A Historically Informed Look at Haiti

Catastrophe seems to have a special affinity for Haiti. Or perhaps the Haitians have a predilection for inviting disaster to visit their third of Hispaniola, the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Certainly, the floods that killed thousands in Haiti during the 2004 rainy season were widely interpreted in the American press as an implicit confirmation of this latter view. While Florida, Grenada, and Jamaica weathered powerful hurricanes with extensive property damage but little loss of life, over 2000 were dead or missing after (only) heavy rains triggered mudslides around Mapou and Fond Verattes in May (Lakshmanan 2004). Another 2000 died in and around Gonaives in September, after heavy rains from Tropical Storm Jeanne set off flash floods; by comparison, the storm killed only nineteen in the Dominican Republic (Bracken 2004).



Following independence in 1804, most of the Western world predicted that the new “Black Republic,” Haiti, would fail because blacks are incapable of self-governance (Farmer 1994: 226). An uncritical examination of the state of Haiti today would seem to verify the prescience of these (undeniably racist) prophecies. The floods in Gonaives and Mapou, for example, were naturally initiated, but the disasters were man-made: weak government and denuded lands, not forceful winds or copious rain, transformed storms into floods, and floods into humanitarian catastrophes (Lakshmanan 2004; Williams 2003).



But this reading of Haiti’s most recent ecological trials is inadequate—it expunges the guilt of the international community and implies equality of blame between Haitian peasants and the elite. Haiti, both before and after independence in 1804, essentially functioned as a colony from which both wealthy Western colonial powers and Haitian elites extracted everything of value. And yet, now, when the material reserves have been exhausted, the routinely exploited peasantry is forced to shoulder the blame for their own suffering.