Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. Gina Athena Ulysse
ever set foot on the island under the title of master or proprietor. Whites were barred from owning land. Not surprisingly, Haiti became a geopolitical pariah, diplomatically isolated for nearly sixty years because it threatened the great powers that still trafficked in slaves.
This isolation and periodic economic blockade both compromised and corrupted former revolutionary leaders and successive governments, which attempted to establish the former plantation labor system in order to trade with larger markets. Haiti was further crippled by high-interest loans from European banks used to pay an indemnity demanded by France for its loss of property.
A brutal U.S. military occupation (1915–34) furthered state centralization in the capital of Port-au-Prince, while weakening regional institutions and economies. This geographical split between urban and rural Haiti is best exemplified by the fact that “peasant” and “moun andeyò” (people born on the outside) were categories of citizenship used on birth certificates of those born outside the capital. Haitian ruler after ruler—including the brutal Duvalier dictatorships (1957–86)—favored economic policies that benefited the elite.
To the West, Haiti is popularly known as “the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere”—code for “poor and black.” But invisible in this tagline are the wealth and culpability of the elite 3 percent of the populace, primarily descendants of European immigrants (many married Haitian women to bypass the constitution and become landowners) and Middle Eastern merchants. Along with the small middle class (12 percent of the population), they control 73 percent of national income. The poorest 20 percent receive just 1.1 percent of national income.
According to an old adage, famn se potomitan—women are the central pillars of their families. Yet, in many ways, they are also deemed socially inferior to men and didn’t earn the right to vote until 1950—which women across classes couldn’t fully exercise until 1990, when the first democratically held election took place in Haiti.
Elite women are more socially confined and expected to be trophy wives and daughters. Middle-class women are highly educated and slightly more visible, especially as professionals. Lower-class and poor women are usually less educated (they speak Kreyòl) but are disproportionately workers and heads of household. In urban centers, they are especially active as timachann—small-time vendors—who sell food, dry goods, and other imported items. The poorer women of Haiti are the ones most overtly visible to the West, often represented by the iconic image of a black woman with a basket on her head, or the vendor seated at a street corner.
But how much did anyone in the United States think about Haiti and its women before 4:53 p.m. on January 12, 2010? That’s when the earthquake put Haiti back under a global media gaze that exposed its extreme poverty and gender inequity. Although on that day, recalls Louis Marie Mireille, “we worked just like the men, pulling bodies out from under rubble, helping each other out.” Mireille is a representative of the aptly named Organization of Women Fighting to Combat Misery.
At least three hundred thousand people lost their lives, and according to recent UN reports the majority were women. From what I observed on my visit, women also comprise a greater percentage of the 1.5 million homeless who now occupy the more than eight hundred encampments that have sprung up around the country.
In the camps, living in makeshift tents made of deteriorating tarps and cardboard, an overwhelming number of families have had a member—including children—go an entire day without eating. Unstable Foundations, an October survey by anthropologist Mark Schuller, showed that 44 percent of families drank untreated water, and 27 percent had to defecate in a container. Seventy-eight percent of families are without enclosed shelters; many suffer from untended health problems.
Education—a constitutional right in Haiti that has historically eluded the poor, especially women and girls—also remains lacking. Only one in five camps offers education on site, which violates the UN’s guiding principles for internally displaced individuals.
Back in 1994, former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide had taken a step to upgrade women’s position in the country by creating the Ministry on the Status and Rights of Women to lobby for women’s rights in education and the workplace and to be protected from pervasive gender-based violence. Sadly, four of its prominent feminist leaders perished in the quake—Anne Marie Coriolan, Magalie Marcelin, Myriam Merlet, and Myrna Narcisse—as the ministry headquarters was destroyed.
However, new leaders are emerging among the grassroots (such as the women I spoke with) and longtime activists such as Malya Villard and Eramithe Delva—cofounders of KOFAVIV (Commission of Women Victims for Victims), a seven-year-old anti-gender-violence organization that supports victims and advocates for the prosecution of assailants—are suddenly in the spotlight. Unfortunately, grassroots organizations in Haiti often remain obscured by middle- and upper-class women’s groups that have more access to media and decision makers.
Nonetheless, in the displaced-persons camps and the urban slums that preceded them, groups of women continue to work together to share knowledge, form informal security forces, pursue justice for victims, or just gather together in a crochet workshop. Decembre, a frequent participant, said “Sometimes I don’t eat. I don’t sleep so I can crochet because I love it so much.” That group started to meet regularly to combat isolation and idleness and to give vulnerable girls a safe place to congregate and perhaps develop income-generating products.
The issue of security remains a huge challenge for women and girls in the camps. KOFAVIV documented more than 230 cases of gender-based violence in a three-month period. As a result, the UN’s Gender Based Violence cluster invited Villard and Delva to a meeting, but such gatherings are conducted almost entirely in French and not translated into Kreyòl—effectively excluding grassroots women while favoring middle-class organizations whose members speak French. (Unequal access to education remains one of the most disempowering aspects of poor women’s lives in Haiti.)
The erasure of poor women is a common critique of the Ministry of Women’s Affairs operations. Says Monité Marcelin, member of Club of Mothers in Little Haiti, “Sure we say we have a ministry for women, but the minister never calls us to try to talk with us, and when you finally see her it’s only with women high up there, not ones from below.”
The complex tension of class, color, and language—which foreign organizations tend to be oblivious of—is replicated and amplified at the international level. Haiti’s weak economy has rendered it highly dependent on international aid, which accounts for 40 percent of the national budget. In recent years, that aid has been delivered mostly to NGOs because of limited government capacity and a fear of government corruption. With more than ten thousand NGOs within the country—ranging from mega-outfits such as the Red Cross and Doctors without Borders to copious missionaries and tiny organizations that focus on singular missions—Haiti is often called a republic of NGOs. But NGOs are the main source of services for the masses—from health care to education to jobs—and since the earthquake, their power has only strengthened.
But what about all that aid that was sent to Haiti? Surprisingly, little has reached Haiti’s most vulnerable living in the camps. To date, only 27 percent of the $1.3 billion dollars raised in the first few months by major NGOs has actually been spent in country. Of the $10 billion pledged to Haiti at the UN donors’ conference in New York last March, only 10 percent has been delivered. The U.S. pledge of $1.5 billion is still tied up in Congress.
Some of the delay has been attributed to uncertainty over who would be the next president of the country. The women I spoke with were only too aware of this—and it raised their ire because there’s a history of women being disenfranchised through voter fraud and intimidation. They also resent the sudden notice of women at election time.
“When there is an election they give people five gourdes [about five cents] so they can go out and campaign for them,” Jean piped in again, “but when a big decision is being taken, women are not there. Women must be present because women can decide, too. They need to remember women all the time, and in everything.”
Elections were held against the backdrop of a cholera epidemic that threatened to invade the entire country, and the results were clouded by accusations of fraud and violent protests.