Haiti at the Center of the World

Photo by Laura Wagner

I remember the first time I learned about the Haitian Revolution. It was in my second year of university, in an anthropology course on the Caribbean. (The course and the instructor were one of the main reasons I went on to study anthropology and later to become an anthropologist myself.) It was the mid-nineties and my knowledge of Haiti at that time was largely limited to then-current events, especially the struggle for democracy that had coalesced around the figure of Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Aristide had been a Roman Catholic priest in one of the poorest parishes of Haiti, where he became famous as a liberation theologist and then a political leader. He spoke out against the brutal Duvalier-family dictatorship and survived countless assassination attempts. He was twice elected president and twice ousted by coups. In 1995, when I was in that course on the Caribbean, Aristide had just returned from exile to finish his first presidency. There was much talk of a “democratic turn” in Haiti and many people around the world were pointing to the country as an example of what political scientists call the “third wave” of democratization. And there I was in a university course reading about how the Caribbean was the site of Europe’s oldest and longest held overseas colonies, how the slave plantation system there had produced enormous amounts of wealth for France and England, not to mention enormous amounts of sugar and coffee, how the Caribbean region was one of the largest “consumers” of slaves in the Atlantic triangular trade that united Africa, Europe, and the Americas in an extractive economic system that prefigured our current global order. And then, I learned how in 1791 slaves in the French colony of Saint Domingue set fire to the sugar plantations and launched what would become a thirteen-year long struggle for their freedom. France was so concerned at the loss of their most profitable colony that Napoleon sent his own brother-in-law to head a military expedition charged with defeating the insurrection and restoring slavery. To help fund the mission, he even sold the Louisiana territories to the United States, which at the time was a barely new republic and only a fraction of its current territory. The mission did not go well. The former slaves decisively defeated one of the strongest militaries in the world and on January 1, 1804 they declared their own independence; the Republic of Haiti was born. Reading about it, I thought: How the hell did I not know about this?

Photo by Vincent Joos

What happened in Haiti is something we should all know about. It is, quite simply, one of the most important historical events in world history. Yet, Haiti is constantly and consistently written out of that story—a silencing that is a continued effect of centuries of colonialism and racism. After the Revolution, France refused to grant political recognition to Haiti until the newly independent nation paid an indemnity, a kind of reparations paid to the very colonists and plantations they had just decades before defeated. Haiti paid, under threat of military invasion, but the government had to take out a loan from France to do so and the resulting deal put Haiti on a path to economic dependency that has left the country poor, indebted, and politically unstable. The story of the indemnity recently received major coverage in a groundbreaking series in the New York Times called “The Ransom.”

I’ve spent over two and a half decades studying Haiti, and much of that time has been focused on trying to understand how the past haunts the present, how it seems to return and repeat and give rise to one disaster after another. You don’t have to do much searching online to find Westerners—politicians and pundits, journalists, and religious leaders alike—asking the same questions over and over again: Is Haiti cursed? Is the country destined to tragedy? The answer is of course not. But to truly move beyond that question requires rethinking the very terms in which it is posed. What has happened in Haiti over the past thirty years—coups, violence, crushing poverty, earthquakes, hurricanes, massive displacement—did not have to happen. Disasters are never natural; they are always social. They follow the fault lines of inequality. As an anthropologist I have spent years trying to write against that tragic narrative, the narrative of Haitian exceptionalism that casts the country as an odd and unusual place, condemned to its fate. I’ve tried to trace the history that has given rise to the present, and to understand it through the concepts and categories that Haitians themselves use to think about their world. In my book There Is No More Haiti, I do this by exploring Haitian theories of crisis. More recently, Laura Wagner and I co-edited an open-source, trilingual series that aims to move beyond the framework of crisis. The posts in the series are short and written in an accessible style. They cover a wide range of issues, and there are many points of intersection across the pieces. We hope that the series gives urgent context to understanding the current situation in Haiti. We also felt it was essential that the series include many different voices, including people outside of academia and especially including Haitian voices. The situation in Haiti is so dire right now that some of the contributors had to publish under pseudonyms for their own safety. And yet, I think there is a sense of hopefulness that pervades the posts. It is not a naïve optimism that things will work out. Nor is it a grand utopian vision of a total transformation of Haitian society. Instead, it is a more radical hope, a hope that the future remains open and uncertain. It is a hope steeped in the faith that because things did not have to be the way they are now, they might still be otherwise. A hope that remembers the miracle of the Revolution—the only successful slave revolution in modern history. A hope that insists that such miracles might happen again.

Greg Beckett is associate professor of anthropology at Western University. His research focuses on how residents of poor urban neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince live with and make sense of political, environmental, and humanitarian crises. He is the author of There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince and co-editor of Trouillot Remixed: The Michel-Rolph Trouillot Reader.