Haiti: Crisis, Western Imaginings, and Visual Rhetoric

HAITI: CRISIS, WESTERN IMAGININGS, AND VISUAL RHETORIC

CHRISTOPHER GARLAND

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2014

To Carol, Duncan, Louise, and Alistair McRae Glass

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Finishing this dissertation was not nearly as difficult as getting to the place where I could begin it. I have to thank Sid Dobrin for letting me embark on what was not the most typical rhetoric project. His guidance and intellect made sure that this dissertation came to fruition, and his practical advice about academic life has proved equally invaluable. My parents, Carol and

Duncan, made everything possible through their incredible emotional support (not to mention loaning me money to take my first trip to Haiti). My sister, Louise: thank you for the Skype conversations and advice about healthy living. Benjamin Hebblethwaite provided the kind of mentorship (and, just as importantly, friendship) that graduate school should be all about, and I learnt so much about Haiti’s culture and religion through our conversations; I hope some of that is reflected in the following pages. Leah Rosenberg was tireless when it came to feedback on my work (and job search) demands, and her deep knowledge of other parts of the Caribbean provided crucial context for this project. Laurie Gries asked exactly the right questions at the most pertinent times, and I was lucky to have access to her expertise in both visual rhetoric and cultural studies. And, of course, Sara, I couldn’t have done it without you.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 6

ABSTRACT ...... 10

CHAPTER

1 HAITI: CRISIS, WESTERN IMAGININGS, AND VISUAL RHETORIC ...... 11

Zombies ...... 21 Chimé ...... 22 Shaky Ground/Flooded Streets ...... 24 Junk ...... 26

2 HOLLYWOOD’S HAITI: CRISIS, ALLEGORY, AND HORROR ...... 31

3 THE RHETORIC OF CRISIS AND FORECLOSING THE FUTURE OF HAITI IN GHOSTS OF CITÉ SOLEIL ...... 63

4 PORT-AU-PRINCE IS NEW ORLEANS: RACE, SPACE, AND SPECTACULAR ABJECTION ...... 92

5 ATIS REZISTANS: HAITIAN ART AND THE VISUAL CULTURE OF RESISTANCE ...... 125

6 CONCLUSION ...... 154

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 156

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 168

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

1-1 National Palace, Port-au-Prince, July 2012 (photo courtesy of the author)...... 11

1-2 Herz, Ansel. “Haitian street demonstrators want the UN's MINUSTUH troops to leave.” Photograph. The Rag Blog. 19 Nov. 2010. Web. 24 May 2014...... 13

1-3 “I don’t know elections, but I know what I like.” Cartoon. ZMagazine. 1 Feb. 2011. Web. 13 May 2014...... 14

1-4 Jean Pierre, Romel. “Racine Polycarpe with his creation.” Photograph. Facebook. 27 Aug. 2013. Web. 21 Apr. 2014...... 15

1-5 “Arms Up: Haitians push forward despite security forces firing warning shots.” Photograph. dailymail.co.uk. 26 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Apr. 2014...... 18

1-7 “Phantasmagoria.” Illustration. English CU Boulder. n.d. Web. 24 May 2014...... 20

1-9 “Haitian 2Pac’s young soldiers in training.” Film still. showbizfm.com. 19 Jul. 2007. Web. 24 May 2014...... 24

1-10 Post-earthquake cathedral, downtown Port-au-Prince (photograph courtesy of the author)...... 25

2-1 Pellegrin, Paolo. “Cause Célèbre.” Photograph. The New York Times. 25 Mar. 2011. Web. 16 May 2014...... 32

2-2 “American drowning in blood.” Photograph. mygeekplasphemy.files.wordpress.com. n.d. Web. 05 May 2014...... 34

2-3 “VHS cover for The Serpent and the Rainbow.” Photograph. bannedinqueensland.blogspot.com. 19 Nov. 2011. Web. 16 Apr. 2014...... 35

2-4 “First still released from AMC’s The Walking Dead.” Film still. Forbes.com. 10 Feb. 2010. Web. 16 Mar. 2014...... 38

2-5 “Miami Cannibal Told Victim: “I am going to kill you!” Photograph. abcnews.go.com. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014...... 40

2-6 “The climax of Peytraud’s grisly death.” Film still. blog.analogmedium.com. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014...... 41

2-7 Castro, Marcus. “Taking Over Haiti.” Photograph. time.com. n.d. Web. 04 Mar. 2014...... 43

2-9 “Opening scene of The Serpent and the Rainbow.” Film still. watchingthedead.co.uk. 30 Sept. 2013. Web. 17 Mar. 2014...... 46

2-10 The alleged location for drug smuggling, the port of Cite Soleil (photo courtesy of the author)...... 50

2-11 “The Haitian Revolution in Visual Culture.” Photograph. augustine.com. n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2014...... 52

2-12 “Vamp or Not? Deathdream!” DVD cover image. taliesinttlg.blogspot.com. 28 Jun. 2007. Web. 11 Mar. 2014...... 54

2-13 “Tonton Macoute brandishing a machete.” latinamericanstudies.org. n.d. Web. Nov. 7 2013...... 57

2-14 “The Tortured American in Haiti.” Film still. realqueenofhorror.com. 1 May 2014. Web. 16 May 2014...... 58

2-15 “Sex scene in The Serpent and the Rainbow.” Film still. realqueenofhorror.com. 1 May 2014. Web. 1 Jul. 2014...... 59

3-2 “Haitian 2Pac in a piece-de-camera.” Film still. boston.com. 3 Aug. 2007. Web. 11 Sep. 2012...... 66

3-3 “Shot from the title sequence of Ghosts of Cité Soleil.” Film still. chud.com. 28 Jun. 2007. Web. 11 Mar. 2014...... 69

3-4 “R.I.P., Tupac Shakur.” Photograph. reubenrebel.tumblr.com. 13. Sept. 2011. Web. 05 Mar. 2014...... 70

3-5 “Gabriel’s Wake.” Film still. dvdtalk.com. 20 Nov. 2007. Web. 13 May 2013...... 72

3-6 “Tupac’s Confessional.” Film still. veevr.com. n.d. Web. 13 May 2014...... 74

3-7 “Kids run through the slums of Mumbai.” Film still. Deep-focus.com. 12 Dec. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2014...... 75

3-8 DVD cover image. r1db.com. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014...... 76

3-9 “City of God movie poster.” blog.utc.edu. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014...... 78

3-10 “Embattled” President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. blackpressusa.com. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014...... 79

3-11 “Promotional poster for Ghosts.” imdb.com. n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014...... 82

3-12 “Haitian 2Pac and Lele.” reelingreviews.com. n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014...... 83

3-13 “Burning body in the streets.” Film still. Deep-focus.com. 12 Dec. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2014...... 85

3-14 “Andy Apaid, anti-Aristide critic.” globalresearch.ca. Photograph. 22 Feb. 2014. Web. 07 Apr. 2014...... 86

3-15 The so-called “rabbit warren,” Cité Soleil (photo courtesy of the author)...... 87

3-16 “One of Haitian 2Pac’s soldiers, responding to crisis.” Film still. totalfilm.com. 12 Dec. 2010. Web. 28 Apr. 2014...... 89

4-2 “Hurricane Katrina Five Years Later.” Photograph. blogs.sacbee.com. 24 Aug. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2014...... 95

4-3 “Haitian woman being pulled from the rubble in downtown Port-au-Prince.” Photograph. africaw.com. n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2014...... 96

4-4 “Those remaining in the Superdome.” Photograph. blogs.sacbee.com. 24 Aug. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2014...... 98

4-5 “White people ‘FIND’/Black People‘LOOT.’” Photograph and text. everythingsoul.com. n.d. Web. 10 Jul. 2014...... 100

4-6 Mural in downtown Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of the author)...... 101

4-7 “Temporary” post-earthquake housing in the Christ Roi of Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of the author)...... 103

4-8 “One of the first images of the earthquake to circulate on Twitter.” Photograph. mashable.com. 12 Jan. 2010. Web. 14 Jul. 2014...... 108

4-10 “A Los Angeles Search and Research Team helps a Haitian woman from the rubble.” Photograph. Wikimedia.org/Wikipedia/commons. 17 Jan. 2010. Web. 14 Jul. 2014...... 115

4-12 “Michelle Obama 2010 earthquake National Palace.” Photograph. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki. 13 Apr. 2010. Web. 14 Jul. 2014...... 122

5-1 Alley entrance to E Pluribus Unum Musee d'Art (photo courtesy of author)...... 125

5-2 The Iron Market exterior (photo courtesy of the author)...... 127

5-3 The Iron Market interior (photo courtesy of the author)...... 127

5-4 Romel Jean Pierre, Atis Rezistan, at the Musee (photo courtesy of the author)...... 129

5-7 Monster blan/neg (white/black) child, Atis Rezistans (photo courtesy of the author). ..141

5-8 MINUSTAH operations center, Cité Soleil (photo courtesy of author)...... 143

5-10 “Penis in Casket” (artist unknown); wood, metal, and plastic sculpture; three feet by one and a half feet...... 146

5-11 Bawon Samdi, Andre Eugene, metal and wood (photo courtesy of the author)...... 150

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

HAITI: CRISIS, WESTERN IMAGININGS, AND VISUAL RHETORIC

Christopher Garland

August 2014

Chair: Sidney I. Dobrin Major: English

“Haiti: Crisis, Western Imaginings, and Visual Rhetoric” has three primary, interconnected goals. The first is to recognize how the “meanings” of Haiti are conveyed to

Western audiences through visual culture—for example, how “poverty porn” representations of

Haiti’s slums reify the stereotypes about the country as an inevitably failed state—and how those meanings can be contested. The second is to put various critical approaches to visual culture into conversation with existing critiques of the ongoing silencing, dismissal, simplification, and stereotyping of Haiti, its people, and its history. The third is to recognize these visual representations operate in networks, and how these networks are sites to debate the “story” of the country’s recent past in order to imagine the possibilities of the country’s future.

CHAPTER 1 HAITI: CRISIS, WESTERN IMAGININGS, AND VISUAL RHETORIC

Haiti’s place in the Americas has been consistently framed in terms of the superlative: the poorest, the most corrupt, and the most abject. “Haiti: Crisis, Western Imaginings, and Visual

Rhetoric,” interrogates the visual representations that underpin this discourse. This research has three interconnected goals. The first is to recognize how Haiti is “written” for Western audiences through visual means: for example, displaying the masses of black Haitian bodies (dead and alive) after the 2010 earthquake; reimagining Vodou as “Voodoo” through Hollywood cinema; and presenting political strife as evidence of the country’s so-called inherent dysfunction. The second is to consider how these (often digital) images are communicated, and in what ways these images serve as a place to debate the story of Haiti’s crises in order to imagine the possibilities of the country’s future. The third is to address how contemporary Haitian visual artists have provided a counterpoint to the stereotypes and misconceptions about Haiti, its people, and its history. While scholars have examined the visual culture of many other parts of the Caribbean, there is a distinct absence of extended academic studies regarding contemporary visual representations of Haiti; this dissertation is an attempt to help fill that gap.

Figure 1-1. National Palace, Port-au-Prince, July 2012 (photo courtesy of the author).

In “Haiti: Crisis, Western Imaginings, and Visual Rhetoric” I draw on various, primarily visual texts: from Wes Craven’s 1988 horror film The Serpent and the Rainbow, which was largely shot on location in Haiti, to the street murals of Port-au-Prince; from digital photographs of tranblemandeté (the Haitian term for the earthquake) to mainstream media coverage of a coup d'état in Haiti. My project unfolds chronologically over four chapters and engages with images of

Haiti at various moments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the end of the Duvalier regime in the mid-1980s to the aftermath of tranblemandeté and the subsequent kolera (cholera) outbreak. This dissertation contributes to an important— if underdeveloped— intersection of

Caribbean studies, cultural studies, and visual rhetoric. Specifically, each chapter focuses on visual representations that emerge from the backdrop of crisis: whether it is the toppling of the country’s first democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, or the protests over the aforementioned deadly cholera epidemic. I also trace the relationship between social media and visual representations of Haiti, exemplified by the thousands of digital images circulating on

Twitter of the damage and death caused by the earthquake. I argue that when read critically, the visual representations of Haiti further reveal the country’s deep and longstanding relationship with the U.S. as well as the country’s previously denied place in what Susan Buck-Morss calls

“universal history.” By critiquing these texts, one can see Haiti is not simply a “failed state,” but part of a global network shaped by exploitative labor practices on behalf of foreign companies in the Caribbean; migration between Haiti and the U.S; the HIV/AIDS pandemic; and the cholera epidemic.

Before addressing how this project will unfold over four chapters, it is important to clarify my definition of a central component to this work: the audience. The use of the adjective

“Western” to describe this audience could, quite rightly, be considered problematic; after all,

Haiti is only a two-hour flight from the United States, and it is clearly situated within the geographical confines of the Western hemisphere. Moreover, a demarcation between Haiti and the West could evoke the epistemology of writing Haiti out of the Americas (and, indeed, out of global history), while also removing the agency of Haitians as critical viewers of the way Haiti has been depicted by and for non-Haitians. This distinction between Haitian and Western audiences comes from an earlier research on how fictional feature films produced by the world’s wealthiest nations visually represent crises in poor, “Other” nations —for example, Hollywood depictions of South Africa’s post-apartheid transition to democracy (Clint Eastwood’s Invictus) or slum clearances in India (Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire)—and the difference in audience reception in South Africa or India and the United States.

Figure 1-2. Herz, Ansel. “Haitian street demonstrators want the UN's MINUSTUH troops to leave.” Photograph. The Rag Blog. 19 Nov. 2010. Web. 24 May 2014.

Moving on from my interest in Hollywood representations of the foreign “Other,” this project began through the experience of watching a Danish-produced documentary about Port- au-Prince: the first viewing was with American students in a college classroom in Florida; the second was with Haitian friends on a laptop in Port-au-Prince. Conversations following these

screenings evoked David Crow’s claim that the “meaning of the sign itself is affected by who is reading the sign” (54), and after having the opportunity to participate in larger conversations in the United States about not only the Danish documentary, but also numerous other European and

American texts focused on Haiti, I became more interested in the meaning constructed from

Western representations of the country. Whether one uses the term Western or the more recently popular “global North,” these labels are a way of indicating that a particular set of countries have had the power, means, and opportunity to construct and disseminate representations of Haiti. In

Silencing the Past (1996) Michel-Rolph Trouillot considers how “the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access to the means of such production” (xix). The relationship between power and production is a key context for analysis and critiques of these representations of Haiti.

Figure 1-3. “I don’t know elections, but I know what I like.” Cartoon. ZMagazine. 1 Feb. 2011. Web. 13 May 2014.

In interrogating the contemporary visual representation of Haiti and Haitians for Western audiences, this project focuses on four specific contexts: the post-Duvalier dictatorship

dechoukaj (“uprooting”) and the related persecution of the Vodou religion and its practitioners;

the 2004 removal of the country’s first democratically-elected leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide; the

culture of restavèk (commonly referred to by Western media as “child slavery”); the aftermath of

tranblemandeté. While a number of the chapters focus on a specific visual text (a film,

photographic archive, or documentary) about Haiti, all draw on a variety of elements of screen

culture: including short online videos, posters, and other aspects of the visual arts. Moreover, I

am particularly interested in how new media plays a part in the creation of this visual culture.

New media enables the collection and circulation of these images to occur at a pace that far

outstrips the capability of any pre-new media technology or outlet: whether through excerpts

from an anti-Aristide documentary made available on YouTube or the Facebook images of

avant-garde Haitian art by the new generation’s sculptors.

Figure 1-4. Jean Pierre, Romel. “Racine Polycarpe with his creation.” Photograph. Facebook. 27 Aug. 2013. Web. 21 Apr. 2014.

Taking a lead from Wendy Hesford’s work on visual representations of particular global human

rights causes1 as “sites of material and ideological struggle over meaning” (22), this dissertation

first recognizes how the “meanings” of Haiti are conveyed through visual culture—for example, how “poverty porn” representations of Haiti’s slums reify the stereotypes about the country as an inevitably failed state—and how those meanings can be contested. I then put various critical approaches to visual culture into conversation with existing critiques of the ongoing silencing, dismissal, simplification, and stereotyping of Haiti, its people, and its history. Moreover, I recognize that these visual representations operate in networks, and how these networks are sites to debate the “story” of the Haiti’s recent past in order to imagine the possibilities of the country’s future. In emphasizing of a deconstruction of a number of specific Western representations of Haiti, I do not mean to suggest that there has been no resistance to this imposed national identity. The work of the Port-au-Prince-based collective Atis Rezistans, for example, displays an empowered sense of Haitian national identity. (I discuss their work in some detail in the final chapter of this project.) Their sculpture and paintings are inspired by both their spiritual beliefs—the iconography of Vodou is a prominent but not omnipresent motif in the art—and their urban environment: the immediate setting of Grand Rue, as well as the rest of

Haiti’s megalopolis, Port-au-Prince. Led by an established Haitian artist, Andre Eugene, the Atis

Rezistans use found materials to create powerful representations of their lived experience: religious faith, natural disaster, sexuality, hope for the future.

This project uses a range of visual culture theory—James Elkin’s The Domain of Images

(1999) and The Object Stares Back (1997), Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag’s writing on semiotics and photography, Robert Hariman and John Lucaites’ No Caption Needed: Iconic

Photographs, Public Culture, and Liberal Democracy (2007), Nicholas Mizroeff’s recent The

Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011), and a number of film theorists, including

Bill Nicholl’s documentary criticism, Mary Ann Doane’s work on racial and sexual difference in

narrative film. Moreover, WJT Mitchell’s work on the production, circulation, and meaning of images is a particularly strong influence. Specifically, Mitchell’s suggestion at the end of Picture

Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994) provides a theoretical framework about how to connect, for example, Wes Craven’s reification of stereotypes about Vodou via the

Hollywood horror movie, The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), to the imagery employed in other Western depictions of Haitian religious practice. Mitchell writes:

But suppose we thought of representation, not as a homogenous field or grid of relationships governed by a single principle, but as a multidimensional and heterogenous terrain, a collage or patchwork quilt assembled over time out of fragments (?) (419).

Returning to the idea of the visual text as part of a “patchwork or collage” will enable a teasing out of connections within these representations of Haiti. This particularly comes into play in chapter 3, where I compare the visual representations of post-earthquake Port-au-Prince and a

New Orleans flooded and blown out by Hurricane Katrina. Moreover, in delving into this

“multidimensional and heterogenous terrain,” I wish to explore the multilayered (and often

“multiplicitous”) nature of many of these visual representations: for example, how the cinéma vérité of Asger Leth’s documentary Ghosts of Cite Soleil (2006) simultaneously panders to

Western stereotypes about an inherently “violent” Haiti, draws on the visual image of the

American ‘hood film, and pushes an unabashedly pro-neoliberal political ideology. While this project addresses visual culture in the context of Haiti’s more recent moments of crisis and human rights issues, it is important to note that throughout its history, the country has been deemed by outsiders to be in a perpetual state of crisis. The truth is that Haiti’s history—like many other Caribbean nations—has had periods of peace and (if only relative) prosperity.2

The photograph belongs to a network of representations of poor and traumatized children that extends far beyond representations of Port-au-Prince—a network that includes Kevin

Carter’s “Sudanese Girl” (commonly referred to as the “vulture and African girl” image) as well as Nick Ut’s “Vietnam Napalm Girl—and raises questions of the ethics and politics in depictions of the world’s poorest inhabitants. Moreover, extending on Burnett’s “blur” theory, I argue that this metaphor is particularly potent because it implies obfuscation rather than illumination. A blur reduces clarity, inhibits definition, and lessens the viewer’s perception of the image.

Figure 1-5. “Arms Up: Haitians push forward despite security forces firing warning shots.” Photograph. dailymail.co.uk. 26 Jan. 2010. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

The blurring of Haiti is not just a contemporary phenomenon related to image and representation; it is a central theme in J. Michael Dash’s seminal lecture about historical

(re)interpretations of the country’s early post-independence, “The Disappearing Island: Haiti,

History, and the Hemisphere” (2004). Addressing the place of Haiti in both the Caribbean and the Americas as a whole, Dash asserts: “It is not surprising that Haiti’s symbolic presence in the

Caribbean imagination has never been understood in terms of radical universalism. Rather, Dash claims, the “island disappears” under simplistic notions of “racial revenge, mysterious singularity, and heroic uniqueness” (3). Dash’s explication of a Haiti buried by “images,” in this

case conveyed through “outsider” literature, history, reportage, and foreign policy concerning

Haiti at the time, is the articulation of the discursive construction of an Exceptional Haiti—the poorest, most corrupt, untenable—that continues today. But rather than the circulation of literature and histories which, in the Dash’s terms, invoke “the nightmare of [Haiti’s] history

[and] see the Haitian revolution in terms of a fatal hubris, the sigh of history over megalomaniac black ruins,” Haiti today is buried under a new set of representations intent on ensuring that the country continues to be seen in terms of “reductionist triumphalism on one hand, and reductionist skepticism on the other” (3).

Figure 1-6. MINUSTAH patrol unit in Cité Soleil (photo courtesy of the author).

To demonstrate the connection between language and image as it relates to Haiti, Laurent

Dubois cites the response of a Haitian student residing in Paris, Louis-Joseph Janvier, to a visitor from Martinique who, in a newspaper article, labeled Haiti a “phantasmagoria of civilization.”

Janvier, writing in 1883, puts it plainly: “For eighty years Haiti has been judged” (quoted in

Dubois 1). 130 years later, Janvier’s assertion about Haiti’s representation in Western media is

just as readily applicable. Images circulated online—human skulls employed in Vodou ceremonies, young black men bearing guns during riots, children picking through the trash- ridden ravines, dead bodies strewn with earthquake-caused debris—is the contemporary avenue to perpetuate the idea of Haiti as the national manifestation of the frightening, exceptional

“Other.” Representing Haiti as phantasmagoria is a way to skirt the fact that the country’s present is “the product of its history: of the nation’s founding by enslaved people who overthrew their masters and freed themselves; of the hostility that this revolution generated among the colonial powers surrounding the country” (Dubois 3). Haiti set a precedent that made anxious whites in the surrounding colonial nations, particularly the region’s emergent superpower and first republic.

Figure 1-7. “Phantasmagoria.” Illustration. English CU Boulder. n.d. Web. 24 May 2014.

A black republic was not only possible, but it had come to fruition in very close proximity to the United States. However, thinking about these images as existing in a complex, fractured network, this project examines in detail a number of examples that speak to two crucial, overarching aspects of the discourse of Haiti: its long-standing relationship with the

United States and, importantly, the country’s minimalized position in what Susan Buck-Morss

calls “universal history.” Read critically this visual rhetoric shows how Haiti itself belongs to a tangible, shifting global network; a network that includes, for example, the effect of international neoliberal economic policies on the country, the rapid urbanization of Port-au-Prince after independence due to exploitative labor practices in the capital, and the persistent definition of

Haiti as the archetypal failed state. The four chapters are described in the following pages.

Zombies

Figure 1-8. “Zombie bride.” Film still. Analogmedium.com. n.d. Web. 14 May 2014.

Loosely based on anthropologist Wade Davis’ non-fiction book of the same name, Wes

Craven’s 1988 horror film The Serpent and the Rainbow tells the story of an ethnobotanist,

Dennis Allan, who visits Haiti at the bequest of an American pharmaceutical company. Allan’s ostensible mission is to find a potent drug that could potentially be used as an anesthesia for a

Western market, a substance he believes to be related to cases of “zombification” in the

Caribbean country. On arriving in Haiti, Alan rapidly encounters not only Jean-Claude “Baby

Doc” Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes but also Voodoo: both of which are rendered in over-blown forms. A critical part of my argument concerns how Vodou (the now widely-acknowledged and proper term for the religion) is reduced to “Voodoo” in Western representations of the religion.

Emblematic of many visual representations of Vodou throughout the twentieth century, Vodou in

Craven’s film panders to Western audiences through stereotypes that J. Michael Dash identifies as “the rebellious body, the repulsive body, the seductive body and the sick body,” which

“constitute a consistent discourse that has fixed Haiti in the Western imagination: the

‘Haitianizing’ of Haiti as unredeemably deviant” (137).

The first part of this chapter deals with the film’s depiction of Vodou, and how the film’s visual language—constructed through the editing, soundtrack, dialogue, settings, draws upon

(and contributes to) to the wider network of Western representations of Haitian Voodoo: as cartoonish, sinister, and emblematic of Haiti’s bizarre, lesser culture. The second part of the chapter is concerned with how the specter of two concurrent crises haunts this film: the last years of the Duvalier regime and the rise of the AIDS epidemic. The former crisis is an overt presence in the film, serving as part of the narrative structure and framing much of the generic “action” elements that are inherent within horror films: the fight, flight and capture of the protagonist by the ghoul. The latter crisis, Haiti’s position in the global AIDS pandemic, is an oblique but no less powerful specter in a visual-based allegorical reading of the film. This chapter also addresses the temporal context of the film’s release. Just two years after the ouster of “Baby

Doc,” the violence of the “real-life” dechoukaj, and its targeting of Vodou practitioners, is brought to life on-screen in a particularly significant way: the film was shot on location in Haiti.

Moreover, the year of the film’s release marked a significant moment in the global recognition and understanding of AIDS, an epidemic in which the role of Haiti and Haitians had been so repeatedly foregrounded through visual means by Western governments, academics, and media.

Chimé

Asger Leth’s documentary film Ghosts of Cité Soleil (2006) follows the lives of two gang leaders in the largest slum in Haiti during the months leading up to the fall of President Jean-

Bertrand Aristide’s government in 2004.3 Two centuries after the revolutionary leader Jean-

Jacques Dessaline declared independence for the former French slave colony—creating what

Hardt and Negri call a “specter [that] circulated throughout the Americas in the early nineteenth century just as the specter of the October Revolution haunted European Capitalism over a century later” (123)—Aristide, a former Catholic priest who became the country’s first democratically elected leader since Haiti’s independence, had seen his presidency ended by a range of external and internal pressures. On 28 February 2004 Aristide was forced from office, leaving the leadership of the country in the hands of soldiers from the Haitian Army that Aristide had earlier personally disbanded. As Paul Farmer notes, Aristide immediately “claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a 20-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of

Africa.’”

However, the main critics of Aristide and his Leftist social and economic policies, including members of Haiti’s wealthy elite and the U.S. NGOs in Washington D.C. (for instance, the International Republican Institute) that actively sought the toppling of Aristide’s government, contend that the president fled from office. As one academic who has shown the documentary in a number of undergraduate classes at a North American university points out, Ghosts of Cité

Soleil is an “extremely seductive”4 documentary, particularly for a non-Haitian audience or an audience unfamiliar with Haiti’s history. Whether through the slick montages—in which shots of

Aristide and audio clips of him speaking are rapidly and repeatedly intercut with images that include a decomposing corpse being eaten by a wild pig, surging mobs, a room filled with dead bodies, and another body lying in a pool of blood—or by way of the soundtrack, composed by one of Haiti’s most famous public figures, Wyclef Jean (who is also one of Ghosts’ producers),

the film’s mise-en-scène is clearly influenced by the visual and aural elements of the contemporary hip-hop music video.5

Figure 1-9. “Haitian 2Pac’s young soldiers in training.” Film still. showbizfm.com. 19 Jul. 2007. Web. 24 May 2014.

Moreover, Ghosts is closer, in terms of both the visual style and in the presentation of the

“gangster with a heart of gold,” to fictional feature films like City of God (2002), located in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and Tsotsi (2005), set in the shantytowns of Johannesburg, than the approach of a journalistic documentary about this moment in Haiti’s history.6 At the expense of providing background about Aristide’s predicament, and by consciously reinforcing stereotypes of Haiti as an inherently failed state via the film’s visual language, Ghosts values the style of a tour into the ghetto over the substance of political and historical contextualization.

Shaky Ground/Flooded Streets

If there is a recent world event that demonstrates how new media has changed the way a moment of crisis is recorded and circulated internationally, the January 12, 2010 earthquake in

Haiti and the August 2005 hurricane that overwhelmed large parts of New Orleans stand as particularly powerful examples of this phenomenon. Allowing photographic images of the quake’s aftermath to circulate globally, social media platforms lay bare the devastation wrought

by tranblemandeté and Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans, Port-au-Prince, and their respective residents. Today, there are millions of images documenting the aftermath of the earthquake, documenting single frames of this (literally and figuratively) seismic event; as Susan Sontag asserts, photographs “have an insuperable power to determine what we recall of events.”

Figure 1-10. Post-earthquake cathedral, downtown Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of the author).

The sheer volume of still images documenting the effects of earthquake on Haiti’s megalopolis—captured on inexpensive cellphones as well as professional-grade digital single- lens reflex cameras (DSLRs)— also evoke WJT Mitchell’s theory of visual representation as a “a collage or patchwork quilt assembled over time out of fragments. Suppose further that this quilt was torn, folded, wrinkled, covered with accidental stains, traces of the bodies it has enfolded”

(419).

Using Mitchell’s notion of the “patchwork quilt” as a lever into the sheer volume of these images available on the Internet, this chapter addresses the ethics of displaying the “real” bodies enfolded within: the residents of Port-au-Prince and New Orleans featured in the visual discourse of tranblemandeté and Hurricane Katrina. Unlike for the vast majority of the photographic age,

the mass circulation of images of the injured, dying, and dead was not restricted to mainstream news outlets and constrained by various censorial approaches. Through a variety of new media avenues, including, for example, the Tumblr blogosphere and the Twitterverse, the human and infrastructural cost of the earthquake are put on show; these representations of the earthquake were consistently contextualized by Haiti’s status as the poorest nation in the Western

Hemisphere. However, the question of the relationship between representation and responsibility was rarely raised in the context of tranblemandeté. Instead, the possibility of circulating images of the destruction wrought by the earthquake appeared to follow an “if we can, we should” line of reasoning. Addressing the link between representation and responsibility, Mitchell states:

The good or true representation is “responsible” to what it represents and to whom it represents. “Responsible representation” is a definition for truth, both as an epistemological question (the accuracy and faithfulness of a description or a picture to what it represents) and as an ethical contract (the notion that the representor is “responsible for” the truth of a representation and responsible to the audience or recipient of the representation). (412)

Considering the one-dimensional and exploitative media representations of Haiti as impoverished and “Other,” as well as the history of judgment of the country, this chapter interrogates Mitchell’s definition of “responsible representation” of tranblemandeté in light of the capturing and circulation of these images. Furthermore, this chapter considers these images as part of archives/databases that do not fit previously understood ideas of the “traditional” archive: due to the capabilities and possibilities of new technologies.

Junk

hands become a means for transformative art: addressing the complexity of Vodou; Haiti’s economic and social crises; sexuality; and mortality.

Figure 1-11. Workshop for the E Pluribus Unum Musee d'Art (photo courtesy of author).

But Eugène’s use of “found materials” is more than just access and availability for his sculptures; he and his fellow Atis Rezistans, an art collective led by Eugène and formed on Port- au-Prince’s bustling Grand Rue, are what Donald J. Consentino calls the “most emblematic artists to emerge in the period between the collapse of Aristide’s government in 2004 and the earthquake of 2010” (54). Moreover, the group demonstrates the power of working, as Ella

Shohat and Robert Stam theorize about garbage, with “the same commodities that had been fetishized by advertising, dynamized by montage, and haloed through backlighting, are now stripped of their aura of charismatic power” (45). While there is certainly a sense of what Shohat and Stam call the “artistic ju-jitsu and ironic reappropriation” made possible in transmuting junk into art, Eugène’s critique of broader consumer culture is just one facet of his work.

Eugène and his fellow Atis Rezistans incorporate locally-specific points of reference that include “not only the nearby Vodou temples and National Cemetery (source for the human skulls that have added to the notoriety of the work), but the hipper galleries of Pétionville, and avant- garde studio artists such as Mario Benjamin, Jean Camille Nasson, and Eduoard Duval Carrié”

(55). Not only one of the most important avant-garde figures in Haiti’s art scene, Eugène is also the co-curator of the Ghetto Biennale, which first took place in 2009 and brings artists and their work from around Haiti, the greater Caribbean, and the rest of the world to the downtown streets of the nation’s capital. Despite the challenges of convening an international artistic event in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, the Ghetto Biennale was held again in 2011, continuing to question, as British photographer, filmmaker, and co-curator Leah Gordon puts it, “what happens when third-world rubs up against first-world art? Does it bleed?” The tension between artistic production in the so-called “third-world” and the way it is viewed by its “first-world” counterparts will be addressed again when the third Ghetto Biennale ensues in November 2013.

As co-founder of the Atis Rezistans, Eugène is also mentor to a group of cutting-edge artists. With the Port-au-Prince collective, Eugène builds both a strong local art scene and sets the precedent about how Haitian art can not only be shown around the world, but that contemporary Haitian artists can participate in the global art marketplace. Through the creation of a that details both his own work and numerous other members of the collective, André Eugène and his fellow Atis Rezistans have been able to create an audience beyond Haiti. In recent years, work from members of the collective has been exhibited in Venice, Paris, New York, and

London. Furthermore, Eugène’s art, like other that of members of the Atis Rezistans, is uncompromising, utilizing objects such as human skulls and discarded toys; yet, through this avant-garde approach, he has helped to forge a uniquely Haitian—or, in fact, distinctly Port-au-

Prince—style. And by using found materials to create ambitious and intriguing art, Eugène has given birth to what he calls the “currency of the Ghetto.” His is art drawn from life in Port-au-

Prince’s downtown streets that circulates out to the world’s metropolises.

Figure 1-12. Gordon, Leah. “Kanaval.” Photograph. leahgordon.co.uk. n.d. Web. 11 Jul. 2014.

Figure 1-13. Andre Eugène, soldier/skull (photo courtesy of the author).

This chapter first provides a historical context for the production and circulation of

Haitian art, and how its reception has often reflected dominant stereotypes about Haiti’s inherent backwardness. I then focus on the Atis Rezistans, who have been instrumental in the structure and content of the Ghetto Biennale, and the way that their works evoke multilayered, allegorical readings.

Notes

1 In the case of her book, ethnic genocide, international sex trafficking, torture and unlawful detention. 2 Jean Casimir, in his classic study Ayiti Toma (2000), claims that “from 1804 to 1915, the population grew from about 500,000 to almost 2,000,000. It was because the working conditions in Haiti were a million times more manageable than other countries [...] But in Latin America or in the Civil War in the United States, added to that the extermination of Native Americans in those countries, those are disasters which can't be compared to the cruelty Haitians commit” (56). 3 This essay developed out of papers delivered at the University of Texas, Austin’s Postcolonial Actualities: Past and Present conference in October 2009, the University of Florida’s English Graduate Organization’s 2010 conference, and the Haiti and the Americas: Histories, Cultures, Imaginations conference, October 21-22 2010 at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. 4 Conversation with Dr. Amy Abugo Ongiri, faculty member in the Department of English and Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. 5 It is worth reflecting on Wyclef Jean’s involvement with a film with such a clearly anti-Aristide agenda in light of his aborted run for the Haitian presidency in 2010. 6 See Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy (dir. Renée Bergan & Mark Schuller, 2009) for a documentary that explores and contextualizes economic conditions in Haiti. Also, Haiti: Democracy Undone (dir. Peter Bull, 2006) explores how American N.G.Os were complicit in Aristide’s removal from office.

CHAPTER 2 HOLLYWOOD’S HAITI: CRISIS, ALLEGORY, AND HORROR

Despite Haiti and the United States being, as Amy Wilentz asserts, “intimately connected—historically, economically, politically, and perhaps even spiritually” (297), and the fact that Haiti has an “outsized presence” in American travel writing and other potential filmic source material (Guinn 13), Wes Craven’s The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and Victor

Halperin’s White Zombie (1932) are two of the very few Hollywood films set in the Caribbean country. Released over half a century apart to mixed critical reception, both films feature the malevolent presence of zombies and voodoo: a crude rendering of Haitian religious belief as

“debased Christianity through an incorporation of spirit worship and blood sacrifice” (Twa 145).

While these films belong to the long-standing Western imaginings of Vodouists as “blood- maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened . . . [while dancing] their dark saturnalia,” the connections run more deeply than a shared fetishizing of Haitian Vodou.1 White Zombie and The

Serpent and the Rainbow were produced at significant moments of political upheaval in Haiti, lending to both films particular allegorical dimensions. Halperin’s film was released two years before the end of the U.S. military occupation; Craven’s production came out two years after

Jean-Claude Duvalier’s departure from office. Both moments mark the ending of seemingly separate epochs in Haiti’s history that brought an opportunity for democratic self-rule free from foreign mediation or domestic despotism.

Yet the unfulfilled promise of the both the fall of Duvalier and the U.S. military departure cannot be ignored. The end of the U.S. occupation gave way to the pre-dictatorial interregnum, while the post-Duvalier period lead to a tumultuous end of the twentieth century for Haiti, including the forced removal of the country’s first democratically elected leader, Jean-Bertrand

Aristide, as well as the specter of other crises: the AIDS epidemic, exploitative labor practices (a

permanent crisis since Saint-Domingue), and the January 2010 earthquake. The last event revealed a different kind of Hollywood/Haiti connection than the zombie film, one that is difficult not to foreground when writing about Hollywood representations of the country.

Following the earthquake, Haiti became a cause célèbre for a number of Hollywood actors and actresses, including, most prominently, Sean Penn. In just one of numerous articles about the actor and his work in post-quake Haiti, Zoe Heller, writing for The New York Times, praised

Penn and his NGO, J/P Haitian Relief Organization (J/P HRO), by stating that “[Penn] is never going to have the creamy charm of a George Clooney or the unflappable good spirits of a Brad

Pitt. But it is quite possible that he will end up doing more palpable good in the world than either of those admirable men.” In an uncanny and unsettling narrative strategy, countless American media outlets made a real Hollywood star, Sean Penn, the leading man of this very real, latest tragedy for Haiti.

Figure 2-1. Pellegrin, Paolo. “Cause Célèbre.” Photograph. The New York Times. 25 Mar. 2011. Web. 16 May 2014.

This narrative relied on a range of visual tropes that are staples of media depictions of celebrities “doing good” in the third-world: the Hollywood icon surveying the rubble and/or

“primitive” housing, standing with emaciated children, and meeting with local leaders.

Representations of trauma are “framed by the desires of those who make them or show them or view them” (xii), and facing the post-earthquake’s “overwhelming devastation”— this was a particularly popular catchphrase employed by many Americans talking about the earthquake, from CNN and Fox reporters to American country music group Lady Antebellum to ex-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin—Western media seemed hungry for this crisis to have an identifiable hero. Penn is consistently and often uncritically posited as a swashbuckling and irreverent figure determined to give Haiti (wayward, without agency, broken-again, black sheep of the Americas) what it really needs, by any means necessary. Because of the celebrity bestowed upon him by his appearance in high-profile Hollywood films, Penn is not only given the opportunity to tell the story of Haiti through various media outlets (for example, by stating in

The New York Times article that “success” and “change” is “going to come from this earthquake”); the “star power” of Hollywood and the greater international celebrity culture also enabled Penn to meet with then President René Préval, and take what Jonathan Katz calls “the next step” from political advocacy to “contributing directly to [domestic] policy making” by choosing resettlement sites for those displaced by the earthquake (117). Penn’s presence in Haiti evokes other moments when foreign groups and individuals have flexed seemingly unchecked power in Haiti; this, too, is a form of the American interventions in the country that loom over the narratives of both The Serpent and the Rainbow and White Zombie.

The former tells the story of an ethnobotanist, Dennis Alan (Bill Pullman), who visits

Haiti at the bequest of a U.S. pharmaceutical company. Alan’s mission is to locate and source a potent drug, which he and his backers believe to be related to cases of zombification in the

Caribbean country, and test its potential as an anesthesia for foreign markets. On arriving in

Haiti, Alan quickly encounters both the film’s villain, Captain Dargent Peytraud (played by

Zakes Mokae)—the head of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes and a seemingly omnipotent bòkò (“black magic” practitioner)—and the film’s other, no less dangerous threat, Haitian voodoo (the lurid interpretation of Vodou). The white American’s quest for a zombie potion leads to increasingly violent encounters with Peytraud and the

Macoutes, culminating in a torture session that precedes Alan’s exile. Against the advice of both allies and enemies, Alan returns to Haiti, gets “zombified” and buried, before emerging from the ground for a final, ultimately triumphant battle with Peytraud.

Figure 2-2. “American drowning in blood.” Photograph. mygeekplasphemy.files.wordpress.com. n.d. Web. 05 May 2014.

As the spectacular “battle to the death” between the Haitian villain and the American hero reaches its spectacular dénouement in Peytraud’s headquarters-cum-torture chamber, Baby

Doc’s regime comes to an end in the streets outside. In the light of the other stereotypes about

Haiti and Haitians put forth in the film, whether we are meant to read this as Haitian thirst for democracy or a sign of an inherent unruliness is unclear. But the hero is reunited with his love interest, and the future of Haiti—now rid of Duvalier family and the devilish Peytraud—is seemingly set free from the nightmare of the past. The abundance of state-perpetuated violence,

embodied in the figure of Peytraud, does not undercut any assumptions about Duvalier-era Haiti.

On the contrary, the extremities portrayed onscreen meet the American audience’s expectation, particularly in light of the fact, as Katherine Smith asserts, for “many foreign observers the problem was teleological: Duvalier's regime was the abhorrent but inexorable consequence of a long history of violence and chaos [in Haiti]” (95). With The Serpent and the Rainbow, Western audiences got the Haiti that they had seen on brief television news reports and read about in newspapers, but this time rendered in all of the horror genre’s luridness, complete with what

Phillip J. Nickel deems as the genre’s central facets: “an appearance of the evil supernatural or of the monstrous (this includes the psychopath who kills monstrously)” and “the intentional elicitation of dread, visceral disgust, fear, or startlement in the spectator or reader” (15).

Figure 2-3. “VHS cover for The Serpent and the Rainbow.” Photograph. bannedinqueensland.blogspot.com. 19 Nov. 2011. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.

Despite being directed by one of the most well-known horror film auteurs, The Serpent and the Rainbow has received only cursory attention from critics.2 Yet it is not merely the film’s often-overlooked place in the modern horror catalogue that makes it a film worth greater critical

reflection: Craven’s film stands out as it marks Hollywood’s return of the zombie film to Haiti.

One of the most popular sub-genres of horror, the zombie film traces its origins back to White

Zombie. Like The Serpent and the Rainbow, the narrative action of White Zombie begins with an

American’s first trip to Haiti. Madeline (Madge Bellamy) travels to the island in order to marry

Neil (John Harron), who has been working at a bank in Port-au-Prince. The couple meets a wealthy, fellow American, Charles Beaumont, who insists that they must wed at his plantation estate in an unnamed location, presumably far from the nation’s capital. Beaumont, who has fallen in love with Madeline, conspires with a white Haitian, “Murder” Legendre (Bela Lugosi), to win the American woman’s affections. Legendre owns a sugar cane mill associated with

Beaumont’s plantation, and the mill is run entirely by zombies under the control of the Haitian.

Murder suggests that Beaumont should give Madeline the same potion he uses on his own zombie slaves in order to win her affections. After the wedding ceremony, Beaumont slips the elixir into Madeline’s drink, and she “dies” to be revived later as the plantation owner’s zombie bride to be. Neil, devastated by the supposed death of his wife, visits a tavern and in a drunken stupor sees visions of Madeline, forcing him to visit her tomb, which he finds empty.

Enlisting the help of a missionary, Dr. Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn), Neil discovers that

Legendre has turned many of his rivals (from different parts of elite Haitian society, including the Minister of the Interior, a wealthy doctor, and the head of the gendarmerie) into zombies who now make up his trusted inner circle. On receiving this news from Dr. Bruner, Neil and the older man begin their journey to Legendre’s cliff-top castle. Meanwhile, Beaumont, in a fit of guilt, begs the white zombie master to release Madeline from the spell: a request that the evil Legendre refuses. Neil and Dr. Bruner infiltrate the castle, leading to a showdown where, ultimately,

Legendre loses mental control of his zombies, who tumble to their death from the cliff edge,

followed by their zombie master. With Legendre’s death, Madeline is free, and she awakes from her zombified state to the embrace of her love, Neil. Kyle Bishop asserts that White Zombie is

“the jump” of a new Western monster from folklore to cinema, while using “the exotic setting of postcolonial Haiti to entrance eager viewers” and thus “accentuating the prevailing stereotypes of the ‘backwards’ natives and western imperialist superiority” (141).

However, unlike Halperin’s work, the zombie films of the following decades were not set in Haiti but rather in a generalized Caribbean—joining what Jed Esty calls a wide-ranging literary and cinematic “plantation gothic” genre found in the “plantocratic contact zones from

Ireland to the slave economies of the new world” (179)—before spreading out to locales all around the world: rural Pennsylvania, the Trans-Siberian Express, metropolitan London, the

French countryside.3 The zombie’s ability to become a plague upon any kind of landscape is fitting: neither dead nor alive, he belongs nowhere in this world or the next, so his is a universally uncomfortable presence. With the subservient, seemingly lobotomized Haitian voodoo zombie as predecessor to the hyper-aggressive hordes of flesh-eating, transnational humanoid ghouls that dominate screen culture today, attempting to describe the diffuse nature of the zombie is a sizeable task. Australian philosopher David Chalmers offers the following baseline definition: zombies look “like the conscious beings that we know and love, but ‘all is dark inside.’” (Haitian director Arnold Antonin’s Loves of a Zombi (2009) provides a fascinating counterpoint to Hollywood’s flesheaters; a “lover boy” zombi with presidential ambitions is this film’s protagonist. Additionally, the film functions as an overt parody of the ultimate “puppet” candidate.) Frankétienne’s Dézafi (1975) is a major literary source for the contemporary myth surrounding those who are “dark inside.” The plot concerns a powerful sorcerer and landowner

who has “zombified” a large workforce for his farm; using a salt remedy, the zombis are brought back to life and begin a revolution that encompasses both the living and recently undead.

Building on Chalmers’s definition, Jen Webb and Sam Byrnard assert that the idea of zombie has “ramified, or metastasized, infiltrating society at a number of levels” with “rhetorical turns associated with their use in different periods and different cultural fields” (84).

Figure 2-4. “First still released from AMC’s The Walking Dead.” Film still. Forbes.com. 10 Feb. 2010. Web. 16 Mar. 2014.

Born in Haiti and transformed in diverse times and contexts abroad, the contemporary cinematic zombie has been largely divorced for much of its life from its Haitian origins.

However, this does not mean that the zombie has not been read in the framework of empire.

Edna Aizenberg is just one example of many scholars who have used what she succinctly describes as a “painful yet so often sensationalized symbol of Afro-Antillean bondage” that enables one to “explore the pros and cons of postcolonial criticism” (461). Jennifer Fay, among others, shows the duality of the zombie: a “post-modern creature that reflects back the deadening effects of ‘first world’ consumerism and its attendant evils” (81). A few of the most prominent components of our current zombie zeitgeist, including AMC’s extremely popular and financially successful series The Walking Dead (2009—), are commonly read as an allegorical figure of

American and European capitalist malaise. Infected victim and agent of destruction, zombies are both the product of, and cure for, a sick society.

The links between the contemporary American zombie zeitgeist, past Western representation of Vodou, as well as the zombie’s blurry Haitian origins took on a different appearance after a violent attack in the Omni neighborhood of Downtown Miami on May 26,

2012. In the early afternoon Miami Police Department Officer Jose Ramirez intervened in the mauling of a homeless man, Ronald Poppo, by Rudi Eugene, a first generation Haitian-

American. Because of the nature of the attack, which left Poppo blind and badly disfigured,

Eugene was promptly dubbed a “cannibal.” However, a more popular title became affixed to

Eugene, who was believed to be under the influence of drugs at the time and shot by police as he attempted to “eat” (a term popularized by journalistic accounts of the crime) Poppo’s face: the

“Miami zombie.” This nickname became only more widespread in the media when Eugene’s girlfriend, during an exclusive interview with The Miami Herald, said that she believed that someone “put a Vodou curse on him.” The girlfriend, who is neither Haitian nor Haitian-

American, told the newspaper she “has never believed in Vodou, until now. ‘I don’t know how else to explain this.’” In the same feature Eugene was referred to as “Haitian”—when in fact he was born in one of Miami’s largest hospitals in 1981—with other friends hinting that Eugene had a secret he wanted to divulge (the implication of which was that a “curse” had been put upon him). That one of the country’s largest newspapers in a city with one of the largest Haitian-

American populations would misidentify the perpetrator’s nationality was an unfortunate oversight, especially considering the fact that Vodou had become situated squarely within the

“Miami zombie” narrative. Eugene’s crime became coast-to-coast news, reaffirming the perception of Vodou as an “evil” religion: an idea that had been peddled by not only the major

Floridian news media but also the Californian film and television industry. But while the sensationalist journalism that emerged from the brutal attempted murder of a homeless man in

Miami shows how firmly entrenched the zombie mythology is in the popular culture of the

United States and beyond, these films evoke complicated moments in Haiti’s political history.

Like White Zombie, which was shot and released during the last years of the U.S. occupation of

Haiti, the narrative of The Serpent and the Rainbow transpires against the backdrop of a crisis, the dechoukaj.

Figure 2-5. “Miami Cannibal Told Victim: ‘I am going to kill you!’” Photograph. abcnews.go.com. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

A Creole term referring to the literal uprooting of a plant, dechoukaj was the name of the uprising and process that forced Baby Doc from office and the riots, looting, and acts of revenge on the Macoutes that followed his departure. Dechoukaj was a moment of crisis when individuals and groups “aimed to destroy anything physically associated with the dictatorship” and, due to the Duvalier regimes’ employmengtgvt of the religion, many Vodou priests, accused of being Macoutes themselves “or simply accused of sorcery, became targets of [the] rage”

(Hurbon 270). In the Serpent and the Rainbow, the dechoukaj is never alluded to in the dialogue

or as a narrative wrinkle, but we are given glimpses through particular shots, including, most notably, the film’s conclusion, when the Haitian cinematic monster/antagonist is slain. The death of a voodoo practitioner who is also the head Duvalier thug—even when rendered in the cartoonish form—as the way that all is “set right” in the film’s diegesis is one of the narrative’s most notable elements. The dechoukaj was, as Alexandra Boutros, in a rather understated manner, asserts, a “revolutionary, sometimes violent, period as Haitians sought meaningful social change.” In this film’s provocative reimagining, Peytraud’s spectacular demise reminds us of the immediate, personal violence of the dechoukaj: where, in some cases, both Macoutes and houngans were executed in brutal machete attacks. However, as the representative of the absent

Duvalier dictators, whose visages are only briefly displayed on a billboard during an establishing shot in the film’s first sequence in Haiti, Peytraud’s death is both an ineffectual and inaccurate metaphor for the end of the Duvalierism, especially in view of Baby Doc’s ability to escape punishment despite his recent return to the scene of his crimes. The crisis may be resolved in this particular Hollywood narrative, but the Duvalier ghost continues to haunt Haiti today.

Figure 2-6. “The climax of Peytraud’s grisly death.” Film still. blog.analogmedium.com. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

Writing about the place of crisis in Hollywood narratives, Robert Ray argues that to “a great extent, American history’s major crises appear in American movies only as ‘structuring absences” (31). In both White Zombie and The Serpent and the Rainbow, “absent” crises are just as vital to their narrative structures as any Hollywood film set on U.S. soil. When the protagonist of Craven’s film strikes down his Haitian nemesis, his act is one of the first volleys in the unnamed battle breaking out in the streets outside. As the narrative approaches the climax, newscasters announce that the Duvaliers have fled the country as Alan rushes to save his love interest, the beautiful doctor Marielle Duschamp (Cathy Tyson), and put an end to Peytraud.

After defeating the Macoutes leader, who is also a voodoo master with a collection of hundreds of jars that house the souls of his enemies, John Kenneth Muir reads the climax as follows:

“Marielle assures Alan that the nightmare is over. The trapped souls are free and Haiti will awake to freedom for the first time in many years” (138). But is this what is suggested by the vanquishing of the head of the Macoutes and the demise of the Duvalier regime? Or does the figure of Peytraud and his slaying by the hand of American vengeance stir up a much more knotty vision of Haiti: where Vodou and its adherents are associated with state-sponsored violence. For example, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier’s mimetic appropriation of Bawon Samedi was a public affirmation of his Vodou faith, and known Vodouists were victims of anti-Duvalier vengeance following Baby Doc’s departure.

Read allegorically both Craven and Halperin’s films call to mind the crises that have shaped the way the rest of the world sees and understands Haiti, as well as (just as importantly) the United States’ long-standing, complicated, and entrenched relationship with its Caribbean neighbor. But, far too often, Haiti’s position in the world, which Mumia Abu-Jamal contends

“has seldom been fully appreciated” (196), is portrayed as cut off from American and European

networks of capital, rather than as firmly entrenched in and exploited by the neoliberal economic web. As recently as the June 6, 2013 issue of The New York Review of Books (TNYRB),

Westerners writing and speaking about Haiti through major U.S. media outlets have suggested that Haitians alone—for reasons as wide-ranging as religion, race, and in TNYRB’s case, “the

Haitian character”—are solely responsible for the country’s poverty. By putting The Serpent and the Rainbow and White Zombie in conversation, the U.S.’s role in these crises and Haiti’s place in a wider global network are duly noted. Moreover, these films show how allegorical readings enable “a kind of relational thinking that is not as readily available in other forms of expression”

(Wegner 7).

Figure 2-7. Castro, Marcus. “Taking Over Haiti.” Photograph. time.com. n.d. Web. 04 Mar. 2014.

For example, while White Zombie can be read as an indictment of the U.S. for its early twentieth century occupation of the island nation, and The Serpent and the Rainbow, which, echoing the U.S. Center for Disease Control’s mid-1980s position on HIV/AIDS and Haiti, locates the country as a point of origin for a deadly and mysterious contagion, both films foreshadow current occupations of Haiti: the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti

(MINUSTAH) over the last decade and the post-2010 earthquake deluge of non-governmental organizations that constitute an American presence in the country unmatched since before the

U.S. military’s official departure in 1934.4 But between the “end” of the occupation and the earthquake’s aftermath, other crises have defined the way Haiti has been written for Western audiences. In the context of post-earthquake depictions of Haiti, Katz writes that, “if you stop in a seeming pause to reflect on Haiti’s last story, you are bound to get pummeled by the next”

(265). White Zombie and The Serpent and the Rainbow provide a means to explore the interconnectivity of these “stories,” from the post-occupation establishment of U.S.-owned sweatshops to the deadly importation of cholera by foreign (Nepalese) U.N. soldiers.

Figure 2-8. “Haitians protest the cholera outbreak and its origins.” Photograph. npr.org. 12 Jan. 2013. Web. 27 Feb. 2014.

Additionally, to read these films allegorically is more than just interpreting “more than meets the eye” in regards to certain shots, sequences, and dialogue. Influenced by Walter

Benjamin’s work, Craig Owens argues that allegory has a “capacity to rescue from historical oblivion that which threatens to disappear” (68). The threads of history revealed by an allegorical reading reinforce not only show how the past has shaped the present moment, but also reinforce what Terry Eagleton, in an ode to Benjamin, identifies as how “the past [can] be transformed by what we do in the present” (Eagleton). However, as Owens asserts, the allegorical reading is more than the practice of unearthing histories: the allegorist reader “does not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. He does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured . . . Rather, he adds another meaning to the image” (69). Representations of Haiti such as The Serpent and the Rainbow and

White Zombie, both of which demonstrate how “the name of Haiti’s indigenous religion had long since become the synonym for crazy ideas and sheer luridness” (Kidder 33), are locations of contestation over meaning. Resisting the term “the present,” the contest is staged instead in what

Benjamin terms Jetztzeit—“time filled by the presence of now” (261)—about Haiti’s past in order to reimagine its future.

In moments of crisis, the future becomes hot property: a moment when the notion of Haiti as perpetually caught in an inherent cycle of political violence, disease, and ecological catastrophe can be reified, or a moment to secure the vast, pending possibilities of the country’s future. Writing about the legacy of visual culture theorist Craig Owens (who died from health complications after contracting HIV/AIDS during the first decade of the North American pandemic), Simon Watney states that we “must recognize that the future we attempt to ‘make present’ to ourselves and to one another is not simply ‘out there,’ ready and waiting for us, but

remains always to be contested, always to be remade again” (xvi). Particularly after the earthquake, when Haiti received intense (if, in retrospect, fleeting) media attention, by contesting these representations I do not mean to “speak for” Haiti, but rather locate and engage with a particular set of texts that attempt to fix the country as the bizarre, calamitous outsider of the

Americas. This setting of Haiti in the Western imagination is no new phenomenon; as Michael

Dash asserts, Haiti, “like Africa, has been fixed ‘textually’ since the nineteenth century as a literary ‘sign,’ exhaustively suggestive of mystery and carnality” (107). Extending upon Dash’s semiotic reference, Haiti continues to be written into the Western imagination as an allegorical figure signifying the worst excesses of all the so-called third world: murderous dictators, grinding poverty, and endemic and unavoidable corruption, backlit by superstitions and otherworldly ghoulishness.

Figure 2-9. “Opening scene of The Serpent and the Rainbow.” Film still. watchingthedead.co.uk. 30 Sept. 2013. Web. 17 Mar. 2014.

Although an allegorical reading of The Serpent and the Rainbow and White Zombie illuminates American visions of (and interventions in) Haiti, it also raises questions about historical representation in film. Phillip Wegner argues that allegories “enable complex or

abstract historical processes to take on a concrete form” (6). However, Wegner (who, like Craig

Owens, draws on Walter Benjamin’s writing on allegory), also points out that in “their obvious artificiality and constructed nature, [cinematic] allegories are failures” and “in this lies their power . . . [because] they mark the explicit historicity of the problems and questions with which they are grappling” (7). In the case of Western film and media representations of Haiti, the problems of the country’s history consistently take on binary forms. Considering Haiti’s place in the Americas, Raphael Dalleo illustrates the way that Haiti is imagined:

Is it a land of tyranny and oppression or a beacon of freedom as the site of the world’s only successful slave revolution? Is it a land of devilish practices or of a devoutly religious people? Does its status as the second independent nation in the hemisphere give it special lessons to teach about postcolonialism, or is its main lesson one of failure? (3)

Critiquing representations of Haiti opens up the complexity of the country’s past, present, and future, and, in turn, moves us away from these “same old” questions about Haiti. Moreover, the allegorical reading does not enforce a prescribed reading: for example, fixing the zombie as forever a reminder of slavery. Rather, it opens up the zombies of Craven and Halperin’s films to multilayered interpretations, where, say, the zombie’s subservient, otherworldly nature conjures up other kinds of servitude—such as transnational, neoliberal economic policy—for postcolonial

Haiti. The Hollywood zombie (descendant of the Haitian version) is a potent allegorical figure, one whose infectious wounds bleed through history. Or, as one of the walking dead, she is the nameless, black face of the U.S's Haitiphobic AIDS policy; or he is the dehumanized object of

French colonialism; or she is the uncanny return to the slave past in the U.S's occupation. We might imagine the zombie as a disenfranchised rice farmer, whose livelihood was wrecked when, in the 1990s, “the US began dumping cheap subsidized US rice into the Haitian market with the disastrous consequence of destroying local production and causing further starvation and migration to fragile urban areas” (Wilentz). Or as Wegner might suggest, an allegorical reading

allows the zombie to signify more than one signified meaning, combining these various meanings. Moreover, the zombie as a pathetic figure who needs to be cured or fixed calls to mind the vision of the post-earthquake Haitian. Unknowable, poisoned by the dark rites and

“curse play” of voodoo, in desperate need of help, and ultimately seen as an uneducated "blank slate," today the zombie allegorically evokes the Haitian subject as relief receptacle.

In his seminal essay “Post-Colonial Allegory and the Transformation of History,”

Stephen Slemon locates these types of shifting contexts and the passage of time as central to contemporary allegory. Allegorical writing, he argues, “involves doubling or reduplicating extratextual material; and since the allegorical sign always refers to a previous or anterior sign, it is by definition involved in what Paul de Man calls a ‘rhetoric of temporality’” (158). Thus, an allegorical reading provokes questions not only about historical representation but also the problem of time. To watch White Zombie, which was a major proponent of Western stereotypes about Haitian primitivism during the U.S. occupation, in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, when Haiti’s innate “backwardness” became an explanation for the extent of the catastrophe, changes the critical paradigm. In the same way, The Serpent and the Rainbow panders to the idea of Haiti, by virtue of its religion, language, and history, as nation non grata in the Americas: rudderless, menacing, and prone to political mania. The “anterior” signs to which the allegory is pointing are not fixed in the imagination due to the passage of time and these newer moments of crisis. As Slemon argues, “an awareness of the passage of time is at the heart of allegory, and because of this, all allegorical writing is thought to be inherently involved with questions of history and tradition” (158). In this way, the allegorical reading allows one to consider the interconnectedness of seemingly distinct historical events: for example, the link between the U.S.

military’s tenure in the country, the infrastructure of Port-au-Prince, the response of the so-called international community to the earthquake, and American reportage of the aftermath.

If many academics have identified allegorical readings as “concerned with redeeming or recuperating the past,” even though, as Slemon points out, “the problem of history goes beyond the simple binary of either redeeming or annihilating the past” (ibid), an allegorical reading returns us to the question of what these films suggest about Haiti’s future. For example, take the basic catalyst for the action of The Serpent and the Rainbow, which is a North American company’s attempt to find a powder that has great potential value on the Western medical market. Read allegorically, this backstory takes on a different meeting in light of the recent news that Newmont Mining, one of the world’s two largest mining firms, has purchased large tracts of land in the country in order to extract “possibly hundreds of millions of ounces of gold below

[Haiti’s] surface” (Wilentz 268). The future excavation of precious metals could, of course, further exacerbate many of Haiti’s current environmental troubles. However, gold is not the only valuable commodity that makes its way from Haitian to American shores; Port-au-Prince and other ocean transport locales operate as “trans-shipment point[s] for South American cocaine”

(Katz 138). In this way, an allegorical interpretation of The Serpent and the Rainbow shows the connection between representations of Haiti’s past (albeit in a horror film adaptation of non- fiction source material) and how we might conceive the country’s present as well as its future.

Likewise, White Zombie is a means to explore the obfuscated history of the imperial United

States’ occupation of its neighbor and the uncanny return of occupation through the ongoing presence of that other international power, the United Nations. The proposition of whether or not

Haitians are able to successfully govern their own nation is central to the justification of these

interventions, and Halperin’s film is structured around the figure of the malevolent, literally

“empowered” Haitian as it is by the fetishized Vodou zombi.

Figure 2-10. The alleged location for drug smuggling, the port of Cite Soleil (photo courtesy of the author).

In a scene after Legendre provides the means for Madeline’s transformation into a zombie, the Haitian pours a drink for Beaumont, his recent accomplice in black magic. Holding his glass aloft, Legendre proposes a toast: “Let’s drink to the future!” In the next shot featuring

Beaumont, his face displays his fear about his Haitian host’s imminent endeavors. Regardless, the voodoo master Legendre forges forth with the tribute: “The future, monsieur!” What specific future Legendre refers to is unclear to both the audience and Beaumont himself, but in this context the potential answers are disturbing (i.e. the American and the Haitian working together to make more zombies, Legendre’s sphere of influence expanding), not just for Beaumont, who seems incapable of comprehending what Legendre has in store for him (spoiler alert: zombification).

In Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (1997),

Michael Dash writes that the “history of Haitian-American relations is filled with missed opportunities and tragic incomprehension. American intentions to reshape, control, and dominate

Haiti because of the latter’s threat to its interests, are sustained by an imaginative grid of

stereotypes through which Haiti is filtered into America’s consciousness” (137). While the

American audience reception of White Zombie would have been shaped by lesser to greater degrees of knowledge of the U.S.’s occupation of its Caribbean neighbor, the depiction of Vodou in The Serpent and the Rainbow cannot be read only as a continuation of the rendering of Haiti’s religion by Hollywood into the sinister, weird rituals of voodoo and zombification, but as connected in the film as it was in real life to the AIDS pandemic. Portrayals of those who occupy a space between life and death—zombies—take on a deeper meaning at a moment in history when an HIV/AIDS diagnosis was akin to a death sentence, and when “the living dead” was a metaphor more commonly associated with those with HIV/AIDS than fictional zombies. To add a layer to the link between zombies and the HIV/AIDS patients in the mid-to-late-1980s, Dr.

William Greenfield’s famous letter published in the Journal of American Medical Association,

"Night of the Living Dead II: Slow virus encephalopathies and AIDS” considers Haiti as the source of the North American epidemic and if “necromantic zombiists transmit HTLV-3/LAV during voodooistic rituals?”

As provocative as Greenfield’s assertion in 1986 was, it was only an extension of the

Center for Disease Control’s “4H Club” definition (made four years prior) regarding those most likely to be infected with HIV/AIDS: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians.

American audiences viewing this film in the midst of the AIDS epidemic would have at the very least been aware of the latter, a result of the combination of the CDC’s xenophobia and the media’s treatment of Haitians and their “dark beliefs” in the context of the AIDS pandemic. As

Laurent Dubois asserts,

[during] the 1980s, notably when Haitian boat people were blamed for bringing AIDS to the United States, stereotypical and denigrating portraits of Vodou dominated most public discussions about the religion. The publication of Wade

Davis’ popular The Serpent and the Rainbow, and its transformation into a horror film directed by Wes Craven, contributed to this process. (92)

While the popularity of The Serpent and the Rainbow pales in comparison to other horror films of its era amongst cinephiles, the film is a powerful example of how Vodou “has long been viewed through a distorted lens by outsiders” (92). But the picture of Vodou as “black magic” is not, as Dubois asserts, independent of other stereotypes about Haitians, nor is it separate from inaccurate representations of the country’s history. Dash points out that in the post-revolutionary period, Haiti and its culture disappear “under images of racial revenge, mysterious singularity, and heroic uniqueness” (3). Dash refers to a pivotal moment in Haiti’s perceived disengagement with the rest of the Americas and the world, but the burial of the republic—innately violent, doomed, and, to use the most frequent cliché, failed—continues today, with new paradigms informing the ways that Haiti is read and written. Rather than vengeance and paternalistic identification of Haiti’s special difference in the wake of a bloody revolution, Haiti’s failure— economically, socially, politically—are couched within visual images that reconfirm the discursive formation of an exceptional, frightening Haiti.

Figure 2-11. “The Haitian Revolution in Visual Culture.” Photograph. augustine.com. n.d. Web. 05 Feb. 2014.

But what is it that makes a horror film particularly adept at evoking the horror of history, of crossing that line between fiction and real moments occurring beyond the confines of the

movie theatre? Specifically, what can a Hollywood horror film released two years after the official end of the Duvalier dictatorships, which were three decades of a dynasty that prolonged

(if not destroyed) “the nation’s social, political, and juridicial fabric” (Diederich 3), tell us about the trauma of that epoch? How do these films take on the shifting, dynamic place of Vodou in the occupation- and Duvalier-era Haiti and afterwards? Moreover, can a genre film look forward, foreshadowing the events post-Duvalier period that boasted “a predatory, kleptocratic state, sustained by state terrorism” (Diederich 3), the specter of the AIDS pandemic, and continued foreign intervention by governmental and non-governmental forces? And how do films belonging to a genre that, according to some critics, does not offer “a politically transformative experience in any grand sense of the term,” elicit questions about complicated moments of crisis?” (Pinedo 5)

Adam Lowenstein’s writing on horror, national cinema, and history provides another tool for approaching these questions about crisis, representation and allegory. In Shocking

Representations (2005) Lowenstein gives the example of a scene in Bob Clark’s horror film

Deathdream (1972), where a young man, who was killed in Vietnam but has “returned” to his

American home to be buried by his mother, leads the older woman into a cemetery and a grave that he has dug. As the young man covers himself with soil and implores his mother to help with the burial, a car farther away explodes, and, as Lowenstein explains, the “blast briefly illuminates the graveyard in the eerie glow of a war-torn jungle, closing the space between this death in the cemetery and the death in Vietnam” (2). This is an example of the allegorical moment,

[a] shocking collision of film, spectator, and history where registers of bodily space and historical time are disrupted, confronted, and intertwined. These registers of space and time are distributed unevenly across the cinematic text, the film’s audience, and the historical context . . . [so] shock emanates from the intermingling of a number of sources. The film’s horrific images, sounds, and narrative combine with visceral spectator affect (terror, disgust, sympathy,

sadness) to embody issues that characterize the historical trauma of the Vietnam War (gender, nation, generation, memory). (2)

I quote Lowenstein at length because of his succinct description of the allegorical moment: the way that a single shocking image (in this case, the glow of a distant blast) can function as a multifaceted signifier, folding one moment (death and destruction in Vietnam) into another (the grief of a fallen serviceman’s mother at home). Yet just as important to

Lowenstein’s emphasis on the ontological power of the shocking image is his emphasis on historical setting and audience. Deathdream was released as the bodies of dead Americans were still arriving from the war in Vietnam, a context that affects the film’s early reception but is no less uncanny for today’s viewers who have read about—if not always “allowed” to see—the homecoming of the dead from this country’s current wars. More than just suggesting the closeness of Vietnam and America through war at that point of the twentieth century, this allegorical moment is about that ambiguous figure: the walking dead.

Figure 2-12. “Vamp or Not? Deathdream!” DVD cover image. taliesinttlg.blogspot.com. 28 Jun. 2007. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

Caught in between life and death, this figure in the cemetery disrupts that most familiar binary, causing the reader to confront other contradictory emotional responses: disgust and sympathy, fear and familiarity. But more than just calling to mind a specific incident (for example, a soldier’s death in Vietnam and his uncanny return home), the “shocking” allegorical moment calls to mind the nature and efficacy of representing trauma onscreen.

Like the other films from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s that Lowenstein cites throughout his book, The Serpent and the Rainbow has a number of shocking allegorical moments. While only receiving fleeting mention in numerous academic studies of the horror genre, popular reviews of The Serpent and the Rainbow at the time of its release lauded its visceral visual effect upon audiences. In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas claims that the film

“does for the old Caribbean zombie movie [like White Zombie] what Steven Spielberg's "Raiders of the Lost Ark" did for the serials . . . while drawing upon all the sophisticated resources of big- budget modern film making: richly photographed authentic locales, wondrous special effects and amazingly acute sound recording.” The New York Times critic, Janet Maslin, observes that the film is “handsomely photographed” and contains “a strong sense of spectacle,” but that upon the

“search for the zombifying elixir, the influence of the Tontons Macoute, the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship and the mysterious powers of voodoo sometimes run together in a manner less provocative than confusing.” Maslin points to the film’s tagline—“Don’t Bury Me . . . I’m Not

Dead!”—as an indication of how far the film is from its non-fiction source material, ethnobotanist Wade Davis’s “thoughtful account of his search for exotic Haitian medicinal potions.” However, later in the review, Maslin mentions the “complexity of the material” and that The Serpent and the Rainbow “like much of Mr. Craven’s other work, is concerned with the line that separates reality from nightmare, a line that seems especially thin in this setting.”

In her review Maslin touches obliquely upon the potential of horror, which Carol J.

Clover calls “the most self-reflexive of cinematic genres,” to summon up real-life events unnamed in the film. Allegorical moments that collapse space and time, while also evoking a range of mental and physical reactions through the combination of sights and sounds, occur at scattered instances throughout The Serpent and the Rainbow. Whereas Lowenstein’s first example focused on the singular shadow of Vietnam in the climactic scene of Deathdream, I will give an example of one of a number of scenes where the wounds of crises past, present, and future—the ongoing U.S. presence in Haiti, the targeting of Vodou during the dechoukaj, Haiti’s role of contagion in the AIDS pandemic, and the international community’s invasion of the country in the aftermath of tranblemann té (the earthquake)—become visible and bleed into one another. One such example is the torture scene, in which the film’s protagonist, Dennis Alan, after ignoring Macoutes leader Dargent Peytraud’s warning that “Haiti is not Grenada” and the suggestion that the American should leave the country, is brought by the secret police to

Peytraud’s lair. Alan, strapped into a chair, is brought to consciousness by Peytraud’s waving an unlit but gas-emitting blowtorch in the bound man’s face. The torture finishes with Peytraud, who has told Allan that he will spare the American’s “pretty face,” instead driving a spike through the white man’s scrotum.5

Targeting genitalia as a way to bring about suffering is not a unique scenario in the history of torture, but in the context of Haiti and Vodou in the first decade of an often sexually transmitted and deadly pandemic, this act takes on added meanings. Haiti, identified by social and medical scientists as one focal point in the global network of HIV/AIDS infection, had been posited as an exceptional and objectionable space where sex and death are inherently intertwined. What is more, as previously Vodou was indicted—via specious theories linking

cannibalism (and, by extension, blood transmission) and religious ceremonies—to theories of

Haiti as the gateway of HIV/AIDS from Africa to North America.

Figure 2-13. “Tonton Macoute brandishing a machete.” latinamericanstudies.org. n.d. Web. Nov. 7 2013.

The voodoo priest Peytraud’s attack on the American’s sex organs is not merely the bizarre, unbearably cruel actions of a horror film villain. Marnia Lazreg argues that a torturer and his victim thrown together in a room with a few instruments do not sum up the torture situation:

It is “a structured environment with a texture of its own, a configuration of meanings, a logic and rationale without which physical, let alone psychic, pain is incomprehensible and ineffective”

(6). In viewing the filmic representation of such an environment, one is drawn to consider the

“configuration of meanings” of blood, genitalia, Vodou, and Haiti evoked by Peytraud’s wielding of a spike. For an American audience, what Lowenstein calls the “visceral spectator affect” of Peytraud’s torture chamber consists of more than fear of a sadistic voodoo master. If

Haiti and Haitians had not come synonymous with HIV/AIDS, which was the conscious mission of the CDC five years before the film’s release, the legacy of official policy continued to shape

public perception of the Caribbean country and its people. As Paul Farmer argues in AIDS and

Accusation, unfounded scientific theories connecting Vodou, Haitians, and AIDS were

echoed in the popular presses, both straight and gay, and the North American folk model of Haitians was quickly renovated to make room for the new qualifier, AIDS-carrier. Public perception along the eastern seaboard seemed to have ‘AIDS’ to the folk model that had previously relied so strongly on voodoo imagery. (212)

The connection between “deviant” sexuality and Haiti’s otherness goes back to much earlier American representations of the country, including William Seabrook’s The Magic Island

(the source material for White Zombie) and various travelogues, such as Edna Taft’s A Puritan in Voodoo-Land. Writing about perhaps the most famous of these texts, Seabrook’s book, Mary

Renda argues that, “Haiti served as a literalized special representation of the Freudian unconscious, [where] polymorphous sexuality and could be revisited and unshackled” (249).

Figure 2-14. “The Tortured American in Haiti.” Film still. realqueenofhorror.com. 1 May 2014. Web. 16 May 2014.

This polymorphous sexuality is firmly attached to Vodou in these representations of

Haiti, as well as a vision of the country as site for sexual self-empowerment, which is the case in a modern version of Taft’s travelogue, Kathy Acker’s 1978 novel, Kathy Goes to Haiti, whose

protagonist first attempts to “lose herself” in sexual encounters, by demanding that her Haitian lover to “fuck” her “as hard as [he] can” (149), before visiting a Vodou priest and coming out

“more dazed than before” (170). Moreover, like Taft before her, Kathy’s projected desires about

Haiti are born from the “imperial gaze” that has, as Mimi Sheller points out, “subtly informed the ways in which later tourists came to gaze upon the landscape and experience bodily the pleasures of Caribbean travel” (27). While The Serpent and the Rainbow continues the trope of the

American seeking the sacred and the profane in Haiti—the protagonist, Dennis Alan and the

Haitian doctor Marielle Duschamp have sex during a Vodou pilgrimage, a short scene that resembles aesthetically 1980s soft-core pornography—the film’s most horrifying moments are also undercut by exotic sexual behaviors. Furthermore, bodily violence and harm, which

Lowenstein foregrounds in his theory of the allegorical moment, become intertwined with sexual gratification. The scene where Peytraud nails Alan’s scrotum constitutes a shocking allegorical moment that, to use Lowenstein’s terminology, intermingle a “number of sources” including the notion of Haiti as the catalyst for the North American pandemic, and it serves as a counterpoint to the film’s final action, which draws upon its own “configuration of meanings.”

Figure 2-15. “Sex scene in The Serpent and the Rainbow.” Film still. realqueenofhorror.com. 1 May 2014. Web. 1 Jul. 2014.

Craven’s film, like White Zombie before it, places an American as an agent of change for

Haiti: a representative for one nation that “at first refused to recognize the second, then brutally occupied it, and finally spent decades meddling in its affairs” (Katz 2-3). Moreover, Alan’s altruistic blundering and lack of knowledge of the country echoes the position of many Western

NGOs operating in Haiti today. Towards the end of one of the most comprehensive studies of

NGOs in Haiti today, Killing with Kindness (2012), Mark Schuller reflects on the bogged-down distribution of aid to and within the country, particularly in the post-earthquake epoch. “Haiti may well become Waterloo of the NGO system,” he suggests. “What accounts for this collective failure, despite billions in aid being given, NGOs efforts, and even some remarkable individual successes?” (174). Timothy Schwartz, author of Travesty in Haiti (2010), is more scathing about the processes and outcomes aid to (as anyone reading about Haiti is so regularly reminded) the poorest country in the western hemisphere: “I believe that the disaster we call foreign aid—

‘disaster,’ at least, in the case of Haiti—comes from the near total absence of control over the distribution of money donated to help impoverished people in the country” (3). Just as White

Zombie can be read today as part of the discourse about savage Haiti that helped warrant the invocation of “the Monroe Doctrine and humanitarianism [in order] to justify a criminal occupation” (Clark 97), an allegorical reading of The Serpent and the Rainbow supplants the meaning of the protagonist as hero, with the protagonist who ultimately does more harm than good. Raphael Dalleo speaks for many scholars when he asserts that, “[t]hinking about Haiti requires breaking through a thick layer of stereotypes, in which Haiti can appear as the furthest extreme of poverty, of political dysfunction, and of savagery, to develop approaches that can account for the complexity of Haitian history and culture” (4). Dalleo calls for a critique of depictions of Haiti as a nation dependent on its powerful neighbors (not to mention nations

farther afield), with governments that inherently fail to provide for the country’s citizens, and a culture bound to violence and general lawlessness. Dalleo couches this interrogation of Haiti’s representation in terms of thinking about “alternative ways of imagining its culture and history”

(4).

Figure 2-16. Mobile clinic in Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of the author).

Implicit in this claim, I would argue, is that this critique of representations and reimagining of Haiti’s history could and should have an effect on the country’s future. The concept of critique as a means to “set things right” can be traced back to its Greek etymological origin, krisis. Wendy Brown reflects on krisis as a legal term in ancient Athens. Krisis referred

to a scene in which the object, agent, process, and result of critique were intermingled. Procedurally, juridical krisis thus consisted of recognizing an objective crisis and convening subjective critics who then passed a critical judgment and provided a formula for restorative action. (5)

Intervention is at the basis of both the Greek krisis and its later English usage, which is tied to particular social, economic, and political conditions. However, krisis also reminds us of the connection between crisis, critique, and intervention today. The call for immediate and drastic foreign intervention, which has been a significant portion of Haiti’s history, has been predicated regularly on crisis. But this does not mean that these interventions should go unchecked, and the way that these interventions have been represented pass without critique. For example, following the earthquake Western media outlets consistently showed dead black bodies

being piled up on dusty, broken streets, shocking their audiences with tragic representations, followed by the requisite “hopeful” images of foreign medical and military units assisting with the catastrophe. But these scenes raise questions regarding the ethics of showing the dead and dying—for example, Japanese bodies were hardly shown after the 2011 tsunami, whereas there appeared to be a “no-holds barred” approach to showing Haitian fatalities—and how these images gave rise to the flood of NGOs that arrived in the country after the earthquake. Yet this visual rhetoric of both “helpless” and “savage” Haiti—a vision of the country put forth in the

Hollywood films discussed at length above—justified the intervention of foreign bodies and aid, the long-term effects of which we are yet to see.

Notes

1 William Seabrook’s famous description in The Magic Island (1929). 2 He describes The Serpent and the Rainbow as based on “true events” (he puts the term in quotation marks) and says that the film is about “a medical researcher [who] tries to distinguish hallucinations from real voodoo magic.” 3 Nickel’s definition of the horror film is a broadening of Noel Carroll’s important work on the genre, which presents the “unnatural,” menacing monster as the central component of the genre. Looking at numerous contemporary films that elicit “dread, visceral disgust, or fear,” the importance of Nickel’s redefinition—allowing, as he does, for films that feature either “no specific “monster” and ““realistic” monsters”(15)—enables the inclusion of some of the most important “scary movies” of the post-1970 Hollywood era: for example, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980), David Fincher’s Seven (1995), Craven’s Scream (1996), Mary Harron’s American Psycho (2000), and Eli Roth’s Hostel (2005). 4 As Jennifer Fay asserts, White Zombie can be interpreted as a critique of America’s later military interventions in other nations, including Iraq. 5 Peytraud’s behavior in this scene bears a strong similarity to the “baddie” of White Zombie, “Murder” Legendre, whose lecherous staring at and desire to control Beaumont imply to a contemporary viewer that the love triangle between he, Madeline, and the white Haitian is not predicated on two men’s desire for the same woman.

CHAPTER 3 THE RHETORIC OF CRISIS AND FORECLOSING THE FUTURE OF HAITI IN GHOSTS OF CITÉ SOLEIL

Asger Leth’s documentary film Ghosts of Cité Soleil (2006) follows the lives of two gang leaders in the largest slum in Haiti during the months leading up to the fall of President Jean-

Bertrand Aristide’s government in 2004.1 Two centuries after the revolutionary leader Jean-

Jacques Dessalines declared independence for the former French slave colony—creating what

Hardt and Negri call a “specter [that] circulated throughout the Americas in the early nineteenth century just as the specter of the October Revolution haunted European Capitalism over a century later” (123)—Aristide, a former Catholic priest who became the country’s first democratically elected leader since Haiti’s independence, had seen his presidency ended by a range of external and internal pressures. On February 28, 2004, Aristide was forced from office, leaving the leadership of the country in the hands of soldiers from the Haitian army that Aristide had earlier personally disbanded. As Paul Farmer notes, Aristide immediately “claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a twenty-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa.’” However, the main critics of Aristide and his leftist social and economic policies, including members of Haiti’s wealthy elite and the U.S. NGOs in Washington (for instance, the

International Republican Institute) that had actively sought the toppling of Aristide’s government, contend that the president fled from office.

The film’s subheading claims that Cité Soleil is “the most dangerous place on earth,” a description bestowed on the area by the United Nations in 2004. Located on the waterfront of

Port-au-Prince, Cité Soleil, which is the largest slum in the Western Hemisphere, has come to represent in mainstream Western media all that is wrong with Haiti today: the ineffectiveness of local police, the so-called necessity of foreign military intervention, and the incessant cycle of

poverty and violence. While Cité Soleil might be emblematic of stereotypes about Haiti’s abject state, it also produced many of Aristide’s most fervent supporters in Port-au- Prince. By recognizing the huge gulf between Haiti’s elite and the rest of the country’s population, and harnessing popular support through the Fanmi Lavalas political movement, Aristide had risen to power with the support of many of the country’s poorest citizens. Among these supporters were gangs of youths known as chimè, a Creole term that translates to “ghosts” (but implies

“gangsters” or “thugs”). When Aristide’s leadership came under threat, some of these groups used violent means to demonstrate their support for Aristide and to intimidate political opponents. The film’s primary subjects are two of the chimè leaders: the aspiring rapper Winson

“2Pac” Jean and 2Pac’s younger brother, James “Bily” Petit Frere, a sometime rival to 2Pac and fierce supporter of Aristide.

Figure 3-1. Street scene: Cité Soleil (photo courtesy of author).

Ghosts of Cité Soleil is an “extremely seductive” documentary, particularly for a non-

Haitian audience or an audience unfamiliar with Haiti’s history.2 Whether through the slick montages—where shots of Aristide and audio clips of him speaking are rapidly and repeatedly

intercut with images that include a decomposing corpse being eaten by a wild pig, surging mobs, a room filled with dead bodies, and another body lying in a pool of blood—or by way of the soundtrack, composed by one of Haiti’s most famous public figures, Wyclef Jean (who is also one of the film’s producers), the mise-en-scène is clearly influenced by the visual and aural elements of the contemporary hip-hop music video.3 Moreover, Ghosts is closer, in terms of both the visual style and the presentation of the “gangster with a heart of gold,” to fictional feature films like City of God (2002), located in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and Tsotsi (2005), set in the shantytowns of Johannesburg, than the approach of a journalistic documentary about this moment in Haiti’s history.4 (I do not, however, mean to say that Ghosts is another example of

Haiti’s so-called “exceptional” state; an obsession with violence is visible in many forms of contemporary pop culture.) At the expense of providing background about Aristide’s predicament, and by consciously reinforcing stereotypes of Haiti as an inherently failed state via the film’s visual language, Ghosts values the style of a tour into the ghetto over the substance of context.

As in the aforementioned fictional feature films, the primary narrative strategy of Ghosts is an attempt to be “economically successful internationally” by mimicking what Barbara

Mennel identifies as “the American urban ghetto film that exploits the representation of poverty”

(169). Alongside the exploitative representation of a ghetto in the global South, the commodification of gangs, gangsters, and poverty has a specific transnational political meaning in Ghosts, City of God, and Tsotsi: no matter the national locale, young black men from the ghetto are frightening subjects who are seemingly incapable of avoiding involvement in criminal activity, whether as a willing participant or being reluctantly “drawn in” owing to friendship or familial connections. Thus, at the same time as audiences in the global North are granted access

to various exotic global South ghettos via these films’ settings, the similarities with the North

American ghetto film via the filmic subjects are overt. These foreign films are concerned with what Mennel sees as central to films of the foundational American hood genre, which tell

“stories of violence among urban Blacks associated with drugs and gang warfare and are set in decaying urban locales made to represent such problems as policing, drugs, gentrification; lack of jobs, resources, and education; incarceration and gang warfare” (156).5 This is certainly the case in Ghosts, where the extremely impoverished setting of Cité Soleil amplifies these social ills, setting the standard as the abject überslum.

Figure 3-2. “Haitian 2Pac in a piece-de-camera.” Film still. boston.com. 3 Aug. 2007. Web. 11 Sep. 2012.

Keeping in mind the characteristics of the urban ghetto film, my interest in Ghosts is the problem with it as a documentary: first, in the close resemblance between its narrative strategy and those of the aforementioned fictional ghetto films; second, in how the employment of ghetto

film conventions serves the film’s alignment with critics of Aristide (both in Haiti and abroad) who opposed Aristide’s presidency and wished to justify the toppling of his government. To contest this historical narrative, it is necessary to explore how Ghosts is a Trojan horse of capitalist ideology fitted out with the form and style of the ghetto film; moreover, to contest the film’s representation of this historical moment, one must both acknowledge and address how the film both trades in and appeals to the stereotypes and decontextualization that accompany the visual rhetoric of contemporary Haiti. And while Ghosts is admittedly not a documentary that explicitly claims to interrogate Haiti’s history, the omissions and denials that have marked historical reflections about Haiti are manifest in the film’s telling of this recent moment. From the outset of Ghosts, questions about the way documentary film represents history—crucial questions of inclusion and omission, perspective and bias—are put to the forefront. The opening sequence, which works as an epilogue for the film’s main action, is a series of five shots (four live action and one still image). The first four shots attempt to tell a short history of Haiti by way of matching visual images with superimposed text, and the last shot is a lead-in for the human subjects of the documentary.

The sequence begins with what appears to be an artist’s representation of the untouched pre-colonial landscape; the center of the frame, in plain white text, features the following words:

“On Christmas Eve of 1492 Christopher Columbus discovered the ‘Earthly Paradise’ now called

Haiti.” The following long shot is of steep cliffs sloping down into the evening sea, accompanied by text: “In 1804, African slaves successfully revolted and Haiti became the world’s first black republic.” The cut between these shots calls to mind issues raised by Michel-Rolph Trouillot in

Silencing the Past (1996), a work that considers how “the production of historical narratives involves the uneven contribution of competing groups and individuals who have unequal access

to the means of such production” (xix). The silencing that Trouillot details—silences that are both inherent and “active, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis” (48)—is discernible in the opening sequence of Ghosts. In the omission and thus silencing of the residual effect of centuries of French colonialism, we are reminded how history is “created . . . [by] mentions or silences of various kinds or degrees” (48). When no mention is made, for example, of the ninety million gold francs paid in restitution to France by numerous post-independence

Haitian governments (restitutions of which Aristide demanded a refund of $21 billion), or of the

U.S. military occupation from 1915 to 1934 (not to mention the United States’ ongoing economic and political interests in Haiti), the centrality of inclusion and exclusion to the construction of this historical narrative is made clear. Like the fictional hood film, which, for example, shows the “drug game” without providing context about how and why crack cocaine proliferated in numerous American cities, the residual effects of the restitution and occupation are glossed over in favor of character-oriented storytelling. Moreover, as opposed to the marginalization of peripheral details due to the multitude of established facts, a process that

Trouillot refers to in his theorization of different types of silencing in historical narratives (49), the documentary’s opening sequence is marked by a paucity of information. A long shot of a beach with waves rolling in toward the wreck of a ship is accompanied by the following text: “A string of dictators and foreign trade embargoes have since left Haiti in a state of desperate poverty and political turmoil.” Here the context of Aristide’s election—as well as what David

Nicholls notes as “the continuance [in Haiti] of a relationship of economic dependence on the former metropolitan power and later on other large powers” (247)—is ignored in favor of a vague reference to the brutal and exploitative Duvalier dictatorships. An extreme long shot of downtown Port-au-Prince is the final shot in this brief history sequence, accompanied by the

following text: “In 2004, with demonstrations in the street and rebels closing in, President

Aristide and his Lavalas party enlisted the support of armed gangs from the slum of Cité Soleil.

These gangs are known as Chimeres (sic).” Whereas the opening sequence locates the narrative in time and place, the final shot introduces the reader to the film’s thesis: the relationship between the chimè and Aristide is simply that of a despot and his thugs.

Figure 3-3. “Shot from the title sequence of Ghosts of Cité Soleil.” Film still. chud.com. 28 Jun. 2007. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

The connection drawn between Aristide and the Duvalier dictatorships is particularly damning for Aristide because of the legacy of the Duvalier regime’s Tonton Macoutes, the infamous network of informers, intimidators, and violent enforcers. The opening sequence of

Ghosts implies that Haiti’s latest bogeymen are Aristide’s chimè, a claim that frames Aristide as a despot by categorizing him alongside the Duvaliers. Simply put, the history of Aristide’s leadership—including the coup attempts against his administrations and the 1996 formation of the popular, social reform-focused Fanmi Lavalas—is silenced at the same time as Aristide is posited as merely the latest in the “string of dictators” referred to in the preceding shot. In

Modernity Disavowed (2004), Sibylle Fischer argues that the silences in historical discourses

about Haiti emerge from a “fear” of the precedent set by the establishment of the world’s first independent black nation-state and result in “denial of [its] transcendence”; yet despite their powerful effect on narrative, “silence and fear are not beyond interrogation” (ix). Taking a lead from both Trouillot and Fischer, if silences have been a way of defining Haiti and its history as what Fischer recently called the “cliché of the nightmare, the basket case,” to interrogate and critique historical narratives is a way to disrupt the silences.6

The main protagonist of Ghosts is 2Pac, a chimè leader whose relatively fluent English, love of American hip-hop culture, and desire to use music to escape the ghetto provides Western audiences of the film with a sympathetic protagonist. The content and narrative design of Ghosts evoke a number of specific hood films including Boyz n the Hood (1991), South Central (1992),

Menace II Society (1993), and Clockers (1995), where the death of an angry young black man from the ghetto is instrumental to the climax of the narrative.7 The film also aligns Haitian 2Pac with his deceased American counterpart, Tupac (2Pac) Amaru Shakur.

Figure 3-4. “R.I.P., Tupac Shakur.” Photograph. reubenrebel.tumblr.com. 13. Sept. 2011. Web. 05 Mar. 2014.

A proponent of gangsta rap, which celebrates the power of the loaded gun and the trials and spoils of the “drug game,” Tupac starred in two prominent hood films, Juice (1992) and

Poetic Justice (1992). Tupac also occasionally espoused lyrics referring to the necessity for respect for women in African American communities, such as in “Brenda’s Got a Baby” (on

1991’s 2Pacalypse Now) and “Changes” (1998’s Greatest Hits), address the prevalence of gun violence and the high rate of incarceration among young black men across America. In Ghosts,

Haitian 2Pac, in an act of mimesis rather than mimicry, preserves Haiti’s politics and his own experience in a Haitian prison as a context for the Tupac-influenced rap that he composes. Even with this mimesis, 2Pac is clearly the most American subject in the documentary (particularly in contrast to both Aristide and 2Pac’s brother Bily) due to his language, which draws on African

American Vernacular English, and his Tupacesque persona as a socially and politically conscious gangster rapper.

While the uncanny presence of American Tupac as evoked by Haitian 2Pac’s speech and rap references is central to the main human subject, the documentary’s form also draws on another American hip-hop cultural product. The gun toting and drug use of 2Pac and the other chimères are presented in the manner of a gangsta rap music video. The popularity of gangsta rap, which first gained the attention of mainstream audiences through the controversial Los

Angeles–based group NWA (Niggaz with Attitude) in the late 1980s, reached its apex in the mid- to late 1990s with the American East Coast–West Coast rivalry.8 The celebration of guns, gangs, and criminal activity—now a staple subject matter of many rap artists—became visual motifs in the music videos produced to market the rappers’ album and single releases.9 A scene in Ghosts where the influence of the American gangsta rap music video comes to the fore is during the wake for 2Pac’s “soldier” Gabriel, who 2Pac claims was “killed by the cops” when the young man ventured out of Cité Soleil to downtown Port-au- Prince. For the course of this scene, documentary verisimilitude takes a backseat to high stylization. A bass-heavy hip-hop

beat plays while the chimères smoke marijuana, raise guns in the air, and dance. Shot in night vision, with the nondiegetic music sound track drowning out the diegetic sound, the form of the documentary morphs into a full-blown rap video.10

Figure 3-5. “Gabriel’s Wake.” Film still. dvdtalk.com. 20 Nov. 2007. Web. 13 May 2013.

This sequence reinforces just how deeply the form and content of Ghosts draw on both the hood film and another hip-hop cultural product, the rap video. But the filmmakers’ appropriation of the generic conventions of the hood film is not merely an aesthetic choice: it clearly shapes the film’s implicit political rhetoric about this time (the events leading up to and directly following Aristide’s removal from office) and place (the much-maligned ghetto Cité

Soleil). As Murray Forman argues, through hip-hop culture the spaces of “the ghetto, ’hood, street, and corner all surface as representations of a particular image inscribing an ideal of authenticity or ‘hardcore’ urban reality” (5). The key terms in this assertion are, of course,

“authenticity” and “reality”; hip-hop is a discourse layered with narratives purporting to tell how it “really is” in the streets. But as with the (often) fictional tales of guns, drugs, and criminality that are staple themes of rappers’ first-person narratives both in the United States and around the globe, or the stories conveyed through the American hood film and its international counterparts,

Ghosts’ presentation of the “hardcore” reality of Cité Soleil (and by extension this moment in

Haitian political history) must not be consumed as an uncontestable, “true” story.

Moreover, the Cité Soleil of Ghosts is not just another “hood” but is, as mentioned earlier, presented as the hyperghetto. This notion is reinforced by the seeming verisimilitude proposed by the documentary form: the audience is granted access to the so-called “most dangerous place on earth,” a space occupied by both Aristide’s gangsters and the film’s hero,

2Pac. Accompanying 2Pac and the other chimères as they drive through the narrow lanes of Cité

Soleil, the handheld camera captures a number of close-ups, including young men wearing bandanas and baseball caps, drinking and waving their guns at the camera, with the cuts between each shot accelerating to a frenetic, MTV-style pace. This sequence includes a staple of the contemporary hip-hop video: the attractive woman (or women) who is often positioned as both the rapper’s admirer and his object. Here a white French aid worker, Eleonore “Lele” Senlis, provides the feminine figure to the sequence’s hypermasculine content. The final shot of the wake scene features Lele resting her head against 2Pac. Shortly after, Lele and 2Pac are shown in bed together. “It’s no lie / This is 2Pac’s dream,” he raps. “Corrupt and greedy thief. President.”

After kissing Lele, 2Pac says, “Black and white, nigga, we love each other for real.” His union with Lele and his denial of Aristide are both analogous to the film’s overarching message: the

“dream” of Haiti’s future rests not with the homegrown, democratically elected president but with the foreign body’s presence and intervention.

The construction of 2Pac’s persona as gangster rapper–cum–politically conscious figure is also present in the marketing of the film. At the beginning of the most widely viewed theatrical trailer for Ghosts on YouTube, a sequence that includes a close-up shot of a handgun being loaded and pointed directly at the camera is followed shortly by a head-and- shoulders shot of

2Pac with an accompanying voice-over (“I’m a thugster, gangster”) and a rapid montage of close-up shots of hands holding guns and money: omnipresent visual signs from the hood film.

Yet by the end of the trailer, 2Pac, as the film’s primary subject, moves from gangster rapper to a voice for the people of Cité Soleil: “What we need, we need peace. We don’t want to fight each other. We don’t want people to die in Cité Soleil—we die of hunger already, what, we’re going die by arms now?”

Figure 3-6. “Tupac’s Confessional.” Film still. veevr.com. n.d. Web. 13 May 2014.

The link between Haitian 2Pac and Tupac is made further explicit when Haitian 2Pac raps along to “Never B Peace,” a track included on the posthumously released album Better Dayz

(2002). Turning to the camera, Haitian 2Pac enthusiastically raps the following lyrics: “I know there’ll never be peace / That’s why I keep my pistol when I walk the streets / ’cause there can never be peace.” The significance of these lyrics in the film’s diegesis is unnerving: the last stand by the chimères will lead to more bloodshed and violence, with 2Pac’s death allegedly coming months later at the hands of fellow chimères leader Thomas “Labanye” Robinson. Like the

American Tupac’s murder on a street in Las Vegas, the tragedy of Haitian 2Pac’s life and death

enables pathos for the “gangster with a heart of gold.” By including the rough details of Haitian

2Pac’s death in the film’s epilogue, the hood film narrative cinema elements of Ghosts become even more pronounced. Therefore, when we consider the visual rhetoric and filmic narrative strategy that I have highlighted thus far, Ghosts is not about the investigation of a complicated moment in Haiti’s history. Instead, like a number of mass-distributed films from the global South that imitate the American hood film, Ghosts relegates to a distant background the political and socioeconomic conditions that give rise to slums, favelas, shantytowns, and barrios. But this might not be the most insidious element of the global South hood film. Barbara Mennel argues that these films also “fetishize the violence of the ghetto at the cost of low-budget films that more subtly address issues of urban poverty. [This fetishization] not only creates a misconception about the urban poor in specific Third World countries, but also lends itself to seeing entire Third World countries as ghettos” (169).

Figure 3-7. “Kids run through the slums of Mumbai.” Film still. Deep-focus.com. 12 Dec. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

The fetishization of violence and seeing “entire Third World countries as ghettos” are especially explicit elements of Ghosts’ visual rhetoric; Cité Soleil, with its history and residents

glossed over in favor of the story of gun-toting gangsters, becomes a substitute for Haiti as a whole. Because of this narrow focus and lack of context, the entire country, not just Cité Soleil, becomes the “most dangerous place on earth.” The lack of distinction between Cité Soleil and the rest of Haiti is not merely a subtext made apparent by a close reading of the film but an overt part of the film’s marketing. On the back cover of the DVD version, there is a short synopsis of the film, the second line of which states that the “reality of life today in Haiti unfolds before us as we get to know two brothers and their stories intimately”; the last line of the synopsis claims that “speaking the language of violence and knowing that staying alive in Haiti is a very day-today proposition” (italics mine). In the film’s title and the generalizations about Haiti made on the

DVD’s back cover, Cité Soleil and its reputation—a set of stereotypes perpetuated by proclamations such as the one emblazoned on the DVD’s front cover (“the most dangerous place on earth”)—become representative of Haiti as a whole.

Figure 3-8. “DVD cover image for Ghosts.” r1db.com. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

While endorsing the naming of Cité Soleil as “the most dangerous place on earth” is a marketing attempt to appeal to audiences who are interested in taking part in a poverty tour tinged with extreme violence from the comfort of a cinema or living room, to critique this choice is to consider how naming plays into the discourse of contemporary Haiti. In Edgework (2005)

Wendy Brown calls for a “local criticism” that seeks specificity rather than attempting to

overhaul an imagined social totality: for example, the neoliberal economic policies and practices that continue Western imperialism in the global South. Brown asserts that “naming practices” are

“among the objects of local criticism; interrogation, challenge, discernment, and displacement are among its actions” (viii). In a parody titled “How to Write about Haiti,” the journalist Ansel

Herz aims his own “local” critique at the naming practices employed by the foreign media in

Haiti:

Today, Cité Soleil is the most dangerous slum in the world. There is no need to back up this claim with evidence. It is “sprawling.” Again, there’s no time for the thesaurus. Talk about ruthless gangs, bullet holes, pigs and trash. Filth everywhere. Desperate people are eating cookies made of dirt and mud! That always grabs the reader’s attention.

Although Herz is addressing the print and television media coverage in post-earthquake

Port-au-Prince, the repeated journalistic tropes that he mentions could be used to describe the visual rhetoric repeatedly employed in setting the scene of Ghosts as “the most dangerous place on earth.” The repeated use of visual imagery of spectacular poverty, particularly presented as it is in high-speed montages, evokes the stylized sequences of the immensely internationally popular Slumdog Millionaire and City of God: adrenaline-inducing filmmaking that would not be out of place in the mainstream action film genre. But rather than the visceral thrill coming via a rapidly edited car chase or bank heist shoot-out, in Ghosts the audience gets a thrill ride through an exotic ghetto via stylized documentary footage, where Vodou practitioners blow smoke, children play in the dirt and rubble, and shirtless young black men brandish high-powered M16 rifles. The fundamental visual and aural elements of the U.S. hood film—guns, drug use and dealing, rap music, American slang—feature prominently in the story of an archetypal protagonist: the young black man unable to escape a sordid urban environment. In Ghosts the comparison with the American hood film is especially pronounced because of Haitian 2Pac’s simulation of the rapper and hood film star Tupac Shakur. Again, like the hood film, which can

be read as a left-wing critique of social inequality in the North American city in the wake of

Reaganomics and associated social policies, these details are used to indict a political leader; inversely, in Ghosts they are used to mount a conservative critique of a left-wing president.

Figure 3-9. “City of God movie poster.” blog.utc.edu. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

Moreover, as with narrative cinema that uses a ghetto in a major city as a primary location, including films like City of God and Slumdog Millionaire (as well as the American hood films), the Cité Soleil of Ghosts is a space marked by the superlative: like the slums of these narrative cinema films, Cité Soleil is the poorest, the most violent, the most overcrowded.

The slum is, in a word, the worst, a space worthy of both pity for its abjectness and derision for its criminality.11 The presentation of the slum as an exceptional space is taken to the extreme with this “most dangerous place on earth,” where audiences are shown images that reemphasize the idea of Haiti as “basket case”: alongside shots depicting the impoverishment and lack of basic resources, Ghosts contains a series of shots depicting bodies covered by blankets, fires

blazing in the streets, armed and balaclava-wearing young men, and raucous, violent mobs. The pointless violence depicted in the American hood film is taken to its absurd extreme in Ghosts, where the chimères attempt a futile stand for an already deposed leader, Aristide.

Figure 3-10. “Embattled” President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. blackpressusa.com. n.d. Web. 11 Mar. 2014.

Emphasizing the impoverishment and violence that mark the slum of narrative cinema, the film exposes the viewer to the plight of infants and children. In City of God the teenage gangsters force a very young boy to shoot his friend; in another non-U.S. ghetto film, Tsotsi, the infant who has inadvertently been kidnapped by a young black South African gangster during a carjacking intensifies the division between the middle-class suburbs and the shantytowns.

Likewise, in one brief scene in Ghosts, where 2Pac is explaining how he has come to have a car and a laissez-passer (permit) that allows him to drive throughout the city, two young boys sit in the backseat holding large, high-powered rifles. In another shot, we see a newborn child, who has not yet had his umbilical cord tied, being carried upside down by his feet by a nurse. Along

with many of the images in the film, there is little explication. Who are the children? Are they

2Pac’s youngest soldiers? His relatives? Is the newborn dying? However, what these singular images do is contribute to the visual rhetoric of the intrinsically chaotic Haiti, a mess of a state that cannot protect or care for its most vulnerable citizens. One might argue that in these images, the director Asger Leth is showing us “how it really is” (a view repeatedly expressed in the comments section below the streamed version of Ghosts that is available on YouTube). A number of these online comments praise the risk and effort involved in an “outsider” visiting

Cité Soleil and documenting the chimè. Certainly the outsider can provide a valuable lens. In his praise of an outsider’s depiction of Palestinian life, Edward Said draws attention to the value of intrepid journalism:

Like Joseph Conrad’s Marlow he is tugged at by the forgotten places and people of the world, those who don’t make it on to our television screens, or if they do, are regularly portrayed as marginal, unimportant, perhaps even negligible were it not for their nuisance value which . . . seems impossible to get rid of. (iv)

I quote from Said at length because what he later determines as central to an outsider’s representation—the ability to “unostentatiously transmit a great deal of information, the human context and historical events that have reduced [people] to their present state” (iv)—is precisely what Ghosts lacks. The film’s narrative strategy deals in an uncontextualized visual language: the shots of the anonymous black faces; the bird’s-eye view of the “sprawling” expanse of Cité

Soleil; the soldiers searching the corrugated- iron-lined alleyways; the conversation between the gang leader and the American-based Haitian music superstar; the corrupt police officer handing the wanted gang leader travel documents; the chimères’ food distribution conducted at gunpoint.

Additionally, the audience is informed that Haiti is a two-hour flight from Florida, yet little of the relationship between these neighboring nations is explored. Concluding his appraisal of

Ghosts, Charles Hinton claims that “the United States is the real ghost in this film—it simply

does not exist.” And while the Haitian Revolution, which, as Susan Buck-Morss argues, “lies at the crossroads of multiple discourses as a defining moment in world history” (13) and led to the

“phenomenon called Haiti” (12), the filmmakers peddle a narrative that both denies Haiti’s place in universal history and marginalizes the country as a “basket case.”

Furthermore, the film’s visual rhetoric is constructed through images that reify Haiti as not only a mad but also a diseased (and dying) nation-state. Through the montages that repeatedly show the dead bodies that are literally piling up under the rule of Aristide, the narrative also makes explicit a common trope in Western representations of Haiti: the images that J. Michael Dash identifies as “the rebellious body, the repulsive body, the seductive body and the sick body,” which “constitute a consistent discourse that has fixed Haiti in the Western imagination: the ‘Haitianizing’ of Haiti as unredeemably deviant” (137). To demonstrate how this film uses the notion of the “deviant” and “seductive” body, I turn to an early scene in the documentary. 2Pac speaks on the phone in Kreyol with his younger brother; in the following shot, 2Pac, framed by a handheld medium close-up, is interviewed in the dark: a setting used for

2Pac’s confessionals throughout the film. Directly addressing the camera in English, 2Pac, shirtless and smoking marijuana, laughs at his younger brother’s political aspirations. “Bily wants to be the president, you know, of Haiti,” 2Pac says. There is a jump cut to a shot of Bily, sitting on the side of the road, before returning to 2Pac’s piece de camera. “Fuck Haiti, man,”

2Pac continues. “But my brother, I respect him. I respect him anyway.” The juxtaposition of

2Pac—who by stating “Fuck Haiti” is made clearly identifiable as a critic of both Aristide and

Haiti as a whole—and the pro-Lavalas Bily is particularly striking here. The film’s protagonist dismisses Haiti, while the representative of Lavalas becomes the political Other: secondary, unrealistic, and idealistic.

Cutting to another handheld shot, the camera follows Bily as he walks into one of the makeshift shanties that provide the vast majority of housing in Cité Soleil. Approaching a young woman, Bily puts his finger, with the rest of his hand fashioned to resemble a gun, to her temple, while telling her, “You steal something, pow, you die!” Shortly after, a head-and-shoulders shot shows Bily talking as he drives on the outskirts of Cité Soleil. “If you are a rich man, you are supposed to help the poor people,” Bily says. “If you see the life of people here—no house to sleep in, no job, no water, nothing to eat, no money to pay school for the children—but they have a gun. What do you think they can do? People of Cité Soleil have nobody to speak for them.

There is only Aristide.”

Figure 3-11. “Promotional poster for Ghosts.” imdb.com. n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

In professing crude socialist ideals backed by the threat of menace and violence, Bily not only is depicted as a direct representative for Aristide, but in fact is also positioned as the stand- in for the president throughout the film. 2Pac, on the other hand, with his disdain for Aristide—

despite his seemingly contradictory leadership of pro-Aristide chimè—and his desire to leave the ghetto (not to mention Haiti), is positioned as the film’s heroic and tragic figure.

Figure 3-12. “Haitian 2Pac and Lele.” reelingreviews.com. n.d. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

Furthermore, there is value in reading how 2Pac, Bily, and the Haitianized body—

“rebellious,” “deviant,” and “seductive”—are presented on the cover of the DVD. Due to the film’s relatively limited theatrical release, the DVD cover is the primary textual element that a large portion of the film’s audience would have encountered before seeing the film. The cover is a paratext: the “zone,” as Gérard Genette argues, “between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public” (2).12 The images on the Ghosts cover are indexical of both the film’s appeal to

Western audiences as poverty pornography and its conservative attack on Aristide and the socialist Fanmi Lavalas movement. The cover’s central image is of a shirtless 2Pac, gripping the large semiautomatic rifle that he totes in a number of the scenes in the documentary. Eight smaller images surround the image of 2Pac, mostly from the film: Bily pointing a gun at a group of people (this comes from a sequence that depicts the distribution of aid in Cité Soleil); one of

Wyclef Jean talking on the phone; a partial shot, focused on the breasts, of a young woman in a

low-cut dress; and a still of 2Pac, sitting on a bed, his arm draped across Lele, the French aid worker.

In keeping with the thematic conventions of the hood film, the visual rhetoric of the cover conveys violence, sex, and danger—2Pac’s black body, the muscles of his torso cartoonlike in their definition, grips the gun low, around his midsection, the barrel evoking a phallus—while immortalizing 2Pac, the film’s anti-Aristide hero. Together these seductive bodies are employed to reify the notion of a deviant Haiti where sex and violence are intertwined and where representatives of Lavalas (the chimè) are shown to engage in criminal activity. A close reading of a paratextual element like the film’s DVD cover allows one to consider audience reception as it might occur in the doorway to the film text proper: in the matching together on the back cover of an image of a shirtless young black man carrying an M16 rifle and the accompanying text that describes the film—“the reality of life today in Haiti”—the cover is where the film’s (potential) audience is first exposed to the claims made through the documentary’s visual language.

The filmic rhetoric of Ghosts—expressed through the arrangement of cutting and editing—presents Aristide as a corrupt president who abandoned his people. Director Asger

Leth’s weltanschauung is made particularly apparent in a number of sequences in the film (not all of which I have the opportunity to reference within this essay) that include the uncritical use of the voice-over of an American newsreader pronouncing that Aristide “resigned” and “fled into exile,” two assertions that were put into doubt long before the documentary’s postproduction.

Another sequence, which was also used for the film’s theatrical trailer, shows a medium close-up shot of Aristide speaking to a number of assembled journalists. Aristide says that “today, in

Haiti, we have terrorists, drug dealers, [and] criminals acting and killing innocent people.”

Because the shot is used later in the documentary, after the case against Aristide is developed

through the narrative’s repeated suggestion that the chimères and their violent activities are under the direct command of Aristide, one takes its inclusion as demonstrating the embattled president’s hypocrisy and dishonesty. Continuing the film’s depiction of a maniacal Aristide, this shot is followed by a long shot of an unidentified body lying in a pool of blood, bringing to mind

Dash’s use of the “sick body” as a metaphor for the Haitianized subject.

Figure 3-13. “Burning body.” Film still. Deep-focus.com. 12 Dec. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

But it is not just the editing of the narrative, where images of Aristide are regularly intercut with random images of horrific violence, which makes perceptible the film’s position on

Aristide and his aborted presidency. As its primary witness against the president, the filmmakers employ the testimony of André “Andy” Apaid. One of Haiti’s largest employers, Apaid had criticized Aristide’s doubling of the minimum wage in 1991 during Aristide’s first presidential term, a tenure that ended with a coup orchestrated by the disgruntled military and elites and backed by the United States. Due to the conditions in the apparel factories that Apaid owns and runs, he has been described as the “biggest sweat-shop operator in Haiti” (Sanders 42). At the time of his appearance in Ghosts, Apaid’s factory workers were “reportedly paid only a paltry,

slave-wage salary of 68 cents a day” (42). During his appearance as one of the film’s few talking heads, Apaid tells an unsubstantiated anecdote about a female public official who, according to

Apaid, was murdered because she refused to shake the hand (at Aristide’s request) of a gang leader. If the filmmakers’ bias was not already reinforced through decisions regarding the editing and scope of the documentary, the inclusion of Apaid as the expert on the Aristide situation will, in an audience familiar with Aristide’s removal from office, elicit feelings of “anger and frustration” in the viewer, especially when Ghosts turns to a practitioner of domestic exploitation in Haiti today as its key expert.13

Figure 3-14. “Andy Apaid.” globalresearch.ca. Photograph. 22 Feb. 2014. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

Despite the film’s overt glamorization of violence and its omission of views countering those of the anti-Aristide “experts,” a number of critics in the mainstream press, echoing the aforementioned views expressed in the comments section of YouTube, praised the film. In his enthusiastic endorsement of Ghosts, David Adams of the Saint Petersburg Times, in perhaps the most egregious display of uncritical engagement with the film, reifies degrading and dehumanizing stereotypes about Haiti and Haitians by stating that Cité Soleil is a “rabbit warren” that symbolizes “everything that is wrong” with Haiti. In the same review, the director Asger

Leth claims that he wrote a “storyline [that was] pretty clear” on the day that he met Lele and

Bily, an admission that shows the confluence of narrative cinema and documentary film at work in Ghosts. Although Duncan Campbell, a writer for the Guardian, acknowledges that there are problems with the film’s contextualization, he proceeds to conflate one part of Port-au-Prince and the city as a whole by stating that Ghosts “communicates much of the baleful nature of life in this corner of the country.” But this is not the most disquieting element of Campbell’s review.

Quoting from an interview with Leth, who claims that in making the film he “didn’t want to get swallowed up by the news,” Campbell concludes his piece by asserting that Ghosts “could be a start of the recollection” of Haiti’s history. (The notion that Ghosts could be a point of origin for understanding Haiti’s history is a deeply troubling one.) In contrast, Peter Bradshaw, also writing in the Guardian, directly addresses the film’s political subtext. Bradshaw argues that Ghosts is both “politically and morally illiterate” and accuses the director of being “utterly incurious about the context of the Chimères, and the people that created them.”14

Figure 3-15. The so-called “rabbit warren,” Cité Soleil (photo courtesy of the author).

By extension of the blinkered directorial vision articulated by Bradshaw, Ghosts is also an attempt to show another crisis in Haiti where foreign intervention is deemed simply necessary. Throughout the twentieth century, Haiti has been described repeatedly and

consistently as a state in crisis. In contemporary usage, the term “crisis” has expanded to include a plethora of locales and contexts: psychological distress is described as a “personal crisis”; the recent failure of parts of the capitalist market, both in the United States and internationally, is deemed an “economic crisis”; impoverished communities in countries around the world are referred to as “humanitarian crises.” The notion of crisis demanding immediate and drastic intervention is part of the word’s etymology. The term is derived from the Greek krisis, which has its roots as a medical term for the period when critical decisions need to be made, by mandating, for example, medical intervention on the injured or diseased body (Nadal 3).15

Aristide’s critics could argue that the appropriate intervention for the Haitian body politic took place in February 2004. Aristide, they might claim, was an ineffectual leader willing to subvert the rule of law to stay in power, and the militia provided a critical correction by promulgating the conditions for his departure from office. However, to persuasively argue this position, one would have to not only consider (in detail) the historical context of Aristide as a leader who came to power in the particularly politically unstable post–Duvalier/Tonton Macoutes era but also interrogate the motivation of Aristide’s opponents and detractors. Ghosts fails to address these two issues. Rather, the film’s visual rhetoric reifies preconceived notions of Haiti, makes generalizations about the country’s history, and silences important contextualization about this

“moment of crisis.”

As mentioned earlier, crises in Haiti have been used to justify both foreign and domestic- driven intervention, whether with the U.S. military’s occupation or through Haiti’s own brutal dictators, who lined their pockets at the expense of the Haitian people. While the narrative that

Ghosts presents about this moment concerns 2Pac and his chimères, the silenced historical discourse concerns how the combined effort of Haiti’s elite and a militia trained outside Haiti

succeeded in removing a president who had repeatedly threatened the elite through economic reforms designed to help the country’s poor majority. Rather than contextualizing the history of

U.S. intervention in Haiti’s political sphere, the film simplistically portrays the 2004 coup d’état as a conflict between Aristide, the leader from the slum with untenable socialist beliefs who has been corrupted by power, and the conservative members of the Haitian elite and the leaders of the anti-Aristide militia as those, along with the elite, who have Haiti’s “best interests” at heart.

Furthermore, when the film glorifies 2Pac as a ghetto gangster caught up in a larger political struggle, the audience is left to reflect on the ethics of Aristide, whom the film posits as the manipulator of the thugs: a leader from the slums who gave rise to (2Pac’s) gang violence that spilled out of the slums into the schools, businesses, and downtown streets of Port-au-Prince.

Figure 3-16. “2Pac’s soldiers.” Film still. totalfilm.com. 12 Dec. 2010. Web. 28 Apr. 2014.

By linking the notions of crisis and intervention in the context of Ghosts, to critique the film is to stage no less than an intervention on the past as it is written in a text, pick it apart, and challenge the film’s representation of recent history, demonstrating that Haiti’s future need not be

foreclosed by the way its recent past is represented at a critical historical moment. By staging a critical intervention on the presentation of Haiti in Ghosts of Cité Soleil as a nation-state paralyzed by violence propagated by Aristide for political ends, one can show how the future can be transformed by what we do in the present about historical representations of the past.16

Moreover, by critically engaging with Ghosts, a text that not only peddles simplistic explanations about this historical moment but also panders to stereotypes about Haiti and Haitians, my intent is to show that this kind of visual rhetoric should not go uncontested.

Notes

1 This article developed out of papers delivered at the University of Texas, Austin’s “Postcolonial Actualities: Past and Present” conference in October 2009, the University of Florida’s English Graduate Organization’s 2010 conference, and the “Haiti and the Americas: Histories, Cultures, Imaginations” conference, October 21–22, 2010, at Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton. 2 Conversation with Dr. Amy Abugo Ongiri, faculty member in the Department of English and Film and Media Studies at the University of Florida. 3 It is worth reflecting on Wyclef Jean’s involvement with a film with such a clearly anti-Aristide agenda in light of his aborted run for the Haitian presidency in 2010. 4 See Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy (dir. Renée Bergan and Mark Schuller, 2009) for a documentary that explores and contextualizes economic conditions in Haiti. Also, Haiti: Democracy Undone (dir. Peter Bull, 2006) explores how American NGOs were complicit in Aristide’s removal from office. 5 As Mennel rightly points out, the American fictional feature films can be read as responses to discourses on urbanity in the United States in the late 1980s: taking into consideration the socioeconomic conditions, national and local politics, ethnic demographics, and urban geography. This, too, is true of Tsotsi and City of God, both of which evoke questions of the stark disparity of wealth and resources in the megalopolises of the global South. 6 Comments made at the “Haiti and the Americas: Histories, Cultures, Imaginations” conference. 7 See Forman for a detailed critical analysis of the “hood film” genre. 8 This rivalry became more charged after Tupac’s inflammatory lyrics about the renowned New York City rapper Notorious B.I.G. 9 See the video for NWA’s single “Straight Outta Compton” for an archetypal example of the gangster rap video.

10 Gabriel’s wake begins with a search for a generator, which, like an earlier argument between the chimères over the lack of guns, shows that Cité Soleil’s scarcity of resources also applies to its gangsters. 11 I explore this idea of the slum as a space marked by the superlative in “Urban, Rural, or Someplace Else?” 12 In “Urban, Rural, or Someplace Else?” I also apply Genette’s theory of the paratext to a different kind of “slum” cinema, Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009).

12 From a conversation with J. Michael Dash in Boca Raton, Florida. Dash watched the film at a cinema in New York City during the U.S. release. Incidentally, the film led to Asger Leth having the opportunity to direct a Hollywood feature film, Man on a Ledge (2012). 13 I am constrained by space to limit my analysis of the many reviews of Ghosts available on the Internet. While some of the reviews do touch on the more problematic issue of this supposed documentary, many reviewers appear to be enamored with the access the filmmakers had to the gangs and the slum, which leads them to pay less attention to the lack of contextualization in the framing of Aristide as a corrupt politician. 14 In addition to its origin as a medical term, the word “crisis” shares an etymological basis with “critique” through the Greek krisis; while the word “critique” evokes the notion of separating and “picking apart,” it also means “‘to choose,’ ‘to judge,’ and ‘to decide’” (Nadal 3). 15 The most recent “authoritative” account of Haiti’s history, Laurent Dubois’s Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (2012), omits a meaningful consideration of Aristide and his deposition. Since the 2010 earthquake, Aristide has returned to Haiti, and he is still revered as a (potential) leader amongst certain segments of the rural and urban poor in Haiti.

CHAPTER 4 PORT-AU-PRINCE IS NEW ORLEANS: RACE, SPACE, AND SPECTACULAR ABJECTION

Visual media is central to the ways that Western audiences interpret the relationship between race, space, and contemporary environmental disaster. Images from Hurricane Katrina’s effect on New Orleans in August 2005 and the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake in Port- au-Prince satisfy Western audiences’ desire to view the abject other, those in wretched and degraded circumstances. (I selected the 2010 earthquake—rather than one of the hurricanes that regularly batter Haiti—because of the level of media attention that the country received because of the disaster.) These two cities, which are linked through French imperialism in the Americas, related religious practice, the legacy of slavery, and migration from post-revolution Port-au-

Prince to New Orleans, drew international attention as news of the disasters spread through various mediums, from mainstream television news reports to online social media. Prior to these disasters, alongside their shared French colonial history, both cities frequently have been framed in terms of the superlative. Poet Jean-Claude Martineau contends that Haiti is the only country in the world with a last name: “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.” New Orleans, too, has long been seen as a regional outlier. As Dan Baum states, the city “was by almost any metric the worst city in America—the deepest poverty, the most murders, the worst schools, the sickest economy” (xii). Hurricane Katrina was a Category 5 storm that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin called the natural disaster “that most of us have long feared” (Nagin qtd in Havrilesky). One of the costliest—in terms of both human life and property—natural disasters in U.S. history,

Hurricane Katrina created a storm surge that breached 53 levees, leaving the majority of the city under water and federal agencies stumbling in their initial rescue attempts. Six and a half years later, on 12 January 2010, Port-au-Prince faced a similarly devastating natural catastrophe: a magnitude 7.0 earthquake with an epicenter just 16 miles outside the city. The earthquake, which

revealed the instability of a large amount of residential and commercial buildings in Haiti’s capital, resulted in a death toll that, according to the Columbia Journalism Review, ranges anywhere from 46,000 (from a United States Agency for International Development report) to

316,000, which was reported by the Haitian government (O’Connor).

Figure 4-1. Living on the edges in Port-au-Prince, July 2014 (photo courtesy of the author).

Neither city has fully recovered from the traumatic events, and for many the stories of tranblemandeté (the Haitian term for the earthquake) and Hurricane Katrina came through a series of visual fragments freely available on the Internet: an image of unnamed people on makeshift beds and stretchers; a doctor treating lacerations on the arm of a small child; and, of course, the face-down, dead bodies on concrete, metal, and dirt. Thus, my focus on the still image over the moving image of the body has much to do with the way new media enables the rapid and relatively cheap production and circulation of the static image (via Twitter’s TwitPic platform, or, for example, the attaching of digital photographs to Facebook statuses). Moreover,

despite the awareness of manipulation of the image—from basic cropping to full Photoshop alterations—one only needs to visit the comments section of any news website story adorned with images to see how the notion persists of the photograph as unalterable truth, indisputable evidence, and, most important, an objective “window into the world.”

Throughout his critique of the Marxist/cultural studies emphasis on the “conditions” of photographic production, Simon Watney opposes the notion of the photograph as objective truth.

Watney states that we, with almost instant access to a plethora of images of both events via a

Google search, need “to understand the many means by which photography punctuates the look of the world into a series of discontinuous signs—photographs—which are none-the-less endlessly offered as images of totality, merely divided into moments” (143—144). This essay focuses on the tension between the perceived “totality” of the photographic image and the visceral effect on the viewer caused by spectacular representation of the bodies (the swollen corpse, the orphaned child) in and around these two cities. While Susan Sontag asserts that the

“Western memory museum is now mostly a visual one,” this does not mean that this vast collective archive offers coherent accounts of complex historical events, such as what happened in Port-au-Prince in 2010 and New Orleans in 2005. More exactly, photographs can further perpetuate misconceptions about complex moments of crisis. I will explore how various theorists of visual culture offer different levers for discussing the photographic representations of the aforementioned disasters. In particular, in the context of New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, this article considers the crucial role that photographs in representing the abject other, how these photographs serve particular rhetorical ends, and the way these images are produced and circulated.1 The article concludes with a focus on Haiti, the photographic representations of the

post-earthquake National Palace, and how that plays into a narrative of a helpless “NGO

Republic of Haiti” (Klarreich and Polman).

Figure 4-2. “Hurricane Katrina Five Years Later.” Photograph. blogs.sacbee.com. 24 Aug. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

However, it is important to first clarify my definition of a central component to this work: audience. Affixing the adjective “Western” to describe this audience could, quite rightly, be considered problematic; after all, Haiti is only a two-hour flight from the United States, and it is clearly situated within the geographical confines of the Western hemisphere. Moreover, a demarcation between Haiti and the West could evoke the epistemology of writing Haiti out of the Americas (and, indeed, out of global history), while also removing the agency of Haitians as critical viewers of the way Haiti has been depicted by and for non-Haitians. Likewise, what constitutes a distant, Western audience when the objects being viewed—such as images of disaster in New Orleans—are within the United States is problematic. Therefore, perhaps the more appropriate adjective for this audience is not only outsider but also privileged, due largely to the fact that they are not directly affected by ecological disasters. The photographic image is central not only how these events are displayed for outsiders, but also in satisfying (to adapt

Susan Sontag’s term) that audience’s desire to view the abject other. These two urban spaces,

Port-au-Prince and New Orleans, had their disasters told in wretched visual fragments: blood and dust smeared together on a hand reaching out from the rubble of a collapsed concrete room; the unwashed and shirtless man handcuffed outside the stadium-cum-refugee camp; the United

Nations armored vehicle patrolling near children perched on the edge of ravines filled with trash and human waste; the family perched on the roof of a decrepit home further ravaged by the storm and semi-submerged by dank waters.

Figure 4-3. “Haitian woman being pulled from the rubble in downtown Port-au-Prince.” Photograph. africaw.com. n.d. Web. 14 Apr. 2014.

The primary content of these images is not the all-encompassing damage wrought by a storm or hurricane, but the human subject stripped bare and made abject. The visual rhetoric of these disasters is littered with bodies: living, dead, and somewhere in-between. In the case of

New Orleans these bodies were very often black, while in the case of Port-au-Prince, they were nearly always black. What links these bodies is not just skin color, but also the fact that their struggle to survive is viewable for outsiders on laptops, cellphones, and television screens;

moreover, these bodies occupy cities-as-liminal spaces where the division between life and death is much too close. Even from afar, the dying are the ultimate other; as Michel de Certeau asserts, the “dying are outcasts because they are deviants in an institution [in these cases the city space] organized by and for the conservation of life” (190–1). At these moments, Port-au-Prince and

New Orleans are united by their so-called inherent dysfunction: Dan Baum argues that one could start “thinking of [New Orleans] as the best-organized city in the Caribbean” (xi). In public discourse, the superlative is frequently invoked when describing these cities—the most corrupt, impoverished, and disempowered— and is backed up by a visual evidence: collapsed building, poorly clothed bodies, and all the other markers of the city on life support.

Moreover, the comparison between New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, which was made on platforms as diverse as The American Conservative and the San Francisco Bayview, emerged long before the devastation of the earthquake. After Katrina, Edwidge Danticat spoke of the link between Haiti’s capital and “The Big Easy,” suggesting that New Orleans looked more like Haiti than the rest of the U.S.: “It’s hard for those of us who are from places like Freetown or Port-au-

Prince not to wonder why the so-called developed world needs so desperately to distance itself from us,” Danticat asserts, “especially at a time when an unimaginable tragedy shows exactly how much alike we are” (qtd. in Flaherty). The thin line between first and third-world was underscored throughout Spike Lee’s documentary When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four

Acts (2006), but perhaps no more succinctly than when an “airport official defends the government’s efforts to get people out of New Orleans, and ‘back to civilization’” (Campbell and Leduff 212). The sheer volume of images reflects the extent of the carnage and how it transformed the bodies of those caught in its wake: from the rotting corpse dangling from a gate on a washed-out New Orleans street to the bodies of Haitian children piled upon one another in

the bed of a pickup truck. To discuss the spectacle of catastrophe in Port-au-Prince and New

Orleans requires one to address a range of interconnected contexts, including race, geography, history, and poverty.

Figure 4-4. “Those remaining in the Superdome.” Photograph. blogs.sacbee.com. 24 Aug. 2010. Web. 07 Apr. 2014.

The comparison between Port-au-Prince and New Orleans is based primarily on two aspects: First, the physical conditions under which the two seemingly separate populations—one first-world and the other third-world—live; second, how African Americans in New Orleans were framed in similar (specifically visual) ways to Haitians in Port-au-Prince: partaking in violence and other forms of deviance and criminality, evidenced by the false reports about multiple rapes in the Superdome and numerous marauding, gun-toting gangs in Port-au-Prince.

From CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s televised reports to online articles from New York Times writers “on the ground,” Haitians and black New Orleanians alike were repeatedly described as being involved in looting; however, as Katy Welter outlines in “The Myth of Disaster Looting,” this flies in the face of research regarding human reaction and response to natural disaster.

Welter states that numerous studies show that “looting is rare—an exception to the rule of

communities’ pro-social responses to disaster. Despite fears to the contrary, disaster triggers altruism and cooperation while suppressing criminal behavior.” In New Orleans city leaders did little to combat the stereotypes about individuals affected by disaster.

New Orleans’ Mayor Ray Nagin stated that there had been murders and rapes in the

Superdome, a falsehood that was repeated over and over again in news coverage, helping fuel aggressive police tactics and fear in the city (Shankman). In Port-au-Prince, audiences around the globe were told by The New York Times, CNN, and numerous other outlets that violence and looting in Port-au-Prince was “intensifying,” while one of the leaders of the U.S. relief effort, Lt.

General Ken Keen claimed “that the level of violence that we see right now is below and at pre- earthquake levels” (qtd. in Ripley). While I do not mean to claim that there was no looting or other criminal activity, it is important to acknowledge two important facts: first, many people in

New Orleans and Port-au-Prince were gathering goods in order to survive; second, hearsay and media hyperbole clearly contributed to a distorted understanding of conditions “on the ground” in the wake of these crises.

Photography contributes directly to the aforementioned sensationalized reportage. In a couple of highly publicized photographs taken in New Orleans and published by major news outlets, whites wading through the water with goods were described as “survivors” finding goods, while blacks doing the same were “looters.” Guy Uriel-Charles, a Haitian-American law professor at Duke University, gave that particular image as an example when comparing representations of black residents of Port-au-Prince and New Orleans, asserting that the term looter as “a description that is void of empathy for someone who is consciously or sub- consciously viewed as ‘the other.’ Tragically, it fits into the stereotype [an animal; wanton and depraved] that many have about people of African descent, be they African-Americans or

Haitian-Americans.” Simply put, the use of the term “looter” to accompany images presupposed criminal behavior in those traversing the wrecked streets of Port-au-Prince and New Orleans.

Figure 4-5. “White people ‘FIND’/Black People‘LOOT.’” Photograph and text. everythingsoul.com. n.d. Web. 10 Jul. 2014.

Addressing the way that photographs can contribute to misunderstandings about humanitarian crises, I draw on Guy Debord’s claim that images are “detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished.

Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation.” Debord’s position is that the image falsely purports to reveal “reality” when in fact it is the “concrete inversion of life”; we are lulled into contemplating the singular image as an objective record of the world rather than a fragment broken off from “life.” But this does not mean that photographs hold no intrinsic value; on the contrary, these fragments are the basis for a critique of how abjection in the global south is written for Western audiences.

Specifically, visual representations of these cities in crisis make us uncomfortable because they make visible the porous membrane border between “us” and “them.” Post-earthquake Port-au-

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Prince reminds us of Katrina; post-storm New Orleans disclosed the sorts of governmental failure, massive divide between rich and poor, and seemingly insurmountable natural disaster that are “characteristic” of countries like Haiti, not the wealthiest country in the world. The realities of the third-world seeps into the first through events like Katrina, an uneasy reminder of the tenuous and finite nature of superpowers. Inherent in this sense of unease is a voyeuristic pleasure, which directly related to viewing the fluid border between the world’s wealthiest nation and its black sheep cousin.

Figure 4-6. Mural in downtown Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of the author).

After the earthquake, Haiti had its other entrenched stereotypes—inherently violent, eternally poverty stricken, and essentially failed—reified through images circulated globally.

What Wendy Hesford calls the “spectacle of suffering” (19) was pushed to its limits in post- earthquake Haiti, and not just because of the ample opportunity and willingness to show the dead and dying, wrecked buildings, and other staple elements of those third-world disaster narratives favored by Western television broadcasts. Various platforms—personal and mainstream media- affiliated blogs, Twitter, and Facebook—put images of a so-called “broken Nation,” to adopt

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Phillipe Girard’s sensationalized term, on full display. Depending on the medium, disaster in

Haiti was put forth to be commented upon, shared, liked, reposted, and retweeted. This massive exposure of Haitian bodies (crushed by concrete, scrambling for food and water, shot by police, covered by dust and dirt, clambering across ravines filled with trash and human waste) and

Western audiences’ voracious (if short-lived) desire to “see more,” calls to mind Frantz Fanon’s reflection on the white gaze upon the black body. This gaze, Fanon asserts, “had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories . . . [and] all the time they were clamoring for more”

(91). Both beguiling and wretched, these images of natural disaster in Haiti elicited responses of pity, disgust, and voyeuristic pleasure: for Western audiences, Haiti was framed as the archetypal abject nation. Fanon’s naming of a thousand “stories” could be updated for the potential of today’s Internet age, where a dizzyingly number of “details, anecdotes, and stories” is the norm: social media allows stories to abound, expand, and circulate without end.

Take, for example, the case of Paul Shirley, the former National Basketball Association player, who, in embracing the worst stereotypes about Haiti, wrote a widely circulated blog post where he sarcastically applauded the Haitian people: “Kudos on developing the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Your commitment to human rights, infrastructure and birth control should be applauded.” Shirley also stated that he would not donate “a cent” to the Haitian relief effort because he did not believe “the people of Haiti will do much with my money.” (Shirley also asked “whether [Haitians] could use a condom once in a while?”) Moreover, in his post

Shirley included hyperlinks to numerous pages, including a photo gallery of “flimsy shanty- and shack-towns,” which, one concludes, was the visual evidence for why Haitians were ill suited for assistance following the earthquake. Shirley’s post enjoyed long-term digital presence by being shared, linked to, and quoted on websites from CNN to the New York Daily Post, as well as

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being shared on the most popular social media outlets. Shirley’s rhetoric appealed to the idea of

Haiti as not merely failed but the sole author of its own demise: the abject subject.

Figure 4-7. “Temporary” post-earthquake housing in the Christ Roi of Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of the author).

The fixing of the abject comes about through a myriad of forces: technology, economics, and access. Wendy Hesford addresses the connection between visual culture and “how human rights principles are culturally translated into a vernacular that imagines audiences, particularly

Western audiences, as moral subjects of sight” (8). While Hesford’s international examples range from an Amnesty International USA (AIUSA) poster featuring a photograph of a young Afghan refugee to New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof’s purchase of two young women from brothels in Cambodia, her description of the Western audiences as the “moral subjects of sight” calls to mind the post-disaster situations in New Orleans and Port-au-Prince. Various governmental and non-governmental organizations asked for funds through television and online charity campaigns in the days, weeks, and months following these events, and the “moral subjects” sought for these donations were the same audience who had born witness to the

Haitians and New Orleanians looters. The “moral subjects” of these campaigns are asked to save

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Haiti and New Orleans from the innately deviant inhabitants of these failing cities. However, there is a fundamental difference between these two cities, particularly in regards to how non- residents view and experience these cities. Aimee Berger and Kate Cochran assert that New

Orleans’ “tourist industry secures for the city a nostalgic place in the social imaginary and capitalizes on the city’s history to hold in the idea of New Orleans as an international rather than a southern city” (5), while Haiti, despite the intervention of the world’s wealthiest nations, is a destination not for tourists but for aid workers dealing with a place where there are “nearly a million people still homeless; political riots stalled by frustration over the stalled reconstruction; and the worst cholera epidemic in recent history” (Katz 2). While New Orleans and Port-au-

Prince are connected through their outlier statuses in their respective regions, Haiti’s reputation as the “poorest country in the Western Hemisphere” makes it especially “other,” an example of the archetypal state in the Americas.

Of the countless examples of Westerners watching Haiti and sharing images through various social media of earthquake victims, the underpinning logic appears to be that this “helps”

Haiti. A random Google search of post-earthquake images led me to various blogs created by

Americans who post images of Haitians in various abject states, accompanied by the blog author’s personal reaction to the images and the earthquake as a whole. One blog post that epitomizes this use of digital images of the earthquake is “Depression Hurts, Blogging Helps,” written by a self-described “Mormon mommy with depression and anxiety.” In one post she complains about a television news report in Houston, Texas, where she saw “a toddler lying on the pavement in a diaper receiving CPR from a firefighter. It's one thing to watch Grey's

Anatomy and another to see an infant's anatomy on the verge of death.” She claims that this image caused her to start crying and later experience dreams of “the land of Disturbia [sic] where

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fires abound and my children are in danger.” Directly beneath this evocative claim, “Mormon mommy” posted an image of a young Haitian man carrying a girl who looks to have been caught in earthquake debris. She includes a caption with the following description: “After the earthquake in Haiti. (This is the least disturbing image I could find. I thought I would spare you).” She continues her comparison between dead Americans and those abroad:

Don't get me wrong. I believe seeing challenging images can bring reality to we the privileged Americans. Photographs from the devastation in Haiti, clips of Africa's impoverished parentless children, and shots of Egypt's riots. These pictures bring critical awareness to the needs of the human family around the globe. Without them those of us who can help wouldn't be moved to move. But, what good did the image of this Houston child do?

Aside from the problematic categorization (the Haitian child caught in an earthquake is the “least disturbing” image possible, while the American child in Houston is deemed too disturbing to view), there is the presumption of a righteous and privileged gaze: we have the right to gaze upon their misery because it spurs us to do good for “them.” And this “them” is a wide-ranging group—they could be anywhere, it seems, from Africa to the Caribbean—and they constitute the abject members of Mormon mommy’s human family, who need to be viewed as helpless in order to earn our help.

If Port-au-Prince is New Orleans, Haiti is also Africa. J. Michael Dash’s assertion

(mentioned in earlier chapters) that Haiti, like the continually stereotyped Africa—the catchall term for a continent more diverse than Europe in terms of language, religion, and ethnicity—has been “fixed” in the Western imagination draws on Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952).

Fanon balances his consideration of the universal categories of black and white with personal experiences as a Martiniquais interrogating his relationship with the French metropole and its inhabitants. In perhaps the most well-known section of the book, Fanon argues that the white gaze is not only an active, aggressive mode of judgment; it is an instrument through which the

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black body is invaded and pulled apart. “The white gaze, the only valid one, is already dissecting me. I am fixed,” Fanon writes. “Once their microtomes are sharpened, the Whites objectively cut sections of my reality. I have been betrayed. I sense, I see in this white gaze that it’s the arrival not of a new man, but of a new type of man, a new species. A Negro, in fact!” (95)

But we might want to consider what else “fixed” means, particularly when the word is used directly after “dissecting,” which brings to mind not the living subject but the dead body: the epitome of the abject state. In post-earthquake Port-au-Prince and post-hurricane Katrina, bodies abound for a fixated Western gaze: bodies ready for visual dissection and dissemination.

Moreover, it is worth noting that crisis and intervention are linked through an etymological point of origin, the Greek krisis. Moreover, as Paul Nadal notes, krisis was a medical term, describing the intervention upon the sick, diseased and dying body. Thus, Fanon’s assertion about the white gaze “dissecting” the body is particularly poignant when thinking about Port-au-Prince and New

Orleans as sites of foreign intervention.

While the earthquake in Haiti became the next chapter in the failed state narrative so commonly affixed to the country, Hurricane Katrina was written as revealing the divide between rich and poor that exists throughout the country. The hurricane wrought serious damage on large areas of the American southeast, but New Orleans became the space most readily associated with

Katrina. According to a BBC report, the well-documented failure of the levee system left 80 percent of the city flooded (Murphy). In the aftermath of the hurricane, race, poverty, and space

(particularly the low-lying, black neighborhoods that were devastated) became intertwined with the larger structural issues (federal response, urban planning). Furthermore, Katrina as revelator of entrenched Southern poverty was a common—if lacking in context—trope in media reportage.

For those who did ground their claims about the South—and, specifically, New Orleans’s

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exceptional poverty—in facts and figures, the numbers provided some context about the lives of those black bodies (living and dead) photographed outside (and, in the days during and immediately after the storm, atop) flooded homes. In Come Hell or High Water: Hurricane

Katrina and the Color of Disaster Michael Eric Dyson mines the relationship between blackness, southern poverty, and Katrina:

The hardest-hit regions in the Gulf States had already been drowning in extreme poverty: Mississippi is the poorest state in the nation, with Louisiana just behind it. More than 90,000 people in each of the areas stormed by Katrina in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama made less than $10,000 a year . . . Before the storm, New Orleans, with a 67.9 percent black population, had more than 103,000 poor people [earning less than $10,000 a year]. (6-7)

In the aftermath of the hurricane, black poverty was made visible by the presence of black bodies in spaces that should have been evacuated. Robert Stolarik, a New York City-based photographer, produced a number of widely circulated images of a soaked and broken New

Orleans, including a bird’s eye view shot of a young black man wading through a wide flooded street flanked on both sides by cemeteries. Behind him, there is the kind of row housing associated with the “projects” of many urban areas in the south. The young man, head down and shorts hiked up in order to avoid contact with the murky water, can be read as an allegorical figure evoking the isolation and extreme conditions experienced by many New Orleanians in predominantly black neighborhoods. The effect of this is heightened by the position of the photographer who is high above his human subject, free of the carnage below.

But while images like the one described above were contained in books, featured on news websites (both broadcast television and online), and included in newspaper and magazine reportage in August 2005 and the months after, images of the abject black body caught in the

Haiti earthquake circulated in a different, much more heavily digital manner. One significant difference between the visual representation of the earthquake and the hurricane is the growth of

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our online worlds. Although Facebook and other social media websites (including Flickr and other assorted online photo albums) existed in 2005, these platforms were not as pervasive or sophisticated as they are today.

Figure 4-8. “One of the first images of the earthquake to circulate on Twitter.” Photograph. mashable.com. 12 Jan. 2010. Web. 14 Jul. 2014.

Two years later, in a study titled “Analysis of Topological Characteristics of Huge Online

Social Networking Services,” the authors claim that social networking sites “attract nearly half of all web users” (Jung et al.). Over the last few years, with the growth of Facebook from a platform consisting of mostly American, largely college student memberships to a rapidly increasing amount of new users from around the world, social networking sites have become an increasingly pervasive and all-encompassing part of the Internet (Garland 63). As of 2011, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Internet traffic, Facebook is second only to Google in regards to total users in both the United States and the wider world (Jung et al.). Twitter, which like Facebook has grown into a massive, international social media network, was founded nine months after Katrina, but five years later it served as an extremely effective means of disseminating images of the disaster in Haiti. According to a Nielsen Company report (2010), immediately after the earthquake “much of what people are learning” about the quake (and, by extension, Haiti) was coming by way of social media. The report states that

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[p]reliminary analysis of data shows that Twitter posts (“micro-blogs”) are the leading source of discussion about the quake, followed by online video, blogs and other online boards/forums. While most online consumers rely on traditional media for coverage of the quake, they are turning to Twitter and blogs to share information, react to the situation and rally support.

Additionally, hours after the earthquake struck, mashable.com, a Scottish/American news website, published a story titled, “Haiti Earthquake: Twitter Pictures Sweep Across the Web

[PHOTOS]” with the author, Ben Parr (2010), writing that there are “thousands of Facebook and

Twitter updates on the disaster appearing every minute. The web has been moved by the plight of the Haitian people. Social media has quickly become the first place where millions react to large-scale catastrophes.” The words, “[the] web has been moved,” suggests empathy and concern for earthquake images by those viewing the photographs, and the photographs are suitably evocative for this audience.

One of these “first views” of a post-earthquake Haiti that Parr refers to is a medium shot of the collapsed façade of what appears to be a storefront; in the right hand corner is the head and shoulders of a figure, his or her features blurred by movement. The last in the set of six images is a portrait of an older woman, barefoot and sitting atop a concrete slab, a street covered with debris from the quake. Her dress is open, and her breast is partially exposed. This photograph, one imagines, is an attempt to put a “human face” on the earthquake, beyond the broken glass and dust and mangled beams. The impassivity of the subject’s face could be read as embodying a sense of shock and resistance, a refusal to perform for the photographer. This, too, connects New

Orleans to Port-au-Prince; residents are aware and resistant to their story being told from the outside, and they are acutely aware of the outsider’s gaze. In a recent interview, long-time Lower

9th Ward resident Iantha Parker, in reference to the tour buses that bring in tourists to photograph the reconstructed neighborhood, was forthright about being constantly looked upon: “Leave us alone, already” (Parker qtd. in Quinlan). This is also true of Haiti, where the cliché “the poorest

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country in the Western hemisphere” has been bolstered by a visual language created by the photographs of outsiders “doing good” in the country: of black bodies sitting emaciated in the street, crowding around aid-delivery trucks, running through rubble. For example, searching

“#haitianearthquake” on Instagram leads to an image of a skinny boy being lifted from a pile of rubble by a white emergency response team, an emaciated Haitian woman looking on. Social media has given new opportunities for us to turn our gaze upon the other.

Alongside Fanon’s theorizing of the gaze, Julia Kristeva’s use of the terms “the abject” and “abjection” informs my reading of how Haiti and New Orleans were both written (and read) in the aftermath of these disasters: the veritable “clamoring for more” details that elicit both pity and antipathy—physical destruction, chaos, and, last but certainly not least, damaged black bodies (whether dead, injured, or in other ways traumatized). Providing a counterpoint to Jacques

Lacan’s “object of desire,” Kristeva defines abjection as the potential breakdown of the perceived distinction between self (subject) and object (other), and how this dissolution elicits feelings of disgust and repulsion. What causes this reaction? Kristeva uses the corpse as the quintessential abject object—a stark reminder of one’s own mortality—but vomit, open wounds, and human waste also elicit similar feelings of abjection. That which disgusts is a trope of not only post- but also pre-earthquake Haiti poverty narratives, and also part of the mainstream media’s treatment of poor New Orleanians. For example, the media repeatedly put forth images like the “blanketed body of a dead victim who remained for days in a wheel chair,” and a

Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper claimed (falsely) that somewhere between 30 and 40 bodies had been shoved into a refrigeration unit, including a 7-year-old girl who had had her throat sliced open (Campbell and Leduff, 2012). These scenarios demonstrated the extent to which some expected deviant behavior from the New Orleanian other.

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When in contact with the repulsive other, the seemingly sterile self is struck by a sense of attraction: the corpse is the inevitable destination of our corporal state; reviled vomit and feces also come from our own bodies. My use of Kristeva’s abjection is informed by two elements: first, how she identifies the abject/abjection as that which is “radically excluded,” and, as she describes, “draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.” Viewing particular “other” objects, whether on the micro (a puddle of urine in the hallway) or macro-level (dusty bodies trapped under mangled sheet metal on a city street), disgust and incomprehensibility intermingle, with clear meaning obfuscated by visceral shock and horror. With post-Katrina New Orleans, the images of “hundreds of people—most of them black—stranded and waiting for help” (Campbell and Leduff 212) evoked a sense of familiarity (Americans like us) and distance (they are

American refugees). Moreover, New Orleans is Port-au-Prince not only because it elicits similar feelings of abjection, but also because Hurricane Katrina serves as a reminder of how the distinction between “us” and “them” becomes blurry under certain conditions: how natural disasters can fully reveal the dysfunctional relations between the state and its citizens.

While neither the first nor the lone voice in comparing post-Katrina New Orleans to post- earthquake Port-au-Prince, John Mutter, a geophysicist and professor at Columbia University’s

Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, argued that the

levee failures in New Orleans turned a natural event into a true catastrophe, but the industrial canals, built for commerce through the poorest part of the city early last century imperiled people who benefited little from the ship traffic that passed through their neighborhoods. The poor construction and maintenance of levees, and the people they put at risk, are echoed chillingly by the poorly constructed dwellings of Port-au-Prince.

Even in his seemingly well-intentioned call to arms about the threat posed by bad building practices in both Port-au-Prince and New Orleans, Mutter reiterates stereotypes about the country by stating that “violent unrest is never far below the surface” and implying that this

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potential is one of the main differences between the two cities: “we risk a situation in Port-au-

Prince that is even worse than New Orleans.” Even with multiple similarities, Mutter appears to assert that the latter is more “Other” than the former.

Figure 4-9. Collapsed building, Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of author).

This impression of Haiti as the exceptional Other —in which the spread of AIDS, the practice of black voodoo magic, and the continuation of an inherently fallible and at times grotesquely violent history—is a long-standing and deeply ingrained discourse. As Danticat surmises, “Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when it’s at its extremes, and that’s what they end up knowing about [the country].” Or, as Raphael Dalleo succinctly describes the narrative of Haiti: “a dependent nation, unable to govern or even fend for itself, a site of lawlessness in need of more powerful neighbors to take control” (4). The

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ultimate “powerful neighbor” being the U.S., which, as Katrina showed in acute detail, often struggles to take care of itself.

New Orleans is also written in terms of both the superlative and in desperate need of outside intervention: the international research group, Institute for Economics and Peace, rated

Louisiana as the most dangerous state in the union and New Orleans as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States. Fear seems to underscore the discourse of both cities, whether in direct reference to the residents’ criminal proclivities or as part of these cities’ so- called “character.” Shortly after the earthquake, TIME Books published Haiti: Tragedy & Hope.

TIME’s managing editor, Richard Stengel’s introduction to the book, “To Respond and Report,” says much about the sharp edges of the white gaze:

There is a sense of satisfaction in covering a great story, of course, especially if in doing so you can help those who have been hurt, but in the case of Haiti, that did not seem quite enough. That is in part why we have put together this beautiful and moving book, made up of striking images and insightful words. We are donating to Haitian relief $1 for each softback and $2 for each trade hardback. (6)

The earthquake was a crisis that compelled Western journalists to go to Haiti and, according to Stengel, undertake “writing and reporting [that makes] the case for fixing what is broken, and in doing so, for helping thousands, millions” (6). Earlier in his piece Stengel attempted to describe the conflict that the Western journalist in Haiti faces—whether to continue reporting or to assist in whatever small way they could—by stating that “our reporters and photographers were confronted by Haitian men and women who said, Put down your cameras.

Put down your pens. Do something. Help us.” Implicit in Stengel’s claim is the idea that the mass distribution of photographs taken and words written by outsiders and disseminated to Western audiences directly and positively affect those “victims” of this particular natural disaster.

But that is not the most problematic element of Stengel’s “To Report and Respond.” In the longer quote cited above, Stengel describes the book as containing photographs that are

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“beautiful,” “moving,” “striking,” and “insightful.” Stengel’s essay is accompanied with full- page images of the following “beautiful,” moving,” “striking,” and “insightful” images: a head and shoulders shot of a Haitian boy, perhaps five-years-old, with a large bandage covering a laceration; a double-page spread of a near-dead man being extracted from a collapsed building, his broken body atop some makeshift stretcher (a door?) by a number of men, while at the edge of the frame a group of onlookers, old and young, watch from a few feet away; in another double-page photographic image, a man and woman (the man has a young child clinging to his back) run past a makeshift funeral pyre, one of the bodies clearly visible at the base of an inferno reaching twenty feet off the street; the following two pages show a closer shot of a collapsed room where, in the bottom left hand corner of the image, a man reaches into the rubble over a dead and dust-covered corpse, the live man’s rescue attempt watched by two others wearing that omnipresent accompaniment of rescue crews, the surgical mask; the following is a medium close-up of a woman laying prone on the ground, her arms stretched out towards large broken concrete bits, while, as the accompanying caption tells us, she cries “in desperation for family members presumed dead under the rubble of a home in Port-au-Prince. . . Tens of thousands of the people who died will never be identified” (15). And, it is worth noting: these images are not very different from the rest of the images in the book, which document many different stages of human misery. Beauty? The images contained within show human beings in various abject states, including an injured child and a number of dead adults; that an editor calls them beautiful makes us consider not only his definition of “beauty” but what audience he imagines for his words and the accompanying images. Does he imagine that this audience, too, would describe these photographs as things of “beauty”?

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In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) Susan Sontag begins by considering war photography and its audience:

Who are the “we” at whom such shock-pictures are aimed? That “we” would include not just the sympathizers of a smallish nation or a stateless people fighting for its life, but—a far larger constituency—those only nominally concerned about some nasty war taking place in another country. The photographs are a means of making “real” (or “more real”) matters that the privileged and the merely safe might prefer to ignore. (7)

I cite this passage at length not because I am attempting to make a direct comparison between war and the aftermath of a large-scale natural disaster. Sontag argues that shocking images make audiences beyond the vigilant few aware of death and disaster abroad; the photograph puts a fragment of the “nasty real” on our doorstep. Here is a typical image from the earthquake in

Haiti:

Figure 4-10. “A Los Angeles Search and Research Team helps a Haitian woman from the rubble.” Photograph. Wikimedia.org/Wikipedia/commons. 17 Jan. 2010. Web. 14 Jul. 2014.

The “we” that Sontag imagines here is an audience that encompasses the sympathizers (those who appreciate the plight of the underdog), nominally concerned (those with some awareness of the “nasty”), privileged (those who benefit from such images remaining out of circulation), and

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the safe (all those who don’t want to know what happens “far away”). This line of reasoning relates to the TIME editor’s belief that his reporters have “help[ed] thousands, millions.” The images “do good,” and to ignore the image is to avoid “the real.” At worst this puts one in service to those who wish to suppress “the real,” presumably for their own political and economic benefit. The shocking image spurs different reactions in the audience, whether via an immediate awareness of events transpired/transpiring or as a catalyst for direct action. This is the

TIME logic.

But surely the shocking photograph—for example, Kevin Carter’s Sudanese Girl or the leaked digital photographs tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib—are also examples of the illusion of photography: that these images represent totality “merely divided into moments.” A visceral reaction to a disturbing photograph is not necessarily accompanied by any great understanding of its context; even if, such as in the case of the two aforementioned photographs, the image is widely circulated and commented upon. Moreover, presumably there are other segments of the audience (or, perhaps, it is fundamental to all audiences) who take pleasure in such images. How else can we account for the managing editor of one of the world’s most iconic magazines describing, in the very publication where the photographs are included, the images of dusty, dead

(and often black) humans as beautiful?

Another TIME publication, Hurricane Katrina: The Storm That Changed America

(2005), which, like Haiti: Tragedy and Hope, was published in the months following the storm landing in Louisiana, offers another meditation on the shocking image and its audience. The blurb on the inside promises the reader that within “the editors of TIME tell the full story of

Hurricane Katrina through remarkable pictures, moving words and incisive analysis.” Unlike

TIME’s take on the earthquake in Haiti, the images are not described as “beautiful.” Rather, they

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are described as “remarkable,” assigning a term one might apply to a shooting star or medical advancement to photographs of bloated corpse floating facedown in the flooded street beneath an overpass, another swollen body laying spread-eagle in the wake of a passing rescue boat, and another laid out on a street corner, shrouded by an American flag.

If audiences are not enamored with these images—and the fact that these books sold so well across the U.S. (as well as internationally) is an indication that they are—the “outsiders” who traveled to post-Katrina New Orleans to photograph the aftermath appear to be: take, for example, one of the featured TIME magazine photojournalists, John Chiasson. “Every time I turned a corner, I would see an amazing spectacle, but I hadn’t been assigned to shoot those scenes,” Chiasson said. In a quotation in large font included in the photo essay, which includes a portrait of an older black woman standing in front of her buckled home, Chiasson also stated that

“[he] could have shot until my camera wore out.”

Surrounded by seemingly endless abjection, photographers like Chiasson had to pick and choose whom and what they would contribute to the narrative of New Orleans as the failed

American city. While mainstream media reports focused on the limits of the state as evidenced by the lack of resources and coordination in the disaster response, both the hurricane and the earthquake demonstrated the way the state shapes the (abject) subject. Failing to provide adequately for some of its citizens in the midst of the crisis, the state’s power is asserted by those it does not help; those subjects’ abjectness is confirmed by the state’s ignorance of their immediate needs.2 They are those subjects “who can be abandoned by the state, [and] whose exclusion defines sovereign power” (Schueller 241). In the aftermath of two distinct natural disasters, New Orleans and Port-au-Prince became spaces imbued with abjection. Addressing the distinction between space and place, Sidney I. Dobrin posits that space

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is yet-to-be written. It is potential; it is imagination; it is the possibility and means of every discourse to disrupt every discourse, to disrupt its own discourse. Space is yet-to-be written because space has not (yet) been given meaning; it awaits occupation. Space itself does not then occupy a different location than place but the same locations, only as locations yet-to-be written, yet-to-be produced. Place is a (temporal) moment when space is defined, defined through and by its occupiers and occupations. Place is the temporal in instance of observation of a site of ideological struggle and is written by whomever is winning the struggle at that moment. (41)

Dobrin imagining space as place infused with meaning is not a utopian vision. Space is more than potential; it is the battle to come. In drawing a contrast between space and place, Dobrin employs the terms “occupation” and “occupy.” The transition from space to place is predicated on the space being filled—crowded, injected, infused—with meaning. Providing concrete examples (Israel and Palestine), which constitute both discursive and concrete physical places, this is not a seamless process of “becoming.” The struggle of space to place both creates and ruptures. A space does not have discourse, bodies, or signifiers and the signified. Space is not yet fixed; indeed, its boundaries cannot be mapped. Building on Dobrin’s definition, we can imagine that space is not only what might be, but it is also what will not be or is not. In both New

Orleans and Port-au-Prince, crisis showed how places were transformed into spaces, imbued with new and other meanings.

How does occupation play a part in how we understand both spaces? In regards to the international attention given to New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, occupation (in its most literal sense, as Dobrin indicates) was visible from the outset: images of the post-disaster spaces feature the various aid workers from both governmental and non-governmental agencies. Take, for example, one of the thousands of photographs of the Haitian earthquake available on the

Wikimedia Commons website. Titled “LA County SAR pulls Haitian woman from earthquake debris 2010-01-17,” the shot is an almost bird’s eye view of a woman caught under what appears to be a partially collapsed wall or ceiling. Eleven men clad in black overalls and wearing shiny

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yellow helmets surround her. The woman’s eyes are closed, but judging from the attention she is receiving she is still alive. A particularly striking part of the photograph is the fuzzy brown microphone blimp that is being held several feet above the woman’s prone and trapped body.

Although the boom operator is not in the frame, his or her peers are visible directly behind the rescue team; a reporter stands next to his cameraman, who has his camera trained upon the woman being pulled from the wreckage. The foreign bodies in the photograph dominate the scene; the trapped subject is a minor figure in this morbid tableau.

Figure 4-11. National Palace in Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of the author).

The occupation of Port-au-Prince and New Orleans in the aftermath of natural disaster became a major part in the shape of media narratives concerning these events. Furthermore, the story of one group of outsiders saving the locals in the Third World (both New Orleans and Port- au-Prince) was relayed back to the First World by another group of outsiders: foreign journalists.

But to suggest that foreign occupation were new phenomena for these spaces “buries” not only the early, ugly colonial history of these cities, but it also ignores their contemporary state.

Notably, the burying of Haiti in stereotypes is not just a contemporary phenomenon related to image and representation; it is also a central theme in J. Michael Dash’s 2004 seminal lecture

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about historical (re)interpretations of the country’s early post-independence, “The Disappearing

Island: Haiti, History, and the Hemisphere.” Addressing the place of Haiti in both the Caribbean and the Americas as a whole, Dash asserts: “It is not surprising that Haiti’s symbolic presence in the Caribbean imagination has never been understood in terms of radical universalism. Rather, the “island disappears” under images of racial revenge, mysterious singularity, and heroic uniqueness.” Dash’s explication of a Haiti buried by “images,” in this case conveyed through

“outsider” literature, history, reportage, and foreign policy concerning Haiti at the time, is the articulation of the discursive construction of an Exceptional Haiti—the poorest, most corrupt, untenable—that continues today. But rather than the circulation of literature and histories which, in the Dash’s terms, invoke “the nightmare of [Haiti’s] history [and] see the Haitian revolution in terms of a fatal hubris, the sigh of history over megalomaniac black ruins,” Haiti today is buried under a new set of representations intent on ensuring that the country continues to be seen in terms of “reductionist triumphalism on one hand, and reductionist skepticism on the other.”

And there is no clearer physical reminder of Haiti’s close relationship to the rest of the world than the National Palace in Port-au-Prince. Both a symbol of national pride and reminder of American imperial ambitions in the country, the National Palace was one of the first stops for foreign visitors to Port-au-Prince (often at the urging of Haitians).3 Built on the site of earlier iterations of the seat of Haitian governance, the National Palace, which is twice the size of the

White House, shared the French Renaissance architectural style (Châteauesque, Beaux-Arts) apparent throughout Washington D.C. The trace of France in the buildings of both the Haitian and American capitals is not the only link between the National Palace and its American counterpart. Construction was completed during the first few years of the U.S.’s nineteen-year

(1915—1934) occupation of Haiti, with American naval engineers overseeing and U.S. marines

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contributing to the project. It is not surprising, then, that images of the semi-destroyed National

Palace were such a central component of the visual lexicon following the 12 January 2010 earthquake. The crumpled cupola—the dome-like structure and centerpiece of the palace’s façade—had slid forward from the roof during the quake or one of the numerous aftershocks, personifying the palace as one of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians staggering under the weight of this latest tragedy.

In the weeks that followed the earthquake, the wrecked palace became the background for a new set of snapshots of Haitian bodies: the seemingly ever-growing camps filled with people displaced from neighborhoods all across the nation’s capital. The National Palace is located in the Champ-de-Mars neighborhood, directly across from the Place L'Ouverture, an open space named after the Haitian independence leader who died in a prison cell in Fort-de-

Joux, France; post-earthquake, Place L'Ouverture was promptly filled with shelters constructed from fabric, cardboard, and corrugated iron, amongst various other materials. Logos of the

United States Agency for Aid and Development (USAID) and the United Nations Refugee

Agency (UNHCR) adorned some of tents that helped shelter people at a time when there was an omnipresent threat of aftershocks and subsequent structural damage to nearby homes and other buildings. Hand-washed clothes hung from or were slung across the tops of the shelters in order to dry; women (mostly) crouched in front of boiling pots. Here, the presence of bodies—a literal occupation of space—added new layers of meaning to the National Palace: still a symbol of national pride and reminder of American presence in the country, the National Palace was now

(literally) marked by the earthquake and the people it displaced. From an outsider’s viewpoint, the conditions in which people were now living outside the National Palace appeared similar to how people lived in various other parts of the city, including the two largest shantytowns, Cité

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Soleil and La Saline. Two and a half years after the earthquake, I visited the National Palace, which had still not been torn down: a contentious issue amongst both the “average” Haitian citizens as well as elected officials. The masses of people who were in a makeshift camp there were gone, but the wreckage remained, not yet touched by the machinery that would eventually tear it down.

Figure 4-12. “Michelle Obama 2010 earthquake National Palace.” Photograph. commons.wikimedia.org/wiki. 13 Apr. 2010. Web. 14 Jul. 2014.

The collapsed palace was a central motif in the visual rhetoric used to appeal to outside help Haiti from, for example, individual and governmental donors from around the world, search and rescue teams from the United States, Britain and numerous other nations, and the intervention of various non-governmental organizations. For example, the White House released a photo that demonstrated the power of the destroyed palace as a persuasive visual tool in conveying Haiti’s deep troubles. Taken from a low angle, the shot has First Lady Michelle

Obama (a stern look upon her face), Haitian President, René Préval (smiling broadly) and his

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wife Elisabeth Delatour Préval (facing the photographer) standing in front of one of the damaged wings of the national palace. In the far left of the image is Dr. Jill Biden, wife of the vice- president. The four famous figures are flanked by an assortment of other individuals unnamed in the caption that accompanies the photograph. But the real subject of the photograph is the broken palace, looming behind the human subjects, a reminder of the dissolute Haitian nation state.

Furthermore, the destruction of the official residence of the Haitian president—a building constructed by the occupying U.S. force in the second decade of the twentieth century—has uncanny reverberations in the history of American popular visual culture.

The destruction of the nation’s leader’s official residence is one of the central moments in numerous Hollywood films, including, for example, director/producer Roland Emmerich’s

Independence Day (1996), 2012 (2009), and White House Down (2013) as well as films like

Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), Superman II (1980), Mars Attacks (1996), Armageddon

(1998), Deep Impact (1998), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Skyfall (2012), and GI Joe:

Retaliation (2013). In these narratives, the spectacular destruction of the residence of the country’s leader is a visual metaphor for the end of the nation state: the end is nigh, and outside intervention is necessary to recover a country in the throes of the ultimate crisis.

Notably, the collapsed National Palace evokes another evacuated site of humans once displaced by disaster: the Superdome in Louisiana, home to the beloved New Orleans Saints, and an eerie site of the limits and weaknesses of the United States of America. Today, the Superdome has the sponsorship of one of the world’s most famous luxury brands—Mercedes Benz—and is used for games played by teams in one of the world’s richest professional sports leagues, the

National Football League. But it is also a space once occupied by one of the most marginalized populations in the United States: the poorest people dispossessed by Hurricane Katrina. And, like

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the National Palace in Port-au-Prince, the Superdome became the backdrop for the spectacular visual rhetoric of a city in free fall, featured on blogs and in newspapers and throughout the 24- hour news cycle. Moreover, if New Orleans and Port-au-Prince became further connected by how those cities’ largely black inhabitants were dissected by the outsider’s gaze during crises, then these two locations—the Superdome and the National Palace—were both central focal points.

Notes

1 By employing the term “audience,” however, I do not mean to restrict this study to analyzing the effect of static and moving images (and accompanying text) upon passive subjects. The Internet is a space where a significant portion of the visual rhetoric of Haiti is circulated, and, as Hubert Burda agues, the Internet “represents the first individualized mass medium, in that of course every person has the option to load their (sic) own images, animate them, and furnish them with sound” (19). 2 I use this reading of Agamben in a different context—depictions of the third-world slum in fictional film—in the essay, “Urban, Rural, or Someplace Else? The Slums of the Global South in Contemporary Film.” manycinemas 1.1 (2011). 38—52. I have revised and inserted paragraphs from that essay into my reading of photographic representations of post-hurricane New Orleans and post-earthquake Port-au-Prince because I believe that Agamben’s theories are even more applicable to this context than the fictional feature films and conceiving of the “slum” that I address in “Urban, Rural, or Someplace Else?” 3 Trained at the Ecole d'Architecture in Paris, Haitian architect Georges H. Baussan went on to design many of the most prominent buildings in the country of his birth, including Port-au- Prince’s SupremeCourt, City Hall, and, most famously, the Palais National.

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CHAPTER 5 ATIS REZISTANS: HAITIAN ART AND THE VISUAL CULTURE OF RESISTANCE

From November 26 through December 16 2013 the Grand Rue neighborhood in downtown Port-au-Prince played host to the 3rd Ghetto Biennale. The purpose of the event was to provide a space where Haitian and visiting artists would not only exhibit their work, but where they could also interact and make art during the course of the multi-week biennale. According to one promotional document, another reason for hosting the biennale was to “expose the boundaries of a globalized art market, and have meaningful discussion about sameness and diversity in an allegedly de-centered art world” (“Biennial Foundation”).

Figure 5-1. Alley entrance to E Pluribus Unum Musee d'Art (photo courtesy of author).

Beyond being held in a city that is largely known as the epicenter of a failed state, the specific location for the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince is the Grand Rue neighborhood

(Grand Rue meaning “main street” in French). The Grand Rue—the official name is Boulevard

Jean-Jacques Dessalines—is home to both the Iron Market, a 19th-century structure that is a commercial hub for both visitors to Haiti and local artists, and E Pluribus Unum Musee d'Art, the dirt floor studio and workspace of the artists’ collective Atis Rezistans; or, as Andre Eugene, one

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of the founders of both the Ghetto Biennale and Atis Rezistans, describes the space, it is “a museum in a yard with all the works of different artists mixed together.” The Musee d'Art teems with sculptures and paintings created out of a seemingly limitless range of materials: car tires, the tops of tin drums, plastic toys, discarded musical instruments, rusted vehicle parts, and human and other animal bones.

The influence of the local environment in the Atis Rezistans’ work is visible in these materials. The artists source scrap materials from different parts of the city, including gathering bones from the inner-city cemetery plots that were churned up during the earthquake. But, their work is also in stark contrast to the most well-known part of the Grand Rue neighborhood: the

Iron Market. The main structure was built in France and was “originally destined to be a railway station in Cairo, but the deal fell through and so the President of Haiti Florvil Hyppolite had it shipped over [to Haiti] in 1891” (Coomes). The Iron Market was rebuilt following the earthquake in 2010, and local and international dignitaries, including the unofficial guest of honor, Bill Clinton, celebrated the reopening. The Iron Market is home to an inordinate amount of homegrown art—metal cutouts made from recovered oil drums, smaller wooden carvings, bowls and plates, bags made of banana leaves, embroidered clothing, and the paintings of the village scenes—that is sold to the foreigners in Haiti. These transactions occur in the formal setting of a space like the Iron Market, or in restaurants, sidewalk stalls, street intersections, and popular public spaces that foreigners might visit, such as the site of the collapsed National

Palace. Unlike the art sold at the Iron Market and other informal locations around the city, the

Atis Rezistans’s work is not necessarily produced to be put in the suitcases and backpacks of the blan who circulate in and out of Haiti on Christian missionary trips, anthropological research

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excursions, meetings with local businesses and “partnering” opportunities, and the endless refurbishment of the NGO industry.

Figure 5-2. The Iron Market exterior (photo courtesy of the author).

Figure 5-3. The Iron Market interior (photo courtesy of the author).

Born, raised, and based in Port-au-Prince, André Eugène is one of Haiti’s most provocative and innovative contemporary artists. His work is built from the kind of materials that one—especially in the global North—might describe as trash or scrap pieces, but in Eugene’s hands become a means for transformative art: addressing the complexity of Vodou; Haiti’s economic and social crises; sexuality; and mortality. But Eugène’s use of “found materials” is

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more than just access and availability for his sculptures; he and his fellow Atis Rezistans, an art collective led by Eugène and formed on Port-au-Prince’s bustling Grand Rue, are what Donald J.

Consentino calls the “most emblematic artists to emerge in the period between the collapse of

Aristide’s government in 2004 and the earthquake of 2010” (54). Moreover, the group demonstrates the power of working, as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam theorize about garbage, with

“the same commodities that had been fetishized by advertising, dynamized by montage, and haloed through backlighting, are now stripped of their aura of charismatic power” (45). While there is certainly a sense of what Shohat and Stam call the “artistic ju-jitsu and ironic reappropriation” made possible in transmuting junk into art, Eugène’s critique of broader consumer culture is just one facet of his work. He and his fellow Atis Rezistans incorporate locally-specific points of reference that include “not only the nearby Vodou temples and

National Cemetery (source for the human skulls that have added to the notoriety of the work), but the hipper galleries of Pétionville, and avant-garde studio artists such as Mario Benjamin,

Jean Camille Nasson, and Eduoard Duval Carrié” (55).

As co-founder of the Atis Rezistans, Eugène is also mentor to a group of cutting-edge artists. With the Port-au-Prince collective, Eugène builds both a strong local art scene and sets the precedent about how Haitian art can not only be shown around the world, but that contemporary Haitian artists can participate in the global art marketplace. Through the creation of a website that details both his own work and numerous other members of the collective, André

Eugène and his fellow Atis Rezistans have been able to create an audience beyond Haiti. In recent years, work from members of the collective has been exhibited in Venice, Paris, New

York, and London Eugène’s art, like other that of members of the Atis Rezistans, is uncompromising, utilizing objects such as human skulls and discarded toys; yet, through this

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avant-garde approach, he has helped to forge a uniquely Haitian—or, in fact, distinctly Port-au-

Prince—style. And by using found materials to create ambitious and intriguing art, Eugène has given birth to what he calls the “currency of the Ghetto.” His is art drawn from life in Port-au-

Prince’s downtown streets that circulates out to the world’s metropolises.

Figure 5-4. Romel Jean Pierre, Atis Rezistan, at the Musee (photo courtesy of the author).

After providing further context for the Ghetto Biennale and the Atis Rezistans’ place in contemporary Haitian art, this chapter offers a historical context for the production and circulation of Haitian art, and how its reception has often reflected dominant stereotypes about

Haiti’s inherent backwardness. Rather, the Atis Rezistans epitomize what LeGrace Benson calls the “narrative cleverness” of Haitian art (9). Therefore, I will then focus on the Port-au-Prince based artists’ collective, the Atis Rezistans, who have been instrumental in the structure and content of the Ghetto Biennale. As part of this consideration of the importance of the Ghetto

Biennale, I will discuss specific artworks and the figures represented in these works as, in contemporary art terminology, metaphorical/allegorical and embodied concepts. At the end of

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this chapter I will address how the work of the Atis Rezistans functions as a powerful and

“different form of writing” (Fischer 201).

Figure 5-5. Commemorative street art in Port-au-Prince (photo courtesy of the author).

Reviewing the Atis Rezistans and other contemporary Haitian artists, Glenn Harcourt relates the visceral effect of seeing Andre Eugene’s work at the September 2012—January 2013 exhibition, In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Art, at the University of California, Los

Angeles’ (UCLA) Fowler Museum:

the work functions as an emblem or a synecdoche, condensing within itself all the aesthetic, ideological, and religious energy of the exhibition, and of the art of contemporary Haitian Vodou . . . If this sounds like a lot to ask of a single work, it is; but perhaps it is only to be expected given the density of the historical strata, the protean extravagance of religious ideology, and the contradictory richness of the aesthetic traditions and patterns of cultural appropriation within.

The exhibition at UCLA was markedly different to the previous exhibition of Haitian art at the

Fowler. Perhaps the most living artist of the Haitian diaspora, Eduoard Duval-Carrie, was the focus of Divine Revolution (2004), an exhibition that attempted to show how Duval-Carrie’s

“narrative imagery was the perfect lens through which to reflect on Haitian history, filtered

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through the artist’s own experience in various sites of the diaspora” (Berns 7). For example, in the vibrant-colored universe of Duval-Carrie’s universe, “the old gods now dwell in postmodern dystopias . . . divine people boat people washed up on the shores of Miami Beach—without green cards!” (Consentino 51). Moreover, Divine Revolution was put together as a way to commemorate the bicentennial of the Haitian revolution and the promise, if unfulfilled, of that moment in history, whereas In Extremis came about as a response to the political instability in the years following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide (when the exhibition was first proposed) and in the midst of the post-earthquake recovery and the devastating period of the cholera epidemic (when the exhibition took place). Thus, there is a shift in both form and content in the near decade between these equally important exhibitions of Haitian art: mostly painting and the turbulent state of the North American diaspora in 2004’s Divine Revolution; 2012—

2013’s In Extremis presenting sculpture (amongst other mediums) and Haiti in crisis.

Beyond having a space where Haitian artists from the city’s poor majority can create and show work, the space’s name, which means “One for All, All for One,” speaks to the Atis

Rezistans recognition of artworks as nodes in a larger commercial network. “The dollar (the

“one”) is a money (sic) you can use all over the world: in the United Kingdom, Zimbabwe, all over the world,” Eugene claims. “[And] we hope that our art can speak to people all over the world too. It is a currency: the currency of the Ghetto.” If the Atis Rezistans had a manifesto, it would be grounded in exploring the tension apparent in the production and (international) circulation of art and artists between the global North and South. At a conference at Florida State

University in early 2013, British photographer and writer Leah Gordon, who is also co-curator of the Biennale and preeminent chronicler of the Atis Rezistans, asked the question that would inform the design of the most recent event: “What happens when First-World art rubs up against

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Third-World art? Does it bleed?” Even after the 2010 natural disaster that devastated so much of the city, every two years over the last six years E Pluribus Unum Musee d'Art and the Grand Rue neighborhood become places where that friction plays out in real time.

Since 2009, the year of the first biennale, there has been an emphasis on the production, circulation, and critique of art and artists around the world. This issue is particularly pertinent in

Haiti, where the majority of the artists who have achieved international fame and financial success have been from the middle and upper classes of Haitian society. The first Ghetto

Biennale was conceived as a critique of a supposedly globalized art market, where artists and art move freely around the world, all the while benefiting from the international exchange of capital.

Despite the utopian vision of new media breaking down international boundaries for artists, the art market is still grounded in physical realities, including the showing of artwork in established galleries in major cities, the importance of artists’ promoting their own work at these events, and the cost of shipping art around the world. The art world remains unequal, and for those artists creating work in the Global South there are restrictions (financial and legal) that can affect their ability to have their work appreciated outside the country of origin. As Leah Gordon states,

“class, rather than race or nationality, seem[s] to be a barrier of entry . . . [to the] international art circuit” (Gordon qtd. in Art Review). For Haitian artists from the country’s poor majority, such as the Atis Rezistans, the cost of Visas (if one can even be secured), flights, transportation of art works (if not covered by the gallery/exhibition), can often be prohibitive factors. While, for example, Berlin-based artists can access the European art markets with relative ease—both in regards to travel document requirements and the base cost of travel—the Atis Rezistans are mired in the economic realities and international travel policies that affect those throughout the

Global South.

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Related to the issue of class, one of the major themes of the Ghetto Biennale is travel, and the fact that for Haitians and a large portion of the world’s population travel “takes the form of forced migration or illegal migration” (Gordon qtd. in “Art Review”).

Figure 5-6. Street corner, Grand Rue (photo courtesy of the author).

For artists in the Global South, the ability to travel is often hampered by visa “difficulties,” often based on the ability to prove a set level of income. In the case of 21st century Haiti, Leah Gordon opines, the “two or three Haitian artists that seem to repeatedly represent [the country] in Venice,

Johannesburg, and Sao Paulo biennales were all from the middle to upper class of Haitian society” (Gordon qtd. in “Art Review”). The Ghetto Biennale challenged the traditional exhibition format for Haitian art and artists, where so-called “naïve,” “primitive,” and/or “folk” paintings by Haitian artists were shown in Paris, London and Milan. Rather than aspiring to have their work shown in the Global North’s metropolitan centers, the Haitian artists involved in the

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Ghetto Biennale are engaging the international art contingent—from the United Kingdom, the

United States, and other wealthier nations in the Caribbean—on their own turf.

This does not mean that the Ghetto Biennale has not given rise to the very issues it set out to address and critique. In “The Germ of the Future? Ghetto Biennale: Port-au-Prince” Polly

Savage cites an interview with Frantz Jacques Guyodo, a former member of the Atis Rezistans who laments the way that the showing of their work has been used to “reinforce” the stereotypes so consistently attached to Haiti and its poor majority. As Guyodo succinctly describes the concentration on the place where the sculptures are made rather than their value as pieces of art:

“Often people focus more on the slum than the works themselves” (qtd. in Savage). There is justifiable concern that they are treated as a novelty, particularly in the wake of the 2010 earthquake. To emphasize the poverty of the Grand Rue at expense of the art works themselves is to underestimate the importance of the Atis Rezistans. By reusing “everyday” objects that have been discarded (children’s toys, musical instruments, car parts, brand-name sneakers and electronics), the Atis Rezistans—like other artists who incorporate these kinds of objects—ask us to consider how these pieces “might finally disclose the life and longing of the constituent materials” (Brown 207). This critique of materialistic culture is heightened in the case of the Atis

Rezistans, where most of these “found materials” are made outside Haiti and imported into the country. As Katherine Smith states, “probably the only materials in the work of these artists that are actually made in Haiti are the skulls” (Gordon 109). If these art works reveal only one thing, it’s Haiti’s connection—from its “discovery” through to today—to the rest of the world.

French-American artist Pascal Giacomini, who has been involved in the Haitian art scene since the early 1980s, boldly declares, “Haiti is the biggest source of black art in the world.”

While this claim may not be able to be grounded in specific facts or figures, it speaks to role in

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visual arts have played in Haitian culture since the country’s postcolonial inception. Noted anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out that in the years after the revolutionary leaders declared independence in 1804, state-supported artistic projects were a concern of the earliest governments. In particular, Alexandre Petion and Henri Christophe, who alongside Jean-Jacques

Dessalines and Touissant L’Ouverture are considered to be amongst the founding fathers of Haiti due to their leadership positions in the war against the French, were both influential in encouraging the production of art in the new republic. Ironically, both leaders would encourage art after splitting the country in two: Christophe created a separate government in the north of the country (the Plaine-du-Nord), while Petion was elected as president of the south. Regardless of the complicated origins of modern Haiti, both leaders implemented pro-art programs

(“American”).

The Lycee Petion—a school founded by the leader in a wealthier neighborhood of Port- au-Prince—had art classes beginning as early as 1816, and the schools within Christophe’s government were also providing art education. Specifically, Christophe, in his quest to make

Haitians the “most civilized, educated, and creative people on earth,” arranged for several

English painters to work with Haitian artists at the Royal Academy of Milot. Petion, for his part, also looked to connect Haitian artists with those from beyond the country’s borders: French artists were recruited to help establish an art academy in Port-au-Prince (“American”). Yet it was not just these two leaders who were dedicated to homegrown art. Jean-Pierre Boyer (the second president of Haiti and the subsequent Emperor of Haiti, Faustin-Élie Soulouque, were supportive of many great Haitian artists, including the father and son duo of Colbert Lochard and Archibald

Lochard, Numa Desroches, and Thimoleon Dejoie (“American”).

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However, in what Trouillot describes as the “arrogance” of art historians, the story of

Haitian art is not one of an ongoing production and appreciation by Haitians, but rather the

“discovery” of two artists, Hector Hyppolite and Philome Obin, in the mid-twentieth century by

Dewitt Peters, an American conscientious objector and Quaker. Dewitt’s notoriety is largely due to his role in founding the Centre d’Art, an institution that contributed to the rise of Haitian art that was created, to a certain degree, with an international audience in mind. (Or, at the very least, this is where one can begin to see concrete connections between the Haitian and American art markets.) There are two misconceptions concerning Haitian art: first, that Hyppolite, Obin, and other artists were part of a Haitian art renaissance. It is clear that prior to visits by American and European visitors in the post-independence period, art was being created in Haiti (Russell

16). Second, that the Centre d’Art was what gave rise to art in Haiti. This is not to deny Peters’ place in the history of Haitian art; the notion that Peters was the central figure in developing

Haitian art is tied to his founding of the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince. Peters arrived in Haiti in

1943 for two primary reasons: it was an alternative to military service for the American, and he was part of an English teaching project established by Elie Lescot, the 31st President of Haiti and entrenched member of Haiti’s wealthy, mostly light-skinned elite. Daniel Simidor, an insightful commentator on Haitian history and contemporary politics, describes how Peters became the

Christopher Columbus of Haitian art, finding a “primitive” artistic culture. Peters petitioned the

United States’ Ministry of Education about his status in the country, adding that he was no longer going to teach English because he believed that he would be of “more service in the movement to establish a school of painting here in Port-au-Prince” (Peters qtd in Simidor).

But even though Peters provided the initiative for the founding of the Centre d’Art and contributed his own funds (about $2,000), the Haitian government “paid most of the salaries and

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running expenses, including the monthly rent” (Simidor). To underline how this was not an early non-governmental or foreign non-for-profit outfit, the letterhead used by the organization included the following words: LE CENTRE D'ART, Sous le Haut Patronage du Departement de l'Instruction Publique et de l'Institut Haitiano-American (“The Art Center: Under the High

Patronage of the Department of Public Instruction and the Haitian-American Institute”). From the 1940s onwards artists involved with the Centre d’Art and other Haitian painters were exhibited first in New York, where they were described as “naïve” or primitive artists who

“maintained a certain degree of uncultivated native authenticity” (Middelanis 1). Regardless,

Haitian art received increased critical attention in Europe when one of the major figures in the surrealist movement, André Breton, visited Haiti (along with Cuban painter Wifredo Lam) in

1945; he purchased five paintings and eventually wrote about Hyppolite in Surrealism and

Painting (originally published in 1928), the most important book on surrealist art.

Due to Hyppolite and Obin, Haitian artists gained international recognition by developing

“very distinguished and diversified visual concepts” (ibid). By the mid-point of the century,

Haitian art was desirable by galleries and private collectors around the world, making Haitian artists commercially successful (specifically those who painted in the “folk art” tradition of

Hyppolite). Today, Haitian artists—or, to be more precise, a a select group Haitian painters—are fully integrated into the global “art market and their best works command high prices” (ibid). As well as commerce, another way to think about Haitian art and its place in an international art network is through the African diaspora. Richard J. Powell, in his Black Art: A Cultural History

(2002), writes that a “characteristic of black diasporal cultures is their structural dependence upon an acknowledged collection of life experiences, social encounters, and personal ordeals, the sum of which promotes a solidarity and camaraderie that creates community” (13).

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Powell admits that while a shared life-experience—of “racial and cultural discrimination, segregation, recognition, and identification”—should not be the “litmus test” of blackness due to the differing extent to which an individual encounters, for example, formal segregation in South

Africa or Jim Crow laws in the southern United States, but these “social assays are fundamental to black culture” (ibid). Powell’s black culture, history, and art is transnational because “African

American styles of religious worship, performance, and verbal and literary expression . . .

[represent] a shared vision that often resonates with black diasporal counterparts in the

Caribbean, Central and South America, Europe, and Africa” (ibid). The acknowledgement of the tribulations of black history, Powell suggests, important to realizing and conceptualizing black culture.

Over the course of the subsequent pages, I will give examples of works by the Atis

Rezistans that speak to a transnational black culture and its “social assays—from political disenfranchisement to disproportionate rates of life-threatening disease— through visual metaphor. Before I introduce and discuss these artworks, there are two framing elements to my analysis. First, as many of these sculptures have not been written about at great length, I am reliant on the few critics who have written about the Atis Rezistans, including Leah Gordon and

Donald J. Consentino. Second, this chapter was written after conversations with both Andre

Eugene (an artist who lived through the latter part of the Duvalier regime, the worst of Haiti’s

HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the numerous natural disasters that have afflicted the country over the last four decades) and other younger members of the Atis Rezistans—including Claudel Casseus,

Romel Jean Pierre, and Racine Polycarpe—who grew up during the dechoukaj (the uprooting of

Duvalierism) and the rise and fall of Haiti’s first democratically-elected president, Jean-Bertrand

Aristide. Along with acknowledging the influence of Vodou’s visual culture in their own work, I

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am consciously reading their work as visual metaphors. In “Meaning and Visual Metaphor”

Hermine Feinstein thinks examines the differences between linguistic and visual metaphors, and how this bears on the “problem” of interpreting art. What visual and linguistic metaphors share,

Feinstein writes, is the impetus to look beyond the literal in order

to generate associations and to tap new, different, or deeper levels of meaning. The metaphoric process reorganizes and vivifies; it paradoxically condenses and expands; it synthesizes often disparate meanings. In this process, attributes of one entity are transferred to another by comparison, by substitution, or as a consequence of interaction. (45)

Here, Feinstein describes how metaphor urges the reader/viewer to make connections and seek the potential of multiple “meanings” in a single word (or many words) or an individual image (or images). In simple terms, the metaphoric process is not just merely “A really means

B”: for example, claiming that in George Lucas’ Star Wars, released in the wake of the Vietnam

War, the Galactic Empire is the United States, while the Rebel Alliance is the Viet Cong. This may be a useful way of reading the film, particularly in regards to the anti-war sentiment in the country in the U.S. throughout the first half of the 1970s. But it does not necessarily “condense” and “expand” the meaning of Star Wars; rather, this reading sets a particular meaning in place.

Feinstein’s definition of the metaphoric process encourages one to go beyond a singular interpretation. Star Wars as a prime example of cultural imperialism: American movies and music had, after all, began replacing local products in the Anglophone world and beyond during the preceding decade. The metaphoric process, in this sense, would allow for the fact that Star

Wars is both an instrument of American imperialism as well as a critique of U.S. military and economic expansion. The metaphoric process is not an either/or proposition; the Galactic

Empire, in the metaphorical sense, could be both the U.S. and the Soviet Union, showing at a deeper level that the world’s superpowers in the 1970s and 1980s were not in binary opposition,

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but instead they were intimately and inherently connected through their apocalyptic threat to the rest of the world’s population.1

In the metaphoric process, meaning is never “set”; rather, the meaning of a text changes over time, dependent on many factors. Consider, for example, the figure discussed at various times throughout this dissertation: the zombie. After the 1920s he is almost entirely disconnected from his Haitian origins, the zombie has been present in various pop culture mediums throughout the 20th century, but in recent years has been strongly connected to post-2008 economic and political malaise, amongst other social ills. However, Donald J. Consentino contends that the meaning of the zombie changes in response to national crises: the Great Depression, the beginnings of globalization, and the aforementioned Great Recession of 2008. “The hapless

“differently dead” now operate as metaphors for an anxious (post) modernity,” Consentino writes, “when the individual feels helpless in the face of social, economic, or ecological calamities” (34). Simply put: audiences see in the zombie metaphor a reflection of the troubling times around us, no matter the specific crisis.

Another part of Feinstein’s metaphoric process that is particularly applicable to the visual arts is when the “attributes of one entity are transferred to another by comparison, by substitution, or as a consequence of interaction.” In the visual arts, the attributes of one entity can be conveyed in another through a number of means: homage to particular past and present traditions (impressionism meets spray-paint graffiti); juxtaposition of visual elements and styles

(advertising and portraiture); the reusing/recycling common visual motifs (religious symbols); the use of materials that are not commonly associated with the visual arts (trash). In the case of the Atis Rezistans, their repurposing of so-called junk and eclectic material—bits and pieces of car engines, human bones, oil barrels, discarded and broken children’s toys, building materials

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(such as corrugated iron)—offers a whole range of possibilities for relational interpretation and the consideration of specific historical, political, and social contexts.

Figure 5-7. “Monster blan/neg (white/black) child,” (photo courtesy of the author).

Nadine Zeidler, for example, reads the use of broken electronic devices by the Atis Rezistans as a critique of the nation-state and the ongoing “institutional and political corruption in Haiti.”

Leah Gordon, on the other hand, sees class and artistic apprenticeship as a crucial element in the production and reading of the Atis Rezistans’ work, particularly when comparing Haiti to other countries: “In Haiti there is an uncommon cultural outpouring from the lower classes, a phenomenon in Europe [that] has been increasingly silenced through a restrictive wage system, consumerism, and an increasingly hegemonic control of culture.”

In analyzing the use of trash to represent specific Vodou spirits, Katherine Smith believes that the sculptures capture the creation and contemporary state of the immediate local space,

Port-au-Prince:

When one asks how this garbage-heap [the Vodou spirit Gede] was created, a history of the city is revealed. If one were to ask how a laundry basket, a skull, a helmet, and a shock coil met on the Grand Rue, surely their object biographies would tell a story of excess and power. The labor behind these sundry parts is

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alienated and deterritorialized; their use-value largely spent somewhere north of Haiti. This is the spirit of the familial dead made up of first-world commodities gone bad. (98)

Andre Eugene’s 2004 mixed media sculpture Doktor Zozo (Doctor Penis) has as its centerpiece is a decomposing human skull wearing a blue helmet and a stethoscope. On one level, there is immediate nod to the ironic—the instrument used to determine the health of the living being used by the dead—but it is also steeped in a specific religious tradition: the doctor is facing an erect, wooden penis, which is associated with the Gede lwa (spirit) family. Gede are the spirits of life and death, and due to this are “seen as good and bad” and “mischievous and obscene”

(Hebblethwaite 238). The phallic symbol is important in distinguishing Gede from other spirits; at Vodou ceremonies, “the Gede lwa are called on last . . . [Their] dance, the banda, is performed solely in couples, without distinction of sex. The dance, which originated in the Kongo, involves movements of the hips and the buttocks” (238). In other visual representations of the Gede, they are depicted grasping their own erect penises. Therefore, for a viewer familiar with the rites of

Vodou, the phallic portion of Dokto Zozo is as noteworthy as the presence of the partially decomposed human skull paired with that omnipresent medical device, the stethoscope. But

Doktor Zozo also invokes a host of other potential meanings, including military occupation. In

Eugene’s sculpture, there is a blue helmet perched upon the doctor’s skull.

In 2004, following the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide by Guy Phillipe’s

“Rebel Army,” the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (known most widely in Haiti by its French acronym, MINUSTAH) essentially took control of Haiti, leaving the country under foreign martial law. The blue helmet is an integral part of the United Nations military uniform, the organization that, according to U.N peacekeeping spokesperson Michel Bonnardeux, “the primary purpose for the U.N. troops being in Haiti is to insure the protection of Haitian civilians”

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(Herz, Mosk, and Momtaz). However, in Haiti, the United Nations are not necessarily a symbol of “peacekeeping” and “foreign assistance.”

Figure 5-8. MINUSTAH operations center, Cité Soleil (photo courtesy of author).

The following report by the U.K.’s Guardian in 2011 shows the other side of the UN’s occupation of Haiti, and it sheds light on how the blue helmeted soldiers might be perceived by

Haitians. In December 2007,

more than 100 UN soldiers from Sri Lanka were deported under charges of sexual abuse of under-age girls. In 2005, UN troops went on the rampage in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest areas in Port-au-Prince, killing as many as 23 people, including children, according to witnesses. After the raid, the humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders reported: "On that day, we treated 27 people for gunshot wounds. Of them, around 20 were women under the age of 18." (Weisbrot)

This came in the wake of another atrocity, the rape of a young Haitian man by four Uruguayan troops. The crime was recorded on video and circulated amongst major news outlets, including

ABC, who released an edited version that showed the rapists/UN troops laughing while the sexual assault took place. After the crime received considerable media attention, Uruguayan

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Navy Lieutenant Nicholas Casariego, speaking through the barbed wire exterior of the base where the assault was said to take place, confirmed to a group of reporters that the video was real

(Herz, Mosk, and Momtaz). But although this might be the most extreme example of interpersonal violence between Haitians and the blue helmets, UN soldiers are also responsible for over 7,000 deaths. In 2012 reports emerged that Nepalese soldiers had been dumping human waste in an unsafe manner, leading to a cholera epidemic that proved to be a devastating aftershock of the earthquake. Chantal Laurent, author of The Haitian Blogger, claimed that the cholera outbreak made “clear to most Haitians that the UN mandate in Haiti was not for the protection and security of Haitians. During the tenure of MINUSTAH Haitians more loss of lives

[sic] than they had under the Duvalier dictatorships.” The combination of the skull and the blue helmet has a very pointed meaning to Haitians in the post-earthquake era: rather than providing relief, MINUSTAH brought death and destruction to the country.

Simply put, the metaphoric process offers up a multiplicity of meaning drawn from a single representation. In Metaphors We Live By (1980), George Lakoff and Mark Johnson tell us the “essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in relation to another”2 (5). These “things” could be contained within a single sentence—Lakoff and Johnson include the examples of clichés like “time is money, love is a journey and problems are puzzles”

(239)—but, more importantly, metaphors operate in network rather than singular comparative

“things to be seen beyond. In fact, one can see beyond them only by using other metaphors”

(239). Thus, when identifying metaphor in the work of the Atis Rezistans, one must note that the skull (the ultimate Memento Mori), which is often the central object in the sculptures, has multiple metaphoric meanings. To give a concrete example: after the 2010 earthquake, many of the real human skulls used by the Atis Rezistans were drawn from the city’s cemeteries. The

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earthquake changed the meaning of the skull in the work of the Atis Rezistans. Now, rather than just pointing toward the place of the human skull in Vodou ceremonies, the skull is infused with other potential meanings.

Figure 5-9. “Pirate skull” (photo courtesy of the author).

Not merely symbolic of the earthquake and loss of life, the skull begs questions of the relationship between ethics and representation. Andre Eugene sees this tension in terms of nationality and class.

In my work, when I have used someone’s skull . . . [I know] this man was Haitian: when he was alive, he couldn’t travel anywhere and it is ironic that now he is dead he has visited Chicago, Barbados and Florida. Our use of skulls and bones relate to Vodou symbolism, Vodou altars, but also the lack of mobility of the Haitian people. (qtd. in Garland)

While the presence of Vodou in Haitian art has been a regular entry point into discussions of the traditions of the painting, sculpture and (more recently) film of that country, through this emphasis on the multilayered potential of the metaphoric process I will also point to other

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influences and concerns in the Atis Rezistans’ figures and larger constructions. It should be noted that despite my efforts, I have not always been able to find out the titles/names of the sculptures (if, indeed, they have been assigned titles at all). I will look at one of the works I first encountered on entering E Pluribus Unum Musee d'Art in the Grand Rue neighborhood.

Figure 5-10. “Penis in Casket,” a wood, metal, and plastic sculpture (photo courtesy of author).

This piece, which I will refer to as “Penis in Casket,” was situated near the entry to the rear yard of E Pluribus Unum Musee d'Art. In the Atis Rezistans work/show space, sculptures are often in close contact, leaning against one another and making it difficult to ascertain where one work ends and another begins. Before I address how this affects “Penis in Casket,” I will describe my immediate impression of the work. The wooden phallic portion of the sculpture is the most striking element. The phallus has numerous nails stuck into it; the head of the penis is painted bright red, save the brownish, metallic patch on one side. The phallus emerges from a child’s

“open” casket; on closer examination, one can see a vévé pattern adorning the outside of the

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casket. In Vodou Songs in Haitian Creole and English (2012), Benjamin Hebblethwaite describes the meaning of vévé as “highly formal diagrams and symbols that represent a given lwa

(spirit) . . . and serves to consecrate the place of the ceremony, to focus the community visually and spiritually, and to call the lwa to possess his or her followers” (298). As well as being drawn on the ground with finely granulated substances (such as sand, pepper powders, ashes, ground corn) by the oungan (priest) or priestess (manbo) during a Vodou ceremony, Vévé are also

“inscribed on walls, flags, banners, ason (rattle used by the oungan), and govi (clay jars); they are sometimes traced on the walls with swords or ason” (298). Suffice to say, vévé plays a central role in the visual culture of Vodou, and Hebblethwaite states that vévé could be part of the decorative element of a casket, proving that this is not merely an artistic license on the part of the sculptor.3

As mentioned above, and unlike a traditional gallery setting, the work/show space E

Pluribus Unum Musee d'Art is extremely crowded, with pieces by different artists in extremely close proximity to one another and sometimes touching. Whether this is purposeful or due to size constraints in the studio is difficult to assess; at times, as is the case with “Penis in Casket,” the overflow of other artworks on and around this piece adds to its complexity. A wooden sculpture of a humanoid figure is positioned immediately to the right of the casket; a stethoscope from a nearby piece, which also features a human skull, is draped over the head of the penis; an unidentifiable bit of machinery—perhaps taken from a car engine—is positioned at the head of the coffin. The juxtaposition present in the sculpture is, of course, shocking: combining the overt reference to male sexuality through the engorged sex organ with an object employed for the burial of a dead child. And, as discussed in earlier chapters, the shocking representation lends itself to multilayered, allegorical readings.

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Most immediately, according to Benjamin Hebblethwaite in a recent email exchange,

“the nails in the sculpture seem drawn from the Kongo sculptural tradition . . . in which nails are a very common feature in mystical power objects. The nails center power in the object.” The nails are part of several of the sculptures, and in other parts of Haitian culture—the language and religion, for example—Africa is present. However, on another level, “Penis in Coffin” directly calls to mind the HIV/AIDS pandemic: the engorged phallus sticks up and out from a coffin; the male sex organ is peppered with long, thick nails. This startling treatment of genitalia has an allegorical implication, particularly when considering how important visual rhetoric has come to play in the historicization of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. This is where visual art shows just how powerful it can be in both telling the history of HIV/AIDS and addressing it as a contemporary crisis: a necessary function because, as is made abundantly clear by the continued high rate of new infection around the world, the history of HIV/AIDS is, to paraphrase William Faulkner’s famous adage, neither dead nor past. HIV/AIDS is an ongoing crisis for humanity: the rate of

HIV infected individuals increased every year between 2001 and 2008, with an estimated 33 million people living with HIV/AIDS in countries worldwide today.

Moreover, representations of sex intercourse and the male sex organ have long been apart of the visual representation of HIV/AIDS—from the safe sex and HIV/AIDS awareness poster culture that emerged in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City through to various viral campaigns that emerged in the digital era. As in “Penis in Casket,” the accouterments of certain funeral traditions were featured in a number of the early visual culture of the AIDS pandemic, including the famous “A Bad Reputation Isn’t All You Can get From Sleeping Around” poster, which was produced by the Dallas County (Texas) Health Department. The connection between the origin of human infection in the early 1900s and the critical point of the epidemic in the late

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1980s is displayed by the human face of infection: skin marked by Kaposi’s sarcoma lesions, one of the opportunistic diseases that prey on immune systems weakened by HIV. In “Penis in

Casket,” the tin patch stuck to the engorged red head of the penis evokes the Kaposi’s sarcoma.

That the Atis Rezistans foreground the physical extremities of HIV/AIDS is unsurprising; one of the most common and immediate effects of the virus is weight loss, so images of malnourished

Haitians at home and abroad no doubt helped fuel “rumors that AIDS was rampant in Haiti . . . and the tourist trade (the economic lifeblood of many Haitians) began to fail” (Tann 42). Haiti’s history, which is “also the story of its inhabitants’ resistance to both physical enslavement and cultural oppression,” had another chapter added: the purported point of origin for the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the Americas (Galembo XV). With “Penis in Casket,” the Atis Rezistans do not shy away from HIV/AIDS presence in Haiti, nor the misunderstanding and stereotypes about Haiti and its religion that led physicians affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to claim that it “seems reasonable to consider voodoo practices a cause of the syndrome”

(“Tariro”). As discussed in earlier chapters, in the first five years of the epidemic Haiti was unfairly and inaccurately marked as HIV/AIDS “ground zero,” when, in fact, “the truth was the opposite - it was foreigners who brought the disease into Haiti” (Caistor).

One of the themes present throughout Atis Rezistans’ work is connectedness: to each other’s work, and, in a larger sense, to Haiti’s relationship with the rest of the world. Writing about the Atis Rezistans, Consentino asserts that the “most telling witness to the cosmopolitanism of their work (and to the cosmopolitan history of Haiti since the seventeenth century) is the forty-foot sculpture . . . that towers over the front yard of their atelier” (55). What is this structure? First, it stands out in the Grand Rue neighborhood because, as Consentino points out, it is taller than all of the surrounding buildings. The ambition of the project reflects

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the fact that while “the Atis Rezistans have not had much commercial success with individual collectors,” their sculptures have been featured in high-profile galleries in Haiti, Europe, and the

United States, and the younger members of the Atis Rezistans, in particular Racine Polycarpe, continue to create and show their work in a variety of venues (ibid). It is untitled, but it represents one of the most powerful lwa, Bawon Samdi (Baron Samedi), who is “usually depicted with a top hat, black tuxedo, dark glasses, and cotton plugs in the nostrils, as if to resemble a corpse dressed and prepared for burial in the Haitian style.

Figure 5-11. “Bawon Samdi,” metal and wood (photo courtesy of the author).

He has a white, frequently skull-like face (or actually has a skull for a face) and speaks in a nasal voice” (Princeton). The scale of Bawon Samdi is accentuated by the street-level living of much of the Grand Rue neighborhood. His is a huge presence, casting shadow not only on the dirt path

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that leads to the Atis Rezistans’ workplace, but that there are locals living in small, self- constructed housing in close proximity to the Bawon tower.

The sculpture is constructed of “disparate parts wrought from a whole car chassis with a muffler head,” but this might not be apparent initially as one looks up on the spectacle of seemingly random metal objects; the precarious “top-heaviness” and overall size of the sculpture shapes one’s first impression.

This neighborhood [Grand Rue] traditionally produces woodcarving. Many years ago, these [pieces] were for the tourist trade, but now more of their works get shipped to the Dominican Republic rather than the Iron Market (in downtown Port-au-Prince). So, it is easy to learn the skills of wood carving in this area. My sculpture allows me to express my life and my culture and my economic reality.

Life, culture, and economic reality: the Atis Rezistans and the Ghetto Biennale are more than “a grassroots attempt to enter the global art world” (Zeidler). The Atis Rezistans have created “a vibrant subaltern art production organized through numerous popular neighborhoods, both within and outside of Port-au-Prince” (Gordon qtd. in “Art review’). And this returns us to the use of the skull. After the 2010 earthquake, the use of skulls became more frequent for the simple fact that they were able to source more from the cemeteries near Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

As Eugene claims, the “urban environment colors all the work we make: from the materials we find [including skulls] to the energy generated from our frustration with the urban environment”

(qtd. in Garland). The “junk” that the Atis Rezistans recycle for their sculptures comes from the same neighborhood where the Atis Rezistans live and work: skulls and all the detritus of urban

Haitian life.

Beyond functioning as a memento mori or as part of Vodou iconography, the skull is also a reminder of the country’s violent origins. “If slavery deprived people of color of their personhood and humanity,” writes Sibylle Fischer, “the declaration of Haitian independence reduces the slaveholder to an assemblage of exploitable body parts: bones, blood, skin” (201).

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Whites (blan) were excluded from land ownership after the revolution, which is part of what

Fischer’s assertion, but she is also referring to the revenge killing of white landowners (and other whites present in the San Domingue colonial apparatus). Vengeance was in the air. Fischer quotes Jean-Jacque Dessalines’ secretary, a French-educated mulatto named Boisrond Tonnerre, whose famous words epitomize the spirit of vengeance contained within the second draft of the declaration of independence. “To prepare the independence act,” Tonnerre wrote on the eve of independence, “we need the skin of a white man for parchment, his skull for a desk, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen” (qtd. in Fischer 201).

But to consider the declaration of independence as simply formal recognition of a post- war separation between colonizer and colonized is to miss the significance of the act of writing back to power and affirming this young nation’s identity. “It is in this act of writing one’s own name—Haiti—that the former master is reduced to a bag of body parts, not in the act of direct revenge. Haiti’s name is thus both: written with the blood of the master and a completely new script, a different form of writing” (201—202). This is what the Atis Rezistans have done in the post-earthquake epoch; they are consciously composing a new script. The Atis Rezistans embody what Richard J. Powell fit defines as black artistic forms: they are “not only alternative to mainstream counterparts, but proactive and aggressive in their desire to articulate, testify, and bear witness to that cultural difference” (15). The Atis Rezistans evince their cultural difference on an international level—where the showing of skulls unearthed from graves disturbed by the earthquake was both an ethical and legal consideration—and on a local level, where the Atis

Rezistans are not an easily digestible, comprehensible, or portable commodity. The use of the skull fits this mod: “Our use of skulls and bones relate to Vodou symbolism, Vodou altars, but also the lack of mobility of the Haitian people” (Eugene qtd. in Garland). Taking the three verbs

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employed by Pelowell (“articulate, testify, and bear”), one can think through how the Atis

Rezistans offer an alternative to not only mainstream art around the world, but also the art that is produced in Haiti. The Atis Rezistans are writing Haiti anew. This is the visual rhetoric of Haiti: born in Haiti, made in Haiti, and pushing out to the rest of the world.

Notes

1 If the Cold War had turned hot, there was much more than mutual superpower destruction at stake. 2 I have maintained Lakoff and Johnson’s use of italics in the first chapter of Metaphors We Live By. 3 Conversation with Benjamin Hebblethwaite at the University of Florida, September 2013.

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CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION

In this short epilogue, I was advised to look forward: addressing, for example, how

Haitian artists will continue to provide a counterpoint to the stereotypes that surround Haiti.

However, I have found it necessary to look back. If there is a single lesson from writing about different parts of visual culture in relation to Haiti, it is the extent to which the country’s foundational moment—a bloody revolt orchestrated by slaves and former slaves—shapes the country’s present. Here, I do not mean to fall back onto stereotypes about Haiti as a so-called

“basket case.” Rather, I mean to emphasize the various historical forces that have lead to Haiti’s current state, both in regards to its rich culture and its poverty. To put it in simple terms: I have dedicated as much time trying to understand Haiti, its past, and its present, as I have spent

“reading” the still and moving images that make up the content of this dissertation.

As for Haiti and its history in this project? The visual representations I critiqued throughout the first four chapters also belong to a discourse of Haiti that stretches back to the long war that culminated in revolution. Haiti as an exceptional state—inherently violent, stuck in poverty, menacingly other—was set in the Western imagination from that moment. In Modernity

Disavowed, one of the books that most influenced me embark on this project, Sibylle Fischer tells us that in

the letters and reports of white settlers, the revolution is not a political and diplomatic issue; it is a matter of body counts, rape, material destruction, and infinite bloodshed. It is barbarism and unspeakable violence, outside the realm of civilization and beyond human language. It is an excessive event, and as such, it remained for the most part confined to the margins of history: to rumors, oral histories, confidential letters, and secret trials. (4)

Haiti may no longer be “confined to the margins of history”—from hurricanes to political upheavals, the country’s contemporary crises have been broadcast around the world—but it is still mired in often simplistic and grotesque representations (from TIME magazine’s Haiti:

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Tragedy & Hope through to conservative Christian support of Pat Robertson’s claim that the earthquake came from Haiti’s “pact with the devil”). This dissertation is an attempt to engage with the discourse of Haiti as an exceptional other, particularly in the context of its misunderstood place in universal history.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Christopher Garland was educated at the University of Auckland, the University of

Virginia, and the University of Florida. He graduated with his PhD from the Department of

English at the University of Florida in summer 2014. Starting in fall 2014, he will be Assistant

Professor of Professional Writing and Public Discourse at the University of Southern

Mississippi.

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