05 Feb On grievability for Haiti

…the shared condition of precariousness leads not to reciprocal recognition, but to a specific exploitation of targeted populations, of lives that are not quite lives, cast as “destructible” and “ungrievable.” Such populations are “lose-able” or can be forfeited, precisely because they are framed as being already lost or forfeited; they are cast as threats to human life as we know it rather than as living populations in need of protection from illegitimate state violence, famine, or pandemics. – Judith Butler Frames of War

Haiti has been a test tube for global governance through health and development since the first US occupation in 1915. Marked as a site of experiment in the construction of a national health system (Dash, 1988; Browden, 1986), with verticalized development programs (McBride, 2002), and now for the post-Washington-Consensus-meets-MDG meta-narrative of development, Haiti has been developed to death, quite literally. While Haiti should stand as the model of What Not to Do, particularly in regard to health, the country is still imaginatively mapped as the playground of the US’s global health industry.

Health is the site of intersection of multiple scales of intervention, negotiation, and power. Judith Butler (2010) argues, the body is a site of encounter of a full range of social and political networks leading to differential precariousness.  The evidence of the earthquake, the political and social upheavals, the cholera outbreak, and the dearth of consistent and appropriate health care and access to food, clean water and sanitation, and housing are all being mapped onto the individual bodies of Haitians. And yet Haiti is still be read as a site of backwardness, corruption, violence, and political ineptitude at global scales.

Health is an obvious point of entry into the discourses of failure – framed as a basic human right (and further undergirded by the UN OCHA Guiding Principles for Internal Displacement), the health system (and the lack of it) represents the failing of global mechanisms for humanitarian relief. Paul Farmer (2003) and others (Scheper-Hughes & Bourgois, 2004) have pointed to structural violences as equally demanding of our attentions as the political violences which, for so long, were deemed somehow more “worthy” of attention and analysis. Yet, structural violences meted out through health and development hold every bit of the historical and social processes that are embedded in so-called political violences. It is not enough to narrate the violences so much as it is important to trace them back to the social, political and economic ideologies underpinning the process of state reorganization (or usurpation, as in the case of Haiti).