The Few Things I Know About Haiti
Of all the terrible things that have happened in Haiti, it’s hard to imagine anything worse than this week’s earthquake. That country has known sorrow since its inception. A product of the first and only successful slave rebellion in the New World, it has seemingly been punished ever since. Two centuries of revolution, neocolonial meddling, poverty, and hunger had already left Haiti in shambles, and the last thing it needed was a natural disaster of this magnitude.
In 2004 when I was in grad school, I took a course called “Marginal Literature in Latin America” that studied representations of marginalized people—indigenous tribes, slaves, women, the poor, children—in Latin American literature. One of the books we read was The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, set in Haiti during the slave rebellion and the years following as its people struggled to establish a new nation.
I wrote my final paper for the class about the book, on the heels of more terrible news out of Haiti. President Jean-Bertrand Aristide had just been forced out of office under threat of an armed rebellion, and President Bush was sending American Marines to Haiti as peacekeepers. My paper was about Carpentier’s portrayal of history and revolution in The Kingdom, and how he used the techniques of magical realism to teach the importance of constant struggle in the face of the nation’s cycle of tragedy.
Going back and reading it nearly six years later, it’s actually rather apt given the terrible things happening there right now. In my money quote from the novel to wrap up the paper, Carpentier wrote about how man can never escape his worldly troubles:
… a man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know, and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him. But man’s greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself.
Of course for Haitians now, wanting to be better simply means finding food, water, and shelter. They don’t need any more lessons about struggle. But that can be a valuable lesson for those of us who want to help them, by giving what you can from that which has been meted out to you.
If you’re looking to learn more about Haiti, I highly recommend The Kingdom of This World, along with The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James, another book about the rebellion I referenced in the paper. And for what it’s worth, here’s my six-year-old paper about the whole thing:
Revolution and The Representation of History in The Kingdom of This World (PDF)
