What a week on the international front... North America is burning, Covid is resurgent and the President of Haiti has been Killed.
I can't stop thinking about Haiti though.
There is so much not written in the media about the whole story of the island and its turmoil.
The latest by The Guardian:
"A struggling and chaotic Haiti is reeling from the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse followed by a reported gun battle in which authorities said police killed four of the murder suspects, detained two others and freed three officers who were being held hostage."
Haiti is one of the first nations to free itself from slavers and colonialists, the world has failed it.
I went there in 2008 when living in and reporting from Miami, but mostly I worked with a Haitian filmmaker for years.
An important book to understand Haiti's history is 'Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History', by Michel-Rolph Trouillot. It was one of the inspirations for the doc series 'Exterminate All the Brutes', and I spent months reviewing it and thinking about how to adapt it/include its ideas.
In this review by Kenneth Maxwell in Foreign Policy's July/August 1996 issue, the reviewer wrote: "Trouillot, a distinguished Haitian scholar who teaches at The Johns Hopkins University, has produced a sparkling interrogation of the past. He examines the suppression of the role of Africans in the Haitian Revolution to demonstrate how power silences certain voices from history. The background is the "war within the war." As Napoleonic France attempted to reestablish imperial control and eventually slavery, black creoles -- natives of the island or the Caribbean -- fought dissident groups composed of Bossales -- African-born ex-slaves mainly from the Congo."
He adds "Haiti was, Trouillot convincingly shows, the first modern state of the so-called Third World, and it experienced all the trials of postcolonial nation-building when new elites partially appropriated the culture of the masses and silenced dissent. The silencing was doubly effective because the Haitian Revolution, the most successful slave revolt in history, was largely written out of the texts by historians of the period. Trouillot places the Haitian story within the context of the denial of the Holocaust, the debate over the Alamo, and the meaning of Columbus. A beautifully written, superior book."
Haiti was failed by the West from its independence in 1802, forced to pay an immense debt to France to get its freedom back, and thrown into the turmoil of trying to build a society for traumatised former slaves while the whole continent around them, the Americas was against them. First the Spanish invaders of the island, founding the Dominica Republic on half of the island. Second the United States of America, at the time still built on slavery and a system exploiting displaced African people to this day. Finally, by the 'aid' and emergency help business...
For more on this, the same filmmaker made a documentary titled 'Fatal Assistance'. Here is the trailer:
And the film in French here:
There would be so much to add; but that's a start.
Keep in mind that what you see about a country in the news for 1 minute only reflect a biased point of view, erasing most of its history...
One song to finish...
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