DECOLONIZE HAITI

"Warrior" Jean-Michel Basquiat

The massacre of the whites was a tragedy; not for the whites. For these old slave-owners, those who burnt a little powder in the arse of a Negro, who buried him alive for insects to eat, who were well treated by Toussaint, and who, as soon as they got the chance, began their old cruelties again; for these there is no need to waste one tear or one drop of ink. The tragedy was for the blacks and the Mulattoes. It was not policy but revenge, and revenge has no place in politics. The whites were no longer to be feared, and such purposeless massacres degrade and brutalize a population, especially one which was just beginning as a nation and had had so bitter a past. The people did not want it--all they wanted was freedom, and independence seemed to promise that. Christophe and other generals strongly disapproved. Had the British and the Americans thrown their weight on the side of humanity, Dessalines might have been curbed. As it was Haiti suffered terribly from the resulting isolation. Whites were banished from Haiti for generations, and the unfortunate country, ruined economically, its population lacking in social culture, had its inevitable difficulties doubled by this massacre. That the new nation survived at all is forever to its credit for if the Haitians thought that imperialism was finished with them, they were mistaken. 

- C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938)

"Occupied Port-au-Prince, Haiti (February 2010)" Andrew Newton 

The speed with which these decontextualized images then circulate across many linguistic and national frontiers has increased dramatically with the globalization of mass culture, reinforcing the quasi-universal perception of Haiti as a place of abuse, violence, and lawlessness. In Derrida’s terms, a false ontology of “presence” has been created, one that mimics the real but only succeeds in offering the illusion of transparency and the erroneous understanding of Haiti as pure chaos and mere surface. As Laënnec Hurbon has put it, Haiti is a site of “fantasmic tropes” that have served to justify the US occupation of 1915–34 or the intervention during the Clinton years in the 1990s (1994–95) against the Aristide regime, and that continue today to undermine the “quest for the expression of human dignity and liberty.” These tropes construct Haiti as a paradoxical object, fascinating, haunting, and repulsive, but also “spectacular” and desirable: on the one hand, a commodity with no real value, clad in ridicule or made abject, and of no interest to potential consumers; on the other, a highly coveted exotic colonial space with magical practices that have inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers – and indeed what could be more mesmerizing than Vodou rituals and zombies as numerous horror films have shown.

- Françoise Lionnet,  "Postcolonialism, language, and the visual: By way of Haiti" (2008)

"Clermelle: Sea God" Hector Hyppolite

David Barsamian: The United States invaded Haiti in 1915 and remained there until 1934. Decades of dictatorship followed. What kind of legacy has that left on Haiti? 

Edwidge Danticat: It had a very potent legacy that we’re still living with today. For example, the whole military structure in Haiti that existed until the early 1990s was put in place by the American occupation. At the top there were Southern white officers, who led an army that crushed the indigenous resistance—the cacos. A high-ranking U.S. officer said when he arrived, “To think these niggers speak French!” Later, Haitian officers attended the notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning. The threat from the U.S. is something that is always hanging over people’s heads: If we don’t behave, we’ll have occupation again.

- "Edwidge Danticat Interview," The Progressive (2003)

OTHER STATES OF MIND

"Meditierender Bosnischer Mohammedaner"by Damir Nikšić

I do think that right now in the United States there is an increasing tendency to regard Islamic cultures or "non-Western"--whatever they mean by that--cultures as barbaric, and so it becomes increasingly important to try to understand the different sorts of violence that come from neocolonial state formations. One can't give a culturalist explanation for intra-Iraqi violence for instance, but one has to situate those conflicts within larger global economic and political forms of hegemony. The U.S. imagines that it stands for both culture and civilization, and yet it cannot explain its own cruelty and torture within this self-definition. Thus it casts the violence it cannot explain as the nascent cultural violence of Arab cultures or Islam, even as it periodically invokes a doctrine of tolerance toward this same "Other." Here is a notion of the "Other" one must clearly 
work to dismantle. 

The post of postcolonial does not mean that the colonial is "over"; it means that one has to chart the formations of its enduring and animated aftermath. The culturalist deformation of Islam refuses to consider the colonial histories that continue to operate in that region, so we need a new way of thinking about both temporality and spatiality to do this. And that is clearly part of what postcolonial studies has done for contemporary cultural theory. We have to be able to think a history that remains animated in and through its ruins. 

- Judith Butler, "Accounting for a Philosophic Itinerary: Genealogies of Power and Ethics of Nonviolence," in Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues. (2011)

Saadat Hasan Manto

Many, perhaps most, human societies have used or still use, in differing ways and circumstances, substances which offer those who adopt them temporary access to an extraordinary set of experiences. Temporary escapes from history (partial or total) is an unavoidable ingredient in human history. But the degree of control which each culture--naturally in addition to the individuals who compose them--exercises over these substances varies greatly, and is only in part explainable by a pharmacological analysis of their effects. On each occasion a cultural component, a filter, also intervenes, although how it functions it functions largely eludes us. Why, one may ask, have alcoholic beverages with which, for better or worse, European societies have learned to live in the course of a few millennia (in the case of wine) or only a few centuries (with distilled liquors) had such a destructive effect in just a few decades in the native cultures of North America? 

This is an obvious example. I mention it here because it permits me to introduce an extraordinary passage from a report which the French Jesuit Paul de Brebeuf sent in 1636 to the provincial of his order to inform him of events occurring that year in the Quebec mission. One of the members had explained to the natives (the report naturally calls them "sauvages" [savages]) that their high mortality rate was caused by the wines and liquors, which they did not know how to consume in moderation. "Why do you not write to your great King," one of the natives asked, "to prohibit the transporting of these beverages which are killing us?" "The French," the Jesuit answered, "need them to help them stand the sea voyages and the freezing temperatures of these places." "Well, then," the other said, "arrange that they be the only ones to drink them." At this point, a second native stood up: "No, it is not these beverages which kill us, it is your writings. As soon as you started to describe our country, our rivers, our lands, our forests, we all began to die, in a way that was not happening before you came." 

- Carlo Ginzburg, "The Europeans Discover (or Rediscover) the Shamans," in Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive. (2012)

Walter Benjamin