“Haiti Then and Now's" Interview With Laura Wagner - Respond's Haitian Creole Team Co Lead
Excerpts from:
“Haiti Then and Now” Interviews Dr. Laura R. Wagner
“Haitian & Haitianist Thinkers in the Public Space: An Interview Series”
“Haiti Then and Now” Interviews Dr. Laura R. Wagner
Conducted by Dr. Celucien L. Joseph
August 15, 2022
“I wanted to write a story about the earthquake that was also about ordinary people and everyday life. I wanted my characters to have complex interior lives, and have ordinary joys, concerns, relationships, and dreams, because as we all know there’s a kind of flattening and dehumanization that happens in a lot of foreign media accounts of Haiti. People are reduced to ahistorical, archetypal victims… When most people in the US and elsewhere think about Haiti, they assume that foreigners are the ones doing the saving. But most people who survived the earthquake, who were pulled from the rubble, including me, were saved by their families, friends, or neighbors, without any sophisticated equipment. And this is also how people survive every day, too, not only in moments of extraordinary crisis. People rely on their social connections. Vwazinay se fanmi. Manje kwit pa gen mèt.”—Laura R. Wagner, PhD, anthropologist, novelist, archivist
LRW: Thanks so much for asking me to participate in this series. I was born in California, to Anglophone Canadian parents. My family is Jewish, although I am non-practicing. The main thing I’ve taken from my Jewish background, and the history of Jewish people, is a general concern with human rights and social justice. For me, the idea of “never again” after the Holocaust doesn’t just apply to Jewish people, and I oppose and condemn efforts to appropriate the memory of the Holocaust in order to commit human rights abuses and establish a white ethnostate in Israel. To me it’s always meant a broader struggle for human rights and an abhorrence of human suffering.
I am a writer, a cultural anthropologist by training, an archivist by chance. My connection to Haiti began because, like a lot of undergrads who are looking for a secular answer to the problem of human suffering, I was drawn to the work of Paul Farmer. After college, I moved to Miami, where I worked first as a community organizer and then as a community health care worker in the tuberculosis unit of the Miami-Dade County Health Department. It was in Miami, with Haitian colleagues and friends and with the health department patients, that I first learned Kreyòl and learned about Haiti. This was in 2004-2006. What struck me at the time was how the situation in Haiti defied an easy distinction of who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” were, which is an uncomfortable proposition for a lot of people from the US. And I also learned how much pride, patriotism, longing, and love were mixed in with my Haitian friends’ heartbreak about what was happening in their homeland. As someone who has never really felt like she belonged in any of the places I am “from,” I found that love and devotion really compelling, and it was such a departure from all the stereotypes I had heard about Haiti. Beyond that, I really fell in love with the language, and I gained about twenty happy pounds living in Miami, eating legim, akra, and diri djondjon.
I also observed that while our health department patients were dying of TB and HIV, those were only the proximate causes of their deaths. It all came down to power, to structural violence. I grew up in the Bay Area, and as a kid I knew middle-class gay men who died of AIDS, then saw how, when antiretrovirals came out in the 90s, suddenly people stopped dying. But for a lot of our health department patients, who were undocumented, or unhoused, or simply poor and marginalized, it was like it was still the 1980s. Paul Farmer writes about what his friends and comrades in central Haiti called “stupid deaths” – unnecessary, preventable deaths – and I saw it play out in real time. And I thought, maybe naively, “I’m going to study anthropology, because this is about power, it’s not about the disease itself.” I thought if I knew how power worked, I could do something about the suffering. But it turns out that it’s easy to understand how power works, but very hard to do anything about it.
I am one of many, many people—journalists, researchers, and of course Haitian so-called beneficiaries—to observe that the of the post-quake humanitarian response was a travesty: that most of the money pledged never made it to Haitian people; that the Haitian government, whatever its shortcomings, was completely cut out of the aid response; and that so-called “rebuilding” after the quake was much more about serving dominant geopolitical influences, and capitalism, than it was about helping ordinary Haitian people “build back better.™ ”
But I’m more interested in how people experienced these things, on a personal level, than in the macro story, because a lot of people have done important and powerful work documenting the macro story. I’d start by saying—again, as many people have done—that stories and representations matter. If every story about Haiti and Haitians is about powerlessness, victimhood, and pity, or else violence, criminality and corruption, then it stands to reason that Haitian people couldn’t be political actors who can and should determine the course of their own lives and their own country. But what we saw right after the earthquake, in the immediate aftermath, was that people survived because of their bonds with other people. And I think that’s how I’d approach the question about mental health and trauma.
The organization I work for, Respond Crisis Translation, began a couple years ago as an informal language justice collective, providing translation and interpretation services mainly for immigrants and asylum seekers and the organizations that serve them. Over the last couple years, as Respond has grown, it’s become increasingly formal and professional. We work in dozens of languages, although I am only on the Haitian Creole team. We promote language justice in several ways:
Most importantly, we ensure that people have access to information about changing asylum laws and policies, as well as services and resources, in Haitian Creole (or whatever language they speak). We translate important documents and evidence that people need to make their asylum case in US courts (such as death certificates, police reports, and other documents from Haitian courts). We interpret meetings between migrants or asylum-seekers and the legal, medical, psychological professionals, or grassroots organizers who are assisting them. The US immigration system is fundamentally unjust; it’s a rigged game. Providing access to information in people’s native language and being the conduit for them to tell their stories to the organizations and agencies that can help them—none of that unrigs the game, but it gives people a slightly fairer shot.
Second, our model is to pay our Black, indigenous, and financially vulnerable translators and interpreters. On the Haitian Creole team, many of our interpreters/translators are themselves living in Haiti, or they are Haitian immigrants supporting loved ones in Haiti. On other teams, there are interpreters/translators who are refugees or displaced people. It’s important to us that people be fairly compensated for their work, and to recognize that translation and interpretation are invaluable forms of skilled work. There’s a tendency in different fields to consider translation or interpretation an afterthought – “Oh, we’ll do all the ‘real’ work and then we’ll find someone to translate it at the last minute.” Part of what Respond emphasizes, and about which I personally feel very strongly, is that translation and interpretation are a central, critical part of all of this work. Nothing else can happen if people can’t communicate. Human rights law, health care, psychosocial support, journalism, advocacy: none of that can happen properly if you don’t have good translation and interpretation, if you don’t have language justice.
And then finally, you can’t really know someone as a full human being with a complex interior life unless you can communicate with them. So many terrible, superficial, objectifying representations of Haiti rest on that lack of communication. So, in advocating for Haitian migrants and asylum-seekers—who have been consistently subject to singularly racist discrimination and othering for decades—making nuanced communication possible is particularly important.