This review essay enters into conversation with Greg Beckett’s 2019 There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince to think through the geographies and temporalities of how crisis is known. Focusing on the urban Caribbean, it interrogates broadly circulating understandings of the city-as-crisis, asking how the “where” of crisis connects to a geographical imagination that sites Caribbean cultural authenticity in the countryside. Next, it reflects on the temporalities of crisis, in relation to Beckett’s conceptualization of crisis as a chronic condition, as the routinized anticipation of rupture. Despite a rich tradition of Caribbean scholarship on temporalities, there has been limited engagement with the region’s urban time-spaces. The author suggests that a more thorough consideration of Caribbean urban futures in particular might allow us to read an anticipatory attunement to insecurity and instability as an urban mode of temporal experience, in which future making in and through uncertainty can be not a source of despair but of hope.
Greg Beckett’s There is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince draws on his long-term engagement with Haiti—and more specifically on his ethnographic research in Port-au-Prince over the past fifteen years or so—to think through “crisis” as an everyday lived experience. He suggests that we understand crisis as something that can become “ordinary” rather than as an exceptional disruption of normal life.1 Through his highly poetic, sometimes heartrending descriptions, the book gives an often-bleak account of life and death in Port-au-Prince during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Combining anthropological insights on political, environmental, and urban transformations, Beckett centers the concept of crisis but also reflects critically on what it means to apply this term in analyses of Haiti. He approaches crisis as an embodied experience, a condition with particular sensorial and affective characteristics. His relationships with a number of men, most of whom came to the city in the 1970s and 1980s to “chache lavi, or ‘look for life’” (16), are at the heart of Beckett’s effort to convey what crisis feels like and how it moves people.
In this essay, I am interested in thinking through the knowing of crisis. In particular, I want to think through the geographies and temporalities that inform epistemologies of crisis in the Caribbean and beyond. Concentrating on urban space and its chronotypes, I propose, first, that a long tradition of anti-urbanism informs broadly circulating understandings of city-as-crisis. How is this scalar bracketing of crisis connected to a cultural siting of the nation in the countryside or to pastoralist nostalgia? What is the “where” of crisis, and how is this locating rooted in a specific geographical imagination of the nation? I move from this discussion of spatiality to engage with Beckett’s conception of “forever crisis” (106). How should we understand the temporalities, the “when” of crisis, if it is a chronic condition?
Monstrous Cities
On the first page of the book, Beckett sketches the complex nature of the story, or rather the multiple entangled stories, that he wants to tell. Among other things, he proposes that There Is No More Haiti is “a story of a city that grew into a monster” (1). What does it mean to narrate Port-au-Prince as a monster? Beckett describes “the urban crisis” as “the problems of slums and a lack of services, . . . the anarchic urbanism that began to take shape in the city as the state, too, retreated from public life, opting instead to govern through its persistent absence” (11). What is “urban” about Haiti’s “urban crisis”? Why is crisis mapped onto this specific space, the city, in contrast to the country’s “environmental crisis” and its “political crisis,” which have less-clear geographies? The book also immerses us from the start in “the forest,” Katherine Dunham’s Haitian estate in Port-au-Prince. We are introduced to various Haitian and non-Haitian protagonists who are invested in turning this forested property into a botanic garden. Viewed from above in an aerial image, Beckett tells us, this forest “appeared as a little bit of nature surrounded by the concrete anarchy of Port-au-Prince” (4). What histories and politics are at work when we view the city as anarchy?
These dystopian portrayals of the city—as monstrous, chaotic, lawless—connect to a longer tradition of anti-urban or perhaps dis-urban Caribbean imaginaries.2 While the Caribbean is one of the world’s most highly urbanized regions, both academic and political narratives were long centered on its rural areas and on the contrasting social orders of “plot and plantation.”3 In seeking to dismantle the plantation and its legacies, many postindependence thinkers turned to those small plots of agricultural land that afforded some measure of autonomy to the enslaved and their descendants. Across the Caribbean, the countryside and rural folk (in particular, small farmers, the so-called peasantry) came to feature as the cultural heart of the nation. In contrast, cities, as “modern” spaces, long signified a lack of Caribbean authenticity. Urbanization is frequently associated with cultural adulteration and moral or spiritual decay. For Jamaica, for instance, Barry Chevannes describes urban areas as “communities only in the sense of being dense settlements of people living in face-to-face relationships, but lacking in the processes of civility and a social order based on morality rather than fear.”4
Such sentiments feature in There Is No More Haiti, often voiced by Beckett’s interlocutors, sometimes implicitly or explicitly in his own descriptions. Negative portrayals of Port-au-Prince often reference the countryside, or nature, as the city’s antithesis. For Cameron, a Canadian who played a key role in the botanic garden project, “the city was a space of misery, a space of power,” and he “imagined the forest as the antithesis in a dialectic that would ultimately remake the country” (39). For Raymond, a teacher at an elite high school, the city represents a place devoid of nature. The urban upbringing of his students meant that their opportunities to learn about, and connect with, nature and the environment were limited to his classroom (57). Maxo, the forest’s caretaker, makes a similar point, explaining deforestation and the degradation of natural resources by pointing to urbanization: “People come to the city from the countryside. They lose the connection” (23). For Paul, a professional agronomist, “the only viable future for Haiti was one in which there was a concerted effort to restore the peasantry, to invest in agriculture, and to make the country self-sufficient” (203).
Accordingly, Beckett notes “a longstanding discourse in which the peasantry and rural life more broadly provide the symbolic core of Haitian cultural identity” and a “strong sense of identification with the agrarian past” (43, 44). He argues that Haitians equate the degradation of the countryside with the death of the nation: “When Haitians talk about vanishing land or about the environmental crisis, they tend to mean two things—the loss of natural resources, like forests and trees, and the loss of a world” (44; italics in original). He describes how speaking of “the death of the lakou,” the rural family courtyard, has become a way to describe cultural catastrophe, a crisis of social reproduction, the disappearance of a way of life. He explains the national significance of the lakou—as a spatial formation and the social relations it involves—by tracing its history to the provision grounds of the plantation past and to the family land of the postemancipation era, where the “the most meaningful relations of belonging and affect at the center of Haitian culture” were formed, constituting “an intimate moral community” (46).
Yet across the Caribbean, urban spaces may also generate positive affects; it is precisely in the context of the plantation that the city has long represented freedom, perhaps even more so than the rural “plot.” As Patrick Chamoiseau explains in the famous opening sentences of his 1992 novel Texaco, “To escape the night of slavery and colonialism, Martinique’s black slaves and mulattoes will, one generation after another, abandon the plantations, the fields, and the hills to throw themselves into the conquest of the cities.”5
Beckett’s discussion of the importance of the rural lakou might also be fruitfully compared with the Jamaican yard or yaad. Yaad—a comparable spatial formation of home, belonging, roots, which also works as a metonym for Jamaica as a whole—is not tied as closely to this dichotomy of plot and plantation.6 Rather, it is connected more directly to the urban tenement yard, especially as it emerged in the context of rapid urbanization in the early twentieth century. Writing in the 1970s, Erna Brodber describes the yard as a “geo-social entity” characterized by “some degree of communal life which provides emotional and material support for the dwellers therein and dictates community action of some kind to deal with everyday problems of existence.” For Jovan Lewis, writing more recently, the yard “represents a particular geography of shared fate, of communal striving, even amidst . . . tensions and suspicion.”7
At times, Beckett gently points out the romanticism and often elite nature of pastoralist narratives that locate the Haitian nation outside the city. The men he spent the most time with, those “peasants” who moved to the city in search of social mobility, seem less consumed by nostalgia for an agrarian past. These men moved to Port-au-Prince in the 1970s and 1980s, looking for life (chache lavi), and sometimes finding it, in the city. These men do not appear to mourn a rural past but rather think back fondly to a livelier, cosmopolitan urban era in which they became city-dwellers and became men. As I discuss in more detail below, urban uncertainty and opportunity are frequently intertwined.
Beckett also returns more skeptically to the aerial image—which “perfectly capture[s] the idea of the forest as a space of nature beset on all sides by the disorder and degradation of the city”—cautioning against its visual invitation “to see the situation through a series of binary oppositions: nature/culture, forest/city, order/chaos.” On the ground, “the separation of forest and city, of nature and politics, [is] impossible to sustain” (63). Toward the end of the book, he connects the destruction of the mountainsides, through deforestation and mining, to the construction of the city. He mourns the sight of white limestone quarries where soil and trees previously covered the hillsides—exposing “the mountains’ bones (zo)” (209)—and notes how the city’s concrete structures are built from this limestone:
I thought about all the squatter settlements in Martissant, the ones that hung on the slopes of Morne l’Hôpital so that the mountain above the city was no longer covered in soil and trees but was now covered in houses upon houses, houses made of concrete, made of concrete that had once been a mountain. Houses made of bones.
. . . Alongside the road, we passed a large area where men were making concrete blocks for construction. The same blocks that were sold in the city, that people used to build their houses. . . . We drove past row after row of blocks drying in the late afternoon sun. The mountain’s bones, pressed into new shapes. (209)
This passage, connected to the sadness of witnessing environmental destruction together with Paul, the agronomist, does not suggest an optimistic reading of this pressing of bones into new urban shapes. However, it put me in mind of Tommy Orange’s novel There There, in which Orange outlines an analogous process of transubstantiation but with a somewhat less bleak take on what it means for “the land” to take on an urban form. Sketching Native American life in Oakland, California, Orange pushes back against the idea that the “Urban Indian” is an oxymoron, that “authentic” Native Americans can be found only on the reservation, far from cities. “Getting us to cities was supposed to be the final, necessary step in our assimilation, absorption, erasure, the completion of a five-hundred-year-old genocidal campaign. But the city made us new, and we made it ours,” the narrator explains in the prologue. “Plenty of us are urban now. . . . They used to call us sidewalk Indians. Called us citified, superficial, inauthentic, cultureless refugees, apples. An apple is red on the outside and white on the inside.”8
This framing of Nativeness as inseparable from “the land” and eroded by “the city,” which Orange seeks to challenge, resonates with the location of Caribbean authenticity outside its cities. Orange rejects such essentialist geographies of race, culture, and nature. Mobilizing a type of assemblage thinking, he contests the strict separation of the city from the earth or from the land. He shows how material persists, even if in new forms and arrangements: “An Urban Indian belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth. Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth. All our relations. The process that brings anything to its current form—chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise— doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth. Buildings, freeways, cars—are these not of the earth?”9
This persistence of materiality means that home, and “the land,” can be reassembled in urban form: “Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We came to know the Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range. . . . We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”10
The “urban crisis” discussed in There Is No More Haiti could be reframed similarly, I suggest. We might trouble the straightforward coupling of city and crisis by moving beyond accepted knowledge of the city as a space of cultural loss and alienation from nature. Rather, “the land” and its histories are constantly reworked—materially and symbolically—and perhaps this signifies, more than death, a will to live, to claim life, even in the face of destruction.
Urban Futures
But There Is No More Haiti is not primarily a story about Port-au-Prince. Beckett and his interlocutors tend to read urban conditions as indicators of the well-being of the nation-state, equating the city with Haiti itself. They are perhaps more concerned with emphasizing the temporalities of crisis in Haiti, understanding it as unending, as what Beckett calls forever crisis. Can crisis be a permanent condition? Beckett suggests that yes, in Haiti, crisis has become “permanent and routine, rather than singular or episodic” (164). Crisis, he argues, takes on a forever form when shocking and disruptive events become routine and when people come to expect them as part of everyday life—a condition that Erica James calls the “routines of rupture.”11
Beckett connects this understanding of crisis closely to the Kreyòl term ensekirite, literally “insecurity,” described by James as the embodied “experience of living at the nexus of multiple uncertainties and forms of violence—political, economic, domestic, gendered, spiritual.”12 What interests Beckett in particular is the temporal dimension of this condition: the apparent permanent recurrence of rupture and, accordingly, its permanent anticipation, its incorporation into everyday expectations of the future. “What happens,” he asks, “when disruption becomes normal, when the unpredictable is expected, when rupture repeats so often that you no longer know anything else?” (157). The “view from the ground” interests him: “It shows how crisis becomes ordinary as it settles into the routines and habits of residents, into their language and thoughts and feelings, into the materiality of their everyday lives. Crisis infuses everything, it spreads, it proliferates, it becomes a normal feature of daily life” (64).
I am interested here in the normative consequences this temporal delineation of crisis entails. I suggest that the enduring, routinized anticipation of rupture that Beckett describes need not be understood as crisis per se, nor perhaps as particularly Haitian. And perhaps uncertainty and rupture connote conditions that are tied to more than just suffering. We might also understand this anticipatory disposition as an urban mode of temporal experience, in which the city’s uncertain futures can be a source of hope as well as despair.
As Beckett suggests, other concepts, such as precariousness or vulnerability, might equally be mobilized to understand the lived experiences of ensekirite he describes, which include but extend beyond the insecurity associated with criminal and political violence. This puts me in mind of Henrik Vigh’s influential work on “social navigation,” which draws on his work in urban Guinea-Bissau and among illegalized Guinean migrants in Lisbon. For Vigh’s interlocutors, both contexts are characterized by high levels of social turmoil, and, like in Haiti, radical events can become radical continuities. Navigation, Vigh suggests, can help us understand praxis in “situations of social volatility and opacity . . . in unstable places and contexts of insecurity and/or rapid social change.” The concept explains not only how people are moved or unsettled by uncertainty but also how they move and orient themselves within contexts of social flux: “Rather than designating movement across a hardened, solidified surface, it designates motion within fluid and changeable matter. The concept, in other words, highlights motion within motion; it is the act of moving in an environment that is wavering and unsettled.” Yet this is more of a temporal conceptualization than a spatial one: social navigation “encompasses both the assessment of the dangers and possibilities of one’s present position as well as the process of plotting and attempting to actualize routes into an uncertain and changeable future”; it attends to both the immediate and the imagined.13
It is the praxis that accompanies this anticipation that I sometimes missed in There Is No More Haiti. Beckett shows us compellingly what crisis feels like in the everyday—how it becomes embodied, how it displaces again and again—but he is somewhat less clear on how residents of Port-au-Prince seek to move through it, and toward which futures such movements, no matter how small, are oriented. The sense of anticipation he conveys is more paralysis than changeable future:
Always waiting for something to happen. Always waiting for something that has already happened. What a tragic situation; waiting for the inevitable, the reversal of fortune, the turn of the screw, the cruel hand of fate. Waiting for the plot to finally reveal itself after working so hard, secretly, behind the scenes. Realizing too late that all your actions have been in vain, that there was nothing you could have done, that things were always going to turn out this way. (107)
Without denying the magnitude of the suffering described in this book, I wonder whether a slightly different approach to uncertainty might be conceivable. In addition to Vigh’s articulation, such an approach, which attends to the politics of uncertainty, insecurity, and anticipation, is increasingly elaborated within urban studies.14 Such scholarship seeks to understand cities as time-spaces in which, especially for the urban poor, a constant engagement with multiple possible futures shapes both action and inaction in the present. Acknowledging that urban utopias and dystopias are equally one-dimensional, such work explores a more complex politics of anticipation. This interest in urban future making recognizes the promise of the city, the hope of a better urban tomorrow embedded in chache lavi and its many variations across the world—but it also highlights the many insecurities and threats that urban life entails. Yet insecurity, here, is not only associated with immobilization or involuntary displacement.
Writing of Jakarta, for instance, AbdouMaliq Simone asks, “What is security in uncertain environments, particularly when what passes as certainty is not only deceptive but also constraining, limiting what residents can do with the very uncertain conditions that they face and help constitute?” He suggests that “securing the future . . . entails a practice of being prepared for multiple, disparate dispositions; of finding a way to be ‘implicated’ in various scenarios and projects without making unequivocal personal commitments.”15 He describes this orientation as being on “standby,” a condition characterized by a “pervasive sense of provisionality” and “a constant recalibration of vulnerability, part of an ability to attune oneself to necessarily unstable surroundings that are unlikely to stabilize.”16
The recalibration that such attunement involves can also be thought in spiritual terms. In Kinshasa, Filip De Boeck emphasizes the work of divination in apprehending urban futures. While he understands all urban residents as diviners, engaged in everyday interpretations of the city’s unpredictabilities, professional diviners play a particular role in navigating urban life. A divinatory consultation, he suggests, reframes urban residents’ problems through narratives that suggest new lines of action, an interpretive act that “allows clients to re-insert themselves into the world in an alternative way.”17
Perhaps the catastrophes that Haiti has suffered, which are felt in Port-au-Prince with a particular intensity, are of such magnitude that it is facetious to ask whether an anticipatory attunement to insecurity and instability—a standby orientation or the interpretive disposition of divination—might generate other urban futures than those marked by more disaster. Yet might it be possible to explore such questions of future making in and through uncertainty, without either conscripting Haiti to permanent disrepair or unreflexively participating in the anthropological “hope boom” that insists on reading anticipation as hope?18 Caribbean thought has a rich history of engaging with temporalities, from Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics to David Scott’s questioning of postcolonial futurities to Deborah Thomas’s recent work on the simultaneity of time.19 Notwithstanding, surprisingly little has been written on urban temporalities in the Caribbean, on the complexities of future making in cities freighted with past futures and discarded hopes.20 While Beckett’s There Is No More Haiti pushes us in this direction through his powerful poetic imagery, we might hope that the futures of Port-au-Prince and other Caribbean studies are more multiple, and less tragic, than his work may suggest.
Greg Beckett, There Is No More Haiti: Between Life and Death in Port-au-Prince (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019), 3; hereafter cited in the text.
For a lengthier discussion of Caribbean (anti-)urbanism, see my Concrete Jungles: Urban Pollution and the Politics of Difference in the Caribbean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 7–8, 25–28, 123–25.
Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” Savacou, no. 5 (June 1971): 95–102. I read this spatial metaphor of plot and plantation as literally nonurban; for a contrasting approach that understands the plantation as an urban space, see Katherine McKittrick, “Plantation Futures,” Small Axe, no. 42 (November 2013): 8.
Barry Chevannes, Betwixt and Between: Explorations in an African Caribbean Mindscape (Kingston: Ian Randle, 2006), 164–65.
Patrick Chamoiseau, Texaco: A Novel (London: Vintage, 1998), 3.
See Barry Chevannes, “Jamaican Diasporic Identity: The Metaphor of Yaad,” in Patrick Taylor, ed., Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 129–37.
Erna Brodber, A Study of Yards in the City of Kingston, Working Paper No. 9 (Kingston: ISER, 1975), 55, 55–56; Jovan Scott Lewis, Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 2.
Tommy Orange, There There (New York: Vintage, 2019), 8, 9, 10.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid.
Erica Caple James, “Haunting Ghosts: Madness, Gender, and Ensekirite in Haiti in the Democratic Era,” in Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good et al., eds., Postcolonial Disorders (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 139; cited in Beckett, There Is No More Haiti, 157.
James, “Haunting Ghosts,” 136–37.
Henrik Vigh, “Motion Squared: A Second Look at the Concept of Social Navigation,” Anthropological Theory 9, no. 4 (2009): 419, 420, 425.
See, for example, AbdouMaliq Simone, City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (New York: Routledge, 2010); Austin Zeiderman, Endangered City: The Politics of Security and Risk in Bogotá (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and Filip De Boeck and Sammy Baloji, Suturing the City: Living Together in Congo’s Urban Worlds (London: Autograph ABP, 2016).
AbdouMaliq Simone, “Securing ‘Standby’ and Urban Space Making in Jakarta: Intensities in Search of Forms,” in D. Asher Ghertner, Hudson McFann, and Daniel M. Goldstein, eds., Futureproof: Security Aesthetics and the Management of Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 225, 226.
Ibid., 227.
De Boeck and Baloji, Suturing the City, 129.
See Nauja Kleist and Stef Jansen, “Introduction: Hope over Time—Crisis, Immobility, and Future-Making,” History and Anthropology 27, no. 4 (2016): 373–92.
David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Deborah A. Thomas, “Time and the Otherwise: Plantations, Garrisons, and Being Human in the Caribbean,” Anthropological Theory 16, nos. 2–3 (2016): 177–200.
Jovan Lewis’s analysis of scamming as repair for sufferation and Alana Osbourne’s work on “time-tricking” in Kingston could be considered as exceptions; see Scammer’s Yard, 58, 158; and Alana D. Osbourne, “Touring Trench Town: Commodifying Urban Poverty and Violence in Kingston, Jamaica” (PhD diss., University of Amsterdam, 2018), chap. 3.