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Books discussed in this essay
--Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! (Soho Press, 224 pp.; $20, 1995; Vintage, $11, paper, 1996)
--Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 339 pp.; $35, 1995)
--Herbert Gold, Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp.; $12, paper, 1992 [first published 1991])
--Blair Niles, Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa's Eldest Daughter (1926; o.p.)
--North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads (South End Press, 256 pp.; $35, hardcover, $15, paper, 1995)
Public events give place names new overtones that can seem to override previous, private meanings. For my first 27 years, for example, Waco was merely the town my grandfather came from. Now the name evokes an unhappy recent history, and I'm tacitly asked to take a side. So too with Haiti. I have spent time in that unhappy country, respect particular Haitian people for particular reasons, know the country's language and vivid smells and sounds. The now pervasive presumption that politics should trump my own experience both baffles and angers me; I'm not on anybody's side, thank you very much.
The meaning of "Haiti" has become a battleground. Some months ago a friend sent me a flier for a new book from South End Press. Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads was, I was told, "a succinct history and up-to-date analysis of the tragic betrayal of Haitian democracy" that explained "why attempts to 'restore democracy' in Haiti seem doomed to failure. In part," claimed the flier,
the reasons lie in Haiti's centuries-old "semi-feudal" class structure overlaid by the agro-export economy established during the U.S. occupation. Much blame, however, rests squarely on the shoulders of the United States. The U.S. response to the coup--the inhumane refugee policy, a leaky embargo, ineffectual weak-kneed diplomacy, and a sustained cia campaign to paint [then-President Jean-Bertrand] Aristide as demagogic and mentally unstable--lays bare the United States' contempt for democratic and legal processes.
Such effort expended, I mused with some disgust, to demonstrate what seems so obvious as to be irrelevant. The leftist publisher's blinkered paradigm blinds it to difficult truths: that "democracy" (however defined) is not the be-all and end-all, nor is "the United States" a monolith. (No state is a monolith; only totalitarians say otherwise.) Furthermore, Aristide is demagogic and mentally unstable, even if the CIA does say so.
The American Left did more harm than good with its preemptive invasion of the moral high ground in the debate over Haiti. (The journalist Amy Wilentz, for starters, deserves much credit for having "discovered" Aristide,1 but her own compromised role as his leading apologist remains too little criticized. Her writings during and since the crisis show her striving, and inevitably failing, at once to retain her chair as dean of American retailers of Aristideism and to regain the journalist's authority as independent observer that she should not have squandered.)2 Indeed, this self-congratulatory stance recalls Norman Mailer's words (to V. S. Naipaul) on posturing leftists back in 1969: "They just want to make a statement and stand around being right. 'I know what is wrong, I'm noble.' This I don't buy."
On the other side of the debate, the claimed meanings of Haiti enforced in the service of what the North American imperial state defined itself as doing--"restoring democracy"--were classically Orwellian, and the salvation of our national soul will begin the moment we admit this. "Our success in Haiti to date shows what the international community, with American leadership, can achieve in helping countries in their struggle to build democracy," said Bill Clinton, with a straight face, just after the invasion. As Orwell himself might have put it, two and two make five.
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