-century Haiti. As one Haitian expressed most recently, “The memory of Charlemagne Péralte reigns high.” In 2004, during Haiti’s celebration of its bicentennial, soldiers from the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) arrived to the island and remain there today. During these years, Haitians resurrected the memory of Péralte as a symbol of resistance. Here I engage the themes of occupation, resistance, and historical memory in my examination of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Haitian and U.S relations. Drawing on archival sources and oral histories conducted in both nations, I look at Péralte’s use of historical memory in resisting the U.S. occupation of Haiti

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in 1915 and the memory of Péralte’s resistance in present-day U.N.-occupied Haiti. I argue that the assassination of Péralte and his subsequent historical marginalization demonstrate how revolutionary his acts were in the twentieth century. Furthermore, the reimagining of Péralte among Haitians on the island attests to his revolutionary appeal in the twenty-first century. Silencing Haiti’s Resistance Narratives Polyné begins The Idea of Haiti with a provocative question: “Why is Haiti the exceptional case in the Americas, and perhaps globally to be feared and to be a foil?” From a variety of disciplines, the scholars in this volume offer equally provocative responses to this enduring question about Haiti’s past and present. Here, I look at this concept of fear via a historical approach that examines Haitian and U.S. diplomacy. I argue that from the age of revolutions through the U.S. occupation of Haiti, various individuals in the United States, including slaveholders, politicians, and soldiers, promoted an idea of Haiti as a feared—and later, failed—republic. Haiti became a danger to the United States once President Jean Jacques Dessalines declared the nation independent in 1804, and it remained a danger thanks to the nationalist rhetoric and actions of individuals like Charlemagne Péralte in the twentieth century. Michel Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History interrogates this global angst that Haiti’s revolution generated in 1804 and centuries afterward. In this collection, both Nesbitt and Beckett’s works offer key reflections on Trouillot’s seminal thesis about the recording and disseminating of this unthinkable history. The parallels between the silencing of Haiti’s revolution and the figurative burial of Péralte’s resistance movement in the histories reveal a striking trend. Though occurring in different eras, both moments were rendered invisible and nonrevolutionary, and were viewed as failures. Examples from both periods document the creation of the idea of Haiti and Haitians as an other. Immediately after Haiti’s declaration of sovereignty, U.S. vice president Thomas Jefferson concocted an ideology of fear. He used the Haitian revolution as an example to caution against abolition in the United States. Print culture also spreads this cautionary tale: U.S. newspapers decried Haiti’s revolution as a massacre by brigands and cannibals, a bloodbath that victimized French slaveholders and colonial administrators.

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The aspect of the Haitian revolution that was a battle against slavery and for freedom became constructed as a display of savagery and barbarianism. The delayed acknowledgment of Haiti’s independence by France and the United States, and the reparations paid to the French by Haitians, set up power systems that grossly marginalized Haiti and succeeded in promoting the myth of the nation as an other. Indeed, the surveillance of Haiti by officials in the U.S. government since its revolution gave way to the latter’s illegal occupation of the island in 1915. An examination of marines’ correspondence during the occupation finds similar tactics in depicting these twentieth-century Haitian resistors as the new brigands and cannibals. The marines routinely labeled Péralte as a bandit-rebel and dismissed his revolt as apolitical and disorganized. These deliberate efforts in portraying both moments as nonevents serve a contrary purpose, as it underscores their very significance.1 The twelve-year revolt in Saint Domingue from 1791 to 1803 disrupted the key foundation of the Atlantic—the institution of slavery—and catapulted the island onto the world stage. Haiti’s black republic joined the independence victories of France and the United States during this age of revolution. And in his efforts to promote and preserve this victory, Haiti’s first president, Jean Jacques Dessalines, routinely declared, “Haiti is for Haitians” and precluded foreign ownership of Haitian lands. Péralte upheld this Haitian nationalism in his four-year revolt against the occupation. In doing so, he disrupted the myth of Haitians as barbaric and uncivilized. Through his nonviolent methods of petitioning American and French ambassadors for the occupation’s end, Péralte shed light on the fallacies of U.S. democratic policies in Haiti. In an interesting manner, Péralte became Dessalines’s twentieth-century successor and continued Haiti’s revolution. When the occupation continued despite persistent nonviolent protest, Péralte became violent. The same goals of liberté, égalité, and fraternité applied as Péralte’s fought marines for Haiti’s sovereignty. Resisting the U.S. Occupation of Haiti, 1915–19 Days after 300 U.S. marines disembarked in Haiti on July 28, 1915, Haitian resistance commenced. Haitians from across class, color, and educational lines waged private, public, individual, and collective struggles against the marines for the duration of the nineteen-year occupation. Several U.S. policies

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on the island fueled these fires of resistance. Within the first three years of the occupation, the U.S. administrators neutralized the Haitian state politically and economically.2 First, they selected Haiti’s president, Philippe Sudre Dartiguenave, who, under the threats of the marines, became a puppet of the U.S. occupiers. Second, they negotiated the treaty of 1915, which reduced Haiti to a protectorate status. Third, they authored the nation’s 1918 constitution, which revoked Dessalines’s clause that precluded foreign ownership of Haitian lands. Haiti could now cede territory, but only to Americans. These conditions, along with many other grievances, stirred Péralte’s revolt against the occupation. Péralte was a political man who at the time of the U.S. arrival to Haiti served as a commandant d’arondissement. This post, the equivalent of mayor, provided Péralte with access to a wide spectrum of the Haitian population. He used his position to publish accounts in Haiti’s newspapers that were contrary to the occupation and that appealed for its end. At first, Péralte’s protest was aggressive but nonviolent. He urged the occupiers to “leave with God,” and he reminded the marines of Haiti’s rebellious origins: In the presence of this great danger which menaces and threatens to crush our black and yellow Republic, of which all Haitians are rightly proud. . . . It is not the work of 1804, of Dessalines, Petion, etc. and so many other brave souls, that we must smash, or cause to be smashed. For too long a time we have worked alas to have this terrible catastrophe fall upon us. It is again the time. There are some men, some well-meaning souls capable of defending the soil of our ancestors. To be sure, we shall not permit the insulting strangers to step on us like they are our masters.3

Péralte’s actions marked him as a threat against the occupation, and thus the marines sought to silence him through imprisonment. Before leaving his position, Péralte addressed the populace in the following letter dated August 30, 1915, in which he argued that in fact he was being removed from his post. My dear compatriots, I would be lacking in high moral duty if I were to remain cold and insensitive to your sobbing hearts, to so many tears that you have shed over my removal, and so I say, that I testify loudly and publicly as to my

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gratitude before so much sympathy and the many acts of kindness that you have displayed towards me under these remarkable circumstance.4

The marines’ plan to curb Péralte’s influence against the occupation backfired. Péralte began serving his prison term at a jail in Cap Haiiten and used his time to further recruit guerrilla fighters, known as cacos. In fact, when Péralte escaped from the prison in September 1918, it was due in part to prison guards who were also cacos. In his leadership of the group, Péralte used Haiti’s revolutionary history to appeal the people to join the movement and urged Haitians to uphold the mission of their forebears: Haitians, the day like the 1st of January 1804 will soon rise. Since 4 years the occupation insults us in every way: every morning brings us a new sadness. . . . Haitians, let us be firm: let us follow the example of Belgium. No matter if our towns are burned. For it is not a vain thought that was written on the grave of the great Dessalines: “Upon the first shot the towns disappear and the nation rises.”5

Péralte’s methods worked: that year, 1918, the cacos and marines engaged in over a hundred battles. Although the marines downplayed the actions of guerrilla fighters as bandit raids with no political or military significance, the frequency of their telegrams to the U.S. state department challenged this myth.6 Their subsequent plot to assassinate Péralte further illustrates that he and the cacos posed a formidable threat to the occupying forces. Hunting Péralte and Dispossessing His Resistance, 1919 On October 31, 1919, the marines reported: “Thirty six bandits were killed in the district of Grande Rivière the past month. One of whom was Charlemagne Péralte.” The following comprehensive details about the plot and their display of Péralte’s body demonstrate the marines’ attempts to hunt down and dispossess the nationalist fighter. In the month of August the undersigned arranged with a native named Jean B. Conzé to affect the capture of Charlemagne Péralte. This man, with a gendarme

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yveline alexis named Jean Edmond Francois, his secretary, and a native called Cherubin Blot, Commandant, took up their positions at Capois and organized a [cacos] camp. . . . The affair appeared to have become known and the undersigned made a simulated attack on Capois, during which I was supposed to have been wounded. Charlemagne Péralte with his brother St. Remy Péralte and Ademar Francismar, Estravil, Papillion with many other chiefs and about 1200 bandits finally arrived at Capois on Sunday morning, October 26, 1919. . . . The night of this attack was to be Friday night October 31, 1919 . . . with our faces blackened, and twenty gendarmes all in old dirty clothes, dressed as civilians and with one machine gun took up position. . . . Charlemagne had arranged with General Conzé that after Conzé had captured Grande Rivière that he, Conzé should send up a detachment of bandits to come and notify him. . . . So after our first plan was frustrated the following was decided upon. We would be the detachment that would go and tell Charlemagne that Conzé had captured Grande Rivière and it would be safe for him to come down. . . . The Secretary thereupon returned to us and swiftly told me what Charlemagne had said and that was dangerous as we had to pass six different outposts to get to Charlemagne . . . The sixth outpost was the immediate guard over Charlemagne. . . . Button and myself advanced to within fifteen feet of Charlemagne, who was standing over a fire and was speaking with his woman, when two men halted us and worked the bolts of their rifles. The undersigned said to Button, all right and immediately raised his 45 automatic and took deliberate aim and fired at Charlemagne. . . . The undersigned found Charlemagne’s body shot through the heart. It is requested that the reward offered for Charlemagne, plus $1,000 be given to Mr. Jean B. Conzé, who has performed a wonderful piece of work in the killing of this man, risking his life every moment that he was in the hills.7

Péralte and several cacos lay dead; the marines were elated. The soldiers displayed his body in a town square, photographed him, and later disseminated pictures of the deceased via aircraft. The hope was that without their leader, cacos activity would cease. However, Haitian resistance continued

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until the end of the occupation in 1934. Furthermore, Haitians at the time reinterpreted the image of Péralte’s assassination as a symbol of his martyrdom. This reimaging of Péralte as one of the nation’s beloved sons who sacrificed his life in defending the nation remains in twenty-first-century Haiti. Remembering Péralte’s Defense of Haiti’s Revolution in the Twenty-first Century As Haitians celebrated their second century of independence, MINUSTAH troops arrived to the island in 2004. Immediate objections to this circumstance erupted on the island in the form of protest murals, songs, scholarly works, and rallies. These acts demonstrated that Haitians likened their new reality to that of their predecessors during the U.S. occupation of Haiti in 1915, although with a few differences. In the early twentieth century, the foreign officers were white American men; now Haitians shared similar racial and cultural backgrounds as MINUSTAH recruited soldiers from countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Then, the Haitian government of Vilbrun Guillaume Sam had collapsed in a bloody turmoil; now, Haitians questioned whether the United States had orchestrated the exile of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. Elected by those who believed in his practice of liberation theology (adapted to Haiti as the Ti Legliz movement), the Catholic priest first assumed power in 1991. During his early years in office, President Aristide launched attacks against Haiti’s army and elite, as well as against the United States. The sermon below documents Aristide’s manner to incite protests against these individuals: All powerful God, we are little before you, we do not identify with the imperialist Americans, neither a Macoutes amongst us. We endure the blood, we are destroyed but you are one whom we understand and who can help us feel liberated of our sins and capable of freeing our country of the imperialist impression that suffocates us. All powerful God we incite a united march under the voice of anti-imperialism that can bring a grand revolution of love, of integral liberation, in the name of Jesus who walks with us always.

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These overt criticisms often landed the president in trouble, culminating in a coup d’état in 1991 that barred him from rule in Haiti until 1994. Thus, in 2004, Haitians questioned whether Aristide’s “involuntary” departure was a repeat of 1991 or a resurgence of an imposed foreign occupation. It became clear that Haitians accepted the latter explanation and questioned MINUSTAH’s supervision of the nation during its 200th anniversary. The memory of Charlemagne Péralte immediately became embroiled in their protest. Interlacing history and nationalism, Haitians recalled Péralte’s actions of the early twentieth century to demonstrate against the state of affairs in the twenty-first. A mural in the nation’s capital during this time put the iconic Péralte on a par with one of the revolutionary fathers, Toussaint Louverture. Interviews conducted in Haiti revealed corresponding sentiments. One individual described the cacos leader as “President Péralte, a very highly respectable and respected person [who] is part of the soul of Haiti.”8 Equating the presence of MINUSTAH to a form of a military occupation, one Haitian emphasized that within Haiti’s present condition, the “soul of Péralte will be living . . . as an emblem of freedom and national resistance.” Many people felt insulted by MINUSTAH’s supervision of Haiti and responded by reflecting on Péralte. The following are excerpts from interviews of Haitians from varying disciplines, age groups, classes, and regions in Haiti who shared their views on Charlemagne Péralte’s significance to the nation’s history and present state in the twenty-first century.9 In all of the interviews, it became clear that Péralte’s methods of defending the nation through the use of historical memory succeeded. In a telling manner, the interviewees precisely recalled the memory of Péralte’s acts for Haiti in articulating their sentiments for Haiti to retain its independence in the twenty-first century. One professor possessed a solid command of the topic and provided an in-depth history of the cacos’ origins: First thing is that they are people who had been resisting the military occupations of Haiti. But there is more behind this cacos because the cacos did not appear with the American military occupation. They had been here before, since the nineteenth century, mainly mid-nineteenth century and their existence is related to, how can I put it, the birth of what we can call the peasantry,

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the Haitian peasantry. It was the time when the peasants or the people from the rural area, from the hinterlands, had been trying to affirm themselves as social partners, as having rights.

He continued: “They were mostly black while those people from the south and the west, the new collaborationists, were mostly mulattoes. It is a serious change. That is why I think the rebellion of Charlemagne Péralte is significant.” The cacos’ unified demand for equal rights was a menace because it featured diverse collaborations. The professor praised the cacos leader as “President Péralte” and referred to him as one of the founding fathers who was now a “hope bearer for a new society.” He actually felt insulted by my query about Jean Baptist Conzé, asserting, “I know about Conzé as a traitor. . . . He died the same day that he committed treason against the nation, not only against Péralte, against the nation.” He concluded that Péralte’s legacy remains alive today. Equating the current MINUSTAH supervision to a form of military occupation, it is here that the professor stated that in Haiti’s present condition, “Charlemagne Péralte reigns well.” He appeared convinced that individuals who uphold Péralte’s tradition of resistance would rise to combat Haiti’s present twenty-first-century state. A student from the Université d’Etat d’Haiti indicated to me Péralte’s story seems reserved for the educated class and for peasants who still praise Péralte’s acknowledgment of their plight. With dismay, he alleged that Haitians “know of Petion, Dessalines, and other persons like that. [However,] not everyone knows what Charlemagne Péralte did in battle for the country.”10 He attributed his knowledge of Péralte to his family, specifically those who were alive during the occupation. Additionally, he was from Péralte’s hometown of Hinche, which explained his keen awareness of the details surrounding Péralte’s political agenda, arrest, and later assassination. His view of Péralte was also lofty: he called him a “grand Haitian, a man who was serious, who cared about the affairs and [the] misery the people experienced in order to start a revolution to end the oppressive system.” When I inquired about Haitian presidents who revived Péralte’s memory, he mentioned Aristide and shared how the former president would say, “We will do what Péralte demanded.” He also noted that celebrations for Péralte drew to an end once Aristide endured his first exile, commenting, “You find

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then that defiance, it started to go down, be diminished, started losing its value.” An interview I conducted with an artist fleshed this point out further. According to this man, a drummer, after Aristide’s exile, Aristide abandoned his rhetoric about the more militant Péralte in order to praise the more diplomatic Toussaint Louverture. Below is his extensive speculation about the reason for this change. Well, once upon a time, when Aristide was president, he would speak of Péralte a lot. We walk the testimony of Charlemagne Péralte that is how he used to talk. However, he endured a coup d’état and was exiled. When he returned, he did not speak of Péralte; he started speaking of Toussaint Louverture. I do not know if it is the works of the Americans, what they did to his spirit to have him return but during his first time, he use to speak of Péralte a lot. During this second time, he never spoke of Péralte; he spoke of Louverture. Hence Péralte put a warning in Americans’ heads and Americans do not like when you speak of Péralte. They probably said if we return you to the island, you have to cease speaking of Péralte and that is it. That is the way it is, he wanted to return to Haiti. Once upon a time, he also spoke badly of the Americans but when he came back, he did not speak badly of them at all.11

The drummer expressed that Péralte and allies organized the cacos because an “occupation is never sweet,” and he emphasized how the acts of “violence, rape, [and] thievery” against Haitians inspired their movement. He commended Péralte as being a unique “child of Haiti” whose citizens should applaud his choice to die for Haiti. “It is not every Haitian who will lead this fight. He chose this route and paid for it. You have to respect it,” he argued with overt pride. Our interview continued with several of his rhetorical queries: How are you living in Haiti, [and] you call a street Martin Luther King? You can call it Martin Luther King? This is a joke. But the street named after John Brown, what is this? You have Péralte, a lot of heroes here who did a lot of work. You cannot tell me you have a street named John Paul II. How can you have a street named John Paul II, why did they not call it Benoit Batraville? [Haitians probably devoted a street for the Pope’s role in

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denouncing the Duvalier regime in 1983.] Speak of them, those men! But John Paul II, you cannot tell me this. I do not live in Italy. What work did they do in or for Haiti? The people here are walking on their heads, not on their feet, meaning those who came to do them wrong, they are the ones they honor.

The last statement is especially relevant. Several streets and statues in Haiti do celebrate foreign figures, which invites a question: why is Péralte not memorialized with a national monument in the capital? Ultimately, what history is nationally promoted, why, and by whom? When asked where he learned this history, he attributed his consciousness to his Vodou faith, which he opined Péralte also practiced. “When you speak of Charlemagne Péralte, Benoit Batraville, all of them were Vodou practitioners, not men of the Church. In Vodou circles you will always hear wind of these men and their past.” The community activist possessed a reservoir of knowledge about the occupation and Péralte. With enthusiastic ardor, he narrated the stories of this “great man,” who had the “courage of a nationalist.”12 In his opinion, Péralte’s decision to command a following to refute the occupation resulted in his sacrifice of his chance to rise as a future president, and more importantly marked him as a security threat. According to his description, Péralte, Batraville, and others were great thinkers who led the cacos in a revolution against an oppressive system. As leaders, they advised the cacos to exercise self-control, especially when the marines waged media campaigns that characterized the cacos as bandits and savages. He issued a challenge to writers of history, who, he argued, falter in their assessments of the cacos. He contended, “They do not give truly how many marines died, they always show you the other as a way to psychologically hold the population to show the force was strong. If ten marines died, they would say one, or that there were just injuries.” He questions that if Péralte were not a significant figure, why then did the marines decorate the persons who killed him? Despite his perceptive awareness of the facts, he affirmed that he was on a quest to learn more. He commented on the elders’ role in not transmitting history to his generation when he stated in a proverbial manner, “I have not yet found grandparents to explain them to me.” He is hopeful that Péralte’s heroic role will someday “resonate globally.”

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My interview with a Haitian living in the United States was likewise clarifying. Born two years before the occupation’s end, he confessed to not possessing a firm memory of the period. However, he often heard it referenced because his father had served as a senator under President Sténio Vincent. When I asked whether his family supported the occupation, he remarked, “It was difficult. It was hard to decide because Haiti had a lot of disorders in 1915. Thus, they had diverse opinions. But my father was not in accord with the principal behind the occupation because my father was a good Haitian, a good Goinavian.”13 He characterized the cacos as “a group of patriots” and argued that because of “their reputation, however, they came to have a reputation of terrorists.” When asked how he became exposed to the history of the occupation, he responded genuinely: I will tell you frankly, I am not a historian. I have lived a long time but I am not a historian. There are a number of details that I cannot provide you. . . . The history of Haiti, I learned ever since I was small. I was educated at St. Louis Gonzague. . . . But even then I knew the history of the cacos. Do not forget the history of Haiti. We have a tradition, mouth to mouth, because we are descendants of Africa.

When I asked whether the ideology of the cacos remains in Haiti, he responded: A lot. I think the ideology continues to exist. I am not in politics but I can say, bald-headed, that the majority of Haitians are not happy with the occupation. But in the meantime, they need the whites for the reason that Haiti reached a stage where it produces nothing. It is [NGOs,] people like those that are helping them survive. But I think Haitians overall are patriots and they do have a cacos sentiment at home. But the time has changed; there will not be a revolution like last time with the new modern science. It is very difficult for Haiti to rise and revolt.

He extolled Péralte as a “great patriot” and justified the cacos’ actions as necessary “because the occupation brought racist white Americans to Haiti.” Given Benoit Batraville’s leadership of the cacos as well, I asked: “Why do

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you think many people hear more about Charlemagne Péralte than Benoit Batraville?” He responded: Well, Charlemagne Péralte was more colorful as you say in English, he was a leader. Benoit Batraville was a leader as well but Péralte created more imagination in people’s spirit. . . . Péralte is a very common figure in Haiti’s history and the U.S occupation in the same manner that Jean Jacques Dessalines was known in 1804. Charlemagne Péralte is another Dessalines of 1915.

And finally, he offered commentary on the reason for this revival of Péralte: “Well, I think they want to go back to their roots, like me! See I am seventysix, I am getting older, and I like to know where I came from and the history of Haiti, the history of Haiti is a beautiful history.” He concluded by posing the dominant question I encountered during my fieldwork: why was Péralte chosen as the subject of study, given all the other historical figures? Below is our exchange: YA: Yes, it is true. I grew up on the history of Jean Jacques Dessalines and Toussaint Louverture. Interviewee: Yes, so you want to appear with a new person? YA: Well yes, someone new and the U.S. books outside of academia on Charlemagne Péralte paint him as a bandit or a terrorist as you say. Interviewee: Yes, what you say is very just! I agree with you for choosing Charlemagne Péralte, given that Haiti is under the same thing, an occupation. . . . Yes, Charlemagne Péralte is a symbol for Haiti, a good symbol. Naturally, what Charlemagne Péralte attempted to do in 1915, if we attempted that now, it would result the same because it is not only the U.S. that occupies Haiti; it is the United Nations. All of these countries, the U.S., Brazil, Venezuela, Canada, France, oh my.

Conclusion Despite the attempts to silence Haiti’s past narratives of resistance, Haitians have challenged the dissemination of these fables. Those who participated in the Saint Domingue uprising of 1791–1803 created an independent Haiti,

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and since 1804, Haitians have defended their revolution in various ways. The first president, Dessalines, routinely promoted Haitian nationalism, and as the last interviewee noted, “Charlemagne Péralte is another Dessalines of 1915.” The present apotheosis of Péralte as a freedom fighter and gatekeeper of Haiti’s revolution also serves this purpose. There remains a prevailing idea for Haiti to remain sovereign among Haitians living in the postearthquake and MINUSTAH-occupied state. One of Péralte’s descendants shared the following sentiment: “They [the U.S. occupiers] were scared of Charlemagne because he was brutal, they were scared. They kept him under key always.”14 His thoughts recall the idea of Haiti and Haitians as sites of fear, as I discussed in the beginning of this chapter. Haiti’s revolt in 1804 inspired fear because it threatened the political economy of the time while also challenging myths of racial superiority. In a similar vein, Péralte’s revolt in 1915 posed a danger to U.S. imperial projects in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asian Pacific islands. Péralte’s actions for Haiti, which ultimately resulted in his untimely death, were revolutionary. Another relative of Péralte commented on the significance of his role and praised him: “If we find liberty now, if Haitians find liberty, it is because of Charlemagne Péralte.”15 In 2004, Haitians drew inspiration from the memory of Péralte’s nationalist acts when MINUSTAH disembarked on the island. In voicing their objections to this perceived new occupation, Haitians promoted key moments in the nation’s history. New murals in the nation’s capital not only depicted one of the fathers of the republic, Toussaint Louverture, but the artists also drew a mural of the nation’s flag being tugged at by its citizens on one side and MINUSTAH on the other. Another mural depicted the image of Charlemagne Péralte, the hero who some reasoned was denied an opportunity to be a president of Haiti. These street paintings and their intentional pairings were a strategic and effective protest method. First, they served to remind Haitians of their history as trailblazers during the age of revolution. It reminded them that they were to be gatekeepers of their revolutionary past and to uphold the work of their forebears, such as Louverture and Dessalines. Second, the murals also delivered a message to MINUSTAH that Haitians were prepared to defend their nation-state against foreign intrusion.

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As MINUSTAH continues to play a role in Haiti’s affairs, the national promotion of Péralte persists. Understanding Charlemagne Péralte’s defense of Haiti’s revolution and the enduring resistance against foreign occupation of the island remains relevant in the reconstruction efforts of postearthquake Haiti. Then and now, he is still associated with the ongoing fight for the actualization of Haitians’ progressive desire to achieve equality, justice, and national sovereignty. Notes Alexis thanks her family, mentors at UMass-Amherst, and colleagues in the Critical Caribbean Studies Initiative at Rutgers. She dedicates this chapter to her nephew, Calvin Alexis, the emerging generation of Haitian critical thinkers. 1. Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995). 2. Roger Gaillard, Charlemagne Péralte Le Caco (Port-au-Prince, 1982); Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); Hans Schmidt, The United States Occupation of Haiti, 1915–1934 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1971). 3. Le Matin, August 2, 1915, and Le Nouvelliste, August 8, 1915. 4. Georges Michel, Charlemagne Péralte and the First American Occupation of Haiti (Dubuque, Iowa: Kendall/Hunt, 1996), 70. 5. Charlemagne Péralte, March 14, 1919, National Archives, Washington, D.C. 6. 63rd Company, USMC, Marine Barracks, Port-Au-Prince, Statement in the Case of Private James F. Deigham, October 17, 1919. 7. From District Commander, Grande Rivière, to Chief of the Gendarmerie d’Haiti regarding Charlemagne Péralte’s death, November 1, 1919. 8. The quotations that follow, unless otherwise indicated, are from my interview with the professor on July 27, 2007, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 9. The interviews ranged from thirty to forty-five minutes and included a set of ten to twelve open-ended questions provided in Haitian Kreyòl and English so that participants had a choice to respond in their language of ease. This open-question format encouraged participants to freely assert their opinions on the subject manner, which enabled an assessment of their understanding of this history and use of Péralte by the public. Some of the participants were hesitant about disclosing their names for publication, so I refer to each based on his or her profession and relationship to Péralte. 10. The quotations that follow, unless otherwise noted, are taken from my interview with the university student, July 17, 2007, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. 11. The quotations that follow, unless otherwise noted, are taken from my interview with the drummer, August 4, 2007, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Jean-Bertrand

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Aristide and Christophe Wargny, Aristide: An Autobiography (New York: Orbis, 1993); Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and the Power: Jean Bertrand Aristide and the International Community (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Robert Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reiner, 2002). 12. The quotations that follow, unless otherwise noted, are taken from my interview with the community activist, August 18, 2007, in Hinche, Haiti. 13. The quotations are taken from my interview with the radio personality, Miami, Fla., August 29, 2008. 14. Interview with Péralte’s stepson, August 18, 2007, Hinche, Haiti. 15. Interview with Péralte’s granddaughter, August 18, 2007, Hinche, Haiti.

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pa r t I i

Moun/Demounization (Person/Dehumanization)

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Haiti Fantasies of Bare Life sibylle fischer

C

oming home from work one day in 2006, I found my two-year-old son drawing furiously on a pile of used office paper. “Look, Mami,” he said. Barely obscured by the childish squiggles, there was the grainy black-andwhite photograph of a male corpse on a muddy road, sullied, naked, with no head. There were other photos spread across the floor. I gathered the sheets of paper and took them away, with my son looking at me uncomprehendingly. Pictures of severed limbs, festering wounds, pigs eating corpses: a human rights report on Haiti. I cannot remember who might have sent the images to me, and I have been unable to trace them to their source. No doubt somewhere in the pile of papers was an explanation, something to justify the circulation of these pictures of horror. Would it help to know whom to blame? And what was the purpose of the pictures? Is this how a claim for human rights is made, in the grotesque triangulation of a desecrated body of a victim, an intrepid photographer, and an awed metropolitan reader? The representation of human life violently reduced to its bare bones, beings without the accoutrements of context or history, human life as indistinguishable from animal life—what Giorgio Agamben has called nuda vita (bare life)—raises some serious concerns. This essay is not, I should say from the outset, an investigation into the operations of global power, the crisis of legitimacy of the nation-state, or indeed the many philosophical complications of Agamben’s theory of the state. It is an interrogation of the operations and effects of a representational mode, a rhetoric, an imagery that has as its subject just that: the violence that produces bare life.1

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The example of Haiti is not coincidental. The discourse of Haiti as place where the ordinary constraints of human society do not apply goes back to the origins of the state in a slave revolution, which was perceived by French colonists and most observers abroad not as a political event with political goals, an event to be understood in the context of the revolutionary age, but as a matter of bloodshed, rape, and boundless material destruction. The most circulated and repeated story was that of the insurgents using a white baby impaled on a bayonet as a standard on their marches, a story for which no eyewitness account exists and which is only reported as hearsay by a single French colonist.2 It seems that accounts of that kind prepared the ground for an imaginary that looks to Haiti to see only this: insurrectional bodies, tortured bodies, bodies in trance. This despite the fact that much of Haitian history, from the slave uprisings that began in 1791 and the struggles to preserve independence in a slaveholding Atlantic, to the painstaking contestation of theories of racial inequality and an anthropology that mistook measurements of skulls and bones for an account of humanity, is in fact an act of contestation and an assertion of political subjecthood.3 Haitian intellectuals throughout the nineteenth century expended enormous effort to defend their country against the calumnies of outside observers and scientists, but to no avail. Spencer St. John’s Hayti, or The Black Republic (1884), Hollywood’s zombie movies (“the living dead”), and innumerable other texts that liberally mix stories of political violence, travelers’ adventure and sexual exploits, including Blaire Niles 1926 Black Haiti, Graham Greene’s predictable The Comedians (1966), and postmodernist Kathy Acker’s outré sexual adventures in Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978). As Michel-Rolph Trouillot has pointed out, it almost does not matter whether these texts and films belong to a racist-colonialist imaginary and simply showcase the triumph of the white narrator’s heroism and rationality in the face of impenetrable darkness, or instead mean to offer sympathetic defenses of Haitian eccentricities;4 nor, I would add, whether they aspire to a post/modern exploration of the constraints of Western selfhood. In each case, Haiti is returned to the reader as the bare-boned, incomprehensible place of unspeakable cruelty and bodily suffering, of the Tontons Macoutes and “voodoo doctors” and corpses drifting in muddy swimming pools, a liminal space on the edge of Western civilization without the social and political practices and taboos that constitute life in Western society.

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There are a number of important studies of the discourse of Haitian otherness and its rhetoric that trace its political, literary, and scholarly ramifications. These include Laënnec Hurbon’s classic work on the denigration and suppression of Vodou in Le barbare imaginaire, Michael Dash’s Haiti and United States, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s brief programmatic essay “The Odd and the Ordinary.”5 There is a question, however, that is rarely raised: what is the appeal of this discourse of deviance? What desire is being satisfied? Clearly there are economic and strategic interests of the hegemonic powers in the Atlantic world that are being served. But that does not explain the peculiar shape this discourse takes at times, and why it keeps returning. Bare Life The discourse of grotesque otherness evidently feeds on a number of heterogeneous sources and interests and is deeply embedded in the ideologies of colonialism and racial slavery. It is not my intention here to trace these complex genealogies; nor do I mean to analyze this discourse in its heterogeneity and contradictory repetitiveness. The aspect I will focus on here is what I call, appropriating Agamben’s term, fantasies of bare life—where I take bare life to be an emblem of a highly ambivalent attitude toward the bodily degradation of humans. What happens when we rhetorically, philosophically, or photographically reduce human beings to their mere physical being, to their suffering, to their mortality? In Agamben, bare life and its embodiment, homo sacer, are both a product and a constitutive element of sovereignty.6 Homo sacer can be killed without sanction but cannot be sacrificed. As such, homo sacer can be considered “the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban” and as a trace of “the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted.”7 Bare life—biological life, animal nature—is outside the political realm, yet constitutive of it. The sovereign ban is an effect of the sovereign’s right to decide over life and death. For Agamben, the history of the Western state is patterned through the shifting relation between bare life and political life, and an increasing drawing of bare life into the ambit of sovereignty. In a teleological fulfillment of a potentiality that can be discerned already in ancient Greece and Rome, we are now witnessing the collapse of the two into each other: politics has turned

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into biopolitics. “Man has now reached his historical telos and, for a humanity that has become animal again, there is nothing left but the depoliticization of human society by means of the unconditional unfolding of the oikonomia, or the taking of biological life itself as the supreme political (or rather impolitical) task.”8 But, and this is indisputably the most controversial aspect of Agamben’s account, “there is no qualitative difference between our contemporary predicament and the first radical instantiation of biopolitics in the Nazi Death Camps. . . . The camp—as the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space . . .—will appear as the hidden paradigm of the political space of modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize.”9 In some ways, it is not surprising that Agamben’s thought should have such wide appeal.10 Agamben is one of the very few thinkers who seems to be able to give words to what evidently is the most urgent issue in contemporary political theory: the dehumanization entailed by the exclusionary transformation of citizens and political subjects into subjects of management and control. We might think of the ever increasing number of disenfranchised migrant workers, or the vast numbers of refugees around the world who end up in internment camps beyond the reach of any legal rights and protections; but we can also think of explicitly exclusionary policies such as those that produced the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, secret CIA prisons in Eastern Europe, categories like “enemy combatant” or, less overtly violent, “guest worker.” What more disturbing picture of bare life than José Padilla, shackled to a stretcher, his eyes hidden behind huge dark glasses, ears plugged, shipped thus to the site of dental work?11 Other instances may produce less moral outrage but still support the overall picture: think of those convicts in the United States, who, on account of the sexual character of their offense, are upon their release placed under twenty-four-hour surveillance, barred from certain public areas and activities, and forbidden to reside in certain neighborhoods. The law is done with them—they are released from prison— but they are now subject to the unregulated exercise of power by the state. For Agamben, these developments cannot be understood in terms of unrelated humanitarian crises or quasi-accidental breakdowns of the rule of law. They are a structural feature of modern geopolitics and need to be addressed as such.

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The timeliness and appeal of Agamben’s thought are clear, but there are questions to be raised as well. Take the very term nuda vita: it is a graphic term in a way that other terms—say, “biological life” or “mere existence”— are not.12 It has a representational quality, a certain starkness that no doubt does a lot to explain the high currency the term has achieved in recent years. I will have more to say about this rhetorical aspect, but in order to fully understand it, we need to consider at least briefly the scope of Agamben’s thought. There is, in the first instance, a striking geopolitical limitation to an argument that moves from the Greek polis to Hobbes, the French Revolution, to Auschwitz. Does colonialism belong to this story? What about slavery? On the face of it, there have never been more exclusionary strategies than slavery and colonialism, and both slavery and colonial administration could easily be regarded as instances of murderous biopolitics.13 Yet neither one fits Agamben’s picture particularly well. It is difficult to see how one could argue that the slave, at least under the regime of modern racial slavery, relates to the sovereign in a rapport of exclusionary inclusion. The slave is, first and foremost, private property of a master and to that extent not subject to the sovereign ban. The slave may fit the definition of homo sacer as someone who may be killed without being subjected to a homicide or a sacrifice (and hence is excluded from both human and divine law); yet as private property, she is protected from sovereign despotism. The exclusion (or the ban) that underlies racial slavery goes much beyond the double exclusion Agamben diagnoses in bare life. An interesting instantiation of this problem, and one that is of particular interest because it provides another perspective on the foundations of politics in the West, is John Locke’s justification of slavery in chapter 4 of the Second Treatise on Government (1690). When in the course of a just war a prisoner is taken, Locke argues, he has forfeited his life and can be legitimately enslaved as a way of postponing death. Locke’s argument and language certainly resonate with that of homo sacer: the slave is the living dead, the one who has lost his right to life and who has no claim to the legal protections that the political subject—the Englishman—has. Slavery cannot be a contractual relationship between master and slave because “no Man can, by agreement, pass over to another that which he hath no in himself, a Power over his own

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Life.”14 The master may kill the slave if he resists, but suicide is not permitted. There is then a de facto limitation on the practice of slavery: no one can contract into slavery. Slavery is a continuation of the state of war; it takes place in a realm that is not based on contracts, and hence it is outside the political realm altogether. But consider now Locke’s use of the term slavery in the first Treatise on Government, which famously begins: “Slavery is so vile and miserable an Estate of Man, and so directly opposite to the generous Temper and Courage of our Nation; that ’tis hard to conceive, that an Englishman, much less a Gentleman, should plead for’t.”15 Here Locke evidently defines slavery in relation to sovereignty—that is, as political slavery. Note too the rhetorical form Locke’s polemic takes: he begins his attack on Sir Robert Filmer, the author of Patriarcha (1680) and theorist of absolute power, not with an argument or a statement of principle, but by calling into question his opponent’s patriotism and class standing. The point of Locke’s opening gambit is not to say that slavery is wrong, but that slavery must not even be defended by the right sort of people. It is surprising, then, to find that this same text should contain a justification of slavery. The issue partly turns on the meaning and use of the term slavery in Locke’s text. Few commentators believe that Locke is offering a good-faith argument about seventeenth-century racial slavery in the Second Treatise.16 His rather more straightforward and unequivocal approach to the matter in Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina (1669) would suggest that the unequivocal condemnation of slavery in the First Treatise simply does not refer to racial slavery: “Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.” It seems clear that we cannot read Locke as if he subsumed racial slavery under political slavery (as we would have to if we wanted to understand enslaved Africans as an example of Agamben’s homo sacer). What we see here is foundational political theory of the Enlightenment caught in a state of profound disavowal. It seems that the Second Treatise tries to carve out a space outside of contractual obligations and hence outside the realm of the state in the Lockian imaginary, yet capable of sustaining legitimate relations of domination within the terms of a theory of the state based on natural law: the master has complete control over life and death of the

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slave. Whether or not Locke refers to racial slavery in the Second Treatise is an interesting question, but ultimately it may not be the most important one. The key issue is that he creates a place for bare life beyond the reach of the state. It is this space that then became the realm of racial slavery. What we see in Locke is a cleavage opening up between two kinds of slavery, one defined in relation to the sovereign and the other defined in terms of interpersonal domination. The first relation opens toward the space of the political, where slavery will be banned. The second opens toward the space of property relations, where slavery will be admitted. It is in this second space that racial subjugation becomes the key strategy of domination. Ultimately, this cleavage, which separates politics from race and makes race a nonpolitical issue, became crucial for the foundation of modern politics in the Atlantic world. But it is a cleavage that cannot be grasped with the concept of homo sacer. Bare life is rooted in the Greek polis, not in capitalism’s property relations. Colonialism poses slightly different problems for Agamben’s theory. For Agamben, the increasing inclusion of bare life under sovereignty signifies an increase of power. I would argue that colonial rule is practically always the state of exception and is tied to weak sovereignty rather than an increase of power.17 Agamben’s teleological story tracks the somewhat familiar story of the increasing bureaucratization of Western societies, where the bureaucracy is understood as a limitation on classical politics. This does not fit colonial rule, where the genocidal campaign is carried out with the gun, the camp never was an administrative solution, and bureaucracy never amounts to government. Ultimately, I would argue, there is a reductivism that underlies Agamben’s concept of bare life understood merely in relation to the all-powerful sovereign who draws bare life into his ambit that prevents us not only from understanding some crucial instantiations of exploitative and exterminatory politics, such as colonialism or slavery, but instantiations which became foundational for the establishment of politics in the West. At the same time, the abstract graphicness of the concept of bare life and the lack of contextual detail in the theory that produces it make it available for a highly ambiguous fantasy investment. We do not need to get entangled in complexities of historical roots and causes. We can speak of the political catastrophes of the present without getting caught in miserly pity and compassion, or a human rights

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discourse that ultimately only testifies to its own powerlessness. The extremes of violence of the contemporary state and the degradations imposed on vast populations can be invoked in the style of Greek tragedy, or the unflinching realism of those pictures my son had found in my desk. In Agamben’s thought, bare life is certainly not a figure of fantasy. Yet the dramatic abstractness of the concept, which treats Auschwitz as the truth of Western politics, and its heightened rhetoric of life and death, of state of exception, of sovereign ban, and animalization ultimately create an affective space where identifications and psychical enjoyment go unchecked. Agamben’s impolitical politics takes place under the sign of death: the corpse, not in its universal inviolability, but infinitely violable. The problem is that violence separated from its roots and conditions—suffering, pure and simple, even when only referenced in philosophical terms—engages us in ways that no other subject does. Representation of violence creates a certain form of complicity because it engages psychical structures of attraction–repulsion. Historical, philosophical, or representational contextualization, the restoration of contingency, and the reflexive awareness of standpoint, by contrast, work against this complicity. And that is the issue I will pursue in the remainder of this essay. Haiti Turning the pages in Bruce Gilden’s book of photographs entitled Haiti (1996) can feel like an assault.18 Animal carcasses, a Port-au-Prince abattoir, street dogs, a funeral crowd, bodies sweating, bodies covered in dust, bodies dripping with mud, a body prostrate on the street, a corpse lying unattended, eyes open, face covered in flies. Gilden gets unbearably close to his subjects.19 In these images, the human body loses its aura, its sense of inviolability. Skin becomes texturized, sandy, gritty like the surface of a Tapiès painting (figure 4.2). It is the physical closeness of the prison guard or the torturer, not that of the parent or the lover. The photographer imposes himself, and his subjects stare right back, not with the collected deep gaze of the fashion model but with the defiance and mockery of someone who is being intercepted (figure 4.1). Winner of the 1996 European Publishers’ award for photography, Gilden’s book has artistic aspirations. This is not news photography. Haiti is a highgloss product, and the European Publishers’ award meant publication in six

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Figure 4.1. Mourners at a cemetery, 1990. Photograph by Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos.

languages and wide distribution in Europe and the United States. Although Gilden’s style belongs to the tradition of street photography of Walker Evans and Henri Cartier-Bresson (which means, among other things, no staged or planned pictures) and thus has historical links to documentary photography, Haiti’s mode of circulation and reception is that of art photography, not of photojournalism. As Gilden explained in an 1997 interview with Christine Redmond for the Irish photography magazine Source, he made his first trip to Haiti in 1984, and the fifty-six black-and-white photographs that make up the book are the result of about sixteen three-week trips. The last pictures were taken in 1995.20 His photographs thus cover the last two years of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship, dechoukaj (the uprooting of Duvalier’s apparatus of oppression by acts of popular justice), the violently suppressed elections of 1987, the military regimes of Henri Namphy and Prosper Avril, the Aristide elections, the coup against Aristide, and Aristide’s return to Haiti in 1994. But the reader does not know this; the photographs have no titles, no captions, no dates. The only context offered is a brief introductory essay by the British writer Ian

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Figure 4.2. Flour worker in La Saline eating lunch, 1984. Photograph by Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos.

Thomson, who in turn composed his text largely by lifting passages out of his travel narrative Bonjour Blanc, an account of his travels in Haiti in the years between the fall of Duvalier, 1986 and 1990.21 The text is broken up into twoor three-sentence paragraphs that alternate between boldface and ordinary print with no apparent logic, and jump restlessly between the 1791–1804 revolution, the Duvalier regime of the mid-twentieth century, and the present. In the end, any sense of coherence and narrative is lost. The dominant effect is that of disorientation. We could dismiss Gilden’s photographs as another instantiation of the discourse of Haiti’s grotesque otherness. What country would not appear bizarre if you scramble the context sufficiently? The publisher’s publicity office, in any event, must have decided that that was the way to sell the book. This is how the short editorial description ends: “Steeped in Voodoo and brutalised

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by its rulers, [Haiti] is a country where human life is cheap and animals hardly worthy of life. The unconscious violence that runs through from slaughterhouse to street is chillingly captured in Gilden’s photographs.” Note the play on opposition and implication: accepting the images of Haitian otherness, we also accept the idea that we, whoever that may be, are not steeped in religious ritual, and that Haitians are not brutalized by ad hoc foreign interventions. In Haiti, politics and religion exist only as a form of devolution. As a reviewer for the U.K.-based Haiti Support Group says of Gilden’s book, “These visions seem more exploited than comprehended. The pages are crowded with blind eyes, skulking dogs and graveyard hysterics. This seems to represent the typical colonial curio mentality, obscuring Haiti by mystification.”22 Certainly I understand why the reviewer felt that way about Gilden’s pictures. The first time I saw them, my reaction was similar. It does not help that some of the editorial decisions about the book were evidently dictated by the expectation that the colonial curio shop sells, and that Haiti is most attractive if presented as incomprehensible. But the photographs themselves are a different story. I have come to think that they are problematic in a much more profound way, and that they embody an aesthetics of bare life that is not simply equivalent with the colonialist clichés of travelers’ narratives and zombie movies. It is because of their artistic complexity and their reflexive structure that they offer an opening for a reflection on the difficulty of representing violence, the rhetoric of bare life, and the moral and political dilemmas that come with this. Compare Gilden’s pictures to those of the well-known Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. Where Salgado offers us a humanist celebration of the heroism and beauty of the people in sweeping canvasses reminiscent of nineteenth-century historical paintings, Gilden forces us to look closely. And what we see is the violability of the body. The photos are taken as if in defiance of any public and private distinction: taken in public, the photos deliberately violate their subject’s intimacy. Consider figure 4.1, evidently a picture of a funeral. The photographer must be crouching right next to the open grave. No room for piety here. There is also no space for politics in these crowded pictures—no public buildings, no monuments, no political activities recognizable as such. The production of bare life is the combined effect of certain photographic

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techniques, such as closeness to the subject and the use of daylight flash, as well as the editorial decision to erase any reference to the highly politicized, tumultuous time between 1984 and 1995. The people who make up Haiti are not political subjects. Yet the subjects of the photographs do not exist without relation to power. Take the portrait of a man with his eyes squeezed shut (figure 4.3), two hands manipulating his head. In the Magnum Web gallery, the caption reads, “Portau-Prince. 1995. La Saline. The beating.” With that information, we are likely to make a connection between the man’s evident discomfort and the soldier’s shadow in the background. Perhaps it is a U.N. peacekeeper or one of the U.S. soldiers that brought Aristide back to Haiti in 1994? We would instantly wonder who did the beating. Anti-Aristide gangs? Pro-Aristide gangs? Foreign soldiers? The implied story would be a political one. But without a caption,

Figure 4.3. The beating, La Saline, 1995. Photograph by Bruce Gilden/Magnum Photos.

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a different story emerges. Not knowing that the subject has suffered a beating, we focus on what seems most disconcerting: a hand on the left, in a latex glove, pulling the crown of his head in one direction, another hand coming from the right, pulling his chin in the other. The intention of the gesture is familiar from the photo studio: to avoid the mug-shot effect, the portraitee is to tilt his head. But the gesture is broken down here into its components— two different hands, a pull in opposite directions, and a conflict of intentions between an uncomfortable subject and a photographer trying to get a good picture. We might say this amounts to a deconstruction of traditional portraiture: it shows not the worth and social standing of a subject who seeks to immortalize himself, but bodily suffering, the sweat, pain, eyes shut, the transience of human life and its violability. The putative violence of the beating becomes the de facto violence of photography. The picture not only shows bare life; it also shows that without photographic violence, we would never actually see bare life. Switching from the language of photography to that of political theory, we might say that the place of the all-powerful sovereign in these pictures is occupied by the camera itself. This is certainly the case in figure 4.3, but consider figure 4.1 too. There is the evident hostility by some of the men toward the photographer. But that is not all. With the sole exception of the little girl, it is unclear whether the mourners look at the photographer crouched beside the grave or at the grave itself. In the end, it seems that the camera (and by extension I who scrutinize this picture) occupies the space of death. Several other pictures work through this idea: the portrait of a blind man, for instance, staring unseeingly into the camera, with the shadow of the photographer distinctly outlined on his canvas shirt, a picture with Foucauldian overtones that hardly need to be spelled out; or the picture of a man carrying a large joint of raw meat on his head, taken against the backdrop of a white adobe wall, with the shadow of the photographer crouching, very distinct on the white wall, like a predatory beast, and the subject patently unaware of the fact that his picture is being taken. The troubling, disturbing ambiguity of Gilden’s photographs is thus a complicated matter. No doubt, there is a certain complicity with a discourse about Haiti as the grotesque other of Western civilization. What are we to make of figure 4.2, for instance? The Magnum Web gallery gives us the following

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caption: “Port-au-Prince. 1984. Flour worker in La Saline eating lunch.” A fairly mundane scene, it turns out. But without that information, we are more likely to think of zombies. The radical decontextualization and the erasure of any political space or historical reference produce a Haiti that is opaque and incomprehensible: suffering bodies, violent death, zombielike figures, a world that does not draw a categorical distinction between the life of animals and of humans, or even between life and death. The issue is further complicated by the fact that there is a reflexive insight that it is the camera that produces these pictures: what Gilden’s camera sees is usually not visible to the bare eye. It is not necessarily Haiti. It all turns on angles, on shadows, on focus, on composition. The photographer is part of the picture: as shadow, as hand, as focus of the subject’s gaze. Haitian bare life is a product of the photographic artifice. This artistic self-awareness is of course a fairly conventional strategy and does not necessarily solve the moral and political questions: what does it mean to say “it is not really Haiti” if the book is titled Haiti? Still, it matters that this reflexivity is presented as a power relation: the subjects’ gaze is confrontational, the hand manipulates, the photographer intrudes. Photography as interpellation? As performance? We could argue that Gilden’s pictures stage the operations of power on bare life; that they are reenactments of life in the Global South, and that the decontextualized, depoliticized bodies must not be misunderstood as pertaining to the discourse of exotic otherness. The subjects are imposed upon, cajoled, intercepted; that is the point. When we speak the language of bare life, we always speak the language of the sovereign. But in the end, I wonder whether we can really understand Gilden’s photographs in terms of a purely cognitivist aesthetics. Is it our desire for knowledge that they satisfy? Do we enjoy them because they make us understand the operations of power in Haiti? That seems unlikely. I think that its aesthetics of bare life engage us on an affective level that remains deeply ambiguous. The unsettling subject matter of the photographs and their striking artistic quality work against each other, with one operating as a limit on the other. Their stark beauty and artistic power work as a bulwark against a contextual involvement, be it of the cognitive or humanistic sort. It is not possible to say that we feel pity for the corpse on the street. The picture does not invite

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us to ask why he is dead and what killed him. We worry about the flies—what Barthes in his classic essay on photography called the punctum.23 At the same time, however, their disturbing subject matter works against any feeling of aesthetic pleasure. Again, the comparison with Salgado might be useful here: even where the subject is poverty, or a refugee camp, or life in a favela, Salgado offers us “the people” for our aesthetic pleasure. But how could we possibly say the picture of the corpse gives us an occasion for pleasure? If pushed, we might say, at most, that these pictures are technically sophisticated and the result of a lot of patience and hard work. Where does that leave us? It is a place of both intense discomfort and enjoyment, a place where it becomes difficult to know whether our discomfort is the result of having seen too much already or of not having seen it all, or perhaps of having enjoyed something that is really beyond enjoyment. Bare life becomes a site of what we might call, with Lacan, surplus enjoyment or jouissance, where pleasure and pain become indistinguishable and where ultimately a desire for more would turn into an unbearable closeness: sadistic violence. Notes 1. For recent discussions of the issue of violence and representation, see Donald L. Donham, “Staring at Suffering: Violence as Subject,” 16–33, Julie Skurski and Fernando Coronil, “Dismembering and Remembering the Nation: The Semantics of Political Violence in Venezuela,” 83–143, and Allen Feldman, “Violence and Vision: The Prosthetics and Aesthetics of Terror,” 425–68, all in States of Violence: Politics, Youth, and Memory in Contemporary Africa, ed. Edna G. Bay and Donald L. Donham (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). See also Susan Sontag’s classic On Photography (New York: Picador, 1973) for a critique of Diane Arbus’s photographs of disabled subjects and a critique of the representation of the pain of others. 2. Jeremy D. Popkin, “Facing Racial Revolution: Captivity Narratives and Identity in the Saint-Domingue Insurrection,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 36, no. 4 (2003): 520. Popkin offers a nuanced study of eyewitness accounts of the events and argues that while the captivity narratives allowed for some subtleties of understanding and (limited) sympathy from the white captives, the contemporary press tended to follow a “rigid ideological formula,” as in the following verses: “But what horde of rebels Rushes maddened to carnage: In his cruel hands, the Slave Carries torch and death. Stop, tool of parricide” (514). For an interpretation of nineteenth-century reactions to the slave revolution, especially among the slaveholding elites in the larger

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Caribbean, see my Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). 3. See especially Anténor Firmin, whose De L’Egalité des races humaines: Anthropologie positive, ed. Jean Métellus (1885; reprint, Montreal: Mémoire d’Encrier, 2005), is not only a measured argument against Gobineau and a rigorous refutation of craniology and related practices deemed scientific at the time, but an attempt to reconstitute anthropology as a holistic, contextual discipline equally devoted to the study of physical, intellectual, and moral phenomena. Despite the fact that Firmin’s work is in many ways much closer to twentieth-century anthropology than most of nineteenthcentury European anthropology, his work fell into obscurity while Gobineau’s work went through innumerable editions. Carolyn Fluehr-Lobbain, “Anténor Firmin: Haitian Pioneer of Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 102, no. 3 (2000): 449–66. 4. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the World,” Cimarrón: New Perspectives on the Caribbean 2, no. 3 (1990): 3–12. Thanks to Michael Dash for the reference. 5. See Laënnec Hurbon, Le barbare imaginaire (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1987); Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Odd and the Ordinary.” The direct political ramifications of the international ostracism Haiti was submitted to are analyzed by Brenda Gayle Plummer in Haiti and the Great Powers, 1902–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988). Robert Lawless’s Haiti’s Bad Press: Origins, Development, and Consequences (Rochester, N.Y.: Schenckman, 1992) offers a sweeping analysis of the structures of prejudice in relation to Haiti. 6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). For a sympathetic discussion of the ambiguities in the concept of a bare life, see Andrew Norris, “Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,” diacritics 30, no. 4 (2000): 38–58. 7. Agamben, Homer Sacer, 83. 8. Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 77. 9. Agamben, Homer Sacer, 123. 10. It surely should count as remarkable, for instance, that one of the most influential exhibitions of contemporary art in Europe, the Documenta in Kassel, should this year take place under the heading of three leading questions, one of which is, “What is bare life?” 11. Front page of the New York Times, December 4, 2006. 12. Nuda vita is a translation of Walter Benjamin’s term das blosse Leben in his early essay “Toward a Critique of Violence,” Gesammelte Schriften 2, 1:179–203. Like

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bare in English, bloss in German can mean “mere,” but it is etymologically related to terms like Bloesse and entbloessen, and hence to the idea of an exposure or vulnerability due to a (limited) nakedness. But bloss is not synonymous with “naked.” By contrast, nudo in Italian can mean both “mere” and “naked,” thus shifting the weight toward dramatic, fully exposed nakedness. Note that Cesare Casarino translates nuda vita as “naked life” rather than “bare life,” thus taking a stance vis-à-vis the ambiguity of the term in favor of the more dramatic and graphic. Giorgio Agamben, Means without Ends: Notes on Politics, trans. Cesare Casarino and Vincenzo Binetti (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 13. For a critique of the notion of biopolitics, see Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. 14. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 285. 15. Ibid., 141. 16. For a discussion, see, e.g., Clarence Sholé Johnson, Cornel West and Philosophy: The Quest for Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2002), who argues on the basis of his reading of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding that Locke’s views on personhood are racialized in a way that the African slave would be excluded from the circumspect attempt to justify the loss of freedom in the Second Treatise. See also Julie Ward and Tommy Lott, eds., Philosophers on Race: Critical Essays (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), for a good collection of essays on Enlightenment philosophy and race. 17. We might remember Hannah Arendt’s argument here according to which violence and power are in fact opposites and the use of violence indicates a lack of power. Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harvest, 1970). 18. Bruce Gilden, Haiti (Stockport: Dewi Lewis, 1997). Other projects of Gilden’s include books on New York, the Japanese underworld, and rural Ireland. Thanks to Javier Guerrero for first calling my attention to Gilden’s Haiti book. Thanks also to Karen Probasco at Magnum for timely help. 19. Gilden attributes his aesthetics of closeness to Robert Capa, the renowned photographer of the Spanish civil war and World War II. Gilden cites Capa as saying, “If it’s not good enough, you are not close enough.” Gilden, Source 3, no. 4 (Winter 1997): 10. 20. I was not able to confirm dates and other details because attempts to schedule an interview with Bruce Gilden did not work out in time for this article. In Magnum’s Web gallery, Gilden’s pictures of Haiti are supplied with titles, dates, and locations (http://www.magnumphotos.com). The published book does not contain this information. The book also does not arrange the pictures chronologically. If there is a narrative to the arrangement of the pictures, it would be a story that moves from the hardships of life, through rituals of death and redemption, to death itself.

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21. Ian Thomson, Bonjour Blanc: A Journey through Haiti (1992; reprint, London: Vintage, 2004). The publisher’s blurb announces it as “an enthralling journey into the shadowy republic of Haiti. The land of Voodoo, zombies, and the Tontons Macoutes. In this classic account, history jostles with adventure, high comedy is touched with danger; and Haiti glows like a magic charm.” The Daily Telegraph is quoted on the front cover: “Hair-raising but hugely entertaining.” The narrative itself is journalistic and mostly sympathetic to the plight of Haitians. Still, it is plainly annoying to read, “The politics of this island [Gonâve] might have derived from Alice in Wonderland. But this was the comedy that one looked for in Haiti—the comedy of the banana skin” (62). Compare this to the praise Thomson’s previous book, a biography of Primo Levi, received in the New York Times: “Mr. Thomson’s reserve enables him to deal frankly with Levi’s emotional struggles and personal shortcomings, while avoiding the modern biographer’s overpowering temptations: to treat his main character as a moral inferior or a patient to be diagnosed.” Antony Grafton, “Surviving Auschwitz, Surrendering to Despair,” Books of the Times, November 8, 2003. That one could not say about his dealings with Haiti. 22. Haiti Briefng, no. 22, February 1997. 23. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Refections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982).

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The Violence of Executive Silence Pat r i c k s y lva i n Only through words can we know thought—only through thought can we know words. — a l l a n S t o e k l , Agonies of the Intellectual

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llan Stoekl’s contribution is crucial to the understanding of the French intellectuals who contended with, supported, or collaborated with Nazi Germany, then later agonizingly demonstrated their torments and contradictions through text during and after World War II. Stoekl’s text, Agonies of the Intellectual is of importance to my work as a social critic because it deals with the power of language and thought, especially the ways in which the rhetorician utilizes language. This chapter is far from being a work on textuality and formal rhetoric. However, Stoekl’s analysis of language and violent usage of it has proven useful in my analysis of speech, particularly the absence of language as an example of how verbal expression can be used violently. The French rhetorician can be substituted for the Haitian politician who abuses, negates, or simply fails to utilize language to express thought during a time of national crisis. In 2010, the agony of the intellectual was the agony of the executive, as demonstrated by the president of Haiti, René Préval, as a large part of his nation crumbled under a powerful earthquake. The leader of any nation should view language as his most pivotal tool in the arsenal of power. Once language fails, so does the armory. The political figure is a rhetorician who holds the responsibility of engaging in discursive acts to influence his constituency in the process of implementing policies, supporting a state vision, or establishing a vision for the

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state. The politician as rhetorician has language as his primary tool, and as such, his relationship to words is sacrosanct. Inherent in this sacredness is the communion between the leader and his people, formed at the time of the democratic electoral process and sustained throughout the duration of the assumed leadership. Given the rules of protocol and security, as well as the parameters established for the people to access the executive, language becomes the most direct way of communicating. The nation knows the selected thoughts of the president because they are expressed. The absence of verbal expression systematically leads to mere interpretation of thoughts and feelings, which in turn often leads to distortion and misunderstanding. Within a Foucauldian framework, Stoekl reminds us that “language, transgression, and the sacred . . . are thus intimately linked.”1 Under no circumstance can the executive remain silent when the nation is palpably anxious or in crisis, for he possesses a single power: his words. At a time of national crisis, if language is absent, the collective becomes disenchanted and fragmented, and the potential to establish and maintain collective subjectivity fails because the sacred is broken. In the case of Préval, his silence during the nineteen days that followed the January 12, 2010, earthquake can only be interpreted as a violation of the sacred trust established between the governed and the governor—a transgressive act, and thus one of violence. The politician at the helm of the executive should be the rhetorician who “can guarantee the containment of the vicious circle of violence purgation only by himself arbitrarily acting to contain violence in language.”2 Violence in language, through language, or in the absence of language when language is needed can only be engaged or contained by the master of the national pulpit in which power is seated—the executive. Especially in a democratic system, there is no leadership without clear elocution from the executive. As Heifetz and Linsky remind us, “People grant you power because they expect you to provide them with a service,” and such service must be a decisive leadership that reduces burden, or at least establishes a positive road map.3 Background and Rationale The goal of this chapter is to categorically systematize and establish a new topography of the prevailing effects of the politics of executive silence on the Haitian people. This chapter serves as an anthropological map that surveys

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the speeches of President Préval, his commentaries, his body language, and the public’s overall response to his executive temperament in order to scaffold and support my theory of structural vulnerability as it pertains to the existence and national subjectivity of the Haitian body. This chapter also presents an interdisciplinary body of analysis in order to provide an instructive theoretical discourse on executive silence-based politics as it relates to a symptomatic ecology of violence and indifference. Beyond any reasonable doubt, President Préval cares for Haiti’s welfare. He is not a sadist, as some of his staunchest critics have publicly pronounced; nor is he a demagogue who thrives on deceit and false prophecy. On the contrary, he is a practical politician who can be considered one of Haiti’s most astute political strategists. He knows how to win battles but ultimately fails at winning wars. Unfortunately, the war of trust was a battle that he failed miserably. In a country fatigued by mismanagement, Préval was once seen as a practical, reasonable, and politically agreeable person who would bridge the social and economic chasms wrought by the violent transitional period (2004–6) that brought about an increase in gang-related activities, the closure of businesses in the port area of Port-au-Prince, and an overall sociopolitical tension that further divided the political classes. Préval was also assumed to be a decisive arbitrator who would fulfill his role as a national president satisfactorily and not succumb to the politics of party affiliations or the delivery of empty rhetoric. His commitment to quash violence and stabilize Haiti was positively applauded. However, by 2008, after a series of adverse events that regressed his political progress and downgraded his leadership skills, trust in Préval began to erode. His legacy quickly became completely consumed by his handling of the nation in the aftermath of the devastating January 12, 2010, earthquake. The materialization of violence often transcends the boundaries of both physical and verbal violence to become constitutive in the realm of the symbolic, where gestures and nonverbal acts become tragic form of ambiguity that are associated with political dis/engagement. Although the unanimous common denominator often lies in the presence of physical violence, symbolic or what I term cerebral violence, is an awareness of the other but with a contemptuous response, one akin to nihilistic estrangement. For example, in a culture of organized crime in Boston, the notion of having a code

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of silence is accepted and widely used because of a fear of replication and reprisals. According to Kaethe Weingarten, silence “incubates fear, shame incubates violence, often retaliatory violence.”4 In psychology, when dealing with trauma, silence in the subject of a traumatic event is seen as a form of suppression, thus needing intervention; because, as Weingarten reminds us, having the “ability to reflect on one’s experience is a key capacity that fosters resilience. It allows one to witness the self and to witness others.”5 However, silence by an adult who witnesses repeated violence toward a minor is seen as a direct contributor or enabler of violence due to his abandonment of accountability for the sake of the common good, civility, and the overall protection of human rights. The materialization of silence can also be a byproduct of trauma stemming from the application of torture. Idelber Avelar maintains, “Forced production of utterances during the act of torture may lead to a trauma that eventually buries the subject into silence altogether.”6 The forced utterances that torture produces are a form of language production “so as to manufacture the absence of language.”7 In this case, violence produces silence, whereas intentional silence lies beyond the meditative process of negating language in order to access a deeper level of knowledge. This acquires a different kind of thought process, and the level of language production contrasts that of the negation of language during a time of crisis to cocoon oneself and one’s position. In order to deconstruct the intricacies of silence as it pertains to the executive, one must look at the head of state, who, through the social contract of the electoral process, holds the normative prowess of assuring the safe continuity of the nation as mandated by the constitution and the safeguarding of inalienable rights. Article 148 of the Haitian constitution prescribes that in the event that the president is temporarily incapacitated, a ministerial council must preside under the leadership of the prime minister. Given that President Préval was not incapacitated after the earthquake of 2010, he was required to fulfill his role as head of state, as mandated by Article 136, which states that he must serve as the legal guardian of the nation and respectfully assure the stability of the institutions, the regular functions of the public spheres of power, and the continuity of the state. Meditative silence during a time of national crisis is not prescribed, nor is it ethical in moments of catastrophic challenge. However, it was the primary

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recourse chosen by Préval in the days following the earthquake. His response, or lack thereof, earned him several sobriquets—devil, alcoholic, K.K. (kaka)—which were inscribed on walls throughout the capital. Here, Allan Stoekl’s reading of Jean Paulhan’s rhetorician is apropos: “Ultimately it is the rhetorician who dictates that the vicious circle of purgation be purged, that clear communication and judgment based on grammar be restored—and his power is based on nothing more or nothing less than his blinding authority as a grammarian.”8 It is the executive politician at a time of national crisis who might bring about hope and restore a sense of collectivity in the nation through his effective and sensible language. He might efface the potentially vile rhetoric that would further soil the nation. Instead, Préval did not fulfill his role as the national rhetorician, and he failed to provide the people with the grammar of hope, the inspirational language they were looking for. As a result, he failed to contain violence. Violence in the Haitian landscape remains amorphous and relatively elusive; poverty and unaccountability have encrusted the cultural and political landscape, rendering the Haitian physical and human geography structurally vulnerable. The landscape of indifference is so deeply rooted in the nation’s history that silence by Haitian executives has created a political culture of ineptitude and passivity. In 1842, a devastating earthquake that traversed most of the northern part of Haiti received a delayed response (seventeen days) by then-president Boyer (1813–43), which led to the political division of the entire island. Not only did President Boyer belatedly address the needs of the nation, but also he only focused on the governmental needs of the port city of Cap-Haïtien at the expense of all the other damaged northern towns. His inept leadership was eventually met with violence from the people and the military. Given Haiti’s history, Haitians “knew no other way to dislodge their president for life, whose actions had begun to appear more and more dictatorial.”9 Indifference begat violence and violence became the modus operandi. The 1937 genocide of Haitians on the Dominican Republic border was the largest organized and systematic killing of civilians by a foreign military in the twentieth-century Americas. It was conservatively estimated at 20,000, and amplified to 40,000, for the number dead. This massacre, which took place within a forty-eight-hour period, transpired without a display of aggravation on the part of the Vincent administration, as it maintained amicable political

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ties with the Trujillo regime, which orchestrated the massacre. Even the subsequent Haitian governments of Léscot, Estimé, Magloire, and Duvalier failed to pursue full legal actions against the then functioning totalitarian Trujillo regime, which often negated the letters of accord and continued to mistreat Haitians. Under mounting pressure from the population, on November 12, 1937, one month and eight days after the massacre, the Vincent administration finally brought the case to the Inter-American Conference. The Trujillo government rejected this move under the pretext that it was a local incident. However, on December 17, Trujillo was compelled to accept the mediation ruling, which brought about a Haitian–Dominican legal accord, signed on January 31, 1938. This accord mandated that the Dominican Republic pay the Haitian government $750,000 on behalf of the victims. Only the first installment of $250,000 was disbursed, and in addition, all lost properties ceased to be returned, thus violating the agreement.10 To date, in 2011, Haitians are still being killed in the Dominican Republic, many of whom have suffered miserable conditions as laborers on large sugar plantations. Unfortunately, the victims and families of the 1937 massacre did not receive one cent of the disbursed funds, and their legacy became a mere footnote in the history of the nation. As Suzy Castor remarks in a compelling study of the massacre, “The massacre itself and the attitude of abandonment on the part of the administration had had an unprecedented impact on all the social classes of the nation, and had created an explosive climate: the chief of state had irremediably lost his authority.”11 However, the lost legitimacy did not translate into a loss of power, as Haiti’s authoritarian rule under President Sténio Vincent was reinstituted at the end of the American occupation (1915–34), which consequently brought about an array of light-skinned elites into power. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was primarily writers and intellectuals who probed the nature of the massacre and historicized it. Jean Price-Mars, in the 1950s, was first to explore the implications of this event, and Suzy Castor, in the mid-1970s, later analyzed the archives. In the following decades, two writers elucidated the massacre through the power of novels: René Philoctète in the 1980s and Edwidge Danticat in the 1990s. Specifically, Danticat’s novel, Farming of Bones (1998), rekindled the memory of the massacre, thanks to its vast acclaim in the Anglophone world. In it, she probes the notion of silence: “In all this, our so-called president says nothing, our papa

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Vincent—our poet—he says nothing at all to this affront to the children of Dessalines, the children of Toussaint, the children of Henry; he shouts nothing across this river of our blood.”12 Writing about history, and thus social events, has served to transmit irreversible experiences and has aimed to scaffold consciousness in order to faithfully translate through language the realms of paradoxes and forces of order and disorder in the human social construct so that the past cannot be rendered silent. Writing is vocalizing, and vocalizing is agency. Hence, the victims of the 2010 earthquake vocalized their anger toward President Préval because he failed them as their leader and therefore lost his legitimacy. In that sense, the national agency within the productive context of historical rhetoric or reciprocity of symbolic language construction by the people must be analyzed not as dealing with muted objects of power strangulation, but as dealing with subjects with a form of agency, and also as actors with consciousness who are unrepresented by their elected leaders. I concur with Michel-Rolph Trouillot in claiming that “historical narratives address particular situations and, in that sense, they must deal with human beings as actors.”13 In Haitian historical narratives of power and responsibility, the executive has often proven silent while the Haitian cadre of victims has tried to vocalize their desires and needs without representation. The violent utterances of the victims as agents and as actors proves that “as subjects, that is, as voices aware of their vocality,” even when the vocality of the executive as supreme figure has been silent.14 When the tenor of the executive voice is most needed to recognize suffering and attend with sympathy, a vocalized recognition of national suffering should be a validated form of agency and subjectivity. Exclusionary Politics and Reverberating Silence Préval’s executive silence at the critical juncture of the nation’s greatest natural catastrophe was tantamount to political disrespect and exclusion. It also was representative of the conditions responsible for the creation of a continually marginalized segment of society. This time, the amplification of executive silence as violent reverberated through all sectors of society, given the scope of the disaster. Such a reverberating silence became an altered form of violence as the nation fearfully awaited guidance and collective reassurance in the presence of newly arrived foreign military personnel. As Préval’s silence

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reverberated throughout the nation, symbolic and physical violence accumulated in the capital as there grew a perverse widespread perception of antipathy, repugnance, abandonment, and powerlessness. The elected patriarchal figure of the nation became an “unwanted drunkard,” a papa kaka (shitty father), an incompetent figurehead who was no longer wanted by a population that expressed their disgust through protests, songs, and graffiti. While expletives being hurled at the head of a nation amid catastrophic crisis is difficult to entertain, it can be argued that Haitians were also lucky, at least, to have had the minimal expressive space to articulate their own feelings. As Anthony Giddens has determined, such “dialogic democracy becomes a prime means for the containment or dissolution of violence”—and violence in this sense is physical.15 However, the physical pain, mental anguish, and emotional distress that preceded the earthquake in the absence of leadership could have only been expressed by the symbolic language of violence present in most of the affected towns. Despite Préval’s demands for governmental continuity during the presidential election of February 2011, his party candidate, Jude Célestin, did not make it to the second round (albeit on a technicality) because he failed to articulate his political stance and set himself apart from Préval. Hence, he was rejected at the ballot box, and a rude boy entertainer, Michel Martelly, won the presidency, his election serving as a rejection of the status quo. Silence, or unexpressed thoughts at a time of national crisis, is an indicator of impotent leadership, especially when verbal communication is expected; furthermore, silence indicates a vulnerability that disconnects individuals and leads to a surreal state of relational dissonance and disengagement. Paul Farmer’s Haiti: After the Earthquake expresses some sympathy for President Préval, “who had already taken a public shellacking for failing to move more quickly to meet the immediate needs of the victims.” Nevertheless, Farmer articulates his reservations about him taking a position of power in a country where “governing Haiti was a pretty thankless job, and sometimes a lethal one,” and then states that such a country with acute and chronic problems “would have given any head of state nightmares.”16 While it is true that electing to run for office in a challenging territory such as Haiti is difficult, the responsibility is still the executive’s to bear; he is chosen to be the head of state, the pathfinder for the country’s existential morass. Having miraculously

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avoided being crushed on the day of the earthquake, Préval gained a new vocabulary, a new register—one of victimhood. Unfortunately, however, his newly acquired language failed to give rise to a narrative that expressed sympathy for the collective as victims, a narrative that might have fueled a discourse of togetherness and symbiotic healing, as well as formed koumbit, the quintessential Haitian peasants’ work cooperative model. Unlike Farmer, Amy Wilentz is much more direct in her critique of Préval, whom she claimed “walks around with his shoulders down, like a beaten dog.”17 Wilentz further bemoans the lack of leadership when she declares that Haiti does not need “a fiery populist demagogue, as Aristide once was, but someone who would speak to the people in a time of national emergency, not remain silent and staring. There’s enough silence and staring to go around among the victims of this disaster. They don’t need more of same from their President. Where’s Haiti’s Churchill?”18 Perhaps it would have been more culturally appropriate for Wilentz to invoke Louverture’s name. On Leadership One of the greatest challenges that has faced—and still faces—the Haitian republic is that of effective leadership. By continually concentrating political and economic activity in the capital city, Port-au-Prince, the leaders have failed at developing national politics that are inclusive and would address the exclusion of the Haitian peasant from the productive development of the country. By operating largely within the sphere of Port-au-Prince, the minority lower middle class and the even smaller elite confine their productive activities within controlled parameters and systematically deny educational growth or opportunities to the majority of the population, which are considered peasants, or moun andeyò. Paradoxically, as an agrarian society, Haiti’s economic and political elites reject its semiautonomous peasantry in favor of the cosmopolitan foreign other. Hence, century-long practices of injustice and exclusionary politics have been repeated within the modern instrument of power. In the past, a few leaders have tried to alter the conscience of the elite, but inevitably, their efforts ended up spiraling into greater conflicts. The poor majority, the moun andeyò, has been the single most important source of national cultural creativity and character. The national energy that Haiti emits derives from those who were and are still excluded from both power

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and education. By continually marginalizing the peasant class, a part of the national energy dissipates as people are rescued by foreign organizations that are mostly missionary based and have primary intentions of religious conversion. Unfortunately, the national leaders failed at positively capitalizing on the peasants’ koumbit (collective) system of production and corporation. A koumbit could have potentially formed the basis for a distinctively Haitian mode of socialization and national production. Echoing Mimi Sheller, it is worth noting that “peasant democracy involves a collective subject and collective aims.”19 The disappointing recurrence of ineffective leadership in a structurally vulnerable nation that has regressed into a failed state must be viewed through its process of sedimentation of negative power relations that have become normative. Such normative practices in the realm of ineffective institutional leaderships must be understood and analyzed because they persist as a set of practical and structural tools that shape social relations through temporal as well as spatial realms. Here, certain fundamental categories, such as social interactions, are accepted as antagonistic and static. Moun andeyò (provincial folk) versus moun lavil (urban folk); moun sòt (uneducated) versus moun lespri (educated folk); moun anwo (upper crust) versus moun anba (bottom dwellers). Those antagonistic moun hierarchies run counter to national cohesiveness, and Haitian national leaders have failed to disassemble the rigid structures that are forcing the nation to collapse from within. The very collapse of the nation, apart from its social and economic challenges, was and is still based on the fundamental notion of moun (people). The desire to be subjective agents of their own history was what brought Haitians the universal declaration of human rights in the first place; yet that same notion of equality and peoplehood became so elusive after the revolution that even today, Haitians continue to fight for the basic elements of human rights and dignity. It is unfortunate that the fundamental building blocks of the nation, the citizens, are for the most part relegated to the periphery by the economic and political elite. Just as under feudalism, as Robert Rotberg remarks, Haiti simply remains in “a perpetuation of the kind of personalization of power which had proved efficacious during and since the time of slavery.”20 In essence, the continual demounization (dehumanization) of the poor black population that resides outside of the capital or within the

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periphery of the marginalized class of the urban dwellers can be constituted as the by-product of centuries of neglect and abuse by the ruling classes, both political and economic. Consequently, Préval’s silence was symptomatic of a fundamental national problem that has been in existence for centuries. Even a mildly effective communicator at the helm of power understands the importance of words and would try to communicate the necessity of having a cohesive nation during a time of crisis, because it is only through communication that trust and hope can be embodied from the conditions of despair. An effective leader ought to be driven by the ethos of executive civility. As former Haitian prime minister Michèle Pierre-Louis remarks, “I think Haitians should be deciding what kind of society they want to build in the future. It’s our responsibility, and I don’t think we should run away from that. If we run away, it’s going to be a disaster, too.”21 For too long, we have run into disasters instead of away from preventable adversities just because the inclusive we was never a part of the formulation, and a plethora of leaders have failed to build a cohesive society, regardless of the external pressures that were placed on Haiti, since the 1804 national revolution. The vertiginous decline of the nation to the apocalyptic destruction of the 2010 earthquake, predominantly in the capital city, is not only a failure of government to implement national welfare policies, but also a failure to communicate the eminent dangers of Haiti’s predicament. As Allan Stoekl reminds us, “Rhetoricians are not to be confused with the man in the street: their procedure is actually the opposite of the everyday relation with words. They undergo an ‘initiation,’ which enables them to do things, and create things, with words.”22 As a seasoned politician who served first as prime minister and then as a full-term president, Préval understands the inner workings of power, and the desires as well as the requirements of the people. He has personally been affected by political tragedies: the military coup d’état of September 1991 that killed over 5,000 people; the January 14, 2000, assassination attempt against his sister and other members of his cabinet; and in that same year, on April 3, the well-orchestrated murder of his friend and national figure, Jean Dominique. Additionally, he has witnessed various other tragedies, including deadly hurricanes. Considering his public displays of emotion, it would be difficult to categorize him as unsympathetic; however, it is evident that as a calculating politician, his failings have been due to the very fact that he understands the

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Haitian political processes and the threat that drug trafficking and political instability generate for the future of the country. The political character of a leader can determine the extent to which he would react or respond to a national crisis. One can analyze Préval’s methodical response when he appeared on CNN on January 13, 2010. He focused primarily on his own lack of a place to live instead of appealing to the Haitians, both in Haiti and abroad, to form an effective chain of solidarity for the future of the afflicted nation. He was interviewed again by CNN anchor Christiane Amanpour a few days later, on January 19. At that time, he had yet to address the concerned nation, even as a multitude of criminal prisoners had escaped from the national penitentiary. When prodded on the issue of security, his answers were vague and unconvincing: “I am convinced that every Haitian understand that everybody is a victim in that catastrophe, whether the government, or MINUSTAH [United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti], and all of the sectors of the population. . . . With the help of MINUSTAH and the police, we are going to continue enforcing security and keep the population in a safe environment.”23 Meanwhile, there were no safe or adequate encampments designated by the government as millions of displaced individuals continued to languish in unsafe conditions. The existence of blatantly violent symbolic language that targeted the president a few weeks after the earthquake was indicative of the indignation of a violated population that felt as though they must respond in some way to their conditions. Consequently, in light of the American military presence, as well as that of the French, the president, who must constitutionally guarantee the territorial integrity of nation, was legally and ethically bound to explain to the nation the nature of the troops’ existence. The violation of the sacred space of power through violent words of protest revealed the population’s level of discontent with Préval as he failed to capitalize on any initial sentiments of solidarity that the people felt right after the earthquake. A year later, as National Republic Radio reporter Carrie Kahn articulates in her report on Haiti, the “political instability engulfing Haiti is just the latest trouble for Préval, who has been widely criticized for his handling of the aftermath of last year’s earthquake.”24 Each calamity became an added burden to his despised leadership. As Kahn further reports, one victim of the quake, Carlos Jean, who was encamped near the destroyed

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palace, referred to it as “the devil’s house,” while another man, a wandering art vendor, Charles, vehemently expressed his views: “René Préval is the devil in this country. In his time, we received cholera, earthquake, tsunami. We don’t need him in this country anymore.”25 In an environment where material and structural violence is tangible, symbolic violence through protest became an added element in the politics of disrespect that Haitians are unfortunately so accustomed to. In his defense, in the same interview with Carrie Kahn, Préval responded to his perceived apathy and national absence: “I don’t have a style of leadership that is like show business. I prefer to work and be efficient.”26 Certainly it is valid that Préval, along with his ministers, had been relatively efficient prior to the earthquake in buttressing state institutions, building roads and schools, tempering gang violence, increasing electricity output, and increasing agricultural production. But his history of silence did much to detract from his legacy: during his second term, he failed to give a political speech, and he assumed a largely hands-off position during the food riots of 2008. Fundamentally, it was Préval’s momentous silence after the earthquake that completely erased his accomplishments and prodded the people’s symbolically violent disapproval of his presidency. Structural Vulnerability The 2010 earthquake was not only a site of cataclysmic devastation. It also revealed gaping contradictions that exist as part of Haitian society and render the nation structurally vulnerable. Millions of Haitians and people of Haitian descent currently live in subhuman conditions in Haiti and in neighboring countries; the nation also has an unfortunate susceptibility to healthcompromising pathogens. These institutional weaknesses are fully palpable. Despite these elements, there has been an overall failure by Haitians to systematically address and redress the root causes of Haiti’s impoverishment and susceptibility to destruction, which exposes the deficiency of its leadership. The scaffolding that supports the entire society is compromised. The lack of viable institutions renders the nation ill-equipped to survive calamities, and it allows external and internal forces to apply pressure and negatively affect various elements within a society. The structural vulnerability of Haiti is clearly a product of its harsh legacy of slavery, occupation, dictatorship, hyperexploitation, and willful neglect.

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This has eroded the thin fabric of the nation, leaving a country, as Michel Rolph-Trouillot describes, a “state against nation,” where the interests of the state and its political actors supersede the collective interests of the nation. Additionally, internal forces, including the structural polity engendered by postcolonial rule, also fail to reconstitute an imbalance created by France in the form of divisive class and race politics, as well as the politics of integral territoriality that are psychologically embedded in the draconian policies of nationhood. As Robert Fatton Jr. points out, “Haiti’s predicament is not rooted in the absence of a nation, but rather in the ruling class’s incapacity to construct an ‘integral’ state.” By that, he means “a state . . . capable of organizing both the political unity of the different factions of the ruling class and the ‘organic relations between . . . political society and civil society.’”27 It is the absence of nation-state integrality that has caused such grave structural vulnerability, resulting in a place where normative rules of attributive governance cannot be applied. Furthermore, problems that have arisen from the lack of social and political governance have affected every sector of civil society, creating a warped dynamic of independent selves rather than sculpting a diversely unified Haitian identity. Also integral to the problematic of nation-state integrality is the notion of representation. Although Haiti has periodically had legitimate governments, equitable representation has always been at the core of the struggle for power and political survival, contributing to the tensions experienced within a systemically feeble governmental institution. A year and a half after the devastating earthquake, Préval’s successor, Michel J. Martelly, after nearly four months of being in office, still did not have a sitting government, the result of parliamentary and political class infighting. In the ineffectual and disjoined nation-state, the incentive to obey the rule of law is never fully a legal or a nationally constructed ethos, but rather at times is the result of a self- or community-based moral expectation. For it is those who are in the position of power who are the first violators of the rule of law. Unfortunately, selfinterest supersedes national interests. Again, Robert Fatton Jr. is correct in asserting that in Haiti, “both the possessing and ruling classes have no social project, except the day-to-day struggle of keeping themselves in positions of power, wealth, and prestige.”28 The structural vulnerability of the Haitian society has eroded even the venerable religious and secular traditions where a form of communal ethos, a

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koumbitaj, had maintained the integrity of individuals within the corruptible political space. Increasingly, dishonesty and one-upmanship have regressively become the normative functions of society since the feeble state along with the nonproductive possessing class have, as Fatton Jr. reminds us, “neither a national vision nor a coherent ideology, their time horizon never goes beyond the immediate short term. Ruling and possessing classes are not always in alliance; whatever unity they achieve is rooted in an opportunistic convergence of interests.”29 This convergence of interests is hardly ever nationally oriented, and the civil society is unable to maintain its esteemed traditions for the reason that relationships are increasingly based on opportunistic kinships that eat away at the fabric of the society. The grave structural vulnerabilities revealed by the 2010 earthquake prompted members of the chamber of commerce to declare in March 2010 that: For the first time in the history of Haiti, a unified and inclusive private sector, organized around the Private Sector Economic Forum (PSEF) has decided to break with the past and formulate a shared vision and roadmap for the sustainable development of Haiti. Under the leadership of President Préval and the management of Minister Bellerive, we re-affirm our commitment to working to create an equitable, fair and opportunity-laden society for all Haitians. . . . We propose to create a New Social Compact that involves government, civil society, and the private sector—ranging from the large businesses to the informal traders and smallholder farmers throughout the country—in a partnership built on respect and mutual trust. This partnership will have to include, without discrimination, Haitians living abroad. The New Social Compact will have at its core the strengthening of democracy and free enterprise, and a commitment to individual freedom, both political and economic.30

One can argue that the formative processes of structural vulnerability are less a function of one-party responsibility, that of the possessing class, and more a synchronous confluence of malevolent and corrupted practices sanctioned by an inept state and a nonproductive possessing class to affect marginalized and exploited civil society. The aforementioned private sector’s statement is indicative of its conscious and willful neglect of the masses since the inception of the nation. As Paul Farmer correctly points out, there are “many factors within Haitian borders and without, [that] had weakened Haiti’s institutions

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and made its people so vulnerable to the quake.”31 One of those factors is the systemic drive to hyperexploit the people, even to the extent of their death or their social calcification as non-moun, as if protohumans. Politics of Disrespect The politics of disrespect are a by-product of the Haitian national politics of exclusion that has been on display since the inception of the nation and has been present prior to, during, and after January 12. The politics of disrespect, and thus of sociocultural violence on the excluded other, are of crucial importance to nation building and cohesiveness, as associations and institutions lack the power or agenda to mediate between individuals, groups, and the state. Hence, in the absence of representation, representative democracy cannot be functional or legitimate, and the elected leaders who are unaccountable supplant democracy and aspirations to an inkling of equity as the basic unit of nation building. Inclusion, however, is further thwarted as a politics of disrespect reverberates throughout the realms of power. Consequently, in lieu of pursuing a politics of respect or a politics of civility that could rescue the fragments of society by developing a sense of common purpose, national interest, and a sense of Haitianness, marginalized groups are further isolated and exposed to greater vulnerability as the nation drifts away from cohesion to fragmentation, and virtues of civility quickly dissipate as individuals clamoring for their own lifelines are pitted against each other for survival. Such politics of disrespect and exclusion force people to alienate themselves from their ancestors, forgetting the purpose of nationhood as they feel abandoned by their leaders, and even by their fellow citizens. This sort of degradation of civic purpose and citizenship moves both individuals and institutions away from social engagement and into the realm of despotism that ultimately widens the scope of national conflict as the excluded population mushrooms. Social engagement, or what John Rawls refers to as social cooperation, is where certain “fair terms of cooperation articulate an idea of reciprocity and mutuality” so that society functions to achieve “justice as fairness” in order to “work out a conception of political and social justice which is congenial to the most deep-seated convictions and traditions of a modern democratic state.”32 Emphatically Rawls argues that there “is no

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alternative to social cooperation except unwilling and resentful compliance, or resistance and civil war.”33 In the absence of basic justice, and in the presence of unscrupulous politics and abject poverty, Préval has failed at halting the pervasive politics of disrespect when the vulnerability of the country was internationally exposed. Instead, he publicly addressed the mourning nation one full month after the quake during a faith-based gathering of organizations, calling for three days of prayers to mourn the dead. Instead of seizing on the opportunity to call on the Haitian cultural ethos of koumbit, the essence of solidarity and mutual interest that brought Haiti independence, he announced that his “only answer to all the pain was and is to continue to look for relief, particularly abroad, to help ease the pain of those who are suffering.”34 At least publicly, he officially stated his incapacity as head of state to galvanize the people toward self-reliance while appreciating the solidarity of the international community. As a begging country, the hope of establishing a sustainable, equitable nation becomes mired in the abyss of vulnerability. Politics of Incivility Executive silence as violence is much more than a product of a leader’s character; it is also a product of a culture continually engaged in the politics of disrespect. The Haitian politics of disrespect can be viewed as a form of systematized disregard that has violently degenerated the cultural tentacles of representation and political power relations. The moun andeyò, who are symbolically regarded as a pollutant, the infested other, is systematically rejected by the locus of power—unless, of course, they are needed during national elections. Otherwise, they are viewed as simple utilitarian objects that can be disposed of, and are definitely not important enough to be included or considered during national policy planning. Yanick Lahens superbly reminds us that we “have not been able to exercise either the consistency or the moderation necessary for the construction of a citizenship that should have protected the men and women of this land from subhuman living condition.”35 The ecological repercussions of the earthquake highlighted Haiti’s acute poverty and showcased its tragically epic past to the world; it also surfaced an opportunity to redress its past as politically poignant words such as refoundation, reconstruction, decentralization, and capacity building were brought to the forefront, at least by those in the international community. All the while, although

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working with some international partners, Préval never briefed the country regarding the status of the reconstruction efforts that were purportedly taking place on Haiti’s soil. As Raoul Peck realistically writes, “Knowing the shortcomings of my country and expecting no constancy in the thinking of the international community (Haiti will not be the first place to be abandoned by the media and humanitarian agencies), this provisional state of affairs is transforming itself already before our very eyes (in spite of the denials of Haitian and foreign leaders) into something definitive.”36 Préval’s executive silence within the critical first month of the catastrophe was reminiscent of Haiti’s shortcomings, an unconscious polity of abandonment that continues to sear incivility, not only disrespect but also a disregard of citizenship, onto the national political milieu. There were, however, additional factors at play that worked to undermine Préval’s agency as a leader. Adding to the difficulties faced at this time, the accidental and deadly introduction of cholera by a unit from the United Nations further destabilized the nation, as did the United States’ mandated presidential election, which brought further violence and uncertainties to the country. The surprise return of Haiti’s brutal dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier, and later, that of Haiti’s divisive former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, further worked to sully Préval’s credibility and authority. The postearthquake electoral fiasco fundamentally revealed another marker in Haiti’s shortcomings of incivility: that Haiti’s future was not to be decided by its people and national leaders. With the involvement of the Organization of American States and other agencies in the electoral process, the leadership of the country became further divided along ideological lines. Once again, the politics of disrespect and incivility that created a devastating landscape of abandonment and hyperexploitation paraded the corridors of power. Former prime minister Pierre-Louis dispatched an urgent plea when CNN’s Amanpour interviewed her: “Let’s be conscious that things have to change. We have to look at the future differently, and the world has to help us understand that if Haiti does not see how to get out of poverty, how to get out of disease, how to get out of this situation that the people are living in, we are going to be a trouble for the whole world.”37 The silence of the executive was a misfortune onto itself that perturbed the consciousness of the nation and derailed the agency of the victims who were

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seeking some form of guidance. Dreams and aspirations are made with spoken words, and contempt and rejection are interpreted through the absence of words—the cold of silence. In order to inhabit the collective hope, and I echo Michel Le Bris’s words, “it is first and foremost dreams that keep mankind upright.”38 It is acceptable to suggest that the president is a human being who has the right to be emotionally hurt, but it is absolutely unethical for the commander in chief, the executive leader, the symbolic father of the nation to remain silent while clearly still in charge of a country that is wailing for help. Harold Barrett reminds us: “As rhetorical creatures, we humans act with intention, i.e., with aim and purpose. The influencing of others is accomplished verbally and nonverbally, and it is the position here that messages invented—those of conscious design as well as those arising from below the level of consciousness—ordinarily will reflect the rhetor’s feeling and intent.”39 Intentionality would be dangerous for me to deconstruct; however, the pervasive effect of the president’s silence is material and is undeniably negative on the national landscape. The incivility and symbolic violence that the silence of the executive produced is tantamount to the denial of dreams, the denial of possibilities, and even to social death. Since February 2010, this death has slowly started to manifest around the camps as property owners forcibly retake their lands. In July 2011, a forced decampment of hundreds of quake victims occurred in public places like the Silvio Cator National Stadium and in the town of Delmas. The absence of effective leadership coupled with silence can only erode civility because civility was only minutely present in Haitian national politics. Civility, which is a form of social and cultural respect, is also, as Barrett explains, “a social good—an ethical value—and a rich source of ethos. It is expressed in the symbolic behavior of one with another, i.e., it is effected rhetorically. And that is why rhetorical indisposition precludes the capacity for civility.”40 Préval’s executive silence prohibited the potential capacity to make accountable all participants who were committed to rebuild and improve Haiti. Silence ushered in the monstrous politics of incivility that rendered the distraught population further vulnerable. Effective leadership does not equate to opportunistic leadership that would reduce victims to mere means to an end; effective and civil leadership would

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incessantly try to positively confront social ills by balancing out the elements of disorder. On the one hand, opportunistic leaders would derive an opportunity from national tragedies in order to fulfill their own political careers and to try to accomplish long-term ideological gains by tapping into the emotional weakness of the nation. In so doing, they would alienate and fragment groups by pitting factions of society against other factions. On the other hand, responsible and positively effective leaders would seek the greater good of the nation, not along ideological or partisan lines, but first and foremost through the epicenter of the inclusive national character of the nation that emits national pride and cohesiveness. Such a leader would try to soothe the pain of the nation by calling for a healing process during times of national crisis or tragedy. The positive political engagement of the national leader is an expected response, given his commitment to lead the nation toward betterment. Lea Williams, in her analysis of leadership in the American civil rights movement, indicates that “the leader’s ability to build strong, positive interpersonal relationships and foster esprit d’corps will influence the relative degree of success or failure.”41 The esprit de corps that Williams alludes to is fundamental to Haitian peasant culture and to koumbit. Koumbit reinforces kinship and solidifies the sociocultural and economic bonds of members of a given Haitian peasant community, who rely on one another to form a localized system of organization that is at once social, economic, and political. The absence of koumbit in national politics gave Haiti silence, indifference, and ineptitude. In addition, Williams advises us that the “transformational leader inspires followers to transcend expectations and perform at extraordinary high levels of achievement.”42 Hence, the expected reparative impetus to address and redress the affliction suffered in order to move the nation forward is logical and natural. The voted national leader is not only constitutionally responsible to safeguard the nation, but he is also ethically responsible to assure and guide the nation away from morass during a time of national tragedy and transcend negative expectations. Regardless of the scope of national tragedy, the role of a national leader is to lead by providing examples of courage in times of despair. The absence of leadership and of executive deliberation is damaging to the nation because, as Heifetz and Linsky emphasize, “it becomes critically important to communicate, in every way possible, the reason to sacrifice—why people need to sustain losses and

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reconstruct their loyalties. People need to know that the stakes are worth it.”43 Just like a ship’s captain cannot abandon his ship during an emergency while the crew and passengers are on board, neither can a national leader be silent or absent while the nation is suffering. Language or its absence is an important indicator of a leader’s temperament; it could even be a marker of one’s efficiency or deficiency in civility. Most importantly, language is a multidimensional generator of ideas. It is only through language that we provide reason, rationalization, or purgation from trauma. In Maguerite Feitlowitz’s book, A Lexicon of Terror, language is inherently constitutive of temporality and its effects on the self: When a people’s very words have been wounded, the society cannot fully recover until the language has been healed. Words mark the paths of our experience, separate what we can name from ineffable terror and chaos. At once public and intimate, language is a boundary between our vulnerable inner selves and the outside world. When, like skin, the language is bruised, punctured, or mutilated, that boundary breaks down. We have then no defense, no way to protect ourselves. What we knew, we no longer know; names born of the truth of shared experience ring false. On a mal dans sa peau—we are uneasy in our own skin. We must pay attention to this dis-ease, we must document its signs. We must make an artifact of this Lexicon of Terror, so that it will no longer be a living language.44

The violence of executive silence morphed into a form of bruised language that wrongly reverberated in Haitian ears, forcing them to question whether they were correctly interpreting the absence of words from the crumbled palace. Préval was briefly rumored to be dead; later they wished he was because his silence was unbearable. The absence of language violently shattered Haitians’ trust in their executive leader and further scorched a path toward incivility where abhorrent epithets were increasingly displayed on walls as a retort to the absence of words. The reverberating and resulting silence of the executive added an additional searing catastrophe: acute misery of a denuded people in a failed state that had to endure the collective trauma without leadership that could have

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helped in memorializing and grieving the communal loss. The suffering population became unwanted subjects without substantive political and historical connections, given the absence of a nationally constructive of “we-ness” and an absence of a nationally constructed fellowship of fellow grieving subjects. Finally, the silence of the executive was an abdication of moral responsibility. Notes 1. Allan Stoekl, Agonies of the Intellectual (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 177. 2. Ibid., 163. 3. A. Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Leadership on the Line (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), 168. 4. Kaethe Weingarten, Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day (New York: New American Library, 2003), 142. 5. Ibid., 152. 6. Idelber Avelar, The Letter of Violence: Essays on Narrative, Ethics, and Politics (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 45. 7. Ibid., 46. 8. Stoekl, Agonies, 163. 9. Robert I. Rotberg, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 78. 10. See Jean Price-Mars, La République d’Haiti et la République Dominicaine (Port-au-Prince: Édition Fardin, 1953), and Suzy Castor, Le Massacre de 1937 et les Relations Haitiano-Dominicaines (Port-au-Prince: Le Natal, 1988). 11. Castor, Le Massacre de 1937, 29. My translation. 12. Edwidge Danticat, The Farming of Bones (New York: Soho, 1998), 212. 13. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 23. 14. Ibid. 15. Anthony Giddens, “The Politics of Human Rights,” in The Politics of Human Rights, ed. Obrad Savic (London: Verso, 1999), 256. 16. Paul Farmer, Haiti: After the Earthquake (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), 91–92. 17. Amy Wilentz, “Could Pierre-Louis Fill Haiti’s Leadership Void?” Time Magazine, January 27, 2010, http://www.time.com/. 18. Ibid. 19. Mimi Sheller, Democracy after Slavery (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000), 241. 20. Rotberg, Haiti, 9.

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21. See the interview with Michèle Pierre-Louis in Harvard International Review, March 22, 2010, http://www.entrepreneur.com/. 22. Stoekl, Agonies, 160. 23. Christiane Amanpour, “President and Prime Minister of Haiti Speak about Earthquake Recovery,” my translation, CNN International, January 19, 2010, http:// www.cnn.com. 24. Carrie Kahn, “Haiti a Year Later: Haitians’ Patience for President Préval Wears Thin,” National Public Radio, All Things Considered, January 21, 2011, http://www .npr.org/. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Robert Fatton Jr., “Haiti: The Saturnalia of Emancipation and the Vicissitudes of Predatory Rule,” Third World Quarterly 27, no. 1 (2006): 115–33. 28. Robert Fatton Jr., Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reinner, 2002), 37. 29. Ibid., 37–38. 30. Forum Economique Secteur Privé: Introductory Memo, March 23, 2010. 31. Farmer, Haiti, 99. 32. John Rawls, Politics Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 300. 33. Ibid., 301. 34. René Préval quoted in Joseph Guyler Delva, “One Month after Quake, Haitians Mourn Dead Together,” Reuters News, February 12, 2010, http://www.reuters .com/. 35. Yanick Lahens, “Haiti, or The Health of Misery,” in Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, ed. Martin Munro (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2010), 10. 36. Raoul Peck, “Dead-end in Port-au-Prince,” in Munro, Haiti Rising, 43. 37. Christiane Amanpour, “Haiti’s Former PM Speaks,” CNN International, January 26, 2010, http://www.cnn.com/. 38. Michel Le Bris, “Finding the Words,” in Munro, Haiti Rising, 34. 39. Harold Barrett, Rhetoric and Civility: Human Development, Narcissism, and the Good Audience (New York: State University of New York Press, 1991), 6. 40. Ibid., 147–48. 41. Lea E. Williams, Servant of the People: The 1960’s Legacy of African American Leadership (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996), 25–26. 42. Ibid., 26. 43. Heifetz and Linsky, Leadership on the Line, 94. 44. Maguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 62.

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6

Religion at the Epicenter Agency and Affiliation in Léogâne after the Earthquake karen richman

T

he earthquake of January 12, 2010, devastated Haiti’s Léogâne Plain and the capital at its eastern edge, breaking buildings and crushing bodies unable to dodge unearthly torrents of concrete blocks and cloudbursts of white dust. Whereas an assessment of the material and biological impacts of the seismic tremors may be undertaken without prior personal familiarity with the subjects of concern, understanding the effects of the earthquake on local religious faith and practice requires knowledge of the preexisting and continuing religious contexts of the communities affected by the disaster. Absence of longitudinal data has, however, unfortunately failed to hamper the dissemination of speculative claims about earth-shattering changes in religious affiliation and faith in Port-au-Prince and Léogâne. A dominant conjecture is that the earthquake tested Haitians’ faith in their Vodou gods because these gods failed to prevent the disaster. Many former Vodouists have allegedly turned away from their traditional religion and converted to Christianity; they are simultaneously pushed by disappointment and pulled by admiration for the modern messages and aid proffered by the ubiquitous Christian nongovernmental organizations, whose members rushed to assist in the rescue and recovery. Historical and ethnographic evidence that I present here corrects these speculations and more broadly calls into question the suppositions underlying them—namely, rigid sectarian boundaries, doctrinal fidelity of ordinary

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religious actors, and cosmic powers of Vodou spirits. Catholicism, Vodou, and Protestantism have defined, mediated, and reproduced one another in the fluid, plural landscape of Haitian religious history for at least three quarters of a century. A pragmatic, instrumental approach to alleviating suffering and dodging misfortune has long guided individual religious choices between, and integrated uses of, Haiti’s three major religions. Religious conversion may not entail the radical, permanent break that sectarian leaders and some observers of the postearthquake religious landscape allege. By drawing on historical research as well as ethnographic fieldwork in Léogâne, I investigate the accuracy of such claims and more broadly explore religious continuities and ruptures at the epicenter of the seismic tremors. Coincidentally, Léogâne holds the ambiguous reputation of being the epicenter of the nation’s exotic and mysterious “traditional” religion. The stereotype, like all such representations, is only partially accurate. The moniker is loosely connected to Léogâne’s significant role in the development of the congregational form of a domestic religion that became known as Vodou, in which ethnology itself played an important role.1 Léogâne may thus be seen as having the dubious role of being the dual epicenter of the geological shocks as well as the shocking practices ascribed to Vodou. In contrast to short-term postearthquake observation, my analysis extends an ongoing case study, informed by fieldwork conducted over the last three decades, of the religious life and history of the people of Ti Rivyè (Little River), a rural, coastal section of Léogâne, which is also the anchor of a transnational community.2 My inquiry continued after the earthquake of January 2010 through phone communication and, in 2010 and 2011, three return visits to Ti Rivyè, the geographical and moral anchor of the community, as well as trips to Ti Rivyè’s primary emigrant outpost in Palm Beach County, Florida.3 Catholic and Protestant Missionization in Haiti The religious landscape on the eve of the earthquake can be understood in the context of broader historical processes involving missionization, global capitalism, and the policies of the Haitian nation-state, processes that reach back to the religious origins of the French colony. Roman Catholicism was the official religion of the colony of Saint Domingue, which was established

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in 1697. After independence in 1804, it remained the sole state religion of Haiti until 1985, when the Haitian government under Jean-Claude Duvalier recognized Protestantism. Recognition occurred at an important juncture of religious and political change: Protestant numbers (and defections from Catholicism) in Haiti and Latin America generally had increased to a point of crisis for the Catholic Church, motivating the first papal visit in history to Haiti, and an embattled dictator sought to fortify Protestant support for his weakening grip on absolute power. The elevation of Protestantism’s status in Haiti in 1985 in turn prompted a campaign by Vodou leaders that succeeded in 2003 with an acknowledgment of Vodou as an official religion by President Aristide, who had long publically expressed respect for Vodou. After independence in 1804, when French colonists and their priests fled the country, Haitians controlled their own church. Toward the end of the century, however, as Haiti’s Francophile, mulatto elite invited recolonization by France and Germany and ultimately the United States, authority over the Church was returned to the Vatican. President Geffrard, Haiti’s tenth president, signed the concordat with the Vatican in 1860, declaring, “Let us hasten to remove from our land these last vestiges of barbarism and slavery, superstition and its scandalous practices.”4 Over the next hundred years, a contest over Haitian state sovereignty and European religious power would be waged, with Protestantism and Vodou co-opted by both parties as allies, threats, or scapegoats. A hallmark in that struggle was the hapless antisuperstition campaign of 1942 that was launched by the French Catholic Church in concert with mulatto president Élie Lescot. La campagne anti-superstitieuse formally began with a pastoral letter published in the Catholic daily, La Phalange, decrying “the irreconcilable opposition” between Christianity and “the collection of religious beliefs and practices which came from Africa.”5 Many of the elements of this collection actually came from Europe, but identifying them as African better served the Church’s purpose.6 Vodouisants were not the only targets of the campaign, however; Protestants were occasionally persecuted as well. Temporary sharing of a mutual Catholic enemy motivated paradoxical sympathy between nationalist leaders, proponents of Vodou, and Protestant missionaries, even though the latter appeared to be more opposed to Vodou than the Catholic Church. The most productive instance of this tactical

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alliance transpired between 1957 and 1971, when François Duvalier ruled Haiti and the percentage of the population identifying as Protestant reached 20 percent.7 Duvalier was the first pro-Vodou, pro-peasant, black nationalist president.8 A medical doctor and ethnologist who experienced firsthand the antisuperstition campaign of 1942, Duvalier had been a central member of the Bureau D’Ethnologie and authored or coauthored several studies of the peasant religion. The self-declared president for life developed a reputation not only for practicing Vodou but also for incorporating the practices and priesthood in his ruthless politics. Duvalier appears to have fostered the myth of his promotion of Vodou, which only bolstered outsiders’ stereotypes of an exotic, mysterious religion. Courlander and Bastien wryly observed that the fact that Duvalier fostered Protestantism, which publically opposes Vodou even more strongly than the Catholic Church ever did, demonstrates that “the relationship between Duvalier and religion should be viewed not as one of an individual to a faith, but rather it should be approached from the standpoint of the relations between church and state.”9 Duvalier finally succeeded in breaking the power of the foreign-dominated Catholic Church. Although he resorted to violence to crush the Church, romancing North American evangelical Protestants was a more effective strategy. The Protestants could be depended upon to avoid direct involvement in political affairs as much as possible and meanwhile bring “development’ into the country. By 1965, more than a third of the schools were run by Protestant missionaries. Duvalier received Oral Roberts at the palace in 1969.10 Since the 1970s, the expansion of Protestant missionization in Haiti, as in Latin America generally, especially involved the growth of Pentecostal groups, which systematically covered the geography of the country and encompassed the poorest segments of the population.11 Echoing the findings of many observers of Pentecostal missionization in the region, Charles-Poisset Romain asserts that “le take of pentecôtiste [sic]” (the Pentecostals’ takeoff) in Haiti was the result of their egalitarian promotion of literacy, in the vernacular of the masses, an approach that signified self-improvement and mobility in opposition to the fixed social hierarchy symbolized by the colonial language of French, spoken and written by the elite few.12 Romain furthermore claims that during the 1970s, Christian missionization was more intense in

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Haiti than in anywhere else in the hemisphere and that Haiti witnessed more proliferation of sects during that period than any other country. Though it would be difficult to provide precise evidence for his claim, support for it is found in the selection of Port-au-Prince for a March 1983 Latin American bishops’ meeting with Pope John Paul II, the first and only visit to date of a pope to Haiti. The conference’s top agenda item was “preparing actions to stem the rapid growth of Protestant fundamentalist sects in the region.” Pope John Paul said, “The advance of religious groups, which at times are lacking the true message of the Gospel and with methods that do not respect real religious liberty, poses serious obstacles to the mission of the Catholic Church and to other Christian confessions.” The pope was warning about misguided Protestants rather than Vodouists, a fact clarified when the Haitian archbishop announced the start of a national campaign to defend Catholicism against “the blind proselytizing of Protestants.”13 Individual Religious Agency and Conversion Complementing Romain’s sociological study of the expansion of Protestant churches in Haiti during the 1970s is Fred Conway’s ethnographic illumination of the religious landscape of rural Haiti during the decade that culminated with a massive exodus to the source of progress.14 Conway demonstrates that evangelism oriented people toward North American capitalist culture and an American dream. He argues convincingly that “missionary Protestantism in Haiti gives rise less to a Protestant ethic of self-help than to the idea that the way to worldly success is identified with direct dependence on the foreign—North American—missionary.”15 He cites villagers’ discourse, no doubt mediated by their perception or hope that their North American interlocutor was also a missionary, and thus a source of jobs or visas. Villagers asserted that Protestant mission churches symbolized progress, when, while pointing to Protestant missions, people told him, “the country is becoming more and more civilized,” in contrast to the backwardness blamed on peasant Vodou. Several converts further boasted to Conway that their conversion was a contribution to development.16 Moreover, the Protestant churches signified modern, capitalist principles, including a belief in quantitative accounting and record keeping.17 According to Conway’s interlocutors, villagers understood that Americans needed

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quantities of converts, and they were willing to pay for them. No one benefited more from their needs to build missions and count disciples than the pastors. The clergy was and remains one of the few jobs for men in rural areas, and the field of candidates was and is still vast. Romain comments that “every Protestant is at the same time a minister and a missionary” (tout protestant est à la fois pasteur et missionnaire).18 The success of the pastors reflects the convergence of the fluid, informal, lay, and entrepreneurial character of the evangelical practice with local values regarding leadership and spiritual power, namely, diffuse leadership and charismatic, spontaneous power. The Kreyòl speech practice of addressing any male evangelical as pastè (pastor) reinforces the expectation that any man who behaves in this enthusiastic, pious, sober manner will soon pursue a career as a minister. Strategic positioning for purposes of personal advancement and/or protection is the reason many convert to Protestantism, rather than deep conviction in the superiority of Protestant doctrine. Alfred Métraux noted the use of conversion as an act of resistance in his classic ethnography of religion in and around Port-au-Prince, including Léogâne, more than half a century ago, before the postwar expansion of Pentecostals in the country.19 Métraux explained how the act of conversion represented “a magic circle” of protection from spiritual aggression. He quoted what a Marbial person told him: “If you want the (spirits) to leave you in peace, become a Protestant.” Métraux added the insight that “No doubt it is the challenging attitude adopted by Protestants towards the (spirits) which has finally convinced the peasants that this religion confers upon its adepts a sort of supernatural immunity.”20 Significantly, the anthropologist’s analysis of the instrumental use of conversion closely echoed the internal Protestant critique. The Haitian Protestant theologian, Roger Dorsainville, had previously lamented that a “true conviction and profound commitment to be saved” were rarely the reason people converted. “Protestantism,” he asserted, “is pursued as a superior wanga [magical power], the pastor is like a more powerful sorcerer” (L’Evangile est alors recherché comme “ouanga” supérieur, le prédicateur est comme un bocor puissant).21 The magic circle also protects the convert from very real fear of sorcery, a social weapon long used by peasants throughout the world to limit individualism and greed and enforce reciprocity. The use of Protestantism as the antidote to preexisting forms of sorcery reverberates

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with analyses of many colonized and missionized African societies. In Malawi, the Watchtower sect entered as a new witchcraft eradication movement, offering total inoculation to anyone who converted. As Fields explains, Protestant conversion offered an escape route for young migrant men from an increasingly onerous traditional system.22 The persistence of the belief that conversion offers individuals a useful defense against sorcery has been reinforced in my own investigations of conversion in the Ti Rivyè community.23 Denise, who migrated to South Florida from Ti Rivyè, crystallized this perception when she told me after her conversion in the mid-1990s, “As soon as you convert, nothing can harm you” (Depi ou konvèti, anyen pa ka fè ou). Her new religion has neither replaced nor diminished her belief in the reality of sorcerers’ powers, but rather persuaded her that it offers the most protective armor against evil forces. Many “who are not yet converted” (ki poko konvèti), as people tellingly often classify others’ current (and flexible) religious identities, nonetheless refuse to accept the explanation that conversion is merely an escape from sorcery. They argue the opposite: conversion is a license to sorcery. Thus Ti Fanm (Little Woman) told me during a conversation in 2003, “People convert precisely so they can do wanga” (konvèti pou yo kapab fè wanga menm). Converts switch their religious costume so that they can make money illicitly—money they won’t have to share or redistribute—and they do it with impunity. Converts think that their sober, separatist behavior will pre-empt accusations of patronizing gangan (ritual leader) so that they can secretly pursue magic and sorcery while removing themselves from obligations to a social and ritual redistribution system that serving spirits necessarily entails. It is widely suspected that converts secretly patronize gangan for private magic or sorcery. While living in a Ti Rivyè village, I had been curious about the strangers who occasionally walked into the compound I shared with a matrilineal extended family. They would ask for Joiecius, the local gangan ason (professional ritual specialist who has received the priestly rattle, or ason). I finally asked the ritual leader who those strangers were. “They’re Protestants,” he told me, as if I were the only one who didn’t already know that obvious fact; “they come from the capital city.” Pepe, another gangan ason in Ti Rivyè, also frankly admitted to me that many of his clients are Protestants. He quickly dismissed my query about the

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Protestants’ offer of strong protection against sorcery. “If they say they convert so nothing can harm them,” he responded, “then why do they come to see gangan? And why do they have sacred things hidden in their houses?” In a curious echo of Dorsainville’s 1940s lament about converts seeking stronger wanga from Protestant pastors, Pepe further asserted that “pastors get wanga (charms and spells) and dyab (money-making powers) which they plant at the front of their yards so when foreign missionaries pass by they will notice them and give them money and send them to the States. They have to fill their churches to satisfy their sponsors. And they are good talkers, too.” Pepe thus echoed Joiecius’s (and others’) charge that “It’s a business; it’s so they can make money” (Se yon biznis; se pou yo fè kòb). Catholics Serving Lwa in the Rural Léogâne Context In Kreyòl, the term Vodou (or Vodoun) refers to a genre of ritual music and dance, performed in worship of an important category of spirits. A legacy of the African cultural past, the term is the Fongbe (Benin) word for “spirit.” Over time, outsiders applied the term to refer to the religion as a whole, a usage widely accepted, though foreign to many in the countryside. People from Ti Rivyè do not say, “I practice Vodou” or “I believe in Vodou.” Rather, they speak of being Catholic and “serving their spirits” (sèvi lwa). Spirits are called lwa (pronounced like French loi). Lwa can be thought of as super- (in the sense of all too human) and hypersensitive human beings, who are inherited through family lines among landholding descent groups. Said to be from Ginen (Africa) and to dwell there still, they crystallize a deep historical memory of the violence and displacement of the African ancestors’ past. Their iconography and naming blends African and European influences; some are based on Catholic saints, and many have African names. A Haitian man explained to Alfred Métraux many decades ago, “You have to be Catholic to serve your (lwa).”24 Thus, despite official condemnation by the Catholic Church of practices oriented to the lwa, Catholicism is fundamental to serving one’s lwa. This pattern is the basis of the Protestant contention that Haitians are not real Catholics because their Catholicism is so infiltrated by Vodou as to render the faith irrelevant—a misleading allegation because any given Catholic actor in Haiti falls within a continuum, some self-described as Katolik fran (straight Catholics), who may know little or

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nothing of serving the spirits, and some as lwa fanatics, and the vast middle going through the rites of passage of the Catholic Church while simultaneously maintaining contact with the lwa and ritual specialists and healers in times of crisis. Individuals’ religious involvement runs the gamut from apathy (ignoring their spirits until a crisis looms), to those who are spectators at others’ rituals but neither contribute nor worship (through prayer, song, dance), to servants (sèvitè) of the lwa. The last are often initiated into the ranks (ounsi/ousi) of a congregation headed by a gangan ason or manbo ason (priestess). All collective sèvis lwa (services or ceremonies) begin with substantial Catholic prayer, led by a lay priest. Attendance at Mass and giving alms to beggars gathered at cathedrals are all requirements of serving one’s lwa. Ritual action entails enthusiastic, spectacular multimedia performance involving Catholic prayer (in French), drumming, singing (in Kreyòl), dancing, visual art, parading, spirit possession performance, and offerings of food, drink, and toiletries, as well as animal sacrifice. The symbolism of feeding encompasses all ritual discourse and performance. The very term for worship, sèvi, is “to serve,” as in to offer food. The personalities of lwa are differentiated by their particular tastes in food and drink. Additionally, a lwa’s displeasure is cast as hunger, and a ceremony is called a feeding of the lwa. When lwa are said to be hungry, a metaphor for their feeling neglected or ignored by the heirs, as they often do in their remote home in Ginen, they retaliate by sending affliction, seizing heirs with somatic illness, misfortune, and property loss. A successful appeasement or feeding occurs when the spirit, having been enticed to journey all the way from Ginen, arrives personally to party with the family and to accept the lavish and copious offerings. The spirit’s enjoyment of the music, dance, and food is an implicit signal that he or she has let go of the victim and that he or she agrees not to take hold of others—at least, not in the immediate future. Hence worship by the kin group is a collective effort to ward off illness by enticing the avenging spirits to release their victims and to prevent future attacks. As my research in a transnational community anchored in Ti Rivyè demonstrates, migrants do not escape the mobile lwa’s orbit.25 Indeed, migrants are prime choices for avenging spirits, and they are the primary sponsors of rites taking place back home. Because their society produces migrants more than any other economic value, their

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ritual system is thoroughly adapted to migration. Transnational communities in Ti Rivyè appropriated audio and videocassette recordings in order to perpetuate and revitalize the ritual communication practices of their landbased descent groups.26 The Role of the Lwa in the Earthquake Shortly after the earthquake, a journalist at a prominent newspaper who had consulted various experts on Haitian Vodou asked me to endorse the idea that the cataclysm had tested Haitians’ faith in their lwa. She alleged that Haitians felt betrayed by their Vodou spirits for their failure to prevent the calamity and were converting in large numbers to Christianity, not only in response to the gods’ impotence or indifference, but also because of the exemplary role obviously being played by ubiquitous Christian nongovernmental organizations in the rescue and recovery. I presented this assertion to my friend Ti Mafi (My Little Girl), an initiated servitor (ounsi), whose family is deeply involved with serving spirits. I told her about some of the questions journalists had been asking me about whether, in response to the earthquake, Haitians were giving up on (Catholicism and) their lwa and converting to Protestantism. She scoffed at the absurd idea. “It is God!” (Se Bondye!), she declared. (God [Bondye] is thought to control nature in an otiose, random, impersonal way, as opposed to the spirits, who are intimately involved and interfere in discrete humans’ personal affairs.) She continued, “The lwa had nothing to do with it. The lwa did not cause the earthquake” (Lwa pa gen anyen ladan. Lwa pa ka koz tranbleman tè a). Ti Mafi provided thereby a swift dismissal of the first premise about the religious response to the earthquake: the erroneous assumption that spirits were capable of preventing such natural disasters as an earthquake. Contrary to most outsiders’ representations of their religion, Haitians do not think their lwa are nature spirits.27 Ritual discourse, mainly in song texts as well as visual imagery on flour paintings, painted murals, and cloth banners often compare spirits to aspects or forces of nature—for example, Danbala Wedo’s energy is linked to that of a water snake and Ogoun’s anger is linked to thunder. It does not follow, however, that Danbala is an actual water snake or that Ogoun in fact controls storms. The equation of Danbala Wedo and Ogoun with natural forces follows, instead, from a simplistic, denotative interpretation of

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symbolic representation. It is, to invoke Claude Lévi-Strauss’s terminology, a reductive reading of analogical classification.28 This reading reproduces the modern representation of the tradition-bound, scientific thought of others who occupy a different (read: backward) intellectual time and place, and hold the childish belief that their fickle gods control nature.29 The great religions of modernity have presumably graduated from the nature-bound beliefs of their primitive antecedents. Unfortunately (perhaps for the lwa), servitors like Ti Mafi do not think that their lwa wield powers to control air, land, or water. The powers of lwa are far more circumscribed. Their command is primarily confined to protecting or undermining the health and labor power of members of the descent groups to whom they belong. Yet they are also distinct from ancestors, who are respected in their own right and whose primary role, in virtue of their proximity to the other world, is to mediate relations between members of cognatic descent groups and their inherited lwa. As Karen Brown, Gerald Murray, and others have shown, the lwa are primarily the protagonists of a cult of affliction.30 These afflictions are fundamentally relational. The primary work of religious leaders like Mama Lola, the subject’s of Brown’s monograph, is to help heal—that is, to help heal the ruptured relations whose concrete symbolic manifestation is bodily illness and misfortune. Mama Lola does not treat passive patients but rather, applying pragmatic, instrumentalist discourse and performance, empowers the afflicted actively to influence the threatening lwa. The primary purpose of rituals is to persuade lwa to let go of a member or members in the lwa’s grasp, and by placating the lwa at the same time, to prevent recurrence of dis-ease. In addition to having the power to afflict members of descent groups—no matter where they reside—lwa are also deemed capable of protecting those who serve them from harm. Consistent with their concept of spiritual affliction, spiritual protection is not simply discharged; its realization is contingent rather on human agency. The hypersensate lwa can sense imminent danger before their human counterparts. Some lwa are thought to have felt the earth’s rumblings and tried to warn their human children of the impending danger, sending alerts in their circumscribed and indirect ways, such as dreams and possession performance. These embodied acts of protection from the pending cataclysm constituted the primary mode of the lwa’s involvement during

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the period immediately before the tremors. Far from blaming the lwa for abandoning them, those who acknowledged a lwa’s alarm credited that lwa with saving their lives. My eighty-five-year-old “uncle,” Faustin Amilcar, for instance, took the ominous dream he had on the night of January 11 seriously enough to cut short his medical treatment in the local hospital. (I knew he was hospitalized in the concrete structure, and one of my first concerns on the evening January 12 was for his safety. I was relieved to discover that he wasn’t in the hospital on January 12.) The morning after the earthquake, he told the nurse he was leaving. She said, “You can’t leave. You’re not better yet.” He said, “If I stay here, I’m going to die. Something terrible is going to happen.” He made his grudging grandchildren come and get him. He concluded his recounting of how he avoided the disaster: “I hold onto what I serve.” As Faustin recounted his dream to me, hints of a territorial disaster with great human tragedy became apparent. In his sleep, he saw chaotic scenes of the parading local rara, or Lenten, organizations, being led by his late cousins, the actual former leaders of the bands. The rara processions are strongly associated with the earth. Masses of participants’ feet pound the earth as they transverse the territory, leaving behind clouds of dust. The theme song of the local rara band, La Ste. Rose, named in honor of the now-ruined Cathedral of Léogâne, includes these lyrics: “Ste. Rose is putting their feet to the earth; the earth trembles” (Ste. Rose ap mete pye a tè; la tè a tranble). Faustin attended to the portentous metonymic linkages of a land disaster and left the concrete block hospital in the nick of time. Whereas Faustin felt the lwa’s protective message in a dream, his cousins both saw and heard the forecast of a great earth-shattering disaster through the spirits’ other standard means of communication: possession performance, which is known as “speaking in the head” of a person. Three months before the earthquake, an Ogoun spirit spoke in the head of Mikaèl, predicting that a huge catastrophe was soon going to devastate the land of Haiti. Mikaèl’s father, the gangan ason who was conducting the rite, told me that the family took seriously the lwa’s warning, but they did not know when the event would happen so they could take action to prepare themselves. Mikaèl’s husband, who participated in the rite, recounted the same story. He, too, heeded the signal, but he did not know how to respond.

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A second warning was transmitted through Mikaèl on the eve of the looming disaster. Like Faustin, she dreamed on the night of January 11 of a terrible and imminent calamity. The next morning, she told her relatives about the dream, announcing that she was afraid to leave the house. They pressured her to ignore her fears in order to accompany them to visit an ailing relative in a hospital. She relented and went along to the hospital. Mikaèl was standing in a stairwell of the structure when it crumbled. She was able to climb out unharmed. I spoke to Mikaèl in August. She believes, as do her father and husband, that the lwa tried earnestly to protect their human family. The behavior of survivors of the earthquake from Ti Rivyè, at least, disproves the first received postulation about the effect of the earthquake on religion. They did not reject their lwa for failing to prevent a natural disaster. The spirits, whose powers of perception is thought to be more sensitive and developed than that of ordinary mortals, acted within their far more circumscribed powers to alert their children to danger. The corollary assumption, which I turned to next during my research visit, is that having disavowed their ineffectual spirits, Haitians are converting in large numbers to Christianity, in part due to the exemplary role being played by ubiquitous Christian nongovernmental organizations in the rescue and recovery. The Earthquake and the Phenomenon of Bad Conversion During my visit to Haiti in July 2010, I interviewed several Protestants whom I have known for decades to solicit their honest assessments of the postearthquake religious landscape of Ti Rivyè, Léogâne. Kanès was born into a Catholic family who served their lwa, and he converted to Protestantism as a young man. He was already a member of a small Assembly of God congregation when he assisted me with a land-tenure survey in Ti Rivyè twentyeight years ago. I solicited this long-term Protestant’s reflection on the links between the earthquake and religious conversion. Kanès immediately repudiated the then widespread claim that the earthquake was the catalyst for a major religious realignment. He dismissed the notion that Haitians viewed either the creation or prevention of seismic shocks as the work of their spirits, asserting that they saw the quake as a natural occurrence, like hurricanes. He

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stated that the ranks of Protestants swelled right after the cataclysm, although he did not regard the huge increase as a victory. Many Catholics converted to Protestant sects after the earthquake out of fear of dying. Unremitting aftershocks, which persisted for two months after the primary earthquake on January 12, only prolonged the terror. The relentlessness of the seismic shocks is captured in the repetitive form of goudou-goudou, the new onomatopoetic word for the event itself. Kanès expected that as their panic subsided, so would their enthusiasm for their new religious armor. He classified their pragmatic religious switching as “not good conversions.” Conversions out of fear are inevitably ephemeral: A lot of people converted after the goudou-goudou. They were afraid. They had never experienced anything like it. The earth opened up and then it rose and fell. People thought it was Bondye [not lwa]. It was a natural occurrence like the hurricanes that come every year. They believed Bondye wanted them to convert; they thought if they did, it would protect them the next time. But many have already left it. They weren’t good conversions. Anpil moun konvèti apre goudou-goudou a. Yo pè. Yo pa janm wè bagay sa a avan. Tè a louvri epi li monte, desann. Moun yo panse se Bondye. Se te yon bagay lanati tankou siklòn ki pase chak ane. Yo kwè Bondye vle pou yo konvèti; yo konprann si yo konvèti li ta pwoteje yo pwochenn fwa. Men plizyè deja kite. Yo pa byen konvèti.

Precise illustrations of Kanès’s portrayal of postearthquake bad conversions were provided by several of my long-term friends. Given that Kanès and they are unrelated and have never spoken to one another (as far as I know), the continuities between their remarks provide significant evidence of broader trends in this postearthquake religious landscape. Fear indeed seems to have motivated Ti Madanm’s (Little Mrs.) shift from Catholicism and serving family lwa to the Church of God in Christ denomination. After the terrifying seismic tremors, she feared that were there to be another cataclysm, she might not survive it. She dreaded that she would “go into the fire” (of hell). She no doubt absorbed some of the ominous lectures by evangelists broadcast continuously on bullhorns and loudspeakers after

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the earthquake. When I saw her in 2011, she announced to me (without my inquiring): I converted. After the earthquake, I thought [saw] that I didn’t die. I converted. I didn’t convert before but afterwards; I said if I die I don’t want to go into the fire [of hell]. So I converted. And if I go Over There, there are Church of God [churches] all over Orlando and Pampano. M konvèti. Apre seizm, m wè m pa mouri. M konvèti. M pat konvèti anvan, men apre, m di si m mouri m pa vle al nan difè. M tou konvèti. E si m al Lòt Bò, gen Legliz de Dieu nan tout Orlando, Pampano.

Ti Madanm linked her new affiliation with the Protestant (Levanjil) defense to the bonus tied to her pending migration: the ubiquity of Haitian (Kreyòllanguage) congregations of Church of God in her likely Florida destination points of Orlando (where her mother settled) and Pampano Beach (where she has other kin). She expects these ethnic churches to welcome the new immigrant and boost her efforts to integrate into her new setting. Moreover, she seems poised on a pragmatic ledge between her religious options, which include a boost to integrating as a Haitian American in her pending migration to the United States. The pragmatic logic of Ti Madanm’s decision to join the Protestants suggests that deep conviction played only a minor role in the process. Indeed, this pragmatic logic carried over to her assessment of other kin’s religious choices. Far from expressing the hope that everyone else in her kin group should “know Jesus,” Ti Madanm suggested that conversion is not for everyone. She asserted that a “bad/wrong conversion” (mal konvèti) could rebound on the agent, making the person vulnerable to affliction sent by angry spirits or jealous sorcerers—a surprising admission for a Protestant. To illustrate the consequences of a bad conversion, Ti Madanm cited evidence of her uncle Ti Chini’s (Little Caterpillar’s) untimely suffering and death and her cousin’s mental illness as instances of bad/wrong conversion, which provoked the wrath of inherited spirits. I chronicled Ti Chini’s life, friendship, conversion, and tragic death in my 2005 book, Migration and Vodou.31 According to members of his family, including Ti Madamn, Ti Chini

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was killed by sorcery and by his rejection of his lwa, an action required for conversion to Levanjil. Lwa are supposed to protect their children from harm by evildoers. Once Ti Chini converted, an action requiring public disavowal of inherited spirits, his patron lwa withdrew protection against sorcery: There are people who convert badly/wrongly, too. It makes them sick. Little Caterpillar should not have converted. A person who emigrated with a lwa in his head. It took him only three days to reach Over There. It takes most people seven or nine days. Gen moun ki mal konveti tou. Sa a fè yo malad. Ti Chini pa te dwe konvèti. Yon moun ki pati ak lwa nan tèt li. La l Lòt Bò a li fè twa jou. Gen moun ki fè sèt jou, nèf jou.

Whereas Ti Madanm believed her beloved uncle’s wrong conversion indirectly caused his death, her cousin’s bad conversion directly resulted in madness. There is someone else in the family who converted. She is crazy [now]. A lwa made her crazy. She is married and has children. She is the child of Andre, my mother’s brother. Gen lòt moun nan fanmi a ki konvèti. Li fou. Lwa a ki fè l fou. Li marye, li gen pitit. Li se pitit Andre, frè manman m.

Ti Madanm demonstrated through these examples that she is more interested in the pragmatic consequences of conversion than of the depth of conviction. The most important factor seems to be how the lwa reacted. On the cusp of a migration decision, calculating the utility of conversion to her integration in the United States, she may not be permanently committed to her new religion either. Her fundamentally pragmatic approach to life in general suggests that she would be willing to reconsider her conversion too. She may one day join the ranks of the many undercounted post-Protestants in Léogâne, like David, who disavowed his Baptist faith and married a woman with a “big lwa” in her head. It was this Ogoun lwa who spoke through her in

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October 2009, warning of the disaster and who returned to her in a dream the night of January 11, 2010. Continuities and Discontinuities in Individual Practices and Institutional Policies Claims about the impact of the January 12, 2010, earthquake on religious practice can only be assessed through an appreciation of the historical context of the interplay between Catholicism, Protestantism, Vodou, and the Haitian nation-state. Claims of doctrinal integrity and autonomy notwithstanding, Catholicism, Vodou, and Protestantism have defined, mediated, and reproduced one another in the fluid, plural landscape of Haiti’s religious history. My previous ethnographic research in Léogâne has revealed the often blatant fluidity between these religions and calls into question the meaning and purpose of conversion. Religious conversion may not entail the radical break that separatist Protestants, and some believing scholars, assert it to be. Even the assertive, separatist stance of some Protestants cannot disguise how firmly their congregants remain within a fundamentally integrated spectrum of mystical techniques and strategies to hold illness and misfortune at bay.32 The continuity below individuals’ changes of religious costume is an open secret among virtually everyone I interviewed in my recent sojourn, regardless of their current religious clothing. The religious careers of the sons of the gangan ason, Joiecius, exemplify the fluid symbiosis between these religious orientations. ( Joiecius’s service to Protestants who came from the capital to patronize the country Vodou priest was described above.) Their father initiated both men into the profession. One son, who has spent most of his adult life in Montreal, converted to Protestantism after a bout with cancer. His older brother, Yves, has succeeded his late father as a gangan ason and is well established as the head of three shrines. He is also a skilled ritual drummer. During my recent visit, I talked to him and his cousin, Jean, another ritual leader who was visiting from Florida. I asked them about the effect of Protestant conversions, before and after the earthquake, on sèvis lwa. Yves portrayed an interdependent system rather than a competitive one. “Each religious option has its own role” to play. The Levanjil does not threaten their practice. If the ritual work is sparse right now, it is because “people don’t have any money,”

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a result of the wide economic recession and the decline of migrants’ remittances rather than religious competition. Given the assertive, even aggressive, stance of some Haitian evangelicals, the Protestants I interviewed were more candid than I had expected them to be. Whether long-term Protestants like Kanès or recent converts like Ti Madanm, they endorsed a pragmatic, nondogmatic approach to religious affiliation and conversion and deconversion. They went so far as to contradict the project of universal evangelism, cautioning that conversion could be a bad and even dangerous religious path for the wrong candidate. If Kreyòl’s plethora of didactic proverbs and ironic ritual song texts is any indication, misfortune is the norm in the experience of most Haitians. The lyrical messages of proverbs and songs normalize catastrophe, and they also provide images for coping with the lamizè, the misery of poverty, from which there is no escape.33 “Run to dodge the rain, fall in the river” (Kouri pou lapli, tonbe larivyè). “Beyond the mountain, more mountains” (Dèyè mòn, gen mòn). “In times of hunger, a potato has no peel” (Nan tan grangou, pòm pa gen po). Within a year of the seismic catastrophe, the residents of Léogâne city faced two disasters that, like the earthquake, resulted from a lethal combination of the human and the natural. Hurricane Tomas’s waist-high waters rushing through the remains of the ruined streets were followed shortly by an epidemic of cholera, brought to the country by United Nations “peacekeeping” troops. Although the enormity of the suffering and anguish caused by the disaster must not be underestimated, neither should it be exaggerated. “The stone in the water doesn’t know the pain of the rock in the sun” (Woch nan dlo pa konen doulè woch nan solèy). The proverb warns that some opportunists will try to exploit the spectacle of others’ suffering for their own self-serving gain. Evidence has emerged from my own and others’ observations that nongovernmental organizations capitalized on the disaster. The organizations kept most of the funds donated from abroad; only a tiny fraction ever reached the survivors.34 Individual religious agents made instrumental use of a fluid spectrum to cope with the earthquake, and this system will in all likelihood outlast the changes in religious costume tried on in the wake of the catastrophe. The strategic religious flexibility observed in individual behavior is reflected in

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recent actions taken by the Haitian Catholic Church in regard to both ritual practice and religious policy. In a concerted effort to hold on to a wayward flock drifting toward Protestant denominations, the Church endeavored to increase the appeal of worship by appropriating musical styles of worship for lwa. Catholic lyrics are sung using melodies that derive from the Vodou (or rada) repertoire of sacred songs for the lwa, accompanied by a battery of Vodou drums. As for religious policy, just before the earthquake occurred, the Haitian Catholic Church began a formal rapprochement with Vodou. The rapprochement was extraordinary in light of the Church’s notorious wholesale attack on Vodou (and haphazard aggression against Protestants) in 1941–42.35 Memories of the antisuperstition campaign survive today among the elders of Léogâne.36 In 2008, Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot, the head of the Haitian Catholic Church, initiated what we might term a pro-superstition campaign.37 Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot took to the countryside to reach out to gangan ason. Significantly, the archbishop selected Léogâne to launch his effort. “Why Léogâne?” I asked Father Thomas, who is associated with the local Catholic parish and who attended the inaugural meeting. “Because, as you know yourself, Karen, Léogâne is the center of Vodou in Haiti,” he responded. At the meeting in Léogâne, the archbishop entreated the Vodou leaders to remind their flock that they were still Catholics. The archbishop’s motivation was not, however, a newfound and deep respect for sèvis lwa, but rather a strategy to stem the high rate of Catholic defections to Protestantism, which were said to have reached 40 percent. The archbishop’s pro-superstition campaign signaled that the religious pluralism of Haitians could be a route to the Church’s salvation from the Protestant danger. Archbishop Miot died tragically in the central cathedral of Port-au-Prince on January 12, 2010. He was not able to complete the project he began in Léogâne, a project of rapprochement with the Vodouists to staunch the flow of Protestant conversions in Haiti, though it is doubtful he could have succeeded. His strategy was and remains far below the attention-grabbing headlines about religion in Haiti and in Léogâne specifically, the alleged hotbed of Vodou. Undoubtedly, the most notorious attempt to provide an authoritative religious explanation for the cataclysm came from television evangelist Pat Robertson. Leslie Desmangles and Elizabeth McAlister have deconstructed

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Robertson’s controversial reproduction and revitalization of a preexisting myth in Haitian Protestant discourse.38 Reverend Robertson claimed that the earthquake was divine punishment for Haitians’ pact with the devil. I discussed Robertson’s claim with Ti Mafi, only a few weeks after the earthquake, in the midst of incalculable suffering and wildly swinging emotions. Ti Mafi offered a swift retort. Her riposte confronted not only the misguided pastor’s allegations but also all the speculative claims about the relationship between the goudou-goudou and her beliefs. It thus seems fitting to give her this discussion’s last word: People who want to know if the worship of the devil caused the earthquake— tell them they should buy a ticket to go to Haiti so they themselves can ask the devil if he is the one who caused the earthquake! Moun ki bezwen konen si dyab koz tranbleman te a di yo pou yo achte yon biye pou yo al Ayiti pou yo mande dyab si se li ki koz tranbleman te a!

Notes 1. Karen Richman, “A More Powerful Sorcerer: Conversion and Capital in the Haitian Diaspora,” New West Indian Guide 81, no. 1–2 (2008): 1–43; Karen Richman, “Peasants, Migrants and the Discovery of the Authentic Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37, no. 3 (2007): 1–27. 2. Karen Richman, Migration and Vodou (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005). 3. I am grateful to the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at University of Notre Dame for supporting my recent fieldwork in Léogâne during the summer of 2010. 4. Cited in David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 84. 5. La Phalange, 1941, cited in ibid., 182. 6. Terry Rey and Karen Richman, “The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 39, no. 3 (2010): 379–403. 7. Charles P. Romain, Le Protestantisme dans la Société Haïtien (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 1986). 8. Frederick Conway, “Pentecostalism in the Context of Haitian Religion and Health Practice” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 1978), 166–67.

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9. Harold Courlander and Rémy Bastien, Religion and Politics in Haiti (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Cross-Cultural Research, 1966), 56. 10. David Nicholls, “Politics and Religion in Haiti,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 3 (1970): 412. 11. David Martin, Tongues of Fire: The Explosion of Pentecostalism in Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1993). 12. Romain, Protestantisme, 190. 13. Marlise Simons, “Pope in Haiti, Assails Inequality, Hunger and Fear,” New York Times, March 10, 1983. 14. Conway, “Pentecostalism.” 15. Ibid., 193. 16. Ibid., 172. See also Erika Bornstein, The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe: Religion in Histories, Societies, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003), and Ted Schwartz, Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid and Drug Trafcking (Charleston: Book Surge, 2008). 17. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1958), 72, 111, 124. 18. Romain, Protestantisme, 144. 19. Alfred Métraux, “Vodou et Protestantisme,” Revue de L’Histoire des Religions 144 (1953): 198–216. 20. Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, trans. Hugo Charteris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 352. 21. Charles P. Pressoir, L’Etat Actuel des Missions Protestantes en Haïti (Portau-Prince: Conférence Prononcée au Dimanche de la Bible, à L’Eglise St. Paul, 1942), 8. 22. Karen Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (London: Heinemann, 1996). 23. Richman, “A More Powerful Sorcerer,” and Karen Richman, “The Protestant Ethic and the Dis-spirit of Vodou,” in Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America, ed. Karen Leonard, Alex Stepick, Manuel A. Vasquez, and Jennifer Holdaway (Lanham, Md.: Alta Mira Press, 2005), 165–87. 24. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 323. 25. Richman, Migration and Vodou. 26. Ibid. Terry Rey and Karen Richman, “Congregating by Cassette,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2009): 53–70. 27. Gerald Murray, “Bon Dieu and the Rites of Passage in Rural Haiti: Structural Determinants of Postcolonial Religion,” in The Catholic Church and Religions in Latin America, ed. Thomas Bruneau, Chester Gabriel, and Mary Mooney (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1984), 188–231.

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28. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 29. Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). 30. Karen M. Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and Murray, “Bon Dieu.” 31. Richman, Migration and Vodou. 32. Richman, “A More Powerful Sorcerer.” 33. Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Karen M. Brown, “Alourdes: A Case Study of Moral Leadership in Haitian Vodou,” in Saints and Virtues, ed. John Hawley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 34. Paul Farmer, Haiti after the Earthquake (New York: Public Affairs, 2011); Mark Schuller, “Gluing Globalization: NGOs as Intermediaries in Haiti,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32, no. 1 (2009); Mark Schuller, this volume. 35. Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier; Marlene Daut and Karen Richman, “Are They Mad? Nation and Narration in Tous les Hommes Sont Fous,” Small Axe 26 (2008): 133–48; Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 36. Karen Richman, “The Vodou State and the Protestant Nation: Haiti in the Long Twentieth Century,” in Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing, ed. Maarit Forde and Diana Paton (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 268–79. 37. Ibid. 38. Leslie Desmangles, “Religion in Post Earthquake Haiti: Continuities and Discontinuities,” and Elizabeth McAlister, “The Haiti Earthquake and the Politics of Religion,” papers presented at the invited session The Earthquake in Motion: Essays in Honor of Karen McCarthy Brown, 109th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, New Orleans, La., November 20, 2010; Elizabeth McAlister, this volume.

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The Alliance for Progress A Case Study of Failure of International Commitments to Haiti W i e n W e i b e rt A rt h u s

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he earthquake of January 12, 2010, generated unprecedented international mobilization for Haiti. Three months after this disaster, 150 countries and international organizations participated at the International Donor’s Conference towards a New Future for Haiti, which took place at the U.N. headquarters in New York. They pledged to grant Haiti assistance of $5.3 billion in 18 months. However, more than a year later, Port-au-Prince was still in ruins, and thousands of Haitians were living in tents. The chairmen of the Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (IHRC), former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Haitian prime minister Jean-Max Bellerive, begged donors to redouble their efforts. According to Clinton and Bellerive, only 30 percent of the promised aid had been donated by March 31, 2011, and only Japan and Spain had fulfilled their pledge. It is certainly too early to assess the reasons why the international aid for rebuilding Haiti has not produced the intended effects despite their commitments. Nevertheless, we can find in history a tentative explanation of today’s challenge. The objective of this study is to consider the period 1961–63 as a case study regarding the ineffectiveness of aid pledged to Haiti. On March 13, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced the conception of an Alliance for Progress with Latin American countries. The purpose of this inter-American pact was to be a vast economic development program that would provide roads, schools, hospitals, and public housing in

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the region.1 The United States committed to grant Latin American nations $20 million in ten years (equivalent to $100 billion in 2004 dollars).2 This fund would serve to create jobs and modernize the hemisphere. The economy was to grow at a rate of 2.5 percent per capita per year. A total of ninetyfour goals were set forth in the charter adopted at Punta del Este, Uruguay, in August 1961.3 For some people, the alliance was equivalent to the Marshall Plan, which was a successful plan established by the United States to help rebuild the European countries after World War II. However, despite good intentions and spectacular announcements, the alliance did not bring the promised progress. Scholars have analyzed this program carefully and present different arguments to explain its failure.4 They mainly use countries such as Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic as case studies. These four countries received 60 percent of the total amount of U.S. aid that was for the Alliance for Progress. Even in these situations, the objective of the charter of Punta del Este was not fully attained. Historians who are friendly to Kennedy, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., argue that the alliance failed because of the president’s assassination two years after launching the program. They claim that Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, was more concerned with Vietnam than Latin America. Other scholars, such as Stephen G. Rabe, highlight inherent problems in the Kennedy administration. Rabe shows that the difficulty to launch the aid was perceptible even under Kennedy. Tony Smith, on the other hand, emphasizes cognitive factors related to Latin American societies, particularly the lack of a democratic tradition; in fact, Kennedy linked economic progress, which means the disbursing of the aid, to democratic progress in the region.5 Finally, Jeffrey Taffet, in his analysis, places emphasis on the opposition between the humanitarian objectives of the alliance and its use by the U.S government as a cold war weapon. In Haiti, the program’s failure cannot even be considered. Unlike the cases of Brazil and the Dominican Republic, the promised aid never reached Haiti. The purpose of this chapter is to help identify the reasons Haiti did not benefit from the Alliance for Progress. It will reinforce the examples cited by Smith, Rabe, and Taffet to explain the failure of the program. It will particularly show, as Stephen Rabe states, that the program was ineffective before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Finally, it will point out the resemblance

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between the Alliance for Progress in 1963 and the International Donor’s Conference in 2011 in terms of the needs, commitments, and failure of international aid to Haiti. The ineffectiveness of the Alliance for Progress in Haiti can be explained by a set of singular but interconnected elements. First, there were the weaknesses of the Haitian administration. Partisanship, corruption, and lack of experts, all of which undermined the country, made it difficult to achieve the structural reform necessary for the funds to be disbursed. The second factor was the internal situation of Haiti, which was characterized by political instability and dictatorship. Third, there was the impossible cohabitation of the nationalistic pride of Haitians and the conditions imposed by the donors. For instance, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, the president of Haiti, usually referred to his nationalism when he didn’t want to standardize his action to the international system; but it was more a nationalisme à la carte, a nationalism of circumstances. This brings us to the following questions: Did nationalism go hand in hand with the need for foreign aid? Could Haiti claim a policy of nonintervention in its internal affairs while it was dependent on international aid? Finally, the ineffectiveness of international aid could be related to the hidden motivation of the donors. During the years 1961–63, the Kennedy administration used the Alliance for Progress to advance its own agenda. Consequently, the extent to which the Haitian government contributed to the progress of the donors’ agenda determined whether the aid would be withheld or granted. Administrative Weakness of the Haitian Government Although Haiti has always been qualified to benefit from international aid, it frequently struggled to meet the first requirement, which was to come up with projects in order to receive money. In 1961, countries that were designated to receive the aid from the Alliance for Progress had to submit their own projects to a committee of nine experts known as the Wise Men.6 The main task of this committee was to evaluate whether each project was consistent with the objectives of the charter of Punta del Este and the Act of Bogota.7 Hence, the projects had to meet specific criteria.8 Haiti had difficulty in meeting these requirements because of its administrative weaknesses and lack of expertise. This may be explained by several factors.

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When François Duvalier took office in 1957, he started a policy that would be known as the macoutisation of public administration.9 The president had a fundamental problem with the old administration. Most of the public employees were mulattoes. Holders of the monopoly of knowledge and richness since the independence, they had undoubted expertise in managing public affairs.10 Nevertheless, they were perceived as Duvalier’s opponents for two reasons. First, the racial question was an important issue of the 1957 election.11 Duvalier’s main challenger, Louis Déjoie, was a mulatto. Second, the former president, Paul Eugène Magloire, whose administration was deemed pro-mulatto, was one of the fiercest opponents of Duvalier even though in exile.12 As a result, Duvalier was not at peace with executives of the former administration. He removed officials with years of experience and replaced them with his supporters, who were often unqualified for the positions. Additionally, he centralized all the power in the National Palace. By doing so, he reduced the prospect for expertise of the new public administrator. It is clear that Duvalier did not invent the system of centralization of power in Haiti. But in the history of the country, he was the one who went the furthest in the process of transforming the presidential palace as the center of political, administrative, and military power.13 Decisions to appoint or dismiss the senior officer of the army, a soldier, the secretary of foreign affairs, or a government agent all took place in the National Palace. Duvalier granted only partial authority to even the most faithful servants who occupied key positions in the government.14 On many occasions, the president personally interrogated prisoners and led squads to execute convicts whose sentences were pronounced by special courts in the National Palace. The trias politica principle (separation of powers) approved by the 1957 constitution was of no significance to Duvalier. Instead, during his reign, Papa Doc established a system of subordination of the legislative and judicial powers and the army to the executive branch, which became hegemonic.15 Moreover, being Duvalierist was not enough to have a long and stable career in government. Indeed, by the 1960s, macoutisation of public administration took another dimension with elimination of some Duvalierists. Early in his presidency, Papa Doc surrounded himself with competent members of the black elite. There were many intellectuals in his campaign team and first cabinet. Among them there were Dr. Jean Price-Mars, a former congressman

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and longtime diplomat; Dr. Louis Mars, a psychiatrist and diplomat; Leslie Manigat, a historian and specialist in international relations; Henock Trouillot, a historian; Roger Dorsinville, a prominent writer and diplomat; Joseph Chatelain, a respected economist; Vilfort Beauvoir, who held a Ph.D. in law; and Father Jean-Baptiste Georges, who held a doctorate in canon law. Gradually, the president eliminated most of the influential executives of this administration and promoted more submissive personalities. As early as 1958, Duvalier began using diplomatic missions to displace some famous Duvalierists. That was in fact a form of golden exile for the fortunate few;16 others were brutally imprisoned, exiled, or killed.17 On the other hand, there is evidence that Duvalier, despite his nationalistic and racial policy, preferred conferring some important tasks to foreign experts, especially individuals and companies from the United States.18 A few months after his inauguration, three major U.S. companies worked within Duvalier’s cabinet. His official adviser and lobbyist was John Roosevelt, son of former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose firm, Summers & Hamilton, was in charge of communication for the Haitian president. Technicians of Lehman Brothers and Klein & Sacks, who specialized in finance, were appointed as economic consultants for the government. Among U.S. individuals who were appointed by the president, Nolle Smith seconded the finance minister, Philippe Bottfeld was the special adviser for tourism, and Harlan Tulley was a key expert in the department of agriculture.19 Furthermore, an imposing U.S. naval mission was training the Haitian army. To justify this policy, Duvalier claimed Haitian professionals were incompetent.20 On the contrary, the president simply made a choice of government. He decided to expel from Port-au-Prince—the center of power—the few Haitians who could threaten his regime, while he called on foreign experts who had no interest in the country’s internal policy. In the 1960s, this lack of local expertise became a real obstacle to Haiti’s development. The government was a victim of its own policy, which contributed to the acceleration of the brain drain of Haitians outside the country. According to Robert I. Rotberg, “By 1963, 1000 Haitians were reported to be employed in the Congo (Kinshasa), and between 1960 and 1962 310 Haitian professionals began working in Guinée for President Sékou Touré or the United Nations. By the middle 1960’s about 80 per cent of Haiti’s

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most qualified physicians, lawyers, engineers, teachers, and other professionals had fled to the United States, Canada or Africa.”21 Robert Heinl and Nancy Heinl add, “By 1970, there were more Haitian physicians in either Montreal or New York than Haiti. Montreal had ten times more Haitian psychiatrists than Port-au-Prince. Of 246 medical-school graduates from 1959 to 1969 from the University of Haiti, only three could be found in practice in the country in 1969. Some 50 public-health nurses, trained by the United States, were all lost to Africa. The Organization of American States and the U.N. had more Haitian economists on their payrolls than the government of Haiti.”22 By the end of 1961, the foreign experts that were working within Duvalier’s government left the country because of the fragile economic situation and poor practices of the regime. Hence, Haiti became indisputably in need of specialists to implement sustainable projects to gain the approval of the Wise Men. The country needed assistance, and the Kennedy administration could make thousands of dollars available for its development, but there were no local plans. Therefore, Duvalier’s only choice was to ask the United States to send specialists to prepare a program for Haiti. The executive committee of the Alliance for Progress sent nine experts to Haiti a few weeks after the Punta del Este conference. They quickly reached the conclusion that Haiti did not have qualified staff to carry out the reforms prescribed by the charter. In their first report, they recommended the dispatch of a considerable inter-American mission to Haiti. In November 1961, a committee of fourteen members, the Tripartite Commission for Economic Planning, was sent to Haiti. It was composed of six experts of the Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL), four experts from the Organization of American States (OAS), and four experts from the Inter-American Development Bank. The Tripartite Commission had two principal objectives. First, they had to make an inventory of the possibilities for development in Haiti. Thereafter, they were to offer two ways of developing these possibilities. The first objective was to be attained in two years and the second in eight years.23 In June 1962, the commission submitted the first plan it had prepared for Haiti to the Wise Men. According to this document, there were four major projects that could contribute to Haiti’s development: the construction of an airport in Port-au-Prince, a route between the capital and the southern region, a medical program, and an education campaign in rural areas. According to

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the commission evaluation, it would cost $70 million to implement this plan. The construction was slated to begin in 1963 and end two years later. After their completion, the Wise Men would decide about the second part of the program. This would focus on economic and social development of Haiti as stated by the Alliance for Progress.24 In reality, the projects presented in the first plan were not innovative. Duvalier intended to achieve them before Kennedy launched the Alliance for Progress. Some of them were even promised during the 1957 campaign. Furthermore, in January 1962, funding for the airport was, among other projects, the center of negotiation between the U.S. secretary of state, Dean Rusk, and the minister of Haitian foreign relations, René Chalmers, as a reward for Haiti’s vote against Cuba at the Punta del Este conference.25 On this occasion, the estimated cost for the airport was 2.8 million.26 In April, the United States gave a first disbursement for the construction of the southern route.27 It is obvious that if the experts were from Haiti, they would not spend seven months finalizing projects that the government had already negotiated. Also, the qualitative presentation was all that was new in the projects the commission submitted to the seven Wise Men. Despite all this, no one knew whether the commission’s plan was tenable because the context was no longer favorable to Haiti. By the summer of 1962, before the executive committee of the Alliance for Progress analyzed the eligibility of the projects, Duvalier’s regime was already on the U.S. blacklist. The Kennedy administration decided to halt relations with the Haitian government because of Duvalier’s political practices. Therefore, the political situation in Haiti was another obstacle to access the funds of the Alliance for Progress. Political Practices Out of Phase with International Standards International donors always presented aid as a way to help countries in need; however, international assistance is essentially used as a political instrument. There is no program that reflects this double purpose more than the Alliance for Progress. After promising the modernization of Latin American countries, Kennedy announced that the implementation of the program was a “pact between democratic governments.” On the surface, Haiti appeared to be a democratic country because it had a president and a parliament elected

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four years prior. For that reason, Kennedy only specifically cited Castro’s Cuba and Trujillo’s Dominican Republic of nations that were not part of the “society of free men of the hemisphere.” Nevertheless, for some of the U.S. president’s advisers, there was a third dictatorship in the region: Haiti.28 The most influential anti-Duvalier figure in the Kennedy administration was Adolph Augustus Berle Jr. He was the former deputy secretary of state for Latin America under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Kennedy asked him to head the Task Force on Immediate Latin American Problems, which was supposed to come up with propositions on how to handle urgent regional troubles.29 It was put in place in November 1960, right after the U.S. presidential election. After Kennedy’s inauguration, Adolph Berle became the head of a wider group of delegates from the White House, Pentagon, state department, and CIA. As a specialist in Latin American politics, Berle played a leading role in the conception of the Alliance for Progress.30 Early on, he urged Kennedy to adopt a straightforward attitude toward Haiti by releasing Duvalier immediately.31 Berle was in a good position to understand how to utilize the Alliance for Progress as a means of promoting and sustaining democracy in Latin America. In this cold war context, the notion of democracy was essentially the antithesis of communism. It also referred to the functioning of viable institutions with respect to electoral terms, organization of free elections, political change, guarantee of free enterprise, respect of human rights, and freedom for citizens.32 On the basis of these assumptions, Duvalier’s country was anything but democratic. In fact, at the time of the implementation of the Alliance for Progress, Duvalier began to show the world the true face of his regime in three aspects of governing style: systematic elimination of all forms of opposition to his government, disrespect of private properties, and conservation of power. There is abundant literature on Duvalier’s habit of eliminating people who did not submit completely to his authority by exiling, imprisoning, or assassinating them.33 It is essential to highlight a few important facts that occurred between 1961 and 1963 that portray Duvalier’s time in power. During this period, after neutralizing the most important figures of his political opposition, Duvalier attacked the organized groups of the society. Between November 1960 and January 1961, the government deported several members of the Catholic clergy, including two archbishops, charging

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them with interference in Haiti’s internal politics. He also brutally suppressed a strike led by the students’ union (L’Union Nationale des Étudiants Haïtiens, UNEH).34 Several students and professors were jailed for organizing or supporting the strike. The government accused them of being paid by “international communism.”35 Under that charge, he closed the Catholic newspaper, La Phalange, which was the only daily newspaper in Port-auPrince that was not subordinate to the government.36 Duvalier also attacked members of the Forces Army of Haiti (FAD’H). He gave all rights and privileges to the Tontons Macoutes while he regularly purged the army of its most capable soldiers.37 During April 1963, more than sixty officers were expelled from the FAD’H. They all took refuge in foreign embassies. The Tontons Macoutes murdered those who did not take refuge. The U.S. state department drew up a list of about 150 people, especially FAD’H officers, university professors, and professionals from diverse backgrounds—including entire families—who took refuge in the Latin American embassies in Port-au-Prince.38 Kennedy might not have been concerned with Duvalier’s brutality if his victims were simply left-wing personalities. They would be victims of the cold war. In the Kennedy administration, it was admitted that to fight communism subversion in underdeveloped countries, weapons could not be separated from roads and schools.39 In other words, to achieve the objectives of the Alliance for Progress—building roads and schools, containing communism—a strong government was desirable. However, Duvalier’s actions exceeded Kennedy’s tolerance level. The Haitian dictator attacked people from both the left and right—and many more from the right (bourgeoisie, church, and military) than the left. His politics were obviously contrary to the idea of the Alliance for Progress, not only in its political considerations but also in its economic vision. Since his arrival in power, Duvalier established a system that showed little respect for individuals’ rights of private property and free enterprise. He confiscated the property of opponents who were jailed or exiled, which was a good source of fortune for the Duvalierists. The Tontons Macoutes took advantage of these felonious practices all over the country. Additionally, since 1957 Duvalier used malicious strategies to address the economic problems facing his government. Because he could not get the international support

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needed to balance the budget, Duvalier put financial pressure on the country for years. The population was forced to suffer silently in penury while obligated by the government to finance obscure programs.40 One of the most famous internal activities Duvalier’s government set up to replenish the treasury was called Effort National. This consisted of new taxes, improvised tolls, treasury bills imposed on business, and pay cuts for government officials and the military.41 It is important to note that Duvalier used the Effort National program to build the city of Duvalier-Ville (currently called Cabaret) and the François Duvalier International Airport of Port-au-Prince (now called Toussaint Louverture International Airport). The Haitian president adopted extreme measures to find funds to run his government and to implement programs that were important to him. Duvalier’s policies significantly victimized numerous foreign individuals and companies. This had a definite impact on Haitian international relations. In the U.S. and French archives, there are several diplomatic protests against the regime’s method of extorting money from foreigners. However, Duvalier did not plan to change his ways of collecting funds.42 He declared the British ambassador, Gerard Corley-Smith, persona non grata for denouncing extortion of British citizens by Tontons Macoutes during the collection of “new taxes” for the construction of Duvalier-Ville.43 Duvalier’s attitude toward foreigners was a major obstacle to the disbursement of the international aid. In the case of the Alliance for Progress, U.S. companies played a significant role because they had to be the first to receive the contracts for transportation and construction. The U.S. Congress required that products and services obtained through U.S. aid should come from the United States, and equipment that came from other countries had to be carried by vessels registered in the United States.44 This meant that U.S. companies should be free, and even encouraged, to open or expand their business in countries that received U.S. aid. Yet in Haiti, it was impossible to do business easily because private investment was not protected and private property was not respected. In the meantime, Duvalier also had a reputation for not paying his debts to foreign companies.45 France, for example, decided not to buy Haitian coffee and refused to grant any financial assistance to Haiti because Duvalier did not commit to pay his debts to French companies such as Grands Travaux de Marseille.46 The United States took similar measures in the summer of 1961

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when the Senate amended the Mutual Security Act, which forbade the United States from granting financial assistance to governments that owed money to U.S. citizens.47 The Dirksen Amendment, which was named after Illinois senator Everett Dirksen, specifically addressed the issue of Duvalier’s debts to U.S. companies and individuals, which reached $1.5 billion.48 Beyond these fundamental considerations—Duvalier’s dictatorship and his politics of extortion—Haiti was a politically unstable country. During Duvalier’s reign, there were at least two attempted military coups or invasions each year. The number would be much larger if we added rumors and information from the petite histoire (nonscientific history). Just in the year 1963, there were two military coup plots, an attempted kidnapping of Duvalier’s children, several invasion attempts from an army of Haitian exiles based in the Dominican Republic, and a threat of war between Duvalier and Juan Bosch, president of the Dominican Republic. Duvalier severely repressed every attempt to overthrow his government. Dead bodies of insurgents dragged along the street for days became warnings to potential rebels. The Tontons Macoutes also attacked families of insurgents. They did not even spare children. Duvalier could commit the worst imaginable crime to retain his power.49 Instability was also related to the fact that Duvalier’s presidency was over in 1963, according to the 1957 constitution. Kennedy required the enforcement of the Haitian constitution, which stated that the president was elected for a nonrenewal six-year term. Accordingly, a new president should take office on May 15, 1963. Initially, the Kennedy administration did not find it urgent to forsake Duvalier, as Adolph Berle recommended. Secretary of State Dean Rusk,50 as well as the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Robert Newbegin, advocated in favor of the maintenance of a close relationship with Duvalier in order to protect the U.S. interests in the region.51 By 1962, it became evident that the Haitian political situation was incompatible with Kennedy’s vision for the region. Consequently, Duvalier’s regime became a real problem for the United States. Nevertheless, as a result of strategic considerations, Kennedy did not cut all the U.S aid to Haiti.52 Until mid-1963, he applied a wait-and-see policy toward Duvalier. Haiti was considered unstable and, most of all, in transition. Thus, it could not benefit from long-term investments. The United States decided to give only occasional aid to Haiti, and under certain conditions.

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The Nationalisme à la Carte of Haitians Haitians are known for their pride in being the first black nation in the world, the only successful revolution of slaves in the world, and the second free nation in the Americas. There are fortresses and statues all over the country that serve as reminders of the victory of black slaves against the white French slave owners. Even illiterate Haitians can declaim Dessalines’s oath to never allow the blan (white man) to lead this country. More than ordinary Haitians, the leaders of the government always refer to the serment des ancêtres (oath of the ancestors) to defend national integrity—but mostly their own interest—when faced with international pressure to ameliorate internal Haitian policy. In 1962, Kennedy decided to release some aid to Haiti under three conditions: (1) control of the aid by U.S. agencies; (2) dissolution of the Tontons Macoutes; and (3) Duvalier’s scheduled departure from power in May 1963.53 These conditions underlined the three important components for disbursing international aid even today; they represent good governance, human rights, and democracy. They were all related to internal policy. And Haiti, in addition to its lack of expertise and ongoing instability, had the reputation of being a highly corrupt country that had a precarious democracy even before Duvalier. In the 1960s, the Duvalier administration was at the top of a list of corrupt governments in the region. Leslie Péan uses the term ensauvagement to express how brutal and perversive Duvalier’s regime was.54 Péan details Duvalier’s practice of diverting international funds. Even when money for infrastructure was effectively used for building roads and rail networks, all the lucrative contracts were given to Duvalierist partisans and relatives. Also, international aid was used to enrich the presidential family and friends, used to finance secret activities, or used as vouchers to buy support for the regime. Even Rony Gilot, a dedicated Duvalierist, does not deny this fact.55 The U.S. government was aware of this.56 After turning a blind eye to Duvalier’s misappropriation of international funds for more than a year, Kennedy decided to take control over U.S assistance to Haiti. He wanted to be sure that the money disbursed to Haiti would serve to implement projects submitted by the Haitian government and accepted by the United States. Accordingly, he adopted some radical measures. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) should manage money disbursed for Haiti in the form of

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donations.57 That was related specifically to $7.2 million promised by the United States in April 1962 to implement technical assistance and economic programs in rural areas.58 As for the loans, which the Haitian government obtained with an interest rate, Kennedy decided they should be placed under the control of the Development Loan Fund. When Kennedy announced this measure, Duvalier had just signed a loan of $3.4 million with the United States for the construction of a southern highway. Although the money was not a donation, Kennedy wanted the U.S. agencies to be responsible for launching the request for money and paying contractors that presented proof of their expenses.59 Also, the Haitian government could no longer have unlimited access to the money that came from the United States in the form of aid or loans. Duvalier rejected these conditions, claiming they endangered the national sovereignty of Haiti.60 Under the same guise of national sovereignty, Duvalier refused to dismiss the militia and end his term on May 15, 1963. In this Kennedy and Duvalier had been at loggerheads since April 1961. Two years before the end of his constitutional mandate, the Haitian president used the parliamentary election to reelect himself for an additional six years. In this election, the ballots were designed as follows: “Vote—Jean Joseph Pierre, Candidate for Deputy [Representative]—Dr. François Duvalier, President.”61 Hence, the name of Duvalier was written on each ballot. At the end of the election, the regime started an extensive campaign to convince the international public opinion and diplomatic missions in Haiti of the way the population “spontaneously” turned the vote into a presidential election and used it to “plebiscite Dr. François Duvalier.” The “intellectuals of the regime” used the media to produce “scholarly analysis” justifying the April 30 election. The public precursor Max C. Duplessis resuscitated Montesquieu to support his argument:62 Le peuple, lors d’une consultation électorale, est souverain et exprime sa volonté dans les formes qu’il a choisies et en faveur de qui bon lui semble. Aucun texte constitutionnel ne peut lui être opposé, car il apporterait une limitation au libre exercice de la souveraineté nationale. The people, during an election is sovereign and expresses its will in the manner it chooses and to whom it pleases. No constitutional text can be opposed because it would provide a limitation on the free exercise of national sovereignty.63

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This statement served as the main argument for all attempts to justify the spontaneous reelection of Duvalier. When the official result was announced, Duvalier was “officially reelected” for six years, the president reactivated the theory of popular sovereignty.64 He claimed he did not have any choice but bow down before the will of his people: “My enemies . . . can reproach me for one crime—of loving my people too much. As a revolutionary, I have no right to disregard the voice of the people.”65 By saying this, Duvalier wanted the international community to believe it was not his choice to stay in power, but that of the nation. In other words, who could blame him? In fact, the United States did. In a telegram to the state department, the U.S. embassy concluded, “Efforts to give the election an appearance of constitutionality should stretch the imagination of even the most credulous of the uneducated among the Haitians.”66 The Haitian dictator needed a stronger argument to convince the Kennedy administration, which was committed to democratic standards. To express his disapproval of Duvalier’s maneuver to remain in power, Kennedy recalled his ambassador on the eve of Duvalier’s installation on May 22.67 In the following year, no U.S. ambassador participated in commemorating the date adopted by Duvalier as the day of national recognition. Every May 22, thousands of people gathered in Port-au-Prince, shouting, “Vive Duvalier.”68 Most of them were peasants who were forced to leave their villages and were transported to the capital by buses, military trucks, and vessels in order to enlarge the number of pro-Duvalier demonstrators.69 On these occasions, the government requisitioned all private and public transportation. People were also forbidden to leave the capital. During those days, songs, posters, speeches, and ceremonies were all dedicated to the glorification of Dr. Duvalier, according to a telegram from the French ambassador.70 The Haitian president did everything to show the world, especially the U.S. president, that he had his people’s support. If Duvalier tried to persuade Kennedy, it was because the U.S. aid was essential to the survival of the regime. Since he took power in 1957, the Haitian president placed his government under the total dependence of the United States. He even declared that he wanted Haiti to become “the spoiled child of the United States as it was the case for Puerto Rico.”71 During the last two years of Eisenhower’s presidency, Duvalier managed to get important

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aid from the United States, sometimes through blackmail. The Eisenhower administration financed up to 30 percent of the Haitian budget. Accordingly, when Eisenhower’s successor initiated the Alliance for Progress, Duvalier had been used to depending significantly on U.S. financial assistance. If he accepted the first conditions, it was surely due to the enormous needs of Haiti. A writer friendly to Duvalier described Haiti’s financial situation in this way: Le pays était confronté à une situation économique exécrable. Les bamboches et les couteuses concentrations populaires, le laxisme administratif, la corruption généralisée entretenue par le système des dépouilles post-électorales, la course effrénée de la classe moyennes aux prébendes, et parfois le gaspillage inconsidéré des ressources publiques, tout cela avait contribué à vider les caisses de l’Etat. The country faced an abysmal economic situation. Expensive debauchery and popular manifestations, permissiveness in the public administration, the widespread corruption maintained by the spoiled postelectoral system, the rat race of the middle class to sinecures, and sometimes the reckless waste of public resources, all contributed to empty the state treasuries.72

Clearly, the Haitian government could not function without U.S. assistance. However, President Duvalier wanted unconditional aid. He often asked for massive injections of U.S. dollars into the Haitian economy. But he did not accept any restriction on his internal policy and management of the aid. He expected the moon from the Alliance for Progress, but he rejected its political conditions.73 When the Inter-American Organization raised the question of human rights in Haiti, Duvalier accused them of interfering in the internal affairs of Haiti,74 yet he appealed to them to write the national plan that was presented to the Wise Men. When the chief of the U.S. naval mission to Haiti published his position about the militia, Duvalier accused him of interfering in Haitian policy.75 Nevertheless, the marines were training the Haitian army. When Kennedy asked him to respect democratic rules, he said that Haitian democracy was not that of France or England, and less than that of the United States.76 When Duvalier felt it necessary, he appealed to foreigners and offered them advantages, such as the possibility for the United States to establish a

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military base in Haiti.77 But when these same foreigners acted in a manner that endangered his interest, Duvalier pulled his card of “defender of national sovereignty.” Therefore, Duvalier’s nationalism was made-to-measure attitude: it was nationalisme à la carte. In Duvalier’s vision, even though Haiti was dependent on international assistance, it should be considered a singular country—a nation that fully enjoyed its rights of self-determination and had its own conception of democracy and human rights. These notions were, nonetheless, defined and enforced by the president according to his objective of staying indefinitely in power. In this context, and under the Duvalier regime’s desired conditions, international aid could not be effective.78 It is important to remember that some of Kennedy’s requirements— management of the aid by USAID and the loans by the Development Loan Fund—were not included in the charter of Punta del Este. The Alliance for Progress was presented as a mechanism of the inter-American system; that meant it was subject to multilateral diplomacy. But in practice, it was an instrument of bilateral diplomacy engaging each country with the United States. Accordingly, the more friendly a Latin American country was to the United States, the better its chances of receiving money. As noted previously, since the fall of 1961, some weeks after signing the charter of Punta del Este, Duvalier had not received any financial aid from the Kennedy administration. This was directly related to the Dirksen amendment. This bilateral decision would later affect the release of funds from the Alliance for Progress. Duvalier understood this logic. He decided to start paying his debts to U.S. companies.79 But some months later, the blockage came directly from the heart of the Alliance for Progress: the White House. During the summer of 1962, while the Haitian government was prepared to submit its projects to the Wise Men, it became evident to Kennedy that Duvalier did not intend to accept the U.S. requirements. He resolved not to proceed with his promises of aid. He decided Haiti should not receive new assistance from the United States, and even the disbursement of loans already signed should be blocked. The staff and budget of USAID in Haiti were reduced considerably. The loan of $2.8 million for the construction of the airport was maintained because this project met the military condition imposed by the United States for jets being able to land in Haiti.80 However, the loan for the construction of the southern route was suspended. The United States

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even blocked disbursement of loans Haiti signed with the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Development Association, which was an agency of the World Bank.81 Kennedy adopted these measures knowing that Haiti had great need of financial support from international donors, particularly the United States.82 The truth was that international aid did not serve a humanitarian purpose. The Hidden Agenda of the Donors From a humanitarian point of view, international assistance should not take the form of a give-and-take business. It should be an act by which wealthy countries and institutions share with underprivileged countries and people. Most of the time, the donors never reveal what they hope to receive in return for their aid. They regularly align their assistance with the popular French formula, assistance à personne en danger—that is, the international community has an obligation to assist people in danger. Accordingly, there should be no hidden agenda in international aid. President John Kennedy put forth this ideal humanitarian purpose when he presented his administration’s commitment to help Latin American countries. In the inaugural speech of the Alliance for Progress, he claimed that this program would focus on economic development. The limitation of this statement was carefully demonstrated. Furthermore, the alliance in essence was not an ordinary political instrument, but rather the main weapon the United States used to contain the spread of communism in Latin America. As Melvin Small emphasizes, “American diplomacy, politics, culture, religion, science and technology, and the institution of the family were all dramatically affected by the nation’s longest ‘war,’ the Cold War.”83 That explains why the fight against communism had dominated the 1960 electoral campaign of the United States. Consequently, by attaining the presidency, Kennedy became the commander in chief of the cold warriors of the Western Hemisphere. During the Eisenhower presidency, the United States had developed various forms of financial assistance to support any government in Latin America, including dictatorships, which was aligned with the Western bloc by containing the expansion of communism.84 Kennedy regionalized the containment of communism in Latin America by establishing an economic program for the entire hemisphere.

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At the time Kennedy took office, the United States and its Latin American allies considered Fidel Castro a threat to the hemisphere.85 They accused Cuban broadcasters of “inveighing daily and agents conspiring nightly against the democratic regimes of Latin America.”86 Castro’s regime was perceived as a bad example for a region in which there should be no place for communism, in Kennedy’s view. To bring peace to the hemisphere, the United States was determined to overthrow Castro. The episode of the Bay of Pigs, which was prepared under Eisenhower and fulfilled under Kennedy, was one of the U.S. attempts to attain this goal.87 In the meantime—and more strongly after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion—the United States decided to prevent by any means other countries in the region from following the Cuban example. Therefore, pressuring Cuba would be a good way to stop all leftist movement in Latin American and Caribbean countries. François Duvalier fully supported Kennedy’s policy. In his country, he chased both real and alleged communists. He arrested and executed many famous leftist leaders and presented them publically as war trophies. This was the case with the legendary Marxist leader of the Parti d’Entente Populaire (Party of Popular Agreement), Jacques Stephen Alexis. The author of the famed novel Compère Général Soleil was executed in April 1961.88 At a regional level, Duvalier bragged of having associated his government with the U.S. effort to “curb the spread of communism in the hemisphere and maintain the unity of the hemispheric family.”89 He gave the United States the deciding vote to ostracize Cuba from the OAS. On many occasions, he offered the United States Mole St.-Nicolas, a peninsula located less than fifty miles from Cuba, to install a military base in replacement of the one at Guantánamo.90 After the missile crisis, he allowed the U.S. navy and air force to use Haitian ports and airports to strengthen quarantine measures against Cuba.91 As a result, Kennedy’s advisers considered Duvalier an important ally against Castro and communism. He was therefore in a good position to receive the alliance’s funds despite his dictatorship.92 By the end of 1962, the Kennedy administration radically changed its position regarding Duvalier. Kennedy was certainly concerned about Duvalier’s dictatorship and his disrespect of Haitian rights. But this was not the main apprehension of a U.S. president during the cold war. In fact, Kennedy’s advisers concluded, as they did for Castro, that Duvalier’s regime was endangering

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the hemisphere. The very reason they relied on Duvalier—to stem the red communist menace—became the main reason they wanted him to leave power. Kennedy’s advisers feared that Duvalier’s dictatorship would induce the emergence of a communist regime in Haiti, as had been the case in Cuba. Batista had prepared the way for Castro in Cuba, according to Secretary of State Dean Rusk.93 Thus, the Haitian president became a stumbling block that could affect the management of the cold war in the Caribbean. Duvalier became Kennedy’s foe, and vice versa. The two men had different and incompatible agendas. The U.S. president decided to withdraw all support to the Haitian government and to overthrow Duvalier, who had become an awkward figure for the stability of the region. This implied the death of the Alliance for Progress in Haiti, although the program officially ended after Johnson’s presidency. The United States would never fully resume its assistance to Haiti until François Duvalier’s death. Conclusion: Haiti’s Reconstruction— A Challenge to International Commitments There is a widening gap between commitment and disbursement of international aid to Haiti. This analysis of Alliance for Progress shows that the effectiveness of international aid was determined by a set of factors involving both the recipient’s compliance and the donor’s expectations. From 1961 to the present, making commitments has been the action that requires the least effort in the process of international assistance. However, completion has been subject to conditions. Four factors must be considered before international aid pledged to Haiti can become effective. The first factor, the administrative weakness of the Haitian government, has existed since Haiti’s founding, but it has been particularly flagrant since the earthquake of January 12, 2010. The country lost hundreds of professionals during the disaster, adding to the thousands of young intellectuals who have been leaving the motherland for the last two decades. Despite this lack of qualified human resources, partisanship still remains in the public administration. The government is unable to eliminate corruption in the system while it does not have enough funds to pay its employees. Professionals who stay in the country are mostly working for private companies and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The latter, which have more financial and human

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capital, tend to replace the government. Three thousand NGOs were operating in Haiti in 2009, according to the United States Institute of Peace.94 In 2010, after the quake, the number of NGOs in Haiti was estimated to be as high as ten thousand. Accordingly, some researchers refer to Haiti as the Republic of NGOs. As an article published in the United States Institute of Peace’s bulletin states, Fears of corruption have caused donors to bypass the Haitian government and funnel financial material assistance through NGOs. For example, in fiscal year 2007–2008, USAID spent $300 million in Haiti, all of which was implemented through foreign NGOs. These projects often had more money than the entire Haitian Ministry of Planning. As a result, the Haitian government had little chance to develop the human or institutional capacity to deliver services. The Haitian people have learned to look to NGOs, rather than the government, for provision of essential services.95

This passage demonstrates a paradox in international commitments to Haiti. The Haitian government needs international help to invest in its human capital, but it does not receive international assistance because of its administrative weakness, which is, among other reasons, the consequence of the flight of its human capital. The implication is that, on the one hand, the international community should admit that bypassing the assistance through NGOs is the wrong way to help Haiti strengthen its public service. On the other hand, the Haitian government must improve its fight against corruption, partisanship, and incompetence in public administration. Political instability is the second factor that affects the effectiveness of international commitments to Haiti. Respect of human rights, public security, periodic elections, and political alternation are the most common signs of political stability in a country. For example, the 2010–11 elections were so significant that international funds had been released much faster for these elections than for the reconstruction. Moreover, the foreign embassy in Portau-Prince denounced the electoral fraud more severely than the stagnation of the reconstruction. The United States even threatened to revoke visas of members of the electoral council, the government, and the Party Inite (President Préval’s party) if they did not reverse the November 28 election results,

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which placed Michel Martelly third. It was clear that if these elections led to a political crisis, the aid for the reconstruction of “the desperately poor country [would] be cut,” as Mark Weisbrot notes in his analysis.96 Haiti is now facing a new political crisis. Approximately three months after taking the presidential oath of office, Michel Martelly is unable to find a compromise with the parliament in order to form his government. As a result, the president can only take limited measures to face the difficult situation of Haiti. The cabinet is simply “liquidating current affairs,” according to the Haitian constitution. This means that new agreements cannot be signed between Haiti and members of the international community. New projects cannot be submitted to donors. When asking about the current political crisis, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Kenneth Merten, declared that his country is impatient to see a government established in Haiti in order to reactivate the bilateral program between the United States and Haiti.97 A week later, the Canadian ambassador, Henry Paul Normandin, confirmed “the absence of government had a negative impact on Canadian-Haitian cooperation.”98 International commitments will be ineffective if the current political crisis persists and if the political situation remains volatile for years to come. The third factor is the conflict between the nationalistic pride of Haitians and the conditions imposed for disbursing international funds. Here is another paradox in the international commitment to Haiti. During the March 2010 conference, the donors required the IHRC to be composed of Haitian officials and representatives from the international community. Many Haitian politicians disapprove of this formula for various reasons. They argue that it is awkward to have Haitians and foreigners in equal numbers and with the same rights on the board of a commission that is planning Haiti’s reconstruction. Moreover, the commission is chaired by a Haitian, prime minister JeanMax Bellerive, and a foreigner, former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Despite his long familiarity with Haitian politics, the presence of Clinton at the head of the IHRC is the object of criticism in Haiti. The mission of the IHRC also has opponents. This committee will oversee all projects for the reconstruction. To facilitate its work, the Haitian parliament declared a state of emergency for eighteen months. Under this law, the IHRC has full power to expropriate any land in order to facilitate the construction of housing, schools, hospitals, electrification systems, ports, and other economic development projects. There

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is no doubt about the need for these projects. But for the nationalists, giving so much power to such commission only reinforces Haiti’s dependency. During the electoral campaign, candidate Michel Martelly was extremely critical of the IHRC. He even promised to create another institution composed exclusively of Haitians to work on the reconstruction. But since he became president, Martelly tends to be more pragmatic. Instead of eliminating the IHRC, he decorated Bill Clinton, renewed his mandate as cochair of the IHRC, and reinforced the central role of the commission in the reconstruction process. Without analyzing in details the success or the failure of the IHRC, it is evident that Martelly has made a smart move by giving up his revolutionary promises about controlling international aid. Along with President Martelly, more Haitians should realize that donor conditions to release aid are mandatory most of the time. The last element that should be considered is the motivation of the donors. It is obvious that international aid does not only serve humanitarian purposes. Accordingly, the desire to help a poor country is not all that persuades the international community to pledge billions of dollars to Haiti. From historical facts, it is clear that every international donor has at least one of these two discernible, specific motivations. First of all, being involved in Haiti’s reconstruction facilitates the defending of economic and geostrategic interests. Second, committing aid to needy people reinforces a country’s position of prestige in the international system. Additionally, there is a third motivation that is difficult to discern because it is hidden; it is part of the unrevealed agenda of the donors. Are the secret agendas consistent with the desire to help Haiti? What concealed role is imposed on Haiti, unknown by the Haitian people and government, to advance the donors’ agendas? It will take time to determine that. International assistance is indispensable in Haiti’s current desperate situation. For it to be effective, there must be adjustments in both Haitian’s conformity with international standards and the donors’ expectations. Otherwise, aid for reconstruction may suffer the same fate as the Alliance for Progress. Notes 1. “Address by President Kennedy at a White House Reception for Latin American Diplomats and Members of Congress, March 13, 1961,” Department of State Bulletin 44, no. 1136 (April 3, 1961): 471–74.

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2. Green Book, cited in Jeffrey F. Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America (New York, 2007), 5, and note on 252: “A 1961 dollar is equivalent to 5.08 dollars in 2004 according to AID [U.S. Agency for International Development].” 3. Organization of American States, Special Meeting of Inter-American Economic and Social Council at the Ministerial Level, Punta del Este, Uruguay, August 5–17, 1961. 4. We refer to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John Kennedy in the White House (Boston, 1965); William D. Rogers, The Twilight Struggle: The Alliance for Progress and the Politics of Dependence in Latin America (New York, 1967); Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onís, The Alliance That Lost Its Way: A Critical Report on the Alliance for Progress (Chicago, 1970); Robert M. Smetherman and Bobbie Smetherman, “The Alliance for Progress: Promises Unfulfilled,” American Journal of Economics and Sociology 31, no. 1 (1972): 79–86; Tony Smith, America’s Mission: The United States and the Worldwide Struggle for Democracy in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, 1994); Stephen G. Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill, 1999); Taffet, Foreign Aid. 5. “Address by President Kennedy,” 473–74: “Our Alliance for Progress is an alliance of free governments-and it must work to eliminate tyranny from a hemisphere in which it has no rightful place. . . . Our motto is what it has always been: progress yes, tyranny no—Progreso si, tirania no!” 6. Organization of American States, The Alliance for Progress and Latin American Development Prospects: A Five-Year Review, 1961–1965 (Baltimore, 1967). 7. The Act of Bogota, which was adopted by the Council of the American States on September 13, 1960, recommended measures that had to be taken for social improvement, economic development, and multilateral cooperation for social and economic progress within the framework of Operation Pan America. 8. Taffet, Foreign Aid, 39. 9. Macoutisation derives from macoutes, which was the name given to members of François Duvalier’s personal police. In Haiti, the word macoutes or tontons macoutes is also attributed to anyone who pledged allegiance to the regime. See Leslie F. Manigat, Statu quo en Haiti? D’un Duvalier à l’autre: L’itinéraire d’un Fascisme de sousdéveloppement (Paris, 1971); Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti: State against Nation— The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York, 1990). 10. This question is discussed in David Nicholls, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (New Brunswick, 1979); Frantz Voltaire, dir., Pouvoir noir en Haïti: L’explosion de 1946 (Montreal, 1988); Matthew J. Smith, Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Confict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (Chapel Hill, 2009).

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11. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, “Class Struggle in Contemporary Haitian Politics: An Interpretative Study of the Campaign of 1957,” Journal of Caribbean Studies 2, no. 1 (1981): 109–27. 12. Archives of the Haitian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (hereafter HMFA), unnumbered telegram, Arnaud Merceron, Haitian ambassador in Cuba, “Informer de mes démarches auprès du gouvernement cubain pour la cessation des activités subversives de Louis Déjoie et d’autres haïtiens à Cuba,” April 27, 1959; Gérard PierreCharles, Radiographie d’une dictature (Port-au-Prince, 1987), 135–41. 13. Sauveur Pierre Étienne, in an excellent study about this practice of centralizing the powers in Haitian history, suggests that this practice caused the failure of establishing a modern state in Haiti. Sauveur Pierre Étienne, L’Énigme haïtienne: Echec de l’Etat moderne en Haïti (Montreal, 2007). 14. In his staff meeting, Duvalier was the only one who talked. He read his instruction to the members of his cabinet and the latter listened carefully. One of the scenes was shown in Jean-Claude Diserens, L’émission des continents sans visa: François Duvalier, a television program transmitted in France in October 1968 (http://archives .tsr.ch/player/perspectives-duvalier). 15. Kern Delince, Les Forces politiques en Haïti (Paris, 1993), 243. 16. Jean Florival, Duvalier: La face cachée de Papa Doc (Montreal, 2007), 75. 17. See Leslie Manigat, La crise haïtienne contemporaine (Port-au-Prince, 2009), 234–41. 18. Archives of the French Minister of Foreign Affairs (hereafter FMFA), telegram 23/AM, from the French ambassador, Lucien Félix, “Experts économiques et financiers Nord-américains au service du Président de la République d’Haïti,” Port-auPrince, January 6, 1959. 19. FMFA, document 75/AM, from the French Embassy to Port-au-Prince, “Haiti—Consultation d’experts américains ‘Klein & Sacks’ Politique déflationniste en Haïti,” Port-au-Prince, February 11, 1959; telegram 477/DE, from Ambassador Lucien Félix, “2 experts américains, conseillers du Département des Finances,” Port-au-Prince, September 21, 1959. 20. “Haiti: The Marines Are Back,” Time, November 9, 1959. 21. Robert I. Rothberg, Haiti: The Politics of Squalor (Boston, 1971), 243. 22. Robert D. Heinl and Nancy G. Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of Haitian People, 1492–1995 (Lanham, 2005), 587. 23. FMFA, telegram 528/AM, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Haïti et l’Alliance pour le Progrès,” Port-au-Prince, November 29, 1961. 24. FMFA, telegram 279/DE, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Programme de l’Alliance pour le Progrès en Haïti,” Port-au-Prince, June 5, 1962. 25. According to Time magazine (February 2, 1962), at the Punta del Este conference, the United States decided to pay some countries, including Haiti, to vote in

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favor the exclusion of Cuba to the OAS. The U.S.–Haitian negotiation at Punta del Este is discussed in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Thousand Days, 782–83; François Duvalier, Mémoires d’un leader du Tiers Monde (Paris, 1969), 197–98. 26. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, 565. 27. FMFA, telegram 162/AM, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Programme d’assistance américaine en Haïti,” Port-au-Prince, April 6, 1962. 28. Adolf A. Berle Jr., “Interview by Joseph E. O’Connor,” John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, July 6, 1967, 26. 29. Ibid., 21. 30. Jordan A. Schwarz, Liberal: Adolf A. Berle and the Vision of an American Era (New York, 1987). 31. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 12 (hereafter FRUS), Pre-Presidential Papers, Transition Series, Task Force Reports, 1960. 32. We refer to the classical definition of Philippe Boudreau et Claude Perron, Lexique de Science Politique (Montreal, 2002). 33. This issue is particularly addressed by John Marquis, Papa Doc: Portrait of a Tyrant Haitian (Kingston, 2007); Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti’s Today (New York, 1969); Bernard Diederich, Le Prix du sang (Port-au-Prince, 2005); and Gérard Pierre-Charles, Radiographie d’une dictature (Montreal, 1969), and Haïti: Jamais plus! Violations des droits de l’homme à l’époque des Duvalier (Port-au-Prince, 2000). 34. Claude B. Auguste, “L’Union Nationale des Étudiants Haïtiens (U.N.E.H.),” Revue de la Société haïtienne d’histoire et de Géographie, 67e Année 58, no. 174 (December 1992): 65–91. 35. Tribune des Etudiants, 3rd ser., no. 1, January 15, 1961, and no. 4, January 24, 1961. 36. Duvalier, Mémoires, 78–85. 37. U.S. National Archives (hereafter USNA), Mission Navale Américaine, Lettre 035-rlb 5400, du chef de la Mission Navale au Chef d’Etat-Major des Forces Armées, “Estimation des implications de la Milice Civile sur le progrès et le développement des Forces Armées d’Haïti,” Port-au-Prince, July 20, 1962. 38. USNA, Department of State airgram, Norman Warner, Political Officer, “List of Asylees,” Washington, D.C., May 31, 1963. 39. U.S. General Services Administration, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington, D.C., 1962), 1–3. 40. New York Times, October 2, 1962. 41. Florival, Duvalier, 95–96. 42. FMFA, note JM/MP, “Difficultés en Haïti,” Port-au-Prince, November 15, 1962.

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43. FMFA, telegram 115/AM, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Départ de l’Ambassadeur de Grande Bretagne,” Port-au-Prince, March 14, 1962. 44. Foreign Assistance Act of 1962, cited in Taffet, Foreign Aid, 42. 45. FMFA, note for the minister 125/AM, “La situation en Haïti et les relations franco-haïtiennes,” December 1, 1962. 46. FMFA, telegram 4/AM, from the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the Minister of Finances and Economic Affairs, “Suspension de nos achats de café en Haïti,” Paris, December 14, 1962. 47. HMFA, telegram AM/RC, 501–60, from the Haitian Embassy in Washington, D.C., “Opposition à l’aide américaine à Haïti au sein du Comité Sénatorial des Affaires Etrangères.” 48. FMFA, telegram 162/AM, from the French ambassador to the United States, Hervé Alphand, transmitted for information to the French Embassy in Port-auPrince, “Opinion du Département d’Etat sur le président Duvalier,” Washington, D.C., January 19, 1962. 49. See Diederich, Le Prix du sang, 251–91 50. FRUS, Doc. 368, Department of State, Central Files, 738.00/6-261, “Telegram from Secretary Rusk to the Department of State,” Paris, June 2, 1961. 51. FRUS, Doc. 367, Washington National Records Center, RG 330, OASD/ISA Files, FRC 64 A. 2382, Haiti, 1961, 000.1, “White House Conference on Haiti,” Washington, D.C., May 26, 1961. 52. FRUS, Doc. 372, “Background information for the meeting with the President on Haiti, which is scheduled for Thursday August 9.” 53. Miami Herald, May 13, 1962. 54. Leslie J. R. Péan, Haïti, économie politique de la corruption, t. IV, L’ensauvagement macoute et ses conséquences, 1957–2000 (Paris, 2007). 55. Rony Gilot, Au gré de la mémoire, 215. 56. FRUS, Doc. 372, National Security Files, Countries Series, Haiti, 7/62–8/62, “Memorandum From the Executive Secretary of the Department of State (Brubeck) to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy),” Washington, D.C., August 8, 1962. 57. FMFA, telegram 162/AM, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Programme d’assistance américaine en Haïti,” Port-au-Prince, April 6, 1962. 58. Le Nouvelliste, April 10, 1962. 59. FMFA, telegram R.10, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Modalités de l’aide américaine,” Port-au-Prince, April 25, 1962. 60. Charles T. Williamson, The U.S. Naval Mission to Haiti, 1959–1963 (Annapolis, 1999), 239.

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61. FMFA, telegram 210/AM, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Le nouveau mandat présidentiel du Docteur Duvalier,” Port-au-Prince, May 17, 1961. 62. MAE, telegram 210/AM, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Le nouveau mandat présidentiel du Docteur Duvalier,” Port-au-Prince, May 17, 1961. 63. Word-by-word translation by the author. 64. Le Matin, May 16, 1961. 65. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, 562. 66. USNA, Department of State, Central Files, 611.38/5/961, telegram 469, Portau-Prince, May 9, 1961. 67. FRUS, Doc. 366, Central Files, 738.00/5-2361, “Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State of Inter-American Affairs Wemberley Coerr to the Secretary of State Dean Rusk,” Washington, D.C., May 23, 1961. 68. Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy (New York, 1988), 110. 69. For a detailed account on the role of the crowd in Duvalier’s policy, we refer to our previous study, “Welcome OEA: François Duvalier et la foule accueillentla mission d’enquête de l’Organisation des États-américains, le 30 avril 1963,” in Hypotheses 2010, Travaux de l’École doctorale d’Histoire de l’Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris, 2011), 27–38. 70. FMFA, telegram R10, from the French ambassador, Charles le Génissel, “Prestation de serment du Docteur Duvalier,” Port-au-Prince, May 25, 1961. 71. Leslie F. Manigat, Eventail d’histoire vivante d’Haïti: Des préludes à la révolution de St-Domingue jusqu’à nos jours (1973–2003), t 3: La crise de dépérissement de la société traditionnelle haïtienne (1896–2003) (Port-au-Prince, 2003), 236. 72. Rony Gilot, Au gré de la mémoire, 215; word-by-word translation by the author. 73. FMFA, telegram 141/AM, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Reunion du Conseil Economique et Social Interaméricain à Mexico,” Port-au-Prince, March 20, 1963. 74. Organization of American States Archives, OEA.Sec.G/III C-SA-397–CSA-528, “Activities of the Inter-American Peace Committee, Fifth Session, September 24 to October 26, 1962.” 75. HMFA, Département des Affaires étrangères, République d’Haïti, telegram SG/CONF, from the Secretary of Foreign Affairs René Charlmers, “Note au Département d’Etat, Port-au-Prince,” April 26, 1963. 76. Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, 562. 77. USNA, Département des Affaires étrangères, République d’Haïti, telegram SG/CONF.A-INT:47, Port-au-Prince, July 1959. 78. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, 783; Florival, Duvalier, 95.

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79. Le Matin, March 20, 1962; FMFA, telegram 146/AM, from the French Ambassador to Haiti Charles le Genissel, “Déclarations du Président Duvalier au Vice-Président de la United Press [Harold Jones],” Port-au-Prince, March 30, 1962. 80. FRUS, National Security Files, Countries Series, Haiti, 7/62–8/62. 81. FRUS, Doc. 374, National Security Files, Countries Series, Haiti, 9/62–2/63, “Memorandum prepared in the Department of State as background information for a Presidential meeting on Haiti, on January 22, 1963.” 82. FRUS, Doc. 375, paper prepared in the Department of State, “Haiti Plan of Action from February 15 to September 15, 1963.” 83. Melvin Small, “Presidential Elections and the Cold War,” in A Companion to American Foreign Relations, ed. Robert D. Schulzinger (Malden, 2006), 419. 84. Stephen G. Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill, 1988). 85. USNA, telegram sent to the governments of the hemisphere in the eve of the Sixth and Seventh OAS Conferences of Ministers of Foreign Affairs at San José, Costa Rica, “Aide-mémoire,” 1960. 86. Schlesinger, Thousand Days, 779. 87. Piero Gleijeses, “Ships in the Night: The CIA, the White House, and the Bay of Pigs,” Journal of Latin American Studies 27 (1995); Thomas G. Paterson, “Fixation with Cuba: The Bay of Pigs, Missile Crisis, and Covert War against Fidel Castro,” in Kennedy’s Quest for Victory: American Foreign Policy, 1961–1963, ed. Thomas G. Paterson (New York, 1989), 127–31; James Blight, Peter Kornbluh: Politics of Illusion— The Bay of Pigs Invasion Re-examined (Boulder, 1989), 1–42; Trumbull Higgins, The Perfect Failure: Kennedy, Eisenhower, and the CIA at the Bay of Pigs (New York, 1987). 88. Diederich, Le Prix du sang, 129–40. 89. Duvalier, Mémoires, 211. 90. HMFA, Département des Affaires Etrangères, République d’Haïti, Secret: 150, Port-au-Prince, October 25, 1962; [NA], Note 67, U.S. Embassy, Port-au-Prince, October 26, 1962; SG/CONF:85, Département des Affaires étrangères, République d’Haïti, Port-au-Prince, November 29, 1962. 91. FRUS, Doc. 367, Washington National Records Center, RG 330, OASD/ISA Files: FRC 64 A. 2382, “White House Conference on Haiti,” Washington, D.C., May 26, 1961. 92. USNA, National Security Files, Countries Series, Haiti, 7/62–8/62. Central Files, 738.008-862. 93. Loch K. Johnson, A Season of Inquiry: The Senate Intelligence Investigation (Lexington, 1985); Heinl and Heinl, Written in Blood, 566. 94. United States Institute of Peace, “Haiti: A Republic of NGOs?” Peace Brief 23 (2010). 95. Ibid.

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96. Center for Economic and Policy Research, “‘Sad Day for Haitian Democracy’ as U.S. Threatens to Cut Off Aid to Haiti in Order to Reverse Its Election Results, CEPR Co-Director Says,” January 25, 2011. 97. Hpnhaiti.com, July 13, 2011. 98. Radio Metropole, July 20, 2011.

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8

Urban Planning and the Rebuilding of Port-au-Prince H a r l e y F. E t i e n n e

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n the fall of 2011, a meeting of Haitian government officials, community leaders, foreign diplomats, and representatives from the international nongovernmental organization (INGO) community was held at a Pétionville hotel. After one panel, several attendees came to the microphone to express their anger about the extent to which Americans seemed to be leading the reconstruction efforts. They shouted about a lack of coordination among Haitians that had allowed this unwelcome influence to enter their nation. By the end, some called for the establishment of a state-level ministry of urban affairs or policy to assist in the redevelopment of Haiti’s urban centers. In other contexts, urban affairs and policy has relied on professions and disciplines that work for egalitarian outcomes in the design and development of urban places. However, without the similar legacy of the reform and Progressive eras that shaped many service professions such as social work and planning in both Western Europe and North America, Haiti has not enjoyed the endogenous growth of these fields.1 Planning can be summarized as an activity that organizes land use for human settlement. However, an important feature of this definition is the communal nature of the exercise of planning. A market-based approach to the design of human settlements focuses not on human needs but on capital accumulation. There are thus inherent egalitarian and public ends embedded in the very definition of what planning does as a field and profession. One theory is that political disruptions throughout Haiti’s history have prevented

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sustained and vigorous public action. To institutionalize the planning profession in Haiti as it exists in other parts of the world is to create a sustainable public interest, and an egalitarian Haitian way or life. The course of Haitian history is not tangential to a definition of planning that makes sense in this context. It is perhaps why planning has never been well defined in Haiti or by the Haitian people. Vigorous public action has not been sustained for long periods of time without violence and political repression. That is to say, the egalitarian ends of planning have often eluded the Haitian nation-state. This chapter seeks to describe the current framework for city planning that is operating in Haiti after the 7.0 earthquake of 2010. In many ways, planning is simultaneously desperately needed in postdisaster Haiti and difficult to find in any coordinated or sustained way. For the purposes of this essay, I am separating the acts of shelter provision and housing development from the larger rubric of planning. It is not that shelter and housing are not planning, but that they are parts of planning. It is the coordination of policy, design, engineering, resources, sound decision making, and politics that makes planning what it is in other parts of the world. All of this depends, in part, in the state’s ability to govern and marshal the confidence (or compliance) of its people through the just execution of the law and sound governance practices. Without it, the practice of planning struggles to create and execute future visions of human settlement. An important feature of planning is that it depends on the legitimacy and capacity of the state to function. This is not to mean that planning cannot happen in local contexts; rather, vigorous public action requires the government’s ability to forecast and pursue egalitarian public ends. Haitian history and critiques of its recent crises would suggest that Haitian leaders have often governed how they were themselves governed. The legacy of the brutality of French colonialism lasted long into the twentieth century, only to be surpassed by the brutality of the American occupation. Disasters are catastrophic in many ways, but they do provide an opportunity to address long-standing problems and rebuild communities in ways that would have been impossible without the disaster.2 Haiti’s earthquake was unique in that it was far more catastrophic in Haiti than similar and larger earthquakes have been in other parts of the world. The documented geography of destruction reveals that the greatest damage was inflicted on central

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Port-au-Prince, Carrefour, and Léogâne. Initial estimates placed the death toll at 260,000. This number was revised several times downward to 220,000. The economic toll of the devastation is estimated to be $14 billion. Although the focus of the earthquake’s impact has largely centered on housing the more than 1.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) affected by the initial event and subsequent aftershocks, there are several other issues that have not received the same attention. For example, IDPs were not only residents of the affected communities but workers, suppliers, and entrepreneurs in both the informal and formal sectors. Even two years later, estimates of postearthquake unemployment are still estimated to be near 80 percent. Reports from U.N.–Habitat reflect the destruction of close to 260,000 structures in the earthquake zone.3 The damage in central Port-au-Prince and in the informal settlements in the hills around the city was among the worst. There was also considerable damage to the city’s ports and airports. More important than the amount and geographic distribution of the earthquakerelated destruction is the damage done to key buildings and monuments in and around Port-au-Prince. Among the most notable is the complete destruction of the National Palace, Palais Justice, the Port-au-Prince Cathedral, and Holy Trinité Cathedral, along with several other key government buildings and other sites of patrimony. As of this writing, more than half a million IDPs remain on the streets of Port-au-Prince two years after the earthquake of 2010.4 Cholera continues to plague the nation, and deteriorating conditions in IDP camps has placed greater urgency on returning the displaced to long-term settlements and communities. Haiti is currently poorly prepared to respond to the cyclical nature of disease and the funding streams directed to its resolution.5 Defining Planning for Postrecovery Haiti Planning is simultaneously a profession and an area of inquiry. This duality exists in the many specializations that compose the larger field, which can be seen to do several things. For example, planning can be understood as the physical design of communities and places, but it can also be understood as the study of how urban design shapes humans’ interaction with their environment. Economic development planning can make routine work of implementing interventions that will grow local or regional economies or study

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how the policy choices have affected economic conditions. In almost all senses, it is an intervention meant to change an existing course of events.6 The comprehensive planning that guided the modernization of many global cities incorporated all of those specialties into one agenda that was shaped by technical experts who intended to carry out their plans on behalf of a strong central authority. Planning (community development, economic development, coordination, and organization) is dependent on strong government, land conveyance and tenure systems, and adaptable and aspirational ways of settling land disputes and organizing visions for human settlement. It is possible that since the founding of the republic, Haitians have never had a unified vision for how their country was to be constructed, nor supported any sustained leadership that did. Planning is often engaged by a variety of individuals; however, when planning is done by the public sector, its success depends on the ability of the government to control and organize land uses. Government can create options for future development when it formulates aspirations or must respond to crises. Earthquakes and other natural disasters create opportunities for such planning. Some of the most notable examples of great planning and urbanism have come after governments found themselves having to respond to the need to reconstruct what had fallen into disrepair. The mantra of “building back better” has dominated the recovery discourse since January 2010. I argue here that the legacy of French colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and unstable leadership has starved Haiti of the planning framework that would have allowed Port-au-Prince and other Haitian cities to develop along with the nation. The vestiges of this starvation have led to an urban crisis of sorts that defines the urban form of Haiti’s major cities. In almost all cases, Haitian cities consist of centers with street grids that are artifacts of French colonialism and U.S. imperialism, and baroque suburbs that trace Haiti’s turbulent political history as well as the natural landscape. The activity of planning involves a bit of both transaction and conformity costs on the part of the consumers of urban places. Transaction costs involve individuals having to depend on themselves for their needs. Conformity costs involve some deference to the state and allowing the state to coordinate certain policy. In environments where transaction costs are high, individuals

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must act to secure their own property, food, and services. Where the conformity costs are high, the state provides individuals with their needs in exchange for their conformity to the state. In the case of Haiti, planning is simultaneously possible and impossible. The longer history of the central government’s relationship with its departments (regions) and secondary cities such as Cap-Haïtien, Léogâne, Jacmel, Jeremie, and Les Cayes has been one of a continuous power struggle. Planning in Haiti is difficult given the larger context of political instability that has shaped the republic since its founding. Using Howell Baum’s idea of planning being about the organization of hope, a planning framework in Haiti would have to consider the highest and best uses of land and other scarce resources, as it does in other contexts.7 The lack of confidence in the Haitian government makes a scenario where the Haitian people have confidence in the government’s ability to dispense land equitably, fairly, and transparently almost impossible. This is not to say that Haitians lack hope. In fact, the hope that Haitians have for better futures is what has sustained them through decades of suffering and calamity. If nothing else, planning is also inherently political. This inescapable feature of the practice of planning makes it difficult to implement anywhere. The battles over Haussman’s and Le Corbusier’s plans for Paris and urban renewal and the abuse of eminent domain in the United States were tied directly to strong central government regimes and laws that favored central command of land—either nationally or locally—over the rights and interests of community-level interests and property rights. However, the roots of modern European and American planning stem from the Progressive era and attempts to contain poverty and create order in chaotic urban spaces. A survey of Haitian history can point to a number of dictators who attempted to rule Haiti with iron fists and other instruments of control. In some cases, that rule brought quite brutal results. However, these despots were rarely ever able to create the sustained momentum needed to fully organize Port-au-Prince and Haiti’s other urban centers beyond what had been left by colonists. In the cases where they were, the capital improvements fell into disrepair within a generation or two and never matured to make Portau-Prince a dominant city with the infrastructure needed to do more than export Haiti’s products and import foreign goods.

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A central feature of Haiti’s present circumstances and its history is foreign intervention that replaces or erodes confidence in the government’s capacity. Just before the 2010 earthquake, it was reported that 60 percent of the Haitian government’s budget came directly from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).8 The World Bank’s estimate is that before the earthquake, approximately 10,000 NGOs were in operation in Haiti, earning it the dubious title of Republic of NGOs.9 This relationship between Haiti, foreign governments, and INGOs is problematic for many Haitians for many reasons. First, this entanglement between the Haitian government and foreign capital is reminiscent of the colonial era and U.S. occupation of Haiti in the early twentieth century. Second, the presence of NGOs, foreign militaries, and investors deflects investment in the Haitian government’s capacity and casts a long shadow over Haiti’s sovereignty and its ability to envision a future for itself. The Colonial and Postcolonial Construction of Planning of Port-au-Prince Like many primary metropoles in the Global South, Port-au-Prince is a highly centralized capital of a developing country. Between 1940 and the present, Port-au-Prince’s population has grown tenfold. Although there is evidence of planning at Port-au-Prince’s central core, the suburbs surrounding that core are baroque and uncoordinated in design.10 Although Port-au-Prince was selected as the capital of the colony by the French before their final defeat in 1804, it wasn’t until more than a century later that the features that defined Port-au-Prince as the capital region were installed under the U.S. occupation that started in 1915. The French viewed Saint Domingue as a revenue generator, not a settlement colony.11 Thus, even early in its history, neither Le Cap (Cap-François or Cap-Haïtien) nor Port-au-Prince was ever installed with adequate infrastructure to accommodate large populations or the physical plant to serve as the political center of an independent nation. For most of Haiti’s history, the connections between Haiti’s various cities and departments (regions) was entirely facilitated by the sea. Most of what is now known as Port-au-Prince were suburbs that grew up around the central core in the foothills of the mountains that surround the city.12

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The Port-au-Prince of the early twentieth century was an artifact of nearly a century of political revolutions and squandered resources. Three Haitian presidents were responsible for building some of the infrastructure that predated the U.S. occupation, Fabre-Nicolas Geffrard (1859–67), Lysius Salomon (1879–88), and Florvil Hyppolite (1889–96).13 One of the most enduring projects of this era was the completion of the iconic Marche en Fer (Iron Market). In the wake of the U.S. departure, several Haitian presidents attempted to maintain and improve on those capital improvements, but they were often never in power long enough to do so. The U.S. occupation between 1915 and 1934 was, and continues to be, a chapter of Haitian history that arouses disgust and contempt among many Haitians. However, the United States oversaw the completion of the beloved National Palace, whose construction had been halted as a result of fire damage that occurred during the gruesome death of Guillaume Sam in 1914.14 In all, more than 210 bridges and 1,000 miles of road were built during the 1920s at the height of the occupation. In addition, many private companies operated rail lines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. When ridership fell on some of these lines, they were incorporated as units of the government. There were two primary lines. The first ran northward along the coast toward the town of St. Marc. The second ran westward toward Léogâne. Rail service had been terminated on all lines in the 1950s, and the lines themselves fell into disrepair during the 1980s. Some of the government officials interviewed for this study reported that the lines may have been deliberately destroyed as symbols of American imperialism and capitalism with the downfall of the Jean-Claude Duvalier regime. Current Planning Framework Although planning existed in Haiti as it did elsewhere before the twentieth century, it has not and still not does exist as a profession. Where planning does exist within the Government of Haiti, it falls under the purview of the Directorate des Planification et Affairs Externe (DPE).15 Beyond the DPE, seven other ministries or government units engage in planning in some way at the national level. In the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, there are more than fifty government entities that manage land or planning. It is difficult for insiders and outsiders to ascertain how comprehensive each ministry’s

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engagement is. A significant challenge for planning in Haiti is the division of labor between and within ministries. Although the DPE would appear to be largely in control of Haiti’s planning apparatus, several other ministries appear to be in much greater control of the actual work of planning. The most important of the other seven units is the Ministry of Public Works, Transport, and Telecommunications (MTPTC). Under this ministry fall several almost autonomous units that manage, among other things, bridges and roads, the formerly government-run telephone company, and the municipal trash collection system. There are other units that engage planning and development. The Conseil National de Developpment et de Planification (CONADEP) was created to lead and implement economic policy planning.16 Almost immediately after the earthquake, the government of Haiti invited the World Bank to host a postdisaster needs assessment. The results of this work led to the creation of the Comité Interim pour la Reconstruction de Haiti (Interim Haitian Reconstruction Commission, or IHRC). The IHRC was established by the government of Haiti with the then prime minister and former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Although this is technically a unit of the government of Haiti, many regard this as a Clinton-led initiative. This is partially the result of the former U.S. president’s leadership role as cochair of the commission. Aid from foreign governments was intended to flow through the IHRC and be vetted by a board comprised of Haitian and foreign diplomats and leaders. With only $2 billion of the $9 billion of pledged foreign aid on hand, most NGOs are opting to bypass the IHRC altogether with some positive results. The Digicel Corporation, Haiti’s leading provider of mobile telephone service, helped reconstruct the historic Marche en Fer in central Port-auPrince. Habitat for Humanity is building a new village on the outskirts of Léogâne and another as an expansion to their existing development in the town of Cabaret. The commune of Croix-des-Bouquets is also actively building new housing within their borders. Another example is the partnership between the Episcopal Diocese of Haiti and the architectural firm Duany, Plater, and Zyberk, which released a plan to redevelop large segments of central Port-au-Prince in 2011. The diocese is one of the largest landowners in central Port-au-Prince and is working with the government to acquire land

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to rebuild some of its facilities. The plan includes the reconstruction of the Episcopal cathedral, Holy Trinity, which was destroyed by the earthquake. Before the earthquake, the diocese oversaw a constellation of institutions in central Port-au-Prince, including a university, art museum, and several elementary schools. The new plan would replace the affected properties and provide new spaces for the expected growth of the Episcopal institutions. Alongside these structures is the United Nations Cluster System, which is technically responding to the initial disaster in the form of relief.17 By design, NGOs who are working in Haiti in order to respond to the disaster will work through the Cluster System to ensure that their efforts are coordinated with other NGOs and relief organizations. The clusters that are primarily connected to housing and planning are the Shelter Cluster and the Camp Organization and Camp Management Cluster. The Shelter Cluster has also created a Working Group on Land Rights in response to the evictions of IDPs from public areas and private property. Although these NGOs are working to provide temporary shelter and relief to IDPs, they are often providing tarps, tents, and provisional housing to renters and property owners in circumstances where land ownership is unclear, thus inhibiting reconstruction efforts. Therefore, the temporary and transitional housing is embedded in the planning and reconstruction process and cannot be viewed separately. Challenges in Recovery Planning Although there have been some small successes, some larger structural problems remain while others are emerging. Perhaps the most significant hurdle to the reconstruction of Port-au-Prince is Haiti’s long-troubled land tenure system. Recent reports of forced evictions have highlighted the challenges created by a lack of reliable property records and a more formal land tenure system. The history of the earthquake that rocked Mexico City in 1985 may provide some context for how this may transpire in Haiti. The Mexican government made an almost immediate plan to extend property rights to the affected. Within two years, the city had almost fully recovered.18 At present, Haiti lacks a modern and updated cadastre. Cadastre systems allow governments to understand land ownership patterns, spatial relationships between properties and natural features, and land use. They also can

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serve as alternative documentation systems for land ownership records. The current civil land tenure system requires surveyors and notaries to verify land transactions and property limits, create land titles, and register them with the Direction General des Impots (DGI). Each commune maintains its own DGI office and unique record-keeping system. Notaries are responsible for sending copies of titles to the central DGI office, where they are registered chronologically. The DGI’s principal purpose is tax collection, not land registration for data analysis or planning. There are several efforts underway to remedy this situation. First, the Office Nationale du Cadastre (ONACA) is working with the Organization of the American States (OAS) to modernize the current cadastre. ONACA’s intent is to raise $70 million for the project over the next several years. ONACA-OAS sees the modernization project as a delineation and geographic mapping of property lines and not a reform of the larger land tenure system. The connections between the need for an updated cadastre, the DGI, local commune offices, MTPTC, and others is the result of the emergence of the Comité Interministériel d’Aménagement du Territoire (CIAT). After Martelly’s election, CIAT was drafting a report outlining the central government’s plans for remedying the most significant problems with the civil land tenure system since 2010. However, no report has been publicly released. A central problem is CIAT’s ability to manage the various ministries that contribute to CIAT’s work. The transition between the Préval administration to the Martelly administration and the difficulty of seating a prime minister has brought challenges to how each ministry is led and how CIAT functions. ONACA is not an independent ministry, and it lacks the standing to coordinate land that is above its purview. It also lacks the financial resources to modernize the cadastre without substantial assistance from the central government and the international community. OAS’s commitment to the modernization project is clear; however, their fund-raising goals are high and long term, and may hinder the feasibility of the project. A formal cadastre is necessary, but it threatens to challenge the domain of local mayors who understand their role in the civil land tenure system as being the custodians of all state-owned land in their jurisdiction. The effort to reform the cadastre is viewed by many stakeholders as an attempt to wrest control and political influence away from local authorities. Custom follows policy in that informal use of land in the rural areas seems to dominate the

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norms around conveyance. A common practice throughout Haitian history has been the pork barreling of land to curry political loyalty and favor. This occurs at both a local and national level. Many respondents spoke to how presidents Duvalier and later Aristide used land gifts during their tenures to reward loyalty or earn favor with the recipients of their gifts. Both François and Jean-Claude Duvalier rewarded generals and members of the Tontons Macoutes with such gifts. In the post-Duvalier era, with no formal cadastre or land titles, and/or a fear of confronting politically connected landowners, land disputes often go unresolved. When challenged, landowners sometimes create or use proxy documents, such as endorsements from local and national politicians, that verify their land claims. The formal accounting of private and public land would make such practices difficult, if not impossible. The emergence of bidonvilles in the late 1980s and after were a symptom of the government not regulating land use after it had been designated private or developed as the government had intended. A considerable portion of Delmas 32, which is now largely a bidonville, was slated to be an in-town development developed by François Duvalier. Political instability and a lack of funding stalled the project, and the bidonville grew up in its place. Much the same has occurred after the 2010 earthquake in Canaan in the Croix-des-Bouquets commune area. This previously undeveloped land has attracted hundreds of families who are seeking to escape devastated Port-au-Prince but still have access to markets and employment opportunities located in the central city. As of this writing, the DGI is still operating as it had before the earthquake. Property conveyance still involves a limited set of actors and is recorded locally in the commune-based branches of the DGI. In many cases, they operate with different record-keeping systems, and they often do not communicate with each other or the central office. Creating opportunities for low-income families to become renters and expanding opportunities for employment and entrepreneurial activity are two important features of postearthquake recovery. Updating the cadastre and land tenure system reforms will become essential elements of this process as well. Forced Evictions and the Persistence of Camps In the midst of this research, the mayor of Delmas engaged in the forced eviction of IDPs from three camps in that commune. This event followed a

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series of forced evictions of IDPs from private spaces over the course of the preceding months. In some instances, the forced evictions were accompanied with violence, and in one particular case, the death of a child. Commune and government officials are not attempting to regulate public spaces for a variety of reasons. The destruction of Centreville (Central Portau-Prince) has forced vendors (machann) and vehicular traffic southeastward toward Delmas and Pétionville. Several challenges to the legitimacy of the IDPs and their behavior are decreasing sympathy for their plight. First, the International Organization on Migration engaged in a comprehensive survey of IDPs that helped create the original statistic of 1.5 million IDPs after the initial earthquake. Identification cards were issued to each individual that contained information such as the Haitian fiscal identity number, or NIF, and fingerprints. Several updates have shown how that number has decreased over time to 369,000, or 94,000 households. The emergence of businesses inside the camps has proven that the tents have evolved into serving as much more than shelter. The ability to run an informal business out of a tent with no ground rent challenges the notion that the charity is only helping people survive. Public challenges to the actual residence of IDPs have become a significant issue. Those involved in camp management commented on watching provisions arrive at 6 AM and seeing IDPs emerge from homes, not tents. Delmas Mairie (Mayor) Wilson Jeudy used his claims that criminal activity was taking place in the camps as justification for their removal. On private property, Haitian law is fairly clear that legitimate property owners have the right to remove squatters. This issue is fairly complex in that in some cases the private property owners are schools and churches who desire to use their land for socially beneficial purposes. Many stakeholders also see some large property owners and IDPs as taking advantage of NGO largesse. The idea is that some are waiting in camps in the hopes that an NGO will eventually fe mwen kado kay (give me a gift house). The issue is not really the house, but more the land that the house will sit on. Many NGOs are forbidden through internal rules from purchasing land. The implications of this are that the land they build on must be gifted by a private party or the government itself.

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The Surge of INGOs and the Competition to Recover Haiti has been notorious for the density of NGOs, even before the earthquake. Some estimates place the number of NGOs in Haiti at 10,000. This number has not been updated since the earthquake, but it was likely much higher for a period of time. In addition to the $9 billion pledged by foreign governments, NGOs received $2 billion in donations to provide direct assistance to the Haitian people. As of this writing, a great number of these NGOs have expended the funds they received for immediate relief. More alarmingly, there are accusations of fraud, corruption, and overall ineffectiveness trailing NGOs working in Haiti. This is especially true of the more established NGOs that have been working in Haiti for several decades. The crowded streets and restaurants of Pétionville are metaphors for how the recovery is progressing. There is an unfortunate overload of visitors, consultants, and researchers crowding Haiti, and an inherent problem is the crossover between the INGO community and the Haitian government. The reasons for this disconnect are multiple. The first is well documented in many volumes of Haitian history, including this one. The presence of NGOs in Haiti can be understood as an alternative and more modern form of colonialism. In the wake of the earthquake, many people refer to the proliferation of NGOs in the recovery process as the surge. In accordance with the framework established by the U.N. and the government of Haiti itself, the recovery process was divided into three distinct phases: relief, recovery, and reconstruction. As indicated by the Haitian government’s action plan, the first phase was intended to last six months and provide relief to the affected through basic services, temporary shelter, food provision, and medical services. The second phase, recovery, moved beyond relief into the beginnings of reconstruction: completion of debris removal, restoration of basic government services, and elevation of affected populations into transitional and permanent housing. The current conventional wisdom is that the recovery process has stalled on relief and only partially transitioned into recovery. The coordination of NGO activity was supposed to occur within the U.N. Cluster System framework and through the IHRC. In both cases, foreign groups were able to bypass

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these organizations and provide direct relief to the affected beyond the Cluster System.19 The challenges here are several. The surge of NGO activity here was so great that many are not even aware that the U.N. Cluster System existed, or when they did they saw it as a hindrance to their objectives and work. Violence and Land Security A related and important additional aspect of the planning and recovery process is creating an environment for investment, both domestic and foreign. In both cases, the overall lack of public safety has created an urban form that isolates and discourages shared public space. In recent months, Haitian president Michel Martelly has made public statements about creating safer conditions for incumbent Haitians and members of the Haitian diaspora who are interested in returning to Haiti to assist with the nation’s recovery. Planning depends on the rule of law and the ability of the state to intervene. In a theoretical sense, individual property owners have to allow the state to coordinate land uses and not cling to transaction costs. In the Belvil section of the Tabarre commune, this is exactly what has happened. To create an orderly, relatively safe area, the home owners in this community have created an American-style subdivision, complete with a staffed security gate and cul-de-sacs throughout. This is one of the few areas of Port-au-Prince where the streets are not filled with pedestrians and timachann. The property interests here have created the orderly urban environment in which they want to live outside of the traditional government apparatus. There are other examples too in Delmas and Croix-des-Bouquets where local planning is occurring. Moving Forward Perhaps what is lacking—and perhaps most needed—is citywide and regional planning that connects the various sections of individual communes to themselves and to the larger Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. It is clear that a significant challenge in this area is the lack of planning in Haiti. There are a number of American, Canadian, and European trained planners working in Haiti on disaster recovery. However, a significant challenge will be to find places within the Haitian government for them to operate and bridge

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projects across ministries. If planning is to become a postdisaster profession, it must be considered to be more than an extension of architecture or civil engineering. It should be viewed as a hybrid of those fields and as an intervention to the natural devolution of urban space into chaos. It requires activities related to property conveyance, land disputes, security, transportation, housing development, and economic development to be operationally linked. It also requires individual communes to see the reconstruction of central Portau-Prince as being critical to their own recovery—and to that of the nation. Above all, there is the significant challenge of momentum transfer. The Haitian government needs to assume the energy created by the international community to support its recovery and create confidence among Haitian people in its capacity. One view of Haitian history is that the country has experienced many leaders who have tried to force momentum transfer through autocratic leadership. In the area of planning and development, conformity and oppression create a fragile stage on which long-term planning can take place. The benefits of long-term planning must build on earlier successes. There are theoretical and political considerations as well. It is unlikely that Haiti can sustain long-term planning efforts without political and economic stability. This is perhaps also true if Haiti’s sovereignty and independence from foreign influence comes either directly from foreign governments or through their proxies in the NGO community. That is not to rule out the important role that allies can play in supporting Haiti by purchasing its goods and services. Higher incomes and standards of living in Haiti would ideally feed the government and its ability to coordinate planning action. Notes 1. Depending on the context, the term planning may be accompanied by prefixes such as city, urban, town, or city; and regional, urban, or both. For the sake of clarity, this chapter will simply refer to planning. For more on the emergence of the emergence of social work and planning, see Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880–1930 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), and The Urban Community: Housing and Planning in the Progressive Era (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 2. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).

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3. Robert Olshanky and Harley Etienne, “Setting the Stage for Long-Term Recovery in Haiti,” Earthquake Spectra 27, no. 3 (2011): 463–86. 4. United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Humanitarian Bulletin, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, October 2011. 5. Medecins Sans Frontieres, “Haiti Unprepared in the Face of Resurgent Cholera,” May 9, 2012, http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org. 6. Scott Campbell and Susan S. Fainstein, “The Structure and Debates of Planning Theory,” in Readings in Planning Theory (London: Blackwell, 1996). 7. Howell Baum, The Organization of Hope: Communities Planning Themselves (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1987). 8. Philippe Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History—From Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 8. 9. Paul Collier, “How to Fix Haiti’s Fixers,” Foreign Policy, February 28, 2010, http://www.foreignpolicy.com. 10. Baroque design in urban street layouts is often signified by streets and features that follow natural contours and topography and follows no strict scheme or rationale. 11. Leslie Voltaire, “Port-au-Prince: Growth of a Caribbean Primate City” (M.A. thesis, Cornell University, 1982). 12. Georges Corvington, Port-au-Prince: Au Cours des Ans (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 1991). 13. Girard, Haiti, 78–79. 14. Robert Debs Heinl Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1971 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978). 15. Programme d’Initiatives Urbaines pour Port-au-Prince, Plan-Programme de Développement de la Zone Métropolitaine de Port-au-Prince (Port-au-Prince: Republique d’Haiti, 2003). 16. Conseil National de Développment et de Planification, A Businessman’s Guide to Haiti (Port-au-Prince: Conseil National de Développment et de Planification, 1978). 17. Olshanky and Etienne, “Setting the Stage.” 18. Aseem Inam, Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities (New York: Routledge, 2005). 19. Jose De Cordoba, “Aid Spawns Backlash in Haiti,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/; Alex Dupuy, “One Year after the Earthquake Foreign Help Is Actually Hurting Haiti,” Washington Post, January 7, 2011, http:// www.washingtonpost.com/.

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Cholera and the Camps Reaping the Republic of NGOs Mark schuller

A

fter Haiti’s devastating earthquake, the international community responded with a generous outpouring of aid. According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy,1 $1.3 billion was contributed by private U.S. citizens to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) within six months, $1 billion by March 1. Furthermore, at a March 31, 2010, U.N. conference, donors pledged $5.6 billion for the next 18 months. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, named U.N. special envoy in 2009, marshaled foreign aid, cochairing the Interim Haiti Reconstruction Commission. Despite the enormous infusion of postquake aid to Haiti, mostly channeled through NGOs, why was Haiti totally unprepared for a deadly epidemic of cholera? The earthquake did not magically transform Haiti, despite Clinton’s cheerful slogan of “building back better.” By the same token, neither did Haiti’s social ills begin on January 12, 2010. Social exclusion—moun andeyò—has been woven into Haiti’s social fabric since before its independence in 1804. One obvious change to Haiti’s social landscape specifically brought by the earthquake serves as its most powerful symbol, a constant reminder of the continued impotence of the Haitian state and failures of international aid. Called tent cities or camps, the city of Port-au-Prince now bears on full public display scars of the extended misery. At the peak in the summer of 2010, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) registered 1.3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) living in 1,300 camps, with over 800 within the greater Port-au-Prince metropolitan area. As of September 2011, when this chapter was submitted, there were still 600,000 people living in

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the camps, according to IOM estimates. The camps remain visual reminders of the failures within the international aid response, eyesores that get in the way of selling Haiti as being “now open for business,” as President Michel Martelly boasted in May 2011. More fundamentally, the people struggling to survive under the heat of the tarps or temporary shelters were committing the ultimate indignity: they existed. IDPs’ mere existence brought visibility to profound social problems, such as the extreme depravity and deep class hostility that has always beset Haiti but had been swept under the rug; they were what Hardt and Negri called disposable people.2 The hypocrisy, misery, and inequality could no longer be ignored, now that it was in plain view, even prominently at the Champs de Mars—a visible demand to be seen. One shudders to think of this new reality becoming a permanent fixture in Haiti’s urban landscape. As Valerie Kaussen argues, Haiti’s IDP camps are what Agamben called states of exception.3 At their best, camps are planned relocation sites with temporary shelters, known as T-shelters, made of treated plywood, as well as social services such as security patrols, water, maintained toilets, clinics, and some simulation of a school. This describes barely a handful, as the contracts for services such as water and sanitation began to run out in the first part of 2011. What remained of the clinics were empty and ripped tents emblazoned with fading NGO or U.N. agency logos. Unfortunately, the residents themselves also remained—some 600,000 at the time. According to research I conducted in the summer of 2011, more than 92 percent of camp residents wanted to leave, but they had nowhere to go. Over 80 percent were renters before the earthquake. In addition to the slow pace of rubble removal and house repair or construction (of the more than 175,000 housing units in need of repair or demolition, only 10,464 were built by the end of 2011),4 disaster capitalism on an individual level combined with the invasion of NGOs in need of housing have driven rental prices for safe housing through the roof.5 In other words, Haiti’s remaining IDPs and the thousand camps are not going away anytime soon, except for those IDPs who are forcibly removed. Fully describing the myriad realities in Haiti’s IDP camps is impossible. The camps differ quite significantly: some are veritable cities, well on their way to becoming permanent shantytowns with rows of timachann selling cooked foods and school supplies, used clothing and plumbing. Others are

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cobbled together with only people’s wit and endurance, with ripped-up tarps not even holding back the torrential rains or tropical sun. Shortcomings in the Aid This chapter follows six weeks of research during the summer of 2010, followed by three weeks in January 2011 and six weeks in the summer of 2011. With a team of eight students and a colleague at the Faculté d’Ethnologie, Université d’État d’Haïti, this study covers more than 100 camps for IDPs, a random sample of one in eight of the 861 in the metropolitan area.6 Students conducted quantitative and qualitative surveys in three interrelated areas: conditions and services within the camps; residents’ level of understanding and involvement in the camp committees; and interviews with committee representatives. I followed up with a visit to over forty camps. The results show that despite the billions in aid pledged to Haiti, most of the estimated 1.5 million IDPs at the time were living in substandard conditions. For example, seven months after the earthquake, 40 percent of IDP camps did not have access to water, and 30 percent did not have toilets of any kind. An estimated 10 percent of families had a tent; the rest slept under tarps or even bedsheets. In the midst of the hurricane season, with torrential rains and heavy winds a regular occurrence, many tents were ripped beyond repair. Only a fifth of camps had education, health care, or psychosocial facilities on site. One refrain from humanitarian agencies was to point to preexisting depravity, particularly in the bidonvilles, or shantytowns, the largest and most visible being Cité Soleil, which foreign filmmakers have termed the most dangerous place on earth. However, the billions in aid entrusted to NGOs to “build back better” did not translate to progress across the board. The services provided in the camps varied quite significantly according to a range of factors. Camps managed by NGOs (20 percent of the sample) were twice as likely to have services. Camps in Cité Soleil had almost no services, while those in Pétionville were better managed. Camps that are not on major roads or far from the city center in Croix-des-Bouquets or Carrefour had little to no services. Camps situated on private land—71 percent of the sample—were significantly worse off than those on public land. Although many NGOs empowered camp committees to select recipients and distribute aid—most notably food, until the government stopped general

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distribution in April 2010—most official committees did not involve the population. Less than a third of people living in camps were aware of the strategy or even the name of the committees. Two-thirds of members were men, despite well-documented concerns about gender-based violence. Although to most NGOs managing camps or offering services these committees represent their local participation, it is clear that the structure that NGOs created was ripe for abuse. Although many committees sprang up organically immediately after the earthquake as an expression of solidarity and unity in an effort to survive, NGOs’ relationships with them had several negative consequences, whether intended or unintended. First, most NGOs did not inquire about local participation, leadership, needs deliberation, or legitimacy. As a result, in several cases, the NGOs and self-named committees excluded preexisting grassroots organizations. Some NGOs, the government, and even the landowners themselves created these committees. This was the root of several conflicts. In most cases, the camp committees—many of which were active in the earthquake’s immediate aftermath—reported not doing anything because of lack of funds, testifying to an increasing dependency on foreign aid. These failures are not isolated incidents but symptoms of larger structural problems that require immediate, sustained, and profound reflection and attention. Solutions include involving IDP populations in large community meetings; assessing levels of democracy and participation within committees; and ensuring greater NGO accountability, coordination, and submission to a fully funded local and national government. Housing needs to be recognized as a human right (guaranteed by Article 22 of Haiti’s constitution and Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), with concrete, immediate steps to empower people to return to a safe home and basic services (such as water, sanitation, health care, and education) made available to all, regardless of residency status. Physical Conditions of the Camps One is immediately struck by the physical conditions inside the camps, particularly after a rainstorm (an unfortunately quite common occurrence in the summer months). Without exception, sanitation and drainage for rainwater were serious issues. On the morning after a rainstorm, it is common to find

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large pools of standing, muddy water—often stretching twenty yards—over which mosquitoes, flies, and other potential disease vectors circle. The state of sanitation is manifested in numerous cases of serious skin problems. In at least one camp, Noailles, the researcher estimated that almost all the children had a rash on their bodies because of the heat trapped inside the tents, combined with disease vectors. I myself contracted a rash after repeated exposure to these unsanitary conditions. Bracketing the health consequences, this lack of proper drainage and sanitation still represents serious environmental hazards, most notably the smell. Even in camps with latrines, the standing rainwater and mud are pungent, with a scent reminiscent of pig farms. Often, as documented by research assistants and myself, the mud seeps underneath people’s tents or tarps, rendering it impossible to sleep or keep personal effects (like voter ID cards, birth certificates, marriage licenses, or photos) dry and intact. “It is also impossible to sleep when the mud seeps in. Imagine; everything around you moves,” said one resident. Those whose houses were destroyed or seriously damaged but nonetheless have their lakou, or yard, intact, and those with more than the average economic resources or other means, stay in tents elevated from the ground by cinder blocks recovered from the houses. But those who have these sleeping berths are the distinct minority. Sanitation People staying at or near their houses and not inside one of the 800 camps within the capital do not have to contend with the problems associated with sharing a bathroom with neighbors. At even the best-managed camps, this is a widespread concern. The Sphere Minimum Standards are clear about how many people should share a toilet: no more than twenty. These conditions are not even being met right in front of the National Palace, where foreign NGOs, dignitaries like former U.S. presidents, and journalists visit. The toilets line the outside of the camp, presenting the appearance of plenty. Hidden from view are rows and rows of tarps and tents. And this is in a camp that is relatively well taken care of. Away from the glaring gaze of foreigners, there are camps that are far worse off. In Place de la Paix (Peace Plaza), in the Delmas 2 neighborhood, also lining the perimeter,

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there was a row of toilets next to the trash receptacles, which was next to the water distribution and the site for the mobile clinic. Strikingly, there were only thirty toilets for 30,400 people. In a small camp in Carrefour, to go to the bathroom people have to ask a neighbor whose house is still standing. Camp leader Carline explains, “It’s embarrassing. And even though they are neighbors, it’s starting to strain our relationship.” They have to buy water and carry it back into the camp. According to a June 2010 Displacement Tracking Matrix, 6,820 people lived in the soccer field outside of the rectory in Solino. Despite this density, residents had to wait for almost five months for the first toilets to arrive. When asked how people defecate, a resident held up a small plastic bag usually used to sell half cups of sugar or penny candy. “We throw it in the ravine across the street.” In the recently discovered camp in Impasse Thomas (CAJIT), housing almost 2,500 people in Paloma, a far-off neighborhood in Carrefour, there were no toilets—either portable or latrines—at least as of August 12, seven months after the earthquake. These cases are unfortunately not isolated. According to even the most conservative estimates, with some large camps in which assistants had to estimate taken out of the sample, the average number of people sharing a single toilet in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area is 273 people. Thirty percent of camps (twenty-seven out of eighty-nine) with verified information did not have any toilets at all. Another investigation from LAMP, IJDH, LERN, and the University of San Francisco Law School found similar results, that 27 percent of families had to defecate in a plastic container or an open area. These data were collected seven months after the earthquake, despite the persistent narrative that people are swelling the camps—or faking it, just using the camps during the daytime—primarily in search of services. Unfortunately, residents’ needs don’t stop with the installation of toilet facilities; many of those that do exist are not cleaned regularly. Although residents of twenty-five camps reported that their toilets were cleaned every day (37 percent, mostly those with portable toilets), ten camps (15 percent) reported that they are cleaned less often than once per month, and seventeen (25 percent) report not having the toilets cleaned at all (figure 9.1). “They treat us like animals!” said an exasperated resident. She was interrupted by a neighbor: “Worse! Animals live better than us.” Some members

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Figure 9.1 Condition of a toilet that had not been serviced for six months, Kolonbi camp, January 2012. Photograph by Mark Schuller.

of the Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Cluster are frustrated at what they see as the irresponsibility of NGOs: “We call and call and write report after report. Some just flatly ignore us.” Water Central to any public health effort is the provision of safe, clean water. In several reports, the United Nations highlights the distribution of water to 1.2 million people as a success of the ensemble of agencies and NGOs. Like sanitation, there were still large gaps in water distribution to IDP camps seven months after the earthquake. Take, for example, the case of Bobin, in a ravine outside of Pétionville, in a popular neighborhood off of Route des Frères. As of seven months after the earthquake, the 2,775 residents still had no water. A single PVC pipe that had cracked offers some people a couple of buckets whenever the government turns on the tap for paying clients. Many people use the rainwater in the trash-filled ravine. Some individuals had the

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opportunity to fetch water from a nearby tap, either privately owned or at a nearby camp. Residents mentioned that NGOs had talked about installing a water system, but seven months after the earthquake, it still had yet to materialize. Several other camps, particularly in Cité Soleil and CAJIT in the hills above Carrefour noted above, were without water as the research team investigated. Said Olga Ulysse, CAJIT leader, “Carrefour is blessed with many little springs. But the problem is that they are running under the destroyed houses and the decomposing bodies.” The other choice is to walk downhill to the adjacent camp, pay for a bucket of water, and carry it back up the hill. Of the camps where assistants could obtain reliable information, thirty out of seventy-one, or 40.5 percent, of camps did not have a water supply, and three others (4.1 percent) had a nearby PVC pipe that was tapped outside the camp. With the notable exception of the WASH Cluster—which is distinguished as the only U.N. cluster cofacilitated by the Haitian government, accountable to the people and not the NGOs, and characterized by an activist, hands-on approach to filling the gaps in services—people from all levels of the aid industry repeated the refrain that providing life-saving necessities encourages dependency. A possibility that seemed not to have been considered was to work with the Haitian government to provide lower-cost, sustainable water lines and taps that, even though not free, could have been maintained by community groups as they existed before the earthquake. “People are only living in the camps in order to get the free services,” said a particular NGO worker, but it could have been one of many. This discourse has wide currency in aid circles and foreign parliaments, including the U.S. Congress. In addition to this issue, several commentators pointed to the issue of profit making. According to a person who works at a foreign development agency, private water company owners persuaded President René Préval to stop free water distribution because it was cutting into their profits. Health Care Several gaps remained within the coverage of health care facilities inside the IDP camps. At its peak, only one camp in five had any sort of clinic facility on site. This number does not account for quality. For example, in one camp,

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Carradeux, a tent was provided by UNICEF that resembles a clinic, but it was completely empty as of July 2010: no medicines, no first aid supplies, and no nurse practitioners were present on researchers’ five visits to this camp. “I’m a nurse,” executive committee member Elvire Constant began. “But we don’t have the means to serve the population. UNICEF knows the tent is here, but they have never come by, not even one day, to negotiate with us, to tell us whether it could be a mobile clinic or a health center.” A couple hundred meters inside the camp, a tent from U.S. NGO Save the Children, whose purpose eluded everyone I asked, was empty and ripped past the point of providing any shelter as early as July 2010 (figure 9.2). Carradeux is an officially managed, planned relocation site, and it was therefore supposed to be an example for others. Indeed, the researcher who visited the camp gave this camp a score of 3 out of 10 in overall quality, with 1 being acceptable and 10 being the worst imaginable. Most other camps were given higher scores, meaning the conditions were worse.

Figure 9.2 NGO clinic abandoned by July 2010, Carradeux camp. Photograph by Mark Schuller.

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According to residents, the median time to walk to the nearest clinic was twenty minutes, with the mean being twenty-seven minutes. Five camps were so isolated that residents told researchers that it took ninety minutes to reach the nearest clinic. The same could be said of pharmacies. Although in the earthquake’s immediate aftermath, medications were given to residents free of charge, this practice stopped early on in most camps’ neighborhoods. Nine out of eighty-five responses, 10 percent, of camps had some form of a pharmacy on site. The mean time to walk to the nearest pharmacy was twenty-five minutes, with the farthest being two hours. To borrow Agamben’s words, Haiti’s IDP camps are only repositories of bare life.7 Cholera The lack of sanitation services became the prime breeding grounds for illnesses such as cholera, which struck Haiti with great force. Cholera claimed over 6,300 lives as of the summer of 2011, nine months after the outbreak. Despite the millions of dollars in new pledged aid to Haiti to combat the disease, little progress was made during the first several months after the outbreak. Using the same random sample of 108 IDP camps, a team of three Université d’État d’Haïti students investigated forty-five camps in January 2011 that, as per the previous August 2010 study, had lacked either water or toilets. The results show a minimum of progress: 37.6 percent instead of 40.5 percent still did not have water, and 25.8 instead of 30.3 percent of camps still did not have a toilet. Cité Soleil, which had demonstrably fewer WASH services as of August, showed the most dramatic improvement. The primary reason was that the WASH Cluster, cochaired by the Haitian government agency Direction Nationale de l’Eau Potable et de l’Assainissement (DINEPA), took a hands-on approach to problem solving. Although the other eleven U.N. clusters met in the U.N. logistics base, where Haitians were prevented entry and meetings were held in English, a foreign language, a DINEPA official met with local government and NGO staff in the various city halls across the metropolitan area. After the cholera outbreak, DINEPA set a goal of 100 percent coverage within Cité Soleil. The cholera outbreak—combined with the continued lack of services— was a key factor in the rapid depopulation of the IDP camps. According to the IOM, only 810,000 remained in camps as of January 7, 2011, down from

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almost twice that before the cholera outbreak. One in four of the camps that researchers visited had disappeared since the summer of 2010, eight because of IDPs’ fear of cholera and three because of landowner pressure. Given little progress since the outbreak, most of the patterns remained. Camps with NGO management agencies were still far more likely to have needed services, resulting from NGOs’ primary roles to convene service actors; this became increasingly evident by 2011.8 Municipality involvement was still a factor in services, with far-flung Croix-des-Bouquets and Carrefour still lagging far behind in service provision; however, some progress was made in Cité Soleil IDP camps because of a concerted effort led by the Haitian government. At the time of writing, people were still dying of cholera. In fact, the 2011 rainy season heralded a recrudescence in the waterborne illness. Despite this, NGOs pulled out of providing WASH services in the camps; as of October 2011, only 7 percent of camps had water services.9 What explained the outbreak in a country that hadn’t had one in over a century? Fingers were pointed every which way. Unfortunately the structure of the humanitarian response to the earthquake bears significant responsibility. NGOs’ Responsibilities in Cholera As is generally known in Haiti (evidenced by graffiti), U.N. troops brought cholera to Haiti. One of the world’s leading experts on cholera, French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux, said clearly that the first cases of cholera were immediately downstream from the U.N. base in Mirebalais.10 This report was suppressed but was finally published in July 2011. This thesis was proven with genetic evidence in another independent, peer-reviewed article in August 2011 comparing the genetic makeup of the cholera strain in Haiti with that of Nepal.11 Despite the U.N. troops’ clear signature on the epidemic, generally the international response failed to protect IDPs and other Haitian people from the outbreak. Haiti’s increased vulnerability to the disease was predictable, especially after the gaps in services in the IDP camps and the surrounding poor communities. According to the WASH Cluster’s own database, not even a majority of residents had regular access to WASH services before the cholera outbreak. Only a third of the camps had access to water.

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Why, given this information, was more prevention work not done? Why, despite the figures put out by NGOs and the international community and dutifully reported in the media about service delivery, was there a systemic failure? “In short, a lack of accountability,” said one international aid worker. Even before the earthquake, donors’ reward structure worked against collaboration, coordination, communication, and participation. The earthquake didn’t solve these structural problems. By infusing the system with everincreasing cash, it only got worse. A solution proposed after the posttsunami experience was the so-called cluster system introduced by the U.N. There are twelve clusters, each responsible for ensuring effective and coordinated action in a sector (for example, education, health care, and water and sanitation). Despite the promises, the cluster meetings excluded local voices: all but the WASH Cluster were held in a U.N. base where access was closely guarded, and many were held in English. They were also performative, not deliberative: instead of focusing on problem solving, the meetings tended to be spaces to communicate messages or to promote an NGO or for-profit service, for example. Again, the notable exception was the WASH Cluster. In the end, no single individual agency could take the blame for the collective failure. No individual agency could be compelled to provide needed services in the camps. The one agency that could, the Haitian government (national or local), was still underresourced despite the billions in aid sent to Haiti. Despite public discourse by both U.N. Special envoy Bill Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton about the importance of rebuilding Haiti’s government infrastructure, it only received 1 percent of the emergency funds.12 Several NGOs, including Médecins Sans Frontièrs and Partners in Health, individually led valiant efforts to bring lifesaving services to the IDP camps. There are lessons in their best practices, such as the latter’s explicit coordination with the Haitian government, but the failures, particularly to close the huge gaps, require attention and analysis if the epidemic is to be stopped in Haiti or prevented in other disaster situations. Neither international nor national NGOs are structurally accountable to the Haitian population. They have no incentive or requirement to go outside their turf even though the disease does not respect camp boundaries (figure 9.3). The gaps in services persisted, and people’s response was to flee: in November 2010, all 546 people

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Figure 9.3 Carradeux camp, highlighting the boundaries of haves—served by an NGO—and have-nots. Photograph by Mark Schuller.

staying at an Adventist church in Carrefour fled the day that eight people had contracted cholera. No water or sanitation services were in this camp; church officials had also pressured residents to leave. Closing this gap would require a greater role and resources flowing to the government, at least minimally. With very little capacity to even adequately play an oversight role, not to mention offering incentives to NGOs, the Haitian government has little ability to help. To sum up, according to a Haitian government WASH official, “The bottom line is we have no carrots and sticks. NGOs are private agencies and pretty much can do what they want.” Many in Haiti speculate that this is exactly the way the international community wants it: with foreign agencies in control, and the Haitian people and even the government on the sidelines.13 Although it might be argued that the response to the cholera outbreak was actually better in the camps, the data are inconclusive and subject to interpretation. Even if true, the lack of services within the neighborhoods directly

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resulted from the weakened capacity of the government to provide what would be the most cost-effective and permanent, sustainable solution. With the exception of Spain, which had funded DINEPA (the Haitian government WASH agency), donors—with the complicity of NGOs receiving donors’ aid—did not invest in the public capacity to provide water and sanitation services in the neighborhoods, for reasons discussed above. History of NGOs in Haiti Many Haitian scholars have written about the history of development associations, including NGOs and peasants associations.14 Arguably the most influential work was an M.A. thesis by ethnology student Sauveur Pierre Étienne, who qualified international governmental organizations’ implantation as an invasion.15 Borrowing heavily from a previous work by Mathurin and collaborators, Étienne discusses the history of NGOs in the country. The political climate under the Duvalier dictatorship, particularly François Duvalier, was hostile to NGOs, but a small group of foreign agencies worked in the country. As Richman’s and McAlister’s chapters in this volume argue, religious NGOs were tolerated. In exchange for U.S. support for the succession of power to Jean-Claude Duvalier, the United States demanded acceptance of NGOs, particularly Protestant groups.16 The ouster of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 provided an opening for foreign agencies—international financial institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as bilateral agencies such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) (see also Arthur’s chapter in this volume on the connection between USAID and Duvalier)—to implement neoliberal policy reforms such as trade liberalization, floating the currency, and privatization.17 Duvalier’s ouster, supported if not engineered by the United States, was also an opening for NGOs. According to official records, only forty NGOs were legally registered and recognized before 1971, when Baby Doc took over from his dead father; by contrast, from 1986 (when Duvalier fled) to 1990 (the first democratic election), at least thirty-one NGOs opened offices in Haiti.18 By 2005, the Ministère de la Planification et de Coopération Externe (Ministry of Planning and Foreign Cooperation) officially recognized 343 national and international NGOs, inching up to 400 just before the earthquake.19 Ministry staff estimated double this number as of August 2010, seven months after

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the earthquake. In 2009, U.N. special envoy Bill Clinton declared there to be 10,000 NGOs in Haiti, blurring the distinction from community-based organizations to international nongovernmental organizations, a number that has since become true through its continued repetition. Critiques of this invasion abound from across the political spectrum in Haiti. Étienne and Lwijis had a public argument, each trying to outflank one another in terms of whose critique of NGOs was more radical.20 Both were also vocal critics of Aristide. Aristide supporter Paul Farmer offered a note of caution about NGOs, saying that they “aren’t necessarily more democratic than elected governments.”21 In addition to these critiques from the left, Haitians on the right are similarly critical. A general mistrust is reflected and structured in the two foundational regulatory documents of the NGO system, Jean-Claude Duvalier’s decree about NGOs on December 13, 1982, and the revision decree of military dictator General Henri Namphy of September 14, 1989. The preamble to both decrees declared the legislation necessary to protect national sovereignty. Ordinary citizens were also critical of what they saw as corruption—how NGOs got rich off people’s misery. Said one, “When they come to give the country aid, only the bigwigs see it. They only give us a coating of dust.” Many people began speaking of an insular, privileged NGO class who acted as intermediaries.22 Since the earthquake, these critiques have only gotten louder. Graffiti denouncing NGOs have become a common occurrence in Port-auPrince after the earthquake, particularly after the cholera outbreak in October 2010. NGOs appear to many to lack the will to help. Said one frustrated youth, “NGOs know the problems to resolve, but they want you to be in misery before they give [it to] you, make you suffer.” And another: “They have the means to help. If they don’t help, NGOs wouldn’t exist. And it’s because of these problems that they exist. If all problems were resolved there would never be NGOs.” How did NGOs that began as private voluntary agencies with a shared mission and commitment to service become these behemoths roundly trashed and distrusted by the Haitian people? Changes to NGOs As many scholars noted, NGOs as a structure began as private, voluntary associations—most tied to faith-based communities, but some secular—that

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raised the majority of funds for their work.23 Many practitioners recall that these nonprofit associations were close-knit and self-sacrificing, as well as focused on a shared mission. It is arguably still true for grassroots organizations that raise most of their money from members. The system was remade after shifts in donor discourses, policies, and practices. After the end of the cold war, donors like USAID and the World Bank did not need strong centralized states to compete against the Soviet bloc. In fact, they discovered that states were too strong, centralized, corrupt, and removed from the people. So they began directly financing NGOs instead: the 1990s saw a tenfold increase in NGOs, from 6,000 worldwide in 1990 to an estimated 60,000 by 1998.24 Currently, there are so many NGOs that we can’t even guess at their number.25 This rise in the number of NGOs is matched with an increase in funding through them. Globally, in 2005, NGOs channeled anywhere from $3.7 to $7.8 billion of humanitarian assistance,26 and $24 billion in overall development funding.27 In addition to the general economic model favoring NGOs, foreign aid is often caught up in geopolitical struggles, such as Haiti in 1995. Republicans who had just taken over Congress were looking to expose President Clinton’s inexperience in foreign policy. Returning exiled president Aristide to power was his only success story to date, unlike Rwanda and Somalia. So Congress forbade USAID to fund Aristide: all USAID funds were to go toward NGOs. Other bilateral donors such as Canada and multilaterals such as the U.N. and the European Union followed suit. More generally, Haiti is often a laboratory for new donor policies, from eradicating the Haitian pig population after a swine fever outbreak and structural adjustment in the 1980s to the Cadre de Coopération Intérimaire and the performance monitoring in the first decade of this century—not to mention U.N. clusters after the earthquake.28 I conducted a multiyear ethnographic analysis of two local women’s NGOs both working in HIV/AIDS prevention. One received primarily private funding from an array of European NGOs and the other strictly public funding. The differences in the two NGOs’ management and relationship with their recipient populations was striking: the publicly funded NGO offered far less space for participation than the NGO with private NGO partners.29 From this basis and on the basis of secondary research, hypotheses about the shifts in NGOs as a result of donor policies are possible—for example, that

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donor policies and the huge infusion of cash have corrupted NGOs. Policies like results- or performance-based management have centralized decisionmaking authority and closed off avenues for meaningful local participation. Rather than an open, participative, democratic process, NGOs are increasingly rewarded for a bean-counting approach that reduces people to statistics. On top of this, pressures of upward accountability and the pressures to spend (and get more contracts from the donor) undermine the relationship with local communities. Consequently, corrections and changes made from onthe-ground experience are increasingly difficult. The byzantine reporting requirements also cut off intra-NGO communication. Staff who work in the field and who are the direct points of contact with aid recipients are increasingly removed from decision-making authority. Local needs deliberation has become increasingly irrelevant, as NGOs have to follow the project cycle and do exactly as they’re told to implement donor priorities, or they risk their funding being pulled. The reporting requirements create top-heavy NGOs with more resources directed toward higher-paid full-time administrative staff to keep up with them, with at least one fulltime accountant versed in USAID or other donor reporting requirements and software. Job ads—often written in English—explicitly ask for these competencies.30 Despite much rhetoric on accountability to beneficiaries and the emergence of principles and standards such as Humanitarian Accountability Partnership and Sphere, the reward structure actively discourages local participation, open lines of communication with aid recipients and within the office, and collaboration and coordination with the state or other NGOs. The reporting and other requirements imposed by donors reorient NGOs to be more concerned with accountability from above, not from below. If an NGO fails a community, the community has no recourse. Beneficiaries have no direct contact with the donors or even NGO directors. If a state-sponsored development project failed or lined the pockets of insiders, citizens would be in the streets protesting, because there is at least in theory some accountability, some responsibility, to the citizenry and politicians can be voted out of office. But at the base, NGOs cannot be compelled to work better or work in underserviced areas, because they are first and foremost private voluntary initiatives. This is why any NGO can point to individual successes after the

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earthquake while huge gaps in water and sanitation services remained a year after the earthquake. Because donors’ relationships with NGOs trump others through everpowerful reporting and management regimes, there is little incentive to cooperate with one another. NGOs are, structurally speaking, competitors with one another and the Haitian government itself. Why share information or coordinate with an entity that is competing for the same resources? Often these relationships erupt in hostilities, but is it any surprise that given this, and donors’ systematic undermining of the state’s oversight/coordination capacity, only a fraction of NGOs in Haiti even bother to submit the bare minimum, annual reports, to the Haitian government? According to staff at the Minister of Planning and Foreign Cooperation, only 10 to 20 percent gave their reports to the government. In many cases, donors’ policies actually encourage NGOs to disregard the authority of the state. NGOs often pay employees three times as much as the equivalent government ministry, what World Bank researcher Alice Morton termed raiding.31 Therefore, far from representing individual moral failures, or a Haitian mentality, as Schwartz would suggest,32 actors within the system are in fact behaving in a quite understandable fashion responding to the power structure, inequality, and the rewards system of the aid enterprise.33 Official donors’ reward structure works against collaboration, coordination, communication, and participation. This reward structure is within the purview of international aid agencies to change. Conclusion As this is a volume on the idea of Haiti, the rapid spread of cholera is a reminder that ideas have material consequences. The idea of Haiti being a paradigmatic failed state and having been dubbed the Republic of NGOs by the Economist became a self-fulfilling prophesy, writing the Haitian government out of any responsibility in the emergency response. At the end of the day, no one was responsible for ensuring adequate WASH services to stop the spread of the disease, ironically except in Cité Soleil, where the government took a hands-on role and declared 100 percent coverage. Although this success—because the government asserted a role as coordinator and policy maker—may be dismissed as symbolic, it is an important symbol. Even in

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Cité Soleil, progress can be made if the NGOs work to support the government’s plan. A full year after the outbreak of cholera, it was announced that the government would be working with NGOs to vaccinate against the disease, an idea that was long in coming. Again, this could symbolize new articulations of how the international aid apparatus can work with the Haitian government. It is only sad that this new discourse is written with the lives of 6,500 people who perished while these ideas were finally being sorted out. Notes 1. Chronicle of Philanthropy, How Charities Are Helping Haiti: How Much They Raised and Spent (Washington, D.C.: Chronicle on Philanthropy, 2010). 2. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 294. 3. Valerie Kaussen, “States of Exception: Haiti’s IDP Camps,” Monthly Review (2011): 37–42. 4. See the International Organization for Migration December 2011 Haiti Shelter Report, http://www.iom.int/. 5. I have seen documentation of at least eight NGOs that paid $2,500 per month on housing allowance for their foreign staff; by contrast, my rent was less than $350 for a three-bedroom flat. 6. Mark Schuller, “Unstable Foundations: The Impact of NGOs on Human Rights for Port-au-Prince’s 1.5 Million Homeless” (New York and Port-au-Prince: City University of New York and the Université d’État d’Haïti, 2010). 7. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 8. See Schuller and Levey, n.d., for a discussion of this. 9. See OCHA Humanitarian Bulletin, September 21–October 18, 2011. 10. Renaud Piarroux et al., “Understanding the Cholera Epidemic, Haiti,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 17, no. 7 (2011): 1161–67. 11. Rene Hendriksen et al., “Population Genetics of Vibrio cholerae from Nepal in 2010: Evidence on the Origin of the Haitian Outbreak,” mBIO 2, no. 4 (2011): 1–6. 12. Jonathan Katz, “Billions for Haiti, a Criticism for Every Dollar,” Associated Press, March 6, 2010; Kevin Edmonds, “NGOs and the Business of Poverty in Haiti,” presented at the North American Congress on Latin America, April 5, 2010, https://nacla.org/node/6501. 13. Janil Lwijis, ONG: Ki gouvènman ou ye? (Pòtoprens: Asosyasyon Inivèsite ak Inivèsitèz Desalinyèn—ASID, 2009); James Petras, “Imperialism and NGOs in Latin America,” Monthly Review 49, no. 7 (1997): 10–17.

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14. See, for example, Calixte Clerisme, “Organizations Paysannes Dans Le Developpement Rural,” Conjonction 140 (1978): 5–45; Pierre Simpson Gabaud, Associationnisme Paysan En Haïti: Efets De Permanence Et De Rupture (Port-au-Prince: Editions des Antilles, 2000); Janil Lwijis ( Jean-Anile Louis-Juste), “Haïti, L’invasion des ONG: La Thèse n’Est Pas Aussi Radicale Que Son Sujet” (Port-au-Prince: Faculté des Sciences Humaines, Université d’État d’Haïti, 2007); Janil Lwijis, Entè OPD: Kalfou Pwojè (Pòtoprens: Imprimateur II, 1993); Janil Lwijis, ONG: Ki Gouvènman Ou Yè? (Pòtoprens: Asosyasyon Inivèsite ak Inivèsitèz Desalinyèn—ASID, 2009); Alliette Mathurin, Ernst Mathurin, and Bernard Zaugg, Implantation et Impact des Organisations non Gouvernementales: Contexte Général et Étude de Cas (Port-auPrince: GRAMIR, 1989); Maguy Mathurin, “La Participation Dans Le Développement en Haiti: Bilan et Perspective,” in Defnition, Rôle et Fonction des ONG: Cahier 2, ed. HAVA (Port-au-Prince: HAVA, 1991), 13–16. 15. Sauveur Pierre Étienne, Haiti: L’Invasion des ONG (Port-au-Prince: Centre de Recherche Sociale et de Formation Economique pour le Développement, 1997). 16. Lwijis, ONG. 17. Fritz Deshommes, Néo-libéralisme: Crise économique et alternative de développement, 2nd ed. (Port-au-Prince: Presses des Imprimateur II, 1995); Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1997); “Globalization, the World Bank, and the Haitian Economy,” in Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context, ed. Franklin Knight and Teresita Martinez-Vergne (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 43–70. 18. Mark Schuller, “Invasion or Infusion? Understanding the Role of NGOs in Contemporary Haiti,” Journal of Haitian Studies 13, no. 2 (2007): 96–119. 19. Ibid. 20. See, for example, Jean Anil Louis-Juste, “Haïti, L’Invasion des ONG: la thèse n’est pas aussi radicale que son sujet” (Port-au-Prince: Faculté des Sciences Humaines, Université d’État d’Haïti, 2007). 21. Paul Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, 2nd ed. (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 2003), 368. 22. Mark Schuller, “Gluing Globalization: NGOs as Intermediaries in Haiti,” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 32, no. 1 (2009): 84–104. 23. For example, Erica Bornstein, The Spirit of Development: Protestant NGOs, Morality, and Economics in Zimbabwe (New York: Routledge, 2003); William Fisher, “Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices,” Annual Reviews in Anthropology 26 (1997): 439–64; Tara Hefferan, Twinning Faith and Development: Catholic Parish Partnering in the U.S. and Haiti (Bloomfield, Conn.: Kumarian Press, 2007); Alliette Mathurin, Ernst Mathurin, and Bernard Zaugg, Implantation et Impact des Organisations non Gouvernementales: Contexte Général et Étude de Cas (Port-auPrince: GRAMIR, 1989).

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24. Economist, cited in Regan Jane Regan and Institute Culturel Karl Lévèque (ICKL), “ONG ‘altènatif ’—zanmi oswa ennmi lit radikal?” (Port-au-Prince: Institute Culturel Karl Leveque, 2003), 3. 25. Roger Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 53. 26. Development Initiatives, “Global Humanitarian Assistance 2006” (London: Development Initiatives, 2006), 47; Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work? 27. Riddell, Does Foreign Aid Really Work?, 259. 28. Bernard Diederich, “Swine Fever Ironies: the Slaughter of the Haitian Black Pig,” Caribbean Review 14, no. 1 (1985) 16–17, 41. 29. Mark Schuller, Killing with Kindness: NGOs and International Aid in Haiti (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2012). 30. Schuller, “Gluing Globalization.” 31. Alice Morton, Haiti: NGO Sector Study (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1997), 25. 32. Timothy Schwartz, Travesty in Haiti: A True Account of Christian Missions, Orphanages, Fraud, Food Aid and Drug Trafcking (Charleston, S.C.: Book Surge, 2008). 33. See also Erica Caple James, Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti, ed. Robert Borofsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

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From Slave Revolt to a Blood Pact with Satan The Evangelical Rewriting of Haitian History elizabeth mcalister History belongs to the intercessors. — C . P e t e r Wa g n e r , Warfare Prayer

T

he deadly earthquake that shook the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince and its environs on January 12, 2010, killed an estimated 300,000 people, making it the worst disaster in the history of the Americas. The next day, television evangelist Pat Robertson, while hosting his news talk show, The 700 Club, on the Christian Broadcast Network, said that the earthquake could be best understood by a little-known event that “people might not want to talk about.” Haitians were cursed, he said, because they long ago “swore a pact to the devil.” His exact words were: Something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, you know, Napoleon the Third and whatever . . . and they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you get us free from the prince . . . true story . . . so the devil said okay, it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out. Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after another.1

A media outcry ensued, and a White House spokesman called Robertson’s comments “utterly stupid.” Experts and commentators pointed out that

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Robertson’s ideas were outrageous and obscured the scientific and social truths that the quake was a natural disaster made even more lethal by social factors: overcrowded, inadequate housing and dire poverty. Even the Reverend Franklin Graham disavowed the remarks, saying he thought Robertson misspoke. In the view of most who spoke out, Robertson’s offensive story was callous and racist, an embarrassment to America and even to Christianity. Yet one branch of Christianity—the Spiritual Mapping movement—had been working actively for twenty years to promote this very story. Robertson had absorbed the idea through his affiliation with the movement and repeated it on the broadcast. Spiritual Mapping, which will be discussed at length in the second part of this essay, is premised on a recent evangelical understanding of world history as an ongoing battle between the devil and God; this battle is fought in spiritual ways but in the earthly, concrete places where humans live. Further, God has opened up the present time as a new opportunity for Christians to become warriors in this cosmic battle and act as intercessors and spiritual warriors on assignment to fight the devil. They do this by mapping his activities and undoing his pacts, casting out his demons, and reclaiming the earth and its peoples for Jesus. So Pat Robertson’s comments sounded perfectly reasonable to his audience of believers, who understand the world in terms of demonic activity that must be countered by Christian prayer. He was referring to an event that was indeed written into Haitian history and schoolbooks as a founding moment in the national story: the ceremony at Bois Caïman. The story of Bois Caïman—an iconic one for Haitian patriots, nationalists, and artists—has been written about, painted, dramatized, and rendered in poetry countless times. It is said that during a nighttime gathering at a place called Bois Caïman (Alligator Woods) in the north of colonial Saint Domingue on August 14, 1791, several hundred slaves from different ethnic groups united under a leader named Boukman and vowed to fight the French who ruled the colony and used forced labor to fuel the sugar industry. Haitian writer Stephen Alexis wrote this dramatic version of the occasion in 1949: [Boukman] wore the long garment of papa-loi [spirit-priest], the red robe of sacrifice, and in his right hand glittered a heavy sword. In a deep, hollow voice,

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he began to chant his savage hymn of doom, calling down on the Negroes all the blessings of the invisible powers. . . . At a sign from Boukman, acolytes brought him a gazelle, a pig, and a goat which were killed and disemboweled, and the entrails poured out. Each man present slowly approached, plunged his hands into the entrails, and raised them, vowing aloud as he did so that he would suffer death rather than continue to be a slave.2

Standard histories of Haiti recount that two weeks later the slaves rebelled, set fire to sugar plantations, and launched the revolution. After eleven years of war, during which slavery was abolished, the Haitian nation broke free from French colonial rule and declared independence on January 1, 1804. Driven by the initial religiopolitical catalyst of resolve and unity at the ceremony at Bois Caïman, Haiti became the first independent black republic in the Americas. The story of the ceremony at Bois Caïman was taken up by an aggressive wave of evangelical missionaries in the 1990s, who recast the narrative with a new Christian interpretation. I will elaborate its logics below, but the gist of it is this: The enslaved Africans appealed to their ancestral gods and not to Jesus Christ, and since the African gods are pagan gods, they must have been demonic forces—in effect, devils. Boukman’s vow to the invisible powers to be free and the sacrifice of the pig made up the components of a pact with Satan. According to this logic, the pact was understandable in the sense that the enslaved people were victims of terrible injustice at the hands of the French. They naturally reached for freedom by any means. But biblical, spiritual law being what it is, and founding national events being what they are, the slaves had (perhaps unwittingly) inaugurated Satan as the ruler of Haiti. Moreover, to this very day, Haitians who continue Afro-Creole traditional religious practices ratify that initial covenant every time they address the spirit world. It is this terrible diplomatic deal and its ongoing activation that explain the downward political and economic spiral of the country. Initially theologized in the 1980s by Argentinean and North American evangelicals who inaugurated the Spiritual Mapping movement, this logic came to make sense to a vocal minority of Haitians. Haitian theologians and pastors then went on to elaborate the idea and have filled in interpretive details from their own cultural perspective. (This branch of neoevangelicalism is also called the

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Third Wave movement, and it is this movement I will reference by the terms neoevangelical and evangelical throughout this chapter.)3 Pastor Yvette is one such Haitian evangelical who understands Haiti in terms of Christians’ battle with Satan and his legions of demons. When I visited her neo-Pentecostal, 2,500-person congregation six months after the earthquake, they were living in an encampment for internally displaced persons on a soccer field in Port-au-Prince. Through their sanctified condition and strict codes of holiness, including daily prayer, modesty, sharing, obedience, and fasting, they were in direct communication with the Holy Spirit. Twelve prophets in the congregation were anointed with gifts of the spirit and could speak in tongues, heal, and prophesy. God repeatedly gave the church a message: He loved Haiti and was shaking it in judgment for the sins of its people. Their sins included not only Haitians’ worship of idols in Vodou, but also corruption, thievery, sexual iniquities, and the prideful divisions within the body of Christ, the Christian community. The prophets explained that God loves Haiti and wants the nation to experience a Christian revival before the imminent end of time. The whole nation must repent before God, take possession of Haiti for Jesus, and thereby undo the fateful pact with the devil. This essay first explores the origin of the story of Bois Caïman (fascinating in itself ) and the ways Haitian intellectuals and artists found inspiration in the story of the slaves’ unity and determination to fight for freedom; this section relies on the painstaking scholarship of others. Next, through fieldwork, interviews, and the use of archival missions’ sources, I trace the evangelical history of the concept of the Haitian pact with the devil and reconstruct the way Protestants formed it out of a nationalist mythology already in place. Although the neoevangelical story circulates on Web sites and blogs, nobody has yet pieced together how, precisely, it came about. Here I trace the politics, transnational flows, and neoevangelical logic that gave rise to this narrative of extreme demonization. The contest over the meaning of Bois Caïman pits the political afterlife of a slave revolt against the political afterlife of biblical scripture. It is a case, in part, of competing national mythographies about a country long in crisis and the efforts of some citizens to rewrite national history as a way to create a more empowering identity for the present and the sense of a more secure future.

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Yet the empowerment they seek comes at the expense of others—those affiliated with the traditional Afro-Creole religion known as Vodou. The evangelical project appropriates core symbols of Haitian nationalism and of Vodou, and reworks them in a Christian register to give the story a new meaning. Evangelicals do not dispute the facts of the story or deploy professional historiographic arguments to recast its meaning. Rather, they resignify the elements of the story theologically, putting in place the logic of biblical laws and the mythic grammar of evangelical Christianity’s dualistic categories of good and evil. Simply put, for evangelicals, the ceremony may have birthed political independence, but it also inaugurated an epoch of spiritual slavery. The images of the past thus offer themselves to neoevangelical spiritual mappers as a tool in uncovering the demonic “motor of history”4 that they believe has driven the course of events in Haiti. Once uncovered, historical events that are “discerned” to have been “legal spiritual transactions” must be undone in order to save Haiti. These historical events, in a process somewhat akin to Taussig’s formulation of history as sorcery, are “sometimes objectified as magically empowered imagery capable of causing misfortune.”5 The task of the spiritual warrior is to undo history by exorcizing it. It is worth noting that this new evangelical demonization of Vodou is not actually new in its essence. Many scholars have written about how Catholic missionaries in the colonial period and after linked African ancestral spirits to the devil.6 Elsewhere, I have written about how Europeans even triangulated their ideas about Africans with their preexisting anti-Judaism, equating Vodouists with “the Jews who killed Christ” and demonizing Africans by analogy with the Hebrews who had supposedly refused to accept the messiah.7 But the contemporary “satanic pact” story was produced out of different historical circumstances, operates according to a distinct logic in a new tone, and circulates with new digital technologies for use in a new political landscape. The evangelical version of the Bois Caïman narrative is highly controversial, judging by the scores of commentators who reacted against Pat Robertson repeating it on the air. It stresses that Haitian actions—reaching into the unseen world—were not the catalyst of the first successful slave revolt, but rather the cause of all that is negative in Haiti, even the earthquake. The story punishes the slaves already wronged by injustice, rather than the French (who

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are cast as sinners in the evangelical story, yet go unpunished). And the story demonizes the iconic ceremony at Bois Caïman, thereby attacking a central source of Haitian national pride—the achievement of the first successful national slave revolt and the first black independent republic. It also epitomizes racist thought, as it equates African religiosity with evil. The recast narrative forecloses a major source of empowerment long elaborated by Haitian intellectuals and everyday nationalists alike: pride in an identity firmly rooted in African culture, linked to a politics of black liberation and decolonization.8 It is indeed a puzzle for many onlookers that any Haitians would themselves subscribe to the demonization of their national culture and assist in crafting a counternarrative that would seem so illogical and disempowering. This was a guiding question for me in watching this story unfold over the last twenty years and in interviewing some of its proponents. Some have argued to me that Haitians who hold Third Wave beliefs are dupes of American neoimperialism. Perhaps that is the end of the matter for some, but my assumption must be that born-again Haitians who hold this view are both intelligent and able to decide for themselves how to theologize the world. I decided to take seriously the Spiritual Mapping movement narrative and delve into its production. This essay aims to present a satisfying answer to the question of how, and what it means that, some Haitian evangelicals would take this alternative, Christian nationalist stand. Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes in Silencing the Past that “theories of history rarely examine in detail the concrete production of specific narratives.”9 The case of the evangelical story of Bois Caïman provides the opportunity for such a study, where we “discover artisans of different kinds,” who work to “deflect, or reorganize the work of the professionals.” Indeed, this new story is not a production of professional history written by academic historians, but rather a historical narrative generated by theologians, evangelical pastors, and everyday people. It is a form of nationalism from below, produced through a kind of “vernacular historical sensibility” that is simultaneously an evangelical historical sensibility.10 The competing narratives that neoevangelicals and some Haitian nationalists tell about Bois Caïman make certain kinds of claims that rest on the assumption that the originary event that brings into being a people, a nation, or the like, is somehow paradigmatic and revelatory of the ongoing identity

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of the group. Such origin narratives that make important claims can usefully be understood as myths, which, I want to say at the outset, is not meant to belittle the stories—either nationalist, Vodouist, or evangelical—as false and silly. Rather, I make use of the intellectual tools of scholars of religion who link mythmaking and social formation. For them, myths are “that small class of stories that possess both credibility and authority . . . akin to that of charters, models, templates, and blueprints.”11 Myths are best viewed as “active processes akin to verbs.”12 Through mythmaking, people evoke the sentiments through which they can construct society, either to preserve the status quo or to “advance novel interpretations for an established myth and thereby change the sentiments (and society) it evokes.”13 So mythmaking is the ordinary, everyday process of constructing, authorizing, and also contesting social identities or social formations.14 In looking at the process of mythmaking here, I peel back the story’s many layers and take note of how people recast older discourses and symbols, whom the story empowers, and the ways that knowledge is disseminated. It is a case of mythmaking in the making.15 The question of who gets to mythmake is akin to the question of who writes history. It is telling that Frenchmen published the first accounts of Bois Caïman. The enslaved in the colony of Saint Domingue enter into the historical record only during interrogations by French superiors.16 The writers of the historical record, through their use of literacy and publishing technology, are in significant positions of authority. Similarly, the class of successful mythmakers is restricted to those who can assert their narrative forcefully and repeatedly, often also in writing. But mythmakers have additional techniques at their disposal, including rumor, song, dance, poetry, art, drama, and the very powerful strategy of ritual. Ritual allows ordinary people to participate in mythmaking. Nationalist mythmakers ritualize remembering when children line up to sing and chant for flag days, memorial days, and independence days, and when Pastor Yvette and others led their congregations in prayer and song to clear their tent camps of lwa (spirits), to reclaim Haiti in the name of Jesus after the earthquake, they ritualized evangelical nationalist mythmaking. As evangelical mythmaking about Haitian history gains traction, it presents a case of competing nationalist identity formations, achieved through narrative and cast through religion, but with raced, gendered, and foreign

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relations dimensions (all of which I cannot explore here). Although I have just called the new version a story “from below,” it is crucial to keep in mind that the new narrative is being crafted in partnership with powerful transnational allies—American and other Christians. The transnational dimension of the evangelical narrative reveals that Protestants have opened a space for a global religious informal economy, which provides an opportunity for crossfertilization and mutual identity construction. I have written elsewhere that the story about Haiti’s demonic genesis is a backward mirror image of the evangelical historical sensibility in which the United States is a righteous nation, founded by Christians as a Christian nation, and blessed to be chosen by God for a special destiny. In contrast, Haiti, announced an American missionary in 1993, is “the only nation to be dedicated to Satan.” In this sense, the neoevangelical story aligns squarely with a strand of right-wing American civil religious mythmaking. Third Wave evangelicals in each country produce themselves through an Old Testament sensibility that calculates the relationship of each nation to the favor of God.17 Writing National History in Haiti: The Oath and the Blood The Haitian nation came into existence when slaves and free persons fought an eleven-year revolutionary war, abolished slavery, and proclaimed independence on January 1, 1804. Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes that the Haitian revolution was so radically an overturning of European ontological assumptions and political order that it was unthinkable even as it was happening. All its elements fell outside the European conceptual frame of reference and therefore outside the realm of possibility. Europeans’ racial assumptions of the fundamentally lower state of civilization of Africans, for example, made it impossible for blacks to overthrow whites.18 I want to add to Trouillot’s argument that the revolution was unthinkable also because pagans could not vanquish Christians. A corollary to the politics of race, the reversal of Christian historical teleology—in which Christianity will spread to the far corners of the earth and inaugurate the millennium— was impossible to think. Spiritual Mapping evangelicals underscore that impossibility anew, when they effectively assert that the revolution was only possible with the help of the prince of darkness.

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The historical conditions out of which the Haitian nation struggled to form itself were similar to the conditions under which Haitian historians had to labor: power, technology, literacy, and publishing and the circulation of information had all been disproportionately owned by the French slaveholding colonists, who in turn used them against the Haitian rebels. Similarly obstructive, other nations in the world refused to recognize Haiti and instituted a series of embargoes and punitive measures that would handicap the nation for decades. So the project of representing their nation was made particularly difficult for Haitians, whose historians and nationalist mythmakers alike faced the task of creating for the new nation what Anderson calls an “imagined community.”19 In addition, national representations had, as everywhere, at least two audiences: those inside Haiti and an international community, still engaged in slavery, which looked on in hopes that Haiti would fail. The questions of how to understand the role of enslaved African leaders and their ground troops and how to represent their culturally specific modes of acting and speaking became charged ones. This was especially true when it came to the unseen world of African spirits, said to have been invoked at Bois Caïman. In her book The Spirits and the Law, on Afro-Creole religion and the law in Haitian history, Kate Ramsey points out that colonists were not able to fathom what we now term African-based religion as religion and spoke instead of superstition, fetishism, and sorcery. However, colonists were afraid enough of the empowering potential of the slaves’ spiritual practices that they took them seriously and promulgated a set of laws against them. Even after independence, the second Haitian president, Alexandre Pétion, in 1814 prohibited the gathering of “all dance groups . . . or associations which foster an esprit de corps and a hierarchy of position.” Ramsey makes the point that it was “because popular religious organizations and leadership played a role in empowering rebels who first overthrew slavery, and ultimately French colonialism, that the new authorities placed them outside of the law.”20 Since the first days after independence, Haitians understood that they embodied the anomalous example of black leadership and self-determination in the Americas: “At the ideological level, the early leaders of Haiti defined themselves as ‘regenerators’ or ‘rehabilitators’ of Africa; that is, they saw themselves as black representatives of Western civilization for black populations still under white domination.”21 The intellectual piece of this project

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demanded an accounting and reconciling of the role of African-based culture and religion with the new, modern nation. Struggling to come into its own in an international arena dominated by nominally Christian nations, the project was, in effect, to create a civil religion for Haiti whose mythic symbols would both harness Roman Catholicism and reconcile it to the AfroCreole cultural matrix of the people. As Terry Rey writes in an essay on the symbolic chain of memory linking history and cosmology in Haiti, politics and religion are deeply cross-layered. He points out that not only was August 14–15 the date of Bois Caïman, but it is also deeply significant as the Feast Day of Our Lady of the Assumption, one of the most popular saints in Haiti and namesake of both the Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien cathedrals. “Popular Haitian history is thus mythologized in ways that inscribe saints (especially the Virgin Mary), ancestors, spirits, revolutionaries, and politicians alike in important dates such as August 14–15.”22 The question of how to narrate the ceremony at Bois Caïman has seemed to crystalize, in symbolic shorthand, the politics of political and religious meaning making from the early days of the revolution until the present. The historical record has been the subject of countless writings by historians and anthropologists. Ironically, the first written account of the ceremony was by Antoine Dalmas, a French doctor who fled Saint Domingue during the insurrection. Written in the United States two years after the ceremony in the winter of 1793–94, it was his report that was based on the interrogation of prisoners. He wrote: [They] celebrated a sort of feast or sacrifice in the middle of a wooded untilled plot on the Choiseul plantation, called le Caïman, where a very large number of Negroes assembled. An entirely black pig, surrounded by fetishes (fétiches), loaded with offerings each more bizarre than the other was the holocaust offered to the all-powerful spirit (génie) of the black race. The religious rituals that the negroes conducted while cutting its throat, the avidity with which they drank of his blood, the value they set in possessing a few of his bristles, a sort of talisman which, according to them, was to render them invulnerable, all serve to characterize Africans. That such an ignorant and besotted caste would make the superstitious rituals of an absurd and sanguinary religion serve as a prelude to the most frightful crimes was to be expected.23

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Dalmas’s haughty tone disparages its subjects. Joan Dayan comments that although his account “seems an unlikely source for the spirits of liberation, what matters is how necessary the story remains to Haitians who continue to construct their identity not only by turning to the revolution of 1791 but by seeking its origins in a service quite possibly imagined by those who disdain it.”24 Dayan points to two important points for our purposes here: that Haitians have worked against the grain of French and Catholic attitudes to cull knowledge about their history, and that nationalist mythmakers have nevertheless looked to Bois Caïman as a cornerstone on which to build their national identity. One can also see that in Dalmas there is no mention of Boukman, a speech, an oath, renunciation of the Christian god, a priestess, a tree, or a thunderstorm; these elements would be added later by people farther removed across both history and geography. It is the blood, and especially the oath, that interest us here because of the way neoevangelicals would seize on the idea of a pact in the contemporary era. It is one of the many ironies of this story that the speech, the renunciation of God, and the oath do not appear until an account published twenty-eight years after the event, in Paris in 1819 by a Frenchman who had yet to visit Haiti. His writings would nevertheless circulate into the postcolony and throughout the French Antilles. Unlike Dalmas, Civique de Gastine meant his account as an antislavery testament, writing: “This speech [of the Orator] drew tears from all the listeners, and kindled in their hearts the desire for vengeance. The Orator ended with the account of general Ogé’s martyrdom; they all swore to avenge his death and to perish rather than return to slavery. Then, they renounced the religion of their masters and, in order to gain the favor of the gods of their homeland (patrie), they sacrificed to them.”25 According to historian David Geggus, “Gastine, a young French radical who had never visited Haiti, was the first writer to give the prerevolutionary ceremony a specifically anti-Christian coloring and to associate it with a storm, an oath, and divination from entrails, in his case, a black ram’s.”26 Later, neoevangelicals will work to undo what some have argued was a fabulation by a French abolitionist in the first place.27 The oath to avenge injustice, the animal sacrifice, the renunciation of the whites’ (Christian) god, and invoking the gods of the homeland all became elements of the mythic grammar through which subsequent Haitian thinkers

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would work to construct what we might call a civil religious imaginary for the new nation. These elements signified proactive and collective agency, unity, self-determination, and an anti-European stance that would be admired by later actors struggling against the continued hegemony of France, and then America. Ironically, the oath and the blood—as well as a tree pictured as a gathering spot—would also become key parts of the Christian mythic grammar promoted by Spiritual Mapping evangelicals at the end of the twentieth century.28 All of these mythic images would become tools in the exorcism of history itself, and none would be more powerful than the performative pronouncement of the oath.29 The oath in particular carries ritual weight for both Christianity and national politics. To take an oath, to confess Christ, and to cast out demons in the name of Jesus are all instances of speech acts. Such speech acts carry illocutionary force; that is, they produce an effect by and through the speaking of the statement. Very much like a sacrament, a speech act creates a change in the world; “it is itself the deed that it effects.”30 The moment in which the revolutionaries vowed by their gods to claim their freedom became, for some evangelicals, the same moment in which the devil was engaged to rule over Haiti. And even at the same time that the oath is resignified as part of a pact with the devil, the African gods of Bois Caïman are implicitly cast as demons. In any case, through the centuries, Haitian intellectuals and artists have worked to incorporate the story of the oath and the African gods at Bois Caïman into the revolution as part of a Haitian civil religion that would carve out a respectable place for ancestral religious practices. Michael Largey helpfully notes: “As a practice of lower-class Haitians that has been put to use by elite Haitians in a variety of contexts, Vodou provides a look into the workings of elite historiographic constructions.”31 As Roman Catholics, many elites have been ambivalent about Vodou, and this ambivalence has worked itself into discourses of Haitian nationalism. “In its capacity to instill revulsion in Haitian elites and fear in foreigners while providing a potential rallying point for Haitians wanting to distinguish themselves from outsiders, Vodou invokes what Michael Hertzfeld calls ‘cultural intimacy,’ or ‘the recognition of those aspects of a cultural identity that are considered a source of external embarrassment but that nevertheless provide insiders with their assurance

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of common sociality.’”32 If the awe-inspiring revolution had been kicked off by a Vodou ceremony, then surely ancestral spirits were a driving force for self-determination; they helped generate heroic collective action and could be written into civil religion as a positive feature of culture. As a response to the U.S. marine occupation of 1915–34, and in step with decolonizing cultural movements throughout the Americas, including negritude and Pan-Africanism, Haitian nationalists contributed to the general effort to shift African cultural traits to occupy a position of positive value. The Haitian government opened its Bureau of Ethnology in the 1940s, tasking it with studying African-based traditional culture. In the postwar period, Haitian ethnologists would work to fashion a normative place for Vodou in national culture. Ethnologists valorized the “heroic slave revolution” in a “counter-narrative to European cultural hegemony and North American colonialism.”33 President François Duvalier, who would become a brutal dictator, began his career as an ethnologist who invested in efforts to recuperate a Haitian identity that would be pro-black and identified with African culture. Although he repressed the adherents of traditional practices, Duvalier promoted stylized representations of Vodou in folklore productions. The state invested in folkloric music and dance troupes that attracted tourists, anthropologists, and artists alike. Duvalier himself was famous for his impersonation of the Vodou spirit of the cemetery, Baron Samedi, during public speech making. His use of Vodou ended up as an instrument of control over the population rather than an affirmation of the culture. His son, who succeeded him, was ousted in 1986, and as the 1991 bicentennial of the revolution drew close, Haiti had entered a period of political tumult and uncertainty. The bicentennial of the Haitian revolution, and thus of Bois Caïman, coincided with important political events of the 1990s and invited Haitians consciously to read the two periods, one against the other. In 1991, Jean-Bertrand Aristide was inaugurated president after a landslide election. He had been a Roman Catholic Salesian priest in the liberation theology tradition and spoke out forcefully against U.S. structural readjustment programs. Against a political backdrop of opposition from elites and the business class that would eventually oust him, his administration worked to normalize Afro-Creole practices and to incorporate Vodou into development plans, civic life, and official historical memory.

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In 1991 the Aristide government sponsored a bicentennial commemoration of Bois Caïman at the National Palace, and the Haitian parliament voted to make Boukman a national hero and the site a national landmark. After Aristide was ousted in a military coup d’état nine months into his presidency in September 1991, Haitians protesting in the diaspora reminded themselves of the painful symbolism of the timing of the coup and the anniversary of Bois Caïman. At a rally in Brooklyn protesting the coup, Haitians declared they had a “‘rendez-vous’ with Lady Liberty, that constant companion since that liberating night of August 14th, 1791, until that liberating morning of February 7, 1991. The first date marks the Bois Caïman ceremony and the second, Aristide’s inauguration, which some Haitians called ‘Haiti’s second independence.”’34 After Aristide returned to Haiti in 1994, he held a conference for 400 Vodouists at the National Palace, marking the first time in Haitian history that Vodou was publicly legitimated and formally recognized at a state ceremony. The president’s opening speech was a poetic rendering evoking vèvè, the cornmeal drawings used in Vodou ceremonies, to call for democracy and justice: Let us make a vèvè of democracy so that the lwa of justice comes and dances in all of our heads. Make a vèvè of reconciliation so that the lwa of respect comes and dances in all of our heads. In the same way that we take flour to trace a vèvè on the ground, let us take the flour of justice and trace a vèvè of respect. So that I respect you and you respect me. We’ll use our hands to trace democracy everywhere in this country. In this way we will have schools for the children. There will be food for everyone to eat, houses for everyone to live in, land for everyone to work. Our ancestors, it is for this they died, and we, their children, it is for this we work, to heal this ailing body. So that Haiti can stand up straight and tall, so that everyone feels that the spirit of our ancestors is alive and dancing in our heads. It is for this we continue tracing the vèvè of justice in the four corners of Haiti.35

Aristide was the first leader since François Duvalier to so explicitly harness Vodou to politics, but unlike Duvalier, his public mythmaking discourse attempted to incorporate the religion as part of a democratic, plural civil religion, intelligible to the majority for whom vèvè are stylized forms of spirit

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writing. To cast the image of a vèvè for democracy would be, in the ritual grammar of Vodou, to call down and become possessed by democracy. Aristide did this as part of a strategy to incorporate Vodouists into the nation officially and to make links between Vodou and state-sponsored development.36 However, as I will show in the following section, evangelicals in the United States and in Haiti decried the positive value the government was showing toward Vodouists. The more Aristide worked to incorporate and enfranchise Vodou, the more his opponents spoke out. The political stage became polarized into anti-Aristide and pro-Aristide camps struggling for economic power. Meanwhile, his opponents charged the president with committing nefarious acts of sorcery. Rumors circulated that the national commemoration of the Bois Caïman ceremony in 1991 would be a reenactment of the original event, complete with the renunciation of God and the drinking of pig’s blood. According to rumor, the oungan (priest) chosen to officiate died suddenly, and a second oungan was chosen, who accidentally stabbed himself to death during a sacrifice. Finally, the ceremony went forward, but was cut short by heavy rain. Longtime Haiti missionary Clinton Lane would elaborate on the anniversary ceremony in his missiology dissertation, writing: During a prayer meeting on the night of the [anniversary] ceremony, one young Protestant in La Suisse Church claimed a vision. He believed he saw Satan standing over the great tree of Caïman reaching out to take Haiti again. Suddenly, the voices of a great multitude of Christ-serving people began to quote the Scripture. They said that the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. At the sound of this voice Satan turned and fled.37

Two years later, in 1993, word of this young person’s prophetic vision would be reworked and cited as fact by evangelicals outside of Haiti, such as Patrick Johnston, compiler of the reference book Operation World, published by the organization Worldwide Evangelization for Christ. In Johnston’s interpretation and that of other evangelicals in the Spiritual Mapping movement, the Aristide government’s bicentennial commemoration of the ceremony at Bois Caïman was effectively a second “legal spiritual transaction” that rededicated the nation to the devil. Johnston wrote:

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In 1791 Haiti was dedicated to Satan. Voodooism is a pervasive evil that affects every level of Haitian society. The official recognition of Voodooism, the National Registration of Voodoo Practitioners and nationalistic spirits have led to intimidation of Christians—especially those who speak out against Voodooism. President Aristide re-dedicated the country to Voodooism in 1991 as its “cultural heritage”; shortly afterwards he was deposed.38

The bicentennial of the revolution, juxtaposed against the inclusive policies of the Aristide government, underscored for people a way to link history to the political events of the present. For some evangelicals, political events could best be understood using what they considered to be biblical logic— that is, biblical ideas that they extrapolated into the present. A new evangelical narrative that was a form of myth in the making was aimed at the Aristide administration and also at the genesis of the Haitian nation: the ceremony at Bois Caïman. Evangelical Countermythmaking: Exorcizing History Evangelicals did not formulate the idea that Bois Caïman consisted of a “blood pact with Satan” suddenly out of thin air. Just as with the original story, several historical processes merged to give rise to new mythmaking and a new social formation. At least five interrelated factors were at work. First, as I have indicated, was the political contest revolving around Aristide’s efforts to enfranchise the Haitian majority and to institute land redistribution and tax reforms, and the business class’s opposition, ending in a coup d’état. The second factor was the Haitian and foreign evangelical community’s reaction against the Aristide government’s efforts to normalize Vodou and incorporate Vodouists. Third was that these current events were unfolding against the backdrop of the bicentennial of the revolution, making the elements of national religiopolitical mythography stand out in relief, available for everyone to use in new forms of meaning making. Fourth, these processes coincided with the rise of a new branch of thought within global evangelical missiology called the Church Growth Movement, together with its controversial offshoot, Spiritual Mapping. Fifth, the creation of e-mail technology, which became broadly available in the 1990s, allowed the “blood pact with the devil” story to go viral and, later, to be reproduced on scores of evangelical

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Web sites, often as a fund-raising tool. To begin to account for how these factors converged to produce the new demonic narrative of Bois Caïman, it may help to back up briefly to take in the long view of Protestantism in Haiti. Protestantism was a presence in the colonial period and has woven an increasingly important thread throughout Haitian history. The first active Protestant mission was established in 1817. After a lull, the period from 1822 to 1945 saw thirty-seven different missions build bases in Haiti.39 These missions originated in the North, outgrowths of the earlier faith revival in the United States, and were dispatched by traditional Protestant denominations, mostly Baptist, Presbyterian, and Methodist. They presented an alternative political, cultural, and theological power to Catholicism. It was an American Methodist pastor, for example, who devised the first orthography of Haitian Kreyòl, thus disrupting the hegemony of French language and culture. The United States marine occupation of the country from 1915 to 1934 accelerated Protestant growth, and ten new denominations came to Haiti; the two fastest growing were the Adventist and Pentecostal.40 Mission activity increased dramatically in 1957, when François Duvalier took power. Fredrick Conway notes wryly that Duvalier may as well have been called the Father of Protestantism in Haiti, because while he conspicuously identified with Vodou, he also promoted and supported foreign missionaries from the United States. American Protestants were known to avoid involvement in political affairs and would draw believers away from the Catholic Church while remaining pliant in the face of military rule.41 Protestants embraced the use of technology to evangelize, and in 1958 the Oriental Missionary Society founded Radio 4VEH, followed in 1959 by the West Indies Mission’s founding of Radio Lumière, both of which are major radio stations to the present day.42 From the middle of the century to the present, evangelicalism has become especially popular in Haiti as a religious movement independent of mission Christianity, leading some to estimate that a third of the population is now Protestant.43 Linked historically, culturally, and often institutionally to U.S. missions, evangelicalism creates extensive networks that reach throughout the world. By the 1970s, the American Baptists, World Vision International, Campus Crusade for Christ, Youth With a Mission, and others were launching what they termed “major saturation evangelism campaigns” throughout

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Haiti with names such as “Christ for All” and “Christ in Every Home,” and distributing transistor radios by the thousands.44 From both directions— Haiti and the United States—evangelicals participated eagerly in the increasing transnationalization of the Haitian social sphere. Haitian pastors went frequently to the United States and beyond to study in seminaries and Bible colleges, often returning to plant churches and to participate in politics. Notable examples include Charles Poisset Romain, who studied at the Baptist Theological Seminary in Haiti and then earned a doctorate in sociology at the Sorbonne; he wrote Le Protestantisme dans la Société Haïtienne in 1986. He was a minister of education and ran for president in 2005. Chavannes Jeune studied development and communication at Chicago’s Wheaton College in 1983 and did postdoctoral study in theology, sociology, and development administration at Columbia Bible School in North Carolina. Jeune was vice president of Haiti in the de facto government of 1988–89 after the fall of Duvalier and campaigned for president in 2005 and again in 2010 after the earthquake. As I will elaborate below, Chavannes Jeune and his cousin, Joel Jeune, have been perhaps the most prominent and activist evangelical Haitians to promote the “pact with Satan” story. The Jeunes, like many other Haitian pastors, are members of the Haitian Protestant Federation and have enjoyed transnational fellowship and partnership with a great number of evangelicals worldwide, such as the Reverend Billy Graham, Reverend Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse, Thomas Fortson of Promise Keepers, David Paul Yonggi Cho of the Yoiddo Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea, Vernon Brewer of World Help, and Bishop Ezra Sarganum of the Evangelical Church of India. With the increase in evangelical cross-fertilization throughout the hemisphere came the more typical evangelical understanding of spiritual energy. One main difference between evangelicals and traditional Protestants was their orientation toward the cosmology and ontology of Vodou. Protestants arriving in Haiti were confirmed in their anti-Catholicism when they witnessed the creolized correspondences between Catholicism and Vodou— what Haitians called le mélange. The majority of the population that claimed Catholicism as its national religion was also oriented to African ancestral practices, which included an elaborately developed priesthood, a pantheon of spirits, and cyclical and personal rites of passage including funerary rites,

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supported by a cosmology and basic worldview foundational to Vodou and not Catholicism. Characteristic of mainline Protestants was the view that belief in non-Christian spirits is a superstitious, ontologically false belief standing in the way of modern progress and a proper understanding of Christ. Evangelicals, on the other hand, were likely to engage with the spirit entities of Vodou as if they were real adversaries populating the spiritual plane. Through the lens of evangelicalism, missionaries and Haitians together crafted new narratives about Haitian history and traditional culture. These narratives, while using the same scriptures as the Catholic clergy, were weighted differently in Protestantism. Whereas the saints had lent themselves to syncretism with Vodou spirits, Protestants would stress the absolute authority of Jesus Christ and the absolute irreconcilability—even opposition—of Vodou with Christianity. For Pentecostals in particular, Vodou spirits were as real as Christ himself, and were in fact demons working as the foot soldiers of Satan. Though they are all Christian, then, the theologies and goals of Catholics, traditional Protestants, and evangelicals in Haiti are not the same. Their stories and the stories they created about Haiti, its past, and its religion also have a different effect on their Haitian converts. Making converts—evangelizing—is a priority of evangelical missions. It is not enough to offer the good works of charity, mercy, education, relief aid, or simple solidarity, as has been the thrust of many mainline Protestant missions in Haiti and elsewhere. Evangelicals are defined, even in their very name, by the burden placed on their hearts to spread the good news of the Gospel. Starting in the 1960s, Bible colleges and seminaries began to emphasize the necessity to convert large numbers of souls to Christianity as part God’s plan for the Second Coming and the new millennium. The Church Growth Movement, begun by Yale graduate and longtime missionary to India Donald A. McGavran, became a major influence in seminaries and concerned itself with understanding the conditions necessary for people to accept Christ and convert to Christianity. One factor that aids receptivity, wrote McGavran, is to influence large groups, such that collective decisions and actions would lead to conversions of “people movements.” A paramount strategy was to apply a social scientific approach, studying the anthropology and sociology of the people they were evangelizing, with the aim of converting people in large numbers.45

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The doctoral dissertations in missiology and ministry of several American missionaries reveal the links between Haiti and the Church Growth and Spiritual Mapping movements. Missionaries put a fair amount of energy into trying to understand the ancestral religious practices of Haitians. They cite ethnographic accounts of Alfred Métraux, Harold Courlander, and others, and reproduce several of those postwar-era scholars’ analyses of the African content of Vodou. Clinton Lane is one such missionary, who spent more than twenty years at the Christian Center of the North starting in the 1970s. In his missiology dissertation from Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky, he paraphrases folklorist Harold Courlander saying, “Voodoo is the glue that holds Haiti together,” and works to outline both its positive aspects (its guidelines for social behavior, its herbal medicine) and its negative aspects (its basis in fear, distrust, and a drive for power).”46 Lane and other students quote Charles Kraft and C. Peter Wagner, the most prominent proponents of the techniques of Spiritual Mapping. Both were on faculty at the Fuller Theological Seminary, and Wagner was particularly influential as a professor of Church Growth who was also a prolific writer and speaker. Wagner taught courses on Spiritual Mapping at Fuller in the 1990s, which were likely attended by missionaries working in Haiti.47 Together, Wagner and Kraft worked out an approach that would prove controversial, even in evangelical circles. They extended the pragmatic, managerial, and social scientific approach to Church Growth from the visible world to the unseen world. Wagner and Kraft read scholarship in anthropology in order to understand the specific spiritual forces that they believed affected— and afflicted—the people they were working to convert. This process centered on reading history, ethnography, and sociology, and attending to the spiritual forces working in a given locale, and then mapping them so that missionaries could understand—and do battle with—any demonic activity that might be working to thwart Church Growth and large-scale evangelization. By using spiritual warfare as leverage to convert large numbers of people, Spiritual Mappers could change social structures and hasten the return of Christ. “This is why I believe that history belongs to the intercessors,” wrote Wagner.48 Wagner taught that believers can play an active role in bringing about the Second Coming of Christ by aggressively and strategically spreading the

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Gospel. In areas where people were Christianized but still not living Christian lives, were suffering, or were experiencing extreme poverty or violence, the church was faced with a situation of “demonic entrenchment,” where demonic “territorial spirits” may be holding “people groups” in a form of spiritual slavery. In his books Engaging the Enemy (1991) and Warfare Prayer (1992), Wagner explains the premises of Spiritual Mapping: that Satan and his demons are real, that Satan is engaged in a spiritual war against God in the unseen world, that Satan’s hosts include territorial spirits that may be identified by name, and that some Christians are called to be intercessors, to engage in battle with territorial spirits by name in aggressive spiritual warfare.49 As in the case of African slaves in Haiti, the origins of these demonic territorial spirits may be collective trauma, which may have led people, in desperation, to enter into pacts with ancestral spirits. Says George Otis Jr., a developer of Spiritual Mapping: “In return for a particular deity’s consent to resolve their immediate traumas, they have offered up their singular and ongoing allegiance. It is through the placement of these ancient welcome mats, then, that demonic territorial strongholds are established.”50 Missionaries would come to apply these ideas directly to the ceremony at Bois Caïman. Wrote missionary Lane, “Haiti’s oral tradition tells us that Boukman, looking to heaven, denounced God because He could not deliver them from slavery and then gave the country of Haiti to the Voodoo spirits if they would deliver Haiti.”51 The first explicit application of Spiritual Mapping theology to Bois Caïman that I have found so far is by North American David Taylor writing a 1993 Ph.D. dissertation in missiology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Like Haitian nationalists, he discusses the Bois Caïman ceremony as the foundational moment of the Haitian nation, quoting the 1949 account of Alexis, as I have done at the opening of this essay. In a telling passage, he reveals that it was North Americans such as himself who pressed the idea of a satanic pact on Haitian seminarians and tells of the resistance Haitians had to the idea. Applying Wagner’s idea of territorial demons, he writes: There are Haitians who have argued with me that the Bois Caïman experience should not be interpreted as a demonic incident. Rather it should be viewed politically or socially. It is very awkward for a white foreigner to present the

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case for a Satanic origin to their country since their independence is such a vital part of what precious little national pride they have. A Satanic origin naturally would be viewed negatively, particularly by ministerial candidates! Nevertheless, the weight of evidence is in the Satanic direction. My suggestion is that during this ceremony a host of territorial demons was let loose in Haiti that not only gained for it its independence but also created for it the ecological, economic, moral and political disasters it is infamous for around the globe today.52

Taylor cites anthropological works to discuss the history and ethnography of Haitian Vodou, and in the legal language typical of the Third Wave movement, stresses the satanic weight of evidence. Ironically, he quotes a 1984 text by Weinstein and Segal titled Haiti: Political Failures, Cultural Successes, saying: “Even secular writers such as Weinstein and Segal can make the following conclusion: ‘Out of slavery into other forms of oppression, Haitians have fashioned their own responses to the cruelty of fate. It is a response that reaffirms their ties to their Haitian and African ancestors.’”53 Once African ancestors were redescribed as demonic, even ethnographic writings—especially those linking Haitian religious culture to African sources—confirmed the Spiritual Mapping premise that anything non-Christian was evil. It was through these neoevangelical logics of Spiritual Mapping, taught at seminaries and Bible colleges, that both American and Haitian seminarians worked intellectually to connect Haitian Afro-Creole religion and Bois Caïman to the demonic, and thus to a neoevangelical paradigm centered on the battle between evil and good. The flow of information and people involved in Spiritual Mapping ran from the United States to Haiti to the United States and back again. One Haitian Protestant intellectual, André Jeantil Louis, wrote a doctoral dissertation in 1998 at Fuller Theological Seminary under the direction of Charles Kraft, author of Defeating Dark Angels (1992), who taught and promoted Spiritual Mapping along with Wagner. Kraft was particularly interested in anthropological works on animism and became convinced that animism and biblical figures share the same worldview. This is to say that both for animists and in biblical stories, there are invisible spirits who are actively involved in the human sphere.54 Kraft taught that Christians must use what was termed the

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power encounter—the visible, dramatic display of Christ’s power over elements of the human world. Miracles, healings, and other gifts of the Holy Spirit such as deliverance from personal demons, speaking in tongues, and prophecy were all tools Christ gave believers to fight the devil and win converts. He drew from the Gospel to encourage missionaries to face local demons and cast them out, reminding them that when Jesus sent out his twelve disciples: “He gave them power over unclean spirits, to cast them out” (Matthew 10:1). Kraft taught that evangelization is most effective when carried out not through reason, but by demonstrating that “the old religion had lost its powers and fears.”55 The dissertation that Haitian seminarian Louis wrote under Kraft follows Kraft’s ethnographic method to outline the elements of the demonic in Haitian Vodou. He draws from classic sources on Vodou such as Milo Rigaud and Alfred Métraux to outline Vodou practices at length and then applies Christian interpretations using Kraft, Wagner, and Christian works on the occult such as Rodger Bufford’s Counseling and the Demonic. He writes of Vodou solving the medical problems of its followers and works to prescribe ministry methods for demon-possessed people, as well as for the nonpossessed but still demon afflicted.56 He stresses the importance of education and reaching the poor and nonliterate through culturally appropriate methods of storytelling, drama, and music. He concerns himself with communitylevel, contemporary mission work. Returning to Haiti, he worked as a pastor and a lawyer in the evangelical social circles around Port-au-Prince. But he does not focus on Haitian history and stops short at addressing himself to Bois Caïman. Although some Haitian evangelical theologians viewed the Bois Caïman ceremony as a demonic pact, not all did by any means. In fact, many, if not most, resisted the idea. Those who were drawn to the Spiritual Mapping and spiritual warfare approach joined an international network of intercessors and prayer warriors. In addition to the transnational circuits of seminarians doing intellectual labor, pastors were traveling across emerging global networks, learning, fellowshipping, praying, and exchanging viewpoints and techniques. Pastor Joel Jeune was a prominent Haitian evangelical, active on Protestant radio throughout Haiti since the 1970s. In 1991, Paul Yonggi Cho invited Pastor Jeune to visit the Yoidi Full Gospel Church in Seoul. This megachurch was

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already the biggest in the world, boasting half a million members. Pastor Cho himself was said to have preached two services each day, seven days a week, and was known for his charismatic style as well as his promotion of a spiritual warfare worldview. Cho made a deep impression on Jeune, who began to reflect on what God might be saying about Haiti’s territorial spirits. Throughout the 1990s, Pastor Joel Jeune attended workshops and conferences in the United States and elsewhere on various aspects of ministry, Church Growth, and Spiritual Mapping. He learned of other ministers’ and missionaries’ approaches to conversion in places in the developing world where non-Christian religions, including animism and paganism, prevailed. The idea, developed by Wagner, Kraft, and others, that some places, cities, or nations were both suffering and particularly difficult to evangelize, and that the reason was to be found in embedded spiritual forces working invisibly in the culture, made sense to him. Others working in the mission field were convinced that the best remedy for such cases of demonic entrenchment was to wage spiritual warfare.57 The Spiritual Mapping movement teaches that Christian intercessors, known as prayer warriors, can choose to accept assignments to do battle with territorial spirits if they feel called to such work by the Holy Spirit. An intercessor may call together a prayer team for a prophetic prayer action on the spiritual battlefield. The warfare is not supposed to be aggressive to anyone or anything in the material world, but rather consists of round-the-clock fasting and prayer in the spiritual realm. Drawing on Ephesians 6, prayer warriors “put on the whole armor of God,” that they may be able to “stand against” the “wiles of the devil.” Working “in the spirit,” they “gird their loins with truth,” and “don the breastplate of righteousness.” They “take up the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit” and mount “prayer marches,” walking around demonic spots rebuking the devil and his army in order to “pull down strongholds”—that is, places where demons live and operate. If they know the names of ancestral spirits, they cast out demons by name. Most importantly, the Holy Spirit is invited to enter the space and spread His healing grace. The results of such prayer warfare would be transformative: people would be healed, crops would grow, social unrest and division would resolve, and the group or nation would finally experience abundance and prosperity.

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Pastor Joel Jeune had been vocal in his opposition to Afro-Creole religious practices for many years on the radio. He decided in the mid-1990s that it was time to do something more concrete. “This is when I felt that God was talking to my spirit to do something more significant,” he told me in an interview.58 Others in the Spiritual Mapping movement had developed a strategy of large-scale, public crusades featuring believers marching to a spot infested with demons and praying publicly. The technique was used as an example in workshops and conferences and was said to have been particularly successful in spiritual warfare efforts in Argentina in the 1980s. After several televised rituals, including one in which he burned a picture of the pig symbolizing the sacrifice at Bois Caïman, Pastor Jeune felt it was time to stage a larger prayer action. In 1997, Jeune’s church members put up notices around the National Palace and the downtown area announcing they would be dedicating Bois Caïman to Jesus on August 14. Gathering the people who came forward, including several Haitian Americans, the evangelicals took buses and trucks from Port-au-Prince to the north, to the site commonly known to be Bois Caïman. There, the church and their guests staged a spiritual warfare crusade and exorcism of the land that would come to international attention and effectively remythologize the Bois Caïman story, first for the evangelical public in Haiti, then for evangelicals worldwide. The dramatic public revival would recombine the elements of the nationalist mythic grammar of Bois Caïman into a powerful ritual reversal in the Christian register. The story of the ritual bled from evangelical networks into the broader public sphere through countless repetitions on e-mails, then Web sites. It would be reiterated at points of political crisis in the decade of the 2000s and again by Pat Robertson after the catastrophic 2010 quake. Jeune had studied the techniques developed by other warriors elsewhere and performed one particularly powerful ritual: a Jericho March. The Jericho March draws its symbolism from the Book of Joshua, when the Israelites entered Canaan at God’s command and demolished the city of Jericho by walking seven times around the city blowing trumpets. The technique was therefore to replicate the Israelite action by encircling a city, building, or spot believed to be a demonic stronghold, marching around it seven times, and through prayer and exhortation, dissolve the stronghold in the name of Jesus.

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This spiritual warfare battle maneuver would exorcize the devil from the tree standing as a focusing spot at Bois Caïman.59 After the event, Bishop Jeune would write up his account for another pastor, Reverend Gerry Seale, when both were sharing a room while attending a Promise Keeper rally in Washington, D.C. Reverend Seale was general secretary of the Evangelical Association of the Caribbean and the Caribbean coordinator of a campaign called March for Jesus. He was also the regional coordinator of the AD2000 and Beyond Movement, a global network of Spiritual Mapping movement evangelicals with a headquarters in Colorado Springs and under the supervision of Peter Wagner. The goal of AD2000 was to “break principalities and powers” by the year 2000, and by 1997, momentum was building throughout the Spiritual Mapping movement and beyond. Reverend Seale was thrilled to hear of Bishop Jeune’s crusade and success in declaring Bois Caïman for Christ. He circulated Jeune’s report to numerous Spiritual Mapping organizations, several of which published it on their Listservs. Through this ritual exorcism and its wide circulation via the publicity efforts of Spiritual Mapping movement members, the new evangelical mythmaking about the Haitian revolution made its way into the written record, and thus into popular history. Pastor Jeune used logic consistent with Kraft, Wagner, and Otis in describing how the slaves at Bois Caïman ended up doing business with the devil. His report stated: The slaves brought from Africa went through many, many years of so much cruel treatment and atrocious sufferings from the slave masters in complicity with the Catholic Church who blessed the slave market and thought that black was the colour of the devil, therefore black slaves didn’t have a soul. That terrible situation caused the slaves to turn away from our loving God in heaven to their tribal gods of Africa for help.60

In Jeune’s reasoning, the enslaved Africans were the double victims of French slavery and Roman Catholic racism and complicity. It was this double sin, this terrible situation, that forced the Africans into their spiritual deal with their tribal gods. Jeune went on to explain that at Bois Caïman “they had a satanic ceremony, killed a pig, and drank the blood, swearing and dedicating

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Haiti to serve the devil. All Haitian historians believe and teach that Haiti’s independence in 1804 came from that satanic ceremony.” Eliding the nationalist valorization of Vodou, Jeune presented the satanic as a natural and selfevident category. His dramatic report continued: As we approached that satanic field where no Christian has ever before been, it was not easy for us. The power of witchcraft was so strong and the air so heavy. As we pushed our way towards that big tree where the pig had been slain, we really had to be violent in the Spirit, praying, rebuking, fighting, and casting out the devil and all his spirits. The battle raged until we broke into a Jericho March seven times around that big witchcraft tree . . . and . . . the seventh time we all felt that the heavy power of the devil had been lifted and God gave many people a vision of the devil flying and leaving that place. Joyful noises and victory shouts went up to God as we rejoiced over God’s victory. We took communion together and applied the blood of Jesus to the land under that same tree where the blood of the pig had been shed. We canceled the satanic contract and broke the curse. We consecrated the place to Jesus Christ as a prayer center, claimed Haiti back to God forever, and claimed August 14 as a National Day of Prayer. After the day of fasting, prayer, marching, and the big crusade with many thousands attending and many decisions for Christ (including some of the witch doctors) we went back to Port-au-Prince rejoicing.61

We can notice, once again, that the oath, a key element of mythic grammar for standard Haitian history makers, is also at the center of the struggle to name reality on the part of the spiritual warriors. Assuming that the original oath of Boukman had actually dedicated Haiti to the devil, a second oath was necessary to undo the pact. The prayer warfare method of rebuking the devil entails a strong Christian believer speaking aloud to castigate, shame, and discipline the demons by denying their right to occupy the space. Casting out the devil and his spirits is a speech act with sacramental force, as the believer, acting under the authority of Jesus, and “in the name of Jesus,” is “legally” empowered, by God’s cosmic law, to evict the spirits in the unseen world. The group “cancelled the contract,” “broke the curse,” “consecrated the place to Jesus” and “claimed August 14th as a national day of prayer.” These statements name, identify, and change the world through the process

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of their uttering. In their ritual spectacle, even in its description afterward, they seek to convince the world that they effected the change they named. By performing this spectacular ritual at the original site and on its anniversary, the evangelicals were counting on their privileged understanding of biblical law to move Haiti forward and for themselves to be anointed leaders of the new era. But not everybody appreciated the spiritual warriors’ efforts, and people from nearby Cap-Haïtien protested this invasion of out-of-towners and their aggressive proselytizing, especially when they preached against Vodou from street corners in the city.62 The crusade also caused an uproar in the capital, and many considered it an insult to national pride. A coalition of popular organizations called the Initiative Group for the Commemoration of 207 Years of Bois Caïman revealed on the radio that the crusade was funded by Americans at the International Republican Institute to erode Haitian national sovereignty.63 The government issued an order prohibiting the Protestants from assembling at Bois Caïman again. Bishop Jeune would not be discouraged, however, and in 1998 he collaborated with two other pastors from Cap-Haïtien. Along with pastors Gregory Joseph and Berthony Paul, they announced their intention to hold another prayer meeting at the famous revolutionary site. These northern pastors too had transnational Spiritual Mapping connections; Pastor Paul worked closely with the Christian Center of the North, where Lane, whose seminary dissertation had worked out the Spiritual Mapping of Bois Caïman, was a longtime missionary.64 Going to pray at the site before the August 14 anniversary, the three pastors were arrested. It was reported in several places that the American ambassador intervened to secure permission for the church to exercise its religious rights there. In their statements to the press, the pastors pronounced a victory, “a breakthrough. Haiti has reached a historical turning point.” The arrest of the pastors allowed evangelicals to claim religious persecution, and they made a documentary video describing their ordeal that circulated in Haitian evangelical households and throughout the diaspora. The pastors are filmed in the back of a flatbed truck holding their handcuffed wrists aloft proudly, and the caption below announces “Pastors Handcuffed for Christ!” Through the public and performative attack on the spirits living

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at the revolutionary site, evangelicals attempted at once to rewrite Haiti’s past and turn a corner to a new future. But after several years, Haiti had not experienced the peace and abundance the neoevangelicals were hoping for. The year 2004 would mark the bicentennial of independence itself, and just as during the 1991 bicentennial of Bois Caïman, many evangelicals wove sacred and secular history into a narrative about the nation that cast Aristide as, once again, opening the door to demonic influence. In 2003, Aristide’s government had moved to recognize Vodou as an official religion of Haiti (in addition to Roman Catholicism), stating that Vodou is “an ancestral religion” and “an essential part of national identity.” Vodou priests were invited to register with the Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs in order to be able to perform legally binding marriages, baptisms, and funerals. Newspapers reported that “the authorities consider that it is the duty of the State to protect the cultural heritage of the nation,” and went on to portray Vodou practitioners as agents of “the social, political and moral development of the Haitian people.”65 Meanwhile, as the bicentennial of the independence of 1804 drew near, the political climate heated up and polarized around Aristide’s progressive economic policies and various attempts were made to destabilize the government. For many Catholics and Protestants alike, recognizing Vodou was anti-Christian and unwise. Not only that, but many suspected Aristide of enfranchising Vodouists in order to empower his popular base of political supporters. Once again, religious and political mythmaking went hand in hand. Pastor Chavannes Jeune, Joel Jeune’s cousin, launched a year-long prayer movement in 2003 to take Haiti back from Satan, which culminated in a spectacular revival in the national stadium. Produced by Reverend J. L. Williams of New Directions International (NDI) in North Carolina, an all-star American team joined the event, including Thomas Fortson and Joe White of Promise Keepers and baseball pitcher Dave Dravekey. Teams were present from World Vision, World Help, and Campus Crusade for Christ, and Franklin Graham of Samaritan’s Purse sent a brief video greeting. The revival was videotaped by NDI, and several versions were released to the group’s members and beyond. As at Promise Keepers events and other stadium revivals throughout the world, this extravaganza made use of audio and visual technology and was produced with a sophisticated attention to ritual mythic detail,

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with music, lighting, props, sermons, and a live dramatization by Joe White playing the role of a Roman carpenter building Jesus’ cross. The theme of the revival was Breaking the Blood Pact, and the breaking of the pact was ritually effected, once again, as it had been in 1997 and 1998. God gave Reverend J. L. Williams the method in a vision: “I was to have two tables on the stage—one representing ‘the cup and table of the Lord’ and the other ‘the cup and table of demons.’”66 From the stage, Williams spelled out the biblical law that had landed Haiti in its cursed state until the present moment: “Exodus 20 says that worshipping other gods results in punishment for four generations. Each fifty years is two hundred years.” Referring to the commandment against bowing down to images, Williams reminded the crowd that God would punish the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation. He then gave a message from I Corinthians 10:20–21. There the Apostle Paul exhorted the saints at Corinth: “I do not want you to be participants with demons. You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons; you cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons.” Williams made use of his gift for preaching and boomed authoritatively from the stage in a climactic moment: “This event is to break the blood pact of the devil, and bring Haiti under the blood of Jesus Christ!” He and Pastor Jeune took an ax and broke the table of demons, and then held aloft the “cup of blessing” invoked in I Corinthians as the crowd cheered with joy.67 Using material objects to perform the biblical concepts, Reverend Williams imparted to the assembled crowd the revelation he had received from God in a dramatic and compelling ritual performance. The message was clear: ancestral religion and Christianity were incompatible and opposed. Like Boukman at the original ceremony at Bois Caïman, Williams worked to unify those present by rejecting one divine force and swearing allegiance to another, and by sealing the oath with blood. Chavannes Jeune’s speech at the revival also resignified several of the key elements of the mythic grammar of Vodou, beginning with his striking opening statement: “Haiti is at the crossroads of decision.” In Haitian Vodou, the crossroads can be a mystical place where spirit energies are invoked, because different crossroads are owned by specific spirits. Discursively setting the nation in the metaphysical crossroads, he evoked a powerful cultural metaphor, ironically one associated with the very tradition he sought to erase. He

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made Williams’s point clear again: “We must choose God or choose Satan.” The message of his sermon was simple and elegant: “the wood of the cross at Calvary will replace the wood (bois) of Bois Caïman. The blood of Christ will replace the blood of the pig.” Like Williams, Jeune presented himself as a figure with privileged biblical knowledge, but more than Williams, as a native Haitian, Jeune spoke using insider symbols and images from the culture. A sort of mediator, Jeune was fully immersed in local culture, but he also had traveled, studied, and formed partnerships with others elsewhere, to come home a politician who would run for president. He spoke with double authority, fluent in multiple symbolic languages. Through this ritualized drama of invoking traditional culture in order to exorcize it, the pastors taught the lessons of spiritual warfare.68 Always thinking strategically, the leaders of Spiritual Mapping in Haiti staged spectacular rituals to the crowd in dramatic language and music that the nonliterate majority can easily apprehend. Like conservative nationalist mythmakers in the United States, evangelical Haitian leaders use both ritual and media by design to disseminate their story. During commemorations and anniversaries, they combine dramatic symbolic narrative performance, performative speech acts, and audience participation with a sense of historic, ultimately cosmic, occasion. The pastors of the Spiritual Mapping movement are working to renarrate Haitian history, resignify religiopolitical mythmaking, and therefore recast Haitian civil religion and change the culture of the country. They claim to understand the cause of Haiti’s problems—a curse derived from the revolutionaries’ breaking of God’s commandment by calling on pagan gods and shedding pig’s blood—and its precise time limit, or expiration date, the 200year mark. They also offer a powerful answer to Haiti’s problems, which is the transforming power of Jesus Christ, who would bless the nation through his sacred blood, shed on the cross to for pay the sins of all humanity. In emplotting Haitian history onto the biblical narrative, the pastors and church leaders claim not only an ultimate, cosmic authority, but also an authority that any believer can share. By staging performative spectacles with technology, color, music, lighting, and drama, as well as the offer of a more powerful and true interpretation of reality, spiritual warriors work to bring about the events they narrate.

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Captivity Narratives and Colonial Powers People have reached for the imagery and power of the Bois Caïman myth in historical moments of great pressure from the outside: first during the struggle to recognize and maintain Haitian sovereignty, then during the U.S. marine occupation, the contest over Aristide’s presidency, and more recently after the earthquake. (At the time of writing, the new president, Michel Martelly, has just said that he wants to make the site of Bois Caïman a tourist attraction and turn the story of the ceremony into something like a Broadway show.) The neoevangelical story of Haiti’s pact with Satan is vociferously contested by people holding a wide range of positions. Those who have stepped forward as public leaders of Vodou decry the explicit demonization of their traditions and identify the aspects of evangelicalism that are foreign imports, serving American political interests channeled through evangelicals linked to the religious right in the United States. In her thorough study of the history and contemporary community surrounding Bois Caïman, Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique cites with alarm the Protestant intellectual Romain as saying that Protestantism “will try to desacralize and destroy the spatio-temporal frame of Vodou . . . and will propose Protestant countersymbols adapted to Western civilization” in its place.69 Opposition to the blood pact theology also comes from fellow Pentecostals, such as Haitian Church of God pastor Jean R. Gelin, who outlines various historical and Christian reasons why the satanic pact does not make sense. “I would not be surprised if the satanic pact idea (followed by the divine curse message) was put together first by foreign missionaries and later on picked up by local leaders,” he astutely guesses.70 Likewise, the founder of the oldest Haitian Protestant church in the United States, Pastor Philius Nicolas, disavows the story and explains that it causes division in the body of Christ where there should be unity.71 Although it is the belief of only a minority of adherents, the story of the blood pact with Satan has proliferated on the English-language Internet. It is repeated more frequently (and matter-of-factly) by Americans than by Haitians, Francophone Antilleans, or French. The story is often repeated as a fund-raising tool for missionaries. Said one Web site, the Heart of God Ministries, “We believe with all our hearts that we are part of a spiritual war for the heart of the nation, and that one day we will see the murderous and

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destructive demons of Satan ejected from the nation by the prayers of the people.” The idea of an entire nation being held captive by Satan seems to inspire in American evangelicals a longing to help the spiritually afflicted and provide support for prayer warriors on the front lines of a kind of modernday captivity narrative. One cannot help but see the parallels between this longing to help and the more general Americanism celebrated by American civil religion, in which the United States publicizes its leadership in spreading democracy and freedom throughout the world. For Haitians, “breaking the blood pact” is part of a neoevangelical nationalism in the making that is in profound tension with previous nationalist mythmaking. At issue for nonevangelical nationalists is a respect for ancestral tradition and the inspirational vision of unity the ceremony at Bois Caïman offers that might still serve the ongoing project of decolonization. At issue for evangelicals is the very soul of the nation and its people’s salvation. For those with both kinds of investments, the ultimate stakes are in determining the cultural identity by which Haiti will move in a positive direction and prosper. While no nationalist narrative is consistent and unambiguous, there are various interesting—and painful—ironies in the present case. Nationalists anywhere generally gather their mythic elements from what is culturally distinct in their country. Indeed, the Haitian state since the 1990s has moved to commemorate, celebrate, and enfranchise the folk culture distinct to Haiti. In their alternative rewriting, however, evangelicals ascribe negative value to much of what is African or traditional about Haitian culture. Haitian evangelicals lean toward a transcendent Christian nationalism, a Christendom, whose mythical grammar in fact stems from the medieval church.72 They disavow much of their own culture as they seek to exorcize their national history. Theirs is an impassioned new Christian nationalism. The impulse to reach back and undo the past—to release the country from its magical trap and dedicate the nation to the Christian God—is part of a longing for justice, for an end to suffering, and for an orderly and plentiful world. Yet in another of the many painful ironies to be considered here, the present-day evangelicals seek to exorcize from history their own ancestors, the enslaved Africans and Creoles in the colony (and their ancestral spirits in turn), whose own longing for justice and the end of suffering gave rise to the revolution, ended legal slavery, and brought forth the new nation.

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Spiritual Mapping evangelicals’ techniques of fighting demonic fetishism—of resignifying traditional symbols and ritually performing spiritual work in large-scale spectacles—are, in another ironic way, components of another kind of fetishism. They work against the Enlightenment idea of rational progress and effectively reenchant the nation with spirits and demons.73 Casting out demons at Bois Caïman, breaking the table of demons, and holding up the cup of blessings are all performances of a kind of enchantment that would seem to run counter to modern nationalist discourse. Yet they are just the tools evangelicals use to instantiate their mythmaking and to grow its attendant formation of Christian nationalism. Perhaps the deepest irony of all is in the tension between the anticolonialist narrative of the nationalist Bois Caïman story and the (many say neocolonialist) new evangelical mythmaking. The original story of Bois Caïman has been put to use in various ways in anticolonial, and then decolonizing, movements in Haiti. Ironically, the neoevangelicals construct an anticolonialist narrative in which Satan is the colonial power who must be overthrown. If we look a bit more closely at the blood pact story as an anticolonialist narrative, we may gain insight into why some Haitians would adopt the story as their own. In the new story, the passion of fighting the colonizer is harnessed, but it is redirected to an invisible realm. Still, the issue remains that of slavery and freedom. Viewed in these terms, the project to free all of Haiti in a second, Christian revival-revolution is consistent with the original nationalism, but in a radical new way. What is more, while evangelical mythmaking in Haiti is constructed in active dialogue with Americans, it allows for a recombination of mythic elements that are beyond the control of the Haitian elite.74 Within the hemisphere, the movement may be neocolonialist, but within Haiti, it is a vision of nationalism from below. The neoevangelical version of the Bois Caïman story writes the Bible and its patterns and tropes into the national history of Haiti. Just as the story of the fall of Adam and Eve from the Garden explains suffering and death to Christians, the Bois Caïman story provides an account of the genesis of the nation, together with a diagnosis of where the nation went wrong and why it cannot prosper. Like Eve, whom the serpent convinces to taste the fruit and share it with Adam, Boukman sacrificed to demons, drank sacrificial blood, and shared the sacrifice with the rebel slaves and the nation to be. In

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both myths, this original human interaction with evil creates and explains all subsequent suffering. And just as the remedy for humanity’s original sin is in the crucifixion of Christ, the hope for Haiti’s prosperity lies in its citizens “coming under the blood” and accepting the new covenant with Jesus. In an ironic parallel with the figure of Boukman, the pastors reunite the new crowds and attempt to lead them to the new oath, to be saved and thus free, with the new blood—not of the pig but of Christ. Christianity can explain the creation of the earth and the suffering of humanity, the root cause of Haiti’s many problems, as well as the future end of the world and the afterlife. It can offer a complete picture of reality and of power, the ultimate power of God. neoevangelicalism captures the symbolic grammar of the national story, reenacts it and converts it, and in the process offers a recognizable and intelligible version of reality for Haitian converts to accept as their own. In taking on the rhetorical and ritual work of mythmaking to break the blood pact and win Haiti for Jesus, any citizen can stand in the stream of history and act on behalf of the entire nation in the great cosmic battle between good and evil. Pastor Yvette, carving out a small space of Christian sanctification and holiness with her congregation in a Red Cross camp for the internally displaced, can dedicate every Friday morning to pray and prophesy for the nation. As their country fights chaos and crisis after the earthquake, the members of Pastor Yvette’s congregation live as everyday prayer warriors taking up the profoundly meaningful work of mythmaking in the making. Notes I thank Pastor Chavannes Jeune, Bishop Joel Jeune, Pastor Gregory Joseph, Pastor Berthony Paul, Rev. J. L. Williams, Pastor Philius Nicolas, and Pastor Yvette, whose name I have changed for her own privacy, as she is a less public figure, for sharing their stories and points of view in interviews. Thanks to Rachel BeauvoirDominique, Kate Ramsey, and Nina Schnall for their generosity in sharing unpublished work with me. For helpful and generous critique, I thank my Wesleyan religion working group colleagues Attiya Ahmad, Annalise Glauz-Todrank, Laura Harrington, and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, as well as Leslie Desmangles, David Frankfurter, Jason Craige Harris, Nick Marshall, Holly Nicolas, Kristen Olson, Millery Polyné, Terry Rey, Kenneth Routon, and Bob Corbett and the many members of his Haiti Listserv, for the lively discussion and information sharing over the years. 1. Pat Robertson, “Haiti’s Pact w/Devil Created Earthquake,” YouTube video.

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2. Stéphen Alexis, Black Liberator: The Life of Toussaint Louverture, trans. William Sterling (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 71. 3. Some observers classify the Third Wave Spiritual Mapping movement as Pentecostal, and indeed its adherents are charismatics who, like Pentecostals, stress the primacy of communication with the Holy Spirit as well as prophesy and intercessory prayer. But Spiritual Mapping leader Peter Wagner and others who selfidentify as evangelicals do not consider themselves Pentecostal; this movement is a loose network of people from many denominational homes. 4. Laurent Dubois, “The Citizen’s Trance: The Haitian Revolution and the Motor of History,” in Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment, ed. Birgit and Peter Pels Meyer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). 5. Michael Taussig, “History as Sorcery,” Representations 7 (Summer 1984): 87. 6. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 7. Elizabeth McAlister, “The Jew in the Haitian Imagination: A Popular History of Anti-Judaism and Proto-Racism,” in Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, ed. Henry and Elizabeth McAlister Goldschmidt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 8. Max Beauvoir, “Slavery, Boukman, and Independence,” in Revolutionary Freedoms: A History of Survival, Strength, and Imagination in Haiti, ed. Cécile Accilien, Jessica Adams, and Elmide Méléance (Coconut Creek, Fla.: Caribbean Studies Press, 2006). 9. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 22. 10. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xvii. 11. Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 12. Russell T. McCutcheon, “Myth,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell T. McCutcheon (London: Cassell, 2000), 200. 13. Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society, 25–26. 14. McCutcheon, “Myth,” 202. 15. Burton Mack, Myth and the Christian Nation: A Social Theory of Religion (London: Equinox, 2008). 16. David Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 82. 17. Elizabeth McAlister, “Globalization and the Religious Production of Space,” Journal for the Scientifc Study of Religion 44, no. 3 (2005). 18. Trouillot, Silencing the Past.

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19. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Refections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6. 20. Ramsey, Spirits, 52. 21. David Nichols, From Dessalines to Duvalier: Race, Colour, and National Independence in Haiti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 35. Cited in Gérarde Magloire-Danton, “Anténor Firmin and Jean Price-Mars: Revolution, Memory, Humanism,” Small Axe 18 (2005): 154. 22. Terry Rey, “Vodou, Water, and Exile: Symbolizing Spirits and Pain in PortAu-Prince,” in Religion, Violence, Memory, and Place, ed. Oren Baruch and J. Shawn Landres Stier (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 208. 23. Dalmas, translated and cited in Léon-François Hoffmann, “The Ceremony at Bois Caïman,” in Haitian Fiction Revisited, ed. Léon-François Hoffman (Pueblo, Colo.: Passeggiata Press, 1999), 161. 24. Dayan, Haiti, History, 29. 25. Hoffmann, “Ceremony,” 164. 26. Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 89. 27. The details of this rebel meeting have been the subject of passionate debates. It is certain that there was a nighttime assembly of slaves who planned to set fires in a widespread insurrection; this was the recorded testimony on August 17, 1791, of slaves arrested by French authorities. Conducting oral histories and song analyses, Rachel Beauvoir presents evidence that there was likely a politicoreligious ceremony on August 14, the Catholic feast day of Our Lady of the Assumption, when slaves, many of whom were Kongolese Christians, had the day off and would likely have gathered to celebrate. It was simultaneously the feast day of Ezili Kawoulo, a spirit— who requires a pig sacrifice—in the early Kongo–Petwo–Lemba secret societies whose members fought in the revolt. Rachel with Eddy Lubin Beauvoir-Dominique, Investigations Autour Du Site Historique Du Bois Caïman (Cap-Haïtien: ISPAN, 2000). Taking a wider view, Lucien Smarthe concludes that the Bois Caïman ceremony was a shorthand amalgamation of all the individual ceremonies performed in the different seats of the rebellion. Cited in Hoffmann, “Ceremony,” 179. 28. Mack, Myth. 29. Some observers posit that Boukman was a Muslim. Rachel Beauvoir notes in her 2000 study that the Morne Rouge, where the Bois Caïman ceremony would have happened, retained the Islamic religious influence of the Senegambian wave of slave migration; they also founded secret societies that would have enabled conspiratorial planning networks. Attiya Ahmad points out that the uniting of a group through oath taking under a tree is also an element of the story of the Bayan in Islam, when the prophet united a group of followers under a tree through a pact (Ahmad, personal communication). The Islamic influence in Haiti bears further research.

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30. J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Unversity Press, 1962), 52, cited in Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3. 31. Michael Largey, Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 13. 32. Ibid. 33. Karen E. Richman, “Peasants, Migrants and the Discovery of African Traditions: Ritual and Social Change in Lowland Haiti,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007): 372. 34. Götz-Dietrich Opitz, Haitian Refugees Forced to Return: Transnationalism and State Politics, 1991–1994 (London: LIT Verlag, 1999). 35. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, “Mounting Vodou: Power and Polyphony in the Haitian Public Sphere,” trans. and cited by Nina Schnall (Santa Cruz, Calif.: UC–Santa Cruz, 1997). 36. Ibid. 37. Clinton Eugene Lane, “Church Growth and Evangelism in Haiti: Needs, Problems, and Methods” (diss., Asbury Theological Seminary, 1998), 71. 38. Patrick Johnston, Operation World (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1993); also cited in André Jeantil Louis, “Catholicism, Protestantism and a Model of Effective Ministry in the Context of Voodoo in Haiti” (diss., Fuller Theological Seminary, 1998), 94. 39. Charles Poisset Romain, Le Protestantisme Dans La Société Haitienne (Portau-Prince: Imprimerie Henri Deschamps, 1986). 40. Ibid., 346. 41. Frederick J. Conway, “Pentecostalism in the Context of Haitian Religion and Health Practice” (Ph.D. diss., American University, 1978), 166. 42. World-Vision/MARC, “Newsletter Report: Haiti” (Monrovia, Calif.: Missions Advanced Research and Communications Center, Fuller Theological Seminary School of World Mission, 1971). 43. Laënnec Hurbon, “Current Evolution of Relations between Religion and Politics in Haiti,” in Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Diference in the Caribbean, ed. Patrick Taylor (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 122. 44. World-Vision/MARC, “Newsletter Report: Haiti.” 45. René Holvast, Spiritual Mapping in the United States and Argentina, 1989–2005 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 17–18. 46. Lane, “Church Growth,” 55–56. 47. Holvast, Spiritual Mapping, 40. 48. C. Peter Wagner, Warfare Prayer: What the Bible Says about Spiritual Warfare (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1992), 93.

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49. C. Peter Wagner, Engaging the Enemy: How to Fight and Defeat Territorial Spirits (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1991). 50. George Jr. Otis, “An Overview of Spiritual Mapping,” in Breaking Strongholds in Your City, ed. C. Peter Wagner (Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1993), 30–31. 51. Lane, “Church Growth,” 32. 52. David W. Taylor, “Spiritual Conflict Resolution in a Haitian Context” (Ph.D. diss., Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, 1993), 101–2. 53. Cited in ibid., 102. 54. Charles H. Kraft, Confronting Powerless Christianity: Evangelicals and the Missing Dimension (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Chosen Books, 2002), 244. Cited in Holvast, Spiritual Mapping. 55. Holvast, Spiritual Mapping, 21–33. 56. Louis, “Catholicism, Protestantism,” 300. 57. Interview with Bishop Joel Jeune conducted by the author, Carrefour, Haiti, 2001. 58. Interview with Bishop Joel Jeune conducted by the author, Carrefour, Haiti, 2010. 59. Interview with Bishop Joel Jeune conducted by the author, Carrefour, Haiti, 2001. 60. Joel Jeune, “Miracle in Haiti,” Cornerstone Ministries, http://cornerstone ministries.org and http://www.jesus.org.uk. 61. Ibid. 62. Beauvoir-Dominique, Investigations Autour, 57–58. 63. “Exorcising Boukman,” Haiti Progrès, 1998. 64. Lane, “Church Growth,” 13. 65. AHP, “Vodou Is Fully Recognised as a Religion in Haiti,” Agence haïtienne de presse, April 5, 2003. 66. Interview with Reverend J. L. Williams by the author, Burlington, N.C., 2005. 67. J. L. Williams, “On the Cutting Edge: Breaking the Blood Pact” (Burlington, N.C.: New Directions International, 2004). 68. David Frankfurter, Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006), 37. 69. Beauvoir-Dominique, Investigations Autour, 59, citing Romain, Protestantisme, 55–56. 70. Jean R. Gelen, “God, Satan, and the Birth of Haiti,” BlackandChristian.com, http://blackandchristian.com/articles/academy/gelin-10-05.shtml. See also J. R. Gelen, “La Malédiction Divine Sur Haiti: Un Message Ambigu Et Forcément Caduc,” AlterPresse, http://www.alterpresse.org/. 71. Pastor Philius Nicolas, interview with the author, 2005. 72. Mack, Myth.

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73. Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” Feminist Review 44 (1993). 74. André Corten, “Transnationalised Religious Needs and Political Delegitimisation in Latin America,” in Between Babel and Pentecost, ed. André Corten and Ruth Marshall Fratani (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 106.

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Twenty-First-Century Haiti— A New Normal? A Conversation with Four Scholars of Haiti A l e x D u p u y, R o b e rt Fat t o n J r . , É v e ly n e T r o u i l l o t, a n d Tat i a n a Wa h

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few weeks after the January 12 earthquake and for most of the year of 2010–11, common mantras among politicians, strategists, and donors have been to “build back better” or to establish “a new Haiti.” How would you or have you been unpacking these phrases? What does “a new Haiti” mean to you? Who or what are the forces that are informing those aspirations? Évelyne Trouillot (ET): This is not the first time they have talked about a new Haiti. Even after the presidency of Jean-Claude Duvalier (1971– 86) they were talking about a new Haiti. When Aristide came in 1991 they were talking about a new Haiti. Every president, every government mentions a new Haiti. The thing is, I don’t know if it is because I am interested in history, but when talking about a new Haiti you should know what the old Haiti is about. We have a tendency as a society to forget what happened before. And since we don’t look at what happened, you have a supposedly new Haiti when Jean-Claude Duvalier came back (2010) and some people were saying, “Well, it was better under Duvalier,” because they forgot what Duvalier was all about. Or some people who were really young did not even know how dictators repressed people and how many lives were lost under that regime. So I think we should go beyond that mantra, which has been used before. The old Haiti is still here. We don’t have a new Haiti yet.

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I don’t want to be cynical, but there are a lot of people making money, big money, in Haiti—many locals and foreigners with all their economic interests in Haiti, for the construction, notably. The politicians in Haiti keep on saying “a new Haiti” to bring back the people’s trust in them. The people in Haiti, the majority of the people, have lost trust in the politicians. And when people talk about a new Haiti, it is a way for them to say: “Well, we are promising you something new, something better.” But I don’t think it is that easy now to fool the people. I think the concept of a new Haiti should really be deeper than that. It should go to an understanding of why Haiti is the way it is now, an understanding of the relations between the different groups and the role played by the foreign powers. A new Haiti is not going to come out of the blue. The new Haiti has to take into account all the factors that brought Haiti to where it is now. I don’t think the people talk about a new Haiti. That’s why I thought it was something brought up by the international community and the politicians. The majority of the population is so involved in the day-to-day survival that they don’t think about a new Haiti, they think about the new day coming. What are they going to do about that new day to survive? When I talk with my students, since they have the capacity and the privilege to be able to think and reflect upon the situation, they will mention a new Haiti, but it is something very far, very remote from the reality, their reality. They see it as an ideal. But for the moment, they will address concrete problems: to complete their studies, to find a job, to live somewhere, to buy food, to help their parents, to be able to have a brighter future. And those are very concrete problems. In fact, it’s not the concept of a new Haiti that is more popular now; it is the concept of youth. Youth versus old. I don’t think it is exclusive to Haiti, I think the youth syndrome is everywhere. In France, in the United States and other countries, there is the youth versus the old movement. But in Haiti, young people are a large part of the population and they are really affected by the country’s economic difficulties and other problems: the school system’s deficiencies, the unemployment, and the lack of opportunities. The young feel they do not have any future, any prospects. For them, it is very crucial. Therefore, they believe that somebody who is young will be more able to understand their problems. And they have developed a sense of

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mistrust against the old politician class. They feel betrayed. For me, that’s the term that comes to mind when you think about new terms—not a new Haiti, but the youth. Of course, deep down, it is not a question of youth or old because during the Duvalier regime you had a lot of young people in Duvalier’s administration. Jean-Claude had a lot of young ministers, younger than forty years old with him, and look at what they did. It’s not a question of young, it is a question of political and economic interests, and it is a question of vision. But that’s the narrative you will find, old versus youth. Robert Fatton Jr. (RFJ): Immediately after the earthquake there was a sense that things could change. The disaster was of such huge proportions and people were so shocked that it was not unthinkable to believe that a new solidarity among all Haitians could be established. The problem is that very quickly after that fateful day in January, the old reflexes and divisions reasserted themselves very quickly. This is now very evident as both the political and economic elites are again showing that they are not prepared to abandon their past behavior. The rhetoric of change is loud, but the substance of politics and the deep structures of society continue to be the same. In addition, what has been done since the earthquake is so dramatically insufficient that it shows the optimism that might have paradoxically crystallized as a result of the earthquake. So the question is whether there are forces that we don’t see that are in the making or whether, what you might call the popular sector in Haiti is so exhausted by the past twenty or thirty years that its demobilization would indicate that nothing is going to change. This sense of paralysis is accentuated by the reality that many of the promises of the international community have failed to materialize. In short, the international community seems to be playing the same old unproductive games, and the new political figures of Haiti are still prisoners of the old politics. There is thus a tragic question: are we going to be waiting for the “new Haiti” at every major historical moment, be it after the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier or after the coming to power in 1991 of Lavalas, or after 1994 with the restoration of Aristide, only to be utterly disappointed, because that new Haiti is nowhere to be seen. Are we condemned to recreate again and again the old decomposed and dysfunctional political body?

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There is a sense, at least in my own mind, of pessimism about the future. But as I have said, there might be forces that are being created as a result of the current predicament. We may not see them very clearly, but they might just crystallize suddenly, and I think this is where you have to find hope. I don’t think you are going to find hope in parliament, I don’t think you’re going to find it in the new Martelly regime, which is not even a regime yet, capable of having its own government. So I think there is a sense of exhaustion, after the failures of Lavalas, after the catastrophic earthquake, and after the failure of reconstruction. Moreover, the desperate situation of the camps has aggravated the plight of the marginalized, who are now facing forced eviction from their tents without any guarantee of new lodging or jobs. To that extent, I think you see an attempt on the part of some reactionary forces to reestablish the old sense of subservience which excluded from the moral community of the nation the vast majority of the population, transforming them into the quintessential moun andeyò. We are moving backward, and frankly, as far as I can see, there is no fundamental change in the making, at least in the immediate future. Alex Dupuy (AD): The phrases “building a new Haiti” and “building back a better Haiti” were not coined by the Haitians, the elite, or the politicians. They were coined by the international community. They had several conferences around that theme. To me, the Haitian elite, both the economic and political elite, are completely bankrupt ideologically, in terms of their views of what Haiti could become. I don’t think they even think in those terms. They are incapable of thinking in those terms. And what the earthquake showed after the trauma was a complete capitulation of the government to the international community, and principally the United States and the state department, which ran the show from that point on. That was very clear in the reconstruction plan that was developed after the earthquake. Most of it containing ideas that had been developed long before the earthquake, but were repackaged in the reconstruction plans for Haiti. Many of the ideas came from the state department itself. Sheryl Mills was largely responsible for creating the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission and how it would be comprised. And so, in my view, there was a complete abdication of responsibility to these international actors and that has been going on for quite some time. The only time there was a glimmer of hope,

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a time when the people thought that there might be a different Haiti was between 1986 and 1990 when Duvalier was overthrown and forced out of Haiti and there was a mass movement that resisted the reimposition of a military dictatorship and brought Aristide to power in 1990. There were some fresh, very new ideas—not necessarily new in terms of what other actors and other movements have been thinking about all over the world, especially in Central America and the Caribbean, but certainly new in terms of their introduction and application by a popular movement in Haiti, for a more independent, more self-sufficient Haiti, a Haiti that would be more just, more egalitarian, and more democratic. But unfortunately those ideas never panned out because of both the contradictions in Aristide’s first administration, but certainly the coup d’etat of 1991 that eradicated as much as possible the leaders of those grassroots movements that brought Aristide to power and ruled the country for three years until Clinton brought Aristide back in 1994. By the time Aristide came back, however, he had completely abandoned whatever progressive ideas he had in order to embrace the neoliberal policies of the Clinton administration, and that’s been the name of the game ever since. There has never been any deviation; there’s never been any movement, serious movement, on the part of elected officials, be it in parliament or in the government, to rethink those priorities. There was some resistance to neoliberalism in 1995 and 1996, but after Préval came to power and disbanded parliament, it has been smooth sailing from that point on in terms of implementing neoliberal policies. So I don’t see where within the Haitian elite or the political class, and certainly not the economic elite of Haiti, where there is any rethinking of Haiti other than maintaining the status quo. If there is going to be any new thinking done it’s going to have to be done by, as Robert has mentioned, the forces from below. It’s not going to come from above. And right now the left or progressive movement is pretty much weakened. Its members have been decimated, or they have left, or they’ve been killed. And there are very few of those progressive forces left and they are not sufficiently organized to make much of a presence politically, so unless there is a resurgence of a mass movement, I don’t see where a so-called new Haiti would emerge. For me personally, if there were going to be such a thing as a new Haiti, it would have to be both democratic and socialist. And I don’t

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see any forces on the horizon, other than isolated individuals, like me and Robert, and those in Haiti who think along those lines. But they are not sufficiently grounded in any mass movement in Haiti to be able to translate those ideas into concrete actions for change. There are peasant organizations, there are labor organizations, there are think tanks that are thinking along those lines, but they are weak and disorganized, so unless that were to change, I don’t see where that alternative will be coming from. Tatiana Wah (TW): I think to build back better presupposes that the state and the private sector leaders have a vision for what better is. A vision for Haiti has never been defined for a very long time—arguably for eighty to ninety years. There’s no stated preferred role or function for the country and arguably the Caribbean region. There’s no planning that’s done by any of the governmental entities. Structures are slapped together, segmented, sort of disaggregated, disintegrated projects that carry no weight, which have a time span from eighteen to twenty months and fail to attack the fundamental development issues of the country. I agree with Robert that the state has sort of given up its role, almost washed its hands and saying it is just too much to do. Some Haitians have stated that “it’s the blancs’ money anyway, they are going to do whatever they want with it.” That does not help the situation at all. Although, at the same time, there are pilot projects to deal with the camp situation, to relocate them into neighborhoods and to rehabilitate the neighborhoods from which they came. In fact, that work requires them to govern better. There is an element of democracy here that is burgeoning, believe it or not, but it is still the old ways of doing things. The harder questions about agriculture and neighborhood rehabilitation are not being answered. So all of the difficult policy and territorial questions that deal with reconstruction are more difficult now during this long transition period without a government. Meanwhile, we are in the middle of the hurricane season and we have cholera; at the end of August 2011 the Haitian government won’t have any money to clean toilets in the 1,000 camps, and the donors are saying, “We are done with the emergency phase, we need to do recovery and development.” And so you have a whole mix of reasons why “build back better” could not even be thought of beyond the understanding that the terminology is imported to Haiti. To me, the fact the government did

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not take care of leading the donors is crucial. Their reaction has always been, “Well, it’s your money, you will do what you want to do with it.” This has to stop because the potential billions of dollars would have been spent for naught, and the state will be unable to make the crucial impact that we need on livelihoods in this country. It’s really disconcerting. What has lead to this insufficient leadership? Are these forces or obstacles external or internal? AD: The dominant sectors of Haitian society, particularly the private sector elite and the Haitian political class, generally speaking, have never had any other vision for Haiti than what has been the status quo for a very long time. Mainly, the complete dependence upon foreign capital, complete dependence on the United States, and to a lesser extent Europe, for investments in Haiti and for access to the markets of the United States and to a lesser extent Europe, and increasingly now the Dominican Republic. It is in the matter of the interest of the dominant classes of Haiti who are benefiting as much as they can from the status quo and have always opposed any systematic change to the ways things are in Haiti. One could go back to the time of Dessalines and Pétion, and especially after Boyer’s agreement to pay an indemnity to France to renew trade and diplomatic relations with the rest of the developed capitalist world, to find the roots of Haitian dependence. And the Haitian bourgeoisie and the rulers of the state have always been tied to these external interests, and so this is what we see playing itself out in Haiti now. It’s nothing really new, except that is has taken on more urgency now since the earthquake because Haiti is utterly incapable of rebuilding itself with its own resources. If it were to rebuild itself differently, it would have to be done on very different grounds, under very different conditions, which would mean basically empowering the majority of the Haitian people to determine their own agenda and push for it. But politically, that is not currently an option on the table. And so what we have is a ruling class that is utterly incapable of thinking anything other than what is has always thought about, which is basically tying itself to the goodwill and to the politics and interests of the foreign investors, and principally to the United States.

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TW: I would tend to disagree a little bit. The option is on the table. Leadership is something taken, not given. From where I stand and from where I have been operating for the last two years, the option has always been on the table. And, of course, some parts of it have to be negotiated. We are rotten at negotiating and we are rotten at saying what we need. When we do say what we need, it is usually very petty or based upon self-interests. We are satisfied with $1 million when we can ask for $5 million, and it’s because there’s a petty interest somewhere. We’ve never been able to muster enough leadership, and I think it is because of the lack of educated people in this country. Our entire middle class is gone, and when you do have a concentration of able, skilled people, much of that work has turned toward NGOs, which does not bode well for our economy. We need very strong, disciplined, consensual leaders. They are in need of a strong team effort to go and get these options that are open to this country and to push forward with them. We tend to continually operate at an individual level—the president is God, or the minister is God, and no one else is around him or her to push an agenda forward. RFJ: I think that we are dealing with a profound systemic crisis. I don’t think the question of the utter failure of the elite is disputable, so I agree with Alex. But I think there is also a failure of the popular movement. I mean the experience of Lavalas is, to a large extent, a very hard experience for the popular movement because the popular movement ultimately disintegrated, not only under pressure from the local elite, the military, and the international community, principally the French and the Americans. But it disintegrated also because of its own demons. In other words, the same type of individualized competition between key figures contributed to the collapse of that movement. And there is this structural factor—you know, politics in Haiti is really a business. So the popular movement came to power with some very principled people, but there were also a lot of opportunists in the movement who looked at the capture of power as a means of not only achieving political power, but also achieving economic power. This is why corruption very quickly settled amidst the popular movement. Also, this is why we see among many popular groups shifts in allegiances that were to a large extent a function of what we call la politique du ventre, the politics of the belly. In other words, in an environment of utter scarcity, politicians and aspiring leaders have a tendency to sell their services to

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any moneyed force. You see that with the creation of the chimères, you see that with the creation of other paramilitary groups. I think when you look at all those phenomena, you can see that there is an economic crisis, there’s a political crisis, and I think there’s also a moral crisis. And the whole system is really rotten. So this is where the idea that a providential leader can resolve Haiti’s problems is deficient. You may have capable, progressive leaders, but once they take power, they are faced with the systemic crisis. They have neither the local or international resources to deal effectively with the crisis, and very quickly they become exhausted. They either fight amongst themselves or the movement disintegrates into opportunism. And there is a structural problem here. One of the tragedies of the Lavalas movement is obviously the coup of 1991, which was clearly the coup of the elites. On the other hand, the coup symbolized at the same time the incapacity of the popular movement to fight back. The popular movement was decimated by the military, the incapacity of the popular movement to rebuild itself internally because of repression, and because of its own deficiencies led to the return of Aristide on the back of 20,000 marines. And once you had that, it was inevitable that fundamental change would be aborted. And that again is a symptom of the massive dependence of Haiti. Haiti for all practical purposes is a virtual trusteeship of the international community. The MINUSTAH [United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti] is the repressive police force in Haiti. The budget is 60 to 70 percent funded by external sources. The economic plans are not generated from within; they emanate from the financial organizations, World Bank, etc., and they are old programs. So we have been to a large degree completely infantilized, and there is no easy way out of our predicament. However you look at the situation, the structures that are responsible for the country’s plight seem to be overpowering. And that is really the tragedy. I really don’t see a way out in the foreseeable future. This is why the popular movement is also in crisis—because there is a feeling that ultimately Préval’s infamous bon mot, se naje pou’n soti—you have to leave the country in order to survive—may sadly reflect the Haitian reality. Speaking of the centrality of Haitian migration to individual and familial survival, what role do you see the Haitian diaspora playing in homeland development? Do you see the Haitian diaspora in the United States, Canada, and

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Europe reasserting Western notions of modernization, or do you believe they possess alternative visions of development? Will incumbent Haitians allow them to have much of an impact at all? TW: I don’t see a major impact by the Haitian diaspora because you need quantity to make a qualitative change. You know sending one or two diaspora experts in one sector, [then] sending a couple more to another sector is not going to do it. The diaspora itself is so disparate, so all over the place. And the amenities that these people have received or earned from the United States, Canada or Europe, with the exception of the diaspora in the Dominican Republic, and even then, they are migrating slowly to go to Puerto Rico or other places, Haitians abroad are not going to have them in Haiti unless the Haitian government or the private sector pays them a whole hell of a lot. Then, a whole slew of them will come at the same time. The diaspora is like a great, beautiful word. Haitians say that they love the diaspora, but intrinsically they don’t. They see them as taking their jobs. They believe that there will be nothing left for them. So politically, unless the leadership makes an effort of getting massive of diasporans back and providing a clear vision or plan of what it wants to obtain, I don’t see the diaspora being able to do anything for this country. Second-generation Haitians abroad are so disconnected from the realities of this country, the realities of uneducated people who need education across a whole variety of arenas. They need their hands held. Robert is so right about systemic change. At the same time, we need to recreate a whole system. The same system of governance, whether it was Aristide or Préval, is still in place from the Duvalier years and has not changed at all. It is unclear to me on how politically or practically the Haitian diaspora could aid development, unless you have a clear vision/plan and a concentration of good people who want to produce. AD: The concept of diaspora is misleading because the diaspora does not constitute a unified or homogeneous set of actors. There are many different views, interests, and objectives coming from different sectors, different individuals within the so-called diaspora. So I don’t think we can use the term diaspora as a unified concept or a force that we can tap into to bring about solutions with one voice, so to speak, for Haiti. I agree with Tatiana

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that whatever role individuals in the diaspora can play can only come from initiatives that stem from Haiti itself, rather than those imposed by outsiders from the diaspora. In other words, the diaspora is not, say, like the World Bank, or the state department, or nongovernmental agencies that have a specific mission, that have a specific set of interests that they articulate and can push to have implemented. That doesn’t exist among the Haitian diaspora, or any other diaspora for that matter. You can look at the example of those who opposed and supported Aristide in the diaspora. There were those who were vehemently opposed to him and supported the coup d’etat, and there were those who were strong supporters of him and who condemned the coup d’etat and mobilized demonstrations against the coup and so on. What I am saying is that the diaspora cannot, does not, speak with one voice because it is not a unified and homogeneous group with a unified and homogeneous set of interests. It is just as divided as you would find the Haitian population divided in terms of what they would consider to be best for Haiti and the interest they would fight for. The only way individuals may contribute to a new, reconstructed Haiti would be in the context of priorities and policies that would be articulated, generated, and developed in Haiti itself. The initiative must come from within Haiti and not from outside. RFJ: I agree with both Tatiana and Alex about the division within the diaspora. Ultimately, the diaspora is very much like the wider Haitian society with all of its class, and race divisions and I think that those have been replicated in the United States, Canada, or France. In addition, I think there is a real tension between the diaspora and the people in Haiti. In spite of all the nice talk about the tenth department, I think the people in Haiti to some extent resent the diaspora because they see the diaspora as rather arrogant and telling them how to fix the country while being outside of the daily Haitian reality. So there is that tension, and there is a tension for jobs because people in Haiti live in an environment of scarcity, and when they see people from the diaspora parachuting into Haitian jobs, they look at it as if, “Well, that’s a job that was stolen from us in Haiti,” and this intensifies the tensions between diaspora and Haitians in Haiti. Those tensions should really be looked at very carefully. And, in the past, I think the diaspora tended to tell people on the ground in Haiti what

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they ought to do, without really understanding the fundamental structures of the country. On the other hand, the diaspora is indispensable for the very survival of the country. If it weren’t for the remittances of the diaspora, Haiti would really be a total disaster area. It is estimated that $2 billion is sent annually from the diaspora to Haiti. Just imagine what Haiti would be without that capital. The very survival of the country is largely dependent upon these remittances. So you have contradictions again between the existence of the diaspora as some sort of conflicted group in the exterior of Haiti, as fundamental to the survival of Haiti, and Haitians in Haiti looking at the diaspora as too aggressive, arrogant, and all-knowing. Finally, many people in the diaspora, in particular those who have made it, as it were, would have a hard time abandoning their jobs and moving to Haiti, and that’s another obstacle. Haitians who have made it in the United States and elsewhere have become worried about the political situation, the health situation, etc., so you have another barrier to an easy movement of the diaspora into Haiti. AD: I think Robert makes a good point. The diaspora is basically a cash cow for Haiti. While its true that the remittances contribute more to Haiti’s GNP than any other sector of the Haitian economy—it represents about 20 percent of the GNP of the Haitian economy—much of that money is not funneled into development projects. It goes to maintain families. If that money somehow could be tapped, as it has been properly done in other countries, then there could be funds used for other development purposes. But then again, that would presuppose an organized government, a democratic government, and a government that is serious about investing in the country rather than being exploited by foreign interests. The diaspora is crucial to the survival of tens and thousands of families in Haiti. ET: [Similarly] I don’t like to speak of the Haitian diaspora as a homogeneous thing. The more I meet people living in the United States, in Canada, or in France, the more I see different groups and types of people. This is like Haiti; there is a diversity of mentalities, of points of view. For me, the diaspora is not one big happy family sharing the same ideas about Haiti. That’s not the way it goes for me. I think that some people who live in the

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diaspora are more aware of the problems of Haiti then some people living in Haiti, sometimes. But at the same time, some of the diaspora are completely unaware and have an idea of Haiti that has nothing to do with reality, to comfort their own insecurities or sense of guilt. I think the diaspora is a group of different people with different things to offer. Some of them, most of them, are doing a lot for their families in Haiti, and that is a fact. But to be beneficial on a long and durable term, the actions of the diaspora have to be included in a Haitian national agenda. For example, I know people who come from a small province in Haiti and they have a hometown association very active in that area. But these types of actions will always be limited if they are not included in the national agenda, where you have a global vision for Haiti’s development. A very common notion is that since the diaspora knows other countries, other ways, they will have more logical and modern views. This is not necessarily the case. Some in the diaspora think about Haiti as a place where they could transport the ways and customs of their new place of living. They see all of Haiti’s specificities as negative and to be changed. Out of nostalgia, others want to go back to a place that existed only in their imagination, where everything was fine and everybody was happy. Let’s take the education system, for example. I’m going to be a little sarcastic now, but unfortunately I truly heard comments like that from people from the diaspora, and from people living in Haiti too, to be honest. They think that if Haitian students have computers in the classroom, everything will be fine. Haiti will enter the modern world. Well, for me, the answer is clear: If all the children of Haiti learn how to read and write and possess basic skills, then I think many problems will be resolved on a long-term basis, and without computers in the classroom. The basics of learning how to read and write and the elimination of illiteracy are more important than the empty symbolism of a computer in the classroom—empty and artificial since it does not connect with other tools of learning. What happened is that some people associate the concept of education to the views, for the most part limited, that they have of developed countries. Their idea of development is to follow blindly all what is going on in the United States or other countries. For me, to develop the country, you have to ensure that the citizens of the country are living in decent

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conditions, that they can go to school, have the basic necessities that guarantee their dignity and respect their humanity. It is not only economic growth that is important. Because economic growth can very well be beneficial only to a minority. I’m thinking about India, for example; everyone is talking about India as the perfect example of an emerging country, but a good majority of the population is going through very difficult situations, even though, in economic terms, India has made an enormous jump. And I would not want that for Haiti. What I want for Haiti is that even though we have a small peanut butter jar, that peanut butter jar could be shared with everyone. For me, that is important. It is not to have 50,000 peanut butter jars in somebody’s room. What would the Haitian government/civil society need to do to be more selfsustaining and independent in order to provide for its citizenry? Is a vision of an independent Haiti even possible—now or ever? How do you understand the terms sovereign, independent, interdependent in the context of Haiti’s state and society? TW: You resolve the issue by first knowing what you want. I go back to my same premise. Unless a government, unless a nation, unless a people know what they want, then no one can plan for you. You are the only one who can plan for yourself and say rightly “This is what I want.” And based on what you want, then you know how and what to negotiate. You can be partly independent in some areas, interdependent in some others. Some will be a bilateral agreement, and some others will be multilateral agreements. Socially, Haiti will have to be multidependent in other areas because of their lack of resources. The Haitian government is still talking about quick wins, about things that could be done tomorrow, patching and bandaid approaches. With band-aid approaches you can’t even think about all of the beautiful things you just talked about, like how do you become a sovereign and independent country or even an interdependent country. You can’t because there’s no basis for dialogue. AD: I agree with some of what Tatiana said. The concept of sovereignty is relational. It’s a question ultimately of relations of force between actors who are differently located and situated within a society or in terms of

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global/international relations. Haiti is not interdependent. It is simply and utterly a dependent country. One can talk about the interdependency between the United States and the European Union, the United States and Canada, and so on. But one cannot talk about the interdependence of the United States and Haiti; one should rather talk about the dependency of Haiti on the United States and other foreign countries. Haiti is weak, not only because it has a weak and underdeveloped economy, but also because it has political and economic actors who themselves are dependent on their ties with those foreign interests for their own survival and their own functioning. And they are the ones who, through these international forces, are able to stay and maintain themselves in power in Haiti. So if Haiti were to move to become more independent and move towards greater interdependency, then I would agree with Tatiana, that the Haitians themselves would have to be in the position to determine their own priorities. If they were to set those priorities when they negotiated with foreign actors in terms of what they want and what they will and will not accept, that would require a fairly fundamental, radical restructuring of the Haitian political economy. Only then could the Haitian people articulate their interest, determine the agenda that would determine the politics of the country. But that could only happen if and only if a much more radical democratic, more egalitarian and socialist structure was created, as I’ve said before. That’s not in the cards today. There are no movements from below that are capable of bringing that transformation about, and so as long as that remains the case, as long as you have a political and economic class that are completely subservient to foreign interests, then Haiti will always continue to be subservient and dependent. TW: And I agree with that. I want to provide a clear example of how we can move from dependency to interdependency. In Haiti, nobody pays taxes. NGO organizations don’t pay taxes either. They don’t register as labor. Just take me, for example. I came from the United States and started working, and I have not paid any taxes whatsoever. There are a whole slew of organizations—and this is the republic of 10,000 NGOs—not one of these NGO workers and expatriates is paying taxes. In Haiti, there is the problem of a lack of housing. It is because these houses are being rented for tens of thousands of dollars to NGOs—nobody is paying real estate taxes that

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relate to the type of capital that is being spent on these homes across the city. We need those taxes from them in order to support the basic services for Haitians. We are talking about very clear examples where we can move towards interdependency, and we are very reluctant to do so. ET: Since the earthquake, but even before, a lot of other countries are present in Haiti—as part of the U.N. force, Brazil for example. Brazil is trying to situate itself as a power on the international scene, and this is fine. But as a citizen of Haiti, I don’t feel confident that our rulers’ first priorities are the country’s interests and the population’s welfare. Haiti is there for countries or individuals to use as a pawn. Because unfortunately, since we don’t have a strong state, we don’t have a government that is capable of representing Haitian interests and Haitians’ point of view, we are here for everyone to use for their own agenda. It is very difficult for a country now to be completely independent of any other, the way trade relationships and political powers have evolved. But Haiti is particularly vulnerable because we are like what we call in Kreyòl, pitimi san gadò, like crops of barley or rice that nobody’s watching so anyone can come and grab some. After the earthquake, it was particularly flagrant for everyone to see that no one was in charge of anything in Haiti; there was no local power, no local government really capable or willing to deal with the situation. Even though our resources are limited and Haiti is a poor country, if the state were strong and responsible, the situation would have been much different. And the organization of the international aid and support would have been much more efficient. We have to have some dignity while dealing with other countries, with the international organizations and associations. And for that, we have to have some leverage. For example, you cannot be completely dependent for your food supply. If you don’t have a national production that can, at least, sustain your population for a while, you cannot negotiate with dignity; you have to submit to what everyone else dictates. We have to ensure national production at a minimal level, have a government that is capable and trusted by the population. Otherwise, it is very difficult to deal with other countries. People mention sometimes what they have called civil society. However, I have some concerns about that. This is fine, for the country to have a strong civil society, private associations, a private sector

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that is strong and willing to invest, but the state has to be stronger. Because the civil society can very well represent a minority, and the situation of flagrant inequality will continue. We need a strong state with a social vision towards the welfare of the majority of the people. The civil society can only represent a minority of the population. And that may constitute a risk. To be strong and able to negotiate with other countries, first the government has to start building a healthier relationship with the population. If I take what is going on in the Dominican Republic where there are many abuses against Haitians working and living there, what is happening now? Even though the government wants to protest, they can’t really do it. First of all, their reactions or absence of reactions depend on the nature of the deal the Haitian state made with the Dominicans. Other economic interests and also political interests are taken into account. In cases like that, the civil society can play a role, especially when you have activists groups like GARR [Groupe d’Appui aux Réfugiés et Rapatriés] that represent Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic. GARR can put a lot of pressure on the government, on both sides, because they are strong and they have been there for years [since 1999]. They have been working actively in those communities. Even then, their actions are limited. You can put pressure on the government and the Haitian government can put pressure on the Dominican government for a while. But they can’t really change the dynamics too much. It comes back to the relations between the two states and the internal situation here. Why do Haitians keep on going there? They cannot find work at home. They are desperate. They know that it is not good for them, but they still go to the Dominican Republic. And they know very well that the Haitian government is not going to protect them. The action of the activist groups are nevertheless important, but I just want to point out that without state involvement, the dynamics behind the situation will not be altered. It is a question of negotiation, of a power struggle, and to put yourself in a situation where you can benefit from a given situation. For example, if other countries want to be a part of the most powerful countries in the world, you have to play with that. This is a question of strategic maneuvers—to use what little advantages you have and strengthen your position, to play within the realm of the interests, of the strengths and of the

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weaknesses of each partner to reinforce one’s position. You have to put yourself in a position where you can benefit from that. Now the situation in the world is so complicated, and all the small countries have their own interests, of course, and that’s fine. But Haiti has to diversify its ties and not be dependent upon one country. It is important to change the way our relationship has evolved with the United States or France. The U.S. occupation of Haiti [1915–34] is the basis for Haiti’s current dependency. And Haiti is completely dependent upon the United States as a consequence of the nineteen years of U.S. occupation. People tend to forget that too. We need a government capable of putting Haiti’s interests as the number one priority. RFJ: I think ultimately the word dependence doesn’t characterize the real situation in Haiti. Haiti for all practical purposes is a trusteeship of the international community, and that was so evident during the earthquake. This is a country that was incapable of dealing with the earthquake. There was no state to talk about, and what you had was the United States coming and taking over. That was a necessary move, but one that really indicated that there was no sovereignty. We have no sovereignty when the president has to come back to power on the backs of 20,000 marines. We have no sovereignty when elections are decided really by external actors. We have no sovereignty when the electoral process is all organized and paid for by the international community. You have no sovereignty when your borders are guaranteed only by MINUSTAH and when they are violated whenever. I mean the French and the Americans just took over when Aristide was forced to leave for a second time. So the notion of sovereignty in Haiti is really a myth. There is no sovereignty in Haiti. Haiti is a trusteeship, whether we like it or not. And that, I think, is symptomatic of the utter collapse of the state, which is in part the responsibility of the Haitian elite, and, on the other hand, which is a reflection of the neoliberal policies that have been in place since the late 1970s. The state was seen as the enemy and the international financial institutions sought to create NGOs, which were supposed to replace the state. And when you do that, you don’t have a society. A society cannot work properly when the state is utterly emasculated and unaccountable to the population. The result is a new version of the typical historical marronage that has typified Haitian behavior, an

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individualistic attempt to escape from public problems, a sauve qui peut and a chacun pour soi et Dieu pour tous (every man for himself and God for all) attitude that destroys civic responsibility. Moreover, these problems must be added to the reality of class conflicts and the resurgence of racial tensions. In fact, the issue of race has resurfaced in Haiti with the failed ratification of Gerard Rouzier as prime minister; race, however, is a distraction from the utter failure of the political class and the fact that there is no economic development. So, yes, what we are talking about is a domestic systemic failure and the added problem of being a de facto trusteeship. This de facto trusteeship brings all of the disadvantages of acute dependence without any of the benefits of accountability for what is going on in Haiti. And you see that with the interim commission that was set up after the earthquake. This is a commission that is supposed to be accountable, but ultimately it is accountable to no one. So it seems to me that the idea of Haitian sovereignty is purely mythical. Haiti has become a trusteeship. Typically, discussions of development and modernization focus on the trade policy, urban planning and investment. Yet what role do you see art, literature, and culture (i.e., sports and religion) playing in development? AD: I don’t see how you divorce cultural ideas, artistic expressions, and other forms of cultural productions from what’s going on in the country and the role that they play, either in reinforcing or challenging the existing realities. I’ll give you an example. From 1986 to 1990, Haiti was, if you will, an experiment/an explosion of different forms of cultural, artistic and political expressions. The art that came out (e.g., on murals and walls), the music of that period, the discussions that went on radios, and so on, were all a pouring of energy, expectations, ideas from the population after thirty years of a repressive dictatorship that silenced the population. So there’s no question that these play an important role in any political context. And so what has happened since then, obviously, is a sort of silencing of that outpouring of expression, even with the movement toward democracy that has been going for the past two decades or so because there is no connection between the outpouring of ideas and the political realities of the country. Put differently, whereas during the period from 1986 to 1990 the

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explosion of multiple forms of cultural productions was directly linked to a collective, mass movement for social change, today, such productions have become more individualistic and particularistic because they are no longer tied to a mass movement. But I think that if you were to see a resurgence of a popular movement, a movement of people coming forth with different ideas of how Haiti could change, you would see that being accompanied by all sorts of cultural and artistic expressions that are different from what is being produced today. You would also see a renewed discourse, a renewed vitality in that process. I see culture as an integral part of the political and economic landscape of any society. I don’t see that being divorced at all. So of course, it has a role to play, but that role can only be, itself, a product of people mobilizing themselves, or at least having the opportunity to not only express their ideas, but see them being born out in terms of concrete kinds of political and other social and economic practices. So there is no way to divorce, in my view, political, cultural, artistic expressions from the realities that people live under on a daily basis. RFJ: I think when you look at, for instance, certain artistic forms, in a paradoxical way, they are thriving in Haiti. When you look at some paintings, from artists like Philippe Daudard or Edouard Duval Carrié, or you look at the literary scene with Gary Victor, Frankétienne, I think you have a rather remarkable vitality. But it is also deeply connected to the daily environment. I remember a few years back, when Gary Victor wrote his novel, A L’Angle Des Rues Parallèles, whose very title and substance symbolized Haiti’s madness. The novel showed clearly that Haiti was indeed tèt anba (upside down). So the culture, to some extent, reflects the crisis. The most recent paintings that you see in Haiti are all now deeply etched into the catastrophe of the earthquake. They are absolutely remarkable productions. But that is not necessarily something that is going to extricate us from the current predicament. Now if you look at sports—well, it has collapsed in Haiti. The infrastructure is not there. Like most Haitians, I am a maniac for football, and I see the shape of what’s happening in Haiti and it is a catastrophe. It’s sad to say that forty years ago under Duvalier the sports structure was better. It’s really an indictment of what has happened in the past decades. So the crisis is generalized, and our increasing dependence on outside forces may ultimately create some sort of déplacement

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of the cultural phenomenon. In other words, the danger is that we may come to merely duplicate “the outside” instead of creating and generating our own culture. On the other hand, the crisis, paradoxically, can fuel major literary productions and magnificent work of painters. And, in many instances, great literary figures are very much part of the crisis of their times and milieu, so Haiti is no exception. AD: Right, but what you see in comparison, I mean Frankétienne’s plays also portrayed a sort of irrationality of Haitian society. But if you look at it again, the period between 1986 and 1990—there was such an outpouring of expression and hope, of new creative artistic expressions that were in fact capturing the mood of the population for something different. RFJ: Oh, I agree with you. AD: So, I agree with you that artistic and cultural expressions, even sports in many ways, echo or, if you will, accompany or contribute to either portraying a situation of despair or of hope if there is a situation that rekindles people’s creativity. That’s the point I was trying to make. ET: Well, after the earthquake and even before, a lot of people were saying Haiti has its culture and the culture of Haiti is so strong, and that’s true. Indeed, Haitian painting, our music and our writers as well as the folk art are well represented on the national and international scene. But at the same time, when you think about it, I’m especially talking about literature now, you see that you have a population who doesn’t know how to write or read, for the most part. You have a school system that is so bad that it keeps on forming people who don’t know too much. Every year, I observe that the level of education is going further down. So you wonder despite those few people who are writing and representing Haiti, if something is not done to consolidate the bases, what is going to happen in the future? RFJ: The other thing we haven’t talked about when we talk about culture is religion. And here, what you have again is an escape from the realities of the country. You pointed out, for instance, the question of hope, and indeed during the period immediately before the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier and after, you had a very progressive wing of the Church, which was the dominant way. Now, religion has become an escape, and not only that it has become a point of contention. What happened the last few days in Cap-Haïtien between the Protestant sect and the Catholic Church is an

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indication that the struggle is no longer the struggle to change Haiti; it is a struggle about the mystical, about the afterlife, and it is no longer the struggle about the current situation. And I think you are absolutely correct when you say that when you have that popular movement at its apex, that there was hope and that has disappeared. And this is the tragedy of it. AD: In fact, one of the leaders in the popular movement was the Ti Legliz movement and the radio programs they used to allow the people to speak openly about their realities, their hopes, and their interests. These avenues for free and popular expression were among the first things that the military shut down when they took power. So there’s no question on the connection between those phenomena and processes. ET: Vodou as a religion and a way of life is part of Haitian history and Haitian culture. The people who write, the people who paint, everybody who creates in Haiti carries some of that culture even when they are not practitioners. And when elements of that culture cannot express itself because of economic reasons, we have to feel concerned. So it will be very unwise to feel good about Haitian culture without thinking about the whole situation. Otherwise we are going to reach a stage in a few years where we will realize that our culture is in bad shape, like everything else. And I think the diaspora will play its part to contribute to a larger diffusion of Haiti’s cultural elements. It will play out naturally because people who go to live in other countries carry the culture with them, and they will transmit it one way or the other. But also, on a much more concrete and individual basis, many people from the diaspora travel back to Haiti to participate in the regional festivities in their hometown, les fêtes champêtres, religious festivities like Saut d’eau. People come from the United States and Canada, from Europe, from the Antilles Françaises. Of course, it is beneficial for the country because they come and they spend money and they contribute to the vitality of the events. There has been much to criticize during the past eighteen months [since the January 12, 2010, earthquake]—from the structural devastation, the reimplementation of neoliberal policies, the presidential election process to the conditions in the tent camps and the aggressive displacement without resettlement of residents. But what gives you hope? What inspires you to

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continue to do the work you do, for and about the people of Haiti? What, if anything, suggests that new narratives and improved realities are possible for Haiti? AD: Well, I don’t write for the people of Haiti. I write mostly for myself and whoever wants to listen to what I have to say. So I want to clarify now that I am not writing for anybody, much less the Haitian people. I am not speaking for the Haitian people at all. And I don’t represent the Haitian people in any capacity. So the only thing that gives me hope is that despite the grim situation that exists in Haiti, there are voices out there that are insisting on putting forth alternatives—progressive, democratic, socialist alternatives—and on the need to organize to make this change possible. And as feeble as they may be at present, they are still there. And so as long as that is the case, there is hope that it can develop into something more meaningful, more significant, and that it can take Haiti in a different direction. That is the only glimmer of hope that I still have, and that’s why I continue to write what I write and contribute in some minimal way to that process. RFJ: I would agree with Alex. When we write books, we are essentially intellectuals looking at a particular situation and offering our critical comments. Now the question of hope, especially after what we have been saying, which is rather grim, I think has to be put into context. It’s not that everything is absolutely bleak. In fact, I think there have been a few achievements that are important even if we don’t really celebrate it, as we should. One is the fact that I don’t think we can go back in any way to a dictatorship. I think it would be extremely difficult for anyone to assume absolute power in Haiti now; I can’t conceive of a return to another period similar to the Papa Doc dictatorship, and I think this is one of the major accomplishments of the popular movement. Also, the fact that in spite of all its deficiencies, the press is quite free in Haiti. When you listen to the radio, when you read the newspapers, you can criticize openly, you can say what you want, and this indeed is a major achievement. It’s not going to fill your stomach, but it does give you the capacity to look at the situation and say what is in your mind, the capacity to speak truth to power, as it were. That is a great achievement. The fact that we have elections, however bad they may be,

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but the ritual of election is now implanted in Haiti. A new authoritarian moment may crystallize, but it seems to me that it would not hold for the longue dureé. And the slogan of Lavalas, the tout moun se moun, I think has changed much of Haitian society, in the sense that the submissiveness that existed prior to the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier, has all but vanished. So I think there are achievements, so that is something that gives hope. The other thing that gives hope really is the capacity of the average Haitian to survive in an environment that is so damn difficult. I mean, I just can’t conceive personally of surviving in an environment like that. There is a certain ingenuity about survival, but on the other hand, one shouldn’t idealize it because it is survival, but it is something that can give you an element of hope. Then you have the reality that whenever there is too much authoritarian power that resurfaces, there is a reaction, a popular reaction against it. So I think those are achievements and they can give you some hope. And finally, as an intellectual, I think this may be my own existentialist position that we ought to be like Sisyphus: even though the rock can crush you, you have to stand up again and push it. Otherwise there is absolutely no meaning in life. There is pessimism in that position because you know ultimately that the rock is going to crush you, but you have to stand up again. This is why we are human beings; it is precisely our capacity to stand up and to try to fight an old fight, even if we are pessimistic about it that makes us human beings. So that’s what is driving me, because when you look not only at Haiti but when you look at the structures of the global economy, there’s very little to give you great optimism, so you have to get to the very stuff of what makes a human being, and it’s stand up and try again. TW: My work is inspired by the character of the Haitian people. My hope is rooted in their deep capacity and commitment to maintain their courage, dignity, resourcefulness—and, above all, a fundamental goodness—amid relentless tragedy. There is now a growing recognition that this character cannot be taken for granted. There is now a growing opportunity to meaningfully share, discuss, and implement science-based policies to subvert the trap of charity and create sustainable paths out of poverty. I, along with many others, remain eager to fully support a government and a range of institutions worthy of the Haitian people that can finally help them satisfy their basic needs and aspirations.

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ET: I am still amazed by the vitality of the population and the people that I meet every day. I’m thinking about my students, about colleagues and other professionals, about unemployed people or men and women getting by with odd jobs, little street merchants who live day by day. The children, numerous, eager to learn and to live. Despite the overwhelming difficult conditions, there is a deep desire to live and to enjoy life. There is a word that has been used repeatedly to describe Haitians since January 12, 2010. Resilience. Like some other Haitians and some foreigners, I am reticent to use that word. Saying that Haitians are resilient can imply that we are so used to dire conditions, to catastrophes, natural or man made, that this is not so bad, that although the situation is deplorable, Haitians will survive. Well, I think that the word resilient sometimes, although not always, carries these connotations. I would rather use more than one word to try to describe Haitians’ attitudes towards poverty and tragedy: courage, dignity, and resourcefulness. Some may choose different terms to describe the same behaviors and attitudes. I think what is more important is to say that despite these strong and lasting traits, the population should not be asked to go through more tragedies. There is a limit to human endurance. The courage that I see around me does not totally cover the anger, the despair, and the frustrations. Most of the time, I feel very humble in front of the courage and dignity of people I see. Their courage makes me more determined than ever to work in my capacity and try to give voice to various types of people, the majority whose voice is not often heard. For me, I think this is my duty as a writer, my responsibility—to give voice to people who otherwise would not be heard. The challenge for me is to arrive through my writing to make them alive, to remind all of us that they exist. Giving them voice, giving them importance, can make a difference in the perception we have of ourselves and of others. After all, that’s what art should be and do, to give us a wider perspective of humanity. Note Phone interview with Alex Dupuy, Robert Fatton Jr., and Tatiana Wah, conducted on August 12, 2011, by Millery Polyné, New York. Évelyne Trouillot’s interview was conducted on August 17, 2011, by Chantalle F. Verna.

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Contributors

Yveline A le xis is a postdoctoral fellow in the Africana Studies department at Rutgers University. She received her Ph.D. in history with a certificate in Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino/a studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is completing a book about Haitian resistance to the U.S. occupation of Haiti in the twentieth century. Wien Weibert A rthus is professor of international relations at the State University of Haiti. He is the author of La machine diplomatique francaise en Haiti, 1945–1958, and coauthor of Radiographie de la communaute haitienne de France. G r e g B e ck et t is assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. He has published articles on environmental, urban, and political crises in Haiti and on the ethical and political dimensions of international intervention and emergency response. A le x D u p u y is the John E. Andrus Professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University. He has published broadly on social, economic, and political developments in Haiti and the Caribbean. He is the author of Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment since 1700; Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution; The Prophet and Power: JeanBertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti, and several reports for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Harley F. Etienne is assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is the author of Pushing Back the

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Gates: Neighborhood Perspectives on University-Driven Revitalization in West Philadelphia. R obert Fatton Jr . is the Julia A. Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs in the department of politics at the University of Virginia. His publications include Black Consciousness in South Africa; The Making of a Liberal Democracy; Senegal’s Passive Revolution, 1975–1985; Predatory Rule: State and Civil Society in Africa; Haiti’s Predatory Republic: The Unending Transition to Democracy; and The Roots of Haitian Despotism. He is also coeditor with R. K. Ramazani of The Future of Liberal Democracy: Thomas Jeferson and the Contemporary World and Religion, State, and Society. Sibylle Fischer teaches in the department of Spanish and Portuguese, the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Africana Studies at New York University. She is the author of the award-winning Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution and the editor of Cirilo Villaverde’s Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill. She is currently working on a book on Simón Bolívar and the politics of race in the revolutionary Atlantic. Eliz abeth McA lister is associate professor of religion at Wesleyan University. She is the author of Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora, an ethnography of musical, religious, and political festival practiced by the poor black majority in Haiti. Her second book, Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas, coedited with Henry Goldschmidt, theorizes race and religion as linked constructs. Her learning Web site on Rara festivals is http://www.rara.wesleyan.edu. Nick Ne sbitt’s work in Francophone studies focuses on the intellectual history of the black Atlantic world. He is professor of French and Italian at Princeton University and the author of Voicing Memory: History and Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature and Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment; editor of Toussaint Louverture: The Haitian Revolution; and coeditor with Brian Hulse of Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Philosophy of Music.

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Millery Polyné is assistant professor at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. He is the author of From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870–1964. Polyné has published several articles in the leading journals of Caribbean and African diaspora studies. Ka r e n R ichma n, a cultural anthropologist, is the author of Migration and Vodou and of numerous articles and book chapters on Haitian and Mexican transnational migration, family, religion, and expressive culture. She won the 2009 Heizer Award for the best article in ethnohistory for “Innocent Imitations? Mimesis and Alterity in Haitian Vodou Art.” She is academic director of the Institute for Latino Studies at University of Notre Dame, a member of the anthropology and Romance languages and literatures departments, and a fellow of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the university. M a r k Schuller is assistant professor of anthropology and NGO Leadership and Development at Northern Illinois University, and affiliate at the Faculté d’Ethnologie, l’Université d’État d’Haïti. Schuller’s research on globalization, NGOs, gender, and disasters in Haiti has been published in book chapters and peer-reviewed articles as well as public media, including a column in Hufngton Post. He is the author of Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs and coeditor of four volumes, including Tectonic Shifts: Haiti since the Earthquake. He is codirector/coproducer of the documentary Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy. Patrick Sylvain is a poet, writer, and faculty member at Brown University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies as well as a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. A contributing editor to the Boston Haitian Reporter, his work has been published in several publications, including Agni, Callaloo, Caribbean Writers, Haiti Noir, Human Architecture: A Sociology Journal, Poets for Haiti, Fixing Haiti and Beyond, The Butterfy’s Way, Tectonic Shifts, The Best of Beacon Press, and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. Recently he has been featured in PBS’s NewsHour and in NPR’s Here and Now and The Story.

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Év elyne Trouillot is professor of French at the State University in Haiti and cofounder and director of the firm Pré-texte. She also works as a consultant for international agencies in writing pedagogical documents and organizing training for school staff. Her latest novel, La mémoire aux abois, presents a compelling view of dictatorship in Haiti. After the January 2010 earthquake, Trouillot and her siblings created Le centre culturel Anne-Marie Morisset, a cultural center in Delmas, Port-au-Prince. Tati a na Wa h directs the Haiti Policy Program at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, and is the development policy adviser to the government of Haiti. She has also served as a professor of urban policy and development at Milano Graduate School, the New School for Management and Urban Policy. Her publications include Haiti’s Development through Expatriate Reconnection: Conditions and Challenges and In Search of Consensus after 200 Years: Haiti’s Social System Structure and Development Challenge.

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Index

abolitionist ideology, U.S. fear of, 52–53 abstraction, politics of, 21 accountability paradigm, NGO programs undermined by, 196–98 Acker, Kathy, 70 Act of Bogota, 157n.7 AD2000 and Beyond Movement, 228 Adventist missions in Haiti, 114–15, 219–20 affliction, lwa and cult of, 121–23 Africa, Haitian professionals in, 139–41 African Americans, images of Haiti among, xiii, xxiii–xxiv. See also United States African-descended peoples: diaspora in U.S. of, xxiii-xxiv; evangelical demonization of religions of, 224– 33; Haitian nationalism and link to, xii, 70, 208, 212–18; Haitian religious practices linked to, 118–20, 205–7; international discourse concerning, xv; United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti and, 57–63; Vodou and influence of, 222. See also slavery Agamben, Giorgio, 69, 71–76, 190 agency, individual religious agency and conversion, 115–18

Agonies of the Intellectual (Stoekl), 87–88 Ahmad, Attiya, 239n.29 Alexis, Jacques Stephen, 152, 204–5, 223 Alexis, Yveline, xxvi, 51–65 Alliance for Progress: establishment of, 142; Haiti and politics of, 135– 56; hidden agenda of, 151–53; nationalisme à la carte of Duvalier regime and, 147–51; project criteria for, 137–38; Wise Men committee for, 137, 140–41, 149–51 alterity, Haiti as embodiment of, xviii–xix, xxvi Amanpour, Christiane, 98, 104 American Baptists, 219–20 American studies, Haiti and, xxv Amilcar, Faustin, 122–23 Anderson, Benedict, 211 animism, Christian evangelical view of, 224–25 anti-Semitism, Haitian Vodou linked to, 207 Ardouin, Beaubrun, 33–37 Arendt, Hannah, 85n.17 Argentinian evangelicalism, 205, 227 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand: cholera outbreaks and, 104; election of,

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xxii; elimination of Haitian army by, 12; land tenure abuses and, 175, 218; nongovernmental organizations and, 195; presidency and exile of, 57–63, 77–78; return to power of, 196, 216; U.S. and, xxx, 25n.9; Vodou incorporated by, 215–18, 231–33 Arthus, Wien Weibert, xxviii, 135–56 Asbury Theological Seminary, 222 Assembly of God churches, 123 assistance à personne en danger, 151 Australia, earthquakes in, xviii authoritarianism, Haitian political institutions and, 35–37 Avril, Prosper, 77 bad conversion phenomenon, 123–27 Baptist Theological Seminary (Haiti), 220 barbarism: Haitian slave revolt depicted as, 52–53; stereotyping of Haitian culture and, 30–33 bare life (nuda vita): Agamben’s fantasies of, 71–76; etymological roots of, 84n.12; Haitian IDP camps and, 190; photographic images of Haiti as, 69–83 Baron Samedi, 215 Barrett, Harold, 105 Barthélémy, Gérard, 10, 24n.4 Batista, Fulgencio, 153 Batraville, Benoit, 62–63 Baum, Howell, 169 Bay of Pigs invasion, 152 Beauvoir, Vilfort, 139 Beauvoir-Dominique, Rachel, 234, 239n.27, 239n.29 Beck, Ulrich, 29 Beckett, Greg, xiv, xxvi, 27–44, 52

Bellerive, Jean-Max, 135, 155 Berle, Adolph Augustus Jr., 142, 145 Berlinski, Mischa, xiv bidonvilles, 175, 183–84 Bizonton Affair, 31–32 Black Haiti (Niles), 70 Black Jacobins ( James), 21–24 black self-determination, slave revolt and revolution linked to, 53, 70, 118–20, 145, 204–18 blood imagery, in Bois Caïman story, 213–18 blood pact theology. See Satanic pact story blueprint imagery, new Haiti discourse and, xxi, xxix–xxx Bois Caïman story: bicentennial commemoration of, 215–18; captivity narratives and, 234–37; early published accounts of, 209–10, 212–13; evangelical narratives of, 204–9, 211–12, 223–33; narrative politics of, 212–18, 239n.27 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 13–14, 17 Bonjour Blanc (Thomson), 78, 86n.21 Bosch, Juan, 145 Bosnal, Stephen, 32 Bossale slaves, 17 Boston Review, xx Bottfeld, Philippe, 139 Boyer, Jean-Pierre, xxi, 15–16, 91 brain drain of Haitians, 139–41, 153–54 Brazil: Alliance for Progress failures in, 136; historical paradigms concerning, xix Brewer, Vernon, 220 Brodwin, Paul, 41 Brown, Karen, 121 Buck-Morss, Susan, 19–21

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Index Bufford, Rodger, 225 “building back better” paradigm: camp cities and failure of, 183–84; cholera outbreak and, 181; post-earthquake reconstruction planning and, 168–70 Bureau D’Ethnologie, 114, 215 Burke, Edmund, 18 cacos (guerrilla fighters), xxvii, 55–63 cadastre system, post-earthquake recovery and lack of, 173–78 Cadre de Coopération Intémaire, 196 Calhoun, Craig, 39–40 camp cities: cholera outbreak and depopulation of, 190–91; forced evictions and creation of, 173, 175– 76; physical conditions in, 184–90; post-earthquake statistics on, 167, 176, 181–82; research methodology about, 183–84; semi-permanence of, 182–83; water facilities in, 187–88 Camp Organization and Camp Management Cluster, 173 Campus Crusade for Christ, 219–20, 231 Canada: donations to Haiti from, 196; Haitian professionals in, 139–41; Haitian relations with, 155; images of Haiti in, xiii Capa, Robert, 85n.19 capitalism: history of Haiti and, xxvi; post-earthquake reconstruction and ideology of, 165–79; religious conversions linked to embrace of, 115–18 captivity narratives, colonialism and, 234–37 Caribbean: Haitian relations in, xxv, xxviii–xxix; historical emergence

275

of, 30–33; Pan-Americanism and, xxiii–xxiv; research paradigms concerning, xvii–xix Carlyle, Thomas, 31 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 77 Casarino, Cesare, 84n.12 Casimir, Jean, 10, 24n.4 Castor, Suzy, 92 Castro, Fidel, 142, 152–53 Catholic Church: continuum in Haiti of, 118–20; Duvalier’s attack on, 142–43; earthquake effects on, 120–24, 129–30; Haitian nation-state and, 127–30; lwa (spirit) and, 118–20; missionization in Haiti by, 112–15, 207; Protestant rivalry in Haiti with, 219–20; rapprochement with Vodou, 129– 30, 212–21; superstition campaign of, 113 Célestin, Jude, xxxi, 94–95 centralization of power, administrative weakness in Haitian government and, 138–41 Césaire, Aimé, 3, 18 chache levi, ontological insecurity and, 42–44 chante-pwen (pointed songs), xvi–xvii Charlmers, René, 141 Charte du Mandingue, 9–10 Chatelain, Joseph, 139 Chile: Alliance for Progress failures in, 136; earthquake of 2010 in, xvii–xx Cho, David Paul Yonggi, 220, 225–26 cholera outbreaks, 104, 128; nongovernmental organization role in, 181–82, 191–94, 198–99; research on, xxix; statistics on, 190–91 Christian Broadcast Network, 203 Christian Center of the North, 230

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Christian evangelicalism: Bois Caïman story appropriated by, 204–9, 217–18; countermythmaking by, 218–33; Duvalier’s support for, 114–15; emergence in Haiti of, 205–6; Haitian humanity and role of, xxvii–xxx; Haitian slave revolt as threat to, 210–18; individual agency and conversion in Haiti and, 115–18; nongovernmental organizations and, 194–95; oath-taking in, 214; post-earthquake influence of, 111–12, 120–27; radio broadcasts in Haiti as tool of, 225–27; religious fluidity in Haiti and, 127–30; rewriting of Haitian history by, 203– 37; studies of, xxv; transnational dimensions of, 209–10, 220–21 Christophe, Henri, 14–18 Chronicle of Philanthropy, 181 Church Growth Movement, 218–19, 221–33 Church of God congregations, 125 Cité Soleil camp: cholera outbreak at, 190–91, 198–99; establishment of, 183–84; water distribution in, 188 class divisions: internally displaced persons as symbol of, 182; nongovernmental organizations and, 195; structural vulnerability and, 99–102 clientilism, U.S. occupation of Haiti and, xxvii Clinton, Bill, 135, 155–56, 172, 181, 192, 195–96 Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 192 CNN: Pierre-Louis interview on, 104; Préval’s appearance on, 98 Code rural (Boyer), 15–16 cold war ideology: Alliance for

Progress and, 142–45; hidden agenda of aid donors and, 151–53; international aid and, 136; nongovernmental organization changes after demise of, 196–98 Colombia, Alliance for Progress failures in, 136 colonialism: captivity narratives of, 234–37; colonial and postcolonial construction history in Port-auPrince and, 170–71; discourse of grotesque and, 71–76; Haitian slave revolt as threat to, 211–18;nongovernmental organizations and legacy of, 177–78; planning for postrecovery Haiti and, 168–70; Protestantism in Haiti and, 219–20 Comay, Rebecca, 20, 26n.23 Comedians, The (Green), 70 Comité Interministériel d’Aménagement du Territoire (CIAT), 174 communism: Alliance for Progress as weapon against, 142–45; hidden agenda of aid donors and, 151–53; international aid and, 136 Compère Général Soleil (Alexis), 152 Condorcet, Marquis de (Nicolas Caritat), 16 conformity costs, post-earthquake Haitian development and, 168–70 Congo, Haitians employed in, 139–40 conseil electoral provisoire, 12 Conseil National de Developpment et de Planification (CONADEP), 172–73 Constant, Elvire, 189 conversion: bad conversion, in postearthquake period, 123–27; evangelical prioritization of, 221–33; as protection from sorcery, 116–18

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Index Conway, Frederick, 115–18, 219 Cooper, Frederick, xvi Corley-Smith, Gerard, 144 Council of American States, 157n.7 Counseling and the Demonic (Bufford), 225 counterplantation society, in Haiti, 24n.4 Courlander, Harold, 114, 222 Créole Patriote, 11, 25n.7 crisis: as embodied experience, 40–44; in Haiti, reconstruction of, 27– 44; history of, 29–33; ideology of, 28–29; intervention and, 37–40. See also revolisyon (revolution)/kriz (crisis) Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre), 12–17 Croix-des-Bouquets commune, 172– 73, 175, 191 Cuba: Bay of Pigs invasion and, 152; exclusion from OAS of, 152, 158n.25; historical paradigms concerning, xix, xxiv; sovereignty of, xxvi–xxvii; United States and, 142 cultural representations of Haiti, xiv–xv; developmental paradigms and, xvi–xvii; evangelical rewriting of, 221–33; historical analysis and, 30–33; kriz as embodied experience in, 41–44; Vodou and, 214–18 Dalmas, Antoine, 212–13 Danbala Wedo (spirit), 120–21 Danticat, Edwidge, 92 Dartiguenave, Philippe Sudre, 54 Dash, Michael, 71 Dayan, Joan, 213 debt burden in Haiti: Duvalier regime and, 144–45; ensauvagement in Duvalier regime and, 147–51

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Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 7–8 Defeating Dark Angels (Draft), 224 DeGaulle, Charles, 5 De Gouges, Olympe, 7–8 Déjoie, Louis, 138 De l’Égalité des Races Humaines (Firmin), xii Delgrès, Louis, 8, 13 Delorme, Demesvar, xii democracy: Alliance for Progress and promotion of, 142–45; Haitian history and, xxiii; Haitian political disconnect from, 141–45; Haiti as antithesis of, 5–12; international aid and promotion of, 136; nationalisme à la carte of Duvalier regime and, 147–51; promotion in Haiti of, xii– xiii; Vodou incorporation in Haiti into, 216–17 Desmangles, Leslie, 129–30 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques, 14, 17–18, 21–24, 34, 52–53, 146; historical legacy of, 64–65 Development Loan Fund, 147, 150 development studies: administrative weaknesses of Haitian government and, 138–41; Haitian underdevelopment historiography and, 4–12; Haiti in context of, xv; history of Haiti in context of, xxi; new Haiti paradigm and, xvi; planning for postrecovery Haiti and, 167–70; post-earthquake Haiti and, xxiv deviance, Haiti and discourse of, xx–xxi Diaz, Junot, xx Diderot, Denis, 24n.3 Digicel Corporation, 172–73 Direction General des Impots (DGI), 174–75

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Direction Nationale de l’Eau Potable et de l’Assainissement (DINEPA), 190–91, 194 Directorate des Planification and Affairs Externe (DPE), 171–73 Dirks, Nicholas, 32–33 Dirksen, Everett, 145 Dirksen Amendment, 145, 150 disaster capitalism: post-earthquake reconstruction and ideology of, 165–79, 179n.1; tent cities and, 182–83 Displacement Tracking Matrix, 186 disrespect, politics of, 102–3 Documenta exhibition, 84n.10 Dominican Republic: Alliance for Progress failures in, 136; genocide of Haitians by, 91–92; Haitian army exiles in, 145; historical paradigms concerning, xix, xxv; sovereignty of, xxvi–xxvii; United States and, 142 Dominicans, images of Haiti among, xiii Dominique, Jean, 97 Dorsainville, Roger, 116, 118, 139 Douglass, Frederick, xxiii Dravekey, Dave, 231 Duany, Plater, and Zyberk, 172–73 Dubois, Laurent, xiv Du Bois, W. E. B., xxiii Duplessis, Max C., 147–48 Dupuy, Alex, xxx, 243–67 Duvalier, François, 115; African culture-national identity links fostered by, 215; anticommunist ideology of, 152–53; ensauvagement in regime of, 146–51, 158n.12; foreign experts hired by, 138–41, 144, 194; government centralization under, 137–38; land tenure abuses of, 175; Protestant mission activities

under, 219–20; United States relations with, 142–45 Duvalier, Jean-Claude: earthquake of 2010 and, 104; genocide of Haitians and, 92; Gilden’s photographs in regime of, 77–83; land tenure abuses of, 175; nongovernmental organizations and, 194–95; ontological insecurity in regime of, 42–44; recognition of Protestantism by, 113; urban construction and, 171 earthquake in Haiti (2010): bad conversions in wake of, 123–27; Bois Caïman story linked to, 204–8; brain drain from Haiti in wake of, 153–54; comparison with other earthquakes, xvii–xviii, 173; developmental paradigms in wake of, xvii, xxxi–xxxiii, 167–70; earthquake in 1842 and, 91; environmental implications of, xx; geopolitics of knowledge and, xv–xvi; impact on political elections of, 104; international aid mobilization following, 135–56; Léogâne Plain devastation in, 111–12; lwa (spirit) role during, 120–23; media images of Haiti during, xi; new Haiti discourse in wake of, 243–67; NGO operations in wake of, 170, 173, 177–78, 194– 95; Préval’s leadership failure during, 89–91, 94–108; religious flexibility in wake of, 128–30; statistics on destruction from, 166–67; Vodou and impact of, 111–12, 120–23 Economic Commission for Latin America (CEPAL), 140–41 Economist magazine, 198–99 èd (aid): aid shortcomings and,

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Index 183–84; Alliance for Progress case study and, 135–56; donors’ hidden agenda and, 151–53, 156; Haitian reconstruction challenges and, 153– 56; Haitian scholarship concerning, xiii–xiv, xxx; international standards disconnected from, 141–45; nationalisme à la carte and, 146–51; politics of, xxv; religion and, xxix– xxx, 111–12; research on, xxix; statistics on international donations to Haiti, 181 Edelstein, Dan, 18, 21 Effort National, 144 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 148–49, 151–52 electoral politics in Haiti: instability of, 154–55; nationalisme à la carte of Duvalier regime and, 147–51; politics of incivility and, 104–8 elites in Haiti: French and German ties of, 113; Haitian independence and, xxi; silence of, 91. See also intellectuals of Haiti emancipation, universality of, 7–8 embodied experience, crisis as, 40–44 emergency imaginary paradigm, interventionist policies and, 39–40 Encyclopédistes, 17 Engaging the Enemy (Wagner), 223 Enlightenment: Haiti and historiography of, xxvi, 29–33; slavery and political theory of, 74–76; Spiritual Mapping Movement and, 236–37 ensauvagement of Duvalier regime, 146–51 ensekirite (insecurity), 41–42 environmental disaster: earthquakes as, xx; Haitian life and, xiv, xviii, 128– 30; social constructions of, xviii

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Episcopal Diocese of Haiti, 172–73 esprits scientifiques, xii Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 85n.16 Estimé, Dumarsais, 92 Etienne, Harley F., xxviii–xxix, 165–79, 195 Étienne, Sauveur Pierre, 194–95 Eurasian Minerals Inc., xxiv, xxxvn.41 Europe: Haitian discourse in, xii, xiv– xv, xix, 207; Haitian ties with, xvi, 29–33, 33–37 Evangelical Association of the Caribbean, 228 Evangelical Church of India, 220 Evans, Walker, 77 exclusionary politics: disrespect in, 102–3; silence and, 93–95 executive silence: politics of incivility and, 103–8; violence in Haiti of, 87–108 exiled Haitians, history of, xxii extortion, Duvalier’s politics of, 143–45 Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi, 30–31 Fanon, Frantz, 21 Farmer, Paul, 101–2, 195, 94–95 Farming of Bones (Danticat), 92–93 Fatton, Robert Jr., xxx, 100–101, 243–67 fear of Haiti, ideology of, 52–53 Feitlowitz, Marguerite, 107–8 Ferrer, Ada, xix Fields, Karen, 117 Filmer, Robert (Sir), 74 Firmin, Anténor, xii, 84n.3 fiscal identity number (NIF), 176 Fischer, Sibylle, xiv–xv, xxvii, 18; on Haitian revolution, 3, 18; on photographic images of Haiti, 69–83

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folkloric culture, Vodou linked to, 215–18 food sovereignty, 12 forced evictions, internally displaced persons as result of, 173, 175–76 Forces Army of Haiti (FAD’H), 143 foreign aid institutions: developmental paradigms of Haiti and, xv–xvi; growth of NGOs and, 196–98 Fortson, Thomas, 220, 231 France: amnesia about Haiti in, xiii, xvii, xxxin.2; destruction of Haiti by, 4–12; Duvalier’s relations with, 144– 45, 148; Haitian independence and, 3–17, 53, 213–14; Haitian reparations paid to, 53; Haitian ties with, 112–13; international aid ideology in, 151; Nazi collaborators in, 87– 88; royalist governments in, 15; U.S. occupation of Haiti and, 37–40 freedom, terror and, Hegel’s discussion of, 19–21 French historical studies, racist assumptions about Haiti in, xi–xii French Revolution: Haitian slave revolt and, 7–8, 11–12, 18–21; Hegel’s analysis of, 19–21 Froude, James Anthony, 31 Fuller Theological Seminary, 222, 224 Fundamental Constitutions for the Government of Carolina (Locke), 74 Furet, F., 18 gangan/gangan ason (ritual leader), 117–18, 122, 127; Catholics and, 119, 129 Gastine, Civique de, 213–18 Geffrard, Fabre-Nicolas, 113, 171 Geggus, David P., xxi, 213 Gelin, Jean R., 234

gender issues in Haiti, xxix, 184 genocide of Haitians (1937), 91–92 geopolitics of knowledge: growth of NGOs and, 196–98; Haiti in context of, xi–xii, xv–xvi Georges, Jean-Baptiste, 139 Germany, ties to Haiti, 113 Giddens, Anthony, 42, 94 Gilden, Bruce, xiv–xv, 76–83, 85nn.18– 20 Gilot, Rony, 146 Global North paradigm: Haitian diaspora and, xx–xxi; images of Haiti and, 8 Global Renewable Energy, xxiv Global South paradigm, peasants and marginalized groups and, xvii Gobineau, Joseph Arthur (Comte de), xii, 30–32, 84n.3 Goldstein, Alyssa, xxxin.2 goudou-goudou (seismic shock), 124, 130 government structures in Haiti: administrative weaknesses in, 137– 41, 153–54; current planning framework in, 171–73; inequality of institutions and, xxviii; lack of NGO coordination with, 181–99; leadership failures and, 89–91, 94– 108; legitimation of Vodou and, 113, 127–30, 215–16; NGO disregard of, 195–98; post-earthquake Haitian development and, 168–70; post-earthquake reconstruction and, 165–79. See also nation-state integrality Graham, Billy (Rev.), 220 Graham, Franklin, 204, 220, 231 Grands Travaux de Marseille, 144–45 grassroots organizations: in camp

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Index cities, 183–84; donor sources for, 196–98 Green, Graham, 70 Gross, Jean-Pierre, 16–17 grotesque, Haiti and discourse of, 71–76 Guadeloupe, 8 Guatemala, sovereignty of, xxvi–xxvii Guinée, 139–40 Habermas, Jürgen, 40–41 Habitat for Humanity, 172 Haiti: comparisons of Chile with, xvii–xx; dystopian images of, xx; failure of Alliance for Progress in, 136–56; history of crisis in, 29–33; reconstruction commitments, challenges for, 153–56; resistance narratives in, silencing of, 52–53; Sartre’s discussion of, 12–17; U.S. occupation of, xxiii–xxiv, xxvi–xxvii, 37–40, 51–52, 53–55, 215–20 Haiti (Gilden), 76–83 Haiti: After the Earthquake (Farmer), 94–95 Haitian-American Advisory Board for the Economic Development of Haiti, xxiii Haitian army: Aristide’s elimination of, 12; Duvalier’s purge of, 138, 143; U.S. Marine training program for, 149–50 Haitian diaspora, scholarship concerning, xx–xxi Haiti and United States (Dash), 71 Haitian historiography, crisis in, 33–37 Haitian Protestant Federation, 220 Haitian Republic, founding of, 3 Haitian revolution, xiii; bicentennial commemoration of, 215–18,

281

231–33; Catholic Church and, 113; developmental discourse concerning, xxi–xxii; European dismissal of, 30–33; eyewitness accounts of, 83n.2; historical legacy of, 63–65; national identity linked to, 210–18; Péralte’s defense of, 51–53, 57–63; politicization of, 33– 37; Vodou practices during, xxx; Western European paradigms concerning, 4–12. See also second Haitian revolution (1946) Haiti Liberte, 25n.9 Haiti: Political Failures, Cultural Successes (Weinstein and Segal), 224 Haiti Support Group, 79 Hardt, Michael, 182 Harrison, Lawrence, 33 Haussman, G. E., 169 Hayti, or The Black Republic (St. John), 70 health assistance: in camp cities, 185– 90; research on impact of, xxix Heart of God Ministries, 234–35 Hegel, G. F. W., 19–21, 44n.11 Heifitz, A. Ronald, 88, 106–7 Heinl, Robert and Nancy, 140 Hertzfield, Michael, 214 Hippocrates, 28 history of Haiti: crisis in, 33–37; cultural stereotyping in, 30–33; evangelical rewriting of, 203–37, 218–33; gaps in, xi–xii; national identity linked to, 210–18; new Haiti discourse and, xxi–xxii; structural vulnerability linked to, 99–102; vocalization of agency through, 93 HIV/AIDS prevention, NGO programs for, 196–98

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Hollywood images of Haiti, 70 homo sacer, Agamben’s concept of, 71–76 housing rights, recognition of, 184 Humanitarian Accountability Partnership and Sphere, 197–98 humanitarian interventionism: camp cities and shortcomings of, 183–84; donors’ hidden agenda and, 151–53, 156; lack of international aid for, 150–51; necessity in Haiti for, 4–12 human rights violations in Haiti: Duvalier regime and, 143–51; international commitments affected by, 154–55 Hurbon, Laënnec, 71 Hurricane Katrina, natural disaster research and, xxxivn.24 Hurricane Tomas, 128 Hyppolite, Florvil, 171 imagined community, Haiti as, 211 imperialism, planning for postrecovery Haiti and, 168–70 incivility, politics of, 103–8 inequality: Haitian governance and, xxviii; Haitian slave revolt and, 30–33 Inequality of Human Races, The (De Gobineau), 30–33 Initiative Group for the Commemoration of 207 Years of Bois Caïman, 230 intellectuals of Haiti: Bois Caïman story and, 214–18; brain drain of, 139–41, 153–54; Dominican massacre of Haitians described by, 92–93; Haitian crises and, 33–37; narrative of, xi–xii; nationalism as inspiration for, 70, 208; slave revolt as inspiration for, 206, 208 Inter-American Conference, 92

Inter-American Development Bank, 140–41, 151 Inter-American Organization, 149 Interim Commission for the Reconstruction of Haiti (IHRC), 135, 155–56, 172–73, 177–78, 181 internally displaced persons (IDPs): cholera outbreak among, 191–94; Christian evangelicalism among, 206; forced evictions of, 173, 175– 76; post-earthquake statistics on, 167, 176, 181–82; research methodology about, 183–84; semi-permanence of, 181–83 International Development Association, 151 international discourse on Haiti: developmental change and, xv; Haitian political institutions and, 35–37; visual narratives and, 70–83 International Donor’s Conference towards a New Future for Haiti, 135, 137 international financial institutions, neoliberal policies in Haiti and, 194–95 International Organization on Migration, 176, 181 International Republican Institution, xxxi international standards: Haitian political disconnect with, 141– 45; sanitation in camp cities and, 185–90 Internet, Haitian Satanic pact myth on, 234–37 interventionism: Haitian crisis and, 37–40; post-earthquake Haitian reconstruction and, 169–70; U.S. hegemony and, xxvi–xxvii, 47n.39

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Index Islam, Bois Caïman story and influence of, 239n.29 Jacobinism, Haitian slave revolt and, 16–21, 25n.7, 26n.23 James, C. L. R., 16–17, 21–24 James, Erica, 41–42 Janvier, Louis-Joseph, xii, 35 Japan: aid to Haiti from, 135; earthquakes in, xviii Jean, Carlos, 98–99 Jean-Baptiste, Chavannes, 12 Jefferson, Thomas, 52–53 Jenson, Deborah, 15, 18 Jericho March, 227–28 Jeudy, Wilson, 176 Jeune, Chavannes, 220, 231–33 Jeune, Joel, 220, 225–29 John Paul II (Pope), 115 Johnson, Lyndon, 136 Johnston, Patrick, 217–18 Joseph, Gregory, 230 Kahn, Carrie, 98–99 Kathy Goes to Haiti (Acker), 70 Katolik fran (straight Catholic), 118–19 Kaussen, Valerie, 182 Kennedy, John F.: Alliance for Progress and, xxviii, 135–37, 140–45; hidden agenda in aid programs of, 151–53; nationalisme à la carte and, 146–51 Klein & Sacks, 139 koumbit/koumbitaj system: leadership challenges and, 96; politics of disrespect and, 103; politics of incivility and, 106–8; structural vulnerability and, 100–102 Kraft, Charles, 222, 224–26, 228 Kreyòl language and culture: infinite

283

justice in, 24; kriz (crises) etymology in, 41; orthography of, 219; religious conversions in Haiti and, 116, 128–30; research methodology using, 65n.9 kriz, as embodied experience, 41–44 Labadie Corporation, xxiv La barbare imaginaire (Hurbon), 71 labor movement in Haiti, emergence of, xxii La Gonâve Development Authority (LGDA) project, xxiv Lahens, Yanick, 103–4 lakou (social nerve center), xi lamizè (poverty), 128 land tenure system: Aristide’s reform efforts for, 175, 218; postearthquake recovery and, 173–78; violence involving, 178 Lane, Clinton, 217, 222, 230 language: politics of incivility and, 107–8; violent use of, 87–88 Lansing, Robert, 38–39 La Phalange (Catholic newspaper), 113, 143 Largey, Michael, 214 La Ste. Rose (rara band), 122 Latin America: Alliance for Progress and, 135–36, 142; Haitian relations in, xxv, xxviii–xxix; images of Haiti in, xvii; Pan-Americanism and, xxiii–xxiv; peasants and marginalized groups in, xvii; Protestant missionization in, 114; threat of communism in, 151–53 leadership: challenges in Haiti for, 95– 99; politics of incivility and absence of, 104–8 Le Bris, Michel, 105

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Le Corbusier (Charles-Eduard Jeanneret), 169 Lehman Brothers, 139 Lenin, Nikolai, 17 Léogâne Plain (Haiti): Catholic rapprochement efforts in, 129–30; earthquake devastation of, 111–12; post-earthquake reconstruction in, 172–73; Protestant conversions in, 124–27; religious ethnographic study of, 115–18; religious fluidity in, 127–30; as Vodou epicenter, 112 Le Protestantisme dans la Société Haïtienne, 220 Les amis des noirs, 16 Léscot, Élie, 92, 113 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 120–21 Lexicon of Terror, A (Feitlowitz),107–8 liberation theology in Haiti, 57 Liberté générale, 8 Linsky, Marty, 88, 106–7 local governance in Haiti: absence of NGO links to, 197–98; camp cities and links to, 183–84; studies of, xxv Locke, John, justification of slavery by, 73–76, 85n.16 Louis, André Jeantil, 224–25 Louverture, Toussaint, 8, 13–15, 17, 20–24; historical legacy of, 60 L’Union Nationale des Étudiants Haïtiens (UNEH), 143 lwa (spirit), 41; bad conversions and, 123–27; Catholics serving as, 118– 20; earthquake and role of, 120–23; musical worship of, 129; powers of, 121–23; rituals surrounding, 209 Lwijis, Janil, 195 macoutisation of public administration, 138–41, 157n.9

Madiou, Thomas, 33–37 madness, bad conversions linked to, 125–27 Magloire, Paul Eugène, 92, 138 Magnum Web Gallery, 80–82 Makandal, 10 Malawi, Watchtower sect in, 116–17 Mama Lola (religious leader), 121–23 manbo ason (priestess), 119 Manigat, Leslie, 139 manufacturing industries, privileging of, in development studies, xxv, 12 Marche en Fer (Iron Market) project, 171–73 March for Jesus, 228 Mars, Louis, 139 Marshall Plan, 136 Martelly, Michel J., xxxi, 100, 155–56, 174, 178, 182, 234 Marxism, Haitian antislavery rebellion and, 13–17 Mathurin, Alliette and Ernst, 194–95 McAlister, Elizabeth, xxx, 129–30, 194, 203–37 McGavran, Donald A., 221 Médecins Sans Frontières, 192–93 media images of Haiti: during 2010 earthquake, xi, xvii–xviii, xxxiin.3; in American and European media, xiii–xiv; Chilean earthquake coverage compared with, xix–xx; Christian evangelism’s use of, 203–5, 226– 27, 231–33; Haitian slave revolt and, 52–53 memory, geopolitics and systems of, xvi men anpil chay pa lou (when the hands are many, the burden is light) adage, xi Merten, Kenneth, 155 Métraux, Alfred, 116, 118, 222, 225

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Index Mexico City, earthquake in, 173 Mignolo, Walter D., xi Migration and Vodou (Richman), 125–26 migration of Haitians, studies of, xxv– xxvi military coups in Haiti: in Duvalier regime, 145; Préval regime and, 97– 98; U.S. coup against Aristide, 25n.9 Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs, 231 Ministry of Planning and Foreign Cooperation, 194–95, 198 Ministry of Public Works, Transport, and Telecommunications (MTPTC), 172–73 Miot, Joseph Serge (Archbishop), 129 modernity, Haiti as antithesis of, 6–12 Mole St. Nicolas peninsula, 152 momentum transfer, post-earthquake recovery and, 179 Montesquieu (Charles-Louis Secondat), 147 Morton, Alice, 198 moun anba (bottom dwellers), 96 moun andeyò (marginalized Haitians), xiv, 10; history of, 181; leadership challenges and, 95–96; politics of incivility and, 103–8 moun anwo (upper crust), 96 moun (person, humanity)/demounization (dehumanization): Agamben’s bare life and, 72–76; Haitian scholarship concerning, xiii–xv; leadership challenges and, 95–97; photographic representations of Haiti and, xxvii moun lavil (urban folk), 96 moun lespri (educated folk), 96 moun sòt (uneducated folk), 96

285

Mudimbe, V. Y., xvi mulattoes: in Haitian history, 33– 37; political hierarchy and position of, 138 multinational corporations: Duvalier and, 138–41, 144; post-earthquake Haiti and, xxiv Murray, Gerald, 121–23 Mutual Security Act (United States), 145 mythmaking, social formation and, 209–10 NAACP, Haitian development and, xxiii Naipaul, V. S., 18 Namphy, Henri, 77, 195 narratives of Haiti: eyewitness accounts of the Haitian revolution, 83n.2; history as vocalization of, 93; resistance narratives, suppression of, 52–55; visual narratives of, 70–83 national governance in Haiti, xxv; inequality of institutions and, xxviii nationalisme à la carte, 137, 146–51 nationalism in Haiti: African-based culture valorized by, 215–18; Bois Caïman story linked to, 212–18; Christian evangelical appropriation of, 207–10, 235–37; historical roots of, 146, 204–9; international aid failures and role of, 137–41; in postrevolution era, 53 National Palace, construction of, 171 nation-state integrality: current planning framework and, 171– 73; international aid failures and, 137–41; religious continuities and discontinuities and, 127–30; structural vulnerability and, 99–102

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Index

nature, Vodou spirits compared with, 120–21 Negri, Antonio, 182 neoevangelicalism: Bois Caïman story and, 213–18, 236–37; influence in Haiti of, 205–6, 231–33; Satanic pact and, 234–37 neoliberal capitalism, Haitian life and, xiv Nesbitt, Nick, xxvi, 3–24, 52 Newbegin, Robert, 145 Newell, William, 32 new Haiti discourse: American racial differences and, xxxvn.38; current development paradigms and, xvi–xvii, 243–67; post-earthquake paradigms in, 243–67; post-earthquake reconstruction and, xviii, xxii–xxiii; unification of Haitian north and south and, xxi–xxii Nicolas, Philius, 234 Niles, Blaire, 70 noirisme, xxii nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): camp cities run by, 183–84; changes and evolution of, 195–98; cholera outbreak linked to, 181–82, 191–94, 199; Christian NGOs, earthquake assistance from, 111–12; donor relationships with, 151–53, 156, 196–98; global growth of, 196–98; health services from, 189–90; history in Haiti of, xv, 5, 194–95; housing allowances for, 199n.5; internally displaced persons and, 176; intervention in Haiti by, 39–40; post-earthquake operations of, 153–54, 170, 173, 177–78, 194– 95; reporting requirements for, 197– 98; social health risks amplified by,

xxix; statistics on contributions to, 181; water distribution by, 187–88 Normandin, Henry Paul, 155 North American hegemony, Haitian history in context of, xix oath imagery, in Bois Caïman story, 213–18 “Odd and the Ordinary, The” (Trouillot), 71 Office Nationale du Cadastre (ONACA), 174–78 Ogé, Vincent, 7–8 Ogoun (spirit), 120–22, 126–27 On Afections (Hippocrates), 28 ontological insecurity, Haitian crisis and, 42–44 Operation Pan America, 157n.7 Operation World ( Johnston), 217 Organization of American States, xxxi, 104, 140, 152, 174 Oriental Missionary Society, 219 Otis, George Jr., 223, 228 ounsi (initiated servitor), 120 Packard, Randall, xvi Pakistan, earthquake in, xviii Pan-Africanism, 215 Pan-Americanism, xxiii–xxiv pardos, ideology of, xvii Parti d’Entente Populaire (Party of Popular Agreement), 152 Partners in Health, 192–94 Pastor Yvette, 206, 209, 237 Patriarcha (Filmer), 74 Paul, Berthony, 230 Paulhan, Jean, 91 Péan, Leslie, 146 Peck, Raoul, 104 Pentecostal groups, 234–37;

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Index missionization in Haiti by, 114–15, 219–20 “people movement” ideology, evangelical conversion and, 221 Péralte, Charlemagne, xxvi, 38, 51– 53; capture and killing of, 55–57; historical legacy of, 57–65; U.S. occupation of Haiti and, 53–55 Pétion, Alexandre, 211 peyizan (peasant) majority: developmental paradigms and, xvi–xvii; Haitian historiography concerning, 34–37; leadership challenges and, 95–96; ontological insecurity for, 42–44 Phenomenology (Hegel), 19–21 Philoctète, René, 92 photographic images of Haiti, xxvii, 69–83 Piarroux, Renaud, 191 Pierre-Louis, Michèle, 97, 104 planning for postrecovery Haiti: current framework for, 171–73; definitions of, 167–70, 179n.1 Point Four program, xxiii political parties: emergence in Haiti of, xxii; Haitian elections and, xxxi politics: of disrespect, 102–3; in Gilden’s photography, 81–83; Haitian logic of emergency and, 38– 40; Haitian revolution and, 33–37; history of subjectivation in Haiti and, 6–12; of incivility, 103–8; international aid failures and role of, 137–41; international standards and disconnect with, 141–45; language of, 87–88; leadership challenges and, 95–96; post-earthquake Haitian reconstruction and, 168–70; religion in Haiti linked to, 212–18

287

Popkin, Jeremy D., 83n.2 Port-au-Prince, Haiti: colonial and postcolonial construction history in, 170–71; post-earthquake reconstruction in, 172–73 possession performance, 122–23 post-earthquake reconstruction: capitalist ideology and, 165–79; government instability and, xvii–xviii, 168–70; interventionist ideology and, 168–70; nongovernmental organization surge and competitiveness and, 177–78; persistence of camp cities and shortcomings of, 181–84; urban planning and, 165–79 power, Christian evangelical power encounter and, 224–25 prayer warriors, xxx, 225–26, 228–30 Préval, René, xxiv–xxvii; electoral fraud in regime of, 154–55; leadership failure during earthquake of, 89–91, 93–99, 188; military coup in regime of, 97–98; politics of disrespect and, 103; politics of incivility and, 104–8; speeches and rhetoric of, 87–108 Price-Mars, Jean, 92–93, 138–39 private property, Duvalier’s confiscation of, 143–45 Promise Keepers, 220, 228, 231 property rights: Duvalier’s property confiscation and, 143–45; forced evictions and, 175–76; postearthquake recovery and, 173–78 Protestant Church: anti-Catholic ideology of, 220–21; bad conversion phenomenon and, 123–27; Catholic aggression against, 129; Haitian nation-state and, 113, 127–30; history in Haiti of, xxx, 219–33; individual agency and conversion in

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Haiti to, 115–18; lwa (spirit) and, 118–20; missionization in Haiti by, 112–15, 219; nongovernmental organizations of, 194–95; postearthquake influence of, 120–23 public policy, religious continuities and discontinuities and, 127–30 Rabe, Stephen G., 136 racial science, history of Haiti and, xxvi racism: administrative weakness of Haitian government and, 138–41; Christian evangelicalism and, 208; Haitian historiography and, 33–37; Haitian slave revolt in context of, 30–33 rada (sacred songs), 129 radical culture in Haiti, history of, xxii Radio 4VEH, 219 railway construction in Haiti, 171 Ramsey, Kate, 211 rara (Lenten organizations), 122 Rawls, John, 102–3 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas, 24n.3 reconstruction efforts. See postearthquake reconstruction Redmond, Christine, 77 religion in Haiti: bad conversion phenomenon and, 123–27; crisis and, 41–44; cultural role of, xxv, xxvii–xxx; earthquake effects on, 111–12; fluidity of, 127–30; history of, 112–15; individual agency and conversion and, 115–18; politics linked to, 212–18; post-earthquake changes in, 120–23; racialization of, by Christian evangelicalism, 208, 211–18; ritual continuities and discontinuities in, 127–30. See also specific religions, e.g., Protestant Church; Vodou

representation: structural vulnerability and, 99–102; of Vodou spirits, 121–23 resistance narratives of Haiti: resistance to U.S. occupation of Haiti, 53–55; silencing of slave revolt narrative, 52–53 revolisyon (revolution)/kriz (crisis), 27–44; Haitian scholarship concerning, xiii–xiv; historical/theoretical framework for, xxvi; ideology of, 28–29 revolutionary studies of Haiti, xxv Rey, Terry, 212 rhetoric, leadership and role of, 95–99 Rice, Fred, xxiv Richman, Karen, xxvii–xxviii, 43, 111– 30, 194 Rigaud, Milo, 225 risk, crisis and, 28–29 road construction in Haiti, 171 Roberts, Oral, 114 Robertson, Pat, 129–30, 203–4, 207 Robespierre, Maximilien, 20, 23–24 Romain, Charles-Poisset, 114–15, 220, 234 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 139, 142 Roosevelt, John, 139 Rothberg, Robert, 96–97, 139–40 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 17, 21 Royal Caribbean, xxiv rural Haiti: absence in Haitian history of, xi–xiii; studies of, xxv. See also peyizan (peasant) majority Rusk, Dean, 141, 145 Rwanda, 196 Saint Domingue colony: Bois Caïman ceremony at, 204–5, 209–10; Catholic missionization in, 112–15; construction history in, 170–71;

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Index establishment of, xix; slave revolt in, 8–19 Salgado, Sebastião, 79, 83 Salomon, Lysius, 171 Sam, Jean Vilbrun Guillaume, 38–39, 57, 171 Samaritan’s Purse, 220, 231 sanitation, in camp cities, 185–90 Sarganum, Ezra, 220 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 12–17 Satanic pact story, Christian evangelical mythology concerning, 205–37 Save the Children, 189–90 Schlesinger, Arthur Jr., 136 Schmitt, Carl, 37 Schuller, Mark, xxix, 181–99 Schwartz, Ted, 198 Seale, Gerry, 228 second Haitian revolution (1946), xxii Second Treatise on Government (Locke), 73–76 security paradigm, interventionist policies and, 39–40 Sékou Touré, 139–40 “sent sickness,” 43 serment des ancêtres, 146 700 Club, The (television program), 203 sèvis lwa (services or ceremonies), 118– 20, 127–29 sezisman (shock), 41 Sheller, Mimi, 96 Shelter Cluster, 173 silence: exclusionary politics and, 93–95; leadership challenges and, 95–99; violence of, 89–90 Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Trouillot), 52–53 slavery: Christian evangelical countermythology concerning, 228–33;

289

discourse of grotesque and, 71–76; European development fueled by, 29–33; Haitian nationalism tied to abolition of, 146–51, 210–18; Haitian revolution and abolition of, 3, 6–12, 19–21, 52–53, 205; Islamic ties in, 239n.29; Locke’s justification of, 73–76, 85n.16; Marxism and, 16–17; post-revolution growth of, 13–14; in United States, 4–5 Small, Melvin, 151 Smith, Jennie M., xvi Smith, Matthew, xxii Smith, Nolle, 139 Smith, Tony, 136 social engagement, politics of disrespect as barrier to, 102–3 socialism, Sartre’s discussion of, 14–17 social services, research on Haitian provision of, xxv, xxviii–xxix Somalia, 196 sorcery: Haitian fear of, 116–17, 125– 26; history as, 207 sovereignty: Agamben’s bare life and, 71–76; in Caribbean, U.S. dominance and, xxvi–xxvii; Christian evangelism as threat to, 230; European religious power in Haiti and, 113; in Haiti, restoration of, xxii; Haitian politics and, xxxi; Haitian slave revolt and, 10–12; nationalisme à la carte of Duvalier regime and, 146–51 Soviet Union, Sartre’s discussion of, 12–17 Spain, aid to Haiti from, 135 Sphere Minimum Standards, sanitation in camp cities and, 185–90 Spirits and the Law, The (Ramsey), 211 spirituality, aid to Haiti and, xxx

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Spiritual Mapping Movement, xxx, 204–8, 214, 217–19, 222–33, 236– 37, 238n.3 Stalin, Josef, 12–17 St. John, Spencer, 31, 70 Stoekl, Allan, 87–88, 91, 97 structural vulnerability of Haiti: internal conflicts and, 99–102; violence of executive silence and, 89–108 Summers & Hamilton, 139 superstition campaign in Haiti, Catholic instigation of, 113–14, 129–30 Sylvain, Patrick, xxvii, 87–108 symbolic feeding of lwa, 119–20 Taffet, Jeffrey, 136 Task Force on Immediate Latin American Problems, 142 Taussig, Michael, 207 Taylor, David, 223–24 terror: Haitian slave revolt and, 16–19; Hegel’s discussion of, 19–21 Terror of Natural Right (Edelstein), 18 Third Wave evangelical movement, 205–6, 208, 210, 224, 238n.3 Thomson, Ian, 77–78, 86n.21 Ti Chini, 125–26 Ti Legliz movement, 57 Ti Rivyè (Little River), Haitian community: bad conversion phenomenon in, 123–27; religious practices in, 112, 117–18; Vodou in, 118–23 Tontons Macoutes, 143–45, 157n.9, 175 tourism in Haiti: history of, xxii, xxiv; privileging of, in development studies, xxv Tragédie du roi Christophe, 18

transaction costs, post-earthquake Haitian development and, 168–70 Treatise on Government (Locke), 74–76 trias politica principle (separation of powers), 138–41 Trinidad, sovereignty of, xxvi–xxvii Tripartite Commission for Economic Planning (Alliance for Progress), 140–41 Trotsky, Leon, 13–17 Trouillot, Èvelyne, xxx, 243–67 Trouillot, Henock, 139 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, xiii, xix, 8; on Haitian revolution, 10–12, 30–33, 210; on historical narrative, 93, 208; on images of Haiti, 70–71; resistance narratives in Haiti and, 52–53; on structural vulnerability in Haiti, 100 Trujillo, Rafael, 92, 142 Truman, Harry, xxiii T-shelters, 182 Tulley, Harlan, 139 Ulysse, Gina, xxix Ulysse, Olga, 188 UNICEF, health services in camp cities from, 188–89 United Kingdom: Duvalier’s relations with, 144–45; Haiti and, 16 United Nations: cholera outbreak linked to troops from, 191–94; Haitian aid from, 5, 196–98; Haitian professionals employed by, 139–40; intervention in Haiti, 39–40 United Nations Cluster System, 173, 177–78, 186–87; cholera outbreak and, 192–94 United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH), 51–52, 57–65

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Index United States: Alliance for Progress and, 135–36, 140–41; Caribbean sovereignty and hegemony of, xxvi– xxvii; Christian evangelicalism in Haiti from, 209–10, 219–20, 224– 33; coup against Aristide and, 25n.9; destruction of Haiti by, 4–12; Duvalier’s relations with, 139–45; ensauvagement in Duvalier regime and, 146–51; geopolitics in, 196– 98; Haitian professionals in, 139– 41; Haitian relations with, xxv–xxvii, 3–12, 16–17, 47n.39; images of Haiti in, xiii, xvii, xxxiin.3; military withdrawal from Haiti by, xxii; occupation of Haiti by, xxiii–xxiv, xxvi–xxvii, 37–40, 51–52, 53–55, 171, 219–20; political instability in Haiti and role of, 154–55; postearthquake Haitian development and, xxiv, 168–70; post-revolutionary surveillance of, 53; slavery in, 4–5 United States Institute of Peace, 154 Unity party (Haiti), xxxi Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 184 universal emancipation, Haitian revolt and, 7–10 University of Haiti, 140 urban planning: colonial and postcolonial construction history in Port-au-Prince and, 170–71; current framework for, 171–73; Haitian life and, xiv, xxv, xxviii–xxix; land tenure system and, 173–78; post-earthquake reconstruction and, 165–79; recovery planning challenges in, 173–78; regional planning and, 178–79 U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), 146–47, 150;

291 cholera outbreak and, 194–95; funding of NGOs by, 196–98

Vatican: Haitian concordat with, 113; images of Haiti in, xvii. See also Catholic Church vèvè (cornmeal drawings), 216–17 Vincent, Sténio, 62, 91–92 violence: in Haiti, 89–91; land security and, 178; politics of incivility and, 103–8; of silence, 89–108 Vodou: Aristide’s incorporation of, 175, 215–18, 231–33; backwardness associated with, 115–18; Bizonton Affair and, 31–32; Catholic rapprochement with, 129–30, 212–21; Christian evangelical countermythology concerning, 205–7, 221–33; definition of, 118; denigration and suppression of, 71; Duvalier’s support of, 114; earthquake’s impact on, 111–12, 120–23; elite ambivalence concerning, 214; government legitimation of, 113, 127–30, 215–16; Haitian humanity and role of, xxvii–xxx; Haitian national identity linked to, 215–18; kriz as embodied experience in, 41– 44; Léogâne Plain as epicenter of, 112; mythical imagery in, 232–33; Newell’s defense of, 32–33; studies of, xxv; superstition campaign against, 113–14 Volk, Steven, xix Wagner, C. Peter, 203, 222–23, 225–26, 228, 238n.3 Wah, Tatiana, xxx, 243–67 wanga (magical power), Protestantism viewed as, 116–18

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Warfare Prayer (Wagner), 223 water, in camp cities, 187–88 Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Cluster, 186–88; cholera outbreaks and, 190–94, 198–99 weather conditions, camp cities and effects of, 184–90 Weingarten, Kaethe, 90 Weisbrot, Mark, 155 Western militarism, Haitian life and, xiv White, Joe, 231–32 White, Walter, xxiii–xxiv Wilentz, Amy, 95 Williams, J. L., 231–33 Williams, Lea, 106

witchcraft. See sorcery women: Haitian independence and, 7–8; as voices of Haiti, xxix Working Group on Land Rights, 173 World Bank, 151, 170, 172–73, 196 World Help, 220, 231 World Vision International, 219–20, 231 Worldwide Evangelization for Christ, 217 Yoiddo Full Gospel Church, 220, 225–26 Youth With a Mission, 219–20