There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince by Greg Beckett (review)

Greg Beckett. There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. 312 pp.

In this ethnography, researched during intermittent periods of fieldwork in Haiti from 2002 until after the 2010 earthquake, Greg Beckett shows how phenomena I characterized as ensekirite ("insecurity" in Haitian Creole)—the unpredictability, violence, and resulting embodied vulnerability of Haitians (and to lesser degree, others residing in the nation)—have become routine rather than exceptional. Beckett uses a similar concept of dezòd (disorder) to characterize the unpredictability of social, political, environmental, and economic ruptures across chapters anchored by the experiences of intrepid individuals. The work is sprawling, both temporally and geographically, but centers primarily in Port-au-Prince, the nation's capital. Beckett launches his study of the lived experience of vulnerability from Martissant, a community in which I also conducted ethnographic work (from 1996–2000). The neighborhood, residing along both sides of a national route to southern Haiti, is a highly densely populated coastal area that ranges from seaside shanties to older established middle-class homes, as well as squatter settlements in the ravines and higher elevations of the mountain range that parallels the sea. The continuities in the phenomena Beckett describes (and even the theoretical frameworks employed to contextualize them) provide uncanny and heartbreaking confirmation of my own witnessing and analysis of "routines of rupture," and the "ontological insecurity" that enduring social precarity produces, in the lived experience of many Haitians (James 2008, 2010). It is challenging to offer reflections on a work whose themes, events, theoretical orientation, and locales overlap deeply with my own. What follows is a reflection not only on the book, but also on the ethics and practice of ethnography.

With its provocative (and dispiriting) title, There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince, Beckett aims to describe how environmental and urban crises are intertwined with the ongoing crisis of the state. The author takes great pains to articulate his struggles to tell a story of "crisis" rooted in the experiences of people who lived in, advocated for, and attempted to control a forest in Martissant. In early chapters, the lens through which the reader comes to understand these dynamics is Beckett's narration of the lives of a range of intimate associates—predominantly younger and middle-aged men—who attempt to survive and seek life (chache lavi) amidst the unpredictable ebbs and flows of ensekirite. He also portrays the views of some Haitian and expatriate elites whose political and economic interests are vested in controlling the political economy of crisis. The methodological choice of focusing on stories recounted and remembered give the ethnography more of a novelistic style in which the context and deep historical roots that frame the situations narrated are enfolded within the story. Beckett's theoretical analyses are largely contained in the endnotes. For readers who are new to Haiti's history and the unfolding of various contemporary crises, this mode of writing creates an accessible text that is engaging to read, but may also leave some of the empirical and theoretical nuance in the background and to be sought in referenced texts.

Beckett's voice (and role) is at times that of the omniscient narrator, and at others one of a concerned friend who is willing to risk personal safety to seek the story, to witness, and to support others in need materially and emotionally. But a shift occurs between the initial and later chapters that may reflect the author's dilemma of how to capture an encompassing, rather than "ethnographically intimate" (10) and more localized story. The book culminates in detailed descriptions of a succession of "unnatural" disasters that strike the nation over a decade and continues a narrative of unending crisis that can be experienced as debilitating to his resilient colleagues. But in detailing these stories, Beckett may also be perpetuating...