Devastation Politics

I haven’t been looking at the photos about Haiti. I haven’t been reading the news or listening to the radio for hours, either. Maybe I get enough death from Colombia in my inbox every day. Maybe I question what good listening to those stories will do, as I sit and work from my kitchen table in rainy Oakland. Maybe my body and heart know that I don’t need to see the photos of people mobbing a plane arriving with water, to understand that the devastation is huge.

Even without indulging in the news frenzy, Haiti is on my mind. My friend who has a half-Haitian daughter was posting on Facebook this week as to the whereabouts of her daughter’s family members. My housemate and her boyfriend talked about it while washing dishes. At the grocery store on Monday, there was a barcode next to the machine where you swipe your card to pay, encouraging donations to Doctors Without Borders. After buying deli olives and dried ancho chiles for the mole I was going to make that night, I donated a petty $5.

I can only imagine the way the story is being told in the mainstream media — and it is disturbing for all the usual reasons: it is sensationalized, it is bloody, it is the "poor black people of Haiti," and it is children with big, needy, terrorized eyes. Worse still, I imagine that the story being told is devoid of any analysis that includes an understanding of history, colonialism, racism and neoliberalism that has made Haiti what it is today.

My knowledge of these historical dynamics is as slim as the next person’s: I know that Haiti is extremely poor, that its slave rebellion led to its independence and that the US has something to do with its misery. A quick glance at Wikipedia confirms my vague ideas about Haiti’s past and present: it was the first independent nation in Latin America, the first post-colonial independent black-led nation in the world, and the only nation whose independence was gained as part of a successful slave rebellion. Most Haitians live on less than $2 per day and there is a 50% illiteracy rate. Foreign aid makes up approximately 30–40% of the national government’s budget, but ironically Haiti’s debt to big banks, ends up canceling out all the money it receives from foreign aid. According to a recent article posted in the Nation,  "in 2003, Haiti spent $57.4 million to service its debt, while total foreign assistance for education, health care and other services was a mere $39.21 million. In other words, under a system of putative benevolence, Haiti paid back more than it received."

The US has been involved in the way that the US knows best: by undermining democracy and implementing neoliberal policies that do nothing but increase the wealth of the rich and the devastation of the poor. The US occupied the island from 1915-1934 and gave military and economic aid to Haiti’s dictatorship in the mid 1980’s. In 2000, US Marines were involved in "removing" then democratically-elected President Aristide from his home (or kidnapping as Aristide claimed), after he was ousted by a paramilitary coup. Currently, the US controls about 30% of the Inter-Development Bank’s shares, the same bank which Haiti struggles to pay back.

All this to say, there was devastation in Haiti long before the earthquake hit, but we weren’t paying attention. Now there are dead bodies rotting in the streets. The devastation, which has been festering for 500 years, has intensified and been amplified; the stench is unbearable. All of a sudden, everybody scrambles to help out.

And the money has been pouring in: Shakira, Lady Gaga and Wyclef Jean are only a few of the big name artists who are donating all of their proceeds from concerts and online sales to Haiti relief efforts. The US government has promised $100 million and many other governments and organizations are rushing to Haiti’s aid. I don’t question whether or not we should send money: of course we should. It would be far worse to stand with our arms crossed in the face of such devastation. But I do ask why do we have to wait for bodies to be rotting in the streets before waking up to the grim reality of what is going on in our world?

What is it about the "help" from the rich (mostly white) world that seems so conditional, so near-sighted and so superficial? It is because we are, time and time again, not committed to long-term, deep cultural, political and racial change. We go crazy when a disaster hits: organize events and donate and pat ourselves on the back for coming to the rescue of those "poor people down there." And yet, in the long run, what are we doing to fundamentally transform the systems that create a lack of infrastructure and extreme poverty in the first place, making countries like Haiti underequipped to respond to a natural disaster? How do we, in the rich world, benefit on a daily basis from neoliberal policies that create misery for so many people around the globe? And why aren’t we rushing to change these systems, as if the stench of rotting bodies was unbearable, day in and day out?

In fact, the scramble to provide relief in the face of disaster is problematic, as Naomi Klein points out in her book The Shock Doctrine. These kinds of catastrophes don’t serve to rebuild societies for the benefit of poor people, but are used as a special opportunity for "disaster capitalists" to descend and make money off of the destruction. In 1999 on his way to the Economic Forum in Davos, Guatemala’s foreign minister said bluntly "destruction carries with it an opportunity for foreign investment." The tsunami in Asia, was a case in point: six months later a total of $13 billion had been raised—a world record. But unfortunately, the reconstruction effort turned out to be "a second tsunami of corporate globalization" according to a Sri Lankan activist quoted in Klein’s book. A year later, a respected NGO ActionAid, which monitors foreign aid spending, surveyed fifty thousand tsunami survivors in five countries. They found the same patterns everywhere. "Residents were barred from rebuilding, but hotels were showered with incentives; temporary camps were miserable militarized holding pens, and almost no permanent reconstruction had been done; entire ways of life were being extinguished." If we are not careful, our "help" will be used to further entrench the misery of many for the benefit of a few. And once the photos and news stories are not headlines anymore our urgency will fade; we will become complicit; we will wait until the next disaster hits.

Haiti was the birth-place of black resistance in the Western Hemisphere. That spirit of rebellion has been squashed time and again through dictatorships and neoliberal agendas, leaving the people devastated. Their devastation has deep roots, roots that travel like an Aspen grove’s for miles and miles underground and reach up through the earth to touch our feet, to let us know that our histories and fates are intertwined. So as we donate to Haiti relief today, let’s not forget to understand this crisis in its entirety — as a result of our shared past and as a reflection of deeply flawed systems that we are part of. We must work diligently to transform them. And their transformation depends on our commitment to be in it for the long haul.

For further action/information: join the group No Shock Doctrine for Haiti and check out Incite’s blog with ideas of how to work towards long-term change for Haiti here.