Tragedy brings fresh opportunity
20-Jan-2010

What is the overwhelming emotional response to Haiti’s trauma in the
wake of last week’s devastating earthquake? Shock, horror, pity?
Helplessness, anger, disbelief, or tearful empathy? Perhaps all of
these, all at once. Our feelings betray our being drowned by concern.
And what can we actively do to help out?

From this distance, Haiti is a world away. Haiti took its name from
the original indigenous natives, the Arawak, who succumbed to genocide
at the hands of Spanish and French colonizers. After centuries of
slavery and Caribbean piracy, Haiti became the world’s first
independent black nation – a republic built through a slave revolt
against Napoleonic France at the beginning of the 19th century. Yet
from promising beginnings, Haiti soon descended into political mayhem.

It has hardly known stability in two hundred years of existence.

On hundred and fifty years of virtual dictatorships, assassinations,
overthrows and revolutions reached a settlement of sorts in the 1950s
when after decades of American occupation by Marines, Haiti’s Duvalier
family assumed power. Francois ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier replaced exiting
Marines with his own private army, the Tonton Macoutes. Behind their
trademark sunglasses and automatic weapons, the Tonton built up a
fierce and feared reputation for violent recriminations against Papa
Doc’s enemies.

In 1975 Papa Doc was replaced by his son, Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’
Duvalier. Baby Doc was no different to his father, and in some ways,
worse. Voodoo religious cultism, economic collapse and repression
worthy of the darkest days of the French revolution came to
characterize Baby Doc’s brand of politics. Through this ugly policy
mix, Haiti slid into the basket-case category of western free nations.
Poverty came to accompany oppression; villages were systematically
pillaged, people ritually extinguished.

Meanwhile, voodoo, the indigenous religion of West Africa, was
vulgarized by popular (missionary and Hollywood) representation of it
as a religion of satanic spirit possession. Life imitated art and soon
Haiti became a centre for both the serious practice and theatrical
displays of black magic witchcraft. Possession rituals were paraded in
almost tourist-like ceremonialism. Typically, the voodoo ceremonies
came to involve frenzied drum-pounding and chanting during which a
medium calls for a spirit to enter the body of one of their number in
a heightened state of awareness. The emotional pitch of the possessed
person allows him or her to walk on coals of fire, rub fiery torches
all over their near-naked torsos, bite the heads off live chickens and
generally behave in an unseemly erotic fashion until exhausted.

Haitian voodoo also extends to the practice of zombieism. Haitian
cultists assume the identity of zombies by taking a potion that is
loaded with the chemical properties of tetrodotoxin. Textrodotoxin
lowers the body’s functions to the point of it being nearly comatose.

Doctors and Westerners who were unaware of the properties of the
potion soon allowed the idea of zombies – persons returning from the
dead in a scary post-death state – to flourish.

But the real zombies of Haitian politics were its leaders. The
Duvalier dictatorships fell apart under popular protest and subsequent
democratic governments also became unworkable. A military government
was installed at the end of the ‘80s, but this too was unable to stem
the ritual execution of orphaned children, the rape of young women,
the public display of mutilated bodies, the torture of family members
in front of other family members, and so on. Finally, in the mid-‘90s
President Clinton signed an invasion order, but this was held over
after Haiti’s military general, Raoul Cedras, agreed at the last
minute (while marines were in the air) to America’s terms.

Haiti has been in the process of turning itself around ever since, but
cyclones just two years ago, and now, an earthquake, have conspired to
reverse that progress. Haiti is seemingly perched on the edge of a
kind of national psychological breakdown that characterizes the voodoo
possessed individual. Two hundred thousand lives may be lost in the
final tally, and the capital, towns and village buildings flattened.

As the world agonises, watches and waits for recovery from this
tragedy, Haiti ironically is being offered a chance to rebuild itself
politically, physically and psychically from the ground up. Not to a
zombie-like state, but to full democratic citizenship and equality
under renewed institutions and a re-articulated commitment to human
rights and God through the light of his Word.

What then is to be our response to Haiti? Well, not just medical aid
and material assistance (which are obviously much needed), but in
light of its culture and history, Haiti’s people need our prayers too.