Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse

2. False Witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard Photography of Haitian Boat Refugees

2 / False Witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard Photography of Haitian Boat Refugees Tell me, friends When we were colonized Did the French have alien cards? When we were occupied Did the Americans have alien cards? —manno charlemagne1 The archivization produces as much as it records the event. —jacques derrida, archive fever In a speech given on June 1, 2007, in which he outlined his immigration reform proposal, President Bush described a moment from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s commencement ceremonies at which he gave the keynote address: I was preceded by a young man, a Latino, who stood up as the head of his class. . . . And he talked about his migrant grandfather, how proud the migrant grandfather would be. It struck me again what a remarkable country it is where a person with a dream for his immediate family and future family could come to this country, work hard, make sacrifices, and have his grandson address the President and his class.2 The comments rehearse the typical rhetoric of the American Dream as he recounts an immigrant success story. However, these remarks are particularly ironic given the student’s membership in the Coast Guard, which as an entity of Homeland Security plays a crucial role in delineating state hospitality while enforcing U.S. immigration policy by monitoring territorial and international waters to intercept undocumented sea migrants.3 As Ali Behdad argues, “The myth of immigrant America , . . . uses the model of hospitality to describe the nation’s relationship with its immigrants, a model that obscures how the economics of immigration and the history of racial formation in America have delimited the boundaries of hospitality.”4 Undocumented migrants, among the false witnessing / 89 poorest who often risk their lives to illegally cross national borders, pose a particular challenge to the standard U.S. immigration story. Instead of being seen as an entity whose role is to prohibit refugees’ entrance to the United States, the Coast Guard has typically been viewed through the lens of salvation. For example, with the events of Hurricane Katrina, the Coast Guard was thrust into the international spotlight as the heroic branch of the U.S. military known for daring rescues of the primarily African-American citizens stranded in New Orleans. Who can forget the images of Katrina refugees being retrieved from rooftops and muddy waters that inundated the media?5 One cartoon even consecrated the Coast Guard as “New Orleans’ Saints” through the drawing of a helicopter, rotating propellers giving off a halo-like glow, a cable extending below with a basket carrying an anonymous black body.6 In many ways this cartoon is part of a broader visual rhetoric of Coast Guard search-and-rescue, or “SAR” in Coast Guard parlance. The depiction of an anonymous black body hanging in the helicopter basket can be linked to the Coast Guard visual rhetoric whereby the interdiction of Haitian refugees on the high seas becomes recast as rescue. In this chapter I examine this visual discourse of interdiction-as-rescue by studying Coast Guard photographs of Haitian interdictions. In chapter 1, I discussed how Coast Guard interdictions not only impede Haitian refugees’ physical movements on the seas but also result in fracturing refugee testimonies or otherwise prohibiting them from articulating a “well-founded fear” to gain access to the U.S. asylum process . I argued that this results in inter-diction, speech that has been interrupted by militaristic and state forces so that language is suspended in the limbo space of the seas or the refugee camp. In this chapter I focus on visual modes of witnessing Haitian refugee sea journeys by examining a digital archive of photographic images of Haitian refugees being intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). I consider how through the camera’s “eye,” these photographs are cast as eye-witnesses, providing ocular testimonies to interdictions. By providing images of refugee interdictions, the photos contribute to a visual poetics of hospitality, where the military and state control discourse. The archive, located on the USCG website (www.uscg.mil), contains approximately 250 documentary captioned photographs of Haitian refugees, dating from the early 1980s through 2005.7 I examine the representation of Haitians in these photos and contextualize them within the history of United StatesHaiti relations and U.S. official policies regarding Haitian migration. I assert that just as interdiction is a policy of containment—the shoring up 90...