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9 “Haiti, I Can See Your Halo!” Living on Fault Lines In a scattered series of disparate islands the process [of the Caribbean quest for national identity] consists of a series of uncoordinated periods of drift, punctuated by spurts, leaps and catastrophes. But the inherent movement is clear and strong. —C. L. R. James, appendix, “From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro,” in The Black Jacobins Modifying the words of her song “Halo” for the “Hope for Haiti” telethon, popular singer Beyoncé, in a formation that seemed to exceed her own self-awareness, mouthed the words, “You’re everything I need and more / it’s written all over your face! / Haiti I can see your Halo.” Indeed, the catastrophic experiences and the entire Hope for Haiti Now: A Global Benefit for Earthquake Relief (MTV Networks, January 22, 2010) fund-raising telethon, as did other efforts, served an amazing function of putting back on the table for consideration the important iconic history of Haiti as the first place where black resistance to enslavement became manifest as black freedom. I use the logic of the halo not in the way it appears in Christian iconography, but in the way the halo of what Haiti means radiates as a series of spatial principles across the African diaspora. The contradictory history of Haiti that produced today’s American hemisphere ’s poorest country runs up against a history of glory and transcendence. Thus, in many ways, Haiti becomes an important and extreme representation of the black condition: on the one hand, a past of dignity and legendary greatness ; on the other, the starkness created by the initial history of dispossession , subsequent economic difficulty, brought on sometimes by horrendous leadership, often in collusion with external actors, environment, climate, location, but through it all, an amazing resistance of its people matched by an outstanding creativity. living on fault lines · 159 The “halo” that Haiti throws out, then, is a series of conflicting representations , but above all a definition of an unrelenting humanity for African people: from what it takes to survive in the harshest conditions to how one begins again after everything falls apart. In other words, we see in each encounter with Haiti what it means to be human in the world, minus all the trappings of material possessions. Examining these conflicting representations and what they mean in the larger African diaspora, first of all, there is the gravitational pull of the history of Haiti that consistently radiates outward as representative of a series of configurations of African diaspora identities from enslavement to resistance, culture to literary and artistic transcendence. Quickly looking up the scientific meaning of halo, one gets an energy field with gravitational pull, such as around a planet, a series of readable energies that radiate visibly and invisibly outward. Not only does a halo structure have a fairly small mass, even compared to a small moon, but the mass is evenly distributed radially. One instantly thinks, then, of one reading of the Caribbean as small island spaces that nevertheless radiate outward. Newer readings of space as infinitely expanding are also applicable. An amazing series of articles and visual representations circulated on the Internet and other media in the wake of this 2010 earthquake and its aftermath of displacement of epic proportions. Interpretations of the meaning of Haiti proliferated: from the Caribbean, Latin America, and Black America (these are our brothers and sisters); North America and Europe (aid and recovery and an attempt to control the discourse); Africa (these are our people or I never knew they existed); Asia (how can we help—we feel your pain); a Eurodescended Brazilian diplomat (it is macumba [voudou] that has caused it); from Pat Robertson, an American evangelist (they made a pact with the devil to get liberated from slavery and so are paying back for this freedom now). Caribbean responses, intellectual and political, have been consistently informed of the relevance of the historical meanings of Haiti, as was historian Hilary Beckles, principal of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, in his essay “The Hate and the Quake” (available on numerous websites). In this essay, Beckles, who had already discussed this point in an elaborate way in larger lecture and academic paper formats, was able to seize the occasion to rapidly distill some of the important historical research on Haiti and gesture to some kind of Caribbean-based initiative that seemed to be eroding under the U.S. takeover of the airspace and its plans...

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