Amy Wilentz: Renew Haiti from the Ground Up
[Wilentz is the author of "The Rainy Season: Haiti Then and Now," which is being reissued with a new postearthquake introduction.]
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.
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....
Read entire article at NY Daily News
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.
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....