Well-meaning advocates and hateful critics alike focus on Haiti as a failed state, citing its pervasive corruption as they simultaneously dismiss references to the past. Unless they think historically and explore these interconnections to find new solutions, all efforts to get Haiti right are simply doomed. This moment is especially critical because the Haitian state is being called upon to do something it has never done—have and show a responsibility to the entire nation. Historically, which lives matter in Haiti has always been determined by socioeconomic status. And nothing makes this more apparent than the mass graves; the state treats the dead as they do the living.
To get Haiti on another, more democratic course, concrete steps are necessary to ensure that the poor and nameless have advocates in discussions of rebuilding plans. They cannot continue to be casualties of nonrepresentation. Their opposition to the UN special envoy’s plan for Haiti must be revisited. January 12, 2010, should not be used as a pretext to go back to business as usual. In spite of the narrative pervasive in the mainstream media, Haiti only seemed stable. The Collier solution to build sweatshops and export mangoes being touted again this week as the answer to poverty is an archaic development model detrimental to Haiti’s future precisely because it reinforces the concentration of wealth and exploits the masses.
If you are concerned, keep asking questions. External pressure affected the World Bank days after the quake. So make calls, text, Tweet, send letters to local, national, and foreign officials, as well as international funding agencies to demand the following:
• Forgiveness of Haiti’s debt.
• Greater transparency on the part of both Haiti and the United States regarding the terms of current relationship between the two nations.
• Public debates (at home and abroad) concerning Haiti’s future that actually include real oppositional voices and not the usual suspects who claim to represent the nameless.
• Recognition of and partnership with local grassroots organizations to ensure expedient delivery of relief.
Indeed, nothing would be a more fitting requiem for the dying than a sustainable Haiti that will not crumble in the future from the man-made disasters that are currently under way.
6
Not-So-Random Thoughts on Words, Art, and Creativity
Haïti Art Naïf / Denkmalschmiede Höfgen / March 7 exhibition opens (print)
Years ago, as a translator for Haitian refugees, I found myself getting attached to certain words spoken by men and women seeking asylum in the United States. These words took me into unfamiliar places. Uncomfortable places. Dangerous places. The paintings in this collection, like those morsels of words, also took me on a journey. They took me to a different place. A beautiful place. A regenerative paradise. A place that I did not want to leave. They gave me breath, exposed me to a limitless imagination and reminded me, once again at a very crucial moment, of Haiti’s undeniable and unbeatable spirit of creative survivalism. And because of their location—in a village four kilometers from Grimma, in Germany, they forced me to further expand my notions of community. In that sense, like the words that I have written about, the paintings in this exhibition gave me a little of this country that I used to know, a little of this country that I never knew, a little of this country that I wish I knew.
Art in Haiti is complex. Haiti is the country that produced the only successful slave revolution in the world and as a result became the longest neocolonial experiment in the history of the West. Haiti, once the enfant terrible of the Americas who defied the great European powers, endured external and internal pressures of all kinds and has become the region’s bête noire. To paraphrase anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the more that Haiti appears weird, the easier it is to forget that it represents this aforementioned past.2
Art historians and critics tend to view Haitian art from specific perspectives. Central to many of their frameworks is the idea that Haiti is first and foremost a land of poverty and deprivation from which art—expression of joy and richness of the human spirit—derives.3 Or that Haiti is actually a wreck of a country—with a people who are simultaneously the economically poorest and artistically richest culture in the New World.4 Such notions rest on a particular juxtaposition that disavows the presence of Haitian artists while undermining their agency. The fact is that while the social economic conditions undoubtedly do impact the country, they certainly are not the only things that define it. Associating Haiti solely with its material conditions is a discursive practice, an exercise in hermeneutics—an act of interpretation.
These perceptions actually incarcerate Haiti—restricting it to dystopian narratives of desperation that obscure the republic’s complexity. In so doing, these views come dangerously close to dehumanizing Haitians. Indeed, Haiti cannot escape its main tagline as the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. Yet, it is so much more than that. It is much more than a series of markers and quantitative indices. Haiti is, and has always been, a country of extremes, as Catherine Hermantin puts it. And nothing reveals this as much as the art world. Who makes art? What kinds of art? Who appreciates art? Who views art? Who sells art? Who imports art? And ultimately who owns it. It is no wonder that those looking to explain where Haiti fits within the order of things are continually puzzled by Haitians who make art and why they actually do so.
I was not born into a family that appreciates paintings. We did not go to museums. But creativity was always all around me. My father habitually sculpted anything that he could manipulate into self-portraits, whether these were pieces of wood, metal, or even plastic. Mother sewed and baked cakes that took on life of their own. Making something with anything was simply a way of our daily life. Almost everyone around us did the same. Part of it may have been lack, but part of it was certainly wonder.
Thus, it is not surprising that years later their three children (my sisters and I) are professionals who also sing, dance, write, and, yes, even paint. When we reach the limits of one form of expression, we simply take on another. The point is to answer the call to give voice to that which words alone cannot fully express. As artists, we turn to the arts because we are as filled with need as we are with the torment that will eventually bleed onto canvases in the shape of forms and lines. The desire to pick up a brush is response to a visceral demand. An answer to a cry to document outwardly that which boils within instead of remaining trapped, archived in our minds and bodies where no one can see it.
I prefer to think of the works in this catalog on similar terms, putting less emphasis on economic determinism and the social conditions from which they sprang than on the verve stirring within the artists who created them. In so doing, I bring the artists to the center as active agents, revelers who are interpreters of their world. Gerald Nordland, I believe, puts it best when he says: “Haitian artists paint out of their own resources, their own history and mythology, the double experience of [Vodou] and Christianity, the observation of earth, sea and sky and their knowledge of human interaction. Their personal expression of creative imagination—a fundamental level of human consciousness—has preserved their art’s authenticity and given the world a rich and intense experience of the will to creativity.”5
The works in this collection came to my awareness days after January 12, 2010, when a devastating earthquake 7.0 on the Richter scale and its numerous aftershocks decimated the republic. Upon encountering the paintings in the file to write this introduction, I burst into tears. I practically demanded to see them in person for myself, because these paintings confirm that in spite of a history of confrontation, recent ravage and devastation, as long as there is art and there are artists of all kinds, Haiti will remain a place full of life, love, and will. A place