Haiti, reopening the future
Keynote, Felwine Sarr
La Fokal, Haiti, May 2018
I had planned to give you a talk on the idea of reopening futures. No doubt too affected by the prevailing gloom, I thought it might be worthwhile to reaffirm again and again that the time ahead is always full of promise, that it is the place where possibilities arise, and that the spaces of reality were waiting to be fertilised by our faith, our ardour and our will
But before that, I’d like to tell you what links me to Haiti. First, a dreamy adolescence, searching for words in the infinite space of poetry. I was 12 and beauty was banging furiously against the walls of my being, wanting to penetrate with its wake of lightning and pain. I wrote a few poems and had them read to a neighbour who lived in the next street and who I’d been told was a poet. This lady welcomed me with kindness and friendship, read my scribbles, corrected them, suggested that I add to the line les bougainvilliers se balançaient, the pretty expression tout de guingois, to weigh it down, she told me. To my great delight, she instituted a regular visit every Wednesday afternoon to her house in rue Ahmadou Assane Ndoye. The poet’s name was Jacqueline Scott Lemoine. So I first met Haiti through this couple of poets, Jacqueline and Lucien Lemoine, who decided to settle in Senegal after the 1966 World Festival of Negro Arts.
.Growing up, I heard about Roger Dorsinville, who was an editor at the new Editions Africaines, and Gérard Chenet, a playwright based in Toubab Dialaw. Haiti was woven into the fabric of literature, theatre and poetry. Then came Césaire, the great intermediary, first the Cahier with this fulgurance. Haiti where negritude stood up for the first time and said it believed in humanity. Then a Season in Haiti. Later, I met Jacques Roumain, René Philoctete, Frankétienne, Danny Laffériere, Lyonel Trouillot in the space of a silent, intimate and fertile dialogue.
Then on to Senegal at the turn of the 2010s. Présence Africaine was organising a conference there to commemorate Alioune Diop’s 100th birthday. In the room, I listened to a beautiful talk by a gentleman with a cypress complexion, wearing dreadlocks, a fierce face softened by a Buddha-like face. He was a Haitian poet called Rodney Saint Eloi. He and I became friends and we travelled around Senegal together. I took him to the Serer country and renamed him Wagane, the unbeaten one. I had published a first novel with Gallimard, so he asked me if I had a text to entrust to him, and that’s how Rodney became my publisher and friend and how I joined this fine house that is Mémoire d’encrier. The door to Haiti’s literary imagination was wide open. In the wake of Mémoire d’encrier, Zulma and the book fairs, I met James Noel, Mackenzy Orcel whom I call Senegalese, Gary Victor, Emilie Prophète, Kettly Mars, Louis Philippe D’Alembert, Nehemie Dahomey, Martine fidèle, Yannick Lahens, Ewans Weche and so many others from the galaxy.
From Haiti is for me a dream, a sensitive intimacy, a place where women and men face a fierce destiny with the ultimate weapons of dignity and poetry.
So allow me to leave this evocation for a moment and return to the prose of a thought about time, history and futures ;
The advent of Western modernity had as its major characteristic the promise of a future marked by progress in all areas of social life. In this regime of historicity, the times to come were marked by the promise of betterment. Western modernity, despite its undeniable progress in terms of public freedoms, technological advances and the modernisation of social life, saw faith in progress resulting from an upward march of human history wane. After the Great Depression, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the Gulag, the meta-narrative of human progress driven by Reason broke down. The crises and multiple distopias that accompanied the reign of instrumental reason finally undermined belief in a better tomorrow. They have also led in the West to a relationship with time characterised by a hypertrophy of the present, which the historian François Hartog calls presentism. This hypertrophy of modernity is characterised by an all-out excess (hypermarkets, hypertext, billions of sites on the web, hundreds of TV channels, cloning, extreme sports), but also by an urgency of the instant-present, producing a man-in-the-moment who overemphasises the present relative to other modalities of time (the past and the future).
Postmodernity has become a time marked by a future without promise. Except that of avoiding the multiple catastrophes it promises (ecological crisis, the unbinding of societies, health catastrophes, growing insecurities). The end decreed for Utopias since the failure of the grand narratives promising the advent of new times (communisms, socialisms, …) seems to characterise our era. The only anticipations that still seem to operate are those of a technological future or a post-humanism.
This question of the future, for societies considered to be lagging behind the normal march of the world (Africa, Haiti), is posed somewhat differently. For these societies, the promise of economic development, democracy and societal modernity continues to be made or conquered. These retroactive teleologies inscribe them in a relationship of societal mimicry and keep them in the myth of a linear march of history and progress.
These societies are summoned to go through stages and reach societal states that other societies have already reached, as if the only destiny that was conceivable for them was to reproduce the single Western societal model that is offered as an example. Their differences, their socio-historical singularities, their temporalities ; their relationship to the present, past and future are thus denied and read under the single modality of backwardness.
It is in this context that I wish to reflect with you on what it would mean for these countries to open up their futures.
For these nations the question of thinking their destiny (their present and their future) is crucial. To think it by mobilising their mythological universes, their history, their cultural references, their symbolic capital ; this is what I and others call a decolonial gesture. In this undertaking, it is less a question of distinguishing oneself in a retreat of identity or advocating an imaginary purity, than of building on existing cultural resources, in order to extract vital elements from them. A future cannot be envisaged outside the soil, far from the juices and alluvium of its lands and suns. Every society (culture or civilisation) passes on a heritage and perpetuates a cultural matrix that is the repository of its identity through time, transforming it as the world changes.
Also, it is a question of allowing for the plurality of histories. There is no single history for all human societies. We need to get away from the Eurocentrism attached to the linear and progressive scheme of History, as well as from the master-narrative of Europe condemning all the other peoples of the world to follow the path traced by it or to be a sad repetition of it. To admit the plurality of collective ways of being, of societal forms of life, of the modalities of productions of being that are cultures, as well as the possibility of several worlds in the world (Baschet)
Analysis of the history of societies must also articulate at different scales (global/transnational/regional/local) that complement each other and make it possible to account for the phenomena studied[1]. History shows that societies have their own trajectories, perspectives, dynamics and temporalities, which can be connected to others.
Before we look further into questions related to futures. Let us dwell for a moment on the present and the way in which the contemporaneity of non-European societies, particularly African or Caribbean ones, is often portrayed. The present of these societies (African and Caribbean) is often represented in the form of a dystopia (Trump’s indecent remarks). This is not to deny the challenges they face (well-being, education, health, political stability, security…).
To these societies are applied the categories of evaluation of social well-being falling exclusively within economicism, which since the 18 th century has usurped the lexicon of the evaluation of social well-being. Dimensions relating to culture, psychology, relationality, the quality of links with the living, are generally absent in the lexicon assessing the well-being of societies.
Moreover, our era is characterised by an obsession with evaluation, with the statistical abstraction of reality, with quantification as a major element of meaning. All of this is part of the now predominant use of managerial lexicon to describe social life. The primacy of quantity over quality, of having over being. An inverted perspective of Man
.Why is it necessary to reopen futures ? To emerge from a time without promise. Building meaning or a teleonomy for societies is necessary and fundamental. Societies need to take ownership of their present and future and invest it with meaning. Can we do this without necessarily reviving the myth of progress? The times ahead are always a time of emerging possibilities. But the latter are often the bearers of contradictory dynamics there are concomitant advances (technical, societal…), but also setbacks (ecological crisis, genocides, forms of domination and destruction…).
The difficulty lies in configuring futures, since these are often unprecedented and do not necessarily occur in known forms. But they can nevertheless carry a desire for collective well-being, intentionality and potential energy (for example, by caring for the quality of the relationship with living things by reinvesting it with quality, we open up futures).
How can we invent another regime of historicity that breaks with a teleological vision[2] of history on the one hand, and on the other hand, puts an end to presentism, which is an atrophy of the past and a negation of the future. Presentism by decreeing, for example, the end of history (Fukuyama) has the consequence not only of annihilating any future, by rendering vain any possibility of action, but perpetuates the present state of things (present inequalities and present systems of domination).
One possible way forward is to historicise events by showing that what seems to be ” natural “, established, self-evident is the product of a complex process, a history, movements, dynamics resulting from a social construction and therefore capable of being deconstructed.
[1] For ex : if we are working on the history of the impact of the Atlantic slave trade in Senegal in the 18th century, we need to link the Atlantic dynamics (history of Europe, rivalries between European powers, and its ” expansion “, trade…) and local dynamics (” pre-colonial ” kingdoms, social stratifications, power games….) to understand how societies reacted/responded ; were impacted by the slave trade…how a type of power, forms of domination are established, organised…reproduced.
[2] This, for example, justified the colonial act by setting an expectation horizon for the colonisers which was to civilise other nations and conquer spaces
A rethought relationship with tradition.
For the nations of the southern hemisphere, the African continent, the Caribbean, Haiti (also for the nations of Africa) reopening the future first involves a reinvented relationship with its past and its traditions. This enables a remobilisation of symbolic capital with the power to germinate and reactivate its cultural and social resources.
Tradition and modernity have often been contrasted. The latter, would be defined as that which substantially opposes values, systems of reference, in short epistemes derived from tradition. The colonial library[1] has schematised the traditions of Afro-Caribbean nations as being characterised by an immobile temporality, resistant to the march of History and progress. The invention, discovery or adoption of modernity would then be nothing more than a departure from tradition, a denial of the old, and in particular of its capacity to regulate current social practices. It is the terms of this tradition-modernity dialectic made up of opposition and mutual exclusion that should be examined.
For Jean Marc Ela Tradition is the place where the fundamental spiritual values that give meaning to life are configured. For the Cameroonian theologian-philosopher, it is the anchor point for the dynamics of human becoming. Jean Marc Ela[2] refers to a tradition of values only with a view to their possible fruitfulness in the current places of life : concrete socio-political relationships where the recapture of energies that culture creates. Paul Gilroy, for his part, turns the essentialist vision of tradition on its head, suggesting that it should be seen as an ” even changing “, ” ceaselessly striving to reach a state of self-realisation, which ceaselessly eludes it “. (fire and ash)
Afro-Caribbean societies, over the long span of their history, have been able to weave and reweave social ties. They have produced major and fruitful societal innovations that have enabled them to meet the challenges of their long and complex history. The point here is not to list them all and enter into a system of proof. But just to point out, whether in the areas of justice (courts of the word), conflict resolution, the creation of the community and the moral philosophies that maintain it (Ubuntu,…), the integration of the other and of difference (notion of kinship, extended family) ; there exists in these societies a significant repertoire of resources that not only make it possible to respond to current challenges, but which could inspire other places in search of social re-connection and political reconstruction.
But reopening futures also means reinventing current forms of politics and economics on the Continent. In 1804 Haiti became the first black republic, born of a successful slave revolt.
From the point of view of political organisation, Elle adopte. Haiti has experienced a political history made up of multiple upheavals. Empire, tripartition, the bloody dictatorships of the Duvaliers, interference by foreign powers, …Haiti eventually, after a long process, adopted the system of representative democracy and the procedures for choosing its representatives and leaders. The recurrence of political crises resulting from electoral processes leads us to question the true effectiveness of this form, particularly its ability to organise an equitable, fair and inclusive political life (this is in fact the case for a number of African countries)
In addition, the fundamental elements of a substantial democracy, going beyond the formal organisation of elections, are sorely lacking in our societal spaces. These are an operating system of checks and balances, the existence of deliberative spaces enabling the greatest possible number of people to participate in political decisions, and the existence of a social contract based on an equitable sharing of well-being.
It should be noted that so-called representative democracy is in crisis everywhere. In Europe and the USA, it is being held hostage by various oligarchies (economic and financial, intellectual and media elites, …). One is justified in asking whether it has not been emptied of its true content, particularly when it is led to promote xenophobia, sexism and vulgarity (USA/Trump) and no longer allows a plurality of economic-political options as well as real citizen participation in the decisions that concern them.
I have just returned from Burkina and Tunisia where a civil society and a democratic culture are emerging, the desire for democracy in these places was the result of popular revolutions that put an end to dictatorial regimes. The forms of political organisation that emerge in these areas will be built and consolidated in the non-linearity of their social and political history. These endogenous productions of the political are interesting to observe, as are the promises of reinvention that they carry with them.
After the 2012 earthquake, Haiti was overrun by a plethora of NGOs claiming to help Haitians recover from the tragedy. Raoul Peck perfectly illustrated in Fatal Aid how this humanitarianism not only failed to help Haiti, but deepened some of the difficulties it claimed to solve ; and above all delivered it to the dead ends of the ideology of the Good Samaritans who claim to know what is best for others, and above all trade in the distress of others. These humanitarians maintain systems of dependency beyond the emergency stage, leaving no room for the construction of endogenous solutions which, even if they take time, are necessary. Their worst consequence is to deprive societies of their own initiative.
This expression by Valentin Mudimbé refers to all the texts written about the continent by European explorers, anthropologists, ethnologists who have greatly contributed to constructing a vision and the imaginaries associated with Africa.
[2] Cameroonian theologian, author of La plume et la pioche (Editions Clé, Yaoundé, 1972) and Le Cri de l’homme africain, l’Harmattan 1980.
On the Need to Reinvent Political Forms.
Societies must invent the forms of their political organisation and anchor their institutions in their history and cultural dynamics. They need to produce their own forms of representation, deliberation and participation. How can we produce a collective voice that works? How can the greatest possible number of people be involved in political choices and decision-making processes? The wide range of historical experiences around the world could serve as a source of inspiration.
The idea is to build human communities that control and shape their destiny. In short, it is essential for Haiti to think about forms of political organisation stemming from its long and complex social history (processes of legitimising representatives, organising powers and counter-powers). It also needs to develop forms of governance that are not necessarily linked to the state. Several forms of self-management already exist on the Continent and are rooted in the political and social productions of several social groups.
On the need to reinvent economics.
The point is to start from the observation of the crisis of the dominant economy, to think of the economy as a cultural process as well as the need to reinvent its relationship to the social field.
Our context is that of a neoliberal economy in crisis. The symptoms of this crisis are persistent inequality and the inability of most of the world to satisfy its basic needs with dignity. The crisis is not so much linked to the financial crises (2008). It is linked to the fact that the dominant economy is not fulfilling its fundamental mission : to contribute to increasing the well-being of the greatest number.
- Globalization of trade: privatization of gains and mutualization of risks (Anthropocene, climate disruption, ecological issue)
- A crisis that is fundamentally a crisis of meaning, a crisis of purpose. Technical Orders have taken power
- Crisis is rooted in a mechanicist cosmology and a utilitarian vision, stemming from the episteme of the 19th century Europe (order, progress, rationality)
- Myth in societies (including industrial) plays the role of ordering reality according to a narrative. Economic discourse functions as an ecomyth in modern societies
Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America may be prime testing grounds for this reinvention of the economic. These societies are not heavily involved in the industrial adventure of the 20thcentury , they have been practising forms of economicity based on circularity and the relational economy[1] ; the challenges it faces oblige it for the present time and the century to come to rethink the categories of work, market exchange, production, as well as the ends of the economy.
– Idea to question the forms of economicities practised in these societies based on mythological universes (Indigenous Bolivia, African, Caribbean societies…) and indicate how they are creative, innovative and could constitute avenues for rethinking the economy in a global way. The need for serious reflection on post-capitalism
- The main feature of this economic action is that it is embedded in the respective socio-cultures. The economic is not a separate order. With its characteristics of circularity and reciprocity, the economy is part of a wider social system. It certainly obeys its classic functions (subsistence, allocation of resources…) but was above all subordinated to social, cultural and civilisational purposes
- Economic Institutions are all historical inventions (savings, credit), there is nothing universal about them and they are not pure products of reason. Historicise their genesis.
- Idea that all bets are off. Capitalism in its neoliberal version is not inevitable. It is not alternatives that will defeat the system but singularities. Globalisation has carried out a long process of standardisation and produced a kind of undifferentiated universal culture.
- It will confront everything that retains an irreducible otherness. Indifferent low-definition culture versus high-definition culture.
Uchronies and counterfactuals.
We are here at the Fokal, a place for artistic creation, and I would like to stress the importance of the imaginary in the processes of creating reality. Cornelius Castoriadis has shown that societies are first established in their imaginary spaces. These play a fundamental role in the configuration of conceivable futures.
Counterfactual reasoning, i.e. imagining what would have happened ” if ” things had gone differently, opens up the possibility of other presents and other futures. Counterfactual history, or uchrony, involves changing an element of the past and imagining what might have happened if it had happened differently, and therefore what else might happen. Counterfactual reasoning tests the relationship between what is and what might have been.
Taking an interest in possible futures that did not happen, in aborted projects, in unfulfilled ideals, makes it possible to question the idea of a linearity of history and of time that flows and is oriented towards a precise meaning, goal, finality. This reinforces the idea that the facts (events) could have been different ; what has happened, this present we are living through, is merely an occurrence of plural possibilities ; and so what may happen remains open. Uchronic fictions make it possible to reveal the different potentialities of the past as well as the creation of alternative temporal paths. They make it possible to see History from the point of view of its possibilities, but also allow the resumption of unfinished processes of emancipation.
The history of what has failed haunts what may be born. ” L’inaccompli bourdonne d’essentiel ” asserts René Char. Futures that have not happened, utopias/dreams have been reactivated at different moments in history. The ideals of 1789 in France, which failed after the Terror, were reactivated in 1830, 1848 and 1871. Many successful liberation struggles are the rehash of previous failed attempts from which they have learned (RPF Rwanda 1973, 1990, 1990 1994). Counterfactual history, insofar as it enables the power of utopias to be reactivated, is a powerful engine for change
Conclusion
In recent decades, the futures of the so-called countries of the South have been captured by the inscription of their teleologies in the idea of catching up with the countries of the North through societal mimesis.
Opening up futures for these countries is a task that is first accomplished in the space of thought and imagination. To give birth to an imagined community, it is fundamental to reconstruct narratives about these societies (assessments of their present and metaphors for the future) as well as to produce the knowledge necessary for the types of society they want to establish. It is a question of moving away from the civilisational injunctions of progress, development and modernity, and allowing the advent of unconfigured futures and another regime of historicity, but which carry within them the fundamental aspirations of populations.
A profound cultural mutation is underway. The South, Africa and the Caribbean can become laboratories for reinventing the economic, political and cultural in their own spaces. To do so, they have all the assets needed for this reinvention: youth, space, resources, and the fact that they are not fully engaged in the industrial adventure of the 20th century. These societies can therefore do things differently and propose a different balance between the ecological, political and cultural economic orders.
By opening up new horizons of expectation, they could open up its spaces of possibility to infinite universes.