A Killing Two Hundred Years in the Making: On Haiti and the Narrative of Empire
image by Angelo Maneage
On July 7, 2021 at around 1:30 a.m. EDT, a group of well-trained and heavily armed mercenaries, speaking English and Spanish without a trace of a Haitian accent, stormed the private residence of the now-dead Haitian president, Jovenel Moïse. In videos captured by neighbors, one can hear them shouting at the president’s guards and police forces that “this is a DEA operation—stand down and we won’t shoot you,” which the presidential guards presumably did, as the mercenaries encountered no resistance entering the residence.
The investigation is ongoing. They have so far arrested more than fifteen men. As of right now, thirteen of them hold Colombian passports and two are Haitian-Americans. We do not know if they were indeed the killers, but one thing is certain: they accessed the president’s house and made it to his bedroom without being stopped because their ruse about being with the American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was accepted without scrutiny. One need not study post-colonial theory or even be that well-versed in the history of American imperialism to see why the mercenaries were so confident that once they identified themselves as DEA they would be believed, and why their plan worked so well.
You know the answer, I know it, and the American press knows it too. It is not as complicated as they make it out to be. They need to believe it is complicated because if they accept it to be as simple as it is, they will have to face it and change it. So the next time they tell you that you are naïve, that it is not as easy as you make it sound, know that it has nothing to do with you.
***
The DEA, acting under the larger pretense of the war on drugs, is just the latest imperialist tool used by the U.S. to dominate impoverished countries like Haiti with utter impunity. The pervasive presence of the agency in Haiti is just another form of occupation, replacing the invasions by U.S. Marines in 1915, 1994, and 2004. This is not just the case in Haiti, of course—almost every country in the Caribbean and South America has a similar chapter in their history.
After WWII, the U.S. militarily occupied most of Europe. Countries like France and Germany flourished after the empire exited. Why has this not been the case for Haiti? Some have argued, using the narrative of the West, that it is simply because Haiti’s governance is so corrupt and incompetent. There is some truth to this, but our government is no more corrupt than others. The real reason has everything to do with the value gap.
The value gap is a fact of American life that justifies the policing of non-white bodies and treats white people as more valuable than Black people. It is present in most interactions between a white American and a Black person, no matter where the latter is from. While white America may have seen the white French and German as an equal, it did not and does not see the Black Haitian as such. Instead, in the words of Allen LeRoy Locke, the Black Haitian like the African American is “more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden.”
So it comes as no surprise that the presence of the U.S. in Haiti can be characterized by both harassment and patronizing charity. The DEA, the FBI, and the American press have never seen Haitians as their equals. In return, Haitians never see American civil servants as goodwill saviors.
***
Hours after Moïse‘s assassination, the Haitian media began to speculate that DEA agents had killed the president. This was probably not true. Although, the Hill has since reported that one of the Haitian Americans involved in the assassination was indeed a DEA informant, which sources from the U.S. government have confirmed. The Washington Post and The Guardian have also reported that the Colombian mercenaries were also trained by the U.S. government. But it does not matter. The president is dead because of the presence of the DEA, and the United States more broadly, in Haiti. The same police force that was protecting the president had been ordered to make way for the DEA to operate freely countless times, so when they heard armed foreigners speaking in fluent English and Spanish telling them to stand down because they were DEA agents, it was just another raid. They did what they were ordered to do many times before: stand down before the agents of the hemisphere’s geopolitical superpower.
One might argue that the president’s personal guards should have known better. They should have known that the president was off-limits. One might say that a foreign agency should not storm the personal residence of a president at 1 a.m. One would be mistaken. No one, and I mean no one, in Haiti is beyond the reach of American imperialism. Besides, it has happened to another president, as we will see later.
***
Like everyone upon hearing news of the assassination, I was horrified. Horrified because of what it signaled. That we have fully entered the age of a new kind of warfare, and it is going to be an even more senseless one than those of past. The recent battle tactics—deployments of highly trained special forces units to operate covert operations, mostly at the behest of superpowers like the U.S. and NATO allies—have made their way, predictably, to the private world. There is no going back. I am certain that we will see these atrocious events more often. This horrified me, but so did the other side of it: that repressive acts by dictators, afraid they could be next, will abound and become increasingly more violent. Paranoia will reign and chaos will ensue.
As a Haitian, I was furious. I was angered by the senseless brutality of the act itself, but also for personal reasons. I was not a fan of Jovenel Moïse. This was mostly a result of exposure to frequent coverage of his government in a negative light by American media, and the constant refrain suggesting he was busy establishing himself as a dictator. Since coming to the U.S. in 2016 I have seldom discussed politics with my family back home, and I did not know they were strong supporters of his until July 7. I was angry that I disliked a man that I did not fully understand, and that this man had been brutally murdered before the eyes of the world. I was angry at the western media for tricking me into believing their narrative of Haiti. Again.
But most importantly, I was angry with the murderers, both the killers and those who paid them. I felt robbed. The whole country was robbed. Those who marched in the streets, who died, who were beaten or lost everything under his administration, but also those who were still supporting Moïse, like my family—all of them had been robbed of the future they were fighting for by a select group of elites. The whole thing had the familiar feeling of earlier pages in my country’s history.
***
As I tend to do when I am feeling strong emotions, I sat down to write about it, to try to externalize my thinking onto a narrative frame that might somehow make it digestible, or at the very least bearable. But I couldn’t think straight. My writing was all over the place. I am somewhat still under the hold of these feelings as I consider the optics of writing something about Haiti in a foreign language.
I am well aware that it is inevitable that anything I write will in some way represent Haiti. No Haitian has appointed me or asked me to represent them, especially not in a language that the majority of them can’t understand. A language that has countless times been used to intimidate and marginalize them. A language that when spoken signals demarcation, class separation to such a degree that every time it is spoken they shrink and defer to its commands.
So, I apologize in advance to all my fellow Haitians for whom these words will simply be gibberish. I aim not to steal your voice or represent you, even though some will see it as such. Instead, this is an indictment, and it is only fair to indict the culprits in their own language.
***
In the days since the assassination, I have been reading more carefully about the situation in Haiti, talking with friends still there, and have come up with four instances in Haitian history that can put the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse into perspective. The history of Haiti, depending on where you are and what you have read, is one of a series of corrupt doings, of cowardly acts and political chaos. But it can also be one of extraordinary bravery, ingenuity, and deep commitment to the cause of freedom in the face of far more powerful external forces plotting against it. I have, at various points in my life, been exposed to and believed both narratives—sometimes, like today, have held belief in both at the same time. One thing is true though: the history of Haiti, like every colonized country, has been dominated by foreign imperial forces so often and so brutally that no single moment within its history can be understood beyond the narrative frame of empire.
The history of Haiti, one might say, is the first document written through the lens of Critical Race Theory in modern times. It is as important and imperfect a document as the 1619 Project. I have read it many times. In elementary school, I had to memorize every chapter and recite it in front of my teachers. In high school, I read it just for the intrigue. I enjoyed the extraordinary and improbable stories of bravery, cowardice, and violence. The stuff of history and myth. When I came to the U.S. and encountered the way that Haiti was portrayed in the American media, I read it again to remind myself who I was and where I came from. Like James Baldwin told the SNCC students at Howard University, I was not going to “ever accept any of the many derogatory, degrading, and reductive definitions that this society has ready for [me]”.
Like all stories, this one has a bit of legend. It goes that upon arriving in Haiti after many years spent studying writing and law in France, Thomas Madiou asked for a copy of the history of Haiti and was told that there was no such thing. “This book that does not exist, I will be the one to write it!” he replied. But that is the legend, the myth. The truth is that Madiou was determined to write the history of Haiti years before he went back to his home country. For him, writing the history of his people was the only way to explain his place in the world. Not too different from what the team that wrote the 1619 Project had in mind.
While in France, Madiou met Isaac Louverture, the son of Toussaint Louverture, who told him of his father’s exploits in Saint Domingue (Haiti’s name during the French colonization). After their meeting, Madiou became interested in the past of his country. But at the time, the only written texts about Haiti were by French historians. He felt it was important to learn the history of Haiti from the Haitian perspective, and went back to Haiti to do just that. He traveled around the country interviewing and collecting oral testimonies from veterans of the Independence War and civilians who were still alive, but still had to rely heavily on the French texts to fill in the gaps.
Madiou, with his degree in belles-lettres, knew the importance of storytelling and the power of a good story. He understood what it meant to have one’s own story told by another. I can imagine him among the French students in 1820’s Paris. Being called and defined by them. Feeling rootless, history-less, lost.
The adage that history is written by the victors is not necessarily true. For example, there is a history of Haiti written by the French colonizers after they lost the colony that would become Haiti, but that does not make them victorious. It is not enough to simply say that the victors write the history when history also makes the victors, if we accept history to be what is passed down to us. This is why it is paramount for those left out of the narratives of history, the marginalized, to reclaim their history as Thomas Madiou did almost two hundred years ago.
***
In the past couple of decades, we have seen a push for marginalized people to tell their stories. We have seen and are still seeing efforts throughout the world to confront the legacy of colonialism and imperialism. From Africa to the Middle East. From Europe to the Caribbean. And from the U.S. to Asia. We are also seeing backlash to these efforts, which is perfectly predictable. If history indeed makes the victors, for the writers of history and their descendants a re-writing or rectification of that history might be seen as a loss. But that is not necessarily the case, as history is constantly being written. If everyone can become part of the writing of history then there will be no need for winners and losers.
In part this is my aim in writing these words. The history of Haiti for the past hundred years has been seen through two lenses: one from the inside and one from the outside. The idea that I had of Haiti while growing up is vastly different than the one that I came to see in the news and books written by outsiders, especially in the U.S. In Haiti, we think of ourselves as a hardworking, tenacious, resilient people who can’t catch a break because of outsiders meddling in our affairs. The West has a narrative of Haiti borne out of constant disaster and incompetence.
Both views serve important purposes for those who hold them. For us Haitians, our understanding of ourselves grounds us, helps us through the most difficult moments. For the outsider, it justifies meddling in Haiti’s affairs while displacing accountability. We tried, but these poor people can’t catch a break. Besides, they are so corrupt.
Time after time, U.S. intervention in Haiti’s business leaves it weaker than it was. Most Haitians I know have a list of American interventions from 1804 to the present that can explain Jovenel Moïse’s assassination. The following four are the ones at the top of my list.
1. U.S. Embargo on Haiti, 1804 - 1862.
Some know that Haiti is the second country to gain its independence in the so-called “New World,” and that it is the only successful example of enslaved peoples revolting and establishing their own nation. What many do not know is that the U.S., the first country to gain its independence in the region, saw Haitian independence as a threat. So much so that they imposed a vicious trade embargo on the newly independent country for the first 58 years of its existence, from 1804 to 1862.
According to the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian, under President Thomas Jefferson’s presidency the United States cut off aid to Toussaint Louverture (the first Black person to become governor of a colony in the new world and a hero of the Haitian Revolution) and instead pursued a carefully designed plan to isolate Haiti, fearing that the Haitian Revolution would spread to the United States. For the first 60 years that both countries existed, the relationship between the U.S. and Haiti was marked by a deep dread on the part of the U.S. that enslaved Americans might want to follow the Haitian example. The prospect of a nation governed by Black people was surely terrifying enough to early Americans all on its own, but their true fear was of the total and real freedom that had been secured by the Haitians. White Americans who just a decade and change prior were uttering cries of “liberty or death!” and invoking the language that “all men are created equal” recoiled with fear at the prospect of these principles playing out in a predominantly Black country.
Haiti’s embodiment of that total freedom was threatening to spill out beyond the Caribbean and into the rest of the world. This put the interests of the U.S., devoted to enslaving and plundering Black bodies in order to jumpstart its own agrarian economy in the south and to use those products to industrialize the north, in grave danger. To the harsh system of enslavement that the U.S. had relied on, a free Black nation was not the reflection of democratic ideals, but a threat.
The version of freedom that affirms the equality of every human being, no matter their race or class, has always been contrary to the U.S. version of capitalist freedom, which depends on the plundering of bodies for profit. Haiti’s freedom has been a threat to capitalism since its inception. And since Haiti became the first Black independent country in the world, this effrontery has been intentionally suppressed to prevent its reproduction. But there is something peculiarly vitalizing about freedom. It cannot help itself. Like a liquid fuel it will seep out and into the cracks, waiting for the inevitable spark to blow the whole thing open. Haiti, after wresting itself from overt colonialism, spread freedom like a virus around the Caribbean and the colonized world writ large. The first Haitian president (Dessalines, though considered the father of the country, was technically a governor and then emperor), Alexandre Pétion, welcomed Bolivar and sent guns, vessels, and money with him on his way to assist the liberation of South America. Haitian forces then went to the Dominican Republic and helped chase the Spanish off the island—only to occupy the territory themselves for 21 years. This paradox is one that we have yet to explain: how could a country that only just gained its own independence impose colonial occupation on its neighbor? One cannot help but wonder if proximity to the U.S., who as I have demonstrated were so reluctant to allow their fight for independence to be reproduced, served as a troubling unconscious model for the Haitians in their early treatment of the Dominicans.
But one thing is certain: for threatening to spread freedom through the Caribbean and beyond, Haiti was punished, pushed to the margins, and bullied for its gall by the regional superpowers.
One of the most embarrassing moments in the history of Haiti happened in 1897, 35 years after the U.S. finally recognized Haiti’s independence and 52 years after France forced Haiti to pay an indemnity equal to the present-day sum of $16 billion in reparation for the “loss” of their colony. It is one event that I learned about in elementary school and, even then, I was shocked at the extent to which foreign powers would go to bully Haiti. It is referred to as l’Affaire Lüders.
On September 21, 1897, the police went to the Écuries Centrales to arrest a Haitian citizen, Dorléus Présumé, accused of theft. The Écuries Centrals was owned by Emile Lüders, who was born in Haiti but had a German father. When the police came to arrest Présumé, Emile Lüders, who three years prior was imprisoned for battery against a soldier, came to Présumé’s defense and assaulted the police officers. Both Présumé and Lüders were arrested and sentenced to one month in prison. They appealed and were again found guilty, their sentences extended to one year.
However, less than a month later, the German chargé d’affaires in Haiti demanded the release of Lüders and the firing of the judges and police officers involved in the case. While the president, Tirésias Simon Augustin Sam, resisted for a couple of days, he eventually caved under pressure from the American representative W.F. Powell. President Sam pardoned Lüders, but neither Germany nor Lüders were satisfied. They asked that the government also pay Lüders twenty thousand dollars in reparation. When the government refused, Germany sent two naval ships to the harbors of Port-au-Prince.
Their demands this time escalated to a formal promise that Lüders could return to Haiti, a letter of apology to the German government, a 21-gun salute to the German flag, a reception for the German chargé d’affaires, and for the president to raise a white flag at the national palace as a sign of surrender. They gave Haiti four hours to decide. Under pressure from the foreign powers, Tirésias Simon Sam agreed to these outrageous terms, to the consternation of every Haitian.
3. U.S. Invasion and Occupation of Haiti, 1915.
On July 28, 1915 (less than a year after U.S. Marines, urged by National City Bank in Cleveland, invaded Haiti and took the gold reserve in the Haitian National Bank) Haiti’s own elite opposition orchestrated the execution of then President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam—the last president to be killed while in office prior the July 7 assassination. On the same day, U.S. Marines again invaded Haiti and began a brutal occupation lasting 19 years.
During the occupation, American forces did unthinkable things to Haitians. While most of the intelligentsia and the financial elite class bent the knee in exchange for some economic prosperity, they did so at the price of letting these foreign soldiers fondle their wives in public and impregnate their unmarried daughters. Some even saw the assaults as a good thing, hoping that these unions would give them some tiblan for grandkids. Naturally, it wasn’t long before the working classes rebelled.
The Cacos from the northern mountains, led by Charlemagne Péralte, were a group of ill-armed and fatigued farmers. Nonetheless, they refused to abandon their fields and be brought to the cities to work for Americans, where they’d be forced at gunpoint to build roads, ports, offices, and forts for the occupying forces. The work, which was grueling and essentially slavery with no pay, was known as corvée, which translates to drudgery. They maintained their resistance mostly through guerrilla combat modeled after the tactics used some hundred years prior by their ancestors against the French.
Péralte was eventually betrayed by one of his officers, Jean-Baptiste Conzé, and killed by American forces. With time, though the Americans had increased their numbers and killed the leader of the Cacos, their occupation became untenable. The ragged and ill-armed misfits had proven to the well-equipped American army that the words of their forefather, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, still rang true: “Liberté ou la Mort! Freedom or death!” The occupation had backfired and henceforth the presence of Americans could never be accepted under the guise of good will. American forces vacated in 1934.
But although military personnel left, American influence found a conduit in the Haitian bourgeoisie class and U.S. President Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, worsening the rift between the classes. Put simply, a handful of families, mostly light-skinned and immigrants or those whose parents had married or otherwise intermingled with the occupying Americans and Germans and Middle Easterners, were granted control over the economy. They were made heads of businesses and political offices. To this day they make and unmake careers in politics. They are essentially proxies for the U.S. government, and their power renders them kingmakers in Haitian elections.
Before returning to the United States in 2016, I was working in Haiti for an American company. This granted me a kind of access to some of these circles. I was told by several leading figures in Port-au-Prince that the reason they could not let Jovenel Moïse, then the president-elect, assume power was because they did not know who he was and he had not sat down with them yet. Indeed, when he won the election that year and I came back to the U.S., he had to wait a year for his inauguration. He had to bow to the kingmakers first. It wasn’t until then that the international community, led by the U.S. State Department, gave their okay and acknowledged that the election had been won fair and square a year prior.
And finally, 4. The Coup D’état of 2004.
On February 29, 2004, after a long year of fighting and demonstrating in the streets against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, we woke up one morning to hear that a group of armed men had come to our national palace, kidnapped the president, and flown him into exile. The U.S. government argued that the president had left on his own accord, which was parroted without real investigation by the New York Times, just as they did a year before during the invasion of Iraq. It was only the day after that we were finally able to hear from Aristide, and learned that American soldiers had forced him out. It was a coup.
I was thirteen then. I remember my father’s anger and my desolation. The year prior, my father hit me when I confronted him for supporting a president that I saw as a tyrant. I told him that Aristide did not like our country. If he did, I argued, he would leave and stop all the killings that were being done in his name. My father, who lived through the 1991 coup d’état against Aristide and saw the fallout afterwards, told me I was naïve. That I was too young to know how the bourgeois class, led by Charles Henry Baker, then one of the richest men in Port-au-Prince and later a presidential candidate, was bankrolled by the U.S. State Department. I rebuked him and said that I would prefer to be naïve than support a tyrant. He slapped me across the face.
The morning of February 29, 2004, when he was kidnapped and sent into exile, I did not feel pity for Aristide as I have recently been feeling for Jovenel. Instead, I felt confused and angry. At the time I could not explain why I was so upset. It would be years later, after the vacuum his departure left was filled by armed rebels who terrorized my country, my city, and my neighbors, that I would come to understand that I, along with every other Haitian, had been robbed. Robbed of the future for which so many of us had sacrificed. The future that we were promised by Aristide and that he never delivered. The future that our ancestors fought and died for. The one where real democracy, real freedom, would be a given to all of us. The future darkened by the shadowy maneuvers of foreign powers, aided by a group of corrupt, treasonous Haitians.
The shadow of the American government has haunted political life in Haiti since 1804, when the impertinent Black and enslaved rebelled against their “masters” and secured their freedom. The same freedom that the French and the Americans were boasting so mightily about as the model for the future of society just some decades prior. Yet Haitian freedom was a threat to Americans’ survival. It threatened the economic security and the metaphysical comportment of a racist country busy establishing itself as the hegemon of the hemisphere. They decided to suppress this kind of freedom by keeping a close watch on Haiti and a constant presence there. The best way to do so was to sow chaos and tell a story in which Haiti was always in need of saving, of civilizing, of occupying.
This presence, this shadow, has never been more apparent than during the assassination of Jovenel Moïse.
***
When the mercenaries entered the president’s room, tortured, and murdered him, Haiti was a failed state. By failed state, I mean just that: the state, not the people. A people cannot fail, but they can certainly be failed. That became clear to me after the 2010 earthquake, when I saw the abysmal response of the state and the complete collapse of our institutions. This was mostly due to the state of complete dependence on foreign aid the country had found itself in, an eternal debt in which we have been mired ever since we were shaken down by the French for those billions as an apology for freeing ourselves. These institutions did not fail because of their belief in vodou or personal character flaws, as the ever-loathsome and fundamentally simple David Brooks argued in a racist opinion piece two days after the most devastating and fatal earthquake seen on this planet in a generation.
After the earthquake, I lived the proudest, albeit saddest, few months of my life. I was one of those lucky enough to live far from Port-au-Prince, the earthquake’s epicenter. We could certainly feel it in my town, even over 150 miles away, but had been spared serious damage to our infrastructure. Like every other Haitian city that was not as badly hit, we welcomed and housed folks who had lost their homes and family members in Port-au-Prince. Our parents invited them into our own homes. Many of those who did not have spare rooms they could share with these refugees allowed NGOs to set up tents in their yards.
My high school admitted displaced students midway through the year, something they had never done before, just so those students would not fall behind on their studies. The local students stayed late after school to bring our new classmates up to speed. We shared books with them. We tutored them. We told them which teachers to watch out for. We shared food during recess. At the end of the school year, one of them was elected queen of my prom. We all passed with brio our final Senior National Exam. To this day, some of them still have the name of my high school on their Facebook profiles even though they only spent six months there, rather than their schools in Port-au-Prince.
This is the story of the earthquake that I lived through. Yet the Haitian government, eager to hide its own failures, never showed this to the world and neither did the international media. Why would they? That story does not sell because it does not conform to the West’s stereotype of Haiti as a poor and resourceless country. Helpless people unable to govern themselves. A stereotype that the government relies on to keep financial aid coming, so they can line the pockets of those who already wield power in Haiti and keep us locked in a cycle of debt we are never meant to escape—certainly not to build or rebuild the institutions of the state. Anyone who dares to disrupt this stereotype before the eyes of the world is seen as a threat. It is never safe to go against the stories that states tell about themselves.
My father understood that. This was why, in 2004, he supported someone that his thirteen-year-old son saw as a tyrant. I understand that now. But unlike my father, and because of my distance from Haiti, I can see the problem for what it is and separate myself from it. This is both a curse and a blessing.
***
Moïse was a populist, and probably a demagogue like Aristide was in 2004. However, these two things are not mutually exclusive, nor are they necessarily negative. Donald Trump certainly tapped into these energies, and so too did Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Populism does not mean the same thing in every situation, and it certainly does not mean in Haiti what it does in the U.S. The belief that it does, that political forms around the world can only emerge in the same style and mode as in the U.S., is a fundamentally imperialistic concept. It comes from an attitude on the part of western thinkers and journalists that cannot imagine a world where their ways of understanding cannot explain everything and everyone. Yet the difference is simple and obvious if one chooses to extend some grace and humility to it.
Haiti’s demography is majority Black, with varying skin tones (as in every Black country). The light-skinned people, due to racism’s little brother, colorism, tend to be preferred by the ruling elites, thus they usually occupy the best positions in politics and business. The richest families in Haiti are light-skinned and intermarried. Power protects power. And power seldom relents on its own accord and does everything to perpetuate itself. This is to say that the interests of the richest families are prioritized in politics and business. With the importation of neoliberalism and “free market” capitalism from the U.S., the Haitian government tends to favor the demands of the bourgeois class. When a president decides to overlook these foreign impositions and tend instead to the masses (which is rare, because this is a sure way to provoke the U.S.’s ire and trigger another coup under the guise of upholding democracy), that president is painted with the label of populist. But the imperialistic position of the western media and powers is to always portray a populist as a malcontented demagogue, eager to whip up chaos and violence—just as they did in the case of the former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. There are two possible explanations for this: either western journalists are operating from a place of pure racist malice, which is unlikely for all of them, or they are simply so entrenched in their own narrative of what Haiti should be that they cannot see what it is, and what it has been.
This narrative not only marginalizes the contributions of Haitians like people from my town in 2010, but is outright dangerous. It does not empower people—it actively disempowers us. It overlooks the critical role of institutions and focuses the story on individuals, who are either doing the biddings of foreign superpowers or going dangerously against them. It is a narrative that has been fabricated piecemeal out of the disasters of our history, and from the often carefully managed testimonies of the few who manage to express themselves in the languages of the superpowers. It is not a narrative of the country itself. But that is what imperialism feeds off of: false, simplified stories of other places, other peoples. Imperialism uses them to justify its seizure of their sovereignty, and the undignified position this control inevitably results in for the dominated serves as a narrative to perpetuate the dominance. It is an unending loop, and the president’s assassination was both caused by it and will almost certainly be used as further evidence to justify more of the same brutal foreign influence in the future.
Jovenel Moïse’s murder can be understood as a simple story of violence erupting in an unstable state, or as part of a more complicated and darker story. That longer story began some 200 years ago, and I have attempted to sketch some of its twists and turns, its heroes and villains, its endless paradoxes. This longer story is not an easy one to tell, so the default will be to tell the simple one, as always, and predictably it will again be told by those who haven’t lived it. This reduced story, already apparent in the coverage of the president’s murder, is the one told by foreign powers, especially the U.S. and France. It is a story so well told that even those it marginalizes and undermines cannot see past it, which explains the invitation from Haitian leaders to the U.S. to send troops and practically re-occupy the country in response. As we know, nothing is more powerful than a good story. But maybe there is an even better one to be heard, if people will simply take the time to listen.