Haiti Conference

[bcholmes]

I spent most of yesterday at a conference about Haiti and the rebuilding, organized by Melanie Newton (man, she does some great stuff) and sponsored by U of T. My colleague, Niraj, articulated it well: in essence, the conference was an attempt to create a space for members of the Haitian diaspora in Toronto to come together and network and talk about the reconstruction. Toronto's Haitian diaspora is much smaller, and much more dispersed than the diaspora in, say, Montreal. The one downside to the conference was that it took place in the wilds of Scarborough at the ungodly hour of nine am.

(The event took place at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus, which is Way The Fuck Over There. Notice that they don't call it University of Scarborough because, hey, who would believe that Scarborough has a university?)

Jean St. Vil, an amazing Haiti activist -- I don't know him well, but I've met him a coupl'a times now, through the Canadian Haiti Action Network -- made some especially powerful points. He made a point that I've heard him make a few times: that the aid model in Haiti is, far more often than not, causing greater problems in the country. And that rather than talk about international aid, it's better to frame the conversation in terms of reparations. (On one of his slides he spelled out "REPAiRAcTIONS"). He said that the descendants of former slaves are always being counselled to "get over" the past, but the legacy of the past is still with us.

He also raised two other key provocative ideas. First, he tackled the idea that Haiti has had a long history of bad leaders. I like what I've heard Melanie (who teaches about the Haitian Revolution) say about this. While acknowledging that the Haitian revolution was far more visionary than either the French or American revolutions, she also recognizes that the earliest leaders were military commanders, and their agendas as leaders weren't always perfect. But, as Jean says, there's a tendency among non-Haitian scholars to write off as dictators important leaders like Dessalines, Pétion and Henri Christophe. Jean used an interesting example: he asked, why is it that Thomas Jefferson gets to be regarded as a great (and quotable) founding father and former president and the fact that he enslaved his own children is a little footnote that we're better off just not talking about. But when talking about a Haitian leader like Dessalines, it is important to write him off as a dictator.

There was another interesting point that he raised, specifically in the context of Haitian culture and gender equality. One woman -- Marlène Thélusma-Rémy, a Haitian sociologist and author on the topic of gender equality -- commented about systemic exclusion of women from reconstruction processes. Later, Jean seemed a bit dismissive about this idea, saying that it's evidence of the way that people accept the narrative of Haiti to assume that Haiti has 1950s attitudes about gender roles. He noted that Haiti had a female President long before the U.S. (even before Canada had a female Prime Minister). Jean asserted that a country like Canada could learn a lot from Haiti about gender equality.

Later, I got to see Marlène roll her eyes about this comment. Did Ertha Pascal-Trouillot have any real power, she asked? Was she ever elected? For Marlène, inequality was a fact. For my part, I don't think that these comments were as much in opposition as they might appear to be at first glance. For my part, I think the patriarchy can operate in different ways in different places. It's not like there's a linear path for this stuff. It's wrong to think that if there's inequality, that it must therefore look exactly like inequality looked here in Canada at some point in the past. That fallacy allows us to feel that we're just a bit farther down the feminist path than Haiti is, and we can help them out by sharing our great learning with them because we're more advanced.

I think Jean's comment is true: that Canada focuses a lot of attention on "teaching" Haitians about gender equality ('cause, hey, we're in that post-feminist period, right?). In fact, improving the lives of women was an explicit CIDA priority under the Martin government; under Harper, it's now about securing the future of children and youth ("think of the chil-drun!") It's all very "talk at"-, rather than "converse with"-sounding. And I think he's right: we seldom try to ponder what we might learn about gender equality from a place like Haiti.

My colleague, Martin, with whom I sometimes disagree, put it especially well: leftists are, generally, pro-feminist (although they'll often avoid using the 'F' word). And it's actually a scarily effective strategy to co-opt the left and entrench a particular narrative about Haiti if you can distract them with an issue like "the status of women." I think that's one of the ways that the left gets tongue tied on issues in the middle east, frinstance. You get wishy-washy positions like, "yeah, invasions are bad, but it is true that these countries don't treat their women well." It traps us in our need to categorize things in neat, binary ways. A thing is either good or bad. We're either on the side of the good guys, or the side of the enemy.