When lost in a Champagne Campaign one is always the friend of sex and cigarettes. So begins a fable,
With a vignette vex,
no remorse, no regrets!
The smoke will dissipate and the bottle once empty,
Must be taken off the table.
Best to know your class,
Best to know and surpass your station,
Ideology is not like love,
Yet both have rules and gentle nuances.
While drinking hard, some things are lost in translation.
She said:
Comrade, I have work for you,
“How do you cope with a newly broken heart?”
For the best way to start?
You’ll see!
To get over on a man, is under another man, she told me.
“I’ll tell you how to make Tovarish me….happy.”
First, we have to make bold art constantly.
Found art, forged art, undressed art. Art in motion.
Art we can touch, Art we can see.
Lewd, crude and out of control art.
Thus explodes a muse like devotion!
Art made by you, in the spirit of loving me!
It doesn’t have to be pretty or even rhyme actually. It must cause commotion!
But we have to make it together somehow. My fake smile, my fake golden hair, ass up and eat. My visionary delight, my thighs are your potion.
My true feelings, your defeat.
“I’m sorry I was drinking while Russian in New York Grad,”
Undo those words on art, abort me!
You heard that all wrong in translation,
“What I said was to get a good job and completely support me.”
Where do I start!? When things fall apart, when cultures are clashing,
But there is still romance in her heart!
Second, you have to sing for me! But never to the Voorhi or the cops. Freedom songs, epic ballads. Such is the Melee.
You have to remember the old tongue; and you have to swallow me.
Your tongue, your rough hands dont instagram follow me.
Remember the right notes, the left and right hooks, and the very disposition of the Old and New love, in the beginning and the end all at once.
You will see blat,
I’ll back you up, best I can, in refrain. This begets that.
But they need to be songs from the soul and the heart both at once, like the sound of a circle. Your me, subsumed in the course of we.
I’ll lead the first dance, then you just follow me!
“I’m sorry I was drinking while Russian in New York Grad,”
Undo those words on art, abort me!
You heard that all wrong, in translation,
“What I said was don’t speak so many words in English, don’t waste my time with crude emotions. You want me by your side? Pony up the cash to even court her, she.”
But there is still romance in her heart! It was there at the start!
Third, we have to travel, like a great endless escape.
New cities, new cities, sites! New hotel rooms. New moons, minimal drama, minimal fights.
New friends, new hats on new keys on new necks on new nights.
Holding hands under the vanilla skies and when the sky breaks open too. Cash cannot be spent when you’re dead, spent it on earthly delights.
Rick shaws, picnics and gondolas and mandalas and lingerie you can see through, whatever the fuck a mandala even is. Or a gondola woo!
Pistols out and moving forward on adventure! Alive, “woke”.
Constant endless walk toward new adventure! She thus spoke.
And the world never gets old, gears get stuck, and get choked up amid the champagne and cigarette smoke.
“I’m sorry. I was drinking, while Rushing. In New York Grad,”
Undo those words on art, abort me with these sentimental breaches!
You heard that all wrong in translation,
“What I said was, who doesn’t like Malta, like Paris and Bora Bora. Like Maldives. Like white sandy people free beaches?”
But there is still romance in her heart! More heads in the cart?
“Number four, work that pussy like you know what it’s good for.”
But there is still romance in her heart!
Fifth, we need to save the world, it’s probably true.
The world is hurting. The world is harsh. They say you’re a man of action and struggle, I leave that world saving project completely to you.
“But the world helps those who help themselves.”
College is over Tom Sawyer. Marx was an asshole, if you’re smart as you think you’’ll get a good job and make adult money, as a corporate lawyer.
“I’m sorry I was drinking while Russian in New York Grad,”
Undo those words on struggle, cancel them or abort me!
You heard that all wrong in translation, poems are useless, starvation courting rags.
“What I said was Capitalismo makes amazing food, and red bottom shoes and handbags.
Sixth, we need to eat all the nice foods as they are available to us. We need to indulge in every crevice of the city.
“Fuss, no fuss.”
Seventh, kids, probably they say we have to make lots of kids. Happy and well raised, all that shit.
As long as you can afford it.
“I’m sorry I was drinking while Rushing in New York Grad,”
Undo those words on kids, abort me! You heard that all wrong in translation, your shirt changed the fee.
“What I said was having kids is for suckers. That’s for those who have a belief in the future.”
Life was quiet, now it’s a bit better- your cash and a small suture.
Eight, “Never leave my side please!”
Ever for too long. I need your attention, now.
And back to number 4; which was skipped actually skipped in the world of the real somehow.
Way back to the when?
We have to make love, again!
“We never did,” she said.
In all best forms and low forms and high Russian and low English and all the between ways to say defy.
Russian to English, emotions and thighs lie,
Cry, all that is being said about cynical loves, and opportunistic loves. Reading past the dollar signs,
We are the very same age, of the same class of tumult and drama,
Born on opposite sides of the geopolitical, not the class lines.
When you hear such art, or such cold calculated self inflicted interest,
This cab is now a magic carpet for a story cabaret.
Using-a-punchdrunk-kitten in the back seat of a Breuklyn-southbound-gypsy as my muse. One doesn’t choose,
_the muse they use. Or when.
There were worse assignments.
Given to more cowardly men!
And my constitution is and always will be_a wide canvas for futurist painting_
My-heart-when-fainting_
Is grinding, then breaking it_causes Brighton to flood and post Haitian earthshaking:
My soul is for barter_sign the dotted line,
I’m a phantasm now-shaking collapsing-and up for the tainting.
Exsanguination! Being bled dry!
There’s blood in my eye,
A mind game, that’s fine, but the mind can unravel before the right time, and the things it envisions; the things you complete; like a thousand lifetimes emptying out of your whispers_
_Like two shots in the dark_unloading my heart on the cold of the street!
Vasa, she whispers:
“Why so sad all the time?_Tell me a story with Camels and Bandits and rhyme!- and keys strung to kites_ mix your biwinning antics and Arabian nights! Make more epic poems! Can-we-not-agree_the audience cannot swallow_ an endless account, as you wallow in all of your feelings for me.”
Starry night burns bright, I begin again:
I have the will!
In a previous life she believed mostly in kill-or-be-killed.
She comes from place_ So brutal, so base, frustrated, consumed by the men in her face,
The following ointments, which vodka let boil to a brine of pure hate_ juxaposed with the partisan flame of my zeal,
I’ve been reborn in a futurist gate.
_And invested with powers to steal or to heal!
Absorb all of your pain_ and restore your ideals! And you will open my chest with your fingers: And start spinning the wheels_
It’s Russian Roulette, the way that she feels!
Magic carpets to carry us so far from this place where we are_Highspeed races and chases_
_ Drive bys taking place without use of a car!
Her kiss is the bullet of deady surrender.
The sweetness of service she’s willing to render_greatest by far:
To enroute replace my pumping mechanism, without medical training_without even leaving the hint-of-a-scar!
A pipe dream_a pipe bomb_ a zen.
Near endless composition, the art of story telling unleashed from my phone or my pen_
In base thirst for a woman I’ve known in other lives.
And desire to keep knowing forever_
_If forever could just be again, and again.
I am trained to fix a broken heart, my own excluded.
For the heart is a time bomb_ your emotions are fire ball bearings_
_Your wiring is now made faulty,
your rational mind is at times misguided-deluded…
“Vasili, please, I’m lying here counting on your story to ease, I want erotic adventure, daring or fun, no more talk of feelings or the latest bombastic-head-fuck-with-a-gun, I like alegory, the-cave-with-the-thieves? What’s the name of that story?! No more tales of the mechanical heart, right before bed,”
“I’ll tell you my dreams about star crossed Chechen peasants instead”.
II.
How can I, live so many lives; But be without you so many nights?
Cold sweats. And the ache of seperation, imprisonment and then exile:
Broken bottles or spears or my pen’s wronging rights,
Sweat itself often passes as tears.
While Writing my politics off as mere hooligan fist fights?
I didn’t mean to trouble you with me, But we seem unable to end it quickly,
Or end me quietly.
I have been hunted like a partisan and I found refuge in your secret kisses.
Now we are partisans together I suppose, but you warned me you prefer the cities to the forests. The Peoni to the Rose.
What about Peoni verses Prose?
I prefer bath houses to General Winter_and the wearing of my solitude below four layers of my clothes.
So how now?
Where will we find shelter?
We’ve run helter-skelter on the glass-bottle-broken-beaches or that Bulgar tavern where we hide.
They have done so many things to me,
Until now I cannot recognize my own face.
I listen it seems, but prefer to confide.
But it is just the face of a man claiming love!
Cupids arrows mutilate.
The barrage burns apart my barricades like katusha rockets, raining from above.
Don’t fail me fearless heart,
Ill get back to you!
From Shali, the mountains, Brighton or Grozny too!
With black eyes, black ties, last tries; this is no mere seduction, or simple desire:
It’s a visceral longing to woe.
Putin has declared war! But foolishly I long for just peace on this front line fight_
_A lull in the violence allowing me to steal my way back to you_guided by moon and my tragic-parachute-knockaround-daggerman-incite.
The barricade-we-made was cobbled together with useless albiet pretty word;
Damn all my gradiose promises,
The misuse and abuse of fables and myth that confuse what I see with that which you claim that you heard.
I am almost quite old.
In old soul time.
I bought what you sold. Dash my face against Dagestan’s rocks, break all my bones if in this life I am more coward_more villain than hero and bold…
“Silly Vasa,” she giggles, pulling her supple body supine even closer to closeness of mine, “Your passions on fire when you press your fingers to prose,_I’m drawing a line_ press your fingers to hold, I want Ambulance Action Peoni ambush_No thorns of the Rose, and my grand design for the story this time is to hear about the dark in your soul, the black rabbit hole where your ambulance goes!”
III.
A Poet paramedic: warm body, heart now made stone cold. I have the will, I carried bodies in piles through Bed Stuy,
Up moutains_we always will battle the Reaper uphill.
I never cried then, I did not even wince,
Every night I’m not dreaming of loving your company, kissing your lips_I’m flashing right back_senses under attack: to life tremmors we trembled_in the City of Port-au-Prince!
We carried legions off to what passed as hospitals.
I’ve had to watch ten thousand die, now all I want is to carry you away from the coast of Brooklyn, magic carpet fly.
Fly in the face of your husband, your secrets;
The dance I do with my stories, in trains or in cabs, returning with you
To the place that you lie.
But I dance again from time to time.You bring it out of me.
“Why cry old soul?” She whispers.
“I saw things I wasn’t meant to see.”
“Women like me?”
“You’re a dangerous creature we both can agree.”
She gives me fourth and fifth tries, the body dies, but the song of the heart is timeless, therefore free.
IV.
Because when you are gone there are only words. Words make the basis of poems_ forming a plee from the deepest depths of my heart’s agony.
When each parting seems so long my mind invents monsters which lurk which are not even there!
In a silky, billowing dress_ I’d hide under your covers, I’d caress the folds of your being, run fingers through darkness through the locks of your hair.
“Until I’m safe too?”
“Like my fallen angel with her wings on gold fire; Dorogaia I need you.”
I pace the Brighton Boardwalk so long that all these lives mesh together ’til the story seems too wild, too Noire to be true;
“Turn this cab toward the seaboard, turn Idlewild, let’s run away, before we break day_”
“You haven’t a clue! Mad man! A poorly laid plan!”
Begging for some proof of goodness of his kind.
“The validity of his mind!”
A million cold stones acquired over long tenuous adventures, but regrets are for traitors on rewind.
Battles and then conflicting accounts of my enemies treacheries abound.
An escape plan is successful only when the underlying logic is found!
The logic is half based on a whisper, and half on a dream.
Their scissor hands dripping from love of the kill. Demons enter the portal with intention to scheme. To make you a mark, turn me to a skell or a shill.
They separated me from my humanity, loving you is against my rational will.
She’s half in the old world,
and half in the new,
half iron curtain, half crystal glass shoe.
The cab nears the Verazono precipice, the Brighton abyss where we will be seperated anew.
Tell me Odysseus: What mean me to you?
Was that voyage anything but unjust for all involved?
Once I had a white motor cycle, I was a fugitive slave, I was evolved. I killed the master and stormed the plantation and then half of the problem was solved!
And on it you waited to escape north toward the blue moon.
“Sooner than soon? Did your love for me grow after the rooftop fist fight in the light of my murderous swoon?”
“Dorogaia that’s right.”
“I don’t want such a life; a life of no humor, a life or death struggle, the terror of night.”
“Stories for night, are about all of the wrongs swept away by the dawn and the light. I require one muse only. One significant. One longing. Never again in the trenches so vast, so empty and so lonely.”
“The story of us? Us is a wild tragic roundabout fuss!”
“Is_to_be_a_tale_of_triumph. Over the hopeless heart via the art of romantic prolonging!”
“Righting or wronging?”
“I sought out your company.”
“Do it again.”
“I do it still out of the longing.”
I have a voice and I have a loud pen.
And I have passion and it overflows my body until I see miracles in the streets.
The strength of forty men!
And the moon winks.
Then on Banner Ave. the story completes.
And then again, the world’s smallest violin plays just for us, she thinks.
Why does such a long shadow fall over his house every time he drinks?
We are not star crossed.
We are not divided by a sea.
Or by barricades. Maybe we’re just in defiance of destiny.
Or the flaming up of the ghettos in the latest Caucasian raids.
When I looked to the sky I saw three ships sailing us apart.
You off to marriage and the world of the continent.
Me, bound forever to the belly of the ship enslaved only to my own fearless heart.
And as they sailed us apart, to never meet again,
Some sailors sang out, “The Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria!”
“To the glory of the new world!” they toasted.
Vain Braggarts and white men.
But I begged the moon:
“Dasha, Dasha, Dasha! Why can’t you love a wild peasant like me?”
What fate was this where we have to part our story time in endless tragedy?
Death itself could not stop this kind of beating in my chest.
If am reborn another thousand lives,
Each time waking from a long kiss good night,
Each life I will call out to you again as my test.
The body will die, but its sleep is the cousin of rest.
So, tied again to the mast.
Shackled and blinded I swagger on hopeless, fearless heart.
In dreams, don’t forget me.
This was begged long ago.
I will steal away and climb to the roof of Mt. Olympus if I must to give the gods a show.
I’ll ask for the help of the spirits if God has no time for us artisans.
Wild peasant partisans, from good families with magic carpets and reckless biwinning minds. The heart yearns, the back breaks, the soul is on fire, the real man, he grinds.
Black until blue.
Carrying me, one day, with wings home to you.
And if you read my verses see if I still appear a slave.
And we can say we knew each other when I was a free man and you were a free woman. I’ve traded my weapons of war for the power to save.
There is only one chain I cannot learn easily how to break.
And that, is the one I first broke to be by your side. By your side, give or take.
I long for you.
It will always be that way. It has been that way since Labor Day.
But then, story time is easy for an old soul with a pen.
“You’re not like other men.”
“Hopeless, Fearless Heart how long apart must I wait to stay gone?”
In 1986 a social movement based in the Little Church (Ti Legliz) used liberation theology gospel, strikes, demonstrations, and targeted assassinations in an uprising referred to as the Dechoukaj to force Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc) to flee the nation of Haiti. Led by a Salesian Priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide this movement succeeded in dismantling a hated seemingly intractable regime, carried out the nation’s first and only democratic elections and dissolved the army that had since the time of the American occupation had been used to violate the human rights of the Haitian people. The only social movement that truly represents Haiti’s 8-9 million impoverished peasants is called “Lavalas”, or “the cleansing flood”. Since the fall of Duvalier, Aristide has been twice elected (1991 & 2001) and twice exiled (1991 & 2004) in two bloody coups. Fanmi Lavalas, the political arm of this movement is officially banned from elections. A neo-Duvalierist pop singer was elected to the office of the President following the devastating earthquake of 2010. This briefing paper will attempt to analyze the historical foundation, rise to power, fall to repression and current capabilities of the Lavalas Peasant Movement and its underground political party “Fanmi Lavalas” (Lavalas Family) and what its actions will mean for the future of development, human rights and political landscape of Haiti.
Introduction: What is Lavalas?
Lavalas is a movement based on the idea that Haitians must triumph over their internal and external enemies, free their nation and win their promised human rights.
On January 1st, 1804 the nation of Haiti was born but to this day an illiterate peasant can speak of it and its leaders as though it had just recently occurred. That is because the history of Haiti is the history of how the European hegemon powers moved to contain an uprising and idea that is as threatening to globalization as it was to slavery and colonialism. The people of Haiti and their partisans in the Lavalas Movement are fighting to win a struggle begun over 200 years ago between the masters and the slaves.
Currently, 1% of Haiti’s population owns 45% of its wealth. Its President Michel Martelly is a former pop singer with deep ties to the previously toppled Duvalier dictatorship. Life expectancy is 56. Haiti is occupied by a UN umbrella army called MINSTAH. A disease called Cholera has killed over nine thousand people and infected over 700,000. There are over 10,800 NGOs operating in Haiti with little central coordination or planning. Of the roughly 9 billion delivered of the 16 billion pledged in development & reconstruction aid after the 2010 earthquake; most went directly to NGO or foreign military expenditures and a full $224 million was used to build a 60,000 person capacity sweat shop complex called Caricol Industrial Park (Buss, 2008)(Farmer, 2011)(2012 MINUSTAH Reports).
One should not be dispassionate about the birthplace of Human Rights as a fact on the ground. For the “Rights of Man” as understood by the French Jacobins were for all people, but if Napoleon in 1800 turned that revolution into his personal bid for empire; shortly after an army of slaves would win the first stage of a campaign to make these rights a world order in the Americas. Lavalas is continuum of this historic effort. It is the majority supported, banned and persecuted underground movement for democracy which began in Haiti in the1980’s. Clearly with facts before us we see the birthplace of a Human Rights revolution that took simultaneous aim at slavery, colonialism, class structures and race relations. In 1815 Simón Bolívar and a group of Haitian guerrilla fighters exported this uprising to the entirety of Latin America.
Not until the socialist revolutions of the 20th century had there ever been a more direct threat to contain. And admittedly the masters, the elites of the metrolpol hegemons have contained populism, socialism, and national self-determination in near totality. A victorious indictment of the exploitation that emanates from European greed truly began in Haiti. Paul Farmer claims in his book The Uses of Haiti; her greatest modern use is to continuously discredit an idea (Farmer, 2005).
There was a slave general named Toussaint L’Ouvature who believed that the liberation of San Domingo could shatter a global structure of brutal exploitation. As described so eloquently by C.R.L. James in Black Jacobins:
“Leader of a backward and ignorant mass, he was yet in the forefront of the great historical movement of his time. The blacks were taking their part in the destruction of European feudalism begun by the French Revolution, and liberty and equality, the slogans of the revolution, meant far more to them than to any Frenchman. That was why in the hour of danger Toussaint, uninstructed as he was, could find the language and accent of Diderot, Rousseau, and Raynal, of Mirabeau, Robespierre and Danton. And in one respect he excelled them all. For even these masters of the spoken and written word, owing to the class complications of their society, too often had to pause, to hesitate, to qualify. Toussaint could defend the freedom of the blacks without reservation, and this gave to his declaration a strength and a single-mindedness rare in the great documents of the time. The French bourgeoisie could not understand it. Rivers of blood were to flow before they understood that elevated as was his tone Toussaint had written neither bombast nor rhetoric but the simple and sober truth.” (CRL James, Black Jacobins).
The truth about Haiti is every conceivable effort has been taken by aggressive, capitalist European powers to break her people and annihilate the spirit of the original revolt (Rotberg, 1971) (Farmer, 2005) (Hallward, 2007).
Since independence was declared on 1 January, 1804; the world’s “first black republic” has been plagued by economic quarantine, endemic socio-racial fragmentation, civil war, periodic coups and foreign backed totalitarian dictatorships. The office of the President has been persistently utilized to expropriate the national treasury and keep the Haitian people in a condition of permanent underdevelopment. Haiti is currently the most impoverished nation in the Western hemisphere. The Haitian people, who are largely illiterate subsistence farmers, are not consulted or even included into Haiti’s narrative. Its history is a permanent rebellion from slavery toward a desperately yearned for, but forever fleeting emancipation. The Lavalas Movement with the Haitian people firmly behind them behind are getting closer to that collective dream than any before them. Their movement was able to conquer Duvalier, but has yet to vanquish the entrenched forces of Duvalierism (Dupay, 2007). To know the mind of the Haitian people it is important to understand their collectivism, their fearlessness, and their full connection to their real and imagined history.
The Lavalas Movement and its aspirations cannot be understood unless in context of historical events for the Haitian peasant’s claim of readiness to “complete the revolution” reflects a mental continuity of events that we too must grasp are we to be a participant not a perpetrator.
Micro brief on Haitian History; Part I: (1791-1857)
“The poor have long experience in creating a third way. They face death and death every day. They survive. In Haiti we have survived for hundreds of years this way. This may be a jarring notion for those who believe the poor are poor because they are stupid. If one believes this, one will always feel that the solution to poverty will not come from those who are poor. But in fact, if we are alive at all it is not because of aid or help from other countries, rather despite it. We are alive because of our tremendous capacity for survival.” (Aristide, Reflections, p20).
To understand what is happening today in Haiti one must always separate its people completely from their hyper-predatory government, but never ever separate the people from their history. The Haitian collective memory is product of resilience to trauma inflicted throughout the entirety of its past; it colonial existence, its revolution and it’s periods of repeated occupation.
Mats Lundahl, in his book Poverty in Haiti traces the track of economic and social devastation to five key historical events. I have included five more. The first was the European discovery of Hispaniola in 1492. Within 50 years of arrival 100,000-8 million indigenous Taino Indians had been eradicated by forced labor and disease. They were replaced by a slave labor kidnapped & imported from 40 African regional ethnicities which on the eve of the revolution numbered over 450,000 slaves. Slaves were perishing via the structural violence of the St. Domingue colony at such rates that by 1790; 40,000 new slaves were being imported per year (James, 1963). The second event was the Haitian Revolution itself which from 1791-1804 took the lives of an estimated 140,000 slave, mulatto and colonial inhabitants; as well as over 57,000 French, Irish, Polish, English and Spanish soldiers sent in to suppress it. A plantation economy that was once providing 60% of the world’s coffee; was a vital supplier of sugar, indigo, cotton and made up ¼ of the Pre-Jacobin French GNP was reduced to ashes and absolute ruin. The third event cited was the 1809 Land Reform of President Alexandre Sabès Pétion who broke up most of the major land holdings established by the post-revolutionary leadership and laid the legal foundation for mass peasantry whereby only through periodic government taxation could any form of agricultural exploitation occur. Two events (of my own addition) are the 1822 enslavement of the Dominican Republic compounded with the 1825 imposition of the French Indemnity, an estimated 21 billion dollar debt that Haiti would continuously pay until 1947 to France for “compensation” of its lost territorial and human property. From 1843 to 1915 Haiti had no less than 22 Presidents, 11 of which were in office less than a year little of this had much effect on the peasantry (Rotberg, 1971). The 1809 Land Reform sealed the fate of Haiti underdevelopment according to Lundahl, but it also made the bulk of the population cultivators of their own land without any firm infrastructure to engage in state predation. The fourth main event was the American Occupation which lasted from 1915-1934. The most tangible effects of this occupation were the forced conscription of the Haitians into infrastructure building projects, the full repayments of foreign debts, and the creation of the military forces that would soon after occupation become the Forces Armees d’Haiti, the Haitian Army (FAdH). It was this army and infrastructure that would set the stage for the fifth event sealing the nation into predatory state underdevelopment; the Duvalier Dictatorship of 1957-1986. I will identify the chief attritions of that father-son regime in the next immediate section.
The final three devastating events to Haitian development & democracy were the Coup of 1991, the Coup of 2004, and the Earthquake of 2010 which killed between 100,000 to 316,000 people and reduced the country to full blown a “Republic of NGOs”.
Micro brief on Haitian History; Part II (1957-1986)
The regime that Francois Duvalier built reflected a keen understanding of the Haitian people and the power centers that held the traditional predatory state in check. He maintained power and presided over (father then son) a period of state predation and totalitarian control unrivaled by any previous Haitian despot (Rotberg, 1971). Using “Noirist” political rhetoric and strategic brutality he contained the mulatto elites. Using the army he came to power then brought the army in line by creating his own hyper-violent personal army; the Tonton Macoute. He played on Cold War tensions to secure US aid for his militant anti-communist repression. He neutralized the Catholic Church by replacing all higher clergy with his own loyalists. He wrapped his entire brutal regime in the trappings of voudoun. He established a systematic network of local bosses called Section Chiefs on every level of the 9 Haitian departments. Through systematic killings, torture, rape and massacre he drove most of the intelligentsia and professional class into exile. When his son Jean-Claude Duvalier was handed power at age 19 an intensified period of looting began.
After the U.S. occupation from 1915-1934; via roads, rural pacification, and the creation a new Haitian proto-military; the necessary infrastructure was in place to transform Haiti’s illiterate peasant class into a vast pool of cheap, expendable labor for use in an envisioned island wide export processing zone focused on garment assembly in Haiti and on the Dominican side; sugar cane harvest. Both Duvaliers and their Dominican counter parts Trujillo/Balaguer played on racialist rhetoric to consolidate rule, but both regimes found common cause in conscription of Haitians to work Dominicans sugar plantations. With the exception of the Parsley Massacre in 1937 both sides used their militaries exclusively to make war on their own populations (Wucker, 2000). Backed intermittently by US aid, plunder of state assets and narco-dollars during the height of the Cold War, the Duvalier Regime which lasted from 1957-1971 under Francois Duvalier (Papa Doc) and continued under his son Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc) 1971-1986 presided over one of Haiti’s longest periods of organized internal violence and state looting. Backed by foreign aid and reinforced via a vicious secret police (Milice de Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale/Militia of National Security Volunteers/MVSN, better known as the Tonton Macoute) over 50,000 Haitians were viciously annihilated, hundreds of thousands were driven into exile and hundreds of millions dollars were funneled out of the country into private slush funds in foreign banks.
There were by 1980 only four strategic fields that the Haitian peasant could use to resist the brutality of the regime; popular mutual aid associations called Konbits, the spiritual field of liberation theology via the Ti Legliz; urban youth gangs and the resources of the Haitian diaspora.
Haiti’s Konbit System
Haitians survive via a vast informal economy providing subsistence for 70% of the urban workforce (Lundahl, 2011). No public assistance from any government has ever meaningfully replaced this framework.
In the late 1980’s US subsidized rice replaced Haitian grown rice. The 1985 US Farm Bill began subsidizing 40% of the cost of domestic rice and dumping it via “aid” on foreign recipients. By 1996 Haiti was importing 196,000 tons of US rice up from just 7,000 tons in 1986. Eradication of the Haitian black pig began in 1982. International aid agencies told Haitians that the pigs were sick and had to be killed and they were over next 13 months. Replaced with a larger Iowa pig “prince a quatre pieds”. This effected numerous issues. Decapitalization of peasant economy, soil and agricultural productivity, and the people didn’t even like their taste. These two events are often associated as the Haitian peasantries first mass interactions with globalization (Hallward, 2007).
In 1809 Petion’s Land Reform Act transformed the newly liberated Haiti into a nation of small-holding rural peasants. The cycle of political coups and violence centered around the capital Port-Au-Prince and due to lack of infrastructure and mountainous topography the Haitian peasant was until the American occupation an almost ahistorical actor. Until roads and the military were in place, until Section Chiefs and Macoute were available to extort and coerce, until NGOs and missionaries arrived with “development projects”; the Haitian peasant relied on his or her village Konbit to survive.
A Konbit is a collective labor framework utilized on nearly every level of rural Haitian society to extend mutual aid to secure basic support for education, healthcare, agriculture, and other needs. These agreements and their associations were one of the four mechanisms that allowed clandestine organization in the face of Duvalierism.
Less important to the resistance are the various arrangements of Konbits that existed at the time of the 1986 uprising or continue today. More important was and is the Lavalas ability to harness these collective frameworks into strikes, demonstrations, social programs and until 2004; votes.
The Little Church: Ti Legliz
Rhetorically Lavalas organizers are liberation theologian priests and/or young leftist grassroots activists that draw on the messages of the Christian gospel to reinforce socialist conceptions of economic distribution and social justice.
Under the Duvalier most of Haiti’s traditional power centers firmly squared away. The mountainous interior was under the control of a Macoute infiltrated voudou hierarchy and the notoriously exploitative ‘Section Chiefs’. The army and Macoute tortured and disappeared an estimated 50,000 citizens. The official Catholic Church, once recognized in Haiti after the Duvalier purse of all non-Haitian clergy was a mouth piece of the regime. In this was physical repression, spiritual repression, and civil political repression were absolute. But Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc) was more of a playboy beholden to technocrats than his strong man despot father ever was.
The average Haitian living on less than a dollar a day finds more use for a konbit than any non-existent civil service. They turn to a god that will give them justice and since the Macoute infiltrated voudoun and Catholicism the Ti Legliz became the predominant platform to organize the assault on the regime.
Chimères & Diaspora
Haiti is a place of extremes. There is no traditional middle class to speak of. A tiny mulatto and noire elite of un-apologetic Duvalierists, or post 1986 neo-liberal “neo-Duvalierists” have lorded over the larger peasant population via the Macoutes and the army. Lavalas was and is a peasant movement which harnessed Konbit collective frameworks and liberation theology to mobilize the people into the streets. The overwhelming numbers belayed the fact that this movement had neither the arms to fight the army or the finding to play international politics, but defeated both for a time.
Haiti has nine geographic “departments” and over one million expatriates abroad make up the 10th department responsible for between 400-600 million in remittances. The Haitian diaspora with major population concentrations in Boston, New York, Montréal and Paris are not only disproportionately wealthy and educated as a diaspora, they have been highly excluded from Haitian politics. The diaspora support would prove vital to restoring President Aristide after the military coup of 1991. It is vital to the future of the movement to harness this 10th department.
Unfortunately the Haitian Diaspora is fickle. Dual citizenship is illegal and as many in Diaspora fund or support Neo-Duvalierist candidates (such as Martelly), or are completely disinvolved; as place support behind Lavalas.
In Cite Soleil, the largest slum in the western Hemisphere 400,000 people live on but 2.5 square miles, sleeping in shifts for lack of space. Aristide and other Lavalas leadership could rely on both the slums and the diaspora for support intermittently in crucial ways. In place like La Saline, Bel Air or Cite Soleil Street gangs of young urban men rallied behind the Lavalas flag. These gangs which were never any military match for the FAdH, FRAPH or MINUSTAH but they were the only violent counter balance Lavalas has had to the sheer volume of repression used against the movement. They are referred to the Chimeres.
Lavalas strongholds have been most consistent in the places of greatest desperation. Numerous military efforts have been directed against these youth gangs under the auspices of “security” since 2004 and the French/American press uses them as evidence that Aristide ruled also with terror and force.
In the time leading up to the uprising of 1986 the Chimeres were perhaps the most audacious and violent counter balance available to fight the Macoute. The slum gangs and peasantry carried Lavalas via Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the office of president in 1991. The diaspora has yet to decide completely what if any side they are on in Haiti’s future.
Dechoukaj: “The Uprooting”
“One does not adhere to Lavalas as one becomes a card carrying or dues paying member of a party. One joins freely a movement which transforms the eternal vassals, the serfs into free human beings. We are all free human beings. Lavalas was the chance of all men and women…it was the opportunity for the army, the mercenary institution yesterday, to become united with its people. It was the chance for the bourgeoisie to opt for a democratic transition rather than a violent revolution. It was the chance for the church to come closer to its people. The idea of Lavalas – the torrent that cleans everything in its path- was growing in the people’s opinion- unity; the unraveling of the Macoute system. To unravel. To uproot. To be born again.” (Aristide, Prophet and Power, p.91)
The dechoukaj affected every intuition and population center in Haiti, especially the institutions of the Haitian Voudoun religion, whose principals and traditions had been directly tied to the dictatorship; the Section Chiefs, the army and all known members of the Tonton Macoute (Wilentz, 1989).
From the fall of Duvalier to the election of Aristide in 1991 the Lavalas Movement directed and encouraged mobilization in defense of civil rights, but not attacks on known members of the brutal secret police and security forces that so immediately preyed on the masses. This occurred rather spontaneously. Haitians all over the country took advantage of the uprising to execute or apprehend as many agents of the regime as possible. “Necklessing” was the preferred means. Placing a burning tire around the neck of the captured Macoute. While accused by Western media of contributing to the violence Aristide and Lavalas largely directed efforts at sustaining the popular movement while over thirty years of tyranny were assailed in the streets (Hallward, 2007).
Duvalierism had driven the population into previously unknown levels of deprivation. The Little Church aggressively mobilized against the regime and worked hard to ensure that the military could not impose a new president for life upon them. The movement was highly decentralized and took form around a variety of priests that utilized their congregations as mobilizing platforms. After a cycle of mass protests and retaliatory massacres escalating to a point of possible revolution Jean-Claude Duvalier fled in 1986 leaving the army in control of a completely bankrupt country on the verge of total class war.
Election and Coup Pt. 1 & 2
In 1991 Aristide was elected with 67% of the vote in Haiti’s first truly open and democratic election (Hallward, 2007). He defeated a full range of other candidates backed by the army, the United States, neo-conservative backers and overt Duvalierists. Lavalas as a movement had no structures political machine, no media platform, no foreign funding even from the diaspora or party apparatus. But the Haitian people elected him with a mandate to defeat Duvalierism and defend free Haiti. The United States State Department and intelligence community, long Duvalier supporters were not very pleased.
“We are not against trade, we are not against free trade, but our fear is that the global market intends to annihilate our markets. We will be pushed to the cities, to eat food grown on factory farms in distant countries, food whose price depends on the daily numbers game of the first market. ‘This is more efficient,’ the economists say. ‘Your market, your way of life is not efficient,’ they say. But we ask, ‘What is left when you reduce trade to numbers, when you erase all that is human.” (Aristide, Reflections, p.10)
A C.I.A. backed coup carried out by the army toppled Haitian democracy in just 8 months forcing Aristide to flee the country for his life as the military killed and tortured an estimated 5,000 Lavalas activists and supporters between 1991-1994.
The Lavalas Social Movement in Haiti was responsible for toppling the Duvalier regime, later dissolving the military in 1995, introducing unionization, raising minimum wage and establishing widespread social services while carrying out Haiti’s first period of democratic elections bringing Jean Bertrand Aristide, a liberation theologian priest into the Presidency in 1991. Eight months later when was toppled and exiled in a military coup the diaspora rallied behind him and the US restored him to power in 1994. He was reinstated via U.S. military intervention and he was forced to adopt neo-liberal trade polices upon re-assuming office. His term ended in 1996 and he stepped down in the first peaceful transition to opposition Haiti as ever had. He was re-elected in 2001 with 90% of the vote. During this tumultuous period the newly formed Fanmi Lavalas party incarnation of the Lavalas Movement under the leadership of Aristide implemented major reforms in healthcare, education and human rights attainment with Cuban support. The US cut off aid to Haiti and the Lavalas government was without any funds. In 2004 Aristide was exiled yet again in a second coup. This time he was kidnapped by US soldiers and placed under house arrest in Central African Republic as right wing FRAPH paramilitaries stormed the country (Sprague, 2012).
“Inside Haiti Aristide’s government had been ‘denounced by virtually every element of the coalition that supported his rise to the presidency in 1990’. This is true if ‘virtually every’ means ‘everyone except the poor’. The anti-Aristide movement united a broad spectrum of the elite, from Marxists and anti-globalization crusaders to Duvalierists and sweatshop owners. But every indicator, from Gallup polls to the relative size of demonstrations, showed that the government enjoyed solid support from the vast majority of Haitians who were not an ‘intellectual or artist of note’. The anti-Aristide camp knew this, and so refused to allow legislative elections. The ease with which Haiti’s leftist elite and its foreign supporters joined sweatshop owners, Duvalierists and the Bush administration in a crusade to overthrow Aristide says more about the fluidity of their own political commitments than about Haiti’s government. The real cleavage in Haiti has always been not left-right but up-down. When push came to shove, class allegiance trumped any professed commitment to social equality or democracy.” (Concannon, Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti)
The UN “stabilization mission” began shortly after. Since the 2004 coup Fanmi Lavalas has been banned from participating in elections. Neo-liberal development reforms have been reinstituted under a “Republic of NGOs” and a mulatto pop singer and open Duvlaierist has been “elected” President but Lavalas remains the predominant social movement and party representing the poor in Haiti.
“On the tarmac in CAR, Aristide thanked the Africans for their hospitality, and then said: ‘I declare in overthrowing me they have uprooted the trunk of the tree of peace, but it will grow back because the roots are l’Ouverturian.’ (Chompsky, Goodman, Farmer 2004)
The Banned Majority
Why does Haiti a ruined and impoverished nation and an underground movement of peasants matter?
In January of 2011, a year after the devastating earthquake, both Aristide and Duvalier ended their respective exiles and returned to the country. Aristide was greeted fanfare and thousands of supporters, Duvalier with barricades and an “arrest for his safety”. Both are now on trial for corruption with ongoing highly politicized proceedings. Both represent diametrically opposite ideological schools of opinion on what will determine the future of Haiti under the “build-back-better” era of Michel Martelly.
Lavalas is till banned from elections as of March 2014 and remains highly polarizing in Diaspora, but widely supported in Haiti.
There are a staggering number of challenges facing the people of Haiti. They have many enemies and many more indifferentists. It is vital that those who are defenders of human rights and allies of the Haitian people support the only movement that has ever represented the impoverished of that long abused nation.
The rhetoric of the “development enterprise” and the full misery of poverty hides the underlying reality that for over 200 years the Haitian peasant and Haiti herself are via their very survival are a revolutionary and existential threat to colonialism then and globalization of today. Therefore, Lavalas is not just a “preferential option for the poor.” It seeks victory over oppressors internal and international; its views its survival as an act of resistance; and it seeks to wash away, to uproot the mechanisms that keep the Haitian people still as perpetual serfs.
References:
Aristide, B. (2000). Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization. Monroe: Common Courage Press.
Buss, T. (2008). Haiti in the Balance: Why foreign aid has failed and what we can do about it. Washington D.C., Brookings Institution Press.
Dupay, A. (2007). The Prophet and Power. Lanham. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Chompsky, Goodman, Farmer (2004). Getting Haiti Right This Time: The US and the Coup. Monroe: Common Courage Press.
To agree on what it is not: neither evangelization, nor a philanthropic enterprise, nor a desire to push back the frontiers of ignorance, disease and tyranny, nor a project undertaken for the greater glory of God, nor an attempt to extend the rule of law. To admit once and for all, without flinching at the consequences, that the decisive actors here are the adventurer and the pirate, the wholesale grocery and the ship owner, the gold digger and the merchant, appetite and force, and behind them the baleful shadow of a form of civilization which, at a certain point in history, finds itself obliged, for internal reasons, to extend to a world scale the competition of its antagonist economies (Cesaire, p.32)
And in response to that emancipatory development is form of resistance. Before one can struggle they must articulate to their people the nature of the oppression that has befallen them. Colonial literature in different terms seeks to convey the way in which the colonial experience is one of dehumanization and physical rape. While varying authors take different approaches to understanding the social phenomenon it is important to show a textual analysis of different writer’s presentation of the subject. Focusing primarily on Houseboy and Heart of Darkness, this writer will tackle the use of literature to demonstrate the horrors of colonial violence supplemented by the writings of Fanon, Memmi, and Cesaire.
Perhaps the greatest trick ever pulled on mankind was the false consciousness delineating race and nation over the unity of humanity. Colonialism was an institution was designed to extract the wealth of the non-Western world, dehumanize them to nothing short of a reformative slavery, and thus cloak the entire venture in the great civilizing mission, or development enterprise. Yet colonialism was/is a dual pariah. In destroying the indigenous cultures and exacting terrible brutality it also changes the metropol power as well. The colonial experience changes both parties involved for in it one group was dehumanized and the other was forced to admit or rationalize the inhumanity of their practices and policies. To understand a given societal interaction one must first analyze the participating parties to determine the dynamics that define their relationship. In the context of colonialism, social theorists have sought to paint a portrait of the participating parties to show the true costs of maintaining the colonies. It is an entity whose defining attributes include glorification of mediocrity, quick financial gain for a privileged few, and the ultimate ruin of the participants. This was the narrative that declared the age of colonialism “over” and has declared that era; dead, lessons learned. Yet the dependency persists. The economic domination continues. Neo-Colonialism not referring to a “new type of colonialism”. It is the exact same power relationship of North over South divested of its overt ideological of racial overtones. Neo-Colonialism if a globalized version of the old paradigm. To form a true indictment of colonialism one must first know its actors and its cost.
The Colonizer
The archetype of the colonizer most implanted in the Western mind is found in Heart of Darkness is of course Kurtz; the colonizer who accepts. Kurtz is a product of the colonial project; an extreme rendition of the fate of the colonizer. Once the sense of mission is stripped we are left with the brutal reality unjustifiable even under the feeble terms offered in the defense of the enterprise. Says Cesaire in his damning indictment;
They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; the colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal (Cesaire, p.41).
And an animal is what Kurtz becomes. The journey of Marlow up the Congo River is journey not just into a Heart of Darkness connoting the barbarity of the jungle; it is a metaphor for the darkness in the heart of man transformed by the greater project. And along the way Marlow comes across the varying degrees of colonizers. There is the chief accountant with the starched collars and pristine appearance. Slightly removed from the horror there is the colonist who maintains a position of privilege yet has so far been unmoved by the brutality. Marlow comments on this man;
Moreover I respected the fellow. Yes. I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy, but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character. He had been out here three years and, later on, I could not help asking him how he managed to sport such linen (Conrad, p.18).
The esteem articulated by Marlow about this man demonstrates the rational of the colonizer. The place is savage and its savagery is the juxtaposition of the western metropol civilized. In reference to the indigenous people Marlow sees them as beasts of burden; as completely subhuman and looks in relative indifference when they are to be treated as such. While he has a sense of sympathy to the pathetic nature of the broken and whipped creatures that once were the indigenous African tribes or when he sees a ship shelling the bush over a minor and trivial rebellion a part of him must convince himself that this violence is not to a fellow man. There is the cool indifference to the nature of the project and that becomes worse as one moves deeper into the real motivations and realities that lie up river.
Further up river Marlow encounters men from the Eldorado Exploring Expedition. Their rugged indifference to uphold even the pretense of the mission is evident in their talk and conduct they reflect that the colonizer ultimately realizes the nature if their mission.
Their talk however was the talk of sordid buccaneers. It was reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage. There was not an atom of foresight or of serious intention in the whole batch of them, and they did not seem aware that these things are wanted for the work of the world. To tear treasure out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with no more moral purpose at the back of it than there is in burglars breaking into a safe (Conrad, p.30)
The colonizer is of course an agent of profit as expressed my Marlow earlier on in the book. The concept of the civilizing mission is more for the Europeans at home in the metropol power for it would be absurd to express such a view amidst the witness of the project itself. A colony after all is defined by its objective goal. Says Memmi:
Leaving for a colony is not a choice sought because of its uncertain dangers, nor is a desire of one tempted by adventure. It is simply a voyage toward an easier life…” it is “a place where one earns more and spends less. You go to a colony because jobs are guaranteed, wages high, careers more rapid and business more profitable (Memmi, p.3).
The colonizer comes to the colony because of the inherent privilege attached to his status, profiting from a situation instigated by his people and maintained through the oppression of the colonized. The goal of the colony is to get as much as one can for as little as possible. The colony itself exists as a mechanism of pure exploitation.
If his living standards are high, it is because those of the colonized are low; if he can benefit from plentiful and undemanding labor and servants, it is because the colonized can be exploited at will and are not protected by the laws of the colony; if he can obtain administrative positions, it is because they are reserved for him and the colonized are excluded from them (Memmi, p.8).
Upriver beyond the starched collared accountant and the pirates of the Eldorado exploring company lies Kurtz. He is a man of mediocrity made great by the colony and its mission. In the metropol country he is too poor to be married yet here in the Congo he has fashioned himself into a god. Cesaire would comment that the colony has brought the brutality out of Kurtz and that he is merely acting out the natural result of the colonial power structure. The colonizer is of course not accountable to anyone. Kurtz engages in barbarism and wanton brutality for the colony has made him insane. On intrinsic level however Kurtz knows that with his full understanding of the project; his vested role in the colonial endeavor; in his final moments he comes to terms with what he has done.
It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of somber pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror-of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in very detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision-he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “The horror! The horror!” (Conrad, p.69).
Kurtz is the creation of the colonial system; he represents its greatest agent stricken by the underlying horror of it all. What Conrad means to say with his character is that colonialism brings out the animal hiding behind the veil of Western civilization and that barbarity of the heart of darkness must always be reflected that the West is “one of the dark places of the earth” too. The only way to justify these atrocities is to attempt to hide them behind the great civilizing mission, but this veil cannot hold for long. While Marlow fabricates the message of Kurtz and conceals the final madness from the intended; this is the metaphoric concealment of the metropol country from ever making its citizens aware of the reality of the colonial project.
The Colonized
For a colony to exist it must be sustained by a large, unskilled, uneducated and generally illiterate indigenous population. These are the natives of the country. These are the colonized. Says Marlow:
No they were not inhuman. Well, you know that was the worst of it- this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped and spun and made horrid faces, but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity-like yours- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar (Conrad, p.36).
But thought like that had to be suppressed.
They were never given the option to accept or refuse. They were born exploited and have been taught from birth a self-degrading mentality that would insure they would never revolt. They are kept unskilled so their labor remains cheap. They have no rights, nor do they have access to power. They are taught inferiority and their only real aspiration is to emulate the colonizer closely enough that they might become him. In Houseboy Toundi bears witness to the role of the colonized. While the natives are taught to embrace a rigid Christian dogma the colonizers live a gilded life of luxury, profit, and hypocrisy. Toundi with relative unconscious rebellion becomes the repeated victim of colonial violence through his failure to grasp what the white man deems is his role. Says the household cook:
Toundi, will you never learn what a houseboy’s job is? One of these days you’ll be the cause of real trouble. When will you grasp that for the whites, you are only alive to do their work and for no other reason. I am the cook. The white man does not see me except with his stomach. You lad’s of today, I don’t know what’s the matter with you (Oyono, p.87).
Assimilation however is impossible. The colonizer tells them that they are incapable of self rule. They have been oppressed for so long they have forgotten what freedom ever felt like. They have been dehumanized into anonymous collectivity existing purely to serve the colonizer. He is trapped and there is no means for social mobility. He is not offered citizenship nor can he convert to the faith of his masters and ever truly be regarded as an equal. His degradation has been absolute.
To keep the colonized from revolting the colonized must be made to believe in the legitimacy of the system. To do this institutionalized racism is used to make the language, culture, and ethnicity of the colonized inferior in their own minds. They are given Christianity and new names; they are taught to believe in the “savage” nature of their old customs. Toundi is socialized through the church to accept his place. In Houseboy religion is the cement that binds the colonized to their prescribed role as an army of slaves. They must struggle to be like the colonizer, but be constantly reminded that this is unattainable.
‘Perhaps Madame, but my wife and children will never be able to eat and dress like Madame or like white children.’
‘Oh dear,’ she laughed. ‘You are getting big ideas.’
She went on. ‘You must be serious. Everyone has their position in life. You are a houseboy, my husband is Commandant…nothing can be done about it. You are a Christian aren’t you?’ (Oyono, p.56)
Revolt is unthinkable. Not only is everything done to disrupt and discredit nationalist feelings, there exists both an army and a police force ready to brutally crush rebellion. Because the typical colonized has little to no education, it produces few intellectuals, and thus remains backward. This backwardness is enforced and relied upon to retain control over a population that greatly outnumbers the colonizers. And yet revolt is carried out in the simple assertion of the colonized’s humanity. It is after all the reclamation on ones humanity and dignity that is the greatest threat to the colonizer. If the colonized are people the system simply will not hold. Toundi comes to this realization throughout the course of Houseboy. Upon witnessing the brutal beating of a native he exclaims:
Is the white man’s neighbor only other white men? Who can go on believing the stuff we are served up in the churches when things happen like I saw today…On Sunday the priest will say, ‘Dearly beloved brethren, pray for all those prisoners who died without making their peace with god. Everyone will put a little more than he had intended. All the money goes to the whites. They are always thinking up new ways to get back what little money they pay us. How wretched we are (Oyono, p.76).
The colonial system, founded on inequity and buttressed with dehumanizing ideas, is not sustainable. While much can be done to enslave a people the obvious hypocrisy of the system only reinforces dull sensations of nationalism and equality in the native people. The colonized wonder why they work so hard and earn so little; they wonder why a foreign power has subjugated them for so long. A writer like Cesaire reminds the colonizer that the system brings out their inherent decadence and lust for blood. For her the colony is but an extension of Nazism. Conrad has demonstrated in his book that this conclusion is not so far from the truth. Europe’s heart is dark indeed. A writer like Memmi introduces us to the mediocrity of the colonizer and paints a vivid picture of the colonial system’s ultimate moral bankruptcy; mediocre people seeking profit. Oyono’s Houseboy not only depicts the colonizers mediocrity, it shows the colonized in proto-rebellious understanding of a needed political reaction.
Conclusion
As we have said literature is a form of resistance. Both Heart of Darkness and Houseboy depict the horrors of the colonial experience for an audience removed from the project. Cesaire, Memmi, and Fanon would be out of context for most without human portraits of the main protagonists. We have touched on Memmi and Cesaire, but what of Fanon? How does the colonial project end?
The naked truth of decolonization evokes for us the searing bullets and the blood stained knives which emanate from it. For if the last shall be first, this will come to pass after a murderous and decisive struggle between the two protagonists. That affirmed intention to place the last at the head of things, and to make them climb at a pace the well-known steps which characterize organized society, can only triumph if we use all means to turn the scale, including, of course, that of violence (Fanon, p.37).
A system founded on such grievous injustice will yield fiery rebellion and violence will wash over every colony as the redemptive actions of a people long in captivity. The systematic subjugation of the colonized took hundreds of years to perfect, but the violent revolution against it will be quick in comparison. Colonialism according to Fanon will be washed away only through bloodshed. Because a people can tolerate such treatment only for so long; the anger unleashed against the colonizer will be great. The fate of both Toundi and Kurtz was death. While the literature may serve to remind the West of the violence they have perpetrated these books are for the West and not for the colonized. The colonized after all read Fanon not Houseboy. Colonialism is an institution that destroys both protagonists. The extent of course rests on the duration of the project.
References:
Cesaire, A. (2000). Discourse on Colonialism
Conrad, J. (2006). Heart of Darkness.
Fanon, F. (1968). Wretched of the Earth.
Memmi, A. (2000). The Colonizer and the Colonized.
Oyono, F. (1990). Houseboy.
The Cost of Colonialism
By: Walter Adler
To understand a given societal interaction, be it the struggles of the working class to gain access to the means of production, or that of a colonized people subjugated by a foreign power; one must first analyze the participating parties to determine the dynamics that define their relationship. In the context of colonialism, Memmi seeks to paint a portrait of the participating parties to show the true cost of maintaining the colony. It is an entity whose defining attributes include glorification of mediocrity, quick financial gain for a privileged few, and the ultimate ruin of all participants. To understand the case against colonialism one must first know its players and its cost.
A colony is defined by its objective goal. “Leaving for a colony is not a choice sought because of its uncertain dangers, nor is a desire of one tempted by adventure. It is simply a voyage toward an easier life…” it is “a place where one earns more and spends less. You go to a colony because jobs are guaranteed, wages high, careers more rapid and business more profitable.” The colonizer comes to the colony because of the inherent privilege attached to his status, profiting from a situation instigated by his people and maintained through the oppression of the colonized. The goal of the colony is to get as much as one can for as little as possible. The colony itself exists as a mechanism of pure exploitation. “If his living standards are high, it is because those of the colonized are low; if he can benefit from plentiful and undemanding labor and servants, it is because the colonized can be exploited at will and are not protected by the laws of the colony; if he can obtain administrative positions, it is because they are reserved for him and the colonized are excluded from them.” A natural dependency is formed and as a result there become two types of colonials; those that refuse and those that accept. Both are changed by the colony in different ways, but are quite aware of its true nature. The reality of the colonizer is the ongoing knowledge that he is a usurper; that all his privilege is derived from the degradation of an entire people to the status of quasi-slavery. The decision he then makes effects the severity of the cost.
The colonizer who refuses tends to come from a left or liberal background. He is upset by the glaring poverty, the malnourished and undereducated colonized, but primarily he regards the very colony itself as a permanent injustice that he must work to right. He rejects the opportunity that comes through his colonizer status and attempts to be accepted by the colonized. Unfortunately, he is not one of them and never will be. Their customs are not his own and their objectives post-liberation do not necessarily coincide with his ideals and long term interests. “He suspects that he will have no place in the future nation. This will be the last discovery, the most staggering one for the left-wing colonizer…if he could continue to live in the midst of the colonized as a tolerated foreigner, he tolerate together with the former colonizers the rancor of a people once bullied by them.” The result of his choice will inevitably leave him alienated by his own people and rejected by those he attempted to aid. He is made ineffective by his origins. While his intentions were indeed righteous, “his statements and promises have no influence on the life of the colonized because he is not in power.” The final act of the colonizer who refuses will be to leave the colony and put an end to his ineffective and contradictory political career. He is left demoralized and may come to the conclusion that perhaps his ideals of freedom and democracy are not so well instituted in the third world. Compared to those that accept however, his loss is less severe.
The colonizer who accepts is by nature mediocre. His decision is obviously more convenient for he is fulfilling the unstated objective of the colony. Its existence is not to better the local populace, it is to make use of them. He pretends not to see the poverty around him and justifies his exploitation through institutionalized racism. He insists both to his class and to those he oppresses that the colonized are inherently lazy and naturally backward. He champions the token developments the colony has brought to the colonized people. All are indeed inadequate, but he rationalizes that his people have done these savages a service. The colony tends to lose its brightest minds as those of real intellect or ability leave, gravitating toward social institutions based on merit. “The promotion of mediocre personnel is not a temporary error but a lasting catastrophe from which the colony never recovers.” Because they have accepted they have made a commitment to remain. Even though their stated objective may be to retire back to their country of origin with the riches they’ve amassed, they remain aware that such a return would mean the end of their privilege and a decreased standard of living. In their home countries they are without rank or privilege; they are simply mediocre. They are supported by a system fashioned to their benefit and a priori they will aggressively defend what they have usurped. He will do everything he can to falsify history, rewrite laws, and praise both himself and his kind. “His disquiet and resulting thirst for justification require the usurper to extol himself to the skies and to drive the usurped below the ground at the same time.”
A deep seated insecurity grips all those who accept for they know that the colony will inevitably cease as an institution. They have become more a burden than asset to the mother country. They are a living anachronism; the skeleton in the closet of the free world. While they do everything they can to suppress the nationalism of the colonized, they know that one day the colony will fall. When it does they will be hunted, they will be forced to flee, and their very lives will be threatened. After all, they are an alien minority living at the expense of an entire people; the Nero complex will inevitably have a cost.
The colonizer who accepts has paid for his luxury by accepting a delusion. His entire existence is based upon justifications that are false and rationalizations that he himself must admit are questionable. He has destroyed a people for personal gain. His class has enabled the misery around him. The price he will pay will be high. The inevitable fall of the colony will strip him of both his material processions and his power, but there is a far worse result of his acceptance. He has spent most of his life in a system where his mediocrity was rewarded. He did not have to work hard or earn what he received. He will find that the outside world is not like the colony. His views; the very way he lives his life is no longer in synch with the outside world. The result will be a permanent isolation. Nothing will ever compare to the life he lived in the colony. While he may have been able to extract some assets before the liberation, he will never possess what he once had. The absolution he created for himself now means nothing. He is aware of what he has done and will never readjust to the social norms of a society based on merit.
For a colony to exist it must be sustained by a large, unskilled, uneducated and generally illiterate indigenous population. These are the natives of the country. These are the colonized. They were never given the option to accept or refuse. They were born exploited and have been taught from birth a self-degrading mentality that would insure they would never revolt. They are kept unskilled so their labor remains cheap. They have no rights, nor do they have access to power. They are taught inferiority and their only real aspiration is to emulate the colonizer closely enough that they might become him. Assimilation however is impossible. The colonizer tells them that they are incapable of self rule. They have been oppressed for so long they have forgotten what freedom ever felt like. They have been dehumanized into anonymous collectivity existing purely to serve the colonizer. He is trapped and there is no means for social mobility. He is not offered citizenship nor can he convert to the faith of his masters and ever truly be regarded as an equal. His degradation has been absolute.
To keep the colonized from revolting the colonized must be made to believe in the legitimacy of the system. To do this institutionalized racism is used to make the language, culture, and ethnicity of the colonized inferior in their own minds. They must struggle to be like the colonizer, but be constantly reminded that this is unattainable. Revolt is unthinkable. Not only is everything done to disrupt and discredit nationalist feelings, there exists both an army and a police force ready to brutally crush rebellion. Because the typical colonized has little to no education, it produces few intellectuals, and thus remains backward. This backwardness is enforced and relied upon to retain control over a population that greatly outnumbers the colonizers. “The question of whether the colonized, if let alone, would have advanced at the same pace as other peoples has no great significance. To be perfectly truthful, we have no way of knowing. It is possible that he might not.” What is accepted by anyone examining the colony system is that in no way was the colony’s existence of actual benefit to the colonized. It was markedly detrimental. “How could a social system which perpetuates such distress— even supposing that is does not create it —endure for so long? How can one dare compare the advantages and disadvantages of colonization? What advantages even if a thousand times more important, could make such internal and external catastrophes acceptable?” There are none.
The cost they have paid is enormous. They have gained little if anything and were denied everything positive the colonizing country could offer. Their entire way of life has been disrupted. Countless resources have been stolen from their country. Millions have died of starvation and disease. While the colonizer that refuses suffered idealistically and the colonizer who accepts may have been bankrupted, displaced, and forced to accept reality; the colonized has been raped. They have been raped both physically and mentally; altered beyond recognition. They have no past, they have no future, they remain trapped in the oppression of the now.
The colonized are left with only two options; assimilation or revolution. Being that assimilation is outright rejected as a concept by the colonizer, they are forced to aggressively demand change. It may start small, by refusing to speak the language of the colonizer. It will intensify; perhaps weapons will be acquired. One way or another, either through peaceful settlement of political violence, the colony will cease to exist. But what was the cost of colonization? It scarred all those that took part in it. Undoubtedly some profited from its existence financially. Obviously lives were destroyed and a nation was ravished. There can be no stability for a system founded on injustice. One cannot undo history, but one must learn not to repeat it.
All quotations have been taken from The Colonizer and The Colonized by Albert Memmi
Over 33,000 New Yorkers have died so far during the COVID-19 pandemic. A lot of bravery, heroism and inter-agency cooperation has ensued for the worst four weeks of the pandemic. The virus is here and will be for some time. My EMS brothers and sisters will continue to help hold the front lines.
But when the coughing stops and the fevers cool, will the inequities be addressed? EMS workers need profession-wide protections. We need to be compensated in parity with policemen and with firefighters. We need leadership to bring the disparate sectors of the field together in common purpose to advocate for political action to resuscitate this field. For decades we have been there at critical moments of loss and terror, laying down our lives for our patients and their families.
NYC EMS workers have been both separate and unequal to all other city service workers for years in terms of wages, benefits and working conditions. Another challenge is the awkward segregation of the workforce into distinctive sectors with competing leadership. NYC’s 13,000 EMS workers are divided into four distinct deployment models with different funding channels, varying benefits, uniform colors, vehicle colors, conditions and levels of prestige — FDNY 911 Municipal, Voluntary Hospital 911, Private Interfacility Transport and Community Volunteers.
Compared to firefighters and policemen, EMS is highly revenue generating. While “saving lives,” EMS is also a multi million-dollar industry. Every billable ambulance ride brings the city, private ambulance companies or hospitals between $500 to $4,000.
While providing significant revenue, the disparity in starting EMS salaries as compared with Fire Suppression and the NYPD is significantly lower. The starting NYPD salary is $42,500, and within 5 ½ years raises to $85,292 with the possibility for additional income from overtime. FDNY firefighters begin at $43,904 and, after 5 ½ years with fringe pay, make $110,293.
Entry pay for an FDNY EMT is $35,000 and, after five years, is capped at $50,000 or around $16.50/hour. New hire transport EMTs begin at the minimum wage — $15.00 per hour only recently up from $10.20 per hour — and go up around $1 a year. Voluntary Hospital (non-public hospitals) EMTs start at $20 per hour and go up $1 a year. When 14-year FDNY EMT Veteran Yadira Arroyo was murdered by a crazed attacker — run over by her own ambulance — she was raising five children on $48,142.
Entry-level FDNY Paramedics make $48,287 and after five years the base cap is $65,226. An entry Voluntary Hospital Paramedic makes between $23 to $38/hr job, with less security and benefits, except in more exclusive, higher-income neighborhood hospital garages like those serviced by New York Presbyterian, Northwell or Mt. Sinai. An entry-level private transport paramedic makes $23 to $25 per hour with no job security or benefits at all.
EMS workers are the frontline troops in medical and public health emergencies that are dangerous, uncontrolled and always unpredictable — where reinforcements do not always arrive or are not available, where ambulances flip, patients assault and a virus lurks.
FDNY EMS manages around 66 percent of the daily 911 call volume. Voluntary Hospital EMS manages over 33 percent of NYC citywide total call volume. This averages about 4,000 calls a day, 1.5 million a year. The combined response of Private Companies and Community Volunteers accounts for a comparable number of non-emergent, Inter-facility or emergency handled outside the 911 dispatch.
We do a lot for this city. We take great risks and we do save and prolong lives. We need proper masks. We need proper wages. We need proper unity.
With one united voice, one Political Action Committee of many small EMS unions, one lobby we must finally demand a parity whose time has come.
Mehlella (Ge’ez: ምህልላ, lit. ‘Supplication’), also Amata Saww (ዐመተ ሰወ, ‘Grouping Day’) or Sigd (ሰግድ, ‘Prostration’, Hebrew: סיגד, also romanized Sig’d), is one of the unique holidays of the Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) community, and is celebrated on the 29th of the Hebrew month of Marcheshvan. Since 2008, it has been recognized as a state holiday for all Israelis.Quick Facts: Official name, Also called …
Date
Previously, Sigd was celebrated on the 29th of Kislev, and after a calendar reform in mid-19 century it was moved to its present day, 50 days after Yom Kippur.
Etymology
The word Sigd itself is Ge’ez for “prostration” and is related to Aramaic: סְגֵד sgēd “to prostrate oneself (in worship)”. The Semitic root √sgd is the same as in mesgid, one of the two Beta Israel Ge’ez terms for “synagogue” (etymologically related to Arabic: مَسْجِد masjid “mosque“, literally “place of prostration”, and the word for mosque in Hebrew: מסגד misgad).
Significance
Originally Sigd was another name for Yom Kippur and after the reform that reunited them, the holiday was called by its present name.
There are two oral traditions about the origin of Sigd. One tradition traces it to the 6th century, in the time of King Gebre Mesqel of Axum, son of King Kaleb, when the war between Jews and Christians ended and both communities separated from each other. The second tradition traces it to the 15th century as a result of persecution by Christian emperors. The first mention of Sigd is from the 15th century.
Sigd symbolizes the acceptance of the Torah. The kahənat have also maintained a tradition of the holiday arising as a result of persecution by Christian kings, during which the kahənat retreated into the wilderness to appeal to God for His mercy. Additionally they sought to unify the Beta Israel and prevent them from abandoning the Haymanot (laws and traditions) under persecution. So they looked toward the Book of Nehemiah and were inspired by Ezra‘s presenting the “book of the law of Moses” before the assembly of Israel after it had been lost to them during the Babylonian exile.
Event
Traditionally in commemoration of the appeals made by the Kessim and consequent mass gathering, the Beta Israel would make pilgrimages to Midraro, Hoharoa, or Wusta Tsegai (possibly marking locations of relief from Christian persecution) every year to reaffirm themselves as a religious community.
Today, during the celebration, members of the community fast, recite Psalms, and gather in Jerusalem where Kessim read from the Orit (the Octateuch). The ritual is followed by the breaking of the fast, dancing, and general revelry.
Official national holiday in Israel
In February 2008 MK Uri Ariel submitted legislation to the Knesset in order to establish Sigd as an Israeli national holiday, and in July 2008 the Knesset “decided to officially add the Ethiopian Sigd holiday to the list of State holidays.” According to an opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post newspaper, however, “While the qessotch [Kessim] and Beta Israel rabbis are pleased that the Sigd became an official Israeli state holiday in 2008, they would also like the holiday to become an integral part of the yearly Jewish holiday cycle and be embraced by more Jews, at least in Israel, rather than remain a holiday primarily celebrated by the Jewish community from Ethiopia.”
Synopsis: A volunteer returns from a foreign war to “Newyorkgrad”. He is re-united with old friends at a Tavern he is hiding out in, many of which he believed had died in the war. The secret police pursue him. Someone wants him dead. He is haunted by a woman that wrote to him every day on the front, Goldy, a singer who is about to marry her wealthy patron. Adonaev is soon joined by a shot girl, police spy, a gangster, an anarchist and a person who plans to kill him.
Framing mechanism: A man hides out in a Tavern. He is joined over the course of Act 1 by many of his “dead friends”. They inquire about varying matters and engage him in drinks, poetry and song. It is not ultimately clear if he is himself dead, in some purgatory, or living out an unhinged non-reality confined in a mental hospital. It is revealed that at midnight tomorrow the love of his life will marry a wealthy man for citizenship.
In Act 2 varying charterers previously introduced take hostages at the Millennium Theatre, in an effort to stop the marriage, which the media declares an “act of terror”, related to the unknown foreign war. Sebastian and his group are ultimately killed with bullets and poisonous gas.
Conflict: In Act 1, tension builds as 1 or more of the “Old and New Friends” are planning to kill fugitive Sebastian. Ends with a shoot out. In Act 2, the friends take hostages at a theatre, they all are ultimately killed when the police pump in poison gas and then raid the building.
ACT ONE
SCENE 1
SET IN:
NEWYORKGRAD
Adonaev, a fugitive is being hidden in a Tavern. A soldier returning from a foreign war, losing his mind. A shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka based drinks. Ever present smoking a cigar is Sasho, the owner. Also, the Gangster Medvinsky, an old friend of Sebastian and Peter, a marine and decorated war veteran. They are later joined by Dmitry, a lawyer bringing bad news of a wedding. Watson Entwisle, newly returned from the colonies with news of an uprising there. Alexander an anarchist, and a professional Solider “Mountain Rock” are all veterans from the war. And Siegfried Sassoon, a Cuban Actor shows up to warn Sebastian the police are looking for him.
Improbably in walks Anya Campbell, who died in the war. Dan Newey, who was last known to be in Prison; a young sultry Lebanese debutante Anya Rhubarb, the Fixer Ayar Rassool and the burly Guerrilla commander Jansher the Georgian.)
One or more of these old and newly dead friends plans to murder Adonaev. He is told that around midnight the next day Goldy his confidant will soon marry her patron after curtain call at the Millennium Theatre.
SONG
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I survived to say the most and do the least.
We are the ones who held the barricades
I just returned,
On a shuttle from the fires of the Middle East,
I survived, I survived by happenstance,
This I know!
When dozens that I slept beside are now in coffins,
In the ground below.
This revolution is a first, and perhaps also a last chance.
Their fearless faces,
Are now martyr posters on a wall,
Reports are now coming in, the Turkish Army is fast advancing;
Rojava will likely fall!
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I walk in concentric circles, I try to tell our story,
A story etched upon my brain.
I tell the tale to many scared civilians, they look at me like a mad man,
A foreign person person gone insane!
Thanks to the fallen, the Islamic State is now defeated.
Thanks to to the YPG and YPJ these bandits have retreated.
Now raise the glass or the flag!
For what we’ve done!
American thanks, still it remains unsaid.
There was a clear and present danger,
A vile Jihadist menance,
Lives lost, flags flown high, the dead cannot mourn the dead.
Thanks to my training:
I can stay awake for days,
Here I am!
Here I am.
I’m alive, I’m alive but my friends are dead,
Find me the means, count me in all the ways!
Back in this fortress of a city,
In the heart of the Empire,
Make a stand;
You know the way!
This is your land.
What we gave and what we lost is a nightmare, that forever will replay!
On the very soil of my homeland,
the total safety of this place,
I beg my God, I beg my family and my lovers,
Give me bullet.
Let me not die in disgrace!
In my adopted not-a-country Kurdistan,
The enemy advances
The Turkish Army kills my people, burns our cities,
Aims to defeat our revolution,
What are the odds,
What are the chances?
I know forever I will carry, the faces of my dead friends, dagger etched inside me the on the inner most compartment of my mind,
There so much hurry up and waiting, there were bodies on the road,
40,000 died for Kurdistan!
Everything around you could explode!
There was fire on the mountains there, there was bloody murder in the streets,
There was marching, there was dying,
And defeating
There was attacking,
There was terror,
There going forward then retreating.
Thank to my training,
I can take apart a rifle. I can put it back together.
Thanks to my training,
I can engage in democracy, I can believe we can do better.
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive! I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I was hiding in that Tavern, then Adonaev said:
ADONAEV:
I had spent my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse, if your could call it a bath house in Sulymaniya. During our border re-entry run from Rojava back into Iraq, most of our column was blown apart in missile strikes, we hid in a P.K.K. dug out for two days. I was covered in piss, shit blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss.
Jansher, my commander, I think he died. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman, but all I wanted to do was take a long hot shower. Wash the filth and death off of me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever, get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Daria Andreavna alive.
Now!I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. But! The war and the ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious show time.
By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind isn’t where I had thought I’d left it and nether are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It’s March or it’s April. I have just done a forty day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern riht before night fall.
I don’t know what the hospitals did to me, actually. I just want to kill myself.
I show up to the Tavern very early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor is my friend and associate, the Gangster Medvinsky.
On the wire, I heard Ms. Daria Andreavna will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call on a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote me every day during the war. I think I’m just too late.
I think I’m being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I don’t have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with, before the pick me up again.
Well anyway, there’s only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern.
Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me that is to say. Not Medvinsky, he’s buying me drink. Out in the wide open. Like he doesn’t give a fuck!
In walks a Shot girl Maria Silverstova.
ADONAEV
Zdrastvistia.
SILVERSTOVA
Why Hello my very strange one, my wayward and my leeward Amerikanski. You can say to me Privet, my old new friend. I know you naked.
ADONAEV
I had met Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I had met her again on international working woman’s day.
She gave me a good price. There are 70 Rubles in Dollar. Her shots, they cost 280. Her body much more.
SILVERSTOVA
I tell people I’m from Moscow, though of course I am not.
My waist is tight and breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cock tail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am a very good listener.
Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us.
ADONAEV
I’m looking for Medvinsky.
SILVERSTOVA
And Medvinsky, he looks for you.
SILVERSTOVA:
Sasho said “try and make him happy”.
Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on scene kind of way, maybe they encourage him. Giving him a refuge.
Adonaev doesn’t remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sort him out some work and some papers.
He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a real mad man.
He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And almost been asked to exit, relinquish his tavern card last Saturday.
I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist.
ADONAEV
Maria, Tovarish Maria how goes the life of night?
SILVERSTOVA:
I’m alive. It’s a start. Would you like a drink?
ADONAEV
Not on your ruble.
SILVERSTOVA:
There’s other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit.
Tell me about the Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.
ADONAEV:
More good was done than any evil, by my otriad anyway. I’m sure the others killed more Jihadists and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. But really, few of my friends survived the war.
The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Turkey rolls in to squash the entire revolution.
SILVERSTOVA:
What Otriad did you serve in? I’m a little familiar with actors.
ADONAEV:
I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G.
SILVERSTOVA:
Y.P.G.?
ADONAEV:
The Kurdish Militia recieving American support to defeat the Islamic State.
SILVERSTOVA:
Freedom fighting or U.S. Imperialism, maybe both?
ADONAEV:
We were defending the only Democracy in the Middle East besides Israel. Turkey was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking from Idlib in the West, the Hashid Ashabi Popular Mobilization forces from the east and ISIS from the south.
You take guns from who offers them in that situation.
SILVERSTOVA:
So, on the news tonight. Turkey has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is almost completely over run and Mambij is next and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against who ever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned.
ADONAEV:
I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Daria Andreavna and will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.
I need from you, or Medvinsky. A different kind of bullet.
SILVERSTOVA:
Prosto! You need a new whore! Someone to pay to love you ever better. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots remember, not paintings or any poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we french kissed, it just makes me pity you a lot.
You’re basically not a man to me or Daria Andreavna. You have no car, no good job, no property and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. I and she and others like us have to think about papers.
ADONAEV:
Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin.
Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting a democracy and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.
Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than criminal!
SILVERSTOVA:
Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the begging of the narrative and explain me your motivation!
Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life verses a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.
ADONAEV:
Tovarish Maria, I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount in dollars.
SILVERSTOVA:
Your money Tovarish, they say is no good here. You can’t pay for a bullet or dance. You can’t pay in Rubles, Dollars or faceless Dinars.
You can buy time with or with out sympathy.
ADONAEV:
Sympathies with the resistance?
SILVERSTOVA:
Sympathy with an American Mayakovsky, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what?
ADONAEV:
You do in fact know what!
SILVERSTOVA:
You know I don’t partake in the lap land for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod as well as a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight.
That actually 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand.
I don’t think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want.
ADONAEV:
I don’t have 100 Rubles to my name.
SILVERSTOVA:
Then you get what you pay for, which is nothingly nothings.
ADONAEV:
What is my story worth?
SILVERSTOVA:
It’s worth less than a lap dance.
ADONAEV:
I need her you know.
SILVERSTOVA:
Oh that we all know.
“It doesn’t take a weather man or woman, to know which way the winds blow.” Old American saying?
ADONAEV:
I don’t follow pretty your little allegory.
SILVERSTOVA:
Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your mask falls off.”
ADONAEV:
That one I understood, perfectly.
SILVERSTOVA:
As if I was making reports in Russian, or Turkish.
“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self deployment was around nine months were we to include Cuba and Russia and also Iraq, Turkey and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been with out any doubt ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brain washing. He is to be watched, if necessary eliminated.”
Well I guess you didn’t die in the war.
ADONAEV:
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war.
There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and totally useless. All my best efforts forgotten and amounting to less than one nothing.
SILVERSTOVA:
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute blat. Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon to be dead Kurdish friends.
Enter the Gangster Medvinsky
MEDVINSKY:
But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in; he hopes to fully con-volute the narrative.
Blur apart the story war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sex-escapades, pornographic poems and perhaps some borrowed prophesy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air.
Maria, call up some of your friends this man needs a serious distraction.
SILVERSTOVA:
A simple patriotic task.
MEDVINSKY:
One night at the tavern, about one year after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. His quest which began in Cuba, then Russia, then Iraq, Turkey, Iraq, Turkey, Iraq and then finally Syria), or also about eighty days since he returned a version of his former self. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan.
In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Daria Andreavna.
ADONAEV:
What news do you have about Daria Andreavna?
MEDVINSKY:
Listen man, not again.
She’s all cleaned up. Singing on Broad Street.
ADONAEV:
She wrote me..
MEDVINSKY:
…every single day of the war?
ADONAEV:
Da.
MEDVINSKY:
They have apps that can do that now. Robots can also write you every single day too. You don’t even need to pay them, or sponsor their citizenship.
ADONAEV:
She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can get figured out. For nine months she urged me to come stay alive and come home. I need to find her.
MEDVINSKY:
You can’t even consider supporting Daria, look at the state you’re in.
Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American love sickness?
The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards and keeping her papers in order.
ADONAEV:
Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Bruce?
MEDVINSKY:
What does it matter? Other people’s property now.
ADONAEV:
I need to see her tonight.
MEDVINSKY:
Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now.
ADONAEV:
Well I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possible.
MEDVINSKY:
No. Certainly. What do you care or know about children, much less someone else’s children. The boy will need Russian language school. He has ADD so maybe a specialized school. Where will you live? Where are you living now? How will you even get that bitch a visa? Leave her alone anyway.
ADONAEV:
These are all unanswered questions. I love her though, I feel like I need to do this. She wrote me every day during the war.
MEDVINSKY:
Nope. You do not. In a month you’ll have another woman, or girl if you want. In the meantime is Daria even talking to you?
ADONAEV:
No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple weeks ago.
MEDVINSKY:
Prosto, that’s it. You too were an okay team once. You supported each other, in a very strange way.
But really, that Suka is curse.
ADONAEV:
She’s only with, who ever she is with for some money and the green card.
MEDVINSKY:
And you actually want a paper work marriage and world of work?! You’re not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right way again. Go slap yourself in a bath room. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride.
You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars.
You cannot afford a woman like Daria Andreavna, I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things.
ADONAEV:
Not yet.
Next thing we know a Martyr and a dead Guerrilla enter our Tavern.
ANYA:
In video recording a deceased Ana Campbell tells us, “Yes, forgive me loved ones, I died immediately in an airstrike in Afrin. My body was in, smithereens.
Afrin was shortly overrun by Jihadists and the Turkish State. It was the Western most canton of Rojava; the besieged revolutionary movement called Democratic Confederalism that defeated ISIS and took over 45% of Syria, until the Turks began to bring a genocide upon us in April 2018.
I died pretty. I was a true believer. Sebastian blames himself for my death, but really I was a true believer in the cause. I could have died much worse if the Turkish Army or its proxies took my alive. I would have been gang raped. And had my head cut off eventually. Like all the others.
Sebastian lives with his guilt but Dan Newey another guerrilla I almost once kissed, he does not.
Dan Newey is in a British prison accused of terrorism. As are his brother and father. He mourns me loudly. Honestly, we all lost a lot and much defending the Revolution, but we internationalists that the papers now call “the new Chechens”, we were actors on a stage of world events, but we didn’t do that much.
Now I’m dead, which I’ll tell you seems like being on the mountain without being shot at. It’s peaceful, I’ll have him tell you that. I died with my A.K. in hand. I believed in this, I wasn’t mentally ill. I wasn’t a bandit girlfriend. This was, this is, big and important, but sadly as far as self-defense; a mirage.
Without American airstrikes to back us up we melted under Turkish air power.
At the time of writing this my corpse is still behind Turkish lines and it looks like Mambij is next and then all of Rojava will fall to the Turkish Army, a U.S. ally and second biggest in N.A.T.O.
I was happy alive and happy also dead. But vicariously, I grieve for my Arab and Kurdish comrades who prepare to make Shahid Namorey, immortal martyrdom.”
JANSHER:
Alcohol is Prohibited in the Party.
I’ll order a water or a Tonic. Drink it in a pint glass like a man. When I was young, I worked seedy places like this.
Actually, I tried to prepare them for a lifestyle of revolutionary militancy. Kill the enemy. Kill the enemy before the enemy can airstrike, execute, torture or disappear you and your friends. I don’t think they all got it. The training was just too short. They retained much of their Western bourgeoisie privileges. They thought it would maybe be like a movie. It’s a shame the woman died, she was the one with possibly the very most potential, excluding the Germans. That’s all I can say about that, Heval.”
Now that our breathe has been held on the latest nonsensical peace plan.
I’m just trying to get up to date, on modern thought process? After “the occupation” ends, hypothetically by raw demographics and a South Africa style global movement in say 2050, when it ends and the Islamic resistance succeeds in bringing an end to ” Israeli apartheid”, will the 4 to 5 million non Palestinian Israelis be allowed to bring their 200 nuclear missiles to New York City, or should we hand them over to the Palestinian unity government? Or neutral broker Iran?
Second, once “the Zionist entity” is replaced by a clearly unprecedented Human rights observing, pluralistic democracy, will Palestinians avenge themselves on virtually every regional power who exploited or massacred or expelled them and side with Iran? Or, use their high level of literacy to collaborate with big Christian or Chinese super powers. Or go their own way?
Third, will Palestinians accept a state in West Bank, Gaza, all of Sinai, all of Jordan, Southern Lebanon and half of Jerusalem and a 100 year Hudna? In an Israeli and Iranian lead Confederation? Or is anti Zionism so profoundly entrenched that only the sea will do?
I’m not making fun. I seriously am curious if anyone actually has a plan besides put Jews into the sea.
It has been two years since I first arrived in Port-Au-Prince. It is remarkable how short it feels, the eyes close just for a second and flashes of the dream on fire emerge in a slew of most visceral memories; as if they were the lips of a lover parted with just one moment before. Yelizaveta, how I miss her already; and if the last two years has erupted now in snap shots, bombastic escapades and grind; well in just eight hours I miss her as if it were a month, then a year, a forever passing in rapid cycle. Time is relative, memory subjective but for the past two years, really two human moments, there has really been only the desire to possess Yelizaveta juxtaposed with my total solidarity with the Haitians. The moral empathy, endless struggle to know them as a people so that I might wed my trade and toil and talent to the cause of their inevitable liberation.
The attainment of human rights long deferred and structurally denied.
I am now on a plane. It is Continental Flight 1647 and Victor Emile Cange, my stalwart comrade and partner in this operation slumbers silently, Christianly even. Next to me. We have succeeded in moving 840 kilograms of Basic Life Support medical equipment past U.S. customs and home land security. Long boards have become surf boards, bags loaded with stethoscopes, sphygmometers, training manuals, wound care supplies, are all just our non-declared tourist items. The second anniversary of the quake is eight days away, it is 4th January, 2012, by body is tried still from the ethanol athletics of New Years. Yelizaveta is still on my very lips, I can still feel where she grabbed the blue collar of my uniform and pulled me in.
Victor and I are wearing the unmarked blue battle dress uniform fatigues of the movement we are affiliated to; the Banshee underground, and the z.o.b. We suspect these uniforms will allow us more scrutiny going into country while lending less scrutiny to our bags. There is an embargo on all bulk items entering the country not coming in as declared and taxes humanitarian cargo until January 15th.
Like most Blan initiatives pre/post-quake; the dynamics of doing any so-called good are maddening and inexplicable; and have many factions to blame themselves on. Principally always the tiny 5% of the Neg, Mulatto and Arab bourgeoisie, followed by the MINUSTAH UN authorities, the cartels, and the Republic of NGO technocrats. And also the heat, and also history and illiteracy, and famine and rampaging Nepalese Cholera too.
Once again, we are flying into a hell. Flying into the city of lost children and shattered dreams; the land of many mountains. Ayiti Cherie! We are the third wave of the reinforcements from New York. We will meet Tiputti Capois, our oldest associate and brother at Toussaint L’Ouvature International Airport. And re-supply the Gwoup Ayisyen pou Ijans, the Haitian Emergency Group. We will meet their members and prepare them rigorously. EMT practical drills and negotiations on their future, and plans. We will ready them to stand before the archangel Michael Mastroianni who arrives 21st January to administer a witnessed practical and written EMT exam. For whatever good it will do I pray we find them stalwart and reasonably well organized.
I pray too that the city isn’t exactly as I left it two years ago.
Around us on the plane are the faces of Haiti; noire, mulat, blan and representing all things. Things tragic, things ineffective, things self-serving, self-dealing, against and for human dignity, faces of perseverance, of calm of nervousness of taking and of giving. There is also the hard face of Haitian pride, indomitable.
So many trying with the mandate of science, God, and reason to remake the face of Haiti; save her somehow in some small way.
So many never even asked the Haitian people. Too many are simply short sighted interventionists. Or cowered by the ten million masses shackled in the modes of survival. Today we will ask the GAI and their members where to from here? Victor, myself, Michael, all of us in Banshee and LAHAF; all the supporters of the movement; all the veterans of the first and second waves; one and all are fighting for a small dream too.
But thankfully none have died for it, yet. I remember so many faces from the first time; from 15 January, 2010 to 28 January, 2010; the first wave. The Bed Stuy-AMHE Detachment. Our tumultuous landing in the 6th day of relief, before the bodies were buried or the smoke had cleared. Indomitable will; fearlessness and selflessness and all of that faith we had in our humanity. The cooperative solidarity of a Kombit Medikal. That two weeks, that slaughter of so many Haitians; who knows whether it was 1, 2, 3,000,000 people; no one knows at all. That laid the basis of my dream, the dream I sold to Victor, to Cassidy, to Dominich, to Lou Auguste Jr and LAHAF, to Jenn Slitter, to all of the Banshee underground, well I’d sold the dream even to myself convincingly. We dreamed that the Haitians would have the training, will and organization to save lives.
I must always remember the steams of the bathhouse, where me and my first partner, my first co-conspirator beautiful Yelizaveta Kotlyarova gave me true support and true unflinching council. Must also keep my parents in mind, or in a heartbeat I would lose myself in the people of Haiti and never return to America at all. Go big or go home, banshee-motherfucka-if-ya-ain’t-running-with-it-run-from-it.
Victor knows this well.
We were both there in the blood and rubble of the trembling earth. Our tears and their lack of tears our blood and their blood, mixed into the casement and cracks on the pavement. I may have the face of a blan, but my heart is that of a Haitian. My constitution to take the struggle to where it must logically go, all the way up the great mountain, to secure this people, my adopted people from vicious exploitation, mismanaged sympathy, foreign rape and plunder. For two whole years we organized volunteers, we supplied the GAI with trainers and gear. And reinforced the shared dream. Not EMS in Haiti! Not mere ambulances! The power to respond to human and natural disaster on their own, the ability to rescue their own people. Liberty through control of their own social services, full human rights would come later, full reclamation of sovereignty. Realization of emancipation and the conclusion of the revolution. Haiti, finally in the hands of Haitian people.
How am I such now a major patriot for a foreign people? In their eyes I see my own people, maybe I see myself in another life. That is what the earthquake showed me about myself and my destiny. I see my reflection as a human in them. I see a way to reclaim my own humanity, restore my own life through something much more important than mere me.
And I have lost so much on this battle already, they think, some think I am a mad man possessed by the spirits. Which spirit I do not even bother to guess. Something had entered me in those grisly days of the first wave. I saw the world to come.
I saw that were I to show ineffable might, like a Haitian; I would live to see the liberation. I would live to see our victory over that oligarchy.
The Haitian oligarchy first and then the tyrants in my own nation and all of the other plantations too. For it was in this country, this was the beginning of the Great Revolt, it was the very first time a rebel alliance took on European hegemony, slavery and colonialism; and for a time won.
There was no only Yelizaveta and the slaughter I saw from the quake. Both opened my eyes to hating and to loving, to despair and to a possible freedom. With my eyes opened now they can never close until I am cold and dead. Haitian and foreigner, blan, mulat, neg; l’union fait la force! We are here to keeping laying a base.
The ability to heal and help is not the ability to save. Wounds and sickness across a body politico cannot be helped with small cosmetic Band-Aids. The blame for what happened here is a shared blame. There are so many people black and white and in between that have conspired to ruin Haiti. To keep her people backwards and maldeveloped as lesson to all those who would join the revolt.
Haiti hemorrhages now for 200 plus years and they kick her when she is down, they steal whatever there is to steal, they plunder and they rape and they abuse her while she lies long vanquished. 97% of the fucking trees are gone! 84% of the people live below $2 a day. No one even knows how many died in that quake because there was no census since 2004! When US marines kidnapped the first and only elected President Aristede and dragged him off to house arrest in the Central African Republic.
But Haitians will never be exterminated. Or long brought to their knees. They are capable of incredible resistance. Résistance to both foreign and domestic enemies. A year ago Jean Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc the last dictator) returned to a city of barricades and a populace demanding his arrest. Aristede returned to be celebrated though his party Lavalas is banned an illegal still. Resistance to and beyond death. In one generation or two in diaspora Haitians have become doctors, lawyers, nurses, lawyers and business men. More millionaires than any other Caribbean diaspora. They make up 1/5 of the Greater New York healthcare work force. Who knows if these statistics are true, they reflect a fact on the ground.
In Haiti, despite the best efforts of 10,800 non-governmental organizations (Klass ONG), charities and missionaries unleashed in the 1980’s after the fall of Duvalier in 1986; things have gotten as bad as sub-Saharan Africa. A UN garrison of roughly ten thousand Brazilian and Argentine soldiers occupies the only UN peacekeeping mission in a nation with no declared ceasefire between combatants; neo-Duvalierist oligarchs and the Famni Lavlas party.
Here everyone is dying.
Of cholera, of being a restovik child slave, of preventable disease, of Cholera, of road accidents, of child birth, or exposure and tropical storms, of hunger. Life expectancy is below 58. There are over 46,000 mostly white development technocrats here, they live well. On the top of the hills with servants and drivers. Parts of Kenscoff and Petionville look like high society France. With chipping paint. There is an opera house at the top of the mountain called Tara’s. You can see plays there or famous international musicians. There are so many Haiti’s except the one that most of its citizens live in; one of early death and great squalor.
If you are blind to that then you have not really been to this place. Or you are part to blame for it.
Many but few, have made Haiti what she is. The iron heel is elusive and complex. The violators are of all colors and creeds. NGO imperialists, human and drug traffickers, Dominican businessmen, the local oligarchy. But before we can know our enemies we must know our friends. Tiputti and his sister Tipudine Capois do not talk politics. They are not affiliated with Lavalas or any faction we are aware of. They met us during the quake and have told our grand alliance; Alliance 01 that they will organize their people.
We began with 68 EMT trainees and I am told we now have only 25 or 26 that are ready to test out, a year later. The other possible 100 members of GAI dropped the course Paramedic Instructor Howard carried out for 6 months, but they hang around the club and see what will be offered. Their motives are as diverse as our own collection of idealisms, but they want jobs in the medical sector. They want to leave the island some. They have varying degrees of patriotism, none speak English except Tiputti and his sister Tipudine. Many were original responders like Tiputti Capois who met Victor and I two years ago during the first wave in “unit C” when we enlisted several hundred to secure the General Hospital. Many are new. Most of the serious opportunists are gone allegedly. The GAI has held out with no pay for nearly two years, we sent a scout Wilkinson Francois to assess them three months ago, he reported enthusiasm but virtually no command structure of program for the future. He reported 25-30 possible EMTs and 40-100 first aiders, Haitians despise making rosters and lists of names, so they don’t do it.
These 25 potential EMT trainees, and 100 some odd responders, their family and friends are what we are here to properly assess the operational capability of.
Are they young bold visionaries seeking change in Haiti? Or are they opportunists as so many warned. Do they want real change, or do they just want jobs and livelihood? Well only Wilkinson had asked. Paramedic Instructor Howard has disappeared. Wilkinson as a Haitian and speaker of Haitian Creole had reported to us that they were sincere. And also a bunch of disorganized civilians in their early 20’s.
His report was what got authorization for Victor and I to proceed with a third Wave.
All the experts and much of the diaspora had told our Alliance that EMS in Port Au Prince is simply impossible. They told us our volunteers would be kidnapped, our supplies stolen or killed. They told us Haitians don’t do anything without being paid. Thinly guarded racism, a lot of it.
Victor has faith. I have zeal. And Michael Mastroianni has a great deal of expertise and we all wish to see if two years of effort had a result. Hundreds of other members and volunteers are waiting for our unit to validate or invalidate a lot of sacrifice. They came from Atlanta, from New York, from Miami, from Las Vegas, from Seattle and Chicago; 104 in the first wave, 28 medical and communications volunteers in the second wave. Now, just 3 in the third. Civilian volunteers all, mostly EMS, fire, and communications backgrounds kept this going for two years. GAI survived without pay or resources cut off from LAHAF and BANSHEE in the states except phone calls and email, periodically. They and we are fighting to give the people here and abroad something to believe in.
Hope floats? Maybe.
Soon people will testify. Haske & Mapfre, Greenlee, Denby, Marriana, Fishman and Resnick who shot a lot of film and took a lot of pictures. Hundreds of hours of never gonna be seen footage. How this occurred was wrongly held faith in the power of the media. No film was ever made. Thomas later made a short one.
Victor and I are emergency medical professionals, I’m an EMT, and he’s a paramedic. We have to determine alongside paramedic Mastroianni; was this all for nothing or is the GAI real. Can GAI pass BLS exams, take multiple choice tests and pass? They never even had power points or text books. Can they complete the eight stations of basic life support practical skills, can they hold up as real EMTs? Are they school kids or potential heroes and avenger of their people? We have to testify in less than 20 days.
Testify about the birth of Haitian EMS, and if a clandestine Haitian human rights movement can grow from that or not. In an hour we land at Toussaint L’Ouvature.
This time I bet they stamp my passport.
Thank god this is all finally happening. Despite all the struggle and all of the loss and hardship I feel as though we are close to the edge as well as the tipping point too. Real change. I pray I will never forget Yelizaveta’s face, how could I? More I pray I never fail to separate FACT from EMOTION, as all too many do in Haiti coming from the outside. I must make sure I sleep more, a little more. We have a lot of work cut out for us. Making the GAI ready for Michael, the 22 January test, the 26 January Consortium on EMS in Haiti, a lot must be done in just 22 days.
If you ain’t running with it, run from it. That’s what my life coach Lil Wayne told Yelizaveta and that’s what she told me.
It is not that any of us longed to die. It was only that we believed that in this transience, this short human life, it was preferable to die on ones feet moving towards a just idea. Moving in solidarity, in defense of the powerless. Then it would be to die on our backs or our knees, half lives, shuffling along like zombies. Always asleep. With meaningless, un-free lives wasted. Lives spend like serfs and slaves.
Have you ever had an amazing noble idea in your head? That simply refused to translate itself or find traction in reality? Have you ever risked everything, sacrificed absolutely everything for such an idea? Myopically, almost psychotically pushing forward in the face of a stubborn, intractable cruel reality. When you can bring yourself to do that. To engage in nothing short of overwhelming zealotry. Pursuing a new reality, a reality where the vast suffering of this world is mitigated. Where the chaos and carnage and daily humiliation that is the lot of most humans is undone by rights, by hope, by heroism. That is called the motivation for the fight.
It has been a very long hard bloody road to the mountains and back from them. From Manhattan to Jerusalem to Havana. All the trips to the City of Port-Au-Prince. To Greater Boston. Back to Brooklyn then to out Russia. Across Russia on a train then into the Middle East to fight in Rojava. Iraq, Turkey, Syria and Egypt and then back to the Big Apple again. Riding on the backs of armored trucks and flying carpets. On horses, on tanks on airships. Over the great rivers and through the woods. Mountains beyond mountains beyond mountains. With stopovers where all civilization has come to a resolute end in the Fertile Crescent. Smoldering villages. Enormous cities razed to the very foundations. Once historic places, simply crushed and undone. Burning down river by river shore to deep sands of desolation. A revolution within a civil war within an endless third world war. A place called Kurdistan which exists not on maps but in the hearts and dreams of perhaps forty million stateless, long oppressed people. Engaged a very long fight for their right to exist.
How do you make any sense of such carnage to people that were not there? How do you make an enjoyable narrative about bloody chaos? Articulate ideas that when they become facts on the ground, have vast contradictions. Has a highly improbable capability to ever survive!
The revolution itself has hardly been secured. The struggle is hardly over. The iron heel and might of the Turkish army looms right over the border to the North. Ready to descend quickly and murder us all. Undo everything that has been fought for against the so-called Islamic State. The Forces of the bloody dictator Assad backed by the Russian army and Hezbollah dig in to the south of the Euphrates river. The collaborationist Iraqi Kurdish K.D.P. Peshmerga, the Iranian supported Hashid Ashabi popular mobilization forces, the Shi’a dominated Iraqi Army and all manners of Iranian revolutionary guards to the south east in Sinjar. To the West the Jihadists of Al Qaeda’s latest rebrand and Islamists of different types in Idlib.
Enemies of the revolution on every single side! In fulfillment of my promises I will try and present our little part of the story as the defense has really only just begun. Everything might be wiped away before you even paid attention to vastness and hope of it. I worry, no sadly I expect, that long before this manuscript is ever published anywhere, all will be lost. My remaining Hevals will all be killed. The Turkish Army will literally roll over the border and everyone will be slaughtered. This isn’t really speculation, since it has happened many times before.
What does a half Jew know about the Ghosts of Christmas past?
Arrogance vast!
If sirens of suffering call-free-for-all_
_then have your crew insert wax in their ears and bind your bleeding heart to the mast!
Look at your most tragic failures,
Look at your past!
Your sister, your brother, your comrade, the love of your life: raped and abused
Self-murder imprisoned and her young body used:
The die is cast.
You toast to our fortitude?
Look in the mirror and see the accused!
Who put the world on your shoulders man?!
Whoever asked!
Labriut.
There was nothing one person ever asked you to be,
Nothing they asked you to do.
No one expected a miracle.
You battle demons still in their name,
And when it was done the world was exactly the same, man it’s too true:
Sometimes you drink to remember,
Sometimes you drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks you.
II.
The card said:
“Ya tbya verejnum glaz najom.”
So I went up to Brighton Boston.
To consult with a gangster named Medvinsky.
“Droog.”
You had better turn that walk into some kind of fearsome-forward-run.
“Get gone, Get done.”
Get yourself a final lavish Turkish bath,
You lost a lot,
She lost a bit,
We’ve all lost something over flesh chase bullshit,
A fait complit_ it’s done.
Since you won’t take a lap dance down on Brighton 7 as down payment on your solitude,
We can’t build you back until you repay the debt accrued,
Pass port change your latitude,
It’s your very Westy attitude we’ve come to question!
So make adjustments to the clout,
You thought you could throw about.
Without suggestion:
Settle up and out.
Take a shot then,
Run.
You have to settle up with the Voorhis down in Oceania,
That won’t be fun.
“Gde bolit tovarish?”
“Did you even stop to think about the things that you two unleashed?
With passion pens, with cold war sword play, and with gun!
It was your morals that she prayed on with her callous kick box on the night she almost killed you.”
“For sport?”
“Not for sport. For fun.”
“You had best turn in your 8 shot, because she’s gone and punched your midnight ticket now!”
“She’s removed the bullets from your gun.”
There’s no blame in this situation. You two just forgot your host nation, class and social station.
And lost in excited trepidation you made war.
But in all that war you’ve been making,
You were changing nothing
See the score?
And shortly one dead Russian escort
And one badly tortured gun man is all there will be to show totality of foolishness:
The things, you and she were fighting for.
Let’s do a shot for good intentions now a bloody mess under duress:
What Medvinsky says is partly true:
Sometimes you drink to remember,
Sometimes you drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks you.
III.
Sometimes,
I get drunk.
And I drive my car
In figure eight circles around the Adler Loop in coop city,
The only street which bears my name.
And from the wheel of my Civic I survey a high rise brick kingdom.
All I can see!
Sometimes I drink to remember, sometimes I drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks me.
It’s a bevy of victimless crimes.
There are no children playing at these midnight hours,
Most of the times,
Or those that are carry various calibers as they carry on trade in West Indian nickels and dimes.
With each kiss of Stolichnaya I get further from all the accusing faces of friends lost,
And lubricated by the demons still waters I am forgiven for my yet unfulfilled promises.
And that which such promises cost.
I sip and shoot shot and bottle tip.
And the ghosts of past make clever cheers:
Nazdrovia!
They say as I sip.
More shots!
To the last drop, a fast viscosity, a deadly drip.
Cheers to little Malka who’s daddy abused her, and who’s foreign baby’s father used her like a Siberian doll and fled leaving a teenage mother with child in the slums of Shahoun Daled!
Shot to the head.
Cheers to Maya captured and bonded to brothels at the age of sixteen,
Pale white tits all the gawk of Montreal’s flying flesh carnival scene.
Long white lines of supine mortgage,
Traumas of the slave trade never fully known_ what they made her do.
Time supine, also prone.
Third shot for Rahula, also called Jeremy McGaffey,
A soldier, a comrade now dead, and all the dark things he saw before putting two rounds in his tough brilliant head.
For all that they went through these three in particular abused an accosted,
I empty the bottle to my useless gestures exhausted,
Having arrived too late to have saved them and too weak to have healed them, and play pretend knights making promises into a sad mock-ery.
Sometimes I drink to remember.
Sometimes I drink to forget.
And sometimes the vodka drinks me.
IV.
I awoke in hand cuffs black hood folded blind.
And it wasn’t just another Saturday night wilding-wild-West Indian
On the loose in Coney Island of the mind,
Truncated by tell-the-boys-in-blue I won’t be easy.
They had laid their hard hands on me.
Stop the tape. Pause.
Rewind.
Wam!
Something struck the Gulliver out of nowhere_ it gyrated my warbles.
This time, maybe; my past had caught me.
That then said;
My first thought was of my baby, my lady who is even tougher than I am.
Good thing your woman’s hidden said the voice in my head.
Simmer-on-sinner,
A loser or a winner is in the end always picking up taps for the devil at dinner.
When I say baby, I should say goddess, she’s a warrior.
Or just several shots short of serial killer,
A base sinner invited into your house for the small talk most certainly, also her chest, high heels and the promise of dinner.
She loves me because I am a good man.
You can, only hurt a Real man by destroying his goodness and if he be a hard man,
No kid’s gloves_
_you can only do that by hurting people he loves.
I’ve been interrogated before.
There many ways to do it,
You can purchase a good deal of information via third party use of shill, mark or whore.
When people don’t know what they’re fighting for…
Or stacked shocks, shock headed peter_a drill with a small bore.
But who’s keeping score, anymore.
I was trained in district Florentine.
I have mental blueprints to up the ante of an occupation, or increase the flicker flame of fire on a low boiling international class war.
What for? What was in it for me?
I was tapped long ago on my shoulder by a series of sirens
And enlisted in a long simmer struggle to even a score,
Against the forces of Razpizdia, general a-pathology bloody feuds based little more than mistranslated folk lore.
To Hit back,
And coordinate the American arm of a general attack on behalf of the wretched run miserable, the abused and the victimized poor!
Oh that’s adorable, he’s a man with ideals. Let’s get him out of his country and rip out his teeth with some plyers so he can see exactly how real change making feels!
The prelude to a good long torturing is an offer you can’t refuse.
Already assume you have nothing to lose.
False positive clues to dissuade and amuse as they work to disfigure,
And of course to abuse.
They said I was born chosen, but I keep on choosing battles that my lady says that I’m destined to lose.
That’s what she said.
And when panting and longing and holding me tightly, through the calling of names
But only she is the one I allow in my head.
The trick is to talk in circles,
Keep asking for cigarettes,
Saying nothing makes them think you know more than you do.
Once the beatings begin you must meditate your way through the blood and the swelling.
So master art of storytelling.
So when that occurs you can only betray yourself via you’re capture and give long accounts of imaginary conspirators.
And try and make sure you don’t know where your woman is being hidden
A pale horse with pale rider will give no account of the devastations witnessed passing though places he’s ridden.
You can beat a man into saying almost anything.
You can try and buy him, make him sing tunes you want him to sing. Strike his face with a truncheon cuffed to chair he’s got nowhere to run.
And if they know who you are they just might do it for fun.
But having done this before, if you want to get to my family you’d better be legion, better have monstrous tentacles, bottomless pockets, or know how to properly swim.
For I know the face of the devil and Invest adequately in keeping my loved ones from him.
I hide my woman in Haiti. Just cause you can see her golden blonde hair from space, well that don’t mean you can fight your way through eleven million Haitians. Has nothing to do with race.
I’m one popular fucking blan these days. They say no good deed goes unpunished, and but I have my ways.
Russians have counter insurgency down to a T.
The Ts for torture the shit out of everyone. Best believe these days several are gunning for Vasa, Vasa is me.
Its a long game, its a late stage in the war.
A fist crunches my face, then a bucket of water.
I’ve brought a box cutter on a plane before.
Before it was cool.
Who am I?
Fool, If you allow yourself to be coffined they will attempt it using desriptive pejoratives.
I’m new school.
I have spoken to you at length in babalonian, but parable take away, here’s the golden rule:
Don’t pose a question that you do not intend in a timely fashion to unravel.
I am a man of three colors. Red black and green. I’m in the business of chechen resistance, this involves travel.
In my rounds and deployments you’d have no idea of the suffering I’ve seen.
Its less a riddle to fuck the answers out of me. But just incase they get me, know that when my families safe, and Ichkerias free, and most of the world is a place where its safe for your pasty white children to be, and then we can agree that when you open your eyes and turn off your tv, then you will collaborate with a chechen like me, and the resistance generally.
These are hard cuffs. I’m not going anywhere. I zone out and I dream of the mountains, the scent of my babies hair. I know she’s safe, I know they gonna break me out. Unpleasant nights until that occurs, no doubt.
Soon as these wolves know they got Vasa the gunslinger, I can hear them shout.
Ya tbya verjnum glas najum.
I’m gonna cut your fucking eyes out.
Do your worst motherfuckers. I’ve heard these words before.
You aint getting nothing but nonsense from the lips of a rebel implore,
ladies and gentlemen my name is Vasili Pveada, the world is one fire and you’re all in a tower on top of a hill, for the blood that they spill, for our loved ones they kill, listen to me.
The armed wing of the human rights movement has long arms and old soul memories, we will not stop fighting, until every last man woman and child is free.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 