Books discussed in this essay

--Edwidge Danticat, Krik? Krak! (Soho Press, 224 pp.; $20, 1995; Vintage, $11, paper, 1996)

--Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (University of California Press, 339 pp.; $35, 1995)

--Herbert Gold, Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti (Simon & Schuster, 320 pp.; $12, paper, 1992 [first published 1991])

--Blair Niles, Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa's Eldest Daughter (1926; o.p.)

--North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA), Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads (South End Press, 256 pp.; $35, hardcover, $15, paper, 1995)

Public events give place names new overtones that can seem to override previous, private meanings. For my first 27 years, for example, Waco was merely the town my grandfather came from. Now the name evokes an unhappy recent history, and I'm tacitly asked to take a side. So too with Haiti. I have spent time in that unhappy country, respect particular Haitian people for particular reasons, know the country's language and vivid smells and sounds. The now pervasive presumption that politics should trump my own experience both baffles and angers me; I'm not on anybody's side, thank you very much.

The meaning of "Haiti" has become a battleground. Some months ago a friend sent me a flier for a new book from South End Press. Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads was, I was told, "a succinct history and up-to-date analysis of the tragic betrayal of Haitian democracy" that explained "why attempts to 'restore democracy' in Haiti seem doomed to failure. In part," claimed the flier,

the reasons lie in Haiti's centuries-old "semi-feudal" class structure overlaid by the agro-export economy established during the U.S. occupation. Much blame, however, rests squarely on the shoulders of the United States. The U.S. response to the coup--the inhumane refugee policy, a leaky embargo, ineffectual weak-kneed diplomacy, and a sustained cia campaign to paint [then-President Jean-Bertrand] Aristide as demagogic and mentally unstable--lays bare the United States' contempt for democratic and legal processes.

Such effort expended, I mused with some disgust, to demonstrate what seems so obvious as to be irrelevant. The leftist publisher's blinkered paradigm blinds it to difficult truths: that "democracy" (however defined) is not the be-all and end-all, nor is "the United States" a monolith. (No state is a monolith; only totalitarians say otherwise.) Furthermore, Aristide is demagogic and mentally unstable, even if the CIA does say so.

The American Left did more harm than good with its preemptive invasion of the moral high ground in the debate over Haiti. (The journalist Amy Wilentz, for starters, deserves much credit for having "discovered" Aristide,1 but her own compromised role as his leading apologist remains too little criticized. Her writings during and since the crisis show her striving, and inevitably failing, at once to retain her chair as dean of American retailers of Aristideism and to regain the journalist's authority as independent observer that she should not have squandered.)2 Indeed, this self-congratulatory stance recalls Norman Mailer's words (to V. S. Naipaul) on posturing leftists back in 1969: "They just want to make a statement and stand around being right. 'I know what is wrong, I'm noble.' This I don't buy."

On the other side of the debate, the claimed meanings of Haiti enforced in the service of what the North American imperial state defined itself as doing--"restoring democracy"--were classically Orwellian, and the salvation of our national soul will begin the moment we admit this. "Our success in Haiti to date shows what the international community, with American leadership, can achieve in helping countries in their struggle to build democracy," said Bill Clinton, with a straight face, just after the invasion. As Orwell himself might have put it, two and two make five.

The fiasco's tellingly unremarked background music was the moaning and chain-rattling of the apparently never-to-be-exorcised ghosts of Vietnam. Sen. John McCain asked if U.S. troops in Haiti could be kept safe from "a bomb in a cafe." Sen. Nancy Kassebaum noted that "people remember Somalia"--a polite way of saying what it was people really remembered but still preferred to forget. "The lesson of Vietnam is that you don't commit troops until the country is committed to the mission," opined David Broder from his desk in Washington, D.C.; "the" lesson, indeed. Above all we kept hearing about "boat people," most Americans evidently having quite forgotten that term's origin. (Even more chilling was the constant talk of "refugee flows," as though human beings were some kind of liquid substance.)3

"People's interest in Haiti," a publishing professional informed me all too rightly in January 1995, "has peaked." The prevailing American attitude seemed quickly to have become that of Pilate: Well, that's taken care of. On to Bosnia and beyond. The secular media for their part have not known what to make of the awkward fact that Aristide came to politics from the priesthood, so they ignore it. But Aristide the priest, called to speak the truth, secularized himself (and set the stage for the ensuing tragedy) by seeking power. If recent Haitian history demonstrates anything, it is the moral poverty of a purely political response to oppression. Which way to something better?

My own journey home to a place beyond politics began when I found the courage to consider Haiti a personal matter. I am entitled to do this because I first went there at age 16 in 1982, when very few of my fellow Wisconsinites even knew the place existed. More fundamentally, I am entitled, even bound, to take personally the sufferings of Haitians because, like them, I am a human being.

My father, an Episcopal priest now in the Diocese of Colorado, began taking teams of medical people and others to Haiti in 1980. He took me along in 1982 and again in 1983, when I stayed for six weeks. The Wisconsin program became less attuned to his priorities, so one day in the mideighties, at the Episcopal cathedral in Port-au-Prince, he and his associate Ed Morgan met the priest with whom they still work. "We sat at the table outside the gift shop," my father tells me in a letter, "and I asked if it was possible to begin some programs with him that would maintain the church connection as well as the medical and he said, 'Sure.' I'll never forget our first trip from L_____ one day to 'scout' out T_____. All day, 7 of us in a 4 or 5 person, small jeep, over all the rivers and through all the mudholes, with our medical gear sliding off the top of the jeep and sliding all the way down the mountain . . . and our retrieving it . . . and when we got back to L_____ that night, I talked the day over with Ed."

"We just can't do it," the two Americans told the Haitian. "It's too far and too difficult. We'd never get our people and stuff there."

"If Jesus wants us to go, we'll go," replied the Haitian priest. "And besides, I've already bought the land [for the church]."

Since then my father has pursued his work with a doggedness I now know comes only from a hard-won serenity. "The taking of medicine to Haiti is incidental to our going there," he said recently in a sermon, and now I am prepared to understand what he means. But for a long time I wondered: What good does any of it really do? The liberal impulse always requires rectification. Not a damn bit of good, I think my father would reply. And more good than you can possibly imagine.

"Our reality looks forever different after we have experienced somebody else's," writes Jim Wallis in The Soul of Politics, "especially if it required that we cross over the lines that divide us." The Episcopalians who accompany my father to Haiti are the best of their breed: husky, milk-fed white Americans who go beyond meaning well. I have known women who had voted for every Republican since Dewey uncomplainingly sleeping in tents and hiking four miles to staff a clinic to bring not only a measly modicum of medical attention but also concretely expressed compassion to people of a distinctly different skin color and cultural background, living at the end of indescribable "roads" in a country whose very name evokes only horror to most Americans.

I have learned wisdom from such women and, even more, from Haitians--because wisdom emerges from suffering, and they have suffered more than I have. On the last night of my last visit, the month Bill Clinton became President of the United States, I found myself holding hands with three small children, one of them my father's adorable godson. The children were ubiquitous and, as always, came seeking hugs, recognition, balloons. "Ba-m blad! Ba-m blad!" they cried: Give me a balloon!

"Mwin rinmin ti moun yo ampil," I said in Creole to my new friend, a young man who had attempted the sea journey to Florida once already and planned to try again. (As I write this, I don't know if he is still alive.)

"And they love you too," he replied. "Jesus say, 'Let the little kids to come to me.' "

"I don't want to leave," I said that night to my father.

"Well," he said, "it's time to move on to the next thing."

Haiti poses a challenge to writers: How to respond? The first task of all writing is to define terms, in this case "Haiti" and "democracy" and "restore." It is not a simple or straightforward task. To get at truth and--even more difficult--to communicate it, we need to look at our world out of the corner of our eye. All real writing is samizdat; the rest is filler and propaganda. The recent book I consider to have handled Haiti best, for instance,

is Herbert Gold's loving memoir, Best Nightmare on Earth: A Life in Haiti. There ain't much politics in Gold's book. What the world needs, now more urgently than ever, is for each of us to have the audacity to take history personally.

Alas, Haiti's most emphatically is a political history. Its revolution of 1791-1804 is a perpetually crucial touchstone: If fundamental social change could be (or could have been) made to succeed in such a place, what might that forebode for us all? Haiti fascinates Americans, more than we realize, because it connects all too directly to the story of slavery and race and injustice in our own country.

Haiti and the United States and the New World in general all were founded on the same seductive lie: that it is possible to begin anew. By now we should know better. The great Southern writers, from Thomas Jefferson (who trembled for his country when he reflected that God is just) to Zora Neale Hurston (who wrote a book on voodoo) to the author of Absalom, Absalom! (in which Haiti figures significantly) knew truths to which many of us today are only beginning to awaken. The painful truth we should learn from Haiti, and Detroit in 1967, and Los Angeles in 1992, and the double murder trial that finally ended October 3, 1995, is that we are all southerners now. The journey forward of our race (the human race) leads nowhere but back to our tragic past. But there is good news: All we need do to claim the amnesty we don't deserve is acknowledge that we are involved and responsible.

Two women writers with Haitian roots explore the meanings of Haiti in new books. The stories in Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak! are so good and true they are painful to read. Whether set on a doomed boat bound for Florida, in a village where a young father chooses a defiant suicide over the obligations he cannot meet, or in New York where an immigrant mother and her American daughter never quite succeed in understanding each other, they always stress the personal over the political, irony over ideology. Danticat is a hugely talented as well as disciplined young writer; one's hope for her fast-developing career is that she will continue to rise above the vulgarities of the culture of hyphenation. Danticat understands that the circle between the past and what is yet to come is unbroken. If her personal voice sometimes seems just a bit precious, put it down to youth (she was born in 1969); she has a long road ahead. As she herself reflects,

The sky in all its glory had been there for eons even before she came into the world, and there it would stay with its crashing stars and moody clouds. The sand and its caresses, the conch and its melody would be there forever as well. All that would change would be the faces of the people who would see and touch those things, faces like hers, which was already not as it had been a few years before and which would mature and change in the years to come.

Speaking to herself in the collective voice of her forebears, Danticat writes:

Sometimes, you dream of hearing only the beating of your own heart, but this has never been the case. You have never been able to escape the pounding of a thousand other hearts that have outlived yours by thousands of years. And over the years when you have needed us, you have always cried "Krik?" and we have answered "Krak!" and it has shown us that you have not forgotten us.

What Joan Dayan's rambling, unfocused, self-absorbed monograph lacks in clarity it almost atones for with not infrequent flashes of keen insight. One does wonder by what criteria Haiti, History, and the Gods was edited; but turgid though it is, it is in places superb. It even may be said that the book's opacity mimics the immense complexity of its topic. "Yet in highlighting complexities and ambiguities that have been obscured in writings about Haiti, about France, and even about the United States," Dayan says, "I hope to set the stage for what might be called literary fieldwork." In this she may have succeeded, albeit at a high cost.

Yet all the brighter shines the occasional nugget. One such is the very first sentence: "Haiti tempts impassioned representation, as well as proprietary impulses." Yes, the reader sighs, it's true. The New World "kept Haiti as its silenced but crucial interlocutor, and to a large extent its ancestor spirit." Yes, yes. "Those who came to Saint-Domingue in the last years of the eighteenth century came to a country where definitions were defied as they were made and categories were mixed up as more rigorous labels were invented." Yes--not unlike the last years of the twentieth century? And this on the inner life of Haiti, its spiritual imagination, is deeply revealing: "For the Haitian who serves the spirits [the loa of the voodoo pantheon] there is no 'beyond' in the Christian sense," writes Dayan, "no redemptive surcease of sorrow, but rather an uncertain realm of obligation, or broken but obstinate communion between the living and the dead."

Not all the books that might enlighten us are new ones. Graham Greene's 1966 novel The Comedians remains exquisitely timely. And a decade or so ago at a library sale in my hometown I found Black Haiti: A Biography of Africa's Eldest Daughter, published in 1926. "The workers sing in the fields, and against the black tide of their recurrent lives the spectacular crises stand out," author Blair Niles had written. "Peasants have sung and toiled in Haiti, danced and sung and drummed, sorrowed and wailed, while the great figures have moved passionately through their parts." Of one Haitian, Niles wrote: "His candidate for the Presidency had lost. And then he'd had, of course, to take to the 'bush.' In order to save his life he'd gone up into the hills. It was always wise to give a new President time to settle down into office and to forget just who had taken up arms to elect his rival." Is Aristide, and are the events of the last few years, really all that distinctive?

If we listen carefully, we can hear history unfolding well before it hits the headlines, and the echoes remain audible long after the battles have been fought and forgotten. Our fate is to return whence we came, perhaps (so we must hope) just a little wiser.

My own education began in November 1990, in a mountain village on Haiti's southern peninsula. My teacher was an elderly Episcopal priest, a wiry man given to gallic hand gestures and shrugs and sporting a goatee that made him resemble Ho Chi Minh. An election was to take place in less than a month: the country's first genuinely democratic election ever. Almost idly, I asked the priest which candidate he thought would win. Marc Bazin, a former World Bank official, was a name one heard often.

"Aristide will win," he said without hesitation. He lifted a finger. "If he lives."

I had not heard the name before. I asked which candidate he preferred.

"I prefer the candidate who will be the best for the country."

Well, which one was that?

"God will choose the right one. No man can become a leader unless God wants it."

I rejoined: Had God chosen Hitler?

"Oui," he retorted. "Bon-Dieu a choisi Hitler, mais Hitler a trompe Bon-Dieu." God chose Hitler, but Hitler betrayed God.

The priest wanted, he told me, a government "that will allow you and me to continue doing our work here."

Did Bazin stand a chance?

"Between you and me, no. Aristide is too popular."

A few days later, at a restaurant in Petionville, I asked the priest's wife what the government-I used the French etat-was doing for the people of the village where we had been.

"L'(tat, c'est mon mari ( L_____," she replied and laughed. In L_____, my husband is the state.

It was a perfectly Haitian reply: ambiguous, ironic-and true.

-Ethan Casey is a journalist based in Bangkok. He writes for The Globe and Mail of Toronto, among other publications.

1. Note Wilentz's eerily prophetic treatment of her acquaintance with Aristide, well before he was at all known outside Haiti, in The Rainy Season: Haiti Since Duvalier (Simon & Schuster, 1989).

2. See, for example, her call in the Nation of August 22, 1994, for a continuation, at that very late date, of the brutal economic embargo.

3. The political game playing continues. In September of 1996, Republicans on the House International Relations Committee charged the Clinton administration with covering up the murder of two critics of Aristide in August of this year. (Aristide stepped down as president in 1996, but the new president, Rene Preval, is widely regarded as a puppet of Aristide.) U.S. Ambassador William Swing conceded that members of the Haitian presidential guard were implicated in the murders, but said that those responsible had been fired. Michael Killian of the Chicago Tribune (Sept. 28, 1996) reported that the State Department and the Pentagon have sent 46 security experts to Haiti "to help protect Preval from rogue elements within his own presidential guard. State Department security agents have never been used before to protect a foreign head of state in his own country, according to the American Foreign Service Association."

Copyright© 1997 by Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine.