What I Do Here

You might wonder what exactly I am doing here in Haiti. I conceived of this project a few weeks after the January 12th earthquake. When I first learned of the earthquake I felt the impulse go to Haiti right then and help dig people out of rubble and bring water to those with none. Luckily for all, my friends made it clear that as a grad student, not a doctor, I would have very little to offer to those with lost houses, lost relatives, broken limbs. In such a disastrous situation, I would probably have need to be cared for more than I could have cared for anyone else. But after reflecting for awhile, I concluded that being a historian did not make me totally useless. It seemed to me Haiti future(s) were going to be shaped in the crucible of the earthquake and its aftermath, that whatever was coming in these next years would only make sense it light of this particular present moment. But of course, what you read in the newspapers and in UN press announcements doesn't seem like it could be real. That's because it's not. Most mainstream media sources, in my opinion, are paying more attention to what the audience whats to hear and read about Haiti than what is actually happening on the ground. I decided that I can try to create non-institutional documentation of this present moment so that researchers in the future can have alternative voices and opinions about the earthquake and reconstruction. By trekking around Port-au-Prince with a notebook and a tape recorder, I am creating what I hope will become an archived collection of interviews with all kinds of Haitians about their thoughts on the earthquake, conditions of living in Port-au-Prince, the international occupation of Haiti, and what is being done to move this country forward.

Three weeks in I can say with confidence that this is easy to say, and very hard to do. First of all, access "all kinds of Haitians" is a joke. I mostly hang out in one refugee camp close to my house where I have made some friends. What does that say about my the representativeness of my samples? While it is easy enough to get interviews with people, few people are willing or comfortable sharing their true perspectives with me. In regular conversation people are open and animated, but as soon as we are in "interview mode", answers to my questions become brisk, a few words or a single sentence. Or people say what they think they should say to a "blan" like me. For example, recentlye I saw people come to blows over aid distribution, but each time I ask if there is ever any conflicts between people in the camp, people say "no, never, we live together like brothers and sisters." Part of the problem, I know, is that Darly is often my translator, and he is one of the camp leaders. Thus people often makes comments about how the leaders of the camp do a great job keeping people safe and organized, or how Darly himself is personally to thank for their well being. While there might be a certain degree of truth to that, hjs presence definetely influences responses. I know they see things they won't talk about with me because I see them too. But my observations doing matter in the frame of an oral history project, it's all about the perspectives of the people I interview. I can't add a footnote to the interview transcription that reads "untruth". If I was an anthropologist I could do a whole schtick on the per formative aspects of the interview and the image of camp-life that people want to project for whatever reason. But I'm not. Of course maybe in the future the line between history and anthropology will have been worn thin.

The other problem I am realizing I face is that I never really chose what exactly I am here to find out. I can't document a whole society. I lack focus, or maybe am realizing I never had it to begin with. Since I am spending so much time in the refugee camp, I find myself trying to document the conditions of life there, and the local history of the camp. But I also am meeting dancers, poets, and artists, and want to have a series of conversations with them about the artistic community in this city. I am talking to Evangelicalists and Vodou priests about religion. And everyone has a story of the earthquake. In conversations among Haitians, "are you a victim?" follows shortly after "hi, what's your name, how are you?". I'm also interested in documenting the various ways people invoke history to explain the present situation: either they say nothing has changed, it's always been like this; or they blame or bless the Revolution; or if Duvalier was here things would be different; or the Holocaust is connected to the earthquake through roundabout ways. This is why I suspect I will be a shitty academic: I can't privilege one question over all the others that animate life, plant my flag and dig my little intellectual hole. I'm interested in everything.

Before I got here I thought society was a deck of cards and the earthquake was 52 card pick-up. I thought I could get here and document how everything was falling into place in new Haitian order. Document the variety of possibilities that were being shuffled through before the powers that be settled on one. But now I'm here and I realize that even though everything seems unstable and up in the air, this is in fact the new Haitian order. No one is going to come and remove the rumble. No one will be picking up these cards. Some people plan on staying in these tents for years. Aid money trickles in with bags of rice and malaria pills. But no one is going to build houses for these people, or factories for them to work in. No one is going to pave the roads to keep the rubble and dust from settling in the lungs. It's just like this now. On the socio-political level, things are pretty depressing. But on the individual level, life just goes on. I am in awe of the human resilience I encounter on a daily basis here. People here are so strong, especially the women. Guys mostly just sit around in the shade, listen to the radio and joke among themselves. Women on the other hand are constantly busy: are selling vegetables in the street, carrying gallons of water on their heats, cooking for the family, constantly washing clothes. That's really what I want to document. How in a place where the state does absolutely nothing for its people, people continue to do things for themselves.