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Epilogue: Diverted Testimonies: New World Refugees in the Twenty-First Century Then words, no one’s fiefdom, meet up with the materiality of the world. Relation is spoken. —édouard glissant, the poetics of relation It is difficult to imagine how to end a book about refugees, especially when so many of the refugees that I have discussed in Asylum Speakers have not arrived at a destination but remain in limbo. The conditions of New World refugees are inherently protean—their movements constantly shift and change, depending on the current economic and political configurations in the hemisphere. As I write this epilogue just weeks after a 7.0 earthquake leveled much of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince along with the cities of Carrefour, Léogâne, and Jacmel, we are presented with a new refugee crisis. Estimates suggest that more than two hundred thousand people died in the earthquake. Overnight, millions of people became homeless, joining the scores of those already homeless (prior to the earthquake) owing to the dire economic conditions of Haiti. Hundreds of thousands are internally displaced by fleeing to other parts of the country. Others remain living on the streets in Port-au-Prince; the city has become a refugee camp. While the refugee crisis is the result of a natural disaster, the degree of devastation is also tied to the fragile infrastructure of the country. Obviously, we are only beginning to see the effects that the earthquake will have on refugee movements and discourses ; however, the ideas of refugeeness are sure to be both radically altered and similarly approached in terms of international response, particularly that of the United States. We have already witnessed the politics of hospitality clash with the attempts to grant hospice for the thousands of injured survivors. The 242 / epilogue humanitarian effort to provide food, medical assistance, and shelter has, from the beginning, been militarized, with the U.S. military taking over the airport in Port-au-Prince, the port and coast, determining the flow of aid and who can enter and leave the country by air and sea. The force of these interdictions have been demonstrated most powerfully through the diversion of several Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Fronti ères planes, carrying doctors and medical supplies, away from the Haitian airport to the Dominican Republic. The U.S. military presence reflects the concern with containing Haitians, deterring them from fleeing the country by boat. In what is known as “Operation Vigilant Sentry,” established under the Bush administration in 2003 to prevent a mass Caribbean migration, the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy vessels blockade the Haitian coast while the Navy prepares its base on Guantánamo Bay for a possible influx of refugees.1 Detention centers in South Florida are also being readied for the possibility of housing refugees. As one Coast Guard Captain put it, “It’s not that the deterrence is the physical power; it’s more the soft power, . . .You let people know you’re there if you need help but that it doesn’t make sense to leave.”2 In one of the more nefarious articulations of the politics of hospitality, an Air Force cargo plane flies over Port-au-Prince daily; it broadcasts a message in Kreyòl from the Haitian ambassador to the United States in an attempt to dissuade Haitians from fleeing to the United States because they will be sent back. In this preemptive linguistic strike, using Haitians’ language against themselves, the representative of diplomatic hospitality enables U.S. border control. Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard online photographic archive has exploded with images of rescue and hospice—of Coast Guard personnel handing out food and water and tending to the sick and injured, which reflects a continuation of the rescue discourse that I addressed in chapter 2. Added to that is an emerging “orphan” discourse based on the numerous reports of the thousands of unaccompanied children pre- and postearthquake . Orphans represent a particular kind of refugeeness, where they are no longer considered part of a home, a family, a nation of origin. In a discourse of care and refuge, NGOs and TV commentators consider whether the children should be taken out of the country to be adopted. It is important to remember, as I discussed in chapter 2, the implications of “orphaning” for Haitians, which has historically been imbued with racism. In this case, it has also become disturbingly tied with evangelical Christianity whose conditional hospitality includes the “saving” of...

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