Crash course on Haiti

Voodoo, AIDS, Creole food, sex tourism – that's what most of us know about Haiti. It's not much help today in understanding why the island nation is in such desperate straits after an earthquake, and with so few of its own resources to care for its people.

The reasons are many and complicated, starting with the 1804 slave revolt against France which made it the first African-American republic in the New World. Then you've got colonialism, imperialism, over-population, dreadful education and health care, deforestation, inappropriate architecture – pacts with the devil don't enter the list.

One of the best resources is Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared M. Diamond (New York : Viking, 2005.) the chapter One island, Two Peoples, Two Histories: the Dominican Republic and Haiti explains it: Crippling reparations paid to France after independence, isolation as a French-speaking nation in a Spanish-speaking region, the brutal reign of the Duvaliers, Papa Doc and Baby Doc, from 1956 to 1986. The Duvaliers followed an invasion by US Marines in 1915 which created years of repression of political dissent, and American-installed puppet rulers.

Diamond is a professor of geography and physiology at UCLA and author of Guns, Germs and Steel and the forthcoming book Natural Experiments of History.  Diamond was on Forum, the NPR show, Thursday, Jan.21 . Check their schedule for the podcast: http://www.kqed.org/radio/programs/forum/


For more recent history, see the story by John Maxwell of the Jamaica Observer at http://www.counterpunch.org

Censored 2006: The Top 25 Censored Stories (New York : Seven Stories Press, [2005]) includes Diplomacy by death squad.

Avengers of the New World : The Story of the Haitian Revolution, Laurent Dubois,

Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

In a remarkable year in which the 200th anniversary of Haiti's independence collided with the undeniable recognition that Haitian politics are still being shaped by outside forces, Harvard University Press launched a retelling of the events and individuals who engineered the Haitian Revolution. Dubois (Michigan State Univ.) emphasizes the impact of French revolutionary principles (i.e., the Rights of Man) on the Haitian rebel slaves, as well as the inextricable influence of French politics on the fate of its Caribbean colony.

Haitian Book Centre was

founded in 1977 to spread Haitian culture in the United States. Their inventory consists of all the classics of Haitian literature plus all the newly published titles by Haitian authors here and abroad and can be browsed online. They carry numerous categories, including children's books, art, history and fiction. Their major customers are university and public libraries. Worth browsing, especially the tempting collection of Images of Haiti.

Haitian-born Edwige Danticat, now a Miami resident, has a breath-taking number of books and awards:

• Breath, Eyes, Memory (novel, 1994)

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  Krik? Krak! (stories, 1996)
  
  
  
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  The Farming of Bones (novel, 1998)
  
  
  
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  Behind the Mountains (young adult novel, 2002, part of the First Person Fiction series)
  
  
  
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  After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (travel book, 2002)
  
  
  
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  The Dew Breaker (novel-in-stories,2004)
  
  
  
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  Anacaona: Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490 (young adult novel, 2005, part of The Royal Diaries series)
  
  
  
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  Brother, I'm Dying (memoir/social criticism, 2007)
  
  
  
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  The Butterfly's Way (anthology editor)
  
  
  

Danticat wrote the foreword to Tram Nguyen's book, We Are All Suspects Now: Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities after 9/11.

She also wrote a foreword for the Harper Perennial edition of Their Eyes were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston, and for Pesea Book's Starting With I: Personal Essays By Teenagers, edited by Andrea Estepa.

Danticat wrote the introduction to Alejo Carpentier's novel, 'The Kingdom of this World', describing the legacy of revolution and its flaws. In 2009 she received the MacArthur Genius Award.

Much fiction and film on Haiti is, frankly, pretty cheesy. If you're in the mood for that, try The Comedians, best known for starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in an illicit affair (again?) but with a fine performance by Alec Guinness. Screenplay from his book by Graham Green (and of course the book is better.)

For how to create zombies, there's The Serpent and the Rainbow, from a much-criticized book by anthropologist and botanical explorer Wade Davis, Ph. D., who spent more than three years in the Amazon and Andes as a plant explorer, mostly through the Harvard Botanical Museum. Serious stuff about medicinal plants; director Wes Craven has turned it into some pretty fine cheap thrills and nervous giggles. Stars Bill Pullman as the ethnobotanist and Zakes Mokae as Peytraud, the delightfully evil priest and chief of the Tontons Macoutes, Duvalier's dreaded secret police.