Haiti and the Americas

8. The Rhetoric of Crisis and Foreclosing the Future of Haiti in Ghosts of Cité Soleil

179 8 The Rhetoric of Crisis and Foreclosing the Future of Haiti in Ghosts of Cité Soleil —Christopher Garland Nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. —Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Notre passé nous crie: Ayez l’âme aguerrie! [Our past cries out to us: Have a strong soul!] —From La Dessalinienne, the national anthem of Haiti I Asger Leth’s documentary film Ghosts of Cité Soleil (2006) follows the lives of two gang leaders in the largest slum in Haiti during the months leading up to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s government in 2004.1 Two centuries after the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared independence for the former French slave colony—creating what Hardt and Negri call a “specter [that] circulated throughout the Americas in the early nineteenth century just as the specter of the October Revolution haunted European Capitalism over a century later” (123)—Aristide, a former Catholic priest who became the country’s first democratically elected leader since Haiti’s independence, had seen his presidency ended by a range of external and internal pressures. On February 28, 2004, Aristide was forced from office, leaving the leadership of the country in the hands of soldiers from the Haitian army that Aristide had earlier personally disbanded. As Paul Farmer notes, Aristide immediately “claimed he’d been kidnapped and didn’t know where he was being taken until, at the end of a twenty-hour flight, he was told that he and his wife would be landing ‘in a French military base in the middle of Africa.’” However, the main critics of Aristide and his leftist social and economic Christopher Garland 180 policies, including members of Haiti’s wealthy elite and the U.S. NGOs in Washington (for instance, the International Republican Institute) that had actively sought the toppling of Aristide’s government, contend that the president fled from office. The film’s subheading claims that Cité Soleil is “the most dangerous place on earth,” a description bestowed on the area by the United Nations in 2004. Located on the waterfront of Port-au-Prince, Cité Soleil, which is the largest slum in the Western Hemisphere, has come to represent in mainstream Western media all that is wrong with Haiti today: the ineffectiveness of local police, the so-called necessity of foreign military intervention, and the incessant cycle of poverty and violence. While Cité Soleil might be emblematic of stereotypes about Haiti’s abject state, it also produced many of Aristide’s most fervent supporters in Port-auPrince . By recognizing the huge gulf between Haiti’s elite and the rest of the country’s population, and harnessing popular support through the Fanmi Lavalas political movement, Aristide had risen to power with the support of many of the country’s poorest citizens. Among these supporters were gangs of youths known as chimères, a Kreyol term that translates to “ghosts.” When Aristide’s leadership came under threat, some of these groups used violent means to demonstrate their support for Aristide and to intimidate political opponents. The film’s primary subjects are two of the chimères’ leaders: the aspiring rapper Winson “2Pac” Jean and 2Pac’s younger brother, James “Bily” Petit Frere, a sometime rival to 2Pac and fierce supporter of Aristide. As one academic who has shown the documentary in a number of undergraduate classes at a North American university points out, Ghosts of Cité Soleil is an “extremely seductive” documentary, particularly for a non-Haitian audience or an audience unfamiliar with Haiti’s history.2 Whether through the slick montages—where shots of Aristide and audio clips of him speaking are rapidly and repeatedly intercut with images that include a decomposing corpse being eaten by a wild pig, surging mobs, a room filled with dead bodies, and another body lying in a pool of blood— or by way of the sound track, composed by one of Haiti’s most famous public figures, Wyclef Jean (who is also one of the film’s producers), the mise-en-scène is clearly influenced by the visual and aural elements of the contemporary hip-hop music video.3 Moreover, Ghosts is closer, in terms of both the visual style and the presentation of the “gangster with a heart of gold,” to fictional feature films like City of God (2002), located in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and Tsotsi (2005), set in the shantytowns [18.118...