07 Aug ICCG Paper – Geographies of Blame: Cholera in Haiti

I have a paper talk to give in just 9 days. I’m nervous. It’s only the second time i’ve written an abstract first and a paper later. The paper, itself, is having some difficulty fleshing out theoretically – not because there isn’t a wealth of empirical data to work with, but because there is almost too much that i’m not sure what direction to take. I have too many questions:

1. Why did the UN, MINUSTAH, and particularly the Nepalese Minustah forces refuse to take responsibility for the cholera outbreak at the outset, even as independent (unsolicited) origin and epidemiological studies concluded rather quickly that it is an Asian strain (not the strain in Latin America right now), that the Nepalese, though tested, were only tested if there was clinical presentment of infection and then were sent for 10 days home leave before returning to reassemble in Kathmandu right smack dab in the middle of a cholera outbreak there, and that the Nepalese Minustah base had poor sanitation (including pipes leading directly out from under the latrines directly into the river – downstream from which the first cases appeared).

1a. which makes me then ask, “but why is it important to know the ‘culprit’, as it were – particularly as this kind of blaming may (or may not) lead to (violent) reprisals?”
2.a. which then leads the point that Haitians have born the brunt of several accusations of blame – everything from slave uprisings in Cuba and the US’s south (through the “infection” of slaves with revolutionary ideas) to AIDS in the US (alright 200 years of blaming Haitians boiled down to two simple examples doesn’t really get to the heart of the brunt of blaming that Haiti and her people have had to contend with, but at least there is some semblance of continuity)
2.a.i. but two wrongs don’t make a right…*ahem*

2. Haitians have successfully managed to keep cholera out of their country for its entirety (the Duke University Haiti Lab, funded by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute recently unveiled a digital mapping project on cholera in Haiti in the 19th century – here’s a talk given by Deborah Jenson that’s interesting) – what between abolishing slavery before cholera arrived in the Caribbean (1833) and not keeping its army in barracks, there was kind of living situation that could exacerbate an outbreak. Further, Jean-Pierre Boyer (pres from 1818-1843) implemented public health programs in Haiti when news of cholera coming to the Americas arrived (however much i read that, i have yet to find a substantive source for this claim).

Ultimately, what i’m struggling with is the dichotomous situationality of the personal responsibility frames of understanding one’s own responsibility in the disease versus the structural frames which inform this process. One of the great boons and celebrated understandings of the post-disaster, humanitarian process is the fact that cholera, for instance (a disease of disaster and poverty) supposedly was not ever supposed to be a concern. Haiti represented a kind of “clean break”, if you will, of epidemic-free tent living that has been undermined by the introduction of this particular bacteria.

It’s not that placing blame will cure the problem, so much as the fact that Haitians were poised to be able to bypass the second calamity of camp living – namely, cholera. But how do we theorize about this? How do we actually step into this discourse about a disease that has been pervasive within imperial confines as it blooms within a nation that has somehow managed to avoid this very problem? Is it about placing blame? or is it that we have a very concrete example of the throes of imperialism? that the occupation of Haiti is only one more notch in the proverbial belt of conquest – this one whose very roots are dug deep into racism and its after-effect of occupational humanitarianism…