bcholmes | Pay no attention to the countries behind the curtain (Reply)

I've found myself having this conversation several times in the last few months: I'm chatting with someone about Haiti (which I do far too much, I suppose) and the other person asks: "what do you think it'll take to make serious improvements in Haiti?"

In my response, I usually tend to focus on getting western governments to butt out. Usually, I focus on debt forgiveness (the international concept of odious debt is applicable to Haiti, in my opinion), untying aid from economic policy change, and ensuring that aid goes to the government, rather than so-called "grassroots" political organizations comprised of Haiti's millionaires (*cough*FOCAL*cough*).

But the other person always seems unsatisfied with that answer. An answer that involves us changing isn't what they want to hear. They want to know how Haiti has to change. In these conversations, I can see them circling back, again and again, to try to elicit an answer that's more in line with their expectations.

Randall Robinson, in his book, An Unbroken Agony recounts how he organized a few prominent African Americans to protest apartheid by getting arrested at the South African embassy. When he tried to organize an action to protest Bill Clinton's policy toward Haitian refugees, he couldn't get anyone to join him. He writes:

Indeed, everything about the way that Haitian society had been described to Americans in general made it difficult to view Haiti's crisis in racial terms. Americans were given to believe that Haiti was an all-black society and that its wounds had been self-inflicted. What blacks do to one another has never galvanized black Americans into broad public action.

At the risk of focusing too much on concepts (rather than, say, the suffering of millions of Haitians), I do find this fascinating from the point of view of memes and the pervasiveness of language that situates the political crises of Haiti only in terms of Haiti itself. The story seems to be that Haiti is in a bad place because Haiti has screwed itself. I started thinking about this because of this blurb in the National Geographic Haiti fact sheet:

Haiti, the first Caribbean state to achieve independence, occupies the western third of the island of Hispaniola. Mountainous with a tropical climate, it is the poorest country in the Americas due to decades of violence and instability.

See the way this description makes it easy to arrive at the conclusion that the issues in Haiti are because of internal strife and mismanagement? I'm no economist, but I do think there are some important facts that relate to Haiti's poverty, and the most important is the 1825 reparations demand from France. In 1825, French ships sailed into the bay and demanded reparations for all of the property (read: "slaves") they lost during the Haitian Rebellion. The initial demand was for 150 million French francs, but they eventually settled on 90 million.

France was pissed because prior to the Rebellion, Haiti (Saint Domingue) was the wealthiest colony in the western world. Here are some interesting factoids from Wikipedia:

By the 1780s, Saint-Domingue produced about 40 percent of all the sugar and 60 percent of all the coffee consumed in Europe. This single colony, roughly the size of Maryland or Belgium, produced more sugar and coffee than all of Britain's West Indian colonies combined.
The labor for these plantations was provided by an estimated 790,000 African slaves (accounting in 1783-1791 for a third of the entire Atlantic slave trade). Between 1764 and 1771, the average importation of slaves varied between 10,000-15,000, by 1786 about 28,000 and, from 1787 onward, the colony received more than 40,000 slaves a year.

After the rebellion, Haiti had only one neighbour that wasn't a colony: the US. Unfortunately, the US refused to recognize Haitian independence (and that refusal continued until the American Civil War). Of the revolutionary French government, Jefferson stated, "We certainly cannot deny to other nations that principle whereon our own government is founded, that every nation had a right to govern itself internally under what forms it please, and to change those forms at its own will." About Haiti, Jefferson was not so magnanimous.

All other neighbours were slave-holding colonies, and Haiti's ability to trade with those partners was impeded by European disdain for the idea that slaves would rise up against their white masters. (I wish I knew more about Simcoe's tenure in Haiti -- he spent a brief period commanding British forces in Haiti, and it'd be interesting to know how someone who is celebrated for ending slavery in Upper Canada perceived the British action in Haiti.)

But the point is that the reparations payment had a devastating effect on the Haitian economy, and that debt was still being paid until after World War II. National Geographic, interestingly, doesn't mention that. It also doesn't mention that Haitian debt ballooned under the Duvaliers (who maintained pro-American economic policies in exchange for loans that padded the Duvaliers' bank accounts and further indebted the country). Paul Farmer writes:

Yet in order to meet the renewed demands of the IDB, the cash-strapped Haitian government was required to pay ever-expanding arrears on its debts, many of them linked to loans paid out to the Duvalier dictatorship and to the military regimes that ruled Haiti with great brutality from 1986 to 1990. In July 2003, Haiti sent more than 90 per cent of all its foreign reserves to Washington to pay off these arrears. As of today [2004], less than $4 million of the four blocked loans - which totalled $146 million - has reached Haiti in spite of many assurances from the IDB.

So. Haiti has certainly known its share of violence. And political instability. But I think National Geographic is way off base when they suggest that those things are the causes of Haitian poverty. Haiti is poor because countries like the US and France keep fucking with them economically.

In the interest of memetics, many of the Haitian activists I hang out with make a point of rejecting the statement "Haiti is the poorest country in the western hemisphere" in favour of "Haiti is the most impoverished country in the western hemisphere." (I think the WisCon observation about passive voice is important here, too. There's a world of difference between saying "Haiti has been impoverished" and saying "Rich western countries like the US, France and Canada have impoverished Haiti.")

To some extent, this portrayal of Haiti reminds me of Said's writings about orientalism (I wonder if there's a WisCon panel in this? A follow-up to Mary Ann Mohanraj's 2001 panel? I'm reminded about something that nadyalec said about Stargate fan fiction and pleasure of seeing American values brought to other worlds. In what ways does modern sf support neoliberalism?)

Anyway, Said asserted that there was a whole discourse that involves representing the middle east in a way that suggested that the best thing we could possibly do for it is to colonize it. While his writings paid special attention to academic study, some of the post-colonial film courses I've taken have paid special attention to fiction about sites of colonization. Victorian stories such as She and King Solomon's Mines.

Farmer talks about this as well:

Both the historian Brenda Plummer and the anthropologist Robert Lawless have offered important analyses of this "literature of condemnation." Haitian intellectuals have for generations complained about the racism of their international interlocuters. A good deal of Haiti's bad press would seem to be linked to "schemata" that generate, year after year, a small number of scripts about what is wrong with Haiti and Haitians. These scripts emerge with surprising regularity in most popular commentary on Haiti and, indeed, in much scholarly analysis as well.
Many of these ready-made narratives have taken on the status of full-blown myths -- stories more powerful than any mere fact. In the nineteenth century, when the uses of Haiti included the continued production of tropical produce and raw materials, Haiti's prime symbolic function was to serve as a model of "anti-civilization." Accordingly, the scripts generated in that era usually included voodoo, zombies, cannibalism, and savage misrule. The master myth of the era - that blacks were incapable of self-rule -- was held to be reinforced principally by Haiti.

Farmer (in 1994) went on to suggest that there were several modern myths of Haiti that every story about the country reinforced:

Haiti as the source of AIDS (interestingly, this story has resurfaced)
Haitian boat people are economic, rather than political, refugees
Aristide has fomented class struggle and mob violence and that he's mentally ill. (The new version of this myth seems to be that he's the same as Duvalier -- engaging in human rights abuses and despised by the majority of Haitians)
Haitian political conflict is a confrontation between two equal and opposed forces unable to resolve their differences (again, this myth seems to have changed. Now it's the myth of the plucky, grassroots group of Haitian millionaires trying to restore democracy to the Aristide distatorship. It seems it wasn't enough to portray the opposition as "as powerful as" Aristide -- they need to be seen as the underdogs. The irony, it burns.)
US (and Canadian) aid to Haiti is well-intentioned but ineffective (now that Aristide is gone, we can claim "now our well-intentioned aid has a chance to be effective)
US (and Canadian) foreign policy is similarly well-intentioned and ineffective.

Each of these myths, Farmer argues (and I agree with him), serve neo-colonial/neo-liberal interests because ultimately they serve to oust Aristide and cripple the Lavalas party and lay the groundwork in support of foreign support of the opposition (Convergence, and the Group of 184). It helps to explain why Canada gives "aid" to Haitian millionaires in the name of "promoting democracy".

What I find interesting is that even when I'm talking to "friendlies" -- when I'm involved in some conversations with people who are sympathetic to hearing what's going on in Haiti -- these myths have still been absorbed by osmosis and are colouring the entire conversation making my job 10 times harder. That's the sort of thing that Said was talking about: that an entire social apparatus is engaged to make a certain ideological position on a foreign country look obvious and natural.