Harvesting Haiti: Reflections on Unnatural Disasters

By Myriam J.A. Chancy

2024 Longlist OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, Bocas Lit Fest

This collection ponders the personal and political implications for Haitians at home and abroad resulting from the devastating 2010 earthquake.

The 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 was a debilitating event that followed decades of political, social, and financial issues. Leaving over 250,000 people dead, 300,000 injured, and 1.5 million people homeless, the earthquake has had lasting repercussions on a struggling nation. As the post-earthquake political situation unfolded, Myriam Chancy worked to illuminate on-the-ground concerns, from the vulnerable position of Haitian women to the failures of international aid. Originally presented at invited campus talks, published as columns for a newspaper in Trinidad and Tobago, and circulated in other ways, her essays and creative responses preserve the reactions and urgencies of the years following the disaster.

In Harvesting Haiti, Chancy examines the structures that have resulted in Haiti's post-earthquake conditions and reflects at key points after the earthquake on its effects on vulnerable communities. Her essays make clear the importance of sustaining and supporting the dignity of Haitian lives and of creating a better, contextualized understanding of the issues that mark Haitians’ historical and present realities, from gender parity to the vexed relationship between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781477327838

Myriam J.A. Chancy

MYRIAM J. A. CHANCY was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A Guggenheim Fellow, she currently holds the Hartley Burr Alexander Chair in the Humanities at Scripps College in California. She is the author of four books of literary criticism and four novels. Her first novel, Spirit of Haiti, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Best First Book, Canada/Caribbean) in 2004. The Loneliness of Angels won the Guyana Prize for Literature Caribbean Award (Best Fiction) and was shortlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature in 2011.

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HARVESTING HAITI

REFLECTIONS ON UNNATURAL DISASTERS

Myriam J. A. Chancy

University of Texas Press

Austin

Copyright © 2023 by Myriam J. A. Chancy

All rights reserved

First edition, 2023

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Chancy, Myriam J. A., 1970– author.

Title: Harvesting Haiti : reflections on unnatural disasters / Myriam J. A. Chancy.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022051960 (print) | LCCN 2022051961 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2781-4 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2782-1 (pdf)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2783-8 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Haiti Earthquake, Haiti, 2010. | Haiti Earthquake, Haiti, 2010—Press coverage. | Haiti—Politics and government. | Haiti—Social conditions. | Haiti—Economic conditions. | LCGFT: Essays.

Classification: LCC HV600 2010.H2 C436 2023 (print) | LCC HV600 2010.H2 (ebook) | DDC 363.34/95097294—dc23/eng/20230317

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051960

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051961

doi:10.7560/327814

This book is dedicated

to my mother,

for giving me light

and

to Natália,

for bringing back the light after a long season of

death and dying . . .

CONTENTS

Introduction

PART I: SOVEREIGNTY AND SURVIVAL

The Aftermath: Responding to the Crisis (2011–2022)

A Marshall Plan for a Haiti at Peace: To Continue or End the Legacy of the Revolution (October 2010)

Submission or Omission: Haiti’s Challenge in Latin America (April 2011)

A Haiti for Haitians: Ending the Legacy of (Band) Aid (November 2010–January 2011)

Haiti: Five Years After (January 2, 2015)

PART II: GENDER AND EQUITY

Hearing Our Mothers: Safeguarding Haitian Women’s Representation and Practices of Survival (March 2010)

Cultural Impasse and Structural Change: How to Address Questions of Gender Equity for Haitian Women across Societal Strata (2013)

Love, Debt, and Forgiveness: Women Speaking from the Rubble in Post-earthquake Haiti (2011–2019)

Women in Haiti: Strength in Spirit and Culture (February 19, 2010)

PART III: UNDER/WATER

Under/Water (Poem, May 31, 2010)

Ayiti Alive! Photo-Essay (2011–2013)

PART IV: UNDERSTANDING HAITI, IN CONTEXT—TRINIDAD & TOBAGO REVIEW COLUMNS (JUNE–DECEMBER 2012)

Nou Bouké!!! (June 2012)

Independence Notes, or, What’s So Great about Being Haitian, Anyway? (July 2012)

What Dreams Are Made Of: Haiti Kanpé (September 2012)

The Horrors of Slavery: Haiti, Vodou, and the Myth of the Cursed Nation (October 2012)

Walking Sadness: Haitian Returns—Nomad (November 2012)

Tout Moun Se Moun: Haitian Women’s Feminism, Then and Now (December 2012)

PART V: FRENEMIES—THE DOMINICAN RELATIONSHIP

Are You Haitian? (October 2013)

Lavé Tèt: Striving for (Black) Wellness in Academe and Beyond (Travels in the DR, October 2013)

New Year’s Resolution 2014: Love Thy Neighbor

Conclusion: Living with Ruins

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Recommended Charitable Organizations Working in Haiti

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

ON AUGUST 14, 2021, HAITI SAW its second large-scale earthquake in eleven years. By all modern measures, the earthquake that rocked Haiti’s southern peninsula was catastrophic. At a time when, in most parts of the world, a major earthquake results only in material damage and a death toll attenuated by bolstered building codes, the August 2021 earthquake resulted in over 2,200 dead and left over a million people shelter- and food-insecure just before the arrival of sweeping fall rains. Some survivors of the most recent earthquake retreated to the southern peninsula as a reprieve from the lack of sustainable reconstruction in and around Haiti’s capital, which had been shattered by the 7.0 earthquake on January 12, 2010, leaving over 300,000 dead and over 1.7 million without shelter. For those seeking shelter from future storms that summer, the southern peninsula offered none, only a repetition of all that had been experienced in 2010.

The first images out of Haiti in August 2021 came from Haitians themselves and circulated quickly on social media, where survivors filming their towns and villages could be heard saying, "It looks like January 12. It looks like Douz," as they walked down fissured streets and recorded collapsed buildings by the sides of the roads. Sometimes they opined about who might be dead or living, who they had known to live in such and such a building, who they thought had gotten out in time, or not.

Predictably, aid was to come slowly, given that the towns and villages affected were far from the capital and armed gangs had increasingly taken control of the major passageways throughout the country, blocking convoys of food staples, fuels, and other materials being sent out from the capital to affected areas. Some took to the ocean in order to avoid gang-disputed territories, but one wonders when the ocean surrounding the port of Port-au-Prince and ebbing off the coasts will also be patrolled and controlled by entities other than the average Haitian seeking to make a living, survive catastrophe, and help their neighbor to do the same. When aid came from the larger NGOs, not-for-profits did what they always do: flood the markets with foreign goods and set up camp for limited periods, without consultation or coordination with local governments—in other words, without a coordinated plan to respond to the crisis in ways that both are sustainable and can mitigate future such occasions, which will inevitably occur. Natural disasters are on the rise, and fragile infrastructures in what we think of as developing-world countries are often in states of continuous disrepair.

For those of us intimately familiar with the workings of reconstruction after the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, the occurrence of another disastrous earthquake in the summer of 2021, on the heels of the assassination of Haiti’s president just a month earlier, only portended another disaster-in-the-making. For those for whom Haiti is home and home to family members; for those who were present in Port-au-Prince, Léogâne, or Jacmel and surrounding areas at the time of the 2010 earthquake; and for those who witnessed from afar and then lent their efforts to reconstruction efforts thereafter, there was also the need to contend with the memories of January 12th that the recent earthquake brought back. For many, there was the need to grieve what had not been grieved in its entirety, and some faced new losses as well. For each of us, there was a need to brace oneself for what was to come, as common Haitians became, once again, subject to manipulation and neglect at the hands of politicos for whom the common good of the population is beside the point.

I call this collection of essays "Harvesting Haiti because, for too many, Haiti serves either as a cautionary tale of what can happen if a population of African-descended people take control of their sovereignty—as Haitians did when, having won a thirteen-year, slave-led war against their enslavers, the French, they declared the state of Haiti on January 1, 1804—or as an example of a territory whose only function is to provide its raw resources, including physical labor, for a pittance to its northern neighbors and other benefactors." In his analysis of Haiti’s marginalization in global history, Silencing the Past, Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has written about how the success of the Haitian Revolution has been denied because of a belief (ensconced in continental philosophy since Hegel¹) that enslaved people could not imagine and free themselves. Yet, the success of the Revolution can be measured by the visceral global response to it. At the time, this response was not limited to France’s imposition of a sizable indemnity to allow the new nation access to global trade, estimated in today’s currency to amount to $44 billion; it can also be perceived by the resulting ripple effect of insurrections throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, some of which were to some degree successful (Venezuela, followed by Peru, Argentina, Colombia), others not (particularly in the US, where the Haitian Revolution’s success resulted in extreme repressions of enslaved Africans and African Americans throughout the plantation-holding southern states). Gunboat diplomacy then ensured that the fledgling nation could not advance its sovereignty. Consequently, the number of Haitian immigrants and refugees to the US rose dramatically in the late twentieth century, only for them to be rebuffed, sometimes violently.² When Haiti is referenced as the poorest in the hemisphere, I don’t cringe, as others do, because I know this history.³ Many, however, do not know it, or do not care to.

It may be surprising that since the 2010 earthquake, Haiti and Haitians on the ground are no better off than they were in 2009, a year before the earthquake, when the United Nations–led plan for Haiti’s development focused on establishing more factories in Haiti, rather than on the development of Haiti’s educational, health, or trade sectors. In 2010, that plan held strong and was not altered. In 2022, it remains the same.⁴ Investments in Haiti seem focused only on what can be extracted in the form of natural resources and physical labor, not on bolstering infrastructures that could lead to increased options for average Haitians and for Haiti’s role as a more equal actor among neighboring countries and within the hemisphere. Haiti, then, is harvested for such resources; much is taken from it, but very little appears to be learned from what Haiti and Haitians have been through since the inception of its nation-state, even less from their experience of an earthquake that, had it occurred with the same level of death toll and damage anywhere else in the world, would have brought other nations to their knees. One could argue that Haiti, already compromised, had little to lose in the aftermath of the earthquake, but the three hundred thousand dead would probably differ in this opinion, as would those who had to reconstruct their lives and shelters without much support while carrying the burdens of their losses: of limbs, kin, colleagues, homes, businesses.

For those who do not know this history: Haiti’s lot after the earthquake was widely described as inconceivable, and yet the poverty and abject state of Haitians today also appears, to some, to be a natural consequence of years of underdevelopment easily blamed on the Haitian State’s ineptitude or corruption. These facile explanations conveniently cover up the variety of ways in which international engagement with Haiti has both obscured its beginnings and disabled the state’s progress, from inception to the present day. It might, then, be helpful to provide a brief overview of the ways in which Haiti’s history, particularly with respect to foreign involvement, has contributed directly to the failures of infrastructures during the earthquake itself, to say nothing of the post-earthquake reconstruction period, which some of the essays in this collection will address more directly. This overview is intended not to provide an in-depth analysis of such involvements but to sketch, for the reader unaware of this history, some foundation from which to assess the ways in which I observe and critique, intellectually and personally, the unfolding drama and failure of the post-earthquake political reality. I offer this hasty summary without pretense of being myself a political scientist or historian.⁵ It is but an overview of some of the factors that one needs to take into consideration when trying to hold as distinct, on the one hand, the realities of governmental inefficacy and corruption on the ground with, on the other, the realities of international ineptitude and efforts that one might deem equally corrupt or, at least, devoid of lasting impact.

A number of Haitian scholars and specialists in Haitian politics have offered their analysis of the unfolding tragedy in Haiti while also harboring sophisticated analyses of alternative possibilities for development away from capitalist models that continue to impoverish the nation. Among these, probably the most notable are the historical analyses of Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World (2004) and more recent Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2013), both of which recount Haiti’s complex history in ways that undermine the repeated narrative of Haiti’s supposed congenital corruption. Jean Casimir’s The Haitians: A Decolonial History (2020) offers a radical revisioning of Haiti’s inception, as one rejecting the precepts of coloniality and therefore of models of European governance. Casimir’s text enters into conversation with the respective works of Sibylle Fischer (Modernity Disavowed of 2004) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Silencing the Past of 1995), both of whom demonstrate how the unthinkability of the Haitian Revolution changed the future trajectories of neighboring countries within Latin and South America, as well as the trajectory of the southern United States. Fischer and Trouillot also show how the denial of the Revolution’s success was mired in racist ideology that made it inconceivable, even as it unfolded—to such a thorough degree that many today still do not realize that Haiti won the war against the French and exacted its freedom rather than being granted emancipation. Paul Farmer’s much earlier The Uses of Haiti (1994) more cynically demonstrates how, with US interference, Haiti’s political and economic infrastructures were ground to dust. This still leaves the question: does Haiti have a corruption problem? Well, yes, it does.

According to a World Bank Institute capacity development brief dated December 2007, authored by Susana Carrillo, Haiti was ranked 177th in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, above only three other countries; the report stresses the need to enhance the oversight role of civil society organizations and other nongovernmental players, a role that is currently, in 2022, as I will discuss below, being contested by US actors.⁶ The report surveyed lay individuals in the population to assess the impact of instability on citizens. Survey respondents cited the lack of a properly functioning judicial system, lack of basic security . . . violence in the streets, robbery, kidnapping, and murder as seriously undermin[ing] the fabric of society. Ironically, in its public airing of dissatisfaction with the delivery of services (electrical, water, etc.), the report reveals its support for capitalist notions of development as a solution to Haiti’s entrenched instability, stating that direct comparison among service providers has helped spur competition and helped improve performance and efficiency in other global sites. It fails, however, to examine why monopolies of service providers persist in Haiti and why civil society is consistently kept at bay from having influence in governance. It does not examine the role of the international community in the mechanisms of local corruption. My point is that Haiti’s current political quagmire results from a long history, colonial and postcolonial, mired in degradations both inhumane and unethical, the contradictions of which are often difficult to disentangle since the former were anchored in discourses of civilizing missions and modernization, and the latter in pretensions of establishing democracy. I am not sure where the notion—that the progenitors of systems of enslavement and governance by terror and decree could create an alternative that would produce socialist or democratic structures—comes from, but it is certain that the aftereffects of colonial and neo- or postcolonial political modes have only reproduced, under new guises, their original mechanisms. It is also true, as Casimir thoroughly demonstrates, that when those systems were vigorously rejected and resisted, modes of being that did not emanate from colonial paradigms were, in turn, roundly and forcibly rejected by the former colonizers. We see this in the global refusal to acknowledge Haiti’s declared independence in 1804, as well as in the gunboat diplomacy of the late 1800s through to the early 1900s, through which Haiti and other Caribbean and Latin American states were invigilated and many of their heads of state installed. After the Revolution, Haiti did not have a truly, freely elected head of state until the elections of 1990 that brought Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in his first term, to power. Thereafter, it is unclear which of Haiti’s elections were, in fact, democratic, if any.

In a recent publication, Gerard Le Chevallier, a United Nations official, opined that it should be possible to ‘fix’ Haiti, because its problem is a political conflict, which has no ethnic, religious or territorial dimensions. It is also a small country whose neighbours, in a relatively rich hemisphere, wish to assist it in achieving a durable stability.⁷ Le Chevallier does not consider that such neighbors, including the UN-sponsored MINUSTAH, might have much to do with Haiti’s incapacity to achieve such stability. Fixing Haiti: MINUSTAH and Beyond, the collected essays regrouping Le Chevallier’s text with other expert opinions from across the Haitian political spectrum and from Haiti’s US-based diaspora, crystallizes that the international plan to achieve Haiti’s stability is in direct conflict with the vestiges of communal self-governance upon which the society was founded. At the same time, we witness the deployment of those vestiges in the widespread and very public manifestations of members of civil society whenever security or political precarity forces the country into a further descent upon the slippery slope it has navigated since the presidency of Jean-Pierre Boyer, shortly after the Revolution. Patrick Sylvain, for one, reminds us that there are lessons to be drawn from Boyer’s presidency, especially because of the uncanny similarities between the Boyer and Préval presidencies. Sylvain notes that the devastating earthquake of 1842 coincided with a socio-political revolution against the government; it exposed the weaknesses of the state led by then president Jean-Pierre Boyer and ushered in a stealthy fight for democratic freedom.⁸ He notes further similarities between Boyer and Préval: Both men were 66 years old and in charge of the nation when the two most catastrophic earthquakes in the island’s recent history struck. To the surprise of even their staunchest defenders, both men remained silent in the calamitous days following the earthquakes and their support from that point on plummeted.⁹ One could draw the conclusion that very little had changed between 1842 and 2010, but Sylvain’s point is something else, that Haiti’s tragic history has not been the result of natural evolution. It emerged from territorial insecurity, economic subjugation imposed by Western powers in order to satisfy market needs and the propagation of certain policies dictated by post-colonial rules.¹⁰ In other words, these realities—of territorial insecurity, economic subjugation, and Western supremacy—have remained unchanged over the course of Haiti’s history, no matter who has attempted to govern and change the course of the country’s trajectory.

Amélie Gauthier and Madalena Moita contend further that one of Haiti’s chief problems is its open economy and the removal of tariffs (through the 1980s to the present), which crippled its internal economy and ability to grow its domestic resources in agriculture and in other sectors.¹¹ In an integrated global economy that rewards specialization, write Gauthier and Moita, Haiti’s main competitive advantages have been its abundance of low-wage, unskilled workers and its proximity to the United States, its biggest trading partner,¹² none of which benefits Haiti and Haitians themselves; rather, these advantages reward those who exploit them, the US and other partners for whom suppressed wages and an unskilled, largely uneducated labor force guarantee higher profit margins while keeping the laborers both impoverished and dependent. In other words, this is a form of development that is an archaic development model detrimental to Haiti’s future precisely because it reinforces the concentration of wealth and exploits the masses.¹³ If this is what is meant as development, then it is no wonder that Haitians have taken to the streets in protest year after year after year.

As Gauthier and Moita note further, without sound public politics, breaking out of the poverty cycle is not viable. Corruption, crime and the drug trade become alternatives to legal economic activities.¹⁴ This is especially true when one is sequestered on half an island, with nowhere else to go, but I do not want to romanticize illegal activities born from poverty, as some journalists have unwittingly done in the mainstream press in the United States, not realizing the very long history of entanglement between local gangs and government officials, but also unable to differentiate between groups organized for criminal activity and those organized for public good.¹⁵ For instance, after the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, some media outlets brought up the fact that the vacuum in governance might be taken up by gang leaders, and it has not always been clear if they did so with condemnation or support, since some gang leaders have been depicted as modern-day Robin Hoods, robbing the rich to give to the poor—to the point that readers, including myself, might have begun to feel a blurring of reality and been led to believe that the key to the future might be held in unlikely hands. Such pieces have cited one gang leader in particular as saying, I have never ordered kidnapping, murders or rape to anyone in Haiti,¹⁶ and discussed the fact that this leader’s street name came from the items sold by his modest mother on the streets of the capital (when, in fact, the name appears to have come from criminal activities such as the burning down of homes as well as people), thus painting a romanticized figure potentially poised to ascend to power.¹⁷ Such pieces, while decrying gang activity, simultaneously appear to suggest that gang leaders might turn into peacemakers, because, well, haven’t we seen everything in Haiti—from a former physician, former priest, former konpa king, to a banana plantation owner—become presidents? While it should go without saying that it might be possible that some individuals bound up in gang activity do so, as Gauthier and Moita point out, out of necessity and lack of options, this kind of coverage obscures the actuality of legitimate, structured organizing taking place on the ground, in particular the Montana Accord, signed in August 2021 by multiple political groups, including the leading opposition groups, and by representatives of hundreds of Haitian civil society organizations.

The Montana Accord calls for a provisional government, even going as far as to name a provisional president for said government, Fritz Jean, a Haitian economist and former banking head,¹⁸ to lead Haiti towards organized and democratic elections, not just for the presidency but for other open seats in parliament. One has to wonder why the Montana Accord has been roundly ignored in US media and why the focus on gangs does not extend to an examination of how and by whom gang activity is fueled—particularly, as many have mentioned, their access to arms.¹⁹ Gauthier and Moita argue that the problem is Haiti’s government, that, unlike Cuba, with a similar geographical size and population, Haiti’s lack of sound governmental infrastructures leaves it vulnerable to repeated devastation, through both natural disasters and economic ones. What the two coauthors fail to consider, however, is that Cuba, for many decades after its revolution, received economic support from the Soviet Union without direct interference to its governance. Some historians have argued that Castro received this aid because of the US blockade against Cuba, but the point here is that this aid came with little to no political interference. By contrast, aid from the US in Haiti has always been accompanied with demands and conditions that have crippled the workings of the local government and local economy. Cuba, then, received less direct interference from a superpower (and much less from its close neighbor, the US), which allowed for the development of its infrastructures based on a communal or social model of governance (in turn inspired by the Haitian Revolution). The question that is not raised is why, with models of success in the surrounding geography, South-South development is actively discouraged—whether it is the medical assistance once provided in Haiti by Cuban doctors, or the economic support brought by countries like Venezuela through trade agreements designed to assist and support the Haitian government and the Haitian population at large—and why, when Haitians themselves organize solutions to their own internal problems, those solutions are disregarded or actively dismantled.

In a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing held in Washington, DC, on September 29, 2022, called Haiti at the Crossroads: Civil Society Responses for a Haitian-Led Solution, Haitian advocate Vélina Élysée Charlier, a representative for Nou Pap Domi, which she describes as a civil society organization that advocates for social justice and accountable governance in Haiti, pithily stated, you have failed, in response to a challenge issued by a member of the US Foreign Affairs Committee. That member was countering the Haitian panelists’ statements that Haitian civil society has the ability to solve Haiti’s ongoing crisis. Charlier insisted: it’s very important that the international community acknowledge their failure in Haiti. She went on to make the following eloquent statement, which went viral over social media:

The Haitian police that we have is a US founded, trained, and funded police, so that police cannot provide security to us, the citizens of Haiti. [That police] was made, tailored, and paid for by the US. . . . It’s not only us in the civil society who are failing Haiti: our friends in the international community are failing Haiti. And the very reason why we do not want an intervention is because when there are boots on our soil, we get raped, we get killed, and we get cholera . . . it has never solved any problems in Haiti, so we must make the effort of looking at things differently . . . what is it that we have been doing and doing and doing over and over again stubbornly that are not working, acknowledging that they are not working, and finding other solutions. The [solution] that we are saying is that there are Haitians in Haiti who are honest, who have integrity and who are competent enough to rule their country. All we are asking for is for a chance to do so. And so far, there always has been the United States of America’s hands on the scale, supporting unconditionally corrupt governments, sending troops that are raping us, that are killing us, and that don’t even have the decency of acknowledging their failure.²⁰

As the title of Gina Ulysse’s important post-earthquake collection of op-eds states, Haiti needs new narratives, ones that imagine what Haiti would be like had it been supported and nurtured instead of disavowed and shunned in its infancy²¹ and, as I would argue, continues to be today.

While Sylvain argues that Haitian heads of state have never fully accepted the constitutional principles of the republic that the three branches of government must be separated, and that the executive cannot be the central distributor of power,²² Mirlande Manigat, a former presidential candidate, argues that Haitian politics have been overshadowed by two forms of populism, Duvalierism and Aristidian populism, such that the population is splintered into groups fighting for the country’s leadership, but without the necessary financial capital to build representation. Instead, the population is left defenseless in front of constitutional and other crises. Manigat also contends, for one, that this defenselessness is supported by the international community, which tolerates violations of constitutional rights on Haitian soil that they would not on their own. Speaking of reforms to the constitution shortly after the departure of the Duvaliers, Manigat writes of the international community: They criticize, sometimes openly, the 1987 constitution as being too complicated and too advanced in its principles, a kind of sterile luxury for the illiterate and poor Haitian people.²³ In short, democracy and human rights have never been the priority for the international community with regard to Haiti. My chief concern, in this collection and elsewhere, is the right to both.

Here, I have brought together talks and essays that I was asked to write over a period of several years following the 2010 earthquake, for opinion pieces, for a column in Trinidad, and for various functions as a keynote or guest speaker in both academic and nonacademic settings. What I gather here are thoughts and reflections from a learned point of view on the aftereffects of the earthquake on vulnerable communities, and also on how the continued harvesting of Haiti, described in the brief historical overview above, might be halted. My hope is that for those who don’t recall the events of January 12, 2010, or are unfamiliar with them, these essays bring to life what was at stake in the first weeks, months, and years in the aftermath of the earthquake. For those who do, I hope that they contain some reflection of what many of us have worked to make clear and preserve—that is, in no uncertain terms, the importance of sustaining and supporting the dignity of Haitian lives and of creating a better, more contextualized understanding as the ground on which engagements with the country should take place.

PREVIOUS TO THE JANUARY 12, 2010, earthquake, I was already prepared to deliver several talks and readings that winter and spring on campuses across North America and the Caribbean. After delivering my first keynote (in Puerto Rico), I was asked questions in the Q and A that had little to do with the talk but everything to do with the current situation and the questions that young scholars of the Caribbean were facing in terms of how to think, teach, and speak of Haiti and also how to situate other parts of the Caribbean with similar infrastructural and economic problems. In response, I shifted all of my talks to focus on the tragedy, even when organizers resisted my calls to do so. In addition to the prescheduled talks, several more were added to my calendar. By fall 2010, I had given sixteen talks altogether, with a brief six-week reprieve in the