Haiti Books

So as is pretty evident from my blog these past weeks, I'm in Haiti.  Both before going and while there I've been doing a lot of reading.  I'd previously read both "Aids and Accusations" by Paul Farmer and the book about his work by Tracy Kidder, "Mountains Beyond Mountains."  Which spend a little bit of time going into the history of the nation, although they are pretty narrowly focused on the countryside and on health care.  So I wanted to get a little bit of a different story.  I started with "The Serpent and the Rainbow" by Wade Davis.  Davis is an ethnobotanist from Harvard who travels to Haiti in the early eighties on the trail of the truth behind zombis and vodoun.  His account is interesting (but slow getting started, beware: for first you must sit through a long exposition of how he got the gig and why he's an Awesome Explorer) and great if what you're looking for is a somewhat anthropological exploration of vodoun ritual and the science behind zombification.  Both of these things can be fascinating, but portray a very narrow slice of Haiti.  Unmentioned in his entire book is that it takes place in the political context of Jean-Claude "Baby doc" Duvalier's failing regime.  In fact, as Davis waxes eloquent on the brilliance of combining the administration from the goverment and religious divisions of the country in the person of the "Chef de Section" who is often also the local Vodoun priest, he is ignoring that this administration makes sense only in the context of the Duvalier years, in which vodoun was for the first time explicitly permitted, and in fact used as a tool to uphold the dictatorship.

Shifting from his vision of Haiti to Amy Wilentz's "The Rainy Season" is like shifting from a sepia-toned discovery channel special to some kind of MSNBC special report.  A journalist who lived and wrote from Port-au-Prince in the years following Baby Doc's leaving the country, her work is far more urban and political in nature.  Wilentz became quite close to Aristide in the eighties, when he was a persecuted enemy of both the state and the Catholic church hierarchy itself, so her work is peppered with interviews with the man who would later become a massively popular elected president in Haiti.  What's surreal at times about her work read directly after Davis' is that they come from nearly the same timeframe, but feature dramatically differing visions of the same Haiti, sometimes even the same people.  It's from Wilentz that I gleaned that Dulvalier's approach to the Chefs de Section was entirely new, for example.  And both feature the character  Max Beauvoir.  To Davis, he was a well-education Haitian who knew all the secrets of voudoun and set himself up as benevolent guide.  To Wilentz he's a disenfranchised, but still wealthy, member of the elite cadre of Duvalierists who consistently attempts to feed her false stories about Aristide's seditious, at times communist activities.  These stories are usually repeated almost verbatim from another source: Baptist pastor Wally Turnbull, who founded and for many many years ran the Baptist mission at Fermathe.  Yes, the hospital we took Julio to in my first post on Haiti.  Dr. Turnbull is also the author of the Creole course recommended to volunteers here: "Creole Made Easy."  It's a great little course book - a really simple introduction to Creole, which I wish I'd used at home instead of trying to work with the one I had which is much more complex.  Although more complete, that textbook was near impossible for me to get through by myself with no grounding in the language.  But now, knowing a little more background, the Creole Made Easy course seems somehow more suspect. . . or at least limited.

I guess this is less a post about books to read when coming to Haiti (although I would recommend "The Rainy Season" to anyone interested) and more a swirling commentary on how surreal it is to come across so many different visions of the same place, the same people.  This is even more true of the history of the country.  Together with the another volunteer here, I took a little trip to the National Museum.  It's a small place, with a nice collection giving a broad overview of Haitian history, and celebrating the country's four big independence heros:  L'Overture, Christophe, Pètion, and Dessalines.  To look at the museum and hear our guide tell the story is to see these four men as venerated, universally admired pioneers of independence.  All the other books I've read (and the history I'm reading now) tend to depict them as priveledged elites who were less interested in democracy and economic equality and more interested in being the elites who controlled the plantations instead of the whites.

Now, the authors of the books I'm reading are American, and to give him his due I don't think our guide could adequately express himself in English to give a nuanced version of history.  And there is no doubt that we also tend to have an overly venerating attitude towards our founding fathers (an added note of irony for those keeping track:  my visit to the museum took place on July 4th).  But I can't help but notice the conflicting visions which, together with the evidence of stark contrasts in living situations, and the divisiveness and enbattlement of the country's history all lead me to see this country as somehow split.  Both wealthy and poor.  Both extremely well educated and worldly and entirely provincial.  Both modern and stuck in history.