The response to the disaster was heartening in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake. A diverse group of many good people pitched in to lend their expertise and their labour to Haiti and the global public contributed significantly towards the reconstruction of Haiti. Much of the media concern has now moved away from the tragedy and put it into the rear view mirror. Understandably, human resilience has insulated us against dwelling too long on the things that are beyond us. Here in Canada we have been celebrating the Winter Olympics and feeling justifiably proud of the accomplishments of the elite athletes of the countries of the temperate zone of the world. But how can we simply move on? How can we walk away? In Haiti the nightmare continues for many and the nightmare will continue for the forseeable future. In fact for many in Haiti and elsewhere, the view is as bleak from the rear view mirror as it is in the view going forward.
Views from a rear view mirror
1) Voltaire and Pat Robertson
On January 12, 2010 with details of the magnitude of tragedy in the loss of human life in Port au Prince, Haiti, a piece of literature, Poem on the Disaster of Lisbon by Voltaire which I had read fifty years ago came immediately to mind. It reflects the shock and dismay that we all must have felt as the nature of the disaster in Haiti unfolded before us. The source of Voltaire’s consternation and indignation is obvious as he discusses an earthquake, which took place in Lisbon on Nov. 1st 1755. The estimated loss of life in the Lisbon earthquake was between 10,000 and 60,000, considerably less than estimates of the loss of life in Port au Prince.
Come, ye philosophers, who cry, "All’s well,"And contemplate this ruin of a world.Behold these shreds and cinders of your race,This child and mother heaped in common wreck,These scattered limbs beneath the marble shafts—A hundred thousand whom the earth devours,Who, torn and bloody, palpitating yet,Entombed beneath their hospitable roofs,In racking torment end their stricken lives.To those expiring murmurs of distress,To that appalling spectacle of woe,Will ye reply: "You do but illustrateThe Iron laws that chain the will of God"?Say ye, o’er that yet quivering mass of flesh:"God is avenged: the wage of sin is death"?What crime, what sin, had those young hearts conceivedThat lie, bleeding and torn, on mother’s breast?Did fallen Lisbon deeper drink of viceThan London, Paris, or sunlit Madrid?In these men dance; at Lisbon yawns the abyss.Tranquil spectators of your brothers’ wreck,Unmoved by this repellent dance of death,Who calmly seek the reason of such storms,Let them but lash your own security;Your tears will mingle freely with the flood.(Poem on the disaster of Lisbon, 1756, Voltaire)
Voltaire’s questions about God’s role in disasters and his challenge to the notion of catastrophic events as acts of God in 1756, is still being debated it appears in some circles. Pat Robertson’s speculation that Haiti’s bleak past and current difficulties may be the result of Haiti’s leaders’ pact with the Devil, of course ignores the obvious evidence of the results of plate tectonics, seismic events created by the consequences of powerful subterranean movements. Is Mr. Robertson suggesting that the death of over 100,000 people was caused or condoned by God? In a universe governed by God do disasters bear God’s stamp of approval?
Views from a rear view mirror
2) Major Seismic Activity in Haiti in the last 250 years
The Island of Hispaniola, which Haiti shares with the Dominican Republic, has a history of seismic activeity. There had apparently been an earthquake in Haiti in 1751, a mere four years prior to the Lisbon earthquake and there would be another major quake in 1761 and yet another in 1770.
The earthquake of June 3, 1770, was one of the strongest shocks recorded on the Island of Haiti, the area of greatest destruction extending from Croix de Boquets through the plain of the Cul de Sac to Port-au-Prince and along the north coast of the Tiburon Peninsula as far as Miragoine. The sea rose a mile and a half up into the island and at Grand Goave the foot of the mountain of La Saline was partly submerged.
In 1783 the principal church at Santiago partly collapsed after another strong quake.
The earthquake of May 7, 1842, however, was the worst recorded in Haiti before this week’s catastrophic quake. It hit near Cap Haitien, a city of ten thousand inhabitants on the north coast of Haiti. Approximately half of the population died. Waves dashed against buildings along the quay. In the neighboring village of Port de Paix the sea withdrew 60 meters, only to come back to bury the city under four or five meters of water. The 1842 earthquake did serious damage to Henri Christophe’s palace at Sans Souci (see image above) and to the Citadelle La Ferrière near Milot. Milot was Haïti’s former capital under the self-proclaimed King Henri Christophe, who ascended to power in 1807, three years after Haïti had gained independence from France.
Contemporary newspaper reports offered the following description of the damage:
“May 30, 1842: The New York papers of Saturday morning contain all the particulars received of the great earthquake at Cape Haitien, which occurred on the 7th inst. and destroyed an immense deal of property and thousands of lives. It is a singular fact that at Bayou Teche, Louisiana, an earthquake was experienced on the same day, and the waters of the river and lake rose suddenly about six feet…
“There were two very decided shocks, the first was not as long as the second; the latter was the most violent and lasted about three minutes. All abandoned their houses, and the streets were filled with the afrighted population … There is scarcely a single brick or stone house which has not suffered damage. They are all more or less damaged. Some, it is said, are scarcely habitable. The facade of the Senate House … were detached from the edifice and broken into pieces by the fall…
“During these latter days it appears to us as if the earth on which we were walking was constantly quaking.
(Haiti’s history of earthquakes, from repeatingislands.com)
Views from a rear view mirror3) Bound by the past I come to the consideration of Haiti with a depth of ignorance that frankly is appalling. I also bring with me some prejudices and fears that I acquired inadvertently through my early culture, prejudices and fears which Pat Robertson exploits in his unfortunate suggestion that the death of possibly over 100,000 people could be “a blessing in disguise”.
Though I was born and lived on an Island in the same neighbourhood for 15 years, as an inheritor of values from traditional sources I was nurtured as was everyone else on the biases from ideas that I have received from main stream Western Eurocentric culture in the form of easy negative judgments about how difficult it is to understand the dense, menacing qualities of the indigenous spiritual practices and how worthy of damnation Haiti’s African inspired spirituality renders it. I must confess to a certain laziness that even after a lifetime and a career in education I had remained essentially uninformed about Haiti and until the crisis placed Haiti front and center in my awareness I had as much knowledge of Haiti at seventy as I had at 15 years old. It was easy, too easy to trot out the clichés about voodoo, zombies, tonton macoute and to characterize Haiti as a lost cause because of superstition and mismanagement by leaders of the ilk of Papa Doc and Baby Doc. That we keep getting a uni-dimensional and simplistically unflattering portrait of Haiti should not be surprising because mainstream Western culture has isolated and punished Haiti for retaining some of its African heritage instead of renouncing them and adopting exclusively Eurocentric values.
Part of the cultural baggage that I have carried with me from my childhood in Jamaica may shed some light on the isolation that Haiti has experienced throughout its history.
Jamaica shares a similar geological past and a possible seismic destiny because it is situated on the same fault lines as the Island of Hispaniola. As a child I recall hearing accounts of the earthquake of 1691in Jamaica where Port Royal was destroyed. The elements of the account from my childhood are sparse and the information is superficial but the oral history about this event and its legendary elements are instructive because they resonate in a powerful way in my memory and undoubtedly in the collective memory of people of that Island. The elements are these: 1) Port Royal late in the seventeenth century was considered one of the wickedest cities in the world because of the activities of Bucaneers, debauchery, plunder and pillage 2) The earthquake was so powerful that the earth opened and “swallowed” people 3) One fortunate individual was swallowed and later was spat out and lived to report his good fortune 4) Part of the Port Royal was swallowed up and submerged by the sea 5) The bell of a church, submerged but relatively intact, could be heard tolling when the sea in the harbour was rough.
The earthquake is a historically accurate event as is the destruction. Some details however are of sufficient importance to be considered as more than facts but as cultural regulators of belief and behaviors of the people who even today can sense the impact of the events of over three hundred years ago. The church bell, the evil of the city and the survivor seem to suggest a Caribbean version of Sodom and Gomorrah. The prosaic historical fact of the 1691 earthquake thus becomes a fear inducing, behavior modifying, cautionary tale where God punishes evil through disaster. Haiti’s African tinged spirituality, considered anomalous in the New World is at the base of much of the spiritual stereotype that inspires fear and condemnation among the right thinking mainstream Churches and some of their adherents. In Mr. Robertson’s world by simple spiritual reductionism Haiti’s non-conforming mysticism can be considered part of the occult and assigned the label of evil, leaving it open to Divine punishment.
The spiritual isolation of Haiti is periodically revisited and renewed, For some religious leaders at the outset of the AIDS epidemic, misfortune was visited upon that nation as a moral consequence of some existing
cultural and/or spiritual flaw.
Add to this isolation on the spiritual level, the geopolitical isolation, which will be catalogued in the article below by Sir Hilary Beckles, and Haiti’s status was far from enviable. Is it possible to take another look at our prejudices, those things that have been prejudged by our institutions and presented to the public through these traditionally negative lenses?
Haiti’s earthquake disaster presents us with the possibility to look again at the body of “facts” in our culture that we keep consulting whenever Haiti makes the headlines in our media, this time attempting to go beyond the easy regurgitation of the old positions. Not to reject the bigoted rhetoric of a Pat Robertson is once again to allow ignorance to inform the discourse about Haiti.
In a desire to go beyond the superficial knowledge that I had, I found a rich source of information at www.normangirvan,info to challenge the simple, ready-made quality of the ideas I had acquired about Haiti and I was rewarded with some challenging and fascinating information, which I will now share with you.
Haiti: /the Hate and the Quake
Published on: 1/17/2010.
BY SIR HILARY BECKLES
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES is in the process of conceiving how best to deliver a major conference on the theme Rethinking And Rebuilding Haiti.
I am very keen to provide an input into this exercise because for too long there has been a popular perception that somehow the Haitian nation-building project, launched on January 1, 1804, has failed on account of mismanagement, ineptitude, corruption.
Buried beneath the rubble of imperial propaganda, out of both Western Europe and the United States, is the evidence which shows that Haiti's independence was defeated by an aggressive North-Atlantic alliance that could not imagine their world inhabited by a free regime of Africans as representatives of the newly emerging democracy.
The evidence is striking, especially in the context of France.
The Haitians fought for their freedom and won, as did the Americans fifty years earlier. The Americans declared their independence and crafted an extraordinary constitution that set out a clear message about the value of humanity and the right to freedom, justice, and liberty.
In the midst of this brilliant discourse, they chose to retain slavery as the basis of the new nation state. The founding fathers therefore could not see beyond race, as the free state was built on a slavery foundation.
The water was poisoned in the well; the Americans went back to the battlefield a century later to resolve the fact that slavery and freedom could not comfortably co-exist in the same place.
The French, also, declared freedom, fraternity and equality as the new philosophies of their national transformation and gave the modern world a tremendous progressive boost by so doing.
They abolished slavery, but Napoleon Bonaparte could not imagine the republic without slavery and targeted the Haitians for a new, more intense regime of slavery. The British agreed, as did the Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese.
All were linked in communion over the 500 000 Blacks in Haiti, the most populous and prosperous Caribbean colony.
As the jewel of the Caribbean, they all wanted to get their hands on it. With a massive slave base, the English, French and Dutch salivated over owning it - and the people.
The people won a ten-year war, the bloodiest in modern history, and declared their independence. Every other country in the Americas was based on slavery.
Haiti was freedom, and proceeded to place in its 1805 Independence Constitution that any person of African descent who arrived on its shores would be declared free, and a citizen of the republic.
For the first time since slavery had commenced, Blacks were the subjects of mass freedom and citizenship in a nation.
The French refused to recognise Haiti's independence and declared it an illegal pariah state. The Americans, whom the Haitians looked to in solidarity as their mentor in independence, refused to recognise them, and offered solidarity instead to the French. The British, who were negotiating with the French to obtain the ownership title to Haiti, also moved in solidarity, as did every other nation-state the Western world.
Haiti was isolated at birth - ostracised and denied access to world trade, finance, and institutional development. It was the most vicious example of national strangulation recorded in modern history.
The Cubans, at least, have had Russia, China, and Vietnam. The Haitians were alone from inception. The crumbling began.
Then came 182, the moment of full truth. The republic is celebrating its 21st anniversary. There is national euphoria in the streets of Port-au-Prince.
The economy is bankrupt; the political leadership isolated. The cabinet took the decision that the state of affairs could not continue.
The country had to find a way to be inserted back into the world economy. The French government was invited to a summit.
Officials arrived and told the Haitian government that they were willing to recognise the country as a sovereign nation but it would have to pay compensation and reparation in exchange. The Haitians, with backs to the wall, agreed to pay the French.
The French government sent a team of accountants and actuaries into Haiti in order to place a value on all lands, all physical assets, the 500 000 citizens were who formerly enslaved, animals, and all other commercial properties and services.
The sums amounted to 150 million gold francs. Haiti was told to pay this reparation to France in return for national recognition.
The Haitian government agreed; payments began immediately. Members of the Cabinet were also valued because they had been enslaved people before independence.
Thus began the systematic destruction of the Republic of Haiti. The French government bled the nation and rendered it a failed state. It was a merciless exploitation that was designed and guaranteed to collapse the Haitian economy and society.
Haiti was forced to pay this sum until 1922 when the last instalment was made. During the long 19th century, the payment to France amounted to up to 70 per cent of the country's foreign exchange earnings.
Jamaica today pays up to 70 per cent in order to service its international and domestic debt. Haiti was crushed by this debt payment. It descended into financial and social chaos.
The republic did not stand a chance. France was enriched and it took pleasure from the fact that having been defeated by Haitians on the battlefield, it had won on the field of finance. In the years when the coffee crops failed, or the sugar yield was down, the Haitian government borrowed on the French money market at double the going interest rate in order to repay the French government.
When the Americans invaded the country in the early 20th century, one of the reasons offered was to assist the French in collecting its reparations.
The collapse of the Haitian nation resides at the feet of France and America, especially. These two nations betrayed, failed, and destroyed the dream that was Haiti; crushed to dust in an effort to destroy the flower of freedom and the seed of justice.
Haiti did not fail. It was destroyed by two of the most powerful nations on earth, both of which continue to have a primary interest in its current condition.
The sudden quake has come in the aftermath of summers of hate. In many ways the quake has been less destructive than the hate.
Human life was snuffed out by the quake, while the hate has been a long and inhumane suffocation - a crime against humanity.
During the 2001 UN Conference on Race in Durban, South Africa, strong representation was made to the French government to repay the 150 million francs.
The value of this amount was estimated by financial actuaries as US $21 billion. This sum of capital could rebuild Haiti and place it in a position to re-engage the modern world. It was illegally extracted from the Haitian people and should be repaid.
It is stolen wealth. In so doing, France could discharge its moral obligation to the Haitian people.
For a nation that prides itself in the celebration of modern diplomacy, France, in order to exist with the moral authority of this diplomacy in this post-modern world, should do the just and legal thing.
Such an act at the outset of this century would open the door for a sophisticated interface of past and present, and set the Haitian nation free at last.
l Sir Hilary Beckles is pro-vice-chancellor and Principal of the Cave Hill Campus,
Views going forward
For a broad look at the Caribbean region and the reconstruction in Haiti see Norman Girvan’s Solidarity with Haiti.
