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| Twenty Days of Aftershocks | A selection of testimony and opinion pieces - reflecting a range of views - which have appeared online over the last three weeks.
| Useful sources include the excellent Repeating Islands blog, email bulletins from the Haiti Support Group, and Bob Corbett's Haiti List.
Edwidge Danticat, A Little While, New Yorker, 1 Feb 2010.
Laura Wagner, Haiti: A survivor's story, Salon, 1 Feb 2010.
Peter Slevin, As food distribution improves, Haitians want U.S to 'take over', Washington Post, 1 Feb 2010.
Nick Allen, Haiti earthquake: voodoo high priest claims aid monopolised by Christians, Daily Telegraph, 1 Feb 2010.
Gary Younge, The west owes Haiti a bailout. And it would be a hand-back, not a handout, Guardian, 31 January 2010.
John Maxwell, Protecting Haiti's Interest, Jamaica Observer, 31 January 2010.
Peter Hallward, The Land that Wouldn't Lie, Haitianalysis.com, 29 Jan 2010.
John Pilger, The Kidnapping of Haiti, New Statesman, 28 Jan 2010.
Melanie Newton, World's Future in Haiti, (Barbados) Nation News, 27 Jan 2010.
Eduardo Galeano, A história do Haiti é a história do racismo, Adital, 25 Jan 2010.
Ker Than, Haiti Earthquake & Voodoo: Myths, Ritual, and Robertson (Interview with Wade Davis), National Geographic, 25 Jan 2010.
Tom Phillips, Haiti earthquake: religion fills the void left by aid agencies, Guardian, 24 Jan 2010.
Rodney Saint-Éloi, La tendresse et l'élégance nous sauveront du séisme, Cyberpresse.ca, 23 January 2010.
Sites sur Haïti : témoignages d’auteurs à consulter, Etonnants Voyageurs, 22 Jan 2010.
Peter Hallward, Securing Disaster in Haiti, Haitianalysis.com, 22 Jan, 2010.
Dany Laferrière, Tout bouge autour de moi, Novel Observateur, 21 Jan 2010.
Amy Wilentz, The Haiti Haters, The Nation, 21 Jan 2010.
Richard Morse, Haiti: My Experience on the Ground, Huffington Post, 21 Jan 2010.
Juan Carlos Chavez, In wealthy enclave of Pétionville, another picture, Miami Herald, 21 Jan 2010.
Andy Kershaw, Stop Treating These People Like Savages, Independent, 21 Jan 2010.
Tracy Wilkinson, Haiti's Elite Hold Nation's Future in their Hands, Los Angeles Times, 21 Jan 2010.
Évelyne Trouillot, Aftershocks, New York Times, 21 Jan 2010.
Colin Dayan, 'Civilizing' Haiti, Boston Review, 20 Jan 2010.
Dianne Diakité, The Myth of “Voodoo”: A Caribbean American Response to Representations of Haiti, Religion Dispatches, 20 Jan 2010.
Sir Hilary Beckles, The Hate and the Quake, Barbados Advocate, 19 Jan 2010.
Robert Booth, Cruise ships still find a Haitian berth, Guardian, 17 Jan 2010.
John Maxwell, No, Mister! You Cannot Share My Pain!, Jamaica Observer, 17 Jan 2010.
Haïti : le témoignage bouleversant de l'écrivain Dany Laferrière (interview), Le Monde, 16 Jan 2010.
Ruth Gledhill, Voodoo faith 'could hinder Haiti's recovery from quake', The Times, 15 Jan 2010.
David Brooks, The Underlying Tragedy, New York Times,14 Jan 2010. And responses from Matt Taibbi (18 Jan) and Tom F. Driver and Carl Lindskoog (19 Jan).
Edwidge Danticat Voices Haiti, Always, Women's Voices for Change, 14 Jan 2010.
Tyler Cowen, Why is Haiti so Poor?, Marginal Revolution, 13 Jan 2010.
Alain Mabanckou, Haiti ou l'énigme d'un séisme, Black Bazar, 13 Jan 2010.
Témoignage de Rodney Saint-Éloi (interview), Potomitan.info, undated. |
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| The V Word Revisited | 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?
| I can hear him calling out. What is he saying? 'The fatalism inspired by the voodoo religion would militate against recovery'.
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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| Ayiti se tè glise | Sunday morning beside the statue to Alexandre Pétion, Champ de Mars, Port-au-Prince, January 2004.
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In a moving piece in the Miami Herald, Edwidge Danticat recalls the Kreyòl proverb, Ayiti se tè glise, Haiti is slippery ground:
'Haiti has never been more slippery ground than it is right now. Bodies littering the streets. Entire communities buried in rubble. Homes pancaked to dust.
For those of us who know and love Haiti, now our hearts are also slippery ground. We are hopeful one moment then filled with despair the next. ' |
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| Douglass in Leeds | Many now recognize the importance of Frederick Douglass' visit to the British Isles in 1845-47, a lecture tour that took him the length and breadth of the country and which secured his international reputation as an anti-slavery campaigner.
| His second visit has attracted much less attention. In November 1859, Douglass arrived in Liverpool to begin a speaking tour, arranged long before John Brown's fateful attempt to capture the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry the previous month. In the wake of Brown's arrest it was probably the safest place for him to be, as Douglass was rumoured to have been one of his co-conspirators. Brown himself was executed in December.
His speeches discussed the significance of the raid and, mindful of the deepening sectional rift in the United States, promoted an anti-slavery interpretation of the Constitution.
As it happened, Douglass' tour was largely confined to Scotland and the North of England. In Yorkshire he stayed with his old friend and collaborator, Julia Griffiths (newly married). James Walker, secretary of the Leeds Young Men's Anti-Slavery Society observed: 'His powerful and eloquent appeals deepen our detestation of slavery, and have imparted to us a stronger impulse for, and led us more actively into, anti-slavery work than ever.'
Leeds Metropolitan University have organized a week of events (Mon 30 Nov to Fri 4 Dec 2009) marking the 150th anniversary of Douglass' visit to the city. On the programme are several talks, an anti-slavery walk, a play and a re-enactment of the speech Douglass gave in Leeds Music Hall on 22 December 1859. More details on this flyer.
News of the death of his youngest daughter Annie, aged ten, back home in Rochester, New York, forced Douglass to postpone engagements in Ireland and the south of England. He returned in May 1860, relieved to find that the moment of danger had passed, but pressing political concerns preventing him fulfilling his promise to resume his tour in the near future. In fact he did not visit Europe again until 1886, this time in the company of his second wife, Helen Pitts. |
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| Raising Cain | Welcome to the new bulldozia: projects site, finally rebuilt on new foundations after more than a year's work behind the scenes.
| The site won't look very different at first, but new features and sections are just waiting in the wings.
Coming soon - before the end of 2009, I hope - will be:- an active blog (of which this is actually the first entry)
- a new section on voodoo with some hard-to-find primary texts from the 19th- and early 20th-century sources
- some additional user-features including the ability to add comments and the creation of an rss feed.
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