I meet "Fred Voodoo" in Haiti

Farewell, Fred Voodoo***
by Amy Wilentz

The white man's burden has changed a good deal since Kipling's day. It's a pack filled mostly with shame, and nowhere should white people be more ashamed than in Haiti. At least that's what I gather from Amy Wilentz, who spent some 20 years reporting on and sometimes living in Haiti.

In this book-length reportorial analysis, Wilentz offers a respectful and balanced view of Haitian culture, and does not try to turn The Haiti Experience into some kind of tragi-porn for her readers as other journalists have done. (Mac McClelland, "Mother Jones" feature writer, comes in for special criticism, though Wilentz scrutinizes her own work as well.) Neither does she breeze through what she does not understand. She describes a voodoo ritual she attends, being careful to explain what voodoo is not (zombies and dolls with pins) and what it might be to its adherents (a performance? possession by one of its many gods? a values system that emphasizes hospitality and charity?) without pretending to be an expert. She is a white outsider, and she knows that means there are complexities about Haiti she will never be able to penetrate.

Wilentz's admission of her own limitations gives the book a tentative aspect. But there is still much to recommend it. There is a wonderful chapter on Haitian Creole and the politics of language. And there is good historical exegesis. Probably most interesting to Americans are Wilentz's deep insights into how charities and NGOs work in a place like Haiti. Do-gooders bring in tents and water and porta-potties after a disaster--all great for the short-term--but these efforts do nothing to get Haitians OUT of the tents or to install sanitary systems. Meantime, celebrities and high-profile types (Sean Penn, Angelina Jolie, Bill Clinton, etc.) and any number of happy-clappy missionary types arrive after disasters with mixed intentions, and Wilentz is at her best when she is musing on her deep ambivalence about these folks.

Haiti is being rebuilt, of course, but largely out of materials people can find to hand--plastic tarps, old bits of tents, corrugated tin, rubble from old buildings--all of which will likely come crashing down again in the next earthquake or hurricane. Meantime, fresh water supplies dwindle and cholera has become chronic new problem (never mind the chronic old problems of AIDS and TB). The landscape has long been deforested. Road conditions worsen making it harder for Haitians to move their own products around the country. Industrialized nations set up manufacturing complexes that pay good wages in good working conditions--by Haitian standards--but the products from these industries are whisked out of the country and sold on global markets for more than a Haitian worker can afford. The one bright spot is cell phone technology, which not only allowed many of those buried by the earthquake to call relatives for help, but has benefited Haitian farmers and small business people.

At the heart of the piece is "Fred Voodoo," the nickname given the Haitian "man on the street" by an English reporter Wilentz meets. Wilentz knows people in every niche of Haiti's complicated class system, and she manages to make all of them fully realized people. The dope-smoking layabouts are at least as interesting as the foreign-educated intelligentsia. Wilentz's portrait is unsentimental but sympathetic, and the picture that emerges is one of an industrious and canny people who manage to hang on to life despite the constant meddling of outsiders and the corruption ingrained into the government by years of foreign diddling in Haitian affairs. This is not a hopeful picture. But it's one we need to look at.