I was planning to blog about the movie Avatar and poetry by queer women of color this week.
But on Tuesday: a 7.0-magnitude earthquake and devastation in Haiti. Horrifying photos, terrifying footage, and wrenching interviews. Brooklyn, where I live, is home to a large Haitian community. The anxiety and grief is palpable.
I want, then, to write about my increasing (and familiar) anger at how the disaster is being covered in the media. More specifically, about all that is missing from mainstream media coverage: the laps and gaps in their language, images, and analysis.
And about the ambivalence I feel about the outpouring generosity that flows from the American public at times like this coupled with the appalling lack of context.
To be clear, I’m not criticizing individuals who respond in deeply human ways to our witnessing (albeit through the television or computer screen) of the suffering of others. We feel an overwhelming desire to do something, to help. That is the basic goodness in us.
Last night, my Facebook page was filled with updates of where and how to give money. And amid those pleas, this status update from poet Suheir Hammad: “knows haiti has been deforested, isolated, and made vulnerable because she was the first black nation to free herself from colonialism’s coil. bless her, her children, her land, her vision.”
A sigh, a breath. A clear vision, sharp analysis, deep compassion and love. Poetry.
Yes, we need to be generous with our money in times like this, but we also need to be strategic: that is, searching out grassroots organizations who have been in Haiti for years and are responsible and accountable (if you are on Facebook, here’s a great compilation of resources). And we need, just as much, to not be myopic.
Trust the writers to understand.
Novelist and MacArthur Fellow Edwidge Danticat who was born in Port-Au-Prince, said in an 2004 interview (after the military coup that removed Aristide from power):
People think that there is a country there that these people are only around when they are on CNN. “ If you don’t see them they don’t exist. I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extreme. And that’s what they end up knowing about it. There is a frustration too, that at moments when there’s not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people’s consciousness.
And indeed, for a few years after the coup, Haiti disappeared from the U.S. public’s consciousness. A series of tropical storms in 2008 brought it back into the news-camera lens, and now, an avalanche of reporting on the earthquake. But what is being said about it?
This BBC report is a perfect example of the condescending and totally ahistorical reporting that is flourishing in the Western media. The reporter says Haiti is “unlucky,” having more than its share of “political mismanagement” and “natural disasters.” When I heard that, I wanted to throw my shoe at the reporter.
Is it “unlucky” that, after a long and bloody revolution, the first nation of former slaves was required to go into debt ($21 billion, in current U.S. dollars) in order to have its independence be recognized by Western powers?
Was it “unlucky” to have been occupied by the U.S. for almost 20 years, and then ruled under the tyranny of dictators often supported by the U.S. during the Cold War as a bulwark against Communism and Fidel Castro?
Is it “unlucky” that Haiti’s first democratically elected president was removed by a coup, which many believe was backed by the U.S.?
Is it “unlucky” that, because of trade liberalization policies pushed for by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank, Haiti has gone from being self-sufficient in the production of its staple food ??? rice ??? to having to import a majority of it from the U.S. ??? causing devastation in the rural areas? (or, as the BBC report maddeningly put, a “drubbing around in subsistence farming.”)
Is it “unlucky” that poverty and lack of energy sources has resulted in the deforestation of Haiti, which contributed to the mudslides, which made the earthquake damage that much worse?
Unlucky?
To bring this back around to language (since this is, after all, a post on a literary magazine’s blog), it is this kind of inattention to language and context that I am arguing against. We don’t need language and images that narrow the scope of our understanding of the disaster. Nor do we need, as Farai Chideya notes on the recent use of the term “cursed” to describe Haiti, language that serves as “a phantasmagorical way of dis-engaging Western history from the literal rubble of Haiti.”
Instead, I am asking for a language that opens, that makes room for the whole history, for all the realities. For our complicity. For what has come before in Haiti and what will come after. For language that will not let us forget after we have made the online donation and clicked through to the next disaster.