Responsibility for the spoof Bastille Day announcement promising the repayment of Haiti's 'independence debt' to France (covered in an earlier post) was claimed by a group called CRIME.
The original website at diplomatie.gov.fr was taken down by the authorities, but was quickly replaced by one at diplomatiegov.info and the video of the announcement can now be viewed here.
On 16 July, a message from the @DiplomatieFR twitter account stated:
« Le Comité pour le Remboursement Immédiat des Montants Envolés » d’Haïti (CRIME) takes credit for a hoax carried out on July 14.
The acronym works in English too, standing for the Committee for the Reimbursement of the Indemnity Money Extorted from Haiti.
At a press conference in Montreal on 22 July the group promised more action according to this report in the Winnipeg Free Press. And then the issue seemed to disappear from the news.
But on 16 August an open letter to Nicolas Sarkozy was published in the French daily Liberation urging France 'to pay Haiti, the world’s first black republic, the restitution it is due.'
The letter was reprinted on CRIME's own website, both in French and English with a full list of signatories. The issue was also covered by BBC News, the Guardian, and the Toronto Star.
That the signatories included French scholars such as Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière may have brought some comfort to Tontongi, the author of La France doit restituer à Haïti la rançon de l'indemnité (which seems to have been written before the letter was published), who noted the disappointing response of formerly progressive intellectuals such as Régis Debray and René Depestre to Aristide's renewal of the claim for restitution in 2003.
The substantial article draws on the detailed arguments made by Anthony D Phillips regarding Haiti's Independence Debt and Prospects for Restitution (pdf) which demonstrate the solid legal case behind Aristide's claim. In 1825 President Boyer 'agreed' to pay a 150 million franc indemnity to compensate French planters for the loss of land and slaves as a result of Haiti's independence.
The legality of this agreement could be challenged on several grounds: the fact that negotiations were shadowed by the threat of French military force; the dubious basis on which the amount of the indemnity was arrived at; and the already-established consensus among the colonial powers that slavery and the slave trade were morally wrong - as evidenced by the abolition of the slave trade by Britain and the United States in 1807, the commitment to extend abolition in the Treaties of Paris that ended the Napoleonic Wars; and even the (albeit short-lived) abolition of slavery by the French government itself in 1794.
Furthermore, when it became clear that Haiti could not make the scheduled repayments (it had to borrow the first two installments from French banks), in 1834 the government appointed a commission to review the arrangement. Although the Dalloz Report declared the original ordinance unlawful and argued that it was the responsibility of the French government to compensate the planters, a replacement treaty imposed a schedule that was scarcely less crippling.
Phillips examines the legal grounds for restitution in the light of successful 'unjust enrichment' claims made by Holocaust victims against Swiss banks, and by American states against tobacco corporations. He concludes:
In the recent movement toward addressing historical injustice through legal and political action, Haiti's Independence Debt makes a compelling case. The historical background presents a sympathetic story of profound tragedy and unfairness. The story well fits the traditional elements of a cognizable unjust enrichment claim and presents strong arguments against dismissal on procedural grounds. As part of a concerted, multi-disciplinary approach, a claim for the Independence Debt could realize some relief for the modern-day people of impoverished Haiti and perhaps deliver justice for one of history's most tragic wrongs.
The Christian Science Monitor reprted on 17 August that the French Foreign Ministry had dismissed the petition. But the article makes the following interesting observation:
French officials did not address the legitimacy of the debt, with analysts saying such an admission could open a flood-gate of former colonial claims. France, for its part, has steadily requested that Moscow recompense a group of French investors that prior to 1917 put vast sums into the Russian rail system. Lenin declared the debt void under Soviet rule. But recently Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin agreed to reopen negotiations.
According to a post on The dangers of sovereign debt default, the Soviet government settled with British holders of these so-called Czar Bonds in 1986 'because the Soviets wanted to get hold of large amounts of Czarist money frozen in 1917 that was still sitting in British banks.' And while the Yeltsin government compensated French bondholders to the tune of $400 million in 1996, many have argued that the amount should have been much larger. And the Association Fédérative Internationale des Porteurs d'Emprunts Russes (AFIPER) continue to press for what they argue is full restitution of the bondholders' investments. (See also this article in Le Figaro in July this year).
If the holders of Czar Bonds are as much victims of violent breaches of international law and custom as the Haitian government, then there is an embarrassing inconsistency in the French government's response to their claims for restitution. But even if the Haitian petition that the government ignores is based on arguments as strong, if not stronger, than those that led to Russian compensation in 1996, what makes such claims compelling is not the logic of their arguments but the relative standing of the two parties in the dispute. In some circumstances, France can compel Russia to bow to international pressure in ways that Haiti could never duplicate in her dealings with France.
But this is not something we are likely to hear the Foreign Ministry say in so many words.
I'm normally reading two books at any one time. Sometimes three, and occasionally four if I have a collection of poetry on the go or a new issue of a journal I intend to read cover to cover. But right now, for a variety of reasons, I seem to be mid-way through more than a dozen. How did this happen?
Some of them go back to last year. Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History (2007) was a recreational read - recreational in the sense that it was not directly related to anything I was currently writing. And I'm not sure what prompted me to buy it (although I'm glad I did). Possibly I thought it might help me think through some of the issues to do with representations of time in an essay on Moby-Dick I had set aside since giving a talk about it in 2004. The bookmark - a folded sheet of A4 scribbled with pencilled notes (such as 'IB's own reconstruc of the Zong case & its participants is an actuarial one - Qbp46') lies between pages 54 and 55, as it has done since December when I needed to begin work in earnest on several projects with looming deadlines.
First I had to make some final revisions to an article on a vodou chant in response to comments by the editors and the publisher's anonymous readers. One suggested I refer to Madison Smartt Bell's All Saints Rising (1995), the first volume of his trilogy on the Haitian revolution, because it quoted the chant in question. I knew of the book, and had been meaning to read it for years, so I now had the excuse I'd been waiting for. The chant did indeed appear on page 118, although I'm not sure there was anything unusual about it that would merit more than a passing mention in a footnote. I ploughed on for another twenty pages, according to the slip of paper, hardly scribbled on at all, for I don't take easily to historical novels. And this one seemed to take just a little too much pleasure in the depiction of violence and suffering, and robbed the story of the narrative impetus I was expecting. I found the non-fictional accounts of historians more gripping, even if C L R James' The Black Jacobins or Aimé Césaire's Toussaint Louverture only hint at the nitty-gritty detail of the day-to-day struggle.
Other things I wanted to revise in the paper included my translation of a passage from Frédéric Marcelin's Thémistocle Epaminondas Labasterre (1901). The scene, featuring the adolescent protagonist's encounter with young women washing clothes in a river, appears quite early on and I'd sped past, firmly intending to finish the novel at the time - two summers ago now - but, well I must have been sidetracked by something or other. It's a fascinating read, reminding me a little of Flaubert's L'Education sentimentale, and while I did tinker with my English version, I didn't have time to resume the narrative, and this will have to wait until later this summer.
With the vodou chant out of the way, two other obligations took their place. One was a paper on the 'Liberty or Death' motif in the Age of Revolution for the Caribbean Enlightenment conference at Glasgow University in April. I never got to deliver it in the end, as I was taken ill two days before and spent a week in hospital. I'd completed the reading I had set myself for this, except for Laurent Dubois' A Colony of Citizens (2004). I notice I was still several chapters short of the one entitled 'Vivre libre ou mourir!' when Haemophilus influenzae type b breached my defences. I'll return to this when I return to the draft in October and begin to work it into a more substantial piece, if I can.
Alongside my wanderings in the world of political slogans and the Hegelian dialectic, I had been converting a conference paper into a more substantial essay on the literary geography of a tropical hotel. For months I'd been pursuing various themes (the hotel in fiction, travel writing and cultural theory; the philosophies of space; acoustic geographies; heterotopia) like a pup licking bone. Now the full-length text has been emailed to the editors (to be returned for revisions in due course, no doubt), a few half-chewed morsels remain on the bedside table.
One is Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space (1958), a classic that has some intriguing remarks on sounds that I never used: 'It is a salutary thing to naturalize the sound in order to make it less hostile,' he writes, thinking of the way the noises of Paris that keep him awake at night can be transformed into an 'ocean roar.' It is waiting to be resumed at page 38 at some point later this year.
Another is Paule Marshall's The Chosen Place, The Timeless People (1969): an enormously rich narrative that takes off from the arrival of a US-funded research team hoping to make a difference to an impoverished community on an island in the Caribbean. Project leader Saul, his wife Harriet, and assistant Allen take up residence in a guest-house run by the loquacious Merle, who straddles the racial divisions of the newly-independent country and serves as the ideal 'cultural broker' for the visitors.
I had read Marshall's first novel before, but the friend who recommended this was so on target. I'm only a third of the way through, but it is clear why the guest house should be such an appropriate setting for this Proustian anatomy of the postcolonial condition, this dissection of the souls of white folk. Each time I pick it up, I read less pages, not wanting it to end.
An ongoing project to outline an imaginary anthology of Haitian travel writing - travel writing by Haitian authors, that is, rather than writings about Haiti - has required me to read or re-read a number of fictional works in which the theme of exile and homecoming loom large. But I have also been trying to track down the motif of the everyday in Haitian literature, going back to the oral tradition of the lodyans, recently revived in Georges Anglade's Rire haïtien / Haitian Laughter (2006), a bilingual edition that combines several smaller collections of these mini stories in one volume.
It's a book that is best suited to dipping into now and again, which means it will be beside my bed for some time. With Dany Laferrière's Vers le sud (2006), my task is to compare it with his earlier work, La chair du maître (1997) of which this is a revised version, named after the film that was based on some of the stories in the first. At first glance Laferriere has removed ten chapters and added five, not to make it more like the movie, but rather to respond to it, in turn. A sequel, even.
I have read the first novel in Marie Chauvet's Love, Anger, Madness (1968) trilogy, now appearing in English translation for the first time, and now anxious to read the rest of it. But I'm not sure if I should really finish Rene Depestre's Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (1988) first. I'll decide once I reach the end of Marshall's masterpiece.
Joe Moran's On Roads (2009) I've nearly finished: a brilliant cultural history of the road in 20th-century Britain, especially the impact of the motorway in the 1960s. And quirky too, from its attention to things normally taken-for-granted, such as signage and road-numbering, to the discreet count-down symbols (used on motorways to mark the approach of junctions) that appear in the page-headers towards the end of chapters.
The poetry volume I have on the go - Sean Borodale's Notes for an Atlas (2003)- is prose rather than verse, but demanding enough that it can only be read slowly in short bursts. Described as a '370-page poem written whilst walking through London', it is divided into twenty-five sections, capturing the experience in a series of highly fragmentary impressions of things seen, read and overheard that could almost be absorbed in any order, for the pleasure of the text is in the changing rhythms and startling similes and metaphors that endow each moment with a fragile beauty.
Oh, and there are the latest issues of Studies in Travel Writing and Small Axe that I've only had time to flick through so far. I am particularly looking forward to the interview with Merle Collins.
On Wednesday, many people were taken aback by an announcement from the French Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of a new 'framework initiative' that would return the 90 million gold francs paid by Haiti from 1825 to 1947.
This indemnity has long been a bone of contention, pressured as Haiti was to pay 'compensation' for the loss of colonial property in return for international recognition of the newly independent state.
When the Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, brought up the question once more, on the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the death of national hero Toussaint L'Ouverture in a French cell in 1803, his counterpart Jacques Chirac was not impressed.
Even though two years earlier the French parliament had recognized slavery as a crime against humanity, the official response to the bill for $21,685,135,571 and 48 cents (its modern equivalent, with interest) was brusque, even bad-tempered. The foreign ministry commissioned a report on Franco-Haitian relations, which dismissed the claim for reparations as anachronistic and mocked the way in which Aristide had presented it.
There was precious little support even in the left-wing press in France, leading the Haitian writer Louis-Philippe Dalembert to pen an article in Libération wondering why intellectuals in the land of Hugo and Zola had all turned into foreign ministers whose main aim was to defend French interests. Dalembert was no friend of Aristide, and doubted whether Aristide was the best person to raise the issue, but he insisted that the demand for the restitution of an 'immoral and iniquitous debt' should not be allowed to be forgotten.
And indeed it has not. So despite Aristide's enforced departure in the coup of February 2004 and Gerard Latortue's prompt reassurance that the 'illegal' and 'ridiculous' claim would not be pursued, when Nicolas Sarkozy visited Haiti in February this year, he faced angry protests demanding that France pay up and help return Aristide to office.
The announcement of 14 July did not, then, come out of the blue. But, only a day after the National Assembly voted overwhelmingly in support of a ban on wearing the Islamic full veil in public, it was unexpected, to say the least. And, of course, it was too good to be true.
'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,' goes Gramsci's slogan. For those with too much of the latter, the news may have prompted a flurry of excitement, but disappointment would inevitably follow. Those with an excess of the former may have taken some cynical delight in pointing out that the website was 'fake' or a 'hoax', as if it were therefore of no further account.
But both responses miss something interesting. It is no more 'fake' than a play or a film. The point of the excercise is not to kid people that something has taken place but to make it seem strange that something hasn't. We might think of it as a kind of historical re-enactment but of the future rather than the past.
It stages a possible - or alternative - future, by composing a plausible statement that combines the language of neo-liberalism with that of France's long-standing democratic traditions, without making reference to the claims of Aristide and his supporters.
In doing so, it invites us to imagine a rationale that would allow France to do a U-turn without losing face. Anyone reading the statement would find it hard to dismiss it as giving in to 'illegal' and 'ridiculous' demands. And thus the demand - whose symbolic importance should not be underestimated - is kept alive.
Sweetest of all perhaps, it has forced the Ministry to deny that it is planning to do anything so noble and to declare that it is considering legal action against those who dare to imagine such a thing.
There are so many trapped in the rubble of rational thought which tragically collapsed this week in parts of Europe and North America. Can someone help Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach?
Unlike, presumably, the fatalism inspired by the removal of a democratically-elected president. Twice.
Nothing he is quoted as saying seems to admit that 'fatalism' may have secular as well as spiritual sources. And is it really so inconceivable that people combine vodou – or any other religious - beliefs with activities like making a living, bringing up children, going to school, getting involved in community projects, or pulling people out of wrecked buildings and caring for them? Can't we at least agree that it just might be possible?
I hear an echo. What's that? 'There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile.' David Brooks on The Underlying Tragedy in the New York Times. Couldn't he have said the same thing about the global financial crisis? In any case, it sounds like David Brooks is spreading that message well enough himself.
And then there are Tyler Cowen's scatter-gun hypotheses that try to answer the rather loaded question Why is Haiti so poor?. They include this intriguing suggestion:
Hegel was correct that the "voodoo religion," with its intransitive power relations among the gods, was prone to producing political intransitivity as well. (Isn't that a startling insight for a guy who didn't travel the broader world much?)
Cowen is actually not the only one for whom Hegel has recently become an authority on Haiti (and I will return to this in a future post), but he is unusual in claiming that this is because of the philosopher's alleged views on voodoo.
That word again. It's been around for a while, though it's not as old as Hegel, at least not in this spelling. In The V Word I tried to show how voodoo emerged victorious in English in the late 19th Century over French or Creole versions like vaudoux or voudou. And in doing so it rapidly mutated as a metaphor that took it far from the island of its birth to refer to practically anything that was inexplicable or malicious or both.
At the same time the religion attracted the interest of more sympathetic scholars (inside and outside Haiti) and by the 1980s and 90s, something of the reality of vodou - to adopt the spelling in the language spoken by most of its followers - had seeped into the Western mainstream, and its difference from the cartoon voodoo was recognized by anyone who gave serious consideration to the matter.
I suggested that the two forms had diverged to the extent that we could afford to relax. Almost no-one used voodoo to define Haiti anymore. The word had drifted away from its Caribbean moorings to harmlessly scare (or lure) a world blissfully ignorant of where it came from. And we could begin to expect that discussions of the religion - given official recognition by Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2003 - would be more likely to dignify it with the name vodou,and treat it accordingly.
But I may have been proved wrong. Last week the ghost returned, as those who sought facile explanations or excuses for the desperate scenes unfolding in the media seemed to find a large captive audience willing to accept them.
How much it will be allowed to haunt the efforts of emergency relief and reconstruction remains to be seen. At least that captive audience is now beginning to answer back.
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