December 8th, and Why Martelly?

On Tuesday, election results were announced two hours late by a single official who sat alone at a table prepared for eight. The results? Manigat (grandmotherly former first lady) in the lead, with 31.37 %, Celestin (Preval's chosen successor) in second with 22.48%  and Martelly (popular musicien and badboy) in third with 21.84%. This was very bad news. (If you already know everything that's happening, skip to the bottom for an assessment of it)

The way Haitian elections are suppose to work, if no candidate gets more than 50% of the vote, the top two go on to a second round. In this case, Manigat and Celestin, ostensibly leaving Martelly out in the cold. However, his supporters were having none of it. Celestin a most unpopular man, and the election process was so riddled with corruption, criminal disorganization, ballot stuffing and intimidation that the margin of six-thousand some votes between Celestin and Martelly is negligible and probably fraudulent. Within fifteen minutes of the announcement, Martelly supporters in Petionville (where Martelly spends most of his time and money, and has large support base) were out in the streets, setting up flaming barricades, stopping cars, and breaking windows. Protesters sang political songs from the Aristide-era, inserting Martelly's name in all the appropriate parts.  At least one protester was in a pillaging mood, since he reached into our car and stole the cell phone out of the hands of my friend. From my house I could a half-dozen fires and heard spatters of gunfire throughout the night, although it is unclear who was shooting what.


    By 7:30 in the morning, the protesters had regrouped, and flaming barricades were visible up and down Delmas, the sounds of protesting oppression were clearly audible from my house: cheering, drums, chanting, screaming, the pops of tear gas and the booms of concussion grenades. Around noon we went to Place St. Pierre in Petionville, location of the old electoral office and site of much UN-Martelly tenison.  The UN troops used tear gas to keep the protesters away from the office, but they were releasing it basically next to a camp full of families. People (including children) inserted slices of lime in their noses to help with the pain, others smeared a citrus cream beneath their nostrils. At one point I saw the face of a woman sitting outside her tent transform with suffering as she began to inhale the gas and dove inside her tent. The camp inhabitants report that babies are particularly badly affected with gas and more than one child has passed out for over an hour after a tear gas attack. If the UN had the slightest consideration they would allow the protesters to move a bit closer so that at least the people they were targeting were the people actually demonstrating instead of innocent bystanders.

    From Place St. Pierre I hopped a moto with journalist TD in order to go get a sense of the town.  There were the chard remains of burning tires every few blocks, a tree pulled off the hillside to block the road, groups of protesters wandering through the streets, singing, yelling. Burning tires are an interesting thing: they are a very aggressive yet non-violent form of protest. They are a symbol of violence without requiring any violence itself. The aggression comes from the blaze and the huge amount of thick black smoke they produce. From afar a few tires can make it seem like a whole neighborhood is ablaze. And yet neither people nor property are injured.

        Things had obviously cooled off substantially from the morning, but there were still serious tension spots, like at the electoral office at Delma 41, were UN tanks had blocked off the streets and were having a stand off with hundreds of protesters. The whole thing has a rather theatrical element to it, since the protesters are throwing rocks at people wearing riot gear. Throw rocks, throw tear gas, run, repeat. We continued on our way, driving to ransacked the unpopular INITE (Unity) headquarters which were still smoking from earlier in the day when protesters burned the place down earlier after the security guard fired on them. Here the violence was real: rumor has it that protesters were shot, and in retaliation the whole place was destroyed. On the way back up Delmas we almost got de-moto-ed by some guys who had just set fire to a barricade and surrounded us, asking our driver to give him gasoline. When I said that we were the press (half-true) and that we needed to rush home to write articles and tell the world what was going on here, they were like 'oh, okay, no problem' and used a rod to move one of the tires out of the way so we could run through the black smoke to the other side and speed away.

     That afternoon at home I listened to Martelly's speech on the radio.  It was terribly brief, all he said was that people have the right to peacefully protest, and they should do so until VICTORY!  Kind of encouraging the protests, kind of not assuming responsibility for them.

     My two cents: These protests make perfect sense (and were rather predictable) in light of the past year of mind-numbing incompetence, corruption, negligence, and suffering.  The elections were a sham, and it is unlikely that any country or international authority is going to foot the bill for another try, especially with the obvious incompetence of the electoral counsel.  What I am curious to know is what Martelly means to people, exactly. I mean, why him? As a popular singer and a leader of Carnival, he is associated with positive, non- political aspects of Haitian culture. Having no prior experince with politics means that he is pure, uncorrupted.  But his political message, when its not completely vapid, is rather frighteningly right-wing. He talks about recreating the Haitian army (traditionally used only to suppress its own people), and he uses the motif of red and black, associated with the Duvalier era.  People seem to have forgotten that Martelly was a vocal opponent of Aristide (a widely beloved and now exiled president and 'champion of the poor') and supported both coups.  Its true that the elections are an embarrassment to democracy, and the people's anger and suspicion is completely justified. But they have seized on Martelly as their savoir not for what he is, but for what he is not.  I think they are using the language of politics to express otherwise unheard grievances: the need for work, the need for shelter, the need for respect in the eyes of the world. But Martelly has shown that he lack integrity and  is no more capable then Preval or anyone else to soothe international anxieties and bring much needed jobs to Haiti. I asked a woman  at a large pro-Martelly rally what Martelly would do for the people once he was president. Her response: "I'm not certain if Martelly will be able to change this, I mean we took to the streets for Preval too and he proved he wasn't able to do anything. But we have given professionals a chance and they have proven they aren't capable of helping us."

For me the sadness in this election is how little there is to aspire to.  All of the major candidates have made clear that they are far more interested in personal access to power than in the safety or stability of the Haitian people. Martelly, Celestin, and even Manigat have all issued statements claiming they think they deserve more of the vote. Celestin's people are threatening that they can 'unleash Cite Soliel' as if it was an animal in order to provoke a civil war. Martelly's people are claiming they won't stop until their man is president. Manigat thinks she should have won already.  These politicians are as embarrassing as the election that might bring them into power.

If you are intersted, look at my photos at http://picasaweb.google.com/erialcp/December8th2010#

Elections in Haiti

People lined up to vote in Port-au-Prince

Yesterday, after several weeks of rallies, concerts, and the occasional gunfight, thousands of Haitians turned out to vote. It was hard to believe yesterday that Haitians are politically apathetic. The atmosphere in the polling places was chaotic.People wandered from polling site to polling site, searching for their names. No one had been informed where they could vote. While the information was available on the internet, the internet is not accessible to most people in Haiti. In one school-cum-polling site, would be male voters stomped through the halls, shouting that their name didn't appear on the list since they were Martelly, rather than Celestin, supporters. Their agitated manner defined the mood, while those who were able to vote without problem passed silently around them. Even the president's chosen successor, Jude Celestin, was unable to find his name when he came to cast his vote.

Celestin himself seems harmless enough, but as Preval's chosen successor he represents continuity. Continuity is the last thing Haiti needs right now. However, since his campaign is funded by the government, his posters plaster walls all over the country, his campaign is broadcasted in 20 minutes slots on public television, airplanes fly his name through the sky. I've heard from many people that his cronies go into the camps and hand out money and pay people to register for his party. People take the money, but they assure me that their votes cannot be bought.

Jude Celestin posters in the gutter

There was much hand-wringing before the elections about whether or not they should go forward considering all the logistical problems of voter registration, polling sites, the of course the 200,000+ dead whose names were still on the voting lists. According to one person, the lists were both "bloated and incomplete". Some people are also angry that Lavalas, the party led by the exiled yet incredibly popular Jean-Bertand Aristide was excluded from participating from the elections. Many people who might have run on the Lavalas platform, for example front runner Ceant, ran with alternative parties. (Remember, in Haiti there are basically as many parties as their are candidates). People were also questioning the wisdom of having elections while so many people are living in tents and the cholera epidemic is spreading. All in all, the elections were being discredited before they happened

However, the consequences of not having the elections are also severe. The UN was pushing for the elections to illustrate that they had been doing significant work since the earthquake. The reconstruction process has been excruciating slow, in no small part because donors have been holding out until the new government is installed. Haiti politicians are notoriously corrupt and it seems foolish to hand millions of dollars over to a government that was on its way out of power. The peaceful installation of a new government is one of the most important elements to international support for reconstruction. Also, there is wistful possibility that new leaders might actually mean new governance in Haiti, and perhaps, even more wistful, a plan for the future. The government, the electoral counsel,and the UN, understanding the importance of stability for investment, probably hoped that a peaceful elections would be a litmus test for post-earthquake Haiti.

Too bad.

 

polling place in Port-au-Prince

Around 2 in the afternoon,12 of the 19 candidates came together in a press conference to denounce the elections as fraudulent.  Martelly, Manigat, Baker, Ceant, all the important front runners stood together and asked that the elections be canceled and that their supporters take to the streets. They claimed to have proof of voter intimidation and ballot stuffing, all part of a government plan to secure the election for Celestin. It would take some footwork on the government's part, for sure, considering hardly a single person in the past few weeks that I have met in the course of my interviews has expressed anything but disgust with Celestin and the present government.The press conference of the "group of 12," as some have called them, was played as a spontaneous intervention, but really, I wonder how long they had been planning this.  Why not call for the cancellation... before election day? 

Within a few hours, the streets of Port-au-Prince filled with people, mostly young men, chanting and dancing, waving Martelly posters high in the air. He was clear commander of the crowd (while it is easy to read this as Martelly winning the popularity contest, one has to keep in mind that those who support someone like the grandmotherly Manigat are probably more reliable to turn up at the polls and less likely to take to the streets). The march went up and down Delmas. At Place St. Pierre in Petionville the UN soldiers apparently used tear gas to disperse the crowd.  From what I saw, though, the mood of the crowd was wary and jubilant, but not angry. Some people even thought Martelly had already won.


The demonstrations lingered late into the evening. This morning, Martelly made a statement that the 12 candidates had made their demands, they had not been met, and the elections therefore would go on as planned. Basically, he backed down in order to allow the results of the election to still be valid. However, he did imply that the only means by which Celestin could win was fraud. Considering the massive public support this man is able to command, I suspect he has either been offered a position in the run off (this is just election round one, believe it or not), or knows that whether or not there was election fraud, he is still going to win. He is certainly distancing himself from the forceful statement he made the day before. Maybe it was a spontaneously organized (and quickly regretted) gathering after all.  However murky his motives, the fact that he did not call his supporters to further action may have spared Haiti a day of widespread violence.

UN soldiers prepare to meet the protesters

Does the Origin of the Cholera Matter?

Cholera is not native to Haiti. It's not a disease endemic to poor people the world over that spontaneously occurs when sanitation conditions reach a particular low point. The disease migration is actually a rather important historical pattern that has shaped the outcome of many a event: the infamous smallpox blankets that helped the British defeat the Native Americans in 1763; the decimation of the French forces by yellow fever in 1802 that paved the way for Haitian independence. Maybe I'm too optimistic here, but it seems that the cholera epidemic in Haiti today is not going to reach such catastrophic levels, but the point is, the introduction of disease matters. At the moment, all evidence suggests that cholera came to Haiti when a group of soldiers from rotated into a base on the Artibonite river. The sanitation system at the base leaves much to be desired: human waste is stored in large pools that are dug uphill from the river, and broken pipes on site have spilled untreated human waste into the environment. The people who live next to the base stopped drinking the water long ago.

Understandably, this is a very embarrassing situation for the United Nations mission in Haiti. At first they both denied the possibility that the base was responsible and insisted that their contractor was responsible for all matters of sanitation. Then the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)conducted tests and established that it was a South Asian strand of cholera, but insisted that the specific origin could not be established, and that energies should be devoted to prevention instead. Yesterday Dr. Paul Farmer of Partners in Health (also a special UN envoy) made a statement to the Associated Press, insisting that origin of the disease could and should be established, and that Harvard would be willing to do the tests. To claim that the strain could not be established, he said, was a political move to protect the UN from further possible embarrassment.

To date, approximately 442 Haitians have died. Its tragic but logical that the disease was introduced: its a natural consequence of migration, and the UN troop rotations are a form of migration. From beginning the UN could have just acknowledged that there might be unintended consequences to a influx of a large and diverse population of foreigners. Rather than denying the possibility and claiming infallibility, they could have devoted energy to making sure affected populations had access to clean water and rehydration salts. They could have used the blunder to make a show of UN compassion, coordination, and humanitarian assistance. It could have been an occasion from them to take the high road, and instead they did a cover up and hoped the questions of origins would go away.

Its too politically imprudent for many in the international community to take seriously, especially at a moment when Haitian disillusion with the military presence is high. And the lack of international outrage around this issue is very telling. The U.N. peacekeepers are suppose to be the good guys, so this is almost too horrible to contemplate. Hasn't any seen Erin Brochovich? The fact is the 430 deaths matter. Their families deserve an explanation. In this situation these people were not the causalities of their poverty, they didn't die of a lack of education, they died of cholera. Although from now on, cholera will be another way that poverty kills. And to claim that no one should worry about how they contracted the disease, that we would be wasting our time on "the blame game" or "pointing fingers" is tantamount to saying that their lives and deaths just don't matter. Which is maybe what the UN has been saying along. I didn't think so before, but now I am starting to wonder.

Haiti's Not Dying

Homeless and Handicapped in Cite Soleil

In the aftermath of the earthquake, doctors amputated thousands of limbs as a quick-fix procedure that would prevent infection. You see handicapped people everywhere these days in Port-au-Prince: an infant with one leg using a walker to stand for the first time on the edge of a soccer field; a legless man in a wheelchair cruising alongside the traffic on Delmas, going 20 miles an hour, swerving out of the way of rubble. Getting around Port-au-Prince on two legs was hard enough before the earthquake, before the buildings spilled out on to the street. So many limps, so many ghost limbs: uncomfortable reminders of the cost of survival. But some people have being dealing with handicaps in Haiti long before the quake. The other day Stan and I arrived in a Cite Soleil camp to interview a contact I had made a few weeks before. The camp, as it turns out, is run by a local association of the handicapped and the elderly and tries to cater to their specific needs. We interviewed Kevin, a thoughtful young man of 28 with a deformed arm who identified himself as the coordinator for Solidartie des Handicapes Moteur, a neighborhood organization that has been helping the handicapped since 1996. It was founded in reply to discriminatory treatment people with special needs were receiving in the neighborhood: verbal abuse, sexual abuse, general disregard of their human rights. I imagine social exclusion of handicapped folks happens in every culture, and Kevin gave an example of a man (now the president of the association) who was so afraid of how people treated him that he hardly ever left his family's house. In addition, the materials needed by the handicapped in Haiti are sorely lacking. What few wheelchairs are available are designed for limited indoor hospital use and absolutely inadequate for getting around a city like Port-au-Prince. They break too easily to ever be passed on to others. Canes and crutches are also in short supply. Solidartie des Handicapes Moteur (SOHAMO)worked to find materials like this, they helped the sick and elderly pay for prescriptions, and they even were running a small mirco-credit program when the earthquake struck. The organizations resources were destroyed, but a sense of solidarity among the members remained, and two weeks after the wake the leaders established a camp so that the elderly and the handicapped could help look after one another. There are over 300 people who live there. It's difficult but the camp tries to accommodate special needs: it is built on a cement lot and the tents are laid out to allow wheelchairs to pass easily between them. Kevin said that any group who wants to offer them aid or relief has to meet with them first to make sure that the services are accessible: for example, the showers come with seats for those who cannot stand.

The earthquake, Kevin said, is changing the way Haitians look at the handicapped. Everyone knows someone who lost a limb or was permanent disabled after the quake. It could be their children, their parents, their friends. So they have more patience now, he said, and they show more respect. The earthquake has also created a space of revindication: the demands of the handicapped are heard much more loudly, and it is time for the state to assume more responsibility for this portion of the population. Although Kevin says the earthquake brought nothing good for him personally, for the Haitian handicapped, this moment of tragedy might transform into a opportunity.

Let's Talk About Cholera

The bad news: as I'm sure anyone who reads this blog knows by now, thousands of people have come down with cholera in the Artibonite, about 50 miles north of Port-au-Prince. There have been about 300 deaths so far, all inhabitants of that region. The rumor mill has it that the UN might be responsible for the outbreak: the Nepalese base is located in St. Marc near the Artibonite region. In September there was a cholera outbreak in Nepal, so if there was a Nepali troop rotation recently, its possible (probable?) one way or another their waste made it into the Artibonite river, and into people's drinking water. Nothing has been confirmed, but its all over the radio and television here. The deaths in the north are tragic and tragically unnecessary (of all the things Haitians already had to worry about, at least they didn't have cholera), but this has the potential to become a disaster of major proportions if cases start appearing in Port-au-Prince, with several million people densely packed together in camps and slums. Whether or not this develops into a major epidemic, the cholera bacteria is now present in the Haitian water supply and will probably be a risk for people for many years to come. Even the DR is feeling the consequences, as tourists are reluctant to visit the island. So much for my mother coming to visit me for Christmas.

The mildly good news: So far there have been cases in Port-au-Prince, but they are all people who came from the Artibonite to the capital to seek care. So far, to the best of my knowledge, no one has contracted the illness in Port-au-Prince. Haitians and the international community alike are mobilized to educated people all around the country about water sanitation and to distribute water treatment tablets. Today I saw a van with speakers driving through the city announcing the wonders of hand washing and water treatments. Critics have been decrying the NGO world, saying they blew it (one particularly salient and well-written example can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/38nay48). The absence of a post-earthquake epidemic was the one success that the international community could claim, and now they've f-ed that up too. Putting aside the UN (they should really feel ashamed), I think it is too early to judge whether or not the development world has blown this or not. The introduction of the bacteria happened, there is nothing that can be done about that now, but really how treatment and prevention is really going to be what decides whether or not the NGO world here is legit or just a racket and a charade.

It's important to recognize that its not only the international community that is taking action. The responsibility for public health is also taken up by the Haitian government, community groups, and media outlets. The television and radio have been talking about cholera and prevention all weekend, the Ministry of Health is also mobilized and investigating the situation. Although in all fairness the Ministry of Health is probably inextricably tied to UN health organizations. But we must be on guard from thinking that this is solely the responsibility of the international world and ignoring the efforts, however constricted, of Haitians from helping each other. The expectation that Haitians can't take care of themselves is one of the modern day manifestations of colonial racism which is unfortunately still present in the development world today. Even if the reality is that Haitians need the NGOs for many of their most basic services like health care, we should never abandon the belief that Haiti should be taking care of itself.

Addendum: Or How My Job Could Be Better

In my last post, I attempted to articulate a sort of mission statement, to describe why I am here and what I hope to accomplish. Two or three days ago, as I wound down a nearly two hour interview with a vodou priest, he asked me why I was doing this, and when I told him, he asked me if there were others working with me. No, I said, it's just me. You are not enough, he said. I know, I replied. And he is absolutely right, for so many reasons. First of all, I sometimes feel overwhelmed by my goal of 200 interviews, but ultimately, two hundred stories are nothing if you are trying, in a way, to take a snap-shot of a collective trauma. Five hundred, a thousand, maybe those could be a significant sample. To do that I would have to be able to enlist other researchers to go out in the field along side me. Of course, what are the future researchers of my imagined audience going to do with a thousand interviews? Two hundred interviews, making probably a hundred and fifty hours of audio, is already an overwhelming body of work to sort through. Somehow in the coming months I will find the means to transcribe all of this, and eventually get it translated into English so that the interviews can be accessible to the most people possible.

Also, I'm not Haitian so my sense of nuances in the Creole language is poor, and there are myriad culture references that are inevitably lost on me. In my dream world, I find the funding to buy more audio recorders (or...video!) and develop this project future with a team of three or five Haitian researchers, who would actually be the ones conducting the interviews. I learn a great deal from the contributions of my Haitian translator and co., whose personal investment in my project helps me learn themes Haitians themselves think important to document. The questions they think to ask are the ones that probably matter most. These teams would go out into the field while I dedicate my energies to transcribing, developing the database, re-listening to the interviews and summarizing them to make them more easily searchable to others. Maybe I would build a website so that people could access them from anywhere, not from the privileged location of a New York or Haitian archive.

I wonder sometimes if its a delusion to think that anyone else will ever listen to these or care about them? I don't think so, but it all depends on how I can make them accessible to others.

Why I Love My Job

It comes and goes, but at the end of today's work I was filled with the sense that the Haiti Oral History Project is very important. It helps that my Haitian translator, Stan, is into to it and is becoming more of a collaborator than a mere translator. The fact that Haitians themselves see value in my work is deeply validating, because ultimately, as Stan said, the preservation of earthquake memories will be much more important for them than for the handful of international academics. Over the course of my interviews, more than one person has told me that I am the first outsider who has been curious about their lives and their perspective on the earthquake. Obviously that fills me with a great sense of pride, but the Project is much bigger than just human-to-human connection.

I have respect for people who are fighting to protect the human rights of Haitians, to guarantee them shelter and health care. But that is not the only work here to be done. These people have seen and lived through terrible things, and now they are in the process of reconstituting lives for themselves from what remains. They are subjects of the crude social and economic experimentation of Reconstruction. For most, the lives they find themselves living are not the lives they want. And yet they are going forward, one way or another, often in spite of institutions that are supposed to be helping them. Let me be clear that moving forward does not mean moving on up. You might ask yourself when you hear news of Haiti, how can people live that way? I assure you that Haitians in the camps are asking themselves the same thing. The experience of the earthquake and the disappointments that followed are being absorbed into generation that will someday be gone. The Haitians who survived are the last ones that who know the world before everything fell down. They are the last generation who can tell you from personal experience how drastically things have changed. The new lives that they build will shape where Haiti will go next. In order to understand Haiti's future, we need the people who have memory of all three worlds: before, during, and after. Ordinary people's stories have incredible value because of the intimate way they present the historical moment and because they have insight into how humanity survives even in circumstances meant to destroy or ignore it. The Haiti Oral History Project is an effort to document and preserve the thoughts and memories of some of these people because without them, the most intimate meanings of the earthquake will be lost.

Interviews in Canape Vert

Certain areas in Canape Verte are completely devastated. House after house flattened up the entire hillside, some sliding into the houses beneath them. Knowing this was a particularly affected neighborhood, I decided yesterday to go check it out and see if my translator and I couldn't talk to some of the folks still living there. Here and there people had rebuilt shelters on the site of their destroyed house. Several sites were being cleaned up, the crushed homes being broken down into rocks and dust and carried away, leaving the surface of the earth empty and open. In one interview, we interviewed a woman while sitting on a porch overlooking the remains of the house as a young man broke apart cement and sorted through the rubble. They are cleaning it for me, she said. That house had almost killed her. She had been trapped, unconscious, for three days in the ruins of her kitchen. All her children are alive though, and she is grateful to be alive too. She thinks about the earthquake constantly, she said. She doesn't feel well. She slowly turned away from us turning the course of the interview until she wasn't facing us at all. I put away the recorder. We walked on.

Marie-Ange's shack is perched tenuously on the hillside, a small shelter amid a field of rubble and twisted rebar. She pushed aside the blue curtain when we approached and stood on the threshold while we explained what had brought us there. We were standing, she said, on the site of her old house, the house where she had been conceived and lived until January 12 2010, when the house above her house fell off its foundations and came crashing into her house, causing it to collapse. She took us out back and lo and behold there was the neighbors house lurching nonsensically, violently, downhill. The roof curved forward over the floors beneath it and reached nearly to the ground. It still stinks sometimes, she said. She and her family had been in the house at the time, but luckily they had made it to the front room when the above house fell, since that was the only part of the old house that didn't fall. Marie-Ange was five months pregnant with her first child on January 12th. That day she started to bleed, and on January 14th she had a miscarriage since they were unable to find a doctor. She spent a month and a half in the nearby camp, ill from the failed pregnancy, before returning the site of her house. In the meantime the rubble had been cleared from the site for her by a young men of the local soccer team. For the past ten years she had sponsored them, making food for them and washing their uniforms, and they wanted to do something kind for her. After the earthquake the survivors of the neighborhood had organized themselves and established a committee that sought out aid distributions and divided it peacefully among themselves. The foreigners are the only ones doing anything for us, she said. Well, God too. I asked her if her relationship with God had changed since the earthquake. "He's farther away now," she said.

I asked her what makes her happy these days, how she finds comfort when she is sad. She said all she really wants is another child. Her friends have children, her younger sister has children, all she really wants is to be able to have a child.The miscarriage was complicated though, and she doesn't know if it will be possible. She knows it is a gift from God, and isn't for her to decide, but she is waiting everyday with hope.

Everything has changed. It's a whole new world, she said.

A Geography of Trauma

"Do you want to see the house?" We were driving up towards Petionville as the mid-afternoon rains started to mist the windshield. We drove past rows of painting that are mounted on the side of the road. In one, a the Marron Inconnu pulls the Haitian flag out of the crumpled National Palace; in another, dust settles on a post-earthquake destruction landscape. "Uh, sure. Why not?" I shrugged. I always wonder what they do with the paintings when it rains. Do they just leave them there? We turned off the main road, parked the car and got out. At the top of the driveway, he stopped. "This is where I stood in my boxers and called to report that there had been an earthquake." We continued down through the mist towards a small piece of land freckled with garbage, rubble, and few dumpsters. "And this was my house." I looked out over the emptiness. There was nothing there, but he spread out his arms. "Here's where the desk was, this where the wall fell down." Then he walked a few steps to the left."Over here, the kitchen. Here are where the stairs would have been, and here" he said, taking a few more steps and pointing to the sky, "was where my room was. I was sitting on my bed, right..about... here." He planted himself on the spot, defiantly alive and full of sadness.

The tour went on. I stood in the mist, kicking pieces of the kitchen floor and standing on top of a pile of rocks that used to form the walls. There were some shoes, a crushed video tape. "The landlords are happy. They've been wanting to tear this place down for years. They probably called America and asked for the earthquake just to get us out," he joked. He pointed to a flattened patch in the gray slum on the hillside and said that was where the church had been. "I knew it was bad because when I ran out, the neighborhood behind me was completely gone." We walked back up the drive way to the nearby hotel, which had stayed open after the quake despite that in certain parts the ceiling was elegantly cascading onto the floor. That's where he stayed for the weeks following the quake, sleeping in flowerbeds, writing reports, and feeling the terror of the first time with every aftershock that rolled through. As he told me his story, play by play, peppered with "This was where I was when...", I started to feel that I was full of ghosts. It's one thing to know that it happened, to know it was terrifying and that people were dying all around, for days. It's another to be standing on the spot with someone who points out the various places in eyesight that he saw people die. As witness to his rising anxiety, to the uneasy way he eyes the cracks in the walls, I was scoping out breadth and magnitude of that horrible moment with my heart. Standing there amid the ruins of his home, his loss of innocence could not be abstracted. It was on the ground all around him, beneath our feet. There is no good reason he survived, and he knows this.

I have known ruins. Despite the earthquake, the ruins of Port-au-Prince are still living. In fact, they maybe aren't ruins at all. They don't have the luxury of being ruins because they are still needed spaces. There is no where else for people to go, and so they live on top of, in front of, and even inside the spilled city. They are also soaked in living memory. Nearly every single fallen building is someone's profound loss of innocence, a place that full of someone's worst memories. With all these buildings taken together, we could compose a geography of collective trauma.

Not Everyone is Waiting for the Money

The island of La Gonave, like most of the Caribbean islands, used to be a pirate hang out. During the Revolution, General Leclerc asked Napoleon to give him the island as a reward for all is hard work trying to restore slavery to the island, that is, before he died of yellow fever. The island even had an American king for a few years the 1920's during the US Marine occupation. I spent the past week there, trekking around, talking about water scarcity and community organization and learning the art of Haitian cooking (hint: oil and tomato paste). Its a quiet, mountainous place, and the thick verdure in certain dark ravines gives you a hint of what the Haiti must been like back before Europeans laid claim to the land. Dusty uneven paths hug the mountain side as they stretch between thin fields of corn, and banana trees. Every mile or two a group of people are hanging out in the shade around a woman's basket of merchandise (always the same things), listening to the music on the radio. The island, which is a department of Haiti, has traditionally been neglected by the state and aid-organizations alike. It's not connected to the mainland, has only one town of any size, and is the home of maybe 30,000 people. La Gonave's state of neglect has not really changed since the earthquake, since the island did not suffer major destruction. But it's problems, especially access to water, are significant. According to a friend, institutional neglect has lead to a greater level of self-sufficiency among the islands communities. One of the communities I spent time in was based around a pastor's home up in the mountains. In 2000 a community organization called AJPDG (which translates into english as Young Peasant Association for the Development of Lagonav), based out of the pastor's home, established what they called the 12 Big Dreams, or goals that they wanted to realize in their area that are primarily based around education: free schooling in kreyol where students will have access to (potable) water, food, and where teachers will secure adequate pay. Sounds like goals certain places in America should be aspiring towards. In the past ten years this organization moved towards realizing many of its goals, without any sustained help from outside organizations. It was a pretty beautiful place. Apparently the way they fund their operations is by something along the lines of 'guerilla capitalism'. The schools run by their organizations have gardens where they teach the children about plants and farming, and the staples grown in these gardens is saved until well after harvest when food prices are high, when it is sold at community stores for a profit. The money is then reinvested into the organization to fund its further development. It's true that you don't come across sustainable community-based organizations like this everyday in Haiti, but AJPDG could be a excellent model for how Haitian communities can help themselves without relying on tenuous injections of outside financing or 'expertise'. Of course, AJPDG certainly benefits from the occasional presence of a mobile clinic or the gift of seeds for next season's crop. But what's important is that people doing the organizing are from the community, and can be held responsible for it's functioning over the long term, unlike programs that are set up by most foreign NGOs and do-gooder types. They are also the direct manifestations of the community's self-determination: they decided what they needed, it wasn't imposed on them. If more communities were able to organize like this one, its possible that the shameful tragedies of America's (and the world's) withheld aid could be mitigated somewhat.

Maybe that's an unfair comparison, since the communities on La Gonave were not shattered in the way that Port-au-Prince was. It's just refreshing to see a group of people getting things done instead of adhering to the mentality of dependence which can be so damning.

Port-au-Prince matters, certainly, but I think Haiti is still a profoundly rural society. Which means that the despite the earthquake, the fundamental problems of soil exhaustion, deforestation, erosion that plague La Gonave are still the key to understanding Haiti's predicament, even though they lack the shock value of a city turned to dust and uncountable deaths and never-found bodies. (Of course, these problems are magnified by the American economic imperialism that has driven many farmers out of business.) Is the earthquake primarily an urban problem? I'm certain the circulation of goods and produce was seriously disturbed by the earthquake. Also, the influx of food-aid seriously undermined the efforts of small-time farmers for a while, but now that most of that has been pulled, or never delivered, that might have normalized too. It's important to remember that the destructiveness of the earthquake is only a sign of Haiti's institutional weaknesses, not a primary cause of it. There are deeper, bigger problems that we might forget to address if we are only think about rubble removal and housing. Not to imply that those aren't important, but when and if those problems are even resolved, the long term problems of La Gonave and elsewhere in rural Haiti will have been continuing, unabated, and perhaps even exasperated.

Not Even a Hurricane

We've all known for some time that tents in Haiti that house hundreds of thousands of people were not going to cut it when the storms came. People say in passing, ah yes, things are bad now, and when the hurricanes comes,it will be even worse. The storms are coming, and things are even worse. On Friday there was a freak thirty minute storm with high speed winds blasted Port-au-Prince and killed at least six people. At least in one case, a tree fell on a tent, crushing a two children inside. Thousands of tents were blown apart, exposing people's fragile sense of normality to the elements. This wasn't even a hurricane! In the camp where I hang out, the tarps that made the roof of Twenty's tent were ripped off and the rain poured in over everything. It's great and all that this month the Haitian government is putting together a housing expo to show off possible model houses, but that maybe should have been done six months ago because right now peoples lives are on the line and there is nowhere for them to go. This is an absolutely unacceptable situation that has, somehow, become acceptable. People have begun to adjust to it. Hundreds of thousands of people squatting throughout the region in shabby houses made of plastic sheeting and tin is totally normal. Intolerably hot during the day, prone to flooding, and easily blown away in the winds, totally normal. It has been said that Haitians are very 'resilient' and 'adaptable', but as soon as this situation became tolerable Haitian leaders responsible for finding a solution were released from the pressure of 'NOW'. I want to believe this place is a time bomb about to explode with collective outrage, with people demanding basic human rights, but as far as I can tell, it's not. Some people say people are much to worried about meeting their day to day needs to concern themselves with social change. Others say people lost too much or too many in the earthquake, they are still in mourning. People will share their grievances with you when you ask, and the list is long. "Mwen blige akseptel": I'm obliged to accept it. You hear that phrase over and over. Maybe it's a reflection of the role of the church that encourages resignation and the patinent bearing of suffering. On tap-taps you see expressions like "The future is with God". The future may be with god but it's made by men and women. Are they obliged to wait for their homes to be destroyed in the next gust of wind? Are they obliged to wait for the hurricane that might crush their family as the huddle together to wait out the storm?

It's frustrating to see the intolerable become tolerable, but that might be because the Haitians know that the answer to those questions might be yes.

Voyage to the East Side of the Island

The first thing you notice flying over the east side of the island is the trees. I knew this already, I had looked at Hispanola on Google maps, I had seen the legendary line of foliage that divides east from west. But I wasn't entirely prepared for what the surviving jungle represented: the Dominican Republic has a more-or-less functioning state, a mildly healthy economy, a middle class. There are not women on every street corner selling produce in baskets, because many of them are inside, working at their jobs. Streets are paved, businesses have signs that light up at night. There are sushi restaurants for gods sake! Sushi! There were plenty of Haitians there, riding around on bicycles selling coconut juice or hawking paintings of cheerful tropical scenes on tourist strips. Haitians come to the DR for work, either cutting cane in the fields or working the informal economy. Haiti invaded the DR twice in the past two hundred years, at one point controlling the area for over twenty years. This has created a fair amount of resentment, and the supposed 'fathers of the Dominican Republic' on their bills are the men who liberated the country from evil Haitian rule. I got talked into buying a painting of a boat by a Haitian who claimed he lost eight family members in the earthquake. I feel like I am probably the only person to buy a trashy Haitian painting in the DR only to bring it back to Haiti. I felt bad for the guy. There is so much anti-Haitian racism in the DR, he said, I hate it here.

Santo Domingo's claim to fame is having the first everything in the New World. First colony, first church, first hospital, first fortress, first university etc. We're talking like 1490's, early 1500's. I got accidentally got picked up by a stray tour guide one morning who took me around the Zona Colonial and we peeked our faces into windows, looking at original this and original that. But when Santo Domingo is not trying to be original, it's trying to be New York. They recently installed a small subway system, New York style yellow cabs have begun to appear, and every other restaurant or laundry mat is named after the big apple. And of course, the Yankee's hats.

The ostensible reason for the trip, beyond learning to dance merengue and eating fresh seafood on the beach, was to go for Yom Kippur. There are only two synagogues on the island, both of which are in the Dominican Republic. Apparently in the Santo Domingo synagogue, the local rabbi had left some months ago, so a American ex-pat had been asked to lead the services. He is a modern orthodox Jew and he said he would lead under the condition that a divider would be put up to divide the men and the women of the congregation. The local Jewish community (also mostly ex-pats of various stripes but some Dominicans too) was not to happy about this but they figured they had to compromise when they had no one else to lead the service. In addition to that, the Yom Kippur service was led by a visiting Chabad Jew from Israel. So I found myself atoning for my sins and the sins of others at an orthodox Israeli service on a tropical island in the Caribbean. Dear Jewish God: May I never cease to be amazed by the confluences of cultural forces in the world. I gave fasting a try on Saturday, since I had never done it before, and let me tell you, walking around all day in wet heat not eating or drinking water leaves you feeling very very sorry for the things you've done. So sorry that I said screw it, I'm not even jewish, and drank a bottle of water. But even with this confrontation with my physical limits, my forays into the DR and into Judaism led me to a very interesting weekend.

Election Malaise

People all throughout this city are just waiting for something to change. However, its not the elections they are waiting for. On a small scale, some communities can address their own needs: clear a field of garbage to lay a garden, organize sports camps and schools. But on a fundamental and structural level this place is stagnating, and at this distance (both subjective and temporal) it doesn't seem like the November elections give anyone reason to get excited. Politics leave people pretty apathetic. That's a fairly natural reaction considering the assassinations, shootings, and disappearances that seemed to accompany the political activity of any kind from the 1950's till the early 2000s. Speaking out, organizing, attending a radical church, or even voting in national elections has historically led to massacres (usually at the hands or sanctioned by the Army or the secret militia of Tonton Macoute). So unless there is a reason to get excited, like Wyclef for example, its not really worth getting involved. Safer not to know and not to care.

Another part of the problem is that both sides of the great struggle of the recent era -Duvalierism and Aristide- are rather of washed out. Although you can't run as either as either of those groups officially (the first is in bad taste and the second is illegal), the political players on the scene now have roots in one or the other or both. The language that defined this struggle is still the language of politics today, although now it seems hollow, signifying nothing. Duvalierism is right-wing dictatorship, state control, order, noirism. A lot of people have been looking fondly upon the Duvalier years, which ended in 87, since the earthquake. You see lots of 'Bon Retour Jean Francois Duvalier' graffettied around town. The logic under a dictatorship at least shit would get Ladone. Aristides party, Lavalas, is the party of "the people", purporting to challenge American economic imperialism and make the amelioration of material conditions for the poor a top priority. Aristide made a name for himself as a supporter of liberation theology and daring and outspoke critic of oppression and violence during the junta that followed the Duvaliers. Through his preachings, considered radical by church and state, he gained a massive popular following that only grew the more times they tried to assassinate him. Though not a skilled politician, he was president for seven months in before being removed in a CIA backed coup in 1991. He was reinstated in 1994 with strict conditions, including the enforcement of neo-liberal political measures. He was president until 1996, then reelected again in 2001, but removed in another CIA backed coup (under Bill Clinton, who is now practically the Resident-General of Haiti), and has been in exile ever since. He party Lavalas was banned from elections, but many of the present day politicians cut their teeth in Lavalas (for example, the current president Preval served as Aristides prime minister).

All the major candidates in the current elections made their careers through involvement or accordance with one or another of these 'parties', or both. The fact that Alexis was a former prime minister, or Manigat was a first lady, none of these are actually endorsements. The fact that Manigat's husband worked for Duvalier and came into office in a discredited election and then was promptly duped out of the office and into exile, that's not really a glowing recommendation, is it? The fact that Preval was formerly involved in Lavalas means nothing about his contemporary political agenda. He's certainly not particularly worried about ameliorating the material conditions of the poor. The idea and the network of Lavalas might have meant something once, but it doesn't anymore.

The point is that the ideas that motivated both Duvalierism and Lavalas rouse little enthusiasm today, but another political language has yet to develop to take their place. People are still fighting the same old battles, thinking in the same old diachomy, and yet the realities of the world have moved on. I'm not saying that violent dictatorship is a thing of the past, or that addressing social inequality directly is passe, but rather the Haitian people aren't animated by the same ideas anymore, and politics has yet to catch up. The celebration of Aristides birthday, which has in the past brought out thousands of people, saw a demonstration of three hundred or so this year. Its possible that people too preoccupied with meeting their most basic necessities to get involved, but I don't think that's all of it. There's no lack of political conversation or engagement in Haiti, its just that people don't see themselves or a future they want reflected in anyone running. They just see more of the same old shit. The miserably low voting turn outs don't reflect only a lack of interest. They also reflect the deliberate rejection of a system that most people recognize as a charade. What Duvalierism and Aristides movement have in common is the charismatic leader. At the center of each is a magnetic personality that is able to mobilize thousands. They each came into power bring the promise of something new. The personalities in the up-coming elections are viewed as stale and compromised. That was the appeal of Wyclef: he was an outsider (less compromised), already filthy rich (less inclined to steal), and he mobilized people. Granted, his political platform was a over hashed pile of cliches, but the idea of him got people, especially young people, to want to get involved. The presidential debates this weekend were a joke. But this country doesn't seem to run on political platforms, it runs on political personalities, both of which are absent.

Camp Ground News

I've dropped by the camp a few times now. I turn off the dust filled street and pass through the gate, waving to women who crouch in the shade of the trees. I pass the tables of men and boys playing domino along the path (this is a new development)and onto the dirt soccer field. It's pretty nice now, with the lines drawn with white rubble and netted goals on either end. There's a tournament going on this month, with individuals from the camp putting together teams from the whole neighborhood. Matches every afternoon at 4. A few hundred people show up. The winning team gets a goat.

Beautiful Sabine is pregnant again. She's a few months along, maybe she just found out or just decided to tell me. She wants a son. She has asked me to be the godmother of her baby. I love Sabine. One afternoon a few weeks ago I was crying in the camp in the mist of some disaster, and she took my head in her hands and stroked strands of hair out of my face. She insisted on walking me home, and when we passed by a hot dog vendor she took out a few crumpled bills and bought us sausages with hot sauce. I ate it gratefully, and I have to say that hot dog, given to me with sympathy by a girl living with her two kids in a tarp shack was the best tasting street food I have ever had the pleasure of eating, and I hate hot dogs. I have agreed to be the godmother to her child. I'm sure I'm getting in over my head here, but I wade willingly into the unknown.

There was a warm welcome for me when I first navigated my way to Twenty's tent through the labyrinth of tarps, ditches, and patches of corn. Rosemead was there, along with Twenty's model-esque girlfriend Kitt and some of their friends. They turned up the the music on their new speakers when I arrived, broke out some rum, and we caught up with each other's news. How was America? You've gotten fat! You missed Twenty's show, but that's okay, there'll be another one. Your mom is well? She let you come here again? No new aid distributions have come. Keep in mind that this is all happening in Kreyol, a language I can control liked a three year old. But hey, who says you need language to be friends? I can hardly ever understand Twenty, but then I just look at Rosemead, his sister, and she patiently repeats whatever he says slowly, more simply, and I laugh and nod. Bon bagay. Every afternoon these kids set up a table at the soccer game and sell rum, beer, cigarettes spaghetti and fritay. They definitely know how to make the most of a little. I sit with them at the games, occasionally putting away bottles and passing out plates of food, all the while admiring the players as they kick theatrically above their heads and headbutt the ball back and forth across the field. When I wander off Twenty shouts out after me, wants to know where I am going, wants to make sure I am safe.

I came back to Haiti with a digital camera for Kevins, my twelve year old photographer sidekick (thanks josh!! he loves it!!). Last time I was here I would give him my camera for days at a time. Most of the photos he takes are of him and his friends looking various shades of badass in different locations around the neighborhood, but some of his photos are of life in the camp. I have to say that they are so much more insightful than any photo I could take of this place. People aren't posing for him. They aren't suspicious of him, and so his photos are small windows into the vie privee of camp life. He catches graceful moments of painful boredom : a man lounging on sheets of metal with his head in the lap of a lover; a red-haired and pot-bellied baby causally chewing on cardboard; women carrying water. People all throughout this city are just waiting for something to change.

Smackdown in Cite Soleil

Yesterday afternoon, as I was driving past Cite Soleil with journalist friends, I witnessed something that puts Haitian resentment towards the international presence here into perspective. As our car approached the intersection in front of the Commissariat (police station), a police and UN caravan emerged from the slum and pulled in front of us, with a large group of people running along side them. They looked more agitated and curious than upset. There was a man sprawled out in the bed of the police pick-up truck, obviously they had made an arrest in the slum. Chilean UN soldiers with flak jackets and guns took pictures of the scene with point and shoot cameras. As the trucks rolled into the Commissarat the crowd followed right up to the gates, until the UN soldiers started shouting and pushing them back across the street to let the traffic (us) pass through. We pulled forward slowly, doors locked and windows open, trying to figure out what was going on. Apparently we caught the attention of an intoxicated young man weaving towards us, small plastic cup of clarin in hand. He was shouting something and indicated to us to stop. I eyed the door lock uneasily as he sidled up to the car, but someone in the car said he was shouting that he was glad the press was there documenting this. A second later there was a Chilean UN solider at his elbow, shouting at him (in Spanish, most likely...) to back off from the car. He pulled at the guy, and when he kept pushing towards us the UN officer smacked the young man hard across the face. I gasped, the man doubled over slightly and brought his hand to his face, and the UN officer stalked off. We rolled forward a bit more and then came to a stop. The drunk man came up to the driver's side window, this time animated and angry. We were aghast that the UN soldier smacked him thinking that he was doing us a favor. He was like "you saw that? you saw that!?" and we replied something to the effect of "oh dude we totally saw that, that was so uncalled for i'm sorry that sucks." A crowd gathered around the car, listening to the conversation between the drunk man and the journalists. They wanted to know if we would write a story about this, show the world how Haitians are treated. It's no small surprise that some Haitians feel so degraded by the international presence that is basically running the country right now. They feel like they aren't respected or valued, just treated like poor dark garbage. They're opinions aren't listened to, their right to housing a joke, and in this case even their physical person is abused. I know a slap in the face is rather mild as far as physical violence goes, but it makes me think about what must happen when the threat is worse and there are no witnesses. Also, when violence like that is sanctioned, violence used by one foreigner to protect another group of foreigners from the inconvenience of having to engage with Haitians, it upholds the idea that the current occupation is just one more generation of oppressors in a long line of oppressors that can be traced back through the US occupation to the days of slavery, when blacks could only speak to whites with permission.

The cup of clarin had fallen out of his hand at some point, and in a few minutes the man had calmed down slightly and started to explain to us what had happened. Apparently that morning gang wars in the neighborhood had broken out into open fire, and several people were dead. Presumably, the arrested man was affiliated with one or another of the gangs. Did the police or the UN fire any of the shots, we asked. The crowd talked amongst itself, then decided that no, they had not. But the violence is really the NGO's fault, they explained. While they are not the ones pulling out guns, they aren't distributing the food equally among the different parts of the city, and this is causing group tensions to escalate to the point of violence. I wonder if the violence was an attempt to secure food resources, or if it was a expression of jealously and vengeance. You could argue easily against the logic that blames the NGOs for gang violence, but this is a place where the basic necessities of life are so hard to come by, given only by charity and sometimes taken by violence. I can see how easily those two forces can become interconnected in the eyes of the people who live at the whim of both.

The Comeback

After a four week hiatus in America, the Haiti Oral History Project is getting up and running again. I was so conflicted about returning. I will admit (as I did, often and loudly) that I dreaded going back. To put it mildly, Haiti is a very challenging place that tested me in ways I wasn't aware of and I sometimes failed. But I had already put the wheels in motion for a return trip and those wheels kept turning regardless of what I thought. My professor pulled some strings, broke some rules, and gave me his confidence to come back and do something awesome. But what kind of poor life choices had I made that this opportunity awaits me in godforsaken Haiti? It'd be so much easier to read books and drink beer with my similarly minded friends in Brooklyn, talking shit about the professors we aspire to become. What had I done?

I imagined simply not going. But within an hour of my arrival, the anger and fear in me melted. Tap-taps had new paint jobs, the smell of fritay my mouth water. Graceful women wove through the cars with baskets of avocados balanced on their heads. I started asking the guy who picked up me what he thought about Wyclef. Oh yeah, I remembered, I'm obsessed with talking with folks about Haiti. What is Haiti? Why is it? It was nice to have a month where I could try to talk about something else, but let's be real, I didn't succeed. If I hadn't come back I would have still be wondering the same things, just from afar, while those who engage with me do so first with interest, and then later with kindness. Here there are people who can feed my curiosity, who are as fascinated as I am, if not more so. This is where I belong. So I rented a room in boarding house and moved back. I've met a few of the folks who live here, asked timid questions about where my room is and how stuff works. I have a bed, a closet, a mosquito net, a pile of books, a few photos. It was a redundant of me to take photos of Haiti to decorate my room in Haiti. There will be no (mental) escape.

Underneath ripples of thunder the soft voices of my housemates drift off their balcony and through my window. The electricity flickers on and off. Whatever this becomes will be entirely my own creation. I know that sounds like hubris yet whether or not it is true it is what I believe.

Wish me luck, my friends.

The Wrestler: Haiti Round Two

One week in the States and I have decompressed enough that I am starting to be able to think clearly about Haiti and the Haiti Oral History Project. I have 48 interviews, ranging in length from twenty minutes to two hours. The interviews touch variously on politics, Christianity, trauma, health conditions, the camps, crime, Vodou, almost all in the context of the earthquake or it's shadow. Most are in Kreyol or French, a handful of them are in English. The first third or so aren't so great, in my opinion, just because I wasn't very comfortable yet in the position of the interviewer and I had a pretty boring questionnaire. Or I should say, I had a questionnaire at all. By the end I already had in my head the most interesting questions and I was much more flexible, trying to search out whatever the subject's concerns or angle was, and prompting them to talk about that. I think I have 40 hours of conversations.

Of course none of this matters unless of course I find something incredible to do with it. My plan to make a donation to an archive seems pretty puny now, honestly. Its not enough now amazing conversations with refugees and others only to stick them in an archive and hope maybe someone else someone else decides to dust them off and decide to give them a listen. My heart is inside of them, and pieces of other people's hearts are inside them too. Amara suggested that I write a play based on them. I could also start thinking of them as field work for a yet to be determined dissertation. Give up the slavery question altogether and start reading about the 20th century. I had no idea this side project was going to become so big. But really, in retrospect, what did I expect? How did I think I could spend two months ducking into refugee tents, climbing over piles of rubble, hearing stories about the worst day in the history of Haiti without it being a big fucking deal? But what can I do that will do justice to myself and my material? Publish? When I set out I was only a collector of stories and opinions, and now that's just not good enough. But it's a lot easier to do research than analyze it. So what next?

I've decided to go back. I talked to my department, and they dig my research, and they agree that the best crash course in all things Haitian is actually living in Haiti. So I'll stay in the States until September, pack up my apartment, and fly back to Port-au-Prince. But instead of taking the semester off I will design three independent studies, so technically I will still be in school and receiving my stipend even though I'll be living in Port-au-Prince and spend my days continuing my interviews. There are a lot of methodological points I should work out for Haiti Round Two. I'm aiming for 200 interviews. Whatever I end up doing will be a lot stronger if I have more documentation, more perspectives. I'll work more outside of Port-au-Prince, go into more camps. Talk with more people who aren't refugees, who still live in their houses and maybe believe they aren't that affected. Find Sean Penn and ask him what exactly what he thinks he's doing. If you are reading this and thinking "wow yeah claire really needs to figure out what she's doing" please email me and let's talk because I agree. All input welcome.

I feel like a wrestler who has had the crap kicked out of him and then climbs to get back in the ring with his teeth covered in blood. Let's just hope I'm not like Micky Rourke.

I Wish My Skin Would Just Shut Up

Haiti is far beneath me. Like ten thousand feet beneath me. I imagine her undulating mountains waving goodbye to me, or maybe good riddance. After two months, my ego and my heart are bruised. I have collided over and over again with the limits of my assumptions, and the limits of the assumptions of others. I opened up Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in the airport. The first paragraph reads: "I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me... When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." What perfect timing. Ellison is writing about being black in America, and the story he weaves is very specific to that experience. But the essence of the problem, the reduction of people into the complex of ideas we have about the color of their skin, I think can help me reflect about this small epoch of my life that is rapidly ceding into the distance. Of course, the difference between racial ideas about white people in Haiti and black people on America is that the ideas about white people are somewhat based in reality. I think for me the more fitting metaphor is language and speech. Being white in Haiti speaks certain things much louder than my voice. It makes my voice mute (or my person invisible). It speaks of disposable income, a life without hunger, the possibility of leaving that place. Of course this is not true for all people with white skin, it happens to be true for me, but those subtleties don't matter. They hear my skin speak of recent history of dependence of foreign aid, a longer (but related) history of slavery, colonization, and imperialism. It talks to them about a history of racism and resentment. My skin says all those things while I waiting for a tap-tap bus or buying an avocado. When I open my mouth to speak, I might say other things, like "I like salad" or "Tell me about the earthquake" but really what I am saying is: "I have the money to travel to another country and if you fuck with me my functioning government will come and get you so play nice." It is also saying things like "I am here to give you money and rice and tarps" which is particularly frustrating because before I came to Haiti I deliberately shed the presumption that I could 'help'. Many Haitians get confused, sometimes even upset, when what my skin says and what I say contradict. I can say whatever I want and most of the time it won't matter, people won't hear me because they are deafened by the noise of "my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination."

I am not upset if people don't want to be my friend. It would be one thing to be ignored and if people didn't care about me. Why should they? They have much bigger things to worry about that the random American chick who wanders around asking questions about things most would rather forget. But the thing is, they do care. They care a great deal. Just not about me. Strangers ask for my phone number, and if I give it to them, they will call me. Frequently. To ask for money, sex, a visa. Maybe just to say nothing, to remind me that they are out there. Often they call me to listen to what my skin says, the sweet promises they hear it whisper. Maybe if they befriend me I'll give them money, or my Ipod? Maybe I'll call up Obama on his cell phone and tell him to intervene on their behalf to try to arrange a scholarship for their son. But what I say with my voice doesn't resonate nearly so much, if at all.

Part of this is the consequence of poverty, and its overlap with race. Money matters so much in Haiti. Money is more important than blood. The reality is that money matters that much everywhere, but in places where most people have at least some of it, like America, we don't have to talk about it quite as much.

For example, in Haiti, many girls are looking for a man to spend money on her. "Does he have a job?" is more important than "Is he hot?". When I went out with K and her friends, they would not want us to talk to guys if they were too cheap to buy us drinks. At first I thought this was crass. But then I realized I have the luxury of being able to buy my own drinks, so I can look for other qualities in the guys I want to talk to. The guys being able to spend the bucks on me is not going to make or break the deal, since I can cover my own bases. But if I couldn't, I'm sure I would be looking for the same thing. K has no income and comes from a poor family. What she is looking for on a Friday night is a way out. Someone said to me here that it's next to impossible to fall in love when you have no idea how you are going to feed your family tomorrow. I believe that. As long as people's most basic material needs are not being met, why would they take the time to develop and intellectual or emotional connection, particularly to someone who doesn't share the same situation?. These two elements aren't even mutually exclusive, and they can both characterize an interaction or a relationship from one moment to the next. I'm not saying it's impossible, and I have had the honor of some serious connections with people who live in refugee camps (and outside the camps) with people who never asked me for anything. But it's rare. For the most part, everyone is trying to move along in the world, make it to the next day, and to many people I met in Haiti, I am the suggestion or promise of a means to an end.

I am flying towards America at hundreds of miles an hour. Haiti is far behind me, and for now it is the ocean and the clouds. I am flying towards building codes, towards laws against corruption, towards English. Most importantly, I am flying towards a cultural language I know more or less how to control. Obviously America too is an incredibly complicated and often fucked up place, and I still make social gaffs and get people pissed at me. There are plenty of places where I speak volumes without words, plenty of places I don't understand. Nevertheless, I will breath a deep sigh of relief when I get off the plane and feel the ratio between things said and things heard even out, at least a little bit.

Everything Falls Apart

The last few days have been taken up with a ridiculous drama involving the closest friend I had here, a woman named K. Summary: unbeknownst to me, a taxi driver that I interviewed made a menacing comment to K on the basis that he held her responsible for me not paying him double the price of a moto ride. Rather than letting it go, K freaked out and wanted to go the police. While I consoled her, I did not offer up contact information for the guy. I told myself that since it was given to me for the purposes for my research, it was not up for available to be used against the dude. That and because the Haitian police are really scary people. Of course, research ethics doesn't make a ton of sense outside of academic circles.

Flash to K storming into Camp Trezalie with a police officer friend in a rage, intent on poisoning my friendships there by breaking all my confidences in her and adding some straight up lies to sweeten the pot. Not really sure why, either to punish me or to bully me into giving her what she wanted. I don't know exactly what happened since I wasn't there. Flash to me on the back of motorcycle speeding to Ft. Dimanche, the notorious police station where under Duvalier people went and never returned, in order to get information about a camp friend who I had been informed was arrested in the course of K's madness. Then to me riding to Trezalie in the back of a police pickup to investigate said arrest, only to find out it was elaborate lie constructed by my friends there to observe my reaction, to judge if I was really the awful person K had portrayed me to be. Finally, flash to me thanking Haitian police officers and awkwardly telling them their services weren't necessary after all. Yet the damage had been done, and some of the friendships I was building there were seriously wounded. The rest of my days (for better or for worse there were only a few) have been spent making peace offerings and avoiding certain people and situations.

This situation breaks my heart, especially since my friendship with K is definitively closed. I always knew she was a little nuts, but I didn't know she was capable of being so irrational. But really, what is the most revealing is that the motivations that animated this drama make perfect sense to everyone involved except me. There was so much going on in this situation that I didn't see. My unintentional betrayal of loyalty, the hot-headed vengeance, the manipulation of those who felt betrayed by me. Maybe it was the first time K realized that her friendship with a the white girl could have negative consequences, and then the white girl didn't even back her up. In my circles, people tend to opt for discussion over vengeance, people don't make up elaborate lies just to see what happens. Of course there was a whole cultural language going on that I just don't understand. Kreyol is more than a spoken language, and I don't speak it very well. The guy who threatened K was a D.P. and a rasta, both of which make him a particularly threatening character to Haitians. Maybe she was right to be terrified by his passing comment. But if that is the case, do you want to piss him off further by getting the cops involved? Cops can make people disappear. To her, the fact that I didn't furnish the information she needed was a betrayal of loyalty. By protecting him I was taking his side. But then, if he did something more serious to K, or if me, would I hesitate? Part of it is stubbornness, I guess, the refusal to allow myself to be bullied.

When I talked about this story with other Haitian friends, everyone advised me to have been more careful with my choice of friends. It seems that many Haitians think advice is telling you what you should have done differently in the first place. Not helpful. When I first arrived in Haiti, Sandra told me she didn't like having friends. Get involved with people and trouble will follow. I think I understand what she means. Is the lesson to be drawn here really to just to trust people less? Maybe it's to not become the constant companion of crazy drama queens. But to reduce our friendship to that would also be false, since we spend many hilarious and adventurous weeks in Port-au-Prince. I owe her a lot. Besides, mistrust is contrary to my nature. Particularly in Haiti, where I have such a strong desire to give common humanity every chance to seep through the boundaries of race and class that divide. What I am learning is that maybe those boundaries are not as porous as I would like to think. When everyone is happy, anything seems possible, but as soon as someone is angry I am called out as an outsider to the 'race', I'm a white person who came into their lives and they accepted despite the color of my skin. With the folks in the camp, I think things are going better, we talked about the situation enough that they understand what happened from my perspective. I think they were impressed that I went to Ft. Dimanche to look for my friend and then came to the camp with police officers to figure out what happened. I haven't talked to K since. I saw her twice, out and about, but we didn't talk. I could have tried to reach out to her more and repair things, but first of all I honestly don't think she would understand or would want to understand my perspective; second of all I don't have room in my life for someone who could do something that cruel. But the real lesson, perhaps the most important, is to how every action and interaction is informed by a whole slew of cultural meanings, both in the intention and in how it is perceived. Makes me wonder how often I am sending messages I have no control over because I don't know how to read the meanings I create.

The Revolution and The Earthquake

I am, ostensibly, an aspiring historian of the Haitian Revolution. So what does the Revolution have to do with the earthquake? Depending on who you ask, God killed those people, or the government killed those people, but often both potential C.O.D.s are located in a larger narrative of Haiti. For many Protestants, God punished Haiti for a whole slew of sins which are rooted in the (mythical?) origins of the Haitian Revolution, the Bois Cayman ceremony. It's not just Pat Robertson that says this kind of stuff, but at least Haitians get the facts right. Weeks before the uprising of August 1791, a group of slave leaders met at Bois Cayman, sacrificed a pig and drank its blood, and basically pledged themselves to the devil (or Vodou gods) if he would help them leave slavery and expel the white people. For many, this is Haitian original sin: of course a country that was founded with Satan's help would only end up badly! In my interviews this is brought up fairly often as a reason for the earthquake, but I must stress that it's usually in conversations with particularly religious Protestants. So was it a cleansing? Getting rid of those who are particularly stained by evil? Or was it violent message to those who lived to repent repent repent? Either way, God finally got around to punishing Haiti about 220 year later for achieving freedom from slavery through violence. (The follow up question to this is: Do you think the slaves of Saint-Domingue should have consented to stay in slavery? Often the answer is yes. I mean, look at Guadeloupe! they say. Sure they got reenslaved, but they're a French department and we're dirt poor. Would forty more years of slavery really hurt that much? Aime Cesaire came to a similar conclusion near the end of his career: Sure the Haitian fought a glorious revolution against a system of profound oppression, but what did they do with their freedom? Not much.)


The Haitian Revolution is also invoked to explain the sorry state of Haitian politics. And in light of the earthquake, the criminal neglect of the Haitian state is cast in the limelight. Sometimes their neglect held up as a reason so many people died in the quake and the days after. One of Haiti's greatest problems is a state that is either predatory or absent. Power is more interested in maintaining itself than doing anything with the power (I guess that's not that particular to Haiti, but its consequences are more devastating here) and this goes way way back. During the course of the Revolution and in its immediate consolidation, rather than allying, the leaders successively stabbed each other in the back until there was only one man left standing. Dessaline himself had a hand in the fall of Toussaint Louverture, then Dessaline was murdered by Petion and Christophe, who then split the country in two, until they were both dead (natural death and suicide) and the country was finally unified by Boyer in 1820. The founding fathers of Haiti pioneered the dog-eat-dog Haitian political tradition and blatant profiteering that has defined the Haitian state since. I try to ask about how this mentality has been perpetuated across the generations, but I have yet to find an answer. But many people know that their current disillusionment has deep deep roots, and use history to explain the rubble and the death. So much for the Tree of Liberty?

Part of me revolts against these mentalities, the part of me that believes the Haitian Revolution was something spectacular for all of humanity, in the Laurent Dubois-Susan Buck Morss sense. But it's true that the Haitian Revolution is only spectacular if you disconnect it from everything that came after. The enslaved overthrowing racial oppression is and establishing their own state is a magnificent moment, but it takes a certain fetishization of 'equality' and 'democracy' and 'racial equality' to let the story end there. I mean, racism never left Haiti. Democracy has never truely been implemented here (I'm not saying that I think it exists elsewhere...). Equality? Maybe in Haiti everyone is 'black' but there is no economic equality, social equality, political equality. On an intellectual or humanitarian level the Haitian Revolution is covered in glory, but as soon as you try to tie it to material success, it stops shining so much.

The Mountains of Haiti

In one of my interviews yesterday, somebody commented on how this land used to be the "Pearl of the Antilles" and now it is the "Capital of Garbage". I have to admit, this last slogan is rather apt. At least for Port-au-Prince. There are parts of Port-au-Prince, particularly in Centre Ville, which have mountain ranges of garbage cutting through the streets. Some of this mountains are smoldering or on fire, since burning trash seems to be the only way to reduce its mass. I was walking down a road yesterday that was tiled several layers thick with flattened plastic bottles grayed with mud. I hopped an archipelago of trash to keep my flip-flops out of the fetid water. Bottles, plastic bags, styrofoam cartons, food scraps, rubble, plastic water sacks, wrappers are several feet thick in the canals, several feet high in the major intersections of the markets. This shit adds up. Some people (mostly foreigners I have talked to but some Haitians too) take the filth of the city to reflect the nature of the people. What kind of people would accept to live like this? Why do they have so little respect for themselves and their land that they denigrate their city like this? The problem of perception here is multifold, but my brief opinion would be that the people who share this opinion don't spend much time in Haitian homes, or in the camps, or simply aren't very observant. Individual Haitians have no control over the streets: those are public spaces that in many societies are claimed by the state. Also, at least in the States and in France, the state or the municipality concerns it self with the regular collection and disposal of garbage, in order to avoid exactly the situation we witness in Port-au-Prince. Individual Haitians have very little control or influence over large public spaces, since there are no channels for them to express a collective voice. But over the spaces that Haitians do have control (the body, the home) most exercise a great deal of concern with beauty, cleanliness, and order. The streets may be full of rotting garbage, but you will not find a spec of trash in most households. Even in the refugee camps, where people live under tarps on fields of mud, most tents are swept out, (even if the floor is rocks), garbage removed, things placed in order. For the most part, Haitians keep themselves remarkably groomed, an many dress much much better than me or my friends in the States. They might not have a roof, but shirts are spotless, children uniforms pressed, women's nails and hair are perfect. That's the thing: everyone is aware of the degrading state of the city, but they don't accept it (even if their waste-disposal practices help create it). No one thinks living like this is okay. People carry handkerchiefs in their sacks to wipe mud off their shoes. Even if they are obliged to live in mountain ranges of garbage because their is no force that cares for the healthy of people as a whole, many Haitians choose to define themselves in contrast to their surroundings by their personal comportment and their domestic spaces. While they can't control much, what little they can control reflects a great deal of personal dignity. You need dignity to live in a place like this (although as I have written about before, dignity on a national level is another thing). Obviously, I am not speaking for every single Haitian, like the man naked and covered in dirt that was walking through the electronics market the other day,but I am talking about most. Often when people on the outside think about Haiti, they speak and write as if you would have to be not fully human to tolerate these dehumanizing circumstances. But in the camp there are people who have planted rows of flowers and put up picket fences outside their tarp tents because if they have to live there, at least its going to be beautiful.

Addendum: After spending an afternoon in the Champs de Mars camp doing interviews, I think most of what I wrote here needs to be qualified. There is a certain level economic class associated with the nice hair and the clean shirts, even if it's not a very elevated class. There are many people who don't have the means to reach this level, and they aren't able to or aren't concerned with defining themselves against the poverty of the city.

Cake and Eat It.

On the possibility of expanding the HOHP.....

Dear H.
Thanks so much for your straight-forward feedback.  This is exactly the information I was looking for.  I haven't made any decisions yet (obviously), I'm just trying to feel out what my options are.   If I intend to be a scholar of Haiti, I feel deeply that working to understand of this moment, post-earthquake reconstruction, is one of the most valuable things I can do for myself, since everything in the future will be defined by the possibilities that are stewing right now. And I'm on to something. I have learned more about Haiti and its history by living here for six weeks than I have learned in two and a half years of study. Through my interviews I have participated in some amazing situations and conversations, and I am looking for the opportunity to continue to collect interviews if possible. I think that what I'm doing here has the potential to very useful resource for future scholars of Haiti.  I've recorded fascinating and diverse perspectives, memories, stories, religious and political rants. Right now I have about 40, and if I stayed longer in Haiti I'd aim to collect 200. I know the intentional creation of historical documents is not the normal work of a historian, but I see it intimately related to my training.  As to my dissertation, this summer in Haiti might also have recalibrated my focus. Slavery seems so far away when there are equally dehumanizing and possibly more insidious forms of oppression that are shaping lives all over Haiti today.  Of course, it all goes back to slavery in the end.

   As far as the job,  I have been offered a position with The Natural Builders, an alternative construction consulting organization (think buildings made of glass, rubble, tires), which would give me the necessary to stay for a period of time and continue my own work on the side. The job itself is not the reason to stay, but would give me an meager income while I continue traveling around Port-au-Prince with a audio recorder. The ease with which I was offered the job makes me wonder if I could shop around for something a little more substantial, but before I do that I need to know whether staying is a viable option.

   So, that's what I'm thinking. I will confess what you no doubt already suspect, that I'm not entirely sure where this is going to take me. But I have the profound sense that staying here and devoting more effort to trying to wrap my head around this place will be invaluable for the rest of my scholarly life, particularly since Haiti right now is in such a vulnerable place, so full of possibility. But I don't want to risk my fellowship or cause any irresolvable problems with my academic career, so if it doesn't work out that I can stay, that would be okay. In the case that I return to NYU in the fall, I would like to discuss creating an independent study where I can write a seminar paper based on my summer of research. 
---cp

H., my thesis adviser, wrote me back, and miraculously he is supportive of these developments, but he has to speak to the Dean on my behalf to request a leave of absence when he returns to the country from his academic voyaging. He also said a semester sounds more reasonable than a year. So for now, we camp out and we wait. For a while I thought I might drop out of grad school and move to Haiti, but maybe, just maybe, I can have my cake....

Worthwhile Feedback on Fight. Racism.

CT: ‎"I thought I was making the distinction between a whore, someone who doesn't mind being talked to like that, and a woman who has the right not to be aggressively sexualized." Are there women who don't have the right not to be aggressively sexualized in everyday conversation? Do women who sell sex give up their rights?

UT:Sounds like a pretty awful conversation all around. Can't help but get sticky when dealing with a society where race and class are so incredibly intertwined, and feminist ideology is so foreign, that making a perfectly reasonable feminist declaration of boundaries would be seen as a class/race distinction that highlights your outsider role, and makes you look elitist, as though you consider yourself above 'normal' male-female relations by virtue of your whiteness as well as your wealth, because that is the context they have for someone refusing to accept being treated as a sex object, even though they are undoubtedly by and large inured to rejection of advances from the women in their own community. In this case, rather than shooting them down from within their existing context for male-female relationships, it looks more like you've made an attack on their cultural identity, creating a degree of cognitive dissonance that's almost bound to result in social exclusion, angry men not listening to your point of view at all and all that.

I hate to say it, but in terms of maintaining trust and respect with the locals, you'd probably be better off making claims as to your own chastity, calling them on going too far, but avoiding taking it to a place of principle, even if that principle can be taken as a given here in the US, unless of course you're interested in having these sorts of conversations again. Without the cultural context and background, I'd bet feminism is a tough sell, to men anyway, and very likely to lead to these sorts of misunderstandings. Even among the poor here in the US, it's by and large a different world for women. Not defending their sexism, just pointing out the weakness of your position regarding actually changing or even opening their minds on the subject. If that's really important to you, maybe there are ways to go about it, but I don't know. Maybe I'm going on inadequate information: I'm not really sure what sort of culture you're involved with in terms of feminist progress, but it seems likely to be the case, from what you've written.

In that vein, how is the spread of feminist ideology accomplished in other nations? How can common ground be found with the men of more patriarchal societies so that meaningful dialogue can be built? Is it possible if there isn't much pressure being exerted by an already active women's movement, or does cultural resistance to an existing movement impede open discussion? Might be worth some study. And in regards to your project, what space does feminism occupy in Haiti? Is there any meaningful cultural understanding of the principles? What's normal for sexual relationships in that culture?

Anyway, sorry you had a rough one. Love the updates, though, really interesting stuff.

CP: @CT: you are absolutely right, and this was brought to my attention by someone else already. Every woman has the right to sexual respect, but there are some women (regardless of profession, I wasn't thinking literally when I used the word whore, although if I am assuming a feminist standpoint I really should be more careful) who chose not to assert it or don't feel like they are in a position to assert it.

@UM: first of all, thank you for taking the time to be interested in my ramblings, and for your serious and thoughtful feedback. There were so many assumptions on my part that in the moment I didn't recognize as such. I love your comment about men being inured to rejection from women in their own community, that is pretty spot on. I really didn't have to go on principles, I think that was certainly one of the first wires I tripped over. For the reasons you clearly articulate, I didn't have to make such a big deal about being heard. Ultimately it didn't matter, and the ideologies I was speaking from mean nothing here. I should have dropped it, or gone about it a totally different way. From what I can tell, feminism is a bit of a bad word, with associations to homosexuality (very bad here) and efforts to widen the abyss between Haitian men and women I have seen few signs of a self-conscious women's movement here, although I did meet with an group that organizes emotional and legal support for female victims of sexual violence. I asked the spokeswoman if she considered it a feminist group, and she recoiled from the word. But there is also a government ministry for the condition of women (not clear what that means) that supposedly addresses issues of sexual discrimination. Relations between men and women don't seem particularly 'progressive' (more than one person has used terms like "archaic" or "middle-ages" when describing sexual dynamics, but many people say stuff like that to describe Haitian society in general). Some of the younger generation I have talked to though say that they have very different expectations from their elders, so maybe in the next twenty years or so that will pan out into cultural change. But in the mean time, lots of accepted male polygamy and girls aspiring to be mothers when they grow up.