EMAIL SIGN UP!
Most Popular This Week
- Corporate Win: Supreme Court Says Monsanto Has 'Control Over Product of Life'
- Patent Filing Claims Solar Energy ‘Breakthrough’
- Disaster Capitalism Strikes as Hedge Funds Circle Near-Bankrupt Municipalities Like Vultures
- In 'March Toward Disaster,' World Hits 400 PPM Milestone
- Ignoring Bee Crisis, EPA Greenlights New 'Highly Toxic' Pesticide
Popular content
Today's Top News
It's No Wonder the Haitians Wanted Wyclef Jean
The star's brief candidacy gave hope to people deeply in need
Wyclef Jean has been disqualified from running for the presidency of Haiti because he has not been a resident for at least the last five years. While Jean respected the decision as a legal matter, his disqualification highlights the longer-term tragedies that have made living in Haiti such a compromise, particularly for those with other options. The drain of brains, talent and money from this, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, is the sorry product of foreign meddling, domestic corruption, the Aids epidemic, deforestation, hurricanes and an educational system so dismal that 80% of the population is illiterate - all before the most recent cataclysm.
Jean's brief candidacy underscored the reality that the luckiest survivors of this and all the previous miseries are themselves a scattered presence: some have fled the island altogether; many are traumatised or in deepest mourning.
Yet despite the devastation of the earthquake, one year later many people have forgotten the ongoing suffering in Haiti. And so if the Haitian government continues to wobble, it's not much of a mystery. The only people in Haiti with enough running water to function at the level modern electoral politics requires will most likely be expats. And as against all the others - foreigners, foreign corporations, NGOs, missionaries and pirates - who are providing the services that have kept the population alive (in a hotchpotch of well-meaning outreach and felonious intent), it is no wonder that Jean captured the hearts and hopes of a nation so in need of spiritual resurrection.
Two weeks after the earthquake, I met a woman in Boston airport. She had just arrived from Port-au-Prince, and her story lingers in my mind. When I followed her hints and asked the pertinent questions, she fell open, a river of sorrow. So many dead, so many died, she said over and over. She had been sitting in her yard, the earth shifted, the buildings collapsed and everyone died. She told me the same story eight or nine times, each time with some new detail: she had been barbecuing meat; the flowers were in bloom, her daughter was doing her schoolwork. Then she looked over her shoulder, the earth moved, the house collapsed and everybody died.
Suddenly, after this terrible litany, the woman halted and told me a new story. The night of the earthquake there was a funeral for a nine-year-old girl. Just before the earthquake she sat up in her coffin and said: "I'm too hot." Then she jumped out, ran around the church three times and into the night. And then the woman fell silent. I wondered what the story meant. It did not seem the tale of a madwoman. I concluded that it must be a parable about all the rules of mortality turned suddenly upside down. It was a story from the book of the dead, tombs tumbling open, the Earth stalked by ghosts. Of all that she had recounted, it was that image that brought home the horror and incalculable fear.
When I think about Wyclef Jean, I wonder if part of his appeal to the people of Haiti is that of an artist, whose gift might be mending national identity. If music speaks to the same part of the psyche that pain touches, perhaps it is no wonder that in a time when all natural law seems suspended, we humans reach for the tail of the nearest star and hang on as though in search of miracles.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
12 Comments so far
Show AllMs Williams' piece on Wyclef Jean is wretched to the point I wonder how it found its way on to Common Dreams.
In the first instance Wyclef Jean comes from a long line of Haitian reactionaries. His uncle Joseph opposed Fanmi Lavalas since the 1990 elections. Wyclef himself was quite open in his support of the U.S. backed coup in 2004. He went so far as to produce a film entitled "The Ghosts of Cite Soleil" which among its other blatantly pro-coup outrages neglects to mention that fact that the U.S. kidnapped President Aristide.
In the words of Charlie Hinton of the San Francisco Bay View:
"Let us be clear. Jean and his uncle, the Haitian ambassador to the U.S., are both cozy with the self-appointed czar of Haiti, Bill Clinton, whose plans for the Caribbean nation are to make it a neo-colony for a reconstructed tourist industry and a pool of cheap labor for U.S. factories. Wyclef Jean is the perfect front man. The Haitian elite and its U.S./UN sponsors are counting on his appeal to the youth to derail the people's movement for democracy and their call for the return of President Aristide. Most Haitians will not be hoodwinked by the likes of Wyclef Jean."
What romanticized tripe from Williams i.e. " If music speaks to the same part of the psyche that pain touches, perhaps it is no wonder that in a time when all natural law seems suspended, we humans reach for the tail of the nearest star and hang on as though in search of miracles." Maybe the next time Wyclef serenades Colin Powell with Bob Marley's "Redemption Song" - as he did at Obama's inauguration - Williams might be lucky enough to sit next to the general.
I wonder how it made it's way to The Guardian, or what she is doing with The Nation (even as far down hill as it's come...).
Bring back Aristide!
Puff Daddy for US President anyone?
What embarrassing and ignorant drivel. This writer is a Professor of Law?
Law professor? So is John Yoo -- and Francis Boyle! -- so that says what you tell about someone just from their being a Law professor.
The best place I oufnd for learning about Haiti is Flashpoints.org, with Dennis Bernstein, and guests or staff like Kevin Pina.
Thank you Thatch,
Ms Williams obviously knows nothing at all about Haiti. It is sad that Common Dreams will print such drivel, and equally sad that it was picked up by the supposedly center left London Guardian, and that she is carried by the Nation.
There is no evidence that the Haitian people "wanted" Wyclef Jean. They want Bertrand Aristede and the Lavalas party, who were elected twice and thrown out twice by Bush family coups. The last coup army trained openly in the Dominican Republic with American weapons. Both coups instituted massacres.
Aristide never felt the need to be self exiled. He stayed with the poor of Haiti until he was exiled twice by US coup forces.
Why is Haiti so poor? Ms. Williams doesn't mention the fact that France collected tens of billions of dollars in "reparations" from Haiti, enforced by gun ships and threatened invasions, as "payment" for the loss of French owned slaves in the early nineteenth century; and that these "reparations" continued until AFTER WORLD WAR TWO. Nor that these payments were supported by the slavocracy of the United States which supposedly had a "Monroe Doctrine" to keep European influence out of the Western Hemisphere. Nor does she mention that the US armed and supported the kleptocratic dictatorships of the Duvaliers, who murdered and stole at will.
Please, Common Dreams. Even on a Sunday , real news and serious opinion is not that scarce. There is no need to publish such empty headed nonsense.
I agree with the substance of what you've said.
I can also add that, in Haitian culture, if you press someone to talk about some trauma in their life, they assume you're asking because you are going to help. That's the reason the woman in the airport repeated her story 9 times, she was waiting for the author to offer money or something substantive.
Not to be mean to the (I'm sure) well-intentioned author, but that's what was happening there.
A good source for info on Haiti:
http://dyinginhaiti.blogspot.com
The Haitians wanted Wyclef Jean?
Has anyone actually asked them? Did the author even ask the traumatized woman she spoke to in the airport?
I just got back from several weeks in Haiti about a month ago, and I saw signs (or rather spray-painted walls) everywhere that said Haitians want their elected leader Aristide back. Wyclef Jean was on billboards all over the place - on ads for his Violà cell phone company. I never saw any evidence that people were excited about his (then potential) candidacy. People seemed to think it'd be good that he was already rich and so perhaps less likely to be corruptable.
I'm not saying he'd be terrible (I don't know how he'd do) but I am saying that the statement "it's no wonder the Haitians wanted Wyclef Jean" has no basis in any of the many conversations I've had with Haitians, or in any polls I've seen. I think the fascination is among westerners. What was that about "foreign meddling?"
And by the way, the earthquakes started about 7 months ago, not a year ago.
Since when are the rich "less likely to be corruptable"?
I am reporting what people in Haiti said to me.
Dear emminent law Prof. Williams, Esq.,
Thank-you for you well-informed commentary on this pop-troubadour and would-be presidential candidate who is a darling of the neoliberal capitalists - a sort-of Hatian Bono or Sting.
However the person the Hatian really want for president is this nice fellow, a former priest and proponent of liberation theology named JEAN-BERTRAND ARISTIDE.
Ever heard of him?
He was forcibly ejected from the presidency and from his country in a US-sponsored coup-d'etet in February 2004 and is living in forced-exile in South Africa.
Ever heard of these events?
Agreed. It's Aristide they want and need. But he would stand in the way of US garment manufacturers and companies that want to continue the project of corporatizing agriculture there.
Joe
I'm not sure what it means when even an NPR's All Things Considered host demonstrates far less gullibility than Attorney Williams and her remarkable twaddle:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129090122
In the interview, Wyclif Jean is made to appear a tax scofflaw, a prevaricator and an administrative incompetent by means of a very few pointed questions.