Dr. Beckett’s Episode Playlist
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:00:00]:
Hello. My name is Doctor. Greg Beckett from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. My area of specialty is cultural anthropology, and I’ve done ethnographic and historical work in Haitian, primarily in Port au Prince for, over 20 years. I am the author of the book There Is No More Haitian Between Life and Death and Port au Prince and co editor of the recently published Trio Remixed, the Michel Rolfe Trio reader. I had the great pleasure of studying with Michelle Rolfe Trio at the University of Chicago to do my PhD, in anthropology at the time, and I wanted to, speak about and review Haiti’s State Against Nation because I think it’s a classic in Haitian studies, and I think it’s a very interesting book to revisit in light of the kind of political crisis we’re seeing in Haiti today 30 odd years after the book was originally published.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:52]:
May or may not be related to the, Michelle Wolf, to your book we’re discussing today. But you’re an anthropologist, and he was one as well. My question is this, doing your doing your field work, does you does your discipline give you the mental scaffolding or the training to to not only perceive the unexpected, but also able to interpret what you’ve seen without destroying it in the process. I don’t know if that makes sense. And, also, can you can you give me some examples give us some examples that, of of this, you know, the type of training that you all received to handle what what what you observed?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:01:40]:
That’s a great question. And I you know, it’s actually quite related to to Trio as well and and and to me and to my field. And the short answer is I certainly hope that it it gives us that, and our training and the sort of history and the apology has been around thinking about that question. There’s lots of different ways we could think about it, the different kinds of methodology people might use. In some ways, historically, there’s been this argument in anthropology about whether you had to be kind of an outsider to a culture to go through that process of becoming accepted as an insider, learning the language, learning a culture, coming to understand it, and then leaving again. Of course, that dynamic historically was tied to anthropology being part of a kind of colonial enterprise, and so people who justify it might want to separate it from its historical connection to colonialism. And then there’s someone like Trio who’s who’s Haitian, and writing about Haitian, but one of the interesting things just to bring it to him and then I’ll say more about my own thoughts on this is that Trio’s ethnographic work wasn’t in Haitian. It was in Dominica, and he often would say that that understanding things in Dominica helped him understand things in Haitian, in particular, about the peasantry.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:02:53]:
And he studied the peasant economy in Dominica, a small island in the Caribbean as well, but historically very different from Haiti. And he often told his students, especially students who were from the Caribbean themselves, that they should do their first project somewhere different than where they were from, and then their life’s work might be coming to understand the place they’re from. Or and I think that that was really interesting to to to think of because it’s not always not not everyone would make that kind of argument. You know, for me, I’m I’m an outsider studying in Haiti, and so I I think that the methodology is all around trying to to really listen and develop habits of listening and learning and and and being open to the unexpected, the unknown, the unfamiliar, and then not treating it as odd, but coming to understand it as ordinary. That that is the key shift, I think, the more you live in a place and and can build relationships with people, learn a language, learn a culture, the more the things that initially felt weird because of that cultural, difference or cross cultural translation begin to feel normal, and then when you go home, when I when I leave Haiti and come back to Canada, things in Canada seem quite weird and so when we teach anthropology in our introductory classes, for example, we’d like to say that anthropology makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, so you’re always kinda trying to move in those two different directions in some way. Hopefully, our methods give us the the tools for that and I think the key methods that do that is that it’s a very long, period of research, in in the sort of Haitian, PhD training, usually a year or 2 in the field, and then, of course, much longer over the course of someone’s career, as I do further research projects. A real deep commitment to learning the local language or languages and to working with the sort of intellectuals in the place you’re working with as well. And so, you know, for me, it’s been hugely important to treat to say, well, there’s plenty of people in Haiti.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:04:57]:
They might not all be professional academics because there isn’t an institutional place for them in Haiti for them to do that. Maybe they’re a lawyer, but writing a history book about Haiti or all kinds or or a poet, or maybe they don’t have any of those kinds of professional, middle class sort of markings, but they are they are theorists of what’s happening in their lives and to be open to understanding that and coming to to, have that shape your understanding. And then when I think about writing about Haiti, I’m writing in English primarily to a to a non Haitian English reading audience. And so there, that second part of your question, how do you how do you do that process of interpretation and analysis without really, destroying the thing that you’ve, come to understand, I think, is a is a really delicate and nuanced kind of question. I’ll give you an example just of of something that I’ve I’ve thought through with that problem. When I was working in Haiti in from 2002 to 2004, I’ve worked there longer, but in that period in particular, people started that I was talking to in Port au Prince started to use the the crowd word blackout blackout, to talk about the loss of electrical power, but to talk about all kinds of other things like being hungry or feeling like they had no power or feeling like they were in shock. And this is all as people were really aware that there’s this enormous international pressure to remove Narrative, who was eventually removed, and to bring a UN mission into the country, which eventually came. And so people were really using it in a very pithy, kind of pointed way to speak to different kinds of audiences, myself included, and it could so that one term could carry all these different kinds of resonances and associations and implications, so learning that became imperialism, but then writing about it without kind of making it flat or making it seem too simple and really and also writing about it in a way that makes it seem like not my concept, but my attempt to translate something that people are actively using to think about their own lives became really important for me, and so I think that’s kind of key to the anthropological enterprise or mission that that Trejo was trained in and that I was trained in working with him, and, hopefully, that that we that we at least strive to achieve that kind of level of interpretation that does justice to the kinds of of ideas that we’re, lucky to listen to and take part in and learn from through the course of ethnographic field work.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:07:23]:
Alright, professor. It’s time for the Tortuga pitch. I’m about to get stranded on Tortuga for a year or 2. You have 5 words or concepts at your disposal to convince me why I should take this to your book with me. What would those 5 concepts or words be?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:07:46]:
Oh, well, I love this question, Patrick. And as you know, I do go on sometimes, so I I appreciate you limiting me. I’m gonna give the 5 words and then I’ll say something brief about each of them, and we can talk more about them through our conversation. The first word is the state, the concept of the state. The second is history. The third, crisis. The fourth, dictatorship and the 5th, the nation. And I think all of these are really key analytic terms that Trio uses in the book and also gives us kind of a new method or a new way of thinking about them.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:08:21]:
So on the one hand, the book represents Trio’s, I would say, kinda Marxist analysis of what the state is, not just government, not just political institutions, but the state as a kind of entity and its relationship, to forms of power and to structures in a particular society, in this case, the Haitian state. So thinking about the book as a way to think about what the Haitian state is and how it’s come to be, I think, is a crucial intervention the book makes. That gets me to the second word which is history. The book begins really with the problem of the de validate dictatorship and the at the end of it. The book was written right at the end of it, and people are thinking about what happens to Haiti next. And a strong claim in the book is that to really understand that present moment of, say, the late 19 eighties, the book was published in 19 90, To understand the present, we have to know the past. And so there’s an argument for history as methodology and for a particular reading of Haitian history that I find very compelling. The third word that I gave was crisis.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:09:25]:
And, again, at the time the book appeared, many, you know, pundits and analysts and anthropologists and politicians are all looking at Haiti thinking of it as in crisis, how to move from dictatorship to democracy, and the book makes a pitch that the crisis didn’t begin in that moment with the end of the of the dictatorship. And the crisis wasn’t really the dictatorship itself, but the dictatorship was a response to a much deeper structural crisis in Haitian society, and that gets connected to his historical arguments. We’ll talk more about what he sees as the roots of the economic and political crisis in Haiti at that time. The 4th word I gave was dictatorship, and in particular, the book is obviously about the dictatorship of of Francois and Jean Claude Duvalier, the Duvalier family regime, and it gives us an argument about that regime and its political ideology known as Duvalierisma. But it’s also a a really strong argument, and people have have critiqued him for this. But I think it’s interesting in its strength to understand devalueism as a form of totalitarianism, a very strong, you know, argument about the nature of the dictatorship more than just authoritarian rule. And so we can come back to to why Trio thinks it’s a form of totalitarianism in our conversation. The 5th word is the nation, which is in the title of the book, and it’s it’s used as sort of a pivot to the state.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:10:48]:
There’s the state and the nation as these two kind of opposing groups in in in very broad strokes in the book. And I think that for me, I I really have a strong memory of the final line of the book, which really under underscores the argument tree I was making about the nation where he says that the peasantry is the haitian, and he has a particular kind of take on what the sort of who the people are, who are the people we would want represented by a democratic government, who are the people who who should have a say of what Haitian society, the Haitian state, ought to look like? Or who are the people who have have really given us a sense of Haitian culture and identity? That’s the nation. We’ll see what he means by that as we talk again more about the complexities of the book.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:11:37]:
First book, He wrote in French back in 86. He wanted to just translate that book into English. And what he discovered was that literal translation is one thing. Cultural haitian is a totally different ballgame.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:12:06]:
It’s a fascinating question, and to think about the questions of translation, you know, very broadly speaking, but also in Trio’s work specifically. I would just add to sort of complexify the the question even more. Trujillo’s very first book, which was written in 1977, was published in in Kreyol, Didifibouillet, and it’s, which is now coming out. There’s an English translation of it, but it’s a very hard book to translate, and it is about Haitian history, and there’s elements of that argument kind of resonating through all of his writing about Haiti, and we can get to his sort of understanding of Haitian history later, but to think of 3 languages, 3 different kinds of books, speaking to 3 different kinds of audiences in different kinds of ways. So first of all, I think it just shows you the the suppleness of Trio’s thinking and writing his his attention to audience and genre that goes into his thinking about translation. And then there’s also kind of a moment of this change in the years between, it seems like a small amount of time between 1986, when the first book in French was published, in 1990 when when State Against Nation was published. But those 4 years were, you know, a lifetime in a way in terms of what was happening politically in Haiti. And so there’s there’s added stuff in the book, in the English translation.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:13:21]:
There’s things have changed in his thinking about what’s happening. But the biggest point that I think he’s trying to make is about, about 2 things. 1 is how to make the argument about the state and the nation that he wants to make given the kind of different sense and implication that those words would have in French versus in English where, especially in to an American or North American English speaking audience, they would seem to be identical, so you have to disambiguate them and say how they’re in opposition for that audience. And that really is the other thing he’s speaking to, that idea of cultural translation, especially thinking of him as an anthropologist. He’s really thinking about the audience for whom is this book intended, And State Against Nation is obviously for an English reading audience and primarily, a politically engaged one, perhaps people who might be advocating against forms of of American intervention in Haiti. So it’s really for, I I would say, an American English speaking audience. And in that case, you have to write and talk about and explain things like color prejudice in Haiti in a in a very different way because of the assumptions of how race and color are understood in the American cultural context. That’s that’s part of the question.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:14:39]:
And the other thing is that in in French, he was really writing for other Haitian intellectuals and for the Haitian, middle middle professional, middle class, and the people who would be, maybe helping shape or come to terms with what would come after Duvalierism. And so there’s a ton of of references that you can make, much more directly or slightly in French to that audience, and so I think he had to unpack that and clarify it or write in kind of a bit more of an academic way. And the biggest thing that signals that change is that in the French, he uses I and us. He’s really speaking directly and personally to people he thinks, okay. Well, we have to figure out some of us stayed, some of us were implicated in this, some of us were exiled. What comes next? What’s our responsibility? And he slips back into a kind of more academic mode in the English version where it’s, a little bit more of an analytic distance. And I think that that’s telling, but I do think you can see his position through it even though it might be less clearly signified through the first person pronoun usage, for example.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:15:50]:
It’s Twilio here’s Twilio on the elite. State fetishism, the congenital disease of the Haitian urban classes. What’s Tuyo getting at here?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:16:03]:
It’s a it’s a funny faith phrase for sure, and I think there’s a lot going on in it. So I’ll just briefly try to gesture to what I think is going on, and we can maybe touch on some of those other points, throughout our conversation because it’s it’s also announcing a key theme or a key argument of the book, and just to kinda give some background for those who aren’t familiar with that kind of language. And this is part of that cultural translation and shift that goes with the English version of the book. It is it does read a little more academic, and in particular, it’s drawing on, a language from a kind of Marxist social analysis. And so fetishism the idea of fetishism understood in that way comes from Marx thinking about things coming to take on much more value than they have or being associated with the the sort of locus of value or power or wealth, but in a mistaken way. And in the idea of a kind of political Marxism, state fetishism refers to sort of the overwhelming focus on the state above everything else, above other forms of politics, other political relationships, other things that might be happening. And so when we think of that as the congenital disease of the Haitian urban classes, that’s a pretty pointed, target, and and we have to assume the trio knows almost exactly the particular people he’s speaking to in that comment. To think about it more broadly, though, part of the historical argument of the book is that a dynamic got set up in Haiti after independence, where the sort of only way that the upper class could could rule wasn’t through, let’s say, restoring plantations, because the peasantry had resisted that.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:17:46]:
They wanted to own their own land and work their own land, so most of the elite end up in primarily in in Port au Prince, but in other cities as well. And so that urban classes become really key economically and politically in the counter, and what Trio is suggesting is that their understanding of the only way they can hold power and legitimize themselves as holding power is to control the state and so the state becomes, again, a kind of a Marxist language, the arena in which class struggle takes place, but here it’s between rival members of the urban elite trying to vie for control of the state and its various institutions and structures which will allow them to, you know, extract forms of wealth or to legitimize their forms of power, give their families special licenses or monopolies or whatever it might be, so that’s the kind of thing he’s thinking about there, and, and again, it it it, in English it just sounds like this this a lot of verbiage and a lot of jargon in the French version I think it’d be much more pointedly targeted, and I think that it’s meant to be pretty pointedly targeted as a critique of the the Haitian elite.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:19:04]:
For those who haven’t read this book, how is it organized in terms of its content?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:19:10]:
That’s a great question. And, the book has a pretty simple and and standard academic form of of of structure where there’s an introduction that’s quite dense and theoretical. And for those, who are less interested in some of the the the sort of really deep in the weeds arguments about the concept of the state, the concept of the nation, and various theoretical frameworks that we can think through that. It might even be possible to bracket the introduction or skim it and dive right into, chapter 1 and kinda read the the book, which a little bit more historically driven and narratively driven after that. The book is then so after that introduction, which is, again, sort of agenda setting in terms of its theory and frameworks where it sets out the problem of the state and the nation as he sees it, you have 2 parts. The first part, which is really the first half or maybe even a little bit more than half of the book, is the historical legacy as he calls it. And that is really about the history of Haiti, a little bit about the revolution in the colonial area, but really about thinking the 19th century up until early 20th century in the US Haitian. What happened in that 1st century in a bit of independence in Haiti to set the structural conditions for what he’ll wanna talk about in the second half of the book.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:20:23]:
And so we get, you know, a history of the ideas of Haitian nationalism, the the kind of economic dependency that Haiti has to the rest of the world given the way that it is sort of isolated in the way that it’s set up existing in relationship to its neighbors and and and to other forms of centers of power like in Europe and North America. You get the rise of the economic elite, which he calls the republic for the merchants, an analysis of the peasantry in relationship to the merchants and the political class, and then a chapter on called culture, color, and politics in which she thinks through the relationship between, you know, idioms of of color and how they are inflected by ideas of social or economic class or rural versus urban location and how all of that gets transposed into or becomes the foundations for various political ideologies that groups have used to justify their rule and that’s gonna be crucial to see how racism inherits that legacy of thinking about color, culture, and politics as the key form of, you know, idea that gives your group or your political party or your movement some sort of claim to legitimacy. The second half of the book is called the totalitarian solution and that sets out his strong reading or a strong argument to read de valorism not only as dictatorship, but as a totalitarian form of of politics. And so the book gives us a history of the transition into Devalerisma. It sets up the argument about how the state then becomes against the nation and what he means by that, and it ends with a couple chapters about the the continuities of Tevalorisme and how they set root in Haiti. Very briefly, just to give you a sense of why he wants to to call it totalitarian, he doesn’t see it just as an authoritarian rule imposing itself on Haitian society. He sees Duvalierism as, a break from other forms of authoritarian rule we’ve seen with various political moments in Haiti in the past. He sees it as really total because it reaches into Toussaint extends far beyond the state into all kinds of forms of what academics would call civil society, the family, the church, all kinds of institutions, the educational system, the the media system.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:22:38]:
Duvalierism really transformed all of those not obviously political institutions in part through the vast paramilitary structure that he created, but in other ways as well, and so it really altered, the sort of very terms under which politics could be understood in Haiti after developmentism.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:23:00]:
And the, preface, Trudeau, accuses the, the urban classes, the elite of ignoring certain key aspects of devaluerism. One of them is he says they the the social basis of Duvalierism is one of them.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:23:19]:
It’s a really interesting phrasing, and I think that at first read, it might sound as if he’s saying sort of thinking about the social basis of support for Duvalierism, which, in some cases, that’s part of what he’s trying to show historically when and how was, Francois Duvalier able to generate certain kinds of support for his his political projects. But, I would I would read it slightly differently and especially in light of what he says just before that about state fetishism, and I think that what he’s getting at is that most of the discussion happening in Haiti, in a lot of areas at this time are around a a political solution to the end of dictatorship and a very narrow idea of politics, that’s what’s the new government gonna be, what new party is gonna come in, and who’s gonna control the state? And Trio is trying to get us to see that underneath the political as we understand it, the government, the particular, politicians who make it up, maybe the constitution, which, of course, gets rewritten during this period as well. Underneath all of that is the social, that politics are in deeply deeply embedded in social, economic, and cultural systems. That’s the anthropologist of him making an argument that a political scientist would maybe perhaps pitch differently. And so what he’s trying to get at is that we we really have to understand, I would say, the social and historical and cultural basis of where Duvalier isma came from, and and thus that’s gonna be crucial to understanding the ways it settled into the structures of society so that merely replacing the people who make up the government won’t undo what it is. And so thinking about it in those ways is, I think, what he’s getting at in that early preface.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:25:04]:
Another thing, Du, Tuio says the elite myths were the condition of Duvalierism’s, emergence.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:25:14]:
That’s right. And this is a real key part of the overall argument and structure of the book. It has to do with with why he wants to look so historically deeply and sort of broadly socially at where Duveluism came from, where it’s rooted, how it came to be. I would say, very broadly speaking, there’s 3 key conditions of its emergence that he talks about in the book. The first has to do with the historical setup of it and it goes deeper than this, but I’ll just say say one part of that here, which is the US occupation, from 1915 to 1934 changed Haiti dramatically in all kinds of ways as as, any student of Haitian history would know. But some of the key changes that are important here is the overall centralization of administration, political rule, and and a lot of economic, rule as well in porta plants, sort of sidelining other kinds of cities like Cap Haitian and others, and, of course, the creation of the Haitian army by the US marines, which really obviously, there had been a Haitian army before this, but it gets, again, centralized and trained differently and becomes a sort of a a a sort of key broker for US power and US interests in Haiti, and that’s key to the politics that sets up demeilarism in the 19 fifties. Another kinda condition of its emergence has to do with his argument about color in relationship to class and politics, in particular, thinking about the cultural movement that gives birth to Nuarisma, and the kind of political renaissance and and cultural renaissance of understanding and reevaluating the peasantry, Creole language, voodoo, all kinds of other things that give us various forms of what we might call, but I don’t know if it’s a it’s determined sort of a broader comparative case that gets used because they’re black power movements. I think Nuwarizma is a little bit different than Toussaint, but Duvalier comes out of that generation post occupation where they’re thinking about race and color and class, the peasantry, the nation, and that all becomes key to his ideology.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:27:27]:
The third condition for its emergence, and I think this is the one that that especially is key to, to Trudeau’s argument and that people overlook, has to do with the nature of the crisis that we’re talking about. Many people look at Duvalierism at the dictatorship as the political crisis of Haiti, and no doubt it caused all kinds of crises. Duvalier’s Trio’s starting point is that Duvalierism emerges as a solution to a crisis that’s been there and mounting for decades, and then in its solution, in some ways, it ends up deepening the structural conditions of that crisis, which has a lot of kinds of nuance to it, but one of the main ones is the deep economic dependency that Haiti has to sort of the global economy and then within Haiti, the particular economic relationship between a peasantry which is is sort of losing out, losing its land, losing, forms of wealth and and moving to the cities, and an elite that is dependent on extracting wealth from that peasantry, and that’s getting harder and harder to do. And that sort of big economic crisis becomes part of the story of the emergence of Duvalierizna.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:28:42]:
The the elite, the third aspect that the elite missed about Duvalierism was the social imperialism that propped it up, that led to its longevity and resilience as a dictatorship.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:28:55]:
This is also a really great question and a key point to understanding his argument and and the sort of depth of meaning behind Trio calling Duvaloyisma a form of totalitarianism, and, again, others don’t use that term for it. He he’s he was really kind of alone in making that argument. Everyone understands it as a form of authoritarianism, as a form of dictatorship. Trouillot’s argument is that the sort of the social mechanisms that propped up, Duvalier Yzma and gave it its longevity is resilience, and I would argue even the the continued roots that persist, in some ways even today, have to do with the way that so the preconditions were shifting Haitian society, but also the way that that Francois Duvalier in particular used the state to transform other elements of Haitian society. He often referred to it as the Haitianization of x. The Haitianization of the Catholic church was one of the big ones and that was one of his big targets, and Duvalier even publishes, you know, this strange book where it’s it’s, a memoir of him and his argument and and and sort of political fight with the Catholic church, something that that is sort of incomprehensible, to outsiders, I think, but was really key to some of the changes he was making in Haitian society and, of course, the creation of of the Macoute network, and all kinds of other ways in which, institutions not normally thought of under the purview of the government were also transformed and and tied to the structures of of power, of duality, and and, and his sort of, like, inner circle, and so those become really key and also very hard to undo, which is why we get things like the political metaphor of deschoukage, the uprooting that people say is is needed to get rid of the dictatorship and that many would argue was never really fully accomplished in the the phase of the transition to democracy.
00:00 Studying different cultures through listening and learning.
04:57 Haitian academics interpret and convey cultural nuances.
09:25 Book addresses Haiti’s deeper structural crisis.
12:06 Translation’s complex challenge in Trio’s Haitian history.
16:03 Complex book theme involves state fetishism and history.
20:23 Analysis of Haitian nationalism and economic dependency.
25:14 Duveluism’s emergence and key conditions explained briefly.
28:55 Trouillot argues Duvalierism as totalitarianism, not authoritarianism.
00:00 Anthropologist researches Caribbean peasant economy and cultural understanding.
04:57 Challenges of interpreting and writing about Haiti for non-Haitian audience, referencing word “blackout” in multiple contexts. Ethnographic field work’s goal: accurate interpretation.
09:25 Book argues Haiti’s crisis predates dictatorship, critiques Duvalierism as totalitarianism.
12:06 A discussion of translation in Trio’s work and its complexity in conveying Haitian history across languages and audiences.
16:03 Summary: Discussion of book’s key theme and Marxist analysis; focus on state and class dynamics in post-independence Haiti.
20:23 Summary: The text discusses Haitian nationalism, economic dependency, rise of economic elite, and the totalitarian nature of Duvalierism.
25:14 It discusses Duveluism’s historical roots and key conditions of its emergence, including the impact of the US occupation and the relationship between color, class, and politics in Haiti.
28:55 Duvaloyisma labeled as authoritarianism, not totalitarianism. Trouillot argues resilience and societal change under Duvalier. His use of the state, transformation of institutions. Efforts to undo legacy.
Introduction to Episode and Guest
- Introduction of Dr. Greg Beckett, cultural anthropologist with expertise in Haitian studies
- Overview of the book “Haiti’s State Against Nation”
- Contextualizing the book in relation to Haiti’s current political crisis
Anthropology and Fieldwork in Haiti - Dr. Beckett’s approach to anthropology: deep listening, learning the language and culture, building relationships
- The importance of accurately interpreting local expressions like “blackout” without distortion
Brief Overview of Trio’s Book - Dr. Beckett’s five-word pitch: “the state, history, crisis, dictatorship, nation”
- The Marxist analysis presented in the book and its relevance to understanding the Haitian state
Historical Context and Analysis - Haiti’s history: its importance to the current situation
- The dictatorship era of Francois and Jean Claude Duvalier
- Totalitarian nature and societal impact of the Duvalier regime
- National identity and democratic governance
Comparative Analysis: French vs. English Versions - Translation challenges between French and English
- Tone and audience shift in Trio’s work
- Topics tailored to American English-speaking audiences vs. Haitian intellectual and middle-class audiences
Elite and State Fetishism - Critique of the Haitian elite’s obsession with the state
- Dissecting the organization of the book: the historical legacy and the totalitarian solution
- Focus on the pre-19th century events and the transition to Duvalerism
Structural Components and Conditions for Duvalierism - Social bases and elite myths contributing to Duvalierism’s rise
- Historical setup: The US occupation of Haiti
- Cultural reevaluation of race, class, and politics
- Economic dependencies contributing to Duvalierism
Impact and Transformations under Duvalierism - Totalitarianism within Duvalier’s regime and its social support systems
- “Haitianization” of the Catholic church and creation of the Macoute network
- Challenges in dismantling the legacy of the dictatorship
- Preconditions affecting Haitian society and the struggle toward democratic transition
Understanding Cultural Perspectives: “anthropology makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar, so you’re always kinda trying to move in those two different directions in some way.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:04:15 → 00:04:22]
Exploring Local Theories and International Narratives in Haiti: “When I was working in Haiti in from 2002 to 2004, I’ve worked there longer, but in that period in particular, people started that I was talking to in Port au Prince started to use the the crowd word blackout blackout, to talk about the loss of electrical power, but to talk about all kinds of other things like being hungry or feeling like they had no power or feeling like they were in shock.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:05:50 → 00:06:09]
Haiti’s Political History: “The crisis wasn’t really the dictatorship itself, but the dictatorship was a response to a much deeper structural crisis in Haitian society.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:09:44 → 00:09:53]
Complexities of Translation in Literature: “So first of all, I think it just shows you the suppleness of Trio’s thinking and writing his attention to audience and genre that goes into his thinking about translation.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:12:52 → 00:12:57]
The Congenital Disease of the Haitian Urban Classes: “state fetishism refers to sort of the overwhelming focus on the state above everything else, above other forms of politics, other political relationships, other things that might be happening.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:16:57 → 00:17:07]
The Structure and Content of Academic Books: “The book has a pretty simple and standard academic form of structure where there’s an introduction that’s quite dense and theoretical… And after that introduction, which is, again, sort of agenda setting in terms of its theory and frameworks where it sets out the problem of the state and the nation as he sees it, you have 2 parts.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:19:47 → 00:19:57]
Haitian Politics and Society: “You get the rise of the economic elite, which he calls the republic for the merchants, an analysis of the peasantry in relationship to the merchants and the political class, and then a chapter on called culture, color, and politics in which she thinks through the relationship between, you know, idioms of of color and how they are inflected by ideas of social or economic class or rural versus urban location and how all of that gets transposed into or becomes the foundations for various political ideologies that groups have used to justify their rule.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:20:43 → 00:21:17]
The Social Basis of Duvalierism: “Underneath all of that is the social, that politics are in deeply deeply embedded in social, economic, and cultural systems.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:24:21 → 00:24:30]
Emergence of Duvalierism: “there’s 3 key conditions of its emergence that he talks about in the book. The first has to do with the historical setup of it … the US occupation, from 1915 to 1934 changed Haiti dramatically … the overall centralization of administration, political rule, and a lot of economic, rule as well in porta plants … the creation of the Haitian army by the US marines … becomes a sort of a key broker for US power and US interests in Haiti, and that’s key to the politics that sets up Duvalierism in the 1950s.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:25:34 → 00:25:43]
Understanding Duvalierism: “Everyone understands it as a form of authoritarianism, as a form of dictatorship. Trouillot’s argument is that the sort of the social mechanisms that propped up Duvalierism and gave it its longevity its resilience, and I would argue even the continued roots that persist, in some ways even today, have to do with the way that the preconditions were shifting Haitian society, but also the way that that Francois Duvalier in particular used the state to transform other elements of Haitian society.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:29:32 → 00:29:43]
Anthropology and Fieldwork Perspectives: “doing your doing your field work, does you does your discipline give you the mental scaffolding or the training to to not only perceive the unexpected, but also able to interpret what you’ve seen without destroying it in the process.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:01:07 → 00:01:25]
The Lure of Adventure: “time for the Tortuga pitch”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:07:24 → 00:07:26]
Challenges of Translation: “He wanted to just translate that book into English. And what he discovered was that literal translation is one thing. Cultural haitian is a totally different ballgame.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:11:47 → 00:12:06]
State Fetishism and Haitian Urban Classes: “State fetishism, the congenital disease of the Haitian urban classes.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:15:55 → 00:16:00]
Understanding Duvalierism: “One of them is he says they the the social basis of Duvalierism is one of them.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:23:11 → 00:23:19]
Duvalierism’s Support System: “the third aspect that the elite missed about Duvalierism was the social imperialism that propped it up, that led to its longevity and resilience as a dictatorship.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:28:43 → 00:28:55]
- Can you break down Trio’s Marxist analysis of the Haitian state and its relevance to understanding the current political crisis?
- How does Dr. Beckett’s approach to deep listening and learning the local language enhance our comprehension of Haitian culture and the state?
- What are some of the most significant challenges faced when translating Trio’s work for different audiences, and how do these changes affect the book’s message?
- How does the concept of “blackout” reflect broader societal issues within Haiti, and what can it tell us about the way Haitians perceive their own state?
- In five words, how could we summarize the core argument of “Haiti’s State Against Nation” and why are these themes chosen to represent the book?
- How did Francois and Jean Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship shape the Haitian society, and what are the lasting impacts we can identify today?
- Can you explain the three key conditions that led to the emergence of Duvalierism and how they’re interconnected?
- What role did the elites and their state fetishism play in the persistence of Haitian structural problems according to Trio?
- In what ways did the Duvalier regime employ the strategy of “Haitianization” and the creation of the Macoute network to reinforce its totalitarian rule?
- What are the “preconditions” that still affect Haitian society as mentioned by Dr. Beckett, and how do they impede the transition to a stable democracy?
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:00]:
Let’s, talk about Melville Herskovits. You said he was one of the first American anthropologists to work in Haiti. You cite something Herskovits said that I found interesting and wanted you to expand on it. Herskovits said that because Haitians had won their freedom much earlier than anywhere else in the Caribbean region, it meant that Haitian peasants had retained a deeper level of continuity with their African ancestors. So first, do you agree with that? And second, can you flesh that out for us?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:00:41]:
Yeah. That’s a really interesting question. And and I I think before getting to the answer and what I think, I just want to note that so, Herskovits was a American culture anthropologist and, one of the first to really study and work in the Caribbean. So some of what I’m gonna say is really kinda inside baseball about anthropology and anthropology working through its concepts and its methods. And the answers anthropologists would give to that, what they mean by continuity between a place like Haiti and and variously places in in West Africa might be very different from how people understand their own history, you know, effectively, emotionally, in terms of or or in terms of sort of national identity. And so I would just first say, you know, if people feel that that is a real continuity and a deep incontinuity for them, then it is real at that level of meaning and attachment to that history. Right? The way that anthropologists are talking about it the way that Herskovits are talking about it and then anthropologists responding to Herskovits, myself included, is a little bit different from the question of of meaning and more of the question of, can we trace sort of a historical connections between different, say, social practices or institutions or languages or religions or something like that. Right? So I just wanna note that sort of a kind of academic version of this, and then there’s a different kind of answer to this as well.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:02:13]:
But it’s a really interesting question in a couple of ways. For for one, the Caribbean is an interesting place in the history of anthropology, and anthropology really begins to emerge, especially in the US and also in Europe at the end of the 1800 to early 1900, where it becomes institutionalized, and Herskovits was one of the early generations of people trained in anthropology departments in the US. He was trained by Franz Boas, a sort of founding figure of American culture anthropology, trained as anthropologist doing anthropological work, so he’s of that early era. And at that time, the Caribbean was largely ignored by anthropologists because it was sort of written off as not authentic, and I have I did air quotes, but you can’t see them. Because at that time, anthropologists primarily study culture. That’s sort of our keyword and our key topic. And, at that time, people thought that cultures had to be kind of traditional and essential and kinda tied to a place and have a certain sort of depth of continuity to them. So the Caribbean seemed in inauthentic because everyone there was from somewhere else.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:03:25]:
Especially you know, and this is a distinction that many people make about the Caribbean even different from the rest of the Americas where there’s also all kinds of settler colonialism and people being moved and brought there through slavery or indentured servitude or other kinds of mechanisms. But the Caribbean is often written as if the sort of genocidal erasure of the indigenous community was complete in a way it wasn’t in the Americas. That’s become kinda questioned now, so I don’t wanna say that it definitely people from parts of Asia coming into the Caribbean and making what academics would call creole societies, mixed societies. So they didn’t fit the kind of terms and methods of anthropology so easily at the time, and Herskovits was a very innovative thinker and was working in the Caribbean, and Haiti was one of the places he went. He went to Haiti in the early thirties, in sort of the final years of the US occupation, So he would have been there in, say, 33, 34, around that time, and, so that’s kind of in interesting context to think about. And then he Herskowitz also worked elsewhere in the Caribbean and in West Africa. And he was a very interesting figure anyway, and he would learn drumming patterns, and he was very adept at picking that kind of thing up. And, eventually, he ends up thinking that that, that Haiti has sort of kind of more, in his view, authentically African cultural forms than some places even in Africa.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:05:05]:
And that’s where I would kinda disagree with him because I’m not sure what we would mean at that Toussaint. And my worry in his phrasing is that, you know, anthropology did a lot to try to displace and argue against racial understandings of difference. The the whole idea behind the concept of of culture is to say that social and cultural differences have to be explained through history, society, and culture, not through biology or inheritance or genetics, so not through racial ideologies, but through social analysis and cultural analysis and historical study. And so my worry with Hirschkowitz’s framing is that he sort of brought race back in through the lens of cultural continuity to say that that Haiti is somehow deeply African. There’s a deep connection between Haiti and and parts of West Africa, undeniably. But, say, from 18 04 to to 1934, when he’s there, it’s not like what was there before the revolution stays and and just stays as, quote, unquote, African. It it’s Haitian. It’s it’s informed by a kind of active understanding of it as connected to Guinea, to Africa, and it’s informed, but it’s also informed by the kind of history of Haitians making their own their own cultural traditions, their own language, their own religion, in the form of Vodou, their own cosmology.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:06:31]:
And so I wouldn’t so my worry is that we kinda miss the agency and the change and transformation within a cultural set of traditions if we think of it only through the language of continuity. That being said, Herskovits made its a hugely important argument because in the United States, at the time that he was writing, it was understood by a lot of people that African Americans in the US had lost all of their cultural traditions and any connection to Africa. So Hirschkowitz’s argument is hugely important, but I think it’s important less for our understanding of of Haitian culture and sometimes maybe as a kind of too blunt of a theory to understand what was happening in Haiti. But it’s hugely important politically as an intervention into America, where there had been a total silencing about the African part of African American culture and the way that African cultural traditions and forms had had been a huge part of the making of American culture. It’s silenced, of course, because of the legacies of slavery and racism and all kinds of things, and so Herskovits’ argument about continuity was an attempt to get away from that idea of erasure, of of total loss of culture. And I think that I absolutely agree with it. And, but I but what I don’t like about his framework or or that we’ve just gotten more sophisticated frameworks after Hirschgoods. I think he opens a space for us to think, and people have have taken it further in some different ways, where we can think about, say, Haitian culture as a vibrant living tradition that is connected constantly to ideas of of Africa, in particular places in Africa sometimes, but also is connected to its own kind of, development within Haitian.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:08:34]:
And and, so that is what I think is is really important. But I do think that, you know, elsewhere throughout the Caribbean, Haiti does have this this, I I guess, reputation, I would say, or this people do think of Haiti as somehow different from the rest of the Caribbean. It it fits a little imperfectly with its other neighbors since and that part of that, again, is because of the revolution and the the sort of longer time of being free. And so Haitian national culture developed earlier and in a different way than some of the other, Haitian cultures throughout the Caribbean. But, again, I think that we have to be weary of of saying that Haiti is somehow out of place, that it is just African, in the Caribbean. I think that is part of the way that Haiti is sometimes silenced as as being actually a part of the West, which is what I that’s how I would locate Haiti kind of historically, that the hate Haiti is actually crucial to the emergence of the West, but often in a way that has to be silenced. That doesn’t mean that its culture is necessarily European or or influenced by Europe, but that it’s it’s but it’s and not that it doesn’t have African elements or cultural practices, which it clearly does. But just that if we constantly connect Haiti to one place rather than the other, what does that open up, and where does it close in terms of our thinking of the political and social and cultural haitian, so the the way that we frame the story of of Haiti in relationship to its its neighbors or the broader Atlantic world in which it’s a part.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:10:14]:
But Herskovits, just to say a little more about him, I mean, he’s a he’s a really significant figure, and I think that it’s sort of, for me, conceptually, again, he opens a door and people moved through it and kinda passed, his more blunt ideas of continuity or not continuity. It’s sort of erasure or continuity are the kind of two main things he’s thinking of there. Interestingly enough, one of Herskovits’ students was Katherine Dunham, who didn’t stay in anthropology, but she went to Haiti as an anthropologist and, very influenced by Herskovits’ ideas. And, you know, Dunham ends up eventually instead going on being a dancer and very active in Haiti where she has a home at at the Haitian Leclerc, and so she has a really interesting relationship to Haiti. Herskovits, I think she Dunham made a decision to leave anthropology, I think, on her own and a and a good decision because she was amazing amazing choreographer and dancer, and she did way better work as a global figure that way than I think anyone could just in in a academic discipline like anthropology. But in a way, she was also kinda chased out by Herskovits, who, got pretty upset with her when she decided to go through, an initiation ritual into voodoo, where Herskovits thought, well, you’re no longer the objective outsider. Now you’ve gone too too much, to the other side. And, I I I counter can’t prove it by any means, and I don’t wanna psychologize, Hirschkowitz too much.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:11:43]:
But I I do have a feeling that he might have been a little, jealous of just how good an ethnographer Dunham was, that she was able to really come to understand Haitian culture, voodoo, Haitian dances at a really, really interesting level deeply. I mean, in her body, she really got the dances, and she would go on very famously to combine the dances from voodoo with very, cutting edge modern dance technique with classic ballet into a whole new form of dance that was just beautiful and and and unseen elsewhere. And I think Khiriskovits sort of saw that and was a little, like, taken aback because he had been so proud of his ability to learn drumming patterns in Haiti and then go to Senegal or somewhere else in West Africa and show it off and see it, And Dunham did that too. I mean, Dunham ended up founding the national dance troupe in Haiti, and then the Haitian dance troupe went to Senegal, was invited to Senegal after independence to help treat to help found their dance troop. So there really is a way in which Haiti ends up becoming the basis of national culture in some places in West Africa because even in West Africa, it’s understood to have been sort of the repository of African traditions that were free from another century in the 9 the 1900, another century of of European colonization. So it’s not just that that Haiti is sort of a continuity of Africa, but Haiti plays a role in shaping Africans, West African ideas of culture and tradition, and they shape Haiti. It’s a real dialectic back and forth, and Haiti is a huge part of that story as is, in fact, anthropology. But it’s, you know, it takes us a little farther from from just the question, but I think it’s really interesting to think about.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:13:34]:
And I think that sort of where I land, I think it’s sort of I want just to have a theory of it that is continuity plus change and to think about the agency of people in Haiti actively making their cultural traditions deeply connected to what they had and could bring with them from Africa, but acknowledging that the slave plantation system was a system designed to to destroy those connections. So when we do see those connections, it’s really important at the level of culture but also politically and ethically to acknowledge that the hard work people had to do to keep and hold on to those cultural traditions in the midst of a system designed to destroy them. And I think that that, absolutely is something we have to recognize. Long did it take to write this book? Oh, it’s so so long in lots of ways. And it wasn’t always just writing this book. There’s sort of other versions that never made to the light of day, that are on the cutting room floor or stuck in drawers or, as it were. You know, I like to think of anthropology as a very slow discipline, and I think that’s one of its strengths even though in some ways it’s a weakness and that we can’t always get our work out to a public audience in a timely fashion where it might make, you know, have some important consequences, perhaps, I think anthropology could do better than find better avenues for that. But writing an ethnography, which is the, you know, an anthropology book, that’s what we call it, It usually is is something that people take a while to do, and and just like our method takes a little while, the the kind of idea still in our training is that your method, you might spend a year, maybe 2, in the field doing the research and then slowly write write the book.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:15:33]:
This book is based on research that began in 2002, and my the research for my graduate training ended with my dissertation in 2,008. And so after that, I was trying to write a book, a very different book, and I don’t think it would have been a very good book compared to this one, for a lot of reasons. And some of the reasons is I just struggled with how to think about moving from a decision to a book and and what to write, but, honestly, at that time, just kind of in my own intellectual trajectory, I think I was still too caught up in the academic game of of the book needs to to be theory first, and then Haitian is sort of an example of the theory. I think I had the whole thing wrong, and I think that by the time I was successful here, it was really about, people’s experiences and and lives first and the theory being a little bit in the background or in the footnotes or or woven into the story in some slightly different ways. And I think that that was, for me, very important in terms of figuring out what I wanted the book to look like and and what was important for me in writing it. But it was also, you know, my path, even in the research, was interrupted a lot. Instead of sort of one chunk of of fieldwork, it was done over multiple years. I was all set to kinda do my big year in the field, in 2003, 2004, but, the the 2004 coup changed that, and, the area I was doing research in in Madison became, much more dangerous.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:17:00]:
And so my research was sort of start and stop and, that shaped my thinking, in some, I think, interesting ways. It shaped what I was even gonna focus on in my research, but I think it also allowed me to in the in the process of continually coming back, rather than sort of staying for one long chunk, it did help strengthen some of the relationships because I think when you leave a place and you can have the if you have the privilege to be able to leave a place, but you choose to come back and and do more research, I think that that can be important for getting deeper, into the kind of relationships you’re building during field work. And then, of course, the book that I was writing was I kinda just sort of threw it out in 2010 after the earthquake in a cup for a couple of reasons. One, it felt like that I had to reckon with the earthquake, and what I was writing didn’t make as much sense anymore, but, also, because I just wasn’t interested in writing ethnography at that time. I was much more interested in writing or speaking to anyone who would listen to me about the earthquake and and how to think about responses and intervention, you know, and and we’ve seen what’s happened in the decade since the earthquake and more than decade of of reconstruction and all the kind of problems it’s had. And so that ended up producing sort of just just some different research as well and shaping how it might kind of connect the research after the quake with the research before it. And so, really, in earnest, I sat down to begin writing a version of a book that would become this one in 2016, and that that was just that, you know, part of academic careers is that you do maybe some shorter articles first, and then, you know, I was I was privileged to have a chunk of time off from teaching to to write, and that’s where the book really began to take shape. So this version of the book, just sort of sitting down in the computer writing it, took about a year and a half, to make as a manuscript, but it really took about 10 years worth of of thinking and unthinking and learning.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:19:00]:
And if you add the research time into that, it’s almost, it’s almost double that. And I hope that that it that it that the time depth shows, I’d like to think that it helped me get a better understanding of what I was writing about and get a sense of how people’s ideas myself included change over time as you’re thinking about things that are, you know, social processes that are unfolding in time. We have different engagement and different understandings of them at different moments. And so that having that ability to retrospectively look back and see a process of development or processes of haitian or change in new ways helped me think about what I was writing about in a whole different light than I think I would have if I if I wrote any or if I had finished any of the versions of the book before this that I that I started. So, yeah, there’s a couple different ways to answer that. It took a couple of years to etch some level of the manuscript in writing, but once I I felt like once I found the the way I wanted to tell the story, this particular version of the manuscript came together relatively quickly and easily compared to other ones that I was struggling to write, and I think that that also felt like that there’s maybe a a way I had found, for the story that it that it wanted to come out a certain way. And so it felt, like, easier to to bring it to con a revolution. And that seemed like a good indication that maybe that was the way the story ought to be told, I I hope.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:20:35]:
Yeah. So anywhere between 2 years and and and 15 years or so, of of sort of thinking and unthinking and learning and and rethinking and writing and redrafting and revising, that kinda went into making the book.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:20:59]:
How did the Haitian Revolution challenge the very categories and concept of what constituted History haitian?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:21:10]:
You know, that’s such an important question, and it’s it’s a really big one. But let me try to sketch out what I think is really at stake in in saying that and and in recognizing the way that the Haitian Revolution is and isn’t acknowledged by the West. And I think I would start just by first saying I’m thinking of the West here as as a project, not just a a geographical place and something that emerges history, self consciously thinking of itself as a as a culture or a society, what we would now maybe call the the global north, Europe and North America, you know, the old European empires and then the the United States as well, that think of itself conceptually around certain cultural and social and political ideas. The American Revolution and the French Revolution are really central to that story the West tells about itself. And ideas of freedom, individuality, liberty, these are all sort of foundational values and concepts in a kind of History liberal political haitian, And so I’ll come back to that in a second, but I wanna begin by by noting something that I think is just a really important phrasing. CLR James, in his his classic book, The Black Jacobins, which is the first English language book length discussion of the Haitian Revolution. Obviously, Haitian historians have been writing about it throughout 19th century, but here was, James as a Trinidadian, but but based out of the UK and and sometimes the US writing for a history audience about the Haitian revolution originally in the thirties, and the book was was redone, with a new preface in the sixties. And and he was connecting it to, sort of decolonial movements in Africa and then the Cuban Revolution in the sixties as well.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:23:01]:
So the book is is really significant, first English, non Haitian treatment of the Haitian Revolution. And in it, kinda near the end of the book, James writes something to the effect of it’s not a full quote, but I’m paraphrasing, that what happened in Saint Domingue, the French colony of Saint Domingue, is something that everybody should know, and he’s right. We all should know. It’s it’s what philosophers like to call a world historical event. The Haitian Revolution is something that is so significant to the world that came after it that it should be a foundational part of the the history of the making of the modern world, and yet partly in James’ phrase and he’s noting and the reason behind he’s writing that book is that we know that people don’t know it. And why is that? Why even still can people write about the French Revolution and say nothing about Haiti, let alone any of the other, French overseas colonies at the time? How does that happen? How could you have a book, say, another kind of example of a very famous British history, Eric Hobsbawm, has a book called The Age of Revolutions, where the Haitian Revolution is a footnote. It’s about the American and the French Revolution, and and how how can this come to be. And I think of it even in my own, intellectual trajectory.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:24:22]:
I didn’t learn about the Haitian revolution until university, and it was in a a college class on the anthropology of the Caribbean. I learned about Haitian, and this is in the the early to mid nineties, and I was actively paying attention to Haiti in the news then following, the democratic transition, the coup against Aristide in 91, the sort of discussion of the international level about, bringing democracy back in 94, 95 interventions, and so Haiti was very much kinda in public discourse throughout the nineties. As part of, that sort of 3rd wave of democratization, as political scientists like to call it, and yet there was nothing, about the Haitian Revolution. And I when I found out about it, one of my first thoughts was, like, how did I not know about this already? And I think, you know, then, eventually, I dug deeper, and I was somebody very much attuned to trying to find out about Haiti, and it was still took me a while, and I hope that’s not just a failing on my own part or something like that. I think that it speaks to a much broader issue and then and here, I’m really drawing on the work of Michel Raffetillot, who’s given a name for this, and I think it’s a really important name. He talks about it as the silencing of historical narratives, and the Haitian Revolution has been silenced in many, many ways, more than just sort of a lack of attention to it. And I wanna say something a little bit more about that because when Michel Bostrieu made that argument in some articles and then very famously in his book Silencing the Past, which came out in 1995, in which there’s a specific chapter where he talks about the Haitian Revolution as a nonevent or something that is unthinkable at the time. And it’s that unthinkable that I’m really building on when I when I make the argument that the Haitian revolution challenged the, kinda, conceptual categories of the West.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:26:08]:
I’m basing that on Trio’s argument and and trying to extend it. Now when that book came out, a lot of historians took issue with it and said, well, you know what though? Here’s a here’s a place in the archive where you see people worrying about slave revolutions. Planters throughout the Caribbean were were very, maybe rightly so, kinda paranoid. Slaves were always trying to rebel, running away, or other kinds of forms of resistance to the slave plantation system throughout the Caribbean, and I think that, you know, you can definitely find evidence that people were thinking about the possibility of slaves, attacking their history. Right? Poisoning them in their food or something like that. And so there was a debate, kinda like, well, was it really silenced, or was it really unthinkable? Here’s an example of somebody maybe worrying about it. And there’s more, evidence since Trio published this book. We’ve seen more historical work come out about the Haitian revolution, a real kind of boon in publishing about it, comparatively, just thinking of the size of the the literature on Haiti compared to other places.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:27:18]:
So there’s been a lot more about it. There’s been more showing how, you know, European philosophers like Hegel were were actively reading about the Haitian Revolution as it was happening, and so some people, especially history, have taken that to say, well, Trio exaggerated. It wasn’t unthinkable, but that’s not quite what he meant. It’s not so much that individuals couldn’t have worried about slaves, you know, burning their plantations and and taking over. That is definitely true. They worried about it a lot, and that animated a lot of the violence over and against slaves in the Caribbean. And it’s not that it was unacknowledged, but it’s the ways in which it’s acknowledged and the ways that it fit into the sort of sense making, into the philosophy, into intellectual discourse of Europe or the west more broadly, and so it in the and so we have to think about how it fit in, and I think that that’s really crucial. So for Trio, silencing is structural.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:28:17]:
It’s not just the presence or absence in the archives, but the way that the the Haitian Revolution gets, represented. So some of the ways it’s it’s silenced is by trivializing it by, for example, saying that the reason the French lost is because of yellow fever or, so there’s not the the actual Haitian revolutionaries who won, but the French kinda lost because of these other factors. And rather than recognizing the agency there where the, very clearly, it was a military strategy to use the rainy season, to use the geography against the French forces and sort of force them into places where they might get sick or to for to hide out in places that they can’t get to. I mean, it really is trivializing something that should be really underscored, which is that the Haitian revolutionaries militarily defeated the strongest, most powerful army in the world, Napoleon’s army, at that time. That is significant, and I wanna pause there to highlight how significant that is and how enormously important it is to see it trivialized then, to see in France there’s no discussion of it that way at all, and, in fact, you know, Napoleon’s still glorified. There’s no discussion of this defeat. There’s no discussion of the fact that the that France was going to sell the Louisiana territories to the fledgling United States in order to fund the campaign to keep this very small colony because Saint Domingue, as a colony, was the most productive, wealth producing colony in France’s overseas empire. It was really significant, and its loss shook the French empire.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:29:54]:
Its loss shook all of the slave societies throughout the Caribbean and Latin America, including the United States, which as a newly post colonial state was a slave society, including all of the British and French and Dutch empires in the area, which were also slave societies, and the West doesn’t write its history that way. It doesn’t acknowledge that England was a slave society because it thinks, well, the slaves were elsewhere in the colonies. France doesn’t think of itself as having been a slave society, but it was fundamentally based around the slave plantation system. The Haitian Revolution, if it were actually written into the history of the West in an honest way, would show that and thus would really challenge a real key idea of the West, which is that the West, as a project, likes to tell its history as a moral success story, as a kinda teleology where it’s moving from one place to another, heading towards perfection or progress or development. There’s different different kinds of words that people would give for that endpoint, for that target, and in that story, the West is the hero and so you can’t so the West, when it writes about, say, the long process of the ending of the transatlantic slave trade, it took about a century to end it from, say, the the early, attempts to to end it during the Haitian Revolution or the British ending of the slave trade to, the actual end of slavery in the final places where it was still present in in Cuba or Brazil and other places in the 18 eighties. Took about a century. In that story, the West sees itself as the emancipator rather than seeing slaves as people arguing for their freedom, in all kinds of ways. The Haitian Revolution is one form, but maroon societies is a huge other one throughout the Caribbean where people left the plantation system and found alternative means.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:31:48]:
And then between those two poles, there’s all kinds of small acts of resistance in space where, you know, people who were classified as slaves on the slave plantations found ways to try to navigate the system, provision ground so they could grow their own food and make a little bit of money and start their own markets, all these things that became the basis of Caribbean cultures and economies and religions and languages. If we were to actually acknowledge that, we’d have to give a lot of agency to the slaves, but the dominant narrative is that they were largely, you know, not the agents of the of history, but people whose freedom was given to them at a certain point.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:32:33]:
Let’s, stay on this path a little bit longer. Tell us more how the Haitian Revolution challenged, the West’s concept of itself.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:32:44]:
Eric Williams, another Caribbean scholar who wrote a very early and very important, history of this called imperialism and slavery where he finally showed much earlier than any other kind of western scholar was able to to show or accept the tight relationship between what we think of as the emergence of capitalism in Europe and the existence of slavery in in the colonies. And in that, in in some of his work, not in that book, but in some of his other work, Eric Williams has a really, I think, good, pithy kind of statement where, again, sort of paraphrasing, but but trying to channel his idea here. He notes that, you know, British historians write about slavery and abolition in such a way that you’d almost think that they they invented it just so they could tell the story of them abolishing it. You know, they wanna see themselves and Britain as the great moral peep barometer of of the west, a great awakening to the horrors of slavery, and so we ended it rather than seeing it as something that was driven by either, you know, pretty brute economic interests where planters realized that wage labor would be cheaper for them or driven by slaves themselves. And so we think about what the Haitian Revolution could point out if it was written into that history. It would really show us different ideas of freedom. It really challenged the idea that slaves not only might revolt, but that they would have intentionality behind it, that it wouldn’t just be a reaction to the to the violence of the slave system, but that it would have been a revolution politically thought out. And it’s so often when it is acknowledged, the the Haitian Revolution is acknowledged, it usually is written still as if, you know, the political ideas came from Europe.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:34:26]:
So were they reading or or hearing about the French Revolution? Who was leading, the Haitian Revolution, and and how educated were they? How much were they taking ideas from America or France or other places in Europe? Those are good historical questions, and no doubt there’s a lot of interchange of ideas happening. But very few people ever pose the question the other way. Why is it the case that the Haitian Revolution didn’t spur other things in Europe or elsewhere? Or did it? And in fact, I think if we think about it that way, we’ll see that the Haitian Revolution did provoke, responses in France, but they weren’t revolutionary responses. They were largely counter revolution responses. And so we would have to see the West’s response to the Haitian Revolution is a counterrevolution meant to protect and restore slavery. The 1802 expedition that Napoleon sends, to stop the revolution. He sends his brother-in-law, General Charles Leclerc, to stop the revolution, and, you know, variously different accounts would say there’s somewhere between 200,040,000 soldiers, coming at different times it took in this military expedition to stop the revolution, and Leclerc has these secret orders from Napoleon. He arrives and says, I’m here to defend your freedoms and keep the colony French, and we’ll find a solution here.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:35:48]:
But the secret orders are arrest Toussaint Louverture, who is then the head of, the governor general, the head of the colony, the head of the revolutionary army in Saint Domingue, to arrest or kill the other leaders like Jean Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and then to reimpose slavery, and as France was doing in its other colonies at this point. And so that really became the final act of the Haitian Revolution when it was clear that the only solution to it from the point of view of, say, Dessalines, who became the head of what they called the indigenous army, the only point of view they had was, well, if we keep any of our freedom, the only way we can do that is is full independence from France. So that that moment is really crucial in the Haitian Revolution and for setting up the goal of a independent state outside of the French empire, but it’s really driven by the French response to the Haitian Revolution, which was a reactionary one. We’ve got to kill them and then restore slavery and get back to the old way. It was sort of the ancient regime in the colonies, let’s get back to the status quo. So to write the Haitian Revolution into the history of the West or into the history of France even is almost impossible because France wants to be the hero of that story, the great, agent of of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the the the the subject that ended slavery, not the one that tried to keep it. And you think about all the ways in which, the Haitian Revolution is still problematically assimilated into that narrative. Think about 2,004 and the bicentennial celebrations of independence in Haitian, where, no foreign heads of state came.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:37:36]:
No no French head of state had ever been to Haiti after independence until 2010 when Sarkozy came after the earthquake and began to sort of set some new French, Haitian relations. But in in 2003, France was very much thinking about the bicentennial because, the Haitian government at the time was thinking of launching a legal claim for reparations based on the indemnity that France imposed for political recognition of Haiti’s freedom in in 18/25. And they sent a philosopher, Regis de Blaise, to to Haiti to talk to a number of stakeholders, although largely, just the elite in poor prints, and to think about the issue of reparations and this so it’s a little bit less about the Haitian Revolution specifically, but how does the history of Haiti get written in in into the history of the West, and Debre is a really interesting figure for France to have sent in 2003 because in France, he had sort of impeccable at a certain moment in his life, impeccable leftist credentials as a philosopher, but also as a activist. He had been arrested with Che Guevara in the sixties. He’s a revolutionary who had become a political actor, and and I think he had drifted very far right by the eighties nineties and 2 thousands. And he writes, and not surprisingly, a report that says France does not owe a debt. Shouldn’t there are we can’t make a reparations claim. There’s no way of of sort of adjudicating it in the terms of the present, without kind of forcing the present terms on the past as a part of his argument, but in the course of making that argument, we can separate that out for a second, the reparations claim is a is a big issue, but it’s more about how he writes about Haiti in that piece that, that I think is is really interesting.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:39:24]:
He talks about Haiti as a a little piece of Africa that sort of drifted into the Caribbean, and he ends up saying that Haitian, in fact, owes a debt to France for giving it the French language and thus access to a universal language and to Haitian. And I’m not making this up or exaggerating, this is in his report and this is fundamentally the language of French imperialism and colonialism. It’s like France still can’t see Haiti as anything but a colony that it’s letting be free and thinking of it as the only path Haiti has to being understood as part of the History world or part of the of of world society and civilization is if it comes through this kind of colonial relationship with France. And I think that the legacy then of the silencing of the Haitian Revolution or its unthinkability as something that Haitians made, that Haitians did. That’s the unthinkable part, not the fact of a revolution or the slaves who’d want to get out of the condition of slavery. The unthinkable part, as Cheah has it and I think it’s of it as well, is the West’s refusal to acknowledge that Haitians did it, and they wanted freedom, and they had a concept of freedom that is their own, that it participates in a kind of republicanism and and liberalism of the era, but that they also founded a Haitian state on their own terms, and then we can see what happens after independence as a sort of thinking through of what freedom’s gonna mean and what it’s gonna look like in Haiti. And there’s some debates about that between sort of the political elite, the old plantation owners, and the peasants, and the peasants kinda win in the 19th century of of a certain kind of model of independence, and and and the story gets a little more complicated from there onwards. But to think about how Haiti continues to challenge the categories of the West today, not just at the moment of 1804 or throughout 19th century as all the other, places around Haiti refused to acknowledge its political independence.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:41:29]:
You know, France didn’t acknowledge it until 8 25 when it forced Haiti to pay a debt back to the planters who lost all their property in exchange for that recognition. The US didn’t recognize Haiti officially until 18/62, which has to do with the own the context of the US Civil War and debates about slavery there, so it’s really only after sort of the end of of slavery throughout the region that Haiti can be recognized officially, and when it is recognized, it’s continually framed as, there’s so many books that they kinda call it this, a black state or a black republic or the first black, independent country in the Americas. And I understand from the Haitian point of view that there’s a certain politics to represent it that way, but from the foreigner point of view, it sort of ends up seeming like the underlying assumption in the west is that independent liberal states or republics are white and that Haiti stands out as an anomaly, and has to thus be marked, by an extra adjective or an extra term. And I think that that’s been an unconscious, unspoken kind of idea that Hades’ odd because it can’t be fully assimilated to ideas of freedom, because, it’s not sort of the proper subject, it’s not as the West sees it. And I think of, you Frederick Douglass in 18/93, the American statesmen who had been ambassador to to I mean, he had been born into slavery and then freed and and become a political, figure and a writer in the United States. In 18/93, during the Colombian revolution, the World’s Fair, the US was kind of becoming beginning to perform itself as sort of a world actor just kinda coming out of being a regional post colony and and beginning to become more expansive in the region after that. And Douglass gave a speech in which he notes that the United States well, he says we, and so I think it can be more broad than just America. He says we have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black, and I think that that is really important to think about, the way in which the West has not yet forgiven Haitian, and I think for 2 things I would add to Douglass, it’s it’s not that the US does not forgive Haiti yet for being black and for being free, and so the whole question of of Haitian freedom and Haitian sovereignty is always sort of as is being discussed right now, what the US is trying to get together a kind of military force to intervene in Haiti despite most Haitians saying they do not want it despite history telling us it will not work.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:44:08]:
There’s still this sense that that the West wants to intervene in Haiti to to fix it or to correct what didn’t happen historically in the past, which is that, you know, to kinda correct the revolution in some way, or or silence it yet again or punish Haiti for it. I think that a lot of people in Haiti feel all of those things, and I think that it’s sometimes hard to express to to non Haitians why people might feel that way, that Haitian being punished for its revolution, but when you start looking at the way history that even the most sort of liberal minded historians have written about the Haitian revolution or failed to write about it or or not been able to fully understand it as part, not only of Haitian history, but a part of of world history and the history of the West in a way that challenges the West as a project in its own terms. The fact that we still can’t reconcile that, I think, is huge, and I think a lot of the current sort of policy and politics internationally around Haiti is sort of still working out the legacies of that deep, and deeply fraught relationship between Haiti and the West.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:45:16]:
I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook at Negmawo podcast. That’s Mauo with a w not an r.
00:00 Anthropologist discusses continuity between Haiti and Africa.
03:25 Caribbean’s unique history and cultural diversity.
06:31 Herskovits’ argument about cultural continuity and change.
11:43 Dunham deeply understands and shapes Haitian culture.
13:34 Cultural continuity in Haiti amid slave system. Ethnography writing process.
17:00 Intermittent research, earthquake impact, book writing journey.
21:10 Importance of Haitian Revolution in Western history.
24:22 Haitian Revolution’s historical narrative silenced, notable absence.
29:54 The Haitian Revolution challenged the West’s history.
32:44 Eric Williams revealed capitalism’s reliance on slavery.
37:36 Sarkozy visited Haiti; reparation debate in 2003.
41:29 Haiti’s recognition, freedom, and US intervention debated.
44:08 West’s historical intervention in Haiti still resonates.
00:00 Discussion on continuity between Haiti and West Africa in anthropology, noting academic and emotional perspectives.
03:25 Caribbean history, Herskovits’ work in the region, and cultural influences.
06:31 Herskovits’s argument on cultural continuity and agency in African American culture is important politically but may be too simplistic for understanding Haitian culture.
11:43 Dunham’s deep understanding of Haitian culture influenced African dance and culture.
13:34 Author discusses continuity and change in Haitian culture, acknowledges the impact of the slave system, and reflects on the lengthy process of writing the book.
17:00 Research shaped thinking, earthquake shifted focus, 10-year journey to writing book.
21:10 Importance of acknowledging Haitian Revolution to the West, and CLR James’ role.
24:22 The author didn’t learn about the Haitian revolution until university, despite paying attention to Haiti in the 1990s. The revolution has been silenced historically.
29:54 The loss of Haitian Revolution shook slave societies, challenging the Western history of moral success and progress.
32:44 Eric Williams highlighted the relationship between capitalism and slavery, and criticized British historians’ portrayal of slavery abolition. He also emphasized the significance of the Haitian Revolution.
37:36 French head of state visited Haiti in 2010 to improve relations. Historic reparations claim in 2003, philosopher Regis de Blaise sent to Haiti by France. Report denies debt owed.
41:29 France forced Haiti to pay off debt for recognition. Haiti framed as a black anomaly, not fully assimilated to ideas of freedom. US didn’t forgive Haiti for being black and free. Ongoing discussion of US intervention in Haiti.
44:08 Many Haitians feel punished by the West for their revolution, impacting current policy and politics.
Introduction to Dr. Greg Beckett and His Work
- Background on Dr. Greg Beckett’s academic focus.
- The significance of Herskovits and Dunham on Beckett’s work.
- Life-changing events that influenced Beckett’s research: the 2004 coup and the 2010 earthquake.
Herskovits’ Legacy and Anthropological Influence - Herskovits’ ideas on cultural continuity versus erasure.
- Impact on his student Katherine Dunham and Haitian dance.
- Beckett’s critique of Herskovits’ continuity framework.
Haiti’s Historical Significance and International Relations - The revolutionary challenge to Western historical concepts.
- CLR James’ “The Black Jacobins” and its significance.
- Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of “silencing” historical narratives.
French-Haitian Relations and the Undermining of Haitian Achievements - Sarkozy’s 2010 visit to Haiti and the significance of France’s acknowledgment.
- Haiti’s bicentennial and the reparations debate.
- Philosophical and imperialist perspectives on Haiti’s debt to France.
Race, Independence, and the West’s Perception of Haiti - Delayed recognition of Haiti’s independence by France and the U.S.
- Frederick Douglass’ observations on Western attitudes towards Haiti.
- The West’s interventionist desires rooted in the revolution.
Understanding Haiti’s Cultural Identity - The discrepancy between anthropological and Haitian perspectives on cultural continuity.
- Recognition of Haiti’s agency and national culture development.
- The portrayal of Haiti in relation to the Atlantic world and its neighbors.
The Haitian Revolution’s Global Impact - Misrepresentation of the revolution in historical narratives.
- Consequences of the revolution for the French empire and slave societies.
- Challenging the West’s moral success story through different concepts of freedom and agency.
Countering the Western Narrative - Foreign response to Haitian independence celebrations.
- The contrast between the French self-image and their historical actions.
- The complexity of integrating Haiti’s story into Western and French history.
The Influence of Katherine Dunham on Dance and Culture: “She would go on very famously to combine the dances from voodoo with very, cutting edge modern dance technique with classic ballet into a whole new form of dance that was just beautiful and and and unseen elsewhere.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:12:06 → 00:12:20]
The Continuity and Change in Cultural Traditions: “I want just to have a theory of it that is continuity plus change and to think about the agency of people in Haiti actively making their cultural traditions deeply connected to what they had and could bring with them from Africa, but acknowledging that the slave plantation system was a system designed to to destroy those connections. So when we do see those connections, it’s really important at the level of culture but also politically and ethically to acknowledge that the hard work people had to do to keep and hold on to those cultural traditions in the midst of a system designed to destroy them.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:13:38 → 00:14:16]
Impact of Earthquake on Research and Writing: “I kinda just sort of threw it out in 2010 after the earthquake for a couple of reasons. One, it felt like that I had to reckon with the earthquake, and what I was writing didn’t make as much sense anymore, but, also, because I just wasn’t interested in writing ethnography at that time.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:17:44 → 00:17:56]
Revisiting the Haitian Revolution: “The American Revolution and the French Revolution are really central to that story the West tells about itself. And ideas of freedom, individuality, liberty, these are all sort of foundational values and concepts in a kind of History liberal political haitian.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:21:55 → 00:22:13]
Understanding Historical Narratives: “the Haitian Revolution has been silenced in many, many ways, more than just sort of a lack of attention to it.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:25:34 → 00:25:41]
Perspectives on the Haitian Revolution: “The Haitian Revolution, if it were actually written into the history of the West in an honest way, would show that and thus would really challenge a real key idea of the West, which is that the West, as a project, likes to tell its history as a moral success story, as a kinda teleology where it’s moving from one place to another, heading towards perfection or progress or development.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:30:27 → 00:30:53]
Impact of Colonialism and Capitalism: “British historians write about slavery and abolition in such a way that you’d almost think that they they invented it just so they could tell the story of them abolishing it.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:33:18 → 00:33:27]
French-Haitian Relations: “No no French head of state had ever been to Haiti after independence until 2010 when Sarkozy came after the earthquake and began to sort of set some new French, Haitian relations.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:37:36 → 00:37:46]
Legacy of the Haitian Revolution: “The unthinkable part, as Cheah has it and I think it’s of it as well, is the West’s refusal to acknowledge that Haitians did it, and they wanted freedom, and they had a concept of freedom that is their own, that it participates in a kind of republicanism and and liberalism of the era, but that they also founded a Haitian state on their own terms, and then we can see what happens after independence as a sort of thinking through of what freedom’s gonna mean and what it’s gonna look like in Haiti.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:40:29 → 00:41:00]
Historical Perspective on Haiti’s Independence: “You know, France didn’t acknowledge it until 8 25 when it forced Haiti to pay a debt back to the planters who lost all their property in exchange for that recognition. The US didn’t recognize Haiti officially until 18/62, which has to do with the own the context of the US Civil War and debates about slavery there, so it’s really only after sort of the end of of slavery throughout the region that Haiti can be recognized officially, and when it is recognized, it’s continually framed as, there’s so many books that they kinda call it this, a black state or a black republic or the first black, independent country in the Americas. And I understand from the Haitian point of view that there’s a certain politics to represent it that way, but from the foreigner point of view, it sort of ends up seeming like the underlying assumption in the west is that independent liberal states or republics are white and that Haiti stands out as an anomaly, and has to thus be marked, by an extra adjective or an extra term. And I think that that’s been an unconscious, unspoken kind of idea that Hades’ odd because it can’t be fully assimilated to ideas of freedom, because, it’s not sort of the proper subject, it’s not as the West sees it.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:41:29 → 00:42:49]
Cultural Continuity in Haiti: “Haitians had won their freedom much earlier than anywhere else in the Caribbean region, it meant that Haitian peasants had retained a deeper level of continuity with their African ancestors.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:19 → 00:00:34]
The Haitian Revolution’s Challenge to Western Self-Concept: “Let’s, stay on this path a little bit longer. Tell us more how the Haitian Revolution challenged, the West’s concept of itself.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:32:33 → 00:32:43]
Social Media Engagement Strategies: “Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook at Negmawo podcast. That’s Mauo with a w not an r.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:45:21 → 00:45:32]
- How do Herskovits’ ideas on cultural continuity in anthropology relate to Haiti’s connection with its African roots, and what limitations does Dr. Beckett identify in this framework?
- What role did Katherine Dunham play in shaping the global perception of Haitian culture and dance, and how was her work influenced by Herskovits’ theories?
- Can you explore the bi-directional relationship between Haiti and West Africa, and how each has impacted the other’s ideas of culture and tradition?
- Given that anthropology can be a slow-paced discipline, as evidenced by Dr. Beckett’s book based on research from 2002, how does this impact the relevancy and accuracy of anthropological findings?
- In what ways did the 2004 coup in Haiti and the subsequent relationship building with the community shape Dr. Beckett’s research and perspectives?
- How did the 2010 earthquake in Haiti alter the course of Dr. Beckett’s work, and how did it transition from pure ethnography to a focus on intervention and reconstruction?
- Discuss the differences between the global recognition of the Haitian Revolution and the level of acknowledgment it receives within Western history, as explored by Dr. Beckett.
- What does Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of the “silencing of historical narratives” reveal about the way the Haitian Revolution is treated in European intellectual discourse, and why might this be?
- Reflect on the idea presented by philosopher Regis de Blaise that Haiti owes a debt to France for the French language and discuss the implications of this view for understanding colonialism and post-colonial power dynamics.
- Considering Frederick Douglass’s observation on the West’s unforgiveness towards Haiti, how does this perspective on race and independence inform our current understanding of international policy and politics towards Haiti?
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:00]:
When you first landed in Haiti, you said you met a forest, and you met a man named Manuel. What’s the connection?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:00:07]:
Yeah. So I wanted to begin the book with a kind of fairly standard narrative form in in anthropology, which we often refer to as the arrival vignette. And so I was playing with that a little bit and trying to think about how to open the story and situate it for readers. So I thought I’d begin where where I began, which was my first research trip to Haiti in 2002. I went to study some very different things, and I think that it’s one of the hallmarks of anthropology’s method of immersive field work. We call it ethnographic research that allows you to be kind of pulled into research questions, to topics, to all kinds of things that you didn’t expect. And that certainly happened to me, and and it happened through what I call a a meeting of the forest and meeting of Manuel. Manuel is a a pseudonym for someone who was a key research participant in the early phases of my research, and I’ll come back to him first or second.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:01:05]:
I’ll talk about the forest first. And I I say that I met the forest because the people who took me there, put it that way. They said, I I wanna bring you to meet this forest. And the forest is an area in a neighborhood of Port au Prince, called Mar desin, and the forest is is fairly well known throughout a lot for a lot of residents in in Port au Prince. It’s now a national park, and there’s all kinds of really interesting projects that people who are managing the park have tried to make happen there, although it’s a very contested area of the city. Especially right now, a a lot of Mara’s aunt is under gang control, so it’s very hard to get to the forest right now. But at the time that that I was doing research, the forest was known much more commonly by its old colonial name of Haitian Leclerc, named after General Charles Leclerc, who was Napoleon’s brother-in-law, and the property had been, at that time, owned by the American dancer and anthropologist, Katherine Dunham. And she had this idea to turn the forest into something else.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:02:08]:
It had been her own private estate since she bought it in the forties, and it had been a private estate before that. It had been a a hotel and casino in the seventies. It had been a lot of different things, and she wanted it it to become something more. She thought of it as a really important space. It is understood to be ritually important. There’s all kinds of of, rich vegetation in there. There’s a lot of mapu trees, a lot of things that are of ritual significance for voodoo practitioners. She had a voodoo temple in there at one point, and she thought that she could turn it into a botanic garden as sort of a a gift to Haiti.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:02:47]:
And she had been, you know, living on and off in Haiti since the forties, although she had been working all around the world as well. And so when I when I met the forest, I was sort of unexpectedly drawn into a project that was already in sort of its its late stages. It had been going through all kinds of iterations of what to do with the forest, how to make it haitian, And it had been sort of swallowed up into a a a kind of national crisis where squatters had taken over the property. There was an armed gang that had controlled much of it. People were trying to still make it a botanic garden and get the government or foreigners, foreign NGOs to help support this conservation project. But to me, that was fascinating on its own. But to me, the place was just really interesting because of the layers of history that were really apparent there, from sort of parts of the forest that were associated with the Tanyo Arawak indigenous peoples who had lived in Haiti before the colonial era to the fact that it was named after Le Clerc and its association with him and the end of the Haitian Revolution, to the fact that Dunham had owned it as a as an American, so it was only really made possible by the legal changes pushed through by the US occupation in 1915 to 1934, which allowed foreign ownership in in the country again to the fact that it had been a place that kind of middle class residents and suburban residents around Port au Prince had gone to and thought of as a weekend picnic area, to all kinds of other other uses and associations with the place, including its association with voodoo or its association with just sort of untouched nature even though it had been a lot of human history associated with the property. So I became really interested especially in how this is a small grassroots organization in Martezan working with a couple of, foreigners, Canadian and Americans who are working with Katherine Dunham to turn it into a botanic garden, and they were really invested in something that I that I think was really crucial, in in the whole era of the Democratic transition in the nineties, thinking about the question of the countryside, the question of environmental and ecological issues, and the question of the peasantry.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:05:02]:
And that all got wrapped up into the question of how to make a botanic garden a a national space in Haiti that could serve as a site to do, conservation issues throughout the country and to to educate people on environmental problems. And as they imagined it in a really robust way to play a role in restoring the countryside, wrist and and thus restoring what is materially and symbolically associated with the Haitian nation, the agrarian nation, the peasant nation, which has had all kinds of of, you know, attacks against it from all kinds of structural adjustment programs and and foreign, you know, foreign interference to to shift Haiti from a vibrant, self sufficient peasant economy to something quite different. We’ve seen that throughout the 20th 21st century. So the place seemed to be a really charged symbolic site for all of those things and for, in a simplest sense, the crisis of the countryside. But it was happening also in the city, so it there’s all these interesting tensions between the city and the countryside, ideas of nature, and ideas of the built environment. And so that became one of the the central research questions that drove me for the next decade or so, and so meeting the forest was interesting, I thought, way to, help the reader into that part of the story. And then the other sort of main narrative that weaves in with that comes from this introduction to a man that I call Manuel, who was a a a a, an artist and a a guide who lived in in Puerto Prince all his life and was part of a generation of men who had worked in the informal economy from the seventies eighties nineties and become quite strongly associated with the popular movement associated with Jean Bertrand Aristide and had really invested a lot in the democratic transition in the nineties. And they were of a generation that had kinda come up of age under the Duvalier dictatorship.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:07:12]:
They really saw themselves as urban residents. They had a strong attachment to their own sense of agency and prestige and respect. They went with their control over their own lives because they were Port au Prince, and that allowed them to become fixers and guides for foreigners, anthropologists, or journalists, or NGO workers, or others, so this really straddled the informal economy that had really taken shape in porter prints, especially from the seventies when a whole, you know, generation of of people have been driven out of the countryside into the city as part of Jean Claude Duvalier’s economic revolution, so called his attempt backed by the US to push people into low wage, textile factories, economic production, a model that was supposed to be part of the national development of Haiti, which really just made it more dependent. And so Manuel was was one of a number of of people that I began to also do research with, especially as it became harder to do research in Madison around the forest once it got really taken over by by an armed gang by 2004, the era of the the second coup against Aristide. It was really hard to do research there. Many of the people I was working with were displaced and living elsewhere in the city, and so I did this other research with with Manuel and a number of other, men of his same generation who were all, as they put it, looking for life, Cha Chezal Levy, struggling to find a living, struggling to make it work in the informal economy. And Manuel becomes very important in the framing of the book because it’s in that initial meeting with him that, I first heard what became a very common, sentiment and expression among that whole generation of men who are working in the informal sector. I narrate this story that becomes part of the title of the book where Manuel tells me that Haiti is dead.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:09:14]:
There is no more Haitian, And after that, you know, I was really struck by that, didn’t believe it, pushed back against it. He didn’t really explain it much at the time, although we would eventually talk about it again and again over the years that I knew him. When I talked to other people and said, you know, Manuel said this thing to me, and I just don’t know what to do with it, they would say, yeah. We all know that, and I didn’t know what it meant or what to do with it, and so that became a central struggle to think about the the project of hope that became stalled associated with the forest and the botanic garden project and then this sort of seemingly, a statement of of despair or or resignation from Manuel, although, ultimately, I don’t think that that’s what he meant by it. And those became kinda central questions for, my own research and and also for the narrative in the book, and and so they really brought together for me the kind of lived experience of the urban crisis of of people who have to live in the informal city, in the informal economy, and find a way to live by navigating it in really creative ways and feeling that things were getting harder and harder and harder for them to do that, thinking that they were kind of stuck in a present moment of crisis where they couldn’t go back to the past. Manuel had been born in Port au Prince, but many other men of that same generation had come from the countryside. They didn’t wanna return to it. They knew they couldn’t become peasant farmers again, and they didn’t want that.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:10:39]:
They didn’t really have much else they they could do, and then their whole vision of the future that they wanted had been really taken from them, especially by 2004 with the second coup against Aristide, and they were all very actively aligned with his project. So they were navigating that that sort of end of the first decade and a half or so of the democratic transition and and the sort of faltering or or disappearing or disillusionment with the promises that that era had had brought forward and not really delivered on. And I think that that the forest project was sort of similarly stuck in this moment of, a really rooted in a sense of hope and a transformation and a future that would be a restoration of the past, but it was also kinda stuck in some present kinda crisis that seemed to keep getting deeper and deeper and deeper. And so it’s in meeting the forest and meeting Manuel that that question of crisis became kinda put forward for me, as it were, as the central question that I really wanted to explore.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:11:48]:
You write that this book is the is a story that exists between hope and despair. How so?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:11:57]:
Yeah. I mean so in a sense, what I’m trying to suggest there is that the book’s narrative is going to be complicated, and it’s going to try to avoid hopefully, avoid kind of reductive explanations, of the sort of merely optimistic things will get better or, the sense of total hopelessness, nothing can ever change. And in a sense, you know, it goes back to that that arrival story at the start of the book where in one reading, the meeting of the forest stands for me kind of being pulled into projects that were really grounded in particular projects of of hope or a politics of hope where, you know, those who are working hard to turn the forest into a botanic garden really, really reinvested in the idea that it was not only important in itself, but that it would have far reaching consequences nationally, that it would be not just a symbol, but it would actually be a a key moment in the restoration of of the country in a sense. It was a very hope laden project. And on the other hand, you know, in the start of the book, at least, Manuel gives voice to this structure of feeling of, this sensibility that that Haiti is dead or that there’s something that he felt, some version of Haiti, that he felt was no longer possible for him and that can can be read. And and and at the start of the book, I suggest, that I try to complicate this later, that we can read that sort of as a sense of hopelessness or despair. But in a much more complicated sense as the book unfolds and I try to weave those stories together and connect them to other ones, like the story of the 2010 earthquake or the 2004 coup, you get a sense that even a project like that, the Banana Garden Project counter on the forest, had moments that it would vacillate between a sense of hope and a sense of hopelessness in the project or moments when things seem possible and they seemed impossible or blocked in some way. And Manuel himself, well, he, you know, gives voice to this this statement that becomes part of the title of the book, there is no more Haitian, it’s not like he gave up or didn’t do things.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:14:18]:
He was really active and engaged, and and I think that for me, initially, that was hard to know how to understand, how he felt or what he was doing there. He never really gave up hope in a future even though I think what he was giving voice to was a sense that he no longer felt he knew what the future would be like. And so it’s not the same kind of hope of, like, I think the future is gonna be this democratic transformation. We’re gonna back our candidate. He’s gonna take control. We’ll get all these sort of policies or particular kind of government programs or things specific goals he might fight for or argue for as he had done and many others had done through the nineties early 2000. I think by the end, he was thinking that, well, there’s there’s there’s a future, but the future is gonna be so different from the past. It’s hard to know what it will be, and so I wanted to get a sense of that that sentiment and that feeling.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:15:15]:
And as much as the book is really, in one sense, about some of the larger structures of oppressive forces, political forces, economic forces that are blocking people’s projects and attempts to live the lives that they wanna live, in Port au Prince, in Madison, elsewhere in Haiti. The book is is really about structures of feeling, the experience of living amidst those oppressive forces and not yielding to them, fighting against them in small ways and big ways. And and so the the book is about how crisis feels to people who have to live through it every day in so many different and unexpected ways and in challenging ways, and they might sometimes, feel a sense of hope or a sense of despair. There’s neither one nor the other only, though, and we have to understand what it’s like to dwell in the emotional space between those kinds of feelings, that it’s easy to imagine them being separate. It’s easy to imagine, and if you have, sort of a stable and secure position in the world, it’s easy to imagine hope being, you know, really simple, and you can understand it as tied to particular kinds of of projects or futures or, things that you imagine. And it’s it’s, I think, all too easy as well, especially for for foreigners, non Haitians, to to imagine a sense of hopelessness about Haiti. And I really wanted to resist that narrative frame, especially while I wanted to look at the feeling that people had in various moments that they might have felt hopeless or stuck or blocked. I wanted to resist a sense of writing that feeling and writing that story as a tragedy, which I think is how a lot of humanitarian organizations or people who push for foreign intervention in Haiti narrate Haiti as a tragedy, as an exception, as something that is sort of fated to be stuck in crisis.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:17:20]:
And I think that the experience of being immersed in it and moving between a feeling of blocking or impossibility or despair and yet not giving up, so finding hope as a stance that you have to cultivate in small ways by digging into social relationships, by digging into the things that you value, and struggling to look for life or find a way or navigate a way through that impasse. By tapping into that experience and that feeling, I I hope we get a more complex narrative of how crisis feels. And then I wanted to also just signal at the outset that that the book really is, and I think that this was important for me, at least, as a as a writer of it, not going to shy away from the emotional content, the feelings. It is really a book so saturated and and laden with affect Haitian and feeling because I think that those are imperialism. And I think that, you can you can see, certainly, my emotions in the book, and that’s not the important part of the story. That’s not what people should shouldn’t you know, I’m not the main character of the book by any means, but I I wanted to be honest about my position as an author in various moments. And so I think you’ll see my anger, at the coup or the UN military invasion, in 2004 or my anger at the political violence that that displaces people or kills people in Madizan and elsewhere, Port au Prince, my sadness and my profound grief at at Manuel’s death, and the death of of countless others, especially in 2010, the the sort of way that grief sorta saturates, my own, imperialism of of working with and talking to people living through really profound challenges to living the lives that they want to live. And so I wanted to keep that really central in the story but, again, to not reduce it to only one kind of emotion or only one sense of feeling, but to look at the way in which people kinda move and narrative, and and their feelings change over time too.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:19:33]:
I really tried to, let sort of the the temporality of the story, inform the argument and the and the analysis of those feelings that people might retrospectively look back in an earlier moment and feel differently about it or feel like no longer feel hopeless but now feel hope or maybe the opposite, and and to just really explore then that that liminal space between those two categories that I think we often or many of us take as as a binary, hope and hopelessness as really separate. But I think that they’re actually really fuzzy and and blurry experiences, and we don’t just have one or the other. And, I mean, we all know this in our own personal lives when when we are, touched by by grief, whether it’s big or small, whether people share it with us or not. You know, we have moments where we have to really hold that feeling, and it becomes sort of our whole sensibility in that day or that week or that month, and there’s other times where we move into some other emotions. It is not just one or the other or a static thing, and we have to move, and live in all kinds of narrative and value laden ways. And and I really wanted to just be honest about what what people were telling me they were feeling and how the feelings were shaping, I think, the theories and analysis they had about what was happening to them. Because I think that, ultimately, one of the main arguments of the book is that we don’t really understand crisis if if crisis is something we wanna understand in the world, and I think that it is. You know, the dominant framework for understanding it is usually as some sort of objective thing.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:21:19]:
There’s there’s sort of indexes or or measurements that the international community might use, thresholds to say, well, now there’s a crisis. As soon as we hit this point, there’s a state failure or a crisis and we have to intervene. That’s sort of the decision matrix at the level of international politics we can see playing out in the UN Security Council’s debates about Haitian, right now as well. And so there’s this sense that crisis is something we can objectively measure. Economists will try to tell you that there’s a moment when you can sort of a threshold where you can say there’s a financial crisis or there isn’t one. All these ways in which racism is is treated, in a way that I think really avoids the human element and the human dimension of it. And my wager in the book is that we really can’t understand something like crisis and certainly can’t understand what we might mean about crisis in Haiti unless we begin by understanding it as something that happens to people, something that people live through. The subjective experience of crisis, I think, is has to be the starting point, for any really not only sort of social scientifically valid understanding of crisis or any good policy about how to respond to crisis, but just at a human level of understanding it.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:22:33]:
We have to begin by seeing people not as sort of objects of pity suffering tragic events, but as people who are trying and struggling, and immersed in things that that are really, you know, challenging imperialism, and the more we can tap into that human dimension. I think the more we can begin to listen to people What I tried to do in the book was listen to people tell me their theories of what was happening to them, their explanations of crisis, And those were, at least as I heard it and understood it, deeply connected to their their feelings, their anger, their sadness, their grief, their sense of loss. And I think that that is a key theme in the book of what do we do with our sense of loss, whether it’s, you know, very personal, the loss of of a loved one, the loss of a friend, or or very big, the sense of the loss of a of a past that you wish was still there, the sense of the loss of a landscape that you associate with the sort of a sense of national identity, the sense of the loss of a political project that you thought was going to transform people fighting for democratic change in the country. We don’t give up in the face of that loss, and I think that that is a crucial lesson that, everyone around the world can can learn from the things that have been happening in in Haiti over the past couple of decades. People don’t give up. They don’t have the luxury of giving up. They don’t have the luxury of, sticking with that feeling of hopelessness and and just resigning themselves to a sort of fatalistic, it’s over. They keep fighting.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:24:33]:
They keep struggling. They find a way to keep going even if the structures that that are shaping their lives also sometimes make them feel powerless. They aren’t ever really necessarily, so powerless or without agency. People struggle. They continue. They find a way, and I think that the emotional reckoning with that loss is part of how people do it by embracing the feelings, by staying close to the feelings so that they can understand crisis as something that, not only is is a terrible thing to be faced with or something that that threatens their ability to live the lives they wanna live, but also because if we listen really to the feelings and the narratives and the theories about crisis that that I try to present in the book, we also really get a sense that it’s something people feel ought not to happen or ought not to have happened to them. And that becomes really crucial to, I think, the the sort of political response we can begin to get out of hearing those feelings and listening to them. Yeah.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:25:36]:
This shouldn’t have happened. Not just to feel sorry that it happened. We should feel that way as well. But to begin to think about our own complicity, our own responsibility, our own kind of the ways in which we’re hailed as people to that story in in a way that should hopefully make us want to, to act and not just listen passively and say, well, that’s just a a bad thing that happened to other people and not to also come in and say, oh, I’ll fix this for you because you, you know, you need foreign intervention or something like that, but to really listen about to how it feels to live through crisis and begin to also then listen to how, Haitians might feel about what they want, for the future, what they want as a resolution to the crisis, or what they imagine as a a life that would be the life that they want to build, the lives that they want to be able to live, the crisis free moments, or the ways that they want to navigate, come through, and build their own kinds of of projects or worlds. Or, and I think that we can see that that is something that is it’s still very much, driving the political question, right now around Haiti where the the international community is staying. Oh, it’s it’s yet again another crisis in Haiti. Yet again, we have to intervene, and, you know, certainly everyone I know in Haiti is saying no. I mean, things are really bad in Haiti right now, but we do not need a foreign military intervention or occupation in the country that is only going to deepen the crisis and make it worse.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:27:17]:
And I think that if we can listen to those theories and those feelings about how a crisis feels and also learn to listen to Haitians about what they want, we can, you know, begin to find ways to build networks of solidarity, and find ways to, you know, to to to learn and listen. And
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:27:49]:
What did you mean by Haiti’s crisis or quite ordinary?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:27:54]:
Yeah. I I write about it as an ordinary in a couple of ways, and and, you know, I think that the the dominant framework again of of crisis, whether it’s by, you know, governments or or economists, like, the kinds of people who argue for various kinds of responses to crisis in it, is usually to frame it as an exception, something outside of the normal that requires a kinda intervention, And that goes that’s a there’s a really deep kinda etymology of crisis in a lot of languages going back to sort of ancient Greek roots of of the concept that, where it was in at least one part of the ancient Greek Haitian, crisis was the the critical moment in the course of a disease where if you didn’t intervene, the patient might die. And I think that that has has stayed with a lot of the conceptual core of how crisis gets used politically to justify, all kinds of things, but most notably in the case of Haiti, to justify foreign occupation, military occupation of the country, or, you know, foreign imposed economic policies on the counter, or all kinds of things that intervene into so called to to sort of resolve the crisis. And then we know they don’t they don’t work. They actually are the crisis. They are the structures that kinda repeat the things that we experience as crisis again and again, or that people experience as crisis again and again in in Haiti or elsewhere. So I I wanted to push back against the idea of crisis as the exception because that framing is so rooted in that that logic of sovereign power, that there’s a sovereign power who can decide when there’s an exception and decide what to do with it, do we intervene or not intervene. Right? And I wanted to instead contrast that with the the subjective experience of crisis as something that is folded into everyday life.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:29:55]:
In some ways, Toussaint be quite banal. So in one sense, it’s sort of one example that I Toussaint one part of of the book. You can think about, the experience of something like an electrical blackout in in a lot of neighborhoods at Port au Prince. It’s something that everybody expects. You know it will happen every day pretty much unless you have, you know, private capacity for your own energy, a generator, and some fuel for your house or your business. It the power will go out at some point, but you don’t quite know when it will. And so there’s that that sense of of Haitian, but also just ordinariness that it will there will be these disruptions in the everyday. And so I wanted to take up that idea of the ordinary to think of crisis not so much as disruption, but as disruptions that are part of the routine of everyday life and give shape and contour and structure to people’s everyday experiences.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:30:54]:
So that’s sort of one of the sort of theoretical interventions I wanted to make and how we can begin to rethink crisis from a different point of view. But I mean a couple other things about it as well. Another way of thinking of the ordinariness or ordinariness of it is just how much people were talking about and using that language of crisis, the people I was working with. It’s not necessarily representative of everyone. Anthropology is not a generalized in social science. It’s very particular, and we dwell in the particulars, and I try to be as clear as I can about who was saying what, when, and what sort of historical counter or what moment in the book. But a lot of the people I was I was working with over the years talked kinda endlessly about crisis. Now that’s partly because there was a kind of broader national political crisis happening, protests against Aristide, the coup in 2004, the UN Haitian, an invasion of the country, and all kinds of other things too, though, like the sense of an economic crisis, problems of of making a living in informal economy, the sense of an that many people had of the so called urban crisis, which is a complicated thing, but that that sense that the city has gotten out of control, or that services aren’t being provided to people, the sense of the environmental crisis that animated the the various projects in the forest.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:32:17]:
People were talking pretty endlessly about it, so it became ordinary in that sort of almost more statistical sense that it’s just everywhere, and people are talking about it. But the other way that I kinda mean it is also to to build on the work of a Haitian scholar Michel Lofriolet who argues very strongly against the idea of Haitian exceptionalism in a couple of ways, and he has a really nice little essay called The Odd and the Ordinary that, is pushing back against the the framings of Haiti as odd. And it’s overwhelmingly written that way by by non Haitians, especially, that Haiti is an exceptional place, and there’s all kinds of terrible language that racist language that that casts Haiti out as some sort of exception. And I think that that has a lot to do with the way that Haiti’s always been excluded from a lot of the rest of the History world after the revolution, that it was just rejected or silenced or or excised out of the the story of of the West even as it should be actually central to that story because we get, because the Haitian Revolution is so central to the making of of freedom in the West and our ideas of of really robust political freedom. So Haiti is framed by people outside of Haiti as an exception, and so I wanted to avoid that framing. And building on Triad’s work, though, I wanted to think of the the ordinary in a, not just as a opposition to the exceptional, that’s sort of the first part of the argument, but in that in that short little essay, The Odd and the Ordinary, he has a really compelling moment where he talks about a lot of the the problems, is written at an earlier moment. The the piece was written in the nineties, early nineties. A lot of the problems we associate with Haiti, whether it’s, say, poverty or food insecurity or political insecurity or government corruption or environmental issues, diseases that people suffer from, whatever it might be, he notes that these are all fairly ordinary things that haitian, not only in Haiti because they might be regular occurrences, but there are things that happen all over the world.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:34:40]:
We just don’t highlight them in, in Canada or the United States or France or England as crises or exceptions that require intervention. There, they’re understood to be, you know, things that can be dealt with in other ways. And so that hits that sort of racialized and political dimension again of of how we think of it. But, he has a a really interesting framework that pushes even more beyond that in in a way that I find, a little unsettling, but also really crucial for how I end up also thinking about ordinary crisis. And I just wanna read a couple of sentences from how Trio thinks about the ordinary, so that I can then to give you a sense of what I’m trying to do with the idea of ordinary crisis. And so Trio writes, quoting him from the Odd in the Ordinary essay, the majority of Haitians live quite ordinary lives. They eat what is for them and for many others quite ordinary food. They die quite ordinary deaths from quite ordinary accidents, quite ordinary tortures, quite ordinary diseases, accidents so ordinary that they could be prevented, tortures so ordinary that the international press does not even mention them, diseases so ordinary that they are easily treated almost anywhere else.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:35:58]:
Exceptional, is it? End quote. And I think that, you know, it begins with that sense of, well, Haitians are like people all over the world. That’s a kinda classic anthropological move, right, to try to to embrace cultural relativity and say, well, a place that might seem, strange to a non Haitian can be made familiar. They Haitians eat ordinary food just like you eat ordinary food. Everybody’s ordinary in that sense, and it quickly turns with that idea of ordinary torture, ordinary death, ordinary disease, ordinary accidents. It puts something else into that framework, and then when he begins to say that these things, you know, let’s say children dying from from diarrhea because they don’t have oral rehydration medicine or the cholera epidemic introduced by the UN or the the spread of HIV AIDS in Haiti. These are things that are treated, routinely and and in some ways kind of easily in a lot of our other parts of the world and said to be things that we can’t do anything about in Haiti, that they’re just part of what happens in Haitian, and and it’s that sense then, that political dimension for Trio, and and I try to capture this, that the things that we gloss as ordinary, ordinary crises, ordinary disasters, ordinary diseases are are routinely prevented elsewhere and could be prevented in Haiti too, that they don’t have to Haitian, and they shouldn’t have happened, and it could be otherwise. And so for me, the idea of the ordinary helps us think about how people live with these things and and understand it as something folded into their lives.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:37:34]:
It gestures to the sort of routinization of the structures of power that keep reproducing those problems, those ordinary deaths, those ordinary accidents and diseases and crises. And it helps put on the table, I think, part of the argument of the book for us to understand is that it should be otherwise. They shouldn’t be ordinary. People shouldn’t have to suffer from these things or die from these things in Haiti or anywhere else. But, the but the fact that we sort of assume that they should happen in one place, because that place is exceptional and is defined by the crisis, becomes part of the way in which the international community or foreigners who might be reading the book just kind of abdicate their responsibility and their complicity in the structures of power and the structures of oppression that make those crises everyday occurrences for people in Haiti. And so that, for me, was what was really crucial for for building on this category of the ordinary to cut across these sort of political and emotional, different kinds of dimensions that we can that can allow us to theorize crisis in a different way, to theorize crisis as something that doesn’t just happen, but that happens in part because of some people’s inaction or because of of some of the things that people do that the crises the kinds of crises I’m writing about are the the cumulative effect of decisions taken and actions taken by people who could have done different things and maybe should have done different things. And so the ordinary for me is a way into thinking about the otherwise, the things that could be, the possibilities that might initially feel foreclosed or impossible if we embrace that idea of crisis as revolution, but could be reopened up for our our imagination for us to envision and otherwise if we begin from that feeling of ordinary crisis and then move out from there into something else.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:39:40]:
I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook at podcast. That’s Maua with aw not an r.
00:00 Fascination with history and conservation in Haiti.
05:02 Creating national botanic garden in Haiti’s significance.
11:57 Book explores complexity of hope and despair.
15:15 Book explores emotion and resistance in adversity.
17:20 Cultivating hope in crisis through relationships and struggle.
22:33 See people as struggling, not objects of pity.
25:36 Reflect on responsibility, listen, and support Haitians.
27:54 Crisis viewed as exception, but embedded daily.
32:17 Discussion of Haiti and avoiding exceptionalism framing.
37:34 “Ordinary crises reveal humanity’s complicity in oppression.”
39:40 Enjoyed episode? Follow on Twitter and Facebook.
00:00 Woman involved in project to preserve forest with historical significance in Haiti, facing challenges.
05:02 The text discusses creating a national botanic garden in Haiti for conservation and education. It also mentions the impact of foreign interference on Haiti’s economy and the tensions between city and countryside.
11:57 Book narrative complex, balances hope and hopelessness, Haiti’s restoration.
15:15 The book explores oppressive forces in Haiti and the experience of living amidst them, resisting hopelessness and the narrative of Haiti as a tragedy.
17:20 The text discusses experiences of hope and emotions in navigating crisis and challenges.
22:33 See people as struggling but resilient and not giving up.
25:36 Reflect on our responsibility, support Haitian voices, oppose foreign intervention in Haiti crisis.
27:54 Questioning crisis as exception, deep societal implications.
32:17 Discussion on framing of Haiti as exceptional by outsiders, based on Michel Lofriolet’s work, and highlighting the ordinary nature of Haiti’s challenges.
37:34 Structures of power reproduce crises, should be otherwise. People’s inaction and decisions lead to ordinary crises, but possibilities exist.
39:40 Encourage following on social media and spelling clarification.
Introduction to Dr. Greg Beckett and the Topics of Discussion
- Overview of Dr. Beckett’s experience in Haiti and thematic focus on life and death in Port-au-Prince
- Introduction of the podcast, host, and special guest
Dr. Greg Beckett’s Fundamental Theses - Ordinary occurrences of deaths and crises should not be inevitable
- International community’s role in oppression and crisis perpetuation
- Embracing the “ordinary” to envision alternative actions
Dr. Greg Beckett’s Initial Research Trip and the Mar desin Forest - Description of Mar desin’s history and significance in Haiti
- Dr. Beckett’s involvement in the botanic garden project
- The symbolic importance of the forest in Haiti’s environmental issues
Manuel and the Port au Prince Informal Sector - Introduction to Manuel, an artist and guide linked to Aristide’s era
- Challenges in conducting research due to political instability
- Manuel’s sentiment “Haiti is dead” shaping Dr. Beckett’s book
Dr. Beckett’s Emphasis on Immersive Experience - Importance of experiencing emotions such as despair and hope
- The emotional content conveyed through his book
- Listening to Haitians’ theories and emotions about the crisis
Resilience and Determination of the Haitian People - Highlighting the spirit of Haitians amidst the crisis
- Opposing foreign military intervention
- Advocating for solidarity and support
Concept of “Ordinary” Crises - Haiti’s crisis viewed as an expected part of everyday life
- Critique of crisis framework justifying foreign intervention
- How the language of crisis is commonly applied in Haiti
Michel Lofriolet’s Work and Haitian Exceptionalism - Arguments against the portrayal of Haiti as exceptional
- Beckett’s emphasis on ordinary aspects of crises globally
Manuel’s Struggle and the Informal Economy - Manuel’s generation grappling with disillusionment
- Exploring the oscillation between hope and despair
- Avoiding reductive narratives in understanding Haiti’s situation
Complexity of Hope and Despair in the Haitian Narrative - Interplay between hope and hopelessness in Haiti
- The need for nuanced understanding rather than tragedy framing
Q&A with Host Patrick Jean-Baptiste - Discussing the dual themes of hope and despair with Dr. Beckett
- Exploring the narrative complexity
Conclusion and Call to Action - Recap of the episode’s key points
- Invitation for listeners to engage with the podcast on social media platforms.
Haitian Forest Conservation Challenges: “It had been sort of swallowed up into a a a kind of national crisis where squatters had taken over the property. There was an armed gang that had controlled much of it. People were trying to still make it a botanic garden and get the government or foreigners, foreign NGOs to help support this conservation project.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:03:07 → 00:03:27]
Sustainability and National Identity in Haiti: “And that all got wrapped up into the question of how to make a botanic garden a national space in Haiti that could serve as a site to do, conservation issues throughout the country and to educate people on environmental problems. And as they imagined it in a really robust way to play a role in restoring the countryside, wrist and thus restoring what is materially and symbolically associated with the Haitian nation, the agrarian nation, the peasant nation, which has had all kinds of of, you know, attacks against it from all kinds of structural adjustment programs and and foreign interference to to shift Haiti from a vibrant, self sufficient peasant economy to something quite different.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:05:24 → 00:05:41]
Urban Struggle and Identity in Haiti: “They really saw themselves as urban residents. They had a strong attachment to their own sense of agency and prestige and respect.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:07:12 → 00:07:22]
Navigating Hope and Hopelessness: “And in a sense, you know, it goes back to that that arrival story at the start of the book where in one reading, the meeting of the forest stands for me kind of being pulled into projects that were really grounded in particular projects of of hope or a politics of hope where, you know, those who are working hard to turn the forest into a botanic garden really, really reinvested in the idea that it was not only important in itself, but that it would have far reaching consequences nationally, that it would be not just a symbol, but it would actually be a a key moment in the restoration of of the country in a sense.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:12:21 → 00:13:05]
Living Through Crisis: “The book is is really about structures of feeling, the experience of living amidst those oppressive forces and not yielding to them, fighting against them in small ways and big ways.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:15:34 → 00:15:48]
Navigating Crisis with Hope and Emotion: “And I think that the experience of being immersed in it and moving between a feeling of blocking or impossibility or despair and yet not giving up, so finding hope as a stance that you have to cultivate in small ways by digging into social relationships, by digging into the things that you value, and struggling to look for life or find a way or navigate a way through that impasse.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:17:20 → 00:17:44]
Exploring the Boundaries of Hope and Hopelessness: “I think that they’re actually really fuzzy and and blurry experiences, and we don’t just have one or the other. And, I mean, we all know this in our own personal lives when when we are, touched by by grief, whether it’s big or small, whether people share it with us or not.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:20:08 → 00:20:25]
The Concept of Crisis in Policy and Intervention: “I think that the the dominant framework again of of crisis, whether it’s by, you know, governments or or economists, like, the kinds of people who argue for various kinds of responses to crisis in it, is usually to frame it as an exception, something outside of the normal that requires a kinda intervention.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:28:01 → 00:28:23]
Haitian Exceptionalism: “Michel Lofriolet who argues very strongly against the idea of Haitian exceptionalism in a couple of ways, and he has a really nice little essay called The Odd and the Ordinary that, is pushing back against the the framings of Haiti as odd.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:32:33 → 00:32:52]
Structures of Power and Ordinary Crises: “It gestures to the sort of routinization of the structures of power that keep reproducing those problems, those ordinary deaths, those ordinary accidents and diseases and crises. And it helps put on the table, I think, part of the argument of the book for us to understand is that it should be otherwise. They shouldn’t be ordinary. People shouldn’t have to suffer from these things or die from these things in Haiti or anywhere else.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:37:34 → 00:38:01]
Haiti Conservation Efforts: “When you first landed in Haiti, you said you met a forest, and you met a man named Manuel. What’s the connection?”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:00 → 00:00:07]
Social Media Handles for Podcast: “Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook at podcast. That’s Maua with aw not an r.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:39:45 → 00:39:56]
- Dr. Beckett, you’ve illuminated the ordinariness of crises in Haiti. Can you explain how this perspective can change the way the international community approaches aid and intervention in Haitian affairs?
- Your encounters with Manuel shaped much of your narrative. Could you elaborate on how his life and experiences provide a microcosm of the larger story of Haiti’s democratic transition and subsequent disillusionment?
- In your book, you stress the importance of recognizing the subjective experience of those living through crises. How do you believe this personal perspective can influence policy and humanitarian efforts?
- The history of the forest in Mar desin is rich and multifaceted. How do you think this forest’s transformation reflects the broader challenges and aspirations of the Haitian people?
- You oppose foreign military intervention in Haiti and advocate for solidarity networks. What concrete steps do you suggest the international community should take to empower Haitians in a meaningful way?
- Regarding the concept of the ordinary you mentioned, how do you reconcile the normalization of crises with the urgency to address the underlying issues causing them?
- You mentioned the resilience and determination of the Haitian people. Could you share an example from your research where this resilience was particularly striking or unexpected?
- With the idea of Haiti being caught between life and death, how do you balance presenting the difficulties without perpetuating a narrative of hopelessness or tragedy that often surrounds Haiti?
- During your talk, you explained that understanding crisis involves listening to the emotions of anger, sadness, and loss. How do you navigate these emotions in your research while maintaining an objective standpoint?
- You critique the dominant framework of ‘crisis as exception’ in Haiti. How do you propose this framework be revised or replaced to better reflect the realities on the ground and support more sustainable solutions?
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:00]:
I was talking to a friend, recently about this, and one of the things I said to her was that the difference, say, between the United States during the 4 years of Trump, where he stress test the the the bureaucracy and try to push the limit to see how much, you know, he could get away with that. There were a lot of pushback in the bureaucracy because the people who are actually, like, career professionals, right, they they kind of push back, ignored or, you know, certain orders that came down. And I and I said to her that the thing is, I’m not even sure, you know, probably the the issue in Haiti is you have corruption here. The difference is the bureaucracy holds here. Right? It’s been around. It it had time to kinda, you know, solidify and entrench itself. So I asked I was I don’t know whether Haiti has these institutions in place. Are the bureaucracies there?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:00:55]:
Mhmm.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:55]:
And are they so corrupt as well? What Fraton calls the machine. Are they part of that? Or because I wanna I wanna go in the side of it’s not a failed state if I know these bureaucracies as they as weakened as they might be.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:01:09]:
Mhmm.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:01:09]:
But, those institutions in place, but it’s just a matter of they don’t have the resources for them to hold the line as it were. Do do you see where I’m going with that? I’m I’m not yeah.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:01:18]:
Absolutely. It’s a great, thought and and question. I mean, I think I I agree with what you’re suggesting too, especially in comparison to the United States or other places that the institutions are I I think they are weak, and I think they’re also fairly young in the sense of, you know, removing them from the form they had under the Duvalier dictatorship where they where all of the various forms of government all the way down to, sort of the village heads or section chiefs and and had really been touched by Duvalier and his system. And and, you know, Michel Ropheillot very famously refers to Duvalierism as a kind of totalitarianism, as not just authoritarianism or a dictatorship, but really a totalitarian one. Fatah and others disagree with him, and there’s a really interesting disagreement about how far Duvalier was able to go. But he certainly tried to kind of transform all the local forms of of government from the village and municipal levels all the way up to the to the state. And so after 86, there’s been an attempt to reform those in a lot of ways. And so they’re they’re weak.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:02:27]:
They’re they’re not fully funded. They are kinda young, and so you don’t have that that time depth that the United States might have in its institutions. I think that’s a huge part of it. But I think that Haiti is also really similar to some of its Caribbean neighbors too where there’s just also a sense that the part of why various people want to control the state apparatus and the presidency in particular is they get to appoint a lot of that civil service and the that’s gonna make up those institutions. Mhmm. We see this in in Jamaica as well very famously since the period of independence where it’s sort of a 2 party system, and whenever one party kind of wins in the elections and kicks the other one out, everyone’s the joke in Jamaica is that all the civil servants start packing up their desks cause I know they’re all gonna lose their jobs and the party’s gonna fill them with all of their kind of, their supporters. And so everyone is is really aligned with whatever party is in power. I don’t know that it’s working quite the same way in Haiti in part because there’s, like, a1000000 political parties, always new ones each haitian, and so there’s not really that sort of, basis of party politics in quite the same way.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:03:34]:
Although we now have the, a couple of of parties that have really taken over in Haiti. And then I think that, the the salaries are also an issue. So just financially, the state can’t quite keep the civil service functioning most of the time, and so that kinda commitment to defending the institutions might not even be there for the people who make it up because they might have to actually have another job or Mhmm. Like you think about teachers rarely getting paid or other kinds of people not getting paid. And so it’s a lot of things, but I do think that is one of the things that that needs to be strengthened and and built as part of the broader kind of political solution that a lot of people are calling for in Haiti is really trying not only to focus only on the state, but a much more expanded sense of the state to include what what political scientists would call civil society, all the kinds of other institutions. And I think that we’ve seen some tensions of it in the past few years, especially around the issues around corruption where the, the judiciary section is producing all these audits and reports. And I think that’s part of the current political crisis is to try to suppress that, because a lot of people have been implicated in that, and it’s been very profitable for them to control the executive branches of government. I think you’ve seen some, sort of pushback at the level of of a couple of other institutions, around issues around, fuel imports and the central bank.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:05:07]:
And so there’s little pockets of of things, and I think that it’s interesting to see that as as difficult politically as the situation is in Haiti right now and especially for the past 5 years or so, there has really been no one’s been fully able to to win in what they’ve been trying to do if if people have been trying to take over the state or take over the government. And I think that trying to figure out why and trying to think about how there’s different kinds of tensions built into the system is an important question. And then the bigger question is how can those tensions be put to democratic use to kinda keep the the government functioning rather than just kind of moments of resistance against authoritarian takeover. How can it become broader?
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:05:58]:
Emmanuel told you that there is no more Haiti, or Haiti is dead. You found quite a few Haitians who felt that way about the country. You also found those sentiments to be intersectional, in the sense that they had gendered generational and geographical dimensions to them. Can you flesh those flesh those out for us, please?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:06:34]:
Yeah. This is a really important question, and and I certainly hope that it’s clear in the book. Maybe I could have done more to make it clear that that it is a really specific set of people who share that sentiment. I think it is, you know, widely shared. It’s not just a dozen people. It was it was pretty widely shared but very specifically located, socially and politically, as you’re as you’re noting in your question. And that it so for me, it’s not a general statement. It’s not even one that I feel, but it’s one that I think is important to to acknowledge and that I wanted to understand what what was behind that sentiment.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:07:15]:
In the simplest terms, and we can qualify this a little bit more but, I think that it’s it’s largely an idea shared by men rather than women, by men who are located in Port au Prince but maybe not born there. Manuel was born in Port au Prince but most of the people most actively in his sort of social circle that he was connecting with, the people that I described in chapter 2 who are looking for life, many of them had migrated to poor plants from the countryside usually from the South and they had come in the seventies and and eighties. So that kinda gives you a sense of their age. They had come probably, as they usually narrative it, you know, maybe in their in their teens, maybe for education, but largely coming to look for work and staying in Port au Prince. And so they their their generation we can kind of put them in a social and political and historical context. They’re a generation shaped by the Duvalier dictatorship and especially by Jean Claude’s version of that. So the so called economic revolution of Jean Claude in the seventies eighties that brought a lot of people to port au Prince to work in the expanding factories. That was, of course, the developmental model being kind of foisted on Haiti that the dictatorship was happy to pick up because there was development dollars coming in.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:08:48]:
It was all geared towards making Haiti the kind of Taiwan of the Caribbean to have, cheap, flexible migrant labor in the factories, coming to the city to work in, you know, textile, garment factories, and those kinds of things. And as we know, in retrospect that, you know, hundreds of thousands of people move to Port au Prince for maybe at its height, 40 to 60,000 factory jobs. So most of those people end up in what is, you know, pretty vaguely called the informal sector, the informal economy, informal housing and this is so they’re a generation of the era of the transformation of the Haitian economy and the transformation of the space of pork plants as a city, the sort of and of course the transformations happening in the countryside, the kinda economic collapse because of constraints of the peasant economy which is driving people into the city to look for new kinds of economic activities and that is something very intentionally being done to the countryside through a disinvestment, blocking of investment, pushing peasants to become mobile wage workers in the capital or overseas as well. And so there’s a kinda whole economic context to that generation. People like Manuel and the others that I that I write about ended up finding that as as sort of hard as those decades were. They really valued them. They sell themselves as urban rather than rural, and that meant something to them. So it is sort of like a kind of social mobility for them to move up and to participate in in the the world of the capital.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:10:32]:
They had access to a lot of cash by participating in the informal economy around tourism especially they were not really working in factories. They were working informally, but that allowed them access to to a lot of cash especially again comparatively what they would have been making if they were still, farmers or still in the countryside or even if they had those sort of formal jobs, and Manuel and others had become quite famous through that tourist system, and they then had access to things like some many of them had some level of of English because they had interacted with a lot of foreigners to arrest the journalists. And so for them, it was really tied to their sense of of individual agency, their own control over their time and their work over the labor process and that became you know tied to their own social values where as wealthy people with big networks around the city, they had a lot they had they accrued a lot of respect and social standing. And then of course through the eighties, a lot of things happened to destabilize that world for them. There’s this almost overnight the collapse of the tourist economy in after 84 or so as Haiti gets blamed by the US and the CDC and the US and and others as sort of the locus of, HIV infection throughout the Americas and we now know that the story goes the other way that HIV AIDS was most likely brought to Haiti by foreign tourists who participated in, the the sort of, in sex tourism and the informal economies of prostitution around the hotels and the tourist areas. And so, nevertheless, Haiti sort of blamed fridge and the aids. Tourists stop coming en masse. That whole economy craters.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:12:32]:
The dictatorship falters, and Haiti enters into a a kind of period of destabilization. The men that I’m writing about who, are of this sort of economic generation, there might be different ages. That’s why I don’t wanna think of the generation as being tied too much just to age but to a kind of location in these, informal economies and in the social networks of prestige and respect that go with them. The men in that field had to kinda pivot and they did that in a couple of ways. Politically they were all very actively aligned with Jean Batory Aristide and the popular movement, Most of them were, voodoo practitioners and and, and so identify as as, as voodoo esson rather than as, say, evangelical Christians. So there’s a kind of a religious dimension to it as well. And then, economically, they pivoted taking their sort of extensive network for tourists and and and now using it for journalists or development workers throughout the the period of the nineties and 2000. And so there’s a lot of navigating and using their resources to navigate the many crises to begin to really kinda build.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:13:48]:
And I by the time that I’m writing about them in the 2000 and Manuel is is saying, Haiti is dead. There’s no more Haiti. It’s after quite a long time of living with insecurity and feeling like all the things you had built in your life are kind of gone or you can’t get them back and they’re no longer helping you navigate the crisis because it’s no longer just a fleeting moment to get through, but it’s just sort of expanding and expanding and escalating and cascading through parts of your life and by the 2000 as Narrative is sort of back in power again, elected again and then kicked out a second time by a coup that political generation of people very much shaped by the, 86, generation. Right? The the the moment of the end of the dictatorship and the possibility, the the the real sense of possibility of transforming Haitian society that drove them by 2002, but certainly by 2004, for a lot of people, it was starting to feel like that whole idea of hope, political hope and possibility was closed that, that elections were not gonna yield transformation because if you get your guy in, there’s gonna be a coup. Or even if Astrid stays in, he can’t do the things he’s promised that everyone elected him to do because of the conditions set by the international community that the path to transforming Haitian society wasn’t going to run through democratic elections and taking over the state but also that if it didn’t do that, where was it going to go? How were you going to transform Haitian society? And, you know, it’s in that context that form Haitian society? And you know it’s in that context that there’s all kinds of projects happening, you know things like the Botanic Garden Project and Marazan that I talk about in in the first chapter of the book. Lots of things that people are trying to do, and I think that by the time that I’m hearing Manuel and others say there’s no more Haiti, they’re feeling disillusioned and kind of exhausted, but also just that that they don’t have any space left to maneuver in part because at that point that they’re saying that, we’re we saw the beginnings of what we’re seeing, in a much more expanded form in Haiti right now, the beginnings of not so clearly politically aligned gangs but now kind of autonomous armed groups in neighborhoods like Marazan that are taking over. They have their own interests. They’re fracturing.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:16:20]:
It’s hard to to know how to safely locate yourself politically if you say you’re with Aristide or you’re against Aristide. Depending on who hears you say that, you might become a target. The economy sort of continued to crater at least for the informal sector and these men in it. They’re losing the kind of respect and privilege and access to cash they used to have. They’re getting older. They’re not able to take care of their families the way they want to. By 2004, you know, things like kidnappings and robberies are becoming endemic, and and their prestige would have protected them from that at an earlier moment, and it and it wasn’t anymore. And so I think that it’s in that sense that you see a kind of political, economic, social generation of men, who work in the informal sector and feel very deeply attached to their own sense as urban residents who control their, who have control over their their work and their time and their value and their agency, they no longer feel that they do.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:17:29]:
And I think that they can see I think Manuel could see that all of those things he valued were were not likely to come back or certainly if they came back, they would they wouldn’t come back for him, a younger Haitian. You know, let’s say you’re you’re a driver, and you’re gonna try to to pivot from driving tourists around to driving journalists around. You know, by the nineties 2000, people who had cars in the eighties still had the same cars and but now there’s younger men who have a car that’s maybe air conditioned or maybe they have a cell phone or they speak better English so they can kinda jump the line and they don’t have to defer to people who are older than them who should have the clients first. They can become sort of the they can pick up all kinds of clients and and take over the whole market. So all those are the kinds of competition. We’re really pushing them out of the the last sort of sphere or frontier they felt that they could navigate and control and actually succeed in. So all those things are happening. The the level of of the national political crisis, they feel like they’re losing out.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:18:30]:
They don’t have a voice, and elections aren’t yielding the the promises that they had heralded. And then, economically, they can’t, you know, they can’t find life anymore. They’re feeling like they might, they don’t know what’s gonna happen. Right?
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:18:46]:
And so
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:18:46]:
I think that that Toussaint sentiment really comes out of that feeling for that generation of people. It’s very different, for for women who have a a stronger kinda sense that acknowledging all those things. But usually because, you know, women are are are socially under see themselves as as being responsible to the whole household and and children. And so there’s a and then they have a whole different role in terms of the markets and, access to informal economy than than men might. You know, people like Manuel ended up, you know, by 2000, they they are largely sitting around not doing much all day, and so they can’t turn their activity into forms of value or into cash. And so they’re losing out sort of a crisis of of even a kind of idea of masculine masculine, yeah, agency in a way too. So for women, it’s a little different for especially for urban residents who would identify as evangelical. They would see it differently.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:19:42]:
And then, of course, for the professional middle class or the elite, they’ve pushed back very strongly on that Toussaint. And I think that’s noteworthy not only because there exist this whole other shared sentiment that a country never dies or Haiti is not going to die. You see all that very strongly in all kinds of beautiful street art after the earthquake as well. But in 2002, 2004, when I first heard Manuel say those things, their responses, the counter of A Country Never Dies was mostly at that point being voiced by, middle class professionals who were pretty actively against Aristide and sort of for what ended up becoming the UN intervention in 2004 that lasted until 2017 or so. And so there was a real different kinda class divide then there as well. I don’t think that that sentiment of of Haitian is never going to die or a country never dies is I don’t think it’s tied to that particular framework anymore. I think it’s much more expansive and and and really important to acknowledge it, that it’s becoming sort of the more dominant sentiment, hopefully. But I think that at the time that I was first hearing it, it had that sense that, the the people kind of pushing back against the popular movement were the ones saying, Haiti’s not going to die, but the people who were most aligned with Aristide were feeling like maybe this is, maybe something is ending here.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:21:12]:
That something that began in 86 might be kinda closing in 2004. I don’t know how true that is, but I think that that’s certainly how people were feeling about it in 2004 as it was happening and as we see the sort of terrible damage wrought by the by MINUSTAH, by the UN haitian and by the decade plus of of reconstruction after the earthquake, we can see a whole new kind of generation reacting in different ways to to that history and thinking about the political moment now in some different ways that I think that people were thinking about it 10, 20 years ago.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:21:59]:
You said that anthropology is like a study of the ordinary. What did you mean by that?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:22:05]:
Yeah. I mean, I like to think of it that way and and I don’t know if every anthropologist would agree, but for me, anthropology as a as a social science dwells in lives in specificity and the particular or maybe even another way to put it, in really small data. If we’re in an era of big data and massive computations that we can do and looking at sort of, you know, global usage of an app or something like that. You can get this astronomically large data. You need big, big, powerful computers to crunch it, and we can get a vision of how the economy works or how something works through that, but anthropology is committed to very, very small numbers and so in some ways, I think other social sciences might say that it is harder to see it as sort of producing, you know, valid results or replicable results or it’s very subjective, and that’s why we we really center the of the researcher in the methodology as well so that we can acknowledge that. But I mean a couple of other things by it too. I mean, anthropologists like to say that our data isn’t so much small as it is thick, that it’s very rather than sort of a thinness of just quantitative data, Qualitative data, as we call it in the social sciences, is all that stuff that’s sort of full of values and counter and complications and ambiguity and even contradictions. It’s harder to make sense of because it can be a bit messy and it unfolds in real time.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:23:33]:
And so partly, I wanted to direct the reader to know that that’s what anthropologists are really interested in and that’s the kind of data and evidence that they’re gonna get in the book that is driving the argument. But we also do as anthropologists make more general statements and the general statements come out of the particular rather than going the other way. So we don’t start with a top down theory and then locate empirical examples that show that theory rather we start with the empirical material aspects of social life, how people live day to day, what they actually do, and then we build our understanding of more general patterns and social relationships up from that. And I think that the other thing I would just note too is that in an earlier version of anthropology history as a discipline, there was much more focus, say, not on the ordinary but on sort of the structures, moments of highly stylized ritual practice or, looking at myth that these are kind of things that societies produce about themselves that that tell members of that society how things are, you know, the origin story in a myth or a ritual where in the course of the ritual it tells you how to do it correctly and it’s a very stylized kind of thing. Let’s say an initiation rite for example or something like that. Now that is also all kinds of ordinary too because it’s just a fundamental part of people’s lives and their experience, but they’re also sort of punctuated very formal moments a little different from, the actual sort of everyday. And I think that anthropologists sometimes like to distinguish between what people say they do versus what they actually do, and everyone has that if you ask people, you know, what is what is society like for you, or how do you think about your own culture, or even how do you think about your own job? You get one kinda answer which might highlight some of the some important things, no doubt, but some of the more obvious or visible or formal things. And then if you just live with them and follow them around, you see that their job or their society or their culture is much more complex than that.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:25:46]:
A lot of things that didn’t get said maybe because, you know, the person you asked would think, well, of course, everyone knows that. I don’t need to say it. The unspoken because everyone knows it or the unspoken because everyone knows it but they don’t know how to articulate it or the unspoken because it’s kind of an unconscious dimension of social life that people don’t even know that they’re doing, but that drives them in a way. Or you can see all of those different elements that make up sort of the the robustness and the texture and the thickness of everyday life, beyond how we describe it in moments of sort of stepping aside, stepping back, and formally describing it. Right? So I think the method of methodology is really well suited because the method is essentially sort of deep hanging out living with people through various moments of their lives and in some ways, it’s almost like the anthropologist is is a bit like a child, in that, you know, you’re asking people questions that are kind of kind of dumb on the surface because people normally, adults don’t ask them, like, well, why do you do this? And it’s like, well, because we do. Because that’s you should know already that that’s how we do things. Do I have to explain it? We don’t ex we only usually explain that to children because they don’t get it, you know. So you can play that kind of naive outsider card as a method in some way, which is a great way to get people to think about things they don’t normally pause to think about and then they begin to articulate theories that they have about why they do it, that maybe they haven’t ever really articulated out loud to people before because everyone else also just knows it and just does it.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:27:28]:
Right? And so the ordinary is really a way that I think is actually where the the theory of social life emerges from but usually in unspoken ways just through the kind of embodied material way we navigate the world. We know it and think about it and know a lot of sophisticated things about how language works or social relationships work or whatever it might be, and then asking people kind of interrupting their ordinary life. The anthropologist comes into your into your house and says, hey, tell me what you’re doing. That becomes a moment not for me to tell them what they’re doing, but for me to listen as they think out loud, you know, where I become the occasion for them to say, oh, you know what? I do know how this works, but I’ve never stopped to kind of say it out loud or to tell somebody about it because I never had to. And so the ordinary becomes, you know, not only this sort of most important space in which we sort of live social life, we mostly live ordinary everyday lives. Those sort of more formal moments are very infrequent in most people’s lives. But also the ordinary is a place of for for theory to emerge from particular experiences, from specificity to a more general claim about how we do things and why we do things, you know, whoever we is, in that kind of, framing. So that, I think, is important methodologically but also kind of theoretically for the ordinary to be the space from which we theorize social life, not the more formal moments, but the the informal, the everyday, the intimate moments where social life emerges, and changes and and takes shape.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:29:19]:
What’s the difference between sad stories and tragic stories? I ask this because, this is a quote from your book. Quote, this book is a meditation on life and death, on living and dying in Haiti. You you also said that you don’t buy the the dominant trope that that stories about Haiti are tragic. Well, why is that?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:29:46]:
Yeah. Maybe that this is a distinction that is is less relevant for others than for me, but I’ll tell you what I was thinking about it and why it was important for me, why I wanted to make that distinction. You know, the idea that that to acknowledge that there’s gonna be sadness, in the book is to acknowledge that that haitian are actually really essential to the story and to the argument and so there’s a lot of grief and loss and sadness in the stories that I tell when people are expressing those emotions. So and then as a reader, you know, or or a researcher, we ought to feel some sadness or some grief as well when we hear about some of the the the things that that are, that Haitian in the book and they’re described in the book. But the reason I wanted to distinguish it from a tragic one really was and maybe I was just sort of thinking as a as a writer thinking about how tragedies work at the structural level as a narrative, you know, kinda classically ancient Greek tragedies or or Shakespeare’s tragic plays, for example, really set some pretty formal kinds of conditions on the way that people write about things as tragedy, and I think that for me, the most notable one in in most tragedies is that, you know, the essence of of a tragedy tragic story in, say, ancient Greece, the classic tragedies like, Oedipus Rex. We know the story of Oedipus. The the essence of the tragedy there is that no matter what the character does, the plot will always win, and the plot is where the tragedy happens. So those kinds of tragedies are written for an audience in ancient Greece that wants the cathartic experience of of kind of going through the emotions because they can see the story in a way that characters can’t see it, and so their own response as an audience is gonna be, you know, largely how we might respond to a film now where you’re like, you know, oh, behave differently.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:31:53]:
Don’t don’t do that. Do this instead, and we we watch the characters do something we know they shouldn’t do because the characters don’t know they’re in a story and stuck in the story, but we as an audience do. And so I didn’t want the ethnography to have that kind of narrative structure where as an audience or as a reader, we have some some different kind of knowledge and that the people in it are just sort of acting out roles until the plot is done. And so for me, it was really important to to not do that because partly what I wanted to do was show how people were actively thinking about what was happening and sometimes their thinking of it was that there’s they were powerless to stop things that were happening to them and other times they thought that they had agency to do things and so I wanted to be able to move between those things at the level of narrative so we could see it so we could see if people felt powerless. That was a feeling get and and a theory about the overwhelming oppressive structures kind of shaping their lives whether it’s foreign military intervention or political violence or or a global capitalist system that they are powerless to sort of change in some way. That that’s their theory about structure rather than me saying that they really are powerless is them understanding quite well the ways in which power is unequally distributed in their own society or globally. So for me, at the level of kind of narrative form, it was important to make that distinction but maybe that’s just also not how people use it, that the people use tragedy in a whole different kind of colloquial sense of extra sad because, of other kinds of conditions. And I think that that, you know, maybe is a good way to keep that word in some sense.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:33:37]:
But I do think that Haiti is often framed by a kinda international media, certainly by kinda international forms of of, Christian Missionization or humanitarian aid as tragic and that framework is used to mobilize a particular emotional response in foreigners towards Haiti which I would say is is pity not solidarity and I think that that was the other kind of idea behind making that distinction for me. Maybe it could’ve just said it better or said it like that that that we need to have our emotions lead us to solidarity with with people, who are living through terrible things and things that shouldn’t have to live with or this shouldn’t happen because, you know, they’re being done by by bad actors or oppressive forces or structures that we should change. So to to think about solidarity as being the outcome of our emotional responses to a sad story, compassion and sympathy and listening and learning rather than pity which so clearly turns people into a kind of object for us rather than a subject that we recognize and I think that that tragic frame often leads to that idea of pity. And so I really wanted to write against that as well and I think that’s very prevalent in the humanitarian response after the earthquake, in the way the development, agents go to Haiti. You hear it all the time from foreigners working in Haiti that, oh, isn’t it just so tragic? Isn’t it just, you know, that they talk about Haiti that way? And and so in one sense, it is, but, again, to me, the underlying unspoken idea when people call something tragic is that it’s sad, but it’s also too bad that it was fated to happen that way, And I really want to get away from that idea that it was inevitable because I think that that is something that our our our sort of everyday understanding of tragedy contains still in it even if we don’t know it, you know. You think about the story of of Oedipus, you might be familiar from, say, the Oedipus complex in psychoanalysis or something like that or maybe you know the history. If you don’t, it’s fine too. But, you know, Oedipus gets this, or Oedipus’ father goes to to an oracle and gets this, hears that his son is gonna grow up to kill haitian, and marry his his wife, Oedipus’ mother.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:36:21]:
So, Oedipus’ father decides, well, I don’t want that to happen to me, so I’m going to take my son and bring him to the countryside and, stick a spike through his foot so he stays in the ground and just leave him to die. Somebody finds Oedipus in the in the next kingdom over and takes him in, and Oedipus grows up in the next kingdom and becomes, you know, a happy person who eventually gets his own prophecy which sets a whole chain of events into, into motion where he ends up killing a stranger he meets on the road who is actually his his biological father. And ends up marrying his mother. And, of course, when he finds out, that the we get the cathartic release in the tragic narrative as it’s presenting in Greek in the Greek play where, you know, Oedipus has this realization and the characters realize something the audience has always known. And so that’s really the formal level. That’s the essence of of what I think we mean by tragedy that it’s something nobody could do anything about. Even if you try to do something about it, you’ll just make it worse. And I think that that is something I refuse to say as a way we should understand what’s happening in Haiti that things can absolutely be different.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:37:37]:
They could’ve been different in the past if people had done different things. They can be different now and they will be different in the future if we do different things. I think that the whole framing of crisis is so often used to make Haiti seem like a place that is just inevitably bound to fail and I think that that tragic narrative whether it’s from humanitarians or or foreign government now is the contemporary version of the kind of silencing and unthinkability about the revolution that we would have seen people are articulating in 1804 when they refused to recognize Haiti politically and then also the 19th century when Haiti was constantly held up as a place that, you know, had to be contained and ignored and people wouldn’t trade with it or recognize it politically. And then when it wasn’t a vibrant successful country, they’d say, Look look what freedom gets you. You’ll become Haiti if you don’t, stay a colony in our empire. So the idea of of tragedy in Haiti is a very old one where Haiti is used as an example held up as an example for, you know, all kinds of other anticolonial struggles, anti imperialism struggles, struggles against systemic racism to say, look. Do you really wanna be like Haiti, or do you want to accept whatever we give you? And so I really wanted to resist all of that, and maybe, it could have been distinguished in a different way from from sad stories. So but I wanted to refuse that sort of framing while at the same time allowing the emotions that people are are talking about and feeling that I’m feeling and that the reader’s feeling to take space in the book is something that we can acknowledge that we should feel sad about this and and and readers who are non Haitian should feel sad, but also complicit in some of the things that are happening in the book, because, of course, it’s not faded and, you know, we can vote for different policies in Canada or the United States or France that our governments can do.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:39:39]:
We can listen to Haitians when they say that they want a Haitian solution and a political solution to the crisis, not another intervention. So all of that doesn’t need to be inevitable but but we do need to think about our how our own emotional responses can hail us into solidarity rather than into repeating this old trope that Haiti is just sort of bound to fail.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:40:12]:
I wanted to talk to you about, just within the notion of political crisis. How does the Haitian concept of desord factor into all of that? Mhmm.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:40:24]:
Yeah. That’s a, you know, a central question that I was thinking through in the book as well, and I think that it it takes different shape and different moments. It’s hard to even know what we mean by the political crisis in Haiti because it can take a lot of different forms. I mean, I think that there’s, in a very simple sense, kind of a budgetary crisis for the government and a a parliamentary crisis at various moments. But in the in the book and the the political crisis that I was talking about in the moment in the book was really centered around what the international community was thinking of and often labels as a failed state, and they use that to justify intervention, which is sort of being debated, right now about Haiti as well. And in that sense, it’s a little bit different than sort of institutional or organizational sense of a crisis a political scientist might think of a political crisis being at the level of an institution not working properly. But here, I think that, in 2003, 2004, and after 2004 going into the UN intervention, the people I was working with talking about political crisis were really talking about the state’s kind of total absence or its its full capture by nondemocratic actors or other kinds of forces. And so, I came to understand as something that had sort of two meanings or two valences to it.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:41:48]:
1, it seemed to speak to that sense of, an atmosphere of uncertainty that goes with unsecurite, that that that sense of insecurity that I think the English word insecurity is a really poor translation of the Karel word, where it’s so much more vast in its meaning. But it it it seems really tied to the way in which the the things that are supposed to keep you secure, the maybe the state or the economy or big institutions socially that should be there and keeping us secure in our lives aren’t doing that and are maybe having the opposite effect so that everything that should produce order in society is actually producing its a who everyone was with or what you could say. And so it was a little bit like being back under the dictatorship, at least as those who could remember being under the dictatorship felt because you didn’t know if you were talking to an Aristides supporter or someone who supported the coup or someone who supported the gangs, and so he didn’t wanna sort of talk about politics a lot. So that atmosphere of uncertainty was part, I think, of the disorder, that sense of. But the other thing that I thought was really crucial about how I came to understand people were using that word is that it really carries a sense of responsibility that there’s people behind the scenes. Maybe you you have a guess of who they are, you know who they are, maybe you don’t, that are actively creating disorder as, you know, to gain power or for ways of generating generating wealth, and that could be, you know, local actors at the level of, a neighborhood where the gangs might create disorder as part of their economy of of terror on a neighborhood to keep control over it, or elites or or political actors in Haiti and, of course, international community, I think, likes to create or the conditions of disorder in Haiti so that it can justify whatever it wants to do, whether it’s cordoning off Haiti and making sure as the US is about to start ramping up to make sure that that Haitians can’t get across the sea to to seek asylum in the United States or elsewhere or whether it means justifying intervention. And so it seemed to be a a more pointed and, I think, a better theory of political crisis because the political science idea of state failure is sort of subjectless. It’s like, oh, some states fail and and here’s the international community stepping in to save everyone when really that there’s a lot of politics that goes behind the scenes of making something look like a failure or that it’s not working and justifying intervention or making something actually actively be disordered is not the absence of order, but it’s a mode of social action that produces a certain kind of social haitian, insecurity, and that’s very generative for some people.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:44:41]:
And of course, it’s terrible for most people who have to live with it. So I thought that to me, that was really the essence of the concept that I was hearing as people were using it in especially around 2003, 2004, and the period after the 2004 coup where especially those first 3 or 4 years of the UN mission were really violent, especially in parlance. And, you know, people were were really just trying to navigate, conditions of total uncertainty. And and in many ways, people are are right back in those kinds of moments right now over the past couple of years in Haiti and
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:45:23]:
So is it so are you saying are you saying then that you don’t believe Haiti is a failed state, or are you saying the causes behind it, are are not, external to the counter? And the I mean, do you believe hate because I’ve actually used that term a few times in moments of despair. You know? It says Yeah. You know? Like so do you not believe Haiti is a failed state?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:45:51]:
I mean, it’s definitely a crisis in in the sort of post 1986 form of government, and I think everyone feels that way. It’s a complicated political system to have any party kind of win and have enough of a mandate that it can do something. Mhmm. But that’s also the system, and I think that that there’s all kinds of dysfunction in American democratic institutions. We don’t call America a failed state in part because, you know, it’s obviously still doing some of the work of governing. Mhmm. But so I I my my worry is less about whether we call it that or not and more about the kind of intellectual genealogy of that term, which was really created by American political scientists to to justify forms of intervention.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:46:42]:
Mhmm.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:46:42]:
So if we’re calling Haiti a failed state in order to to justify military intervention, I wouldn’t wanna call it that, but, obviously, everyone that I know, most people I work with live in in Marisande or other neighborhoods, they certainly feel like the state is absent or completely failed at its responsibility to its citizens. So I think that it makes sense to talk about it as, as failed. I guess part of the question too is is it is it not working, or is it it working the way somebody wants it to work?
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:47:16]:
And I
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:47:16]:
think that’s part of what that sense of there’s people behind the scenes actively making this order is is gesturing to. Mhmm. I think a lot of the failures of the state do come from from extranational actors or the structural conditions that the the Haitian any Haitian government would find itself in where its national budget is completely dependent on the International Monetary Fund and other international financial institutions. They set some basic conditions for that money. So there’s a immediate tension between, say, you know, somebody elected or a government elected with a broad popular mandate to do x, y, and zed policy, and then it’s complete inability to do those policies because of conditions that come from financial institutions that are not, you know, elected or democratic, and so there’s a real tension in whether the the conditions that any Haitian government meets because of the sort of dependency it has on international, financial institutions
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:48:14]:
Mhmm.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:48:14]:
Could allow it to function. I think that is one of the important sort of frameworks, and I think the other thing is that there’s a lot of political tensions in Haiti and a lot of political actors who want power but can’t get it by democratic means. They can’t they’re not popular enough to get elected or their whole party can’t get elected enough, and so they need to find mechanisms to take control of the state because the government and the state apparatus is still predominantly the most important institution that to hold if you want to have power or the ability to generate certain kinds of of wealth in the counter. And so there’s a internal kind of tension of of of what’s going to happen at the level of the government, and then there’s some external conditions. I think that if you look broadly at the the democratic era from Aristides’ first election to, to Moise’s government, you know, there’s been very few of those of those governments that have finished a full term with a full kind of constitutional arrangement of the government without, say, disbanding parliament, for example. And so there’s a continual crisis in the organizational form of the government to be sure that has to do with party politics and all kinds of internal things, but I think the broader conditions that we point to the state not being able to actually fulfill its obligations to people, if that’s what we mean by state failure. You know, one gloss for state failure in political science is that the state can no longer provide public goods in particular security. So we’re seeing that right now that the state and the national police cannot provide security in the country.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:49:52]:
The question is, you know, why and what’s going on and and how to find a solution to that. Mhmm. So in that sense, it’s definitely an apt term. My worry with the term is that it if it is the answer, if we stop there, we don’t get too far but if it’s the start of a question you know what are the conditions that keep producing the political crises in Haitian, and what could we do to get rid of those conditions? I think that is the the next step we need to go to beyond just thinking of of calling it state failure or is sometimes called weak state as well. We have to go a little bit beyond that and say, what are the underlying conditions that keep producing governments that keep having that particular quality or that form or that Haitian? For me, this goes back to some of those structural conditions too where the the whole international paradigm for states like Haiti since the eighties has been to reduce the role of the state to minimal functions, the kind of, structural adjustment programs that come from the IMF and other Haitian, the United States idea, what used to be called the Washington Consensus is that after dictatorship, Haiti should become a kind of neoliberal state where the government should do very little. All the national nationally owned enterprises should be privatized so that they can, you know, run more efficiently or to root out corruption and all. There’s lots of arguments to be made about why that should happen, but one of the things that did happen, say, from racism to to after 86, the state had been history in Haiti the largest employer, and it now isn’t. And I think that that so part of it is that that there’s a weakening at the level of sort of a critical mass of the the institutional apparatus of the government or civil society or professional middle class that has stable public jobs, public sector jobs.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:51:56]:
I think Haiti needs a much more robust government in that sense because I think that it’s those institutions where you have professionals who have a kind of vocational calling to their own profession, and then they’re doing a job for the government, that’s where you’re going to get that sense of, no, it’s it’s more important for me not to give into corruption or any particular political leader, but to defend the state as something as to defend the public interest. I think that that has been withered away by the sort of template that’s been foisted onto the Haitian state to reduce its role Mhmm. To basically just security, which now we see they can’t even do, of course.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:52:37]:
If I remember right, the Washington Consensus, they’re a group of libertarian leaning right wing conservatives and funded by them. Right? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:52:48]:
And so that, you know, they they’re kind of free market, extremists in a sense. Right? If if then the state is always an obstacle to the market and so we should step out of the way. The market can govern more efficiently than the state, which, you know, it can’t necessarily do if you’re if you’re Haiti where you’re already inserted in a highly unequal way into a global market, Mhmm. Given the sort of long legacy of of neocolonial economic forms of dependency and debt, it’s it’s not going to work very well.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:53:19]:
Gail, any final thoughts for us to close this out?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:53:23]:
I mean, just to to thank you for having me. It’s always a a real pleasure. I I’m a big fan of the podcast and I’m just honored to be, on it and have the chance to talk to you, and and thank you for reading the book.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:53:34]:
No problem. I really enjoyed it. And also to now you’ve expanded my my my definition of the word, dzod, because I only used to use it against my 6 year old boy, you know? Because he’s pure chaos, you know? Right. Yeah. So is what he call it. Yeah. So yeah. I appreciate it.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:53:54]:
Thanks a lot. Alright. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook at Negmawopodcast. That’s Mauow with a w, not an r.
00:00 Haiti’s institutions lack funding and historical depth.
03:34 Haiti’s political and financial challenges need solutions.
08:48 Haiti transformed into factory hub, urban migration.
10:32 Informal tourism work brought fame, cash, respect. Then, collapsed.
13:48 Haiti in crisis, loss of hope.
19:42 Middle class and elite pushed back strongly.
23:33 Anthropologists derive general patterns from everyday experiences.
25:46 Unspoken societal norms and behavior in everyday life.
29:46 Distinguishing sadness from classical tragic narrative structure.
33:37 Challenging tragic Haiti portrayal, seeks emotional solidarity.
37:37 Resisting tragic narrative, Haiti’s potential for change.
41:48 Insecurity and disorder result from societal actions.
48:14 Political tensions in Haiti lead to state failure.
49:52 Questioning root causes and solutions for state failure.
53:34 Expanded definition of “dzod” appreciated for chaos.
00:00 Haiti lacks institutional depth and is influenced by political patronage.
03:34 Issues in Haiti include financial instability, corruption, and political tensions within various institutions.
08:48 Haiti’s urbanization and economic transformation drove peasants to become migrant labor in factories for social mobility.
10:32 Informal tourism economy in Haiti leads to cash influx but collapses due to HIV.
13:48 In 2000s Haiti, hope fades amidst political turmoil, disillusionment, and the rise of armed groups.
19:42 Elite and middle class in Haiti pushed back against sentiment, class divide, shift in dominant sentiment.
23:33 Anthropologists study daily life, not just formal rituals and myths, to understand cultures.
25:46 Unspoken social dynamics analyzed through ethnography.
29:46 The text discusses the distinction between sadness and tragedy in storytelling and the impact on readers or audience members.
33:37 The text critiques the portrayal of Haiti as tragic and argues for solidarity over pity.
37:37 The text highlights Haiti’s tragic narrative, challenging the framing of crisis and urging resistance against such narratives.
41:48 The text discusses the concept of insecurity in Haiti and how it is tied to political and social factors, creating a sense of uncertainty and responsibility. This leads to disorder and can be exploited for power and wealth.
48:14 Political tensions in Haiti lead to struggles for power. The state fails to provide security.
49:52 Questioning of state failure in Haiti due to structural conditions and international influence.
53:34 Gratitude for expanding word definition.
- Introduction to Dr. Greg Beckett and the Focus of the Episode
- Contextualizing challenges facing Haiti
- Influence of international financial and political environments
- Discussion of the state’s failure to provide public goods and security
- Examination of structural conditions undermining Haiti’s institutional strength
- The Washington Consensus and Its Impact
- Definition and implications of the Washington Consensus for Haiti
- The role of minimal state intervention advocacy
- Effects of privatization on Haiti’s professional workforce and economy
- Comparing Bureaucratic Strength and Corruption
- Contrasting United States and Haiti’s bureaucratic systems
- Addressing Haiti’s weak, young, and underfunded institutions post-Duvalier
- Civil service commitment issues due to financial constraints and political factors
- Internal Tensions and Struggles in Haitian Government
- Corruption and power dynamics within the government
- Historical context of political instability and its modern-day manifestations
- Sentiments of Despair and Hope in Port-au-Prince
- Perspectives of male migrants shaped by the Duvalier era and economic shifts
- Gendered, generational, and geographical variances in outlooks on Haiti’s future
- Gendered Roles and Socio-Political Differences in Haitian Society
- The different experiences of men and women in economic and household responsibilities
- Class and political divides regarding Haiti’s resilience
- Dr. Beckett’s Anthropological Approach
- Emphasis on small-scale qualitative data analysis
- Distinguishing between people’s stated actions and actual behaviors through anthropological methods
- The role of the “ordinary” in understanding social life and change
- Rejecting Tragic Narratives
- Critique of framing Haiti’s stories as inevitable tragedies
- Advocating for empathy and solidarity over pity
- Dismantling the stereotype of Haiti as inherently doomed
- Recognizing Complexity and Avoiding Simplistic Labels
- Dissecting the term “crisis” as it relates to Haitian politics and economy
- Concerns with labeling Haiti as a “failed state” and the repercussions of such framing
- The entangled nature of Haiti’s political and economic systems
- Economic Transformation and Political Realignment
- Shift from agricultural life to urban wage work and migration
- Adapting to the collapse of tourism and political shifts in the 1980s
- Disenchantment with the prospects of political reform and stability
- The Plight of the Informal Economy
- Dynamics of competition and loss of social status
- Surge in crime affecting sense of control and agency
- Broader picture of economic and political despair in the urban context
- Conclusion and Expressions of Gratitude
- Thanking Dr. Greg Beckett for his insights
- Final thoughts and a lighthearted moment discussing the cultural significance of the word “dzod”
The Decline of Hope in Haitian Politics: “by 2002, but certainly by 2004, for a lot of people, it was starting to feel like that whole idea of hope, political hope and possibility was closed that, that elections were not gonna yield transformation because if you get your guy in, there’s gonna be a coup.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:14:49 → 00:15:07]
The Essence of Anthropology: “But we also do as anthropologists make more general statements and the general statements come out of the particular rather than going the other way. So we don’t start with a top down theory and then locate empirical examples that show that theory rather we start with the empirical material aspects of social life, how people live day to day, what they actually do, and then we build our understanding of more general patterns and social relationships up from that.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:23:43 → 00:24:12]
The Intricacies of Unspoken Social Rules: “A lot of things that didn’t get said maybe because, you know, the person you asked would think, well, of course, everyone knows that. I don’t need to say it. The unspoken because everyone knows it or the unspoken because everyone knows it but they don’t know how to articulate it or the unspoken because it’s kind of an unconscious dimension of social life that people don’t even know that they’re doing, but that drives them in a way.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:25:46 → 00:26:09]
The Essence of Tragedy in Storytelling: “You know, the essence of of a tragedy tragic story in, say, ancient Greece, the classic tragedies like, Oedipus Rex. We know the story of Oedipus. The the essence of the tragedy there is that no matter what the character does, the plot will always win, and the plot is where the tragedy happens.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:31:06 → 00:31:26]
Narrative Insight and Power Dynamics: “And so for me, it was really important to not do that because partly what I wanted to do was show how people were actively thinking about what was happening and sometimes their thinking of it was that there’s they were powerless to stop things that were happening to them and other times they thought that they had agency to do things and so I wanted to be able to move between those things at the level of narrative so we could see it so we could see if people felt powerless.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:32:21 → 00:32:47]
Humanitarian Perceptions and Solidarity: “I do think that Haiti is often framed by a kinda international media, certainly by kinda international forms of of, Christian Missionization or humanitarian aid as tragic and that framework is used to mobilize a particular emotional response in foreigners towards Haiti which I would say is is pity not solidarity and I think that that was the other kind of idea behind making that distinction for me.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:33:38 → 00:34:10]
Haiti’s Enduring Struggle: “They could’ve been different in the past if people had done different things. They can be different now and they will be different in the future if we do different things.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:37:37 → 00:37:44]
Understanding Insecurity in Contemporary Society: “it really carries a sense of responsibility that there’s people behind the scenes. Maybe you you have a guess of who they are, you know who they are, maybe you don’t, that are actively creating disorder as, you know, to gain power or for ways of generating generating wealth.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:43:07 → 00:43:24]
Political Instability in Haiti: “I think there’s a lot of political tensions in Haiti and a lot of political actors who want power but can’t get it by democratic means. They can’t they’re not popular enough to get elected or their whole party can’t get elected enough, and so they need to find mechanisms to take control of the state because the government and the state apparatus is still predominantly the most important institution that to hold if you want to have power or the ability to generate certain kinds of of wealth in the counter.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:48:22 → 00:48:53]
Understanding Haitian Political Instability: “We have to go a little bit beyond that and say, what are the underlying conditions that keep producing governments that keep having that particular quality or that form or that Haitian?”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:49:52 → 00:51:56]
Bureaucracy and Governance Stability: “the difference, say, between the United States during the 4 years of Trump, where he stress test the the the bureaucracy and try to push the limit to see how much, you know, he could get away with that. There were a lot of pushback in the bureaucracy because the people who are actually, like, career professionals, right, they they kind of push back, ignored or, you know, certain orders that came down.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:05 → 00:00:31]
Stability of State Bureaucracy: “Are they part of that? Or because I wanna I wanna go in the side of it’s not a failed state if I know these bureaucracies as they as weakened as they might be.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:01:00 → 00:01:09]
Resource Constraints in Institutions: “but it’s just a matter of they don’t have the resources for them to hold the line as it were.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:01:11 → 00:01:16]
The State of Haiti: “Emmanuel told you that there is no more Haiti, or Haiti is dead. You found quite a few Haitians who felt that way about the country.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:05:58 → 00:06:12]
Perception of Haitian Narratives: “this book is a meditation on life and death, on living and dying in Haiti.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:29:29 → 00:29:36]
Haitian Political Philosophy: “How does the Haitian concept of desord factor into all of that? Mhmm.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:40:17 → 00:40:24]
Statehood and Challenges in Haiti: “You know? It says Yeah. You know? Like so do you not believe Haiti is a failed state?”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:45:47 → 00:45:51]
Washington Consensus Influence: “If I remember right, the Washington Consensus, they’re a group of libertarian leaning right wing conservatives and funded by them. Right? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:52:37 → 00:52:48]
Expanding Vocabulary Through Parenting: “And also to now you’ve expanded my my my definition of the word, dzod, because I only used to use it against my 6 year old boy, you know? Because he’s pure chaos, you know?”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:53:36 → 00:53:46]
Social Media Engagement: “Please follow us on Twitter and Facebook at Negmawopodcast. That’s Mauow with a w, not an r.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:54:01 → 00:54:12]
- How do international financial institutions influence Haiti’s national budget and the government’s ability to implement policies, according to Dr. Greg Beckett?
- In what ways does the struggle for power among Haiti’s political actors exacerbate the challenges within the government, and what are the consequences of this power struggle on the nation’s stability?
- Dr. Beckett discusses the state’s inability to fulfill its obligations, particularly in securing public goods and services. What are the root causes of this inability, and what can be done to improve the situation?
- What structural conditions have led to the weakening of Haiti’s institutional apparatus, and how has the privatization of nationally-owned enterprises impacted the country’s professional workforce?
- Can you elaborate on the role of the Washington Consensus in shaping Haiti’s economic policies and the implications for state functions?
- Dr. Beckett describes the sentiment of hopelessness shared by many male migrants in Port-au-Prince. How do these feelings relate to Haiti’s historical, gendered, generational, and geographical context?
- Anthropology often places a strong emphasis on “thick qualitative data” as opposed to large quantitative data sets. How does this approach enhance our understanding of the complexities of life in Haiti?
- How does Dr. Beckett differentiate between the portrayal of Haiti’s challenges as sad versus tragic narratives, and why does he advocate for solidarity over pity?
- The term “failed state” is often associated with Haiti. What are Dr. Beckett’s concerns about the use of this label, and how might it impact international perspectives and interventions in Haiti?
- Considering the economic transformations and political instability described by Dr. Beckett, how have these changes affected everyday Haitians, particularly those involved in the informal economy?
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:00]:
Let’s do the nation of the 5 items, themes that you you outlined for this book. You quoted through to you earlier as saying the peasantry is the nation. Now, that might have been true back in the nineties when this book was written because I looked at some numbers. The world has counter for about 60 plus percent of the total population. Today, it seems like it’s the reverse. Haiti is more urbanized. So Mhmm. He was talking about peasantry.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:33]:
He didn’t necessarily mean just geographically. Right? He meant also socioeconomic. Right?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:00:39]:
That’s right.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:40]:
How he how would he redefine or look at the peasantry today as an urbanized peasantry versus a rural peasantry? How does the book kind of still keep its relevance to what’s going on today versus when he wrote it? Yeah.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:00:56]:
I think it’s a it’s a really important question, and it in some ways, I’m not quite sure what he himself would say now. I think that that, you know, the term nation in the title state against nation is in some way invoking almost a class struggle, the the state against the peasantry as a social economic class that has been spatially marginalized and socially marginalized, that is in some sense, you know, agricultural workers, cultivators, people who own their own land. I think that’s the sort of core of the idea for him is what other Haitian scholars have called the the panty the the peasantry as the counter plantation. You know, in the 19th century, one of the great political movements after independence was the complete refusal of the now freed slaves to still work on plantations. They wanted to own their own land and really to control their own lives by controlling their own labor, and that was the central social struggle for them. And then you have the emergence of urban elites who are merchants controlling import export, and that becomes a central class struggle as Trio sees it sort of urban, merchant class, and political class that uses the state to extract surplus or wealth from the agricultural sector. So the nation stands for a peasantry that is in the 19th century really a peasantry. It’s it’s cultivators in the countryside.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:02:19]:
But by the 20th century, that peasantry has been displaced from their lands through the US occupation, through the consolidation or reconsolidation of large land holdings. You know, you can go to the Haitian countryside, and it might look like there’s a peasant on every piece of land, but that doesn’t mean that every peasant owns a piece of land. Many of them are actually working on somebody else’s land, renting the land, or or, oh, you know, in as almost a futile sense, owe some of their crops to someone. And so the peasantry might not always mean the same thing. It’s a really kind of a shifting term for him, which is why I think he shifts it into the nation. And he doesn’t mean, like, nationalism by then, but he means sort of the the sort of who are the sort of real Haitians in opposition to the smaller group that doesn’t see themselves as in the same boat as the rest of Haitians. So the big question is, would he think the now, you know, very large urban population is a displaced peasantry? I don’t know if he would call them that or not. I think some people see that it that way.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:03:22]:
My own sense from the neighborhoods I know best in Port au Prince is people who are, you know, who moved to Port Au Prince as teenagers in the seventies or eighties maybe, and their kids and their grandkids now in Port au Prince do not necessarily imagine going back to the countryside and being farmers. That’s not a horizon for them where an earlier generation of migrants might have imagined that or they might migrate to do seasonal work to get money to buy more land or something like that. I think there really has been an urbanization in Haiti that isn’t just a displacement appeal from the countryside to the city, but a kind of urban culture and urban sensibility, especially in in Port au Prince. And I think that that’s a bigger question of to know how to understand that because that urban population, I think, has some different interests than what the peasant movements of the sixties seventies eighties, which Trio is thinking of, had at that time. They were a lot more they they fit a lot more kind of a Marxist sense of class struggle against oppressors. Whereas, I think we see a lot of the urban population, especially young men in the cities, turning to different kinds of horizons. Gangs, for example, being being one of them, but not the only one, the informal economy, all kinds of other interests that they might have. So I think that who makes up the nation has shifted in the past 40 years.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:04:48]:
And for me, at least, I don’t I don’t know if I could speak for Trejo on this. I don’t know if you would agree, but I think the the Aristide years and the sort of popular movement that emerged around figures like Narrative, especially, really changed how the political significance of the urban population. You can’t really win elections in Haiti without winning Port au Prince in part because of the number of people there, but also because their interests are shaping the kind of political decisions. So I think there’s another kind of fracture then between the interests of political parties who wanna win by appealing to an urban base versus the sort of realities in the countryside where we need sort of land reform and we need reinvestment in the production of food because Haiti is food insecure, but it could be food self sufficient. All those different kinds of political policies that might shake out. And so I think that the question of who the nation is has become a lot more fractured in the past 40 years as well. And so there’s a kind of a an extra contradiction and an extra crisis around what Haitian identity is politically and who can claim to represent it more than others.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:06:02]:
And and it’s not just the urban landscape changing the sensibilities of the rural culture. It also works in reverse as well too. Right? Right. So urban Haitians today also have probably imbibed the sensibilities of their parents who left the countryside to come into. So it’d be interesting to see if there are any, you know, recent anthropological ethnographic, you know, studies of that. Like, what happened to that huge I mean, literally, millions of people moved into the urban areas since the nineties. Right?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:06:36]:
Exactly. Like, Port au Prince has sort of doubled a couple times in in the past 40 years in terms of of size. And and so when he’s ready in the nineties about the sort of Jean Claude Duvalier’s legacy was to draw a ton of people out of the countryside to the city as part of that export led production that he was calling his economic revolution, you know, the the offshore assembly factories in Port au Prince. That drew, you know, a couple of 100,000, and then it’s been many, many more people since then. I think that, you know, what what I would say anthropologists have seen or what I’ve seen myself in in Port au Prince especially is that even if people don’t imagine going back to the countryside to work on land, so that that would be one way of thinking of the connection between an urban population and some idea of the peasantry. What I do think we see in a lot of the neighborhoods of Port au Prince is what some people, Michel Lagarde, for example, has called the urban laku, the sort of taking of the laku system from the countryside, not as a spatial system of how households are set up and how people live together with their families, but as a social and cultural system where people feel like they have this network of connections, like and that might connect you to different neighborhoods in Port au Prince. And I think that that’s how people navigate and build their own social relationships in the vast informal market of Port au Prince is through those really thick connections. And so we do see a lot of the kind of culture that comes from the countryside and the peasantry being maybe put to new uses in in, in the neighborhoods of Port au Prince.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:08:13]:
And I think so that becomes one kind of touchpoint we can see still between them.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:08:17]:
And I see it even within the Haitian diaspora. My aunt called me recently and said, hey, one of my cousins need a place to stay. I wasn’t even asked if that was
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:08:28]:
Yeah. Yeah. Just told
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:08:30]:
It’s like, hey. You know? So and so is coming. We know you got the space. So Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, okay. Let’s do it. So it’s still it’s still alive.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:08:40]:
Right? It’s still there.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:08:41]:
For sure.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:08:42]:
Yeah. The Haitian urban elite and state fetishism. Mhmm. The congenital disease was what you touched on, the first part. 1, is that still applicable today in Haitian? And can you flesh that out for us?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:09:00]:
Yeah. I mean, it so it’s such a funny term, and it it’s so, you know, tied to these little academic kind of of of frameworks, the idea of state fetishism. But, you know, he’s building on a Marxist tradition to think of fetishism as the sort of mistaken value we put on things as as the locus of the production of value. Classically, in Marx, he thinks of commodity fetishism, and where he says, it looks like the market is producing value, but it’s actually the the laborers who are making things that produce value that gets transformed into money or profit through circulation in the market. In the terms of the state, it looks like the state is the locus of power and kind of autonomous, but state fetishism is is kind of a theory to say that below the sort of visible parts of the state is this relationship as Trio is mapping in this book between state and the nation where it’s sort of drawing its wealth from. And so it I I think if that’s his main framework, he’s thinking that the state has largely been oppositional to the country. That’s part of what he’s trying to say in this whole book. In the dictatorship form, that’s pretty easy to see.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:10:09]:
And I think if we look at the past 40 years, though, it’s a really good question to say, does that still fit to describe what happened in the sort of, you know, called it the unending transition to democracy, which is a phrase I really like because everyone talks about the transition, and it doesn’t seem like it’s it’s clear when it’s gonna end or where it’s going. And we just got constant crises and coups and disruptions along the way instead. But if we think of the post 86 era as a kind of the the the democratic era in Haiti, the attempt to consolidate democracy, The question is, does the state still produce that kind of fetishism, and does it still have the same antagonistic relationship to the nation, to the to the citizens of the country? And I think it does. I think that it does it in a different way. There’s certainly an attempt under Aristide and Preval, most notably, to use the state for the nation to kind of reassess that haitian. And that’s tied to his kind of populism, but that that version was, I think, blocked perhaps partly through kinda internal contradictions within the family level house political party and the popular movement in Haiti, but blocked mostly by the international community, which backed 2 different coups against Aristide and has really asserted the kind of economic control over the Haitian state that comes from international financial institutions. Alex DuPuy has written a lot about this as well to think about the way the international community controls the national budget and how that becomes essential for shaping what’s possible politically in Haiti. So it’s really hard to have any kind of democratic government in Haiti that might invest in agricultural sector because the World Bank sets conditions on its loans that come in to make the budget for the government.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:12:03]:
And those conditions say you have to invest in in factories in the city or infrastructure for those factories. You can’t invest in the countryside because Haiti should import food rather than make it. So those conditions really make the state really weak. And so that has been the most notable shift from the the the totalitarian strength of the state in Trio’s thinking under Duvalier to the systematic stripping away and weakening of the state. And even in the international language, I don’t really like this term, but the international community likes to use it to talk about state failure. You know, why is the Haitian state failing? What does that mean? I think one of the things it’s doing is it’s, one of the things that Haitian state is doing is it’s becoming increasingly important and increasingly fetishized, but it’s able to do less and less. And so the struggle over it is actually getting harsher in terms of the political crises in part because what the state can do is sort of more more limited. You know, the state has been really reduced in terms of its functions by, again, conditions from the United from the United States or from the World Bank that have led to privatization of of national industries and the dismantling of the sort of scale of of the Haitian state.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:13:21]:
But I think if we just look even at the past couple of years, we can see there’s an intense focus on controlling the presidency as a way to control other things in Haiti. And I think we’re in a moment where that is is shaking out in some questionable ways, but it’s feels like a repetition of things we’ve seen over the past 40 years, people continually trying to control the state. I think that the reason it’s important for political actors to to control the state right now and and the reason that state fetishism is still there in Haitian politics is because now the state is so central to controlling the massive flow of foreign aid into the country. I think that has been the big change. What the state allows you to extract or steal or or manage or distribute has shifted from the peasantry and and its wealth that it’s producing to the sort of aid industry, and especially in the post 2010 period, the kind of reconstruction era that has been enormously important. If you control the government, you control access to those 1,000,000,000 of dollars of reconstruction funds. So that to me has been kind of why I think state racism is persisting and especially this overwhelming focus on the presidency and the kind of control the battle to control the presidency as a way to kinda control the political and economic system in the country.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:14:51]:
How would the how would the, do you think in any way the book addressed the proliferation of the gangs?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:14:59]:
Yeah. I did it’s it’s interesting because I think to me, that that’s the $1,000,000 question over the past 20 years is how to explain what we even mean by gangs in in Haitian right now and and their role. You know, and at the time the book is written in 1990, there really wouldn’t have been the things we’re calling gangs. Now there’s a lot of armed actors, but they would have been, you know, pretty tightly tied to Duvalierism through the Ton Ton Lacout. And I think that, you know, again, in the neighborhoods that I know in Port au Prince, people often joke that, like, in 1986, everyone who was a Macoute just took their uniform off and said, said, oh, I’m not a Macoot. I never was one, you know, but everybody knows who they were. They were your neighbor or they lived down the street or everyone really intimately knew who was involved in it, and suddenly there’s this, like, I’m not with that. And I think the same thing happened with the when Aristides disbanded the the army.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:15:54]:
So all these institutions, the army, the paramilitaries created in the nineties like like FREP and the Makut were kind of there, but not there. And they got reconfigured. Some of them some people left. Some people were killed by popular kinds of uprise uprisings. Some people were folded back into the national police. Some people have become gangs and are part of the gangs. And so it’s, what’s interesting about that is that the phenomenon that we’re kinda naming gangs, especially from the 2000s on, I think in the nineties, the armed groups were actually more like civil militia trying to fight against the military coups. And so there was a kind of arming of the popular movement to fight against the the coups that had displaced Aristide.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:16:43]:
And then that became its own kind of thing. Potentially people I think, are still divided on this. Potentially, Aristide aligning with or arming them when he came back into power again in 2000. But I think that from the early 2000s on, we have a whole different kind of phenomenon of armed groups primarily in Port au Prince who are involved in all kinds of things. In some ways, they’re doing community policing and protection. In some ways, they’re doing little development projects in their neighborhoods, but they’re also armed and involved in criminalized entrepreneurial activity, controlling marketing or controlling access to water in their neighborhoods, controlling drugs or prostitution or other kinds of things. Those whatever we call those, I mean, they began to call themselves gangs in the early 2000. They got strengthened by the aid apparatus in Haiti, which I think is an important part of the story because as NGOs wanted to go in to neighborhoods in Cite Soleil or Madison or Bel Air and set up, you know, a a a water sand pipe or do a little clean up a gully so that streets don’t flood or whatever little development projects are happening.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:17:59]:
All these little projects that should have been done by the state, but the international community forced the state to to outsource them to NGOs, and so you now have foreign NGOs flooding into the country. It’s an era where Port au Prince starts to get called the Republic of NGOs. There’s thousands of them just doing who knows what. There there’s nobody’s keeping track of them. And they’re going into these communities with money, and they begin to broker with those gangs who then become kind of strengthened as little kinds of sovereigns over their territory, a couple of blocks here or there, their base within a particular neighborhood, and they become the brokers who bring, you know, NGO resources into their community. But they were also doing other kinds of things, and I think they got transformed by political groups who wanted to begin to use those gangs to get at voting blocks in those neighborhoods. And I think there’s probably also a story that we don’t fully know of those gangs getting hooked up to larger international structures like drug and gun trafficking, which I think has been a key part of the strengthening of the gangs in the past 10 years. And I think that they’re different from the Duvalier era because they’re not a coherent group with a political ideology.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:19:16]:
They might be politically aligned with certain politicians, but usually that’s a fragile alliance. And so the gangs are a whole new actor on the political scene that is not so clear. You know, they had their own interests. They’re occasionally aligned with the political interests of others who want to control the state. And then and that has been a a fragile alliance to try to to manage because I do think that you can’t really run elections. People was talking about shifting to elections in 2025 to get out of the current political crisis where there is no, you know, elected officials at the national government at all right now. You can’t really run an election without mediating through those gangs right now that control 80% of the territory in Port au Prince. That is millions of people.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:20:05]:
If you want to set up a campaign in a neighborhood or a polling station or an election monitor, you’re gonna have to work with those groups. So one of the things that that that is a huge question going forward is what role those gangs will begin to play in the political future of Haitian. How if people wanna have access of counter of the state, they’re probably gonna have to work with those gangs in some way. And what’s that gonna do for the political crisis? I think that’s a big question for us, for everybody looking ahead right now.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:20:38]:
Is what’s going on today a form of dishukage? I think that time is sometimes used too much. Yeah. Or is crisis a more precise way of looking at it?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:20:51]:
Yeah. I mean, it it if it is the shikash, the question is what’s it uprooting? I mean, is it uprooting is it trying to uproot duvaluism? I I think some of what’s been happening under especially Michel Martelly and and and Moises’ governments was the reconsolidation of some forms of revolution, including welcoming Jean Claude back to the country, for example, or or or restoring the Haitian army, although it’s not really a very sizable force. There is gestures towards kind of placating or bringing back in former political and economic elite who had been part of the the devaluing dictatorship. I think if there’s any kind of uprooting, one of the things that’s been happening is an attempt to uproot whatever got consolidated through the nineties and early 2000 of the populist movement, especially in in part of print and to reshape and recon and and reconfigure that. But I do I agree with you. I think that, really, we’re in an era of crisis. And I think that the term is overused, to be sure. And I don’t agree with how the international community uses it to justify intervention in Haiti or to say that that these are somehow just Haitian problems that these crises are made and manufactured and made in good part by international policies that that really limit what can happen in Haiti politically and economically.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:22:15]:
But I think crisis is, to me, the best word to describe it. And and it’s a constant it’s constantly on repeat right now. And I think that that’s because we’re not getting resolution to the under underlying structural contradictions that keep generating those crises, which to me makes Trio’s book still relevant today even if it’s describing a historical period that feels like it’s ended. It’s also giving us a kind of toolkit for how to think about what those underlying conditions might be today that are still producing crises. In a sense, I I guess you could use a medical metaphor to say that the political crisis seems kinda constant right now is a symptom, and you wanna think about what is producing that. What’s the sort of underlying thing? And as he puts it, the sort of state fetishism was one of the key underlying conditions. But I don’t, but I think we want to add some to his analysis to update it for the past 40 years. But I do think he’s right that crisis is is the key thing that needs to be explained and obviously, hopefully, resolved so that it doesn’t keep happening.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:23:23]:
Yeah. You mentioned crisis. Let’s go back to what you said in the first part about how Tuyeo said the Duvalier dictatorship was a response to, to to deeper structural crises. What were those structural crises, Yeah.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:23:39]:
I think, again, this is a kind of novel claim of the book because so much was being written in between 8890 about devalorism, trying to explain it and see that that it was a crisis that had to be solved by democracy. And that that was, like, the big kind of massive economic production and journalists producing all kinds of stuff. And one of Chiyo’s interventions is to say it’s a real mistake to think of of the dictatorship as the crisis. It deepened the crisis significantly. So we have a crisis coming out of it for sure, but the crisis predates it. And so he wants us to just have this historical reminder that in the is when Duvalier comes to power, he sees it as a solution to a crisis. And, of course, it it it wasn’t one, but, that’s sort of part of the ideology behind Francois Duvalier’s political movement. And that kinda for Gilles is why we need the 19th century history here and and the history up to the US occupation as well to really understand what happened after independence in Haiti and the kind of path the country was set on where you have, on the one hand, an economic crisis that is about the sort of limits of the peasant system.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:24:54]:
That that’s for better or worse, the vision of freedom that many people had after the revolution was to become, you know, more or less autonomous farmers or peasants. That was the sort of model they wanted to kind of be left alone as much as they could be from the state. And that worked really well for the first half of the 19th century for the sort of what Trio calls the reconstituted peasantry. People were pretty well off, but there was some limits to that system, partly because there’s not a lot of capital investment in agriculture in Haitian, so it’s mostly manual labor or maybe some animal labor. And so there’s a limit to the production. There’s a limit to the amount of land, the way that land is divided through inheritance laws and and the family lineage in the peasantry, which is really important to the consolidation of social groups in the peasantry, also led to a lot of constant division and subdivision and subdivision of lands. So the plots got smaller, the yields got smaller. So that’s one kind of version of the economic crisis was there’s just less and less sort of stuff being produced by the end of 19th century.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:26:05]:
And then the other side of that coin, as it were, was the political crisis where there’s more and more elites more and more members of the urban elite who want to extract fewer and fewer resources from the countryside. So the fights between them got sort of starker, and we see that just at the start of the 20th century in a kind of regional contest for power between groups in and around Port au Prince and groups in the north and the the arming of sort of rebel insurgencies and fighting for the huge turnover of presidents that lead to the US haitian. Yeah. The US just sort of use it as an excuse, of course, but but there is a political instability and these revolution of of coups and and political struggles. And so the economic crisis and the political crisis go hand in hand for him. And in in the lead up to Duvalier coming to power, coming out of the occupation, there would have been some renewed investment in Haitian. In the forties, it looked like those crises it it might look like those crises were resolved. We have Estimate coming to power and in 1946 and what look what’s sometimes narrated as the revolution of 1946, an early opening of democratization of Haitian society.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:27:27]:
And it looks like a kind of a economic growth happening in the counter. But a lot of that was kind of foreign investment and foreign aid through UN projects, UNESCO projects, or world World Health Organization projects coming into the country or investment for the Bicentennial of Port au Prince that was celebrated the the expo that was held in 1949. And then so the economic crisis is still there and kinda and I think that that is a pattern in the 20th century, the kinda covering up of that economic crisis of the the country just isn’t producing enough for everyone food or or wealth or all money, jobs, all kinds of things. That economic crisis is constantly covered up by foreign aid, and I think we’re still seeing that today as well. So that crisis those crises for him, again, in this sort of Marxist paradigm that he’s using in the book, really is a kind of rooted in what Marxists might call a a kind of the crisis of capitalism, but that but Haiti doesn’t fit the model of industrialized capitalism and class struggle. It’s not, you know, a a working class proletariat in factories fighting factory owners and the bourgeoisie, but there is nevertheless this class dynamic of the peasantry or the nation fighting against an elite that’s using political and economic institutions to extract forms of wealth out of them. So that crises are the preconditions for him, for everything that comes after it. And so I think if you put it into sort of today’s language, you can see that that that is the constant claim of of every popular movement that keeps emerging in Haiti is still pretty much the same that there’s people are being exploited.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:29:13]:
People don’t have jobs. People don’t have all the things they ought to have. The government isn’t providing it. It’s working against people. And so that, I think, shows us that those contradictions are still there and are driving a lot of the political movements in Haiti against various kinds of governments, against corruption or against political violence or against, you know, misery or insecurity, all the kinds of things that we see, when people are protesting that they are protesting against.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:29:42]:
The the rural community in Haiti had a level of self sufficiency for 100 of years. Right? And then policies, external policies, and sort of change their way way of life. They had to move into the urban areas, and now they’re dependent on the supposed jobs, factory jobs coming from. And now we’re at the point where the the the country as a whole is totally dependent on external capital, right, for it to to even have a semblance of of of of a structure there. That’s where we are today. It’s hollowed out. The country is basically hollowed out. Mhmm.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:30:27]:
And and the strings, the economic strings are being guided or manipulated by external forces in conjunction with the elites, I’m assuming. Yeah. I think That’s that’s where we are that’s where we are
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:30:40]:
today. Yeah. That’s scary. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that if you again, putting it in this long history as Trio wants us to do shows that, you know, something happened after independence, and and people didn’t have a lot of choice. Right? At that time, Haiti was marginalized and excluded by everybody around it and wasn’t, you know, politically recognized by neighbors for decades. And so there was this unfortunate thing that happened.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:31:12]:
The legacy of how Haiti came into the world is that in order to keep a semblance of political independence, territorial sovereignty, for example, The elites in Haiti had to continually accept the terms from international actors, from France as a former colonizer and then eventually from the United States as well. And those terms were largely economic dependency and debt. And so Haiti got really set into that kind of trap that became a kind of template for a lot of post co post colonial counter in the 20th century, in the end of of European empires and the emergence of of independent states in the Caribbean or in parts of Africa or parts of Asia. We see this as a 20th century story, and Haiti has a much deeper history there. And Trio is sometimes referred to Haiti as the longest experiment in neocolonial rule. And I think that the economic piece of that has been really crucial. So it doesn’t look like colonialism or imperialism quite the same way. And that is really partly a story of US empire because that’s how US imperialism has tended to work and how it can look so different from European colonialism, which tended to occupy places and and and be a little bit more visibly there as a political power.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:32:30]:
Economic or US power tends to work by making places subservient to US markets, to the US dollar. So both of those happen under the US haitian. In US occupation, you also see the US buying Haiti’s debt, so it shifts from French banks to American banks narrative the constitution to allow for foreign ownership so you get US firms or or hybrid firms like Hesco, the Haitian American Sugar Company coming into the country. But I think what also really happens that that broad story of the counter is economically dependent on international community in various ways. It’s also a story at the level of of the peasantry where from the the 1915 invasion, we see the US Marines fighting the Haitian peasantry and fighting a pretty big rural insurgency led by Charlemagne Parole for ex and a number of other figures. Parole is a really interesting figure. I mean, he’s writing to France and to other countries in Europe saying, look. If you guys are serious about democracy and this international system you’re building, this is just the era of the League of Nations, for example, then you have to support us and recognize the US can’t invade us.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:33:46]:
This is a invasion of sovereignty. And, of course, nobody backs Haiti in that struggle. The US Marines really, really attack the peasantry. I don’t think we have a good accounting of the toll of that yet, although I know you’ve had a couple of of episodes about some recent scholarship on this period, and we’re still learning more and more that the scale. Some estimates I’ve seen from Haitian historians are up to 50,000 people killed by the US Marines and then many people displaced as well. And and I think one of the things that happens in the US occupation is really breaking the back of the Haitian peasantry as a group that was more or less had limited autonomy and freedom over their lives. Now to even be a peasant family in any anywhere in rural Haiti, you need to have family members who are working for wages somewhere else. Maybe they’re cutting cane in the Dominican Republic, maybe they’re working in construction in the Bahamas, or maybe they’re in Florida or New Jersey, and they’re sending money back.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:34:49]:
And so the illusion of a peasantry in Haiti right now is supported by the 1,000,000,000 of dollars of resist of remittances that come back from people overseas. And so the there’s there’s a shift from the peasantry as more or less quasi independent producers to mobile migrant laborers, and the peasantry is increasingly consuming things that come in on the market, eating rice from the US or other kinds of imported food or other kinds of things. And so that shift has happened at the level of people’s families. And then, of course, at the level of the state itself where the national budget I think somewhere between 60 80% of the national budget these days comes from foreign sources, from from loans, from international financial institutions. And so the country is incredibly, incredibly limited. I think you could say it’s held hostage by the international community. And then you have, underneath all that, these sort of political crises to control the state to to use it for whatever limited ends one could use it for.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:35:52]:
So so as an anthropologist, if a people land, you identity, cultural identity is tied to the land. Mhmm. What is your identity if there’s no land attached to that identity anymore? Kinship, you develop all sorts of social interactions. Right? Because you’re you’re in place. But if you if a majority of you are still moving to send stuff back, what’s your identity now? What do you you’re kind of in this liminal space. Right? Like, some of you are still well, you’ve been there for generation, but most of you are out trying to send money back. What what do you what do you call that? What?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:36:34]:
Yeah. I mean, it’s a really interesting shift culturally. Right? So and I think that my sense among that quite dispersed Haitian diaspora is that there’s still a pretty strong emotional tie to land even if not a material tie to it, like not actually owning it, or or maybe not so much to land, but to a certain idea that is tied to the kind of culture that the peasantry produced. And, again, this goes back to, I think, why Trio wants to call the peasantry the nation here to think about so maybe it’s not land anymore people are attached to, but some idea of of Haiti itself, some idea of the nation or their culture and whatever that is that they’re tied to, that was produced by the peasantry. They’re the ones who who kinda made everything that that from the struggles as slaves through the revolution to the independence period, because of the people who created the language, created voodoo, created marketing approaches to marketing, created and figured out how to grow certain crops and how to share them and build social relationships like the laku. And so all of that, that kind of cultural nationalism, even if it’s not rooted in a place, I think is so it’s been uprooted and maybe it gets weakened or transformed, but I think it’s still really potent. And I think that that’s why there is that question of whether people in Port au Prince, for example, still identify with that culture even if they don’t identify as a a peasant, let’s say, or as a a a paesant. And so whether that’s being weakened or not, I think is a really important question or whether it’s being transformed.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:38:21]:
I think it’s probably being a little transformed in Port au Prince. One of the things I think as an anthropologist, one of the things I think is most throwing that kind of cultural sensibility into its own crisis is that it’s just infinitely demanding for people right now. People are are having such a hard time living. Inflation is soaring through the roof. Things are scarce. There’s the informal economy does not provide for everyone. And yet the kind of cultural system is meant to kind of have people redistribute their wealth and the resources through their kin networks and through their community. And so you have people kinda constantly making demands on each other, and and people aren’t able to meet them.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:39:12]:
And so sometimes you see people breaking with it, breaking with their family or breaking with their church, and I think that’s reconfiguring a lot of that cultural sensibility and that sense of identity as well. The kind of more especially, I think, people who are in Canada or the United States as migrants might be shifting a little more to a kind of North American idea of individualism, rather than the sense of being responsible for your people, for your network. And I think that that’s a really big tension at the revolution just most people’s everyday lives. And one of the ways this political crisis, which rests on the economic crisis at the kind of level of the counter, kind of becomes very intimate for people and the way it can kinda cut into their their sense of identity or their sense of family or their sense of responsibility to the people that they that they’re connected to.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:40:07]:
My takeaway from from reading this book was that, has the state ever really benefited the nation? Yeah. Or has it always been for the last 220 years, this constant struggle of the nation, the culture Mhmm. To do what it needs to do to develop organically, but it is always its development is always being frustrated and interrupted by the state and all its, you know, groupings.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:40:43]:
Mhmm. Yeah. I think that Trudeau’s answer would be it’s pretty much always been this this the state is essentially producing these blockages on a kind of more a different system flourishing in some way. Whether the state could be transformed to change that relationship or not, I think, has been the central question of the kind of popular movement or democratic movement of the past 30 or 40 years. We’ve seen some, I think, some efforts to change the state and and re reassess and and change that relationship. But, again, that has been really blocked by this other thing, which is the international community’s, you know, idea of what it wants the Haitian state to do. I think the international community wants the Haitian state to be a broker that hooks up the Haitian economy to the global economy. And the idea there has always been for more than 60 years I mean, it it really begins under Francois Duvalier.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:41:45]:
That idea has always been that Haiti is gonna be something like Taiwan of the North, that it’s going to be a place for that Haiti’s value in a global economy is low wage work. I think that that has been the economic template from the international community for 60 odd years that that’s the only way to hit fit Haiti into international economy. That’s completely at odds with what people want, and, of course, it makes an unlivable situation. In part, it’s at odds though with that sense of the peasantry of the nation because people want control over or some kind of autonomy over their labor process, over their work, over what they do. So the peasantry has always kinda stood for that. Even if it wasn’t farming, it stood for the idea that you could control your life by deciding what you work or what you do. I see that a lot in the informal sector and people in Port au Prince who are maybe maybe they’re painters or they work as just hustlers trying to get clients to, you know, fixers for journalists or anthropologists or they arrange drivers for people, whatever they might do. I think they often see it as different from wage labor, even though they’re looking for wages and they wanna get paid.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:42:56]:
They see it as them controlling and making decisions about their own lives. And so that, again, I think stands at the level of people’s individual lives and also at the level of the country where the that if there’s some vision of of Haiti as a sovereign independent state, that sovereignty is consistently undermined by the international community which which again amplifies the kinds of political struggles that we see for control over the state. It’s so the state isn’t gonna be used by people to do to make people’s lives better. It’s gonna be used by people to temporarily extract money, foreign aid, reconstruction funds, giving their friends monopoly licenses to import or export cars or whatever it might be. And so that becomes the value of the state for certain people who wanna control it. So, no, I think that Trejo’s answer would be with with very limited exception, the state has basically just always been working against the nation. Yeah.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:44:00]:
Did did he ever meet John Casimir?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:44:04]:
I I would assume yes, but I don’t know. I mean, but it’s an interesting question.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:44:09]:
I would love to be a fly on the wall to hear those 2 talking, right, about the moon and the year.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:44:15]:
Yeah. For sure.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:44:16]:
Yeah. So, professor, what, are we done with the 5 themes, or do you wanna go beyond the 5 themes? Because you said I restricted you to those 5 themes. Are there anything outside of the 5 themes that you wanna cut loose on about this book?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:44:32]:
Yeah. I mean, for me, it’s just interesting to to read it now as a book that helps us think about what’s happening in Haiti today even though we might not expect that. I mean, you think a book about Duvalier, well, that is several generations ago now. We need to get through all these other things that have happened. But I feel like there’s still a lot of of touch points or or guiding frameworks for me that helped me think about what’s happening. And and rereading parts of it, thinking of this conversation, I was really struck with a couple of things, just given the particular moment we’ve been in this month in Haiti. And so at one point in the book, he talks about the country being blocked. And I’ve been thinking a lot personally about that beyond crisis, but thinking about a new language for whatever is happening politically in Haiti.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:45:20]:
I think that that we partly, it’s it feels like repetition again and again. But partly, I feel like there’s something new happening, and that newness might be rethought not so much as crises, but as impasses. Like, the way people use blockages. Quite literally, the gangs use roadblocks to take the country hostage, for example. But politicians use the sort of endless delay of never never setting up the transitional counter, never holding elections so that they can then govern unconstitutionally for as long as they can. So there’s this whole kind of new political game that is sort of using the state but also using the blockage of the state to actually do something as well. And so what I think is important about that, and and we can connect it to, it’s it’s almost the the inverse of what Duvalier tried to do to use the state to resolve the crisis and then deepen it. Where Duvalier’s attempted resolution was, okay.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:46:16]:
Well, let’s make a really strong state. That that was his sort of political ideology, and, of course, it led to, for Trio, a totalitarian dictatorship. Here we have instead the opposite, a very, very weak state, but a weak state that is not, I think, a failed state. I I I said earlier, I don’t like that language. So I think it just misidentifies what’s happening. I think that it’s interesting to try to understand partly through Trio’s analysis and partly maybe through some new thinking how it is that the weakness of the Haitian state and the the constant political crises actually become important for people that they’re not, they’re not the failure of the state. That’s actually what people are trying to do that that making disorder and making crisis, blocking things allows you to do things politically that you couldn’t do if the state was properly functioning. And so I think that that is a new kind of tension where some people want to build a state that actually does govern and is responsible to the people, finally resolves the state against haitian, And some people wanna use the state as this sort of kind of chaos or crisis agent that allows them to draw wealth or hold power or rule in some way through the crisis or through the blockage.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:47:38]:
Do you have some examples of that?
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:47:40]:
Yeah. I mean, I think well, Ariel Henri is is a really good example right now. I mean, he he came through power through really no constitutional means, only really backed by the international community. Constantly, people protesting, calling for him to step down. International community keeps saying, okay. You’re gonna do a transitional council. He he delayed and delayed and delayed and finally stocked it with just his allies, and then they delayed and delayed and delayed. Even now he’s delaying.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:48:07]:
He’s, like, not in the country. He’s not governing. He’s resigned, but he hasn’t resigned until the council from CARICOM is fully appointed. So in the meantime, what’s happening in Haiti? I don’t think it’s the absence of anything. You know, it’s not and that’s what that state failure would suggest nothing is happening. I think a lot is happening, and a lot is happening through that impasse, which allows people more time to do whatever they’re gonna do. And what we’re seeing in particular is the gangs are using that time. This might not be Henri’s intent, but the gangs are using that time to consolidate their own power through port au prince and hold the country hostage for their own ends.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:48:45]:
So everyone’s kinda using the crisis right now to delay and hold open this moment. We could have had a really different story if 3 years ago, the international community had just forced Henri out and put in some sort of transitional counter or or backed the one that was offered by the Montana Accord or civil society And so, again, rereading the book, I was really struck at the end of it, And so, again, rereading the book, I was really struck at the end of it. Again, Trio is it’s published in 1990, so he must have been writing it, you know, in 1989, let’s say, maybe 88. And in that moment, there’s it had it had still seems to some people like Duvalierism fell because of a popular uprising. That is one important piece, but what Trio tries to show, I think, pretty fast in the final chapters. I don’t know if he gives enough space to it, but he tries to suggest that 1986 is a really weird moment. It looks like it could be narrated like a revolution, a popular uprising, and a dictatorship falls. There’s been there was definitely a popular uprising.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:49:56]:
People were standing up to the tanks and the Makuts, and I don’t wanna diminish that. But Trio sees it as the international community intervening to remove Jean Claude Duvalier in order to prevent that revolution from actually happening and to try to manage a transition that they can control in some way. And so I think the international community really set that template, and you see political actors in Haiti knowing that that’s gonna happen and playing on it. So some people want this Kenyan led foreign police haitian, some people don’t. But either way, they’re positioning themselves to have legitimacy to take power in relation to how they’re going to be situated against or with that foreign intervention. And so that becomes the new kind of political game. It is all about managing the transition, making it look like a transition, making it look like democracy or elections, but actually trying to control the process so that you can gain the system and just hold on to power. That’s at least my kind of take on on where things are right now.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:51:01]:
I don’t know if Trio would fully agree with that, but I think that I’m just mindful of that’s how he saw the end of the Duvalier dictatorship was looking like he puts it as like looking like a movie that’s poorly dubbed where the words don’t quite match the actions, you know, and I think that that’s really reminiscent of right now as well. It looks like Henri fell because of the gangs. But but, really, he’s only out because the international community, the US in particular, has decided that he has to go because it’s just not anything they can work with anymore. So that shows the sort of limits of the political system that you really can’t come to power without the backing of the US and the core group, the international community that that shapes Haitian affairs.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:51:48]:
And was it the pressure of, like, steadfast for years, the the masses in general were totally against Ariel Lawy. They just have a role and we are in an haitian year in the United States too. So Mhmm. Anything that kinda disrupts that, right, to keep people to refocus on Haitian Yeah. Facing the roots of root cause of what’s going on right now would not be good for the current administration either, I think.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:52:14]:
Yeah. Exactly. And so they have their own delay. I mean, the the weird thing to me about this looming Kenyan led mission, if it even happens, is how how weird it is. It’s not it keeps being presented in the media in all these ways, and I keep doing this nerding out, doing this deep dive, trying to trace if it’s accurate or not. Like, the UN held this vote on it and authorized the mission in October of last year in 2023. But in their own press release from the United Nations, they keep referring to it as a historic new way to do things and as a non UN mission. So we had the UN authorizing a non UN mission.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:52:58]:
What the hell is that? What does that even mean? And by new way to do things, they’re pointing out that usually, UN missions under charter 7 are peacekeeping missions that involve military units and sometimes policing coming from member states under an organizational command that’s backed by the UN and run by a particular point country. So Brazil led it in the 2004 in MINUSTA, which began in 2004. But this and then they’re they’re financed by the UN. This is going to be financed only by donations collected by the US, not by the UN. So the project might never exist because the country might the money might never materialize. And then the UN is, like, authorized it by saying whoever leads it should do it this way, but it’s not actually a mandate for them to do it. It’s a really ambiguous it’s a totally, I think, invented thing. And then it’s clearly brokered by the US, which doesn’t want to intervene itself.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:53:54]:
As you said, right now, it’s a political nightmare with an election year, but the US, I think, knows that it wouldn’t be met with legitimacy in Haiti if it if it brought a military a US military force in. I think the UN knows that they wouldn’t be met as legitimate given the legacies of MINUSTA, bringing cholera, killing thousands of people, all kinds of things that that that we now know about that mission. And so we have this this weird other thing. The US kind of did this defense deal with the Kenyan government, and part of that deal was Kenya agreeing to this policing mission. But what I find so frustrating is the level of the the level of thought they put into it. Nobody bothered to do the research to realize that Kenya can’t send police to Haiti, that there’s just international laws against that and Kenyan laws against it. Unless countries have a reciprocal policing agreement. You can’t send police to another country because it violates sovereignty and jurisdiction and law, And I just find it so telling of the lack of imagination from the international community that nobody even bothered to just look up the files.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:55:04]:
Hey. Does Kenya have this with Haiti? Should it have it before we say they can send this mission? Which is why the mission got held up for so long that the Kenyan courts actually put a stop to it, and then that’s why Henri had to fly out to Kenya at the start of March to to sign that agreement, which was the last sort of legal hurdle. This is a long sort of deep story just to show that the way the international community is trying to manage things in Haiti is also contributing the crisis because it’s so slow, and it just ends up constantly kicking the can down the road instead of doing the simplest thing, which is to work directly with Haitian civil society, which has been you know, there’s a lot of of disagreement in Haitian, political in political parties and civil society groups. But there’s a lot of consensus about what the country needs. And that consensus has been the thing that the popular movement has been saying for 40 years or more. And and so there’s a real sense of what would work and what people in Haiti do seem to want. And the international community refuses to ever work with that, whether it’s from a civil society group or whether it’s from a popular political movement or figures like Aristide or Preval or others. And instead, they always prefer to work with these usual suspects and and the same sort of tired sort of system.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:56:33]:
And I think that that becomes a whole another piece to the the dynamic that’s reproducing these crises in Haiti again and again.
Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:56:42]:
So what what other book do you wanna do? Book review.
Dr. Greg Beckett [00:56:45]:
I don’t know. We’ll have to think of the next one. Yeah?
00:00 Nation vs. peasantry: class struggle, historical context.
03:22 Shift from rural to urban defines Haiti’s change.
06:36 Port au Prince urban population and cultural connections.
10:09 Challenges in Haiti’s democratic consolidation and governance.
13:21 Intense focus on controlling presidency and state.
17:59 Outsourcing to foreign NGOs strengthens local gangs.
20:51 Haiti faces crisis amid political and economic upheaval.
26:05 Political and economic crises lead to instability.
27:27 Economic growth fueled by foreign investment in Haiti.
31:12 Haiti’s history shaped by international economic control.
36:34 Haitian diaspora still emotionally tied to cultural roots.
40:43 Trudeau on state’s role in Haiti’s development.
41:45 Haiti’s economic template clashes with people’s desires.
46:16 Haitian state reflects tension between governance and chaos.
48:45 Delaying crisis for political and transitional change.
53:54 US and UN avoid military intervention in Haiti.
55:04 Kenya-Haiti mission delays due to legalities.
00:00 The title “State Against Nation” invokes class struggle in Haiti, with a focus on the peasantry in the 19th century.
03:22 Urbanization in Port au Prince has shifted the nation’s demographics and cultures, with younger generations opting for urban lifestyles over rural farming. This has led to a change in the nation’s interests and priorities.
06:36 Port au Prince has grown, drawing people from the countryside to the city, adapting rural customs in urban neighborhoods.
10:09 Questioning Haiti’s transition to democracy, impact of state control and international influence.
13:21 Intense focus on controlling presidency to control aid flow in Haiti.
17:59 Outsourcing of state tasks to foreign NGOs in Haiti leads to gang influence and international connections.
20:51 The text discusses political shifts in Haiti and critiques international influence.
26:05 Urban elite clashes with countryside, political instability, US intervention, economic and political crises, Duvalier’s rise.
27:27 Foreign aid masks economic crisis in Haiti, rooted in class struggles.
31:12 Haiti’s legacy: economic dependency, neocolonial rule, US imperialism.
36:34 Dispersed Haitian diaspora’s emotional tie to land and cultural nationalism.
40:43 Trudeau’s view on state blockages in Haiti and international influence on its economy.
41:45 Haiti’s economic template is low-wage work, but people want autonomy and control over their work.
46:16 The text discusses the concept of a weak state in Haiti, and how some people use the state’s weakness for their own political and economic benefit.
48:45 Missed opportunity for regime change during crisis. Trio discusses 1986 uprising.
53:54 US and UN aware of challenges in bringing military force to Haiti; US-Kenya defense deal flawed.
55:04 Kenya delayed Haiti mission, international community not working with Haitian civil society.
Primary Topic: Understanding the Concept of Peasantry and Urbanization in Haiti
- The historical context of the peasantry in Haiti
- Association of peasantry with agricultural land ownership
- Displacement and alteration of the peasant identity
- Impact of land ownership issues on rural communities
- Urbanization and its effects on Haitian society
- Growth of the urban population and its political implications
- Blend of urban and rural cultural influences
- Persistence of rural culture in urban settings, exemplified by the laku system
Primary Topic: Haitian Diaspora and Housing Traditions - Cultural practices within the Haitian diaspora
- Traditional support in finding housing extended to Haitian communities abroad
Primary Topic: International Interventions in Haiti - Political complications of external interventions
- Historical controversies of US and UN actions in Haiti
- The recent US-Kenya defense deal and its implications for Haiti
- Critique of the international community’s approach
- Lack of swift decision-making and creativity
- Dependency on established figures over civil society’s consensus
Primary Topic: Economic Crisis and Foreign Dependency - Haiti’s dependency on foreign aid and investment
- The role of international organizations in Haiti’s economy
- Historical economic dependence and its consequences
- Shift from self-sufficiency to reliance on external capital
- The sway of the US and its economic policies on Haiti
- The significance of the US dollar and markets for Haiti’s economy
- The legacy of US imperialism and occupation
Primary Topic: Political Dynamics and Gang Influence - New political strategies leveraging state weakness
- Dr. Greg Beckett’s analysis of contemporary political maneuvers
- Gang consolidation of power in the absence of strong governance
- The role of international backing in Haitian politics
- The necessity of US and international community support for political legitimacy
- The association between armed groups and political outcomes
- Involvement of gangs in Haitian elections and future politics
- Transformation of civil militia into criminal enterprises
Primary Topic: Cultural Identity and Nationalism - The potent force of cultural nationalism
- Emotional ties of the diaspora to Haiti’s cultural roots
- Transformation of cultural identities in urban settings
- The impact of crises on cultural practices
- Economic struggles affecting traditional wealth distribution customs
- The role of the state in stymying organic cultural development
Primary Topic: Sovereignty and State Fetishism - Examination of state fetishism in Haiti
- The misplaced value on the state as a source of power and wealth
- Dr. Beckett’s theory on the relationship between the state and nation
- Control of foreign aid as a driving political goal
- The significance of the presidency in directing aid flows
- The persistence of state fetishism in Haitian politics
Primary Topic: Literature as a Lens - Insights from the book “Duvalier’s Ghosts”
- Analytical frameworks to understand Haiti’s current state
- The historical narrative influencing today’s political and social landscapes
State vs. Peasantry as a Class Struggle: “the term nation in the title state against nation is in some way invoking almost a class struggle, the the state against the peasantry as a social economic class that has been spatially marginalized and socially marginalized, that is in some sense, you know, agricultural workers, cultivators, people who own their own land.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:01:05 → 00:01:24]
Urbanization in Haiti: “I think there really has been an urbanization in Haiti that isn’t just a displacement appeal from the countryside to the city, but a kind of urban culture and urban sensibility, especially in Port au Prince.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:03:53 → 00:04:02]
Urbanization in Haiti: “Port au Prince has sort of doubled a couple times in the past 40 years in terms of size. And so when he’s ready in the nineties about the sort of Jean Claude Duvalier’s legacy was to draw a ton of people out of the countryside to the city as part of that export led production that he was calling his economic revolution, you know, the the offshore assembly factories in Port au Prince.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:06:42 → 00:06:57]
Haiti’s Struggle for Democracy: “It’s really hard to have any kind of democratic government in Haiti that might invest in agricultural sector because the World Bank sets conditions on its loans that come in to make the budget for the government.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:11:51 → 00:12:03]
Haitian Politics and Foreign Aid: “I think that the reason it’s important for political actors to to control the state right now and and the reason that state fetishism is still there in Haitian politics is because now the state is so central to controlling the massive flow of foreign aid into the country.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:13:46 → 00:14:06]
The Role of NGOs in the Evolution of Gang Power: “All these little projects that should have been done by the state, but the international community forced the state to to outsource them to NGOs, and so you now have foreign NGOs flooding into the country. It’s an era where Port au Prince starts to get called the Republic of NGOs. There’s thousands of them just doing who knows what. There there’s nobody’s keeping track of them. And they’re going into these communities with money, and they begin to broker with those gangs who then become kind of strengthened as little kinds of sovereigns over their territory, a couple of blocks here or there, their base within a particular neighborhood, and they become the brokers who bring, you know, NGO resources into their community. But they were also doing other kinds of things, and I think they got transformed by political groups who wanted to begin to use those gangs to get at voting blocks in those neighborhoods. And I think there’s probably also a story that we don’t fully know of those gangs getting hooked up to larger international structures like drug and gun trafficking, which I think has been a key part of the strengthening of the gangs in the past 10 years.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:17:59 → 00:19:08]
Haitian Political Dynamics: “I think if there’s any kind of uprooting, one of the things that’s been happening is an attempt to uproot whatever got consolidated through the nineties and early 2000 of the populist movement, especially in in part of print and to reshape and recon and and reconfigure that.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:21:32 → 00:21:48]
Economic Disparities in Haiti: “That economic crisis is constantly covered up by foreign aid, and I think we’re still seeing that today as well. So that crisis those crises for him, again, in this sort of Marxist paradigm that he’s using in the book, really is a kind of rooted in what Marxists might call a a kind of the crisis of capitalism, but that but Haiti doesn’t fit the model of industrialized capitalism and class struggle.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:28:08 → 00:28:34]
Cultural Nationalism in the Haitian Diaspora: “I think that my sense among that quite dispersed Haitian diaspora is that there’s still a pretty strong emotional tie to land even if not a material tie to it, like not actually owning it, or maybe not so much to land, but to a certain idea that is tied to the kind of culture that the peasantry produced.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:36:38 → 00:36:53]
International Involvement in Haiti: “This is a long sort of deep story just to show that the way the international community is trying to manage things in Haiti is also contributing the crisis because it’s so slow, and it just ends up constantly kicking the can down the road instead of doing the simplest thing, which is to work directly with Haitian civil society.”
— Dr. Greg Beckett [00:55:23 → 00:55:48]
Urbanization and Demographic Shifts: “the peasantry is the nation.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:10 → 00:00:12]
The Contemporary Relevance of Rural Themes: “How does the book kind of still keep its relevance to what’s going on today versus when he wrote it?”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:00:50 → 00:00:56]
Cultural Exchange Between Urban and Rural Haiti: “And it’s not just the urban landscape changing the sensibilities of the rural culture. It also works in reverse as well too.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:06:02 → 00:06:36]
Haitian Urban Elite and State Fetishism: “The congenital disease was what you touched on, the first part.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:08:48 → 00:08:53]
Structural Crises in Duvalier Dictatorship: “how Tuyeo said the Duvalier dictatorship was a response to, to to deeper structural crises.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:23:29 → 00:23:37]
Impacts of External Policies on Rural Communities: “The rural community in Haiti had a level of self sufficiency for 100 of years. Right? And then policies, external policies, and sort of change their way way of life.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:29:42 → 00:30:27]
The Impact of Displacement on Cultural Identity: “What is your identity if there’s no land attached to that identity anymore?”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:36:02 → 00:36:08]
State Versus Nation Development: “has the state ever really benefited the nation? Yeah. Or has it always been for the last 220 years, this constant struggle of the nation, the culture Mhmm. To do what it needs to do to develop organically, but it is always its development is always being frustrated and interrupted by the state and all its, you know, groupings.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:40:11 → 00:40:42]
Exploring Beyond Boundaries: “Because you said I restricted you to those 5 themes. Are there anything outside of the 5 themes that you wanna cut loose on about this book?”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:44:23 → 00:44:31]
Haitian Year in United States Politics: “And was it the pressure of, like, steadfast for years, the the masses in general were totally against Ariel Lawy. They just have a role and we are in an haitian year in the United States too.”
— Patrick Jean-Baptiste [00:51:48 → 00:52:01]
- How has the concept of “peasantry” in Haiti evolved with the rise of urbanization, and what implications does this have for Haitian society and culture?
- In what ways has the traditional Haitian cultural tradition of mutual assistance in housing been maintained or altered within the diaspora?
- Can you discuss the impact of US and UN interventions in Haiti on the nation’s sovereignty and the current political dynamics?
- How has the defense deal between the US and Kenya for a policing mission in Haiti influenced the already complex legal and political environment?
- What are the consequences of the international community’s preference for working with established figures in Haiti, rather than engaging with Haitian civil society’s consensus on the country’s needs?
- Given Haiti’s history of economic dependency and debt, what strategies could be implemented to encourage self-sufficiency and reduce reliance on external financial aid?
- How has the transition from independent producers to mobile laborers influenced the cultural identity and community structure within Haiti?
- In Dr. Greg Beckett’s view, how does the current political strategy using impasses and blockages in Haiti compare to past political methods, such as those during Duvalier’s dictatorship?
- What role do gangs play in the current and future political landscape of Haiti, particularly in the context of international structures like drug and gun trafficking?
- How does the concept of state fetishism in Haiti, as explained by Dr. Greg Beckett, affect the perception of power and value within Haitian politics, and what can be done to address this issue?
