Memories of Haiti

We’re all thinking of Haiti and Haitians now, so I thought I would write about my experience of Haiti.

Haiti changed my life. It was August, 1972, and a few weeks before my 13th birthday and becoming bat mitzvah. I accompanied my parents on a cruise of the Caribbean. St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, and Nassau were pleasant and touristy, with plenty of shops selling all sorts of things my mom and dad were interested in. Cap Haitien, Haiti, was different. Cap Haitien was not the touristy, built up part of the island, and our arrival there (rather than at Port-au-Prince), was the ship captain’s decision for some reason I don’t recall.

Before disembarking (I think by dingies) and visiting the island, the cruise director – yes, the same guy who planned the costume party and the amateur night – presented a lecture of Haiti’s politics. I have forgotten his name, but the lesson remains.

The average annual income for a Haitian family, he told us, was $76 per year. (Calculating GDP per capita from World Bank statistics, I get $97 in 1972 – not exactly the same measure, but suggesting the same awful situation.) The US, he reported, had provided a considerable amount of aid to Haiti, but it all ended up first in Papa Doc Duvalier’s pocket, and then in that of his son, Baby Doc. I can’t remember whether the cruise director spoke of the Tonton Macoute, but I suspect that he did. His passion for the people of Haiti and his outrage over their suffering was clear.

When we reached land, we were immediately surrounded by people who looked quite poor begging (and my father could not resist giving out some money), but we quickly got into a taxi with a driver who promised to show us the sights (the ruins of the Citadel).

My memories of the Citadel are very vague. My memories of what we saw on the trip there are crystalline. As we drove into the hills, I saw children with distended bellies. I knew that those bellies meant serious malnutrition. I also knew that I (overly nourished and white) was a child just like those children (malnourished and black). Odd how, when one is a child, one seems to belong to the Family of Children. Why, why was I so lucky/rich/healthy when they were not? What had the Duvaliers done to this country? How could leaders hurt the defenseless children?

I still do not understand inequality, injustice, and why some people are fortunate and others not. Oh, I can use the skills of my profession to study theories of dependencia, biopolitics, power, globalization, and the like; but I still have a visceral lack of understanding. That sense of moral outrage (usually hidden behind sober scholarship that is notably NOT about Haiti) is what has led me to become a political scientist, and despite the disciplinary norms of careful, non-polemical work, it is that moral outrage that still motivates my research.

I am not a crusader; my roll is not to be one of the fighters for freedom and justice. I admire those who are. My roll is to ask the “why?” question. I prod, over and over again and on a very small scale, the question of why? In doing so, I can only chip away at very small pieces of (what Bill Connolly reminds us is) the human predicament. I started asking why in the summer of 1972 in the hills of Cap Haitien, Haiti.