The little fellow does what he can;
the big fellow does what he wants.
—Haitian proverb
you can enter by two routes. By ship you look away from the luxury of a Caribbean cruise to the city spread out in a yellow-gray haze along the wide, wide bay—a low jumble of buildings and the guttering poverty of La Saline and the lovely blue mountains rising through the town. The first Haitians you meet are elite doctors and port officials, sweating primly and stubbornly in clothes made for another climate, and the naked boys diving for coins from their burned-out log canoes.
Or you may step from an air-conditioned airplane onto a road where the donkeys and peasant women are carrying their loads of vegetables or coffee into the market, and there you hear the insinuating greeting the mass of Haitians offer the tourist: “Geev-me-fiave-cents-Meester.” If you hold your hand out right back at her, she may laugh and join you in the joke. Her mood changing, she prefers the conspiracy of shared laughter to an easy nickel. Beggars here are rarely insistent.
Haiti is surely one of the queerest places on earth. The American has little to sustain him at first except a taste for exotism. The traditional joys of tourism—swimming, sunning, running, wenching, and writing letters home—are required because they at least make contact with a familiar world.
Otherwise it is exile in a Garden of Eden fallen into permanent depression. The Republic of Haiti, a small island state in the Caribbean Sea, is tropical, mountainous, sea-bordered except for the frontier shared with the Dominican Republic, and so densely populated that the traveler finds it difficut to relieve himself by the side of the road without a crowd of peasants materializing out of the brush to observe and applaud him. Born of a slave revolt unique in history, the chief characteristic of Haiti’s career has been a nervous alternation between occasional reformers and ephemeral tyrants who have used the state as the means to personal fortune. While Haiti has succeeded in producing a number of extraordinary men, it has never succeeded in developing a stable government serious about educating the illiterate masses and consistent in attempting to raise the standard of living of a people that is one of the poorest and most long-suffering in the world.
In principle, Haiti is a Negro nation, French in language, Catholic in religion, democratic in government. In practice, Haiti is a collection of almost four million Negroes ruled by a largely mulatto upper class; its business is controlled by this so-called elite and by foreigners; the people speak Creole and except for about eight per cent of the population do not understand, read, or write French; Catholicism has an ambiguous position among a people profoundly rooted in the celebrations of the voudou pantheon; the government, under elegantly written laws and a model constitution, is democratic in form and a military dictatorship in fact.
Some of the first leaders of the Haitian slaves against their French masters fought earlier at Savannah in the American Revolution. The chief motive for rebellion in Haiti was the misery of the slaves. However, the genius of Toussaint and of the other slave leaders in Port-au-Prince was kindled by the same ideas of the Rights of Man that illumined the disorders in Paris and Boston in that epoch.
Despite a common parenthood of ideas—this can be seen in the declarations of independence for the United States and Haiti—official American policy, often instigated by slave-holders, remained for a long time deeply hostile to the new black nation which had won its liberty by its own efforts against a Napoleon at the height of his power. Thomas Jefferson even expressed the fear that the Haitians might invade the United States in order to free the slaves. Throughout the first hundred years of Haitian independence, the United States stayed mainly aloof from the affairs of Haiti, which was treated as an untouchable among the nations, except to warn away any Europeans who seemed to be looking for naval bases in the Caribbean Sea. The chief part of Haiti’s commerce and international intercourse was carried on with France, with which the Haitian ruling class preserved sentimental ties despite the bitterness of slavery and the bloodbaths of the war for freedom. The sons of rich Haitians, perhaps bearing the blood of both Norman nobility and Guinean princes in their veins, went to school at the Lycée Stanislas and the Sorbonne in Paris.
Then, in 1915, the integration of Haiti into American hemispheric affairs began with the military occupation of Haiti by American Marines. The public explanation for the Occupation involved the revolutionary disorders in Port-au-Prince. The Haitian President, Vilbrun Guillaume Sam, following a massacre of his political opponents in prison, had just been torn to bits by a mob in the street; presidents before him had come and gone like the wind, poisoned, blown up in their palaces, and regularly removed from office by irregular means. The more compelling reason for the American Navy’s steaming into the harbor concerned a debt which the National City Bank of New York wanted to make sure would be collected and which was, in fact, paid out of the customs receipts.
A just appraisal of the Occupation, which continued until implementation of the Hull-Roosevelt “Good Neighbor” policy, is not easy to make. Progress, profitable both to Haitians and Americans, was achieved in several areas, including public health, road-building, fiscal organization, etc. At the same time, the fierce individualism of the Haitian spirit was affronted by the ineptitudes (and sometimes worse) of an occupying force which, at least at first, chose Southern Marines for duty in Haiti because “they know how to deal with darkies.” The sophisticated Paris-educated elite, accustomed to being the master in its own house, suffered emotional slights; the peasantry suffered from the forced labor gangs organized by the Americans to build roads—this seemed close to the dreaded slavery which Haitians have never forgotten. Military force is a poor teacher of the democratic process. The Occupation closed gracefully, however, and the general Haitian feeling toward the American colossus was not an unfriendly one.
Now, after years of sporadic sentimental efforts to relate the Haitian to the French economy, Haiti is permanently fixed as an economic pendant to the United States. Its coffee, for example, the chief money crop, is finally finding its natural market. Some light on the new role of Americans in world affairs may be generated by rubbing against some of the questions that occur to an American resident in Port-au-Prince:
How comfortable is Haiti in this necessary joining of its own national destiny with a culture which is so profoundly different from its own?
Where is the place in Haitian life of the Americans residing in Haiti?
What is it like to be an American in this “tropical paradise” which is one of the poorest, most overpopulated, most underdeveloped, most primitive nations in the world?
Every creature in the sea eats people; it is
the shark which bears the bad name.
—Haitian proverb
The shadow of the United States over Haiti is a long one. It is a protective mantle for the American visitor; he feels it the first time he makes a traffic error and is whistled down by a cop who then, seeing that he is American, waves him on if his victim can walk away. The Haitian government charged the United Nations $150 for a baby run over and killed by a careless chauffeur. This seemed a fortune to the bereaved parents, but to most Americans would seem to be really a rather inexpensive baby. The famous and immensely moving Haitian hospitality—almost any peasant will offer coffee to a stranger, and if he needs a place for the night, the peasant will put his family outdoors and give the traveler his hut—is especially tender toward Americans. The desire to please can be embarrassing. If asked for a direction, the average poor Haitian will always answer, even if he does not know the answer. This may cause the traveler some confusion, but at least it attests to an eagerness to make the American happy. Most Haitians will never say no to an American. If an American asks a question involving a yes or no answer, he should be prepared to figure out from the way the Haitian says yes whether he means yes or no.
On another social level, invitations to the exclusive clubs are readily available to the visitor, while nouveaux riches Haitians, who may have every personal merit imaginable, are kept waiting until their children make a brilliant marriage into a “right” family or otherwise prove themselves with the elite. It is relatively easy for an American to be promoted to the highest society, there to play tennis or canasta with names that date back to Dessalines’ generals; a Haitian whose wealth is new, whose skin is dark, and whose family is unknown may still be voted down by the admission committee of the Cercle Bellevue. (The question of skin color is a complicated one which it is not my purpose to discuss here. Some upper-class Haitians have dark skins; some lower-class Haitians have light skins; but nevertheless the chief criteria of class distinction are color of skin, slope of nose, twist of hair, and other tests of Caucasian blood, despite the fact that everyone is proud of his slave ancestors who won freedom from the French.)
Another sign to the visitor of the special status of the United States is the profound impregnation of the Creole and French languages of Haiti with Americanisms that set on edge the teeth of visiting Frenchmen. The policeman yells, “Faites back!” (pronounced “bock”) when he means “En arrière.” The verb for spraying a room with insecticide is “flitter,” derived from a popular product of Standard Oil. The grammar of Creole, modeled on various African languages, is more like that of English than like French, although most of its vocabulary comes from French. High-status words and phrases, such as “Dry Cleaning” and “Air Conditioning,” are often spoken and written in English rather than in their French equivalents.
The Port-au-Prince radio broadcasts singing commercials for American toothpastes and breakfast cereals in Creole; offices, parties, dances, and dinners require clothes which are a real burden in the tropics—but which give the sufferer the badge of French or American culture that separates him so visibly from the peasant or laborer; to drink visky instead of the excellent native rum is the pinnacle of chic; a common reading of Time or a common appreciation of Bing Crosby offers an occasion for communion with the forces of great power. This respect for American achievement is genuine and extends to all domains. One of the great primitive painters of Haiti, a man of enormous individuality and self-respect, has decorated his house with his own drawings, with paintings and sculpture by his friends, with relics of Catholic and voudou religious art, with flowers and plants from his neighborhood—and, in the place of honor on the wall, a full-page photograph of Harold Stassen. He had clipped it from Life. The fact that he doesn’t know who Harold Stassen is makes the tribute still more touching.
Despite the evidence of favor, the deep ambivalence of attitude toward Americans expresses itself in many domains. An American has little chance against a Haitian in a court of law. The American who seeks to start a business in Haiti without Haitian partners will suffer such strange misfortunes as to make him wish he had stood in Delaware. An American who makes any slight error, such as slipping in the street, will find a crowd enormously entertained by his bad luck. They will help him up and dust him off if necessary, but their pleasure in the fall from dignity of the blanc is unmistakable. Incidentally, the word blanc has come to mean simply “foreigner,” so that even an American Negro has been referred to as a blanc.
The world-wide stereotype of the American as a crude but efficient engineer is echoed in Haiti, where an educator will say that Haiti must import its automobiles and tractors from the States but its textbooks and “culture” from France. Only a younger generation of thoughtful Haitians has begun to point out that realities must be faced in a society that still allows students to spend their evenings outdoors memorizing Racine under streetlamps because they do not yet have electricity in their houses. For many years French law, art, and manners were painted over the realities of Haitian life: America is the turpentine which is dissolving this pleasant surface. (Some upper-class Haitians have asked the police to chase away the students working under streetlamps. They say that it makes a bad impression on the tourists.) Many Haitians can compare the styles of Bossuet and Racine; not enough can set up an electrical circuit. In part, at least, this emphasis on classical intellectual training, along with a persistent disdain of technical skills, is an inheritance from the master-slave society of the colonial epoch. “You Americans tell us to work,” the Haitian seems to be declaring, “but we are masters now.” And the master is a cultured gentleman for whom others do the work. “Sweating is a sign of ignorance,” the Haitian says.
As the result, even the servants have servants, and a houseboy will use his own money to hire a shoeshine boy to clean his employer’s shoes. To be a houseboy is to have a job of higher status than to be a shoeshine boy. A worker promoted to foreman of a gang will not deign to show the men under him how to perform a task which he used to do every day. The American drive to get the job done is foreign to the Haitian way. It is a trait of the American character that is both admired and feared.
Of course, national habit is one matter and individual personality another. Every American in Port-au-Prince knows a few angry Haitians who defy climate, custom, and public pressure in order to arrive at work promptly, become emotionally involved with their jobs, and take pleasure in accomplishment. But they have a hard time.
Haitians who are being sent in increasing numbers to the States to study often find a wall of prejudice against them when they return. The engineers have to open shops, the educators work as clerks because they no longer fit into the “Haitian way.” Columbia and Carnegie Tech may replace the Sorbonne in time, but it is the graduate of the French schools who wins the respect shown a scholar. One agronomist who defended his American hosts was admonished with the peasant saying: “The fish trusts the water, and it is in the water that it is cooked.” For many Haitians, aware of a history of spite and exploitation and a continuing race prejudice, the years of suspicion are not over. Charlemagne Peralte, who led a rebellion against the American Marines and was crucified against a door, is a popular hero.
A striking illustration of the overestimation of American power comes in politics, which is the chief concern of life in Port-au-Prince, even more important than love-making, except perhaps on Saturday nights. It is generally assumed that an American resident is an FBI spy, a journalist ready to imagine calumnies about zombies and black magic, or an agent sent to do in the current government. The most trivial remark of an American resident can have political repercussions as it is transmitted by that most rapid means of communication, the telejiol or telemouth. It is automatically assumed that the American Embassy is a control, for bad or for good, on Haitian affairs. The opposition to the present one-party government, which of necessity must be a revolutionary opposition, is emotionally rooted in the hope of American approval; it therefore appeals to American democratic processes against the present (and traditional) military dictatorship. During the absence of an American ambassador, no opposition newspaper was allowed to function. When the Honorable Roy Tasco Davis was appointed, two newspapers took courage again, and lo! their presses were not burned and their editors not beaten or imprisoned. (This situation has been modified. On January 8, 1954, the police broke up and carried away the printing press and type of Haiti-Democratique. A few days later, the editor, the deputy Daniel Fignole, together with his printers, associates, and friends, was arrested. Last July the other independent newspaper, Le Constitutionel, was shut down after the chief of police threatened its editor with “bodily harm.”)
If you tell a Haitian in opposition to the regime of General Magloire that the American government is probably not interested in encouraging any movement that upsets the relative stability of Haitian politics, even though it is a one-party stability, you will probably not be believed. “What! But what about democracy?” The notion that the United States Embassy will exert pressure against an undemocratic government is one that does not die despite the evidence of contemporary history. In the hopeless morass of Haitian politics, many otherwise intelligent people cling to the dream of magical American intervention: those who hope for it and those who fear it both believe in it.
An example of the exaggerated esteem in which the American is held can be taken from a personal experience. As recipient of a fellowship in order to study Haitian institutions, I was interviewed by a number of journalists in Port-au-Prince. In one newspaper I was quoted as having cited Montaigne’s remark that “all culture comes from the people.” A-ha! It was immediately “telemouthed” that the visitor had put himself on the side of “the people” against “the regime,” that he represented official American policy, and that he was a paid “fomenter.” I was warned that further statements of this sort would result in my being expelled from Haiti.
A curious sidelight is that, while the citation from Montaigne is an unexceptional remark with which I can agree, it was never spoken during the interview. The journalist, playing on the exacerbated subtlety of the readers of a subsidized press, put the phrase in my mouth for reasons of his own.
Another American resident, writing in a local newspaper that fear is an obstacle to human progress, created a sensation among Haitians who took this to mean that they should not be afraid of trying to overthrow the government. The process of logic is impressive: Fear makes us obey. An American says that fear is bad. Ergo, the secret policy of the State Department is to help us overthrow the government of Haiti.
In a culture which Edith Efron Bogat, an American journalist resident in Haiti, has described as suspicious almost to the point of paranoia, the American is now perched among the heroes of the national fantasy life. He represents wealth, beauty, power over God’s atomic earth, and the mobility of achievement. He may be loved; he may be feared; he may be loved and feared at the same time. He is never ignored. As the Haitians say, “All that you do not know is greater than you.”
During my first days in Haiti, I got lost in the maze of unmarked streets near my house. I stopped and asked for my street by name. No one knew it. Then I asked where the new white man in the neighborhood lived, and I was led home immediately by people who had, apparently, never seen me before.
You cannot sleep on a mat and then
speak evil of it.
—Haitian proverb
Americans in Haiti are not just individual human beings; they are even more than “ambassadors.” They are a focus for envy, aspiration, and the mysteries of power. A Miami floozy can turn the heads of men married to the most charming Haitian beauties. A state senator down for a quick suntan becames a representative of American authority, deserving receptions, dinners, and an exchange of fountain pens with the President. A buyer for the notion counter of a department store is a gros commerçant and the pale literary cowboy who turns out Western stories at two cents a word is feared and buttered up as a grand écrivain de notre amical voisin nord-américain.
How do Americans function in this tender situation?
The thousand or so American residents, mostly located in the capital, fall into several fairly distinct categories.
First, there are the commercial and diplomatic residents who, in general, lead the familiar life of American officialdom abroad. They are assigned to a job; they do it; then they go home. Their contact with Haiti is kept to a minimum. The American country club has recently admitted its first Haitian members, but the usual social life of these Americans is one of ping pong and poker, sewing bees and bazaars, and as little contact with Haitians outside the work day as possible. Of course, the avoidance of relationship is a kind of relationship. Haitians suspect race prejudice as the reason for this isolation, and it surely does nothing to improve feeling between the two peoples, but it can be said in defense of these Americans that their behavior is not exceptional: American businessmen and diplomats live like this all over the world. Their children may learn Creole from the servants, but the mysteries of Haiti—voudou, the rich folk culture, the complex meeting of French and African ways of life, the bitter fret of Haitian aspiration and Haitian misery—are foreign to them. They solve the problems of living in Haiti by not really living there.
Then there is a small number of former Marines and American Navy men who stayed on to settle after the Occupation. These men, usually marrying on the island and otherwise “Haitianizing” themselves, are perhaps the most secure of the foreigners. One, the former medic who now calls himself “Doctor” Reiser, is a muscular and energetic grandfather with a career as drummer, painter, leaf doctor, and voudou initiate; for a time he directed the local insane asylum; he has exhibited considerable histrionic skill and attained some financial success in nursing his legend, a variation on the white-voodoo-doctor theme. Others, less spactacular than Doc Reiser, have found their levels in Haitian society and are living out their lives and rearing their children as the Haitians do.
Another curious group includes the American women who have married Haitians. Living in a Negro republic does not solve the problem of high feeling against intermarriage. These women have families, friends, and their own pasts abroad: they cannot sever all contact. Besides, Haiti has its own home-grown variety of race prejudice. What can the American woman say when her husband forbids their coffee-colored children to play with the black children next door? Rearing children with a Haitian partner creates problems which marrying an American Negro does not involve: in Haiti the American is marrying into a culture which is deeply alien to American ways. Because of all the obstacles, most of the American women who marry Haitians are iconoclastic characters with powerful urges towards individual assertions of personality. They are also often the envy of their American friends, as they generally find husbands with special attributes of capacity, handsomeness, and fortune. The Haitian upper class which is interested in whitening its children’s skins is an elite of considerable charm and drive.
A small group of Americans, living in a no-man’s-land between Haitian and American life in Haiti, includes the bohemians attracted by the sun, sea, glamour, and cheap rum. They generally do not stay long. The complexities of life in a culture which is African and French at the same time, and difficult to penetrate, usually send them back to the more familiar climes of Mexico or Paris. Haiti is weird and magical and very primitive; these attributes, while potential tourist attractions, are not yet ready to be assimilated by the typical American cheap-liver abroad. The artists of Haiti do not have a tradition of discourse; they are not great café talkers. An obstacle to the male in search of passing adventure is the rigid upper-class moral code. The Creole maidens are lovely, but their fathers are all crack shots. Gossip is rapid and lethal.
More than in most places in the world, the American in Haiti is held off from sharing the life of the people. He is isolated by color, language, religion, habits, and standards, and by the economic prodigy which puts almost any American automatically in a lonely eminence at the top of a feudal structure. Poverty is bad for the rich, too. But sustained good will is rewarded by good friends, and even power has its compensations. The prestige of America focuses an exaggerated attention, sometimes hopeful, sometimes suspicious, on the actions of individual Americans. The American lives in Haiti as an honored guest, a too-much-honored guest whose slightest mistake can be disillusioning to his hosts. It is in many ways a high and intense way to live.
The problem of the American separated from his own culture is similar all over the world. Of course, he forgets about Arthur Godfrey and loses track of Walter Winchell; he takes his ease from television and the New York Yankees. Haitian art, literature, music, and dance are based on rich traditions and can show the interested outsider some luminous modern developments. The experience of living in Haiti, while exotic, is one with the life of human beings everywhere. The specific emphases of Haitian ways provide a sharp perspective on American experience.
However, the long-time American resident also runs the risk of reducing the possibility of a meaningful involvement in the life of his own society, of moving off, of becoming distant from himself. An air of inefficacy and vagueness in the expatriate is familiar to travelers everywhere.
The accusation of authority may make a mediocre man strive to live up to the expectations that surround him: dignity is contagious. Or he may take a peculiar pleasure in selling his clothes and being picked up drunk and naked in a gutter: responsibility is threatening. Both types of behavior occur. For Americans, life in tropical Port-au-Prince seems to produce an accelerated development of character in the direction of either the sick softness of a fallen mango or of a firm and sunny self-realization. Haiti is difficult for foreigners. Each difficulty presents an option. These options seem to be put forward more strictly than elsewhere in the streets, offices, homes, plantations, and social occasions of Haiti.
Nevertheless, the brilliant contrasts and powerful feelings animating Haitian life suggest the possibility of a healthful stimulus. It should be easy to keep the emotions awake—and not just at the level of a dilettante in exotism. The proud individuality of all Haitians is a lesson in human dignity amid conditions of material misery. While the average per capita income is estimated at less than thirty-five dollars a year, the Haitian remains a lively and sympathetic person, despite the occasion for deceit and craft which must also be assimilated by the stranger. The Haitian’s fears are enormous and his problems intense; his urge to life is joyful, angry, and energetic. His energy is expressed more creatively at play and at talk than at work in a society in which the conventional rewards of work are difficult to attain. The possibilities of men cooperating in order both to fulfill some common design and to gain individual benefits await the evolution of a society which can properly assimilate intelligent labor. Try to build a house in Haiti, for example. Men who live in mud huts, and who live without the hope of ever having anything but a mud hut, cannot be expected to make doors fit and walls perpendicular. Why should they be interested? Children who grow up without machines or mechanical construction of any sort in the household will never develop the concept of the straight line or the right angle.
The stick that beats the black dog
can beat the white dog too.
—Haitian proverb
France and Italy have had a society which rewarded labor and, at least temporarily, find their world unhappily diminished; Haiti has never had this level of civilization. The situation for the American visitor in all these places is similar, but with important differences in esteem and expectation. Being rich in population and resources, relatively immune to inflation and foreign manipulation, less scarred by war or internal conflict, and blessed by a continuity of government, America still offers a personal future to work done by the individual. This gift has been lost in many advanced societies; it has not been achieved in Haiti. The Haitian knows it; the American knows it. Their knowledge is a continual unspoken communication between them. It makes for a sort of hope and understanding: and it makes for a bitterness and unease. The troubles of pride are the most dangerous ones.
Both stubborn and yielding, tense and sleepy, heavy with pride and drenched in shame, the paradoxical Haitian character is a challenge to the American willing to participate in Haitian life. The fact of his being overvalued as an American may give him a special resonance of sense for others and of responsibility to his own capacity. As long as he remains in Haiti, he is addressed by martial music: Be as important as Haitians want and fear you to be! It is an expectation from others and from himself which may urge him to return to the possibilities of American life with a new awareness.
Finally, because of the special sin of American history, it is instructive for Americans to live in a culture in which the statesmen and diplomats, the brilliant educators and the artists, the agronomists and the engineers, and most of the rich businessmen are colored. The white man is the stranger, the interloper. He may be an honored guest, but he is only a tolerated guest all the same. He will see in action the liberal truism that, despite differences in condition, all peoples face similar problems with the same resources in character.
1954