(This reflection was published about a week after it was first written.)
I awoke this morning in a half-daze to read that the President of Haiti, Jovenel Moïse, had been murdered in his home the night before by men who spoke both Spanish and perhaps also English.
Never having read the news in Creole, incapable of such a feat, I looked for some time and began to read this afternoon. If there is such a thing as a Haitian ‘news function,’ it is absent on the island. There is nothing of the sort that is written for a petit bourgeoise, reading public: a documentary mill, constituting the values of its readers and looping back to affirm their prejudices. The “news” largely circulates over private channels here, both in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, relays owned by Facebook and its allied brands, like WhatsApp and Instagram. (Though, I am not sure how one might even begin to delimit this sprawling genre of investigative, fact-finding and opinionated articles, ready to come apart at any moment, held together by little more than a paper crease.)
Again, that ‘function,’ in the sense we English-speaking Americans conceive of it, is largely carried out by Haitian expatriates, voices of human rights activists that issue from abroad: that, or, perception is outsourced entirely. Indeed, el Listín Diario and el Diario Libre, both far quicker than the Times’ international coverage, spoke briefly, for example, of Dominicans’ experiences on the ground of Port-au-Prince, but there was little if any mention of Haitians alone, other than the withdrawal into their homes and silence, intimated by that telling headline “pendiente de informaciones”. (The Haitian public is acted upon and perceived for: whether they are “actors” at all, French, Spanish, and English-language sources largely fail to say. This afterthought especially comes now with the rise of protests in La Habana this week: Cubans reportedly took to the streets to proclaim, No tenemos miedo. It seems Cubans are able to take fate into their own hands.)
Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo occurs to me today, a reactionary work published in the late 40s. It sought to inscribe novelistically–that is, re-present–the economic and political palimpsest that is North Haitian life. The foreword to that novella is perhaps one of the most widely anthologized in Caribbean literature and originates the term lo real maravilloso (just nearly “magical realism”) that endlessly circulates in American literature classrooms. That the absurd and the marvelous and the horrible, the violence, the traumatic are all intermixed–and that this is the lived reality of the Caribbean–is likely an observation not yet fully appreciated by (our) news sources & ideologues.