I said good-bye to my mother only twice in thirty-four years. The first time was when I abandoned her in the Bronx to start a new life at boarding school when I was fourteen years old. I’d earned a scholarship to attend the Emma Willard School in upstate New York, and instead of being proud of my achievement, my mother wailed as though I were the parent leaving her child instead of the reverse.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” my mother, Marguerite, whined with a pout. Along with a borrowed, green suitcase full of my clothing, I carried the confusion, guilt, and shame of leaving my mentally ill mother behind in order to make a life for myself. But I still left.
If there’s such a thing as a normal mother-daughter relationship, what I had with my mother was far from that. Our bond was unbreakable, yet destructive. I was the baby, the last of Marguerite’s five children, and had been born to replace my brother, José, who had been killed in a bus accident when he was twelve. My name is a combination of José and Shunda, and as far back as I can remember, my mother instilled the importance of my life being a tribute to my dead brother.
Marguerite possessed a euphoric mix of bipolar and borderline personality disorders that enthralled me like a whirling dervish. A big-boned, black, Cherokee woman, she spread panic and jubilee whenever she moved. The frayed bangs of her wig splayed around her chiseled cheekbones, and her always-damp skin excreted cheap perfume. A permanent wind seemed to encircle Marguerite, swirling the Holy Spirit around her omnipresent rosary in a way that was messy, endearing, and violent.
My childhood was tormented by my mother’s unpredictable fists, which came interspersed with love in the form of exclamation points. One moment my mother would brutally beat me and call me out of my name like a demon possessed. The next moment she would be a total goofball, dancing wildly to Tina Turner by shaking her shoulders and hips like a quarterback in the end zone after a touchdown.
As a young adolescent, I wanted my mother dead during the worst of her manic episodes. She frightened me by disregarding adult responsibilities, like paying the rent and shopping for groceries. We moved so many times that by the time I left to attend the Emma Willard School, I found stillness and quiet suspicious.
I had no instruction guide on how to deal with my mother’s moods, and I didn’t know her narcissistic fury was the result of untreated mental illness. To be black in America, popular culture suggests, is to be crazy. The only escape was flight.
So, I packed my things and my mother wept. Her tears continued right up until I boarded the bus to leave. “Good-bye,” I said flatly, my stoic demeanor a defense against the range of emotions that tugged at my soul.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving me,” she responded, giving me a trademark sloppy kiss that left her maroon lipstick smudged on my cheek. “I will miss you.”
My mom called me daily, then weekly. Since “good-bye” was her least favorite word, she would always end our calls by simply hanging up.
After I graduated from boarding school, I went to Vassar College. In the land of “normal” folks, most of them white and wealthy, I learned that the isolation and chaos of poverty was just one kind of childhood trauma. There were other traumas that came to pass in other kinds of families. Some of my classmates had been raised with too much money and not enough love. Others developed a deep self-loathing that led to self-imposed starvation. Seeing this was the start of my process of understanding my relationship with my mother.
I began to heal from my tumultuous past when I understood my mother’s emotional flaws emerged not from a faulty heart that was incapable of nurturing, but from a chemical neurological imbalance. Realizing the true culprit of my struggles with my mother, I wanted Marguerite to live forever so I could also free her from the tangled mess of our dysfunctional history.
At the beginning of my sophomore year at Vassar College, my mother was evicted from our Bronx apartment and moved across the street from me in Poughkeepsie. I’d stumble out of bed to the cafeteria and find her there, showing pictures of me to the kitchen staff. If she had any boundaries, she never let on.
In my twenties, I left the state and eventually settled in Texas. I carried the inexplicable hope that my mother would get well on her own, that she and I would eventually chuckle about how she ran up my phone bill by calling me at 5 a.m. regularly. But our final good-bye came in a flash, and it was a mixed blessing.
On the heels of my father’s suicide, my mother was diagnosed with terminal cervical cancer. That Christmas, I returned home to spend the holidays with her. The cancer had shrunk her body in a way that made her appear older than seventy-two. She was in a lot of pain, so a nurse administered morphine.
“I love you,” I told her quietly, as she stared at me blankly. “I will miss you.”
“Good-bye,” I thought, but didn’t say, when I walked out of the room.
My mother died six days before my thirty-fourth birthday. When my sister called to deliver the news, I felt bereft and relieved. I understood that my mother’s death was my clarion call, a way for me to be born again and rise from the ashes of our story.
Marguerite’s unexpected passing required me to take a longer, more compassionate view of the many wounds she left behind. My mother never acknowledged that she needed my forgiveness, but I needed to forgive her for never fighting for a better life or her own well-being. I understood my mother had been the best version of herself that she could be, but I never got to thank her or tell her I’d be fine after she was gone. Maybe she understood the words that were left unspoken, just like she understood good-bye.
Talk of climate change seems to be everywhere these days. From elected officials in Washington, DC, to the farmers of rural India, people hold wildly divergent opinions about the ways climate change is affecting our lives, and the impact it will have in the future. In spite of widespread disagreement, many people are already seeing the consequences of climate change in the form of more storms, less rainfall, and severe flooding in their countries. Although the slower-onset disasters may be imperceptible to some, the rising sea levels, higher global temperatures, and food shortages are being endured by many.
In a deeply unjust twist to this story, the people who are most vulnerable to climate change’s harshest effects are those who contribute to the problem the least: millions of the world’s poor. A 2009 report by the Global Humanitarian Forum estimates that 315,000 people die every year as a result of climate change. The injustice of the equation is striking, and so far action to solve the problem has been insufficient compared to the need. Fortunately, there is still time to turn some of the impact of climate change around and solve what some world leaders are calling the greatest emerging humanitarian challenge of our time.
In their book, The Human Face of Climate Change, Swiss photographers Mathias Braschler and Monika Fischer present a glimpse into the lives of people who have suffered various hardships brought about by climate change. The images and stories of people from sixteen countries across all continents are at once beautiful and heartbreaking.
In Santa Barbara, California, sixty-six-year-old Christine Powell had to move in with her child after a wildfire destroyed her home and all her belongings. “The morning after the fire, everything I owned was suddenly gone,” she said. “I woke up in the middle of the night and cried in a way I had never done before.”
A forty-year-old fisherwoman from Havana, Cuba, lost her home and possessions in a hurricane. “We have gone through the toughest time,” said Estrella Sosa Osorio. “Even if we pray to God, I don’t think the hurricanes are going to stop.”
Shortages of water and food threaten the lives of people whose means of subsistence are tied to the regularity of the seasons. A fifty-nine-year-old farmer in Chad explained, “There are no more fish and no water. The rainy season is late. It takes three hours to walk to the lake from here. We are all tired of this situation, but have nowhere to go.”
These harrowing stories serve as a reminder that tackling this global challenge cannot wait. With the world continually shrinking, it is our collective responsibility to do what is necessary for the sake of all humankind.
Watch this short video made by the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation featuring some of the photographs and stories from The Human Face of Climate Change.
I discovered I had bibliophilic tendencies when I was a child, and though I’d like to attribute this trait to precocious proclivities, it was more likely the personal pan pizza BOOK IT!® awards my elementary school gave out for reading. I grew up on a household where fast food was a luxury my single mother could not afford. So, in order to earn a dinnertime treat for my sisters and me, I would obsessively read.
The incentive program eventually paid off in more than individual-sized pizzas; it turned me into a lifelong, avid reader. Today, I actively read no fewer than four books at a time, with a stack of ten or more in reserve. I keep fiction in the mix to maintain creative sanity, scholarly writing to encourage new ways of thinking, memoir fulfills my desire to hear intimate stories, and bestselling nonfiction is excellent fodder for conversation among strangers. I like to have a variety of options from which to choose depending on my mood, and I keep books in various locations — my bag, next to the bed, in the kitchen — so I can access them with ease.
Books are both a comfort and a challenge. Although the completest in me makes every effort to read each one from beginning to end, pragmatism alleviates the guilt of setting a partially finished novel or dry bestseller aside. Life’s too brief to trudge through prose you don’t find pleasing or short stories that put you to sleep. On Saturday I entered my thirty-third year, and I’m celebrating by sharing thirty-three quotes from works I’ve gained something from reading. Perhaps you’ll gain something by reading them, too.
“She wanted a book to take her places she couldn’t get to herself. She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.” ― Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot
“Being comically generative and having a sense of humor are one and the same thing. The former is among the least important things in the world, while the latter is among the most. One is a handy social tool, the other an integral component of human survival.… Not being funny doesn’t make you a bad person. Not having a sense of humor does.” ― David Rakoff, Fraud: Essays
“Empathy has the potential to be the first, crucial step on the way to solidarity — not just feeling someone else’s pain, but working together to try and cure it.” ― Gary Younge, Who Are We ― and Should It Matter in the 21st Century?
“It’s alright that there are things you do not get over, not really. You just go on, knowing that the things you love could be stripped from you at any moment, remembering to love them now. It makes you human. You try to be decent and treat people gently, knowing that they, too, have their scars and madnesses that, like yours, do not show.” ― Joy Castro, The Truth Book
“I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I’m gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter.” ― Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children
“If you’re an introvert, find your flow by using your gifts. You have the power of persistence, the tenacity to solve complex problems, and the clear-sightedness to avoid pitfalls that trip others up. You enjoy relative freedom from the temptations of superficial prizes like money and status. Indeed, your biggest challenge may be to fully harness your strengths. You may be so busy trying to appear like a zestful, reward-sensitive extrovert that you undervalue your own talents, or feel underestimated by those around you. But when you’re focused on a project that you care about, you probably find that your energy is boundless. So stay true to your own nature.” — Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking
“Even in the moments when you don’t think you are moving forward, you really are.” — Claire Bidwell Smith, The Rules of Inheritance
“Writing is hard for every last one of us.… Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig.” — Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
“Don’t push too hard; your last chance to see a person the way you wanted them to be may come at any moment.” — Danielle Evans, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self
“Dialogue cannot exist without humility. The naming of the world, through which people constantly re-create that world, cannot be an act of arrogance. How can I dialogue if I am closed to — and even offended by — the contribution of others? How can I dialogue if I am afraid of being displaced? Dialogue requires an intense faith in humankind, faith in their power to make and remake, to create and re-create, faith in their vocation to be more fully human (which is not the privilege of an elite, but the birthright of all).” — Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
“I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.” ― Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“The experience of cross-cultural living reminds us, not in an intellectual way, but in a firsthand way — full of wincing, shame, hope, and disappointment (and often laughter, both at us and by us) — that, in fact, we know very little about the way things really are.” — Sarah Davis, Being There: Learning to Live Cross-Culturally
“We must find a way to continue dreaming of each other. If it seems simple, it should. If we could just rest our minds a minute, it might even be easy. The more difficult it gets to clear the necessary space, the more necessary that space becomes.” — Michelle Orange, This Is Running For Your Life
“We do not need to become each other in order to work together. But we do need to recognize each other, our differences as well as the sameness of our goals. Not for altruism. For self-preservation — survival. Every day of your lives is practice in becoming the person you want to be. No instantaneous miracle is suddenly going to occur and make you brave and courageous and true.” — Audre Lorde, I Am Your Sister
“The assumption that if somebody commits a serious crime they have to go to prison is based on the idea that crime is a deviant form of behavior and criminals should be separated from the rest of society. I understood crime as a process, not an isolated action or deviance from correct behavior, but rather the consequence of a system that produces a criminal class and also benefits from it.” — Jana Leo, Rape New York
“They stood up, his hand still in hers, and went inside. Somehow, without saying anything, it had turned into this. Into an exchange of confessions — the little ways they’d hurt or disappointed each other, and themselves.” — Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of Maladies
“Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” — Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“I took it as a given that women like me would have to do it the hard way, steal time away from my day job, work without an editor or ready reader, and never have any confidence that what I was writing would be anything that anyone would want to read. But I never considered not writing.” — Dorothy Allison, An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots
“She placed both hands on his shoulders and gazed at him for a long time with a deep, rapturous, and at the same time searching look. She studied his face to make up for the time in which she had not seen him. As at every meeting, she was bringing together her imaginary idea of him (an incomparably better one, impossible in reality) with him as he was.” — Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
“A society’s social policies should support morally justified reproductive needs and choices and provide assistance in acting on them. Individuals making choices about procreation should not and cannot be regarded as acting in a social void.” — Christine Overall, Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate
“I care because I want you to care about me. I care because I have become aware of my absolute dependency upon you, whoever you are, for the quality and the outcome of my social, my democratic experience.” — June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die
“There is no way to do it right. You cannot have it all. Something has to give. You won’t know what it was you gave up until it is too late to recover.” — Danzy Senna, You Are Free
“One morning I awoke to find that, during the course of the night, my mind had completely ejected the names of all the streets in Pakistan, as though to assure that I could not return, or that if I did, it would be returning to a loss.” — Sara Suleri Goodyear, And the World Changed: Contemporary Stories by Pakistani Women
“Growing up in a house full of siblings and failing to make the most of that lucky accident of birth is like inheriting a thousand acres of fertile farmland and never planting it. You can always get your food elsewhere, but think of what you’re allowing to lie fallow.” — Jeffrey Kluger, The Sibling Effect: What the Bonds Among Brothers and Sisters Reveal About Us
“The demand for women’s safety is inevitably articulated in terms of surveillance and protectionism and contributes to reducing rather than expanding women’s access to public space.” — Shilpa Phadke, Why Loiter? Women and Risk on Mumbai Streets
“At first, as they stood there, their hands were clenched together. They relaxed slowly until during the walk back home their fingers were laced in as gentle a clasp as that of any two young girlfriends trotting up the road on a summer day wondering what happened to butterflies in the winter.” ― Toni Morrison, Sula
“Writing is an activity that colludes with you. It’s absorbing, gratifying, and creates the powerful illusion of escape to another world, another existance. At the same time, it’s keeping you exactly where you are, wasting time, not really changing anything. But the alchemy of publication can sometimes achieve that.” ― Carrie Jones, Cutting Up Playgirl
“The language of choice invokes free will based on individual freedom, obscuring the interplay between social constraints and human activity. Choices are primed by larger institutional structures and ideological messages.” ― Irene Vilar, Impossible Motherhood: Testimony of an Abortion Addict
“This was what I required of love: an equality in which no one accused the other of being an irrational female, or an oblivious male. We both understood that we shared the burden of being flawed.” ― Carlene Bauer, Not That Kind of Girl
“For us, writing isn’t a career so much as it is a vocation, a life saver, a way to prove, to ourselves at least, that we actually exist, that our struggles aren’t for nothing, that our lives are meaningful, are triumphant. We write to release old injustices and abuses, to make sense of them, to contextualize ourselves. We write to tell the truth…so that we can finally see our experiences portrayed honestly, in many dimensions.” — Michelle Tea, Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class
In a recent email exchange, an acquaintance wrote, “I’ve got nothing but love for my culture and my people.” As someone who writes about ethnic and national identity, this statement immediately piqued my interest.
When spoken by a person of color, as it was in this case, this sentiment comes across as an uncomplicated and straightforward expression of ethnic and cultural pride. America has seen progress recently, but negative depictions of people of color have permeated U.S. history. As a result, some Americans from groups that have faced discrimination push back against these negative depictions by expressing strong feelings of pride and solidarity. As a white, Jewish American, I considered how I express my relationship to my own culture, ethnicity, and national identity.
I benefit in countless ways from being seen as white, no matter my self-identification or feelings of affinity with white people as a group. My whiteness is complicated by the fact that I’m Jewish, which means many racist white nationalists don’t see me as white. And my Jewishness is qualified by my nonconformity to Hasidic tradition, which would clearly mark me as such were I to follow it.
I identify with Jewish history in a personal way, but would I say Jews are “my people,” and that I love their/our/my Jewish culture? I certainly feel more connection to the American Jewish community than I do to whites in general because of our shared history and cultural similarities. When I think of American Jews, and even Jews worldwide, I think in terms of “us.”
Ultimately, being an American is my primary group identity. I strongly identify as a part of this group whose shared, multifaceted history is defined by cultural, religious, ethnic, sexual, and ideological diversity and a commitment to democratic principles. I can’t say I love American culture in its entirety, but I believe Americans have an obligation to one another to contribute to a common good. I believe in a culture that demands respect for our differences of opinion and desire for freedom. This isn’t love in the way I love my family and closest friends, but it is a meaningful feeling of community and national pride.
Loving my fellow Americans doesn’t mean I feel negatively toward people from other countries, and it doesn’t mean I think America is perfect. I’m fully aware of this country’s strengths and its flaws, of the tremendously positive and the terribly harmful treatment America has shown to Americans and foreigners alike. Taken as a whole, I identify with American history much like Michael Lind: “Even if our genetic grandparents came from Finland or Indonesia, as Americans, we are all descendants of George Washington—and his slaves.”
Feeling connected to my country and to all its citizens is consistent with my progressive beliefs, in particular because Americanness can be — even though it hasn’t always been — an inclusive form of national identity. Americanness can offer a model whereby people of every imaginable background see themselves as part of a single community, a model that stands in powerful contrast to fundamentalism and hate. That’s the kind of identity that builds bridges rather than walls. And that’s the kind of America I can wholeheartedly love.
In her deeply personal account of life in post-earthquake Haiti, journalist Amy Wilentz looks at how outsiders' distorted views of the country have misrepresented its culture and history and encumbered its progress.
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti By Amy Wilentz
Simon & Schuster. 352 pages.
Amy Wilentz first visited Haiti in 1986, when she was a writer for Time magazine and the ousting of dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier was underway. Admittedly, Wilentz was not the type of foreign correspondent who traveled from war zone to war zone, or from one uprising to the next in pursuit of a grand and dramatic news event. Rather, Wilentz’s journalistic demeanor ran more along the lines of observational witness; she was a spectator of all that surrounded her, and sparked her imagination and curiosity.
Yet, when it came to Haiti, there was something “eternal” about the country that called to Wilentz. She had read The Comedians, Graham Greene’s 1966 novel about the reign of Jean-Claude’s father, François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, and scenes from the book remained etched in her mind.
Elected president in 1957, Papa Doc Duvalier is one of history’s most unforgettable political figures. His fourteen-year reign was the longest and most brutal in Haiti’s history. To quash political dissent, and protect himself from being overthrown, Duvalier created the Tonton Macoute, a personal police force that terrorized citizens and assassinated anyone Duvalier thought was a threat. In 1971, when Jean-Claude succeeded his father as president, Duvalier-style despotism continued.
From her office in Manhattan, Wilentz perused the daily news written by Haitian exiles in the 1980s, which heralded Baby Doc’s impending departure from power. Wilentz felt an impulse to witness the end of the Duvalier era. Plus, she wanted a firsthand look at the Tonton Macoute, which was still in use by Baby Doc. With guns tucked into their waistlines and hats lowered over their sunglasses, the Tonton Macoute haughtily prowled Haiti’s streets to search for so-called troublemakers.
Thus began Wilentz’s love affair with Haiti. Her decades-long relationship with “La Perle des Antilles” (“The Pearl of the Caribbean”) has been anything but straightforward, simple, effortless, or predictable. In her first book about Haiti, The Rainy Season, Wilentz chronicled a nation and a people that were oppressed by the Duvalier regimes’ terror and totalitarianism. In her latest book, Farewell, Fred Voodoo, a deeply personal narrative about post-earthquake Haiti and Wilentz’s connection to the place, she revisits the country to listen to Haitians and recount her astute, unvarnished impressions.
Hello, Fred Voodoo
Wilentz’s experiences on her initial trip to Haiti commenced her “Haitian education,” and introduced her to stereotypes of Haitians invented by the outside world. One stereotype that persisted was the idea of “Fred Voodoo” — a dismissive term used by many reporters to refer to the ordinary Haitian man (or woman) on the street. “Fred Voodoo” could be a presidential candidate, a market lady, a renowned academic, a taxi driver, an unwed mother, or an Army general.
In 1986, Wilentz routinely interviewed Haitians, who told her what it was like to not have enough food for themselves and their families, and who wondered what it was like to live in a real house, not a shantytown shack. They discussed what it would be like to live freely and vote openly for a president who cares about ordinary Haitians and their suffering. They talked about democracy.
That was in 1986.
In 2010, after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck, many Haitians Wilentz interviewed still said a lot of the same things. Although this time they added more details of death and dying, blood, pandemonium, loss, amputation, starvation, and fear.
Returning to Haiti almost didn’t happen for Wilentz. She knew an abundance of international relief groups with “their money [and] their development résumés” would descend on a nation that already had more than ten thousand aid organizations in operation before the earthquake. She wasn’t sure she could tolerate a “salvation fantasy” from the international community, in which well-intentioned, post-disaster relief workers insist their presence would solve Haiti’s unmanageable, centuries-old troubles. Exasperated by the media’s reductionist portrayals of Haitians in despair — which she calls “the objectification of the Haitians’ victimization” — Wilentz wondered if she could “bear to watch the difficult lives of most Haitians rendered even more unbearable by this dreadful event.”
But she could not stay away. Within two weeks of the earthquake, Wilentz was back in Haiti for what may have been her thirtieth or fortieth visit. (She lost count after so many years.) The experience was consequential. She explains:
This book in your hands, then, is my attempt to put Haiti back together again for myself, to understand why all the simplest hopes and dreams of the men and women [that outsiders] call Fred Voodoo have been abandoned, and to stack the pieces flung apart by the earthquake back up into some semblance of the real country. I wanted to figure out, after so many attempts by so many to uphold democracy, why Fred and all his brothers and sisters have become, in our eyes at least, mere victims, to be counted up on one ledger or another as interesting statistics, casualties of dictatorship, of poverty, of disaster, of outside interference, of neglect, of history — of whatever you want to point a finger at — rather than as active commanders of their own destiny.
Amy Wilentz. Paula Goldman
“Nothing You See Is What It Seems to Be.”
The long-standing misapprehension about Haiti and Haitian identity has everything to do with the country’s history, religion, culture, isolation, and relationship to the United States. As Wilentz discusses in great detail, and with keen insight: “[Haiti] defies categorization.… It’s eccentric and unexpected. At every corner, in every conversation, with every new event, Haiti makes you think, it challenges you.”
One of the many indeterminable stereotypes about Haitians is that “ninety percent of Haitians are Catholics, and one hundred percent are voudouisant, or voodoo worshippers.” Wilentz attended several voodoo ceremonies, during which various African gods were worshiped and spirit possession occurred. At the end of these “stunningly theatrical and participatory” services, she wondered whether Haitians really believe in voodoo, or if its practice is more tradition than conviction.
Wilentz knows this question is formalistic, and the answer is as enigmatic as the country itself. “Tou sa ou we, se pa sa,” a Haitian proverb warns. It translates to: “Nothing you see is what it seems to be.” Still, Wilentz doesn’t sit back and leave a gap in her analysis. She delves deeply into voodoo’s cultural importance.
“For most Haitians at a ceremony,” Wilentz asserts, “this is community, escape, entertainment, and as much transcendence as is allowed to them. For others, the ceremony represents Haitian patrimony and inheritance, and they take pride in it even when they have little or no religious belief.… This is a culture that values theater and a certain degree of artifice, even a great degree. Artifice and duplicity were natural and necessary survival methods during slavery.… How much of what the white man sees in Haiti is specifically a show for the white man to see — and this not just in terms of voodoo ceremonies, and not just today?”
Although an answer is unattainable, a look at Haitian history is instructive. In 1804, after obtaining freedom from France in the only successful slave-led revolution in history, Haiti became the first independent black nation in the Western world, but its legitimacy was suspect because it was ruled by descendants of slaves. After wresting power and prosperity from a European colonial power, Haiti was regarded by many as a nation that “never really had the right to exist.” As Frederick Douglass said in a speech at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, “We have not yet forgiven Haiti for being black.”
Haiti is much like the U.S. and France, countries whose histories cite revolution as a defining force that established sovereignty and national identity. Haiti’s revolutionary forefathers — Henri Christophe, Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines — maintain a presence in many Haitians’ minds similar to that of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson for Americans. Folklore has it that Dessalines “ripped the white stripe from the French tricolore in order to create the new red and blue Haitian flag, [sending] the message [that] the white man will have nothing to do with [Haitians’] destiny.”
It wasn’t to be.
For more than a century, France forced Haiti to pay reparations for the loss of the slave economy, while the slaveholding U.S. imposed a burdensome embargo that crippled the fledgling nation’s integration into the world economy. The U.S. occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, and it has meddled in the country’s affairs ever since.
Wilentz explains that, for almost all of the twentieth century, only U.S.-approved Haitians were allowed to become president in Haiti. She also cites a U.S.-led military intervention in 1994, Operation Uphold Democracy, that re-imposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. (Aristide had been overthrown by the Haitian Army just three years before the U.S. intervention.)
“I cannot recall another U.S. military deployment that performed regime change by reinstating an unseated leader,” Wilentz writes.”But Haiti is always singular, and so is America’s long, torrid relationship with it.”
Wilentz continues:
How Haiti works in general has historically had more to do with foreigners than is the case in most other countries, and this has never been so obvious as in the post-earthquake era. With so many coming down to assist in relief and reconstruction, so much of it concentrated in the capital, it has sometimes felt as though the country is being taken over by a new occupation, by a different kind of army.…
Rather than disrupting old ways of thinking about Haiti, the earthquake allowed many commentators, political analysts, and columnists to restate what they’d always imagined to be true about the world’s first black republic. The white Western world has a tendency, when confronted by Haiti’s intractable problems, to fall back on easy stereotypes and a deep-rooted, unconscious racism that suggests to them that this is all “depressing” and “hopeless,” and that somehow all the problems are the fault of this irresponsible, ungovernable people, with their weird old African customs and religion. It’s all Fred Voodoo’s fault.
But in fact, this depression and hopelessness come from “experts” who don’t understand Haiti, don’t acknowledge its strengths (and don’t know them), don’t get its culture or are philosophically opposed to what they assume its culture is, and don’t know its history in any meaningful way.
Despite billions of dollars in aid that flowed into Haiti, and thousands of relief workers who donated their time, it’s no secret that the country remains in disrepair. Wilentz is unsparing in her criticism of the failures of the international community and the Haitian government, and her writing on their dereliction is superb. She is unafraid to ask whether it is worth continuing to provide humanitarian assistance to a “kleptocratic” country that lacks a “functioning government that works for the people.”
Two Westerners who receive indisputable praise from Wilentz for “getting Haiti” are Megan Coffee, a doctor who cares for tuberculosis patients at her perpetually under-resourced Port-au-Prince clinic, and actor Sean Penn, who ran a refugee camp and moved refugees to real housing within days of the earthquake.
In the end, the most profound and perplexing question Wilentz asks, and tries to answer, is: “All the outsiders who come to Haiti, and come again, and never absolutely leave … what is it they get out of Haiti? This is the mystery I was trying to solve, after all. What do I get out of Haiti?”
At this point, Farewell, Fred Voodoo comes full circle. Wilentz’s love affair continues, yet it is changed. Indeed, Wilentz is changed. After “years of being schooled by Haiti,” she realizes the lessons have exacted an emotional toll.
“This book is … what I’m doing to relieve the pain,” she confides. “Putting down these marks across my computer screen: I can feel the release.… Yet what I’ve done in Haiti, what I’ve achieved with marks on paper, I cannot help but feel is useless, especially in the wake of this terrible disaster.”
Is Farewell, Fred Voodoo Wilentz’s goodbye letter to Haiti? For both her readers and a country that has been misunderstood for so long, I hope it is not so.
Last month after a dinner, I was sitting in my friend’s car, and for the first time in our two-year relationship, we discussed our shared experience of growing up with abusive fathers and abused mothers who did nothing to save us. Recently, I’ve been making an effort to be more transparent about the experiences I had growing up, opening up in ways that go beyond the obligatory statement that my dad isn’t a nice man.
“How do you explain this to people?” I asked my friend. “How do you explain that you were terrorized by your parent when you were a kid, continue to endure their abuse as an adult, and still go out of your way to help and care for them?”
My friend, who finds himself in oddly similar circumstances to mine, replied, “You can’t explain it. It’s cultural.”
I am a twenty-eight-year-old Latina feminist who lives with her dad. Every day, I pack his lunch for work. Every day, I make him dinner and literally serve him his meal. I buy all of his groceries. I give him money. I help him pay the mortgage and utility bills. I can afford to move out and live on my own, but I don’t because I feel an obligation to look after my father.
Everything I do is with the hope of making him proud, making him feel loved, and trying to repair whatever is broken inside of him that causes him to be abusive. But the thing that makes him so unkind and me so invisible in his eyes is that I am not one of his sons. I am the same knobby-kneed kid who cowered in a closet, covering my eyes with my hands and praying for the slapping to stop. I am the seven-year-old girl who ran as fast as I could through my childhood home, trying to avoid the belt licking at the backs of my legs. I am the tiny child with long hair and big brown eyes whose mom clutched her against her chest, whispering, “Tell your daddy to be nice to me.”
There is a big part of me that still plays the role of peacemaker. Despite my dad being a small man, he seemed to tower over my mom and me. Even though I was terrified as he stood shaking with rage, I would still speak up and tell him to be nice to my mom. On those days, I saved her at the expense of myself.
Now, twenty years have passed, and my dad is not the same man he used to be. Time has mellowed him out, and he is more lighthearted. The smiles come a little easier, but he still rarely has a kind thing to say about anyone and still knows nothing of gratitude. My dad doesn’t hit me anymore, but I still remember the countless times I’ve wished he would disappear to deny him the satisfaction of my tears and knowing his barbed tongue had once again hurt me deeply.
I am fully aware of how crazy my actions seem to those who grew up in families that shared a healthy love, cultures that don’t emphasize caring for one’s elders, or with parents who demand that respect be earned, not given. I want to be more than the “good Latina daughter” who did everything she was supposed to at her own expense. It is my hope that I will one day learn to love my father in a healthy way, even if he is unable to do the same in return.
My first step has been to have honest conversations in an attempt to unravel the connections between Latinas and family and violence. When I recently interviewed artist Favianna Rodriguez, who has struggled immensely with the expectations thrust upon her by her family and community, she told me that the most important and transformative work we can do is within our own families. You can love your people and your culture, but that doesn’t mean you can’t openly address their shortcomings.
For me, loving my culture means wanting to embrace it and smash it at the same time. It means I am proud of who I am and have immense love for my family, in spite of the machismo and patriarchy that was deeply ingrained in my home. It means I have so much work to do, so many chains to break, and so many generations of abuse to unlearn.
Growing up in Mexico with an alcoholic, abusive father, a complacent mother, and fifteen siblings he felt responsible for, my dad never made the connection between his hitting my mom and me and the violence he experienced as a child. Despite knowing the tragedy of being beaten by someone he loved, he couldn’t understand how to spare us from experiencing the same. Although they possessed the virtue of being born male, my brothers did not escape our father’s beatings, and they inherited some of his vices.
In some ways, writing these words feels like a betrayal to my father and brothers. I am finding the courage to speak about the things we’ve been taught not to publicly discuss. But it’s a crucial step for my health and my healing. Attempting to unravel what it means to be a Latina in a violent and unhealthy family is vital not only to my own recovery, but it is connected with the recovery of a culture that understands we must unravel our pain together.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, tonight In The Fraytweeted links from stories we’ve published over the past decade that relate to violence against women. We joined thousands of other individuals and groups in a twenty-four-hour, global tweet-a-thon to raise awareness about gender-based violence. In case you were asleep during our time slot, here are the links we tweeted:
The topline numbers in the recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center are not good. There are now more hard-right, antigovernment “Patriot” groups than there were at the movement’s previous heyday in the mid-1990s. The number of hate groups identified by the SPLC has been on a steady climb over the past dozen years.
Among other factors, the election and reelection of America’s first black president has fueled the growth of extremist groups. From the report:
“Since Obama’s first term, our numbers have doubled and now we’re headed to a second term, it’s going to triple,” one Virginia Klansman told WTVR-TV in Richmond. Daniel Miller, president of the secessionist Texas National Movement, said that his membership shot up 400% after Obama’s re-election. White News Now, a website run by white supremacist Jamie Kelso, said that it had had “an incredible year” in the run-up to the vote, reaching more people than ever.
Meanwhile, the paranoid ideas of these extremist groups have gained traction in recent years — what the SPLC has called the “mainstreaming of formerly marginal conspiracy theories.” One such theory centers on Agenda 21, a plan put forth by the U.N. and signed by President George H.W. Bush. The plan — in reality, a statement of goals lacking any enforcement mechanism — promotes sustainable development through, for example, environmental protection, altering patterns of consumption, and population control. The John Birch Society (yes, the group that accused President Eisenhower of being a communist and traitor) and others have pushed the idea that one day the federal government will use Agenda 21 for legal authority to ignore individual liberty and property rights and impose a collectivist system on the United States. To see how far this idea has been mainstreamed, just look at the official 2012 Republican Party platform, which declares: “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”
In a previous post, I explored some of the delusional, racist paranoia coming from the extreme right on the gun issue. For some people it’s not easy to adjust to demographic changes, and unfortunately some media personalities and political figures are willing to exploit anxiety about them to advance their own causes and careers. Some people don’t like the idea of a black president, or the fact that white Americans may not be a majority of the population in a couple of generations.
To be clear, one need not be a bigot to express concerns about how best to integrate large numbers of immigrants. But racial and cultural anxieties do underlie those concerns for a segment of the white population. The most extreme identify as white nationalists. The adherents of this cause, historian Leonard Zeskind explains, are “dedicated to the proposition that those they deem to be ‘white’ own special rights: the right to dominate political institutions, the economy, and culture. They believe that a ‘whites-only’ nation exists in fact, if not in name. And they swear to a duty to create a whites-only nation-state on soil that was once the United States of America.”
In a recent article, I discussed these white nationalists, and what I see as their potential to weaken or even break the bonds that tie together Americans of different ethnic backgrounds:
[They] cling to an imagined definition of what America once was — an America that valued them because of the one thing no one can take from them: their whiteness. They fear that if America is not “white” then they will be second-class citizens.… These extremists need not turn us into a racialist, genocidal totalitarian state in order to cause serious damage to the fabric of our society. Just think of what a few more Timothy McVeigh-type attacks might do. We ignore their alienation at our peril.
Gun rights advocate Larry Pratt at a 2011 political conference in Reno, Nevada. Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia
What are they afraid of? Apparently, when it comes to the issue of gun control, some activists in the gun rights movement are really afraid of a race war. Take a listen to a recent conversation on the Talk to Solomon Show. On the air with host Stan Solomon were Greg W. Howard, a conservative blogger with just under 100,000 Twitter followers, and Larry Pratt, an advocate of gun rights and “English only” laws who famously clashed with CNN’s Piers Morgan in an interview after the Sandy Hook shooting.
The discussion that transpired was like a dramatic reading of The Turner Diaries, that influential (and fictional) book about violent revolution and racial war in America. Pratt argued that President Obama is building his own private army and will send his agents “door to door” to “confiscate guns” — all to provoke a “violent confrontation” with gun owners. Solomon went further, claiming that Obama’s real goal is to create a black army and start a race war. Howard condemned Obama for “sowing the seeds of racial hatred,” adding that the president is “not American” because he was “not raised in American culture.”
It is worth noting that Gun Owners of America, of which Pratt is executive director, has 300,000 members. (Ron Paul, the Texas congressman and former Republican presidential candidate, once called it “the only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington” — take that, National Rifle Association!) Yet even a national figure like Pratt can entertain the paranoid fantasy of a race war, telling his colleagues on the air that Obama “would definitely be capable of something as evil as you were suggesting.” In the past, Pratt has gotten in trouble for his ties to white supremacist and anti-Semitic organizations, but his popularity has only grown in recent years. After Morgan called Pratt “an unbelievably stupid man” for arguing that gun bans don’t reduce violent crime, tens of thousands of people flooded a White House petition site calling for the British television host’s deportation.
The fear of a race war is clearly delusional, but it draws strength from the half-truths and outlandish comments that reverberate in the partisan media’s echo chamber. For example, black nationalist leader Louis Farrakhan said in a recent interview that the film Django Unchained — a fictional account of a freed slave seeking retribution — is “preparation for a race war.” Conservative media — from Rush Limbaugh to Fox News to Breitbart.com — breathlessly spread word of Farrakhan’s remarks. With pundits so willing to piece together high-level conspiracies out of random shouts and murmurs, it’s no wonder our politics have become so toxic.
Today, the most prominent voice on behalf of gun rights is Wayne LaPierre, the NRA’s executive vice president. LaPierre doesn’t talk about race wars, but racial anxiety underlies many of his public comments. In a recent essay attacking gun control in the Daily Caller, he referred to post-Hurricane Sandy “looters” who “ran wild in South Brooklyn” and “Latin American drug gangs” who have “invaded” every major city. “Good Americans” must arm themselves, he wrote, “to withstand the siege that is coming.”
LaPierre and the NRA don’t have to say “race war” because Larry Pratt has. But their crusade against gun control benefits from the hysteria and paranoia that such reckless, inflammatory rhetoric incites. By exploiting racial fears, these demagogues may be helping their narrow cause, but they are poisoning the very idea of America — a pluralistic society that is built on trust and responsibility.
Three men carried out an acid attack on the Bolshoi Ballet's artistic director in January, police say, and one of the celebrated company's dancers has now confessed. But the Bolshoi is not unique in the intensity of its artistic jealousies. From Moscow to London to New York, all the world's a blood-drenched stage.
Dmitri Medvedev, then president of Russia, meets with ballet dancers during a 2011 visit to the Bolshoi Theater. Sergei Filin is at right. Photo courtesy of Kremlin.ru
There is something particularly vicious about an acid attack. In January, a masked assailant chased down the Bolshoi Ballet’s artistic director outside his home in Moscow and threw a jar of sulfuric acid in his face, disfiguring him and severely damaging his eyes. “I fell on my face in the snow and began to rub snow in my face and eyes,” the victim, Sergei Filin, later told Russian state television. “I was in terrible, unbearable pain.”
Someone clearly wanted the ballet company’s handsome artistic director to suffer. (Just today, Moscow police announced that a Bolshoi dancer and two other men have confessed to carrying out the attack.) For his part, Filin insisted that rivals within the company were to blame. News reports portrayed the Bolshoi as a hotbed of uncontrolled ego and tawdry scandal, fascinating both ballet enthusiasts and people who wouldn’t know an arabesque from an assemblé. Before the attack, Filin had been harassed repeatedly, his tires slashed and his email hacked. Before Filin’s tenure as artistic director, a series of directors had left after short, acrimonious stints. Indeed, since its founding in 1776, ambition, political connections, and rivalry have been the other backdrops to the Bolshoi’s productions, preserved in colorful — and bloody — tales of dead cats thrown on stage and broken glass slipped into toeshoes.
It’s tempting to crack Black Swan jokes, but for all its dysfunction the Bolshoi is not unique in the intensity of its artistic jealousies. There is a long history of violent rivalry in the performing arts, and stages in Moscow, London, and New York have seen their share of blood spilt.
In Elizabethan London, quarrels could escalate into swordfights, and the city’s theaters saw some of that action. In 1598, playwright and poet Ben Jonson, a contemporary of William Shakespeare, killed fellow actor Gabriel Spencer with a rapier in a duel. Jonson was sentenced to hang for the murder, but in a plot twist worthy of an East End play, he escaped the noose through a legal loophole.
One of the art world’s deadliest rivalries came to a head during the 1849 Astor Place Riot in New York City. Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest rose to prominence in the 1830s, becoming one of America’s first theatrical stars, beloved by his working-class fans. Forrest had some success in Britain as well, until 1845, when his melodramatic characterization of Macbeth was met with hisses from the London audience. He was convinced that his rival, English actor William Charles Macready, was behind the mortifying incident. Forrest sealed their enmity by delivering a hiss following Macready’s performance as the Danish prince in an Edinburgh production of Hamlet. (Their childish antics aside, the feud between the two actors epitomized the growing antipathy in the mid-nineteenth century between America’s Anglophile upper class and its patriotic working class, with Macready the representative of aristocratic privilege, and Forrest — who rewrote Shakespearean plays to exemplify democratic themes — a working-class hero.)
A few years later, Macready arrived in New York to play Macbeth at the Astor Place Opera House. Forrest’s supporters descended on the theater and rioted. The state militia was called in, and they fired on the crowds, killing about two dozen people. Inside the theater, Macready soldiered on through his performance, then fled immediately after. He never returned to an American stage.
In more recent years, the most violent rivalries can be found in two artistic arenas with seemingly little in common: Russian theater and American hip hop. Clearly, the front lines of the Russian art world’s internecine war have been its storied ballet companies. The Bolshoi’s rival, the Mariinsky Ballet (previously known as the Kirov) in Saint Petersburg, has drawn its own share of notoriety: in 1995, its then artistic director, Oleg Vinogradov, fled to America, claiming he feared for his life. (“I spend half my salary on bodyguards,” he told the Independent.) These days, however, the country’s violent sociopaths seem to be branching out to repertory theaters. Last December, Alexey Malobrodsky, a director at the Gogol Theater in Moscow, was physically attacked. Following Filin’s attack, the Gogol’s new artistic director received a threat via text message: he’d be beaten up “in a grown-up way” if he didn’t leave the theater.
As sensational as the recent Russian headlines have been, America remains the world leader in artistic violence, thanks to the cumulative body count in the music world. Perhaps hip hop’s best-known, most baleful feud was between rival East and West Coast rappers Tupac Shakur and Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. The Notorious B.I.G. or Biggie Smalls. Not long after a trio of men robbed and shot Tupac in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio, Biggie came out with a song titled “Who Shot Ya?” that was interpreted as an admission of guilt and a taunt at his nemesis. (Biggie denied it was either.) A few years later, both rappers were killed in drive-by shootings within six months of each other. Both deaths remain unsolved.
As for Filin, he will live, and further operations may eventually restore his vision. But professional jealousy will likely continue to disfigure the Bolshoi’s art, as it does wherever the stage lights shine. It is no small irony that the play that began and ended America’s deadliest artistic rivalry was Macbeth, a tragedy of unchecked ambition and revenge. After his numerous bloody deeds, Macbeth famously observes that using violence for one’s own gain becomes a self-perpetuating act:
I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er.
So it is in the artistic world, where ambition has a momentum of its own — and woe to those caught in its path.
My apologies for the procrastination — it’s an occupational hazard of volunteer work — but here are the editors’ picks for the best articles published in In The Fray magazine in 2012. (Actually, since December 2011, when we relaunched the site after a year’s hiatus.)
If you like the thoughtful, empathetic, international journalism that we believe these articles represent, please consider making a donation to In The Fray. Any amount helps. Thanks for your support!
What a difference seven years makes. In 2006, violent protests exploded across Muslim societies in the Middle East and Africa, resulting in the deaths of at least 200 people. What sparked the riots was the publication of a series of cartoons in a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, that included images — some critical, others benign — of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. (Many Sunni Muslims find any depiction of Muhammad’s image to be blasphemous.) The Islamic Society in Denmark played a key role in stirring up worldwide Muslim anger over the cartoons.
Jump ahead to the present. A wide array of Danish Muslim leaders from various organizations are firmly defending the free-speech rights of Lars Hedegaard, a polemicist who can perhaps charitably be described as a brutally harsh critic of their religion. Hope Not Hate, a British antiracist group, identified Hedegaard as one of the six leading anti-Muslim figures in Europe.
On February 5, Hedegaard was the target of an attempted assassination when someone dressed as a postal worker shot at him and barely missed his head. In response, Danes at first united in outrage against political violence. But then, as more of Hedegaard’s writings and remarks became known, some Danes wondered whether he had brought this attack on himself. “I think that Hedegaard wanted this conflict,” said Mikael Rothstein, a scholar of religious history at the University of Copenhagen. “Brutal words can be as strong as the brutal physical act of violence.”
Then the Muslim voices emerged. And they spoke with one voice: freedom of speech must be defended. Minhaj-ul-Quran International helped put together a protest in Copenhagen to condemn the assassination attempt on Hedegaard. As one Danish-born Muslim put it: “We don’t defend Hedegaard’s views but do defend his right to speak. He can say what he wants.” The Islamic Society of Denmark not only denounced the attack and defended free speech, they also said that they regretted what they had done after the publication of the cartoons seven years ago.
So far Hedegaard has not been moved by the outpouring of Muslim support for him and his freedoms. He declares that Muslims in Denmark will never embrace their new homeland’s belief in free expression. “There is no such thing as ‘moderate’ Islam, and there never has been,” Hedegaard said. “There may be shades of opinion among Muslims, but as a totalitarian system of thought, Islam has remained unchanged for at least 1,200 years.”
But Hedegaard is an anti-Muslim extremist, so his attitude is unsurprising. More reasonable observers recognize that Muslims in Denmark are taking this opportunity to show that they want to be both Muslims and Danes — that they can respect Danish political values while remaining true to their faith. Muslims “have changed their approach,” said Karen Haekkerup, Denmark’s minister for social affairs and integration. She considers their actions “a good sign.”
Diversity isn’t easy. It’s even harder in countries like Denmark that have, until recently, had very few immigrants from Muslim countries. When you add religion to the mix of language and culture, it’s still harder. Throw in the tensions between Muslims and the West in a post-9/11 world, and now you’re talking about a really daunting challenge. But it is a challenge Europeans, Americans, and every diverse society must overcome. And seeing this kind of progress in Denmark, coming from some of the same people who were at the center of fomenting violence in 2006 — well, that gives me reason to hope.
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