Haiti: The Colonialism Of The Mind (Part I & II)
Les intellectuels ont toujours été des courtisans. Ils ont toujours vécu dans le ‘palais’. Pier Paolo Passollini (1922-1975)
Western journalists increasingly assume the voices of subjugated countries’ natives while muzzling them by denying them access to the press. In the United states, the more visible venues of the alternative press, such as online news sites Truthout, Common Dreams, and Huffington Post are essentially closed to native writers. This colonialism of the mind is rampant when it comes to Haiti.
Inspect the U.S. alternative press for news of Haiti. You will find articles there by Beverly Bell, Mark Weisbrot, Robert Naiman, Jane Regan, Noam Chomsky, and others, but you will be hard put to find a Haitian name. Westerners, whatever their political leaning, do reserve their right to rule the world, and the right to pontificate to the ignorant natives is very much a part of it.
The current war against Haiti is an economic and propaganda war that requires a liberal use of aid money to undermine Haitian culture and agriculture. Such a war would be impossible without a simultaneous disinformation campaign to persuade the U.S., Canadian, and European public that their funds benefit Haiti. This is the task of the high priests of journalism. They promote the neoliberal agenda and encapsulate their disinformation in reasonable-seeming and progressive-sounding language.
On one issue after another, American speakers for Haiti cleverly echo “talking points” that are meant to enable neo-colonial policies. Their work is more insidious than that of the mainstream press, which is limited in its capacity to editorialize. In the hands of the colonialists of the mind, disinformation becomes a lethal candy: a cyanide pill coated with leftist-sounding sugar, much of it collected from the less visible publications of unacknowledged writers.
Satellite image of Isaac at 13:15 EST on Friday, August 24, 2012 (Credit: NOAA).
Makeshift rain water harvesting system (Credit: Bhutan Observer).
Blaming Isaac
Consider for example the recent Truthout article titled “Disaster Capitalism in New Orleans and Haiti”, in which Beverly Bell, who directs several NGOs and sits on Truthout’s board of trustees, promoted two current mainstream “talking points” about Haiti:
1. Expect a massive resurgence of cholera due to tropical storm Isaac.
2. Expect intense hunger due to Isaac.
Before her article, the same points had been vigorously repeated by Michel Martelly, the U.N. and the U.S. government, with the aim of attracting a new infusion of aid money. The first point is unfounded, and the second is untrue. It is more reasonable to assume that the vast quantities of potable rainwater contributed by the storm should help to prevent, rather than promote, cholera. As for Haiti’s agricultural production: it plummeted by 20% last year and was expected to crash this year due to USAID policies, and quite without any help from a natural disaster.
The two talking points — presented early in Bell’s article — are actually the reason for the article. The rest is decoration with history, culture, and politics liberally borrowed from the essay “New-Orleans & Port-au-Prince: Two Tales Of Government Failures”, published two years ago by Gilbert Mercier in News Junkie Post.
I invite the reader to compare the two articles and learn to recognize the strategy of embedding items of disinformation within a text that appears to be truthful and progressive.
The same unfounded talking point linking Isaac to cholera is echoed by Mark Weisbrot, in “Tropical Storm Isaac Heads for Haiti, Likely to Leave a Spike in Cholera in its Wake”. Mr. Weisbrot is a well-known pundit on Haiti and Latin America and co-director of the NGO Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR).
Nepalese UN soldiers direct a line for food and water after the earthquake (Credit: Andres Leighton/AP).
“A disease of the poor”: Haitians as the unhygienic ones
The above predictions from Isaac were not the first campaign to blame cholera on something other than its actual source. When cholera first appeared in Haiti in October 2010, the disease, which was certainly known by US and UN authorities to originate from UN troops, was immediately attributed to the terrible hygiene of the Haitian poor and, by extension, predicted to grow into a massive epidemic, especially in the homeless camps.
Tanker truck dumps excrement from Nepalese UN base 400 meters away from the base in Mirebalais, Haiti on Oct. 27, 2010 (Credit: AP/Ramon Espinosa).
On November 18, 2010 CNN wrote:
“A lack of treated drinking water, coupled with poor hand hygiene and food-preparation practices, make the 1.3 million people still living in camps particularly vulnerable, according to a new study published by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….
“The CDC has said the strain of the cholera bacteria responsible is “indistinguishable” from one found in other parts of the world, including south Asia, but researchers are unlikely to be able to pinpoint how it arrived in Haiti.”
About one month later, Beverly Bell enjoined with the statements:
“This past week has… provided the perfect conditions for a spike in cholera, what Partners in Health calls ‘a disease of poverty’ which impacts those without safe drinking water…. Because sanitation workers could not get to the camps, toilets and garbage overflowed to extremes…. The sporadic rains throughout the week, moreover, spread contaminated water and sewage, perfect vectors for the disease.”
This enthusiasm to blame the poor for their misfortune was decorated with passionate language that appeared to defend the poor and decry their living conditions. In fact, the cholera predictions were unfounded. Haiti’s cholera outbreak was most serious, not in the camps in Port-au-Prince – home of the poorest of the poor — but in a pristine rural region that had become contaminated by the wastes of Nepalese soldiers from a UN base.
There was never any basis to the prediction that cholera would become epidemic in Haiti, and there is still no basis to the predictions that it will spike or indefinitely continue. Last April Dr. Renaud Piarroux argued that Haiti’s cholera could be gone in a matter of months, and as Cuba recently showed, an outbreak of cholera can be stopped in as few as 60 days with the appropriate education, epidemiological surveillance, care, and provision of clean drinking water.
Source: Haiti Chery | Featured image credit: Altered Focus
© Copyright 2012. Dady Chery is a journalist, playwright, essayist and poet, who writes in English, French and her native Creole. She is the Editor of Haiti Chery.
Colonialism of the Mind – Part II
By Dady Chery
Haiti Chery
Of all the campaigns to undermine Haitian culture, the one to discredit restavek adoption — in which a biological parent collaborates with a respected adult to care for a child — enjoys the most zealous support from the west’s NGO and alternative press. This campaign reached fever pitch after Haiti’s Prime Minister called a moratorium on foreign adoptions in late January 2010 to prevent the removal of children from the country during the confusion that followed the January 12th earthquake.
Haitians unworthy of their children
Talking point: Haitian adoptive parents are, without exception, child abusers.
Reuters had this to say on February 2, 2010.
“Deeply ingrained in the culture of the impoverished former slave colony, the practice of poor families giving away children to wealthier acquaintances or relatives is known in the native Creole as ‘restavek,’ from the French words rester avec, or ‘to stay with.’
“Critics call it slavery.
“The children, they said, are taken in as servants, forced to work without pay, isolated from other children in the household and seldom sent to school.”
The New York Times continued on February 25, 2010 with a video introduced by the caption.
“Even before the earthquake, one option for Port-au-Prince’s homeless children was Restavek, an underground system that some call foster care, and others call child slavery. Now their numbers swell.”
Note the deft language from Reuters and NYT to suggest that Haitians are child slavers without saying so outright:
“Critics call it slavery”/“others call child slavery.”
Meaning: We, of course, would never claim anything so outrageous.
By contrast, the alternative press’ Council on Hemispheric Affairs expounded in July 2010:
“In the most impoverished country in the hemisphere, adults regularly view children as economic commodities, which make them highly vulnerable to the perils of trafficking.”
Beverly Bell, who directs several NGO and claims the defense of Haitian children as one of her main causes, wrote in a Huffington Post article titled: “A Second Slave Rebellion in Haiti: What’s the Worth of a Haitian Child?”:
“One of the many effects of poverty in Haiti is that desperate parents regularly give away their children in the hope that the new family will feed and educate the children better than they themselves can. Instead, the children usually end up as child slaves, or restavek. In a country which overthrew slavery in 1804, today anywhere from 225,000 to 300,000 children live in forced servitude. They work from before sunup to after sundown, are often sexually and physically abused, and usually go underfed and uneducated.”
The message is clear: it is desirable, even admirable, to snatch Haitian children from a culture of abuse in adoptive Haitian families.
Thus, as the Native-American and many other cultures were undermined by removing children from their families, today a project is underway to dismantle Haiti’s culture by shipping its youngest citizens, at a rate of 2,000 children per year, to foreign adoptions. This project is only possible because of a disinformation campaign that is most strident in the alternative press.
Missionaries of Charity holds up a Haitian girl in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Tuesday Dec. 21, 2010, scheduled to be transported to France along with 317 other Haitian children for Christmas 2010 (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa).
Haiti’s child abusers and traffickers
While the above articles were being written, Laura Silsby and nine other American Baptist missionaries were in a Haitian jail for attempting to traffic to the Dominican Republic 33 Haitian children, 22 of whom had at least one living parent. In the U.S., Catholic missionary Douglas Perlitz stood accused of the rape and psychological torture of 16 boys in a homeless shelter he had founded in Haiti.
Douglas Perlitz, a graduate of Fairfield University, Connecticut, talks on November 1, 2004 about his missionary work with Haitian street children. On December 21, 2010 he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for sex abuse (Photo: AP/The Connecticut Post/Jeff Bustraan).
The most shocking news came from Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive who publicly noted during an interview:
“There is organ trafficking for children and other persons also, because they need all types of organs.”
Such horrible abuses are possible because there is no follow up to Haiti’s foreign adoptions.
French consulate Jean Pierre Guegan checks for Rose Prioul’s name on his manifest before loading the child on a bus for the airport in Port-au-Prince (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson).
Real restavek adoption
As one who is familiar with restavek adoption, I can recommend the following descriptions by anthropologists as being accurate. Here is what Katherine Dunham (in: Island Possessed, University of Chicago Press, 1969) wrote.
“In Haiti parents of the peasant class love their children. They also love the children of everyone else and expect everyone to love their children. There exists a whole naming practice for “adopted” children among the people themselves — Bienaimee, Dieudonne, Beinvenue, [Beloved, God-given, Welcomed-one] others representing affectionate regard. It is also remarkable in Haiti that there are not the roving bands of homeless young that one finds in other islands – Jamaica and Puerto Rico for instance.
“It is this care for the young that prompts parents when they are not able to feed all the children for whom they are responsible to seek homes for them. It seems best for all concerned to let one or more of the children out in semi-adoption to someone better placed…. The parent… would return to the country hoping for shoes, sufficient food and clothing, medical care, and eventually schooling for the child.”
A Haitian child walks to a bus after arriving at a military airport in Eindhoven, Netherlands, along with 105 other children from Haiti, aged 6 months to 7 years, on Thursday Jan. 21, 2010, (AP Photo/Peter Dejong).
Here is a description by reknowned anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits (in: Life in a Haitian Valley, Marcus Weiner Publishers, 1937) of restavek adoption in Mirebalais:
“Quasi-adoption involves children, often of peasants…. To ‘give’ a person a child in this manner is in Mirebalais regarded as a token of friendship, and such children as were observed, though poorly clothed, were fed not much differently from the children of the families with which they were sent to live. When the ‘ti moun’ [child] grows older, he leaves and returns to his home…. Such a child repays the cost of keeping him by helping in the garden and by running errands.”
In my own family, where my mother served as a restavek and my aunt adopted a restavek, in each case a poorer woman placed a teenage girl with a woman of greater means (though not rich) whom she esteemed, and both women collaborated on the care and education of the child. The biological parent did not “give away” her child but lived in the same city, maintained contact with the child and could withdraw her from the situation at any time.
Could western adoptions ever withstand such transparency and uncertainty?
Representations of restavek as being “informal” or “underground” are disingenuous. According to Haitian law, only partial adoptions that allow the biological parents contact with their children were recognized in Haiti before June 2012 (when the country became a signatory to the Hague Convention). In other words, before this Summer all foreign full adoptions from Haiti were illegal.
Children board a bus headed for the airport in Port-au-Prince. Several children are being sent for adoption to France by the school Lycee Francais and the French Embassy in Haiti (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson).
Many poor Haitian children — my own mother included — have had their education, and their flight abroad to help wrest their families from poverty, sponsored by restavek adoption. This unconventional system denies souls to the sweatshops and impedes neo-colonialism by linking Haitian rich and poor, at home and abroad in the care of children.
Source: Haiti Chery | Featured image: American missionary Laura Silsby behind bars in Haiti.
© Copyright 2012. Dady Chery is a journalist, playwright, essayist and poet, who writes in English, French and her native Creole. She is the Editor of Haiti Chery.
ALSO SEE:
HAITI: WE MUST KILL THE BANDITS
HAITI: MASSACRE AT LA VISITE
HAITI: RECOLONIZATION VIA LAND GRABBING
WHO OWNS HAITI’S HILLS?
THE SLOW AND SILENT GENOCIDE THE US IS CONDUCTING IN HAITI
MUMIA ABU-JAMAL: BLACK AUGUST
HAITI: A LOOK AT KORALEN’S VYEWO
US CONTROL OF HAITI AND OTHER LITTLE REPUBLICS’ VOTE AT THE UN NOT NEW
HAITI: BITTER CANE DOCUMENTARY
HAITI: HARVEST OF HOPE
Haiti is especially targeted because of its history. It was a French colony that gained independence through a successful slave revolt that inspired slave rebellions in the United States. Two centuries of economic predation, military occupation, and political isolation were designed to defame the Revolution and stifle other uprisings of the oppressed against their oppressors.
Encapsulated in the responses to the Haiti earthquake are the futures that humanity can take. On the one hand was the US military invasion, the corporate “aid” and racist contempt for those suffering. On the other hand there were Cuban doctors who selflessly set up shop in the most hard hit areas and began providing directly the care that was needed.