It is not enough to say that the birds are part of the natural setup of reality, it is rather as if a foreign dimension intrudes that literally tears apart reality. We humans are not naturally born into reality. In order for us to act as normal people who interact with other people who live in the space of social reality, many things should happen, like we should be properly installed within the symbolic order and so on. When this, our proper dwelling within a symbolic space, is disturbed, reality disintegrates.But this disintegration is only temporary; once the event ends, we have to reintegrate the experience into our day-to-day reality. To some extent, we might think of such terrifying events as an inverse to the more positive disintegrations of reality experienced in religious experiences or in the profane illumination of hallucinogenic drugs.
How does this help to think about the catastrophic earthquake that, by some recent estimates, killed 2% of Haiti's population? There was a horrific loss of life; for the people of Port au Prince, reality has disintegrated. Any decent human being sees images from ground zero of the earthquake and reacts with horror and empathy; and then what? The normal reaction is to try to integrate the horrific event into our already entrenched ideas about reality. And that can lead to people saying some fucked up shit about pacts with the devil or Haiti's entrenched cultural inferiority. It can also lead to genuinely moving acts of human solidarity. Sometimes, people do both at the same time, like the Queen of Benin.
The Point...
There are a few points I am hearing (0r reading) consistently in much of the American news coverage of Haiti. The first is the endless rumination over the flimsy houses in Port au Prince's sprawling shantytowns, like Carrefour. The city's horrific poverty has been (in a somewhat voyeuristic manner) paraded before the cameras, devoid of context.
Perhaps realizing obliquely that they are speaking of a country with a rich culture and history, a few talking heads have brought up instances from Haitian history. The most common one I've encountered is that Haiti is the only country in the world founded by a slave revolt (Robertson, in his reptilian way, touched on this). This is true. But coupled with the coverage above, I think that it creates the impression that Haiti's current impoverishment is the the result of it being founded by former slaves; that perhaps, the founders of the Haitian republic were not as competent as the slave-owners who founded our own. And this is misleading
The Haitian Revolution
I feel that the Haitian Revolution was the first real, substantial attempt a decolonization in the Western Hemisphere. I don't think that you could honestly say that about the early United States, which in many ways remained a colonialist settler state even after independence. Toussaint L'Ouverture promised to found a republic in which no one had the right to own another human being (though, admittedly, not a republic in which all human beings had the right to vote). And that idea scared the piss out of the countries involved in the slave trade.
In the decade following the initial slave revolt, the newly independent country fought off invasions by Spain, Britain, and France. The final peace treaty with France required that Haiti pay 150 million gold Francs in reparations. Writing in 2004, Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano estimated that, in today's currency, that would be about $21.7 billion, or 44 times the Haitian government's 2004 budget. Haiti would be paying off their debts to France well into the 20th century. Haiti, for most of the 18th century, had been the most lucrative colony in the Caribbean; it began the 19th century devastated by a decade of war, saddled with a mountain of debt, and diplomatically isolated.
The specter of Haiti continued to haunt the southern United States for another six decades after President Thomas Jefferson refused to acknowledge the country's independence (a policy that would continue until the presidency of Abraham Lincoln). It helped to inspire a dramatic spike in slave revolts in the first two decades of the 19th century, particularly the major uprising of French-speaking slaves in Louisiana in 1811. And it was not forgiven for this. A century later Woodrow Wilson, the son of a slave owner and vocal KKK sympathizer, sent US Marines to occupy Haiti. The occupation lasted for almost twenty years, during which the Haitian national bank was handed over to the City Bank of New York, racial segregation was imposed for the first time in Haitian history, and a system of forced labor eerily similar to slavery was created. The occupation lasted until FDR's "good neighbor" policy temporarily ended direct American military intervention in the Caribbean.
Port au Prince
After the withdrawal of the Marines, Haiti was ruled by a series of military regimes, most famously Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier (who, together, executed somewhere around 30,000 innocent people). At the time, Haiti had a population of about 6 million, and was overwhelmingly rural (75%-ish). Metropolitan Port au Prince was still a rather sleepy town of less than 750,000 inhabitants. The ubiquitous corrugated tin shacks of Carrefour and Cite Soleil were basically non-existent. Haiti had suffered a lot since independence, but the bulk of the rural population were still small farmers, mostly growing rice and other staple foods. Even under the early Duvalier dictatorship they enjoyed the protection of tariffs and a trickle of subsidies.
But the 70s and 80s were a shit time for small farmers in the global south. All over the so-called Third World, neo-liberal economists from multilateral lending institutions such as the IMF encouraged debt-ridden countries to slash social services and drop tariffs. Rural Haiti, like the rest of the developing world, faced a dramatic economic and infrastructural crisis. As people lost their farms (many of which had been in their families since the revolution), they fled to the cities. The Duvaliers were both unprepared and unwilling to deal with this influx, and virtually no investment was made in accommodating it. Prior to the earthquake, the population of the Port au Prince metro area was estimated to be at least 2 million people, with some estimates going as high as 2.5. Shantytowns like Cite Soleil have a level of population density "comparable to [a] cattle feedlot" (Davis, 92).
In Conclusion
I think that if I make this any longer it will get unwieldy, if it is not so already. But Haiti's history is much more complex than that of a perpetual victim or national schlimazel.
