Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010 (review)

Haiti Rising is a timely, rather uniquely structured addition to the already voluminous literature on Haiti. Occasioned by the horrendous earthquake of January 2010, it comprises over twenty relatively brief essays by a variety of artists, filmmakers, scholars, and writers. Incorporating a broad range of testimonies, historical and cultural surveys, and personal recollections, it calls for support, understanding, and respect for the island and its people and their future development. The book is divided into four parts. Following editor Martin Munro’s Introduction, wherein he points out that ‘[a]ll author royalties from the book will be donated to the Haitian Art Relief Fund’ (p. 2), Part I presents a set of first-person accounts of the horrors of the earthquake and its aftermath. As the scale of the tragedy unfolds, the randomness of death and survival and the heroism of the populace are matched only by their unity in the face of disaster and the determination of the foreign press to demonize them. Part II surveys Haiti’s lengthy history of authoritarian rule and the ‘endemic crisis in Haiti’s political culture’, as Michael Dash puts it (p. 65). Haiti’s history of massive quakes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is highlighted in order to illuminate the ways in which ‘the blacks were creating graphic arts, an oraliture, and a music binding the homelands to the new lands’ as a unique form of cultural resistance and identitarian self-assertion (LeGrace Benson, p. 88). And Deborah Jenson’s piece points out a number of important historical ironies, such as the fact that ‘[r]evolution was for whites, who [. . .] considered themselves slaves to feudal structures in Europe’ (p. 102). In Part III, John Garrigus recounts modern-day Haiti’s roots in a conjunction of environmental trauma, topography, and colonization, and its early globalization; Jean Casimir and Laurent Dubois provide telling details of economic resistance and cultural autonomy, while Patrick Bellegarde-Smith’s analysis emphasizes the longstanding role played by the search for power and control of the state apparatus. In Part IV, Maryse Condé’s telling memoir interrogates binary sets of race and politics — Guinea and Haiti, negritude and créolité, Duvalier and Aristide, material poverty and cultural wealth — even as it valorizes their varied outcomes. The focus on art and art projects in the remainder of this section, by Madison Smartt Bell and others, highlights the invaluable symbolic role played by the burgeoning population of Port-au-Prince as their survivalist spirit and creative expression came to embody the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of the Caribbean people: from their resistance to the American Occupation and the imposition of US culture in the early part of the twentieth century, through the conjoining of jazz and kompa-direct in the 1940s and 1950s, to the celebration of the city’s two hundredth anniversary during that period and beyond, ‘the bruised spirit of the city remained uncrushed’ (p. 192), as Matthew J. Smith claims. This slim volume paints a valuable portrait of Haiti’s striking past and its painful present, its varying perspectives embodying and conveying a message of hope.