Haiti

  * * *

  Twenty-five years after the overthrow of Duvalier, Haitians are still largely the objects rather than the subjects of the political and economic order under which they live. Their capacity to shape the direction taken by their country remains extremely limited. Elections, understood as the necessary precondition for political stability, are instead occasions for shadowy and often violent political conflict. State institutions are weak and largely unresponsive. And the population has no control at all over foreign governments and organizations, which in many ways call the shots in contemporary Haiti.

  Those institutions—including the U.N. military mission (known as MINUSTAH), official U.S. aid agencies, and NGOs and missionary organizations—make up a startlingly fragmented and complex network. Their actual functioning and impact are difficult to analyze or evaluate with much precision; indeed, trying to count how many nongovernmental groups are operating in Haiti is itself a remarkable challenge. NGO employees, young volunteers, missionaries, and U.N. soldiers from a bewildering array of countries with their national flags on their uniforms are a constant presence throughout most of the country.

  Some political activists compare the current foreign presence in Haiti with the era of the U.S. occupation. René Préval, who was elected president again in 2005, has been accused of selling out to the United States: at one point, graffiti comparing him to Jean-Baptiste Conzé, the Haitian who led marines into the camp of Charlemagne Péralte, popped up on walls in Port-au-Prince. The comparison is politically potent, but it is also somewhat misleading: the foreign presence today operates in rather different ways and on different terms than it did in the early twentieth century. The various organizations are dispersed, decentralized, and largely uncoordinated. Members of the Haitian diaspora are also heavily involved in seeking to address pressing issues in the country, adding another dimension to the international presence. As the novelist Edwidge Danticat puts it, “Every Haitian is an NGO.” Haiti’s new president, Michel Martelly, spent a number of years living in the United States, and the Haitian diaspora was actively involved in his campaign.10

  The current situation does have one major characteristic in common with the occupation years, however: now, as then, the setup leaves most individuals within Haiti almost completely disempowered. To survive, they continue to depend, as they long have, on their informal rural and urban networks and on deeply rooted practices of self-reliance. They draw what they can from the shifting and unpredictable terrain of aid. At times, they gain assistance from foreign organizations for projects that are truly valuable for their communities. When taken as a whole, however, it is clear that the current aid schemes are simply not working to address the larger issues: poverty, ecological devastation, insufficient educational opportunities for the youth who make up the majority of the population, a dire lack of water, food, and health care. Hope for real change is difficult to summon. Demonstrators often chant simply “Nou bouke!”—“We’re tired!”

  The devastating 2010 earthquake profoundly deepened the country’s problems, destroying much of the infrastructure in Port-au-Prince and leaving millions homeless. It also starkly exposed the Haitian state’s inability to help its people in times of crisis. A global response provided emergency assistance to the country in the days and weeks after the disaster, and an array of governments and organizations mobilized to try to contribute to rebuilding the country. But it is now also abundantly clear that the tremendous difficulties of reconstruction are part of much deeper and older problems: the aftershocks of a long history of internal conflict and external pressures that has left Haiti’s population vulnerable and exposed.

  In December 2010, nearly a year after the earthquake, Ricardo Seitenfus, the Brazilian head of the OAS mission in the country, offered a frank and devastating analysis of Haiti’s condition to the Swiss newspaper Le Temps. He described the U.N. presence in Haiti as wasteful and even harmful: “Haiti is not an international menace. There is no civil war.” Rather, he said, the country was in the midst of low-intensity conflict between “various political actors who do not respect the democratic process.” In such a context, the U.N. approach—which results in “freezing” the existing power structures—would “resolve nothing, and only make things worse.” The U.N. troops, Seitenfus said, were there only to prop up a bankrupt vision for the country. “We want to make Haiti a capitalist country, a platform for export to the U.S. market. It’s absurd.” Echoing the historian Steven Stoll, who has called for a “Second Haitian Revolution” that would allow Haiti’s “subsistence cultures” of agrarian self-sufficiency to exist on their own terms instead of being forced to reform or disappear, Seitenfus proclaimed that “Haiti must return to what it is, a primarily agricultural country.”11

  Seitenfus was as withering in his analysis of NGOs as he was about the United Nations. “There is a malicious and perverse relationship between the force of NGOs and the weakness of the Haitian state,” he declared. He described the NGO relationship to Haiti as a relatively cynical one: the country, he lamented, has been reduced to a handy place for “professional training” for an increasingly youthful group of workers. “And Haiti, I can tell you, is not the place for amateurs.” The complex interrelationships between state officials, community leaders, businesses, and other foreign aid groups in the country often mystify and deeply frustrate new volunteers, while the proliferation of different aid organizations—which often do not coordinate their work, and sometimes directly compete with each other—leads to tremendous amounts of duplicated effort.12

  What was blocking a “normalization” of the situation in Haiti, the interviewer asked Seitenfus? In order to answer, the Brazilian official looked back to the country’s founding. “Haiti’s original sin, in the international theatre, was its liberation,” he said. “Haitians committed the unacceptable in 1804.” The world “didn’t know how to deal with Haiti,” and time and time again simply turned to force and coercion. Two centuries on, Seitenfus concluded, it was clear that outsiders’ efforts to shape Haiti to their own liking were ineffective. If there was hope for improvement, it would come from the realization of the original dreams of self-determination that had launched Haiti into the world. “Two hundred years ago, Haiti illuminated the history of humanity and of human rights. Now we must give Haitians the chance to confirm their vision.”13

  Seitenfus’s remarks hit a nerve. The OAS pulled him from his position several months early, displeased with his unflinching critique of essentially every aspect of international work in Haiti. Many Haitians, however, applauded and celebrated the controversial interview, pleased that complaints they had often made themselves were now being voiced by a prominent figure in the international community. They noted that surprisingly few aid workers speak either French or Kreyòl, and that NGOs are subject to very little oversight from the Haitian government, essentially reporting only to their donors. As in the later years of the U.S. occupation, Haitian critics also pointed out that the money spent on salaries and living expenses for foreign workers could go much further if it were used to employ people from within the country. In March 2011, President Préval honored Seitenfus by naming him a Knight of the Republic of Haiti. The entire incident, in a way, only confirmed the continuing distance between the different groups who all have the same general aim—improving Haiti—but harbor completely different visions of what that actually means.

  Looking back on the history of Haiti and its recent struggles, it is sometimes difficult not to succumb to hopelessness, to the feeling that nothing can be done. But in truth, none of what has happened in Haiti during the past two hundred years has been inevitable. Haiti’s current situation is the culmination of a long set of historical choices that date back to its beginnings as a French plantation colony. And it is the consequence of the ways that powerful political leaders and institutions, inside and outside the country, have ignored and suppressed the aspirations of Haiti’s majority.

  It’s easy, in the abstract, to identify
what makes for a successful democracy: a strong state, civil society, popular participation, an effective legal system. Many of these have in fact existed at one time or another in Haitian history. But the devastating combination of internal conflict and external intervention has stymied their consolidation into a network of sustainable and responsive political institutions. Remarkably, however, the history of repression has not snuffed out the Haitian struggle for dignity, equality, and autonomy. Haiti’s people have steadfastly sustained the counter-plantation system that they created through their founding revolution and painstakingly anchored in the countryside over the course of the nineteenth century. Generation after generation, they have demonstrated their ability to resist, escape, and at times transform the oppressive regimes they have faced.

  “A different Port-au-Prince is possible,” graffiti declared on the walls of the city a few years ago. A different Haiti is—always, and still—possible too. That is because Haitians have never accepted what so many have announced, over and over again, during the past two hundred years: that democracy is not for them, that it cannot flourish in their land. They have kept their political imagination alive, and the story of how they have done that for so long should spur us on toward a still unwritten future. When the situation is at its worst, we should remember how this story began, and what the ancestors of today’s Haitians accomplished two hundred years ago. In the midst of a brutal plantation system, they imagined a different order, one based on freedom, equality, and autonomy. But they did more than imagine it. They built it out of nothing—with fury, solidarity, and determination. Out of a situation that seemed utterly hopeless, they created a new and better world for themselves. Two hundred years later, that remains a reminder of what is possible: if it happened once, perhaps it can happen again.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Louis-Joseph Janvier, La république d’Haïti et ses visiteurs (1840–1882) (Paris: Mappon et Flammarion, 1883), i.

  2. Ibid., 11–12, 22, 56, 67, 74.

  3. David Brooks, “The Underlying Tragedy,” New York Times, January 14, 2010.

  4. I tell the story of Haiti’s colonial history and its revolution in Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). The slave trade to Haiti reflects the broader pattern of the Middle Passage, which brought 90 percent of enslaved Africans to either the Caribbean or Brazil. For the precise numbers of known arrivals from Africa to Saint-Domingue, see the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at http://www.slavevoyages.org. Additional slaves were brought, often illegally, through transshipment from nearby colonies.

  5. My interpretation of this process is based on the pioneering work of Jean Casimir, La culture opprimée (Delmas, Haïti: Lakay, 2001)—Casimir uses the term “counter-plantation” system to describe what emerged in Haiti after the revolution; I also draw on Gérard Barthélemy, L’univers rural haïtien: Le pays en dehors (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1990), which draws on and extends Casimir’s approach.

  6. My analysis of the state in Haiti draws on the expert analyses presented in Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti, State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990); Robert Fatton Jr., The Roots of Haitian Despotism (Boulder Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2007); and Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the World Economy: Class, Race, and Underdevelopment Since 1700 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989). The materials collected in Charles Arthur and Michael Dash, eds., Libète: A Haiti Anthology (Princeton: Markus Weiner, 1999), form an excellent introduction and overview of key issues in Haitian history.

  7. My interpretation of Haitian political history is guided by the magisterial two-volume work of Claude Moïse, Constitutions et luttes de pouvoir en Haïti, 1804–1987: La faillite des classes dirigeantes (1804–1915) (vol. 1) and Constitutions et luttes de pouvoir en Haïti, 1804–1987: De l’occupation étrangère à la dictature macoute (1915–1987) (vol. 2) (Montréal: Éditions du CIDIHCA, 1988). My analysis differs in its angle of interpretation and emphasis from two other important works of general history: the detailed and influential R. D. Heinl, N. G. Heinl, and M. Heinl, Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People, 1492–1995, 2nd ed. (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996), and the most recent survey, first published in 2005 and reissued in 2010: Philippe R. Girard, Haiti: The Tumultuous History—from Pearl of the Caribbean to Broken Nation (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).

  8. François Blancpain, Un siècle de relations financières entre Haïti et la France (1825–1922) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 24 and chap. 3. Calculating equivalences between nineteenth-century French and Haitian currency and contemporary dollars is extremely difficult, as is figuring out precisely how much long-term Haitian debt can be directly attributed to the indemnity. In 2004, when Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide demanded that France repay Haiti for the indemnity, he calculated that between the original levy, the debt burden it produced, and the interest on the money that was lost because of it, the former colonial power owed its former colony about $21 billion in today’s currency. More recently, a fake news story announcing that France was repaying the debt—circulated by an activist organization—put the amount owed at 17 billion euros.

  9. Janvier, La république d’Haïti, 17.

  10. Georges Anglade, Atlas critique d’Haïti (Montréal: Groupe d’études et de recherches critiques d’espace, UQAM, 1982), vividly illustrates the shifts caused by the U.S. occupation.

  11. L. Trouillot, Street of Lost Footsteps, trans. Linda Coverdale (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 1.

  12. Janvier, La république d’Haïti, 15–16.

  1: INDEPENDENCE

  1. A translation of the declaration is available in Laurent Dubois and John D. Garrigus, Slave Revolution in the Caribbean, 1789–1804: A Brief History with Documents (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006), 188–91. Throughout this chapter I draw on Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004). For a brief overview, see also the introduction to Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution.

  2. Dubois and Garrigus, Slave Revolution, 188–91.

  3. David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), chap. 13.

  4. On the colony’s population and the plantation system, see Dubois, Avengers, chap. 1.

  5. On the history of free people of color in the colony, see John D. Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), and Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007).

  6. Sidney Wilfred Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985).

  7. Statistics on slave imports are drawn from the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database at http://www.slavevoyages.org. The most detailed exploration of the role of the African-born in shaping Haitian culture is Gérard Barthélemy, Créoles, bossales: Conflit en Haïti (Petit-Bourg, Guadeloupe: Ibis Rouge, 2000). The pioneering studies on the African dimensions of the Haitian Revolution, and particularly on the place of enslaved people from the Kongo in Saint-Domingue, are from John K. Thornton, “I Am the Subject of the King of Congo: African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of World History 4 (Fall 1993): 181–214, and John K. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution,” Journal of Caribbean History 25, nos. 1 and 2 (n.d.): 58–80. A remarkable reconstruction of the life of one African-born woman in Saint-Domingue is offered in Rebecca Scott and Jean Michel Hébrard, “Les papiers de la liberté: Une mère africaine et ses enfants à l’époque de la révolution haïtienne,” Genèses 66 (March 2007): 4–29.

  8. The song was heard by the French anthropologist Odette Mennesson-Rigaud, who wrote out the words in papers now preserved in the Bibliothèque Haïtienne d
es Pères du Saint-Esprit in Port-au-Prince.

  9. The song is recorded on Wawa and Racine Kanga, The Haitian Roots, vol. 1 (Geronimo Records). For analyses of the history of Vodou, see Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); and Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). An excellent introduction is provided in Laënnec Hurbon, Voodoo: Search for the Spirit (New York: H. N. Abrams, 1995).

  10. For a detailed and convincing analysis of the history of Haitian Kreyòl, see Michel Degraff, “Relexification: A Reevaluation,” Linguistic Anthropology 44, no. 4 (2002): 321–414, and Michel Degraff, “Against Creole Exceptionalism,” Language 79, no. 2 (2003): 391–410. On Kreyòl theater, see Bernard Camier and Laurent Dubois, “Voltaire et Zaïre, ou le théâtre des lumières dans l’aire atlantique française,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 54, no. 4 (2007): 39–69; on poetry see Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press, 2011), chaps. 6 and 7.

  11. Thornton, “African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution.”

  12. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig; Garrigus, Before Haiti; Doris Lorraine Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005).

  13. Louverture has had many biographers over the years. For some of the most important works, see Victor Schoelcher, Vie de Toussaint Louverture, 2nd ed. (Paris: P. Ollendorff, 1889); Aimé Césaire, Toussaint Louverture: La révolution française et le problème colonial (Paris: Club Français du Livre, 1960); and Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint Louverture: A Biography, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007).