New narratives, and old ones

New narratives, and old ones

Sometimes, a misreading of your own work just deflates you. Just one little line, and you want to throw in the towel. Instead: let me rectify matters here. In her interesting, smart, and necessary book on Haiti, Why Haiti Needs New Narratives, Gina Athena Ulysse writes about, among many other subjects, Mac McClelland, the Mother Jones human rights reporter who covered Haiti briefly in the wake of the Haitian earthquake of 2010. I’ve written about this complicated writer, too.

Five years — or is it three centuries?

Five years — or is it three centuries?

We’re all checking the news this morning, and noticing — in the margins of the reams of words on Charlie Hebdo and the 19th-arrondissement network — that it is the fifth anniversary today of the Haitian earthquake that took hundreds of thousands of lives in 2010.

Everyone wants to know how Haiti is recovering from that catastrophe. It’s a good question that is more about how well the international community can deliver relief and recovery aid than it is about Haiti in particular. A brief answer to the question is this: some good was done with foreign help, but that’s not the most important question to be asking.

Papa’s Baby

Papa’s Baby

This photograph of Jean-Claude (Baby Doc) Duvalier has been altered by this blog to give the former strongman the thick spectacles of his father, François (Papa Doc) Duvalier. the point being: he was not so different from his bloody-minded dad.

The dictator’s scion — nickname: Tet panye, or Baskethead — died on October 4 in Port-au-Prince.

Bringing Down Baby

Bringing Down Baby

Jean-Claude Duvalier is dead. I never met him. I saw him just once, at the airport in Port-au-Prince, in the early morning hours of a day that then seemed fateful: February 7, 1986. He was driving up to a U.S. cargo plane, and then heading into exile in France. His whole family was in the car with him. It was a brief moment. He whizzed by and was gone. The next day hundreds of thousands of Haitians came out into the streets of Port-au-Prince to celebrate.

But that was not the end of the affair, not by far. The effects of Duvalierism, as conceived by Jean-Claude’s father, François (Papa Doc) Duvalier and continued by Jean-Claude, resonate to this day.

Saving Science in Haiti

Saving Science in Haiti

Haiti and the island of Hispaniola have been studied by botanists and naturalists for centuries, not all of them looking for zombie powder. One of the best known naturalists to visit Haiti was Erik Ekman, a Swede who was in the country in 1917, and then later spent four more years there, from 1924 to 1928, and another four in the Dominican Republic (where he died), discovering — or at least naming – some 2,000 species previously unknown to Western science, including the exceptional bird above, which in camouflage resembles a lizard. Ekman was yet another among the eccentric self-exiled lovers of Haiti, a white king, a mobile sovereign, able to live any which way in this place that forced no rules upon him.

Jalousie Redux

Jalousie Redux

Just so everyone can see the hypocrisy of the Jalousie paint job I wrote about earlier, here’s a picture my brother, a cardiologist who has been working in Haiti, took from the rue Panamericaine a little more than a month ago. To the left, the nicely painted, festive, cheerful, postcard-ready slum of Jalousie. To the right, the continuation of the hillside, Jalousie adjacent slums, as they truly are, without the rouge and mascara. The perky houses on the left, painted by the municipality of Petionville, a town just up the hill from Port-au-Prince, can be seen from the new Royal Oasis hotel, built with post-earthquake loans from the World Bank and the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund. The honest, unpainted, nonbotoxed true shantytown cannot.