I do not mean this in terms of body counts or human suffering, but rather how intriguing it can be that in a humanitarian moment, where the truth of human life, its most raw form is supposed to be laid bare for all, certain crucial parts of the story still don’t get told.
In terms of Japan, we can see this in how people have focused on the tangible negative effects of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima, such as whether or not the radioactivity will travel. But a far more important and fundamental question is what this means for a country which gets 14 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and is prone to having earthquakes.
The debate about the general safety and viability of nuclear power around the world should be reinvigorated, people should be questioning whether this prohibitively expensive and potentially catastrophic way of producing energy is reliable, but instead this gets lost in the coverage.
Haiti, as a poorer, blacker country, had its own frustratingly selective coverage, especially from the perspective of the U.S. As the media was flooded with information about the earthquake and suffering there, it was easy to feel like you understood the situation, but impossible to actually comprehend the situation, because key pieces of the historical nature of the U.S. and Haiti relationship were left out.
In times of catastrophe elsewhere in the world, it is the role of the media to help the people of the U.S. “discover” that locale. The concept of discovery is interesting. It has the aura of learning something new, but in truth this newness is just an illusion, and it acts in such a way to reinforce something you already believe or assume.
In helping people “discover” Haiti, the media was not teaching something new to people (telling them things they didn’t already know), but rather teaching them things they didn’t know they already knew about the island. As a third world country, the earthquake there was the latest collapse in a place where collapse and disaster are ways of life, and so the imagined destitution, poverty, the existing suffering, all these already-assumed things were given even more depth, more details, more graphic imagery or even simple anecdotes to sustain them. As a result, people learned what they already know about poor, black, underdeveloped nations — that they are tragic places which need our compassion and aid.
What was of course completely absent was the role that the U.S. has long played in keeping Haiti a poor and violent place. This role has been ongoing for centuries, and has included instances where the U.S. landed troops in the country to protect their economic interests. From 1915 to 1934, the U.S. Marines ran the country as a “protectorate” of the U.S. Prior to this, both the French and the U.S. strangled Haiti economically, because of the country’s “dangerous” genesis as being the most successful slave rebellion in history.
Haiti was a country formed by slaves who rebelled and fought against the armies of the English, French and Spanish, and eventually formed their own republic. As Haitian historian Michel Rolph Truillot notes, this radical history has been something which the Western world has long refused to accept and acknowledge, and so Haiti is never afforded the place in history it truly deserves. Instead, it is doubly silenced — first, for the role it has played in further expanding our notions of human freedom and liberty; second, because the role the U.S. has played in exploiting Haiti, in a moment where all eyes were on the island, went almost completely unmentioned.
As the most powerful nation in the world, with a long history of both pushing forward the human story of freedom and progress, but also destroying the dreams of progress and self-determination for others, Haiti is not the only place where there exists a long-standing historical relationship which people in the U.S. would rather not remember. But in any horrible human tragedy, especially in places elsewhere in the world, if you do not know that history, then you can only “discover” that place, not understand it, and not truly help it.
MICHAEL LUJAN BEVACQUA
Mangilao, Siapan
