Disaster Capitalism in Haiti – Two Years after the Quake

“We also know that our longer-term effort will not be measured in days and weeks, it will be measure in months and even years” – President Obama, speech announcing the establishment of the ClintonBush Haiti Fund, January 16^th 2010

Okay, so it’s almost two years now. Let’s take a look at the long-term effort.

If anyone was in any doubt that the Haitian earthquake was going to be a goldmine for the disaster capitalists,  a recent article at Counterpunch – which accounts for where the money raised for disaster relief and reconstruction ‘did and did not go’ – makes for a sobering, and frankly depressing read.

‘Two years later, over half a million people remain homeless in hundreds of informal camps, a majority of the tons of debris from destroyed buildings still lays where it fell, and cholera, a preventable disease, was introduced into the country and is now an epidemic killing thousands and sickening hundreds of thousands more.  Haiti today looks like the earthquake happened two months ago, not two years.’

Here are some of the starker facts figures about where the money went and who was consulted about it:

• 33% of every dollar of US aid went to the US military
• only 1% of the $3.6 billion raised by donors went to the Haitian Government
• less than 1% of the $412 million in US funds allocated for infrastructure reconstruction in Haiti has been spent by USAID and the US State Department
• international aid coordination meetings were not translated into Kreyol
• the Haiti Neighborhood Return and Housing Reconstruction Framework drafted by the Interim Haiti Redevelopment Commission (IHRC) which was supposed to guide reconstruction, was not published in draft form in Kreyol so local people could review it
• of the 1490 contracts awarded by the US government only 23 contracts went to Haitian companies
• two US based private companies with strong US government connections – CHF International and Project Concern International – received an $8.6 million joint contract for debris removal in Port-au-Prince
• at a meeting of governments in Montreal in January 2011 the international community decided it was not going to allow the Haiti government to direct the relief and recovery funds
• an official report into the operations of the IHRC revealed that it failed to direct funding to projects prioritized by Haitians

Haiti Liberte was one of the first news sources to report the disaster relief ‘goldrush’ after secret cables by U.S. Ambassador Kenneth Merten were released by wikileaks in February last year.

Here is an example of the promotional material for one of the companies that won out in the scramble for contracts after the earthquake, United for a Sustainable America:

The horror. Renzo Martens eat your heart out.

The Haiti Liberte article also reported the story of Lewis Lucke, a 27-year veteran of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) who was named US special coordinator for relief and reconstruction after the earthquake. After a few months on the job he moved to the private sector, where he could sell his contacts and connections to the highest bidder. He quickly got a $30,000-a-month (plus bonuses) contract with the Haiti Recovery Group (HRG).

‘But in December 2010, Lucke sued AshBritt and its Haitian partner, GB Group (belonging to Haiti’s richest man, Gilbert Bigio) for almost $500,000. He claimed the companies “did not pay him enough for consulting services that included hooking the contractor up with powerful people and helping to navigate government bureaucracy,” according to the Associated Press. Lucke had signed a lucrative $30,000 per month agreement with AshBritt and GB Group within eight weeks of stepping down, helping them secure $20 million in construction contracts.’

According to an article written one year after the earthquake by Jordan Flaherty  Gilbert Bigio made a fortune during the corrupt Duvalier regime and was a supporter of the right-wing coup against Haitian President Aristide. According to an article on Haiti Action Net, in 2007, after having doubled his fortunes since the ousting of Aristide, Bigio began building factories secured by armed guards and UN patrols in one of the poorest areas of Port-au-Prince, Cité Soleil.

A photograph from the GB website is uncannily similar to those bought by the plantation owner in Renzo Martens’ challenging exposé of the ethical paradoxes of global aid, photojournalism and contemporary art in the moral labyrinth of humanitarian aid work in the Democratic Republic of Congo: Enjoy Poverty III.

…artistic?

‘What can we do?’…use the ‘R’ word

The Counterpunch article ends its dismal inventory of aid relief and reconstruction failures for post-earthquake Haiti with a less than inspiring proposal of what can be done.

‘The UN Special Envoy to Haiti suggests the generous instincts of people around the world must be channelled by international actors and institutions in a way that assists in the creation of a “robust public sector and a healthy private sector.” Instead of giving the money to intermediaries, funds should be directed as much as possible to Haitian public and private institutions. A “Haiti First” policy could strengthen public systems, promote accountability, and create jobs and build skills among the Haitian people.’

Most of these proposals were made by many – including the author of the current article – immediately after the earthquake. Why would they be headed any more now than then? It’s also very worrying to see the ‘R’ word used in this context. It does not bode well.

The sudden ubiquitous use of the ‘R’ word in the language of British politics and social policy reached a peak during the summer riots here last year with politicians, newsreaders and political commentators all proclaiming the need for robust policing, robust sentencing and robust responses. It was a kind of memetic mania. How this word managed to find its way into so many mouths is a mystery. I random google search of ‘Robust UK Politics’ brings up calls from David Milliband for Labour to be ‘robust on Europe’, calls for a ‘robust voluntary sector work program‘, a ‘robust debate over jobs’ , a ‘robust climate change policy’, a ‘robust demand for gold bullion’,  ‘robust Christmas sales’ and, my favorite, a ‘robust UK research climate’ .

Interestingly most of these uses occurred in 2011. A few, notably with reference to Gordon Brown’s ‘robust bullying’  and ‘robust survey of deaths in Iraq’ occurred a year or so earlier.

Isn’t ‘robust’ a meaningless, jargonistic,  contemporary political euphemism for pretending to be doing something significant when actually you haven’t got a clue what to do? Or is there something more sinister at work here?

I can’t help being reminded of President Obama’s first statement following the Haitian earthquake: “I have directed my administration to act with a swift, coordinated and aggressive effort, to save lives”. Aggressive effort to save lives?

I will be discussing alternative approaches to what can be done about the situation at two events taking place at Occupy LSX next weekend. The first is an event taking place at the Bank of Ideas on Saturday January 14^th about The Corporate Occupation of the Arts where I will be discussing protest pedagogy and the second an event organised by the London Occupy Economics Working Group called ‘Beyond Capitalism?’ on Sunday January 15^th.

Scratch Edit of the Tap Tap Sign Video

Here is the scratch edit of the video I made during this year’s Ghetto Biennale. A final, subtitled version will be screened and exhibited along with the sign itself during 2012.

Barber Shop and Beauty Salon Signs in Port-au-Prince

Days 3 and 4

During the early negotiations about the painting for the tap tap it was proposed by Chevy that we should make the painting on vinyl so as not to damage the bonnet of Evel’s truck. The next day Michel and Joseph – the painters – suggested we make it on canvas so that after the biennale I can take the painting back to the UK. This is a brilliant solution. Alex printed off the new design he had made and the plan was to come back the next day to make the piece.

I arrived at the rue on Tuesday and painting began at about 9 o’clock. Here’s a sequence of stills from the process which I was also filming. The images are high-quality. If you double-click them you can see the detail.

Early stages. Drawing out the sign.

Michel begins the drawing

Joseph and Michel painting.

Joseph painting.

Sign painting almost done.

Finished sign.

The next day, after some confusion about where the canvas had been left, how it would be attached to the bonnet of Evel’s truck and the question of the sign for the front of the truck, Michel and Joseph arrived at Eugene’s yard with two signs on plastic they had made copying the lettering I had designed for the original Tele Geto postcard.

Today there is a memorial service and a procession to the cemetery for the members of the Grand Rue community who died during the earthquake. Eugene has proposed that Evel’s tap tap be used to lead the procession.

Days 1 and 2

It’s too much to explain what it is like to arrive at the Oloffson and to be plunged into the energies of the Ghetto Biennale. Suffice to say that it is a medium.

It turns out that the Tap tap I’ve commissioned to be painted has already been half done and that there seems to be some confusion as to whether the owner – Evel – will allow the rest of his truck to be painted, and whether the $100 US I sent to pay for the job will be recuperable from the guy Michel who painted the other parts of the truck.

I meet with Evel and Chevy from Atis Rezistans and some sort of deal is struck about making a painting on the bonnet of his truck on plastic so that it can be taken off after the biennale. That’s agreed. Now it’s a question of finding the painter and working out the cost.

After dinner I meet with a guy who says he can do the job. But we will have to speak to Michel first. I’m not sure how this is going to work out exactly or whether any definitive agreement was reached because I’m working in incredibly bad, broken French with bits of English thrown in. I’m never sure exactly what I’m saying or if it’s being understood. There’s also a lot of discussion and debate moving in Kreyol between the different interests to which I’m not party. I’m re-assured something will be sorted.

The next day I spend some time walking around the neighborhood with Jana Evans Braziel, who is writing a book about Atis Rezistans and the Ghetto Biennale. I take the opportunity to take some photos of signs in the area.

I notice that several of the signs have business names and contacts written on them, suggesting that they are made by free-lance painters. I had assumed that their might be some kind of guild system working, at least with the tap tap painters, but I’m starting to think that sign painting in Haiti is a much more individual and entrepreneurial venture pursued by any one with a feel for it.

That certainly seems to be the case when I start to negotiate with both of the sign painters, who turn out to be friends, down at Grand Rue, the site of the biennale.

Michel and Joseph on the Grand Rue

After some negotiations with Evel, Eugene, Michel and his friend we agree on a price for the new work which will be painted on a canvas which will be attached to the bonnet of the truck: $200 US, $100 each, the first today, the second on completion of the job in two days time. We shake on the deal. I will be at the rue tomorrow at 8 to start the filming. I go back to Eugene’s yard, take a few more photos of the biennale space as the light fades, then head off back to Oloffson on Evel’s truck.

Romel and Racine at Eugene’s place

Shooting Diary

The Entrance to the Oloffson Hotel

I’ve decided to keep a shooting diary for the Tap-tap Painters Project I’m working on while here in Port-au-Prince. This will not be a well-formulated and carefully considered thing but something I’ll be doing first thing each morning, head and energy willing. It may not have anything to do with the painting either. Let’s see.

Comfort Inn, JFK – 10^th Dec 2011

I awake from a dream after having met the first delegation from the Ghetto Biennale on a house-boat I was living on precariously with my flatmate Kelda.

Leah introduced the group. We began to talk about what we were thinking of doing for the Biennale. The conversation moved along associational relationships between ideas and words. One such association – I think it was ‘mint’ – led to my proposing to do some research about the Haitian central bank and the minting and printing of Gourdes. One of the women in the group said that she had access to the National Mint but was reluctant to support a project around it as it could be seen as a colonialist gesture. I asked her how so? She said that Haiti’s international reputation was very much associated with its economic history and negative stereotypes about the mismanagement of its economy. I suggested that, on the contrary, by making work which looked at the practical economic and fiscal ‘realities’ of Haiti I was approaching the Haiti like any other nation currently operating within a global financial economic context. The conversation moved on.

I found myself in a low wood by the edge of the water. It’s not clear what I’m looking for but it has something to do with the ‘project’. I find a pile of used-waste DVD packages (reminiscent of the ‘Dirty Material‘ we found at La Moleya dump in 2009).

I think they may have some significance-value and start to see what they are. Nothing of much immediate meaning. I then become aware that I am in visible distance from a road along which people are walking and become very conscious of what people might think about me rummaging around in this wood, or indeed, what other people might have been doing in here before. At the same time I notice that there are multiple copies of one video, a recognition that brings a sinister affect. It is a video with the image of three Latin-American brother cowboys on the cover in white shirts and black Stetsons, a third-rate Mexican action-romance-music movie with resonances of Los Tigres del Norte and Antonio Banderas. I don’t see any title.

On the runaway at JFK airport I am thinking about some of the ideas expressed in the early essays about Kant in Nick Land’s Fanged Noumena. I notice that the drones of the plane’s engines, mixed with the cascade of voices from inside the cabin have a hypnotic and deeply reassuring affect. There is a momentary and trance-inducing choreography of machines on the runway that resonates in accord with the event of the female sparrow eating crumbs and drinking from the fountains in the airport terminal just before we departed. There are frequencies and tones that come from machinic outside, that are purely haphazard, formally, but still have the effect, in combination, of calming the ‘wild/blue beast’ (see Nick’s ‘Narcissism and dispersion in Heideggers Trakl Interpretation’). The material world generates healing as well as violently maddening frequencies. Nick quotes Hegel:

‘One can admire the stars because of their tranquility: but they are not of equal dignity   to the concrete individual. The filling of space breaks out [ausschlägt] into endless kinds of matter; but that [i.e. the casting of the stars] is only the first outbreak [Ausschlagen] that can delight the eye. This outbreak is no more worthy of wonder than that of a rash in man, or than a swarm of flies’.

I am also reading Sybille Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. This book and Nick’s seems to be conspiring -along with David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years (which I left in London) – in a paranoiac critical convergence of thematics. I could barely get through a paragraph of the former without the interconnections amassing and overwhelming the read. In Note 2 of her introduction – ‘Truncations of Modernity – “The Fate of Striking Events”’ – with reference to the New World’s apparent ‘limitless hunger for slaves’, Fisher refers to the same text as Graeber in Debt: Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982) in which he defines slavery as “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonoured persons”. (Graeber develops the theme of ‘Honour and Degradation’ in relation to debt in Chapter 7 of his book). Fisher proposes two models of slavery which have been proposed in the literature on the subject: ‘Slavery as Domination’ and ‘Slavery as Exploitation’. I recall on my last visit to Haiti the unspoken significance of de Sade for the discussions of slavery in Haiti and Nick’s reminder that power is exercised not simply or primarily in the interests of profit.

This resonates immediately with the opening paragraphs of the first essay in the collection -  ‘Kant, Capital and the Prohibition of Incest’ – which in turn evokes the thought of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world systems theory as I remember it, that welfare state democracy was established to ameliorate the risk of revolution ‘at home’ while exporting the full violence of raw capitalist exploitation to the colonies and to that the British abolitionist movement was simultaneously a strategy for disciplining the British labour force.

‘The policy [of apartheid] seeks to recast the currently existing exteriority of the black population in its relation to the society that utilizes its labour into a system of geographical relations modeled on national sovereignty. The direct disenfranchisement of the subject peoples would then be re-expressed within the dominant international code of ethno-geographical (national autonomy)’.

Nick’s understanding of revolutionary insurgency as an ecstatic ‘complicity with anonymous materials’ (to use Reza Negrastani’s formulation of the same general idea) must surely have relevance too in terms of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-Headed Hydra; Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of Revolutionary Atlantic, a core resource for Fischer’s thesis of an unfinished and sub-latern – un-known (in Nick’s terms) -  revolutionary history that could (have) taken the dominant discourse of historical modernity in another  direction.

‘In response to the [Haitian] revolution [by the settlers of European descent] a cordon sanitaire was drawn around the island to interrupt the flow of information and people’.

There is a correlation here between the primary Foucauldian thesis of the ‘great confinement’ and ‘the plague city’ in Madness and Civilization/Discipline and Punish and Nick’s account of Heidegger’s retreat from the full scabrous and virulent implications of Trakl’s Ausschlag (‘outbreak’, ‘blossom’, ‘waive’ and ‘beat out’) and Aufruhr (‘turmoil’, ‘revolt’).

In an amazing passage from one of the first histories of Haiti in the English language – Captain Marcus Rainford’s A Historical Account of the Black Empire of Haiti (1805)- which Fischer uses to exemplify an early example of the ‘Haiti-as-exception’ thesis and quotes in full -  the last lines leapt out:

‘The same period [the age of revolution] has witnessed a great and polished nation, not merely returning to barbarism of the earliest periods, but descending to the character of assassins and executioners; and, removing the boundaries which civilization had prescribed even to war, rendering it a wild conflict of brutes and a midnight massacre’

As the plane leaves the ground I’m thinking of Nick’s writing, his philosophy of the cosmic howl of virulent materialism and planetary trauma. I see two ovular holes in the alostratus clouds, which become the eyes of a skull, with the sun directly between them, a celestial pareiedolic neotony of death and I am reminded of the benign version of this same psychological mechanism.

Financial Zombie Apocalypse

‘The frozen limbo-state of durable unsustainability is the new normal (which will last until it doesn’t). The pop cultural expression is zombie apocalypse, a shambling, undying state of endlessly prolonged decomposition.’ – Nick Land Suspended Animation (pt.3)

Here is a typically brilliant article on contemporary zombie economics by the inimitable Nick Land, the third of four on the theme of ‘durable unsustainability’ from his Urban Futures blog. Between 1987 and 2007 Nick Land journeyed further into the inhuman heart of cybercapitalist darkness than any being before or since. His terrifying and ruinously infectious philosophical writings from this period have recently been compiled by Urbanomic into a highly recommended collection entitled Fanged Noumena. A courageous and impressive editorial task indeed. Respect goes out to the editors Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier for this important and timely work.

And great to see Nick back at the sharp end of What is (Really) Going On again…

UK Health Minister slams Zombie Petitioners

In a recent exchange in the house of commons earlier this week Tory Health Minister Simon Burns accused his opposition spokesperson of  “joining the ranks of organizations like 38 Degrees who are frightening people and getting them almost zombie-like to send in emails”.

In an open letter which has receive over the 80,000 signatures 38 Degrees responded:

“Yesterday Health Minister Simon Burns compared 38 Degrees members to zombies – for emailing our own MPs about risks to the NHS!

Let’s stand together to show Mr Burns that we’re citizens, not zombies. If thousands of us sign an open letter standing up for our right to be heard, we can publish it as an advert in a national newspaper and deliver it to Mr Burns personally in his constituency.”

Citizens not Subjects: Zombie Protesters March on the Banks from Occupylsx, Halloween 2011

‘Télémaque in Marmelade’ Talk at X Marks the Bökship

I will be giving a talk ‘Télémaque in Marmelade’ at the launch of a volume of new works by ARTicle press at Unit 3, 210 Cambridge Heath Road, London E2 9N on Saturday 3rd December 2011 at 6.45 pm.

This presentation will be in preparation for the talk I will give at the 2nd  Ghetto Biennale in December. It tells the story of how Vodou coincided with Mesmerism in pre-Revolutionary Haiti and the implications of this encounter for future representation of Haiti and Vodou in Western popular culture. The presentation will also be touching on the topic of paranoid critical theory.

Here’s some information about the new publications:

The five volumes address the relationship of art, performance, art writing and knowledge, as well as exploring art as counter-knowledge or a means to counter knowledge. The volumes contain essays, art works, illustrations, documentation of performances and diagrams.

‘Performance Fictions’ – edited by David Burrows with contributions from Sadie Plant, John Cussans, Simon O’Sullivan, Pil and Galia Kollectiv and David Burrows.

‘Barefoot in the Head’ – edited by John Russell, Alun Rowlands and Mark Beasley with contributions from the editors.

‘Performing/Knowing’ – edited by Gavin Butt with contributions from Aaron Williamson, Kate Love, Oreet Ashery and Hugo Glendinning, Adrian Heathfield & Tim Etchells.

‘Materiality of Theory’ – contributions from Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield, Benoît Maire and Marcus Steinweg.

‘Who is this who is coming?’ – edited by Maria Fusco with contributions from Alexandre Singh, Craig Martin, Jennifer Higgie, George Clark & Beatrice Gibson, Giles Eldridge and Maria Fusco.

Series editor David Burrows. Price £8.00. Books can be ordered from www.centralbooks.com Artist’s films, relating to the publications, will also be screened. For more info about the launch and talk contact bokship@googlemail.com or d.burrows@ucl.ac.uk

Article Press, School of Art, BIAD, Birmingham City University, Margaret Street, B3 3BX. Editor of Article Press Henry Rogers – henry.rogers@bcu.ac.uk

Grand Rue/Atis Rezistans on Anthony Bourdain’s ‘No Reservations’

American celebrity travel chef Anthony Bourdain recently traveled to Haiti for his t.v. show ‘No Reservations’. During his time in Haiti Sean Penn introduced him to the artists of Grand Rue (though they don’t get name checked).

“A New York Times photograph of a smiling Haitian merchant” Penn explains, “doesn’t speak the story of what’s going on inside these people. There’s a place that’s downtown, in the most devastated part of Port-au-Prince, earthquake wise, rubble still all over the place, and you go into the catacombs, into the kind of slum area where they work, and they’re mostly working outside, some of their studios are inside these concrete structures, and there’s incredible stuff. You’d think it was representative of post-earthquake Haiti. Bodies broken apart, nails in mouths, using pieces of a baby doll. Poverty makes people feel broken apart like in an earthquake in the first place. So that’s been the constant earthquake in this country.”

The video can be seen here. The sequence in Grand Rue begins about seven minutes in.

The show also includes an interview with Richard Morse, proprietor of the Hotel Oloffson.