The people of Haiti have been beaten, raped, maimed, and even killed all in the pursuit of democracy and some how they still have hope. Erica James ethnography is a tightly woven account of the structural violence, created via culture, history, politics and economy, which has saturated this small Caribbean nation. James states that her book will examine the paradox that many of the efforts to rehabilitate the nation and its citizens, and to promote democracy and economic stability, inadvertently reinforced the practices of predation, corruption, and repression that they were intended to repair (p. 7). The second overwhelming part to her book is how she captures the individual, institutional, and government actors and how they perceive and make sense of the hidden or occult powers that are integral to the generation of ensekirite(insecurity) (p. 8).
To explain these apparatuses and actors she defines two types of economy that are integral to her book, the compassion and terror economies. Both of which are connected by commoditization of the victim and their trauma and by extracting, transforming and making this a tradable “good” these political economies can profit. It is in her first two chapters that there is a comparison and contrast of the terror and compassion economies and their methods of disrupting and silencing the social community. As she defines it a terror economy in Haiti is intimidation, destruction of property, theft, torture, and murder. To instill fear in the general populace, the government utilized necropolitical violence; which is torture through conflict and warfare (p. 43). To provide insight, James states that one method of terror and torture was forced incest, on page 73 she recounts the story of a...
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...ctims who suffered psychological trauma as a direct outcome of the gender violence, economic violence and torture. The method for healing such a trauma was the “Trager Approach”, which involved a space in which a women was able to feel relaxed and talk about their suffering. In doing so she was able to examine their ongoing trauma and understand that treating the deeper wound would be more beneficial for the people of Haiti in the long term. Continuing this aid apparatus and aid recipient interaction, James shines a light on the issue surrounding what she calls the audit culture. Remembering back to the fact that the victim had to prove their trauma through testimony, they then had to demonstrate a continued demand for support. This contestation of the nature of the victim’s identity is again the bureaucraft at work in places such as the Rehabilitation Center.
During the author’s life in New York and Oberlin College, he understood that people who have not experienced being in a war do not understand what the chaos of a war does to a human being. And once the western media started sensationalizing the violence in Sierra Leone without any human context, people started relating Sierra Leone to civil war, madness and amputations only as that was all that was spoken about. So he wrote this book out o...
The result is that Haitians are oppressed because they feel that they are hopeless and that they are trapped in the mold that the media has created. “You will hear these words until you are sick to your stomach, until you no longer recognize [their land], until you start to believe the news stories are true, that nothing else matters, that [translation to English: you cannot buy things you don’t need, you don’t exist, you don’t count, you do not deserve respect].” This quote perfectly articulates the effects the media has on the people of Haiti. Gay pinpoints the media for creating a self-fulfilling prophecy or mold for the Haitians. Because Haiti is represented as poor and stricken by misfortune, the citizens believe this and feel a sense of hopelessness. Overall, the symbol of the media results in Haitians not being able to live out their full potential because of this oppression from the foreign
The novel deals with the pain and pleasure of the past and present and how that effects the identity construction of an individual. The ethnic/racial identity of an individual can be influences by the complexities of a post-colonial society filled with social clashes, inferiority, and the othering of individuals. The novel focuses on the Haitians who have migrated to the Dominican Republic to escape poverty but are still alienated and devalued because of their poor economical conditions. By migrating to the Dominican Republic and crossing the boundary between the two countries they are symbolically being marked as ‘other’ and seen as ‘inferior’ by
When I first read “We Are Ugly, But We Are Here,” I was stunned to learn how women in Haiti were treated. Edwige Danticat, who was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1969 and immigrated to Brooklyn when she was twelve years old, writes about her experiences in Haiti and about the lives of her ancestors that she links to her own. Her specific purpose is to discuss what all these families went through, especially the women, in order to offer the next generation a voice and a future. Danticat writes vividly about events that occurred in Haiti, leading up to an assertion about the strength of Haitian women. Her essay is powerful in large part because of how she manages tone.
Denise is a counselor with a graduate degree who works with many battered women. She is sensitive to vulnerable individuals who have experienced racism, sexism, mental health issues, and are economically disadvantaged. Denise also has had personal experiences of trauma including poverty and racism, similar to her clients. The novel suggests through the settings and the narrative that her trauma and that of others is a personal affair. Each person processes trauma in different ways. It is difficult to assign a general meaning of trauma without considering ones backgrounds, resources, and experience.
The Nation of Haiti has been plagued with excessive bad luck when it comes to external invasion. Whether it be larger countries taking control, or outsiders brought in as slaves, Haiti has endured many hardships. These issues, while very common in a lot of countries, are exposed in a short story by a native Haitian. In “A Wall of Fire Rising”, Edwidge Danticat illustrates a myriad of historical issues in Haiti from the 17th to the 20th century through a series of events in one family’s life. One such issue would be the Haitian Revolution and the consequences that came of it.
The beginning of colonization also marks the beginning of decolonization. From the day the colonists start exploiting the colonized people and belittling the colonized people for the colonists' self-aggrandizement, the colonized ones have been prepared to use violence at any moment to end the colonists' exploitation (Fanon, 3).Decolonization is violent, there is a necessity for violence. This is a point that is repeated again and again throughout The Battle of Algiers and The Wretched of the Earth. Here, the focus will be on The Battle of Algiers to discuss the violence of
The subject that I have chosen for my essay is: ‘Maras in Central America. Analyse its social causes and consequences’ – a gang that operates on territories of Central and Latin America. During writing my essay I want to analyse the phenomenon of how a not that big community of Salvadoran young immigrants has been transformed into one of the most dangerous and the largest gang groups in the United States and Northern Central America in about 30 years. Also I would like to analyse and present social causes and consequences of Las Maras. The past 20 years has been an escalation of crime in Central America. Surprisingly not in Colombia but in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are one of the most dangerous countries in the world. According to
...s and has thus paved the way for foreign intervention. With this in mind, it is important to note that the political insecurity all stems back from the solidification of colour lines within Haitian society – of which is not a new concept to Haiti. The issue of racial supremacy was first laid down by the French during colonial rule. Colonialists truly believed they were the ‘superior’ race in all form and manner and so it was generally understood amongst the them that “nothing good and civilized comes” out of their colonies (Nicholls 1993). Hence, the mulattoes, believing themselves to be more closely akin to the French than their Haitian counterparts, have enshrined and upheld this view even long after French occupation. For this reason, it is thanks to colonialism that there is a gradual erosion of Haiti’s political autonomy during the end of the nineteenth century.
Several of the problems that Haiti faces today have their genesis in the country’s colonial history. The country was like a toy being fought over by spoiled children. The first of these children arrived in the early sixteenth century in the form of Spanish settlers in search of gold. They enslaved the native Taino population and, poisoned by avarice, nearly eradicated the indigenous work force. Thousands of African slaves were brought in to take their place. Eventually, the Spanish left the island to grab their share of newly discovered treasure in other lands. Tiring of their toy, the Spanish
The Haitian Revolution makes for the most fascinating revolt in history. The black race, after many years of oppression, overcame the dominant white race, without the assistance of guns, and other technological warfare at that time. In its own words, the author states that the book makes clear that the roots of the revolution of Haiti consist of movements involving the "wisdom and common sense of the masses". Hordes of blacks reached a consensus that human sacrifice is a small price to pay for freedom. In the view of Carolyn E. Fick, no organization or political entity involved can be attributed as much credit than the masses for the popular revolution that unseated one of the longest dictatorships of mankind.
Haiti is drenched in poverty, corruption, and lack of education. Due to these aspects Haiti is “the least developed country in the western hemisphere”. With only one-third of suitable land...
In 1915, the United States began its often forgotten nineteen-year long occupation of Haiti. Justified by the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, the proposition that established the United States as a self-proclaimed international police power, the occupation was framed by the American government as a “progressive intervention” meant to benefit the Haitian people. Haitians, however, despised the occupation as it deprived them of the autonomy they struggled to obtain from their French colonizers, and subjected them to Jim Crow racial values that considered all dark-skinned Haitians as inferior beings. In reality, despite the American government’s claims of wanting to help the Haitians, it willfully ignored the Haitians’ needs and demands simply to
When I was a kid my parents always took me to Nathdwara to take the blessings of Lord Krishna every now and then because my parents are so religious. So by going there several times I am also attached to that place. Actually Nathdwara is situated in Rajasthan state and I live in the state called Gujarat and in the city called as Ahmedabad. It takes six hours drive from my city to Nathdwara and this is the only nearest place where I could get mental peace. This is very important place for me and my family because it is a tradition of our family that whoever goes there gives free food to the hungry and poor people. We do so because we think that if we do good work in our life we will be allowed by god to go to the heaven. [The two states on the left are Gujarat and Rajasthan. One in light blue color is Gujarat with the arrows and on the top of it with cream color is Rajasthan. I live in the middle of the state and Nathdwara is at the border of the Rajasthan]
Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world. Agriculture is one of the incomes of the population. However, everything changes after the 2010 earthquake. The losses caused by the quake were between 8 billons and 14 billons dollars (Haiti earthquake). Joblessness, the lack of Foodland, the lack of clean water, further affected the economy because people chose to emigrate to other places for work such as the Dominican Republic (Haiti earthquake). Furthermore, “Haiti was a Republic of non-governmental organization to become a Republic of unemployment,” and in order to accomplish an economical growth Haiti needs the investment of companies that can help many of the people find jobs. Companies such Royal Oasis, are creating hundreds of jobs for many Haitians. Thayer Watkins, an economics teacher at San Jose State University, provides his review in his analysis of the Political and Economic History of Haiti, which states more than 80 percent of th...