Greg Beckett - There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince

This is a story. A story about how crisis feels, about what it is like to live your life in the midst of forces that seem destined to destroy you. But its not the story that I set out to write. You might say that the story found me, that I am a part of this story that takes shape somewhere in the gap between hope and despair. And like all stories, it has to start somewhere.

Perhaps it is a long story, spanning centuries. A story full of war and revolution, the rise and fall of kings and countries, the end of empires and the birth of new nations. A story of a new world, of slavery and sugar, of the massive demographic displacement of the Middle Passage. It is an epic story of freedom and rebellion, but also a tragic one of debt and dependency. It is a story of people living and working on their own land, of families growing food and tending crops and making their way in the world. And yet it is also a story of a global economy so vast in scale and scope that it can only be rendered in abstract terms as the momentous struggle between capital and labor. It is a story of the transformation of the environment, the shaping of the landscape, the cutting down of trees and the planting of sugarcane or coffee or other crops destined to be consumed by people on the other side of the world. A story that ends in deforestation and soil erosion as the hills turn to stone and the dirt runs away, to be chased later by the peasants who once farmed those same eroding hills. A story of a city that grew into a monster, a city full of people fleeing what the experts call the crisis of the countryside, a city full of people desperately trying to make a living. There are many places along the way where we could begin, and there are many ways to tell such stories. This story starts here, but it could just as easily have begun somewhere else.

I went to Haiti for the first time in the summer of 2002. Before that, I studied Haitian history and culture for years. When I was in school in the 1990s,

Before I went to Haiti, I moved to Chicago to study anthropology. There, I learned to think about globalization and the world economy from a Caribbean point of view, from a standpoint that made a place like Haiti central to the sweeping arc of world history. I read Haitian history with an eye to the present. I read about the revolution and its aftermath, about the rise of the peasantry and the urban merchant elite, about how the U.S. military occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 set the stage for the economic and political crises that followed. I read about the terror and violence of the Duvalier dictatorship, about the democratic transition and the military coups that came with it, and about the many international interventions that some Haitians call a second occupation. I read about the many crises facing the country, about what the international community referred to as the Haitian crisis, as if the country were inextricably defined by that word. Later, after I went to Haiti, I came to see that the country was not as exceptionalnot as odd as so many people seemed to say it was. It was an ordinary place, a place where the majority of Haitians live quite ordinary lives. They eat what is for themand for many othersquite ordinary food. They die quite ordinary deaths from quite ordinary accidents, quite ordinary tortures, quite ordinary diseases. Accidents so ordinary that they could be prevented. Tortures so ordinary that the international press does not even mention them. Diseases so ordinary that they are easily treated almost anywhere else. And I came to see how the Haitian crisis was ordinary too, that Haiti was a place filled with ordinary crisescrises so ordinary they could easily be prevented.