Haiti UnEarthed, Restoration, Recovery

The criticism of Yele Haiti and Wyclef Jean, himself, comes primarily from The Smoking Gun, a celebrity gossip website which traffics mostly in DUI mugshots and divorce settlements of the rich and famous. Jean held a press conference in New York where he responded head-on to the allegations as soon as he returned from pulling bodies from the rubble in Haiti. A YouTube video of Jean’s remarks has been circulating on the internet for a few days now. Why this sudden controversy about Yele Haiti when other longstanding aid organizations like the Red Cross have faced outright scandals and are still being billed as safe places to donate? Who is afraid of what might happen if Wyclef Jean’s organization continues to raise a million dollars a day? What might Yele Haiti accomplish in the coming days, weeks, months and years if the money keeps coming in?

Organizations like Doctors Without Borders (MSF) and the Red Cross have much more experience in dealing with immediate emergency situations, but their goals right now don’t reach much past keeping people alive. Of course Haiti needs this kind of help right now. Haitians need food, water, shelter and medical supplies. Right. Now. And perhaps it is legitimate to point out that that’s not what Yele Haiti does. It’s not a charity that feeds X number of people in X number of days. But relief for Haiti is not about rebuilding what got destroyed in the earthquake. It’s not about getting back to normal. It’s not about simply putting back what was there before last week, like one might do for an earthquake in Los Angeles or San Francisco.

Any project or program or aid that goes to Haiti must be coordinated with real targets for the future, like reversing topsoil erosion or securing clean water infrastructure. Only a Native Son like Wyclef deeply understands this, not the benevolent Americans or Europeans who want to give a drink of water to the thirsty, congratulate themselves and return to The X Factor. I’m grateful for those benevolent ones, as too many really don’t care to be interrupted at all when they’re watching TV. All of those people need to grab their cell phones and send 5 bucks once, once a week, or once a month. Will MSF and the Red Cross be there next month or next year or only next earthquake?

Yele Haiti is an organization already on the ground in Haiti that works on a structural level with long-term goals. Another organization has arrived on the ground in Haiti that works on a structural level with long-term goals. It’s called the US military. The US is launching a real, full-scale military invasion and Wyclef Jean is in the best position to lead the non-violent PanAfrican resistance to yet another military occupation of Haiti. We need to elevate this Brother, not just as a celebrity, an example, a poster child, but to actively organize to give him what a leader needs. How do we empower, feed, water and grow a leader? What is more useful to him at this moment than our admiration?

1. Cash Money: If you’ve got it, give it. Five dollars a week or $5 a month. Give what you can. We are very busy people directing limited resources to crucial projects all over the world, from Gaza to Gitmo, from the rainforests to the ice caps. If you don’t have it to give, recruit 2 people who do.

2. Strong Bodies: Boots on the ground, roll up the sleeves and do that project that you know how to do.

3. Bright Minds: There is nothing new under the sun. Africa’s children have already invented everything we could ever possibly need. We had refrigeration before electricity. Black people crossed continents before cars. Aboriginals had long distance conversations before telephones. Have you heard of the theory of The Advantage of Backwardness? One is free to implement the latest technology on the cheap if one is not saddled with trying to convert an aging, ever less useful infrastructure. San Franciscans spent billions of dollars and decades of labor retrofitting buildings to prepare for future earthquakes. Haitians can anchor and assemble geodesic domes in a matter of months for hundreds of thousands of dollars and carry on through the next hurricane. The Elite Power Brokers are learning how to think outside the box, forgetting that the excluded have had to live outside the box. Flip the script and we’re ahead of the curve. We need to remember the simplest things we’ve let ourselves forget.

4. Let the Ink Spill: Black People have a right to tell Black stories in Black words from Black vantage points. We have the right to define, to describe and to delineate our own priorities, our own visions and our own goals. As People of Color, we have the right to control our own images and the obligation to call out the mainstream media when they are wrong.

Distortion of Grenadians: The TV in my living room said, “Looting! Riots! Pandemonium!” When I finally got through on the phone, Beloved One in Grenada said, “The line formed at the door, so after we got our stuff we left through the broken storefront window. The shopkeepers can’t sell anything, of course they’re distributing it! What else are they going to do with it? Riots and looting? The storm broke the windows!”

Smear Campaign on September 11, 2001: The TV at work showed Palestinians celebrating the attack on the Twin Towers, dancing and giving sweets to children. A journalism professor in Brasilia thought the scene looked familiar, searched through some archives and found out that the clip was from 1991. Ironically, it was a celebration of the arrival of US troops to help the Kuwaitis. I was told CNN apologized when no one was listening.

Outright Lies about Katrina: The TV in someone else’s living room said, “Criminals! Violence! Gangs of Rapists Marauding through the Astrodome!” and showed the same very short clip of one Black male running with a candy bar or diapers or some such, over and over and over again. If there was such widespread thieving, why could you show me only one person for a few seconds? And why was there not even one, single documented case of rape in the Astrodome?

The White Power Looters jack entire nations, I can spare a Brother a Snickers bar!

5. Anatomy of a Lynching: When the Enemy Imperialists come at a Revolutionary Brother, we know how they do. They bind his hands behind his back. They tie his feet. They cut off his penis and they stuff it in his mouth. They wind a rope around his neck. They hang him from a tree. When the Disaster Profiteers come at Wyclef Jean, it may be symbolic, financial, structural, legal and/or psychological, but it will be a lynching. Pay attention. He’ll need our protection.

We need to be proactive about what the Imperial Forces are going to try to do to Wyclef Jean as an international face and voice for Haiti. We scattered people need to choose him, raise him up and keep him up. A leader needs a constant flow of money, sweat and ingenuity. We need to be vigilant in our journalism, protecting the truth and protecting the mission and protecting the man. Haiti will not recover through development industry scams, aggressive colonial occupation, corporate looter conditional aid packages, GMOs, suicide gene seeds and privatization schemes.

Middle Passage Slavery broke our bones, ripped our flesh, plunged us to the bottom of the sea, left us rotting in mass graves. It scrambled our brains, it shattered our hearts, it desecrated our sexuality, punched out our deities and scattered us in the wind. But after 400 years, there is not a language we cannot speak, a book we have not read, a university we have not attended, a profession we do not practice. There is not a code we cannot decipher, a symbol we do not recognize, a God we have not prayed to, nor a Devil we have not met.

Yele Haiti needs a million dollars a day.

Sadakne Baroudi
January 21, 2010
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil