Haiti: Next chapters

I asked someone what Haiti is famous for, and the answer was “chaos.”

Not even for its art, or voodoo or Papa Doc, which everyone seems to know about. The current and accumulating bad news about one of the most historically important countries in the Americas, if not the world, has completely overshadowed every other significance Haiti could claim.

Of course, the more encouraging answer would have been that Haiti was the second independent country in Latin America and the Caribbean (after the US). Every other Caribbean country remained colonised until at least the 1960s, and some still are, but Haiti became independent in 1804 after the slaves of French-ruled Saint-Domingue had revolted in 1791, defeated the great Napoleon and renamed their part of the island of Santo Domingo Haiti.

Haitians should be famous for having led the most successful slave rebellion in history and having inspired all the other independence movements in the New World.

However, it is the litany of natural and unnatural disasters occurring in Haiti since 1804 that defines it. The most irreconcilable was the 2010 earthquake that killed 250,000 people and left 1.5 million homeless.

The most recent is the unprecedented gang violence that between this January and March claimed 1,500 lives.

The country is currently without any elected officials. Since President Moïse was assassinated in 2021, the state has lacked a president. The unelected, de-facto Prime Minister Ariel Henry, supported by the US, was recently forced out of office first by mass demonstrations and then by the 200 or so gangs whose illegal activities include kidnapping and mafia-style drug-trafficking, gun-running and extortion. They freed about 5,000 prisoners from jails, causing some 60,000 people to flee the capital in recent weeks as the declining numbers of police officers struggle to prevent the gangs from taking over the country completely.

What Haitian Haiti-watchers most struggle to come to terms with is the degree to which Haiti has failed to establish a successful democracy and economy, and the role of foreign, and particularly US, intervention in that. They signal how the new Haitian state was thwarted by France and financially bankrupted by its former coloniser, in cahoots with the US, and how that economic and political enslavement continues.

They point to US insistence on a role for Henry in any move to new elections when he was deeply unpopular and his political power illegitimate. They seem to have lost any residual trust in the US, doubting that it really desires a peaceful and prosperous Haiti on its doorstep, much as it seeks to keep Cuba in poverty and everywhere else in the Americas under thumb.

The idea that Haiti has been mined since its inception with the forced financial compensation to French slave owners at today’s value of $30 billion is hardly a controversial one.

The Harvesting of Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters is the title of Myriam JA Chancy’s newest book, which was shortlisted for the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in the non-fiction category. It is a feisty, personal and sharply-argued text that is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand why Haiti has been perpetually in a dreadful situation since the famous Haitian Revolution and how that historic event provoked fear by challenging western hegemony and the response to it.

One chapter draws upon essays previously published in a special pullout section of the Trinidad Express in 2012-13, sponsored by the Lloyd Best Institute, while Chancy was writer-in-residence at UWI.

Chancy, a Haitian Canadian/American, is the prizewinning author of other non-fiction titles and also four novels. Village Weavers, her latest, is about two young girls growing up in Haiti in the 1940s. Their lives inside and outside Haiti reveal much of the intricacies of Haitian reality, identity and society, past and present.

The author will be discussing both her novel and nonfiction books and the ways of writing in both genres in separate sessions at the NGC Bocas Lit Fest on April 27 and 28.

Haiti has been the subject of much study and reflection by international scholars and historians. However, some of the most moving and convincing testaments to Haiti’s history are the stories of the Haitian people themselves told in fiction.

One of the most beloved storytellers is the brightest star of Haitian literature, Edwidge Danticat, head judge of the 2024 OCM Bocas Prize. On April 27 at TT’s literary festival, Danticat will be in conversation with Prof Elizabeth Walcott-Hackshaw, French specialist and herself a writer.

The Haitian-American Danticat is one of the very finest writers of fiction emanating from the Caribbean. She is the winner of several literary awards, including the OCM Bocas Prize for both fiction and nonfiction.

Danticat and Chancy participating in the NGC Bocas Lit Fest presents a unique opportunity to critically engage with Haiti and to reframe the narrative.