Amy Wilentz - Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti

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for Nick

Everything was transformed or deformed by an empty stomach: love, pride, willpower, and tenderness.

Jacques Roumain, Masters of the Dew

It is astonishing how much money can be made out of the poorest of the poor with a little ingenuity.

Doctor Magiot, in Graham Greenes The Comedians

Development consists of the removal of various types of unfreedoms that leave people with little choice and little opportunity of exercising their reasoned agency.

Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom

It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying, that it could occur to an association of human beings drawn together through need and chance and for profit into a company, an organ of journalism, to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings... for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives before another group of human beings, in the name of science, of honest journalism (whatever that paradox may mean), of humanity, of social fearlessness, for money, and for a reputation for crusading and for unbias... And that these people could be capable of meditating this prospect without the slightest doubt of their qualification to do an honest piece of work, and with a conscience better than clear, and in virtual certitude of almost unanimous public approval...

All of this, I repeat, seems to me curious, obscene, terrifying, and unfathomably mysterious.

So does the whole course, in all its detail, of the effort of these persons to find, and to defend what they sought: and the nature of their relationship with those with whom during the searching stages they came into contact; and the subtlety, importance, and almost intangibility of the insights or revelations or oblique suggestions which under different circumstances could never have materialized; so does the method of research which was partly evolved by them, partly forced upon them; so does the strange quality of their relationship with those whose lives they so tenderly and sternly respected, and so rashly undertook to investigate and record.

James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

I have chosen to use the word voodoo in its common English orthography throughout the text, rather than the more current and anthropologically acceptable vodun or vaudou. When I write about voodoo in this book, I am examining the historical engagement of outsiders with the religion, and so I wanted to capturewith the very wordall the negativity thats been associated with this ancient form of worship by unschooled visitors and a dismissive outside world.

Apre bal, tanbou lou

After the party, the drums are heavy

Even after an officer from the international police force secured the crisscross seatbelt around me, I didnt feel safe. We were taking a helicopter to a town in the north of Haiti that Id managed never to visit, although Id been coming to Haiti, and sometimes living here, for eight years, and had been almost everywhere that was even remotely accessible. The roads were nearly impassable from Port-au-Prince, Haitis capital, to where we were going that morning, and, as far as I knew, the little town that was our destination had nothing much to recommend it. It was the stuff in between that I wanted to see.

It was late October 1994. Ray Kelly was my guide on this jaunt to the north. The former New York City Police Commissioner had been deployed to help out with the latest U.S. military intervention in Haiti. Kelly was training a new police force in order to keep the Haitian Army in check and, ostensibly, to prevent them from once again overthrowing the elected president of the country, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, whom the army had already tossed out once, and whom the United States had just returned to the presidential palace after three years in exile. The intervention to reimpose Aristide was called Operation Uphold Democracy. Offhand, I cannot recall another U.S. military deployment that performed regime change by reinstating an unseated leader, but Haiti is always singular, and so is Americas long, torrid relationship with it.

We took off. As anyone knows who has experienced helicopter flight, it is an organically counterintuitive thing to go straight up when you are used to the more gradual, more natural upward incline of an airplane. An airplanes flight resembles that of a bird. A helicopters is more like jumping, and the end result of jumping, in practice, is coming back down, almost immediately. Also, I am not at my best in any aircraft. I fear flight, though most of my work requires flying. I didnt want to go on this trip, but a reporter cannot reasonably turn down an offer to fly alongside the American officer in charge of the new police in the country shes been writing about for nearly a decadeeven a reporter who is sensitive to the big fact about helicopters: that if theres a problem, these machines are not aerodynamic. They simply drop to the ground. Anyway, I thought the trip would give me the chance to interview Kelly in an informal setting, as journalists like to say. I didnt know about the noise inside a helicopter, the headgear you have to wear to protect your ears from the sound, the headphone intercom system that the pilots use just to be heard above the din.

So there I was, strapped in. Because the men around me were military men, they left the helicopter doors opennot something I knew could be done in flight. Kelly gave me an evil smile from across the aisle. Mine was a window seat. I prepared to be very, very frightened.

Instead, I was dazzled. Down below me lay Port-au-Prince, a glittering, gorgeous warren of tin shacks and the tiny squared-off fretwork of shantytown after shantytown, with the enormous white presidential palace, where Aristide was presumably working right now, at the center, a palace built by the Marines during an earlier U.S. occupation of Haiti. The shantytowns draped themselves over the hillsides around the capital like sequined gowns, and then we were off to the Artibonite Valley, green, lush, and wide below us, with the brown river flowing through it.

The landscape was wonderful to me. Watching Haiti open up below us was like taking in at one gulp the entire place, with all its social complexity and all its history and geography and topography. It was like looking at what the book I had written about Haiti five years earlier ought to have been, all the knowledge about the country concentrated into a single page scrawled with forest, mountain, river, and sand. Caught up in the emotional surge that flight can trigger, I was transfixed, spellbound. The cresting mountains and the flat green valley, and then the desertified wasteland that spills toward the Caribbeanthe brown, then green, then blue waters reaching out and awayseemed to explain everything to me, all at once. My love of this place (and no other word will do), an overwhelming emotion that I had thought lost to me with time and too much knowledge, came back with the force of pain and ecstasy. I was within inches of the Haitian skies; I was inside the Haitian clouds; I could see all of Haiti.