Why Haiti Needs New Narratives

In reading for this week, I found myself reflecting a lot about the ways in which emotions, sentimentality, can be used in ways that belie their often innocuous surface reading. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, I can remember friends and family members who expressed such great sympathy of those people down there in Haiti–oh, how they MUST be suffering. In the same breath, however, it was made clear that there were proper, and improper, victims in Haiti that needed our help or did not, respectively. It was, in hindsight, an exercise in the very narratives that Ulysse claims in Haiti Needs New Narratives are some of the most destructive–a proverbial White Savior looking on in horror from Above as some bodies who were once invisible become legible in the rubble of the Earthquake while others remained beyond the view just beneath the surface, either unnoticed or overlooked. What an eye-opening revelation for me as I read for this week. I was then required, politely forced, to consider the web, with all its stickiness, of symbolic meanings that enveloped the world around that crisis; this web created a global reaction that, like my own family's, rendered some bodies important within the aftermath while others were ignored or forgotten. This rendering of legibility in the aforementioned aftermath comes stacked with power relations and operated within existing structures of privilege that allowed mostly white, mostly middle- and upper-class Western folks to decide who was worth saving, and who was not.

Thus, I was thinking within Ahmed's conception of a cultural politics of emotion in which emotional reaction, depending on to whom the emotions belong, are valued in such a way as to become globally realized, extending the power to make decisions about the legibility of others, however temporarily, to you. As I think about the readings for this week more, I am faced with another of my own senses of implication. It is amazing, now that I have the experience and time, to look about to those narratives and see myself as part of that (privileged) affective community that "mourned" those lost in the earthquake, even though I did not necessarily have the ability at that time to enact my new-found global sense of humanitarian "responsibility." But, I do remember feeling badly about those poor children without being able to understand that so much more was happening just beneath the narrative surface. I, nonetheless, am implicated in what is now an historical (temporal) point in time where the operations of global structures of power made things seem so intimate–and, for some, they were–and yet so removed from the situation that mourning could happen by us good white-folks from the comfort of our homes, lamenting the conditions of those poor people while sipping sweet tea from a mason jar. For perhaps the first time this semester, I have seen myself as part of this global economy, though I now have the language to attempt to resist its enveloping stickiness. It seems that capitalism, which is something that has been touched on by my classmates, is partly responsible, but it cannot be all. Racism, too, seems to be so instrumental in these narratives, but as you look for the instances where racism lives, you see that gender comes into the fold as well. Thus all of these narratives of Haiti, all of the political ramifications of affect and emotion, show the multi-layeredness of these global situations. It is inescapable, then, the implications of Haiti narratives for those of us who did not feel badly for all Haitian, but for some; who ignored the suffering of so many because they did not seem worthy of even the shallowest of sympathies; who remember wanting to be able to help, but not enough to ask Haitians what actually needed to be done; who wanted to see themselves as saviors of people, but only certain ones. It has been a lot to think about.