Renew Haiti from the ground up
by Amy Wilentz
Monday, April 12th 2010, 4:00 AM
Everyone was talking about reimagining Haiti at the UN donors' conference two weeks ago. Haitian representatives and Haiti's friends, as they are called - including the U.S., France, Brazil, Canada, the UN and the Red Cross, as well as the two global development banks - got together to decide what to contribute and how those funds should be apportioned in the wake of January's catastrophic earthquake. All told, they pledged some $11 billion.
That's a lot of money, which is to be invested in nation building, infrastructure, education, health care, agriculture, etc. But even with that aid package on its way (which it is not yet - for the moment, much of this is only pledged), it's hard to imagine what Haiti, reimagined, will look like.
Haiti before the earthquake was already unimaginable. It was an unprecedented state, the product of the world's only successful slave revolution, invented out of bloody revolt and French ideals and thin air. As two postrevolutionary centuries passed, the country, long shunned by the world economy, sank slowly into a mire of financial and political lethargy and corruption, punctuated by short periods of hope. Its zigzagging history, and its tormented relationship with the United States, ended up - in the first days of 2010 - with Haiti a precarious electoral democracy with a tiny national coffer and deep social and economic fissures that have only been exacerbated by seismic ones.
Yet Haiti, in the runup to geological destruction, was also a place of unimaginable beauty and delicacy, where cornmeal curlicues laid out in the dirt summoned up gods who descended into men's souls, where gorgeous artworks decorated not just the walls of galleries but the doors and sides of shacks, and where you could come around a corner in Port-au-Prince to find a copper-colored rooster standing on the edge of a blue wall in the late afternoon sun.
The real question for Haitians and others who love Haiti goes beyond issues of appropriation and pie-dividing and asks, instead, whether what was special and unimaginable about Port-au-Prince and the country as a whole can be retained while building something new in its place. While donors talk about "building back better," old Haiti hands and skeptics secretly chortle at the phrase. There can be no thought, for example, of building Port-au-Prince back, better or worse. What is gone, a heart-tugging city of surprising beauty and terrible, ruthless privation, cannot and should not be reinvented. Only sentimental foreigners and perhaps its elderly residents can long mourn the city's demise.
Instead Haiti needs a Pretoria or a Brasilia in its stead, a clean, sturdy and perhaps sterile city of civic buildings, with housing and a support system for the government, and another town nearby, perhaps somewhat less neat and clean, to serve the national port. The capital can also provide the nation's connection to the rest of the world. This may be unsentimental, but it's true.
And then everything and everyone needs to be swept back to the countryside - already this movement of internal refugees has begun, and some country towns have nearly doubled in population since the earthquake. The donors in New York last month recognized this, and many proposals brought to the conference emphasized decentralization and aid to the provinces. Seeds, fertilizer, new schools, country clinics, strong, efficient provincial governments, organized local tax collection - these are the new watchwords. Real jobs with pay in the countryside - now that would be an innovation.
For those who hope that the Haiti of the imagination can be retained and reinvented, a new life in the countryside holds out the greatest promise. It was after all in the mountains and fertile valleys of this magnificent piece of land that, at least according to legend, the Haitian slaves conspired to invent Haiti. In the countryside, too, the gods of Africa have never ceased to be worshiped under broad mapou trees and the crashing cascades of waterfalls.
It was this countryside - reimagined as lush, bountiful and verdant - that the great Haitian artists of the 1940s through contemporary times used for many of their most astounding tableaux. Here, also, the coumbite - or cooperative work group - was an everyday organization that, with no help from the outside, constructed houses and farm buildings, and raised roofs, and planted seed. Out of such materials - a revolutionary spirit, the strength of traditional belief, and cooperative endeavor, which are the very life and breath of the countryside - Haiti may rise from the rubble of this latest, and most profound, national disaster.
Instead Haiti needs a Pretoria or a Brasilia
in its stead, a clean, sturdy and perhaps
sterile city of civic buildings, with housing
and a support system for the government, a
nd another town nearby, perhaps
somewhat less neat and clean, to serve the
national port. The capital can also provide
the nation's connection to the rest of the
world. This may be unsentimental, but it's
true.
And then everything and everyone needs to
be swept back to the countryside - already
this movement of internal refugees has
begun, and some country towns have
nearly doubled in population since the
earthquake. The donors in New York last
month recognized this, and many
proposals brought to the conference
emphasized decentralization and aid to the
provinces. Seeds, fertilizer, new schools,
country clinics, strong, efficient provincial
governments, organized local tax collection
- these are the new watchwords. Real jobs
with pay in the countryside - now that
would be an innovation.
For those who hope that the Haiti of the
imagination can be retained and
reinvented, a new life in the countryside
holds out the greatest promise. It was after
all in the mountains and fertile valleys of
this magnificent piece of land that, at least
according to legend, the Haitian slaves
conspired to invent Haiti. In the
countryside, too, the gods of Africa have
never ceased to be worshiped under broad
mapou trees and the crashing cascades of
waterfalls.
It was this countryside - reimagined as
lush, bountiful and verdant - that the great
Haitian artists of the 1940s through
contemporary times used for many of their
most astounding tableaux. Here, also, the
coumbite - or cooperative work group -
was an everyday organization that, with no
help from the outside, constructed houses
and farm buildings, and raised roofs, and
planted seed. Out of such materials - a
revolutionary spirit, the strength of
traditional belief, and cooperative
endeavor, which are the very life and
breath of the countryside - Haiti may rise
from the rubble of this latest, and most
profound, national disaster.
Wilentz is the author of "The Rainy Season:
Haiti Then and Now," which is being
reissued with a new postearthquake
introduction.
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