amy wilentz

Urban Botox in Haiti

                                              photo: Dieu Nalio Chery/AP

                                                                               photo: Amy Wilentz

Both of the photos above are of the Jalousie shantytown, arguably the most photographed shantytown in Port-au-Prince. They are before and after photos of the recent  government paint-over of Jalousie (after and before, actually, in order of appearance). 

Why is Jalousie so photographed, one might wonder. Jalousie is not the biggest, or even necessarily the poorest, of Haiti’s sprawling slums. But the tumbledown, terraced shantytown looks dramatic and also happens to face one of the two major roads that connects downtown Port-au-Prince with the wealthier suburbs of Petionville, Bourdon, Montagne Noire, and others even higher up the hill.

You can pull over, as I have done, and take a picture of Jalousie without (and this is the great convenience for nervous outsiders with their cameras and phones) ever having to get near the shantytown. In fact, there’s a kind of a look-out point off the road there, next to some shops, as I recall.

Many, many outsiders have taken photos from this point — in fact almost all pictures of Jalousie are taken from this one spot.  (It’s hard to see it in these pictures but major swaths of Jalousie were destroyed in the 2010 earthquake). When I took one such picture (just above) people who were sitting on their roofs in Jalousie enjoying a moment of leisure and ostensible privacy in their own homes, or hanging laundry on the clotheslines you can see in the picture, gave me the finger and otherwise made warding off gestures, because (I assume) the 45,000 or so residents are sick of their neighborhood being offered to the world as Haiti’s poster-slum.

Last month, in a moment of astounding cynicism, the Haitian government, which is loathe to make any move on behalf of the Haitian people, began a $1.4 million effort to put a bright face on Jalousie by painting scores of facades in an array of pleasing Caribbean colors.

Today, Jalousie is a target neighborhood for earthquake camp depopulation, which is to say that people from the 3-year-old makeshift earthquake camps that sprang up de facto around town after a million people were made homeless by the quake are being moved into Jalousie and a few other neighborhoods. The target neighborhoods that are not so visible are not getting the paint job.

Most of the people who work in service for the wealthy residents of Petionville and Montagne Noire and Bourdon live in Jalousie: the drivers, the housekeepers, the tailors and handymen, the locksmiths, the blacksmiths, the cobblers, the groundsmen, the cooks, the caregivers, the nannies, the hotel elevator operators, the wait staff, the bartenders, the busboys, the street sweepers, the market ladies, et al.

While the masters and mistresses of the suburbs live in graceful walled houses or mansions that look like the south of France, their servants live in Jalousie, with no running water and no sewage or power systems. The sewage flows in open canals, and the power comes (as it does in other shantytowns and in the camps) from dangerous freelance wiring that pulls stolen power from the weak, unreliable municipal grid. The water comes occasionally from the municipal twiyo, or pipes, where women and children line up with plastic buckets on their heads. 

Now in the old days, before globalization destroyed the Haitian economy, Haitians themselves used to paint their cement block houses. One year, pink paint would be cheap. And the houses that year would be pink. The next year, green. Sometimes, blue or yellow. Hence the famous paintings of the great Haitian painter Prefete Duffaut, that depict fantasy Haitian cities rising up into the heavens. When Duffaut first painted these tableaux, they weren’t so fantastical. 

                                     painting: Prefete Duffaut

This (above) is what inspired the Martelly administration (if you can glorify President Micky Martelly’s regime with that noun) in its repainting of Jalousie: the newly painted slum is supposed to look like Duffaut’s cities in the sky. It’s a nice idea.

Who remembers New York City’s controversial program — in 1983, under the late Mayor Ed Koch — to beautify the abandoned buildings that bordered the Cross Bronx Expressway by putting vinyl decals in the jagged remains of the punched out windows? Crack addicts and smack heads shooting up inside, but — for the outsiders passing through on their way from suburban Jersey to suburban Long Island, decals decorated with pretty shutters, pastel flower pots, drawn-back pleats of curtains, and half- pulled-down shades.

There was an uproar, of course, about the cynical program, the racist implications, the city’s failure to help the poorest residents better their lives, etc., etc., but at least no one was living in those buildings when the decals went up. The program cost the  comparatively rich New York City  $300,000.

                                                                              photo by Ricky Flores

I have to say that for whatever reason, a free paint job for your house is a lot better than decals covering the shattered windows of economic blight. I have no doubt that the Haitians who live in Jalousie are glad to have a few brightly colored houses interspersed with the rest of the dull, crumbling, half-built, unsafe, stifling, and still unpainted beige or gray cement-block homes.

As Clement Belizaire, director of the Haitian government’s camp relocation program, told the Associated Press: “People are sitting on the balcony, having a beer, smoking a cigarette — whatever — and you have all of Port-au-Prince at your feet, and you’re living in colors.” Of course, the problem with this daydream is that the guy on the Jalousie balcony in Belizaire’s imagination is unlikely, in reality, to be able to afford the beer, or even the single cigarette (that’s how cigarettes are often sold in Haiti).

Anyway, the aim of the officials in Haiti in 2013 and New York in 1983 is the same: to prettify their economic failures with a makeover, a kind of urban Botoxing. In Haiti, the cosmetic effort is especially grating, since  billions have been promised by the international community to help with earthquake recovery, and millions have actually been spent.

And yet this, THIS, is the best that can be done to improve a camp-relocation target community?

It’s shameful, really. It’s not so much that the bright exteriors are bad in themselves. It’s simply that the cheery, slapped up paint is meant to hide — but actually highlights — the profound failure of the earthquake recovery effort.

This paint job is for passersby, for people with cameras at a distance, for outsiders — for tourists, business investors, journalists, and development workers. If it were intended to help the guy on the Jalousie balcony (relaxing with his supposed beer and his cigarette), the improvement effort would consist of toilets, sinks, sewers, and generators. And not pink paint.

Guess Who Is A White Supremacist?

 

 

                               From a t-shirt design on the Ku Klux Klan website

Amy Wilentz, “Racist Suspect,” learned something new on the radio yesterday. Actually, a few new things. 

One:

Don’t trust people who say they want “the truth,” especially when they are posing as journalists! Real reporters are never so arrogant. Also never trust a radio show that airs for two hours consecutively.

Two:

There are people who believe I am a white supremacist, a spy, and a sexual imperialist.

So yesterday I appeared as a guest on a show on something called “Justice Radio” — or that’s what I was told it was called in various emails. I was interviewed by someone who called himself Gus Lawrence in his emails to me but who calls himself Gus T Renegade on the Black Talk Radio Network (sorry, I’m not linking; but it won’t be hard to find).

Here’s how Gus T described me on his show’s site:

The Context of White Supremacy [COWS; it’s the name of his show, it turns out] welcomes Racist Suspect, Amy Wilentz … She’s written extensively on the area of the world known as Haiti. We’ll discuss her 2013 publication, Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti. Somehow the 8th area of people activity becomes a dominant theme in this narrative. Amputated limbs, tens of thousands of earthquake victims, centuries of White Supremacist meddling and even Sean Penn, somehow become analogous to sexual intercourse. White people always find a way to make their contact with Victims of Racism a pornographic sewer; the whole world as the White Man’s {and White Woman’s} brothel

Yes, incomprehensible, I agree. “The 8th area of people activity,” indeed.

Having been on the show, however, I now have an inkling of what Gus T could possibly mean by all this.

There’s a section in my book where I write about a theoretical American reader of a photo book called Haiti: Tragedy and Hope, that was put out by Time, Inc. Books in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. I describe this theoretical reader as sitting in his comfortable living room and looking at pictures of earthquake victims that I describe as virtually “pornographic” —and his interest similarly. In the section, I’m critical of what I see as the cynical use of tragic images to make money, and I also point out that when I write about Haiti, in a way I’m doing the same thing.

So Gus T misread the section. I will say this: unlike most of the callers-in to the show, and unlike many interviewers I’ve dealt with, Gus T had at least read the book. But every section he quoted at me, he had misread and misunderstood. What I criticized, he thought I endorsed. I would assert that it was a willful misreading, but I don’t think that’s the case.

It’s just that like most ideologues and all thought police, Gus T is singularly post-ironic.  

Anyway, I was richly accused by callers-in of being a racist and white supremacist, which is something that I have always associated with George Corley Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan, having grown up during the Civil Rights movement.

But that’s not what white supremacy means today. There’s a broader way of describing it.

Here’s a quote from University of Tennessee law professor emeritus Frances Lee Ansley:

By “white supremacy” I do not mean to allude to the self-conscious racism of white supremacist hate groups. I refer instead to a political, economic and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources, conscious and unconscious ideas of white superiority are widespread, and relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily re-enacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.

This is not exactly the active white supremacy Gus T described on the show: spreading white supremacy and dominance “throughout the universe.” However, Dr. Ansley’s description so accurately conveys what Haiti has been like since the earthquake, and so succinctly conveys the subject matter and argument of my book, that I had to do a double take when I read it.

I was also told by Gus T and the callers that I had too much access to US publications, and I should get out of the way so Haitians could publish pieces on Haiti in American papers and magazines — this is in fact something I’ve been thinking about, and this blog that you’re reading lets me write about Haiti without taking up print real-estate.

Go, English-speaking Haitian writers and reporters: the field is yours!

Anyway, the show gave me ample fodder for thought. Gus T and another caller pointed out that although I had castigated an important foreign institution for its information-gathering in Haiti, and had compared its work to spying in the old days, I too was an information-gatherer in Haiti. 

I tried to explain that this is what reporters do, and that journalists explain the world they see to people who haven’t seen it, but my interlocutors were having none of it.

They asked me point blank if I was in the employ of any foreign intelligence agency. (They seriously used this language: “are you now or have you ever been…”) They also wanted to know if I’d ever had sex with a Haitian, and also how much did I get for my book. Geez. And all these questions were asked in that post-ironic way: as if I would certainly respond truthfully. 

Let’s put it this way, it was an interesting. uncomfortable, slightly insane but useful two hours —  and I’m really glad it’s over.

PS I had to hang up on them, because at 2 hours and five minutes, they were still having such a good time I could see they’d never let me go!

Fixing One Thing

Image courtesy of Haiti Stands on its Feet

After the 2010 Haitian earthquake, I visited the Physicians Without Borders emergency clinic in Léogâne. Patients with varying degrees of injuries were waiting for attention on the long driveway there. The doctor I talked to that day was full of posturing and foolishness, unlike most of the doctors I’d met who work with this group. In the long line of patients was one boy who’d lost both arms when his house fell on him, and of course both his hands, as well. He was three years old.

He was waiting and waiting — for hours.

Eventually, late that afternoon, I brought him and his mother to Port-au-Prince to get more pain medicine and to make sure his wounds had been properly dressed and fixed.

They hadn’t been, and the volunteer doctors in Port-au-Prince gave the boy what’s called a refinement operation. Soon after, he and his mother disappeared back into the countryside, and, searching in desultory, on-and-off fashion, I couldn’t find him again.

So when I visited Haiti most recently, in December 2012, I made this kid my priority. I had written about him in my new book, and felt an urgent need to make things better for him. I knew that if he had been a little guy in the US, injured in such a catastrophe, he would have had prosthetic arms within a few weeks or months of the disaster.

And so I did find him.

A big New York doctor told me that he couldn’t really begin to advise me about the kid until I could offer him some photos of the injuries — so I took photos, too. The child’s family shack was on a remote hilltop somewhere outside Léogâne. I got the pictures and sent them to my New York specialist who wrote back: “He needs prosthetic arms.” Duh. For this we need a medical degree?

But he also sent me some contact numbers and emails of orthopedists working in Haiti, and it turned out that the first ones I contacted, Haiti Stands on its Feet, a Puerto-Rico based group, were coming down to Haiti in January, 2013, to see patients at a clinic not so far from Léogåne. I contacted them, and they said they’d very much like to see this patient.

From here in California, I called Roberny Rosier in Port-au-Prince — Roberny, the heroic driver who’d gotten me over three rivers and up steep hillsides to the boy in December, and he agreed to go find the kid again, and bring him to the clinic.

After three visits, the most recent last Thursday, March 14, the child, now six years old, has a set of prosthetic arms. Thank you, Haiti Stands on its Feet!!

Naturally, I am happy about this — but still, I worry that it will be so hard for the child to stay focused on getting used to his new arms. His mother died of heart problems soon after the earthquake; he has an attentive father, but he lives in a big household, and that father has many other responsibilities. Plus there is so much stress in the Haitian countryside, so much poverty, so little work and so little food — it’s not like the kid can go to his physical therapist every other day. It’s not as itf he has a state-funded caregiver. He doesn’t even attend school.

So I am worried but hopeful. The boy’s doctors at Haiti Stands on its Feet seem to care in a serious way. His were the first upper body prostheses they have put together for their Haitian patients.

Well, so far it’s the kind of feel-good story I never thought I’d be part of.

Aristide, Chien Timide

 

This is the cover of a children’s book published by Grasset-Jeunesse in September, 2004, in France —  six months after Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown for the second time. The co-authors are Joëlle Rodoreda and Véronique Willemin.

I found it in my son’s bookshelf just the other day. It’s about a dog named Aristide who is so shy he doesn’t want to go for a walk. And when Aristide is pulled along on his leash by a little French boy named Jean in a park somewhere in France, he gets so embarrassed that he actually turns pink!

Well, it doesn’t mean much — but the cover’s good. 

Google Killed Me

I bet you’ve never read a blog post written by a dead person before.

But Google has turned me into a zombie. See above: they have me long gone, departed for more than a decade.

Personally, as you can tell from the fact that I am putting this up on my blog in real time, I am not quite dead yet, though some might take issue with that statement.

Also, just for the record: I happen not to have been born in 1927. Somewhat later… 

Also, for the record: although that’s a real picture of me above, on most days I do not look as if, in fact, I had died in 1996. Except during those ashen moments when I am reading a review of my work by Michiko Kakutani. 

Finding myself offed by the world’s greatest search engine, I began to wonder how they’d ended up sending me to an untimely grave.

It was all the fault of my distant cousin Joel, a legendary Florida dermatologist, whom I have never met.  

Google picked up my facts from my Wikipedia entry. My Wikipedia entry, oddly, was put up by Cousin Joel, who has a genealogy obsession, and has assembled an astounding dossier on our family, finding members of it in places as far flung as Dvinsk, Latvia, Hollywood, California, and Perth Amboy, New Jersey. 

So it’s not too surprising that my original Wikipedia entry, as conceived by Joel, was — let’s be honest — more about my father (a famous New Jersey judge) than about me. Joel began the entry with my connection to my father, and immediately mentioned my father’s birthdate and the date of his death. 

Google is not a subtle thief. If your name on Wikipedia is followed by a birth and death date, apparently those belong to you from that day forward, no matter whose dates they may be. Seen that way, I suppose I should just be glad that I’m not related (as far as Joel knows) to King Solomon, another judge.

I have consulted with various experts about this problem, or oversight, or hideous attack on my very existence.

Here’s part of what I’ve come to understand: 

An error in a Google search “factbox” can only be corrected when Google re-indexes (whatever that means) the information that will update the search.  Depending on the size of your website, re-indexing takes either a couple of days, or several months. Like good guys, small websites finish last. Note: my website is small.

There is no way to speed up the process if you are a simple individual, unless you own the original source file or website from which the information comes (in this case, Wikipedia   — I don’t own it) and are willing to get in there and use Google webmaster tools to deal with the situation.

Under the factbox is an opportunity to provide feedback. If you click on it, the word “wrong?” appears next to each fact. Needless to say, I have clicked on it for the dates of my birth and death; however, the factbox doesn’t ask for elucidation. 

Actually, I have “wronged” my facts many times in the last few months — but they are still there. This is what happens when the world is ruled by a robot. Luckily in this case the consequences are not dire, but merely amusing and slightly (for me) existential.

It all comes down to Google’s algorithm (a word I use carelessly, and frequently, but whose meaning is obscure to me, though I feel it is something mathematical), and how and how often it culls and sweeps the Internet, trolling for lies to tell about innocent civilians.

My fondest wish, perhaps desperate, is that the Awesome Algorithm (awesome in the old sense) will adjust my dates before I actually am translated to eternity. I’m reading Kafka’s Castle right now — which itself may kill me — so I don’t put too much faith in the willingness of unreachable powers. 

I once sat at a dining room table in a very rich man’s house. He was in agribusiness, and as he sipped wine from a gilded goblet, he described for us the teams he had working on retainer to ensure that his company’s name would always pop up at the very top of the Google search page, even though the company shared part of its name with a powerful movie studio.

I bet he wouldn’t stay dead long!

No Show

Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier after his return to Haiti; photo altered to provide Baby Doc with Papa Doc’s thick spectacles

So for the second time, Jean-Claude Duvalier didn’t see fit to attend an appellate court hearing on his human-rights abuses on Thursday. His lawyers hopped up and down, denouncing the appeal for various picayune and Kafka-esque points of “law.”

I’m not surprised. Are you? Why would a person like Duvalier, raised and then elevated to power on an utter disrespect for any concept of the rule of law in Haiti (although he probably has come to respect the Swiss courts…) — why would such a one agree to come before a Haitian court to be judged?

In fact he knows that for him and for his people to remain powerful, it is of paramount importance to disrespect the rule of law, and the courts, in Haiti. Duvalier’s arrogance is natural and even predictable in someone with his tragic and disastrous upbringing. He has always been certain that he is above the law. Daddy said so.

From the Haitian media on Thursday: 

After more than 3 hours of debate, the court ordered the hearing of Jean-Claude Duvalier before the Court of Appeal and issued an arrest warrant against the former President “It is necessary for the court to declare that the appearance of Jean-Claude Duvalier is imperative […] It is therefore appropriate to order that he be brought to be heard by the court,” setting a new court date for February 28.

So yet again, we will see whether the Haitian courts hold any sway over the Haitian government. We will see their decree respected or disdained. And we will find out whether the U.S.-supported, OAS-ordained President Martelly will side with justice or with his friend, and perhaps his hero, Duvalier. 

Baby Doc to the Dock?

The handshake: Jean-Claude Duvalier, right

Tomorrow, Jean-Claude Duvalier is supposed to appear at a hearing concerning human-rights charges against him. This is not a hearing put together by people who just feel like demanding justice from the former Haitian dictator; it’s a hearing ordered by an appellate judge   — a real judicial hearing.

Of course, Duvalier was also supposed to appear at this hearing on February 7, but simply failed to show up, demonstrating for any who doubted it his habitual disregard for Haitian institutions of justice. Rather than sending a paddy wagon to round him up  and bring him in, the judge merely rescheduled the hearing.

At the end of January, 2012, showing how very fluid the judicial system is in Haiti, a judge ruled that Duvalier could not be charged for human-rights violations but permitted the corruption charges against him to stand. (The appeals court is attempting to revise that decision.) 

The January 2012 decision was a shocking one, no matter how corrupt you think the current Haitian government is, no matter how close to Jean-Claude you might imagine the current Haitian president Micky Martelly to be (since Duvalier’s unthinkable return to Haiti, after 25 years in exile, Martelly has hugged him, and invited him to formal events, and shaken his hand and generally shown pleasure in his presence).

So a year ago, the court ruled there could be no charge for human-rights abuses against Jean-Claude, even though during his almost 15-year rule, Baby Doc mimicked his father’s regime, crushing dissent, imprisoning opponents, running his prisons like gulags where prisoners where beaten, starved, and neglected, and allowing his secret police, the infamous Tonton Macoutes, to shake down the population, and to imprison and torture on personal whim. 

Amnesty International and Human RIghts Watch have said that the whole world is watching tomorrow’s hearing and its outcome.

I doubt it. This is what Hillary Clinton said after Duvalier returned to Haiti:

Well, we are very clear going back many years about the abuses of that regime. And certainly, we believe that his record is one of repression of the Haitian people. Ultimately, a decision about what is to be done is left to the government and people of Haiti. But we’re focused on trying to maintain stability, prevent chaos and violence in this very unpredictable period with his return, with cholera still raging, with the challenges of reconstruction, with an election that’s been challenged.

Hmmm. That’s ominous. The U.S. government almost never leaves anything up to “the government and the people of Haiti.” When Clinton says that, what she means is that the Obama Administration washes its hands of the whole Duvalier affair, and that the Haitian government can do as it wishes (the Haitian people have very little to do with what the Haitian government does, at this point; Martelly won the 2011 election with about 16.7 percent of the electorate).

This from the U.S., which essentially forced Duvalier out of power back in 1986, when the wave of Haitians fleeing his regime for Florida and other points north became too huge.

This, more particularly, from Hillary Clinton, someone whose husband recently shook hands in friendly-like manner with Duvalier. A warm little handshake from Bill Clinton for the former dictator. The — to Haitian commentators — notorious handshake took place at a commemoration for the earthquake dead. President Martelly had invited Duvalier and Clinton, a regular at such affairs, to remember the hundreds of thousands of victims at a seaside area called Titanyen, which is the very spot where Papa Doc and Baby Doc’s secret police used to dump the bodies of their victims. Martelly might possibly not know that (a lot of the victims of the earthquake were also dumped at Titanyen), and Clinton might not know it. But Duvalier knew it. DId he smirk inwardly, I wonder — or is he past that?

Portrait of Baby Doc’s father by the roadside in Port-au-Prince, appearing just after Martelly’s election

Sometimes, when I think of such events, I wonder what it is that Sean Penn likes so much about Martelly.

Just for the historical record, the same Bill Clinton who shook Duvalier’s hand is the one who reinstated Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power after Aristide was ousted by the very friends of Duvalier who override justice so arrogantly in Haiti once again.

I’m getting sidetracked here. Bill Clinton will do that to you, he’s so charming and smart and hamisch. Sometimes, when I think of events like the handshake at Titanyen, I wonder what it is Paul Farmer likes so much about Clinton. Maybe it’s that the former president Built Haiti Back Better after the earthquake, with Farmer as his deputy.

In the event, I’m hoping that Duvalier will actually show some respect and go to his hearing tomorrow. If he were forced by this hearing to revisit his human-rights crimes and do the time other dictators around the world have done for similar abuses, it would actually signal a new day for Haiti. It would actually be a way to build Haiti back better. 

But I have watched Haiti for a long time, and I am not optimistic on this one. 

Back tomorrow or Friday for a post-game analysis.