Traumatic Encounters: Negotiating Humanitarian Testimony in Post-earthquake Haiti

Abstract

IntroductionImages of destruction and suffering relayed by survivors, journalists, and aid workers were essential to connecting the world to the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti and to generating the global expressions of solidarity that followed. Yet these attempts to bear witness to the catastrophe in Haiti for viewers at home often reinforced the distance between Haiti and the West. Despite their authors' stated compassion for and solidarity with the Haitian people, such accounts detached the crisis from its historical and political contexts to insert Haiti into what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the savage slot, a temporary stand-in for the global South, until the international media moved its catastrophe caravan on to the next disaster.1 Buried under this deluge of reports and survival accounts trying to make sense of the disaster, Haiti seemed beset once again by a shroud of otherness as the island quickly disappeared behind a mirage of images.2 As the immediate response to the earthquake reveals, testimony is a fundamental cog of the humanitarian machine that is important for publicizing causes, shaping perceptions, and mobilizing solidarities; as a result, it is also a fragile terrain of cross-cultural encounters fraught with the politics of writing or speaking for others.Five years after the 2010 earthquake, my objective in this article is to return to a number of long-form testimonies published in the immediate wake of the catastrophe to examine how these narratives grapple with the ethical, political, and ideological implications of representing the pain of others for audiences in Europe and North America. In their accounts of the disaster, US humanitarian filmmaker Gerard Straub, Haitian Canadian author and newly elected member of the French Academy Dany Laferriere, and Haitian writer Yanick Lahens all marshal a journalistic realism in their efforts to document and bear witness to this traumatic upheaval. These three authors also share a sustained concern for the production, circulation, and consumption of images of the disaster in the international public sphere. Though they are not humanitarian aid workers, Laferriere and Lahens relay representations of Haitian trauma into the same international public sphere wherein foreign humanitarians and journalists projected their own. Like Straub, Laferriere and Lahens also position their narratives as necessary rejoinders to deformations of Haitian history and culture that permeated many popular mainstream accounts of the disaster including, but not limited to, CNN's voyeuristic coverage as well as the heavily condemned remarks by Pat Robertson about Haiti's pact with the devil or David Brooks about its progress-resistant culture.3 The portraits of postquake Haiti that emerge from such testimonies bear witness to the reactions of the individuals and communities enmeshed in the catastrophe and the international humanitarian response to it.Humanitarianism, whether as disaster response or in the form of development, remains an important economic, political, and social interface that mediates power relations between the global North and South. In recent decades critics have denounced Western humanitarianism as a tool for the spread of neoliberal globalization, the opening of new markets, and the privatization of even greater swaths of Southern economies.4 However, in mainstream views of humanitarianism, Mark Schuller argues, the 2010 Haiti earthquake is particularly significant because it sparked the emergence of a short-lived discourse critical of humanitarian organizations in light of the grossly mismanaged recovery.5 The accounts by Straub, Laferriere, and Lahens that are at the center of my analysis actively participate in the emergent, yet fleeting, discourse that Schuller highlights. Combining foreign, diasporic, and national viewpoints with regard to Haiti, their narratives think critically about global NorthSouth relations in the humanitarian context. …