le silence
plus déchirant qu’un simoun de sagaies
plus rugissant qu’un cyclone de fauves
et qui hurle
s’élève
appelle
vengeance et châtiment
un raz de marée de pus et de lave
Sur la félonie du monde
et le tympan du ciel crevé sous le poing
de la justice - Jacques Roumain
Marguerite Laurent dissected the colonialist myths recycled in the msm's Haiti reporting:
There are perhaps two common stories about Haiti that are retold ad nausea:
One is, the convenient black-on-black crime dismissal where the manipulated Haiti image displays the fighting "troubled" Haitians with the "winner take all politics and attitudes" who won't allow Western countries to help them modernized and who are continually killing each other in "civil unrest" and who simply cannot absorb foreign aid or use effectively the generous help provided by the benevolent, heroic and wealthier U.S./Euro white world.
The Tallahassee students' article ("Trip to Haiti changes students") is a good example of the second common news story on the "needy (and pitiful but proud) Haitians" of Haiti.
That article tells the perpetual story of the poor, pitiful, proud and victimized Haitians and of the young, innocent, compassionate white American come to “do good” in Haiti. It's a true article and I've read a thousand of them with different faces, same storyline on Haiti.
One group is heroic and self-less, one group is helpless and proud victim and forever shall that be, as is intended, by the powers always not allowing there to be any relief from these pre-ordained roles and the racists and cultural biases it extends about Haitians from the time Haitians chose Africa instead of Europe at Bwa Kayiman, on August 14, 1791.
What such stories don't tell, is most important.
[...]
The neocolonial storylines serve and reinforce the white settlers' Tarzan/Superman mythical compassion, sacrifice and heroism towards needy Black Haitians/Africans and to blunt and obfuscate the truth of U.S./Euro corporate, governmental and imperial bullying, injustice and barbarity in Haiti. These storylines extend white hypocrisy to the nth degree, fostering the "godliness" of the Westerner convincing himself he bore the brunt of the ravages of Haiti's struggles and "helped" the needy Haitians. When the uncomplicated truth is that it's white systemic tyranny, ethnocentricity and neocolonialism and its consequences of underdevelopment in Haiti that leaves Haitians without access, opportunity and the material structures to protect themselves against acts of nature such as Hurricane Dean. Nowhere in these storylines will you learn how the U.S. citizen's individual compassion (sincere as it may well be for some) extends dependency, paternalism and co-exists and is vastly overwhelmed by the white settlers' official and systemic, political, military, diplomatic, media and corporate tyranny and economic exploitation of Haiti and Haitians.
But Haitians are not as pitiful as being trumpeted by these neocolonial storylines. For, it may be observed that Haitians are so powerful that the greatest superpowers on earth and their mainstream medias spend their printing space spreading these two storylines and half truths on Haiti, in willing efforts, to ignore, diminish and re-cast Haiti's noble David-against-Goliath-Herculean struggle. This reality also brings to mind that we are in the month of August and that August 14, 2007 marked the anniversary of the ceremony that began the Haitian revolution where Haitians forever changed world history, annihilated (for a time) those two storylines and broke their chains themselves, found “relief flights” for themselves. It reminds me that though Haiti still suffers for that great feat everyday, and in a myriad of ways, it can never actually be undone.
Examples are endless, but this year's "Gentleman Explorer J. Peterman In Haiti" award would have to go to Michael Deibert for his (almost)
unbelievably vile and shocking "review" of
Peter Hallward's superb book
Damming the Flood. Hallward
replied to this with breathtaking forebearance, rightly noting the pointlessness of any attempt to "defend" the book from this "review" as the latter scarcely even mentioned the content of the former and sedulously avoided engaging with its analysis.
Which analysis is, actually, of the US-France-Canada aggression against Haiti, Haitians and Haitian democracy, a fact which escapes Deibert who seems convinced the only genre in which it is possible to write about imperialism in Haiti would be
travelogue cum memoir of J. Peterman, gentleman explorer's, exciting, perilous and benevolent adventures there.
Out Of AfricaBetween the years 1906 and 1939, a trickle, then a light rainfall, then a downpour, of Englishmen, Germans, Scots, and some remarkable women, began to fall upon the immense gorgeous plateau of East Africa.
Some came for a year, and stayed a lifetime. Some came to farm; or make a fortune; or to put something awful far behind. Don’t ask what.
All came to start life over again. Fresh.
Discovered they hadn’t been expelled from a Garden of Eden after all, but were just now entering one.
That first night they lay awake listening, hearing Africa, hearing for the first time how to hear.
And how to read a flattened blade of grass: who or what had passed through here, exactly how long ago.
It was paradise. It lasted three decades. There will never be anything else like it again.
(Days of laughing, dancing, talking all night; ostrich omelettes the morning after; walking thirty miles to see an ocean of oryx, a river of hippos; flying low over a sea of wildebeest; driving among elephants in a maharajah’s 3-axel Buick; great luxury; great simplicity. Never again anything like it.)
Striding through the coffee fields with a strong walk that means business. No mincing. No dainty, uncertain steps.
Stretchy cotton with buttoning contour waistband. On-seam side pockets. Buttoning watch pocket and fly front. The sweeping, ankle-length cut is slenderizing, too. (Those big Edwardian breakfasts.)
Deibert in
Salon, 2000:
Haiti, a country I love and where I lived for months in 1997, seems once again to be drifting, inexorably, toward its own terrible, particular marriage of anarchy and dictatorship....
A shellshocked Reuters correspondent, just arrived from the States, appeared at the house I was staying at in Port-au-Prince to inform us that his car had been detained as a group of young men ran past, smashing bottles and carrying tires under their arms. Word on the street had it that they were angry because Lavalas still hadn't paid them for their "work" during the elections. Zenglendos (armed thugs) stuck a gun in my friend's sister's face as she sat stuck in traffic on a downtown street. Finding notebooks that indicated she was a student, they threw them back at her through the car window as they drove away on their motorcycles.
As a friend of mine, a wealthy progressive mulatto, said, "The security situation here is not good." The fact that the streets of a city of 2 million people are empty at 8 p.m. is testimony enough to that.
I got a taste of how unstable that situation was firsthand when a group of friends and I ventured out one night to a hotel in the affluent suburb of Petionville. We went to see a concert by Sweet Micky, the legendary "president" of compas, Haiti's singularly slinky and sensual popular music. Micky is an unrepentant supporter of the 1991 coup against Aristide, and is as famous for his scabrous double-entendres as for his anti-Lavalas politics. His sweaty, exhilarating shows are known to attract a raucous crowd of ex-secret police, soldiers and gang members.
Sure enough, once we arrived among the massive, dressed-to-kill crowd, the audience scattered over the demurely arranged deck chairs and around a pair of illuminated pools -- not once but three times -- as groups of men drew their guns on one another, spitting invective and threatening violence. After one particularly nasty stampede, where I badly twisted my ankle knocking over a table to get away from any potentially flying bullets, a teenage Haitian boy got up with his girlfriend from their own pile of scattered chairs, looked at me and said simply, "Blan," the Creole world for foreigner. He was doubled over with laughter.
But in the face of such terror, kindness persists. A musician insisted that I partake of his young daughter's first Communion cake. An evangelist minister drove me the whole, hot, long, dusty way from Aristide's foundation at Tabarre to drop me off in downtown Port-au-Prince and then refused to take any payment for his services. A Haitian English teacher in a frayed suit who had lived near my own home in Brooklyn for 14 years began a conversation with me, unsolicited, just to hear what New York was like these days. As we walked down the street, he asked me with a sad shake of his head to tell people "what they [Lavalas] did to these elections."
..."I came down here in 1985 to research voodoo rhythms," says Richard Morse, a surpassingly tall New York transplant, as he takes a drag off an early morning cigarette. We're in the lobby of the hotel he runs, a space where his group, Ram, also plays regular weekly gigs. The hotel itself is one of the outstanding examples of gingerbread architecture in Port-au-Prince.
"I took over the hotel in 1987, formed a band in 1990 and stopped counting governments in 1996." He remembers a time in the early 1990s when coups and counter-coups gave the country three governments in 12 hours. Morse, a Haitian-American educated at Princeton, is not hopeful about the current state of affairs in his adopted country. He says the lines between the old military regimes and Lavalas are getting fuzzier.
Before Hallward,
Justin Podur had to deal with this character, and concluded:
Why I did not want to debate Deibert
I was convinced, reluctantly, into replying to Deibert. My inclination was not to do it. After going through the long and painful process of reading 450 pages of his writing, I know enough to realize that debating him is a waste of time. For a debate to occur, there would have to be some limit on personal attacks and demonization. There would have to be some separation of allegation from evidence. There would have to be some sense that the other person was paying attention to what you were actually saying. Deibert is manifestly incapable of any of this....
...He refrained from critiquing my physique (I assume he'll get around to it if he ever sees it), but he assigned me (listing slurs in order that they appear) a "cursory knowledge" of Haiti, "an inch-deep grasp" of its history, accuses me of "chastising" Haitians, of "lies", of "fealty" to Haitian politicians, of taking "shelter in shop-worn rhetoric learned in the safety of North American universities and activist circles", of being "unable to conceive of a Lavalas partisan [I] wouldn't like", of having "skepticism about corporate motives" which "becomes wide-eyed credulity when confronted with the dubious financial dealings of Haiti's former government", of calling people "chimeres", of "seeming to dissemble for political effect", of "ignorance of the demographic and political makeup of Haiti and its people", of taking a "novice approach".
Of course, as he did with Chomsky and Farmer, Deibert is contrasting me, with my ignorance, my fealties, and my shop-worn rhetoric, with himself, the main hero of his book and his reply. He has "a decade's worth of experience there" (I suspect some creative accounting is going on. Though his book jacket says that he first visited Haiti in 1996, it says he was a Reuters correspondent there from 2001-2003. The book suggests he was there from late 2001 and left in mid-2003, with shorter trips after that) after all, he has an "ache within" him for Haiti (pg. 434), and his book views the country "through the eyes of Haiti's poor".
In case anyone is tempted to believe any of the midwest MFA Phil Gourevitchism of Deibert's "reporting", Podur's inquiries regarding the book turned up plenty of discouragement to credulity:
Some of Deibert's book is first-hand reporting, and as such is difficult for the reader to verify. I did have a rare opportunity to verify one of Deibert's claims. I met Haitian activist Patrick Elie (who I found, from a brief interaction, to be a very courageous and brilliant individual) in Port au Prince in September 2005. When I saw him mentioned in Deibert's book, I wrote to him (on January 2, 2006):
Hi Patrick.
I am going through Deibert's book the second time today and reached the part where he describes you. It's page 285. December 3, 2002, at the memorial of journalist Brignol Lindor, he describes "chimere" who showed up and chanted for Aristide under the direction of Hermione Leonard.
"I stood on the steps and watched as journalists who had been honoring Lindor began to come out and the ! chimere advanced to the cathedral steps, flinging Aristide pictures at them, shrieking 'git mama w, blan' and about how they worked for 'colon blan'. As Michele Montas descended the stairs, one stood screaming 'Aristide a vie' about five feet away from her... Patrick Elie, the head of the Eko Vwa Jean Dominique organization that had strung those damning banners around Port au Prince on the second anniversary of Dominique's death, shook his head and looked disgusted."
-J.
Patrick replied immediately:
Justin,
I never attended any religious ceremony for Lindor and have not set foot in the cathedral since February 7, 1991, the day of Aristide's first inauguration, when I was in charge of his security. Deibert sure has a creative writing style, which is a nice way to say that he is a goddamn liar.
Patrick
Hallward's book needs no defence; it is unquestionably the most thorough, thoughtful and informative account of imperial policy toward Haiti in the post-Duvalier period available. Its existence serves as a mere pretext for Diebert's performance of the colonialist routine - and that performance is absolutely complete, missing not a single trick.
Deibert - whose blogger profile describes his "Interests" as
Travelling the world in search of adventure - begins his attack on Hallward with the linked questioning of credentials and suspicion of motives already familiar from his abuse of Podur:
In early 2004, a few days after the February ouster of Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide following months of massive protests against his rule and an armed rebellion of former soldiers and once-loyal street gangs, Peter Hallward, an academic working in the United Kingdom specializing in modern French philosophy, weighed in with his take on Haiti’s situation.
Writing from London, Hallward, who had never visited Haiti, wrote in the British newspaper the Guardian that “Aristide was forced from office…by people who have little in common except their opposition to his progressive policies and their refusal of the democratic process.”
This move of course is rivalising, Deibert positioning himself as the expert in contrast to the sheltered philosophy professor dilettante. But it is much more than the privileging of his own point of view, or superior expertise, for these familiar types in the form of which Deibert presents himself and Hallward belong to an established genre of colonialist writing, and their introduction implies much more than it states. As an "opening scene", juxtaposing the equivalent of newsreel from Haiti (montage:
massive protests, gangs, soldiers) and (cut to) only days later, our story begins, far away in London, (French philosophy, Hallward, professor) the leading paragraphs introduce a genre. Among the themes we are alerted to expect is the folly and arrogance of intellectuals and bureaucrats, "ensconced" "safely" (favourite Deibert words, applied to Hallward, Podur, Jeb Sprague, the anonymous Type they represent, and others) somewhere against whom the heroic explorers, the Tarzans whom Laurent mentions above, who get their hands dirty and dodge bullets, must constantly fight if some helpless land with its helpless and enduring natives are to be saved from the rapacity and barbarity of the uppity and ridiculously madly ambitious native leadership without being simply abandoned to the incompetence, neglect, out of touchness, cowardice, etc. of civilised but soft, vain, self-interested professors and politicians, those who shirk their duty to shoulder the white man's burden.
So it is not merely that Deibert is attempting to throw suspicion on Hallward's ability to collect and interpret enough information to write intelligently about his own government's coup which overthrew Aristide's administration and the Lavalas government. The two characters - desk-man and adventurer - immediately set out tell the reader a great many things surreptitiously: what kind of story this is, and what kind of place Haiti is. Imagine a "review" of a book about the late credit crisis which noted that the author "writing from Switzerland, who had never visited the floor of the New York Stock Exchange".... With his opening, Deibert immediately establishes that somehow an understanding of US-France-Canada policy toward Haiti and the coup requires some physical, sensual consumption
of Haiti (alone - not Paris, not Washington, not Wall Street, god knows not anywhere in Canada). Unlike Washington, Haiti is a place which has to be smelled, heard, seen, felt, to be known. It's bodily. It's a scene of adventures. Anecdotes. Violence. Guys who know guys you know. Their sisters. Colourful characters, "voodoo rhythms", kindness and communion cakes. Somehow one can better understand Bush regime policy toward it by standing around in Pétionville bars than by reading publications of international lenders, think tanks, NED, IRI, and the financial press. The philosophy professor in London has had no such adventures; he has not
immersed himself, gone half-native, talked to the guy who knows a guy you know; he probably wouldn't recognise "a Glock" if you knocked his little wire glasses off with it; and Haiti is one of those places one cannot learn about by telecom. Knowledge of Haiti is absorbed and experienced, through the senses. Research is pointless - we are dealing with something too visceral and primitive for language. But this does not imply that Haitians, with lots of such experience, can know Haiti. Certainly not enough to communicate anything worthwhile about it by words, telephone, email, newspaper, government press conferences, ambassadors. Haiti and Haitians are the known, Deibert, the adventurer, the knower. He brings to Haiti what only his character possesses, the intellect and desire to know this body without self-knowledge that is Haiti. Deibert is explicit about Hallward's failure to seek, or inability to fulfill, this role as explorer-adventurer-consumer-saviour, which marks him as the incompetent, ignorant, bookish, self-interested, desk- bound foil to Deibert's Heroic Tarzan Jorno:
Admitting freely that he has “visited Haiti only twice” and has “ no special interest in the peculiarities of Haitian society, of its remarkable languages or even more remarkable religions,” these facts nevertheless do not stop Hallward from holding forth on Haiti’s tortuously complex recent political history.
If he's not into "voodoo rhythms" what possible interest could he have in Haiti? Deibert will conclude: "I believe knowing whether or not Peter Hallward operated in similar good faith [to Deibert's own] is open to debate, but the evidence is not encouraging."
Hallward's investigation into the crimes of the government of his own country smells fishy to Deibert's canine nose for the safely ensconced intellectual romanticisers of self-proclaimed tyrants and the slum-dwelling riff raff they whip up into frenzies of anarchy and mayhem. Having set out the protagonist and his foil, Deibert proceeds swiftly to introduce the most important stock character of this colonialist tale: the Absurd And Terrible Mad Black King. Ridiculous and brutal. It is somewhat shocking to see Deibert produce this cliché absolutely without mincing words - Aristide is "the latest manifestation" of a type, identified as "noirist"; he is only an avatar of the eternal Figure, the risible and horrifying black man in power, (whip in hand, astride a furious beast that is the Haitian citizenry) and before he was even elected was covered in gore and drenched in the blood of slaughtered "mulattos", because he is only Duvalier, who was himself only a copy of the ancient original, with a new name:
One of the major flaws of Hallward’s account becomes apparent early on and it is a major one for an undertaking of this nature: The book has no historical memory. In seeking at all costs to prove the author’s thesis of the essential uniqueness and saintliness of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and Aristide's Fanmi Lavalas political party, Hallward ignores the inescapable fact that Aristide and Lavalas did not come out of a vacuum, but rather represented simply the latest manifestation by which bright, ambitious political leaders sought to harness the popular discontent at the criminal poverty that Haiti’s poor majority is forced to exist in on a daily basis. It is a discontent that had been harnessed with varying degrees of effectiveness in the late 19th century by Lysius Salomon, and in the mid-late 20th century by Dumarsais Estimé and François Duvalier (both of whom made it to the presidency), as well as by more marginal figures such as Daniel Fignole, the Port-au-Prince political leader who oratory was so skillful at whipping his slum-based followers into a frenzy that they became know as his rouleau compresseur (steamroller).
These historical periods are viewed by Hallward as needless distractions from the task at hand, which is to rush headlong , very much in the manner of the novice though ultra-confident commentator that he is, into proving his thesis, but unfortunately for him, the periods of Jean-Pierre Boyer, Faustin Soulouque, Salomon and Estimé (as well as the tenures of more minor presidents such as Sténio Vincent and Elie Lescot) all left profound impacts on Haiti’s political culture, leading up to today. One scans the book’s pages in vain for any discussion, or even acknowledgment of Boyer’s 20 year annexation of the Dominican Republic, of Soulouque‘s arming of irregular loyalists known as zinglins (precursors of Duvalier’s Tontons Macoutes paramilitaries and Aristide’s chimere bands in later years), of Salomon’s virtual destruction of the commercial districts of Port-au-Prince in 1883 (and along with it the murder of at least of 1,000 of the president’s enemies) and of Estimé's ascension to the presidency in 1946 (breaking 20 years of mulatto hegemony of the office), but none is to be found.
Hallward's skimming over Haitian history up until 1991 (during which he tenuously links wealthy industrialists and importers - millionaires - with working-class local journalists and academics as being part of the country’s “bourgeois” elite), asserts that “class rather than race exerts the most powerful influence on Haitian society.”
It is actually extraordinary and startling how unashamedly Deibert makes these assertions - listing the names of the presidents who are, he insists, a Single Figure, demanding "historical memory" which is nothing other than recognising the Figure and Aristide as the "latest manifestation", somehow hinting a promise of drawing some actual connections but brazenly casting that aside with a textual
wink-wink, you know what I mean. He comes right out and complains that Hallward has gone off-script. He simply asserts that Hallward is telling the wrong story, with the wrong paradigm, and because it is impossible for him to rebut this or support his objections, he merely emphatically rehashes the official ancient tale against the painted backdrop with the palm trees and huts. One "scans the text in vain for an acknowledgement" that Aristide in his former incarnations invaded the Dominican Republic and led the notorious Tonton Macoutes; one looks for the "acknowledgement" of
what Aristide is. (In the
Salon article, Deibert tells us Aristide is Robert Mugabe.
Not Nelson Mandela. "Haitians, meanwhile, are left wondering whether they will have a heroic, visionary Nelson Mandela or an authoritarian, scapegoating Robert Mugabe (two other third-world leaders who came to power on a tide of popular movements) on their hands...." Because that's the choice, these Figures, those are the two dolls in the shop. He anticipates the reader's mind filled with these images, and admits, nowadays, yes, you have the long shot that the audience will picture a black President as a copy of that other Figure. Deibert knows that other doll is out there somewhere, and he tells you straight, no, no, not that one, this one. This is the Aristide doll, sunglasses, limo, spear. The old one, the usual one, not the exception but the rule.)
As if this were yet too subtle, Deibert continues to hammer away, emphasising that Aristide, being black, and President, is nothing other than the current version of the Figure:
Though Hallward does not explore the theme in any detail, since the late 1950s advent of the noiriste dictatorship of François Duvalier and continuing on with the rise to power of Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his Fanmi Lavalas party in the 1990s, a nouveaux riche black political class has emerged in the nation to share the country’s economic stage with the traditional mulatto elite, an elite who historically through Haiti’s history, via its surrogates in politics and the military, wrestled for control of the levers of power in the country with populist demagogues agile at exploiting the very justified feelings of exploitation that the majority of Haitians - black, impoverished and poorly educated and cared for by the state - felt against them. Until the Duvalier dictatorship brought the mulatto elite to its knees with arrests and pogroms (most notably in the southwestern city of Jeremie in 1964, where entire families of mulattos were wiped out) this, along with fears (some realized) of foreign intervention, had been the dominant theme of much of Haiti’s history.
As you will be expecting, the insistent drumbeat of this
dominant theme of pseudo-"Haitian history", a pageant of racist caricatures monotonously re-staged as if it were combined evidence and explanation, will loop back to the beginnning to conjure one of the earliest incarnations of the Figure of the Mad Savage Black Man In Power, talented but mentally unstable, delusional and cruel, afflicted with genocidal "moods", ridiculously "proclaiming himself" what it is simply unnatural for him to be, laughably mimicking his betters:
This dynamic appears to allude [freudian sic] Hallward, though, and instead he rapidly detours into an explanation of why, in an historical context, the “battered guns” of Aristide’s Fanmi Lavalas party were never any match for the “better guns” of Haiti’s elite, before returning - apparently without irony - to laud Jean-Jacques Dessalines as a “proto-socialist.” Dessalines, a brilliant military strategist, was nevertheless capable of mass slaughter verging on genocide when the mood seized him, and promptly proclaimed himself emperor after declaring Haiti a republic in 1804.
In his sum up, Deibert fills out the supporting characters his genre requires with cartoon crowds of the long-suffering and worthy of patronage, assuring us that when Haitians are isolated, downtrodden, helpless, waiting in vain for their civilised saviours to finally liberate them from this monstrous risible mad black man in power - when they are not uppity, becoming politicians, engaging in collective action, meddling in the management of their country, proclaiming themselves Emperors, (in which moulds of self-assertion and agency of course the Haitian substance becomes invariably wicked, corrupt, murderous and incompetent, that's the
theme, the
dynamic, of Deibert's "historical memory") - they are quite acceptable and noble. Deserving of more humanitarian rescue coups. In their proper place,** Haitians are at their best:
It may have been many years since Haiti’s hugely decent, gentle, honest, hardworking and always-struggling populace have felt like they have glimpsed the promised land, and in the past decades of turmoil no doubt they have always felt the net, whether it be that of poverty or oppression, tightening around them. They have been failed on so many counts, by the lack of vision and the predatory nature of their own political leaders, by the short memory and dithering approach and often naked self-interest of the international community, by foreign journalists who often seem more concerned with moving on before they really even bother to get to know the place, and by overweening “experts” like Hallward, ever-eager to lecture Haitians on what their history means without ever bothering to even listen to what the Haitians themselves have to say.
But in the million small kindnesses on display to visitors to the country, and with the Haitians’ own acute sense of their history, one must still, however tenuously, have faith that the delicate task of repairing Haiti’s torn social fabric, of rebuilding its economy, and of creating a genuinely representative system of democracy based on strong institutions and the rule of law is an eminently possible undertaking, and the Haitians will get to that promised land someday.
In between the opening and this conclusion, Deibert goes on at length with a pseudo-factual, frenzied catalogue of violence which he, groundlessly and mainly by insinuation, attributes to President Aristide, spewing a context free chronicle of vividly described murders and rapes. A flurry of unnecessary sensational details, resembling, as the prose of J Peterman in Haiti must, the technique of fashion journalism as Barthes described it,* is intended to distract from the utter vacuousness of the text. During this, as if by accident, Deibert stumbles into a glancing contact with the book he is purportedly reviewing:
Hallward dismisses the concerns of the students of Haiti’s state university system - overwhelmingly poor and hardly members of the “bourgeois elite” that he so enjoys obsessing over - as “a trivial dispute.” In fact, the July 2002 “hunger strike” by seven Lavalas-affiliated students (out of a student body of 12,000) - an event that the Aristide government used as an excuse to oust the system’s rector, Pierre-Marie Paquiot before scheduled (though delayed) faculty elections were held - was viewed by these young, materially (though not intellectually) impoverished scholars as anything but trivial. Though Hallward focuses on the role the students played in late 2003 (and the “training” some student leaders received that year from organizations such as the International Republican Institute in the Dominican Republic), the genesis and development of the student movement against Aristide was far more organic to the particularities of Haiti at the time than Hallward would ever let on to his readers.
Consider the inverted commas hugging the word
training. In them is condensed Deibert's whole function, and that of the colonialist mythos he reproduces.
*
It is the very preciseness of the reference to the world [of copy like:
a raincoat for evening strolls along the docks at Calais]
that makes the function unreal; one encounters here the paradox of the art of the novel: any fashion so detailed becomes unreal, but at the same time, the more contingent the function the more 'natural' it seems. Fashion writing thus comes back to the postulate of realist style, according to which an accumulation of small and precise details confirms the truth of the thing represented. - Roland Barthes,
The Fashion System. In his
review of Deibert's book of open imperialist apology, Justin Podur vividly captures Deibert's deployment of this style as simulacrum of "the Foreign Correspondent diary of dispatches":
The narrative is essentially experiential: our man in Port-au-Prince leaves his flat, attends a demonstration, breathes the air, encounters various characters who mutter ominous words about Aristide or sigh about what's happening to the country. An aerosol of local colour: blue skies, crowded lanes, pungent smells, snatches of kreyol, barefoot kids, throbbing music: is spray-painted over a framework supported at all key points by international officialdom. Time and again, the clinching argument of a passage will be made by 'a member of the OAS team', 'a veteran of international observer missions', or a seemingly ubiquitous 'US official'. Further claims are attributed to still more anonymous sources: 'many said', 'most said', 'critics wondered', 'it appeared'; or simply to 'rumours', some of which were 'unusually detailed rumours'....Experiential narrative has the advantage of avoiding any necessity to evaluate evidence, weigh contrasting claims or reckon with data (Chomsky, a particular bogey for Deibert, is haughtily dismissed for his 'flurry of numbers'). Instead, it's on to the next bar, the next faceless OAS source....Deibert must thus rely heavily on insinuation to make his case. Predictably, Aristide is likened to the Duvaliers (ten times) and Pol Pot, and a pro-government newspaper to Streicher's Der Stürmer. Pro-Lavalas youth, and the opposition to the Convergence Démocratique and the paramilitaries, are almost universally referred to as chimères in these pages: though Deibert never tells us how he distinguishes a chimère from any other teenage boy: and linked whenever possible to a suggestion of nameless vodou horrors. **Deibert is rather
repetitive with his emphasis on the approved and proper station of Haitians and the dangers arising when they get thoughts above it, as it is important to his own role (personification of as well as publicist for US Empire), protector of those who remain patiently meek and helpless and isolated, (those imagined grateful to work for almost nothing are credits to their nation, making it worthy of better imperial care), fearless, indignant and contemptuous opponent of the mad, ambitious and uppity who strike, demonstrate or dare aspire to management and "miserable power":
The Haiti I know and love is full of people who, in their everyday struggles, display twenty times the heroism that any politician I have seen in the country ever has: A man working late hours at his media support group despite the danger of being kidnapped if he is late returning home; a father, out of work for three years, who dutifully gets up to pound the pavement every day in order to search for a job to support his family and restore his sense of dignity, and his wife, who braves strikes, demonstrations and the daily threat of violence to go teach school at a facility often lacking the basic instruments for education such as books, pens and paper; the woman fleeing a gang war sheltering in the parking lot of a Baptist mission who has nothing in mind more than keeping her children safe from the struggle for miserable power. These are the real heroes of Haiti, not the politicians.
Of course, there are people engaging in those everyday struggles all around the world, and I, for one, have to go out and report on them today.
