A Vain Fascination: Writing from and
about Haiti after the Earthquake
 |
| Raoul Peck—a leading member of the the pro-2004 coup G184 and Collectif Non! |
Abstract
In
the wake of the huge earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010,
Haiti instantly became the focus of media attention across the world. At
that moment, the tropes that had imprisoned Haiti for two centuries
(barbarism, savagery, vodou, the land-that-God-forgot, etc.) began to
resurface. Some Haitian intellectuals sought to combat those images, but
in so doing they inadvertently revealed their complicity not only in
the negative discursive construction of their country, but also in the
economic and military re-colonisation of Haiti over the last decade.
Adept in the fabrication of replicas of ‘post-political’ discourse,
These Haitian intellectuals are in reality a subset of that country's
morally bankrupt political class.
Introduction
Haiti
is a country that rarely registers on the consciousness of news
media—outside of the USA and Canada at least—unless its president is
being deposed or it has been hit by a hurricane. But after a
catastrophic earthquake struck Haiti late in the afternoon of 12 January
2010, the world's media cast a spotlight on that country that continued
to shine for several weeks, a spotlight that has been re-lit on each of
the three subsequent anniversaries—albeit with diminishing intensity.
However, that spotlight left some important issues in the shadows. My
purpose in this article is to cast a little light into those shadowy
recesses. For reasons that I will explain shortly, Haiti was immediately
represented in the world's media by a small group of writers who
enjoyed some name-prominence in France, Canada and, to a lesser extent,
in the USA. Their neutrality or objectivity—not to mention their
‘authenticity’—appeared to be guaranteed by the simple labels ‘writer’
or ‘intellectual’ or ‘educator’. But as I will attempt to show, they had
a history. And that history was one of an active, if disavowed,
complicity with the reactionary forces—both within their country and
outside of it—that have struggled to maintain Haiti's unenviable status as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
Reaping What You Sow
Haiti
is the quintessential subaltern: deprived of the right to speak and
subject to decisions taken by the elites both inside and outside of the
country. Haiti has always been ‘known’ primarily through the narratives
constructed about it in the centres of imperialist power. In finally
defeating Napoleon's expeditionary force in 1803, Haiti endowed itself
with a symbolic power that far exceeded its actual strength: throughout
the nineteenth century, the great dread of the French
bourgeoisie—haunted by memories of the Parisian mob during the French
Revolution—was the ‘haitianisation’ of the popular classes, and if Haiti
was not recognised by the Land of the Free until 1862, after the
secession of the South, it is because of the dangerous example it had
set in destroying the institution of slavery. As the Haitian sociologist
Jean Casimir has noted, Haiti has always been a country that ‘disturbs’
(quoted in Dubois, 2012:
11). All forms of economic terrorism, backed up when necessary by means
of gunboat diplomacy, were used to subdue this disturbing presence, but
the weapon of choice has always been language. Haiti was imprisoned in
the trope of barbarism. It was certainly no coincidence that it was
during the USA's brutal occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) that lurid
novels started to appear portraying Haiti as the Devil's own land,
inhabited by cannibals and zombies: these texts were little more than
projections of the occupiers' own brutality onto their victims. Many
more tropes—by which I mean rhetorical constructs harnessed to an
ideological agenda—have followed: despotism, corruption, coups d'état,
vodou, poverty, violence. In January 2010, with the dust still not
settled on Port-au-Prince, these clichés began to be resurrected by the
world's media. In March, the evangelical preacher Pat Robertson assured
his listeners on the Christian Broadcasting Network that Haiti owed its
freedom to having made a pact with the devil (The Huffington Post, 2010). The likely historical reference in Robertson's claim is to the
semi-legendary ceremony at the Bois Caïman in August 1791: presided over
by a vodou priest and priestess, it is widely held to have marked the
start of the slave revolt (Dubois, 2012:
92). But the idea that Haiti was a cursed land was repeated in
newspapers and television studios far more sympathetic to the plight of
the Haitians than Robertson and his fundamentalist flock. So pervasive
was the idea that Haiti was the object of a presumably divine
malediction that it would be tedious to attempt even a cursory
enumeration of those articles. The article published by Le Monde
on 15 June 2010 under the banner headline ‘Haïti, la malédiction’ (The
Curse on Haiti) and signed by modern historian-cum-reporter Jérôme
Gautheret could serve as the epitome. In that article—where, amongst
other things, the US occupation is described as an attempt to ‘restore a
little order [to the country]’—Gautheret pulls off the tour de force
of equating two centuries of interventions, exploitation and
brutalisation with a succession of natural catastrophes (Gautheret, 2010).
No
sooner had these first ill-judged articles appeared than voices were
raised in protest. The voices in question were not those of Haiti's
accredited representatives—its politicians—but those of Haitian writers
and artists. By a curious happenstance, on 12 January 2010
Port-au-Prince was full of Haitian writers. The ‘Etonnants Voyageurs’
literary festival, organised by Michel Le Bris to promote his notion of
‘littérature-monde en français’ (world literature in French) was due to
open in Port-au-Prince later that week. The organisers had been in place
for a week; celebrated novelists such as Dany Laferrière had been doing
the rounds of radio and TV stations for days; the poet and publisher
Rodney Saint-Eloi (Laferrière's fellow Montréal ‘exile’) arrived at the
Hotel Karibe only an hour or so before the earthquake hit. About twenty
more French and francophone writers and academics were scheduled to
arrive in the following days. And that is in addition to the many
Haiti-based authors—such as Lyonel Trouillot, Yanick Lahens and Gary
Victor—who were present and due to participate in the festival. The
voices of these writers were amplified in short order by those of a
veritable panoply of Haitian intellectuals with connections in the
international media. By the autumn of 2010, many of these artists and
intellectuals had published books which reproduced and supplemented the
articles they wrote and interviews they gave at the time of the
earthquake. These are listed at the end of this article.
One of
the most urgent tasks for the writers responding to the disaster of 12
January was to combat the discourse being woven around the disaster in
the international media. Dany Laferrière, for one, sensed the danger: ‘I
can see a new label starting to emerge, one that is getting ready to
bury us all completely: Haiti is a cursed country. There are even some
Haitians who are starting to use it. You have to be really desperate to
take on board the contempt of the other for oneself’ (Laferrière, 2010:
78). He continued: ‘All it takes is for one person to launch the word
“curse” on the airwaves for it to metastatise like a cancer. Before they
start talking about vodou, savagery, cannibalism and vampires, I feel
that I still have enough energy to speak out against it’ (Laferrière, 2010: 79). I shall return to these cannibals in a moment.
Another
cliché doing the rounds concerned the famous ‘resilience’ of the
Haitian people. It fell to another novelist, Yanick Lahens, to inveigh
against that particular cliché: ‘There is a kind of exoticism in
glorifying the resilience of the Haitians. [The foreign press] has
turned it into such a leitmotiv that it has become a cliché’ (Lahens, 2010b:
142). Lahens's pointed use of the term ‘exoticism’ signals her
awareness that colonial habits die hard. Rodney Saint-Eloi, for his
part, wished the word could be struck from the dictionaries (Saint-Éloi,
2010: 259).
Tiring
perhaps of vodou, vampires and cannibalism, some French newspapers
attempted to present a more upbeat image of Haiti. A week after the
seism, Libération invited eight Haitian writers to provide a
rectification. One idea runs through these articles: the idea that
Haiti's unique artistic vibrancy and creativity was the key to national
recovery. Here is Yanick Lahens:
But
Haiti provides another quite essential measure of the world—that of
creativity. Because we have also forged our resistance to the worst by
the constant transformation of pain into human creativity. In what René
Char called ‘the sanitary virtue of misfortune (la santé du malheur).’ I have no doubt that we writers will continue to impart to the world a particular savour. (Lahens, 2010a)
In
fairness, Lahens retracted that view in the autumn of 2010, seeing in
it a fascinating lure –‘I will say, contradicting a very fashionable
discourse, that artistic production will not save us. To repeat that it
will is to inscribe ourselves within the logic of a vain fascination (une séduction stérile)’ (Lahens, 2010b:
156)—although she does appear to have forgotten that she herself had
contributed toward making that discourse fashionable in the first place…
Her colleague Rodney Saint-Éloi is less circumspect. Here is Saint-Eloi
counselling his friend, the polymathic creator Frankétienne: ‘Nothing
has changed. Don't allow yourself to be intimidated by the earthquake,
carry on doing what you know how to do. Culture is the only thing that
can put the country back on its feet’ (Saint-Éloi, 2010: 83). And again: ‘Only art possesses the energy that we need to pick ourselves up again’ (Saint-Éloi, 2010: 83).
It
is perhaps always the images that flatter one's own narcissism that are
the most difficult to detect and avoid, and that expression, ‘une séduction stérile’,
captures very well the historic tendency of francophone Haitian artists
and intellectuals to become fascinated by the gaze of the prestigious
Other. As Lahens implies, the result is as devoid of creativity as an
image infinitely reflected between two facing mirrors. That need for
recognition can attain pathological proportions. Such is the case of the
aforementioned Frankétienne, who is obsessed with the idea that he deserves to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (that is to say, to be recognised
by the Nobel committee). He told Saint-Éloi that he was glad he had
been ‘overlooked’ for the prize in 2009, since, had he won then, his
glory would have been overshadowed by the 450,000 [sic] deaths in the
earthquake (Saint-Éloi, 2010: 251).
Not
all of the ‘Haitian tropes’ that resurfaced after the earthquake were
manufactured abroad. There is one that echoes through the texts of
Laferrière, Lahens and Saint-Eloi and, as far as I can tell, it
originated in Haiti. I refer to the ‘we are all in it together’ refrain.
As if anticipating—and attempting to forestall—the press reports of
anarchy and looting, writers present on 12 January emphasised the
dignity and solidarity of the victims. But Laferrière and Saint-Éloi go
much further, detecting in the immediate, human reaction of
shell-shocked people the dawning of a new community. As if, in levelling
Port-au-Prince, the earthquake had also created a level playing field,
sweeping away two centuries of social apartheid. Saint-Éloi remarks:
Rich
and poor alike are in this boat that is sinking towards the abyss. They
shake hands with each other, afflicted by the same sense of desolation.
‘Tout moun jwenn’ [everyone gets their share/their slice of
the pie] says Jean [the taxi-driver]. Why did it take an earthquake for
people to want to make common cause, to have a collective project and to
feel this desire to form a crowd and to be fully engaged in their
history? Is catastrophe the only thing capable of bringing people
together? (Saint-Éloi, 2010: 120)
It
is true that the earthquake did not discriminate on social grounds when
it struck: if anything, the middle classes were disproportionately
affected, as they were the ones most likely to be buried under the
concrete of collapsing office blocks and administrative offices. But
those 39 seconds of dreadful equality passed in the blink of an eye: the
very moment the tremors ceased, the chances of survival were
conditioned by money, power and influence. The filmmaker Raoul Peck
reports that the instant going rate for digging somebody out of the
rubble was $6000—in a country where 80 percent of people live on $2 per
day (Peck, 2010).
The
economics of survival have become even clearer in the three years since
the earthquake. Within days, at least 1.5 million people found
themselves living in tents or under plastic sheets and scraps of
tarpaulin in makeshift camps. More than three years on, 365,000 of them
are still there. Predictably, those who were best able to get out of the
camps were those with access to funds or to still-habitable property.
Those with family in the Haitian diaspora able to send them money did
not remain long in the camps. But how does one come to have access to
such resources? Who had family in the diaspora? Historically, emigration
from Haiti has correlated strongly with level of education. Between
1965 and 2000, 84 percent of Haitians with a tertiary (university level)
education left Haiti—compared with just 22 percent in the Dominican
Republic (Soukar, 2010:
314). Over the same period, 3 percent of Haitians with only the most
basic level of education (primary) emigrated—for the most part to seek
work on the Dominican sugar plantations, the bateys. As the Haitian saying has it: ‘boujwa-a ap mache avèk viza-l nan pòch li’
(lit: the bourgeois walks around with his visa in his pocket, i.e.
ready to hand). In turn, access to education is also overwhelmingly
predicated on class and wealth: over 90 percent of tertiary educational
provision in Haiti is private and fee-paying. For the briefest of
moments, then, rich and poor were in the same boat, but today only the
poorest of the poor remain in the camps, where they are increasingly
subject to illegal evictions, as the International Organisation for
Migration—the UN body tasked with protecting the rights of Internally
Displaced Persons (IDPs)—looks on.
In unleashing a plethora of
writing about Haiti, the earthquake laid bare a certain relation. What
interests me in the foregoing discussion is not the discourse about
Haiti produced outside Haiti per se, nor the discourse about
Haiti produced from within that country, but rather the way those
discourses are related, or articulated one on the other. Before moving
on to discuss a second level of post-earthquake discourse, I will
provide one particularly striking example of this discursive relation. We heard Laferrière vowing to combat the invidious clichés that
threatened to ‘bury’ Haiti before it was too late—before ‘they’ started
to talk about ‘vodou, savagery, cannibalism and vampires’ (Laferrière, 2010:
79). But within living memory—if not within Laferrière's,
apparently—‘they’ had been talking at great length about vodou, savagery
and cannibalism. Except that in this instance ‘they’ were not
thrill-seeking journos in the foreign press, but Laferrière's own close
friends and colleagues, Lyonel Trouillot, Gary Victor and Frankétienne.
In a set of interviews published by the journal Africultures
shortly after the ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004, at a
moment when Haiti had high visibility in the world's media, these
writers were determined to tell the truth about the departed ‘despot’.
Frankétienne assured the journal's readers that Aristide was guilty of
‘plunder, murder, child-sacrifice’, that he had ‘latched on to the other
side of the divinity, the diabolical side’ and that ‘even Satan has
abandoned him, you can see it in his face’ (Frankétienne et al., 2004).
For his part, Trouillot—apparently hankering after the good old days
of Papa Doc, when at least you knew where you were—opined that Aristide
was worse than Duvalier because at least the latter ‘took responsibility
for (assumait) his killings’. Now well into his stride,
Trouillot could not resist feeding a last titillating morsel to the
interviewer: ‘Aristide used vodou as much as Duvalier, or at least a
certain kind of vodou […] A few months ago, a baby disappeared from the
general hospital. What a scandal! Of course, everyone knows that Aristide had the child sacrificed in order to win the favour of the loas’ (Frankétienne et al., 2004,
my emphasis). It apparently did not occur to the interviewer to ask who
this ‘everybody’ was and precisely how they ‘knew’ these things. Gary
Victor dutifully echoes his colleagues: ‘Haitian despots have always had
recourse to Oungans (vodou priests) or Boko [sic] (sorcerers) to
consolidate their power’ (Frankétienne et al., 2004).
Not a trick was missed: despotism, vodou, savagery, cannibalism. Little wonder that Laferrière was worried. The propagandising of
Frankétienne, Trouillot and Victor is to be understood in the context of
a much broader campaign of demonisation mounted against Aristide from
Autumn 2002 onwards by a so-called civil society group, the G184 (Groupe
des 184). All three were enthusiastic members of that group. I shall
return to it presently.
Taken in isolation, the Africultures
episode is illustrative of a certain mechanism. Information theorists
might call it a positive feedback loop (‘a’ produces ‘b’, which produces
more of ‘a’, which produces more of ‘b’ - where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are sites
of discursive production inside Haiti and outside of Haiti). Psychoanalysts would more likely be reminded of D.W. Winnicott's
description of the basis of narcissistic identification: ‘What does the
baby see when he or she looks at the mother's face? I am suggesting
that, ordinarily, what the baby sees is himself or herself. In other
words, the mother is looking at the baby and what she looks like is related to what she sees there’ (Winnicott, 1971:
112). Except that, in our case, it is Mother France whose benign
approbation is so craved by the francophone Haitian intellectuals. (Not
to mention the generous artistic subsidies handed out to Haitian writers
who take the ‘correct’ view of Franco-Haitian relations.) Put simply,
Haitian intellectuals of the likes of Trouillot and co. feed the images
of Haiti produced in the centres of imperialist and neo-colonial power
and then react to those images with pathetic gratitude (if they flatter
their narcissism) or with uncontrollable fury (should they wound their
narcissism). The libellous diatribe unleashed by Trouillot against Peter
Hallward in the pages of Small Axe a few years ago is a textbook example of the latter kind of reaction (Trouillot, 2009).
What is said about Haiti is one thing; what is done to it
is another. But in very recent history, words have proved to be the
prelude to deeds, and Haiti in 2013 is still living with the
consequences of those deeds. If the Haitian intelligentsia feign
ignorance of their role in the representation of Haiti in Europe and
North America, when it comes to their responsibility for the fact that
Haiti is now, effectively, an occupied country, their attitude is one of
total disavowal. I will develop this assertion with reference to one
particularly illuminating work that was written in direct response to
the challenges of post-earthquake reconstruction.
The Disavowal of Responsibility
In October 2010 the Quebec publisher Mémoire d'Encrier put out a 400-page volume of essays titled Refonder Haïti?
The volume contains 43 pieces written by those who like to think of
themselves as Haiti's ‘qualitative majority’: novelists, historians,
sociologists, anthropologists, economists, film-makers, journalists,
political scientists. The selection ignores the old inside–outside
rivalries between Haitian intellectuals: the contributors are drawn from
Canada, France and the USA, as well as from Haiti itself. The editors
were Pierre Buteau, Rodney Saint-Eloi and Lyonel Trouillot. The overly
modest biographical notes on the editors inform readers that Buteau is
an historian and teacher (professeur) at the Université d'Etat
d'Haïti; Saint-Eloi a writer, publisher (he co-founded Mémoire
d'Encrier) and academic; Trouillot a novelist, poet and teacher of
literature. In brief, a trio of well-meaning intellectuals and artists,
passionately committed to the cause of the Haitian people but apparently
standing aloof from the political mêlée. The problematic of the volume
is clearly presented in the Introduction:
Re-found
what? Should we rebuild on the basis of the devastation that has been
left by the earthquake, or re-found on the basis of the past and of
history in order to create the anchoring points of renewal, making
whatever breaks with the past are necessary in order to construct a fair
and just society (une société juste)? (Buteau et al., 2010: 5)
The
editors of the volume recognise that Haitian society was broken long
before the earthquake provided a physical analogue of that
dysfunctionality. The task now is to identify the constructive and
destructive elements of the past with a view to building a ‘common
sphere of citizenship (une sphère commune de citoyenneté)’. (Buteau et al., 2010:
5). The range of ‘elements’ discussed is impressively broad:
inequalities in the education system; discrimination against Kreyòl,
against women, against children; the undervaluation of popular culture
and religion; the need to reform journalistic practices; the need to
involve the diaspora in the political life of Haiti; ecological
disaster; the importance of good diplomacy [sic!]; the need to eradicate
gender-based violence; the need to decentralise, etc. But very few of
the contributors appear willing to go directly to the root causes of the
situation in which Haiti found itself in the wake of the earthquake.
One of the best-informed essays in the volume, and one of the few that
articulates the reality of Haiti's situation clearly, is ‘Construire et
reconstruire Haïti? Acteurs, enjeux et représentations [To construct and
reconstruct Haïti? Actors, stakes and representations]’. The piece was
penned by Émile Brutus and Camille Chalmers. Describing himself as a
‘political militant’ in his biographical note, Chalmers is a highly
educated socio-economist who is the co-ordinator of the Haitian Platform
for an Alternative Development (PAPDA), one of Haiti's longest
established civil-society organisations. In their article, Chalmers and
Brutus develop the unsurprising view that Haiti is the historical
‘laboratory’ of the neo-liberal project, and provide a succinct summary
of Haitian actuality:
A
tiny minority, just one percent of the population, owns more than 40
percent of national wealth and puts in place a state system of predation
and repression against the majority—the peasants and the urban popular
classes—with the support of a proteiform petty bourgeoisie and some
imperialist powers. (Brutus and Chalmers, 2010: 35)
Unlike many of the contributors to Refonder Haïti?,
Brutus and Chalmers are sceptical about the idea that the earthquake
might represent a watershed in Haitian history, let alone a ‘tabula
rasa’. They point out that the USA and the World Bank had been pursuing
the reconfiguration of the Haitian economy for many years prior to the
earthquake (when that project was rebaptised as ‘reconstruction’),
beginning with Reagan's Caribbean Basin Initiative, through the waves of
liberalisation of 1983, during the years after the departure of Baby
Doc in 1986–1990, throughout the first Préval presidency (1995–2000),
right through to Hope 1 and Hope 2 (2007–2008), the latest Poverty
Reduction Strategy (2007–2010) and the Collier Plan (2009). In that
context, it was obvious that the Post Disaster Needs Assessment of March
2010 would not bring forth any new ideas for the ‘reconstruction’ of
Haiti, let alone its ‘re-foundation’ (Brutus and Chalmers, 2010:
41). Instead of the authors' preferred remedy—democratic, popular
socialism—the Haitians have, since 2010, simply seen more of the same:
the accelerated development of Free Trade Zones, high-end tourism, the
liberalisation of foreign trade (the further lowering of import
tariffs), privatisation of the few remaining state-owned enterprises,
the further erosion of the prerogatives of the Haitian state and the
slashing of the public sector.
So far, so good, but we need to ask ourselves precisely what kind of object we are dealing with in Refonder Haïti?.
Chalmers' prescription of ‘democratic, popular socialism’ strikes a
decidedly discordant note in the volume. The introduction, signed by all
three editors, strikes a quite different tone. According to them, Haiti
does not have ‘social classes’ but is, rather, made up of ‘différentes composantes sociales’ (various social constituent parts); and the aim of the volume, they say, is to reflect on how to bring about ‘une nouvelle sphère de citoyenneté’ (a new sphere of citizenship). Even while they go through the motions of attacking the neo-liberal guardianship of Haiti, the language
of most of the contributions is that of the ‘post-political’ liberal
consensus. In couching their analyses and prescriptions in an ethical
discourse, vaguely inflected towards human rights, the editors and most
of the contributors carefully eschew the properly political—that is to
say, the domain of action.
A feeling of uncanniness hangs
over the volume, extending to the authors themselves. It is the
uncanniness encountered in a dream where a person is simultaneously
familiar and unfamiliar: both one person and another. A useful reference
here would be Chris Bongie's Friends and Enemies. The Scribal Politics of Post/Colonial Literature,
in which he talks (after Debray) of ‘the disavowed relation between
“mercenary scribes” and their uncanny doubles—the intellectual, the man
of letters, and so on’ (Bongie, 2008: 33). I referred above to the biographical notes included in Refonder Haïti?
as ‘over-modest’. Perhaps ‘disingenuous’ would have been a more
accurate description, for two of the editors—Buteau and Trouillot—have
political pasts that are somewhat at odds with the personae
they create for themselves in the ‘notes on contributors’. At this
point, we need to go back to ten years before the publication of Refonder Haïti?.
After the election of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2000, Haiti was plunged into political crisis: the ‘opposition’ to Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas—who
baptised themselves, laughably, the ‘Democratic Convergence’—refused to
oppose in any recognisable, democratic sense of the term, and chose
instead to adopt a ‘zero option’ designed to bring the country to the
point of collapse—at which point, they calculated, the International
Community would step in and restore democracy and the rule of law (see,
inter alia, Dupuy, 2007; Hallward, 2007; Fleurimond, 2009; Chomsky et al., 2004).
In 2002, a ‘civil society’ front dedicated to the same ends was
formed. It was called the Groupe des 184 (G184). It was created by two
of Haiti's sweatshop oligarchs: Andy Apaid Jnr. and his brother-in-law,
Charles Henri Baker. They succeeded in co-opting a range of civil
society organisations (student groups, trades unions, peasant groups,
women's groups, church groups), many of which did not actually exist,
except in the form of an acronym. The active connections in the G184 had
as much to do with clan as with political platforms. The Haitian elites
believe in keeping things in the family: Yanick Lahens, a writer whose
work I have referred to here, was co-president of the G184 with Apaid;
she is the wife of Philippe Lahens (Vice Governor of the Banque
Républicaine d'Haïti and former President of the Haitian Chamber of
Commerce) and the daughter of a former minister of François Duvalier;
her brother Alain Jean Pierre is Secretary General of the Haitian
Olympic Committee, whose president is Jean-Edouard Baker. And so on. If
the moving force behind the group were the business elites, it was the
‘intellectuals’ who provided them with their fig-leaf. Indeed, the only
named individuals in the G184's membership list are the eighteen members
of the ‘Cultural Sector (Intellectuals, Writers and Artists)’. In 2003,
an offshoot of the G184 called the Collectif Non! was formed by G184
members Lyonel Trouillot, Magalie Comeau-Denis and Syto Cavé.
To return to Refonder Haïti?,
no fewer than sixteen of the contributors to that volume were members
of the G184 or the Collectif Non!. Trouillot and Buteau were members of
both. Between September 2003 and the ouster of Aristide in February
2004, the Collectif Non! put out nine increasingly hysterical press
releases which were widely reproduced and treated as fact, especially in
the French, US and Canadian media. These press releases contained a
mish-mash of half-truths, hyperbole, deliberate obfuscation and,
occasionally, outright falsehoods. Their content had the tedious
predictability of ‘a message from our sponsors’; the same key messages
and buzzwords are repeated ad nauseam: Aristide was a despot, a
tyrant, a dictator, a drugs trafficker; he had hordes of heavily armed
thugs carrying out massacres all over the country etc. When the word
‘massacre’ did not have the desired effect, the authors escalated it to
‘genocide’ (Collectif Non!, 2004).
Under the pen of Trouillot and co., the huge mass of poor Haitians who
had elected Aristide in 2000 found themselves transformed into ‘Lavalas
henchmen’. That recent history merits barely a mention in the pages of Refonder Haïti?,
which is odd given that ‘[t]he secret of the future, of any future,
resides in the past’, as the three editors so sagely remind us (Buteau
et al., 2010: 6).
The
authors of the Collectif Non! press releases were careful not to call
explicitly for intervention by the ‘international community’ to rid them
of that troublesome (former) priest, but that appeal is crystal clear
in texts such as that of 31 January 2004, titled ‘Jusqu'où ira
l'International dans l'acception de l'inacceptable? (Just how far will
the International [sic] go in its acceptance of the unacceptable?)
(Collectif Non!, 2004).
And ‘intervention’ is precisely what happened on 29 February 2004,
when the combination of a tiny paramilitary force and American, Canadian
and French special forces effected the removal of Aristide and his
banishment into an exile that would last seven years.
The de facto
regime imposed by the State Department immediately set about
‘stabilising’ the country. As documented by numerous international human
rights observers, that ‘stabilisation’ took the form of two years of
arbitrary arrests and imprisonment; the return of beatings, torture,
‘disappearances’ and unexplained deaths in custody; the use of rape as a
weapon of war; deadly raids into the shanty towns of Port-au-Prince
(Griffin, 2004; Amnesty International, 2005; Mance et al., 2006)
and blanket impunity—the most egregious example being the night-time
court hearing that acquitted Jodel Chamblain and Jackson Jonais, former
FRAPH death-squad members previously convicted for their part in the
Raboteau massacre of 1994. Amnesty International called the acquittal a
‘mockery’ and ‘an insult to justice’ (Amnesty International, 2004).
In
the period February 2004–January 2006, it is estimated that some four
thousand almost exclusively poor, shanty-dwelling Haitians lost their
lives (Hallward, 2007:
277–310). If the actions of Trouillot and the G184 intellectuals
contributed directly to bringing about that state of affairs, they had a
further consequence that is still shaping the political and economic
landscape of Haiti to this day. On 1 June 2004, the Multinational
Interim Force (essentially the remnants of the forces that had ousted
Aristide) was replaced by a large contingent of United Nations troops
(MINUSTAH, or United Nations Mission for the Stabilisation of Haiti)
deployed under Statute VII of the United Nations charter. That statute
was specifically designed to deal with states whose aggression posed a
real and present threat to neighbouring states. Despite its dubious
legal justification, the mandate of MINUSTAH has been renewed annually
for the last nine years. The terms of its deployment allowed for a much
more pro-active engagement than we have seen in real conflict
zones such as Rwanda or the Democratic Republic of Congo, and MINUSTAH
commanders fulfilled their brief enthusiastically. MINUSTAH forces
regularly accompanied Haitian National Police and sundry right-wing
paramilitary groups on punitive raids into the poorest quarters of
Port-au-Prince. The 6 July 2005 raid on the huge seaside slum Cité
Soleil—perceived as a stronghold of Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas party, that
is, home to the poorest of the poor who had voted for Aristide en masse in 1990 and 2000—was one of the most murderous (Hallward, 2007: 286–295).
The
stated goal of the UN mission—to restore the rule of law and establish
the stability necessary for the democratic process to take its
course—was clearly a sham. The troops were deployed as proxy enforcers
of US regional policy. Their mission was to destroy the remnants of the
popular movement that had first brought Aristide to power in 1990, and
to promote the interests of the ‘business-friendly’ Haitian
transnational bourgeoisie. In brief, to further the neo-liberal economic
agenda that had subtended US foreign policy in the Caribbean and Latin
America ever since it first strove to establish a ‘stable business
environment’ in Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay in the 1960s and
1970s. This is not speculation on my part: we have it from the horse's
mouth. In 2011, Haïti Liberté and The Nation published
leaked diplomatic cables between Washington and the US Embassy in
Port-au-Prince that had been obtained by Wikileaks. In those cables, the
then US ambassador Janet Sanderson, noted that ‘[t]he UN Stabilization
Mission in Haiti is an indispensable tool in realizing the core USG [US
Government] policy interests in Haiti’—interests which included
suppressing ‘resurgent populist and anti-market economy political
forces’. She continues, in a self-congratulatory tone, to boast that
MINUSTAH was ‘a financial and regional security bargain for the USG’
(Ives and Herz, 2011).
One
might charitably assume that Trouillot and his G184 colleagues were
simply victims of their own naivety, caught up in a cruel game of
unintended consequences. If that were the case, Trouillot, Frankétienne,
Lahens and Victor would have been horrified by the well-documented
human rights abuses that followed the ouster of Aristide; and contrite,
perhaps, at having opened the door and invited in an army of occupation.
After all, they positioned themselves in their Collectif Non! press
releases as politically disinterested champions of human rights. Not at
all. The closest any of them have come to admitting any kind of
responsibility, let alone regret, is a pseudo mea culpa that occurs towards the end of Lyonel Trouillot's (2012) autobiographical text Objectif: l'autre.
It is such a rare bird that it is worth quoting in full. Trouillot says
that he has only ‘felt bad’ twice in his life, and the second occasion
was when he heard ‘the coordinator of a Haitian “civil society” movement
pleading in front of the Parliament against the raising of the minimum
wage.’ He continues:
A
Haitian worker earns less than five euros a day. I had taken risks with
that man when the government [of Aristide] was using banditism as a
political weapon and was sliding towards totalitarianism in the first
half of the 2000s. It looked as if the Haitian bourgeoisie was finally
accepting that it was not possible to build a modern society without
tackling the glaring inequalities that forbid Haitians access to a
common sphere of citizenship. Once the government had been overthrown,
that bourgeoisie simply returned to its old habits of exclusion and
unregulated exploitation (exploitation sauvage). I reproach
myself, I reproach all of those people, people of the left, who had
participated in that movement, for not having been more vigilant, for
not having forced these champions of exclusion masquerading as democrats
to make the effort of humanity that would show that there is more to
them than their appetites and their desire to continue enjoying their
rents and their privileges untroubled by the slightest pang of guilt (sans état d'âme). (Trouillot, 2012: 208–209)
One
is left almost speechless by the bad faith on display in that
quotation. Could Trouillot seriously expect his readers to believe that
he was disappointed and surprised to see this anonymous businessman (in
fact, the sweatshop magnate Andy Apaid Jnr.) oppose the raising of the
minimum wage? Had he perhaps been looking the other way when, after
Aristide's re-election in 2000, Apaid, along with virtually every
businessman in the G184, had opposed Aristide's attempts to
raise the minimum wage, as they had the first time he was elected, in
1990? It is no more credible that Trouillot should have been surprised
that Haiti's so-called MREs (Morally Repugnant Elites: the clue is in
the name) should have reverted to their ‘habits of exclusion and
unregulated exploitation’. As a connoisseur of Kreyòl proverbs,
Trouillot is doubtless familiar with the phrase ‘bourik swe pou chwal dekore ak dentèl’
(lit: the donkey sweats so that the horse can be adorned with lace). As
for Trouillot himself, he emerges with his credentials as ‘man of the
left’ and ‘champion of the downtrodden’ enhanced by his denunciation of
the perfidy of his erstwhile comrade in arms (‘I had taken risks with
that man’).
The fact is that it is not only the Haitian business
elites, the State Department and US financial institutions and
corporations looking for business opportunities who benefited richly
from the ousting of Aristide. Trouillot and his band of merry ‘scribes’
did quite well too. Above all, they got what the narcissist craves:
recognition. Since 2004, Collectif Non! writers have been awarded more
than a dozen literary prizes, many of them more or less in the gift of
the French government. But the gratitude (‘reconnaissance’, in French,
means both gratitude and recognition) of the Chirac and Sarkozy
administrations went further than literary prizes: on 10 January 2010,
Raoul Peck—a leading member of the G184 and a film-maker of decidedly
modest achievements [at the time]—was made President of the ‘Ecole nationale
supérieure des métiers de l'image et du son’ (normally known as ‘La
Fémis’, or French National Film School) by presidential decree; Victor
and Trouillot are both ‘Chevaliers des Arts et des Lettres de la
France’, but they are trumped by Frankétienne, who was made a
‘Commandeur’ of that Order in 2010; back in Haiti, Magalie Comeau-Denis
was made Minister of Culture and Communication in the de facto
regime imposed by the USA after Aristide's removal; Lyonel Trouillot was
appointed to a junior position in that ministry; Pierre Buteau was
named Minister of National Education, Youth, Sport and Civic Education.
Frankétienne, meanwhile, came close to deification when, in 2006, he was
proclaimed a ‘Living National Treasure’ by a foundation created by
several Haitian business elites, the ‘Fondation Françoise Canez Auguste
et Image et Marketing’.
At the start of this section, I referred to Refonder Haiti? as a simulacram. I was alluding to the uncanny quality of much of the writing in that volume: indictments that appear genuinely impassioned, prescriptions that appear rational and well-reasoned, lamentations so heart-rending that one can almost
perceive the dried tear-stains on the paper; yet all of that is totally
divorced from a context that would allow readers to take full measure
of the object they hold in their hands: not one of the sixteen erstwhile
G184 members sees fit to remember that glorious past in the ‘notes on
contributors’. Even the note on Camille Chalmers, which lists at great
length his manifold achievements and honours, omits to mention the
moment in January 2004 when he threw in his lot with the ‘tiny minority’
and the ‘imperialist powers’ (see above): in a press-release for PAPDA,
he wrote:
Aristide
must go immediately. The Haitian Platform to Advocate for an
Alternative Development (PAPDA) praises the courage and foresight of the
Haitian people who are mobilising in greater numbers every day to
demand the resignation of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. PAPDA is
happy to associate itself with this demand and reiterates its conviction
that President Aristide's departure constitutes an essential element of
any real way out of the crisis facing the country today. (PAPDA, 2004)
The
press release is headed, in large capitals: ‘PAPDA is opposed to the
intervention of any multinational police or military force on Haitian
soil under the pretext of re-establishing order’. He might just as well
have handed to the French, Americans and Canadians—whose intentions
were by then quite clear (Hallward, 2007:
91)—a handful of bullets, saying ‘but if you use them, I take no
responsibility for the consequences!’ Ultimately, Chalmers' complicity
in a situation of oppression that he now decries, seriously weakens the
moral force behind his article in Refonder Haïti?.As I move
towards a conclusion, I feel that I should address a foreseeable
criticism of the foregoing. This article was not conceived as a paean to
Aristide or to what was left of Fanmi Lavalas by 2004. I hold
no personal brief for Aristide: I tend to think that he was a quite
seriously flawed leader. But this is not about the personal qualities of
Aristide, nor even about the success or failure of his administrations.
It is about a people who twice glimpsed a fleeting chance of
empowerment, only to see that chimera evaporate before its eyes. One
obstinate fact remains—and it is a fact that sticks in the craw of the
unelectable Apaid, and the unrepresentative Trouillot: Aristide was
democratically elected by a huge popular majority in 2000; a mature,
responsible opposition would have allowed Aristide to see out his
mandate and would have put their alternative vision before the people in
the next election. As it is, in not only calling for the departure of
Aristide but actively working for his removal, they sent the message
that democratic elections were fine, but only so long as their result
was acceptable to the Haitian elites and the US State Department.
The
narcissism of the virtual totality of what passes for an intelligentsia
in Haiti is matched only by their irresponsibility: things ‘happen’ but
like Eliot's Macavity, they are never there. What are we to
make of ‘committed intellectuals’ who take responsibility for nothing?
But ‘we’ also need to look in the mirror, even if we may not like what
we see there. We have our own narcissism to confront. The veritable
Haiti industry that has sprung up (particularly) in North American and
French academic circles in recent years received a shot in the arm after
January 2010—not unlike that received by the neo-liberal ‘project’ for
Haiti. Haitian writers are invited to conferences and colloquia in order
to be admired, and because it is thought that their presence adds the
cachet of ‘authenticity’ to the proceedings. But never once does anyone
dare to ask them who or what they represent. In short, it behoves academics working in the centres of what Trouillot half-ironically calls the ‘empire’ (Trouillot, 2009: 128) to cease preferring interlocutors from the South on the basis of some supposed resemblance. Let us start questioning the oracular status of these ‘good elites’ and
recognise them for the consummate ventriloquists that they are. Perhaps
then we can seek out, listen to, and amplify the voices we have allowed
them to silence.
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