Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse 9780823237357

Citation preview

Asylum Speakers

This page intentionally left blank

Asylum Speakers Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse

april shemak

Fordham University Press new york 2011

© 2011 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Shemak, April. Asylum speakers : Caribbean refugees and testimonial discourse / April Shemak. — 1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3355-7 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8232-3357-1 (ebook) 1. American literature—Caribbean American authors—History and criticism.

2. Refugees in literature.

literature.

4. Refugees—Caribbean Area—Social conditions.

United States—Social conditions.

3. Emigration and immigration in 5. Refugees—

I. Title.

PS153.C27S54 2011 810.9'3526914—dc22 2010033990 Printed in the United States of America 13 12 11

54321

First edition A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

Contents

Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4 5

vii

Introduction: The Poetics of Hospitality: Refugee, Migrant, Testimony

1

Inter-dictions and Limbo Citizens: Haitian Boat Refugee Narratives

45

False Witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard Photography of Haitian Boat Refugees

88

Silent Subjectivities: Testimony and Haitian Labor Refugees

131

Corporate Containment: Refugee Seafarers on the Seas of Transnational Labor

177

Crossing the Threshold of Asylum: Dominican and Cuban (Post)Refugee Narratives

213

Epilogue: Diverted Testimonies: New World Refugees in the Twenty-First Century

241

Notes

251

Bibliography

287

Index

304

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

This project evolved from the ideas that I began exploring in my dissertation and I am thankful for the numerous people who have supported me as I shaped them into a book. My dissertation advisor Sangeeta Ray provided endless guidance and encouragement throughout my graduate career and beyond. I am most grateful to her for imparting her knowledge and for modeling intellectual courage that continues to sustain me. Others at the University of Maryland who helped to create an intellectually dynamic atmosphere include Merle Collins, who provided me with a foundation in Caribbean literature and invaluable knowledge and experience during a winter session in Grenada. My thanks to Stephan Palmié who first turned my attention to the congressional hearings on Haitian sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic (the focus of chapter 3). Ralph Bauer and Zita Nunes also offered helpful guidance and commentary on my dissertation. I am grateful for all of my colleagues in the English Department at Sam Houston State University for providing me with a kind and supportive atmosphere in which to work. Thanks to Kim Bell, Tracy Bilsing, Paul Child, Linda Cook, Bob Donahoo, Julie Hall, Scott Kaukonen, Carroll Ferguson Nardone, and Gene Young for their enthusiasm, advice, and continued interest in the book. Lee Bebout and Drew Lopenzina provided helpful comments on chapter drafts. Thanks to the chair of the English department, Helena Halmari, for her professional guidance and advocacy. During his time as department chair, Bill Bridges was an

viii / acknowledgments

encouraging mentor and lent his scrupulous editing skills to my work. I also appreciate Shirin Edwin, Bernadette Pruitt, and Sujey Vega, colleagues whose shared interests allow for interdisciplinary engagement at SHSU. Sam Houston State University supported my work with three faculty grants. A 2006 Faculty Research Grant enabled me to complete research at the U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office in Washington, DC. Two Enhancement Grants for Professional Development allowed me to focus my attention on researching and writing during two summers. My thanks to the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ Dean John de Castro and to the SHSU Office of Research and Special Programs for their support. I owe a debt of gratitude to Helen Tartar at Fordham University Press for supporting this project and shepherding it through the review process. Thanks also to the two reviewers whose astute, meticulous comments on the manuscript pushed my arguments about refugees and testimony further, resulting, I believe, in a stronger book. Thomas Lay, Eric Newman, Kathleen O’Brien-Nicholson, Tim Roberts, and Katie Sweeney ushered me through the production process. Lisa Nowak Jerry’s careful and thorough copyediting helped make this into a more readable book. It is with deepest sincerity that I thank Edouard Duval-Carrié for graciously agreeing to allow me to use his spectacular artwork on the cover. A portion of chapter 3 was previously published as “Re-membering Hispaniola: Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones” in Modern Fiction Studies 48, no. 1 (2002) and I thank Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint. The friends and colleagues I have come to know in postcolonial, ethnic, and Caribbean studies have enriched my work and experiences as a scholar. Liz DeLoughrey has offered excellent advice and information. Her work on oceanic voyaging and Atlantic discourses has proven vital for my understanding of boat refugees. I was fortunate to participate in an American Studies Association panel on refugee cultural production with Crystal Parikh, Nina Ha, and Zenia Kish. Their work and insights on the ideas of refugeeness have been most helpful as I finished this book, and my thanks to Nina for reading and commenting on portions of it. Sandra Paquet has been part of a vanguard of Caribbean literary scholars, paving the way for those of us now working in the field. I most appreciate her kind support and encouragement of my work. I could not have completed this project without the group of friends who have provided unflagging support and encouragement: Gia Harewood, Randi Gray Kristensen, Bob Mondello, Carlos Schröder, Tanya

acknowledgments / ix

Shields, Belinda Wallace and the rest of the ñoquis crew. Our DC “ñoquis night” tradition taught me something about hospitality and friendship that has sustained me in the quiet days of researching and writing this book in Texas. A special thanks to Tanya for reading and commenting on several chapters in their various stages and for always reminding me that I was capable of writing this book. Thanks to Randi for providing me with a place to stay on trips back to DC. My thanks also to Kimberly Brown for extending her welcome—institutional and otherwise—when I arrived in Texas. Although we now live half a world apart, Mark Cenite has been invaluable friend over the years. His encouragement of me to pursue graduate studies while we were both at UW-Madison led me to the path I am on today. I am thankful for the love, support, and encouragement of my family, especially my parents, Richard and Beverley. Andy, Sharon, Kevin, Tina, Katy, Brianna, Coty, Angie, Rose, and Kevin C. enrich my life with their care, good cheer, and laughter. I am most grateful to Stan for patiently understanding the nature of academic work and for taking our son on countless walks in the park to give me time to think and write. To Gabe, whose mom I became as this project began to take shape. Your life and it have converged in unexpected ways. While this book has taken precious time away from you, I hope one day you will realize that it has allowed me to think about and appreciate home and belonging more deeply. Finally, this book is dedicated to the lives lost in the January 2010 Haitian earthquake and to those survivors who find themselves in need of refuge.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction: The Poetics of Hospitality: Refugee, Migrant, Testimony Hospitality consists in doing everything to address the other, to accord him, even to ask him his name, while keeping this question from becoming a “condition,” a police inquisition, a blacklist or a simple border control. This difference is at once subtle and fundamental, it is a question which is asked on the threshold of the ‘home’ and at the threshold between two inflections. An art and a poetics, but an entire politics depends on it, an entire ethics is decided by it. —jacques derrida, “the principle of hospitality”

In her 2007 memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat recounts the events surrounding the death of her eightyone-year-old uncle Joseph Dantica, who died while being detained by U.S. immigration authorities shortly after his arrival at Miami International Airport in 2004. Dantica, a pastor, fled his home in Haiti after gang members burned down his church and threatened to kill him. Despite having a visa, which had allowed him to enter the United States on numerous other occasions, Dantica, “not understanding the full implication of that choice, said that he wanted to apply for temporary asylum” when questioned by a Customs and Border Protection officer at the airport.1 Danticat writes, “I can only assume that when he was asked how long he would be staying in the United States, he knew that he would be staying past the thirty days his visa allowed him and he wanted to tell the truth.”2 Danticat notes that the transcripts of an interview with a second Customs and Border Protection officer reveal that the officer did not ask for further details on the three occasions that Dantica indicated that his life was in danger in Haiti.3 The officer determined that Dantica did not have “a legitimate reason for entering the U.S,” and he and his son Maxo were sent to Krome Detention Center in South Miami, where they were subsequently separated and Dantica’s personal effects, including medication for blood pressure and an inflamed prostate, were taken from him.4 During his daylong detention at Krome, he was given medical attention for high blood pressure, but his medications were not returned to him. During his asylum interview the following day, he

2 / introduction

suffered a violent seizure that paralyzed his body. When a medic finally arrived, he declared that Dantica was “faking.” Danticat explains that “to prove his point, the medic grabbed my uncle’s head and moved it up and down. It was rigid rather than limp, he said. . . . The medic then turned to Pratt [Dantica’s immigration lawyer] and told him that based on his many years of experience at Krome, he could easily make such determinations.”5 When his health continued to deteriorate, he was “transported to Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital with shackles on his feet,” where he waited for twenty-four hours to be seen by a doctor.6 A few hours after finally receiving his medical examination, he died in the hospital’s prison ward. Ironically, Danticat explains that years earlier her uncle’s natural voice box had been removed when he had traveled to the United States for throat cancer treatment, which resulted in a tracheotomy, leaving him able to speak only with a battery-operated voice box. Immediately prior to his seizure during the asylum interview, he was asked to lean closer to the phone so that his interpreter, who was on the line instead of in the interview room, could understand him more clearly. Once the seizure began, he dropped the voice box: “Vomit shot out of his mouth, his nose, as well as the tracheotomy hole in his neck. The vomit was spread all over his face, from his forehead to his chin, down the front of his dark blue Krome-issued overalls. There was also vomit on his thighs, where a large wet stain showed he had also urinated on himself.”7 In a sense, his body betrays his voice as the vomit makes his voice box inoperable. With the loss of his voice, his body becomes material testimony, a physical response to the poor medical care during his incarceration that authorities, despite the physical evidence, refute—as he is deemed to be “faking.” That the seizure took place during the asylum interview indicates that the interview is the ultimate space of interdiction, which would have decided Joseph’s future in relation to the United States, because it becomes the space where his speech halts and his body breaks down. The officers bring Maxo from where he was being detained in another section of the facility to translate for his father and facilitate communication. When he points out that his father cannot speak without the voice box, Maxo urges his father to give a sign of physical movement and “maybe they’ll let you go.”8 Instead of acknowledging the desperate situation, the medic interprets Joseph’s stare and failed attempt to lift his hands as signs of rebelliousness: “His eyes are open and he’s not unconscious. . . . I still think he’s faking.”9 I begin with Danticat’s recounting of her uncle’s case because it

introduction / 3

exemplifies the main concerns of this book, which include the convergence of testimonial narrative, literary and public discourse for refugees and asylum seekers in the Americas. Brother, I’m Dying operates on a number of narrative registers. It testifies to the appalling conditions of the U.S. asylum process for asylum seekers, a process that has become increasingly criminalized in the country as demonstrated by Dantica’s shackling. In recounting the events that led to Dantica’s death, the narrative witnesses to Dantica’s unheeded verbal and physical testimonials so that it also functions as a human rights document. Danticat pieces together her uncle’s time in detention through hospital and government records, which include the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General’s report that declared, “Dantica’s death was the result of an illness that likely pre-existed his entrance into the United States five days earlier.” Finally, Brother, I’m Dying is also a literary text in the sense that Danticat, who was not an eye-witness, tells us that she must “assume” some aspects of the recounting.10 As such, she cannot testify to its absolute truth. The book tries to carry on as witness when Dantica could no longer do so. Thus, we must consider how testimonial narrative and human rights discourse become inflected through the literary. Asylum Speakers: Caribbean Refugees and Testimonial Discourse is the first interdisciplinary study of refugees, who are located in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States. Both the refugee seeking political asylum and the undocumented transnational laborer seeking economic refuge function as a new incarnation of the native informant who occupies some of the most contested spaces of articulation. In this book, I consider how testimony surfaces as a narrative device in fictional texts and public discourse. My title, Asylum Speakers, emphasizes the role of testimony in searching for refuge, the manner in which language can become a site of either comfort and sanctuary or expulsion and alienation. Those seeking asylum must become eloquent, persuasive speakers despite the enormous obstacles that can hinder testimony: trauma, memory, cultural differences, translation, and political ideologies. As Peter Nyers notes, “The banished individual not only loses claim to a political community and identity but also is banished from the space where political speech is audible. This displacement from meaningful discourse also involves a dislodging of their claim to be human.”11 More often than not, refugees are denied credibility or even the right to speak on their own behalf. As Liisa Malkki argues, refugees often become so dehistoricized by institutional forces, including those of humanitarian organizations, that they are denied the ability to construct themselves as

4 / introduction

subjects through narrative. In doing so, they remain within the socially constructed realm of victim.12 Asylum Speakers focuses on refugees within the Americas—New World refugees—whose movements, whether they migrate toward the United States, are often tied to U.S. foreign policy in the hemisphere. The twentieth century saw an onslaught of refugee movements in the Americas, as a result of a number of dire circumstances including civil war, natural disaster, genocide, or failing economies, which forced people to flee their homelands. The wars in Central America, the Cuban Revolution, and political and economic upheavals in Haiti have propelled mass migrations throughout the hemisphere, with many refugees from these places attempting to gain asylum in the United States, often without much success.13 With increasing migration to the north, the United States has continued to tighten restrictions on asylum.14 For example, the number of refugees admitted into the United States has steadily declined (by 70 percent) in the last quarter-century.15 In 1995, the “United States had committed itself to resettling about two tenths of 1 percent of the world’s refugees and displaced persons.”16 Of these, refugees in the Americas made up a minute number.17 Such statistics underscore the falsehoods surrounding the narrative of the United States as a space of refuge and hospitality. By placing the refugee at the center of my study, Asylum Speakers argues that the peripheral nature of refugee testimonial narratives requires reshaping the boundaries of U.S. ethnic, transnational, and postcolonial studies. None of these fields has dealt explicitly with refugee narratives and testimonial discourse in contemporary literature or public discourse in the Americas. Perhaps one reason for this void is the paradoxical position of the refugee native informant; refugees both embody transnationalism and refute it as they pursue “rootedness” in a new nation. As such, I interrogate transnational studies’ rejection of the nation-state as well as postcolonial studies continued privileging of it. Thus, this book aims to address this scholarly gap by placing these fields in dialogue while examining the role and function of refugee native informants vis-à-vis testimonial narrative. Asylum Speakers engages with questions regarding the central role of testimonial discourse in facilitating or hindering refugee movements, in determining if, or when, refugee voices are heard, and in determining whether a refugee becomes a legitimate member of a state. I aim to expand current discussions of diaspora and migration by examining the role of the refugee in New World cultural and political formations, and the function of testimonial discourse in constructing refugee

introduction / 5

subjectivity. Additionally, New World refugees, who may encounter a number of nations in their search for asylum, embody what J. Michael Dash proposes as a New World perspective: “establishing new connections not only among the islands of the archipelago but also exploring the region in terms of the Césairean image of that frail, delicate umbilical cord that holds the Americas together.”18 The prominence of the Caribbean in my study emphasizes what Dash refers to as “the centrality of the Caribbean to the experience of the New World.”19 Dash continues, “Including the Caribbean in any survey means ultimately more than simply expanding the literary canon to include new minorities or the heretofore marginalized. It means dismantling those notions of nation, ground, authenticity, and history on which more conventional surveys have been based and exploring concepts of cultural diversity, syncretism, and instability that characterize the island cultures of the Caribbean.”20 Additionally, I include a narrative of Central American refugees in my study in order to consider how refugee movements and narratives are a pan-American phenomenon. I assert that it is necessary to consider how the refugee is a central component to understanding the complexities of migratory movements in the Caribbean and rest of the Americas as they traverse the hemisphere. The fictional narratives and public discourse about refugees that I examine are also linked by their ties to the United States, signaling its role in propelling refugee movements via its foreign policy throughout the hemisphere. Many narratives that I examine are distinguished through refugee experience on the seas in boats.

The History of the Refugee The conditions of displacement and asylum-seeking are not exclusive to the modern era.21 The term “refugee” can be traced to seventeenthcentury France when it was used to describe French Huguenots who fled to England to escape religious persecution when Louis XIV in 1685 revoked the Edict of Nantes.22 Contemporaries distinguished this group as refugees because “their plight stemmed from membership in a religious organization targeted for destruction by the governmental authorities of their own country, in peacetime and without any provocation of their own.”23 Current official configurations of the idea of refugee reflect similar considerations.24 In the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees the United Nations defines a refugee as a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,

6 / introduction

is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”25 To understand the current official definition of “refugee,” it is necessary to understand the increasing institutionalization of the management of people fleeing persecution that occurred in the early to mid-twentieth century. In 1921, the League of Nations established an office to address the staggering numbers of displaced persons from Russia and eventually also those from Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria.26 Although intended as a temporary measure, it continued to be necessary with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe, especially that of Nazi Germany. In 1936, a draft resolution, prepared by the Institute of International Law, defined a refugee as one who had left one’s state of origin owing to political events (to distinguish them from ordinary migrants). Debate was ongoing among nations over the definition, particularly because “much of the globe’s population could be thought of as victims of ‘political events.’”27 One fear was that the vast number of people living under colonial rule could argue that they were “victims of political events.” Not only would this mean that exorbitant numbers of people could potentially claim the status of “refugee,” but it would also legitimize the view that colonial regimes were equivalent to other authoritarian regimes. In an attempt to circumvent an expansive definition of refugeeness, the official definition written into the 1951 Convention asserted that if one left a country due to “political events,” it had to be “accompanied by persecution or the threat of persecution.”28 Thus, from its inception, the Refugee Convention was conceived of in Eurocentric terms, aimed at aiding displaced Europeans, but not as concerned with the non-Western world. In 1946, the International Refugee Organization (IRO) was established to deal with the approximately eleven million displaced people in Europe following World War II. In 1949, the United Nations High Commissioner’s Office for Refugees (UNHCR) was established to succeed the IRO. During this time, the UNHCR remained focused solely on those refugees in Europe, although other massive refugee movements were occurring elsewhere in the world, such as those following Indian Partition (1947).29 The 1951 Refugee Convention stipulated that it would only apply to people who had become refugees prior to 1951, and maintained its focus on European refugees. Not until drafting the 1967 Protocol, however, did the UN address refugee movements outside Europe in the developing world. The shift in focus reflected the ongoing refugee crises following decolonization across Africa, South Asia, and other parts of the Third World. Initially, the United States had limited involvement with the refugee

introduction / 7

crisis in Europe. This reluctance to engage with displaced populations came on the heels of a number of xenophobic legislative measures from the late nineteenth century into the twentieth century that sought to limit immigration of certain nationalities. These included the Immigration Act of 1917, which banned immigration from India and Southeast Asia and instituted a literacy requirement. The National Origins Act of 1924, like a previous 1921 piece of legislation, instituted quotas based on national origin and favored immigrants from northern Europe; this act reflected a biologically essentialist attitude, which asserted that admitting too many people of non-European descent would lead to a degeneration of the U.S. population.30 One concession made to the refugee crisis occurred in 1948 when, after years of debate, Congress passed the Displaced Persons Act, which permitted the admittance of 200,000 refugees into the United States; this legislation, however, excluded the majority of Jews.31 For the first time the U.S. government made an explicit legal distinction between refugees and other migrants.32 Significantly, the United States did not sign the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The passage of the highly restrictive McCarran-Walter Act (1952) sought to reassert the restrictive measures of the National Origins system. When the United States did allow refugees to be admitted, such admission considered ideological issues more than humanitarian ones. The refugee crisis following the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 instituted the executive use of parole power, which authorized the attorney general to parole aliens temporarily in the United States and allowed 38,000 Hungarians to obtain asylum.33 This same parole system allowed the entrance of multitudes of both Cubans following the Cuban revolution and Indochinese refugees from 1976 to 1978. The 1965 Immigration Act, seeking to overhaul the system by which immigrants were admitted, erased the racial restrictions that had defined previous immigration laws. For the first time, refugees were given a quota of the total number of immigrants admitted each year to the United States, although they were largely restricted to those coming from the Middle East or Communist nations. The United States subsequently ratified the 1967 protocol to the 1951 Refugee Convention, but not until 1980 did Congress pass the Refugee Act which “built into American law the Refugee Convention’s definition of a refugee, expanding it slightly to include those who had been persecuted, as well as those with a well-founded fear of future persecution, on the basis of one of the five listed grounds.”34 While the Refugee Act included a measure specifically for granting asylum by allowing refugees to remain in the country

8 / introduction

permanently, an ongoing battle over asylum in the United States has raged ever since. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, in particular, created more restrictive legislation for the admittance of immigrants and refugees. Among other things, the act required asylum seekers to be detained while their cases were being assessed and allowed for “expedited removal” of undocumented aliens without hearing.35 These conditions became further restricted following 9/11.36

Refugee as Homo Sacer The central requirement for the definition of a refugee rests on exclusion from a country of origin; refugees are no longer members of a nation-state and no longer have access to political or human rights protections afforded by a nation-state. Drawing on Foucault’s notion of “biopolitics”—the increasingly powerful role that politics has played in defining life in the modern era—Giorgio Agamben develops the figure of homo sacer, “an obscure figure in archaic Roman law, in which human life is excluded in the juridical order” to articulate the condition of those subjects who have been stripped of political rights and exist as “bare life.”37 For Agamben, this contemporary notion of “bare life” marks a reconceptualization of state power and serves as an unprecedented defining figure for modern politics. This “bare life” is produced through a “state of exception” where the sovereign suspends the existing order of law to expand sovereign power. In so doing, the sovereign ensures its power to continue to exist as sovereign. Here Agamben is drawing on Carl Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty as the power to suspend all rule of law; he views this as something that has become the norm in modern politics. The prevalence of a homo sacer, who has been abandoned by law, indicates the pervasiveness of the state of exception. For Agamben, the Nazi concentration camp serves as the paradigmatic example of this kind of political control over modern life (biopolitics). Agamben also includes refugees as examples of those who are stripped of political rights and embody “bare life.” They are simultaneously both excluded by sovereign power and included to enable the sovereign to maintain its power. This paradoxical state in which bare life exists—outside and inside the polity—is a “zone of irreducible indistinction.”38 The sovereign must continuously exclude and include the refugee to maintain its power. Agamben’s theorization of homo sacer has received an enormous amount of academic attention in part because of the ways in which he

introduction / 9

engages the questions of human life and modern politics. Homo sacer, although a useful category for considering the profound impact of political banishment on subjects, can also be limiting through its sole emphasis on destitution, which can perpetuate stereotypes of refugees as victims, without agency. For example, refugee is a category generated by the UN human rights enterprises, but it is also an unstable category, in which subjectivity can be undermined by the very human rights practices that seek to aid refugees. In her study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, Liisa Malkki writes of how the administrators of international aid organizations acknowledged the legal claim of refugee status of the Hutus; however, through their expectations of how refugees were supposed to appear and exist as victimized “bare” humans, the administrators “depolitiz[ed] the refugee category and construct[ed] in that depoliticized space an ahistorical, universal humanitarian subject” that “can strip from them the authority to give credible narrative evidence or testimony about their own condition in politically and institutionally consequential forums.”39 Thus it is important to attend to the institutionally and socially constructed inflections of refugees as destitute, starving, mute, downtrodden “bare life.” Furthermore, many scholars of the Caribbean have also critiqued Agamben’s emphasis on the Nazi concentration camp as the ultimate site of the conditions that produce a homo sacer in modern politics, and Agamben’s critics have likewise taken issue with his silence around the question of European empire-building that created a state of exception that featured myriad forms of biopolitical manipulation. In his study of New World slavery, Ian Baucom points out that, despite his reliance upon Carl Schmitt, who developed his notion of sovereignty in relation to the New World, Agamben “disregard[s] the New World in favor of the old, [and] he thus leaves absent from his account not only the territories of the Caribbean and the Americas but the history of New World slavery and that vast number of persons subjected through slavery, to the mode of sovereignty whose planetary history he had originally intended to write.”40 I find Agamben’s use of homo sacer productive for imagining the status of refugees and political banishment; yet, keeping in mind his limited historical application, for my purposes, it is necessary to consider how the bare life of New World refugees is linked to prior moments of a lack of sovereignty and citizenship in the region, owing to colonialism and slavery. Particularly, my discussions of Haitian refugees are necessarily linked to the Middle Passage as a state of exception, especially because the writers whom I discuss in chapter 1 make these links explicit.

10 / introduction

Neoliberal States of Exception Furthermore, it is important to consider the ways in which global capitalism, which has increasingly reconfigured state structures, creates other “states of exception.” The contemporary status of many transnational laborers whose movements are often the result of neoliberal policies originating in the industrialized Western nations must also be considered in relation to the rise of capitalism during European empirebuilding. Undocumented transnational laborers also represent “bare life” as they exist without political rights, sometimes in conditions that mimic those of a refugee camp, another kind of zone of indistinction. For example, Haitian cane cutters are forced to live in bateyes while they work in the Dominican Republic, and the flag of convenience ship has become the ultimate site of free-floating capital and dangerous working conditions for contemporary seafarers. This is not to suggest that all neoliberal states of exception produce “bare life” or produce it in the same way. In the context of refugees in the Americas, however, neoliberalist practices have often had devastating effects that are intertwined with totalitarian political regimes—like the Duvaliers in Haiti—or a vested interest in subverting revolutionary movements—like those in Central America. Thus, while my use of the term “refugee” includes those people who are officially recognized as such—those who are deemed official refugees by NGOs or a nation-state and successfully navigate official channels to gain this status—I also expand the term “refugee” to include those displaced persons who do not gain official refugee status as political asylees but nevertheless have fled their nation of origin because of political and/or economic hardships to become stateless people. In doing so, I challenge UN, state, and other institutional definitions that exclude economic circumstances as a basis for asylum. The narratives that I examine reveal that for many refugees the links between politics and economics are inextricable. Thus, I am interested in blurring the lines of demarcation between “political” and “economic”; the latter has historically been used to deny asylum claims, particularly for Haitians, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans, who have sought asylum in the United States but been denied because the U.S. government has supported the regimes from which they fled and perceived the refugees to be seeking solely better economic opportunities.41 In fact, asylum determinations have often been based on the types of economies from which refugees come. In the decades following World War II, Cold War politics defined U.S. refugee policy so that those who fled communist nations were

introduction / 11

typically automatically granted asylum (for example, Cubans). Peter Nyers explains how in the drafting of the UN Refugee Convention, “UN delegates of Western states consistently advocated for a refugee definition that would prioritize international protection efforts for people whose flight could be construed as being motivated by pro-Western values. The result of this debate, of course, is a Convention that promotes respect for liberal civil and political rights and makes no mention at all of socioeconomic rights . . . whereby people displaced by market forces are excluded from qualifying for refugee status.”42 From this liberal perspective a distinction is drawn between “natural” nonpolitical market activity and the “collectivized command economies of the communist nations [which are seen] as unnatural—indeed as political—arrangements imposed by totalitarian regimes.”43 The distinctions made between those fleeing communism versus those fleeing other political structures has had profound effects on New World refugees who have sought asylum in the United States. Philip G. Schrag notes that shortly after the United States passed the Refugee Act of 1980, human rights violations soared during conflicts in Haiti, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua so that “large numbers of people who might reasonably claim to be refugees under the new act could without too much difficulty (compared with similarly situated Asians or Africans), reach American shores. Asylum applications rose from 3,700 in 1978, to . . . 63,000 in 1981.”44 However, reflecting the political agenda of U.S. foreign policy, which supported the regimes in Haiti and El Salvador, in 1983, “only 2 percent of Haitian and 3 percent of Salvadoran applicants” were granted asylum.45 Meanwhile, refugees fleeing communism were granted asylum at a much higher rate with “78 percent of Russians and 44 percent of Romanians” obtaining it during the same period.46 Similarly, those people who were seen as fleeing Castro in Cuba and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were granted asylum at much higher rates than other refugees from throughout the Americas. Nyers notes that although refugees may fear the dire effects of economic destitution, in the eyes of the UN Refugee Convention (and nations such as the United States, which have adopted the UN definition) this does not constitute a political (“well-founded”) fear and instead is “recast as ‘despair.’”47 However, the economies of the Caribbean, Central America, and elsewhere in the Americas, have been regulated by the World Bank and IMF policies, which themselves are largely governed by Western nations, especially the United States, so that these economies cannot be extracted from politics. The adoption of neoliberal economic

12 / introduction

policies has often accelerated the breakdown of the structures of nations throughout the circum-Caribbean. In this sense, those who seek economic refuge outside their home nation are simultaneously seeking refuge from the politics that govern those economies. Paradoxically, this can mean that these refugees seek economic asylum in the very place in which the policies that govern the economies of their home nations are made. Focusing on the dilemmas that contemporary refugees confront in seeking asylum, in On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness Derrida notes the aporia between political and economic refugee status that nation-states increasingly exploit to deny refugees asylum: How can a purely political refugee claim to have been truly welcomed into a new settlement without that entailing some form of economic gain? . . . This distinction between the economic and the political . . . makes it virtually impossible ever to grant political asylum and even, in a sense, to apply the law, for in its implementation it would depend entirely on opportunistic considerations, occasionally electoral and political, which, in the last analysis, become a matter for the police, of real and imaginary security issues, of demography, and of the market. The discourse on the refugee, asylum or hospitality, thus risks becoming nothing but pure rhetorical alibis.48 The fictional narratives, photographs, human rights documents, and governmental documents that I examine in this book present specific examples of the ways that state (in)hospitality manifests vis-à-vis political and labor refugees.

The Politics of Hospitality Current debates around hospitality and cosmopolitanism inform the conditions of the refugees that I discuss throughout this book. Many of these discussions recall Immanuel Kant’s “Toward Perpetual Peace” essay, which has been influential in contemporary understandings of refugees and immigrants. Kant discusses the cosmopolitan “right” of universal hospitality, which “means the right of a stranger not to be treated in a hostile manner by another upon his arrival on the other’s territory. If it can be done without causing his death, the stranger can be turned away, yet as long as the stranger behaves peaceably where he happens to be, his host may not treat him with hostility.”49 According to Kant, this right can be configured as universal because there are not endless resources of

introduction / 13

land to acquire on earth; we must ultimately share the globe with each other. By configuring hospitality as a right, Kant envisions the nationstate as accountable to the global community: “[humans] cannot scatter themselves on it without limit, but they must rather ultimately tolerate one another as neighbors, and originally no one has more of a right to be at a given place on earth than anyone else.”50 Hospitality manages the space of political membership, at the “boundaries of the polity; it delimits civic space by regulating relations among members and strangers. Hence the right of hospitality occupies that space between human rights and civil rights.”51 I consider how both political and economic refugees exist at the threshold of the civic space of the host nation as they attempt to gain entrance. Refugees force the issue of hospitality most profoundly because their search for asylum is urgent, an issue that other migrants do not necessarily face. As many scholars have pointed out, there is a certain paradox in Kant’s configuration: he believes in the sovereignty of nation-states while he simultaneously recognizes the limits of territorial expansion of states and the need to extend individual rights beyond those provided by and contained within the nation-state. There is a gap between the ideals of granting individuals the right of hospitality and the inability to regulate individual nation-states’ treatment of those people who arrive at their borders. Derrida has devoted much attention to the issue of hospitality and the role of nations in relation to “foreigners.” He explains the aporia of Kant’s philosophy on hospitality in terms of the unconditional hospitality, the ideal form of justice to which hospitality aspires, versus the laws of hospitality, the juridical structures (of border control, immigration interviews, etc.) that manage and regulate absolute hospitality. In Of Hospitality, he writes, “absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only to the foreigner (provided with a family name, with the social status of being a foreigner, etc.), but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them that I let them come, that I let them arrive, and take place in the place I offer them, without asking of them either reciprocity (entering into a pact) or even their names. The law of absolute hospitality commands a break with hospitality by right, with law or justice as rights.”52 The philosophy offers a paradox: for hospitality to exist, a host must be able to exert power to exclude others from entering because, without that power, there is no hospitality, and strangers could simply invade the host’s space; thus, the limits that a host—whether an individual or a nation-state—places on those allowed to enter constitute the laws of hospitality. Moreover,

14 / introduction

although recognizing the need for certain limits, to keep the laws of hospitality from becoming perverse and xenophobic, there is a necessary and continuing quest for unconditional hospitality. In chapter 3, I explore this further in relation to my analysis of the U.S. congressional hearings on Haitian canecutters in the Dominican Republic, a nation-state that has, at various points in its history, sought to kill or expel Haitian migrant laborers because of their perceived threat to the Dominican nation. I consider the paradox that, while the United States shores up its own borders against the “invasion” of undocumented immigrants via the laws of hospitality and elides these migrants the right of hospitality, the country purports to function as a space that seeks to enact the justice that unconditional hospitality aspires to within the ostensibly humanitarian space of the hearings by regulating Dominican hospitality. The question of who is being “heard” within the hearings reveals the contradictory logic of U.S. hospitality as Haitian cane cutters continue to be silenced in this political sphere. Thus, one current question for hospitality is how to negotiate the gap between economic refugees who are not granted citizenship but who may be allowed entrance into the nation to perform labor; by not having political membership, however, they are not granted civil rights. The current debates surrounding “guest” workers demonstrate the degree to which the laws of hospitality are often tied to the economic sphere. The term “guest” seems to suggest that such workers are granted the right to a universal hospitality. Yet such programs can also be used to enable the laws of hospitality to keep others out, as George W. Bush’s 2004 State of the Union Address demonstrates: “A temporary-worker program will help protect our homeland, allowing border patrol and law enforcement to focus on true threats to our national security.”53 Furthermore, when economic and political tides shift, those guest workers can easily become ghost workers working in the shadows of transnational capitalism. I explore this tension generated by migrant workers’ relationships to the economic borders of the nation in chapter 4 through my analysis of seafarers working on flag of convenience ships as well as in my discussion in chapter 3 of Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic.

Refugees and Transnationalism There has been a tendency in transnational studies to mark and celebrate the imminent end of the nation-state with the global movement of media, capital, and subsequent mass migration of peoples. Arjun

introduction / 15

Appadurai coins the term “postnation” to capture what he sees as the “other formations for allegiance and identity” that have occurred in the face of the disintegration of the nation-state as a viable political, economic, and social entity.54 The nation is associated with restrictive, primordial ideas of belonging that serve to exacerbate ethnic tensions, tribalism, and fundamentalism. Of course, these very conditions can lead to refugee movements. In fact, Appadurai see refugees and refugee enterprises (i.e., Non-governmental Organizations [NGOs]) as one of many contemporary phenomena that are emblematic of “the permanent framework of the emergent, post-national order.”55 Similarly, in responding to Hannah Arendt’s essay “We Refugees,” in which she, writing as a refugee in 1943, sees the pervasiveness of the refugee condition in Europe as the way of the future, Giorgio Agamben echoes Appadurai’s claim, stating that refugees represent the political future of a transnational world: “At least until the process of the dissolution of the nation-state and its sovereignty has come to an end, the refugee is the sole category by which it is possible today to perceive the forms and limits of a political community to come.”56 Indeed Agamben asserts that through the figure of the refugee we can “reconstruct our political philosophy” for a future without the rights and protections provided by the nation-state. If we are to follow this thread, and “refugee” embodies the political category of the future, then we must address the various forms of transnationalism through which we can imagine political membership. In other words, how are refugees configured differently as they encounter different transnational forms? What kind of “flexible citizenships”57 are required to imagine this? I consider these questions in relation to my discussion of the effects of transnational capital in the Americas and its impact on the movement of refugees in chapters 3 and 4. For Agamben, refugees represent the breakdown of the sovereignty of the nation-state; he contends that “by breaking up the identity between man and citizen, between nativity and nationality, the refugee throws into crisis the original fiction of sovereignty.”58 However, I argue that Appadurai and Agamben are a bit premature in suggesting that refugees are the model of the future. The Caribbean has been transnational since the beginnings of colonialism and today allows multiple forms of citizenship and sovereignty, which include postcolonial nation-states, commonwealths, territories, and departments that are not independent entities. Additionally, there have also been attempts at creating a political union among a number of Caribbean states with the West Indies Federation (1958–1962) and the current regional configuration

16 / introduction

Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM). Coupled with the history of migration within and outside the region, Caribbeans have long dealt with multiple configurations of citizenship and sovereignty, yet they are not necessarily always as liberatory as Appadurai and Agamben might imagine. Nor does the desire for a regional identity negate the desire for a national one. Although nation-states have certainly been restructured in a variety of ways, owing to the influence of the transnational flows of media and capital, the nation-state continues to have relevance in defining political subjectivity—who has rights and who does not. Refugees are one of what Seyla Benhabib refers to as the “special categories of human beings created through the actions of the nation-state.”59 Moreover, refugees are subjects whose lives also depend upon the hospitality of nation-states because they lack any other structures through which they can gain long-term political and/or economic asylum. They must officially or clandestinely navigate the borders of the nation-state to gain this access. Benhabib has noted that, despite the impact of the mass global migrations of people in the twentieth-century, “national borders, while more porous, are still there to keep out aliens and intruders.”60 It is also necessary to keep in mind the specific local histories that have propelled refugee movements so as to avoid an overarching celebration of transnational flows.

The Poetics of Hospitality and Testimonial Narrative “Hypothesis to be verified: all responsible witnessing involves a poetic experience of language.” —jacques derrida, “a self-unsealing poetic text”

Kant states that the right to hospitality “pertains . . . to the conditions of the possibility of attempting interactions with the old inhabitants.”61 While this interaction can take the form of various general social exchanges and interactions, central to it is the function of communication. The problems facing asylum speakers manifest in the encounter between hospitality and language. Thus, my concern is with not only the politics of hospitality but also the poetics of hospitality. I link the political implications of hospitality to the utterances and narratives by and about refugees as they attempt to enter a host nation. The poetics of hospitality include the linkages between various etymologies and cognates of “hospitality”: host/enemy, hospitality, hospital, hospice, and hostage. This lexicon of contradictory ideas, which is informed by the work of

introduction / 17

Derrida, allows me to consider how language moves between justice (unconditional hospitality) and law (conditional hospitality). This poetics also includes visual discourses of hospitality. Derrida points to the central role that language plays in hospitality, as his remarks in the epigraph to this chapter highlight. He emphasizes the need for communication, specifically oral conversation, to enable hospitality. Language becomes central to the management of hospitality. The host must strike a balance between attempting to welcome the stranger via conversation while not allowing language to be transformed into a hostile cross-examination. Indeed, language defines the relationship between unconditional hospitality and the laws of hospitality; idioms, for example, are associated with place, belonging or unbelonging: “mother tongue,” “foreign language,” “second language,” or “alien language.” Derrida considers whether unconditional hospitality requires “suspending language, and even the address to the other,” by asking “shouldn’t we abstain from asking the other these questions, which herald so many required conditions, and thus limits to a hospitality thereby constrained and thereby confined into a law and a duty?”62 Because the absolute hospitality and laws of hospitality exist in a dialectical relationship, we must navigate language’s affiliations with these two conditions of hospitality. Derrida provocatively proposes that silence is the ultimate language of unconditional hospitality because language—in the form of questioning the guest/stranger—holds the potential to transform the unconditional law of hospitality into the laws of hospitality, which can restrict and ultimately exclude the guest/stranger. Thus, language can become hostile to the speaker, especially those seeking asylum. Language carries this contradiction within itself: the Latin origin of “hospitality” “allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, ‘hostility,’ the undesirable guest [hôte].”63 Language can turn against the asylum applicant. Thus, it is necessary to consider the various forms and functions of language in the poetics of hospitality. My title Asylum Speakers privileges the mode of orality central to an understanding of the poetics of hospitality that shape human rights discourses and asylum processes. I consider how refugee testimonial discourse functions as a political ritual situated on the periphery of citizenship and serves as a precursor to political membership; asylum processes require that refugees testify to their experiences of persecution in their native lands. That is, the asylum seeker must be able to speak in the idiom of the host nation to prove his or her “well-founded fear.” Different modes of the poetics of hospitality engage with questions

18 / introduction

of testimony and language. How does one articulate oneself outside the political margins of discourse? For those who are attempting to regain political and human rights, testimony becomes the required mode of discursive engagement. For refugees, this can take the form of testimonial and linguistic exchange between asylum applicant and asylum officer, immigration lawyer, interpreter, or advocate. I am also interested in the role of literature in either representing this kind of exchange or revealing the (in)hospitality, the impediments to these communications. What passwords, shibboleths, watchwords, and other narrative criteria constitute a poetics of hospitality? How do we incorporate a discussion of narrative and narration into different configurations of hospitality? How are laws discursively and narratologically constructed? Joseph Slaughter writes, “although the law—like Lyotard and Emmanuael Levinas in their analyses of human rights—presumes that the individual’s narrative capacity and predisposition are innate and equally shared by all human beings everywhere, the particular forms in which the will to narrate finds expression are inflected and normalized by social and cultural frameworks in which the individual participates.”64 I consider how the impact of the social and juridical conditions of refugees impact narration as the refugee native informant is constructed by the laws of hospitality through interactions with asylum officers, attorneys, judges, human rights advocates, and translators vis-à-vis dialogues, interviews, and interrogations. I also pursue Caribbean philosopher Édouard Glissant’s theory of the poetics of Relation as a means of theorizing refugee discourses and the poetics of hospitality. Following Deleuze and Guattari, he defines a poetics of Relation in rhizomatic terms, “in which each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other.”65 The metaphors of relation that Glissant utilizes—errantry, nomadism, and rhizomes— articulate the tenets of hospitality. I extend Glissant’s poetics of Relation, which he originates with the severing of tongues and silencing of slave voices, to the situation of New World refugees, new emblems of modernity, who themselves require new forms of communication. He describes the formation of Western nations out of “the totalitarian drive of a single unique root”66; many of these nations were either the direct result of or buttressed by the “arrowlike nomadism” of colonial invasions of other lands.67 Thus, imagining Caribbean cultures in creolizing relational terms allows the movement beyond debilitating colonial structures. As I demonstrate throughout Asylum Speakers, New World refugees are often immobilized by the “predatory effects of the unique

introduction / 19

root” that characterize the border structures of the nation-state as well as the debilitating conditions in the nation of origin.68 Glissant turns away from the nation-state via the notion of errantry: “this thinking of errantry, this errant thought, silently emerges from the destructuring of compact national entities that yesterday were still triumphant, and, at the same time, from difficult, uncertain births of new forms of identity that call to us.”69 Errantry evokes the conditions of the majority of refugees who cannot claim a unidirectional, linear journey from homeland to destination but who may encounter, or be forced to take, a number of paths, routes, and detours along the way. This errantry is not easily claimed because the directions are unknown, shifting and evolving over time. Refugees embody what Glissant refers to as “persecuted errantry.”70 Errantry dismantles the dichotomies between citizen and foreigner.71 He grounds his theory with the history of slavery in the Caribbean. With the silencing of voices that resulted from slavery there is a need to create new forms of cultural exchange and communication.72 I argue that because refugees mark a new category of forced migration, they also require an alternative form of expression that captures their liminal status. The ideal form of the poetics of hospitality is a poetics of Relation, which emerges from a space of encounter and interaction, and, as Glissant asserts, “the thought of errantry is a poetics, which always infers that at some moment it is told.”73 Refugees embody what Glissant refers to as a “circular nomadism,” although he resists idealizing this status and asks instead, “is nomadism not a form of obedience to contingencies that are restrictive?”74 Of course, for refugees, these restrictions come in many forms: economic, bureaucratic, linguistic, and so on. In a sense, to imagine the poetics of Relation is to imagine the narrative form of unconditional hospitality. Errantry is an “imaginary vision”:75 “It is not merely an encounter, a shock . . . a métissage, but a new original dimension allowing each person to be there and elsewhere, rooted and open, . . .in harmony and errantry.”76 Refugees enter into new modes of creolization. Another way of imagining the poetics of hospitality for New World refugees can be found in Wilson Harris’s notion of the “limbo gateway,” which provides a useful concept for considering the transnational spaces in which asylum speakers exist. Harris builds on the limbo dance that originated on the slaveships of the Middle Passage and “becomes the human gateway which dislocates (and therefore begins to free itself from) a uniform chain of miles across the Atlantic.”77 The dislocation that occurs becomes reimagined and reassembled via the limbo dance through “a profound art of compensation which seeks to re-play a dismemberment

20 / introduction

of tribes . . . and to invoke at the same time a curious psychic re-assembly of parts of the dead muse and the god . . . to articulate a new growth.”78 Harris imagines the reassembling of parts as re-membering by invoking the idea of the “phantom” limb as mythical archetype. Refugees are themselves poised at a “gateway” that exists at the locus of hospitality; thus, within either an entryway or a checkpoint determinations are made regarding who is allowed entrance into the nation and who is excluded. In her reading of Harris, Nicole Waligora-Davis writes, “Limbo re-members the histories of lost lives as much as it marks the conditions of the asylum seeker, hung by law, suspended between civil identities and national spaces.”79 I suggest that refugees enter into a “limbo gateway” as their testimonies become fractured and maligned via “processing” by INS officials. A radical reordering of speech and language occur in the limbo gateway. Moreover, the corporeality of the “limbo gateway”— as dismemberment, phantom limb—allows us to consider the ways in which testimony also depends upon refugee physicality. In my opening discussion of Joseph Dantica, we saw how the body can become a kind of limb/o gateway where the poetics of hospitality—the struggle over communication and interpretation that occurs in the space of hospitality—is manifested on the body (politic) of the refugee. I link Harris’s concept of the “limbo gateway” with anthropologist Michel S. Laguerre’s configuration of Haitian boat refugees as “liminal citizens.” He writes, “boat people at sea, those who congregate or are placed in refugee camps, and those who are waiting for a formal hearing on deportation, exclusion or political asylum hold that status of liminal citizenship, a particular form of the diasporic condition.”80 The idea of liminal citizenship elucidates the position of boat refugees, who are physically caught between national spaces and thus are subsequently caught between spaces of political membership. Although Laguerre is speaking specifically of Haitian refugees, I apply his notion more broadly to the New World refugees that I consider in this book. I am interested in the ways in which testimony becomes tied to this particular notion of citizenship so that New World refugees enter into a kind of “limbo citizenship” whose political membership hinges upon their negotiations of speech and language. “Limbo citizenship” counters the more facile constructions of “liminality” put forth by Homi Bhabha. When referring to the position of migrants in First World nations, Bhabha writes that they have the potential to disrupt homogenized national narratives through their “liminality.” The ambiguous space of the migrant becomes a space for

introduction / 21

minority counterdiscourse to challenge the nation: “It is from the liminal movement of the culture of the nation—at once opened up and held together—that minority discourse emerges.”81 While this may be true of some migrant discourses, refugee discourses are often marked by political and ideological forces that complicate, if not impair, expression. The way in which Bhabha collapses all migrations into a litany of liberatory experience is unsettling: “exiles, émigrés and refugees” are virtually interchangeable.82 I argue, however, that refugees comprise a specific category that must be considered separately because their relationship to the polity is determined by rigid juridical structures, particularly for those refugees who remain stalled in detention centers or are refused entrance into a host nation. Because they exist in “limbo spaces” as “limbo citizens,” refugees are inherently trespassers as they move between native and non-native languages, cultures, and locations while they attempt to enter places of refuge. Trespassing counters facile notions of travel and migrancy as it connotes the unsanctioned crossing of boundaries. “Trespassing” conjures up many entangled images concerning land, property, boundaries: “legitimate” land holders versus “illegitimate” squatters, voluntary versus involuntary migration, sanctioned versus unsanctioned crossing of borders, legal immigrants versus illegal “aliens” and refugees. Trespassing, causing discomfort for both interlopers and those who claim to “authentically” occupy certain spaces, suggests intrusion and encroachment, particularly for refugees who are often perceived as infringing upon nation-states.

Sea of Refugees The sea becomes a central site of travel and limbo existence for a number of the refugee narratives that I explore in this book (chapters 1, 2, 4, and 5). Numerous writers and scholars have contemplated the fluvial and marine spaces that constitute the Caribbean. Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea is History” uses the sea as a site of historical consciousness where the lost histories of the slave trade are contained: “Where are your monuments, battles, martyrs? / Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, / in that grey vault. The sea. The sea/ has locked them up. The sea is History.”83 Cuban scholar Antonio Benítez-Rojo writes, “the culture of the Caribbean, at least in its most distinctive aspect, is not terrestrial but aquatic, . . . The Caribbean is the natural and indispensable realm of marine currents, of waves, of folds and double-folds, of fluidity and sinuosity.”84

22 / introduction

Benítez-Rojo emphasizes how this fluidity reflects the significant role of migration for Caribbean peoples—the movement of peoples across the sea that has shaped the population of the region. The emphasis on the aquatic environment of the Caribbean also allows for a configuration of identity that is regional rather than national. Indeed, migration has long been a part of Caribbean existence, with the transporting of slaves across the Middle Passage, the importation of indentured laborers from Asia, and the migration of Caribbean peoples to Europe in search of educational and other opportunities. Yet, nowhere does Benítez-Rojo include in his configuration the boat refugee’s very fraught relationship to the sea, where a dangerous journey on the seas may be the only option for survival and holds within it the possibility of death.85 Through their evocations of the Middle Passage, Harris and Glissant also recall the sea as space of migration. In fact, the fluidity and movement associated with the sea are significant for my discussion of transnationalism because several chapters address political and economic refugee migration by boat. Marine vessels, particularly the ship, are often evoked as appealing metaphors because they exist beyond the borders of the nation. Kant sees the ship as a conduit to absolute hospitality; the ship “makes it possible to come into contact with one another across these regions that belong to no one, and to use the right to the surface, which is common to the human species, to establish commerce with one another.”86 He continues, “In this way, remote parts of the world can establish relations peacefully with one another, relations which ultimately become regulated by public laws and can thus finally bring the human species ever closer to a cosmopolitan constitution.”87 For Kant, ships serve as vessels of peace, uniting distant lands and peoples. However, I consider how various water vessels—Coast Guard ships, refugee boats, rafts, and cargo ships—become sites of New World refugee experience of inhospitality. Ships hold particular significance for the Caribbean, where they have traditionally signaled migration into and out of the region. Ships typically symbolize movement and mobility, but they also arrive at a destination. Ships ushered Columbus to the New World and later transported human cargo from Africa to the Americas. Later, ships carried hopeful Caribbeans to the metropole in search of education and employment opportunities. One of the most noted articulations of the ship metaphor in diaspora studies is found in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness: I have settled on the image of ships in motion across spaces

introduction / 23

between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organizing symbol for this enterprise and as my starting point. The image of the ship—a living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion-is especially important for historical and theoretical reasons. . . . Ships immediately focus attention on the middle passage, on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland, on the circulation of artifacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs.88 For Gilroy, the ship is a symbol of transatlantic cultural exchange that facilitated the circulation of notions of freedom in the black diaspora. This metaphor allows Gilroy to move outside the national frameworks of identity to explore the mobile history of black intellectual culture. However, in contrast to the flows, mobility, and progress that Gilroy associates with ships, the water vessels depicted in most works I analyze symbolize an alternative sea history, which is marked by a lack of movement. This has much to do with the fact that the occupants of these vessels—political and economic refugees—have little control over navigating their journeys.89 For example, the U.S. Coast Guard’s constant vigilance over Caribbean waters severely hinders Haitian refugee boat migration as it attempts to reinforce national borders in transnational “fluid” spaces. As I discuss in chapter 2, in carrying out interdictions of boat refugees, the Coast Guard represents a surveillance of the water, an “eye-witnessing” that seeks to contain and control this fluidity. Furthermore, a refugee boat may be steered by a smuggler who may have little interest in whether his occupants make it to their destination, or a makeshift refugee boat may simply be no match for powerful seas. The flag of convenience ships, which I discuss in chapter 4, are the ultimate markers of contemporary global capitalism as they carry the majority of goods traded in the world today, yet, without any secure links to the laws of the nation whose flag the ship flies, workers on board are often left similarly “adrift” as boat refugees, working in perilous conditions that signify their positions as economic refugees. These contemporary conditions of marine travel have their precursors in the slave ships that crossed and recrossed the Atlantic centuries ago.

Refugee Native Informant Asylum Speakers picks up on the term “native informant,” popularized by Gayatri Spivak to underscore the differential casting of the native

24 / introduction

informant as refugee. Historically, the native informant denoted the figure who had been identified by anthropology as both the possessor of cultural information and the agent who imparts that information to an outsider, such as anthropologist or ethnographer. In this environment, native informants have typically been viewed as “authentic” bearers of culture. The subjectivity of the native informant was erased in the interest of “knowing” the “other.” Spivak cautions against relying upon the native informant for understanding cultural truths because she or he always already occupies an ambiguous position. Their words can easily be appropriated as part of the dominant discourse so that they are ultimately “foreclosed” by Western discourse.90 Spivak considers how this figure manifests in a number of discourses within the nation-state and with the mass migrations from “Third World” to “First World” in the diaspora. As she articulates in A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Spivak is concerned with how postcolonial subjects have, at times, appropriated the position of the native informant, especially as they move into metropolitan spaces. Moreover, the figure of the native informant is a construct of the desires of the metropole. Within this context, I read refugees as native informants. Refugees occupy a paradoxical position as native informants because they are no longer “native,” and in fact, their forced migration out of the native land radically severs them from the native space. Asylum structures are designed, however, so as to view refugees as native informants; thus, while they must offer testimony as it applies in a juridical model, by conveying information about their native land they are also cast as bearers of cultural information. What does it mean for refugee native informants to testify to their experiences of persecution? Because they are caught within the field of hospitality, refugee native informant testimonies become part of the poetics of hospitality. A successful asylum applicant’s testimony convinces the asylum officer of the inability of the home nation to function as a habitable space. Thus, refugees must construct narratives about their lives in stories that betray their allegiance to their nation of origin. Refugees become native informants in that they must present information about their native land and culture to outsiders—INS authorities, human rights lawyers, interpreters, or other audiences. In a sense, refugees become “informers” who incriminate their governments, and in so doing they begin the path toward declaring allegiance to the host country. While these testimonies are scrutinized for credibility, they become sites of surveillance and policing of national borders, as evidenced by the systematic denial of Haitian refugees’ asylum applications, which I discuss in chapter 1. I assert that

introduction / 25

because testimony becomes a checkpoint to asylum, refugee testimonial narratives delimit the boundaries of the nation-state. Asylum speakers encounter a number of mediations of their testimonies—the translator, the lawyer, the asylum officer, and so on. I am concerned with the impact of testimonial discourse when it is linked to those refugees who must use it as a means to attempt to enter into a new nation-state, a new civil society, and yet are confined by nation-state parameters in their quest. Refugee testimonies are often haunted by the specter of death. Establishing a “well-founded fear” ultimately rests upon the refugee’s ability to convey her or his fear of dying in the nation of origin. For some refugee native informants, death’s presence is especially close if they have witnessed the deaths of friends or family members or have had their lives threatened through torture. Paradoxically, the refugee will never be able to provide “proof” of this fear within testimony, proof requiring his or her own death. Derrida and others have observed that testimony is a performative act, which tells about something that took place at another place in another time that can never be fully recovered, which destabilizes the authority of the witness.91 Asylum speakers’ testimonies reflect attempts to convey experiences of persecution for an audience of people who were not “there.” Paul Ricouer observes that testimony reflects the attempt to reconstruct memory in a way that it can be present(ed) for an audience. It is “the ultimate link between imagination and memory, because the witness says ‘I was part of the story. I was there.’ At the same time, the witness tells a story that is a living presentation, and therefore deploys the capacity of imagination to place the events before our eyes, as if we were there.”92 Derrida contends that testimony “can only appeal to an act of faith” and can never be about “proving, confirming a knowledge, in assuring a theoretical certainty, a determining judgment.”93 In addition to the death that haunts asylum seeker testimonies, the narratives that I analyze also reveal an emphasis on “wounding” through numerous references to hospitalizations, illness, and injury.

Testimonio While I discuss a variety of testimonial forms throughout this book, several literary works that I analyze engage specifically with the neoliterary forms of Latin American testimonio. Indeed, any discussion of testimonial narrative in the Americas must include the debate that has taken place over the last twenty years regarding testimonio’s efficacy as a genre of human rights discourse and literature. When it initially arose

26 / introduction

out of the Caribbean and Central America in the 1960s and 1970s, critics such as John Beverley, George Yúdice, and Marc Zimmerman hailed testimonio as a genre of the subaltern that could foreground the voices of the oppressed. Beverley defines the genre: “Testimonio is, to recall again a phrase from Ranajit Guha, the ‘small voice of history’: that is, the voice of the subaltern. But it is not the intention of this voice simply to display its subalternity. It speaks to us as an ‘I’ that nevertheless stands for a multitude. It affirms not only a singular experience of truth in the face of grand designs of power, but truth itself as singularity.”94 Many critics viewed testimonio as a site of the creation of radical subjectivities that could challenge hegemonic military and political forces. Testimonio moves away from Western literary traditions that emphasize individual voices to foreground the collectivity of voices that an individual voice represents. However, testimonios are also often mediated texts that feature an interlocutor who transcribes an oral testimony. The Cuban Revolution served as a seminal moment in testimonio with the publication of Che Guevara’s diaries and those of other Cuban revolutionaries. The story of Esteban Montejo, The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave: Biografía de un cimarrón (1967) edited by Miguel Barnet, is also cited as one of the earliest testimonios. Beverley asserts, “testimonio as an énoncé—that is, as something materialized in the form of a transcript or text—serves to bring subaltern voice and experience into civil society and the public sphere.”95 As such, testimonios are about asserting one’s position as a political subject through voice. Such assertions are particularly significant when testimonial speakers attempt to recount urgent experiences of atrocity, torture, and genocide to their readers. Testimonios often recount conditions of homelessness—whereby the home nation is in a state of distress or dysfunction because of civil war, totalitarian regimes, and so on—that refugees seek to escape. As Alberto Moreiras writes, testimonio must produce “unlivability” “in order to be persuasive as testimonio.”96 Refugees face a similar task of conveying urgency and unlivability in the nation of origin in order to gain asylum. Testimonios are thus narratives about the search for sanctuary, which may come through the telling of an experience of persecution or the creation of solidarity with readers. Testimonio and testimony are also about the speaker’s attempt to locate herself as a subject in time and space, a particularly fraught endeavor for refugees.97 Particularly significant for my project is the overt politicization of language and personal narrative that comes with testimonio. Specifically, testimonios were promoted as a consciousness-raising genre giving

introduction / 27

“First World” readers insight into “Third World” political and social injustices. While Beverley differentiates between testimonio and other forms of testimony (legal, fictional, confessional), the refugee narratives I examine function within a testimonial continuum where various testimonial expressions commingle: “testimony brings into contiguity many areas of critical concern, including corporeality, subjectivity, history, witnessing, law, ethics, performance and the literary.”98 The narratives that I analyze blur the boundaries between testimonio, testimonial novel, and testimonial discourse in the literary, governmental, and legal realms. Testimonio has generated numerous debates over authenticity, truthvalue, narrative authority, orality, and mediation. After the initial euphoria surrounding it as a place where the “subaltern speaks,” there has been much disagreement over its efficacy as a human rights discourse, especially upon its institutionalization and commodification in the U.S. academy. Beverley continues to see the liberatory potential in testimonio, “as a model for a new form of politics, which also means a new way of imagining the identity of the nation.”99 He notes that while it comes “from outside the limits of the state, it is also implicated in tracing the frontiers of the authority of the state and expanding the compass of what counts as expression in civil society.”100 However, I tend to agree with Alberto Moreiras’s assessment of the “fetishizing” of testimonio “precisely through its (re)absorption into the literary system of representation. In other words, solidarity, which remains the essential summons of the testimonial text, and that which radically distinguishes it from the literary text, is in perpetual risk of being turned into a rhetorical tropology.”101 I discuss the various approaches to the troping of testimonio in relation to the novels of Edwidge Danticat, Francisco Goldman, and Julia Alvarez. Danticat and Goldman demonstrate that for stateless people, testimonio’s liberatory potential is circumscribed by the nation-state and the forces of global capital.

Refugee Credibility “From its inception the experience of the refugee puts trust on trial. The refugee mistrusts and is mistrusted.” —e. valentine daniel and john chr. knudsen

Asylum speaker testimonies rest upon their perceived truth-value. These testimonies reflect the confrontation between the nation-state and

28 / introduction

testimonial articulations as they are under constant scrutiny for their credibility, or lack thereof. However, it  would be fallacious to assume that all refugees, all asylum speakers, are silenced. Indeed some are allowed to speak because their testimonies, such as those that condemn the communism of Castro, shore up the narrative of U.S. foreign policy. However, the majority of testimonial narratives that I examine in this book reveal the great difficulty that many refugees from the Americas have had in testifying and being heard, whether in the United States or elsewhere. Perhaps one of the most controversial and well-known refugee narratives and testimonios in the Americas is Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio, I Rigoberta Menchú (Me Llamo Rigoberta Menchú) (1984). Narrated and written during her time as a refugee after she had fled persecution in Guatemala, her testimonio recounts the persecution of members of her family who were tortured and killed by the Guatemalan army. The controversy erupted with the publication of anthropologist David Stoll’s book Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans in which he interviewed members of Menchú’s community and found discrepancies between their accounts and Menchú’s testimonio. Conservative pundits such as Dinesh D’Souza took Stoll’s findings as evidence that Menchú is a “fraud” in order to buttress his argument that the inclusion of the testimonio in the core curriculum at Stanford and other institutions constituted a deterioration of the humanities.102 Many scholars and writers responded to Stoll’s book, often in strong defense of Menchú. Although I do not have the time and space to explicate the intricacies of these arguments here, the controversy over testifying, truth-value, memory, historical record, and trauma runs parallel to the contested spaces of refugee articulations.103 In fact, refugee testimonies are frequently discredited, often in the face of powerful authorities such as nation-state asylum processes or, in the case of Stoll and D’Souza, U.S.based authors. The discounting of Menchú’s testimonio reflects a familiar trope of refugee-as-liar that I discuss in chapter 1 in relation to the systematic discounting of Haitian refugee testimonies. The debate surrounding Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio reflects the question of credibility that surrounds any testimony whether given in a court of law, or a literary text. In her discussion of Hutu refugees, Malkki notes that even humanitarian workers often dismiss refugee testimonies as unreliable: “There was a more general tendency among some (though by no means all) administrators to characterize the refugees as dishonest, prone to exaggeration, even crafty and untrustworthy.”104 Instead, administrators

introduction / 29

found bodily wounds to be more truthful and compelling evidence of refugees’ experiences of persecution: “Their bodies were made to speak to doctors and other professionals, for the bodies could give a more reliable and relevant accounting than the refugees’ ‘stories.’”105 As Janet Gilboy points out in her study of airport immigration inspectors, the body language of immigrants, along with their statements, is routinely studied for clues to the veracity of their claims.106 Yet, as I demonstrated in my opening account of Joseph Dantica, bodily evidence is just as open to questionable interpretation and discounting as is the case with spoken words. Thus, one question that I address throughout the chapters concerns narrative authority and how fictional and real asylum speakers construe positions from which their stories are told in order to construct themselves as subjects. In Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, Derrida explores questions of how literature can witness when the author writes about an experience that he or she cannot claim to have witnessed, although it may bear traces of an actual occurrence.107 He takes up the issue of how testimony comes into play with literature. Testimony implies the antinomous, contradictory logic of both the “truth” (what is real) as well as the lie: “there is no testimony which does not structurally imply in itself the possibility of fiction, simulacra, dissimulation, lie, and perjury. . . . If this possibility that it seems to prohibit were effectively excluded, if testimony thereby became proof, information, certainty, or archive, it would lose its function as testimony.”108 Testimony can never be concrete “proof”; as soon as it becomes provable, it is no longer testimony. Testimony always holds the possibility fiction within it. Testimony is thus always linked to the possibility of perjury, even as a witness swears to its truthfulness. In this sense, testimony always holds the potential to trespass, to breach trust and perjure. I do not want to naively suggest that refugees are so pure and innocent that they would never lie, but I do suggest that, as a whole, refugees are often assumed to be lying and therefore must work to gain credibility, especially given testimony’s inability to provide definitive “truth.” For refugees, whose testimonies are the means to access a host nation and political membership, lying carries political implications and can be seen as a treasonous act against the host nation, even though the refugee does not yet have political membership. The testimonies of asylum seekers hinge around the question of veracity, where the gaps, absences, and irreconcilable aporias that are inherent to any testimonial narrative can quickly derail a quest for asylum.109 Asylum speaker testimonies thus occupy two realms: the ethical and the juridical. Because

30 / introduction

asylum speakers are testifying to their experiences of persecution, their testimonies occupy the ethical realm, but, because they are presented in the legal realm, they also occupy the juridical. In his analysis of testimony and witnessing at Auschwitz, Agamben argues that the ethical and juridical requirements of testimony are two, often irreconcilable realms; a testimony cannot function on both terrains simultaneously. The ethical “has nothing to do with the acquisition of facts for a trial.”110 He forcefully argues, “Almost all the categories that we use in moral and religious judgments are in some way contaminated by law: guilt, responsibility, innocence, judgment, pardon. . . .”111 For Agamben, testimony to atrocity during the Holocaust cannot be reduced to the strictures of what counts as evidence in law; ethics must not rely upon the juridical definitions or categories. His points of reference are the Nuremburg trials, “which helped to spread the idea that the problem of Auschwitz had been overcome . . . it has taken almost half a century to understand that law did not exhaust the problem.”112 Asylum applicants face a predicament: they must provide testimony that, although it may tell of atrocity filtered through the ethics of memory, violence, trauma, and death, must likewise adhere to a legal framework. Legal testimony typically begins from the point of disbelief, where speakers must try to convince their audience of their credibility. As Agamben notes, “Law is solely directed toward judgment, independent of truth and justice.”113 The job of the asylum speaker is to attempt to navigate between the ethical and juridical realms, an often daunting task.

Well-Founded Fear Well-Founded Fear, a documentary film that records the asylum interviews of several applicants who have applied for asylum in the United States, foregrounds how refugee narratives are constructed in the official juridical capacity in the U.S. asylum process. The film demonstrates the power and force of a poetics of hospitality as the asylum interview becomes the site of hospitality as does the testimony of the applicants. The film follows Romanian, Albanian, Chinese, Haitian, and Salvadoran asylum seekers. In some ways, the film’s account of the asylum process complements Danticat’s written account of her uncle’s case, yet it is also important to note that the film was shot in the late 1990s and released in 2000, before the events of 9/11 imposed the drastic strictures that Joseph Dantica encountered in the asylum process in the United States. Nevertheless, the asylum process was hardly easy before 9/11. In addition

introduction / 31

to portraying asylum seekers’ interviews, the film records testimonies of asylum officers, who testify to their role as arbiters and speak of the testimonies that they hear from applicants. Officer “Jim” explains his approach to assessing asylum applicants: “you know in your heart as well as your head that the person sitting in front of you—none of this happened to them, or it’s very unlikely. Occasionally you do have a grant [of asylum], a legitimate grant.” Jim’s comments regarding Chinese asylum applicants are particularly revealing: “you have to just go for them in terms of their credibility and usually you can get them. And I realize that sounds kind of sinister. . . . But that’s what you gotta do. It’s usually not too difficult. They’re not too sophisticated. They’re basically a bunch of farmers and factory workers and they’ve been basically practicing some story.” Jim’s anticipation of fabricated testimonials reveals that, for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), testimony marks the alterity of the foreign asylum applicant. The disbelief and the inability or unwillingness to comprehend the experiences of “others” suggests that the “stranger’s” asylum narrative cannot be assimilated into an “American” national narrative. Jim’s approach rests upon his interpretation of the poetics of hospitality, and asylum applicants’ testimonies fall into the benign genres of the “same stories” or “a twist on the same tall tale,” which erase the heterogeneity of asylum speakers’ testimonies. This demonstrates the negative ways that testimony becomes associated with the literary—echoing Derrida’s observation that the nature of testimony always leaves open the possibility for fiction. The notion that refugees are inherently liars reflects the degree of hostility of the host nation, which fears not only the impact of refugees on national resources but also the embarrassment of being “duped.” In a sense, by attempting to weed out the “false” stories of those refugees who seek political membership in the United States, the perceived truth-value of the narrative of the United States as a place of refuge for “real” refugees remains intact. Given the overwhelming distrust of the veracity of any applicant’s claims speaks to the power that states wield in circumscribing asylum speakers. One officer, Martha-Louise, who has a higher “grant” rate than other officers, takes a more philosophical approach and does not see lying as a betrayal: this is not a moral situation. If somebody’s lying because they want to stay here, that’s perfectly understandable to me. I don’t think that’s a good or bad issue. It’s not like you trust somebody and they lie to you and betray you. It’s not that sort of situation. . . . And to

32 / introduction

me, somebody who is in this country illegally, it’s like you park illegally. Yeah, it’s against the law . . . but I don’t think a person who parks in the wrong parking space is a bad person. She draws a distinction between moral guilt and legal guilt so that while an applicant who lies in the asylum interview may be guilty of a legal transgression in the eyes of the law, the applicant has not necessarily committed a moral transgression.114 For Martha-Louise, a legal transgression may simply be an act of expediency for the applicant. Asylum officers obviously hold great power in interpreting these stories. One officer states, “if you’re an applicant, you play asylum officer roulette here. Your chances of getting [an asylum recommendation] depend on who you get as much as what your claim is simply because you know everybody’s got their own threshold, everybody has their own interpretation of the law to believe or suspend disbelief.” This “threshold” between a hospitable and hostile interpretation of asylum law and applicant testimony speaks to the struggle at the heart of a poetics of hospitality. Asylum applicants are often acutely aware of the constructedness of testimony, worrying about whether they can adhere to what the asylum officer wants to hear. One applicant “Christian” explains, “It’s one thing to tell a story about something. It’s a completely different thing to live it. After I left [the asylum interview], I had the feeling I didn’t say enough. And it’s really tough to present in a nutshell—a couple of minutes—what you went through for half a life.”115 Asylum officers scrutinize testimonies for asylum based on the applicant’s use of language and the narratives they construct, which, as legal scholar Ilene Durst writes, “must be believable, consistent, and sufficiently detailed to provide a plausible and coherent basis for her fear. . . . The adjudicator’s assessment . . . shall consider whether the narrative demonstrates . . . deliberate falsehood.”116 The ability that applicants display in their narrative authority determines which narratives “pass” from one space to another. Refugees become credible because of their ability to describe the horrors they have endured in ways that are recognizable and believable to their audiences. Derrida states, “the witness must both conform to given criteria and at the same time invent, in quasi-poetic fashion, the norms of his attestation. The stakes are enormous for the social, political, or juridical order of education, as for the exercise of citizenship.”117 Derrida’s comments highlight the performative aspects of witnessing. This ability can be hindered by the layers of mediation of asylum applications. Written

introduction / 33

applications are often transcribed by someone other than the applicant, an intermediary who raises the potential for differences between written and oral statements. One out-take of Well Founded Fear focuses specifically on a lawyer’s preparation of his client for her asylum interview. The lawyer “Virgil” specifically emphasizes the performative aspects of testifying to his Haitian client “Christianne.” He advises her to listen to a cassette tape of the testimony that she had previously recorded and practice her testimony so that there are “no mistakes.” When he quizzes her on the facts of her application, he explains that the asylum officers expect applicants to have a memory “like a cassette tape.” Socioeconomic status and levels of education also figure as determining factors in asylum assessments. For example, “Kevin” acknowledges that he is more likely to believe someone who is highly educated and “articulate” over “some guy who is cookin in the back of some kitchen.” Thus, impoverished applicants are often perceived as solely seeking economic opportunity, regardless of the circumstances surrounding their cases. Well-Founded Fear reveals the extreme weight that is placed upon the clarity and linearity of the story an applicant tells, a process that cleanses individual’s stories of the havoc that trauma, stress, and memory can wreak and also reveals the economic bias of the asylum process. The documentary depicts how asylum officers attempt to bring order to the disorder that refugee testimonies represent. One way of doing this is by categorizing them and placing them into genres of what they have already heard—the “same tall tale”—so that specific traits are attributed to applicants from particular nations even though the asylum officer may have little knowledge of the region from which an applicant comes. Rwandan applicants say this. Haitian applicants say that.118 Well-Founded Fear, however, also demonstrates the great ambiguity surrounding the decision-making process as discussed by an asylum officer, Kevin, who reveals his ambivalence over the decisions he makes on a daily basis. He describes himself as someone who has “humanitarian” concerns and remarks on the issue of fabricated stories: “sometimes cases that are real, that aren’t fabricated, often have more inconsistencies you know . . . sometimes a story that’s fabricated and it’s rehearsed, it’s going to be tighter so that’s kind of the irony of all this.”

Translation Translation is one of the most important aspects of a poetics of hospitality. Derrida contends that translation is “an enigmatic phenomenon

34 / introduction

or experience of hospitality if not the condition of all hospitality in general.”119 Translation is particularly relevant for refugees because to be cast out of a nation often means being forced to encounter a foreign language. To require a translation means that a refugee does not “naturally” belong to a host nation and thus highlights the refugee’s alterity. As they negotiate between “native” and “foreign” languages, translators carry the suspicion of impeding communication or intentionally misleading one or both agents in the linguistic transaction. Thus, translators become caught in a linguistic field of allegiance, betrayal, and lie. As translation scholar Sandra Bermann notes, “Translation” denotes the “transportation of meaning, a physical displacement” through its etymology of trans (across) and latus (carry).”120 Thus, “translation” evokes etymologically the kind of boundary-crossing and the potential for trespassing also associated with asylum seekers as they attempt to gain entrance to another nation. Furthermore, translation holds the potential to infringe upon the coherence and linearity of an asylum applicant’s testimony. Well-Founded Fear records many breakdowns in translation, which often raise doubts in the asylum officer’s mind. For example, in the case of an Algerian woman who is applying for asylum on the basis of religious persecution, confusion arises when the Arabic translator cannot understand what is being said when the applicant interjects French. Different linguistic usages arise because the translator, who is not Algerian, is not familiar with some idioms that the applicant uses. In this case, the asylum officer had been somewhat open to hearing the woman’s case because of his awareness of the dire political conditions in Algeria; however, once the problems of translation began to occur during the interview, he became much more skeptical of her claims. Thus, translation further compounds the authority of testimony, which already always carries the potential for perjury. Derrida writes of translation’s inherent link to questions of in/fidelity, and, when testimony cannot be translated, it immediately becomes associated with perjury.121 As Bermann writes, “Language remains radically impure, haunted by endless semantic contexts . . . Translation only multiplies this awareness of otherness that inhabits languages as it inhabits human society more generally.”122 I discuss this situation further in chapter 1 in relation to Nikòl Payen’s essays about her experiences as a Krèyol-English translator working with Haitian refugees on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice. For Payen, translation becomes a particularly fraught space where power relations between the government and the refugee are negotiated at the linguistic level.

introduction / 35

Furthermore, a growing number of linguists are concerned with the ways in which asylum seekers’ use of language comes under scrutiny and the resulting conclusions drawn by immigration agents.123 Michael Erard notes that a number of European nations and Australia have begun using the services of private companies that specialize in language analysis to screen asylum applicants and to verify their place of origin; Erard contends that an “elaborate shibboleth is used to regulate national borders—and to determine the origins of asylum seekers whose only forms of identification may be their bodies.”124 It is ironic that the ultimate asylum success story depicted in Well Founded Fear features Chinese dissident poet Huang Xiang whose life had been devoted to the poetic use of language while experiencing decades of persecution and imprisonment in China for his writings. Yet Huang Xiang’s capacity for language does not necessarily facilitate his case, but the mountain of documentary evidence that accompanies his application supports his request. Flipping through the pages, the asylum officer’s response is one of awe as he says that he is “humbled” and remarks, “what a life.” Huang Xiang is not a typical asylum applicant. His extensive application reflects the intervention of NGOs on his behalf. In fact, he became one of the refugees sponsored as a writer-in-residence by the Cities of Asylum Program in Pittsburgh, which provides safe haven for artists fleeing persecution. Finally, it should be noted that as a film that purports to “document” a kind of unadulterated reality, other issues of witnessing and testifying come into play. Although all the officers and applicants agreed to be filmed, how are the applicants and officers who participate in the film consciously or unconsciously affected by the cameras rolling? How does the camera’s witnessing impact the performance of testimonies?

Locating Refugee Narratives Thus far, I have focused primarily on the bureaucratic and juridical aspects of refugee articulations. However, Asylum Speakers juxtaposes the conditions of actual asylum interviews and human rights/public discourse with literary representations of refugees to reveal the imbrications between these two realms. As I discuss, human rights discourses and asylum speaker testimonies are inherently literary because of their narratological elements. Indeed, if language is central to hospitality, as I have discussed, literature must also be seen within the ambit of hospitality. Literary refugee narratives invoke the juridical and bureaucratic

36 / introduction

elements of human rights discourse to the extent that a book like Brother, I’m Dying functions as both a literary work and a form of human rights discourse.125 What are the effects of these intersections? Many literary works that I explore in this book incorporate testimonial narrative tactics in telling their stories.126 Many of these texts also “trespass” by using postmodern narrative tactics and offering narrators, who have traditionally been silenced, to act as native informants offering their testimonies to history. Yet, these testimonials serve as a hybrid genre: text-imonials, which blend the narrative elements of the oral testimonio format with that of essays, short-stories, and novels. As such, these texts demonstrate the complex subject positions of refugees as “native informants” and the difficulty in establishing “truths” through their testimonial narratives. I consider both intertextually and extratextually the connection between the political structures that these writers are writing about in the Americas and how they tell their stories and to whom. And while testimonial narrative tactics have the potential to subvert the “master narratives” of history, I argue that the use of these tactics calls testimonio into question as a purveyor of “truth.” The ambivalence surrounding these fictional testimonials reflects an ambivalent relationship between the fictionalized refugee “narrator-witness,” the nation-state, and language. By occupying an interstitial space between the pressures of the postcolonial native land (war, persecution, poverty, etc.) and migration, narratives about Caribbean and Central American refugees become what Judith Butler refers to as “dystopic travel narratives,”127 trespassing across existing disciplinary borders of U.S. ethnic, postcolonial, Caribbean studies, and American literature. Scholars such as Vera Kutzinski and George Handley have begun the work of bringing these fields together by examining literatures of the Caribbean and the United States beyond their national frames. For Handley, this constitutes comparing postslavery literatures of the Caribbean and United States, “alienated cousins . . . of the same plantation family.”128 New World refugees are situated at the crossroads between postcolonial and U.S. ethnic studies; Asylum Speakers brings these two categories together by revisiting and reenvisioning refugee narratives as part of a literature of the Americas. One of the earliest proponents of a hemispheric perspective was José Martí, who spent several years in the United States as a refugee after he had been expelled from Cuba for conspiring against the Spanish colonial authorities. Significantly, he wrote some of his most anti-imperialist tracts while residing in the United States and became an asylum speaker who entered into political discourse by critiquing the imperialism of the

introduction / 37

North to reclaim and remap American space. Martí writes, “Everything I have done to this day, and everything I shall do is to that end . . . to prevent in time the expansion of the United States into the Antilles and to prevent her from falling, with ever greater force, upon our American lands.”129 Refugees often incur negative associations with “the masses,” where individual subjectivities are lost in the struggle to survive amidst hordes of other people attempting to navigate the bureaucratic institutions of nation-states as well as the transnational institutions of NGOs. The contrasting figure is that of the exiled individual, who Edward Said describes as having a “touch of solitude and spirituality.”130 Ariel Dorfman reflects upon this distinction in his memoir Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey, in which he recounts his flight from Chile following the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. He writes that he chose to think of himself as an exile because there was “something vastly more romantic and Promethean than the fate embodied in that recently coined word refugee that the twentieth century had been forced to officialize as a result of so much mass murder and wandering.”131 Thus, if refugees have been cast as a bureaucratic, anti-aesthetic opposite of the exiled, how do we address them when they surface in the literary realm? Conversely, what do we do when literature emerges in the explicitly bureaucratic, judicial space? For example, during the U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the U.S. policy of repatriating Haitian refugees interdicted at sea, the lone dissenter Justice Blackmun advised that the government’s attorney read Graham Greene’s novel The Comedians to understand the harsh conditions in Haiti.132 Blackmun’s choice of a nonHaitian author probably speaks to Western cultural blindness to Haitian literature, but my larger point tackles how the literary may become configured as a testimony to the “real” and as evidence. There is no established category in which to situate refugee narratives. They encounter their own literary checkpoints, and it is important to consider where these checkpoints arise institutionally. Despite discussion of interdisciplinarity, how do disciplinary boundaries continue to be reinforced? Refugee narratives, pressing the boundaries of the categories by which we study literature, call into question the configuration of literary study in national and even regional terms. In this sense, as they are poised in the disciplinary gateways, how might we reassemble our notion of literary study? Refugees themselves encompass a diversity of experience: fleeing political persecution, weathering economic crisis, being detained in camps, being repatriated, and even encountering few

38 / introduction

obstacles in gaining asylum. Although they form a part of the literature of migration and diaspora, the political instabilities of the refugees that mark their in-betweenness keep the majority of them from the stabilized spaces of articulation. In her discussion of the myriad forms of statelessness, including those who are internally displaced, Judith Butler critiques Hannah Arendt’s configuration of the refugee as one in exile “who has left some place and then arrives at another.” Butler writes, The idea of passing from one bounded territory to another requires a narrative line in which arrival follows departure and where the dominant themes are assimilation and estrangement. Surely a certain thematic for comparative literary studies has depended on the legibility of that transition and the stability of those territories that constitute the “then” and “now” as well as the “there” and “here” of emplotment, topology, and narrative line.133 Literary studies have been able to imagine “exile,” but neither statelessness without arrival nor statelessness within the state. The question becomes how the lack of political membership can be narrativized when one does not “arrive” anywhere, is detained for months or years, or is involuntarily repatriated. These conditions require alternative narrative routes, or to return to Glissant—a rhizomatic, circular, detoured, diverted notion of narrative. Refugee narratives represent specific kinds of migration and thus specific kinds of literary narratives. In this book I explore those written by writers residing in the United States; however, I do not suggest that these works fall easily into U.S. ethnic literary categories. Ironically, these writers embody a mobility to move between the metropolitan space and the “native” space in a way that their subjects ultimately cannot. Refugee narratives present a particular challenge to the traditional categories through which literature has been studied. For example, Caribbean literature has typically been aligned with linguistic categories— francophone, anglophone, and hispanophone—which demarcate prescriptive disciplinary borders so that in English departments often only anglophone Caribbean literature has been studied (if it is studied at all), while typically hispanophone writers are studied in Spanish/Portuguese departments, and so on. However, these linguistic borders reflect and reinscribe the hegemonic geographic and linguistic boundaries established through European colonialism. Such divisions create a false sense of historical continuity. By focusing on narratives from and about such varied places as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Central America, and

introduction / 39

the United States, this study “trespasses” not only across the prescribed linguistic, geographic, and national categorizations of Caribbean literature and other literatures of the Americas but also into the landscape of U.S. literature, which requires “legitimate” acknowledgment of these texts. Furthermore, by juxtaposing these refugee texts from such varied places, the history of U.S. economic imperialism in the region emerges.134 Each text that I examine in this book reveals that asylum speakers must negotiate between the global and the local contexts in their testimonials. Although we cannot definitively locate refugee narratives within existing disciplinary models, the majority of the creative works that I analyze in this book reflect the conditions of Caribbean refugees so that it is necessary to locate their authors in the broader history of Caribbean writers in the United States. With the rise in immigrants from all parts of the Caribbean to the United States, we now have texts being produced in English by writers from such disparate places as Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Jamaica. I do not want to conflate the histories of these places, but it is necessary to address both texts and writers from these places as representatives of colonialism’s corresponding experiences and significant contributions to “American” literature. I put this term in quotation marks to highlight its ambiguity as a literary/geographic category, especially in reference to the Caribbean, which is itself a part of the Americas. Although “American” literature has traditionally implied literature produced in the United States and bounded by U.S. geographic borders, I use this term to represent literature from throughout the Americas.135 As Paul Giles states, “American literature should be seen as no longer bound to the inner workings of any particular country or imagined organic community but instead as interwoven systematically with traversals between territory and intercontinental space.”136 Literary refugee narratives stretch and bend our notions of U.S. ethnic and postcolonial literatures and their various subcategories as they reflect the experiences of people in between national spaces who have no legitimate political membership. The traces of colonial history that they represent require that we attend to their postcoloniality even as they reflect migration from the native land. Thus, they inherit both national and transnational traditions. As Amy Kaplan asserts, “imperialism as a political or economic process abroad is inseparable from the social relations and cultural discourses of race, gender, ethnicity, and class at home.”137 These issues speak to the increasing number of U.S. “ethnic” writers having roots in the Caribbean; it is necessary rethink the manner in which this literature alters the already established categories of

40 / introduction

ethnic American studies without neglecting its ties to postcolonial studies.138 One must decipher racial, ethnic, and gender categories as they are manifested differently in the Caribbean, Central America, and the United States. Considering the multiple placements of refugee narratives, one must rethink postcolonial and U.S. ethnic formations. For example, what is lost if one claims Edwidge Danticat as either a U.S. ethnic writer or a Haitian writer? I aim not to erase either the postcolonial or the ethnic American categories but to ask why these categories exist as either/or categories and what can be gained when we think of them as coeval categories, which allow us to consider Danticat as simultaneously an African-American and a Caribbean writer. Without examining the concurrency of these formations there is the danger of eclipsing the multiple heritages and histories for a given writer or text. Jenny Sharpe cautions against “treating transnational diasporas as homogenous groups, we need to exercise vigilance about locating their members within specific racial formations. The tendency among critics, however, is to ignore the historical specificities governing migrations from the former colonies to different metropolitan areas.”139 We must find ways to theorize the complexities of racial and ethnic identities both “at home” and in the diaspora, especially for refugees who remain in limbo. While the tendency has been to address U.S. ethnic studies and postcolonial studies as having separate histories and subjects, the presence of refugee narratives in the Americas demands that we find new ways of thinking about both of these fields. I contend that it is necessary to “trespass” across existing methodologies to interrogate the formations of literatures of the Americas in their multiple locations throughout the hemisphere. I readily concede that this kind of trespassing can be risky with the danger of misinterpretations and lack of “expertise” and understanding, but much is to be gained in doing so. Refugee narratives require that we move outside our epistemological comfort zones to fully address the cultural ramifications of both the historical events of the past that have shaped the hemisphere and the contemporary events of the present that will shape the future.

Witnessing Asylum Speaker Discourses In this book I address the asylum speakers from several different regions representing several different situations. Chapter 1 examines how the refugee signals a new category of forced migration in the Caribbean for whom the United States is often viewed as the prospective space of

introduction / 41

political and economic asylum. I focus on Haitian refugees because of their particularly fraught relationship with the U.S. asylum process. I analyze how U.S. interdiction policy impedes Haitian boat refugees from producing testimonies that establish “credible fear” of persecution in Haiti, a requirement for progressing through the legalities of the U.S. asylum process. Drawing on human rights reports, I argue that the systematic dismissal of Haitian refugee testimonies results in what I term “inter-dictions.” I draw upon Harris’s notion of the “limbo gateway” to analyze how writers attempt to narrate the often-silenced transnational experiences of Haitian refugees, who exist as “limbo citizens” outside the boundaries of the nation-state. In Nikòl Payen’s autobiographical essays “Lavalas” and “Something in the Water . . . Reflections of a People’s Journey,” translation becomes a limbo space of unmaking and remaking language and meaning for Haitian asylum seekers detained at Guantánamo. In Edwidge Danticat’s story “Children of the Sea,” boat refugees exist in an ontological limbo on the sea, where a young reporter’s testimony serves as a precarious lifeline. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the work of another seminal figure in Caribbean Studies, Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite, whose prose-poem “Dream Haiti” utilizes experimental narrative and visual imagery to create a graphic poetic grammar of refugee experience, reminding us how the Haitian refugee haunts the region and recalling his poem about the Middle Passage, “Caliban.” In chapter 2, I continue my analysis of Haitian boat refugees by examining a U.S. Coast Guard electronic archive of photographic images of Haitian migrants being intercepted at sea. I argue that the refugee allows me to trace how the United States becomes tied to the postcolonial via the Caribbean. These photographs stand in contention with the refugee narratives of the previous chapter by representing an institutional form of witnessing Haitian migration. While Haitians’ experiences adrift on the open seas are by their clandestine nature “unmapped” and undocumented, the photographs purport to function as testimonials to these experiences via a narrative of “search-and-rescue,” which I argue is linked to a military attitude of imperial paternalism. Drawing on instruction manuals, memoranda, and newspaper accounts, I argue that analyzing the Coast Guard is crucial to understanding the movement of Caribbean refugees to the United States. I examine the representation of Haitians in these photos and contextualize them within the history of U.S.-Haiti relations and U.S. interdiction policy. I assert that the photographs deploy a visual rhetoric of Coast Guard hospice via images depicting the

42 / introduction

cleansing of refugee bodies, medical examinations, and Coast Guard members as “nurturers” of refugee children, but I contend that the visual and textual rhetoric of hospitality obscures the hostility whereby national borders are violently reinforced. Photography becomes a means to contain the threat posed by Haitian physicality by fixing refugees within a visual frame. This containment carries deep resonances with the historical treatment of Haitians by the United States government. Chapter 3 examines the 1991 U.S. congressional hearings’ published document The Plight of Haitian Sugarcane Cutters in the Dominican Republic. While the hearings purport to provide a forum to investigate the exploitation of Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic, I assert that these humanitarian aims ring false when read alongside the plight of Haitian boat refugees that I discuss in chapters 1 and 2. I deconstruct the hearings’ testimonial discourse to reveal how it excludes the voices of migrant laborers and effaces the history of U.S. economic and political ties to the Dominican sugar industry. By examining the hearings, I interrogate the ways in which public discourse can construct “natives” and “native spaces,” yet, with the voices of Haitian cane cutters absent from the hearings, the labor refugee becomes “foreclosed” through the silencing forces of transnational labor as well as the limitations of human rights discourses.140 I juxtapose the hearings with Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones, which tells of the 1937 slaughter of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic through the fractured testimony of Amabelle Désir. For the Haitians who survive the massacre, testimony becomes a space laden with ambivalence, especially for those who expect to find justice after telling their stories to Haitian officials, who stop listening (and recording) when the money they have designated for reparations runs out. I illustrate how both language and the material body become sites of state power negotiation during the massacre. Because testimonials in the novel are often fragmented and at times silenced, I argue that the novel critiques the revolutionary potential of testimonio. The narrator’s voice reveals ambiguity about the ability of testimony to provide closure, healing, or solidarity even for those persecuted Haitians who return to Haiti in search of sanctuary. Chapter 4 considers the configuration of “refugee seamen,” an overlooked category of protection established by the UN Refugee Convention. I discuss the contemporary resonances of this category by revisiting Caribbean refugees’ associations with the Middle Passage via contemporary transnational movements of capital and labor vis-à-vis the global

introduction / 43

shipping industry. My analysis incorporates a discussion of the economics of the global shipping industry. With the deregulation of vessel registration, international sailing ships and their owners are no longer bound by national trade and labor laws and instead often operate under so-called “flags of convenience.” The lack of corporate accountability and the increased exploitation of seafarers suggest the need to reconfigure contemporary notions of “refugee seamen” in ways that address the conditions of transnational laborers. I then examine Francisco Goldman’s 1997 novel, The Ordinary Seaman, which portrays a group of undocumented seafarers originating in various countries of Central America; they become boat refugees when they are stranded aboard an anchored, nonfunctioning ship in Brooklyn Harbor. The novel rewrites the typical Central American testimonio as the protagonist, a former Sandinista soldier, attempts to recount his experiences of warfare, but his memories of the past are often subsumed by his efforts to survive on board the ship. While contemporary theories of transnationalism emphasize the flows of culture, people, and capital across borders, along with a subsequent decline of the nation-state, the anchored ship becomes a symbol of the debilitating effects of transnationalism, where the workers are left to languish as they encounter reinforced national, political, racial, and economic borders. I trace the ship as a symbol of migration and the movement of transnational capital and analyze how Goldman reconfigures the ship as a rooted entity to represent current configurations of transnational capital repeating the stagnation of the Middle Passage. The anchored ship is also juxtaposed with the ship at sea (discussed in relation to Haitian refugees), while the corporate/corporal containment of laborers reconfigures the containment of Haitian bodies in Coast Guard photographs. In Goldman’s novel, the migrant workers, who were nearly effaced by war in their native lands, find that transnational capitalism produces forms of economic persecution and erasure. In chapters 1 through 4 I discuss the representation of the native space as a space of persecution, and chapter 5 explores the resonance of refugee narratives after a refugee has been granted asylum. I consider how Julia Alvarez, whose family escaped from the Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic, represents refugee experience as it is inflected through familial relationships in her nonfiction essays and in her semiautobiographical novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo! By representing the intimate manifestations of refugeeness in the family, we begin to see how the familial narrative of political refugee status

44 / introduction

becomes a means to explore a number of other political, economic, and environmental displacements within and outside the family. I also focus on narratives of Cubans who have received asylum in the United States. I contextualize them within the discourse of hospitality put forth by the U.S. government in the early years of Cuban migration (1960s). I juxtapose this discourse with a reading of Ivonne Lamazares’s novel The Sugar Island (2000), which questions the commodification and sensationalization of Cuban refugee testimonies in the United States, particularly within the Cuban exile community of Miami. Finally, I end the chapter by analyzing the shift in U.S. attitudes toward Cuban refugees that occurred during the 1980 Mariel boatlift as portrayed in Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés’s collection of short stories Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles.

1 /

Inter-dictions and Limbo Citizens: Haitian Boat Refugee Narratives Unlike the Cubans who came to the United States after 1959 to flee a Communist government unfriendly to the United States, the Haitians came from a government friendly to this nation. Thus, the dilemma: if the United States welcomed Haitian refugees on political grounds, it would have verified Duvalier’s brutal repression of his people, a favorite U.S. charge against Castro. . . .The double-standard was most evident during the Mariel boatlift of 1980, when 125,000 Cubans were welcomed to the United States with “open hearts and open arms,” while an estimated 25,000 Haitians, who came into south Florida during the same period and in similar fashion, were denied asylum and threatened with deportation. —felix masud piloto, from welcomed exiles to illegal immigrants We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone. —édouard glissant, poetics of relation The sea is our embassy. —haitian refugee saying1

As I have discussed, the politics of hospitality configures the asylumseeking process as a site of struggle over refugees’ articulations. A poetics of hospitality foregrounds the place of language in deploying the state laws of hospitality in the asylum-seeking process while a poetics is also central for seeking the justice symbolized by unconditional hospitality. This chapter focuses on Haitian refugee narratives of migration that occur by boat or raft. I consider the implications of testimony and testimonial narrative within the limbo space of the ocean and the refugee camp for those who are interdicted by the U.S. Coast Guard. Boat migration poses specific issues for geographic and cultural “trespassing” as such refugees attempt to cross illegally into the United States by water. In addition to the environmental challenges they face, these migrants encounter bureaucratic obstacles—such as U.S. Coast Guard interdiction, INS officials, and detention centers—that hinder their attempts to gain asylum in the United States. While previous Caribbean

46 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

migration narratives of the 1950s and 1960s represent the journey from the native space to the metropolis and the various negotiations of race, ethnicity, and language that they entailed, Haitian boat refugee narratives are most often distinguished by the lack of arrival in a new place.2 These narratives challenge us to consider, in literal and visceral ways, that the Caribbean has been configured through aquatic metaphors of fluidity. The space of the open seas shapes and shifts postcolonial Caribbean identities so that they become geographically unmoored from the boundaries of the nation-state. Elizabeth DeLoughrey contends, “the ocean’s perpetual movement is radically decentering; it resists attempts to fix a locus of history.”3 These narratives tell of a chasm, a submarine, submerged space—evoking Derek Walcott’s famous assertion that the “sea is history”—to indicate that the history of the Middle Passage lies on the ocean floor: “Then there were the packed cries, / the shit, the moaning: / Exodus. / Bone soldered by coral to bone, / mosaics / mantled by the benediction of the shark’s shadow.”4 Because it is a submerged history, it has gone unrecognized, “but the ocean kept turning blank pages / looking for History.” While Walcott was referring to the lost history of the Middle Passage, boat refugee narratives suggest that once again we must look to the submerged and submarine spaces to begin to comprehend the complexities of Caribbean history and identity. I begin by examining human rights reports that document the conditions of Haitian refugees in the U.S. asylum process. For refugees, the construction of testimonies about Haiti as a life-threatening place is central to the asylum process as these migrants attempt to gain entry to the United States. Before being allowed to even apply for asylum, interdicted and detained refugees must first be screened to demonstrate that they have “credible fear,” the belief that in returning to Haiti their lives would be in imminent danger. This process can be as simple as a “shout test” whereby refugees “must step forward and express a fear of return before any screening is provided.”5 In chapter 2, I examine the U.S. Coast Guard’s role in carrying out interdiction policy and its photographic documentation of refugee interdictions, but in this chapter I consider the effects interdictions have on refugee articulations. What is allowed to be said? What is prohibited from being stated? What conditions lead to testimonial prohibitions? Interdiction represents prohibition and exclusion and specifically targets Haitians from passing into the United States. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the transitive form of the word “interdiction” is defined as “to declare authority against the doing of (an action) or the use of (a thing); to forbid, prohibit, to debar

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 47

or preclude by or as by a command.”6 More recently, the word has accumulated U.S. militaristic connotations: “to impede (an enemy force) or interrupt (its lines of communication or supply), esp. by aerial bombardment.” And finally, it also connotes drug enforcement: “to intercept (a prohibited commodity, etc.) or to prevent (its movement).”7 Notably, the latter is framed around preventing the movement of things, not people. Nevertheless, through interdiction, Haitians become associated with the “enemy” and criminal forces against which the United States must protect itself. Michel S. Laguerre explains how the U.S. policy of interdiction underscores this notion of warfare by “abrogat[ing] Haiti’s right to patrol and police nearby international waters. In this sense, the United States has declared war on the Haitian nation (or at least some of its people) without declaring war on the state of Haiti.”8 I juxtapose the human rights documents with creative Haitian boat refugee narratives that attempt to break the surface of articulation. The texts I analyze include Haitian-American writer Nikòl Payen’s autobiographical essays “Something in the Water . . . Reflections of a People’s Journey” (2001) and “Lavalas: The Flood After the Flood” (2002); Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat’s short-story “Children of the Sea” (1996); and Barbadian writer Kamau Brathwaite’s prose-poem “Dream Haiti” (1994; 2007). These narratives also trespass in terms of language; they are written primarily in English, not French or Krèyol. Although Payen writes of her direct experience working with Haitian refugees, Danticat and Brathwaite present fictional imaginings of refugee experience. Both of their stories were initially published after the mass exodus of boat refugees from Haiti following the military coup that ousted Aristide when Coast Guard interdictions were in full swing.9 Additionally, these texts were written from locations in the United States, not the native “home” space in the Caribbean; however, each text also moves between native and U.S. spaces, shuttling between the categories of Caribbean literature and U.S. ethnic literature as these writers continuously negotiate the local, home space, and the spaces of migration. Drawing on the human rights reports, I assert that Haitian boat refugees are asylum speakers whose testimonies are interdicted by the political and military institutional forces that infringe upon asylum processes. I use the term “inter-diction” to emphasize that Haitian boat refugee testimonies are articulations occurring in the transnational, in-between, indeterminate spaces of the seas, Coast Guard ship, and the detention center. These “inter-dictions” constitute a poetics of hospitality for Haitian boat refugees as they attempt to offer testimonies to members of

48 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

the INS or Coast Guard, whose interests lie in maintaining the laws of hospitality via interdiction. As the human rights documents I discuss demonstrate, Haitian boat refugees confront extreme bureaucratic obstacles in gaining access to an asylum interview and testifying convincingly for U.S. immigration authorities, which results in the systematic discrediting of Haitian refugee testimonies. Aside from the observations of human rights monitors that are found in these reports, there is little consistent record of Haitian asylum seekers’ testimonies. Thus, the reports are essential for understanding the conditions of both refugees who have been interdicted and those who have been returned to Haiti; however, because they must conform to the parameters of human rights discourse typically rendered in legal and policy-making terms, the reports are also limited in scope. Therefore, I assert that by juxtaposing the reports with the creative works we can explore how writers imagine the bureaucratic manipulations of Haitian boat refugee articulations as well as how they represent the corporeal and psychic inter-dictions of boat refugees. While I am suggesting neither that these texts or writers stand in for Haitian refugees nor that their words replace the testimonies of asylum seekers, I do suggest that they participate in reimagining and reassembling this limbo gateway in order to forge a space for Haitian asylum speakers to be heard.

Haiti/U.S. Historical Connections To understand the current relationship between the U.S. government and Haitian boat refugees, it is important to consider the long and complicated relationship between the United States and Haiti. Not until 1865 did the United States officially acknowledge Haiti’s independence, even though the nation became the first black republic in 1804, following the Haitian Revolution that originated as a massive slave revolt.10 During that time, the United States became the destination of white French families seeking refuge from the violence.11 The independence of Haiti represented the ultimate form of subversion as the United States and other colonies in the Americas feared that similar slave revolts could occur on their own soil. Shortly after the United States finally acknowledged Haitian independence, the northern power began its bid to incorporate Haiti into its strategic plans by attempting to acquire Môle St. Nicholas for establishing a military base.12 The history of U.S. intervention into Haitian politics and economy continued with the U.S. Occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, during

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 49

which North American companies acquired a significant amount of Haitian land and thereby displaced countless numbers of peasants.13 During this time, U.S. Marines rounded up thousands of peasants to work on labor crews, also known as corvées. When a peasant rebellion, the Cacos Insurrection, erupted, Marines responded by massacring thousands.14 Michael Dash discusses how during the time of the occupation, texts that sensationalized notions of primitiveness and vodou and purported to tell of the “real” Haiti were published in the United States. Among them were accounts of former Marines who served during the U.S. Occupation: John Houston Craige’s Cannibal Cousins (1934) and Black Baghdad (1933) and Faustin Wirkus’s The White King of La Gonave (1931).15 Such texts disseminated associations of Haitianness and blackness with deviance, ideas soon inscribed into the U.S. imaginary. Implicit in this notion of Haitian “deviance” is the racial makeup of Haitians, who are predominantly of African descent owing to the composition of colonial St. Domingue, which in 1789 had a slave population of 500,000, a freedman population of 28,000, and a white population of 40,000.16 With the election of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier in 1957, violence in Haiti increased as the secret police force, the Tonton Macoutes, tortured and killed thousands of people deemed enemies of the dictator. The United States supported the regime and, in fact, saw it as an asset in its war on communist Cuba; Grosfoguel explains, “During the Cuban missile crisis [1962], Duvalier offered Haiti’s harbors to the United States and provided the crucial vote to expel Cuba from the Organization of American States.”17 Even after the death of “Papa Doc,” oppressive rule continued under his son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier and economic ties between the United States and Haiti were strengthened. Robert Lawless describes it as “a relationship featuring private investments from the United States that would be wooed by such incentives as no custom taxes, a low minimum wage, the suppression of labor unions, and the rights of U.S. companies to repatriate their profits from their offshore plants.”18 Paul Farmer explains the integral role the United States had in shaping Haiti’s politics, economy, and military: “During the Duvalier dictatorships (1957–1986) and the junta regimes that followed, the Haitian military, created by an act of the U.S. Congress—and that has known no other enemy than its own people—was used to control and terrorize the population into submission.”19 In reaction to Duvalier’s oppressive regime, Haitian migration by boat began in 1963, when twenty-five refugees arrived in Florida seeking political asylum but were denied and sent back to Haiti.20 In 1972, “Poorer

50 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

Haitians who could not afford exit visas or air fares but could, by selling their possessions or land, raise the amount charged by boat captains for the 700–mile trip to Florida began leaving in large numbers—the ‘boat people’ phenomenon was born.”21 The year 1972 also marked the establishment of the first detention centers, and, as Dash argues, these facilities were “a dramatic reaction to fear of contamination by the unknown and unspeakable.”22 While Haitians had also typically emigrated to their neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic, or to the Bahamas, there was a shift after 1977, when these nations began turning them away and Haitians began migrating with more frequency to the United States. Between 50,000 and 70,000 Haitian boat people arrived in Miami between 1977 and 1981; instead of being granted refugee status, most were placed in detention centers and eventually deported.23 As Felix Masud-Piloto writes in the first epigraph to this chapter, this mass exclusion of Haitians occurred at virtually the same time as the Mariel boat lift (1980), which brought nearly 125,000 Cubans to the United States. As he explains, the discrepancy between the treatment of Cubans and Haitians can be attributed to the U.S. policy that has historically favored those coming from communist nations. In 1965, as the numbers of Cubans fleeing Cuba by boat increased, the U.S. Coast Guard stepped in to aid Cubans in their flight by intercepting them and bringing them to the United States.24 As many observers have noted, the policy also appears to be racially biased to favor Cubans of a lighter complexion over darker-skinned Haitians. The treatment of Southeast Asian refugees in the period leading up to the Haitian and Cuban refugee crises also reveals the fissures in U.S. treatment of asylum seekers. Following the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, between 1975 and 1979, thousands of Vietnamese were paroled by the U.S. attorney general to be allowed entrance into the United States. This included those people who were in refugee camps in Thailand as well as boat refugees. They were later allowed to become permanent residents. In fact, as Sucheng Chan explains, because of the media attention given to the Indochinese “boat people,” the State Department and INS worked to process those refugees more quickly.25 Following the 1979 International Conference on Indochinese Refugees in Geneva, during which Vietnam agreed to halt illegal departure and promote legal departures through the Orderly Departure Program (ODP), the United States agreed to resettle more refugees who had family in the United States, were former employees of U.S. government agencies in Vietnam, or those who were otherwise affiliated with the U.S. presence

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 51

in Vietnam prior to 1975. This was intended to take the burden off countries of first asylum in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore). The Vietnamese refugee crisis, and related crises in Cambodia and Laos, contributed greatly to the passage of the 1980 Refugee Act, which sought to regularize the asylum process.26 A second Geneva Conference in 1989 adopted a Comprehensive Plan of Action (CPA) to reduce clandestine boat migration, which had recurred after subsiding for several years. This agreement dealt with Vietnamese and Laotian refugees and was more selective in the screening process. Those who were determined to have a well-founded fear were resettled in another country, while those deemed to be economic migrants were repatriated. Unlike the repatriation of Haitian refugees that I discuss below, Indochinese repatriates were given financial aid to assist them in their return home, and members of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees monitored the Vietnamese government’s treatment of repatriates. The U.S. policy toward Central American refugees (Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador) during the Reagan administration in the 1980s was much less accommodating than its policy toward Vietnamese and Cubans under the previous Carter administration. The United States took the approach of sending development “aid” into the region in an attempt to stabilize the economies in the region and keep people from migrating north. It also encouraged refugees to resettle in other countries such as Mexico. The majority of Central American refugees did not meet the asylum criteria in the 1980 Refugee Act, despite the fact that the United Nations generally viewed them as refugees. María Cristina García explains that the U.S. requirements placed more stringent parameters on individual applicants to prove their well-founded fear.27 The United States responded to the migration of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans with increased border patrols and detentions.28 Thus, most Central Americans who entered the United States were illegal. While Nicaraguans had a bit more success than Salvadorans and Guatemalans seeking asylum, the U.S. policy was overwhelmingly against granting asylum to Central Americans.

Interdiction Policy The Carter administration created the classification of “Cuban-Haitian Entrant,” which allowed Cubans and Haitians who had migrated by sea during 1980 to remain in the United States although it did not certify them as refugees; instead, the United States granted them an ambiguous

52 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

legal status, and most eventually became permanent residents.29 However, following the U.S. presidential election, the Reagan administration saw Haitian boat migration as a continuing threat and established the interdiction program in conjunction with the dictatorial Duvalier government as a way to stem the flow of migrants fleeing Haiti for U.S. shores. The terms of the agreement authorize U.S. Coast Guard vessels “to stop and board unflagged vessels on the high seas [and in Haitian coastal waters], determine if their passengers are undocumented aliens bound for the United States, and if so, return them to their country of origin, in this case, Haiti.”30 The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights explains the protocol for interviewing interdicted refugees: “According to the bilateral agreement, an INS examiner and interpreter would be stationed on board a designated Coast Guard cutter to interview the intercepted Haitians. If a person were found to have a reasonable fear of returning to Haiti, that person would be taken to the United States to seek asylum in accordance with refugee law.”31 As Janice D. Villiers observes, “For the first time in U.S history, immigration was controlled by using Coast Guard blockades to prevent people from reaching its shores. Both national and international observers vigorously condemned the use of such extraordinary measures.”32 Human rights lawyers and Haitian human rights organizations have argued that under these conditions Haitians often have very limited opportunity to make their case and gain access to an asylum hearing. The 1992 human rights report Half the Story: The Skewed U.S. Monitoring of Repatriated Haitian Refugees states, “Determinations of whether Haitians met the ‘credible fear’ standard were based on five- to ten-minute interviews held aboard Coast Guard cutters, often after the Haitians had been without food or water and exposed to the elements for days.”33 Furthermore, interdiction of Haitian refugees at sea made legal representation inaccessible.34 Because one is required to be within U.S. territory to apply for asylum in the United States, “being in U.S. custody but outside the United States itself does not grant eligibility to claim asylum.”35 Thus, if migrants are intercepted either on the high seas or in Haitian territorial waters, the United States is not required to provide an opportunity to apply for asylum. This treatment contrasts the treatment historically given to Cubans who migrated by sea to U.S. shores; these Cubans, as Christopher Mitchell explains, “enjoyed both the benefits of the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, permitting them to avoid detention in the United States and return to Cuba, and the active sympathy of the INS district office in Miami.”36Executive Director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center Cheryl Little argues,

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 53

“There is effectively no mechanism in place for screening Haitian asylum seekers apprehended by the U.S. Coast Guard. This despite the fact that every Cuban who is interdicted receives instructions and an asylum screening interview, and every interdicted Chinese national is given a questionnaire in his/her native language to complete and then may be screened.”37 Despite massive boat migrations during periods of extreme violence in Haiti, the majority of Haitian boat refugees have been repatriated without the opportunity to apply for asylum. Because only a miniscule number of Haitians are taken to the United States to apply for asylum, the majority of Haitians are never officially classified as refugees by the INS. And yet, the year prior to establishing the interdiction program, the INS Asylum Program report maintains that with the passage of the Refugee Act of 1980, “U.S. law expanded the definition of ‘refugee’ to include someone who has been persecuted in the past, as well as someone who has a well-founded fear of future persecution.”38 In a classic move of official double-speak, however, the report also notes that there is “no universally accepted definition of persecution,” thus leaving the door open for refusal of asylum claims. In the weeks following the September 1991 military coup ousting the democratically elected President Jean Bertrand Aristide, the Bush administration continued to interdict and repatriate Haitians. After growing opposition from human rights groups, the administration shifted its policy and sent intercepted Haitians to detention camps at the military base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Between September 1991 and March 1992, 34,000 Haitians were detained, and one-third was given permission to apply for asylum in the United States “in sharp contrast to the figures for Haitians who had been interviewed aboard U.S. Coast Guard vessels.”39 Because of the growing number of Haitians housed at Guantánamo, on May 24, 1992, U.S. policy toward Haitians again shifted when President Bush issued the Kennebunkport Order that authorized the Coast Guard to repatriate any Haitians intercepted without the opportunity for screening: “Haitians desiring asylum in the United States were told that all applications for asylum would have to be initiated at the U.S. Consular Office in Port-au-Prince, where they would be screened by U.S. immigration officers.”40 In-country processing of refugees meant that Haitians seeking asylum would have to “out” themselves to the same authorities from whom they sought refuge.41 In fact, in August 1994, applicants waiting in line were attacked by regime forces. Of 9,389 applications for asylum applied for in-country (representing 15,580 people), only 61 cases (136 people) were admitted to the United States.42 Bill Frelick also

54 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

points out that the screening standards for refugees were more stringent than international refugee standards, and those Haitians who were successful at obtaining asylum were primarily those of the elite class.43 One obstacle facing illiterate people was the inability to fill out the extensive application. Following the U.S. Occupation (1994) and Aristide’s return to power, most Haitians were returned to Haiti. During the same time, Cubans were granted refugee status and allowed to come to the United States.44 From the outset the interdiction program drew sharp criticism for what many argued was a violation of international law. Particularly, interdiction policy violates the obligation of nonrefoulement, of which Article 33 of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees states, “No Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”45 Furthermore, Pallis argues that in doing so, the Coast Guard violates the laws of the seas: “although the territorial sea is ‘territory,’ given the seas’ special juridical status, international law has unquestioned primacy in the zone, trumping not only the coastal state’s domestic law but its sovereignty also.”46 Furthermore, the policy has drawn criticism for returning Haitians to dangerous conditions in Haiti, where those who are repatriated can face retribution upon return.47 Some returnees have been imprisoned in Delmas 33, a prison notorious for horrendous living conditions, until their families could pay a fee to release them.48

Human Rights Discourse and Haitian Refugees Gunther O. Wagner, who headed three INS survey missions, decided that most asylum claims made by Haitians were lies. “I feel that 95 to 97 percent of the people obviously have had no problems, and therefore would not be eligible for asylum,” he recalled telling an asylum officer working at Guantanamo. “It is my opinion that most of these cases are fraudulent cases . . .” 49 —national coalition for haitian refugees and americas watch, half the story: the skewed u.s. monitoring of repatriated haitian refugees

Because the conditions of hospitality involve delineating the rights of those people who attempt to enter a host country, the discourse surrounding assessing the rights or lack of rights of those people become

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 55

part of the poetics of hospitality. Reports of human rights abuses have become a staple of human rights discourse—documentation that is meant to provide evidence or proof of abuses. These reports typically function in the juridical realm as a way to document and bring attention to a situation and sometimes appeal to governments to intervene. Typically, the reports are drawn up by an NGO or organization such as Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International. In my reading of two human rights reports about Haitian boat refugees, I keep in mind not only the information provided about Haitian asylum-seeker testimony but also the reports’ role in a poetics of hospitality. The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights’ report Refugee Refoulement: The Forced Return of Haitians under the U.S.-Haitian Interdiction Agreement (1990) and a report published by the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, in conjunction with Americas Watch, titled Half the Story: The Skewed U.S. Monitoring of Repatriated Haitian Refugees (1992) examine the legal questions of interviewing, detaining, and repatriating Haitian “boat people” by the U.S. government. These reports both raise serious concerns regarding the intersections between national borders, territoriality and testimony for “limbo citizens” who seek asylum in the United States and document the systematic methods by which Haitian asylum seeker testimonies have overwhelmingly been denied by INS officials. Here, the discrepancy between who tells what story and to whom they tell it becomes crucial. As the above epigraph demonstrates, most often, despite migrants’ testimonies of persecution in their homeland, their testimonies to Haiti as a life-threatening place are denied credibility as the majority of Haitians picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard have been repatriated, demonstrating Derrida’s observation that asylum is “controlled, curbed, and monitored by implacable juridical restrictions” of the nation-state.50 I analyze how Haitian refugee testimonies become embedded in a poetics of hospitality that is translated through the politics of the nation-state to consider what it means to speak as a political subject. Upon reading Refugee Refoulement, it becomes clear the significant role that testimony plays for those Haitians who are interdicted at sea.51 Coast Guard ships became spaces where testimony and territorial boundaries converge as Haitians who are intercepted at sea undergo interviews while on board to determine whether they qualify for asylum. Keeping in mind Walcott’s notion of the “sea is history,” we must ask what kind of “history” is being inscribed on the seas by the INS and Coast Guard and what histories are being effaced? Published in 1990, the

56 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

report describes the Lawyers Committee’s assessment of the situation of interdicted Haitians seeking asylum after it conducted interviews with U.S. officials, Haitian officials, and Haitian returnees in 1989.52 The Lawyers Committee argues that interviews occurring on board Coast Guard ships are compromised by the lack of privacy and the brevity of the interviews, resulting in fragmented, partial testimonies that subsequently fail to obtain asylum. That these interviews take place in such difficult conditions on the high seas compounds the refugees’ ability to testify to persecution, when the persecution itself could dramatically hinder their ability to testify. The report explains the circumstances of the interviews “may not be private; the Haitians may be hungry, are definitely ill-at-ease and have no idea why they are being asked questions. It is impossible to ask and get minimal, let alone adequate, responses to the seventeen questions in a brief interview, particularly since both questions and answers must be translated.”53 The list of questions asked of the refugees reveal how language, particularly in the form of questions—whether innocent or not—can quickly place conditions upon hospitality. The questions supposed to have been asked on board Coast Guard cutters include: What is your name? Where were you born? What is the date of your birth? What is your current address? What is your country of citizenship? Do you have a passport? When you left Haiti, to what country did you intend to go? Why did you leave Haiti? What kind of work do you do? Why did you wish to go to the United States? Have you belonged to any organizations in Haiti? Have you done anything in Haiti which you believe will result in problems for you if you return? Have you ever been detained or sent to jail in Haiti? Do the conditions in Haiti affect your freedom more than the rest of the population? Have you or your family been mistreated by the authorities in Haiti? Is there any reason you cannot return to Haiti? Is there anything else you would like to say?54 The report also explains that, in addition to rarely being given sufficient time or privacy in their interviews, Haitians are not assured of confidentiality. Furthermore, the INS examiners “sometimes found it too time consuming to write down all the answers.”55 The report analyzes an INS examiner’s documentation of interviews with intercepted Haitians: Some of the answers given by the Haitians clearly warranted further questioning by the INS officer interviewing the

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 57

Haitians . . . Although the guidelines provide for a private interview if there is any indication of a refugee claim, unequivocal statements by the Haitians of fear of return to Haiti were apparently disregarded. To the question “Have you or your family been mistreated by authorities in Haiti” one person answered that her “cousin and uncle had spent five years in jail.” When asked if there were any reasons why she could not return to Haiti, she answered, “I have problems there.” . . . The forms show that several Haitians stated in no uncertain terms that they could not go back to Haiti or Port-auPrince . . . Despite [their] alarming answers, no further amplification or clarification is noted, and all were summarily returned to Haiti on April 2.56 Even when refugees’ responses were recorded, the transcriptions of testimonies were often partial and lacking in detail. The bureaucratic fragmentation of asylum-seekers’ testimonies is reflected in the INS examiner’s notes on interviewees’ responses: “Country is difficult; cannot live; no money; people are dying and being burned; cannot go back to Port-au-Prince.”57 Refugee Refoulement attempts to partially rectify this fragmentation by providing the stories of seven individuals and a group of Haitian soldiers who fled the country by boat and were subsequently repatriated.58 Each of the individuals had been politically active against the Duvalier government, and, as a result, their lives and the lives of their family members had been threatened. Some even had family members who had been imprisoned or killed by the Macoutes.59 One should note that these cases are not presented as first-person testimonies, but as third-person narratives constructed following interviews conducted by representatives of the Lawyers Committee with the Haitians. There are limits to what is presented in this kind of format. For example, the report refers to “alarming answers,” but we are not told what these are. The establishment of trust between the INS examiner and Haitians often determined the kind of responses they would give: “For some, only indirect probing will reveal whether the Haitian fears persecution in Haiti. Such indirect questioning has proven essential in eliciting information from refugees who, for a variety of reasons, are unable to express opinions and beliefs for which they have previously been made to suffer.”60 The Committee’s investigation concluded that “Haitian refugees are simply not likely to reveal their claims in the brief encounters with officials provided under the interdiction program.”61 This suggests that the narrative confines of the interdiction process do not accommodate

58 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

alternate modes of testifying and witnessing. An aporia results when refugees, whose survival in Haiti was determined by their ability to deny, evade, or remain silent in an interrogation with Haitian officials, are suddenly asked to reveal everything as transparently as possible so as not to appear suspect to immigration officers. Similarly, Peter Margulies writes of his experience working with Haitian asylum seekers: Many people who run the risk of persecution, or have already been persecuted, do not acknowledge their situation. This denial can be either a strategy for survival, or an internalization of oppression. . . . Haitians tend to deny, based on long practice, that they are “political” when in fact they are. Deference is an art in Haiti; abandoning deference for candor is a recipe for death. “Switching gears” to practice candor once one encounters “impartial” asylum decisionmakers is a difficult move.62 Margulies’s remarks reveal just how complex testimony’s truth-value becomes in the face of complex survival strategies of deferral and denial. Given all these factors, perhaps it is not surprising that only 6 of the 21,461 Haitians intercepted between 1981 and 1990 were taken to the United States to apply for asylum;63 that is, only those few had testified convincingly enough to INS officials to be allowed to continue their journey to the United States.64 The denial of the rest of the claims constitute what Édouard Glissant refers to as a “forced poetics,” which he defines as “any collective desire for expression that, when it manifests itself, is negated at the same time because of the deficiency that stifles it, not at the level of desire, which never ceases, but at the level of expression, which is never realized.”65

Half the Story Published on June 30, 1992, Half the Story: The Skewed U.S. Monitoring of Repatriated Haitian Refugees interrogates the surveys of repatriates carried out by U.S. officials in Haiti. The State Department used these documents to create the perception that stability had returned to Haiti and that Haitians were no longer being persecuted. In fact, the report reveals that the issues surrounding Haitian refugees’ ability to testify to their persecution in order to seek asylum in the United States had grown even worse with the mass exodus of Haitian boat people following the military coup of September 30, 1991, in Haiti. Only after the Miami-based Haitian Refugee Center filed a lawsuit challenging the original interdiction program was a

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 59

temporary refugee camp established at the U.S. naval base on Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in lieu of immediately repatriating the refugees. Yet even then, U.S. government officials “claimed that the adjudicators were deceived by human rights groups and the Haitians themselves to believe that persecution continued in Haiti, when in fact calm had returned to the country.”66 One gets the impression that no matter how much interview conditions were improved, Haitians would never be able to construct stories convincing enough for their audience of U.S. authorities, who already believed them to be liars. As the epigraph that prefaces this section demonstrates, the INS leadership advocated wholly dismissing refugee claims because it believed that Haitians inherently lacked credibility. Half the Story explains that “a review of the reports emanating from the Embassy monitoring effort in Haiti reveals that its primary purpose is to discredit repatriates’ stories. The purpose is evident even in the selection of investigators: many of them experts in the detection of fraudulent claims, rather than experts on conditions in Haiti or in the process of conducting human rights field investigations.”67 Furthermore, discounting Haitians’ claims of persecution served to legitimize U.S. foreign policy, which did nothing to curb the violent repression taking place in Haiti during this time and perhaps aided in perpetuating it. Although the denial of Haitian claims for asylum is unwarranted, it is also in keeping with a systemic process of delegitimizing refugee testimonies by U.S. immigration officials. In a discussion of her interviews with INS officers who assess foreign travelers who wish to enter the United States at airports, Janet Gilboy writes, “Credibility judgments are seen as the product of reactions to discrete characteristics of individuals, the outgrowth of decisionmakers’ reactions to the way an individual speaks or acts.”68 She quotes one inspector who states, “What you’re asking is mainly, ‘does that person appear to be what he says he is.’ Quite often the national background makes a difference. Let’s say he’s from [a specific European country]. Now [they] come, and they say they backpack . . . In most cases, that is just what they are going to do.”69 Similarly, when referring to the government’s assessment of asylum interviews, legal scholar Ilene Durst writes, “the atmosphere pervading the administrative process implicitly characterizes the refugee as a liar, often imposing an impossible and unlawful burden on him to objectively corroborate his claims.”70 Thus, a degree of narrative analysis occurs as asylum officers assess refugee testimonies for narrative consistency. Durst writes, in order for the persecuted to receive the protection of political

60 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

asylum, the applicant’s narrative must be “believable, consistent, and sufficiently detailed to provide a plausible and coherent” basis for her fear. The adjudicator’s assessment must be qualitative and shall consider whether the narrative demonstrates, among other factors, deliberate falsehood, internal consistency, vagueness, or evasiveness, and inherent believability.71 Refugee Refoulement and Half the Story provide essential case studies of the history of the treatment of Haitian boat refugees in relation to the asylum process; the reports highlight the asylum processes’ failure to consider not only the psychological impediments to constructing effective testimonies, such as experiences of trauma or lapses in memory, but also cultural factors affecting narrative styles, especially in the face of Western legal processes that value linearity and transparency and may be in direct contrast with various oral forms of cultural transmission. As a result, Haitian refugees become further embedded in liminality as their speech is rendered unbelievable and thus inaudible in the political sphere.

Translational Inter-dictions: Searching for Hospice No language is neutral. –dionne brand, from derek walcott, “midsummer, lii”

As I discussed in the introduction, translation is essential to most asylum testimonies. It is a central issue for the majority of Krèyol-speaking Haitian boat refugees who do not speak English and can be the factor that determines whether they gain asylum or are repatriated. Translation, a highly political act, is thus central to hospitality as it signifies movement between a familiar, domestic language and an “alien” or foreign language. In her autobiographical essays “Lavalas: The Flood After the Flood” and “Something in the Water . . . Reflections of a People’s Journey,” Nikòl Payen describes her experiences working as a HaitianAmerican Kreyòl/English interpreter for the U.S. Department of Justice at the detention center for Haitian refugees at Guantánamo and aboard a U.S. Coast Guard cutter that interdicts and repatriates Haitian migrants following the 1991 military coup.72 Payen serves as a native informant who works “both sides”—Haitian and American—in her role as an interpreter caught in a bureaucratic web of interdiction, detention, and repatriation, in the geopolitical limbo space between Haiti and the United States. Initially, she is hopeful about her role: “For the first time

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 61

in my life I felt empowered by my supposed handicap. To think Krèyol, my insignificant dialect—concocted by African slaves—could link me to such a powerful force as the Pentagon in the execution of its mission.”73 Her “dialect”—an “illegitimate” language—becomes transformed into a powerful weapon in deploying the laws of hospitality. She also hopes to “find that Haitian part of myself that in many ways still remains foreign to me” via her participation in “Operation Safe Harbor.” Through her participation in the linguistic laws of hospitality, she hopes to find legitimation to remedy her self-alienation. As an interpreter, she becomes the mediator in linguistic political transactions and, through her access to both languages, attempts to bring linguistic clarity for all agents in these transactions—refugees, lawyers, INS, and military officials. The essays reveal how translation becomes an “inter-diction,” the space of unmaking and remaking language and meaning. I draw upon Emily Apter’s notion of the “translation zone” to theorize the position of the interpreter who is between languages, nations, and cultures. Apter defines that place as “a zone of critical engagement that connects the ‘l’ and the ‘n’ of transLation and transNation. The common root ‘trans’ operates as a connecting port of translational transnationalism . . . as well as the point of debarkation to a cultural caesura—a trans—ation—where transmission failure is marked.”74 For asylum speakers, translation becomes either a space where testimony can be interdicted by institutional authorities or a space that facilitates transnational communication between stranger and host, refugee and asylum officer. While testifying to the dismal conditions at Guantánamo and on the repatriation ship, Payen’s essays also raise questions about the ethics of translation and the possible complicity of translation with processes of domination, control, and surveillance when it becomes attached to the state apparatus of the U.S. asylum process; her essays demonstrate that translation is “a military zone, governed by the laws of hostility and hospitality, by semantic transfers and treaties.”75 The need for adequate translation in the screening of Haitian refugees has been an ongoing concern for interdicted and detained refugees. Götz-Dietrich Opitz quotes reports from Haiti Progrès, a weekly newspaper for the Haitian-American community, and the Los Angeles Sentinal, which outline the significant deficiencies in translation services and access to Krèyol interpreters on board U.S. Coast Guard cutters and at Guantánamo during 1991–1992.76 Opitz also notes the deep distrust that INS authorities had of Haitian-American translators. When HaitianAmericans volunteered as interpreters (owing to the lack of interpreters),

62 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

the numbers of Haitians “approved to pursue asylum in the U.S. soared to 80% between December 1991 and January 1992, but pressure was then applied [by INS officials] to ‘screen-in’ fewer Haitians.”77 Opitz quotes one interpreter as stating, “[Immigration] began to accuse us of testifying on behalf of Haitians. . . . They began hiding their notes from . . . (the interpreters). We could no longer see whether the final translation was correct as we had before.”78 Payen’s essays represent translation as a “limbo gateway” where linguistic transactions constitute zones of instability. The texts reveal the limitations of legal testimony, and the testimonials that she attempts to decipher are marked by ambivalence, silences, gaps, and frustration over refugees’ treatment by military officials, INS authorities, and even the lawyers sent to assist them in their asylum applications. I explore the duality of Payen’s role as an interpreter whose job is to make meaning transparent for members on each side of a linguistic exchange while she also experiences a lack of clarity in her own interpretations of events. The essays display the confessional aspects of testimony as she recounts her growing apprehension with her abilities to effectively decipher what she sees and hears—a powerful commentary on the bureaucratic ineptitude and frequent hopelessness associated with the asylum process for Haitian refugees. Payen has been located in the diaspora for some time and lacks the cultural and linguistic knowledge needed to fully understand and translate refugees’ worldviews, which thus highlights the lack of transparency in the process of translation. As such, Payen is a native informant who is not “native” enough. She is not quite a host and not quite a stranger. Payen’s ambivalence over her role as an interpreter resonates with the space of the detention center and Coast Guard ship, where refugees themselves are in limbo. Long before it became a “zone of indistinction” in which post-9/11 “enemy combatants” were housed, Guantánamo existed as a geopolitical limbo space located on the island of Cuba, but under U.S. jurisdiction since the U.S. Navy began leasing it in 1903, following the Spanish-American War.79 In fact, lawyers for the George H.W. Bush administration enacted a state of exception to justify placing Haitians in the refugee camp without rights accorded to those asylum seekers who touched “mainland” soil. As Cathy Powell explains, the administration argued that “the U.S. Constitution and other sources of U.S. and international law do not apply to Guantanamo—this despite the fact that the U.S. military base at Guantanamo is under the exclusive jurisdiction and control of the U.S. Government.”80 The ambiguous status of the refugee

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 63

camp heightens the refugees’ status as “limbo citizens.” Moreover, Payen’s essays are significant for my exploration of New World refugees as they bring together the legal, literary, and confessional aspects of testimony and chart how these testimonial rites/rights of passage often become interdicted by military and governmental institutions. Haitians have often been constructed as “diseased” in U.S. public discourse, an image that becomes particularly deleterious when connected to race. For example, in the 1970s, rumors that Haitians were tuberculosis-carriers circulated in South Florida, resulting in the loss of jobs and other forms of discrimination against the Haitian community.81 Discrimination against Haitians in the United States piqued with the Centers for Disease Control’s 1982 decision to place Haitians on the list of those people at “high risk” for contracting AIDS, known as the “4 h’s”: hemophiliacs, homosexuals, hypodermic needle-users, and Haitians.82 Michael Dash characterizes the relationship between Haiti and the United States in terms of “health” and “sickness”: “Images of the rebellious body, the repulsive body, the seductive body and the sick body constitute a discourse that has fixed Haiti in the Western imagination: the ‘Haitianizing’ of Haiti as unredeemably deviant.”83 Payen portrays the notions of “obscene visibility” and “deviant physicality” that have been associated with Haitians.84 As a translator who experiences and witnesses illness, she participates in a poetics of hospitality where the focus becomes the lexical associations of hospitality: “hospice” and “hospital.” “Something in the Water . . . Reflections of a People’s Journey” foregrounds Payen’s poetics of hospital/ity as it opens with her describing her hospitalization for an unknown bronchial illness, which is symbolic because as a translator her breath serves as a corporeal bridge that enables her to orally translate Krèyol into English. Her compromised health signals that her control over language has been interdicted; her ability to speak is impeded when the medication she is being treated with “paralyzed [her] tongue.”85 As she considers the possible influences on her condition, she hopes that an earlier diagnosis of bronchial asthma is correct as it “was beginning to seem mild now that I was up against possible heavy hitters like tuberculosis, PCP pneumonia and HIV.”86 Her illness also reflects the notion of “obscene visibility” as she echoes the paranoia surrounding Haitians as carriers of deadly contagions. Her remarks signal her possible interpellation into the governmental ideology of Haitians as disease carriers. But just as it seems that she has contracted an illness from the refugees, she describes the “5 a.m. dosage of pesticide the military used to wage the war against bugs. When

64 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

it was kind, the fumes tickled your nostrils. Otherwise, you went into a choking cough that could rage for twenty minutes.”87 Here the military apparatus becomes implicated as the physical and environmental agent of contagion. Payen exemplifies Spivak’s observation that those who are deemed native informants are highly ambiguous figures. Instead of posing as the native informant who purports to provide authentic cultural information, Payen is self-reflexive about her position. Part of her ambiguity lies in her use of language. As she recalls the events that lead to her hospitalization, Payen explains that “Krèyol, the language whose purpose in my life up until now had been to pain and confuse me” now “became my passport” and that “the Justice Department would use me as a medium.”88 Instead of viewing her language as a kind of nostalgic “mother tongue,” it instead serves as a site of conflict. Her ambiguity is further heightened by the fact that because of her literacy she has the ability to move in and out of U.S. military and governmental systems and discourses. Her testimonial reveals an ambiguity, where the interpreter’s language skills are part of both the hegemony of the U.S. government bureaucracy and the language that gives her access to other Haitians, like her in national origin but dissimilar in so many other ways. In both “Something in the Water” and “Lavalas,” Payen relates her experiences working at Guantánamo, which, as a detention center for thousands of Haitians intercepted at sea, becomes a site of the exertion of state power.89 Because the U.S. military placed great restrictions on journalists’ access to the base during this time, the narrative offers a rare glimpse into the conditions of the refugee camp. The military base becomes the gatekeeper for containing the “plague” of immigrants. Given the U.S. government’s history of seeing Haitians as “diseased,” the spatial partitioning of Haitian refugees in an offshore location serves as a way to patrol the epidemiological border of the nation and contain the threat of contamination. Payen describes the processing of the refugees as they are “photographed, fingerprinted, and given identification cards” along with “acquisition of an ID bracelet, marked with a bar code similar to those found on the side of household products,” which she also describes as a means of “stamping . . . the refugees with the marks of ownership.”90 This “processing” marks the alterity of Haitian bodies. Michel Laguerre refers to the detention of Haitians refugees as “carceral control” which “implies that the individual being held has committed or deemed likely to commit a criminal act.”91 Payen’s description of the detention center echoes this notion of carceral control and bare life, where individuals

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 65

are objectified: “Bodies lay in rows on olive-green cots, all their worldly possessions on the concrete floor beside them.”92 Movement is further impeded by the U.S. military’s “strategic design of the island,” including “acres of land mines” that reinscribe the military’s control over the landscape as well as Haitian (and Cuban) bodies.93 One testament to the conditions of Guantánamo is that “three-hundred and fifty people drowned trying to escape to ‘Castro’s’ Cuba to see if communism could offer a kinder hand.”94 Payen’s ability to move about, especially during the ferry ride from the town where she lives to the naval base, “reminded [her] of her outsider status.”95 While she expresses ambivalence at being able to move more freely than the refugees, her actions are also scrutinized by the military when she interacts with a seven-year-old boy who has been put into a steel cage, placed there by a soldier for “making trouble.”96 She describes how “High up, a guard sat post in a twenty-foot tower equipped with a rifle, a gun, binoculars, and a video camera. He recorded my interaction while adjusting his walkie-talkie.”97 Like Foucault’s description of the panopticon, the layout of the military base replicates that of the prison (as well as echoes the plantation) to facilitate optimum surveillance of detainees. She explains that the military enacts strict rules against “fraternizing with the ‘migrants’” and thus theoretically limits the contact that she has with the Haitians.98 “Lavalas” also depicts the dismal conditions of Guantánamo where Payen’s outsider status is marked by her passive position of “seeing” and “watching” and even being “grossly fascinated” but not fully engaging in the events surrounding her: “I could hear bits and pieces of the interrogations, sometimes called ‘asylum interviews,’ that went on all day.”99 Her use of the word “interrogations” emphasizes the hostile, militaristic realm in which the refugees’ testimonies are scrutinized. She describes working with a lawyer who attempts to transcribe her interpretations of refugees’ testimonies needed to prove “credible fear” in order to apply for asylum. Despite being a “native speaker,” she becomes increasingly uncertain of how to translate the words of refugees when she encounters unfamiliar Krèyol terms and cultural references so that this translation zone becomes the space of a “forced poetics” where “a need for expression confronts an inability to achieve expression. It can happen that this confrontation is fixed in an opposition between the content to be expressed and the language suggested or imposed.”100 Disease becomes a central focus of this forced poetics as refugee testimonies become filtered through the lens of sickness for those refugees

66 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

who test positive for HIV. Reflecting the fear that Haitians will transgress epidemiological borders, the government quarantines ill refugees separately from the rest of the refugees. The extreme liminality of these refugees is underscored by the fact that the U.S. government had no legislation for determining the status of HIV positive migrants so that they are further marginalized. However, it is also important to note that during the resettlement of Vietnamese refugees in the United States in the late 1970s, illness was not a deterrent. Congress allowed the INS to waive requirements that barred refugees entrance because of illiteracy, had a communicable disease, or economic need because, as Sucheng Chan observes, “Lawmakers . . . knew that many Indochinese refugees were illiterate, suffered from tuberculosis and other diseases and very likely would need public assistance or ‘welfare’ to survive.”101 Payen’s focus on those who have been quarantined emphasizes a poetics of hospital/ity, where disease and testimony converge. Disease compounds Payen’s abilities to translate as when she must try to effectively communicate the experiences of a woman whose six-year-old granddaughter, Chantal, has been diagnosed with AIDS. The two had fled their home when Chantal’s father, an election-monitor in Haiti, was shot and killed by the military. During a grueling day of interviewing, Payen attempts to translate the grandmother’s testimony to a young American lawyer working on her behalf, who repeatedly asks about the nature of Chantal’s transmission of the disease. The grandmother’s responses to the lawyer’s queries about Chantal’s mother are anything but transparent: “She was a young woman, oh, about twenty-three or so, when she took ill and died.” To the probe, “She died h__?” she responds belligerently. “I thought I told you already . . . imprudence . . . I don’t know, madishon, maybe?” When the lawyer probes again, “What happened?” She replies, “I don’t know. All I know is that she died.” He asks again, “How’d she die?” and Payen describes how, Grandma sucked her teeth. She wasn’t much for repeating herself. “I told you already!” she intoned in utter indignation. “Bon-Dye,” she called on her Christian God. “What’s not to understand?” Disgust had overtaken her. “She got sick! She went into shock and milk went to her head.” Grandma leaned towards the table, neck craning, obviously annoyed by this supposedly intelligent man’s inability to understand such a simple story—a man who held her fate in his hand. But he was not alone. Sitting there, I too struggled to make sense of her statement, especially since I was the one having

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 67

to translate. “Milk going to the head” was one among a string of maladies I had recently discovered myself. How do you provide a comparable translation of a “backward,” en deyo, diagnosis known only to country folk who invented it? I had not been privy to such an upbringing, though I thought I had.102 The grandmother’s assertions represent her refusal to adhere to the strict, linear expectations of storytelling that the legal system requires. By attempting to exert her own authority over her testimony, she demonstrates the potentiality of asylum speakers. That her assertions must rely upon translation, however, diminishes their effects as it becomes evident that her beliefs concerning the body, health, and disease complicate Payen’s attempts to explain Chantal’s possible transmission of HIV to her. Payen writes, “My explanation was too sophisticated, too medically sound, or just plain too Western for this countrywoman with a grade school education to comprehend. She could not fathom any of what seemed so completely logical to me. So far as she was concerned, HIV— what she had heard of it—was a hex cast by God upon women who did not live Christian lives.”103 The grandmother refuses to believe that her granddaughter is HIV positive. She becomes indignant, believing that the Americans are lying to her. When Payen suggests the possibility that Chantal’s mother was herself a carrier of the disease, the grandmother responds, “If Meriken don’t want me to step foot in their country, why don’t they just say so instead of playing games, telling me lies, insulting me and this poor child.”104 Here language is central to the politics of hospitality as the grandmother interprets Payen’s Western medical explanation as “lies”—or a linguistic hostility through which she and Chantal will be excluded from the United States. Payen’s frustration over how to convey the grandmother’s explanations that are alien to the lawyer (and herself) demonstrates her limited cultural literacy as a diasporic subject and the way that cultural power is negotiated in the translation zone. Sandra Bermann points out that a translator must address “how much of the ‘otherness’ of the ‘foreign’ should [be] highlight[ed]? How much of the foreign should he mute or erase in order to make texts easier for the ‘home’ (target) audience to assimilate?”105 While she refers to the translation of printed texts, Bermann’s comments also apply to the interpreter of oral communications; each person struggles to both assimilate and translate cultural information marked by alterity. In her study of the role of narrative in asylum claims, Ilene Durst writes, “Many negative determinations of credibility

68 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

can be explained by the inability of the asylum applicant, or his attorney, to translate the persecution suffered into a narrative graspable by the adjudicator, and/or the adjudicator’s inability to transcend the barriers created by the inherent otherness of trauma, culture, and language.”106 Ultimately, Payen’s remarks demonstrate the limits of the translator’s position as a native informant. The moment marks an impasse in the translation zone: there is no way to effectively translate that which she herself cannot fully assimilate and can only view as “backward.” Apter contends that “in attempts to translate, we become most aware of linguistic and cultural differences, of the historical ‘hauntings,’ and of alterity within language.”107 While the government is clearly concerned with the “threat” that HIV-positive refugees pose, Payen also testifies to the brutal, unhealthy conditions in the detention center and their effects on the refugees. Particularly, she addresses the camp’s treatment of children, such as a malnourished six-month-old infant: “the sun had so shriveled and turned him tomato red, his exposed bottom was welted, blistered with rash. The baby was so malnourished, his skeletal frame could have passed for a two month-old.”108 Here Payen reconfigures the notion of “obscene visibility” because although the baby is clearly ill, his sickness is not attributed to his Haitianness or his homeland where, according to his mother, “food was not an issue.”109 Instead the U.S. military becomes implicated in the baby’s condition. The baby’s mother tells Payen, “Everyday it’s the same thing. The military says they’ll come around, but I never see them.”110 This serves in stark contrast to the “search-and-rescue” rhetoric expounded by the military, particularly the Coast Guard, which I address in chapter 2. Again, while she offers momentary assistance to the mother by providing her with diapers and jars of baby food, Payen ultimately testifies to her helplessness in the situation, especially when the woman ponders whether she would be better off returning to Haiti: “It was all so confusing, both for her and for me. . . . The best I could do was to lend an attentive ear. I could only advise that, ‘whatever you decide to do, think it through carefully.’”111 Like Chantal’s grandmother, another refugee quarantined in the camp, Milot, articulates a similar distrust of the claims of immigration authorities when he states, “I don’t think I can take much more of this lying and reneging on promises.”112 Milot, an educated professional, is an articulate political activist who kept “a Nike dufflebag that contained important documents supporting his claim of political persecution”; his bag is later confiscated by the U.S. military.113 Milot and a group of

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 69

refugees have passed the “Credible Fear” standard, through which they would normally be automatically qualified to apply for political asylum in the United States, but, because they are HIV positive, they must “undergo yet another interview to now prove the more severe ‘Well-Founded Fear of persecution.’”114 Milot becomes the spokesperson for the group, who views the request for a second interview to be “racially tainted and discriminatory.”115 When the lawyer attempts to placate Milot with assurances that “our people in Washington [are] working around the clock to make headway on your behalf,” Milot responds by inverting the relationship between the lawyer trained to root out lies and himself as refugee/defendant. Drawing on colonial history, he begins to interrogate the lawyer on the agenda of the U.S. government: “does your government even possess the gift of conscience? Are you not embarrassed? The least bit ashamed that you would sit here and attempt to defend your country’s politics?”116 By reversing the interrogation and rendering the lawyer speechless, Milot reassembles the dynamics of the translation zone and thus demands his rights as a “limbo citizen.” Moreover, Milot’s line of questioning falls into the ethical realm as opposed to the juridical. As an act of defiance and principle, Milot and some other refugees in his predicament refuse to go through another screening and must therefore return to Haiti. In doing so, he knows that he will resume living underground or risk being killed for his political beliefs. Milot also reconfigures the notion of blood and disease that has been used against him and other HIV-positive refugees by telling the lawyer, “If my blood and the blood of all who follow should spill on Haitian soil, let it be on your head . . . let it be on your conscience.”117 Whereas the quarantining of HIV-positive refugees reflects the government’s attempt to contain the threat of Haitian blood, Milot’s remarks suggest that by returning the refugees to the danger from which they fled, U.S. officials will forever be drenched in the blood spilled on Haitian soil. Ultimately, Milot’s control over the discourse is only momentary as he and his compatriots are eventually repatriated. However, he has a profound effect on Payen, who, in the course of listening to his argument, “became self conscious of [her] own presence,” wondering if she too would be considered “an enemy, a traitor by the refugees.”118 In “Something in the Water” Payen describes how her state of ambiguity becomes compounded when she is asked to escort a boatload of refugees who are being returned to Haiti. She writes, “I reluctantly volunteered to accompany them back. The two-day journey promised to be a grueling experience, but I was prepared to make any sacrifice to return

70 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

to my homeland after fifteen years of unintended absence.” The privileges she possesses in her role as an interpreter are delimited by space when she is assigned a private cabin separate from the refugees, who must remain on deck; ironically, the space of the repatriation ship becomes a freer space for speaking than the detention center: “En route, clandestine discussions held by the refugees and me in the camp were openly voiced here on the ship.”119 While Payen’s reasons for accompanying the repatriates are tied to her nostalgia for returning to her homeland, for the Haitian refugees, return signals the dread that their lives would again be in imminent danger. Payen finds that they have a “mutual distrust of the asylum process. I had often overheard conversations corroborating these allegations from higher-ups. Programmed to spit out whatever numbers Washington entrusted them to produce that day in the name of efficiency and a job well done, these functionaries lost neither sleep nor appetite over the desperate accounts of a people whose destiny lay in their hands.”120 Payen has access to both U.S. bureaucratic discourse as well as to the refugees’ discourse. On board the repatriation ship she also hears testimonies of those who did not meet the credible fear standard—for example, an emaciated twelve-year old boy whose parents were killed by soldiers in Haiti and “the woman whose community group was plastered with photos of a rooster and Aristide, thereby making her a candidate for death.”121 Payen also witnesses the restraining of a fifteen-year-old girl who tried to jump overboard rather than return to Haiti: “Servicemen tied her feet together. Eventually she was subdued with her hand and foot securely tied to a pole on the flight deck.”122 In another scene reminiscent of the Middle Passage, the narrator describes how “witnessing two hundred fifty bodies enroped in slave-ship fashion on deck to be baked by the summer blaze or soaked by impulsive skies if nature willed left me feeling helpless and uneasy. We seemed to be going backward—in time—in history.”123 This convergence of slave history and the contemporary refugees’ plight is also reflected when they arrive in Haiti’s harbor and the refugees “were instructed to return their yellow I.D. cards” despite “concerns about being followed home by the same would-be attackers who had been responsible for their initial departure.”124 She recounts watching a “U.S. State Department staff member handing the bag of I.D. cards to Haitian soldiers” so that “ownership” of these repatriated refugees had now been given over to Haitian soldiers.125 Payen laments, “confused and frustrated, I looked for an ally until it dawned on me that no one on board remotely shared my concern.”126 On the return trip back to Guantánamo, Payen explains that the

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 71

“ordeal cast me into a four-day bout with insomnia,” symbolic of her survivor’s guilt as she wonders how she came to be in a more privileged position than the refugees. In reaction to a conversation to “size up the distance I would go for my people and my two countries, one that had my allegiance as a birthright, the other hoping to win it,” she volunteers “to be lowered by rope from the cutter into a tiny motor raft in an attempt to negotiate with prospective refugees on behalf of the United States government.”127 While trying to persuade a boat of eighteen Haitians to board the Coast Guard ship, the young man who is their spokesperson asks her, “Why should I go on the ship, why should I trust you?”128 She explains, “I was lost for an adequate response except, I’m all you’ve got here and you have to believe in my good intentions. And besides, I was unprepared to watch them drown.”129 Her inability to persuade the refugees is compounded by the boy’s mother who “spoke in a delirium, a blur” after having witnessed her sister jump overboard with her ailing infant. When Payen finally convinces the Haitians in the boat to come aboard the Coast Guard cutter, she confesses that “a conspiratorial chill raced through me as I watched their craft along with all their worldly possessions set afire, a ritual that branded a mental scar on these victims and on me.”130 This “ritual” facilitates the “bare life” of the refugees. The burning of the refugees’ belongings serves as an ominous rite of passage; instead of signaling hope for the future, it suggests the vulnerability and powerlessness of the Haitians and the erasure of their subjectivities. “Something in the Water” ends with Payen asking, “Did this really just happen? Was I partly responsible for someone’s impending death?” She ponders that the effect of these events “was apparent in emotions only, like the sharp pain that registers that a finger has been burned. It is not until days later, when the wounded area darkens, that the effect actually becomes visible.”131 Again, we return to the notion of “obscene visibility” with the wound whose degree of damage is not evident until it becomes visible. Perhaps this offers an explanation for the unknown illness with which Payen begins “Something in the Water.” The illness is linked to her ambivalence over translating—the implications of which are now only becoming visible as she reflects on the events in which she participated. As such, “Something in the Water” and “Lavalas” are testimonials characterized by hesitancy, reluctance, and remorse. While Payen attempts to represent the voices of refugees via testimonial narrative, perhaps most effective is her testimony to her own complicity in the structures of power guiding Haitian migration, structures that depend upon her ability to navigate and manipulate English and Krèyol

72 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

linguistic systems. Her decisions in how to translate words and ideas raise questions about not only the degree of fidelity that her translated words show to the original words but also her degree of faithfulness to her two countries so that “a shifting of selves, both inside and out, is the only constant.”132 Thus, she embodies a poetics of hospitality.

Testimonial Lifelines: Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” One overarching question raised by Edwidge Danticat’s story “Children of the Sea” from her collection Krik? Krak! is straightforward: how do we record the stories of boat refugees who exist in the fluid, limbo space of the seas? Whereas translation becomes a kind of “inter-diction” in Payen’s narratives, where meaning cannot always be successfully transferred from one language into another, Danticat portrays a number of inter-dictions for Haitians fleeing violence. In one sense, the story’s epistolary form of letters written between a young man on the refugee boat and his lover who remains in Haiti become narrative “interdictions” that fill the space between the couple. The story takes place following the 1991 military coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and during the mass exodus of boat refugees who took to the seas to escape the murderous violence of the coup. The young man has fled Haiti to avoid certain death at the hand of the Tonton Macoutes for his participation in a politically dissident youth radio program. The young woman’s family becomes internally displaced when they flee persecution in the capital of Port-au-Prince and relocate to a small country village. That we are not told their names suggests a kind of interdiction, a withholding of identifying markers, so that their testimonials represent all of those undocumented Haitians whose voices have been eclipsed by violence. Remarking on the significance of the sea to Danticat’s story, DeLoughrey draws on Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of “tidalectics”—the fusion of language and poetics with the rhythms of the sea—to describe the narrative: “The epistolary narrative form reflects the orality of call and response and incorporates the tidalectic between land and sea.”133 Furthermore, the sea poses the potential to interdict refugee voices as the narrator worries that he will not make it to America, that his testimony will be lost in the ocean: “I dream that the winds come of the sky and claim us for the sea. We go under and no one hears from us again.”134 By representing refugees’ experiences on the open seas, Danticat has placed them within the politics of state hospitality. The refugees are aware that somewhere the U.S. Coast Guard is patrolling the seas in search of

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 73

boats like theirs, and their status as black refugees puts them in a particularly vulnerable position as the narrator alludes to the way that they can be perceived as racially different from (and thus inferior to) Cuban refugees: “the faces around me are showing their first charcoal layer of sunburn. ‘Now we will never be mistaken for Cubans,’ one man said.”135 Skin tone becomes a kind of “obscene visibility,” a marker seeming to steer the course of the boat so that instead of sailing to the United States, a place where black refugees are not welcomed, the narrator writes, “I feel like we are sailing for Africa.”136 The limbo citizenship of the thirtysix refugees is symbolized by not being able to pinpoint themselves in time or space. The space on the open sea in a flimsy boat evokes a kind of rootlessness and limbo space. The narrator writes, “I can’t tell exactly where we are. . . . We might be barely out of our own shores. There are no borderlines on the sea. . . . I cannot even tell if we are about to drop off the face of the earth.”137 These passages suggest the inability to geographically “mark” this kind of refugee’s passage. While the male narrator represents a “traditional” refugee, who is fleeing political persecution, Danticat also portrays how gender becomes significant in refugee experience. “Obscene visibility” is also prominently displayed as the insignia of the refugee boat as “White sheets with bright red spots float as our sail.”138 The “smell of semen” on the bloodied sheets signals a loss of innocence that resonates with the group as their journey becomes more and more precarious. The “virgin” sails also become a symbol of Célianne, a pregnant fifteen-year-old on board whose horrific testimony of being gang-raped by Macoutes haunts the narrator’s journal entries. We learn that Célianne fled Haiti once she discovered that she was pregnant by the rape. She gives birth on board the boat, but, instead of symbolizing innocence and new life, the baby is born dead. The baby’s silence serves as a symbolic interdiction, indicating what is to come for the refugees. It stands in stark contrast to Célianne’s repeated testimony: She keeps repeating the story now with her eyes closed, her lips barely moving. She was home one night with her mother and brother Lionel when some ten or twelve soldiers burst into the house. The soldiers held a gun to Lionel’s head and ordered him to lie down and become intimate with his mother. Lionel refused. Their mother told him to go ahead and obey the soldiers because she was afraid that they would kill Lionel on the spot if he put up more of a fight. Lionel did as his mother told him, crying as the soldiers laughed at him, pressing the gun barrels farther and farther into his neck.

74 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

Afterwards, the soldiers tied up Lionel and their mother, then each took turns raping Célianne. When they were done, they arrested Lionel, accusing him of moral crimes. After that night, Célianne never heard from Lionel again. That same night, Célianne cut her face with a razor so that no one would know who she was. Then as facial scars were healing, she started throwing up and getting rashes. Next thing she knew, she was getting big. She found out about the boat and got on.139 Célianne’s testimony is related by the journal’s narrator, but her continuous repetition of the story signals a repetition of the trauma that she endured without the kind of psychological transformation that testifying can sometimes produce, especially because the other Haitians on the boat to whom she tells her story are consumed with their own attempts to survive. Through Célianne’s testimony Danticat portrays the politics of (in) hospitality operating in Haiti where the domestic space of the home— the site of traditional hospitality—becomes a repeated site of violation. The soldiers’ invasion of Célianne’s home and her body represents the ultimate violation of hospitality. The private space of the household (oikos) has been desecrated as have the familial ties; Célianne’s family holds no power as host in the home. Célianne’s rape by soldiers symbolizes a state of exception whereby the power of the sovereign is extended through its deployment systematically on the bodies of women. In this sense, the rape and subsequent pregnancy figure as specific forms of homo sacer where the woman has been stripped of rights and excluded from the polity by the violence of state power. The pregnancy reminds her and others of the power of the sovereign, and her womb becomes another kind of “zone of indistinction” that marks her dispossession. Célianne’s self-inflicted scars represent an “inter-diction”—her attempt to interrupt the inscription of rape on her body by rewriting her identity and reclaiming her body after it had repeatedly been possessed by soldiers. By altering her face, she inscribes her identity with her own mark in an attempt to overwrite the inscriptions of rape and the phallic power of the Macoutes and thus offer her own corporeal testimony. But Célianne’s inscription is overwritten by the mark of pregnancy. By fleeing with her pregnancy intact, her body, serving as a reminder of the rape, is a kind of limbo space where life and death converge, a body whose growth through pregnancy serves as a kind of diseased “growth” or tumor. Despite one fellow refugee’s remark that “at least [the baby]

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 75

will have its mother’s breasts,” Célianne does not symbolize a nourishing maternity; to the contrary, the narrator has “never seen her eat.”140 Célianne’s story parallels that of the young female narrator, whose father gives up the family home, land, and money to those in power in order to save his daughter from being arrested. Moreover, the father had been sleeping outside the family home to avoid the possibility that soldiers would break into their home and force him to sleep with his daughter. While the family has not experienced the violence that Célianne and her family endured, the family has experienced a violation of hospitality when forced to flee the home. The young woman’s sections of the narrative serve as testimony to the ongoing oppression in Haiti as she describes the brutal violence of the Tonton Macoutes. She recounts how her neighbor, Madan Roger, inconsolable with grief, wanders the streets carrying her son’s decapitated head as evidence of his murder by Macoutes. The girl’s letters describe how the violence encroaches upon her family as the Macoutes come to interrogate Madan Roger, and, when she defies them, she is beaten; the girl’s father refuses to allow her or her mother to interfere: “you can hear madan roger screaming, . . . [the Macoutes are] pounding on her until you don’t hear anything else.”141 Instead of intervening, the girl’s father forbids her or her mother from helping their neighbor, for fear that they too will be victims of violence. Célianne’s pregnancy ultimately threatens the lives of others on the refugee boat. There is a paralleling of her water breaking and the influx of water on the boat through its multiplying cracks. When she goes into labor, “The captain asks the midwife to keep Célianne steady so that she will not rock any more holes into the boat.”142 This juxtaposition of the slowly sinking refugee boat and Célianne’s delivery is foreshadowed earlier when the narrator describes how “She woke up screaming the other night. . . . Some water started coming into the boat in the spot where she was sleeping.”143 Such a paralleling of birth and the leaky boat has several implications. The boundaries of the boat and of woman are crossed simultaneously so that the sea is configured as a kind of womb that is at once nurturing and deadly. This scene again echoes the conditions of the Middle Passage that we saw in reference to Payen’s texts, evoking Glissant’s description of the slaveship as both a generative and banishing space: “This boat is a womb, a womb abyss. . . . This boat is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you.”144 When Célianne gives birth to a dead baby girl, who never cries, it foreshadows the way in which the Haitians on the boat, instead of being given the chance at a new life, a rebirth (in a new country), drown in the “womb” of the sea. Here the sea is cast as

76 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

maternal, which is also underscored by the story’s title “Children of the Sea.” The sea has a relational quality that offers an alternative genealogy of the oppressive root of state violence that was deployed on Célianne’s body. However, the sea is forever a space of ambiguity. The narrator recounts a dream in which he imagines himself “at the bottom of the sea. . . . You were there with me too, at the bottom of the sea. . . . I tried to talk to you, but every time I opened my mouth, water bubbles came out. No sounds.”145 Just as Célianne’s baby does not cry so too the narrator imagines that his voice will be interdicted. This imagined voicelessness signals the narrator’s anxiety that he will soon have to throw his notebook overboard to make the boat lighter. Yet, Célianne’s child is the true “dead weight,” the tumor that needs to be extracted from the boat, but the narrator remarks that “Célianne’s fingernails are buried deep in the child’s naked back”146 and “she just cannot seem to let herself throw it in the ocean.”147 As such, the dead child embodies the traits of what French philosopher Julia Kristeva associates with the abject—corpses, rot, excrement, and decay—that which we are repulsed by and reject in order to claim life. Yet even in its rejection, the abject continues to figure into how we define ourselves. Kristeva explains, What is abject, . . . the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. . . . And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. . . . . . . Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.148 As a corpse, the baby remains outside the symbolic order. While the maternal body is a kind of limbo gateway through which the child enters the world, in this case, because the baby is dead, Célianne lingers in a kind of purgatory, where the baby continues both to be an extension of herself—as a kind of “phantom limb” to use Harris’s words—and to haunt the other people on the boat. It signifies Kristeva’s observation that “the corpse, the most sickening of wastes, is a border that has encroached

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 77

upon everything.”149 When she finally does throw the corpse overboard, Célianne immediately jumps in after it “and just as the baby’s head sank, so did hers.”150 Shortly after this, the narrator is forced to throw his notebook overboard in a last attempt to lighten the boat so that it too becomes configured as “abject.” Death haunts the narrator’s journal with the account of Célianne’s baby and his anticipation that he will not survive. He explains, “It goes down to them, Célianne and her daughter and all those children of the sea who might soon be claiming me.”151 This act signifies the way in which the refugees’ stories will not be transcribed for posterity. The narrator also indicates that he will jump into the sea after his notebook: “I go to them now as though it was always meant to be.”152 There is a paralleling between Célianne’s inability to give birth to a living child and the narrator’s inability to bring his story, his testimony, to fruition; thus, once his notebook is gone, the existence of the narrator and his fellow refugees is erased in “the place where meaning collapses.” The narrator also imagines, however, that the notebook becomes a part of the sea. In this sense, as the “abject,” the notebook, continues to be “something rejected from which one does not part.” In an illuminating analysis of the story, DeLoughrey argues that “the sea is not inscribed as a void, aqua nullius to be imprinted with the expectations of the migrant, but has its own history into which the subject is incorporated.”153 In this sense, the narrator’s notebook becomes part of the existing history of the sea that includes the Middle Passage and other migrations. It enters into the space of a collective unconscious where it will supplement the ocean’s “blank pages.”154 As such, “Children of the Sea” both marks the ultimate silencing of refugee voices and offers an alternative means to imagine them—an inter-diction where the narrator’s testimonial narrative testifies to past and present, life and death, sea and homeland. Despite the imminence of death for the boat members of “Children of the Sea,” the notebook inscribes their histories onto the seas so that, even though they are “limbo citizens,” they remain part of the “dyaspora” or “floating homeland,” in which, through a deterritorialized imagining of the nation, they do not have to be rooted to be remembered.155

“Dream Haiti”: Breaking the Surface of Refugee Articulation Thus far, I have discussed writers of Haitian descent who have written about the experiences of Haitian refugees. Barbadian-born Kamau Brathwaite’s story “Dream Haiti” reflects a pan-Caribbean interest in Haitian refugees. Brathwaite has long been interested in Haiti, having

78 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

traveled there in 1968–1969, when he became particularly interested in Haitian vodou.156 As the first black republic, the result of a successful slave revolt (1791–1804), Haiti has long functioned as a symbol of freedom for the rest of the region. For this reason, writers such as C.L.R. James, Alejo Carpentier, and Aimé Césaire have been drawn to write about Haiti, but Haitian refugees are the ultimate contrast to the revolutionary figures of Touissant L’Ouverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The collection of stories in which “Dream Haiti” is published DreamStories (1994) marks a significant shift in Brathwaite’s literary output. He has been writing prolifically since the 1960s, with his best known works including The Arrivants trilogy (1973), Mother Poem (1977), and X/Self (1987). He is also known for his critical engagement with the development of Creole language, or “nation language,” in his study History of the Voice (1984). Gordon Rohlehr explains that DreamStories was written after Brathwaite had endured three traumatic experiences: the death of his wife Doris, the destruction of a significant portion of his personal archive in Jamaica following Hurricane Gilbert, and being tied up and assaulted at his home in Kingston, Jamaica.157 In these stories, dream becomes a conduit for exploring the subconscious effects of trauma for not only the artist but also for cultural, historical, and regional distress. “Dream Haiti” marks Brathwaite’s exploration of Haitian refugees and their encounter with the U.S. Coast Guard. As I discussed in relation to human rights reports and Payen’s narratives, the Coast Guard control of refugee movements via interdiction results in the interdiction of refugee articulations. In “Dream Haiti,” Brathwaite uses poetics to attempt to reassemble language and expression for and about refugees at the site of hospitality. The spaces of the sea, the migrant vessel, the Coast Guard cutter, and the poetic imagination become “limbo gateways,” portals through which language is both dismantled and reassembled into a new language through which subjectivity can be imagined, creating a visual poetic grammar of refugee experience. Brathwaite attempts to give text, voice, and image to the psychic geographies of the refugee, revealing the grammatical blurring of subjectivities, the sea, and Coast Guard cutter. The prose-poem represents the dream-state journeying of a subject traveling between the submarine and surface, conscious and subconscious worlds where dream becomes a space of “inter-diction” between these worlds. Stewart Brown writes of Brathwaite’s “concern with dream, with possession, with trance”: “Often such states of mind are associated in Brathwaite’s work with confrontation—willing or otherwise—of the unspeakable, be it the horrors of the

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 79

Middle Passage or the re-discovery of a submerged/forbidden consciousness of Africa.”158 In a stream-of-consciousness prose-poetry, “Dream Haiti” signals the confrontation with the horrors of the refugees’ journeys, while simultaneously invoking such histories as those found in the rites of vodou, the Middle Passage, connections to Africa, the preColumbian past, and pan-Caribbean cultural identity. One of the most innovative Caribbean writers today, Brathwaite is the ultimate textual trespasser as he creates on the page what he describes as “word sculptures”—bending and morphing words into a new language of expression and experience. Indeed, some words and nonalphabetic images in “Dream Haiti” evoke the Haitian traditional art of iron sculpture.159 Brathwaite asserts that the work is “like video. like timheri. like something mural—on the walls rather than something on the paper page . . .”160 He explains timehri as ancient Amerindian petroglyphs that are found in Guyana: “The word translates as something like ‘the mark of the hand in the rock’ . . . a way of history before books. . . So I begin to conceive of poetry itself as a kind of timehri: a human imprint with all that’s recorded in and by that imprint, into a kind of enduring enignmatic silence—the poem signing back to life when you see it, say it.”161 “Dream Haiti” performs a myriad of trespassings, such as the blending of prose and poetry genres. Brathwaite plays extensively with font size, style, and text arrangement on the printed page; these elements were created by using special software on an Apple Mac computer and thus represent his pushing the boundaries of language by merging the technological with poetics and aesthetics in what he refers to as his “Sycorax video style.” Brathwaite reclaims Sycorax from her denigrated position in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a play that has generated an extensive discourse in the Caribbean for its depiction of colonial relationships between the European Prospero and the “native” islander Caliban. Brathwaite explains, “Sycorax being the submerge African and woman and lwa of the pla[y], Caliban mother and person who deals with the herbs and the magical sous-reality of the world over which Prospero rules. And therefore I celebrate her in this way—thru the computer—by saying that she’s the spirit/person who creates an(d) or acts out of the video-style that I workin with.”162 Cynthia James, elaborating on Brathwaite’s use of the Sycorax video style, explains that it is “a process of capturing elements and shifts that print literature as we have known it up to now has ignored and may even have deleted because of the way in which it compresses text.”163 As with much of Brathwaite’s work, “Dream Haiti” has undergone several revisions. Various versions of it have been

80 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

published in DS (2), ConVERSsations with Nathanial Mackey, Savacou, the literary journal Hambone, and the collection DreamStories. These various versions are in keeping with shifting nature of Sycorax videostyle in which he attempts to capture oral creole voices, visual imagery, and to disrupt the power of standardized printed text. As such, I refer to various versions of “Dream Haiti.”164 Brathwaite’s style resonates powerfully with the conditions in which boat refugees find themselves—conditions and experiences that are not part of official discourse—the text and words morph, disintegrate, and reemerge into new words and hieroglyphs, echoing the ebb and flow of ocean waves, the dismantling of language, and the dream-state of the speaker. This crafting of text and image to reflect the tides of the sea demonstrates what Brathwaite has referred to as a “tidalectics” or “seametrics”—his attempt to fuse the rhythms of the sea with language: “The sea influences the nature of poetry—the pauses between words, the tidalectic nature of the sea.”165 This tidalectics is particularly significant for capturing the vulnerability of refugees on the open sea so that where they have little control over their voyage—so too must the reader relinquish “control” over where her reading will take her: “we wd find ourselves like fallin hard on the deck . . . & pitching forward or sideways towards the railings / & the frontiers of our nation which was all we had between ourselves & those high nervous seas out there.”166 Further adding to the disorienting effect of the narrative, the speaker’s point of view drifts from that of both a living refugee and a lifeless refugee in the water to that of someone on board a Coast Guard cutter—perhaps a sailor, a slave, or other prisoner—to that of the poet. The language shifts before our eyes and instead of finding stabilized meanings, the reader constantly grasps for footing amidst ever-changing (re)interpretations. The lack of standard punctuation and capitalization of words not only contribute to the disorienting effect but also allow for emergence of new, ever-shifting assemblages of language and syntax. The style of the prosepoem is reminiscent of Glissant’s poetics of Relation, which “remains forever conjectural and presupposes no ideological stability. It is against the comfortable assurances linked to the supposed excellence of language. A poetics that is latent, open, multilingual in intention, directly in contact with everything possible.”167 While “Dream Haiti” reflects a traveler on a journey through the imagination, it also evokes the material conditions of the boat refugee. The narrative opens with the image of a decomposing body that is disintegrating into the sea, symbolizing the fragility of refugee subjectivity:

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 81

“The sea was like slate grey of what was left of / my body / & the white waves / I remember / they was like very white / on what was left of my skin / & they kept comin in at this soft swishing diagonal / against the / bow & wet metal slides of my nerves.”168 Here, it is as if Brathwaite attempts to capture that which seems inexpressible through a “tidalectics” of the drowned and/or drowning refugee, whose fate lies with the “white waves,” perhaps reflecting the racialized borders of U.S. immigration, which the Coast Guard maintains by policing the waters. Like Payen and Danticat, Brathwaite’s speaker underscores the history of racial discrimination through the evocation of the slaveship as the cramped quarters and the collective suffering on board the refugee boat parallel the Middle Passage: “& i remember feeling very cold even though we were 25 in a boat designed as the tv commentator kept saying to carry only 14 or 15.”169 The speaker also references African signposts—Dakar and Goree—and emphasizes the collectivity of experience, linking the poet, the refugee, and the Coast Guard: “we was all standin they in that kind of windy silence / of this dream—not close together /of course since we was all artists & strangers to each / other & not soldiers or sailors or dwarfs as I have to / go on insistin / even tho we was all on the same trip as / Black Stalin / had seh so many years ago / & all on the same ship & the same slopin deck.”170 The passage serves as an emblematic moment of hospitality, where members of various entities are assembled together yet remain as “strangers to each other.” Nevertheless their time on the ship serves as a potentially unifying experience. The poet references Black Stalin’s 1979 calypso, “Caribbean Unity” which indicts politicians’ inability to unite Caribbean nations: “One race (de Caribbean man) /From de same place (de Caribbean man) /Dat make de same trip (de Caribbean man) /On de same ship (de Caribbean man) / So we must push one common intention / Is for a better life in the region.” The invocation of the calypso suggests that the speaker is calling for a consciousness of the connections between peoples within the Caribbean, who are on the “same ship” bound for the same fate. Brathwaite extends these regional connections to the broader hemisphere, which is underscored by linking Haitian refugees to other border-crossers—Mexicans, “where the U.S. Naval Coast Guard cutter was patrolling / all along the borders of the Mexicans & my brothers.”171 In his illuminating introduction to DreamStories, Gordon Rohlehr writes, “‘Dream Haiti’ suggests that the rest of the Caribbean, while on the same trip and ship as Haiti, will likely remain helpless or indifferent spectators on the privileged white deck of the [ship], until they all recognize their fate as drowning refugees.”172

82 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

By invoking the issue of Caribbean federation, Brathwaite thus raises a question as to what refugees represent to the rest of the Caribbean region and beyond. If the refugees have been stripped of their rights and exist as “bare life,” what does it mean to be on the “same slopin deck”? After all, Haiti is not alone in its precarious economic and political status, and citizens of other countries in the region (Cubans, Dominicans) have also attempted clandestine sea migrations in search of refuge elsewhere.

“U.S. Coast Guard Gutter” It is important to unpack both the text and the image of one passage in the DreamStories version of “Dream Haiti” that features the juxtaposition of vantage points—the refugee in the water and the subject onboard a U.S. Coast Guard Cutter: US COAST GUARD GUTTER stencilled upon its both sides in black on what i suppose was suppose to be like top & bottom US COAST GUARD GUTTER & then RETTUG DRAUG TSAOC SU w/i suppose the US COAST GUARD GUTTER part for yr head & the RETTUG DRAUG TSAOC SU for yr feet or coffin if you shd ever have to jump thru one of those mints like on the scarlet airlines where the HOSTESS stand in front of evvabody else xcept the crew wavin she limbs about & smiling like the palmfronds173 This passage comes near the beginning of the story where the speaker

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 83

on board the cutter describes the life preservers used to rescue Haitians from the water. Life preservers and other flotation devices, recurrent images throughout the text, symbolize the lifeline—to the boat, to political asylum, to the American dream—that remains beyond the reach of the refugees. This passage offers one of the most striking pages of imagetext with a combination of declamatory bolded words interspersed with smaller-font-sized words—typographical inter-dictions. The focus on the Coast Guard is particularly significant because it represents the official body of the U.S. government that carries out the policy of interdiction. Thus, the Coast Guard performs a policing role in maintaining national boundaries and preventing the refugees from trespassing those boundaries. Most prominently featured on the page are the bolded words “US COAST GUARD GUTTER.” The effect of replacing “cutter” with “gutter” challenges the powerful image of the Coast Guard. By replacing the official discourse of the Coast Guard as a body that “rescues” stranded travelers on the seas, a “gutter” invokes the idea that the Coast Guard collects the human detritus that no longer has a home in Haiti. In some ways, because the rest of the world pays little attention, the refugees become humanity’s castoffs. As such, “Gutter” signals that this ship symbolizes a kind of abyss so that the refugees that the Coast Guard picks up merely move from one chasm (the sea) to another—the Coast Guard ship, and perhaps even the detention center, which could be the refugees’ next destination. Elizabeth DeLoughrey reads Brathwaite’s rendering of the Coast Guard ship as a “gutter” within the metallic “waste of oceanic modernity” that marks the Atlantic.174 While Gilroy emphasizes the movement of ocean vessels and their role in connecting people and places, Braithwaite’s configuration of the Coast Guard ship signals not necessarily mobility, connection, and progress, but paradoxically, an abyss, a gutter: “I mean we was not goin anywhere although the ship / was movin.”175 This challenges us to consider the different configurations of the ship when comprehending their significance for Caribbean history and identity. Furthermore, the Coast Guard “gutter” parallels the refugees’ vessel “Salvages,” which is referenced later in the text, and signals the refugees’ attempts to salvage the shattered pieces of their lives via the sea voyage.176 However, “Salvages” also connotes negative associations with “savages,” which evokes the perception of refugees as uncivilized and unfit for political membership in the United States. The ship is also a “dreamship”: “& I do not know why I was there— how I came to be on board that ship—that navel of / my past.”177 To be

84 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

on the dreamship is to be in the limbo between consciousness and a submerged interior vision.178 “Nerves” and the speaker’s “nervous condition” provide avenues by which to access this dreamstate. Brathwaite speaks of the “wonderful alternative system-routes of the nervous(s) system” that can serve as a gateway to a deeper consciousness.179 Although the seas serve as routes that the refugees must physically navigate, nerves provide a gateway into the subconscious. As the eye scans down to the middle of the page, it stops at the bold letters “RETTUG DRAUG TSAOC SU.” Again Brathwaite disrupts readers’ control over interpretation. As one attempts to decipher what, at first glance, appears to be another language, it becomes apparent, that it is actually a reversal of letters and words—US COAST GUARD GUTTER is spelled backwards. The reversal of words, which serve as the identifying marker of the ship, signals Brathwaite’s disruption of the power of language (standardized English). This reassemblage occurs in the limbo gateway so that the “U.S. Coast Guard” no longer “holds” complete control over the page. There is also another typographical inter-diction as a layer of wording is placed in between the bolded words. This smaller font size and placement suggests that these words “fill in the blanks” by offering context for the bolded words, such as revealing that the words are “stenciled upon its both sides in black on what i/ suppose was suppose to be like top & bottom” of a life preserver. But as we continue to read down the page, the smaller-font words take on a much more subversive connotation with the lines “part for yr head & the . . . for yr feet or coffin.” Here the image suddenly shifts, becoming ironic, as the life preserver leads not to the saving of life but becomes a marker of death—an image that subverts the “search-and-rescue” rhetoric of the Coast Guard. Later in the text, the refugee reports that “nobody had started throwing any of them overboard to help us.” Brathwaite adds another layer of nuance to this passage in terms of the politics and poetics of hospitality when, at the bottom of the page, he introduces the word “HOSTESS” of “scarlet airlines” who “stand in front of evvabody else / xcept the crew / waving she limbs about & smilin like the palmfronds,” which takes the reader into a world of hospitality and welcoming—a kind of antithesis to the surveillance role of the Coast Guard. The effect is a stark juxtaposition between the refugee struggling for survival in the voracious seas with the relatively effortless travel of the airplane, the means of transportation for the tourist, for whom the life preserver becomes transformed into an inconsequential candy mint

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 85

(lifesaver). Given the Caribbean region’s dependence on the hospitality industry for economic survival, the animated “smilin” hostess represents an unconditional hospitality for the tourist with dollars. In this world the poet implicates himself. In the DS (2) version of the text, the poet imagines himself as a passenger on the airplane, where he acknowledges his detachment from the refugees as he tries to write “& i often wondered what it would be like out there far / away from my homeland on the flat / Atlantic w / io & i only head above the thatch / roofs of the waves & my hands lonely like creation up / & down the rub-a-dub & white ahab stump / of my elbow & my no feet under the white whale of water.”180 At this point the poet can only connect to the refugees through a Western literary reference to the epic struggle between human and whale in Moby Dick. Here the refugee is a kind of Ishmael exiled on the sea, an outcast orphan for whom the sea becomes a nemesis—a “white whale of water.” The passage also evokes the limbo gateway, where words and syntax become dismembered, a limb / o—with the dismemberment of the “white ahab stump / of my elbow” so that the time on the sea as well as the violence from which the refugees have fled have broken their bodies. At the same time, the poet has reassembled the Western literary icon. Confusion continues as “not one a we know what we was doin there / when we shd have been somewhere else writhin poetry,” suggesting the pain from which words are rendered.181 Like “Children of the Sea,” “Dream Haiti” ends with Haitians not having arrived at their destination; they remain limbo citizens because they continue to exist in the space in-between nations, in-between material worlds. And while these limbo states mark the near-obliteration of identity for refugees who exist without protections of any states, Brathwaite’s dreamlike narrative also creates alternative spaces of “interdiction” that exist in-between conscious and subconscious worlds, life and death. Here he begins to reimagine the unimaginable experiences of boat refugees. The spaces of the sea and the cutter remain interlocking focal points for Haitians as the speaker describes how “we were all quite dead and bloated by this time / & some of us had even started floating on our / blacks up to the surface.” Here again Brathwaite’s punning of “blacks” for “backs” indicates the racialization of the U.S. refugee policy. The narrative ends from the vantage point of a speaker on board the Coast Guard cutter, whose name “Impeccable” suggests that U.S. territory will remain “unsullied” by the refugees and that U.S. institutional entities will not be held accountable for what happens to them even as the refugees “went lobbyin lobbyin by w / their / heads up & down in the

86 / inter-dictions and limbo citizens

corv[]e of / water & they arms still vainly / tryin to reach Miami & Judge / Clarence Thomas & the US Supreme / Coast.”182 Thus, Brathwaite suggests that to “dream Haiti” one must enter into a limbo gateway of the imagination. The narrative ends with the image of those on board the Coast Guard ship “watching them poem” so that those who “poem” become asylum speakers as they actively reassemble language. There exists the possibility of imagining the recovery and articulation of fragments of lost histories, even as these refugee poets must continually fight the environmental and institutional tides that threaten to swallow their words: “their mouths wise / open drinking dream & seawater.”183 Brathwaite marks this imminent drowning of body and voice and the Coast Guard’s role as a powerful institutional entity which interdicts refugee testimonies by ending the text with a computer-generated image of a ship hovering at the bottom of the page to indicate the ongoing surveillance of the seas and Haitian voices.

Conclusion Haitian asylum speakers are confronted with a variety of institutional and environmental obstacles as they attempt to articulate themselves. Several genres—human rights documents, essays, short story, and poetry—contribute to the interpretation of Haitian boat refugee migration by offering various modes of witnessing and “asylum speaking.” Refugee Refoulement and Half the Story demonstrate that Haitian refugee testimonials must conform to the mechanics of the asylum process, but most often these structures become narrative checkpoints where testimonies are dismantled. Similarly, Payen demonstrates that the translator who works with refugees walks a linguistic tightrope where translation can facilitate entrance into the host nation or become a checkpoint to reinforce the border—all of which quickly become compounded by a variety of cultural dissonances. Finally, the refugee narratives of Danticat and Brathwaite represent attempts to reconstruct a poetics of limbo citizenship. Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” uses the trope of writing to inscribe refugee subjectivities in the homeland and on the seas while Brathwaite’s “Dream Haiti” creates a new grammar of refugee experience that relies upon a submerged consciousness to find a voice. Because each text that I have analyzed in this chapter has made links between the experiences of Haitian boat refugees and the Middle Passage, it seems appropriate, indeed fitting, to end with an excerpt from “Caliban,” a poem from Brathwaite’s 1973 New World Trilogy The

inter-dictions and limbo citizens / 87

Arrivants. As the speaker describes the slaveship experience, the “limbo” of the limbo dance becomes a kind of incantation: long dark night is the silence in front of me limbo limbo like me ... long dark deck and the water surrounding me long dark deck and the silence is over me limbo limbo like me184 Brathwaite here configures the embodied space of the slaveship through the limbo dance. The “limbo / limbo like me” becomes the speaker’s utterance amidst the silence of the “long dark night” of slavery and the “long dark deck” of the slaveship. Just as the sea threatens to swallow the testimonies of the refugees in Danticat’s story and Brathwaite’s “Dream Haiti,” the sea also threatens to silence the slave forever. As we have seen with the discussion of asylum processes and in the works of Payen, Danticat, and Brathwaite, the challenge for contemporary refugee “limbo citizens” is to continue to try to break the surface of articulation.

2 /

False Witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard Photography of Haitian Boat Refugees Tell me, friends When we were colonized Did the French have alien cards? When we were occupied Did the Americans have alien cards? —manno charlemagne1 The archivization produces as much as it records the event. —jacques derrida, archive fever

In a speech given on June 1, 2007, in which he outlined his immigration reform proposal, President Bush described a moment from the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s commencement ceremonies at which he gave the keynote address: I was preceded by a young man, a Latino, who stood up as the head of his class. . . . And he talked about his migrant grandfather, how proud the migrant grandfather would be. It struck me again what a remarkable country it is where a person with a dream for his immediate family and future family could come to this country, work hard, make sacrifices, and have his grandson address the President and his class.2 The comments rehearse the typical rhetoric of the American Dream as he recounts an immigrant success story. However, these remarks are particularly ironic given the student’s membership in the Coast Guard, which as an entity of Homeland Security plays a crucial role in delineating state hospitality while enforcing U.S. immigration policy by monitoring territorial and international waters to intercept undocumented sea migrants.3 As Ali Behdad argues, “The myth of immigrant America, . . . uses the model of hospitality to describe the nation’s relationship with its immigrants, a model that obscures how the economics of immigration and the history of racial formation in America have delimited the boundaries of hospitality.”4 Undocumented migrants, among the

false witnessing / 89

poorest who often risk their lives to illegally cross national borders, pose a particular challenge to the standard U.S. immigration story. Instead of being seen as an entity whose role is to prohibit refugees’ entrance to the United States, the Coast Guard has typically been viewed through the lens of salvation. For example, with the events of Hurricane Katrina, the Coast Guard was thrust into the international spotlight as the heroic branch of the U.S. military known for daring rescues of the primarily African-American citizens stranded in New Orleans. Who can forget the images of Katrina refugees being retrieved from rooftops and muddy waters that inundated the media?5 One cartoon even consecrated the Coast Guard as “New Orleans’ Saints” through the drawing of a helicopter, rotating propellers giving off a halo-like glow, a cable extending below with a basket carrying an anonymous black body.6 In many ways this cartoon is part of a broader visual rhetoric of Coast Guard search-and-rescue, or “SAR” in Coast Guard parlance. The depiction of an anonymous black body hanging in the helicopter basket can be linked to the Coast Guard visual rhetoric whereby the interdiction of Haitian refugees on the high seas becomes recast as rescue. In this chapter I examine this visual discourse of interdiction-as-rescue by studying Coast Guard photographs of Haitian interdictions. In chapter 1, I discussed how Coast Guard interdictions not only impede Haitian refugees’ physical movements on the seas but also result in fracturing refugee testimonies or otherwise prohibiting them from articulating a “well-founded fear” to gain access to the U.S. asylum process. I argued that this results in inter-diction, speech that has been interrupted by militaristic and state forces so that language is suspended in the limbo space of the seas or the refugee camp. In this chapter I focus on visual modes of witnessing Haitian refugee sea journeys by examining a digital archive of photographic images of Haitian refugees being intercepted at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG). I consider how through the camera’s “eye,” these photographs are cast as eye-witnesses, providing ocular testimonies to interdictions. By providing images of refugee interdictions, the photos contribute to a visual poetics of hospitality, where the military and state control discourse. The archive, located on the USCG website (www.uscg.mil), contains approximately 250 documentary captioned photographs of Haitian refugees, dating from the early 1980s through 2005.7 I examine the representation of Haitians in these photos and contextualize them within the history of United StatesHaiti relations and U.S. official policies regarding Haitian migration. I assert that just as interdiction is a policy of containment—the shoring up

90 / false witnessing

of national borders against the penetration of illegal migrants—so too do the photos attempt to contain the perceived threat that Haitian physicality represents to the U.S. nation-state by fixing Haitian boat refugees within a visual frame as the camera lens becomes the eye of surveillance. This containment carries deep resonances with the historical treatment of Haitians by the U.S. government (discussed in chapter 1). By contextualizing the historical precedent of the U.S. government’s relationship with Haitians, I examine specific photographs as emblematic of larger themes of “search-and-rescue,” racial cleansing, and political ideology based on familial rhetoric, which are reflected in the archive. Furthermore, I look to visual counter-narratives that challenge Coast Guard representations of Haitian refugees by examining Jacques Arcelin’s 1983 documentary film Bitter Cane and Edouard Duval-Carrié’s artwork.

The Photograph as Witness Compared to the difficulties asylum speakers confront in attempting to establish truth-value in their oral testimonies, given their inherent subjectivity, the visual and technological nature of photography has often been seen to imbue photographs with an authoritative truth-value. Susan Sontag has written of how, during World War I, photographs were commonly viewed as depicting the “real”—more so than anything that could be described through language: “Photographs had the advantage of uniting two contradictory features. Their credentials of objectivity were inbuilt. Yet they always had, necessarily a point of view. They were the record of the real—incontrovertible as no verbal account, however impartial, could be—since a machine was doing the recording. And they bore witness to the real—since a person had been there to take them.”8 The idea was simple: photographs could validate a person’s story in a way more real and tangible than the voice. In his seminal essay “The Body and the Archive” Allan Sekula traces the growth of the relationship between photography and criminology back to the 1880s and the 1890s. He explains how criminologists saw the “evidentiary promise” of photography whereby a photograph could offer “mute testimony,” resulting in a “silence that silences.”9 As such, criminologists saw photography as holding the potential to refute the false oral testimonies of criminals. In a battle between the photographic image and the voice, crime photography wins because it is seen as irrefutably “real.” The evidentiary value granted to photographs was vital to the growth of such fields as criminology, physical anthropology, and the biological

false witnessing / 91

sciences, which sought to visually record empirical evidence of physical difference and establish meanings to those “differences.” Photography has thus played a major role in how race has been imagined and understood in the United States and Western Europe. In the mid-nineteenth century, anthropology used photography to document racial “types,” out of which racial theories based on visual differences were developed to justify racial hierarchies that regarded those with darker skin as inferior. Sekula observes that the first photographic archives were developed in relation to police work. Archives that catalogued photos of criminals were used as a means to control populations and determine criminality through detection of physical “deviance.” The fields of physiognomy (study of the features of the head and face) and phrenology (study of the topography of the skull) used photography to systematically catalogue and study the surfaces of the body that supposedly reflected the “inner character” of a person.10 The founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, was also interested in determining a “biologically determined ‘criminal type’” for which he used composite portraiture.11 Sekula writes, “Thus photography came to establish and delimit the terrain of the other, to define both the generalized look—the typology—and the contingent instance of deviance and social pathology.”12 Studies such as Malek Alloula’s The Colonial Harem (1986), Lutz and Collins’s Reading National Geographic (1993), and Hight and Sampson’s Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place (2002) have explored the various connections between photography and colonialism, including the ways in which visual representations of racial difference often served to uphold colonialist doctrine. In her book An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (2006), Krista Thompson analyzes the ways in which early tourist photography (1880s-1930s) in Jamaica and the Bahamas portrayed black bodies as disciplined and submissive colonial subjects. I am suggesting neither a facile connection between early colonial photography, criminal photography, and contemporary Coast Guard photographs nor that Coast Guard photos are participating in an explicit scientific project of developing racial theories. However, these prior moments in photographic history help illuminate our understanding of how Haitian refugees are visually presented and situated amidst a number of social and political factors including the criminalization of refugees in the United States, INS attitudes toward Haitians as liars, and the historical perception of Haitian physical “deviance.” Coast Guard photographs participate in the silencing of Haitian subjects that resonates with these earlier models.

92 / false witnessing

It is necessary to place the study of the Coast Guard archive of Haitian refugee photos within the history of these institutional uses of photography as a means of defining and containing “deviance” and photography’s ubiquity in policing national borders. How does a visual archive of Haitian refugees contribute to delimiting who is a “foreigner” and who belongs to the nation? Given the intermediary role that the Coast Guard plays in determining whether Haitians are given opportunities to apply for asylum in the United States or are repatriated to Haiti, careful analysis of the representation of the activities onboard Coast Guard cutters is imperative. As Ali Behdad writes, “Border inspection, marginal though it may seem, constitutes a field of power relations in which minor and modest procedures of immigration law subject aliens, and increasingly citizens, to a whole set of regulatory techniques, ranging from embarrassing questions about one’s personal life to the humiliating, if not violent, experience of a stripsearch.”13 We could add photography to the list of humiliating procedures used to patrol national borders and control bodies. Haitians’ intimate affairs become part of the public domain as the photos document such intimate activities as medical examinations, eating, and showering. These representations are linked to the history of visual documentation and classification of colonial subjects. The visual recording of these acts signifies attempts to contain and control the liminal alterity that Haitians represent to members of the Coast Guard and the U.S. government. Military institutions are notoriously obsessed with the documentation, cataloguing, and classification of information. Within this context, photographs continue to be imbued with evidentiary value and carry more weight than spoken testimonies. The systematic use of photography by the U.S. military expanded greatly during World War II. In particular, the Navy—and the Coast Guard by extension because it functioned under the Navy’s auspices during the war—placed great emphasis on the use of photography for media and public relations purposes. More important, photography became central to reconnaissance missions so that “by the end of the war, it was estimated that 80 to 85 percent of military intelligence came from photography.”14 Given the documentary authority granted to photography by military institutions, it is important to consider the kind of historical record the Coast Guard photos produce. How do they portray that history of the seas and refugees? Haitian refugees’ experiences adrift on the open seas are by their clandestine nature “unmapped” and undocumented; the Coast Guard photographs serve as visual maps of Haitians’ entry into the territorial

false witnessing / 93

gaze of the Coast Guard. These photographs would seem to provide unmediated access to this type of migration that is not regularly seen by the rest of the world. Indeed, the Coast Guard Public Relations Office emphasizes the role of the Coast Guard in producing visual media of their activities because “Coast Guard imagery will often be the only images available” and “video footage and still photography tell the Coast Guard’s story more dramatically than any news release can.”15 As tools used for the creation of a visual rhetoric intended to disseminate the “story” of the Coast Guard to the public, Haitian refugees become emptied of their subjectivities in the photos. USCG photographers’ depictions of institutional humanitarianism represent attempts to steer public perceptions, in the hopes that this visual poetics of hospitality engages ordinary citizens in its mission.16 The effacement of Haitian subjectivities in the photographs produces a message of Coast Guard hospice/hospitality. Although individual photographs alone “testify” to Coast Guard hospitality, their inclusion in an archive of photographs actively constructed through the selection of photographs strengthens this message. As Sekula explains, photographic archives “establish a relation of abstract visual equivalence between pictures”17 and “by their very structure maintain a hidden connection between knowledge and power.”18 A relationship between photographs has been constructed within an archive through selection and inclusion. In his book Archive Fever, Derrida notes the etymological links between origins and authority in the word “archive” (arkhe). Archives represent a version of the past—where a community, institution, or nation has come from—while the decision of inclusion into the archive shapes this history. Order is imposed on the archive by repressing the heterogeneous: “In an archive, there should not be any absolute dissociation, any heterogeneity or secret which could separate (secernere), or partition, in an absolute manner. The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, that is, of gathering together.”19 The power over the archive carries political significance: “There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.”20 Furthermore, the archive exerts violence in the process of selection and dissemination. Choosing what is to be archived and what will be left out entails a silencing and erasure of that which does not adhere to the archive’s protocols. The Coast Guard’s Public Affairs Manual offers clues about how the Coast Guard’s visual archives are constructed, revealing the institutional demands to which photography must adhere. It emphasizes the importance of photography and other visual media in telling its story

94 / false witnessing

to the public: “Imagery captured by Coast Guard personnel is used to generate interest in and support for Coast Guard operations.”21 In his analysis of Egyptian newspaper photography, Gregory Starrett writes, “photography requires manipulation of the visible world itself to produce the conditions under which the photograph can be created as sign, a relationship forged between the visible and the unseen.”22 Thus, while technically the Coast Guard photographs are “voiceless,” they do “speak” through a visual rhetoric; the archive constitutes an institutionalized visual discourse on Haitian refugees.

Search-and-Rescue Hospitality With an emphasis on “search-and-rescue,” the Coast Guard photographs and their captions render invisible the Coast Guard’s role as a policing agent whose primary goal is to contain the “threat” that undocumented migration poses to national security.23 Instead, many of the photos emphasize a “human side” of the military by depicting Coast Guard members in ostensibly nurturing contact with Haitians. In fact, the searchand-rescue narrative renders the USCG within the field of hospitality that emphasizes hospice, the rehabilitation of travelers; Coast Guard ships are configured as spaces of asylum. And thus, the Coast Guard photographs appear to function as “asylum speakers” through their visual rhetoric of hospice, especially as they evoke humanitarian visual rhetoric. Yet, as I discuss, because the ultimate goal of these search-and-rescue missions is interdiction, the visual and textual rhetoric of hospitality obscures the hostility whereby national borders are violently reinforced—the kind of hostility that resulted in the death of Joseph Dantica in a U.S. hospital prison ward, the account with which I began this book. The Coast Guard exists in paradoxical roles of providing hospice for refugees at sea, portrayed in many of the photographs as an inviting familial embrace, while simultaneously expelling the refugees and blocking their entry into the U.S. polity. Coast Guard cutters become “contact zones”24 where the issues surrounding migration, legality, and foreign relations converge. Delineations of state hospitality occur as Haitians encounter members of the U.S. military and authorities from the INS. As an entity that polices national borders, regulates hospitality, and yet paradoxically represents itself as an agent of hospice for those refugees they interdict at sea, the Coast Guard constitutes what Ali Behdad refers to as “ambivalent hospitality”25 or the “continual vacillation between hospitality and hostility”26 that symbolizes U.S. attitudes toward immigration.

false witnessing / 95

The visual discourse of “rescue” obscures the powerful role that the USCG plays in seriously hindering, if not prohibiting, Haitian boat refugees from applying for asylum. By enforcing the Interdiction Agreement that specifically prohibits Haitian boat refugees from entering into the United States, Haitians do not gain the same automatic right to an asylum hearing that those who touch its shores do. Refugees may be given cursory interviews on board Coast Guard ships (and depending upon the policy configuration at a given time, not all refugees are even granted interviews), but overwhelmingly these interviews do not lead to further access into the asylum process; the majority of asylum claims are dismissed, and most refugees are repatriated. These circumstances rest uneasily against the definition of “rescue,” which is defined as “deliver[ing] (a person) from the attack of, or out of the hands of, assailants or enemies.”27 Thus, while Coast Guard members may aid Haitians to a certain degree by offering temporary food, water, and shelter, ultimately, they do not liberate Haitian migrants because they return them to the land they have fled. The Coast Guard has had to defend its role in carrying out the interdiction policy. For example, the monthly periodical, Seapower, published by the Navy League of the United States, a nonprofit, civilian organization “dedicated to the education of our citizens,” emphasizes the need to shape public perception of Coast Guard interdictions.28 In a 1984 article, “Search and Interdict,” Vincent C. Thomas Jr. laments the “ineffective way in which the Coast Guard communicates to the media and general public the accomplishments of its people. Heroics at sea by Coast Guard personnel are an everyday occurrence.”29 Thus the photographs on the website function in a public relations capacity. Anyone can access them and view images of Coast Guard activities that have been selected for public viewing (all photographs are vetted through the Coast Guard Public Affairs Office). Some of these photographs have been used by the mainstream print media (such as The Miami Herald) when reporting stories on Haitian boat refugees. In reaching this wider audience, the photographs influence public perceptions of the Coast Guard, Haitians, and undocumented migration. Catherine Liu argues, “The photograph has been an important medium by which modernity indoctrinates its subjects, and it never ceases to teach us how to play our roles as citizens of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”30 This discourse of rescue incorporates the idea of saving Haitians from death and assumes passivity on the part of Haitians: they are not agents in their own destinies. As such, the notion of rescue can be understood

96 / false witnessing

as an imperial ideology that promotes its doctrines by suggesting that it is saving the Third World from itself through acts of benevolence, aid, and rescue, which has been central to the justification of U.S. expansion throughout the Americas. The visual and discursive rhetoric of rescue indoctrinates U.S. citizens into this imperial and ultimately, nativist project. The attempt to contain and control perceptions of the USCG is also demonstrated rhetorically in the numerous internal memos that emphasize the official story that interdiction is ultimately a humanitarian effort.31 Notably, the USCG online history page, without mention of interdiction, states only that the USCG has “saved thousands [of migrant lives].” Like the “New Orleans’ Saints” cartoon, the photos attempt to consecrate such activities to the status of the extraordinary. One must consider the kind of power of seeing and looking the photographer and the audience have in viewing Haitians in this particularly vulnerable state. What kind of institutional authority are these photographs granted, and how does this shape our understanding of Haitian migration and manage perceptions of Homeland Security? As John Tagg argues, “Like the state, the camera is never neutral. The representations it produces are highly coded, and the power it wields is never its own. As a means of record, it arrives on the scene vested with a particular authority to arrest, picture and transform daily life; a power to see and record.”32 Are there any opportunities for Haitian subjects to step outside of the confines imposed by the Coast Guard photographs? Finally, I also recognize that the reproduction of the photos in this book can potentially rehearse the same hyperexposure of refugees that I intend to critique within the Coast Guard archive. And my selection of photos can produce its own archive-effect. While recognizing that I (and readers) engage in a degree of complicity in the act of looking, I intend to offer a critical reading that unveils some detrimental visual practices of the Coast Guard.

Sea Power and the State To elaborate on a point I raised in the introduction, the Coast Guard ship and Paul Gilroy’s celebration of ships as vessels that facilitated the transnational, transatlantic circulation of cultures evoke a stark contrast. Gilroy largely celebrates the military ship as a site that facilitated the political radicalism for such figures as James Wedderburn, the child of a slave trader and a slave, who, after emigrating to England was a member of the British Royal Navy.33 For Wedderburn, the ship’s movement proves

false witnessing / 97

liberatory, yet we must also consider the power of military ships to limit and foreclose movement and opportunity. The U.S. history of militarization of the seas and “gunboat diplomacy” has played a major role in U.S. expansion in the Caribbean, the Pacific, and throughout Latin America, which serves the interests of U.S. foreign and economic policy. The branch of the service now known as the Coast Guard originated from the Revenue Cutter Service (RCS) that was established in 1790. The service began as a means to maintain the flows of capital by protecting the nation’s ports; it quickly became responsible for policing maritime migration as cutters participated in operations against pirates in the South Atlantic waters.34 While it carried out interdictions of ships that unlawfully participated in the slave trade after its prohibition in 1807, the Coast Guard also regularly used slave labor on board ships until 1843.35 Prior to the Spanish-American War (1898), the RCS cutters “seized ships suspected of violating U.S. neutrality and smuggling ammunition and other supplies to Cuban rebels.”36 The RCS also played a significant role in enabling U.S. expansion into the Caribbean and Pacific, helping to defeat Spanish naval forces in the Philippines.37 The military presence of ships in the Caribbean, with the establishment of naval bases at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba (1898–present), in Puerto Rico (1943–2004), and on Trinidad (1941–1960), facilitated American sea power in the region. As a part of American expansion throughout Latin America, the military ship reasserts U.S. national power which infringes upon the sovereignty of nations in the Caribbean by establishing naval bases in the region. In a possible effort to reiterate U.S. military might in the face of leftist leaders such as Hugo Chavez, in 2008, the U.S. Navy reactivated its Fourth Fleet, which had been disbanded in 1950, having served its purpose of patrolling the seas to combat German submarines during World War II. Antonio Benítez-Rojo places the origins of these contemporary military fleets within the Spanish flota (fleet) system, designed by the sixteenth-century admiral Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, that enabled the transport of extracted gold and silver and other riches from the Americas to Spain.38 Thus, from the beginning of European colonialism, military ships have proven essential to imperialism in the region. Since the late-nineteenth century, the United States has taken over the imperial helm. The role of the Coast Guard in inhibiting refugee migration dates to World War II when it fired at the St. Louis, a ship of German Jewish refugees, who, after being denied entry to Cuba, tried to enter the United States but were forced to return to Germany, where most died in the

98 / false witnessing

Holocaust.39 It has subsequently played a major role in interdicting migrants. As stated on the Coast Guard’s website, “Between 1980 and 2000, we interdicted 290,000 migrants, mostly from Cuba, Dominican Republic, People’s Republic of China, and Haiti.”40 In February 2003, the institution became a part of Homeland Security, thereby solidifying its role as protector of national borders.41 Today the Coast Guard patrols coastal areas that are much larger than United States’ land borders: “95,000 miles of shoreline bordering nearly 3.4 million square miles of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ).”42 This protection of EEZs demonstrates how the Coast Guard’s surveillance and power over the seas is linked to enabling the flow of capital and U.S. economic interests. Coast Guard ships become emblems of the politics of hospitality as they patrol international waters to intervene in migrations, thereby controlling not only who will be allowed entrance into the United States but also who can have a place on the seas. The Coast Guard photos represent the limbo time-space of the amorphous oceanic in-between where USCG cutters and Haitian vessels are physically situated in perpetual interface.

U.S. Military Attitudes Toward Haiti(ans) Mary Renda’s analysis of the culture of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915–1934) provides historical precedent for the contemporary treatment of Haitians by the U.S. military. She makes an important argument about the institutionalization of discriminatory perceptions of Haitians during the early twentieth century. Remarking on published accounts by former marines, Renda writes, “sensational narratives reinforced official discourses and strengthened their ability to conscript ordinary citizens into the logic of empire. Together, popular and official discourses invited Americans to adopt an imperial perspective and fueled public fascination with Haiti.”43 Just as former marines published works sensationalizing Haitian vodou, at least one member of the Coast Guard produced his own lurid tale of the Caribbean, although it appears not to have gained a wide readership. More than sixty years after the marine occupation, Earl E. Edenfield Jr.’s The Curse of the Aurora (2001) rehearses the exoticism of its marine predecessors as it depicts a group of Coast Guardsmen who, in a night of drinking, encounter a “voodoo queen,” who places a curse on them when they refuse to have sex with her. As I discussed in chapter 1, Michael Dash has examined late twentiethcentury perceptions of Haitians as diseased entities that threaten the U.S.

false witnessing / 99

nation. Dash argues that these perceptions continue to negatively impact Haitians: “The fate of the Haitian ‘boat people’ in the United States is an extreme example of the way official policy is based on a discourse that is rooted in a cultural unconscious.”44 Haitians have been seen solely as economic migrants not political asylees, despite the fact that impoverishment and political persecution are inextricable for many who attempt to migrate.45 Most often, Haitian claims to persecution have been dismissed as mere excuses to make it into the United States for economic gain. This attitude has been echoed by Thomas Jr. who asserts that of the Cubans, Haitians, and other Caribbeans who arrived in the United States in 1980, “a sizable percentage of those thousands was anything but the kind of people most Americans would want to see entering their country as prospective citizens . . . the Haitians, lacking in skill and education, were an added burden to the U.S. economy.”46 He contends that “few [Haitians], if any, according to INS officials, were the political refugees that much of the news media claimed they were, but were, rather seeking employment in the United States.”47 Thomas Jr.’s statements reflect the clear distinctions that INS authorities draw between politics and economics and how these perceptions become interpolated into broader public discourse. When describing current interdiction operations, a USCG memo delineates between the role of the USCG and the INS: “the Coast Guard approaches migrant interdiction as a potential search and rescue case and does not make determinations regarding the status and disposition of the passengers. All cutters on specific migrant interdiction patrols carry INS agents and interpreters who determine the status of the migrants.”48 With the emphasis on search-and-rescue, the memo suggests that the Coast Guard does not deleteriously impact the status of migrants. Yet elsewhere the political implications of interdiction are plainly stated: “When successful, illegal immigration can potentially cost U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars each year in social services. In addition to relieving this financial burden on our citizens, the Coast Guard’s efforts help to support legal migration systems. Primarily, the Coast Guard maintains its humanitarian responsibility to prevent the loss of life at sea, since the majority of migrant vessels are dangerously overloaded, unseaworthy or otherwise unsafe.”49 Thomas Jr.’s article paints an even more politicized view of the program when he interviews both an INS top official and a Coast Guard officer, Had the survivors had problems with the government of President Jean-Claude Duvalier, the son of the notorious ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier? The unhesitating answer was ‘no.’ . . . Boyce’s comments

100 / false witnessing

about the Haitians’ lack of concern about returning to their native land is supported by the immediate former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, Rear Adm. Donald Thompson, USCG. . . [who states] “There are some factions and some Haitians in this country who would suggest they are going back and receiving very poor treatment, but we have yet to uncover one case like that. . . I have been to Haiti and have visited and talked with people who have gone back. We are not aware of any cases of people who have been mistreated.”50 What neither the author nor the INS or Coast Guard officials take into consideration is the process by which Haitians tell their stories and the role that language barriers, cultural differences, and other factors may play in these communications.

Photography: Containing Migrant Bodies I contend that the USCG photographs are linked to the “cultural unconscious” of Haitians in the U.S. imagination. Much like the attempt to “stem” the flow of migrants, photography reflects the perpetual attempt to “contain” the horizon/image within its frame.51 The accumulation of Haitian bodies as they are discovered and “rescued” becomes a marker of USCG “success” in its search-and-rescue and policing-the-seas roles. Several photos depict cutters filled to the brim with huge numbers of Haitians, suggesting the potential for chaos that the migrants represent as they cannot be contained within the camera’s frame. Carolle Charles notes that Haitian migrants have been seen as “less manageable or difficult to assimilate” by INS officials.52 One photograph that underscores this view depicts a mass of overlapping black bodies that is reminiscent of the “overpacking” of bodies on slaveships (fig. 1). The result is a mass objectification of refugee bodies. A story reported in The Virginian-Pilot reveals a similar objectification as it describes a Coast Guard search of a refugee vessel: Then [the Coast Guard member’s] flashlight spots a movement in the darkness. The tarp twitches; something is beneath it. Reaching down, [the crew member] expects to free a rat, common on boats leaving impoverished Haiti. He slowly pulls back a corner of the tarp. There is no rat. Instead, there is a foot. A bare foot. A woman’s foot. A leg is exposed as the tarp is drawn back. There’s a moan. Perhaps a curse. The boarding crew, . . . has found . . . illegal

false witnessing / 101

Haitian migrants. Below deck on the old freighter Marie Belle, several Coast Guardsmen summon an officer from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to help peel back the tarp. Underneath are rows of bare limbs—forearms crisscrossed over thighs and calves. As the tarp comes off, more legs pull back sluggishly retreating. But there is nowhere to go, and soon the bodies are exposed. . . . In little more than a minute, 24 gaunt faces are lined up against the wooden walls. They squint, turning their heads from flashlight beams, saying nothing.53 The rhetorical imagery created by this passage is undeniably visual and deserves unpacking. The passage is framed by visual references to lightness and darkness. If we consider that a photograph is a transposition of light and darkness, the passage rehearses a similar kind of containment as a photograph with the Coast Guard crewmember and the INS carrying the power to see, as they unveil the “darkness” of nighttime, clandestine migration with the technology of a flashlight. The depiction of the “unknown” mass of bodies through the comparison of Haitians with rodents carries starkly racist overtones. Haitians are not seen as human, but as dismembered body parts that “twitch” and “squint.” And because the Haitians are speechless, capable only of “moaning” and “cursing,” they are not granted positions as fully human subjects. Peter Nyers explains that the association of refugees with a lack of speech “has historically been deployed to discursively establish an animal quality to refugeeness.”54 Conversely, the journalistic account represents a violent deployment of language that discursively dismembers the refugees, underscoring a kind of embodiment of their position as “limb/o citizens.” The alterity that these bodies represent is quickly “contained” as the Haitians are “lined up” by authorities. The depiction of the mass of bodies evokes the fear of mass Haitian migration that has fueled much of U.S. policy toward Haitian migrants—the U.S. administration has often stated that interdiction and detention is meant to deter such migration. Similarly, figure 1 visually rehearses this rhetoric of Haitian-otherness. The photo and its caption attempt to visually and rhetorically contain this mass. In the caption, the use of the term “relax” to describe refugees’ actions diffuses both the intensity of the interdiction and perhaps the threat of chaos that such a mass signifies to the U.S. governmental authorities and the public. “Relax” suggests a carefree attitude on the part of refugees, as if they were on a leisurely cruise and not in a state

102 / false witnessing

figure 1. “Haitian migrants interdicted at sea relax aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Harriet Lane as they are taken to camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” (June 29, 1991) USCG photo by PA1 Eric Eggen.

of physical and psychological exhaustion. In another sense, it depicts a typical scene that recalls similar types of photos used by humanitarian organizations to depict the enormity of refugee populations in what Malkki characterizes as “‘raw’ or ‘bare’ humanity” through which “an utter human uniformity is hammered into the viewer’s retina.”55 Yet, however well-intended such images and their captions may be, these visual practices “are far more common than is the reproduction in print of what particular refugees have said.”56 As these bodies accumulate aboard Coast Guard ships, the national and institutional threat that they pose is contained through surveillance, examination, and documentation. Recalling Payen’s description of the identification processing of repatriated Haitians that I discussed in chapter 1, another photo (see figure 2) featuring the same caption as figure 1 depicts a migrant wearing an identification bracelet. The image contradicts the relaxation rhetoric of the caption as the migrant, who is turned away from the camera’s gaze, appears frustrated, despondent, and fatigued. The most prominent feature of the photo is

false witnessing / 103

figure 2. Windward Passage—“Haitian migrants interdicted at sea relax aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Harriet Lane (WMEC 903) as they are taken to camps at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.” Caption on a duplicate photo: “A Haitian migrant onboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Harriet Lane wears a wristband used to identify health conditions and monitor meals.” (December 1, 1991) USCG photo by PA1 Eric Eggen.

the identification bracelet, something that provides the USCG and INS with information on each refugee, but something to which viewers are not privy. We do not know the names or anything about the people in the photos. Without any identifying information or testimony from refugees themselves, they remain in the realm outside the human, mere subjects of bureaucratic classification. Groups of refugees are photographed performing various hygienic and intimate tasks. There are several photographs depicting the “cleansing” of migrant bodies. When viewed in the context of racialized

104 / false witnessing

figure 3. “Haitian migrants picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mohawk are given a chance to shower.” (December 1, 1991) USCG photo by Robin Ressler.

U.S.-Haiti relations, “cleansing” carries the genocidal implications of “ethnic cleansing” and the notion of the attempted “purification” of what have typically been perceived as “diseased” Haitian bodies. In her analysis of colonial soap advertising, Anne McClintock explains the significance of cleansing to imperial ideologies, “The poetics of cleanliness is a poetics of social discipline. Purification rituals prepare the body as a terrain of meaning, organizing flows of value across the self and the community and demarcating boundaries between one community and another.”57 Some photographs (see figure 3) portray personal hygiene as a public act for both men and women who are clad only in towels as they wait their turn to shower. The caption suggests that the Coast Guard vessel becomes a space of renewal and hospice, where Haitians are given opportunities to refresh and cleanse themselves of the effluvia of their harrowing experiences. However, the hegemonic status of the military institution ultimately renders this a momentary reprieve as the Coast Guard continues to carry out interdictions and Haitians are either sent to detention centers

false witnessing / 105

figure 4. “Haitian migrants picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mohawk are given a chance to shower.” (January 6, 1992) USCG photo by Robin Resslar, PA2.

or repatriated. The photograph, however, extends this time of hospice so that it may become stabilized and assimilated into the discourse of rescue and hospitality. The horrendous conditions at detention centers undercut this narrative of U.S. hospitality. One detainee at the Krome Detention Center describes, “When I arrived they put me in jail [Krome], they made me eat without washing my mouth, they made me go to bed without washing my body.”58 One photo (see figure 4) depicts four Haitian men showering together. The men are photographed primarily from the waist up, (although one nude buttock appears in the background), signaling an encroachment of the outside into the intimate space. Although their backs are to us, the private and personal act of self-cleansing becomes transformed into a collective act and exposed to public scrutiny and voyeurism with the caption, “Haitian migrants picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mohawk are given a chance to shower.” Showering is rendered

106 / false witnessing

figure 5. “Haitian migrants interdicted at sea are given new toothbrushes to use by the crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Mohawk.” (January 12, 1992) USCG photo by PA2 Robin Pessler.

a privilege to be granted. The construction of this image reflects an amalgamation of signifiers of containment, voyeurism, and cleansing as the photo is constructed as a frame within a frame—the pipes surrounding the shower frame the men showering. One side of the shower is blocked by a wall, another side is enclosed with a shower curtain, but there are no other visible barriers on the remaining two sides—one of which is the angle from which the photograph was shot. Because the image was shot from an angle above the men, the photographer holds a voyeuristic vantage point; thus, viewers also become voyeurs looking down upon the refugees in the shower. This voyeurism suggests a pornographic vantage point from where migrants’ cleansing becomes eroticized and exoticized. Their bodies are objectified as though they are performing erotic acts on each other, with the soapsuds symbolizing seminal fluids. This eroticization of cleansing becomes a means to contain the perceived threat of the physicality of male Haitian bodies and the epidemiological threat that these bodies pose, while also evoking the notion of sodomy. In his analysis of the military photographs taken at Abu Ghraib prison, Nicolas Mirzoeff argues that they

false witnessing / 107

are constructed to evoke Iraqi prisons in sodomitical positions because “the sodomitical is everything the proper civilized person is not.”59 The sodomitical construction of the shower photo suggests the deviance of migrants’ bodies that must be cleansed, but will never be completely purified. Mirzoeff describes the construction of the “spectacle” of sodomy as “a representation of the very erotics of global power, in which only certain actors have permission to look and to create what is to be seen.”60 The photo of the migrants reinforces the power of the U.S. military to emasculate the men. However, whereas the Abu Ghraib photos serve as explicit forms of humiliation, torture, and military prowess, the photo of the Haitian men showering is rendered within the rhetoric of search-and-rescue hospitality that nevertheless serves to dominate and control. In contrast to USCG technologies, Haitians brought aboard Coast Guard ships are represented as devoid of technology without even sufficient tools for hygiene. One photograph (see figure 5) depicts a group of migrants brushing their teeth over the side of a cutter. Again the ship is configured as a site of hospitality where the Coast Guard “hosts” offer gifts (of toothbrushes) to their guest-strangers. Furthermore, the photographs (see figure 6) underscore a visual alterity between Haitians and members of the USCG through depictions of Haitian bodies as “unclean” and “unwell,” in various states of undress, as opposed to the uniformed, “healthy” bodies of USCG. Barely clothed migrant bodies, bodies often suffering from dehydration or starvation, are juxtaposed with the official, authoritative bodies of members of the USCG, clad in uniforms and appearing strong and healthy. The discourse of hospice is contrasted with the need to discipline and contain the perceived threat that Haitian bodies pose. A Coast Guard manual for Alien Migrant Interdiction Operations (AMIO) suggests that Coast Guard members’ bodies are vulnerable to potentially “contaminated” migrant bodies. The concern over the possible ill effects that migrant bodies pose is made starkly clear: Activities associated with various Coast Guard operations may place personnel at increased risk for illness or injury. Alien Migrant Interdiction Operations (AMIO) include direct physical contact with people from regions known to be endemic with important communicable diseases. These operations frequently have occupational or environmental conditions and circumstances that expose personnel to potential health hazards. Contact with persons

figure 6. Windward Pass (April 30, 2005)—“A Haitian man receives medical attention on board the Coast Guard cutter Dependable. Most of the migrants were treated for dehydration, stomach cramps and headaches.” USCG photo by PA2 John Edwards.

false witnessing / 109

with communicable diseases may increase the likelihood of disease transmission.61 The manual contends that the containment of contamination requires a regime of hygienic vigilance. One suggested preventive measure is “limited contact with alien migrants and their effects to that which is purposeful and necessary.”62 Another directive declares the potential health hazard posed by eating with migrants, “Meals should be prepared and served separately for Coast Guard members and alien migrants. Attention is required to ensure meals reach the intended persons and cross mixing or contamination of foods does not occur. Once food has left controlled areas to be served to alien migrants, it shall not be returned for storage or reuse.”63 Here again we see the ambivalence of hospitality; providing meals is not only a means of nourishment but also a powerful symbol of hospitality, connection, and trust between host and gueststranger. Prohibiting members of the Coast Guard from eating with migrants thus subverts the rhetoric of hospice. The photos reveal the anxiety surrounding contact between the bodies of Coast Guard members and those of migrants. Many of them portray Coast Guard members clad in breathing masks and other prophylactic gear despite being in the open air, even as the manual states, “No special respiratory protection equipment (e.g., masks) is necessary for the majority of situations involving contact with alien migrants. For most Coast Guard personnel, contact with alien migrants is either brief or occurs in an open-air environment. Masks, therefore, should be used only in highly defined circumstances where the duration and magnitude of TB exposure warrant use.”64 Although the manual does not specify regions or nations from which migrants are coming—seemingly anywhere outside U.S. borders is an epidemiological threat—the reference to TB exposure recalls the 1970s perceptions of Haitians as carriers of the disease. Because these bodies hold the potential to “communicate” across physiological borders, the need to contain and control the threat that they pose extends to the broader atmosphere. Medical inspection of individual bodies is visually recorded as the institutional force of the Coast Guard probes the interiors of the migrant’s body (see figure 7). One image evokes a police search as the migrant stands with his arms clasped over his head and the female agent, clad in latex gloves and mask, searches his body, underscoring the asymmetrical relationship between the refugees and Coast Guard personnel (see figure 8).

110 / false witnessing

figure 7. Windward Pass (April 30, 2005)—“A Haitian woman is inspected upon her embarkation aboard the Coast Guard cutter Dependable. As a safety precaution, migrants are frisked and checked for any health issues before being placed on the flight deck.” USCG photo by John Edwards.

Technologies of Hostility The regime of containment and cleansing extends to the vessels that Haitian refugees occupy before being interdicted. Invariably, reports of refugee interdictions note the rickety-ness of refugee vessels. They are deemed too primitive to warrant saving as one caption reads: “The migrant’s (sic) boats are disposed of at sea because they are too unseaworthy and cannot be towed back to Haitia (sic).” The image (see figure 9) shows a vessel engulfed in flames, which again evokes the notion of purification and eradication. Notably, by deeming these vessels as “hazard[s] to navigation,” the Coast Guard asserts its own power over the seas. In November 1997, a CNN report described how “a U.S. Coast Guard cutter rammed a wooden boat overloaded with more than 200 Haitian refugees off the Florida Coast . . . and then joined other Coast Guard vessels in chasing down the rickety boat when it made a run for it.”65 The Coast Guard explained its actions as a process known as “shouldering” where a cutter bumps up against the side of a vessel in an attempt to stop it from proceeding. The euphemism of “shouldering” belies the violent nature of the act: “The maneuver tore away some of the railing, and chased some of the 60 or 80 people on deck to the other side.”66 Indeed this serves as a stark

false witnessing / 111

figure 8. “Off the coast of Haiti (April 7, 1987)—Searches for weapons and other dangerous objects are carried out when refugees first come aboard a Coast Guard cutter.” USCG photo by PA3 Joe Dye.

example of the limits of the discourse of rescue; interdiction constitutes a violent regime of containment and control. USCG technologies of cutter, gun, camera, telescopic lens, and infrared camera are imbricated to maintain the power of surveillance and are juxtaposed with refugees’ lack of technology. Haitian refugee accounts reveal that the torching of refugee boats eliminate much more than the vessel; the flames also eliminate luggage, photos, and documents. One refugee interviewed by Paul Farmer in 1993 at Guantánamo states that the military offered no reason for burning these items and that “the reason that I came through with some of my documents is because I had a backpack and was wearing pants with pockets. They went through my bag and took some of my documents. Even my important papers they took. American soldiers did this. Fortunately, I had hidden some papers in my pockets.”67 In order to maintain its hegemony over the seas, the Coast Guard must continually search out Haitian vessels and engage in a kind of “scopic imperialism”68 where the continuous scanning of the horizon contains it within the visual frame of the telescope/camera and marks

112 / false witnessing

figure 9. “An unseaworthy Haitian sailboat is destroyed as a hazard to navigation.” (n.d.) USCG photo.

the attempt to unveil Haitians in order to contain and subjugate them. In one image we see a Coast Guard crewmember looking through the lens of a telescope in search of migrants. The photo (see figure 10) is taken as sunset, so that the Coast Guard member and the telescope are silhouetted against a purple sky. As the horizon is consumed by the telescope, viewers become implicated in the act of surveillance. With the onset of nighttime invisibility, the image evokes night-vision cameras that are used to detect refugee vessels in darkness. As the sun sets, the telescope becomes a silhouette that also evokes a gun. The contrast of the silhouette of telescope/gun against the soothing purple tones of the sunset seemingly empty the technology of its threat, thereby making it an appealing image for public consumption. The person looking through the lens becomes only an anonymous silhouette; the borders of person and telescope are indistinguishable, signifying the inviolable power of seeing on behalf of the Coast Guard. In this photo (see figure

false witnessing / 113

figure 10. “A crewman on the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Mohawk scans the horizon for Haitian migrants.” (January 6, 1992) USCG photo by Robin Ressler PA2.

10), the lens that becomes the site of Haitian migrant control as it scopes out trespassers becomes postcard-like, emptied of the violence that an image of a gun would evoke. However, the image maintains the role of the Coast Guard as protector. In a sense, we too become complicit in the scopic power of the Coast Guard as we look at the member of the Coast Guard patrolling horizon. Whereas the image of the telescope becomes emptied of its threat, the infrared photo (see figure 11) serves as an ominous reminder of the militaristic power behind the lens. As the camera zeroes in, the vessel becomes a targeted site on the scope. The photo charts the Haitian boat and records its location in time and space, reminding viewers of the Coast Guard’s power of seeing, even over darkened seas. The Coast Guard photos also portray its work in training the Haitian Coast Guard in the use of weapons as figure 12 represents. Thus, although the caption asserts that this training will allow them to be “better prepared to enforce local laws and conduct search and rescue operations,” it also intensifies the surveillance and discipline of Haitian migrant bodies and reinforces the power of the state from which refugees initially fled. It

114 / false witnessing

figure 11. “Infra-red image of a Haitian sailboat with 72 migrants on board in Dec. ’03.” USCG photo.

is an example of the way that the USCG helps to perpetuate the relations between the U.S. and Haitian governments, often to the detriment of the Haitian people. As my discussion of nonrefoulement and in-country processing in chapter 1 shows, Haitian refugees are often subjected to surveillance, harassment, and persecution by Haitian authorities once they are repatriated. Thus, the USCG becomes complicit in their maltreatment by training Haitian Coast Guard members in the use of weapons and other military tactics. Another photo (see figure 13) reveals that the technological threat of military weaponry is combined with the artillery of language vis-à-vis U.S. Coast Guard interpreters. Echoing Payen’s essays, the man in the photo, whom we are told is Haitian-American, depicts an interpreter whose skill and control over discourse serve as a powerful asset to the U.S. government. The composition of the photo, with the interpreter standing in the foreground and a crowd of repatriated refugees in the background, signals the power over discourse that this interpreter and the institution on whose behalf he translates hold.

false witnessing / 115

figure 12. Port-au-Prince, Haiti (April 16, 2004)—“U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer 3rd Class Robert Orchard plays an attacker for Lindor Malachie, a Haitian Coast Guard member, who has just been pepper sprayed for training. Orchard, a law enforcement petty officer and medical corpsman for Maritime Safety and Security Team 91104 out of Galveston, Texas, is helping train members of the Haitian Coast Guard. The MSST deployed here in early March, supporting Operation Secure Tomorrow by providing security on the water and helping stabilize the country. They are also training the Haitian Coast Guard so they are better prepared to enforce local laws and conduct search and rescue operations.” U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Andrew Kendrick.

Cultivating Refugee Dependency The files at the Coast Guard Historian’s Office contain a script written for a documentary film to have been produced by the Coast Guard Public Affairs Office. The author B. H. Kenny explains the justification for the film: “Throughout this film the focus has been on the Coast guardsmen, not on the Haitians. This is the whole point of the film. We are showing the Coast Guard as the authority, the law enforcers. Compared to the Haitians the men and women of the HAMILTON are, to the camera,

116 / false witnessing

figure 13. Port-au-Prince, Haiti (April 27, 2004)—“U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer 2nd Class Nolet Antoine, a Haitian-American interpreter for the Maritime Component Commander at Joint Task Force-Haiti, is standing by while more than 650 Haitians are repatriated at Killick coast guard base here. He is normally a machinery technician at the Coast Guard Aids to Navigation Team in Colfax, La., but deployed to Haiti in March as an interpreter. The U.S. Coast Guard rescued and repatriated 1,591 Haitian migrants from Feb. 21 to April 27. They are here supporting Multinational Interim ForceHaiti to assist in stabilizing and securing the country.” U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Andrew Kendrick.

‘larger than life’. The Haitians are subject to them, dependent on them. The Coast Guard is calling the shots and giving the orders.”69 The photographic archive reproduces this sentiment by creating a visual rhetoric of Haitian dependency through numerous photos of infants and children. These children are often represented in photos either alone or in contact with members of the Coast Guard, but without connections to Haitian adults. Even when children are photographed alongside Haitian adults, they can still be rendered parentless as in the photograph of a young boy who is wrapped in a towel, looking directly at the camera (see fig. 14). Behind him is a male adult who is photographed from the shoulders down. As a

figure 14. Title: “Repatriation.” Port-au-Prince, Haiti (April 27, 2004)—“More than 650 Haitians, including many women and children, line up at Killick Haitian coast guard base in here to be repatriated April 27, after fleeing the country days earlier.” U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 3rd Class Andrew Kendrick.

118 / false witnessing

result, viewers cannot connect this boy with parents or any other family. He is seemingly alone and abandoned in the world. Here we have the intersection with the proliferation of images of children in photographs of refugees deployed by humanitarian organizations. As Malkki writes, “children have come to embody, more easily than adults, the universalism of bare humanity,” which is part of a “humanistic, universalizing representational practice.”70 In the apparent absence of Haitian parents in these photos, USCG members become familial surrogates. Several photographs feature infants and small children being held by members of the Coast Guard, powerful symbols of U.S. discourse of hospitality. As such, the photos construct “orphaned” babies, cut off from mothers and fathers, turning the Coast Guard into the role of caregiver. Mary Renda’s discussion of military paternalism during the U.S. occupation of Haiti is helpful here. Renda argues that paternalism functioned as an integral component to U.S. foreign policy: Paternalism was an assertion of authority, superiority, and control expressed in the metaphor of a father’s relationship with his children. It was a form of domination, a relation of power, masked as benevolent by its reference to paternal care and guidance, but structured equally by norms of paternal authority and discipline. In this sense, paternalism should not be seen in opposition to violence, but rather as one among several cultural vehicles for it.71 The documentary script reflects this notion of U.S. military paternalism: “To show [the authority of the Coast Guard] vividly we will look into the faces and into the eyes of the Haitians. Into the eyes of the children and the old people. We will see the fear, the hope, the desperation and the realization that the Coast Guard men and the big white ship are unmistakeable (sic) symbols of authority.”72 Carrying an enormous amount of emotional appeal, two photographs of Haitian infants are significant in their portrayal of vulnerability and paternalism. One features masked USCG personnel handing a baby up from a boat in  the water to the outstretched, gloved hands of a Coast Guard member (see figure 15). This particular image figures prominently in Coast Guard publicity as it has appeared on the USCG website in a publication that provides an overview of Coast Guard history and includes two photos featuring Haitian “rescues.”73 The baby is clad in a t-shirt, with a hood covering her/his head, and a face clenched in a cry. The visual construction of the photograph is

figure 15. “Coast Guardsmen pass a Haitian baby up to the ship after being rescued at sea during interdiction operations off of Haiti.” (November 30, 1999) USCG photo by PAC Tyler Johnson.

120 / false witnessing

stunning—one of the most powerful examples of the visual rhetoric of rescue that exists in the archive. The child appears suspended over an unfathomable sea, heightening viewers’ sense of the precariousness of the rescue and fragility of life. This evokes a number of interpretations. As they deliver the child up to the waiting crewmember, the Coast Guard members, wearing prophylactic gear of masks and latex-gloves, evoke images of medical personnel aiding in the “delivery” of the baby. In this sense, the infant has been newly born; the Coast Guard members have succeeded in “delivering” the child into the hands of the would-be doctor, an embodiment of hospice. Given the absence of the mother in the image, the sea evokes a womb from which the child was born and also becomes a baptismal space, which recalls the image of the sea-as-womb in Danticat’s “Children of the Sea” that I explored in chapter 1. What is the child being born into? Who is “baptizing” this child? Does the sea also serve as a purifying space for the child? Can this child, who is tied to a legacy of illegitimacy, tainted bloodlines, and blood ties be “saved”? A more tranquil infant photo depicts a naked baby lying on a blanket aboard a Coast Guard ship (see figure 16). The infant is in this sense “orphaned” in the frame of the photograph without the visible presence of any Haitian adults, except for the back of an anonymous woman’s legs. A male USCG member reaches down and clasps the baby’s outstretched fingers. The photo appears to capture a moment of “bonding” and “intimacy,” underscoring the message of Coast Guard benevolence, whereby members of the Coast Guard step in to perform familial and nurturing roles for seemingly abandoned children. The photographs cast members of the Coast Guard in the role of family, as nurturers and caretakers. A testimonial narrative, written by a member of the Coast Guard Cutter Dallas, reiterates this narrative of nurturing as she recounts her time aboard an interdiction ship: “This boat load is different from the last. This one has many women and children in it. My job is more important now because of the children. I am the only woman on board who has children of her own. I know I will need to help.”74 This narrative complements the notion of paternalism whereby maternity becomes the force through which the Coast Guard member perceives an immediate, intimate bond with a Haitian woman and her infant. She describes how, “One lady hands me her tiny son as she comes on board. She looks into my eyes and I know what she is asking without her saying a word. She is dirty, exhausted, and hungry. She can tell that I will take care of him.” She continues to describe how she “bathe[s] him and give[s] him a little love. In only a few minutes’ time, I have fallen in love with this beautiful little boy.” The

figure 16. “SA John Parmet stops to play with a Haitian child aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Dauntless during an AMIO patrol.” USCG photo by PA2 David M. Santos. Creation date: June 30, 1991. Submit date: December 11, 1999.

122 / false witnessing

maternal abilities of the Coast Guard member quickly displace those of the Haitian migrant woman whose perceived inability to mother renders her obsolete so that the Coast Guard member can “fall in love” with her child. Renda writes that ideology of paternalism constructed Haiti as “a nation orphaned by parental neglect, sometimes figuring France as the father who abandoned Haiti and Africa as the single mother incapable of raising her illegitimate child alone.”75 At least one early twentieth-century commentator explained that Haiti’s “orphaned” status resulted from the nation’s undisciplined nature as a “wayward girl.”76 The sexual overtones conjure associations with illegitimacy: Haiti’s inability to carry on as a legitimate nation and the inability to recognize the legitimacy of its citizens. The representation of children sans parents “frees” them from their parent’s “illegitimate” status as illegal aliens and as Haitians. The children evoke purity and innocence as they are “reborn” into the familial embrace of the USCG as represented by the photographs and testimonial. Within the nurturing rhetoric, however, the author of the testimonial reiterates the abject otherness of the Haitians as she describes encountering the initial “smell” on board the migrant vessel: “The smell of urine, human feces, and vomit. As I look down at the boat, I see them sitting in it. It is more than I can handle. I have to vomit over the side and then go on with my job.”77 The narrative ends with repatriation of the shipload of Haitian migrants and the author’s despair over their return but admiration for the Haitians’ strength: “They don’t cry or beg. They know they did their best.” In her view they are admirable in their stoicism; they are in a sense, “good” refugees who have been effectively disciplined to not step too far out of bounds. Ultimately, the photos and the narrative obscure U.S. governmental treatment of Haitian refugee children, some of whom were repatriated to Haiti without their families, who were in the United States.78 Furthermore, they also mask the INS policy of splitting up families who may end up in detention facilities.79 Finally, we do not see the impoverished conditions from which the children come and to which they are returned; the infant mortality rates in Haiti are among the highest in the world. Dr. Paul Farmer, professor of medical anthropology at Harvard, who has done extensive medical work in Haiti, explains: Life expectancy at birth has dropped to below 50 years. More than a third of all children who live to see their first birthday show signs of severely stunted growth, a result of malnutrition and infectious diseases. A research center based in the United Kingdom recently

false witnessing / 123

developed what it calls a water poverty index, and ranked Haiti 147th out of 147 countries surveyed. Contaminated water is probably the number one killer of Haitian children.80 Further evidence of the institutionalized blindness to Haitian children includes the difference in attention given to Cuban and Haitian refugee children. While there was overwhelming media frenzy surrounding the Elían González case in 2000,81 little attention was given to the story of Sophonie Telcy, a six-year-old Haitian whose mother died a few months after arriving with her daughter in Miami and whose fate was as undetermined as Elían’s.82 One can read the attention given to Elían González within the context of U.S. “rescue” of Cuban children that goes back to Operation Peter Pan (1960–1962), a CIA-backed operation that brought over fourteen thousand unaccompanied children to live in the United States, a program coordinated by the U.S. government in conjunction with the Catholic Church and Cuban exile community. Cuban children became politically expedient pawns in the ongoing power struggle between Castro and Washington. They were ostensibly “rescued” from the clutches of communism. According to Karen Dubinsky, “parents were motivated to send their children for several reasons primarily because of CIA-sponsored rumors that the new revolutionary government was planning on nationalizing children and sending them to the Soviet Union for indoctrination or worse. It is believed in Cuba today that people thought their children would be eaten.”83 Many parents were unable to rejoin their children, and they were sent into foster-care and orphanages, where many subsequently endured difficult experiences. Against the narrative of orphaning and rebirth of Haitian children, however, is the Coast Guard status as an entity of Homeland Security. Amy Kaplan discusses the rhetorical implications of “homeland security” by asserting, “the notion of the nation as home, as a domestic space, relies structurally on its intimate opposition to the notion of the foreign.”84 Thus, to depict Haitian refugee children as “orphaned” points to their ultimate foreign status as refugees; they are not and cannot be assimilated into the “homeland.” As refugees, they are without a country, with no fatherland or motherland: “Homeland thus conveys a sense of native origins, of birthplace and birthright.”85 These children are depicted as adrift, without roots, origins, or kinship attachments. Despite the attempt to establish the Coast Guard as a purely benevolent and nurturing family unit, some photographs reveal images that reflect relationships between the Coast Guard and Haitians as more

124 / false witnessing

complicated, if not contentious. For example, one photograph (see fig. 17) has been constructed as a portrait with a male Coast Guard member posing behind a young Haitian boy. The Coast Guard member smiles with his hands placed on the boy’s shoulders. The physical contact between the two would seem to speak to a bond between them. As Derrida observes, “it is hard to imagine a scene of hospitality during which one welcomes without smiling at the other, without giving a sign of joy or pleasure.”86 Here we have the Coast Guard crewmember smiling not into the face of a refugee, but into the camera, which suggests a performance of hospitality. The reference to a “friend” in the caption sets up a narrative of camaraderie; however, the boy in the photo is not smiling, but glaring into the camera. Given that smiling connotes hospitality, frowning disrupts any suggestion of a shared intimacy between host and guest. The intimacy of the portrait is also undermined by the line of Haitian adults standing behind the two; a Haitian male looks on from behind. These elements destabilize the discourse of aid, nurturing, and paternalism.

Coda Perhaps most telling about the USCG archive is that which is not shown. We do not see drowned refugees there. To include such images would destabilize the search-and-rescue narrative that the archive puts forth. Writing about magazines’ inclination for publishing photographs of youth in the 1920s, Siegfried Kracauer’s remarks can apply to the Coast Guard archive: “What the photographs by their sheer accumulation attempt to banish is the recollection of death, which is part and parcel of every memory-image.”87 We also do not see images of the violent methods used by the Coast Guard to repatriate refugees, such as the firehosing of Haitians to remove them from Coast Guard ships and send them into the hands of the Haitian military waiting for them onshore.88 Similarly, Christopher Mitchell writes of “images of unwilling Haitian returnees being carried ashore by Coast Guard sailors in Portau-Prince and of fearful migrants waiting to be interrogated by officials of the government they had fled.”89 A May 1992 story in The Palm Beach Post describes the reaction of one Haitian who was intercepted by the USCG, who “violently resist[ed] repatriation” by jumping from a cutter into the sea, refusing the aid of life preservers thrown to him.90 When the crewmembers threw him a rope, he wrapped it around his neck. As

figure 17. “Health Specialist Chief Werner says goodbye to a friend just before these Haitians were transferred from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Harriet Lane to Guantanamo Bay’s tent city.” USCG photo by Eric Eggen, PA3. Creation date: December 1, 1991. Submit date: February 25, 1999.

126 / false witnessing

crewmembers jumped in the water, he screamed, “I prefer to die!” before they eventually captured him. On its webpage explaining the details of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, the UNHCR includes an image of a Haitian interdiction taken by the Coast Guard. Yet the accompanying text does not describe the heroics of rescue, but the element of nonrefoulement, the illegality of repatriating refugees when they could still face danger in their nation of origin. By removing the photo from the Coast Guard archive, the image poses a challenge to its search-and-rescue rhetoric. As such, it represents an attempt by the UNHCR to intervene in the space of hospitality through visual practices. This suggests that the photograph is always already unstable and malleable and the reasons that the Coast Guard continues to (re)deploy a visual regime of containment. The issue of how Haitians are viewed and represented by U.S. public discourse remains particularly urgent as it results in real consequences for Haitians. One twenty-first century manifestation of the deleterious perception of Haitians has come with the war on terror. In April 2003, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft linked terrorism to Haitian boat migrants, citing a State Department declaration that stated that Pakistanis and others were using Haiti as a “staging point for attempted migration to the United States.”91 Referring to Ashcroft’s decision authorizing the indefinite detainment of any illegal immigrant, Joan Dayan observes, “In this bizarre logic, to seek asylum is to commit a crime.”92 Furthermore, the U.S. government argues that a Haitian refugee influx will divert USCG resources away from the war on terrorism and that “housing Haitians at Guantanamo will distract from the interrogation of Al Qaeda members held there.”93

Bitter Cane Given the overwhelming effacement of Haitian subjectivities (despite their hyper-visibility) in the Coast Guard photographic archive, I turn to other visual texts that represent Haitian refugee boat migrations. Jacques Arcelin’s 1983 documentary film Bitter Cane represents the migration of Haitians by boat while also providing a counterdiscourse to the INS assessment of Haitians as economic migrants not in need of asylum. The film was clandestinely shot in Haiti during the reign of Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier. It opens with footage of refugees departing Haitian shores by boat at nighttime. We see part of the refugee boat journey on the seas and later see the same boat being towed by the U.S. Coast

false witnessing / 127

Guard, having obviously been intercepted. Prominently featured in this footage of refugees on the Coast Guard ship are the armed members of the Coast Guard standing guard. The display of weapons in the footage contrasts sharply with the Coast Guard archive in which the only guns displayed are in the training exercises with the Haitian Coast Guard. No photos show members of the Coast Guard holding firearms in the vicinity of refugees on the ships. This significant erasure underscores the archive’s emphasis on a message of hospice/hospitality as opposed to a threatening message of potential to harm refugees should they seem to step out of line. After this opening that focuses on boat refugees, the rest of the film seeks to answer the question of why Haitians would risk their lives out on the seas. Through historical analysis, archival footage, and interviews with workers and refugees, Bitter Cane proceeds to demonstrate that Haitian refugee migrations are deeply rooted in the economic conditions in Haiti that, since the early 1970s, have been based on neoliberal policies that allow U.S. companies to run factories in Haiti without paying taxes, paying workers a living wage, or otherwise contributing in any significant way to the Haitian economy. The argument put forth is that indeed many people experienced persecution under the Duvalier regime, which caused them to flee, and U.S. economic interests overwhelmingly allowed Duvalier to remain in power. The film traces the history of U.S. intervention back to U.S. Occupation, which sought to protect U.S. interests in the country and enabled Americans to buy up Haitian land and introduce the capitalist (as opposed to feudal) mode of production. After a period of disallowing foreign investment in favor of Haitian landowners, François Duvalier reopened the country to U.S. interests. The return of foreign investment drastically restructured the Haitian economy and society as U.S. companies set up factories in Haiti. Peasants left the countryside, often because they no longer had land to work, and moved to Port-au-Prince in search of work, which resulted in the growth of slums. Part of this U.S. investment came in the form of development aid where the government put landless peasants to work building roads (as in the U.S. Marine Occupation) and paid them with food instead of money. The film features testimonies of a number of Haitians (via translators)—including workers who remain in Haiti as well as refugees in detention centers in the United States. The argument that political and economic conditions are intertwined is supported through the interviews with workers and an underground labor organizer who tells of the repression of anyone who attempts to strike against the exploitative

128 / false witnessing

working conditions in the factories; strikers can be beaten and thrown into prison without trial. Thus, this political repression is directly related to upholding the economic system that benefits U.S. companies and becomes an impetus for some who flee to the U.S. in search of asylum. One refugee at the detention center speaks of the repression against one worker who organized a strike. As he states, Macoutes came and “beat the hell out of Jean.” Activist Ben Dupuy states, “The flight of boat people is above all an extension of the unemployment problem created by foreign investment. The big landowners are taking back the land which the peasantry lived on . . . but when peasants flee to the cities and try to survive as workers, they are repressed even for the smallest demands . . . the more popular unrest builds with people trying to find a way to survive, the more repression the government must exert with the Macoutes army and police. So we cannot separate the economic causes from political causes to explain the refugee problem.” A refugee being detained at Krome Detention Center states, “All our suffering stems from what the U.S. is doing in Haiti. We could have risen up long ago except for them. And there are a lot of things that we could do for ourselves. We could find a way to use the land, to build factories, do something with our country.” The film provides a broader view of the experiences of refugees and the context contributing to their situation than the Coast Guard photos. In addition to the opening scene of a refugee boat launch, we hear testimonies of refugees in detention via translation. Refugees interviewed at detention centers in New York and Miami testify to their harrowing journeys. One refugee describes her experience: We sailed for twelve days . . . but then we hit a rift, everyone’s going to fall in the water. Now the sun is hot, make us feel sick, our skin burned, turned all red, . . . big, big blisters all over our body. . . . We are going to die! Never see our children again. Never see Haiti again. Two girls start praying. But the next morning, very early, the hurricane, rain, waves, thunder, lightning, knock off from . . . the boat, everyone wet, all wet, no light, . . . don’t know where we going, lost. Now a big boat is coming down on us . . . everyone yelling ‘help! help!’ everyone shouting at the top of their lungs. We’re scared.94 By featuring the testimonies of refugees held in detention centers, Bitter Cane contributes to a poetics of hospitality that foregrounds the voices of refugees. This particular refugee’s testimony was told in a frenzied,

false witnessing / 129

urgent, nonlinear way, as though the refugee could not tell her story fast enough. The film juxtaposes the testimonies of refugees with a scene in a deportation hearing where the arbitrator explains that a motion for simultaneous translation has been denied, an application failed to establish that the applicant would be persecuted if repatriated, and therefore the application for asylum in question was denied. Thus, the film’s portrayal of the asylum process complements that featured in Well Founded Fear, as discussed in the introduction. While the Coast Guard archive turns away from death on the high seas, Bitter Cane shows footage of bodies washed up on shores of Hallandale Beach in Florida in October 1981. The posthumous arrival of refugees on the shores of the United States represents a humbling reminder that the politics of hospitality is often a question of life or death. One refugee testifies to having survived the journey on a sinking boat, while others died. He expresses disillusionment with the treatment of refugees after arrival: “We thought we would be free. Instead they threw us in prison.” Finally, I look to another image that provides a counternarrative to the Coast Guard archive: Edouard Duval-Carrié’s painting which is the image on the cover of this book, Le monde actuel, ou Erzulie interceptée (The World at Present, or Ezili Intercepted, 1996). This painting engages in a visual poetics of hospitality. With images of authorities (INS or Coast Guard) armed with rifles and wearing caps bearing a red cross as a universal symbol of care, Duval-Carrié, with the ironic gaze for which his work has become known, captures the inherent conflict of hostile hospitality of the Coast Guard. Dressed in the jewelry and fine clothes that she adores, Vodou goddess Ezili Freda Dahomey, the loa of romantic love and the sea, is poised in the limbo gateway on the gangplank of the Coast Guard ship. As a goddess she unites the spiritual world with the living. As part of the Vodou pantheon, she represents dislocation from Africa and the reassembling of spirituality in the New World. She appears to be disembarking, in a state of confusion. Is she being repatriated? Sent into detention? Or perhaps she is stepping off to take her place in the sea. With the infantlike being tied to her waist, this painting harks back to the Coast Guard photos of infants and Célianne in Danticat’s “Children of the Sea.” Here the Coast Guard appears to offer no protection to either Ezili or her charge.95 Throughout this chapter I have focused on visual aspects of witnessing Haitian boat refugee migration. I argued that photography continues to contribute to a poetics of hospitality whereby the surveillance role

130 / false witnessing

of the camera paradoxically allows the Coast Guard to project itself as an entity that provides refuge to weary travelers while simultaneously marking the alterity of Haitian bodies. Bitter Cane provides a necessary intervention whereby the deleterious aspects of the Coast Guard’s archival politics of hospitality come into relief, demonstrating that, through military and economic imperialism, the United States has continuously violated the laws of hospitality with Haiti and Haitians. Duval-Carrié’s painting suggests alternative ways of envisioning a poetics of hospitality.

3 /

Silent Subjectivities: Testimony and Haitian Labor Refugees In the present climate, no census can establish the Haitian and DominicoHaitian population objectively. The composition of the population is equally unknown. No more that 25 percent of rayanos (as the sons and daughters of Haitians born in the Dominican Republic are pejoratively called) have been granted legal Dominican status, according to an estimate by the Dominican-Haitian Cultural Center. —andré corten and isis duarte, “five hundred thousand haitians in the dominican republic.” Not having one’s papers in order in our societies is a form of civil death. —seyla benhabib, the rights of others: aliens, residents, and citizens

In chapters 1 and 2, I analyzed the implications of witnessing the conditions of Haitian boat refugees on the open seas. As I discussed, the U.S. government has systematically cast Haitians as economic migrants, thereby disqualifying them from official refugee status. In chapters 3 and 4, I explore how global capitalism, particularly that tied to U.S. policies, creates conditions in which laborers become refugees. Thus, I challenge the false dichotomy of political versus economic factors used to determine refugee status and address the precarious status of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic by focusing, among other things, on U.S. economic interests in the Dominican Republic as contributing factors in the exploitation of Haitians. The neoliberal policies deployed by the United States since World War II in particular have had profound effects throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. Free Trade policies like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), General System of Preferences (GSP) and development programs of the IMF and World Bank have weakened the sovereignty of many Caribbean and Latin American nations by reorganizing political and social structures of nations and contributing to impoverishment that has propelled many people into the transnational labor market. The latest manifestations of

132 / silent subjectivities

global capitalism, however, are not entirely new conditions for the Caribbean. The antecedents of the current circulation of labor and capital in the region lie with colonialism. European empire-building relied upon the establishment of monocultural production (and slave labor) for the accumulation of capital. Late nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury U.S. expansion also put in motion the conditions of capital and labor that we find today. In his critique of Jürgen Habermas’s Eurocentric notion of cosmopolitanism, Pheng Cheah sums up the trap in which Third World states often find themselves in the global capitalist world: “Postcolonial states forced to undergo structural adjustment, especially those in Africa and Latin America, are too impoverished to provide social welfare to their citizens. Worse still, states adopting the neoliberal path of export-oriented industrial development actively sacrifice the welfare of their people to provide conditions to attract transnational capital flows. This scenario is not exactly friendly to any of the three aspects of democratic will-formation (political participation, the expression of political will, or the public use of reason) which Habermas desires and celebrates.”1 In other words, the weakening of economies brought about by neoliberal policies in postcolonial states weakens democratic processes, alienating citizens from political participation. While labor conditions would not seem to be as urgent as warfare, torture, or other atrocities that propel refugee movements, poverty and worker abuses signal more quotidian forms of violence. If refugees are created through their banishment from the polity and a state cannot ensure the welfare of its citizens during times of political persecution, so too can economic conditions create similarly precarious conditions for citizenry, especially for those who work outside their nation of origin. Regarding the Caribbean, Teresita Martínez-Verge and Franklin Knight assert, “Globalization, in short, has not so far resulted in a market relationship between the various participants that is more equitable and just. Rather it has accentuated hegemonies and manifestly reinforced global inequality.”2 For example, the majority of the laborers who have migrated from south to north in the Americas exists at the bottom rung of the transnational migration ladder and experiences some of the worst exploitation. In fact, the home nation is often incapable of providing protections—as in the case of Haiti—because of dictatorship, war, and poverty facilitated through U.S. foreign policies. Workers can often find themselves in conditions as precarious as those they left in their nation of origin; they are still vulnerable to human rights abuses, which reflect the uneven spread of global capitalism.

silent subjectivities / 133

Noting the most recent effects of globalization and U.S. policy on the Haitian economy, Alex Dupuy explains the “politicization of economic reforms occurred in the late 1980s under the aegis of what became known as the ‘Washington Consensus’” that involved “‘neoliberal’ or ‘structural adjustment’ reforms adopted by the World Bank.” 3 The results have been disastrous for Haiti because, although these economic reforms were “ostensibly designed to alleviate poverty by stimulating sustainable economic growth, the policies of the bank and the other IFIS [international financial institutions] in fact maintained Haiti’s position in the international division of labor as a supplier of cheap labor to foreign capital.”4 Echoing the critiques offered by Haitians in Bitter Cane (discussed in chapter 2), Dupuy contends, “Migration is not only a safety valve or an alternative to unemployment and poverty. It is also becoming an increasingly important lifeline to the economy itself” via remittances.5 Thus, contrary to the idea that the transnational migration of workers enables the breakdown of the nation-state that will allow for the more equitable, crossborder linkages, the laborers that I explore in chapters 3 and 4 are limited in their movements and ability to form connections. The labor of Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic has shored up the Dominican economy for nearly a century, and yet they face ongoing restrictions by the Dominican government that impair their abilities for movement or transcultural transformation.6 Their continued containment and repeated banishment from the Dominican nation-state suggests the continued power of the nation-state and the limited abilities of the transnational worker to challenge state structures. For Haitian cane cutters, political and economic conditions often contribute mutually to persecutory conditions, a lack of protections, and statelessness. What kind of structures are in place to witness and testify to migrant worker abuses? I begin this query by examining the document The Plight of Haitian Sugarcane Cutters in the Dominican Republic that resulted from the 1991 U.S. congressional hearings that addressed the conditions of Haitian sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic. I am particularly interested in how humanitarian discourse is staged in the hearings. In many ways, it is not unlike the staging of “search-and-rescue” discourse in the U.S. Coast Guard photographs. Both present forms of humanitarianism, of goodwill toward Haitian refugees, that belie the U.S. government’s foreign and economic policies that have contributed to displacing Haitians. The hearings are presented as a space of refuge where concerns over human rights violations in the world can be aired.

134 / silent subjectivities

These hearings share with asylum interviews the acts of witnessing Haitian refugee experiences to an audience of U.S. governmental officials, but the hearings, ostensibly, offer a more sympathetic ear to Haitians’ experiences. By attempting to assess and witness how the Dominican Republic regulates it border and a segment of its population, the hearings function as a poetics of hospitality. The testimonies of lawmakers, state officials, and lawyers contribute to the juridical tone of this poetics. At the same time, the hearings reveal an absence of the refugee native informant in their discussion of migrant laborers. Ultimately, the hearings’ document is a narrative of transnational capitalism, and its lack of Haitian cane cutter voices speaks to the need to monitor the institutional appropriation of testimonial discourse. Thus, I assess the role of testimonial discourse in the transnational space of labor and mark the disappearance of the refugee native informant from the narratives of transnational labor migration. I juxtapose my discussion of the congressional hearings with Edwidge Danticat’s novel, The Farming of Bones (1998), which serves as a counter to the absence of Haitian workers’ voices in the hearings. The events of the novel and the hearings mark two different historical moments; the action of the novel is set in 1937, more than fifty years prior to the hearings. Despite this time difference, many conditions of oppression and statelessness remain the same for Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Whereas the hearings purport to provide a space of “objectivity” to discuss the “truth” about Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic, The Farming of Bones offers an overtly subjective portrayal of Haitian oppression in the Dominican Republic by attempting to excavate the stories and memories of forgotten Haitians who were targeted in the 1937 slaughter of Haitians by the Dominican army. The novel offers a critique of testimonial narrative as a forum for achieving justice for human rights abuses, especially once testimony enters into the ambit of the institutional nation-state. Connections between Haitian migrant workers and boat refugees are many and complicated. While boat refugee subjectivities become destabilized through the vectors of the sea and U.S. border patrol, without the documents that declare their citizenship in either Haiti or the Dominican Republic, cane cutters also become “limbo citizens.” As the first epigraph that prefaces this chapter demonstrates, this condition has been perpetuated over generations through a state of exception when those who have children in the bateyes do not receive proper documentation so that their children remain banished from the polity.7 Furthermore,

silent subjectivities / 135

just as boat refugees are contained on the Coast Guard ship, or at the detention center, Haitian cane cutters are often “contained” within the bateyes, where their movements are often restricted by their employers. Furthermore, the existence in the bateyes is of the bare human, frequently equated with slavelike conditions, which resonate with the prior history of colonial slave economies.

The United States and the Dominican Republic Both Haiti and the Dominican Republic have struggled to assert their independence as nation-states while also negotiating the space of the island with each other. This negotiation has been complicated by the linguistic and racial demographics of the island: Haiti’s population is largely of African heritage and Kreyòl speaking, while the Dominican Republic is Spanish-speaking with a mulatto population. Furthermore, these nations have repeatedly had to defend themselves against U.S. economic and political hegemony as well as the literal invasion of their national/island borders by the U.S. military. Just as the United States had a long history of involvement and intervention in Haitian affairs, the United States also repeatedly intervened in Dominican affairs. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States made several attempts to annex the island of Hispaniola. By 1904, European interests threatened to descend on the Dominican Republic, and, in response, “to preempt intervention in the western Atlantic by any nation other than the United States, President Theodore Roosevelt added a new dimension to the Monroe Doctrine (1823), which pledged security for the Latin American republics against European imperialism.”8 This arrangement became formalized through a 1907 treaty. For obvious reasons, the United States became a much more visible diplomatic presence in the Dominican Republic, whose representatives held the same interests as the elite. During the U.S. military occupation of the country, which lasted from 1916 to 1924, the U.S. Marines “pursued the goal of complete civil order in the towns, where an indignant Dominican polity resented the loss of sovereignty, and in the countryside, where nationalist guerrilla resistance persisted.”9 The Marines trained Dominican men to be soldiers, including Rafael Trujillo, who went on to become dictator (1930–1961). When the United States pulled its military troops out of the Dominican Republic in 1924, owing to protests of Dominicans, it then adopted a noninterventionist “Good Neighbor Policy” based not so much on “gunboat diplomacy,” but instead on “pan-Americanism” that

136 / silent subjectivities

promoted “policy coordination, economic symbiosis, cultural appreciation, shared heritage and intertwined destiny.”10

Sugarcane and Migrant Labor The first labor migrants began working in the Dominican sugar industry in the late nineteenth century. Initially, they came from the British West Indies. Samuel Martínez notes that the migration of workers from other Caribbean islands was propelled by “highly industrialized, so-called core states of the world economy. Since the mid-nineteenth century, commerce between north and south has changed the character of human geographical mobility across much of the tropical world.”11 Martínez refers to those Haitians who work as cane cutters in the Dominican Republic as “peripheral migrants,” those people who “circulate from one rural periphery to another” instead of migrating to urban areas or the metropolis.12 The U.S. military occupation of the Dominican Republic enabled the entrenchment of U.S. economic interests in the Dominican sugar industry.13 During the simultaneous time of occupation of both Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic, the United States set in motion the industry that thrived through the use of cheap labor, enabling the recruitment of laborers from Haiti to work on Dominican sugar estates.14 The sugar industry, in fact, came to depend on migrant labor as Dominican laborers proved too expensive.15 Several factors appear to have contributed to Haitian migration across the border, including the displacement of many peasants from their land due to laws instituted during the occupation that allowed foreign interests to buy up land.16 Additionally, Haitians emigrated to flee the corvées and Cacos rebellion under the U.S. occupation of Haiti.17 At the same time, the U.S. occupation created the Dominican army (Guardia National) that “made policing the movements of Afro-Caribbean immigrants a practical possibility for the first time.”18 Once Trujillo became president of the Dominican Republic, he established himself as the owner of the Dominican sugary industry. Despite attempting to eradicate Haitians from the Dominican border region in 1937, when Trujillo took control of the sugar industry in the 1950s Haitians continued to serve as cheap labor. In fact, Trujillo came to a bilateral agreement with the Haitian government in 1952 that brought 16,500 Haitians to work in the Dominican Republic.19 The Haitian and Dominican governments continued this agreement for the next thirty-four years, facilitating the yearly mass migration of cane workers

silent subjectivities / 137

between the two countries.20 As Martínez notes, through this agreement both the Haitian and Dominican governments profited from trafficking in laborers: “Chief among the individual beneficiaries was Haitian president Jean-Claude Duvalier, who was paid over two million U.S. dollars in cash for each year’s contract shipment of braceros (agricultural day laborers).”21 In 1986, the Haitian and Dominican governments ended the agreement through which they arranged labor recruitment. Despite concluding this arrangement, however, the Dominican Army and police continue to participate in trafficking Haitian laborers. Notably, after the Trujillo regime ended, U.S. economic interests again played a dominant role in the Dominican sugar industry. Between 1967 and 1985, the U.S. corporation Gulf and Western owned large amounts of land and a sugar company, which it then sold to the Cuban American Fanjul brothers, descendents of a Cuban sugar baron who left Cuba when Castro came to power. The Fanjul brothers own the Flo-Sun Corporation, an umbrella business that includes sugar companies in the Dominican Republic and Florida. On more than one occasion Haitians have been subject to systematic expulsion from the Dominican Republic. Most notably, in 1937, they were the targets of a massacre ordered by Trujillo in an attempt to “cleanse” the Dominican Republic of its “African” elements. One could argue that the anti-Haitian bigotry resulting in the massacre has not been resolved; the Haitians who today migrate into the Dominican Republic to work as cane cutters are in just as precarious a situation as they were in 1937. The conditions in which migrant cane cutters work are poor, including twelve-hour workdays, denial of basic civil liberties, the use of child labor, “round-ups” of Haitians and Dominico-Haitians (second- or third-generation Haitians living in the Dominican Republic) as well as killings.22 The army and police turn over to the sugar estates in exchange for a fee many Haitians who enter the country illegally: “The buses travel under armed military escort, and make few stops on their way east, to diminish the chances of escape of their Haitian passengers. The detainees are not allowed to disembark until they arrive at the batey to which they have been assigned.”23These Haitian migrant laborers present a conflation of issues surrounding displacement, statelessness, and economics. Often seeking work in the Dominican Republic because of the harsh economic conditions in Haiti, they return year after year to work in Dominican canefields despite the harsh conditions, and on more than one occasion they have also sought political asylum from both the Duvalier regime and the military (coups ousted Jean Bertrand Aristide

138 / silent subjectivities

in 1991 and again in 2004). The Dominican state has typically not been receptive to granting asylum to Haitian asylum seekers.24 Furthermore, although Dominican state officials have often denounced Haitian laborers as an invading force, in truth, the nation has historically needed them to perform the work in one of the country’s largest industries, work that other Dominicans will typically not perform. And while they have been allowed into the country to perform labor, they have been systematically denied basic rights, such as identification papers, health care and education, creating a situation of perpetual statelessness, lack of protections, and voicelessness within Dominican society. Even people of Haitian descent, who have lived in the Dominican Republic for generations, exist on the periphery of Dominican society, without a valid place in the Dominican polity, and they have been subject to expulsion from the nation. Thus, Haitian laborers have experienced refugeeness at both an economic level in that they have fled the dire economic conditions of their home nation and a political level when they have fled oppressive regimes in Haiti. At times these two forms of refugeeness have converged into a complex matrix of displacement, where Haitians who have fled political and economic conditions in Haiti have become refugees when the Dominican state has sought either to expel them or, in the case of the 1937 massacre, to kill them. In recent years, human rights organizations have focused on the Dominican government’s refusal to grant children born in the Dominican Republic to Haitian-born parents Dominican citizenship, citing that Haitian workers are “in transit” and therefore not eligible to become legitimate members of the nation.25 The situation of Haitain migrant workers is ripe for testimonials because of the urgency of the experiences of exploited cane cutters.

Testimonial Discourse in the U.S. Political Arena: The U.S. Congressional Hearings In 1991, an ABC “Primetime Live” television exposé about the exploitation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, along with the call of human rights organizations such as Americas Watch, prompted U.S. congressional hearings regarding the status of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic and the efforts to redress them. In the late 1980s, Americas Watch had petitioned the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) to cease trade with the Dominican Republic based on the exploitation of Haitian cane cutters working in the sugar industry. The

silent subjectivities / 139

trade agreement of the GSP, through which trade with the Dominican Republic is established, featured provisions that require the termination of trade with a country if labor rights are not maintained. The hearings’ published document, The Plight of the Haitian Sugarcane Cutters in the Dominican Republic is, ostensibly, a document recording the human rights abuses against Haitian cane cutters working in the Dominican Republic to consider whether the United States should suspend trade with the Dominican Republic. Because the focus of the hearings is the assessment of Dominican state hospitality in relation to Haitian cane cutters, the poetics of hospitality found therein includes the institutionalized testimonial discourse that comprises the hearings and its engagement with a kind of human rights discourse. On the surface, the notion of “hearings” indicates an investigation into an issue at which witnesses testify and are “heard” in a public forum. This idea of “hearings” seems to call for orality, the voices of victims, to be heard, but the final outcome of the congressional hearings relies upon the written documents submitted and produced for the review of foreign policy. This reliance upon documents to produce an archive underscores that the audience for the hearings, which to a certain degree is the public (since the hearings can be accessed by the public), is largely the state itself and those most attuned to state proceedings (such as NGOs)—all of which rely upon and gain credibility through documentation. As a result, the hearings function more as a documentary archive. They fall within the field of what Simon Morgan Wortham refers to as “audit culture,” which he sees as increasingly a part of the university system and its reliance upon evaluative measures to define “excellence”—efforts that have fundamentally reshaped how research and teaching are assessed. In “audit culture” the auditory of a hearing becomes linked to the audit of assessment via etymology: “‘Audit,’ ‘auditory,’ ‘auditorium’: in the first place, it puts us in the lexical and etymological vicinity of a hearing, and therefore an audience. To audit is to examine, to reckon (reckon up, reckon upon, reckon with), but also, inseparably, it is to hear. . . . Thus, an audit unavoidably entails a space (or spaces), a procedure or protocol, a process or structure, that is inextricably linked to the auratic, to the juridical, and especially to a certain theatricality.”26 Audit culture creates specific parameters, constricting rather than opening modes of inquiry, by which institutions and their subjects are assessed. Thus, audit culture is important for thinking about the kind of power that the congressional space holds to review, assess, and take note of the conditions of Haitian cane cutters. From this space

140 / silent subjectivities

policy assessments and legal determinations will be made. Wortham adds that “the idea of the audit as a hearing suggests two concepts, themes, or motifs that appear to be closely related but, as Derrida points out, may in fact be incommensurable with another: evidence and testimony.”27 The hearings illustrate a tension between evidence and testimony because while they appear to emphasize witness testimony, especially through the aural connotations of “hearing,” they ultimately rely upon the evidentiary nature of the documents, including those submitted without a corresponding oral testimony. We can link this notion of the hearing to Derrida’s etymological tracing of “archive” (arkheion) as the dwelling place of those in authority, the archons, who hold power to make the laws, hold/house official documents: “They are also accorded the hermeneutic right and competence. They have the power to interpret the archives. Entrusted to such archons, these documents in effect speak the law: they recall the law and call on or impose the law.”28 Situated within the legislative structures of the U.S. Congress, the hearings function as an archive that has “the force of law, of a law which is the law of the house (oikos), of the house as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution.”29 Despite what in actuality emphasizes documentary evidence, the congressional hearings foreground testimonial strategies as a way to legitimize the United States as an advocate of human rights in the Dominican Republic. There is a way that the hearings’ document reveals the performance of human rights discourse as some participants attempt to draw upon the liberatory associations of testimonial narrative that echo those of testimonio. As such, it illustrates a kind of First World institutional appropriation of testimonio, which loses its ability to subvert systems of oppression. Georg Gugelberger argues that “we must monitor the system’s ever increasing capability and capacity to always turn the ‘anti’ into the ‘pro,’ counterdiscourse into discourse, the anticanonical into the requirement.”30 Through discourse analysis of the text of the hearings, I attempt to deconstruct the events of the hearings to reveal their construction as a moment of seemingly altruistic humanitarianism. In particular, I am interested in the hearings’ presentations of the different “voices” or positions, some of which adopt the “unofficial” genre of testimonial narrative and mimic what Albert Moreiras refers to as a “poetics of solidarity.”31 For this very reason, it is important to keep in mind Gugelberger’s warning to be attentive to “how literary discourse functions within the state.”32 The congressional hearings purport to provide a forum for testimonial-giving, yet the “witnesses” who testify are not themselves subalterns.

silent subjectivities / 141

“Expert” Witnessing Factuality is established in the hearings by relying upon the testimony that is granted authority within the state—expert witnesses and their written statements.33 The reliance upon expert witnesses means that their testimonies are cleansed of any impurities typically marking testimony—narrative gaps, nonlinearity, untranslatability, and so on—they are constructed with the aim of becoming evidence and provable facts. Indeed, the authority of expert witnesses in the hearings comes through their official positions within the state, law, the church, or well-established human rights organizations. Some of these witnesses are lawyers, who underscore their positions as witnesses who speak the law; they rely upon evidence and claim impartiality. Furthermore, the hearings are limited by the fact that they are a part of the state apparatus.34 The expert voices presented in the hearings can be divided primarily into two camps: “the bureaucrats” who speak from within the ambit of government office and human rights advocates who speak on behalf of cane cutters. Participants in the hearings include the Chairman of the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs Robert Torricelli, U.S. Representative-New Jersey; Robert Lagomarsino, U.S. RepresentativeCalifornia; Joseph Becelia, Office of Caribbean Affairs, Bureau of InterAmerican Affairs, Department of State; Father Edwin Paraison, coordinator of the Haitian Ministry, Episcopal Church of the Dominican Republic; William O’Neill, deputy director, Lawyers Committee for Human Rights; and Holly Burkhalter, Washington director, Human Rights Watch. Significantly, while the Dominican government is represented at the hearings, the Haitian government is not. Predictably, the testimony given by the State Department spokesperson, Becelia, proves to be evasive in the U.S. role and/or responsibility, while Father Paraison claims to speak the truth for “his” people. The spokespeople from the human rights organizations, the Lawyers Committee and Americas Watch, claim to be “impartial observers” merely reporting their findings. Despite the attempt to frame the hearings as an impartial forum for the discussion of human rights abuses, this discussion is impeded by the lack of actual Haitian laborers as witnesses. What are the effects of not having cane cutters present to testify? How would their presence change the hearings? I am not suggesting that Haitian cane cutters would somehow offer more pure, truthful, or convincing testimonies, but their testimonies would most likely disrupt the streamlined logic of “truth” and evidence through which the hearings operate.

142 / silent subjectivities

It would introduce the issue of translation as it can be assumed that most cane cutters would not speak English, and, in fact, many are illiterate so they represent radically different subjectivities from expert witnesses. Without them, the hearings rehearse a kind of political theater where concern for human rights is performed. Thus, most important is the text that is “missing” from the hearings—the voices of Haitian cane cutters and the silence surrounding U.S. foreign policy that has contributed to the failing Haitian economy and the outflow of Haitians. There is no acknowledgment that the space of the hearings in the U.S. Congress is a place where U.S. hegemony is enacted on a daily basis, including such trade policies that shape the flow of capital and labor hemispherically. And as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, such silencing is not merely accidental, but intentional in the construction of a history. He writes, “By silence, I mean an active and transitive process: one ‘silences’ a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. Mentions and silences are thus active, dialectical counterparts of which history is the synthesis.”35 While the hearings do contain some moments of apparent dialogue between the U.S. congressional representatives on the committee and the authorities chosen to come and speak on behalf of their respective parties, the speakers mostly read from prepared written statements.36 The hearings’ record includes the statements that each “witness” makes publicly to the committee as well as a prepared written statement. The written documentation solidifies testimonies so that gaps, aporias, and fragmentations inherent to oral testimony are smoothed out. The record also includes written statements from some who were not present, including one submitted by the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees. There is also a letter from José del Carmen Ariza, U.S. ambassador to the Dominican Republic, which states that “Since the Committee’s rules prohibit my appearance as a witness at the June 11 hearing on the treatment of Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic, I am herewith submitting a statement by Juan José Arteaga, the Economic Advisor to President Joaquín Balaguer, for the Subcommittee’s consideration.”37Even though the ambassador is not present at the hearings, the fact that his letter is included indicates an understanding that the hearings ultimately result in a written document which takes the place of oral testimonies. This practice allows him to still take part in the hearings. As such, his words are granted authority through written documentation. The evidence is cleansed of its subjectivities and is thus, “objectified” in this

silent subjectivities / 143

process. This movement from the subjectivity of testimony to the objectivity of documentation is not necessarily deleterious in and of itself. I do not want to suggest that subjective testimonials are the only acceptable form of representing experience. But we must question whether objectivity is possible in these hearings, given the U.S. collaboration in the political and economic processes that have contributed to silencing Haitians. Furthermore, the discussion of Haitian asylum seekers (presented in chapter 1) is relevant here. While the 1991 hearings purport to address the violations of Haitian human rights in the Dominican Republic, in that same year the U.S. government refused to grant asylum to more than twenty thousand Haitian refugees, based largely on official INS reports of Haitians’ “unreliability” in the interview process; their testimonies were not considered truthful by authorities. When understood within this context, the reliance upon expert witness testimony in lieu of that of Haitain cane cutters further effaces Haitian witnesses and calls the alleged humanitarian concern of the 1991 hearings into question. Moreover, there is no attempt to look at the context of the whole island of Hispaniola. The hearings deal only with the Dominican Republic; there is little reference to Haiti and/or U.S. interventions in the region.38

Solidarity Poetics and the State As the moderator of the hearings, Representative Robert Torricelli begins his opening statement by invoking a testimonial call to action and solidarity by stating that “we must speak as one voice” and that the nation must be united on the issue of the exploitation of sugar laborers.39 He implores his audience to consider the urgency of the issue of Haitian sugarcane workers: We meet today as two subcommittees, the Human Rights and Western Hemisphere, to discuss the issue of slavery in our own hemisphere. This is not a misstatement. It may not even be an exaggeration. It is 1991, and yet, just a few hundred miles from our shores there are allegations that slavery is being practiced for all practical purposes against the citizens of Haiti.40 In this statement, Torricelli adopts a “poetics of solidarity” that Albert Moreiras describes as central to testimonio but warns “is in perpetual risk of being turned into a rhetorical tropology.”41 As such, Moreiras posits that testimonio can be used as an instrument of colonial domination: “it needs to be asked whether testimonio criticism might end up

144 / silent subjectivities

becoming, or is in constant danger of becoming, a tool for the imperial representational self-knowledge of which it was supposed to be the very opposite.”42 Indeed this appropriation is evident in Torricelli’s statement which echoes the rhetoric of human rights groups including that of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights and Americas Watch which also compare the situation of Haitian cane cutters to slavery.43 By referring to the situation as slavery, Torricelli establishes the hearings as an ethical and morally superior space to the issue at hand. “Slavery” as he evokes it calls to mind nineteenth-century notions of plantation slavery—a historical blemish to be left in the distant past. Therefore, a place which allegedly still practices it is stuck in the past; after all, “[i]t is 1991,” and slavery is not part of the modern narrative of progress in the United States. Acknowledging such “slavery” becomes a way of distinguishing the “advancement” of the First World from the “failures” of the Third World, yet the notion elides the history of colonialism and slavery that contributed to the creation of both worlds. As oppressive as the Dominican government continues to be in their treatment of Haitians, Samuel Martínez explains that the referral to Haitian migrant conditions as “slavery” by human rights groups and through the hearings caused a backlash by the Dominican government through the largest deportation of Haitians from the country since the 1937 massacre.44 He asserts that “the Haitian bracero differs significantly from that of slaves on nineteenth-century Caribbean sugar plantations. For example, it is neither physical coercion nor the demands of social superiors but economic need which chiefly drives Haitian men to go to the Dominican Republic. . . the primary means of maintaining labor discipline is not the threat of physical punishment or legal penalty but wage incentives.”45By pointing to the insufficiency of the term “slavery,” Martínez’s remarks suggest that there needs to be a new vocabulary for discussing the exploitation of both Haitian cane cutters and other transnational laborers. Doing so would emphasize that such exploitation is not something that happens and is contained within the bateyes, but is linked to the circulation of transnational capital in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. By viewing the cane cutters as economic refugees, we might begin to imagine the dire economic conditions that propel refugee movements and also enable more effective forms of asylum speaking. By considering the situation through the lens of “economic need,” it becomes much more difficult for the United States to condemn the Dominican Republic because it is complicitous in establishing the current capitalist system in which the Dominican sugar industry operates. As

silent subjectivities / 145

Martin Murphy explains, U.S. influence in the region was strengthened by its military occupation in 1916–1924 when the military governor Admiral Knapp facilitated the break-up of communal lands (terrenos comuneros) and registered them as private property. Thus, by 1925, North Americans controlled 81 percent of land used for sugar production. In 1965, after the assassination of Trujillo in 1961, Murphy explains, “multinational corporate and finance capital dominated the economic scene.”46

Poetics of Evasion As a representative of the State Department, it is no surprise that Joseph Becelia’s remarks and the prepared statement from the State Department focus on the official documentation by the Dominican government of the situation of Haitian cane cutters. Predictably, Becelia rarely veers from officially sanctioned (by the U.S. and Dominican governments) statements. He begins his testimony by reviewing the political relations between the United States and the Dominican Republic: Our friendly bilateral relationship is based on common democratic ideals. Elections have been held every four years in the Dominican Republic since 1966, making it one of the older and more established democracies in the hemisphere. . . . Because of this administration’s concern for human rights around the world, the Department of State, through our Embassy in Santo Domingo, has investigated worker rights conditions in the Dominican Republic.47 The reference to democracy assumes that all democratic governments are free from human rights abuses. In her analysis of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, Anne Cubilié argues that “the United States, France, and Britain, do not have an unself-interested concern with global human rights abuse. Their responses to particular situations are shaped by past history (such as colonial responsibility), economic interest, domestic concerns, and media pressures. Thus they cannot be counted upon either consistently to push a human rights agenda in the Security Council or to promote human rights within their own borders.”48 The question of whether the Dominican Republic is, in fact, a democracy is inextricably linked with the status of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. André Corten and Isis Duarte note that in Dominican elections “fraud is virtually a rule of the game,” especially when it comes to the question of whether Haitians and Dominico-Haitians are granted citizenship and are allowed to vote.49 They continue, “During the May 16, 1990, elections,

146 / silent subjectivities

Balaguer’s Christian Socialist Reformist Party (Partido Reformista Social Cristiano—PRSC) distributed numerous identification documents to Haitians, whether or not they were Dominico-Haitians, in exchange for their votes.”50 In the State Department’s written document, “Worker Rights—Cane Cutting in the Dominican Republic,” that follows the statements of Becelia, questions about human rights violations are evaded. Becelia refers only to documents and what the Dominican government has officially sanctioned or stated. This is contrasted by Becelia’s other remarks, couched in vague language. Becelia refers to the “measurable progress” of the Dominican government, a “new will” of the Dominican government to “do something,” a “certain element of good faith” on behalf of the Dominican government.51 At one point in the discussion, Becelia states that he “cannot speak with great authority to the precise situation in any one of these locations. . . . I cannot speak precisely to the presence of armed guards and what their precise role in this context might be.”52 This use of opaque language signals a kind of poetics of deferral and denial—carefully spoken and written to avoid any implication of the U.S. or Dominican governments in discriminatory labor practices. It is never clear exactly how authority on the issue is established or who can “speak precisely” about the issues of Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic. One is left wondering why Becelia chooses to speak at all if he cannot make any definitive statements about the issue. Ultimately, Becelia’s statements result in an apology for the Dominican government. While supposedly speaking from a point of “objectivity” on behalf of the U.S. embassy in the Dominican Republic, he defends the Dominican government stating, The Government of the Dominican Republic (GODR) strenuously denies the allegations [made by the ABC “Primetime Live” television show] and in response to the ABC program and other international criticism, President Balaguer has ordered the repatriation of all undocumented aliens working in the sugar fields under age 16 and over 60. Based upon our continuing review of the Bracero issue, we believe that the GODR does not have a policy of exploiting Haitian youths in slave-like conditions. To the contrary, the GODR is taking meaningful steps to curb abuses, although much remains to be done.53 Again, we see a poetics of deferral operating where indirect language is used to evade the question of how aware and/or involved the GODR is

silent subjectivities / 147

in the exploitation of Haitians. With his reference to repatriation, Becelia gives no indication of the violence by which such repatriations are carried out when Haitians are forcibly detained and returned to Haiti. While Becelia states that the GODR does not have an official policy of exploitation, he evades the question of whether the government passively condones such practices. Furthermore, Becelia states, We [the State Department] do not believe that the GODR has a policy of exploiting Haitian youths in slave-like conditions. Our own observations, including numerous visits to sugar plantation communities (Bateys), and countless private discussions with knowledgeable sources indicated that the trend in the Dominican Republic is clearly away from such practices.54 This statement suggests a contradiction, a slippage in the “official” perspective. Becelia states that the State Department does not believe there have been exploitative conditions; however, in the next breath, he states that the GODR is “clearly away from such practices,” which suggests that such exploitation did exist at one time or that it still exists but is being phased out. Becelia repeatedly chastises the ABC program for not putting “existing problems into their historic and social context,” and yet he himself completely elides this context.55 Nowhere in his statement (verbal or prepared) does he refer to the complex history of the Dominican and Haitian nation-states. And he certainly never refers to U.S. occupations of the island. Apparently, to Becelia, “historical context” includes a brief comparison of wages and living conditions for Haitians and Dominicans, but nothing more. In another contradictory statement he asserts: “The program correctly depicted work in the cane fields as hard and the pay as low. (It is precisely for these reasons that Dominicans shun working there and that large numbers of Haitians have been brought in to perform the harvest.) This must be viewed in the context of the Dominican Republic’s overall economic situation and wage levels.”56 This statement directly contradicts the Dominican government’s allegation that Haitians flood into the Dominican Republic on their own.57 It is also not clear why Dominicans shun working in the cane fields if the wages that cane cutters receive are “comparable” to that of other Dominican workers.58 Ultimately, Becelia’s remarks represent the official rhetoric of the state.

148 / silent subjectivities

Silencing the Present As I discussed in relation to the Coast Guard photographs in chapter 2, the archive holds the potential to silence and repress that which is not selected for inclusion. It becomes evident within the hearings that the content of the hearings’ archive has been manipulated by the State Department. Prior to hearing Becilia’s testimony, Torricelli points out that the State Department has withheld documents originating in the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic, which were the basis for the U.S. trade representative’s decision to continue sending U.S. foreign aid to the Dominican Republic (sanctions on aid were to be considered by USTR if the Dominican Republic was not shown to improve its conditions for Haitian workers). Because these documents were the basis for this decision, it would only seem fitting that they should be part of the “official record” of the hearings. This withholding of documents becomes even more important when Becelia makes statements that are based on official documentation of the situation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic.59 Torricelli asks, “Where are the documents, the information, that led to the USTR [U.S. Trade Representative] to make its judgment?”60 Becilia offers only that the committee’s request for the documents is “being reviewed in the context of a procedure that mandatorily takes place in such instances.”61 This in itself suggests the ambiguity of so-called “official documents” upon which governments rely. If they are not accessible, then how can they be used to make (democratic) state policy?

Testimonial Solidarity and Silence Whereas Becelia represents the interests of the states involved, Father Edwin Paraison represents the interests of the Haitian cane cutters.62 As coordinator of the Haitian Ministry of the Episcopal Church of the Dominican Republic, Father Paraison worked closely with Haitians in the Dominican Republic, collecting and videotaping testimonies from many child workers. He thus begins to function as both a native informant and a kind of mediator of testimonial narratives. He opens: I would like to first offer my thanks to you, Mr. Chairman, and to the rest of the subcommittee, for offering me this opportunity to testify on behalf of my brothers and sisters, the Haitian laborers of the Dominican Republic. I think that my presence before you indicates real proof of interest that the international community, and

silent subjectivities / 149

particularly in this case, the United States, has shown towards the working conditions of the Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic. I am especially pleased that the Haitian sugarcane cutters can be listened to and understood by the Dominican Republic Government officials. . . . I am not here to just condemn the Government of the Dominican Republic. I would like to bear witness to a situation that is no longer acceptable.63 Evoking the solidarity poetics of testimonio, Paraison claims to speak for the collective community of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, illustrating John Beverley’s assertion that “each individual testimonio evokes an absent polyphony of other voices.”64 At that same time, his earlier statements indicate that he has trust in the ability of the U.S. and Dominican governments to “hear” the plight of Haitians and to do something about it. These statements may be merely political etiquette, but they illustrate the level of restraint on display during the hearings. Paraison is not condemning either government but thanking them for their “interest.” In the testimonio tradition, he establishes himself as representing the collectivity of laborers and giving voice to the “voiceless,” explaining that he will “testify on the situation of my fellow countrymen and brothers in Christ, the Haitian laborers.”65 His language is couched in the poetics of solidarity as he claims to speak for Haitians, and in the process Haitians will be “listened to and understood.” By emphasizing his church affiliations, Paraison appears to minimize the political aspects of his testimony. His remarks suggest that he is aware of how he, as representative of Haitian laborers, will be viewed by the Dominican state. He is careful not to assign blame but to contextualize his remarks within his work as a member of the clergy: “The campaign to improve the conditions on the plantations cannot be claimed as a campaign to discredit the Dominican Republic. The churches have their pastoral responsibility to make known the subhuman conditions in which the cane cutters live and work as well as the treatment they receive.”66 These remarks signal the public function of “witnessing” during the hearings, as Paraison anticipates how his words may affect those for whom he speaks should the Dominican state see their protest of conditions as a threat to the state. While it is not mentioned in the hearings, Paraison’s life had been threatened on more than one occasion in the Dominican Republic because of his activist work on behalf of the cane cutters.67 It is notable that this information would not be included in the hearings. If it were, he

150 / silent subjectivities

would become a different kind of witness who would not only be testifying on behalf of cane cutters but also bearing witness to the violence that he has endured as a witness to these abuses. The fact that this information is not included in the official record—the archive—also speaks to the limited scope of the hearings and the selection process of testimony; Paraison has carefully calculated not only how he will speak but also how and when he will be silent. Perhaps the strongest evidence of the performative aspects of the hearings is that Paraison repeatedly quotes President Joaquím Balaguer in support of his own statements. This is particularly ironic because, as a defender of the Trujillo regime, Balaguer perpetuated the racist national policies against Haitians begun during the Trujillo regime, in which Haitians were cast as a threat to the “purity” of the Dominican nation. Balaguer, who was president of the Dominican Republic on six occasions until 1995, wrote in his bestseller, La Isla al Reves (1947) that “if the racial problem is of great importance for all countries, for Santo Domingo . . . the issue is of an immense significance, since on it depends, in a certain way, the very existence of the nationality that for more than a century has been struggling against a more prolific race.”68 By reiterating Trujillo’s racial discourse, the racism of Dominican nationalism is evoked; Haitians are not seen as citizens of a neighboring country but as a race, a biological element, to be kept at bay. Given that Balaguer is the president of the Dominican Republic during the time of the hearings, Paraison thus attempts to establish a certain kind of ethos by quoting him. It reveals the limited rhetorical parameters in which Paraison must function. By invoking Balaguer in his statements, the Dominican state maintains a certain level of power within the discourse of the hearings. Despite the ambiguity of his opening remarks, Paraison goes on to contradict much of what Becelia (and the State Department’s written document) testifies to by citing the forced recruitments of Haitians, a lack of freedom of movement for the workers between the two countries, child labor, and the Dominican government’s refusal to give citizenship to Haitians who were born in or have lived much of their lives in the Dominican Republic, who are known as “Dominico-Haitians”: Since 1916, and even earlier, tens of thousands of Haitians have been born in the Dominican Republic and have a right to Dominican citizenship, but it has been proven that due to their ethnic origin, and frequently because their parents’ status was not registered, there exists a huge number of people without a country. These

silent subjectivities / 151

people do not have a definite nationality. These people are known as ‘Dominico-Haitians’ (children of Haitians or of mixed marriages born in the Dominican Republic).69 Although 1916 signals the beginning of mass migration of Haitians to the Dominican Republic, it also marks the beginning of the U.S. occupation of the country and strengthening of control over the sugar industry. Furthermore, Paraison’s description of the “statelessness” of Haitian laborers essentially defines them as perpetual refugees. Through this description Paraison attempts to convey the urgency of the conditions of Haitians in the Dominican Republic, which reflects John Beverley’s definition of testimonio as involving an “urgency to communicate, a problem of repression, poverty, subalternity, imprisonment, struggle for survival, and so on.”70 Although their condition would not fall under the UN Refugee Convention’s definition of a refugee, their economic status has rendered them refugees without the protections of a state and without a voice in the polity. The Dominican government’s letter challenges Paraison’s statements by foregrounding a poetics of hospitality; their borders are open, and the Dominican Republic is a welcoming host nation: “The traditions of liberty and the pride that all Dominicans take in their country are too important to be trivialized by anyone. Indeed, the fact that so many foreigners, including over one million Haitians, have chosen voluntarily to leave their own lands to live and work in our country is perhaps the best testament to the quality of life and liberty that all of us enjoy.”71 Corten and Duarte note that the Dominican government has repeatedly inflated the numbers of Haitians estimated to be living in the Dominican Republic as a means of fueling the perception of Haitians as “invaders” who must be kept at bay. They estimate the number to be closer to five hundred thousand.72 It is also clear that language is used as a tool to silence Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Paraison notes that because of the high illiteracy rate among the Haitian laborers, the contracts, even if they are in Creole, are “incomprehensible to Haitians”: “The 187 repatriates affirm that they did not personally sign the contract, not because they do not know how to write, but because in many cases the contracts were given to them already signed.”73 Paraison uses the testimony he has collected from repatriated Haitian laborers to challenge the discursive authority of the State Department. This is the first time in the hearings that there is even a reference to Haitians actually speaking for themselves. Nevertheless,

152 / silent subjectivities

it is important still to question why Paraison’s voice becomes the representative voice and not the individual voices of the cane cutters. What role do his evangelical affiliations play in garnering him the authority he needs to be heard within the hearings?

Human Rights and National Allegiance One would expect that the testimony of human rights organizations would offer the most persuasive evidence of the mistreatment of Haitian cane cutters. And, although it is a significant part of the hearings, the testimony of these organizations becomes obscured by the fact that the United States again becomes a barometer for migrant laborers’ rights in their statements. As a result, this testimony further eclipses Haitian subjectivities, demonstrating Liisa Malkki’s observation that “humanitarian practices tend to silence refugees.”74 William G. O’Neill, representative of the human rights organization The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, begins his testimony by establishing his organization’s judicial authority when he calls on international law: “The committee works to promote international human rights and refugee protection. The committee’s work is impartial; we hold every government to the same standards as enunciated in international law, especially the international human rights treaties.”75 After establishing his ethos, O’Neill, like Father Paraison, claims to speak for Haitian cane cutters, relying on interviews of mostly children.76 O’Neill offers some of the most critical testimony in the hearings when he cites the U.S. government’s history of involvement in the Dominican sugar industry. He also challenges the discursive authority of the contracts that are given to Haitian cane cutters as documents of truth and challenges the bureaucratic maneuverings of the Dominican Republic (and even the State Department): “the Dominican Republic showed itself to be quite adept at passing decrees proposing reforms and labor codes, but has fallen far short in the application or implementation of any of these decrees or laws.”77 Despite chastising the Dominican government’s nonenforcment of decrees, O’Neill then advocates revising the Dominican labor code to include cane cutting. That he should advocate legislative reform suggests the limited avenues for gaining human rights with the judicial framework in which he operates. Where the testimony of the human rights organizations begins to falter is when the United States is called on as a kind of barometer for the ethical treatment of workers. Like Torricelli’s opening comments, Holly

silent subjectivities / 153

Burkhalter, Washington director of Human Rights Watch, invokes the United States as a moral compass on the treatment of Haitians in the Dominican Republic: “The fact is that the [Dominican] government is presiding over a system of near slavery. . . . If that fact were known by the majority of the American people, and that the sugar that they were pouring on their cereal in the morning was being produced by wretched individuals who get no health care, who are in the fields barefoot, in the blinding sun, wielding machetes . . . Americans would be very, very unhappy about that fact.”78 Burkhalter’s remarks reflect nineteenth-century antislavery rhetoric that called for boycotts of sugar produced through slave labor and gestures toward the solidarity-building aims of testimonio. She assumes that U.S. citizens would immediately feel solidarity with the cane cutters’ struggle, but I argue that it is a premature assumption given the history of farm workers’ struggles for rights within the United States. Moreover, she continues to ignore the complicity of the United States in establishing the present-day Dominican sugar industry: “it should not escape notice that the Dominican Republic enjoys quite the largest share of the U.S. sugar quota of any country in the world. Now the Dominican Republic is not the only country in the world that produces sugar, but by a quirk of history they bring it in the largest quantities.”79 By referring to the economic relationship between the United States and the Dominican sugar industry as a “quirk of history,” Burkhalter fails to question the imperial system by which the Dominican Republic came to provide sugar to U.S. markets in the first place. This “quirk of history” involves a complex set of economic and political factors beginning in the 1890s when the first trade agreement was made by which the United States became the largest importer of Dominican sugar in return for reduced and sometimes eliminated tariffs on U.S. products exported to the Dominican Republic. Martin Murphy notes that this was the beginning of U.S. hegemony in the region where “the market needs of the sugar industry transform[ed] the economic, political and international relations of the entire [Dominican] nation.”80 When asked to compare the situation of Haitians in the Dominican Republic to other cane cutters around the world, the notion of universal human rights deteriorates as Burkhalter responds, “Well we have a little problem in the United States. The conditions of work for Haitian migrants and other black migrant workers in the south, and particularly in Florida, are very bad. . . . We do not have a perfect situation here.”81 Here, Burkhalter slips into an evasive rhetoric. By minimizing the conditions in which Caribbean laborers working in the United States as a

154 / silent subjectivities

“little problem,” Burkhalter undermines her own argument calling for attention to human rights and reinforces the notion that human rights violations only occur outside our national boundaries. If there is a problem with workers’ conditions within the boundaries of the United States, should there be hearings held to investigate those as well? O’Neill follows up on Burkhalter’s comment by distinguishing between ages of cane cutters in the Dominican Republic and the United States: As bad as it is for the primarily Jamaican cane cutters in our own cane fields in Florida, they are experienced grown men, who have cut cane . . . the conditions are abysmal. But when they go out in that cane field, they have goggles, they have gloves, they have boots, they are experienced, and they are grown men. In the Dominican Republic, you go out into the cane fields and you see children, teenagers and adults, most who have never cut cane before.82 Again, the United States becomes an implicitly morally superior place where workers are not (as) exploited. One is left wondering what happens when those asking for the enforcement of universal rights and international labor laws are themselves bound by their own national biases? By establishing a U.S./Third World binary, Burkhalter and O’Neill fail to expose the real reason behind the exploitation of field workers: through the system of global capitalism Dominican and U.S. transnational corporations exploit cheap migrant labor.83 Through this system the Cuban American Fanjul brothers own land and sugar interests in both Florida and the Dominican Republic, which further links the Jamaican cane cutters and Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic because both groups of workers have experienced exploitation within the Fanjulowned sugar companies.84 In fact, the conditions that Jamaican cane cutters working in Florida faced in the 1980s while working for the Fanjul-owned corporation was more than a “little problem,” and in fact the Jamaicans shared many of the problems of Haitian cane cutters in the Dominican Republic. As portrayed in Stephanie Black’s 1990 documentary film H-2 Worker, during the 1980s, approximately ten thousand Caribbean (primarily Jamaican) workers were selected to participate each year in the H-2 worker program. Workers were brought in to work cutting sugarcane for Florida companies for six months a year. Sugar companies began importing Caribbean workers in 1943 following a series of high-profile arrests of owners and authorities for a system of peonage of African American

silent subjectivities / 155

workers, who were brought from other parts of the country to cut cane. The film charts the exploitative conditions in which Jamaican workers lived and worked through footage of the back-breaking, dangerous labor in the cane fields, interviews with workers, archival footage, and interviews with both sugar company lobbyists and politicians in the United States and Jamaica. In addition to deplorable barracks housing in which they were required to live and very limited mobility, employers manipulated contracts and the wage system to make it appear as though they were adhering to labor laws and paying workers $5 an hour when, in fact, workers were making about $1 an hour. The film provides footage of a work stoppage when workers protested a drop in the amount they would be paid, and employers responded by having police round up the 350 participants, with dogs and guns, and deport them back to Jamaica. In an interview, former Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley states that the economic realities of Jamaica, which at the time included 23 to 25 percent unemployment and “endemic poverty,” go back to a colonialstructured economy created to serve British interests, and that “driven by those realities, you have the phenomenon of the Jamaican who . . . has been a migrating person through the generations simply to survive.” An interview with an African-American man, Samuel, reveals that conditions have not changed much from the time that he was a worker in the camps in the 1940s; the biggest change is that the companies no longer want to hire American workers, who were deemed too expensive.85 If Burkhalter and O’Neill had linked the situation of Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic, Jamaican migrant workers in the United States, and the history of slavery and postslavery exploitation of African American field workers, the pervasiveness of the exploitation of migrant workers by U.S. interests across the hemisphere would become more visible. The situation of Haitian sugarcane cutters in the Dominican Republic would no longer be seen as an isolated “barbaric” practice of a Third World nation. To do so, a fundamental reworking of the notions of workers’ rights in relation to transnational capital would be required so that U.S. attention to human rights would have to be placed in the context of the operations of global capital’s circulation in U.S. interests. The fact that Burkhalter and O’Neill separate these issues reveals the limitations of human rights discourses as they are confined by the space in which they speak to gain support for the cause of Haitian cane cutters. As many scholars have pointed out, human rights discourse is hindered by the fact that it is limited to the realm of state institutions. William Over argues, “human rights movements cannot transcend the particular

156 / silent subjectivities

power structure they seek to overcome. They are instead ‘contaminated’ by the forces they oppose.”86

Tracing U.S. Complicity Torricelli chastises the State Department’s statements regarding the “progress” of the Dominican government in reference to the cane cutters issue: But if a message is going to be sent to the Dominican Republic, let it be this. I am not interested in good intentions. I am not impressed by any additional promises. There is not a person in this country who would want one dollar of our taxpayer’s money to go to any government that condones any of these activities at any level. As long as I am chairman of this subcommittee and able to muster a majority, it will never happen again, not a dollar. This next year is either going to witness the most remarkable progress in human relations in Dominican history, or it will mark the end of American assistance to the country.87 Despite Torricelli’s remarks and testimony of human rights advocates, the United States did not, in fact, cut foreign aid to the Dominican Republic. Ultimately, the resources missing from the congressional hearings are the actual voices and material bodies of the Haitians workers. The omission prompts one to ask who and where are the asylum speakers in the hearings? The absence of Haitians “in-the-flesh” signals a silencing; they are without agency in this process, a fact that speaks to the long history of U.S. silencing of Haitians. As such, the hearings are ostensibly about the plight of Haitian sugarcane cutters, but ultimately they are about reproducing and maintaining the state itself. In other words, if the ultimate aims of the hearings are to reassess the trade agreement between the United States and the Dominican Republic, the flow of capital remains the central focus and the situation of cane cutters remains on the periphery. Instead of looking solely at the testimony and written documentation of the hearings, if we were to trace the exploitation of the material bodies of Haitians, then we would find a very different historical narrative of U.S.-Haiti relations. Like the Dominican Republic’s national policies of racial discrimination, the United States also made discrimination based on race and national origin an issue of national policy through the placement of Haitians on the list of those people at “high risk” for AIDS

silent subjectivities / 157

infection in the 1980s.88 While the U.S. congressional hearings critique the treatment of Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic, the hearings elide the history of U.S. involvement in political and economic affairs of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which have contributed to the migrations of Haitians to the Dominican Republic and enabled the current hyperexploitation of migrant workers.89 The Plight of Haitian Sugarcane Cutters in the Dominican Republic, a narrative of transnational capitalism, ultimately speaks to the need to monitor the travels of global capitalism, human rights, and appropriation of testimonial discourse.

Testimonial Ambiguity in The Farming of Bones Edwidge Danticat’s novel The Farming of Bones attempts to create the same kind of Haitian subjectivities that are elided in the hearings. The novel deconstructs Dominican nationalism and produces a history of the Trujillo era through the fractured and ambiguous testimonial of Amabelle Désir, an orphaned Haitian domestic servant in the Dominican Republic. What becomes clear in reading the novel is that, unlike the hearings’ sole focus on the Dominican Republic, Dominican national history cannot easily be extracted from the history of the whole island of Hispaniola, largely because of the way that the continuous migration of fieldworkers from Haiti to the Dominican Republic binds the two nations together. As the title of The Farming of Bones suggests, labor is inextricably linked to corporeality for the Haitian characters who work as cane cutters in Dominican sugarcane fields. Specifically, the novel focuses on the period leading up to the 1937 massacre of Haitians (known as “El Corte” in Spanish) ordered by Trujillo. Thus, the “farming of bones” connotes the back-breaking agricultural labor of the cane fields as well as the slaughter of bodies—a kind of cultivation of death where the machete, the cane cutter’s tool, becomes the modus operandi of the massacre. In my analysis, I focus specifically on how the material bodies represented in the novel serve as sites of memory that are caught in the Dominican nation’s politics of hospitality as the army attempts to eradicate the nation of Haitians. Literally inscribed with the Dominican nation’s laws of hospitality, the bodies of Haitians (and darker-skinned Dominicans who “looked” Haitian) thus become texts in a poetics of hospitality. Michel Rolph-Trouillot argues, “history begins with bodies and artifacts: living brains, fossils, texts, buildings.”90 Danticat demonstrates that remembering the Trujillo regime in Hispaniola entails a confrontation with a history that is corporeal—a “re-membering.”

158 / silent subjectivities

My analysis draws on the theoretical discourses of border theory and testimonio to explore implications of the fragmented testimonial offered by Amabelle Désir and Haitians’ precarious position as migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. Border theory has typically been associated with Chicano studies of the U.S./Mexican geopolitical border. Between this border and the Dominican/Haitian border, there are, however, many similarities, including the often unsanctioned migration of laborers from one nation to the other (Mexicans to the United States, Haitians to the Dominican Republic), the exploitation of those migrants’ labor, and the migrants’ precarious position on the margins of the nation where they often serve as the scapegoats for national anxieties. In Borderlands: La Frontera, The New Mestiza, a seminal text of border studies, Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa offers a manifesto celebrating the potential that the border holds in creating a “third country,”91 not only outside of the U.S. and Mexican nation-states but also “wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy.”92 Anzaldúa describes living in the borderland as “exhilaration” and celebrates the border as a material and conceptual space where races, languages, and genders are deconstructed to produce a new culture.93 Her theory is ground-breaking because it attempts to re-imagine culture and identity beyond the often oppressive limits of the nation-state: “To survive the Borderlands/ you must live sin fronteras/ be a crossroads.”94 However, it would be fallacious to assume that the identities produced in the borderlands are automatically free of restraints, especially when Anzaldúa’s interpretation of this “new” culture draws on archaic notions of pre-Columbian indigenous culture to offer a more pure or authentic way of being: “Aztec female rites of mourning”;95 the Aztec deity, Coatlalopeuh, as “the central deity connecting us to our Indian ancestry”;96 and the Aztec symbol of the Serpent as “mental picture and symbol of the instinctual in its collective impersonal, prehuman.”97 Anzaldúa constructs a stagnant, mystified indigeneity for Chicanas to claim as a source of strength, but in the process she loses sight as to how indigeneity can be (and has been) manipulated by nation-states to reproduce deleterious ethnic/racial formations to bolster nationalism. One such example can be found in the history of Dominican national policy, which, as Ernesto Sagas points out, erased African ancestry through the use of the racial category “indio” even though Amerindians have not lived in the Dominican Republic for centuries.98 In her critique of Anzaldúa’s use of

silent subjectivities / 159

Aztec female deities, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo argues, “When she resuscitates this particular representation of indigenous subjectivity to be incorporated into contemporary mestiza consciousness, she . . . does so to the exclusion and, indeed, erasure of contemporary indigenous subjectivity and practices on both sides of the border.”99 Furthermore, in addition to idealizing pre-Columbian indigeneity, Anzaldúa’s text romanticizes the cultural production of the U.S./Mexican border such as when she speaks of her nostalgia for Tex-Mex music and Spanglish speakers.100 Again, while I commend Anzaldúa’s reclamation of this cultural production from its denigration by the (U.S.) nation-state, one must keep in mind that this view of the borderlands eclipses the political complexities of border cultural formations. I argue that The Farming of Bones attempts to deconstruct the racial, linguistic, and national borders that divide Haitians and Dominicans not solely to celebrate it but also to reveal the tensions that led to the 1937 slaughter of Haitians by the Trujillo regime. Thus, by representing the terror produced at the border and subsequent difficulty in conveying these experiences, Danticat’s text challenges prematurely facile celebrations of borderlands.

Fruits of Labor The first section of my textual analysis, “Fruits of Labor,” looks at the borders between labor and maternity, labor and nation, as well as maternity and nation. Specifically, I argue that the first half of The Farming of Bones focuses on the “containment” of racial, gendered, and national boundaries leading up to the time of the massacre. I explore how motherhood re-produces different political affiliations depending on where mothers are in relation to the center/periphery of Dominican national consciousness. Especially significant in this section is Danticat’s construction of Amabelle Désir as a midwife figure in the border region and the political connotations of this rendering. Contemporary Caribbean discourse utilizes the fecund female body as a metaphor for understanding the violent history of the region. Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo configures the region as woman-in-childbirth: the Atlantic is today the Atlantic . . . because it was the painfully delivered child of the Caribbean, whose vagina was stretched between continental clamps, . . . all Europe pulling on the forceps to help at the birth of the Atlantic: . . . After the blood and saltwater

160 / silent subjectivities

spurts, quickly sew up torn flesh and apply the antiseptic tinctures, the gauze and surgical plaster; then the febrile wait through the forming of a scar: suppurating, always suppurating.101 Benítez-Rojo’s construction of the Caribbean as a vagina stretched across the Middle Passage between the continents of the Americas, Africa, and Europe provides a powerful image that highlights the violent beginnings of the South Atlantic system. He has constructed a female body whose own physical borders are transgressed (through childbirth) to link three continents and (re)produce the geography of the plantation economy. This colonial “birth” is problematic with the technological interventions of the plantation system “helping” the region give birth to the plantation economy. And after emancipation, what is left is, in a sense “diseased”— still experiencing the repercussions of colonialism so that even with the intervention of aggressive technologies, the borders of the woman’s body and the nation continue to be precariously maintained. Despite the power of this gendered metaphor of colonialism, such representations of the female body lump “women” together in a singular construct—as maternal, giving birth, vulnerable, exposed and dependent, while the public realm is seen as aggressively male. As Anne McClintock argues, “seeing sexuality only as a metaphor runs the risk of eliding gender as a constitutive dynamic of imperial and anti-imperial power.”102 Danticat literalizes the “woman-as-Caribbean” metaphor through her representations of female bodies and demonstrates that conventional representations of pregnancy and childbirth elide several complex connotations and denotations. Significantly, through the maintenance of rigid class and racial boundaries surrounding woman, childbirth, and labor Dominican national boundaries are upheld, even as pregnancy and childbirth threaten to disturb them. The Farming of Bones represents childbirth as the ultimate moment of interdependency between an upper-class Dominican woman, Señora Valencia, and her Haitian-born domestic servant, Amabelle. Having been taken in by Valencia’s father after the drowning deaths of her own parents, Amabelle continues working for Valencia when she marries a colonel in Trujillo’s army. In contrast to Benítez-Rojo’s graphic rendering of a woman’s body in childbirth, Valencia’s body symbolizes a kind of bourgeois Dominican mother figure, cleansed of the blood, sweat, and labor of childbirth. In fact, when she is about to deliver her first baby, she does not want to have to actually perform the childbirth herself, telling Amabelle, “If Doctor Javier doesn’t come, you’ll have to be the one to do this for me!” Amabelle herself

silent subjectivities / 161

perpetuates Valencia’s bourgeois maternity when she ponders running to get help but decides against it: “Anything could happen in my absence, the worst of it being if a lady of her stature had to push that child out alone, like a field hand suddenly feeling her labor pains beneath a tent of cane.”103 In Amabelle’s mind, defending her employer against the filthy labor of childbirth is equivalent to defending her from the filth of lower-class labor. Amabelle upholds these class distinctions without hesitation. Both women are mindful of Valencia’s class position as the wife of a commander in the Dominican Army, Señor Pico. Valencia remarks, “I will not have my baby like this . . . . I will not permit anyone to walk in and see me bare, naked.”104 That Valencia does not want her body exposed also signals her class position—the body of an upper-class white woman should not be “exposed” to the labor of childbirth. As a kind of bourgeois “mother-of-the-nation,” Valencia’s desire to protect herself from voyeuristic invasions also symbolizes the Dominican nation’s patrol of its racial borders from Haitian “invaders.” Despite her attempts to keep outsiders from entering into her physical space, Valencia’s body inevitably transgresses its own boundaries when she finally gives birth to fraternal twins. The birth of Valencia’s children not only signals a transgression of her own body’s boundaries but also threatens to disturb national racial ideologies. The firstborn, a son, resembles his mother so that he “was coconut-cream colored, his cheeks and forehead the blush pink of water lilies.”105 The daughter, however, was “deep bronze, between the colors of tan Brazil nut shells and black salsify.” Valencia remarks that her daughter “favors” Amabelle telling her, “My daughter is a chameleon. She’s taken your color from the mere sight of your face.”106 Then she asks Amabelle, “Do you think my daughter will always be the color she is now? . . . My poor love, what if she’s mistaken for one of your people?”107 This question foreshadows the massacre that is about to take place in the country, when in fact, some darker-skinned Dominicans are “mistaken” for Haitians.108 Furthermore, Valencia’s remarks reflect the emphasis that the regime puts on the nation’s “singular” racial origins (white/Spanish) so that “other” races are not compatible with Dominican nationality. When the family physician, Doctor Javier, tells Señora Valencia’s father, “[Rosalinda] has a little charcoal behind the ears,” Papi argues that “[i]t must be from her father’s family.”109 He uses his own family’s genealogy to strengthen and purify the racial boundaries of his descendants: “Her mother was of pure Spanish blood. She can trace her family to the Conquistadores, the line of El Almirante, Cristobal Colón. And I, myself, was born near a

162 / silent subjectivities

seaport in Valencia, Spain.”110 As Papi represents her, Valencia serves as a symbolic mother of the Dominican nation whose origins and namesake lie in Spain, not Africa. While Papi’s remarks represent the racial views of the Dominican elite, Valencia’s twins signify the “true” diverse racial origins of the Dominican people. The “dark” daughter, Rosalinda, becomes a metonym for the African segments of the Dominican Republic, while the “white” son, Rafi, is a metonym for its Spanish ancestry. Yet, Valencia does not acknowledge her children as symbols of the racialized elements within Dominican society; instead, in an attempt to contain this “racial excess” produced from her own body, she imposes the nationalist rhetoric onto them. Replacing her children’s genealogy with a Dominican mythology, Valencia refers to the children as “my Spanish prince and my Indian princess.”111 The reference to the darker-skinned Rosalinda as Indian illustrates Valencia’s elision of the racial origins of her children when, in fact, we learn that Valencia’s husband, Señor Pico, “[w]ith his honeyalmond skin and charcoal eyes, . . . was the one that baby Rosalinda resembled most.”112 This attempted erasure of paternal racial origins is similar to that of Trujillo, the self-proclaimed “father” of the nation, who attempted to camouflage his African heritage through the application of cosmetics.113 The political connotations of Dominican maternity become even more complex with the characterization of Juana, a Dominican servant who helped raise Valencia after her mother died. While Papi documents his family’s history in a notebook, Juana is the keeper of Valencia’s oral family history. Valencia looks to Juana for consolation after Rafi dies, pleading, “Juana, please talk to me of Mami”; and Juana replies, “There is too much to tell. . . . She was so shy when she became a wife, your mami.”114 When Valencia confides, “I have had dreams of what my son’s face would look like, . . . first at one, then at five, then at ten, fifteen, and twenty years old,” Juana responds, “I always had similar thoughts about you, Señora. . . . I am so pleased to have seen you at all those ages.”115 Like Amabelle, Juana willingly upholds Valencia’s class position. When Amabelle asks Juana why she never had her own children, she responds that she “was close to becoming a mother once,” but miscarried. She further explains that her personal loss must be subsumed by devotion to her employer’s losses: “I have no need to cry for myself. I must cry for [Valencia’s mother], who died in the attempt to bring a second child into the family. And I must cry for Señora Valencia, who’s without her mother on this day.”116 Juana’s complicity in repressing her own needs with those of the

silent subjectivities / 163

upper class signals that she is completely interpolated into the oppressive Dominican ideology. Thus, Juana offers the testimonial, not of her own life, but of her employer’s life. As a surrogate mother to Valencia, Juana’s physical and emotional labor symbolically sustains the nation as she helps maintain the borders of family, class, and nation. Dr. Javier challenges Valencia’s family “mythology” with Afro-Caribbean beliefs. Referring to the symbolic significance twins have in Haitian culture, he remarks that one twin sacrifices itself for the other,117 which is significant because Rafi, the light-skinned male twin, who his father names Rafael “after the Generalissimo,” dies just hours after he is born.118 Anthropologist Marilyn Houlberg explains that twins are considered “powerful and dangerous” in Haitian Vodou and “are associated with transitional spaces such as thresholds.”119 In the novel, the river border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic serves as a kind of threshold for these “twin” nations, and Valencia’s own body represents this border and the reproduction of these twin affiliations. “Marasa” is the Haitian Kreyòl word for “twins.” Vèvè Clark explains that “Marasa consciousness invites us to imagine beyond the binary. On the surface, marasa seem to be binary. My research of Haitian peasant lore and ritual observance has revealed that the tension between oppositions leads to another norm of creativity—to interaction or deconstruction as it were.”120 On another level, the Marasa motif can be viewed in terms of the island of Hispaniola and its “twin” nations: Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The island here is configured as a kind of womb that “gives birth” to two nations. Rafi, the light-skinned twin, could then become a symbol of the Dominican Republic, and his death challenges Valencia’s metaphorical role as “mother” to the Dominican Republic. Seen through the lens of “marasa consciousness,” Danticat’s text reworks the genealogy of the island by symbolically erasing the border between the nations and revealing their singular origin. The Dominican Republic is no longer a separate entity with separate mythical Amerindian origins; its history and people must be read in conjunction with its Haitian “twin.” Danticat’s reworking of Dominican history is further borne out in the configuration of Amabelle as a midwife, which offers an alternative to Valencia as the bourgeois figure of Dominican maternity. Even though she is not experienced in this area, Amabelle uses the knowledge passed on to her by her parents, who were midwives and herbal healers in Haiti, to help Valencia give birth to the twins. The figure of the midwife, or “sajfanm,”121 is one who facilitates the crossing of borders of the mother’s body in childbirth. If we think of Amabelle as poised at the limbo gateway that is the border river between

164 / silent subjectivities

Haiti and the Dominican Republic, then, when she becomes a midwife, she could aid in reimagining and “re-assembling” the gateway. Thus, the configuration of Amabelle as a midwife also suggests the transgression of national ideological boundaries. In fact, after he observes Amabelle’s skills, Doctor Javier encourages Amabelle to continue working in the capacity of midwife at the border.122 Such positioning constructs the border as a kind of womb, which needs help in “giving birth” to the people there. Amabelle would be the appropriate person for this job because she herself is a child of the border—of both nations—and could potentially help the people of the border-region “give birth” to a new transnational identity. That she is an orphan suggests that she does not have an extensive mytho-genealogy to impose upon the twin nations. Her presence would symbolically challenge the patriarchal presence of Trujillo, who, with guns and machetes, attempts to dismember the island and its people. However, Amabelle tells Dr. Javier that she does not “think [her] self a midwife,” which signals that, at this point in the text, she does not see herself as a “sajfanm” of the border,123 nor is she ready to accept such a potentially subversive responsibility. Mothers of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic further complicate the role that the laboring classes serve in “nurturing” the nation. While Valencia’s offspring are metonyms for both of the island’s nations, for these mothers, reproduction does not re-produce either nation: “I pushed my son out of my body here, in this country,” one woman said in a mix of Alegrian Kreyòl and Spanish, the tangled language of those who always stuttered as they spoke, caught as they were on the narrow ridge between two nearly native tongues. “My mother too pushed me out of her body here. Not me, not my son, not one of us has ever seen the other side of the border. Still they won’t put our birth papers in our palms so my son can have knowledge placed into his head by a proper educator in a proper school. . . . To them we are always foreigners, even if our granmèmès’ granmèmès were born in this country,” . . . “This makes it easier for them to push us out when they want to.”124 These remarks highlight the ambiguous status of people living in the Dominican Republic, those who cannot claim Dominican citizenship even if they are born within Dominican national borders. Considered perpetual migrants in labor, these mothers do not reproduce the nation and therefore remain outside state power. The “pushing out” of childbirth here is paralleled by the Dominican government’s attempt to “push

silent subjectivities / 165

out” Haitians from the country. How do we theorize the position of “peripheral migrants” who remain within the “Third World”? While the Dominico-Haitians in Danticat’s text do offer a critique of the Dominican nation, because of the precariousness of their existence, it is hardly a position to be celebrated as liberatory. Instead, generation after generation remains marginalized and outside national discourse while their labor helps to maintain the Dominican economy. The erasure of Dominico-Haitian maternity from the nation is juxtaposed with the bodies of Haitian migrants working in the Dominican Republic whose labor cannot so easily be expunged from the nation as their bodies are marked by their labor as cane cutters and domestic servants. In the first pages of the novel, we encounter Amabelle and her lover, Sebastian, through representations of their bodies. Amabelle describes how Sebastian, who is a Haitian sugarcane cutter, is corporeally marked by his work: “the cane stalks have ripped apart most of the skin on his shiny black face, leaving him with crisscrossed trails of furrowed scars. His arms are as wide as one of my bare thighs. They are steel, hardened by four years of sugarcane harvests” and “his spacious bowlshaped hands, where the palms have lost their lifelines to the machetes that cut the cane.”125 The description highlights how the labor that Sebastian performs has gradually erased his individuality so that he is almost a machine. His body becomes inextricable from his job as a cane cutter and thus also becomes tied to the earth: “His shirt, one of the many I had made for him from indigo-dyed flour sacks, was covered with dried red mud and tufts of green grass. There were cactus needles still sticking to the cloth and some to the skin along his arm, but he did not seem to feel their sting.”126 It is as if Sebastian’s work in the canefields prematurely inters him. Similarly, Amabelle’s body is defined by her position as a domestic servant. When they are alone together, Sebastian urges her to remove her clothing: “Your clothes cover more than your skin. . . . You become this uniform they make for you. Now you are only you, just the flesh.”127 Unlike Sebastian who cannot remove his “uniform” of scars, he suggests that by removing her uniform Amabelle can go beyond her identity as a domestic worker, if only temporarily. Danticat’s representation of migrant workers’ bodies foregrounds their labor. When one senior laborer, Kongo, bathes in the stream along with the rest of the community (of Haitian workers), he is described as having a “map of scars on his muscular back.”128 As an elder in the community, Kongo’s “map of scars” provides a historiographic and geographic archive of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. Moreover, the “map of scars” attests to the consequences of

166 / silent subjectivities

border-crossing for Haitians—labor becomes inscribed onto their bodies. While the name “Kongo” suggests that he is a “recently-arrived Haitian,”129 his body attests to years of working in the canefields. Although it seems that the bodies here are distinctly gendered—male cane cutter and female domestic servant—Danticat also challenges these genderings of class and labor. In fact, she shows that women’s bodies are just as dismembered by cane work as are men’s: “Among the oldest women, one was missing an ear. Two had lost fingers. One had her right cheekbone cracked in half, the result of a runaway machete in the fields.”130 And she also shows that men are just as implicated in the “female” domestic realm of birthing with representations of Amabelle’s mother and father, herb healers who helped deliver babies. Amabelle explains that “[b]irths and deaths were my parents’ work.”131 Furthermore, Danticat emphasizes the collective body of the Haitian workers in a scene in which all the workers meet in the stream before dawn to bathe. On this morning they have also come to mourn the death of Kongo’s son, Joël: “Void of ceremony, this was a silent farewell to Joël, a quiet wake at dawn.”132 Amabelle describes how the stream “was already crowded, overflowing with men and women, separated by a thin veil of trees.”133 The Haitian community is able to transform this particular Dominican space into a cathartic, spiritual place where they can cleanse their labor’s residue off their bodies, reconnect with their community, and pay homage to their dead. Here, Haitian identity is validated in a way that is not possible in either the sugarcane fields or the houses of their Dominican employers. This is especially significant for Amabelle because the river was the site where she lost her familial connections as well as her connection to Haiti. The stream signifies both healing and disruption because the scene of mourning Joël’s death foreshadows what is to happen at the river border during “El Corte.” Joël was killed when Señor Pico, rushing home to see his newborn twins, drove into him as he walked along the side of the road.134 However, at this point in the text, even after the death of a fellow worker at the hands of her own employer, Amabelle is not yet ready to cross over the boundaries of race and class to seek justice. When another Haitian woman, Mimi, refers to her employers by their first names, Amabelle scolds her for showing “a lack of respect.”135 Struggling to remain in the role that she has grown accustomed to, Amabelle also resists when other Haitians seek revenge against Señor Pico in order “to teach them that our lives are precious too.”136 Gloria Anzaldúa’s border theory is relevant to the situation of migrant workers. Anzaldúa invokes the labor that Chicanos have historically

silent subjectivities / 167

performed as migrant workers on the land: “the Chicano and Chicana have always taken care of growing things and the land” as a way of claiming the land as part of their identity.137 But I would caution against such romanticization of migrant fieldworkers for the very reasons illustrated in The Farming of Bones. As I have argued, the novel illustrates that, while Haitians may work the land in the Dominican Republic, their labor does not tie them to the land and instead dehumanizes them. Indeed, the labor that these migrants perform allows for rigid boundaries to be maintained between class, race, gender, and nation. Thus, when Dominican society is represented in the bodies of the workers who contribute to the Dominican economy, these bodies serve as palpable texts that dismember the mythical Dominican body politic represented by Valencia and Trujillo. The tension between the containment and “excess” of bodies serves as an ominous precursor of the destruction to come.

Corp(se)oreal Testaments The Farming of Bones functions as a testimonio that is not contained within the nation-state, but confronts the borders of the nation(s). Thus, in this part of my textual analysis, “Corp(se)oreal Testaments,” I explore the how various geographic, linguistic, and corporeal borderlands impact Amabelle’s ability to testify to the events of the slaughter. Here, the complex connections between language and the material body are illustrated as both become sites of state power negotiation. One alternative that the novel offers to oral testifying are survivors’ bodies, which become visual and palpable testaments to their oppression under the Trujillo regime. The bodies of the survivors and victims of the massacre are the material reminders, historical markers in a sense, of Trujillo’s attempt to obliterate them. They are “limb/o gateways” that symbolize the alienation of Haitians from the Dominican nation and materially mark the cleavages between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Invoking Michel Foucault’s concept of the “body politic,”138 I will explore how the bodies in Danticat’s text signify the repressive system of Dominican nationalism as well as the limitations of these corp(se)oreal texts. The novel mimics the testimonio format: it is a first-person narrative told from Amabelle’s point of view. The novel has two narrative beginnings, and in neither does Amabelle begin by telling her own story. In the first beginning, she starts by naming her lover: “His name was Sebastian Onius.”139 The second beginning describes the impending birth of the twins as Valencia’s water breaks—a foreshadowing of the impending

168 / silent subjectivities

disruption of the nation.140 Significant about these beginnings is that they go against the typical testimonio format in which a speaker begins by establishing his or her own subjectivity—often by stating his or her own name.141 The fact that Amabelle does not tell her own story right away disrupts the expectation that her story will sufficiently serve as the “truth” of events. In fact, her narrative reveals her unwillingness to believe that Haitians faced danger in the Dominican Republic. Halfway into the novel, she still refuses to believe the rumors that are circulating about Trujillo’s order to kill Haitians. She instead attributes the talk to the community’s anger over Joël’s death: “I couldn’t understand why Unèl and the others would consider that death to be a herald of theirs and mine too.”142 And even when Doctor Javier warns her to leave her employer’s house because Trujillo has ordered his army to kill Haitians, she thinks, “It couldn’t be real. Rumors, I thought. There were always rumors. . . . This could not touch people like me, nor people like Yves, Sebastien, and Kongo who worked the cane fields. They were giving labor to the land.”143 She believes that because Haitians serve a vital function in the nation’s economy, the labor they perform protects them from harm by the regime. Amabelle is finally convinced of the imminent danger she and other Haitians are in after she sees Señor Pico and his fellow officers brutalize Haitians they are trying to round up to deport.144 After searching for Sebastian and finding no trace of him, Amabelle flees into the mountains along with other escapees, hoping to cross the border into Haiti. But, as the narrative continues, it reveals the political dangers inherent in language for Kreyòl-speaking Haitians living in Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. Significantly, it is as the refugees approach the border that language proves fatal. When they arrive in the border-town of Dajabón, Trujillo is giving a speech rallying Dominicans into anti-Haitian nationalist hysteria, and Amabelle and Yves, a fellow-Haitian refugee, are “tested” by a crowd of Dominicans. The crowd demands that they pronounce “perejil,” the Spanish word for parsley, because most Kreyòlspeaking Haitians could not trill the Spanish “r” and instead pronounce the Kreyòl “pewejil” or “pésil.” Amabelle and Yves fail the test: because they are unable to pronounce the word in convincing Spanish, they are force-fed handfuls of parsley until they choke; then they are beaten by the crowd. Not until Amabelle’s own body is implicated in the violence of this scene does her narrative take on the urgency characteristic of the testimonio genre. Amabelle describes the scene: “Our jaws were pried open and parsley stuffed into our mouths. My eyes watering I chewed

silent subjectivities / 169

and swallowed as quickly as I could, but not nearly as fast as they were forcing the handfuls into my mouth.”145 The mouth and the tongue, the sources of enunciation, become the target of the crowd’s hatred, and language becomes a tool of torture. Historian Richard Lee Turits describes the requirement of Haitians to pronounce “perejil” as “a theater of national linguistic difference separating Haitians and Dominicans.”146 Indeed the shibboleth represents the nadir of a poetics of hospitality, where the pronunciation of one word becomes the determinant of not only citizenship, but of life and death. Corporeality becomes part of Amabelle’s testimonial as she describes the physical aspects of her torture: “My whole body was numbing; I sensed the vibration of the blows, but no longer the pain. My mouth filled with blood. I tried to swallow the sharp bitter parsley bubbling in my throat. Some of the parsley had been peppered before it was given to us.”147 These corporeal “texts” become increasingly significant in conveying the events of the massacre so that at times physical “inscriptions” subsume the oral testimonials. For instance, immediately following her torture, Amabelle has no control over her speech. She describes how she tries to communicate with the other escapees: “I tried to explain. . . . My words ran together, blurred and incomprehensible. They stopped listening. . . .”148 Whereas in the first half of the novel the workers’ bodies are marked by sugarcane, in the second half of the text, the Haitian bodies are altered by the machete, the culmination of the many previous attempts to contain race and nation. Trujillo’s army was instructed to kill with machetes so that it would look like rural peasant farmers had attacked the Haitians.149 To make the massacre look like a peasant-led campaign would destroy the possibility for alliances between Haitians and Dominican peasants; however, the novel demonstrates that this agenda was not successful because many Dominicans assisted fleeing Haitians.150 The bodies of Haitians are literally dismembered because of the nationality that they represent. If the body is a metonym for the island, then this dismemberment at the border also symbolizes Trujillo’s attempt to reify the division of the island. Following this corporeal metaphor for the nation, Trujillo’s nationalist discourse portrays Haiti (and Haitians) as a kind of “diseased” element in the island.151 The most profound corporeal “texts” are the corpses that Amabelle encounters when she and Yves finally make it to the river-border after escaping their torture in Dajabón. This is the first time that Amabelle has attempted to cross since her parents’ drowning years before. She

170 / silent subjectivities

re-encounters death at the river, the deaths of refugees murdered while trying to cross the border. The army is “throwing corpses into the water. . . . An empty black dress buoyed past us, inflated by air, floating upon the water. . . . A man floated past us, face down.”152 These corpses are obvious examples of Trujillo’s successful campaign to eradicate Haitian identity from the nation. Ironically, Amabelle herself accidentally contributes to death at the border when she smothers a fellow refugee, Odette, as they try to cross the river. Odette, who has just seen her husband shot by Dominican guards, starts to cry out when Amabelle stifles her screams by placing one hand over her mouth and “moved the other one to her nose and pressed down hard for her own good, for our own good.”153 Amabelle explains, “She did not struggle but abandoned her body to the water and the lack of air.” Odette’s corpse signifies the price at which Amabelle’s own survival comes: “All I had wanted was for her to be still.”154 This serves a sharp contrast to Anzaldúa’s celebration of the “survival instincts” of the new mestiza: “Like an ear of corn—a female seed-bearing organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture. Like kernels she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads.”155 If we read Amabelle as a kind of “new mestiza,” we also must recognize that her survival of “the crossroads” comes at the price of other lives lost. The bodies of the dead, while testaments to the massacre, are also chilling reminders of the limits of verbal and corporeal testimonials, for they ultimately are effaced, given their lack of identification. Danticat’s prose does not turn away from the grisly effects of the slaughter as Amabelle narrates, “I was taken past a line of people with burns that had destroyed most of their skin, men and women charred into awkward poses, arms and legs frozen in mid-air, like tree trunks long separated from their branches.”156 Such visceral details unveil the horror enacted by Trujillo’s regime in their attempt to obliterate Haitian identity. Amabelle and Yves realize that when they leave Odette’s body with the priest who is recording deaths, her identity will disappear completely: “We did not ask where Odette would be buried, for we know she would likely have to share her grave with all the others there.”157 Elaine Scarry explains that regimes use torture not only to coerce prisoners into giving information but also to make their (unstable) power apparent, visible and tangible. She explains that “the physical pain is so incontestably real that it seems to confer its quality of ‘incontestable reality’ on that power that has brought it into being.”158 Trujillo made

silent subjectivities / 171

his power a reality by its display on the bodies of Haitians. Individual identity is virtually erased, and pain becomes a collective element that binds the victims together in a shared suffering. For example, one nun in the clinic tells Amabelle, “You don’t look as bad as some. You look rather well.” But Amabelle is overwhelmed by the suffering others are feeling; when she witnesses another woman’s leg being amputated, she thinks she herself is experiencing it.159 She describes, “I closed my eyes against her blood, thinking this would be the last time I would see someone dying, so sure was I that when the doctor said, ‘She’s not going to live,’ he was also talking about me.”160 The scene evokes Harris’s notion of the “phantom limb” of the “limbo gateway,” where pain and trauma experienced at the border make Amabelle imagine her own dismemberment, and her own body becomes a prosthesis to another’s pain. Survivors embody another kind of limb/o citizenship. After their physical torture, they are identified not by their names, but by their bodily wounds. Amabelle identifies other survivors as “a young woman with three rings of rope burns carved into her neck” and “the man who . . . had been struck with a machete on the shoulder and left for dead.”161 Yet, while the scarred and dismembered bodies attest to the violence of the massacre, the fact that survivors have to live with the brutal inscriptions of the regime for the rest of their lives lessens their own agency in telling their stories. At the clinic, many survivors begin to talk about their experiences: As they ate, people gathered in a group to talk. Taking turns, they exchanged tales quickly, the haste in their voices sometimes blurring the words, for greater than their desire to be heard was the hunger to tell. One could hear it in the fervor of their declarations, the obscenities shouted when something could not be remembered fast enough, when a stutter allowed another speaker to race into his own account without the stutterer having completed his.162 The passage highlights the need for victims of violence to tell their stories—not only to begin the individual healing process but also as a way to make their experiences and suffering “real” to the outside world. Although Amabelle’s ability to speak clearly and be understood has proved challenging since her torture, at this point, she completely loses her own voice in the text. This suggests that the narrative is not meant to be solely an individual story, but a collective one, reflected by the shift to other voices. As a result, stories blend together, in a kind of collective testimonio, as each person in the clinic chimes in with his or her story. Amabelle

172 / silent subjectivities

feels herself blending in with the others: “I looked for my face in the tin ceiling above me as I waited for Yves to return. With everyone lying face up and with their bodies so close together, I couldn’t tell which face was mine.”163 Her response to these (collective) testimonials is corporeal as Amabelle describes that after hearing other victims’ stories, “My skin felt prickly, as if my blood had been put in a pot to boil and then poured back into me.”164 This is in sharp contrast to the apathetic response that the government later offers to the survivors. In fact, Amabelle herself undergoes a dramatic transformation at the clinic. After losing her ability to speak while listening to other survivors’ stories, her only means of communication is through bodily gestures.165 Her outward identity is transformed when she no longer wears the dress that signified her position as a domestic; “I was wearing a different dress from the one I’d arrived in, a frock of faded denim made for a woman with a much longer and wider body than mine.”166 She is no longer defined by her labor as she becomes identified with survivors and the dead. For a short time, the survivors believe that their stories will actually be used to indict Trujillo for his crimes against Haitians: “[They] look[ed] for someone to write their names in a book, and take their story to President Vincent. They wanted a civilian face to concede that what they had witnessed and lived through did truly happen.”167 However, when the government officials come to document their stories, it becomes clear to the survivors that their testimonials are only part of a bureaucratic process. One woman tells Amabelle, “He writes your name in the book and he says he will take your story to President Stenio Vincent so you can get your money. . . . Then he lets you talk and lets you cry and he asks you if you have papers to show that all these people died.”168 It becomes apparent that the Haitian government is only concerned with the official documentation of the massacre—personal testimonies are only valuable when they can be supported by official documentation of the dead. Indeed, the government stops taking testimonials when all the reparation money from the Dominican government has been distributed. This representation is in stark contrast to the revolutionary potential of testimonio lauded by critics such as George Yúdice and John Beverley. Instead of serving as a site of consciousness-raising and social change, testimonials were taken only as long as they could produce capital. The survivors soon recognize that language is not sufficient to capture the horror of the events. Even when the state does take the testimonies of survivors, many of them recognize that their own words could be used against them; Yves states, “You tell the story, and then it’s retold

silent subjectivities / 173

as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours.”169 Oral testimony is not sufficient for the justice he seeks. Instead, memories are often located in the senses. Describing Yves, Amabelle explains, “The slaughter had affected him in certain special ways: He detested the smell of sugarcane . . . and loathed the taste of parsley; he could not swim in rivers; the sound of Spanish being spoken—even by Haitians—made his eyes widen, his breath quicken, his face cloud with terror, his lips unable to part one from the other and speak.”170 Verbal paralysis is part of the slaughter’s legacy for Yves. This sensory evidence is omitted from official accounts. In a culture in which orality is often valued above scribal communication, the material body is an integral part of language as Amabelle notes how “[she] once heard an elder say that the dead who have no use for their words leave them as part of their children’s inheritance. Proverbs, teeth suckings, obscenities, even grunts and moans once inserted in special places during conversations, all are passed along to the next heir.”171 For some survivors “El Corte” permanently alters not only their physical bodies but also their language. In fact, because of the torture experienced at the hands of the regime, one survivor, a Haitian priest named Father Roumain, no longer has full control over his own words or thoughts. His sister explains, “They forced him to say these things that he says now whenever his mind wanders.”172 Instead of testifying to his torture, Father Roumain recites Dominican nationalist rhetoric: Our motherland is Spain; theirs is darkest Africa, you understand? They once came here only to cut sugarcane, but now there are more of them than there will ever be cane to cut, you understand? . . . We, as Dominicans, must have our separate traditions and our own ways of living. If not, in less than three generations, we will all be Haitians. In three generations, our children and grandchildren will have their blood completely tainted unless we defend ourselves now, you understand?173 Father Roumain’s sister explains that his words are a direct result of his physical torture: “He was beaten badly every day. . . . When he first came, he told me they’d tied a rope around his head and twisted it so tight that sometimes he felt like he was going mad. They offered him nothing to drink but his own piss.”174 Scarry notes the effects that physical torture has on the language of torture victims: “The question and answer [of the interrogation] also objectify the fact that while the prisoner has almost

174 / silent subjectivities

no voice . . . the torturer and regime have doubled their voice since the prisoner is now speaking their words.”175 Whereas the survivors’ oral testimonies are vulnerable to misinterpretation, the bodies of the survivors appear to offer more enduring testimonies to the massacre. The emphasis on the physical reminders of the massacre continues long after the survivors leave the clinic. When Yves brings Amabelle to his mother’s home in Cap-Haïtien she goes to bathe in the yard; “I knew that my body could no longer be a tempting spectacle, nor would I ever be truly young or beautiful, if I ever had been. Now my flesh was simply a map of scars and bruises, a marred testament.”176 Amabelle’s body now parallels that of Kongo whose back bore a “map of scars” from working in the canefields. This doubling suggests the connection between political torture and the cutting of cane. Just as Kongo’s “map of scars” is a testament to his lifetime of working in the canefields, Amabelle’s body is a historiographic archive that retains the history of the events of the massacre: “Thinking of Sebastian’s return made me wish for my hair to grow again—which it had not—for the inside of my ears to stop buzzing, for my knees to bend without pain, for my jaws to realign evenly and form a smile that did not make me look like a feeding mule.”177 The material body, not solely oral testimony, eventually leads to solidarity among the survivors and those who did not endure the massacre. Amabelle describes how, once she arrived in Haiti, “I strolled like a ghost through the waking life of the Cap, wondering whenever I saw people with deformities—anything from a broken nose to crippled legs—had they been there?”178 The testimony that these bodies offer challenges the manipulation of language and stories of the survivors by the Haitian and Dominican nation-states. Amabelle states, “This past is more like flesh than air; our stories testimonials like the ones never heard by the justice of the peace or the Generalissimo himself.”179 These corporeal testaments seek justice by offering an alternative historical narrative. In Danticat’s text a survivor also notes, however, the fragility of the human body under attack: “It all makes you understand that the flesh is like everything else . . . it is no different, the flesh, than fruit or anything that rots. It’s not magic, not holy. It can shrink, burn, and like amber it can melt in fire. It is nothing. We are nothing.”180 The speaker highlights the inherent fragility of corporeal testaments as the destruction of flesh signals an ultimate destruction of subjectivity. Furthermore, even when these bodies do offer testimonials, the victims did not themselves choose the “inscription” of violence. Moreover, as “concrete” as survivors’ corporeal testaments appear to

silent subjectivities / 175

be, even they are subject to interpretation. Years after the slaughter, when Amabelle returns to the Dominican Republic to visit her old employer, the body still functions as a signifier of the massacre. When she returns to Señora Valencia’s home, she sees a servant who “when she stretched her neck, I saw that she had rope burns above her collarbone. They were even deeper and more pronounced than those on the woman at the border clinic, a deeply furrowed field.”181 It is significant that Haitians recognize other victims of the massacre, but for upper-class Dominicans like Valencia, the physical altering of Amabelle’s own body causes a mis-recognition. Amabelle states, “That she did not recognize me made me feel that I had come back to Alegría and found it had never existed at all.”182 Valencia’s failure to recognize Amabelle in her altered appearance signals her refusal to “read” the text that Amabelle’s body offers—a testimonial to her country’s role in its altering. However, there is some ambiguity about Valencia’s own allegiances; she tells Amabelle that she hid several Haitians during “El Corte” even though she had begun hemorrhaging from childbirth—so that her own spilled blood becomes tied to the Haitian blood spilled. But she is not willing to give up her national allegiance, stating, “If I denounce this country, I denounce myself.”183 At this moment, when her identity is nearly effaced by Valencia, for whom she was so willing to uphold class and racial hierarchies before the slaughter, Amabelle becomes fully conscious of the extent of her own oppression.

Re-membering Hispaniola In her final act, Amabelle attempts to “re-member” the brutal history that both Haiti and the Dominican Republic share by submerging herself in the river-border between the two countries: “I removed my dress, folding it piece by piece and laying it on a large boulder on the riverbank. Unclothed, I slipped into the current. The water was warm for October, warm and shallow, so shallow that I could lie on my back in it with my shoulders only half submerged, the current floating over me in a less than gentle caress, the pebbles in the riverbed scouring my back.”184It is as if Amabelle has finally become the midwife to the border by embodying it. The passage suggests that she is partaking of a kind of ritual cleansing, not unlike the scene before the massacre in which Haitians cleansed the residue of their labor from their bodies in the stream. This cleansing evokes contradictory images: the attempted ethnic cleansing of the massacre, parsley as a symbol of loss of speech, death but also

176 / silent subjectivities

renewal: “We used parsley for our food, our teas, our baths, to cleanse our insides as well as our outsides. Perhaps the Generalissimo in some larger order was trying to do the same for his country.”185 That Amabelle embodies all of these contradictions suggests the ambiguous nature of the border’s history. Furthermore, the river is a place of remembering: her parents who died there, of “the thousands whose graves are here,” and even the Middle Passage.186 However, this remembering necessitates the “re-membering” of the shared island history. Significantly, this transnational history is represented through the body, not the voice, of a disfigured black woman, a figure that challenges Señora Valencia as the white, upper-class “mother” of the nation as well as Trujillo’s control over the historical narrative. This representation also suggests the failure of spoken or written testimonial as a representation of this history. The Farming of Bones is ambivalent about the transformative or recuperative potential of testimonial narrative. Once she fully comes into her consciousness after returning to the Dominican Republic, Amabelle significantly chooses not to tell her story, and she chooses not to return to Haiti, but to situate herself in the border between the two nations. Amabelle posits, “Perhaps there was no story that could truly satisfy.”187 This ambiguity over testifying reflects the inherently fractured subjectivity of the border. One might be tempted to read Amabelle’s final act as an ultimate claiming of the border, not unlike Gloria Anzaldúa’s utopian vision of the border as a homeland: “This is her home/ this thin edge of/ barbwire.”188 However, this is too facile a rendering for such an aggressively contended geopolitical space as the Haitian/Dominican border (or the U.S./Mexican border for that matter). Despite the moment of tranquility, Amabelle’s embodiment of the border hardly heals the ruptures of the border, for it is a space that other Haitians continue to cross—some will survive, and some will die. Indeed this speaks to the migration that continues to be acted out today as Haitians still migrate across the border to work in Dominican canefields under horrendous conditions that Danticat refers to in her novel’s acknowledgments: “And the very last words, last on the page but always first in my memory, must be offered to those who died in the massacre of 1937, to those who survived to testify, and to the constant struggle of those who still toil in the cane fields.”189 Thus, Danticat attempts to cross the historical divide to witness not only the 1937 massacre, but the early twenty-first century situation in the Dominican Republic. The novel, however, also suggests the limits of testimonial narrative in witnessing migrant labor exploitation, which I consider further in chapter 4.

4 /

Corporate Containment: Refugee Seafarers on the Seas of Transnational Labor I have become acclimatized to the sea. As we bob along the Costa Rican coast the wind begins to pick up and it starts to rain. I look up and notice three flags flying proud and stiff. The Liberian flag, which is the flag of the country where the ship is registered; the Costa Rican flag, it being a tradition to hoist the flag of whatever country’s waters one is sailing; and finally there is a bright yellow flag marked “Del Monte Quality Bananaen.” —caryl phillips, the atlantic sound the belly of this boat dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out —édouard glissant, poetics of relation

After spending months trapped aboard a nonfunctioning ship in Brooklyn Harbor, Esteban Gaitán, the protagonist of Francisco Goldman’s novel The Ordinary Seaman (1997), tells those he meets when he ventures into Brooklyn, that he is a “refugee from a ship.”1 In fact, he has been working aboard a flag of convenience ship, 2 owned by Americans, registered to Panama, operated by a Central American crew. The crew has not been paid and lives in abhorrent conditions, without electricity, running water, or often food. They cannot legally leave the ship because they have no identification papers. This situation has been enabled by the ship’s flag of convenience registry, which has less regulation and oversight than the more conventional registries. By referring to himself as a “refugee,” Esteban emphasizes that he is without protections and has no place that he can claim. He has stated his situation in these terms as a response to a question from Gonzalo, a gay hairdresser from Cuba whom he has just met. When Gonzalo learns that Esteban is from Nicaragua, he assumes they are in the “same boat”—both refugees fleeing communism. With some trepidation Esteban tells him that he was a Sandinista soldier. Instead of lecturing him on the evils of leftist movements, Gonzalo merely reminds Esteban that he will have to tell a different story if he is to remain in the United States legally:

178 / corporate containment

“it will be much easier for you to get legal status here when you tell them you’re fleeing those maldito Sandinistas. If you say the opposite, chico, you won’t stand a chance.”3 Gonzalo represents the position of a refugee who has successfully navigated and benefited from the politics of the U.S. asylum process because he declared his nonallegiance with a communist country. His comments emphasize the performative aspects of testimony in the asylum process. Esteban will need to adhere to the Cold War asylum ideology of the United States if he too hopes to be allowed legitimate entrance to the state.4 Esteban remains confused over this set of rules, “What, he’s going to have to betray old War Gods to stay in this country . . . ?”5 In fact, like Haitians, pro-Sandinista Nicaraguans and other Central Americans faced enormous difficulties in gaining asylum in the United States in the 1980s.6 The exchange highlights a central conflict for Esteban as he attempts to reconcile his life as a soldier with his present situation as an exploited migrant worker. Although testifying against the Sandinistas could earn him asylum, testifying to the abhorrent living conditions on a ship sitting in Brooklyn Harbor would not. The narrator’s comments emphasize this, “[The crew] knew they should have been paid, in a combination of checks and cash . . . but who was there to protest to?”7 By referring to himself as a refugee from a ship, Esteban links the status of refugee, normally constituted in terms of political persecution, with labor exploitation. In doing so, Esteban becomes an agent in the limbo gateway between citizen and migrant, reassembling the language of displacement and statelessness. One problem is clear: the flag of convenience ship is not a national territory of the kind that refugees normally flee, even though it flies the flag of a nation; thus, his claim to be a refugee from a ship raises some important questions about how national territories are imagined in relation to global capitalism and transnational labor and the rights of those who occupy these spaces. Chapter 3 addressed the exploitative conditions between the Dominican nation-state and Haitian migrant laborers, but this chapter’s discussion of the exploitation of seafarers indicates another kind of precarious labor situation for those who work on ships registered under flags of convenience, “floating states” that can easily evade any regulation of working conditions on board the ships. Despite the transnational mobility associated with ships, these seafarers represent a stark contrast to the liberatory notions often associated with oceanic cosmopolitical forms. Flag of convenience registries represent the ultimate neoliberal erosion of the nation-state’s capacity to ensure the protection of rights in the

corporate containment / 179

interests of the flow of transnational capital. The precarious status of seafarers aboard flag of convenience ships also recalls the Haitian boat refugee “limbo citizens,” those outside the territorial boundaries of the nation-state.8 Furthermore, the anchored ship parallels the “containment” of Haitian physicality (see chapter 2) in relation to Coast Guard photographs, and it also resonates with the containment of Haitian migrant workers in the bateyes of the Dominican Republic (see chapter 3).

Refugee Seamen I begin by discussing the category of “refugee seamen” that is outlined in Article 11 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1957 Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen. The category “refugee seamen” marks how, in an earlier historical moment, the United Nations recognized the transnational status of seafarers and their need for protections and thus, resonates with Esteban’s claim as refugee from a ship. While the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees advocates for the right to hospitality for asylum seekers who are determined to have “political” reasons for fleeing their nation of origin, Article 11 and the Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen contradict the cleavage between the economic and political distinctions used in determining refugee status. Article 11 states, “In the case of refugees regularly serving as crew members on board a ship flying the flag of a Contracting State, that State shall give sympathetic consideration to their establishment on its territory and the issue of travel documents to them or their temporary admission to its territory particularly with a view to facilitating their establishment in another country.”9 The provision was included at the suggestion of the International Labour Organization because of concerns over the lack of protections of these seafarers following World War II.10 The category “refugee seamen” is unique because it focuses not on the generalized category of refugee but specifies a particular type of refugee that is defined through the occupation of seafaring. Through it the UN recognizes the right to be a transnational subject and work in the shipping industry, one of the world’s oldest transnational businesses, while it also recognizes seafarers’ rights to state protections and their rights to citizenship. Weis explains that refugee seamen are defined as two types. The first includes those who “formerly serve as regular crew members on ships of their country of nationality and used the opportunity when their ship was lying in a foreign port to ‘jump ship’ and seek freedom, and are

180 / corporate containment

serving on ships of other flags.”11 The second type includes those who already have asylum in a country but left its territory to work in their occupation as seafarers. Weis explains that the seamen who are defined by either of these categories are especially vulnerable because they lack travel documents so that they are not allowed to go to shore and are “virtually prisoners on board their ships.”12 Without documentary protections seamen become immobilized from movement off the ships on which they work. By stepping off their ships they risk imprisonment in the port nation. Additionally, while they remain on board their ships, they face increased exploitation, harsh working conditions, and lower pay because they lack any rights. Thus Weis concludes, “if the legal position of a refugee is precarious in international law, this is still more true of refugee seamen.”13 At the time of the convention, the protection accorded to refugee seamen was to be enacted through the country of the ship’s registration, which allowed refugee seamen to count it as their residence even though they might be away from it for extended periods through their occupation as seafarers. Key to maintaining refugee seamen status is that the seamen must continuously work on ships of the same contracting state. In this sense, because the link between the nation and the ship was enduring, the ship could become a space of asylum. The exception to this included seafarers working in the colonial merchant fleets, such as the Caribbean Merchant Fleet and the British Far East Merchant Fleet—on the condition that the refugee seamen had “served for a total of 600 days within a period of 3 years on ships calling at least twice a year at ports in that territory.”14 It was imperative that refugee seamen be allowed to establish residence for the purpose of securing travel documents, which would allow them to leave and reenter the contracting state, and eventually become naturalized. The ship thus serves as the space of the nationstate, and the space of asylum, even though “ships are not based in [the nation-state’s] territory.”15 Refugees are by definition stateless and on the move, until they find a space of residence/asylum, while seafarers are by occupation continuously on the move. The “refugee seamen” category protects seafarers’ movements so that they may continue to be part of the global economy. The Refugee Seamen provision thus offers a number of contradictions. First, by linking refugee to a particular occupation, one cannot deny a link between refugee status and economics; by protecting refugee seamen, the convention is protecting a seafarer’s ability to participate in the global economy as well as facilitating the operations of the shipping industry.

corporate containment / 181

Furthermore, the fact that they are refugee seamen, who, because of their occupation, do not continuously occupy a territorial residence makes the call to grant them refugee status all the more complicated because refugee status and asylum status are largely defined through the territorial sovereignty of a state. If the Refugee Convention is “primarily designed to regulate the status of refugees in their country of asylum,” what does it mean to grant asylum to a subject who will continue to occupy transnational spaces?16 It is clear that the category of “refugee seamen” was intended for the very specific purpose of protecting—not so much seafarers per se—but those ostensibly political refugees who make their living off the sea. The danger of exploitation faced by refugee seamen could well describe the contemporary circumstances in which many seafarers working on “flag of convenience” ships find themselves. While the category “refugee seamen” is not a template for the seafarers aboard flag of convenience ships, this category raises a number of issues that are relevant to the connections between refugee status, seafaring, human rights, and national protections. Despite the limitations of Article 11 and the Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen, they offer the possibility for imagining the international protection of seafarers in transnational spaces. The hegemonic forces of global capital that have been exploited by U.S. policies have, however, created the conditions by which seafarers increasingly become economic refugees.

Steering the Flows of Capital through Flag of Convenience Registries Shipping has long been considered one of the oldest forms of transnational enterprise. Maritime economics was integral to the spread of European colonialism. Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker note that Adam Smith and Karl Marx pointed to the central role of the sea in the rise of globalization: “Both understood its maritime origins, arguing that the discovery of the sea routes to the Americas and the East Indies marked a new stage in human history,” which resulted in “the expansion of commodity production” and “resettled the globe and transformed the experience of work.”17 During the nineteenth century, the British dominated world shipping by claiming three out of four ships on the high seas during that time.18 However, in the twentieth century, especially during the period following World War II—the same period in which the

182 / corporate containment

Refugee Convention was ratified—major changes were taking place in the world of shipping that reflect the spread of global capitalism and the subsequent weakening of national structures. The United States played a central role in the politics of shipping during this time, and, according to Alan Cafruny, “the victorious Western powers organized an international regime for shipping.”19 The United States had been gaining footing in the shipping world even prior to the Second World War with the construction and control of the Panama Canal, thus signaling its hegemonic presence over maritime affairs in the hemisphere. The United States had long used military vessels to gain power over the seas in the hemisphere, which enabled U.S. expansion throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. In addition to military marine power, a major shift in marine economics occurred, with the United States playing a central role: the rise in “flag of convenience” registries.20 While the Coast Guard ships I discussed in chapter 2 signal the attempt to control the maritime environment militarily by enforcing the law of interdiction, the use of flag of convenience registries originated in attempts to evade existing laws that hindered the flow of capital. For example, Elizabeth R. DeSombre situates the history of open registries in the nineteenth century during the War of 1812, as well as with the slave trade when “ships owned by citizens of both the United States and various Latin American countries flagged elsewhere to avoid detection . . . when international agreements prohibited the slave trade.”21 In the 1920s, U.S. shipping companies wanting to avoid U.S. prohibition laws changed registries of their ships from the United States to Panama.22 Following the end of World War I, the use of flags of convenience increased when countries such as Panama, Honduras, and Venezuela began to “register foreign-owned vessels under their flags for economic reasons and exercised minimal control over the activities and operations on the vessels.”23 The United Fruit Company was a major U.S.-based corporation that exploited the open registry system to its own advantage. Ronen Palen explains, “In the 1920s, under the guidance of the U.S. custom and excise administration, the United Fruit Company created the Honduran registry to ensure the cheap and reliable transport of its bananas.”24 Indeed, the United Fruit Company became noted for its “Great White Fleet” that transported cargo from its plantations in Central America and the Caribbean to northern consumers. Panama was also attractive to U.S. shipowners because its numerous economic, geographic, and political ties with the United States included “its strategic shipping location, the fact that its currency was pegged to the American dollar and

corporate containment / 183

that contracts in English were considered to be legally binding, and the presence of a subsidiary of an American shipping company in Panama to help arrange logistical aspects of conducting business.”25 Through a history of U.S. military, political, and economic intervention in Panama, the United States forged an imperial relationship that facilitated the use of Panama’s flag of convenience registries by U.S. shipowners.26 The spread of global capitalism during the past forty years has had a significant effect on nations by enabling the erosion of the nation-state and/or reorganizing national structures, which have profoundly influenced citizens’ relationships to the nation. Wendy Brown refers to this as a “neo-liberal political rationality” that is “emerging as governmentality—a mode of governance encompassing but not limited to the state, and one which produces subjects, forms of citizenship and behavior, and a new organization of the social.”27 Flag of convenience registries represent this reorganization in most profound terms, whereby capital determines which nation a ship will be attached to, and it does so based on the basis of the weakened protections these nations can provide within their transient “territories” (ships). Capital in this sense intently produces a nation with little or no sovereignty to enable the freer flow of capital and commodities. As Allan Sekula observes, the nation under which a ship is registered is merely a “paper sovereignty: a flag for a fee.”28 The nation whose flag a ship flies typically has little authority over what occurs on board. In fact, a ship may never actually make contact with the nation under which a ship is registered (especially for those landlocked nations with registries). This is transnationalism at its most extreme, completely driven by market demands. Flags of convenience are reflective of North/South economic disparities. Shipowners from European countries that continued to be linked with traditional maritime countries saw flags of convenience as serious competition “because of the virtual tax-free concessions accorded to the owners of flags of convenience vessels.”29 However, those states that created flags of convenience contended the move was “undertaken in the exercise of their sovereign powers and in the national interests, and was not contrary to international law.”30 In fact, these registries have been tied to the economic development of the Third World. Developing nations are the primary holders of flag of convenience registries, which they use as a means of increasing their economic footing in the world. The crews that serve on flag of convenience ships are also primarily from developing nations.31 Flags of convenience are particularly relevant to the economies of the circum-Caribbean because a number of these registries come from

184 / corporate containment

countries in the Americas: Panama, which has the largest registry in the world, Antigua and Barbuda, Honduras, Bahamas, Bermuda, Belize, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Aruba, Cayman Islands, Jamaica, and Barbados. The labor performed on board a ship may subsidize a family at home—when the seafarers actually receive their full wages—and it may help to uphold the system by which flags of convenience operate, thereby paradoxically helping to keep seafarers’ nations of origin afloat. Traditionally, seafarers typically worked for those companies located in “countries with well-established fleets flagged under national flags where conditions of work were known to be good.”32 Today, the trend has shifted so that companies recruit seafarers from around the world for a lower wage to work on flag of convenience ships. One notable result of bypassing the employment regulations of certain traditional maritime countries was that “often, these regulations specified not only conditions of work (notably wages) but in some cases the nationalities permitted to work aboard in particular positions.”33 Thus, crews have become ever more multinational with deregulation. As Susan Strange notes, today the majority of ships are “manned by motley crews from all over the world.”34 Today, one-half of the world’s shipping fleet is registered under flags of convenience.35 Meanwhile, these registries are used primarily by First World ship owners for whom the flag of convenience has become a way to bypass the more stringent maritime labor laws of the traditional contracting states in favor of those states with fewer or no maritime labor protections.36 Because of the deterioration of working conditions on board flag of convenience vessels, seafarers’ unions have strongly opposed the use of open registries. They argue that flags of convenience do not adhere to international labor standards so that seafarers are not protected from lower wages and unsafe working conditions.37 Seafarers’ rights have become severely restricted on board flag of convenience ships. Instead seafarers on flag of convenience ships enter into a hypertransnational state where, because the “nationality” of the “host” nation (via the ship’s registry) is not stabilized, they become “limbo citizens” where their rights are in flux, dependent upon which flag the ship on which they work flies. Furthermore, because the regulations of open registries are weak and difficult to enforce, these seafarers often become “bare life,” stripped of any rights, outside of any polity. This is especially true for those crews who are either not paid or abandoned by ship owners where they are bereft of the resources to even return home, and home nations are reluctant or ineffective advocates for their exploited citizens.

corporate containment / 185

Creating the Liberian Ship Registry One particularly instructive example of the creation of a flag of convenience registry demonstrates the political power wielded by U.S. interests for gaining economic power in the shipping industry: former U.S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., who served under the Franklin Roosevelt administration, created the Liberian registry. Stettinius is most remembered as having helped to form the United Nations and as serving as the first U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. His role in the creation of both the United Nations and the Liberian registry reveals the intimate connections between human rights enterprises and global capitalism. As Rodney Carlisle explains, Stettinius’s endeavors reflected the ideals of the “American Century,” “which proposed American financing of social and economic advances in developing nations to generate markets for American products and to preserve a world in which the American free enterprise system could survive.”38 When he traveled to Liberia during the war, Stettinius saw an opportunity for economic advancement, and in his efforts to establish “a corporate-controlled system of economic aid to Liberia,” he helped to create the Liberian Maritime Code and register Liberia as a flag of convenience state.39 Established in 1947, Stettinius’s enterprise was set up so that “sixty-five percent of any profits were to be returned to the parent corporation, with 25 per cent to go directly to the Liberian government and 10 per cent to be turned over to Liberia Foundation, a non-profit organization devoted to Liberian educational, health, and welfare programs.”40 Stettinius publicly promoted this division of profits in “non-profit, humanitarian terms” while emphasizing the profit-making possibilities for investors.41 He emphasized Liberia’s strategic position in Africa for politically fending off communism. In fact, the United States could re-flag ships for military use during times of war.42 Stettinius also exploited Liberia’s unique relationship with the United States because a large portion of its population was descended from the Afro-American settlers who established a colony there in the early nineteenth century to escape the ills of U.S. slavery. Indeed Stettinius was a good friend of the president of Liberia, William Tubman, a descendent of African American slaves. These links between the history of slavery and the slave trade that eventually led to the creation of Liberia rest uneasily against Stettinius’s creation of the Liberian registry to produce capital through yet another form of maritime and labor exploitation. The development of the Liberian registry came about, in part, due to

186 / corporate containment

the corporate search for an alternative to the Panamanian registry, which had been one of the primary open registries to that point. During the late 1930s, “Standard Oil and other petroleum shippers registered tankers in Panamanian registry to avoid the effect of U.S. neutrality laws” that prevented them from shipping petroleum to Great Britain.43 Labor disputes and higher corporate and income taxes also propelled the switch to the Panamanian registry because Panama required fewer or no taxes. However, as political instability in Panama increased and Panama gained a reputation for extorting bribes from ship owners, the shippers began searching elsewhere for less expensive alternatives. Stettinius’s own corporation comprised a shipping company that included vessels that had been registered under Panama.44 Between 1947 and 1949, “Stettinius and his key aides . . . were actively involved in writing the Liberian Maritime Code,”45 and officials from Standard Oil eventually approved the code.46 As part of his plan to produce economic development through the registry, Stettinius envisioned multinational ship crews and companies that used “‘liberty ships manned by officer personnel of some foreign nations such as Dutch, Scotch, etc., with the balance of the crew native Liberian boys, who would receive in the neighborhood of a dollar a day.’”47 The ship functions that Stettinius imagined reveal a colonialist mindset in which Liberian “boys” would be under the direction of First World (white) officers. The phrase “liberty ships” signals Stettinius’s vision that the cosmopolitan flow of capital would “liberate” a Third World nation. Pheng Cheah contests such an economic philosophy: “Contrary to the neoliberal sermon that the global spread of free-market mechanisms would lead to generalized development and global democratization, the truncated globality of capital exacerbates economic polarization and in many cases leads to the formation of comprador states.”48 Indeed, flag of convenience registries are merely that—intermediaries in the flow of capital to Western powers. The creation of the Liberian flag of convenience demonstrates the power of U.S. political and financial interests to manipulate national and transnational economic codes. Far from achieving the kind of “liberation” Stettinius espoused, the Liberian registry has contributed to a lack of freedoms for many seafarers. Since its creation, the registry has come under scrutiny and has been the subject of UN Security Council Sanctions, given its record of exploitation.49 The slipperiness of the connections between the movement of capital and human rights in this registry became even more dubious during the dictatorship of Charles Taylor, whose regime became notorious for the murder of hundreds of

corporate containment / 187

thousands of Liberians. Beginning in 1999, Taylor siphoned off funds from the Liberian registry in order to buy weapons to equip his army.50 All the while, the registry continued to be operated by U.S. companies, as had been the case since its inception.51 Thus, registry funds enabled the murder of hundreds of thousands of citizens and contributed to an international refugee crisis. Indeed, thousands of Liberians became boat refugees, with one example including four thousand refugees paying $75 for passage on a leaky Nigerian cargo ship the Bulk Challenge in search of asylum in a neighboring country.52 With its corporate connections to the registry, the United States is certainly implicated in these affairs, but its role has been largely erased so that the violence enabled through the Liberian registry becomes part of the script of lawlessness and debauchery that is typically thrust upon Third World, especially African, nations.

Regulating the Seas International organizations have made numerous attempts to regulate flag of convenience registries, but they have been largely ineffective because of lacking cooperation between shipowners and the nations supplying the registries. One year after the adoption of the Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen, the 1958 UN Conference on the Law of the Sea attempted to regulate flag of convenience ships by contending that there needed to be a continuous link between a ship and the state whose flag it flies. The conference, adopted during the Convention on the High Seas, articulated in Article 5 that “each State shall fix the conditions for the grant of its nationality to ships, for the registration of ships in its territory, and for the right to fly its flag. Ships have the nationality of the State whose flag they are entitled to fly. There must exist a genuine link between the State and the ship; in particular, the State must effectively exercise its jurisdiction and control in administrative, technical and social matters over ships flying its flag.”53Other attempts to address the exploitative conditions of seafarers via international resolutions included the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which drafted the international ship registration agreement in 1986 as an attempt to regulate ship owners’ responsibilities toward their crews. However, by 1998, the agreement still had not been enforced because fewer than forty countries had ratified it. In 1996, the International Labour Organization adopted new recommendations for hiring, wages, and working

188 / corporate containment

conditions of seamen; again, however, the agreement depends upon the nation-state to ratify the recommendations to carry out inspections, and the lack of a sufficient number of inspectors makes enforcing the recommendations nearly impossible. Thus, even if some nations establish and ratify the recommendations, these actions do not guarantee their implementation. Furthermore, the nature of maritime labor makes seafarers even more vulnerable and makes implementation even more difficult; workers are isolated for months, sometimes years at a time, without the ability to go ashore and seek assistance. Or, if a complaint is filed, it can still be very difficult to track down ship owners. Like Esteban in The Ordinary Seaman, in some cases seafarers have “jumped ship” to escape slavelike conditions and sought asylum in the country where the ship was in port because they feared retribution from owners upon returning to their home nation.54 There is no guarantee that such cases will, in fact, result in protection or asylum for seafarers. Given the extreme difficulties of implementing international standards to reduce the exploitation of global migrant workers, Pheng Cheah looks to the 1986 UN Declaration of the Right to Development which seeks to provide a means of regulating the wealth disparities between Northern countries and the developing nations of the global South. Cheah argues that the migrant worker’s nation of origin bears responsibility for pressing host nations to provide rights and protections for workers who enter into their spaces: Through a combination of diplomatic channels, economic negotiations, and moral pressure, a labor-sending nation-state can urge labor-receiving states to view the rights of its overseas workers as an extension of its collective right to development, thereby imbuing these rights with the normative force of third-generation rights . . . it has been argued that the complex interdependence created by economic globalization makes the protection of migrant workers’ human rights a matter of mutual economic interest to both labor-exporting and labor-importing countries.55 In doing so, Cheah suggests that nation-states can enact what universal human rights regimes cannot: “define being-human” and “achieving humanity’s full potential.”56 Cheah addresses this in relation to female Filipino domestic workers in Singapore, a firmly established labor-importing nation; however, when seafarers work under flags of convenience, the establishment of the labor-importing country becomes slippery and sometimes nearly impossible to track. How might the seafarer’s nation

corporate containment / 189

of origin demand these rights when the “host nation” is merely a flag, a kind of ghost nation on paper only and paradoxically, and only briefly territorialized on board a ship? This becomes further complicated when Third World states assert their right to establish a flag of convenience as a means of their country’s economic development. Cheah recognizes the problems with the expectation that labor-exporting countries, which are in fierce competition with each other, “do not have the will to demand fair treatment for their workers for fear of losing their market share to others.”57 As he states, the competition between developing nations to “move up” in the global economic hierarchy “legitimates the mistreatment of migrant workers,” prohibiting them from becoming fully human subjects.58 Most human rights are based upon the notion that “freedom” entails subjects who have a freedom of choice; this concept further complicates the establishment of human rights for migrant workers. Cheah, questioning this assumption, contends that in the contemporary world “freedom” is regulated and structured by biopolitical forms of inhumanity: “The functioning of bio-power, however, puts into question the human capacity for freedom, namely, the ability to transcend the instrumental-technical use of human beings through regulation. For the free subject itself is a product of technologies of bio-power and is constitutively imbricated within an inhuman field of means and ends. It is subjectified as a member of a hierarchical system of means and ends through disciplinary techniques. The interests and basic needs that supply the content of specific human rights are products of governmental techniques.”59 Flag of convenience registries signal how the nation-state has taken on new forms in the global economy. They represent a kind of hypertransnationalism, whereby, paradoxically, a contracting state becomes a traveling, floating signifier that is not bounded by territory and is emptied of its protections. Aihwa Ong writes, “different vectors of capital construct spaces of exception—‘latitudes’—that coordinate different axes of labor regulation and of labor disciplining” . . . “latitudinal spaces are thus formed by a hybrid mix of regulatory and incarceral labor regimes that can operate with little regard for labor rights across far flung zones.”60 As such, the Third World nation-state itself becomes a kind of global commodity crisscrossing the oceans, changing ships, with workers who have little access to human or civil rights. This kind of appearing and vanishing of the nation-state signals what Cheah, in another context, refers to as “spectral nationality.” What can we learn from the seeming incommensurability of the Refugee Seamen protocol that singles out

190 / corporate containment

ships as potential spaces of asylum while, at virtually the same time, flag of convenience ships become inhospitable virtual states that offer few, if any protections to seafarers? At the least, it suggests the current aporias between human rights and transnational labor regimes.

The Ordinary Seaman I recount the changes in maritime economics and labor as a way of contextualizing the central issues of The Ordinary Seaman. The novel reflects the kind of pan-Caribbean circulation of ships, laborers, and states that I have discussed, whereby a Panamanian registered ship, Urus, with a Central American crew, owned by U.S. citizens, is supposed to deliver a load of fertilizer from the United States to Costa Rica. Scholars such as Paul Gilroy, Marcus Rediker, and Peter Linebaugh have attempted to rewrite the history of the Atlantic by considering the intersections between labor and resistance for seafarers aboard ships. Gilroy addresses the racial history of the Atlantic that complicates the national/ethnic history of the transatlantic through his articulation of the transcendent experiences of the sailors, “moving to and fro between nations, crossing borders in modern machines that were themselves micro-systems of linguistic and political hybridity.”61 For Gilroy, sailors become embodiments of transnationalism who counter restricted notions of nationalism. He is particularly interested in the impact of maritime travel on black sailors, citing the importance of ships and sailing for the development of notions of liberty and justice for twentieth-century figures Marcus Garvey, George Padmore, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes.62 In The Many-Headed Hydra, Linebaugh and Rediker emphasize the “transatlantic circulation of experience and the effect of struggles in Africa/America upon social and political developments in Europe” which “expressed an egalitarian, multiethnic conception of humanity.”63 Although these scholars’ histories of transatlantic maritime practices are certainly important for charting the kinds of cultural and political exchanges that occurred among an ethnic diversity of peoples, as well as the agency of seafarers in resisting oppressive working conditions, they contrast markedly from the maritime history put forth by Goldman. In an insightful analysis, Kirsten Silva Gruesz places Goldman’s novel in the context of literary narratives of mariner labor experiences such as Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and Benito Cereno, and C.L.R. James’s 1951 analysis of Moby Dick: Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In, which he penned while in detention on Ellis Island. Gruesz observes, “The crew

corporate containment / 191

of the Urus—a crew of migrants, exiles, and stowaways—relives and transcends the movement toward class consciousness begun in the Pequod.”64 The Ordinary Seaman, while reflecting a multi-ethnic, multinational crew, portrays the stagnant material labor conditions of migrant workers who seek to escape the dire circumstance in their nations of origin. In fact, The Ordinary Seaman reveals how the rhetoric of revolutionary liberation that Esteban has learned as a Sandinista offers little in the face of the conditions on board the Urus. The Ordinary Seaman reflects a dystopic ship narrative that is linked with the dystopic marine history of Corinto, Nicaragua, Esteban’s coastal hometown. When describing Corinto, Esteban highlights how the town has been shaped by its role as a seaport. One aspect of this shipping economy includes prostitution, which has resulted in a creolized citizenry that was fathered by seafarers from Denmark, Egypt, and elsewhere around the world: “[Esteban’s] tíos like to joke that the new generation will be marked by the abundant nose hairs and six toes on each foot of the Basque priest, and by the three-nippled chests of pallid Russians.”65 Through the image of deformity, the uncles’ comments suggest that this is not a celebratory creolization; rather, the new generation will constitute a “deformed” citizenry, thereby distorting the vision of the nation. The population of Corinto has been formed just as much by outside forces—the seafarers (and seminal fluids) that perpetually cross boundaries—as those within the nation-state, which make issues of national origins, territoriality, and belonging especially fraught. Women’s bodies become the vessels that engender hospitality, where the creolized citizenry is reproduced. Esteban himself does not know who his father is. The outside forces that have shaped the seaport also include U.S. military invasions where Corinto became the site of a number of marine landings. Indeed, Corinto became the focal point of CIA efforts to destabilize the Sandinista government by mining the harbor and blowing up oil tanks on the docks. The Ordinary Seaman addresses the ramifications of the Sandinista Revolution for Esteban, who hopes to leave the war behind but instead, with his traumatic memories of the war, must navigate the contemporary conditions in which he finds himself aboard the ship. With his lack of both paternal origins and status on the margins of an unsanctioned economy, Esteban symbolizes a detachment from the nation that is further exacerbated by the poverty in which he lives. He has attempted to forge new attachments by joining the Sandinista movement in its effort to create a new, more equitable nation in which he could become

192 / corporate containment

a “legitimate” member of the polity. Yet the civil war only serves as a fraught space that has lead to further detachment, a lack of national belonging that is enacted through the trauma of warfare. These detachments from national belonging, enabled through transnational capital, serve as forerunners to Esteban’s statelessness as an economic refugee stranded aboard a ship in Brooklyn harbor. The novel foregrounds the culpability of the United States in creating the conditions in which the crew members find themselves by paralleling the issue of the exploitation of migrant labor in the United States with that of the revolution which has failed in Nicaragua due in large part to U.S. intervention and military aid to the contras. Furthermore, when seen through the lenses of Central American workers on the periphery of U.S. society—those who contribute to U.S. economy but are not protected from exploitation—it becomes much more difficult to see the United States as a space of liberation, as is portrayed in the congressional hearings that I analyzed in chapter 3. As such, The Ordinary Seaman offers an alternative poetics of hospitality to those depicted in the congressional hearings. Instead of concern over the exploitation of migrant workers, the novel reveals the hostility such workers encounter at the nation’s boundary.

U.S. Expansionist Policies Before continuing my analysis of the novel, I briefly highlight some moments in Nicaraguan history that are significant to the narrative, particularly the role of U.S. political and economic intervention. The history of U.S. intervention in Nicaragua dates back to the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, in which the United States declared that all affairs within the hemisphere were part of U.S. national interest. Thus, despite becoming an independent nation in 1838, Nicaragua remained vulnerable to U.S. interests as did other Central American nations. In 1856, when U.S. citizen William Walker seized the Nicaraguan presidency, he repealed the nation’s antislavery laws. Maritime economics figured into U.S. hegemony as it considered building a canal through Nicaragua but later decided on Panama as the site. U.S. military interventions in the region have often been enacted to either install or support dictatorships favorable to the United States and/or U.S. economic interests. From 1912 to 1933, the United States maintained troops in Nicaragua and battled the Sandino rebel forces, which sought to usurp the dictatorship. In fact, U. S. forces created the National Guard, which trained Somoza who went

corporate containment / 193

on to become the dictator supported by the United States and known for the violent repression of dissidents (from 1936 to 1979). Only an elite benefitted from the regime, while the majority of Nicaraguans were impoverished, without access to education or other social programs. These events became central to the rise of the socialist FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front), which was named after Augusto César Sandino (1895–1934), the leader of a revolutionary movement that fought against the U.S. occupation in the country (1927–1933). The overthrow of the Somoza regime by the Sandinistas in 1979 signaled a transformation of economic policies. The Somoza regime left the country deeply in debt, and the FSLN responded to the crisis by nationalizing lands formerly owned by the Somozas, nationalizing the banking system, and maintaining exclusive control over the export of products in the interest of improving social conditions for all Nicaraguans, not just a select elite.66 The United States, having lost its complete hold over the nation, thus worked to dismantle the Sandinistas through funding the contras (counterrevolutionaries) to fight against the Sandinistas and justifying the action as part of the Cold War attempt to eradicate what it had deemed “communism” from the hemisphere. In 1985, the United States initiated an economic embargo against the Sandinistas, after which the Nicaraguan economy went into steep decline following headway in the first four years of the revolution.67 By 1988 the inflation rate was 33,602 percent, and by 1989 Nicaragua was “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere.”68 To deal with the economic crisis, the Sandinista government enacted harsh measures that increased unemployment and sharply decreased support for social programs.69 The war had devastating effects on the country: by 1990 there were “thirty thousand dead; fifty thousand wounded; and three hundred thousand left homeless. Over half a million Nicaraguans remained outside their country.”70 Following the defeat of the Sandinistas in the 1990 elections, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro and other subsequent conservative leaders aligned with the United States by pursuing neoliberal economic policies, which have had devastating effects. According to Thomas Walker, they have “caus[ed] poverty and maldistribution of income to be as great as they had been in the dark days of Somoza.”71 By 2001, “the ‘structural adjustments’ and neoliberal economic policies begun in the late 1980s and accelerated under IMF and U.S. pressure in the 1990s had so shrunk the state that it was now utterly incapable of dealing with the dire human condition of the impoverished majority.”72 The Ordinary Seaman, while serving as a testimonial novel, also

194 / corporate containment

questions the ability of testimonio to transform the oppressive conditions of global capitalism. It depicts a similar kind of silencing of the labor refugee that I discussed in relation to the cane cutters (see chapter 3). The novel was published in 1997, seven years after the Sandinistas had been voted out of office. Goldman places the novel in the last months of the Sandinista government, several years after the original news story upon which it is based (1982). The change in dates is crucial because during this time the Sandinistas were facing a significant crisis in their government; it was not the hopeful time that the first few years of the revolution represented. By placing the novel late in the revolution, Goldman looks, not to revolutionary politics of the past, but to a future in which migration would increase exponentially for Nicaraguans following the war. The novel anticipates how, following the defeat of the Sandinistas, Nicaragua’s turn to neoliberal economic policies and developmental “aid” from the IMF would result in upholding the interests of the United States and/or transnational corporations while the struggling nation continues to flounder. Esteban and the other crew members on The Urus represent the economic legacy of the wars in Central America; countries—so devastated economically that they are unable to provide necessary social protections for their citizens—propel many citizens to leave in search of employment elsewhere. For Esteban testifying to his experience as a Sandinista does not carry the same weight that it once would have, as he is forced to move beyond the focus on national liberation and into the global capitalist world. Goldman raises the question of what function testimonial narrative has in the transnational world as an agent for gaining justice for the seafarers on board the Urus, who have been impelled by the effects of civil war and atrocity in their nations of origin to enter into the global economy as migrant workers.

Postrevolutionary Testimonio The Ordinary Seaman reflects elements of the testimonial novel in telling the story of Central Americans who not only suffered under regimes supported by the United States but also were subsequently denied political asylum in the United States.73 Goldman explains in the acknowledgments that the idea for the novel came from a 1982 news story which reported that “seventeen abandoned sailors have been living in a floating hellhole on the Brooklyn waterfront for months, aboard a rat-infested mystery ship without heat, plumbing or electricity. . . . The sailors had been lured here from Central America with the promise of good wages

corporate containment / 195

but instead found themselves abandoned, unpaid and trapped on the ship of horrors.”74 Goldman, who is both a novelist and a journalist, interviewed members of the crew: “Our conversation—a few hours in the Institute’s basement cafeteria—took place so many years ago now that I remember very little of what we actually talked about, though some of the things they told me have been a part of my attempts to reimagine the story from the start. I owe a special debt to the waiter, Bernardo Iván Carrasco M. He wrote a twelve-page account of the travail, which he titled, ‘Los Ultimos dias de un viejo lobo de mar,’ and gave it to me, urging me to make good use of it.”75 While Goldman is a kind of interlocuter to the men’s story, he does not make any claims to truth: “I remember very little of what we actually talked about.”76 The Ordinary Seaman signals a kind of fiction of the Americas in which the native space, the transnational laborer space, and the immigrant space are occupied simultaneously. The novel engages with familiar testimonio tropes such as the community of men and the mountains as a site of revolutionary transformation—typical of testimonios of such revolutionary figures as Che Guevara, Omar Cabezas, and Mario Payeras. This becomes further emphasized with the juxtaposition between Esteban’s time as part of the revolutionary community of the mountains is paralleled with the community of men on board the ship. Both are dystopic spaces for him. As I discuss, in this testimonial novel the refugee native informants ultimately disappear from the text, calling into question, like Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, the efficacy of testimonial narrative, especially for contemporary undocumented transnational labor refugees.

Banished Subjects The novel foregrounds Esteban’s alienation from Nicaragua as he embarks on his journey to the ship. As the plane carrying him to New York takes off from Managua airport, he catches a glimpse of the ground below and sees reminders that the war has not ended: He saw five green military ambulances parked in a row, rear doors open, canvas stretchers on the tarmac, figures in fatigues and medical whites standing around waiting. . . . So helicopters and planes were still flying mangled and bullet-punctured bodies in heated, vibrating pools of blood over jungles, mountains and plains. Despite the cease-fire and all the talk of peace.77

196 / corporate containment

The inhospitable space of war is delineated through the ironic image of hospice as medics wait to attend to the war wounded. Accompanying Esteban to New York City are other Central Americans who have been hired to work as seamen. Among them is a sixty-year-old Nicaraguan, Bernardo, one of the only men who has any experience on board a ship. The men arrive at a desolate harbor in Brooklyn with “abandoned, wrecked shells of old warehouses, offices, and shipping terminals,” with one bearing the traces of a transnational past: “faded lettering in English, French, and Arabic” over the doorways of a former spice company. It is a scene not unlike that in Corinto’s desolate harbor. Upon seeing the ship, Bernardo’s impression is that it is a “broken eggshell. . . . It’s ready for scrap. No lights or plumbing or fans!”78 After the crew’s arrival at the “dead ship,”79 111 days later, the narrator describes Esteban as “shivering in two rank T-shirts and jeans and rotted socks under his thin blanket on his mattress on the floor.”80 Esteban and Bernardo find themselves, along with crew members from Honduras and Guatemala, stranded on this ship and existing in a kind of “bare life,” where they compete with rats for food. Instead of sending money home to support families as they had hoped, the men find themselves struggling to survive without sufficient food, water, shelter, or medical attention. Esteban contemplates escaping the ship. But the men are wary of leaving the vessel because of their illegal status. When they first arrived at the Urus, the ship’s captain, Elias, tells them that onboard they were in Panama, contracted seamen protected by that country’s sovereign laws. Onshore they were in the United States, where, of course, for the next four days, until their seamen’s transit visas expired, they were perfectly legal. But they all knew what rough places port cities could be, and this was one of the most dangerous, especially once they left the port yard and entered the streets around “los proyectos.”81 The lack of both a stabilized national territory and legal documents signals the precariousness of the crew’s situation and their ultimate refugee status because they are virtually without protections. Juxtaposed with the stagnation of the seamen onboard the Urus is the mobility of Elias and first mate Mark (who, the reader learns, are the ship’s owners); they come and go as they please and live off the ship in Manhattan. Mark, a U.S. citizen, and Elias, an adventure-seeking cosmopolitan of British and Greek descent, evade international trade and labor laws and eventually abandon the migrant laborers when it is clear

corporate containment / 197

that the ship will never be seaworthy. In an effort to discourage the men from leaving the ship, Elias evokes what, for many of the crew, will be the familiar tropes of the “disappeared” when he describes “los proyectos” as a place in which the seamen would face the death squads and drug wars of “los blacks” and where murdered seamen are often found without papers or identification and ended up “buried in an anonymous pit on a paupers’ cemetery island in the harbor.”82 Eventually, out of desperation, some of the crew do venture off the ship. Although this reveals a certain permeability of U.S. national boundaries, for the undocumented Central Americans this permeability also brings vulnerability as the men are assaulted by a group of black youth they encounter in “los proyectos.”83 This episode is emblematic of the racial, linguistic, and cultural borders that the men confront in trying to enter into U.S. society.

Revolution and Testimonio The Ordinary Seaman engages with testimonio through Esteban’s memories of his life as a soldier. Testimonio has links to national liberation movements inspired by Marxism, and as a genre it became institutionalized through the creation of a specific prize by Cuba’s Casa de las Américas.84 Marc Zimmerman writes that testimonio “is also a means of popular-democratic cultural practices closely bound with the same forces that produce political and military insurgency.”85 In particular, the Sandinista movement generated a number of testimonios, including that of a Sandinista soldier, Omar Cabezas’s Fire From the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista (La montaña es algo más que una inmensa estepa verde). In 1982, it was awarded the Casas de las Américas prize for testimonio. Cabezas was a middle-class college student who joined the FSLN and became initiated in the guerrilla movement, eventually becoming a comandante in the armed forces. Beverley and Zimmerman write, “The text as a speech-act is the linguistic equivalent of the revolution itself. . . . What gives the book its full life is that the process of birth/ maturation to a new collective national and personal identity through the “mountain” experience is replicated in the process of telling the story.”86 As he attempts to piece together his memories as a soldier, Esteban’s narrative reflects a kind of fragmentation of the genre of the “guerrilla testimonio” that Cabezas’s narrative epitomizes, which is distinguished by themes of “the formation and full emergence of revolutionary commitment under the most grueling circumstances during a key transition in the revolutionary orientation.”87 Included in this genre is a return to

198 / corporate containment

origins that is represented by “a descent into the jungle, a return to roots, a meeting and knowing of America and her indigenous peoples.”88 The time in the jungle “constitute[s] an initial school for the guerrilleros, as they attempt to learn from those they hope to work with and teach . . . to the point that they feel a lived solidarity that is productive for future stages of struggle.”89 Goldman rehearses many of these tropes through descriptions of Esteban’s jungle warfare and indoctrination to the tenets of the revolution. Beverley and Zimmerman note Cabezas’s testimonio has “recuperating possibilities of expression lost or damaged since colonial times.”90 In contrast, Esteban’s story reflects a testimonio that does not revere his time in the revolution but is marked by confusion, gaps, and aporias. There is a parallel between his former life as a soldier,91 where he struggled to stay alive while navigating the precarious landscape of the jungle marked by minefields, and his ability to survive by penetrating the borders of the city. Although many members of the crew pass time by reminiscing about home, Esteban is reluctant to talk openly about his native land particularly because of his participation in the Sandinista movement. Nicaragua is not a nostalgic homeland for him; instead, it is filled with traumatic memories of a native space that has been desecrated by war. While testimonio played a defining role in the Sandinista Revolution, Esteban’s refusal to testify about his life as a Sandinista soldier signals a kind of anti-testimonio. Instead of telling a story of cominginto-manhood in mountains, he remains silent. For instance, when the others onboard are reminiscing about their lives at home, Esteban says nothing:92 “He’s never told Bernardo, never told anyone onboard, about the volunteer nightmare battalion from Léon, about la Marta and her sister. Once he told the viejo about Ana, the German shepherd tracking dog, and he kicked up such a hysterical fuss Esteban swore never to mention war to him again.”93His memories of his time in the army remain internalized. These memories include an offensive against the contras that resulted in civilian deaths: “a family sprawled along a riverbank, a mother and three children, . . . It wasn’t the first time he’d seen such an obscene sight: more than a few times they’d come upon the still-smoking rubble of farming collectives and hamlets razed a day or two before.”94 Esteban’s military commander Milton was stripped of his command for disobeying orders during this mission. Esteban “heard Milton left the country and was living in Miami, working as a nighttime security guard in a perfume warehouse.”95 Significantly, Milton, who once espoused the arte militar and amor, “the love he wanted (ordered) everyone in the BLI

corporate containment / 199

to feel for one another” does not end up considered a war hero of the revolutionary struggle but a deflated, emasculated man outside of his country.96 Drawing on Ileana Rodríguez’s study of gender and war in Central America, María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo observes that the majority of revolutionary texts eliminate the presence of women from the mountain revolutionary space to allow for the “new man” to become socialized into revolutionary consciousness.97 She explains how the testimonios of Che Guevara and Mario Payeras make the mountain into a space where the bourgeois subjectivity can be left behind to allow for the transformation of the revolutionary subject. However, instead of recounting a transformation of a male subject into revolutionary subject that is typical of Sandinista testimonio, Goldman introduces female soldiers, in the form of the middle-class Marta and Amalia, sisters who voluntarily joined the army. It is a significant disruption of the mountain space as dominated by men. Marta and Amalia signal women who have shed their bourgeois past in favor of the revolution. Yet the difference between Esteban as a draftee and Marta as a volunteer remains stark: A dentist’s and a finquero’s daughter. Who loved la Revolución . . . those who already have money want something else, things that can be named but not really touched and certainly not eaten, and these la Revolución does seem able to provide, especially if you’re lucky enough to have been drafted and put in a BLI. And so she looked up to him. So she should have, because without the BLI, he would have been no one. Someone else entirely, whom she would never have looked twice at, and would have had no reason to.98 It is a revealing moment in Esteban’s consciousness. While he spends much of his time remembering Marta through a romantic lens, here he seems to see a reality about their relationship that indicates that her motivations may have not so much been romantic love, but the cachet of being associated with someone who is part of a BLI. Esteban’s refusal to testify about his participation in the events of the war also suggests his inability to articulate those events; he does not see a purpose in telling his story. His interior monologue is fragmented, revealing a confrontation with the traumatic memories of war and Marta’s horrific death.99 Esteban’s disjointed interior monologue is juxtaposed with the official news of Nicaragua which comes across the radio on board the ship, “the man on the radio was saying that despite the Sapula agreement and the cease-fire, both sides were quibbling over terms and

200 / corporate containment

supposed violations.”100 Because he does not tell of the good or bad experiences of his time as a Sandinista, Esteban refrains from any attempt to create solidarity with those around him. As such, the novel calls the potential for solidarity, a central function of testimonio, into question. For example, Esteban’s difficulty in articulating his experiences as a soldier becomes even more evident when compared with the postulations of Elias who portentously denounces the U.S. government’s role in Nicaragua, And el Capitan was loudly asserting that the United States caused the betrayal of the revolution’s ideals by suffocating it with an illegal war, . . . And now el Capitan looking down at Esteban again and saying that back in ‘79 during the insurrection against Somoza he’d really wanted to join the Sandinista International Brigades fighting on the Southern Front but he’d had a business in the Amazon going, and then he said, “You were a soldier, Esteban? Is it true you were right in the middle of it?” I’m not going to say a word, thought Esteban, . . . “I’m honored to have you onboard, Esteban. . . Truly, I am. You muchachos kicked culo on an army backed and trained and led by the greatest military power on earth!”101 For Elias, the Nicaraguan revolution serves as a fantasy through which he enacts his penchant for adventure, but he also performs a facile kind of paramilitaristic solidarity with Esteban as a Sandinista, despite the fact that he has not heard Esteban’s story. Thus, Goldman implicitly interrogates the efficacy of “solidarity” between First World and Third World subjects. It is particularly ironic that Elias offers revolutionary “solidarity” to Esteban while on board the Urus. Elias can easily denounce the U.S. government’s role in Nicaragua and claim solidarity with the socialist movement, while at the same time, he, as an agent of global capitalism, disenfranchises the Central Americans who work for him. This scene occurs at a site of hospitality—a barbeque that Elias and Mark put on for the crew as a way to assuage them when they tell them that there will be further delay in paying their wages.102 As Esteban continues to try to piece together his past or repress it, he must do so while contending with the conditions in which he finds himself, which include trying to comprehend the crew’s relationship to “los blacks” who have discovered the men are living on board the ship in the harbor. They express their hostility toward the crew by cursing and throwing beer bottles at the ship. While watching a group of them fighting on the pier, Esteban attempts to link the past with the present,

corporate containment / 201

“In Nicaragua we end up not just screaming, we slaughter each other . . . What does any of that have to do with this?”103 The ideas of the revolution carry no meaning for him on the ship, where the exploitative conditions seem to call for them. As he and his fellow crew members discuss why “los blacks” appear to be so hostile to them, Esteban recalls his revolutionary training, remembering the words “lumpen proletariat,” but the words “made him feel even more apathetic and pointlessly far away from himself.”104 However, “los blacks,” who are themselves racially and economically marginalized from society in “los proyectos” and who do not share the same language as the crew, are able to interpret the situation of the Urus: “Los blacks seemed to know something about the Urus; it was as if they’d somehow figured out what the crew’s situation was.”105 They spray-paint the grain elevator next to the ship with the words “DEATH SHIP,” signaling the ties that Goldman draws between the contemporary condition of seafarers employed under flag of convenience ships and the earlier circulation of “death ships” during the slave trade that mark the history of “los blacks.” In a second incident someone spray-paints “CAGUERO DE LA MUERTE,” which marks a moment in which “los blacks” attempt to communicate in Spanish although the meaning is not entirely evident as it “seemed to mean ‘Shitter of Death,’ though they probably meant ‘Cargo Ship of Death,’ leaving out the r in carguero, but, the grain elevator being the crew’s latrine, maybe they did mean that.”106 The fact that the meaning and intent of the inscriptions is not entirely translatable signals the ambiguity of the poetics of hospitality. Here, “los blacks” are the gatekeepers to the community. Are they attempting to communicate with the crew in solidarity of their plight, or are they mocking them? The scene highlights the crew’s life on board the ship in which they exist as “bare humans,” and the excrement of the latrine comes to define their degraded subjectivities. Underscoring the inscription of the “death ship,” in one particularly cruel scene, Elias asks the crew to participate in a lifeboat drill, only to mock them once they are sitting in them waiting to be lowered into the water.107 The lifeboats are, in fact, nonfunctional and thus recall the failed lifelines/life preservers of Brathwaite’s Coast Guard ship (discussed in chapter 1). Thus, just as Haitian boat refugees struggle to find lifelines, so too do these refugee seamen struggle to survive. Esteban thinks that los blacks are “Fucked lumpen, just like us,” but there is no possibility for solidarity between the two groups.108 Moreover, other crew members’ attitudes reflect disillusionment with Marxist

202 / corporate containment

ideals, with one referring to Esteban derogatorily as “just another brainwashed, rabid dog.”109 Esteban’s interior monologue reveals that he too is skeptical of the romantic ideals of revolution that were imparted during his training. He remembers a political officer in his company, Rodolfo, a former professor who served as instructor in the tenets of the revolution as well as poetry: “la Revolución, which was like a poem you were supposed to be writing in your head.”110 Esteban contemplates what purpose they serve now that he’s stranded aboard the ship: “Where’s their political officer, that fucking Rodolfo, now? Whose ears is he filling with words about poetry and killing and revolution and love and heroes and martyrs now?”111 He thinks, “I’m no one anymore. Puta, I’ve vanished.”112 The description of a “death ship”—a “a dead ship—a mass of inert iron provocatively shaped like a ship” indicates that its function is opposite to that of enabling global movements.113 Instead the anchored, nonfunctioning ship symbolizes the stagnancy in which the trapped sailors find themselves as well as the debilitating effects of transnational capitalism. In fact, the owners ultimately lose money on the deal—although they will likely bounce back with their ability to maneuver within the capitalist system. Ultimately, it is a ship that will be not be used to sail the high seas and enable commerce through its movement; it will, however, be sold off as scrap metal to be dissembled and reassembled in other products for consumption—refrigerators, irons, etc.—representing the endless mutability of global capitalism. The novel demonstrates that while at one time, the shipping industry may have represented cosmopolitan connections as seafarers encountered the ports of the world, contemporary shipping increasingly immobilizes seafarers. While they have not officially been designated as refugees, the conditions that brought the crew from Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Honduras hover over them so that in seeking economic opportunity elsewhere, they are also seeking refuge from the volatile conditions at home. For example, the Guatemalan sailor, whose macabre nickname “Caratumba,” meaning “Tomb Face,” represents “a well-known joke all over Central America that Guatemaltecos are only born to give their army more people to murder.”114 His testimony to the war in Guatemala centers on the role of U.S. corporate interests in the region as he tells about the time when he worked for a “yanqui” oil company exploring for oil. He explains that half of the crew operated as informers for the army and the other half functioned as guerrillas. In this sense, the civil war is configured within capitalist enterprise that carried on despite the war. He tells of the accidental deaths of two army soldiers who were supposed to be

corporate containment / 203

protecting the camp, especially the dynamite supplies used to explode underground sites for oil exploration, from guerrilla raids. The soldiers confiscated some dynamite to blow up part of the river as a means of “fishing” and instead accidentally blew up themselves. The soldiers’ protection of the oil company suggests the complicity between U.S. capitalism and the Guatemalan army; the bombing of the river signals the destructive force of capitalism on the indigenous landscape. The Americans blast deep into the earth in search of oil and “would study the results on their computers. . . . Once they found a very ancient Maya pyramid buried deep under the earth.”115 This scene serves as a significant contrast to what Beverley and Zimmerman describe as the Latin American narrative trope of the search for origins, which they discuss as prevalent in Guatemalan testimonio.116 Here the discovery of origins comes not through time spent in the jungle, but through the computer screen of a U.S. corporation, which can easily destroy these “origins” with their search for oil. Caratumba states that “nobody wanted [the army] there” and that he wished all of the soldiers had died. He hints at the larger crimes committed by the army and does not elaborate.117 Like Esteban, Caratumba does not tell about all of his experiences during the war. He witnessed his lover, another member of the oil exploration camp, shot by the Guatemalan army, “but harasses himself in a different way [from Esteban] because he witnessed it, ran away to save himself and forget.”118

Testimony and the Threshold of Diaspora Despite the humiliation of the beating during the first attempted escape, Esteban continues to take excursions off the ship by himself, each time venturing further and further into the Brooklyn neighborhoods that surround it: “Every night he walks, not knowing the names of the neighborhoods he walks through, . . . he ranges as far as Sunset Park and Owl Point in one direction, through Red Hook to the petering waterfront edge of Cobble Hill in the other.”119 The waterfront is punctuated by a number of barriers and checkpoints: “fenced-off alleys or lots,” “padlocked gates,” and “lots of signs around warning against trespassers.”120 Eventually Esteban also permeates the borders of capitalism: “Truckloading docks are most vulnerable when there’s a way in from the harbor shore. He winds up and down the streets, back to the harbor, probing for weak points, using wire cutters, Esteban snips two cases loose from a packet pallet on a loading dock before he knows what they hold.”121 By these means, he can provide the crew with food and clothing they would

204 / corporate containment

otherwise not have. In fact, Caratumba tells his story while the crew eats the shrimp, a product of Honduras, that Esteban has stolen from a truck on the docks. As José Mateo, the cook, observes, “many along the coast get work on those ships that stay out on the ocean for months, collecting shrimp from trawlers and deep-freezing them in their holds. . . . But how many ever get to actually eat them, brother?”122 The remarks link the displacement of the native from that which the native “land” produces—a displacement that occurs vis-à-vis shipping. Eventually Esteban begins nightly sojourns off the ship, where, once he encounters other people, he must explain his situation as an economic refugee. Even when he finally encounters members of the Latino community, they view him with skepticism. His first real contact is with Joaquina, a manicurist from Mexico, who assumes from his ragged appearance that he is homeless and asks him, “Don’t you feel embarrassed going around like that?”123 Although he is, as a refugee sailor, homeless, she configures him within the derogatory associations of homelessness found within the nation-state—one that anticipates nation-state inhospitality toward internationally “homeless” refugees. Notably, their conversation takes place in the doorway of the salon where she works. The doorway, a symbol of hospitality, is anything but welcoming, and she curses, “Hijos de la chingada, patanes, come and stand in the doorway all night pissing, drinking beer, smoking marijuana, leaving their piggishness all over.”124 Esteban must clean this same doorway before Joaquina will give him a cup of coffee.125 During their exchange in the doorway, there is a notable misinterpretation when Esteban doesn’t understand Joaquina’s idioms. She tells him, “‘If you mop and sweep the doorway here, I’ll make you a cup of coffee. Órale?’ . . . He smiles. Doesn’t understand that word. ‘Órale?’ he repeats. ‘Papas!’ she says. Potatoes? And she steps forward and opens the door, turning various keys in various locks. As she’s going inside, she looks at him standing dumbly on the sidewalk. ‘Ven!’”126 It is a significant moment in the poetics of hospitality wherein a breakdown in communications occurs between two immigrants, one slightly more of an “insider” than the other, although they ostensibly speak the same language. Thus, language and translation are central to not only the politics of juridical hospitality but also the more intimate forms of communication. Moreover, the threshold is an entrance to a business, not a home, and thus signals that Esteban’s entrance into the United States, which began with stealing from the docks, will continue through economic channels. At the moment when he is cleaning the doorway, Esteban recalls his life

corporate containment / 205

in the war as he gazes at the Soviet-made boots that he wore throughout the war and onto the ship: “these boots like a last living witness to his life, like the only proof he has of Esteban Gaitán.”127 Instead of offering a testimonial to his experiences, the boots carry the material evidence— blood, mud, and excrement—of his life as a soldier, the economic destitution of his home in Corinto, as well as his life on board the Urus. The threshold also signals that life on the margins of the nation, even for those who exist within its borders remains hostile. When Esteban tells her about his life on the Urus, Joaquina tells him, “that doesn’t happen here. . . It’s a story. I don’t believe a word of it.”128 By suggesting that Esteban is not telling the truth, she appears to offer no hope of establishing solidarity between them. Her statement also reveals that she is invested in the narrative of the United States as a land of freedom; there is no space for narratives of exploitation here, despite what she encounters in her daily environment. When he shows her his mariner’s tools used to cut wire, it is significant that she assumes they are burglar’s tools and warns him that if the police should catch him breaking into cars, it’s “just the pretext they’ll need to leave you in a bloody pulp.”129 In fact, they are the same tools that he uses to steal from the pallets on the loading docks as he searches for food to carry back to the ship, demonstrating the illegitimate economies through which he must navigate as an economic refugee. This exchange further evidences how he, as a labor refugee, can easily be viewed through the lenses of local homelessness (or slothfulness) and criminalized by the very institutions that uphold the laws of hospitality in U.S. society. As a former Sandinista and a labor refugee, Esteban, instead of going through official channels to asylum in the United States, must find alternative modes of refuge. Joaquina also represents a counterfigure to the Statue of Liberty that is visible but perpetually out of reach on the ship. As the gatekeeper of the doorway to the salon and the nation, she does not offer welcome and, in fact, dismantles the fantasy of a feminized, nurturing hospitality that the statue symbolizes. She initially accuses Esteban of having urinated in the doorway,130 tells him that he has a “funny accent,”131 curses him, and overall rebuffs him. Initially, he “doesn’t like the way she speaks to him, mouthy, bossy, patronizing.”132 When he tells her that he wants to try to find the United Nations to “see if they can do something to resolve our situation,”133 Joaquina only knows that it is “somewhere in Manhattan” and is “seemingly unimpressed” with his plan. She points out that unless he cleans up his disheveled appearance he will be seen as a “terrorist.” This observation suggests that she, as an immigrant with

206 / corporate containment

much more experience in the United States, recognizes that, despite the injustices experienced on the shores of the nation, justice will remain out of reach for the ship’s crew. Even the United Nations, the body that is supposed to protect the downtrodden of the world, has its own borders and checkpoints and would view him with hostility. By leaving the ship and entering into Brooklyn, Esteban must negotiate his legal status as an undocumented laborer. By representing Joaquina’s skepticism that the United Nations will provide justice for Esteban, Goldman critiques the ability of international bodies to provide humanitarian assistance for labor refugees. Here we can recall the irony of Stettinius’s role in helping to create simultaneously the United Nations and the Liberian ship registry. As I discussed at the beginning of this chapter, Gonzalo, a gay Latino, who owns the salon in which Joaquina works as a manicurist, instructs Esteban on the politics of asylum. He also offers him a kind of classic Homeric form of hospitality by cutting his hair, providing him with a glass of wine, and allowing him to sleep in the salon overnight.134 By configuring the hosts of the nation as a gay male and an initially hostile woman, Goldman offers an alternative narrative of “se(a)men” that marks the community of men on board the ship as well as Esteban’s life in Corinto. The erotic dreams that objectify sexual liaisons with women (and men dressed like women) upon which many crew members fixate the longer they are on board the ship are subverted once Esteban enters Brooklyn. It is not a port that will be defined by seafaring “insemination” but is instead configured through other forms of creolization where refugees from throughout the hemisphere converge. The one place where testimony seems to provide hope for Esteban is in his exchanges with other displaced Central Americans whom he encounters in Brooklyn. For Esteban, this first happens in the all-night diner where he waits to meet Joaquina. Once he tells the waitress about his experiences on the Urus, she offers him help and connections to others. When he eventually moves in with Joaquina, she takes him to a Salvadoran restaurant where he gains a sense of solidarity with other Central Americans: “He’s met refugees from the Salvadoran and Guatemalan wars and death squads there,” and “one of the cooks . . . was from Nicaragua too: she had a son who died fighting in a BLI, another still living in the contra camps, and two more children with her in Brooklyn.”135 The refugees become the most effective asylum speakers when they communicate with each other and form new solidarities that help to create a diasporan community outside the native space. The refugees must create their own spaces of sanctuary because most have no hope of receiving legitimate asylum:

corporate containment / 207

Many people, there in the restaurant on Friday nights, and elsewhere in Brooklyn, when they learn of Esteban’s ambiguous refugee status from a phantom ship on the Brooklyn waterfront, offer him a temporary place to stay, a couch or a floor to sleep on until he and Joaquina can find their own apartment. He always writes their names, addresses, and telephone numbers into a little pocket-size notebook Joaquina gave him just for this purpose.136 With the reference to Esteban’s “ambiguous refugee status,” Goldman links the notion of asylum with seafarers working in the shadows of transnational capital. If anything, the notebook in which Esteban records the names of those he meets in New York is his more enduring and liberating testimony, his record of the hospitality offered to him by other refugees. Thus, because it remains marginalized within the nation, the immigrant community must create its own forms of asylum. Otherwise, the possibility of Esteban’s story to create change for other transnational laborers is minimal.

Disappearing Informants The novel reaches a climax when, after months of struggling to survive aboard the ship, the crew suffers a casualty. Bernardo, the eldest crew member, is severely injured when he spills hot cooking oil on his leg. Elias attempts to heal him using homeopathic remedies that he learned in the Amazon. However, when Mark sees Bernardo’s condition and realizes that he could face legal charges if Bernardo dies, he dumps him at the entrance to an emergency room before getting on a plane to escape to Mexico.137 Elias lies to the rest of the crew when he tells them that the owners of the ship have sent Bernardo home, but he himself does not know where to find him. In fact, Bernardo dies abandoned in the hospital emergency room: “Yet another indigent, dirty, with messy, sweatmatted hair and stubbled chin. . . . Another corpse destined for Potter’s Field, the indigent’s cemetery on Hart Island.”138 This scene recalls Elias’s warning to the crew that they could become “disappeared” if they venture off the ship, but Bernardo’s labor on board the ship ultimately results in his “disappearance.” Echoing Esteban’s fear that he and the other members of the crew have “vanished” from the eyes of the world as they languish on the ship, Bernardo becomes the unidentified indigent, the disposable migrant, the body that disappears from the text—not unlike that of slave bodies thrown off of the slave ships centuries before.

208 / corporate containment

Along with his body, Bernardo’s voice disappears. Aside from his tangible service as cook, Bernardo, because he was one of the only seamen to have previously worked on a ship, had provided the only perspective on how ships functioned before the rise of flag of convenience registries and noted that the crew should have signed new shipping articles upon their arrival in New York.139 He was the sole crewmember who initially spoke out against Elias when he told the crew that they would not be paid right away; Bernardo had countered, “you ask us to be slaves.”140 Furthermore, his testimony about conditions on the Urus to an Argentinian couple whom he encountered strolling on the waterfront next to the ship ultimately brought the “Ship Visitor,” a representative of the Seaman’s Institute, to investigate the conditions on board the ship.141 Despite this development, however, Bernardo did not have the opportunity to tell his own story when the Ship Visitor finally does arrive, because by that time he had been left for dead at the hospital. It is also important to note here the choice that Goldman has made in fictionalizing the account. As stated previously, Goldman drew on the written account of a “real” Bernardo who was part of the “real” crew upon which the novel is based. But the fact that he chooses to have the fictionalized character Bernardo die, when in fact the “real” Bernardo does not, offers a sobering picture of the potential of testimonio in changing the conditions of transnational laborers. Goldman recognizes the limits of testimonio in the humanitarian capacity.

The Cosmopolitanisms of Advocacy Initially, when the Ship Visitor first arrives on the Urus, he seems to offer the potential to transform the men’s lives. Esteban is hopeful, and yet decides against going to the lawyer’s office with him and other crew members to give depositions when he realizes that by so doing he will be late for his (illegal) factory job, an illustration of economic realities subsuming notions of justice. When the Ship Visitor tells him that there is no trace of Bernardo, he “tr[ies] to comprehend or even imagine this mysterious abyss that has somehow swallowed Bernardo. It’s something that’s been done to all of them, and that they never even knew or suspected the truth makes it all the more terrifying. And makes it also too much like what happened to la Marta and to how many compas, everyone he’s lost so far, another thing he’s never understood until right now.”142 Thus, through the ultimate erasure of Bernardo, Esteban begins to integrate his exploitation in the transnational economic sphere with

corporate containment / 209

his past trauma. Before he returns to the ship one last time (it is going to be evacuated by the Seaman’s Institute), he goes through his notebook, calling his contacts to find places for other members on the ship to stay.143 Therefore, Esteban, not the representative of an international humanitarian organization, ultimately helps many of the crew members. Through the Ship Visitor’s narrative we see that the situation on the Urus is not unique, but something that he has encountered numerous times, although it is extreme enough for him to begin legal proceedings, which are ultimately fruitless. He notes that part of the reason for taking depositions from the men on the Urus is his “chance to push the institute’s board, see how far they’ll let us take combative advocacy of seafarers’ rights, strike a small but resonant blow, for once, against malefic shipowners.”144 The Ship Visitor attempts to test the limits of the Seafarer Institute’s advocacy as well implementation of U.S. laws, although there is no real hope for action, especially because Bernardo’s deposition about his injury would have been the most powerful testimony to the owners’ violations of labor laws. The Ship Visitor represents a number of cosmopolitanisms that converge and collide. He serves as a kind of emissary of hospitality—visiting ships that come into port where he counsels and advocates on behalf of crews from around the world. Yet, his work too easily becomes subsumed into a romanticized poetics of hospitality, as he tells the stories of what he sees on a daily basis to impress his lover Ariadne and her international group of friends, who represent an educated cosmopolitan elite, characterized by a “detachment from the bonds, commitments, and affiliations that constrain ordinary nation-bound lives . . . a luxuriously free-floating view from above.”145 The seamen on the Urus represent a cosmopolitanism from below that is typically characterized as the “unprivileged—indeed, often coerced.”146 The Ship Visitor navigates between these two cosmopolitanisms, although ultimately those from below become the means through which he experiences the “whole rest of the world,” a world symbolized through all the foods he “gets to taste” when he boards ships.147 The Ship Visitor imagines that his “important work” as an advocate will propel him to a more elevated cosmopolitanism where he is not just another one of the “White Boys” like those that he encounters at the Manhattan bars he frequents with Ariadne.148 In fact, through Ariadne, who attends the same elite university at which Elias’s wife Kate teaches, the Ship Visitor comes closer to the forms of elite cosmopolitanism that silence and “disappear” the very people he advocates for and

210 / corporate containment

thus represents how institutionalized humanitarian endeavors are often complicit with the very structures they seek to challenge. Goldman thus reveals a skepticism toward cosmpolitanisms that emphasize travel, migrancy, and flows demonstrating Cheah’s observation that “the efficacy of these new cosmopolitanisms is generated by, and structurally dependent on, the active exploitation and impoverishment of the peripheral majorities.”149 The Ship Visitor explains to Ariadne and her friends that much of his work involves mediating tensions between multinational crews—“trying to figure out what’s going on between, say, a Greek captain and officers, Punjabi Sikh engine room guys, maybe a Filipino or Latino crew.”150 His descriptions of the various ship societies he has encountered reads like an anthropological text: A ship is a ship is a ship? Not at all. Soviet ship’s a whole different world from, say, a Korean one. Russian captains almost always invite you up to their cabin for vodka; they like to shoot the shit. There’s this one container ship comes in about three times a year, flies a Maltese flag, captained and . . . crewed entirely by women, women from everywhere, a very well run ship—. . . There’s this other ship crewed by criminal fugitives. And another entirely by Portuguese monks.151 The Ship Visitor’s remarks reveal an outdated ideology based on essentialized national, gender, and ethnic traits. However, the novel offers a significant contrasting image to the Ship Visitor’s celebratory cosmopolitanism. For example, when the men first arrive on board the Urus they find the cultural remnants of the previous Japanese inhabitants of the ship: “roach-infested rice and the musty box of chopsticks” and “rotting crates of sardine cans.”152 The most luxurious elements remaining on the ship are Japanese steambaths that do not function. The rot and decay of these items signify the stagnate world that the seafarers have entered and that will define their lives. In reality, the Ship Visitor will not testify to anyone of consequence. When it comes to the men on the Urus, the Ship Visitor and the Seafarer’s Institute he represents can do very little, especially when they learn that the Urus has “become a stateless vessel.” Even while it was under a Panamanian flag, “The crew was never Panama’s responsibility. . . . They’re unlicensed seafarers. . . . Apparently, they never signed shipping articles.”153 Furthermore, the same anonymity that “disappears” Bernardo (no contract, no shipping papers, passport confiscated

corporate containment / 211

by the owners) allows Elias and Mark to remain free from prosecution as Elias absolves himself of responsibility: “But they won’t find his name on a single piece of paper. And the Panamanian Registry has no legal culpability, because they were never licensed seamen. . . . It’s easy to hide.”154 Thus, even though the Ship Visitor does eventually hear the crew’s testimonies, these stories are not enough to seek reparations or justice because the ship remains outside any state jurisdiction and the owners are able to evade detection. “But they tried to give the Ship Visitor as clear a picture as they could of el Capitan and el Primero, and about everything that had happened since June, trying to get it all in order, interrupting each other, everyone wanting to give his own version of certain events so that [he] sometimes had to hear the same story told over and over, which was when, claro, he would seem to be no longer listening.”155 The waning interest of the Ship Visitor in the men’s stories parallels that of the Haitians who tell their stories to officials in The Farming of Bones only to be turned away once the reparation money has run out (see chapter 3). The testimonies that the men provide to the Ship Visitor are virtually worthless; most crew members leave the ship with Esteban to go into Brooklyn to try to find jobs and survive as illegal immigrants, demonstrating that it is “easier to remain undocumented in the underground economies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada than to secure safe haven, asylum or some other protected status.”156 Readers do not know what happens to them, whether they survive or not. The value of their stories remains only on the individual level for the Ship Visitor, who tells the most provocative ones to Ariadne: “Well, I’ve sure as hell got a story for her tonight. . . . A ship visitor’s gotta find his poetry where he can get it, right?”157 Thus, the value of the depositions that he takes is not juridical, but aesthetic. The aestheticization of the men’s testimonies reflects the degree to which the humanitarian realm, in which he functions, can displace the realities of labor refugees. His storytelling hardly results in raising the consciousness of his audience. Ariadne tells him, “I just don’t see how, Johnny, you can spend your life around people like that, complete dupes, people so incapable of helping themselves.”158 Once the men’s words become transformed into “poetry,” they become emptied of urgency.159 As the author of a testimonial novel, it would appear that Goldman is also implicating himself in the limits of the aestheticization of modes of testimonio. Readers are left with the voice of the Ship Visitor, who is ultimately a powerless and ineffective advocate for this crew and all other crews. He reflects so aptly the inability of humanitarian organizations to regulate

212 / corporate containment

the seas. By ending the novel with the Ship Visitor’s voice, Goldman’s text marks the ultimate disappearance of the refugee native informant that parallels the erasure of Haitian cane cutters from the congressional hearings. Thus, instead of serving as a kind of resistance narrative, this disappearance indicates a symptom of global capitalism that cannot easily be integrated into testimonial narrative. The events of the novel are situated in the transitional moment of the breakdown of communism in the world, just as the Sandinistas are about to be voted out of office and the Eastern bloc is breaking up. Esteban learns that the world has changed during the time that he was on the ship with major shifts in the global system—“they’re knocking over those big statues and running crazy in the streets.”160 The breakdown of testimonio in the novel reflects this transitional moment where the once-effective modes of discourse for creating solidarity have been diffused by the forces of globalization. In this chapter I have explored a number of intersections between seafaring and refugeeness, including Esteban’s claim to be a “refugee from a ship,” the Refugee Seamen protocol, and the status of transnational laborers on ships as economic refugees. How can migrant workers witness and testify to such complicated refugee manifestations, especially if, as Goldman’s novel suggests, transnational capitalism has become increasingly effective in silencing the voices of the new refugee seamen?

5 /

Crossing the Threshold of Asylum: Dominican and Cuban (Post)Refugee Narratives

The majority of this book focuses on the instabilities of refugee subjectivities and the difficulties New World refugees confront in attempting to gain legitimacy in a host nation. As I have discussed, the modes of articulation that refugees are required to navigate can often hinder the quest for political and/or economic refuge. However, it is also important to consider what happens for those refugees in the Americas who, once they leave the space of persecution, do gain asylum and citizenship in a host nation. In the narratives that I examine in this chapter, those who have been displaced because of political persecution have gained asylum in the United States and a degree of incorporation into the polity, and thus they no longer experience statelessness. I consider how certain refugee narratives continue to have relevance even after the refugee has made it to safe shores, but obstacles to expression also remain for some. Central to this discussion is Gayatri Spivak’s theorization of the post-1965 “New Immigrant” as native informant who becomes a site of metropolitan desire to “know” the Third World. As such, the New Immigrant has been cast as a bearer of authentic knowledge of the native space, resulting in “cultural museumization.”1 Spivak also traces the way in which immigrants, particularly elite Third World postcolonial critics in the U.S. academy, have served as native informants in metropolitan spaces. Some do so willingly, while others may be consigned to the position through institutional forces that cast them as “experts” on the Third World because of their origins. Spivak argues against the desire to see immigrants as informants on their native places. She links the

214 / crossing the threshold of asylum

migrations of people from “postcolonial” spaces to their role as informants in the metropolis: “the postcolonial informant has rather little to say about the oppressed minorities in the decolonized nation as such, except, at best, as especially well-prepared investigator. Yet the aura of identification with those distant objects of oppression clings to these informants as, again at best, they identify with the other racial and ethnic minorities in metropolitan space. At worst, they take advantage of the aura and play the native informant uncontaminated by disavowed involvement with the machinery of the production of knowledge. Thus, this last group either undermines the struggle by simulating an effect of a new Third World, by piecing together great legitimizing narratives of cultural and ethnic specificity and continuity, and of national identity— a species of ‘retrospective hallucination.’”2 In this chapter I consider how some Dominican and Cuban refugees who have obtained asylum in the United States become cast as New Immigrant-native informants while others experience new forms of marginalization within the host nation. Particularly salient for my purposes are the class distinctions that Spivak makes between postcolonial people who “speak for” their native communities. Because of the heterogeneity of refugees, power is distributed unequally among them so that class, race, gender, and nation of origin become factors in determining who becomes a “legitimate” asylum speaker. Those legitimated voices can displace or “foreclose” the voices of those who remain in the nation of origin, or even of other asylees in the United States. As we saw with Nikòl Payen’s essays in chapter 1, some immigrants remain ambivalent about their ability to speak as native informants. This chapter explores the questions of how those refugees, who are designated as New Immigrant-native informants, produce narratives of both the nation of origin and the refugee experience of persecution to be consumed in the host nation. In what ways are such narratives granted “authenticity” and truth-value? Conversely, how is New Immigrant-native informant an unstable category dependent upon race, social class, and gender? What kind of discourses make up the poetics of hospitality for those who have crossed the threshold of asylum? While the characters of the narratives in this chapter rely upon the hospitality of the United States to grant them asylum, these narratives also reflect the politics of hospitality in the domestic, familial space. Focusing on the family as a refugee unit raises important questions regarding the internal and external boundaries of domestic and public spaces and how subjectivity is tied to refugeeness. How do the laws of hospitality

crossing the threshold of asylum / 215

of the nation-state affect domestic hospitality—who is allowed to cross the threshold into the home space? How are the conventions of hospitality applicable to domestic relationships and spaces?

Narrating a Refugee Genealogy The refugee narrative of political persecution has been a continual point of reference in Dominican American writer Julia Alvarez’s work, owing to her own family’s history as refugees from the Trujillo regime. There are certain aspects of her family’s status that make their refugee story unique from the others that I have examined in the previous chapters, especially their socio-economic status, education, and long history of ties to the United States. Refugee flight from the Dominican Republic was unusual during Trujillo’s reign because he imposed strict travel restrictions on the citizenry.3 Alvarez, one of the most prolific U.S. Caribbean writers to date, has a significant following of readers; she has published five collections of poetry, five novels, an eco-fable, five children’s novels, numerous essays (including one collection), and has been anthologized countless times. One of her novels, In the Time of the Butterflies, was made into a Showtime original movie. In recent years, she has published articles in mainstream sources such as O Magazine, Essence, Better Homes and Gardens, and the New York Times Magazine. In short, she has garnered a considerable amount of cultural capital. While scholars have typically configured Alvarez variously as a migrant writer, an immigrant writer, and a Caribbean writer, none have focused exclusively on the refugee elements of her writing.4 Alvarez has told the story of flight from the Trujillo Regime to the United States many times—both in terms of her own family’s flight as well as through fictionalized accounts. Her novel In the Time of the Butterflies details the horrors of the regime as they affect the historical Mirabal sisters, who did not escape and were murdered by the regime for their politically subversive activities. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo!, which are loosely based on Alvarez’s own family, chart the fictional García family’s flight from the Trujillo regime to the United States. Alvarez has also discussed her own family’s escape from the regime in various essays. In “Our Papers,” she recounts the Trujillo Regime’s threats and violence that her family experienced, although, with her grandfather’s ties to the United Nations, they were also granted privileges that most Dominicans were not. For example, her grandparents were

216 / crossing the threshold of asylum

allowed to make regular trips back and forth to New York when most Dominicans were prohibited from traveling outside the country.5 She describes the events of 1960: the family lived under house arrest because of her father’s underground political activities, and, with the aid of friends in the United States, the family received papers to leave the country. Alvarez ends the essay with a nostalgic glance back at the moment of the family’s departure, “I would remember the big house in Boca Chica, the waves telling me their secrets, the cousins sleeping side by side in their cots, and I would wonder if those papers had set us free from everything we loved.”6 Something to Declare (1998), the collection in which this essay is published, represents the passage from native space of persecution to the immigrant space in the United States with its division into two parts: “Customs” and “Declarations.” The subheadings discursively reproduce the journey through the bureaucratic channels of U.S. immigration as they recall the customs declaration form that visitors and citizens must complete when arriving at a port of entry to the United States. The essays in “Customs,” largely addressing Alvarez’s family, thus connote the customs of family life, while the “Declarations” essays consider her writing life. Something to Declare speaks to the notion that, to move through the channels of immigration, one must declare oneself a subject, and, as the title of “Our Papers” demonstrates, that movement depends upon the documentation of subjectivities. Writing runs parallel to the movement from refugee to immigrant-citizen; language, writing, and bureaucracy are imbricated in such a way to facilitate the movement through the gateways of hospitality. This movement serves as a stark contrast to the conflicted relationship between narrative, language, and bureaucracy for the “undocumented” refugees that I have discussed throughout this book.

Engendering Hospitality I explore Alvarez’s fictional renderings of the García family’s refugee experience as represented in ¡Yo! and its prequel How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. Both novels feature multiple narrators and reveal various perspectives on the García family’s refugee narrative, which most obviously recalls the trauma of living under a dictatorship as well as the trauma induced within the family during that time and after the family’s arrival in the United States, when they feared being sent back and worried about friends who remained on the island.7 In these novels writing, refugee experience, and the family become imbricated in a search for origins. For example, ¡Yo! is essentially framed by parental

crossing the threshold of asylum / 217

refugee testimonies; Mami’s chapter comes just after the prologue, and Papi’s ends the novel. Thus, the protagonist Yo’s narrative is, in a sense, reproduced through the refugee experiences of her parents so that the refugee narrative frames the familial narrative and vice versa. In ¡Yo!, Mami, the family’s matriarch, understands that refugee testimonials can be needed to participate in political and social discourse even after asylum has been granted in the host nation. She harnesses the position of New Immigrant-native informant when she feels threatened. She knows the significance of telling a believable story and testifying to the horrors of the Trujillo regime, which her family has fled, when a social worker, Mrs. O’Brien, comes to check on the family in their apartment in New York City. The home becomes a site where social hospitality converges with the politics of state hospitality; Mami fears the social worker’s visit may threaten her family’s security in the United States. She establishes the urgency of her family’s situation: “We are free at last, . . . Thanks to this great country which has offered us the green cards. We cannot go back. It would be certain death.”8 When Mrs. O’Brien questions whether things are “really that bad,” Mami becomes an effective asylum speaker as she describes how “I fill her two ears full with what is happening back on the island—homes raided, people hauled off, torture chambers, electric prods, attacks by dogs, fingernails pulled out. I get a little carried away and invent a few tortures of my own—nothing the SIM hadn’t thought up, I’m sure.”9 Mami is acutely aware of the type of information needed to convince her listener of the urgency of her family’s circumstances; her litany of horrors depict the “bare human” kind of details associated with narratives of refugees as powerless victims. Mami’s embellishments do not threaten her family’s position but reinscribe their place in the United States. Moreover, in the eyes of the host nation, her narrative reasserts her position as the family matriarch, as reflected in the social worker’s notes: “Trauma/dictatorship/family bonds strong/mother devoted.”10 Terrence Wright observes that refugee mothers and their children are often visually framed as the piously innocent “Madonna and child”; the social worker’s comments rehearse this kind of image by sanctioning Mami as a selfless and sacrificing mother.11 However, the novel resists the narrative of refugee mothers as solely innocent victims. In fact, because of Mami’s harsh treatment of her daughters the intervention of the state ultimately enters the García home. The social worker explains that Yolanda has been “telling stories” at school about “kids locked in closets and their mouths burned with lye.”12 Mami has, in fact, used similar tactics to discipline her children,

218 / crossing the threshold of asylum

in part, as a response to her own trauma of living in fear of the regime, demonstrating that she is both a victim and a perpetrator. However, she is able to convince the social worker that Yo’s stories are merely childish fiction. This scene, which occurs in the family’s home, also demonstrates how Mami strategically deploys the conventions of domestic hospitality as a tactic against the inhospitality of the state as she puts her daughters on display when they “come out in their pretty, ironed dresses, curtsying like I taught them.”13 The daughters’ hyperfeminized manners are meant to underscore Mami’s “good parenting” for the representative of the state. Although she may not have anticipated it, because the encounter is successful, Mami thus becomes aligned with the state, sanctified through the social worker’s notes as she appears to conform to the government’s parental standards. Compounding Mami’s distress is the way in which her family has been reformed into a nuclear family upon arrival in the United States. She can no longer rely upon the extended family to buffer the tensions she has with her daughters, as she could while living in the family’s compound in the Dominican Republic: “You didn’t get along with your mother? You had two sisters, one brother-in-law, three brothers and their wives, thirteen nieces and nephews, a husband, your own kids, two great-aunts, your father, a bachelor uncle, a deaf poor relation, and a small army of housemaids to mediate and appease.”14 Thus, while Mami has been traumatized by the long-term effects of living in terror that her family would be destroyed by the regime, she is also distressed by the familial effects of losing the support network accorded by her social position in the Dominican Republic. While Mami is able to convince the social worker that she is a “good” mother, Yo becomes configured as a kind of informant on the family whose stories result in bringing the surveillance of the state into the home. Mami has warned her in the past about the danger of telling stories, and “often, I put Tabasco in that mouth hoping to burn away the lies that seemed to spring from her lips.”15 In fact, Mami anticipates erasing the aspects of her own complicity in her daughters’ trauma, shifting the blame instead to the narrative of state persecution, which allows her role in traumatizing her daughters to be subsumed: “For a moment I feel redeemed as if everything we are suffering and everything we will suffer is the fault of the dictatorship. I know this will be the story I tell in the future about those hard years—how we lived in terror, how the girls were traumatized by the experience, how many nights I got up to check

crossing the threshold of asylum / 219

on their blankets and they screamed if I touched them.”16 Thus, Mami’s refugee narrative involves the violent suppression of her daughter’s voice and a false narrative. This is not the first time that Yo’s childhood stories have proved threatening to the family’s safety. In the Dominican Republic, Yo’s stories hold the potential to betray her father’s politically subversive activities, such as when she innocently tells an army general that her father hides a gun, which is illegal, in their home. Papi describes how, when he and his wife learn of this particular story, they “went at her like an interrogation team,” and he brutally beats her because “I had to silence our betrayer.”17 Thus, while the refugee experience frames the familial narrative, at times, the family dynamics mirror the political persecution of the regime so that like the nation, the home itself becomes an inhospitable space. The dynamics of regime tactics—threats, trauma, and interrogation—infiltrate familial interactions and memories. For example, in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents Mami threatens Yolanda that she will be imprisoned by Trujillo’s secret police if she does not behave.18 As a child, Yo lashes out at her father by calling him “chapita,” a nickname referring to Trujillo.19 As an adult, Yo interrogates Papi on his memories of his participation in revolutionary activities, pointing out gaps and inconsistencies in his story.20

Dis/arming Hospitality Just as Mami relies upon hospitality for deflecting the social worker’s surveillance in New York, she also relies upon her role as hostess as a way of warding off Trujillo’s secret police who come to the family’s home in the Dominican Republic searching for her husband in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. The scene takes place on what turns out to be the family’s last day in the Dominican Republic. The location of the family’s home in a larger extended-family compound that is walled and gated reflects it as a site of the confrontation between the state, socioeconomics, and domestic space. Papi is forced to hide in a secret compartment in the house upon seeing the guardias walking up the driveway, thereby displacing him from the position of head of the household. Mami is not home when they arrive so that, when she returns, the gate is open, and the guardias having entered her home without invitation. As trespassers, the men have the potential to take over the house, completely usurping the host/guest relationship. However, Mami maintains the illusion of control over the home space in her position as hostess, offering them

220 / crossing the threshold of asylum

hospitality in “her grand manner,” which she thinks “will usually disarm these poor lackeys from the countryside.”21 She implicitly challenges the phallocentric violent power of the regime via her attempt to uphold her class position. Describing Benveniste’s configuration of classical Greek forms of hospitality, Derrida explains that the gifts (xenia) offered to the foreigner (xenos) are meant to create a “pact or exchange with a group or, to be more precise, with a line of descent.”22 However, this form of hospitality is based on the notion that the foreigner is someone who has social status and an esteemed family name so that “hospitality . . . is not offered to an anonymous new arrival and someone who has neither name, nor patronym, nor family, nor social status” and is “therefore treated not as a foreigner but as another barbarian.”23 Thus, the hospitality that Mami offers the guardias reinforces their position as “barbaric” strangers, not only because she considers their class position/line of descent beneath her own but also because of their position with the secret police. Mami’s hospitality is in fact a form of hostility. She serves the men drinks from the “cheap glasses she keeps for servants,”24 while also telling them “my house is your house,” the “traditional Dominican welcome.”25 The guardias in turn participate in this polite discourse: “Doña, excuse our dropping in on you.”26 With this exchange, the language of hospitality, which is always a performance of civility, easily becomes recoded into interrogation as they inquire about her husband’s whereabouts. Mami’s poetics of hospitality becomes a poetics of hostility when she lies to the men, telling them that her husband is away playing tennis. “Tennis shoes” is the pre-established code phrase the family uses to summon their CIA contact.27 The thin veil of hospitality is momentarily lifted when Mami offers the men a tray of food and “remembers that Trujillo forces his cooks to taste his food before he eats,” and she and Yo eat first in order to prove the food is not poisoned.28 In doing so, she violates the codes of domestic hospitality by eating before her “guests.” Ultimately, while Mami’s genteel hospitality may have momentarily stalled the guardias, the intervention of Vic, an unscrupulous CIA operative, renders the guardias impotent. After he is notified of what is happening, he arrives at the home and phones the men’s superior to inform him that the Garcías’ immigration papers have come through and they will be leaving for the United States. While the Garcías have certainly experienced the terror of living under the regime, Vic’s intervention signals their unique circumstances as refugees who are assisted by the U.S. government in their asylum quest. Vic’s ability to dispel the stand-off within the household speaks to his role as a representative of a government

crossing the threshold of asylum / 221

that holds the power to grant selective hospitality and the ongoing U.S. intervention to Dominican politics, which will continue with the U.S. occupation (1965) following Trujillo’s assassination. It is telling that the U.S. government exercises the power over not only U.S. laws of hospitality and the Garcías’ access to asylum but also the laws of hospitality of Dominican citizens within the Dominican Republic; the United States thereby exercises a degree of control over the kind of refugee experience awaiting the Garcías.

The Labor of Hospitality Standing in the shadows of Mami’s strategic hospitality in the Dominican Republic are the family’s maids, who inherently hold a precarious position on the threshold of the home/hospitality, even as they help to maintain the household by cooking, cleaning, and raising children. Some maids have been passed from house to house throughout the de la Torre family, with some being “handed down” from one generation to the next. Despite their integral role in the household, throughout How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, maids are distinguished from the García sisters in terms of class, race, and nationality.29 The fact that they are known only by first names and/or nicknames underscores their alterity, and the readers know nothing of their family histories. Thus the García/de la Torre family has no (acknowledged) genealogical link to them. Furthermore, the maids in the García household are delineated by their phenotypical differences from the family members so that they remain perpetual strangers, never to be assimilated into the home space. In her discussion of the role of domestic servitude, gender, and hospitality, Mireille Rosello explains, “the live-in maid is literally (con)fused with the house she occupies. If she eats the same food as the children, if she shares their bedroom, it is not because the house has replaced the exteriority of a workplace but because the workplace has swallowed the very idea of home, excluding the possibility of hospitality.”30 Chucha, the oldest maid in the García household in the Dominican Republic, is a Haitian refugee who was taken in by the de la Torre family when she showed up on their doorstep seeking refuge during the 1937 massacre. She holds a particularly ambiguous position. The family initially provided asylum to Chucha by taking her into their home in an act of unconditional hospitality. She becomes a loyal servant for years to come, but she is forever marked as liminal, which we see in the youngest García sister’s description: “Chucha was super-wrinkled and Haitian

222 / crossing the threshold of asylum

blue-black, not Dominican café-con-leche black.”31 This description of Chucha reveals the way that Fifi, as a child, interpolates the perceived racial distinctions between Dominicans and Haitians. Ironically, this line of thinking was perpetuated by Trujillo’s nationalist rhetorical call for the extermination of Haitians in 1937. Chucha is exoticized for her voodoo practices, 32 which consist of the prayers and rituals of protection that she performs for the family and their home. Her request to have a coffin built in which to sleep disturbs the family although eventually they fulfill her request. On the day of the family’s departure for the United States, Chucha shows the sisters a wooden statue, the only thing that remains to her from Haiti and a reminder of her own departure from her native land. Through it Chucha connects her own experience to that of the García sisters, although Fifi later associates the statue with anthropology textbooks she reads in an unfulfilled search for a link to her past.33 Thus, Fifi can only associate Chucha with a kind of museumized object of study.34 When the Garcia family flees the island, they leave Chucha the keys to their home and expect her to watch over it. There is an irony in that action: as a Haitian, Chucha is most excluded from Dominican society, and yet she will maintain primary control over a Dominican household “until the day I can see now—when I shut my eyes—that day the place will be overrun by guardias, smashing windows and carting off the silver and plates.”35 While she offers a somewhat subversive presence as she continues to practice voodoo to protect the home, ultimately Chucha carries on the García family’s history, not her own, as she is left to await “the burial that is coming.”36 Unlike the Garcías, Chucha has neither the social status nor other means to challenge the guardias’ invasion of the home. Given the precarious status of Haitians in the Dominican Republic and the care that Chucha has taken to prepare for death, one wonders if the death that she envisions will be at her own hands as a means of escaping the guardias. Or, mirroring her flight from the 1937 massacre, will the guardias catch up to her this time? Regardless of how she dies, her insistence that she has a coffin in which to be buried suggests that she wants to avoid being left to the elements like those who were killed at the river-border during the massacre. She has had to make certain of this because her refugee experience eliminated any reclamation of familial attachments, a stark contrast to the Garcías’ refugee experience.

crossing the threshold of asylum / 223

Stabilizing the Refugee Narrative In ¡Yo! Alvarez points to the potential commodification of refugee stories through Papi, who offers testimonial fragments of his involvement with the revolutionary movement in the Dominican Republic, and by transcribing them Yo becomes a kind of performative, professional New Immigrant-native informant “asylum speaker” for the family. Papi experiences anxiety at the thought of his daughter’s transcription of his memories. As she tries to piece together the “real” story of what happened, she questions the accuracy of the information he offers. Papi’s memories do not adhere to the kind of linearity that Yo desires: “Sometimes I get confused as to what exactly happened. I don’t think it is only because I am now an old man. It is also because I have read the story of those years over and over as Yo has written it, and I know I’ve substituted her fiction for my facts here and there. Many times I don’t even realize I’ve done so until I get together with my old cronies from the underground.”37 Papi is wary of the ways in which Yo’s writing solidifies his testimony: “When she writes a book, the worst she worries about is that it will get a bad review. We hear beatings and screams, we see the SIM driving up in a black Volkswagen and rounding up the family.”38 Thus, Papi and Mami resent what they see as the freedom that their daughter exercises in her role as a storyteller who tells their stories of persecution. To her, they provide the raw materials that inspire her fiction, but to them the stories are reminders of the terror of the regime. In particular, Papi still experiences a degree of difficulty in articulating his testimony. Eventually, his testimony includes his confession to the violence he inflicted upon his daughter for telling stories. The lack of Yo’s first-person testimonial in the novel suggests the legacy of Papi and Mami’s attempts to silence their daughter. In fact, the title of the novel points not only to a shortened version of “Yolanda,” but also to the Spanish form of “I,” so that “Yo” can also be read as an attempt to forge a subjectivity that is lacking.

Nostalgic Informants After years of struggling as a writer and through failed relationships, Yo experiences distress over whether to have a child—to the point that she stops writing for a time. Yet, instead of feeling relief, when he learns of this, Papi suggests that her writing is the substitute for a child. Through his endorsement, Papi concedes that Yo’s storytelling is necessary for those Dominicans who have left the island and bequeaths to her the role

224 / crossing the threshold of asylum

of the storyteller who will carry on the collective cultural memory of the family. After having punished her as a child for telling stories, he explains the need for her storytelling: “We left everything behind and forgot so much. Ours is now an orphan family. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren will not know the way back unless they have a story. Tell them of our journey.”39 After much resistance to Yo’s transcription of his memories of persecution, Papi decides that, because they are refugees whose national-filial ties have been severed, her storytelling is necessary to continue the family’s connection to their Dominican heritage. By publishing her stories, they become the means by which former refugees may reestablish their filial ties to the homeland. Thus, just as refugees must tell their stories to obtain asylum in the host country, Papi suggests that the return of the refugee and the refugee’s descendents to reclaim the native space also requires a story. It is significant that Papi gives his approval to his daughter for storytelling because he, in a sense, represents the patria (native land) by reasserting a linear genealogy of place that the refugee’s descendents can trace back to that native land. In his configuration, Yo will become a kind of New Immigrant-native informant who will have the power to reconstruct the native space in order to “ground” the family. Yet, to achieve this kind of reclamation of origins, particularly the kind of linear genealogy that Papi desires, other narratives must be subsumed. For example, there are numerous examples of the “contamination” of this heritage, including Sarita, the “illegitimate” daughter of the family’s maid, who was fathered by a member of Mami’s family, as well as Papi’s own lineage. As readers learn in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, his father had numerous children by different women: “He is the youngest of his father’s thirty-five children, twentyfive legitimate, fifteen from his own mother, the second wife; he has no past of his own.”40 Because refugees are inherently severed from national and often familial attachments, framing the novel’s narrative through refugee narratives raises the question of attachment, belonging, origins, and genealogy. Papi’s remarks illustrate a desire for maintaining familial ties through the transcription of the “legitimate” family’s refugee narrative.

Disrupting Cuban Refugee Discourse Cuban refugee families suffered similar fragmentation, particularly after arrival in the United States.41 The stories of Cuban refugee experience have typically been read within the theme of exile. In her book

crossing the threshold of asylum / 225

Cuban-American Literature of Exile, Isabel Alvarez-Borland traces the theme of exile in Cuban literature back to the nineteenth century, citing such writers as José Martí, one of the earliest writers who fled to the United States.42 She identifies writers who fled the 1959 Cuban revolution and came to the United States as adults, such as Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo as part of the first generation of Cuban American writers who wrote primarily in Spanish.43 The writers that I explore in this section, Ivonne Lamazares and Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés, are among a subsequent generation of Cuban American writers who grew up in the United States and write in English (Lamazares was born in Cuba). Through their representation of Cuban refugee experiences, they reveal the deep fractures within the Cuban exile community in the United States. As the first group of New World refugees to migrate en masse and receive political asylum in the United States, Cubans obviously carry a great deal of political and cultural significance when considering the constitution of New World refugees. As I have discussed, Cuban refugees represent the counterpoint to Haitian refugees since Haitians have been historically denied entrance to the U.S., while Cubans have typically been viewed as one of the refugee groups most “welcomed” in U.S. history. What began as a Cold War ideology that viewed all Cubans as refugees fleeing Castro’s communist regime and therefore, automatically eligible for asylum, continues largely to the present, although there have been certain restrictions established in recent years such as the Wetfoot/ Dryfoot policy that have somewhat curbed the refugee flow.44 Nevertheless, Cubans who make it to U.S. shores are still granted an automatic right to asylum. Thus far, there have been four major waves of postrevolution refugee migration from the island, which include the period immediately following the revolution up to the Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961; the period of “freedom flights,” when there were daily flights out of Cuba (1965–1973);45 the 1980 Mariel boatlift when more than 125,000 refugees came to the United States; and the 1994 balsero migration when thousands of refugees tried to make it to the United States on small boats and rafts following a period of extreme economic crisis. Castro’s “inhospitable” policies toward foreign interests, that included nationalizing U.S.-owned and other foreign-owned properties, contributed to U.S. policy of unconditional hospitality toward Cuban refugees. A 1962 announcement published by the Cuban Refugee Center in Miami, under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare,

226 / crossing the threshold of asylum

included instructions detailing how U.S. communities could aid Cuban refugees, outlining the aid provided by the federal government (refugees’ transportation fees, a “transition” allowance, medical care), and urging communities to “Sponsor Cuban Refugees . . . Fulfill their faith in freedom.”46 The announcement demonstrates the state’s utilization of a poetics of unconditional hospitality: Miami, Florida, 90 miles from the Cuban refugees’ communistdominated homeland, is a generous host, serving as the port of entry that receives this great number of refugees week after week. But there should be a greater sharing in this example of traditional American hospitality to freedom-seeking Cubans. Communities throughout this free land have opportunity to join in extending this welcome.47 While the announcement constructs the United States as an ideal host, extending unconditional welcome, Cubans are configured as exceptional guests: “Our Cuban guests are eager to earn livelihoods in our free country. How we welcome them and provide job opportunities has a direct bearing on their evaluation of the U.S. way of life.”48 Instead of an asylum interview in which Cubans must prove their need for refuge, the announcement’s description of the registration interview suggests that it is a mere step to facilitate the resettlement process: “The original interview after registration records the information that will help this family resettle through one of our four resettlement agencies cooperating with the federal government at the Cuban Refugee Center.”49 This particular quotation is the caption to a photo of a family of four sitting with an immigration worker who is recording the interview. The photos and captions emphasize the “respectability” of refugees, some of whom are photographed wearing suits and dresses. The pamphlet also emphasizes the education and job skills that many refugees possess (architects, accountants, bankers, physicians, etc.). Another announcement, also from 1962, stresses the importance of “traditional” family values in establishing trustworthiness of refugees: “Miami officials have made public statements about the low juvenile delinquency rate among refugees. The reasons? The strong family feeling among Cubans, cultivated respect of children for their parents, and the chaperone custom traditional in their culture.”50 These announcements were part of a media effort to dispel discomfort that initially arose in response the influx of Cubans. The Cuban Refugee Center was established in response to public sentiment that “found it difficult to cope with a flood of immigrants, who entered

crossing the threshold of asylum / 227

at the rate of at least 500—and later at least 1,000—per week and made significant demands on the local school system and on all of the charitable resources available in the region.”51 Most refugees fleeing Cuba during this time were elites: many of them were white, some were part of the Batista regime, and some had lost their lands when Castro nationalized independently held properties. They also had strong connections to the United States, which allowed them to reestablish themselves fairly quickly and become relatively economically successful. Most were merely waiting for Castro to be ousted so that they could return to Cuba. The Cuban exile community became a powerful economic and political force in South Florida known for its conservative politics that included militant exile groups intent upon overthrowing Castro.52

The Sugar Island Ivonne Lamazares’s first novel, The Sugar Island, is set within this early period of Cuban migration; however, it departs from the discourse of strong, “respectable” family ties espoused in the Cuban Refugee Center announcement as it charts a single mother’s journey with her daughter on a balsa (raft) in the 1960s.53 While the Cuban Refugee Center announcement calls on the broader public to participate in welcoming Cubans, Lamazares’s novel focuses on the “welcome” that the mother-daughter pair receives within the Cuban exile community in Miami. Similar to Alvarez’s narratives, we see how the politics of asylum infringe on the family dynamic, particularly the mother-daughter relationship. The novel’s representation of the ability to manipulate a Cuban refugee story successfully enough to gain not only political asylum but also economic advantage indicates how certain refugee stories circulate and hold the potential for commodification in the United States. For the characters in The Sugar Island the issue of health and sickness is directly linked to the construction of a convincing balsero (rafter) testimony—one that elicits sympathy from the Cuban American community. Lamazares’s novel raises important questions for testimonio and the position of refugee native informants as the testimonial construction of Cuba as a hostile space becomes a passport for entry into the United States. Lamazares invokes the typical testimonio as it opens in 1958 on the brink of the Cuban Revolution. As I discussed in chapter 4, the earliest of testimonios are traced to this period in Cuban history. Thus, Lamazares gestures to testimonio as a genre that has been used to tell the (revolutionary) history of the nation. Tanya, the narrator of the novel, describes

228 / crossing the threshold of asylum

how her mother, Mirella, has just returned from fighting with rebels in the mountains: “One day Mamá said life was about to start and ran off to the mountains to become a rebel guerrillera.”54 Guerrilla training in the mountains is another typical trope of testimonios, which recount revolutionary participation, and the genre’s origins lie in Cuba.55 However, this testimonio departs from the typical format because Mirella’s revolutionary experience is thwarted by pregnancy: “No one knew exactly where she had gone until she came back pregnant a year later on a burro.”56 By focusing on a female recruit who returns to her home because she “got knocked up by a rebel cook so they sent her home on a jackass,” Lamazares satirizes the typical testimonio format while also revealing the marginalization of women from the space of the transformation of revolutionary consciousness.57 Mirella has little to tell of the revolutionaries other than “El Che was a ‘beautiful man,’ Raúl Castro a ‘uniformed rodent,’ his brother Fidel a ‘Marxist-Leninist Opportunist.’”58 The narrative quickly jumps ahead to 1966 when Mirella explains to her thirteen-year-old daughter, Tanya, her plans for escaping with a relative on his boat.59 The motivation for this decision has little to do with fleeing communism and more to do with the fact that Mirella learns that El Gambao Casals, Tanya’s father, defected to Panama while he was a shipmate on a Russian tanker. Mirella is determined not to be left behind. In fact, she wants to take her children with her on the treacherous journey. Tanya is skeptical of Mirella’s plans. She does not see her or her mother fitting into the typical Cuban refugee experience: “I wanted to tell her el Norte wasn’t for us. We weren’t yankees. We weren’t rich gusanos getting back our country club.”60 Thus, even before they leave the island, Tanya recognizes that her experiences and her mother’s experiences do not match the existing Cuban refugee narrative. Instead of escaping by boat, Mirella is arrested and imprisoned when the authorities discover her escape plan, and Tanya and her brother Emanuel are sent to live with their father’s great aunt. When her mother returns after a summer in prison, she again makes plans to journey to Miami along with five others in a makeshift raft. While she tries to convince Tanya that she must leave to escape the “burden” of the revolution, Tanya confesses, “I tried but I couldn’t feel such a burden. . . . I wasn’t willing to pay such a high price for a change of scenery.”61 What weighs most heavily on Tanya’s mind is leaving behind Emanuel, but Mirella argues that they can send for him once they are settled in the United States. Ultimately, Mirella forces Tanya into taking the dangerous trip, led by brothers Romulo and Martin:

crossing the threshold of asylum / 229

They repeated the rules: the women were lookouts, the men would row in shifts. Nestor spread a map on the ground and outlined the route to a place name Cay Sal Bank. The yankee Coast Guard was most likely to spot them there. But only the brothers Romulo and Martin had really trained for the voyage, spending whole nights on an inner tube pretending to fish while studying the griffins’ surveillance schedule and trying to overcome their fear of sharks. No one else knew anything about the sea. Teresa could barely swim.62 Like the Haitian refugees in “Children of the Sea,” once the group is out to sea, the Cubans experience disorientation: “But here we were, lost in the ocean where north looked like south and east looked like west—a skinny line dividing sky and water.”63 When a storm comes up, the raft is flipped over, and the rafters spill out. Tanya describes how “above the racket of the waves and the rain and crisp thunder I heard my full name, Tanya del Carmen Casals Villalta, spoken like a promise. . . . My limbs felt heavy, the way they do before sleep, and I watched myself sliding, a Storm Captain going over in a six-foot wave, choking in Yemaya’s grip.”64 Yet while “Children of the Sea” ends with Haitian refugees left in the limbo-space of the seas, Tanya makes it to U.S. shores. Her arrival is marked by hospice as she wakes up in a hospital bed after having been “unconscious at sea for hours” next to her mother who “shed sunburnt skin like a rattlesnake.”65

False Witnessing The hospital becomes the initial site of a poetics of hospitality where Mirella offers her first testimony of her own and her daughter’s harrowing journey when a camera crew from a local news station interviews her in Tanya’s hospital room. Mirella has invited them to enter and “like a party hostess, offered them ice water in tiny paper cups.”66 Significantly, Lamazares highlights not the bureaucratic channels to asylum, but the media attention given to the mother-daughter story, which sets the stage for Mirella’s performance of refugee testimony. When the reporter interviews her, Mirella emphasizes the narrative of freedom: “Well, Alicia, we came here for freedom, as you can understand, . . . So my daughter could have a better life.”67 Like Mami in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, Mirella rehearses the narrative of the United States as a land of freedom and future for her child. Tanya, however, cannot offer testimony because her memories of the journey are fragmented: “I remembered

230 / crossing the threshold of asylum

nothing after the raft had flipped. Whenever I tried to, my mind turned dim and I could feel only the pull of a hand lifting me from the waves.”68 The story that Mirella tells the reporter is one of a mother who does anything she can so that her daughter will survive: “She’d caught me, Mamá told the reporter, by the hair as I slid down into the water, after my head hit one of the oil drums. We’d drifted, she said, the two of us alone on a small bobbing scrap of canvas and inner tubes, me unconscious, scalp bleeding a little, Mamá holding on, sobbing, hysterical.”69 When Mirella wipes away a tear while telling her story to the reporter, Tanya is already skeptical of her mother’s story as she recognizes its hyperbole: “This was high drama, the greatest of our lives. . . . She was a hero.” The official version of their story that appears in the newspaper headline underscores this “drama”: MOTHER SAVES DAUGHTER IN SAVAGE OCEAN; MIRACLE AT SEA: A SURVIVOR’S STORY; A MOTHER’S GIFT.70 Similar to Mami’s reliance upon a performance of refugee as selfless mother that we see in ¡Yo!, the story that Mirella tells constructs her as the ultimate mother who sacrifices everything to save her child instead of one who coerced her daughter into making the journey to pursue romantic interests. This story of selfless motherhood becomes quite attractive to the community of wealthy Cuban exiles. One exile, Mrs. Walter-Prado, tells them, “Your story has power. It reaches people.” She invites them to be the guests-of-honor at a luncheon with fellow Cuban American women.71 The event proves to be the ultimate performance of refugee testimony. Mrs. Walter-Prado sends Mirella and Tanya dresses to wear, and the meeting takes place in a theater, where Mirella offers her testimony from the stage. Thus, while ¡Yo! represents a kind of commodification of the refugee’s story through her published writing, Mirella’s oral testimony ultimately serves as a story to be exchanged for goods. This kind of testimony fits the accepted profile of a refugee—that of a destitute mother and her child—and allows the exiles in the room to maintain their position as “hosts” who maintain power by deciding which stories should be heard and rewarded. Mirella, like Mami, is willing to manipulate the image of helpless and selfless mother in the hopes of gaining opportunity within the community. Tanya describes how she “told again the story of our rescue. She told it as if it were her first time, slowing down in places, looking into the darkness.”72 Tanya recognizes her mother’s manipulation of the emotions of Cuban-American exiles.

crossing the threshold of asylum / 231

One woman responds, “One thing is to read about this tragedy, . . . Another to see it firsthand.”73 Lamazares draws a stark contrast between the well-heeled Cubans who came to the United States by “legitimate” means of the freedom flights as did Mrs. Walter-Prado and the clandestine migration of boat refugees like Tanya and Mirella. For a time, Mirella is rewarded for her story with checks, furniture, clothes, and other items from members of the exile community. The gifts, however, eventually run out, and Mirella and Tanya struggle to pay their bills. Their hopes of gaining the money needed to bring Emanuel to the United States wanes. By focusing on the family’s economic struggles, the novel, as Claudia Sadowski-Smith asserts, “explodes the myth of the successful Cuban American.”74 Tanya is hesitant about being in the United States herself: “people seemed no better here, only luckier to have landed on the easier side of history.”75 Tanya’s ambivalence thus echoes that of Nikòl Payen, who is reluctant to embrace her privileged position as someone who lives outside the dire conditions of Haiti. Following another meeting of Cuban exiles at which Mirella hopes to meet a TV executive and continue her “performative” career, Tanya learns what actually happened on the journey. She encounters Martin, another Cuban from the raft, whom her mother told her had died on the voyage. He tells her that his brother, Rumolo, not her mother, saved her from drowning in the ocean: “he grabbed you as you went down and hauled you to your mother’s tube. The raft came apart, you know, the oil drums, the ropes broke off, everything. Nestor and me grabbed on to another tube. My brother swam over to us. He was a very good swimmer. But he didn’t make it here.”76 Martin’s story serves as the “true” testimonio, but its truth-value does not hold the economic value that Mirella’s constructed testimonio does. By claiming to be Tanya’s rescuer, Mirella erases Rumulo’s refugee narrative. The lie serves as the ultimate betrayal for Tanya, and she severs ties with her mother for good. Years later, when Tanya confronts her mother, Mirella defends her actions: “I wanted our lives to count. We weren’t supposed to count, you know. We never mattered, not to the Communists and probably not to the gringos either. But now we’re here. I did what I had to do. I made your life count.”77 Thus, although one may be dismayed that Mirella would use her daughter’s near-drowning for economic gain, one must also recognize that, at the same time, Mirella realizes that a believable, pathosladen testimony can become a means of survival. The novel ends without family reunification as the mother-daughter relationship is ultimately

232 / crossing the threshold of asylum

severed. The Sugar Island, challenging dominant narratives of early Cuban refugee flight from the island, presents, not triumphant journeys from a desolate communism to American success, but conflicted realities between spaces and fractured familial relationships.

Refugees at Home Following an economic downturn that left many Cubans living in dire conditions, in March 1980, a busload of Cubans rammed the gates of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana seeking asylum. Thousands subsequently followed seeking asylum at the embassy. Castro responded by announcing that anyone who wanted to leave could and encouraged Cuban exiles to come and retrieve family members via boat in Mariel harbor. More than fifteen hundred boats congregated there to take Cubans back to Miami. Initially, the U.S. government and Miami welcomed the fleeing refugees. President Carter stated that the United States would receive Cubans with “open hearts and open arms.”78 Yet Mariel refugees encountered a different asylum policy than previous Cuban refugees, who had largely been cast as fleeing Castro’s communism. The newly created Refugee Act of 1980 required refugees to demonstrate a “well-founded fear,” and the Mariel refugees were largely viewed as economic migrants seeking better economic opportunity. Instead of granting them automatic asylum, the government created the category of “entrant,” which allowed Cubans to apply for permanent resident status two years after their arrival in the United States.79 The Carter administration created this category in response to negative public reaction to the refugees, who were seen as a drain on public resources during a time of economic recession. María Cristina García explains that it was a “political compromise, a resolution that allowed the U.S. to symbolically uphold its open door policy while appearing to take a harsher stand against illegal immigration.”80 Eventually, the Cuban “entrants” received the same benefits as refugees. Negative public sentiment toward this group of Cubans became heightened when Castro released those he deemed as “undesirables” into the refugee population—prisoners, mental health patients, homosexuals, prostitutes, and vagrants.81 The Mariel boatlift thus represents the crisis at the center of the politics and poetics of hospitality, the negotiation between unconditional hospitality and hospitality with limits. By sending criminals and other “undesirables,” Castro effectively exploited the United States discourse of hospitality that essentially welcomed all Cubans “with open hearts and open arms” because of the certainty that

crossing the threshold of asylum / 233

Cubans could only exist as exploited, powerless innocents in Cuba. The poetics of unconditional hospitality that the United States had deployed in the early 1960s could only then become a perversion. Thus, the Castro regime’s actions disrupted both the poetics of unconditional hospitality and the U.S. position as “host” in command of the nation. Alexandro Portes and Alex Stepick explain how The Miami Herald, reflecting the white establishment’s fears of a Cuban influx, produced overwhelmingly negative coverage of the Mariel refugees in an effort to persuade lawmakers to deter their entrance into the United States. The newspaper blamed both the Cuban exiles in Miami who sought to bring their relatives from Cuba and the Carter administration: “What most disturbed the Herald’s editors and the native white establishment was how an American president could sacrifice them to accommodate the wishes of a foreign minority.”82 The taint of the “undesirables” among the Mariel refugees and the fact that public perception toward the Cuban community as a whole spiraled downward caused a backlash within the community of older Cuban exiles, so that the Mariel boatlift marked a significant shift within not only the broader U.S. public perception of Cuban refugees but also the Cuban immigrant community, which itself, fearful that this group of immigrants would damage their reputation in the larger society, became largely hostile to the newly arrived refugees.83 Instead of being the wholesome, grateful, entrepreneurial, and eager “model” refugees with which the earlier wave of Cuban refugees were associated, the Mariel refugees became forever tainted with criminality. Furthermore, they were largely single, male, and of African descent, which distinguished them from previous refugee groups, often lighter-skinned families. Thus, racism compounded the negative public reaction. Many of those who arrived during the Mariel boatlift were not easily integrated into U.S. society; some had to live in tent cities, and others were sent to camps in Arkansas and Wisconsin where violent protests occurred. The negative associations with Mariel refugees was underscored by American popular culture, such as the 1983 film Scarface, which featured Al Pacino, who plays a Mariel refugee released from a Cuban prison who becomes a murderous gangster. Within the controversy surrounding the “Marielitos,” as those who fled in the Mariel exodus were derogatorily referred, I examine Cecilia Rodríguez Milanés’s short story collection Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles (2009). The collection portrays the rift between the early Cuban immigrant community in Miami and the Mariel refugees and how these divisions manifest within families. The proliferation of familial

234 / crossing the threshold of asylum

denunciations of Mariel relatives in Rodríguez Milanés’s stories is even more pronounced than the familial tensions that I discussed in relation to the works of Alvarez and Lamazares. Some fissures are based upon generational, economic, linguistic, and cultural differences between the existing exile community and the newly arrived refugees. Furthermore, a number of the stories also reflect the politics of hospitality in Miami by featuring homeless refugees—those who have no family members in the United States or those whose ties are severed with family members shortly after arrival. Homelessness signals a perpetuation of refugee experience of itinerancy and dispossession, even though these Cubans have been granted asylum in the host nation, so that they are ultimately disconnected from the larger society. When Cuban exiles cast out—at either the community or the family level—newly arrived Mariel refugees, they move from their initially occupied position of guest to position of host, not only claiming the authority to decide who to welcome or reject but also portraying Miami as their home. This relates to the question that Mireille Rosello poses regarding the dynamic nature of hospitality. What happens once hospitality is granted? She queries, “Does ‘integration’ mean that the stranger, after accepting a nation’s hospitality, can finally offer hospitality, that is, not reciprocate, but lengthen the chain of possibly incommensurable hospitable gestures?”84 This suggests how the guest/host relationship at the center of the politics of hospitality is always in flux. Many of the stories in Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles illustrate the difficulty of forging a voice when one is not only an immigrant but also an exile from the group with which one, ostensibly, shares the most in culture. The testimonial elements of the collection arise in the struggle over discourse about Mariel refugees within the Cuban exile community. Whose voices will be silenced, and whose will represent the community? Several characters experience difficulties with communication or translation, or they must censor or silence themselves to avoid alienation from the larger Cuban exile community. Conservative Cuban exiles claim the position of New Immigrant-native informant and become the gatekeepers of discourse about Cuba, defining who is an acceptable refugee and who is an outcast. The power of the Cuban exile community in Miami to define a deleterious view of Mariel refugees is literalized through the views expressed on a conservative radio talk show in the opening story “A Matter of Opinion.” After the host has offered his negative views concerning the Mariel refugees, one caller asserts, “We first generation Cubans resent

crossing the threshold of asylum / 235

the Marielitos coming to Miami and ruining our reputation.”85 Another caller echoes this xenophobia: “Marielitos have instilled fear into the Anglo community. Before, Cubans had been respected, part of the whole city; now we’re considered foreigners.”86 The comments reflect a crisis at the heart of hospitality—the danger of being (re)cast as foreigner. Thus, Miami becomes a city of nonrefuge for Mariel refugees. However, Rodríguez Milanés avoids constructing the entire existing exile community as hostile. The protagonist of the story, Carmen, who arrived in the United States with the first wave of postrevolutionary migration in 1961, disagrees with the host, even calling into his show to challenge his opinion. Her experience with her nephew, Rafael, a Mariel refugee, provides her with an alternative view. However, Carmen is also completely isolated from society. Her husband died in a Cuban prison before being allowed to leave, her son lives in Germany, her sister remains in Cuba, and Rafael, her only relative in the United States, is imprisoned in Atlanta. Like Tanya in The Sugar Island, instead of representing a desperate refugee fleeing persecution, Rafael does not see the United States as the promised land. He does not put forth a narrative of persecution and in fact, upon arrival in the United States, tells his aunt that he does know why he is there other than his mother told him he should go and the Cuban guards took him from his home to Mariel harbor. Echoing the media attention on the mother-daughter story in The Sugar Island, Carmen recalls that when the refugees initially began to arrive “the television cameras incessantly flashed faces across screens in hopes of reuniting families. There were many tear-jerking, heartwarming scenes on the network news programs that inspired Carmen to hope.”87 This media portrayal of a poignant family reunification is the “acceptable” kind of refugee story to broadcast; however, when Rafael arrives, this triumphant moment does not materialize: “Their first embrace was also their last. . . . The more she gushed affection, the more withdrawn he became.”88 Carmen’s home will not become a place for her nephew to build a new life. Instead he increasingly stays out all night away from her home, sleeping at a local park where he is eventually arrested by the police and incarcerated. Rafael’s inability to adjust to being in the United States reflects the ongoing fragmentation of Carmen’s familial ties and the fragility of the notion of family reunification that is part of Cuban refugee discourse. The theme of family disconnection also becomes central in “La Buena Vida,” another story that portrays the isolation of a Mariel refugee. Initially, the protagonist, Juan, lives with his cousin Mario and his family,

236 / crossing the threshold of asylum

who have lived in the United States for years and achieved a certain amount of economic success. In the home, he remains an outsider because Mario’s wife resents his presence and her father has never spoken to him: “Whenever his cousin’s wife, Lupe, talked about the Marielito escoria, Mario always defended him and reminded her of Juan’s job, the fact that he contributed money for the rent and his quiet manners. Lupe now made it a point to criticize the Marielitos whenever Juan was home and Mario was not.”89 The story also demonstrates that the miscommunication between new refugees and the established members of the community functions at the level of un/translatability. At his job washing dishes in an upscale hotel, Juan experiences problems communicating with his supervisor, a longterm exile, who resents having to deal with the newly arrived refugees. Juan struggles to understand as him as he “cut off many of the words’ endings in his speedy Spanish”—the “changed Spanish that his new old compatriots spoke.”90 Instead Juan “reads” his facial expressions and gestures. That he cannot communicate freely underscores the disconnection between the older exile community and new refugees and the power over discourse that the established Cuban community maintains. When Mario dies suddenly, Juan becomes completely isolated after Lupe kicks him out of the house. He loses his job when he arrives late to work on the day of Mario’s funeral. Unable to find another job, he ends up living under an overpass with an older man, Bill, who recognizes that, for Juan to reenter “legitimate” society, he must learn English. He teaches him to speak and write better English: “Bill tore the bread bag open, pulled a green crayon from his ripped pant pocket and scraped the tip on the concrete column before taking it on the white wrinkled paper. He wrote ‘English’ in an artful even hand.”91 In a somewhat utopian turn, the site of homelessness paradoxically becomes a space of hospitality as the two men share food and protection. Juan is eventually hired at McDonald’s after Bill teaches him to fill out the application. Before he goes to his first night at work, the two part ways—Bill sends Juan on his way into the next phase of his life. Yet just as he begins to decipher the language and codes of Miami, Juan is stabbed as he walks to work; he dies at the hands of another Mariel refugee. Rodríguez Milanés depicts Juan’s killer in “El Loco.” By offering a particularly disturbing image of the Mariel refugee as murderer, the story is one of the most controversial stories in Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles—and one of the most controversial refugee depictions that I have examined in this book. The story alternates between a third-person

crossing the threshold of asylum / 237

narrative and the first-person interior monologue of “El Loco,” a mental patient/prisoner. Through the moniker’s associations with mental illness, “El Loco” signifies an “asylum speaker” of a different sort. When the story opens he is in a mental institution being evaluated by doctors to see whether he is competent to stand trial for the murder of a police officer. Language is the locus of the medical and juridical assessment, and, like Juan, it serves to render El Loco outside the dominant discourse. Initially, El Loco’s words and gestures cannot be translated. Dr. Elena Montes, the only “true bilingual”92 doctor who can interview him, is loathe to do so. Her initial reaction is that he is untranslatable: “He’s got severe language handicaps, he’s illiterate, and has sixty percent hearing loss in both ears.”93 His is virtually incommunicable: “His handwriting is chicken scratch and what comes out of his mouth is hardly intelligible.”94 Through his mental illness and incommunicability, El Loco becomes a kind of distortion of the idealized Cuban New Immigrant-native informant. His interior monologue drifts between the recent past in Miami to his life in Cuba when he was a fisherman and was picked up by the Cuban coast guard when he fell asleep on his fishing boat and drifted too far from shore. He refers to his imprisonment in Cuba when he was severely beaten and was released only to be sent away on a barge at Mariel harbor. After four meetings he has communicated nothing discernible to Dr. Montes: “she can’t understand because my tongue is so mangled and I can’t distinguish what I say anyway so I could just as well tell her the truth.”95 He finally decides to correspond with her by producing legible notes to answer her questions. He is motivated to communicate only because it will keep Dr. Montes in the room with him, not because he feels either remorse or a need for redemption. In his statement he explains that he shot the police officer in self-defense—the officer was beating him and had done so on a prior occasion. By murdering him, El Loco subverts the “force of law” that the police officer represents. El Loco confesses in his interior monologue that, in addition to the police officer, he has killed two other people out of self-defense. One victim was a man who “had a two by four and I had seen him cracking some other guy’s skull open the week before by the big park downtown.”96 The other victim, who turns out to be Juan, looked like his “torturer” from the Cuban prison: “It was him, to me, it was him.”97 We learn that El Loco’s random violence isn’t so random; rather, it is tied to the larger structures of violence he experienced Cuba, which only became compounded in the United States. By focusing on the psychic fragmentation of a refugee who is a murderer, Rodríguez Milanés ventures into risky territory by

238 / crossing the threshold of asylum

bringing to light the ultimate fear that the “stranger” will turn against the host—only here there is no welcoming host to turn against, only another exploited stranger/refugee, and the violent hostility of the nativist citizen and police officer. Rodríguez Milanés suggests that while there may have been criminals among the Mariel refugees, those at most risk for harm were other refugees who had been cast out by the larger community. The fact the “El Loco” and Juan both struggle with translation—as asylum speakers who face obstacles in being heard—signals their position outside of the dominant discourses of the Cuban American community and the larger U.S. society. Finally, I turn to “The Fresh Boys,” a story of a group of young men who came to the United States separately with the Mariel boatlift when they were each ten years old. Dougie, Papo, and Ray are friends who attend school together. The story takes place during their senior year of high school in 1988. The story foregrounds testimonial narrative when the boys’ English teacher assigns them a paper in which they must write their autobiographies. Dougie and Papo make attempts to fulfill the assignment, but their narratives reveal the fragmentation of memory among child refugees. Aside from noting his birth in Havana, Dougie’s report reveals little about his life in Cuba: “I can’t tell you or I don’t know if I can tell you what I feel about Cuba. Many times I don’t no the right words. In Spanish or English.”98 Instead it is filled with such lighthearted details as his dating preferences and car. With both parents working (his mother in a bank and his father in interior design), his story is the most “successful” in terms of socioeconomic status. Papo’s story includes more somber details as he recounts living in rural Cuba before coming to the United States. He explains that he initially did not want to leave Cuba, but once the government found out that his mother’s family in Miami had given their names so that they could leave during the Mariel crisis, his family was denounced: “A group of students ran after my Dad with rocks and sticks.”99 His parents die within a month of each other a few years after their arrival in the United States. He now lives with his friend Manny because, as he explains, “My mother’s cousins didn’t want anything to do with me because they said I was trouble.”100 Excluded from his extended family’s home, Papo found refuge in the home of another Mariel refugee. Unlike Dougie and Papo, Ray rejects altogether the role of native informant by refusing to produce an autobiography. Instead of constructing a story of his life, he writes hostile missives to his teacher: “What the hell do you wanna know about me anyway? . . . It’s none of your fucking

crossing the threshold of asylum / 239

business. . . . What for? So you can call my mother and bother her with bullshit. She works nights and sleeps days, allright. You wanna talk to her, I’ll give her the message. . . . You people make me sick. Think you know everything. You don’t know shit about me, allright? . . . Go ahead give me a zero.”101 It’s a testimonial that refuses to testify to a progressive coming-of-age narrative. He is hostile toward his “host” nation and its institutions. Thus, unlike Yo’s obsession with writing her family’s refugee narrative and her father’s need for a story to link his family with their origins and Mirella’s manipulation of her refugee story in The Sugar Island, Ray’s writing signals a rebuke of testimonial narrative altogether. This refusal to testify itself becomes part of the contours of a poetics of hospitality. Here, we are reminded of Derrida’s observation that to ask questions is to place limits on hospitality;102 thus to refuse to answer the questions about one’s history suggests a refusal of the role of native informant. The implications of this refusal for Ray will not lead to his expulsion from the nation, but there is a way that his refusal to testify highlights his liminal status with a story that does not align with the story of Cuban immigrant “success.” Because of his marginalized position, Ray is not a New Immigrant-native informant, although his refusal is an attempt to exert agency, to wrest the power over discourse away from the institutionalized “host.” The narratives that I have examined in this chapter foreground the issues surrounding which New World refugees gain legitimacy as New Immigrant-native informants. Moreover, by ending my study with Cuban refugee narratives, I focus on one of the largest groups of refugees who have been in the United States the longest. Their stories have gained prominence in the dominant discourse—as long as they contain the necessary narrative elements of anti-Castroism, which suggest that foreign policy influences, and often determines, the refugee stories that will be heard at the national level. Yet, as we see with the Mariel refugees, refugee stories become sites of complex power negotiation even after asylum has been granted. The struggles over which refugee stories will be told reveal the anxieties of the nation and a crisis of a poetics of hospitality. Furthermore, ending the chapter with a story about refugees in the U.S. education system, and an English class, raises the question of the institutional placement of New World refugees and their narratives. These are issues central to the narratives that I have discussed throughout Asylum Speakers. Whether these narratives are focused on the space of asylum and resettlement or feature refugees still “in limbo,” they require considering how emergent literatures in the Americas are constituted

240 / crossing the threshold of asylum

through the figure of the refugee. Refugee narratives contribute to the ongoing discussion of migration in Caribbean literature and require us to think of literature in hemispheric terms for those refugees who are resettled and in transit. This necessitates opening the boundaries of U.S. literature to the instability of refugee discourses and subjectivities. How we imagine literary canons requires thinking through a poetics of hospitality, where the literary converges with state policies of welcome and exclusion, particularly for those populations of the Caribbean and Central America that I have addressed throughout Asylum Speakers. Ultimately, New World refugee discourses disrupt the stabilized boundaries of “American” literature, particularly as they reveal the role of U.S. foreign policy in shaping the movements of people throughout the hemisphere.

Epilogue: Diverted Testimonies: New World Refugees in the Twenty-First Century Then words, no one’s fiefdom, meet up with the materiality of the world. Relation is spoken. —édouard glissant, the poetics of relation

It is difficult to imagine how to end a book about refugees, especially when so many of the refugees that I have discussed in Asylum Speakers have not arrived at a destination but remain in limbo. The conditions of New World refugees are inherently protean—their movements constantly shift and change, depending on the current economic and political configurations in the hemisphere. As I write this epilogue just weeks after a 7.0 earthquake leveled much of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince along with the cities of Carrefour, Léogâne, and Jacmel, we are presented with a new refugee crisis. Estimates suggest that more than two hundred thousand people died in the earthquake. Overnight, millions of people became homeless, joining the scores of those already homeless (prior to the earthquake) owing to the dire economic conditions of Haiti. Hundreds of thousands are internally displaced by fleeing to other parts of the country. Others remain living on the streets in Port-au-Prince; the city has become a refugee camp. While the refugee crisis is the result of a natural disaster, the degree of devastation is also tied to the fragile infrastructure of the country. Obviously, we are only beginning to see the effects that the earthquake will have on refugee movements and discourses; however, the ideas of refugeeness are sure to be both radically altered and similarly approached in terms of international response, particularly that of the United States. We have already witnessed the politics of hospitality clash with the attempts to grant hospice for the thousands of injured survivors. The

242 / epilogue

humanitarian effort to provide food, medical assistance, and shelter has, from the beginning, been militarized, with the U.S. military taking over the airport in Port-au-Prince, the port and coast, determining the flow of aid and who can enter and leave the country by air and sea. The force of these interdictions have been demonstrated most powerfully through the diversion of several Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières planes, carrying doctors and medical supplies, away from the Haitian airport to the Dominican Republic. The U.S. military presence reflects the concern with containing Haitians, deterring them from fleeing the country by boat. In what is known as “Operation Vigilant Sentry,” established under the Bush administration in 2003 to prevent a mass Caribbean migration, the U.S. Coast Guard and Navy vessels blockade the Haitian coast while the Navy prepares its base on Guantánamo Bay for a possible influx of refugees.1 Detention centers in South Florida are also being readied for the possibility of housing refugees. As one Coast Guard Captain put it, “It’s not that the deterrence is the physical power; it’s more the soft power, . . .You let people know you’re there if you need help but that it doesn’t make sense to leave.”2 In one of the more nefarious articulations of the politics of hospitality, an Air Force cargo plane flies over Port-au-Prince daily; it broadcasts a message in Kreyòl from the Haitian ambassador to the United States in an attempt to dissuade Haitians from fleeing to the United States because they will be sent back. In this preemptive linguistic strike, using Haitians’ language against themselves, the representative of diplomatic hospitality enables U.S. border control. Meanwhile, the U.S. Coast Guard online photographic archive has exploded with images of rescue and hospice—of Coast Guard personnel handing out food and water and tending to the sick and injured, which reflects a continuation of the rescue discourse that I addressed in chapter 2. Added to that is an emerging “orphan” discourse based on the numerous reports of the thousands of unaccompanied children pre- and postearthquake. Orphans represent a particular kind of refugeeness, where they are no longer considered part of a home, a family, a nation of origin. In a discourse of care and refuge, NGOs and TV commentators consider whether the children should be taken out of the country to be adopted. It is important to remember, as I discussed in chapter 2, the implications of “orphaning” for Haitians, which has historically been imbued with racism. In this case, it has also become disturbingly tied with evangelical Christianity whose conditional hospitality includes the “saving” of souls. This sentiment is underscored by sensational media accounts of

epilogue / 243

“voodoo burials,” and televangelist Pat Robertson’s declaration that the earthquake was divine retribution for the “pact to the devil” that Haitians made during the Haitian Revolution, an apparent reference to the links between vodou rituals and the slave revolt that resulted in Haitian independence. Although we may be able to dismiss Robertson’s remarks as the rantings of a religious extremist, other mainstream pundits have weighed in with similar sentiments. Note New York Times columnist David Brooks’s remarks about the role of Haitian culture in contributing to the degradation of Haitian society. In a column published just two days after the earthquake, Brooks argued that Americans must face a “few difficult truths” about Haiti. Citing Lawrence Harrison’s The Central Liberal Truth, Brooks argues that Haiti “suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.”3 For Brooks, Haiti is an orphaned nation, a dysfunctional family in need of an “intrusive paternalism” to reshape its society. Of the changes in the treatment of Haitian refugees since the earthquake, the U.S. government has granted humanitarian parole for some orphans in need of urgent medical care or in the case of adoptions that were already in progress.4 The government has also granted temporary protected status to some Haitians already in the United States, which protects undocumented Haitians from deportation. This important policy shift recognizes what immigrant rights activists had been advocating for long before the earthquake; however, for many, the fees for applying for temporary protective status are prohibitive ($500). Yet there are no signs that the government will relax any other policies to facilitate Haitian migration to the United States. In fact, some Haitians who had been hastily evacuated on U.S. military planes, who had no criminal records, were held in U.S. immigration detention because they landed in the U.S. without visas. They were held for deporation, even though deportations have been suspended indefinitely. Other refugees who arrived by boat were also detained.5 The Dominican government has thus far aided in the relief effort, perhaps in an attempt to ward off an influx Haitians across its border. Perhaps the disaster will provoke a serious assessment of the treatment of Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic. Haitians with medical

244 / epilogue

needs have been allowed to cross into the Dominican Republic for medical care, but it remains to be seen how long the Dominican Republic will be hospitable. According to one Dominican immigration official, the Dominican government has beefed up the presence of soldiers on the border to ensure that “no illegal immigrants are coming in by taking advantage of the situation.”6 I began this book with Edwidge Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying, her testimonial account of her uncle Joseph Danticat’s death while being detained by the Department of Homeland Security. This story continues to resonate in the aftermath of the earthquake. In a New Yorker commentary published on February 1, 2010, she tells of the death of her cousin Maxo in the earthquake. In this account, she returns to Maxo’s role in his father’s story of detention, explaining that, while Maxo was released from detention following his father’s death, he was not granted asylum, but he returned to Haiti to carry out his father’s work. She writes, “His time in detention in the United States had sensitized him to prison conditions and to the lack of prisoners’ rights in Haiti. He often called asking for money to buy food, which he then took to the national penitentiary.”7 As she attempts to memorialize her cousin, Danticat relays how governmental hostility continued to reverberate after her uncle’s death. When asked about the role of artists following the earthquake in an online discussion for The New Yorker, Danticat states, “The artist, I think, is a witness. I am trying to be a witness from afar, which is hard and makes me feel really ineffective sometimes, but there is something worth witnessing here as well, this lesser side of the tragedy. Artists are not immune to any of it.”8 This position of writer-as-witness is one that Danticat had previously assumed, not only in Brother, I’m Dying, but also on the juridical front. On October 4, 2007, she testified before the U.S. Congress Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security and International Law in a hearing specifically addressing immigration detainees and medical care. She testified to the events leading to her uncle’s death while in U.S. detention—the same account that she retells in her memoir Brother, I’m Dying. In her prepared written statement included in the hearings document, Danticat positions herself as a witness: “I come today not in my own name, but in the name—and stead—of a loved one who died while in the custody of Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, and the Krome Detention Center in Miami. His name was Joseph Nosius Dantica and he was 81 years old.”9 In doing so, her testimony raises the issues of credibility, voice, and

epilogue / 245

authority as they are associated with the literary and juridical realms that I have discussed in relation to refugees throughout Asylum Speakers. The fact that Danticat is allowed a space in which to speak in Congress points to her privileged position as an asylum speaker. Her citizenship allows her a mobility that her uncle did not have. Her facility with language allows her to become an “expert witness”; she speaks and writes in the language that Joseph Dantica did not possess, and it would seem that this language facility granted her, in part, credibility in the hearings as Representative John Conyers Jr. refers to her as a “distinguished writer . . . a Haitian of great distinction in terms of our literary contributions.”10 Danticat’s congressional testimony and her memoir indicate the different modes of asylum speaking that she navigates and the dynamic nature of the poetics and politics of hospitality. By using her position as a well-known writer, Danticat attempts to be a witness for the silenced asylum seeker, signaling a blurring of the boundaries between author and witness, juridicial and literary, testimony and memoir. In addition to recounting the events as she does in Brother, I’m Dying, Danticat’s testimony offers more analysis of the events themselves, and she explicitly calls for changes in the immigration system. The way that Danticat’s memoir and her congressional testimony are inextricably linked requires us to ask how one informs the other and how this reconfigures the poetics of hospitality. At the very least, it suggests that attending to Danticat’s poetics, like the other narratives Asylum Speakers examines, means also attending to the politics of hospitality. While, at the time that I write this, Haiti is in the forefront (although already fading into the background of the mainstream news media), it is important to link the current crisis with the issues that I have discussed throughout this book. Asylum Speakers has focused largely on the difficulties confronting New World refugees who attempt to articulate themselves whether they encounter hostile bureaucracies, impotent human rights organizations, or indifferent communities. These are narratives where law, politics, and economics collide. I have dealt with a variety of historical moments and events, none of them equal in their manifestation of refugee experience, migration, or articulations. Who or what is a refugee will continue to be a question facing nations, particularly industrialized ones like the United States, which has served as the primary “host” nation in my study. Its prevalence in this book speaks to its shaping of refugee movements through its global capitalist practices and foreign policies. While the Bush administration may not have foreseen a natural disaster on the scale of the earthquake as one that

246 / epilogue

might provoke a mass exodus, by establishing the framework for Operation Vigilant Sentry, it sought to ensure that the border would not be breached by refugees. Additional measures installed since 2001 continue to affect New World refugees. After 9/11, the USA PATRIOT Act and the so-called “war on terrorism” ratcheted up the restrictions on asylum seekers in the United States that began with the 1996 immigration reforms, so that asylum seekers are now often detained for months and years. The REAL ID Act of 2005 increased the burden upon asylum applicants to prove their claims, not solely through their testimony, but by providing documentary evidence to corroborate their testimony, which reflects the continued incommensurability of testimony and evidence. The documentary requirement excludes a great majority of asylum seekers who have little more than the clothes on their backs, or who may have had to obtain forged documents to leave their nation of origin, which, if discovered by U.S. government officials, constitute grounds for deportation. The REAL ID Act also draws particular attention to the applicant’s performance of testimony stating, “the immigration judge may base a credibility determination on the demeanor, candor, or responsiveness of the applicant or witness” while not acknowledging that such categories are not only vague, but culturally determined.11 Immigration judges may also measure “the consistency of such statements with other evidence of record (including the reports of the Department of State on country conditions), and any inaccuracies or falsehoods in such statements, without regard to whether an inconsistency, inaccuracy, or falsehood goes to the heart of the applicant’s claim, or any other relevant factor. There is no presumption of credibility; however, if no adverse credibility determination is explicitly made, the applicant or witness shall have a rebuttable presumption of credibility on appeal.”12 Given these standards, it is not surprising that in recent years the number of people granted asylum plummeted.13 Nevertheless, with the ongoing political, economic, and environmental crises in many parts of the hemisphere, refugees continue to move throughout the Americas and remap their routes, evoking the Glissantian notion of erranty. In recent years, thousands of Cubans have evaded the U.S. Coast Guard by crossing the Gulf of Mexico, landing on Mexican shores, and crossing the land border into Texas, where they receive automatic asylum as part of the Wetfoot/Dryfoot policy. In taking the route to Mexico, Cuban migration converges with that of hundreds of thousands of Central Americans (and Mexicans) who attempt to make the dangerous clandestine journey through Mexico into the United States.

epilogue / 247

Yet as quickly as refugees reroute their journeys, governments also seek new ways to deter them. The sea continues to serve as a highly contested space. Heightening its military power over the seas, the U.S. Coast Guard has turned to extremely dangerous and violent measures to interdict speedboats that try to outrun them by shooting at the boats’ engines to deter them from getting to shore. This practice has resulted in the injuries and deaths of asylum seekers. In 2007, the governments of the United States and Australia came to an agreement to “swap” boat refugees so that Cubans and Haitians held at Guantánamo would be exchanged with Burmese and Sri Lankan refugees in Australia.14 Apparently, the logic behind this agreement is that refugees would be less likely to take precarious sea journeys if they knew they could ultimately end up halfway around the world from their intended destination. The result is further displacement for those refugees who may have familial and cultural ties to the nation that they seek to enter and a rerouting of the diasporic communities of all of those involved. Such forced movements compound our mappings of New World refugees and their testimonial narratives. In 2002, during the same period in which severe restrictions had been enacted upon asylum seekers and the number of asylums granted per year had plummeted, President Bush signed an executive order that made green card holders eligible for citizenship if they signed up for military service. This represents a particular perversion of the politics of hospitality whereby the United States “welcomes” noncitizens through their military service, which enabled the invasion of Iraq, the ultimate violation of hospitality, resulting in the mass displacement of Iraqis. Millions of these refugees have migrated into Syria, Jordan, and other neighboring nations, while millions more remain displaced within Iraq.15 The use of warfare as a means of entrance into the U.S. polity for those on the periphery suggests a particular kind of limb/o citizenship—where the noncitizen soldiering body is included to shore up the military and political interests of the host nation. A great number of the approximately thirty thousand “green card soldiers” are drawn from throughout the Americas. While some of these soldiers come to the United States through conventional legal channels, the case of José Antonio Gutierrez, a native of Guatemala, represents a much more circuitous journey to citizenship. Gutierrez was the first soldier killed fighting for the United States in the Iraq War in 2003. In a tragic irony, Gutierrez was killed not by Iraqis, but by “friendly fire.” He received U.S. citizenship posthumously. As a child in Guatemala,

248 / epilogue

Gutierrez had lived on the streets following the deaths of both of his parents. He entered the United States illegally, posed as a minor to avoid deportation, and eventually obtained a green card. As the film The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez portrays, Gutierrez clandestinely crossed the border into the United States and shortly thereafter the Guatemalan Truth Commission published its report on the thirty-six-year war, which revealed the egregious machinations of the CIA in Guatemala’s “dirty war” and U.S. financial support of the Guatemalan military that carried out thousands of atrocities. After years of civil war, the state could offer little political or economic protection so that Gutierrez and thousands of others like him have been forced to leave Guatemala in search of survival elsewhere. Thus, in ways that echo the Central American seafarers in The Ordinary Seaman, Gutierrez’s experiences of displacement and his “economic” motivations for migration cannot be extracted from the hundreds of thousands of Guatemalan “political” refugees, many of whom were denied asylum by the United States. How do we account for the simultaneous configurations of political and economic refugeeness? Gutierrez represents a number of the vastly complicated ways in which statelessness, political participation, and civil society are being reformed in the global age. His case is also a reminder to consider the ongoing linkages between refugee movements and the circulation of global capital. As María Cristina García observes, “Mexico, the United States, and Canada have two parallel and competing goals in the new century: facilitate the free movement of capital while controlling the movement of ‘undesirables.’”16 The case of Gutierrez and the refugees examined in Asylum Speakers epitomize Derrida’s assertion that “international legislation is in need of an overhaul. The concept and the experience of ‘refugees’ in this [twentieth] century have undergone a mutation that makes both the policies and the law radically out of date in that connection. The words refugee, exile, deportee, displaced person, and even foreigner, have changed their meanings; they call for another discourse and another kind of practical response, and they change the whole horizon of what is ‘political’ in citizenship, of what it means to belong to a nation state.”17 The shift in meaning of the vocabulary that is central to the politics of hospitality emphasizes the protean nature of the poetics of hospitality. How will asylum seekers need to reorder their language to become effective asylum speakers? Because of the nature of the devastation wreaked by years of war, ongoing political crises that are often linked to neoliberal policies, and perpetual “underdevelopment,” in the Americas people will

epilogue / 249

continue to migrate by land or sea, out of desperation, fearful that they and/or their families will be closer to death should they remain “home.” We must attend to the institutional forces that will continue to divert asylum seekers and look for new avenues through which asylum speakers can be heard so that, as Glissant says, relation can be spoken.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction: The Poetics of Hospitality: Refugee, Migrant, Testimony 1. Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying, 215. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 223. 5. Ibid., 233–234. 6. Ibid., 236. 7. Ibid., 232. 8. Ibid., 235. 9. Ibid. 10. She also tells this story in relation to other stories: the death of her father and the birth of her first child. 11. Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, 75. 12. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries,” 378. 13. An exception to this would be Cuban refugees, having much to do with the fact that they come from a communist nation. The 1959 Cuban Revolution was a watershed moment marking the first time that the United States became a country of first asylum for a large number of refugees from the Americas who had not been processed elsewhere prior to their arrival on U.S. shores (Holman, “Refugee Resettlement in the United States,” 6). Philip Schrag notes that “President Lyndon Johnson invited Cuban refugees to seek protection in the United States” (A Well-Founded Fear, my emphasis, 26). 14. Other host nations in the hemisphere that have also been impacted by refugees include Mexico, Belize, the Bahamas, Canada, Costa Rica, and Honduras. 15. The president in consultation with Congress determines an admissions ceiling for the number of refugees to be admitted each year. In 1980, when the Refugee Act was first established in the United States, the ceiling was 231,700. By 2005, the number had declined to 70,000. Furthermore, those are only the numbers that are

252 / notes allowed to be admitted and does not reflect the number that are granted asylum. In 2005, 25,257 were granted asylum. Jeanne Batalova, “Spotlight on Refugees and Asylees in the United States,” http://www.migrationinformation.org/USFocus/display. cfm?ID=415#3 16. Holman, “Refugee Resettlement in the United States,” 26. 17. As demonstrated by the treatment of Joseph Dantica, following 9/11, the Bush administration began to criminalize asylum seekers; they are “often strip-searched, shackled, and held in jails” for months as a time. (Rachel L. Swarns, “U.S. May Be Mishandling Asylum Seekers, Panel Says.”) 18. Dash, The Other America, 3. 19. Ibid., 4. At the basic geographic level, “Caribbean” connotes a region that serves as a crossroads between North America and South America. I use this term because it incorporates all the linguistic regions of the area unlike the term “West Indian,” which usually refers solely to the Anglophone Caribbean. While “Caribbean” is certainly more encompassing than “West Indian,” it too can restrict meaning by connoting only island topographies, when in fact the northern coast of South America and the eastern coast of Central America are also considered part of the Caribbean because they are washed by the Caribbean Sea and also share historical links with other parts of the Caribbean. For example, the populations of Belize (formerly British Honduras), Honduras, and Nicaragua include descendants of those migrants who were “deported” from the islands of St. Vincent and Dominica in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, with the increase in migration out of the Caribbean to other parts of the Americas, one must rethink the location of the Caribbean diaspora and the constitution of Caribbean cultural production. 20. Ibid., emphasis added, 5. 21. Derrida writes of Oedipus’ banishment from Thebes and request for asylum from Theseus in Socrates’ Oedipus at Colonus. See Derrida, Of Hospitality, 35–39. 22. Zolberg, Suhrke, and Aguayo, Escape From Violence, 5. 23. Ibid., 6. 24. For a comprehensive overview of the origins of the idea of the “refugee” in the twentieth century and the rise of “refugee studies,” see Malkki, “Refugees and Exile.” 25. UN General Assembly, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees of 1951 and the Protocol of 1967, 152. 26. Zolberg et al., Escape From Violence, 19. 27. Ibid., 21. 28. Ibid. 29. In 1948 the UN General Assembly created the UN Relief for Palestinians organization, which was replaced in 1949 by UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to deal with the 700,000 to 800,000 Palestinian refugees. 30. Schrag, A Well-Founded Fear, 20. See also Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum, 138. 31. Schrag, A Well-Founded Fear, 24. 32. Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum, 143. 33. Ibid., 147. 34. Shrag, A Well-Founded Fear, 27. 35. Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum, 164–165. 36. I address some of these restrictions in the epilogue.

notes / 253 37. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 38. Ibid., 9. 39. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries,” 378. 40. Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 187. See also, David Scott, “Preface: Soul Captives are Free”; Sibylle Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life”; and Nadi Edwards, “Notes on the Age of Dis.” 41. See Zucker and Zucker, Desperate Crossings. 42. Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, 50. 43. Ibid. 44. Schrag, A Well-Founded Fear, 30. 45. Ibid., 29. 46. Ibid. 47. Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, 50. 48. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 12–13. 49. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, 82. 50. Ibid. 51. Benhabib, The Rights of Others, 27. Benhabib notes that “Kant’s claim that first entry cannot be denied to those who seek it if this would result in the ‘destruction’ (Untergang) has become incorporated into the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees as the principle of ‘non-refoulement’ (United Nations 1951). This principle obliges signatory states not to forcibly return refugees and asylum seekers to their countries of origin if doing so would pose a clear danger to their lives and freedom” (35). I address the issue of refoulement in chapters 1 and 2 in my discussion of Haitian boat refugees who are interdicted and repatriated by the U.S. Coast Guard. 52. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 25. 53. George W. Bush, State of the Union Speech. 2004. 54. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, 169. 55. Ibid., 167. 56. Agamben, “We Refugees,” 114. 57. This term is from Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1999). 58. Agamben, “We Refugees,” 117. 59. Benhabib, The Rights of Others, my emphasis, 54. 60. Ibid., 6. 61. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, 82. 62. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 135. 63. Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 3. 64. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc., 40. 65. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 11. 66. Ibid., 14. 67. It is important to note that Glissant is informed by the situation of his native Martinique, which remains a département of France. 68. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 20. For a discussion of the arboreal metaphors of “roots” often used to link land, soil, and nation, see Malkki, “National Geographic.” 69. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18. 70. Ibid., 20.

254 / notes 71. Ibid., 17. 72. For a comprehensive discussion of various forms of first-person nonfiction narrative in the Caribbean context, see Sandra Pouchet Paquet’s Caribbean Autobiography. Among the texts that Paquet explores is the slave narrative. 73. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 18. 74. Ibid., 12. 75. Ibid., 20. 76. Ibid., 34. 77. Harris, History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas, 381. 78. Ibid. 79. Waligora-Davis, “Phantom Limbs,” 673.Waligora-Davis provides a compelling analysis of the relational aspects of limbo, the dismemberment of the slave trade, and lynching: “The phantom limb—a signifier for enslaved blacks, and for charred, souvenired flesh—equally designates the trafficking of human flesh that continued in the twentieth and now the twenty-first century along the water and skyways of the Americas” (673). 80. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship, 76. 81. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” 305. 82. Ibid., 291. 83. Walcott, “The Sea is History.” 84. Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 11. 85. See also DeLoughrey’s critique of Benítez-Rojo in Routes and Roots, 26–28. 86. Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, 82. 87. Ibid. 88. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 4. 89. Two exceptions would be the boats that were part of the 1980 Mariel boatlift and those in 1965 when Castro invited Cuban exiles to bring their boats to Cuba to retrieve friends and relatives who wanted to leave. While the Cuban exiles who used their own boats to transport Cuban refugees would seem to have more control over navigation because they ultimately brought refugees out of Cuba, even these boats represent a certain element of stagnancy and loss of control, particularly during the Mariel boatlift when they were often stalled for days on end while they waited the release of friends and family members by the Cuban government. As María Cristina García explains, some boats were forced to take on strangers deemed “undesirable” by the Cuban government. Thus the power of the boat captain over the boat was somewhat diminished by the Cuban government. The United States Coast Guard also attempted to intercept some of these boats. See María Cristina García, Havana USA, 38, 60–61. 90. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 342. 91. Derrida, “A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text,” 188–189. 92. Ricouer, “Imagination, Testimony and Trust: A Dialogue with Paul Ricouer,” 16. 93. Derrida, “A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text,” 191. 94. Beverley, Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth, 27. 95. Ibid., 19. 96. Moreiras, “The Aura of Testimonio,” 205. 97. It is important to note here the different historical moments that theories of

notes / 255 testimony refer to. Agamben, Lyotard, and to some extent Derrida discuss the problems associated with testimony in reference to witnessing the Holocaust. Georg Gulgelberger notes that Holocaust testimonies are primarily intended for documentary purposes while testimonio wants to effect change. He contends that Holocaust testimony has no audience in the sense that they are not intended to create solidarity for an ongoing crisis (4). 98. Good and Cubilié, “Introduction: The Future of Testimony,” 6. 99. Beverley, Testimonio, xvii. 100. Ibid., emphasis added, 15. In his definition of testimonio John Beverley also points to the political connotations of the term: “The word ‘testimonio’ in Spanish suggests the act of testifying or bearing witness in a legal or religious sense. The connotation is important because it distinguishes testimonio from a simple recorded participant narrative or ‘oral history.’. . . In oral history it is the intentionality of the recorder —usually a social scientist or journalist—that is paramount; in testimonio, by contrast, it is the intentionality of the narrator. (Beverley, “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio,” 73.) I would argue that the distinction between oral history and testimonio is not as clearly defined as Beverley asserts. The interlocuter cannot be so easily extracted from the intentionality of the narrator. Furthermore, the intentionality of the narrator becomes even more obscured once the testimonio enters into the global marketplace as a commodity. It is necessary to remind ourselves that testimonio is just as much a narrative construction as a fictional novel or even autobiography, biography, and memoir. Moreover, testimonios are transacted as cultural commodities, with the aims of getting something in return, whether it be solidarity, reparations, or asylum. 101. Moreiras, “The Aura of Testimonio,”198. Robert Carr emphasizes this as he states, “The emergence of testimonial literature in the First World marketplace (geographically defined) is thus involved in an ongoing history of mappings of Otherized communities and their worlds (dehistoricized and deterritorialized) for the accumulation of knowledge and power by bourgeois/ruling class Anglo-Americans and their descendants” (“Crossing the First World/Third World Divides,” 155). Carr’s definition of testimonio reflects his reservations: “‘Third World’ experience produced for consumption” through “the speaker from an exploited, oppressed community working with someone who has or can gain access to the managers of the mass media to produce a commodity that can be marketed” (156–157). 102. Dinesh D’Souza, “Fraudulent Storyteller Still Praised.” 103. See The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy edited by Arturo Arias for a comprehensive look at the issues surrounding the case. 104. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries,” 384. See also, Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, 156. 105. Malkki, 384. 106. Gilboy, “Deciding Who Gets In,” 581. 107. Derrida ponders these questions in relation to Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death, which portrays events that mirror those within the author’s life. Derrida raises the question of who can witness for the witness, and whether literature can testify. These questions are related to Danticat’s memoir Brother, I’m Dying, discussed in the beginning of the introduction. 108. Derrida, Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, 29–30. 109. While I draw on the scholarship surrounding Latin American testimonio, I

256 / notes also interrogate its various connotations. The Spanish “testimonio” is closely related to the English words: “testimonial,” which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a written attestation by some authorized or responsible person or persons, testifying to the truth of something.” The related term “testimony” is defined as “personal or documentary evidence or attestation in support of a fact or statement; hence, any form or evidence or proof” and “testify” is defined as “to bear witness to, or give proof of (a fact); to assert or affirm the truth of (a statement).” Generally, I use the words “testimonio” and “testimonial” interchangeably. 110. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz, 17. 111. Ibid., 18. 112. Ibid., 19–20. 113. Ibid., 18. 114. For more on the distinction between legal and moral guilt, see ibid., 23. 115. We are told that Christian’s case was referred to an asylum judge, where he would have one more opportunity to tell his story. The majority of referred cases are not granted asylum. 116. Durst, “Lost in Translation,” n. 41. 117. Derrida, Demeure, 40. 118. Gilboy explains that inspectors typically categorize certain nationalities as inherently fraudulent in their claims (587–588). 119. Derrida, “Hostipitality,” 6. 120. Bermann, “Introduction,” 5. 121. Derrida, “A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text,” 183. 122. Bermann, “Introduction.” 4. 123. See Peter L. Patrick, UEssex, homepage: “Linguistic Human Rights: A Sociolinguistic Introduction” http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/lhr/lhrasylum. htm). 124. See Michael Erard, “Immigration by Shibboleth: Should a Refugee Be Judged by What He Says or How He Says It?” 70. 125. In the epilogue I discuss Danticat’s recounting of her uncle’s story in U.S. congressional hearings. 126. These tactics include the use of multiple narrators to tell historic events, diary entries, newspaper clippings, a story told to a fictional “interviewer,” and a focus on an event in which characters are imprisoned, tortured, or silenced by an oppressive regime. 127. Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? 7; Butler speaking. 128. Handley, Postslavery Literature in the Americas, 6. 129. Quoted in Fernández Retamar, 25. 130. Quoted in Malkki, “Refugees and Exile,” 513. Malkki writes, “Into the contrast between ‘refugees’ and those ‘in exile’ is built a whole history of differences, not only of race, class, world region, and historical era but of different people’s very different entanglements with the state and international bureaucracies that characterize the national order of things. . . . ‘Exile’ connotes a readily aestheticizable realm, whereas the label ‘refugees’ connotes a bureaucratic and international humanitarian realm” (“Refugees and Exile,” 513). See also Caren Kaplan’s critique of Said in Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement, 120–122. 131. Dorfman, Heading South: Looking North, 238–239.

notes / 257 132. Clawson, Detweiler, and Ho, “Litigating as Law Students,” n. 163. See also Joseph Slaughter’s discussion of the intersections between the bildungsroman and human rights in Human Rights, Inc. 133. Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? 17–18; Butler speaking. 134. Orlando Patterson argues that the Caribbean has long served as U.S. economic colonies in “The Emerging West Atlantic System: Migration, Culture, and Underdevelopment in the United States and the Circum-Caribbean Region.” 135. Numerous scholars have argued for a reconfiguration of the notion of “America.” See José Martí’s “Our America.” See also Peter Winn’s Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean. Djelal Kadir echoes Martí’s call to reexamine “American” cultures asserting, “Our perspective must be translocal and relational, rather than fixed or naturalized. Our discursive locus must be supple, mobile, transnational, and, as mediate subjects among academic cultures and disciplinary fields, we must be ethical agents of transculturation, especially in times of affective paroxysm, when critical reason may be dimmed and civilized conversation drowned out” (see Kadir’s “Introduction: America and Its Studies,” 22). 136. Giles, “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature,” 63. 137. Kaplan, “Left Alone With America,” 16. 138. Consider writers such as Michelle Cliff, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Cristina García, Jamaica Kincaid, Paule Marshall, Audre Lorde, Loida Maritza Pérez, Patricia Powell, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and Esmeralda Santiago. 139. Sharpe, “Is the United States Postcolonial?” 112. 140. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 6.

1 / Inter-dictions and Limbo Citizens: Haitian Refugee Narratives 1. Cited in Cheryl Little and Charu Newhouse al-Sahli, Haitian Refugees: A People in Search of Hope, 37. 2. Much has been written about the role of migration in Caribbean literature. For writers coming out of the anglophone Caribbean in the 1950s, emigration to England offered the opportunity to gain exposure to the literary world outside of the region. Male writers such as George Lamming, Sam Selvon, V.S. Naipaul, and C.L.R. James are well known for their evocations of Caribbean exile. For example, in his collection of essays, The Pleasures of Exile, George Lamming writes of the particular necessity of (male) Caribbean writers to go to England to further their literary careers (“An Occasion for Speaking”). West Indian migration to England was in some ways a legitimate migration with migrants, at the time of pre-independence, already having access to England through the possession of a British passport. Of course, this passport did not protect Caribbean emigrants from racial and economic discrimination in England. Migration from the Caribbean to the United States has a much shorter history than migration to England and a much more recent literary connection—with women writing a large portion of Caribbean-rooted texts. See Belinda Edmondson, Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative. 3. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots, 21. 4. Walcott, “The Sea is History.” 5. Little and Young. “Crisis in Haiti: Bush Administration Should Stop Turning Refugees Away.” 6. OED online.

258 / notes 7. Ibid. 8. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship, 77. 9. Brathwaite published a revised version in 2007 in DS (2): dreamstories 2. 10. See Joan Dayan, “A Few Stories About Haiti, or, Stigma Revisited.” 11. Dash, Haiti and the United States, 136. 12. Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, 72–73. 13. Ibid., 84–85. 14. Estimates of the number of peasants killed range from 2,250 to 15,000. See ibid. 15. See also Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. There is also a long history within the Caribbean of seeing Haitians as “contaminated.” The Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, has from its independence sought to eradicate the “darker element” from its society. As Ernesto Sagas and Silvio Torres-Saillant have shown, the Dominican Republic has discriminated against Haitians, Haitian-Dominicans and darker-skinned Dominicans in terms of its national policies. I explore this more fully in my analysis of Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones in chapter 3. See Sagas, “A Case of Mistaken Identity” and Torres-Saillant “The Tribulations of Blackness.” 16. Lawless, Haiti’s Bad Press, 35. 17. Grosfoguel, “Migration and Geopolitics in the Caribbean,” 233. 18. Lawless, Haiti’s Bad Press, xxi. 19. Farmer, “Haitian Refugees: Sovereignty or Globalization.” Farmer also notes that “over 80 percent of the population lives in poverty. Seven out of ten Haitians are unemployed.” 20. See Stepick, “The Refugees Nobody Wants,” 58. 21. Arthur and Dash, Libète: A Haiti Anthology, 180. Arthur and Dash write, “During the 1970s between 50,000 and 80,000 boat people arrived without authorisation in Florida,” and by 1981 “with up to 1,000 Haitian boat people arriving in Florida each month, the US concluded an interdiction agreement with the Duvalier regime that permitted the US Coast Guard to intercept Haitian vessels and return ‘irregular’ migrants to Haiti. The interceptions and forcible repatriations by the US Coast Guard achieved the desired effect of reducing the numbers leaving Haiti by boat, but still thousands attempted to beat the blockade. Over a ten-year period some 23,000 Haitians were interdicted and sent back. Thousands more, told that they had arrived on US soil by the trip organizers, were prematurely put ashore on remote islands in the Turks and Caicos and the Bahamas. Unknown numbers died as overcrowded and leaky boats sank, while others were simply thrown overboard by the crew” (Libète: A Haiti Anthology, 180). See also Alex Stepick et al. “Shifting Identities and Intergenerational Conflict: Growing Up Haitian in Miami,” 237. 22. Dash, Haiti and the United States, 132. 23. Grosfoguel, “Migration and Geopolitics in the Caribbean,” 234. Furthermore, while thousands of Haitians were fleeing by small boats, on February 7, 1986, “the United States provided the Air Force cargo plane that spirited away Haiti’s President for Life, Jean-Claude Duvalier, before angry Haitians could get their hands on him” (Dash, Haiti and the United States, 137). 24. Holman, “Refugee Resettlement in the United States.” 10. 25. Sucheng Chan, “Politics and the Indochinese Refugee Exodus, 1975–1997,” 187. 26. Sucheng Chan, The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation, 82–84.

notes / 259 27. María Cristina García, Seeking Refuge, 88–89. 28. An organized network of people protested these policies through the sanctuary movement, “a grassroots resistance movement that protested US foreign policy through the harboring and transporting of refugees, in violation of immigration law” (Ibid., 98). 29. Mitchell, “U.S. Policy Toward Haitian Boat People: 1972–93,” 71; Conway and Stafford, “Haitians,” 175. 30. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, Refugee Refoulement, 3. According to the Lawyers Committee, “The Reagan Administration determined that the movement of undocumented Haitians to the United States had become a ‘serious national problem detrimental to the interests of the United States,’ despite the fact that Haitians comprised less than 2 percent of the undocumented population in the United States.” 31. Ibid., 3. 32. Villiers, “Closed Borders, Closed Ports,” 877. 33. National Coalition for Haitian Refugees and Americas Watch, Half the Story, 5. 34. Between September 1981 and September 1991 (the first ten years of the interdiction program) “over 24,000 Haitians were interviewed but only twenty-eight were brought to the United States to pursue claims for political asylum” (Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship, 82). 35. Mitchell, “U.S. Policy Toward Haitian Boat People,” 72. 36. Ibid., 79. 37. Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, “OAS to Investigate Interdiction and Forced Return of Haitian Refugees.” 38. INS Asylum Program, History of the United States INS Asylum Officer Corps and Sources of Authority for Asylum Adjudication, 3. 39. Conway and Stafford, “Haitians,”182. 40. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship, 83. 41. Bill Frelick, “In-Country Refugee Processing,” paragraph 6. 42. Frelick, “In-Country Refugee Processing,” paragraph 8. 43. Ibid., paragraph 12. 44. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship, 83. Frelick also notes that Vietnamese boat people were never interdicted and repatriated without hearing (“Hardening the Heart,” 376). 45. UN General Assembly, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 176. 46. Pallis, “Obligations of States towards Asylum Seekers at Sea,” 343. Nonrefoulement in relation to Haitians was the subject of a U.S. Supreme Court case, Chris Sale, Acting Commissioner, Immigration and Naturalization Service, et al., Petitioners v. Haitian Centers Council, Inc. et al., Supreme Court of the United States. No. 92–344, June 21, 1993. The majority decision of the Supreme Court upheld the U.S. right to return Haitian refugees to Haiti, although Justice Blackmun issued a bitter dissenting view. See Pallis, “Obligations of States towards Asylum Seekers at Sea,” 344–345. 47. See Frelick, “In Country Refugee Processing of Haitians,” and Clawson, Detweiler, and Ho, “Litigating as Law Students,” 2356. 48. Wendy Young, “Briefing on U.S. Policy Towards Haitian Refugees.” 49. Emphasis added. Wagner’s quotes are taken from a deposition given on May 5, 1992, in Washington D.C. 50. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 11

260 / notes 51. According to the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, “The Bush Administration has advanced the novel proposition that the prohibition of refoulement does not apply to the Haitian boat people because the U.S. Coast Guard stops them before they reach U.S. shores” (Half the Story, 2). 52. Lawyers Committee, Refugee Refoulement, 3. 53. Ibid., 22. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., emphasis added, 22. 56. Ibid., 34–35. 57. Ibid., 35. 58. Ibid., 35–48. In addition to the soldiers, four of the individual cases presented are Haitians who were returned to Haiti. The remaining cases involve three Haitians who were in detention after having been interdicted, one of whom had received a “favorable advisory opinion from the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs” (48). Their stories were reconstructed from information found in their asylum requests. According to the Lawyers Committee, “The claims of these three individuals are similar to those of the individuals who were intercepted, and indicate that if appropriate inquiry were made on the cutter, many of those intercepted would very likely have been able to assert compelling asylum claims” (44). 59. Ibid., 39. 60. Ibid., 23. 61. Ibid., 3. 62. Margulies, “Difference and Distrust in Asylum Law.” Margulies continues, “Unfortunately, Haitian asylum adjudication often involves a fixation with passing discrepancies, rather than consideration of the refugee’s story in its entirety. For example, in the case of one refugee we represented, the immigration judge found fault with the refugee’s testimony because of a variation in the way the refugee described the person who had let him know the police were looking for him. In his written asylum application, the refugee, through translation, described his source as a ‘childhood friend.’ In his testimony before the judge, again through an interpreter, the refugee described the source as ‘an acquaintance.’ To the judge, this difference effectively discredited the refugee” (141). 63. Lawyers Committee, Refugee Refoulement, 3. 64. In fact, the report states that “Of these, two had lived in the United States before and were presumably somewhat familiar with U.S. legal procedures and three were relatively well educated teachers able to articulate their claims” (Refugee Refoulement, 23). 65. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 120. 66. Lawyers Committee, Refugee Refoulement, 3. 67. National Coalition for Haitian Refugees and Americas Watch, Half the Story, emphasis added, 6. 68. Gilboy, “Deciding Who Gets In,” 586. 69. Ibid. 70. Durst, “Lost in Translation.” 128. 71. Ibid, 135–36. 72. “Lavalas,” which means “the flood,” is the name of the political organization that was headed by Jean-Bertrand Aristide. 73. Payen, “Lavalas,” 759.

notes / 261 74. Apter, The Translation Zone, 5. 75. Ibid., 9. 76. Opitz, Haitian Refugees Forced to Return, 157. 77. Ibid., 161. 78. Ibid. (brackets, ellipses, and parenthesis in the original). 79. The space of the military base serves as a telling reminder of the U.S.-Cuban relationship as Roger Ricardo describes this place: “A sign proclaims ‘Republic of Cuba. Free territory in the Americas.’ Facing it, a few steps farther on, is the emblem of the U.S. Marine Corps. The northeast gate provides the only access to the base from unoccupied territory, flanked by a sentry box where Marines keep watch. A few dozen meters away is the sentry box of the Border Patrol of the Cuban Armed Forces” (Guantánamo, the Bay of Discord, 3). 80. Quoted in Farmer, The Uses of Haiti, 223. 81. Stepick et al., 237. 82. See Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation. 83. Dash, Haiti and the United States, 137. 84. Ibid., 118. 85. Payen, “Something in the Water,” 66. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid., 67. 88. Ibid. 89. See Jana Evans Braziel, “Haiti, Guantánamo, and the ‘One Indispensable Nation.’” Obviously, with the detention of “enemy combatants” on Guantánamo since 9/11, this exertion of state power on this space has become all the more fraught. See Amy Kaplan, “Where is Guantánamo?” 90. Payen, “Something in the Water,” 70. 91. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship, 78. 92. Payen, “Something in the Water,” 67–68. 93. Ibid., 73. 94. Ibid., 71. 95. Ibid., 72. 96. Ibid., 71. 97. Ibid., 72. 98. Ibid., 74. See also Michel Foucault’s description of the panopticon in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison System. 99. Payen, “Lavalas,” 764. 100. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 120. 101. Sucheng Chan, “Politics and the Indochinese Refugee Exodus, 1975–1997,” 187. 102. Payen, “Lavalas,” 765. 103. Ibid., 763. Recalling the discriminatory treatment of Haitians during the early AIDS crisis, all Haitian migrants who were taken to the detention center at Guantánamo Bay were tested for HIV and “forced to receive injections of medications and long-term contraceptives” (Conway and Stafford, “Haitians,” 183). The same was not true for Cuban detainees. See also Paul Farmer’s The Uses of Haiti, 226, 230. 104. Payen, “Lavalas, 762. 105. Bermann, “Introduction,” 5. 106. Durst, “Lost in Translation,” 128.

262 / notes 107. Apter, The Translation Zone, 6. 108. Payen, “Lavalas,” 760–761. 109. Ibid., 761. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid., 766. 113. Ibid. 114. Ibid., 767. 115. Ibid. 116. Ibid., 768. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 769. 119. Payen, “Something in the Water,” 74, 75. 120. Ibid., 75. 121. Ibid., 75–76, 78. 122. Ibid., 77. 123. Ibid., 78. 124. Ibid., 79. 125. Ibid. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., 80. 128. Ibid., 81. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid., 82. 131. Ibid., emphasis added, 82. 132. Payen, “Lavalas,” 770. 133. DeLoughrey, “Routes and Roots,” 166. 134. Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” emphasis added, 6. 135. Ibid., 8. 136. Ibid., 14. 137. Ibid., 6. 138. Ibid., 3. 139. Ibid., 23–24. 140. Ibid., 10, 18. 141. Ibid., 17. 142. Ibid., 18. 143. Ibid., 10. 144. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 6. 145. Danticat, “Children of the Sea,”12. 146. Ibid., 25. 147. Ibid., 23. 148. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 2–4. Rey Chow links Kristeva’s theory of the abject to the ethnically marginalized: “the often culturally tabooed condition of an excessive, rejected being that nonetheless remains a challenge to the body that expels it” (Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 148). 149. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3. 150. Danticat, “Children of the Sea,” 26.

notes / 263 151. Ibid., 27. 152. Ibid. 153. DeLoughrey, Routes and Roots, 270. 154. Walcott, “The Sea is History.” 155. Danticat explains the idea of “dyaspora” as the “tenth department” of Haiti where Haitians in the diaspora are imagined as part of the nation. “Introduction,” xiv. 156. Bridget Jones, “‘The Unity is Submarine’: Aspects of a Pan-Caribbean Consciousness in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite,” 91–93. 157. Rohlehr, “Dream Journeys,” iii. 158. Brown, “Introduction,” 12. 159. Brathwaite dedicates DS (2): dreamstories to Murat Brierre, a renowned Haitian iron sculptor. 160. Brathwaite, ConVERSations with Nathanial Mackey, 210. 161. Ibid., 200–201. 162. Ibid., 189. 163. James, “The Unknown Text,” 763. 164. In a Savacou catalogue description, Brathwaite writes that the Longman edition of DreamStories did not fully capture his Sycorax video style. See also Graeme Rigby’s essay in which he discusses the technical challenges in publishing Brathwaite’s work. Graeme Rigby, “Publishing Brathwaite: Adventures in the Video Style.” 165. Quoted in Cynthia James, “The Unknown Text,” 763. The quotation comes from a speech titled “The Search for a Caribbean Aesthetic” that Brathwaite gave at Carifesta in Trinidad in 1992. James explains that the speech was “published in the “Viewpoint” section of Trinidad’s Sunday Express and serialized in the 25 October and 8 and 15 November 1992 issues.” For a comprehensive discussion of Brathwaite’s tidalectics theorizations, see DeLoughrey’s Routes and Roots and “Routes and Roots: Tidalectics in Caribbean Literature.” 166. Brathwaite, “Dream Haiti,” DreamStories, 102–103. 167. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 32. 168. Brathwaite, “Dream Haiti,” DreamStories, 95. 169. Ibid., 103. 170. Brathwaite, “Dream Haiti,” DS (2), 175. 171. Ibid., 159. 172. Rohlehr, “Dream Journeys,” xv. 173. Brathwaite, “Dream Haiti,” DreamStories, 98–99. 174. DeLoughrey, “Heavy Waters,” 709. 175. Brathwaite, “Dream Haiti,” DreamStories, 96. 176. Ibid., 104. 177. Ibid., 97. 178. See also Marie-José Nzengou-Tayo’s “Kamau Brathwaite and the Haitian Boat People.” 179. Brathwaite, ConVERSations, 304. The term “nervous condition” is a reference to John-Paul Sartre’s 1961 preface to Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth: “The status of the ‘native’ is a nervous condition introduced and maintained by the settler among colonized people with their consent.” 180. Brathwaite, “Dream Haiti,” DS (2), 171. 181. Ibid.

264 / notes 182. Brathwaite, “Dream Haiti,” DS (2) 199. The representation of this passage in DS (2) depicts font which is “bobbing” up-and-down on the page. 183. Brathwaite, “Dream Haiti,” DreamStories, 111. 184. Brathwaite, “Caliban,” 194. Wilson Harris notes that the limbo of the poem evokes the anancy-spider tales that have been dislocated from any essentialized connection between Africa and the Americas, requiring a continual reimagination of the cultural relationship between these two places (History, Fable, and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas, 19).

2 / False Witnessing: U.S. Coast Guard Photography of Haitian Refugees 1. Song performed by Haitian activist Manno Charlemagne at a rally for Haitian refugees in New York as portrayed in the documentary Bitter Cane. No song title provided. 2. “President Bush attends Briefing on Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” 3. The Coast Guard also promotes the fact that it has immigrant members. One press release describes Phidias Edoh, a Tongolese national who joined the Coast Guard and became a naturalized citizen. Edoh’s supervisor stated that he is a “great asset to the Coast Guard. . . . He is bilingual [French and English], which is helpful with our communications during alien migrant interdiction operations, particularly Haitian.” Sandra Bartlett “Proud to Be an American.” Telling here is that the Coast Guard and INS, in a sense, need immigrants whose language skills can prove valuable in migrant interdictions. 4. Behdad, A Forgetful Nation, 14. 5. While “Katrina refugee” came into parlance to refer to those who had to flee the environmental disaster in New Orleans, some also contested using this term to describe people who were, in fact, citizens who had not been expelled from the nation. I would argue that “refugee” is an appropriate term to describe Katrina escapees and those left stranded in New Orleans because the nation-state had essentially failed to provide protections for these citizens. 6. This cartoon was published in special 2005 “Katrina” edition of the Coast Guard Magazine. The cartoonist is John Sherffius. 7. This was the number of photos in the archive at the time of this writing. The dates of the photographs range from 1980 to 2005, although many of the photographs are undated. The larger archive of AMIO (Alien Migrant Interdiction Operation) images includes photographs of Cubans, Dominicans, Ecuadorians, and Chinese being intercepted at sea and serves as a record of the U.S. expansion into both Caribbean and Pacific regions. 8. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 26. 9. Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” 6. 10. Ibid., 11. 11. Ibid., 19. 12. Ibid., 7. 13. Behdad, A Forgetful Nation, 146. 14. Warren, “Focal Point of the Fleet,” 1049. 15. USCG, Public Affairs Manual, 5–2. 16. This is an example of the use of photographs of Haitians picked up at sea for promotional purposes. Of the forty-five photographs featured in the Coast Guard publication, U.S. Coast Guard: America’s Maritime Guardian, five feature Coast Guard

notes / 265 rescue operations, and two are of Haitians being picked up at sea. There are no photos of any other interdiction operations (Cuban or Chinese). One of the two represents a Haitian infant being handed from Coast Guard members in a raft up to a Coast Guard member on a cutter. These are two main photographs used to represent the “humanitarian” efforts of Coast Guard search and rescue operations. Online. January 1, 2002. http://www.uscg.mil/overview/Pub%201/contents.html (accessed October 20, 2006). 17. Sekula, “Reading an Archive,” 445. 18. Ibid., 447. 19. Derrida, Archive Fever, 3. 20. Ibid., 4, n. 1. 21. Coast Guard Public Affairs Manual, 5–2. 22. Starrett, “Violence and the Rhetoric of Images,” 415. Amidst the forces of policy, international relations, and military institutions, photographic texts become malleable; they become mediums through which international relationships are imagined and refracted. Starrett asserts, “One way to approach photography . . . is to consider it as a form of rhetoric and compare how different modes of persuasion and mobilization—whether they are written, spoken, graven, or exposed—organize the relationship between producer, representation, and audience” (410). Photographs of Haitian refugees reflect the attempt to persuade U.S. citizens of the heroism of the Coast Guard and the necessity of interdiction. Therefore, the USCG photos purport to present “real” experiences of “search-and-rescue” as ordinary duties that members perform on a regular basis. 23. The overview of Alien Migrant Interdiction Operation (AMIO) available on the Coast Guard website underscores the “migrant threat” posed by Haitians, Cubans, Chinese, Ecuadorians, and Dominicans who try to reach U.S. shores by boat. 24. I am borrowing Mary Louise Pratt’s term. 25. Behdad, A Forgetful Nation, 18. 26. Ibid., 17. 27. Oxford English Dictionary online. 28. The website for Seapower explains that the magazine “publishes a diverse range of authoritative and informative articles to educate the American people, their elected representatives, and industry on the need for robust naval and maritime forces.” http://www.navyleague.org/sea_power/about_seapower.php 29. Thomas Jr., “Search and Interdict,” 40. 30. Liu, “Getting to the Photo Finish,” 1. 31. USCG Historian’s Office, Haitian Migrant files. At the time of my research the files were boxed but not indexed. 32. Tagg, The Burden of Representation, 64. 33. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 12–13. 34. Chambers, Oxford Companion to American Military History, 145–146. In 1915, the Coast Guard became one of the five armed services. 35. Jonathan Sutherland, African Americans at War: An Encyclopedia, 465. 36. United States Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard: America’s Maritime Guardian, 23. 37. Ibid., 22. 38. Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 7–8. 39. Maryann Cusimano Love, “Broken Promises,” 8. 40. United States Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard: America’s Maritime Guardian, 7.

266 / notes 41. The USCG is typically associated with the maritime safety and domestic law enforcement duties, but the service has also participated in most major wartime actions, including the War of 1812, the Seminole Wars, the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I and II, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf. The branch also took on a prominent role during the Bay of Pigs. The 1927 version of the USCG anthem, “Semper Paratus” reflects the global scope of the service: “From Aztec Shore to/Arctic Zone,/ To Europe and Far East,/ The Flag is carried by our ships/ In times of war and peace” (uscg.mil). The USCG website emphasizes this global scope as it protects “any maritime region as required to support national security” (www.uscg.mil). 42. United States Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard: America’s Maritime Guardian, 5. 43. Renda, Taking Haiti, 21. 44. Dash, Haiti and the United States, 132. 45. The U.S. distinction between political and economic migrants is in keeping with the United Nations definition of refugee, which makes a clear distinction between those seeking asylum for fear of persecution based on political, religious, ethnic, or racial terms versus those who seek economic opportunities. See my discussion of this in the introduction. 46. Thomas Jr., “Search and Interdict,” 41. 47. Ibid., 43. 48. USCG Historian’s Office, Haitian Migrant Interdiction files. Although there is a fair amount of overall historical information on the Coast Guard available on the website, there is little historical information on the Coast Guard’s role in the interdiction process. One blurb reads, “The 1980s and 1990s saw the US Coast Guard save thousands responding to numerous refugee boatlifts from Haiti [during Operation Able Vigil] and Cuba [during Operation Able Manner]. On November 24, 1995, for example, Dauntless rescued 578 migrants from a grossly overloaded 75–foot coastal freighter, the largest number of migrants rescued from a single vessel in Coast Guard history. This work has continued into the new century, for example in the year 2000 alone, the Coast Guard sortied 57,697 times and saved 3,400 lives” (www.uscg.mil/ hq/g-cp/history/h-USCGhistory.html). There is no mention of the differing treatment of Haitian and Cuban migrants. 49. http://www.uscg.mil/hq/g-o/g-opl/AMIO/AMIO.htm. 50. Thomas Jr., “Search and Interdict,” 40–41. 51. In relation to Haitian migrations, Joan Dayan in “A Few Stories About Haiti, or, Stigma Revisited,” 158, asserts that “the language of removal and containment had been rehearsed, staged, and refined ever since 1 January 1804, when JeanJacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of the former French Colony of Saint-Domingue. . . . In Paris as early as 1802, while Napoleon consolidated his plans for reinstituting slavery in Haiti, Baudry Deslozières, in Les egarements du négrophilisme (The aberrations of negrophilism), warned that whites were not only threatened with moral deformation when they ‘misallied’ with blacks but risked transmitting not only darkened skin but black blood ‘that would attack the very heart of France.’” 52. Charles, “Political Refugees or Economic Immigrants?” 199. 53. Bruce Taylor Seeman, “No Exit: Stopping Haiti’s Desperate Flow,” A2. 54. Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, 72. 55. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries,” 387.

notes / 267 56. Ibid., 386. 57. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 226. 58. Quoted in Chierici, Demele, 143. Krome has historically been a militarized zone, part of “a former Nike missile base in the Everglades swamp” (Conway and Stafford, “Haitians, 180). For further discussion of the carceral conditions at Krome, see Waligora-Davis, “The Ghetto: Illness and the Formation of the ‘Suspect’ in American Polity,” 194–195. See also Jana Evans Braziel, “Haiti, Guantánamo, and the ‘One Indispensable Nation.’” 59. Mirzoeff, “Invisible Empire,” 28. 60. Ibid., 27. 61. United States Coast Guard, Public Health and Disease Concerns Related to Coast Guard Operations, 1–1, my emphasis. 62. Ibid., 2–1. 63. Ibid., 3–1. 64. Ibid., 2–8, 2–9. 65. “Coast Guard Rams Boat Filled With Haitians.” 66. Ibid. 67. Farmer, Pathologies of Power, 58. 68. I borrow this term from Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather, 126. 69. Kenny, “Script for documentary on Haitian Interdiction,” my emphasis. Haitian migrant files, U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office. 70. Malkki, Purity and Exile, 11. 71. Renda, Taking Haiti, 15. 72. Kenny, “Script.” 73. United States Coast Guard, U.S. Coast Guard: America’s Maritime Guardian, 44. 74. Lisa Danielle Healy, “Forcing Haitians Home,” my emphasis. 75. Renda, Taking Haiti, 16, my emphasis. 76. Ibid. 77. Lisa Danielle Healy, “Forcing Haitians Home,” my emphasis. 78. See Joanne Cavanaugh, “Sent to Haiti, Kids Now Living in the Streets Repatriated Children Had Family Here, Report Says.” 79. Wendy Young reports that one family was separated and sent to facilities thousands of miles apart. “Haitian Refugee Hearing-Statement” http://www.hagcoalition. freehosting.net/ See also Nicole Waligora-Davis’s discussion of INS incarceration of refugee children (“The Ghetto,” 195). Clawson, Detweiler, and Ho also note that a newborn refugee died of pneumonia contracted while at Guantánamo (“Litigating as Law Students,” 2347). 80. Farmer, “Haitian Refugees: Sovereignty or Globalization.” 81. See Crystal Parikh’s discussion of the politics surrounding the Elían González case in An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture. 82. Walker, “Haitian Orphan’s Story Draws No Crowds,” A4. 83. Dubinsky, “Babies Without Borders,” 143. See also Maria de los Angeles Torres, The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future. 84. Kaplan, “Homeland Insecurities,” 6.

268 / notes 85. Ibid., 86. Kaplan also points out the racist construction of “homeland” under South African apartheid, which associates the term with “racial purity” (“Homeland Insecurities,” 88). 86. Quoted in Nyers, Rethinking Refugees, 91. 87. Kracauer, “Photography,” 433. 88. Clawson, Detweiler, and Ho, “Litigating as Law Students,” 2359. 89. Mitchell, “U.S. Policy Toward Haitian Boat People,” 77. 90. Jackson and Engelhardt, “‘I Prefer to Die!’ Haitian Screams.” 91. Charles, “U.S. Won’t Release Detained Haitians,” 1B. 92. Dayan, “A Few Stories About Haiti, or, Stigma Revisited,” 159. 93. Women’s Commission on Refugee Women and Children Homepage, “Women’s Commission Gravely Concerned About the Plight of Haitian Refugees.” The association of terrorism with Haitians became all the more complicated by the June 23, 2006, arrest of seven men in Miami, Florida. The men, several of whom were of Haitian descent (including one undocumented immigrant) were suspected of planning terrorist attacks in the United States. Later news reports raised doubts about the viability of the government’s case against the group, noting that they lacked basic resources and any connections to Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups. See Tyrangiel, “The Jihadi Next Door?” 94. Arcelin, Bitter Cane. Given the mediated nature of translation, and the rapid pace at which the testimony is offered, my transcription of the woman’s testimony is an approximation. 95. For more on Edouard Duval-Carrié’s work, see Divine Revolution: The Art of Edouard Duval-Carrié by Donald Cosentino. See also Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Martha Daisy Kelehan’s discussion of this and other botpippel (boat people) artwork in “The ‘Children of the Sea’: Uncovering Images of the Botpippel Experience in Caribbean Art and Literature.”

3 / Silent Subjectivities: Testimony and Haitian Labor Refugees 1. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 65. 2. Martínez-Vergne and Knight, “Introduction,” 7. 3. Dupuy, “Globalization, the World Bank, and the Haitian Economy,” 45. 4. Ibid., 46. 5. Ibid., 62. 6. They also work in other economic sectors as domestic laborers, coffee harvesters, and construction workers (Corten and Duarte, “Five Hundred Thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic.”) 7. Bateyes are the compounds in which cane cutters live that surround the plantations. 8. Roorda, The Dictator Next Door, 13. 9. Ibid., 17. 10. Ibid., 28. 11. Martínez, Peripheral Migrants, 14. 12. Ibid., 3. 13. Unlike other parts of the Caribbean, the Dominican Republic came to industrialized sugarcane production relatively late, in the latter part of the nineteenth century. 14. Martínez, Peripheral Migrants, 168.

notes / 269 15. Ibid., 1. 16. Ibid., 57–58. 17. Ibid. Martínez also notes that Haitians, often refusing to work as wage laborers for large landowners in Haiti, cited the work was too reminiscent of slavery. They preferred to work their own small plots of land and sell their products in the market. It is not clear why, exactly, Haitians changed their minds and began emigrating, but a number of factors contributed to the declining conditions for Haitian peasantry, including, “regressive taxation and other forms of exploitation imposed by Haitian rulers, the great powers, and international commodity traders” (55). Haitians had begun migrating to Cuba (1900) and the Dominican Republic (1915) prior to the U.S. occupation. Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic cannot be attributed solely to U.S. interests (59). Thus, the factors contributing to Haitian migration involve a number of internal and external factors. 18. Ibid., 69. 19. Gavigan, Beyond the Bateyes, 8. 20. Martínez, Peripheral Migrants, 52. 21. Ibid., 2. 22. Ibid., 10–11. 23. Ibid., 8. 24. Gavigan, Beyond the Bateyes, 20. Gavigan notes that “the Dominican military bolstered the police and army presence on the border and reportedly forced many Haitian back to Haiti, sometimes handing fleeing refugees over to the Haitian military” (20). Gavigan also notes that despite being a “signatory to the major international human rights and refugee instruments, it made every effort to keep Haitian refugees fleeing military oppression from entering the Dominican Republic and made no effort to assist the refugees who succeeded in arriving. In one highly publicized—and telling—example in early 1992, the Dominican military surrounded and effectively imprisoned 21 refugees inside an Episcopal church in Dajabón. The refugees remained in the church for nearly 2 months, until the standoff was resolved by the intervention of the recently-established Santo Domingo office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)” (20). Additionally, Gavigan notes that despite the establishment of the UNHCR office, Haitians faced extreme obstacles in obtaining asylum in the Dominican Republic. Of the thousands who applied, only 35 had obtained refugee status as of 1994 (22). At the same time, the Dominican government granted asylum to former members of the military dictatorship that overthrew Aristide once he was reinstated as president (9). 25. Marc Lacey, “A Rights Advocate’s Work Divides Dominicans.” See also the documentary The Sugar Babies (2007), which focuses on the lack of education and rights of children in the bateyes. 26. Wortham, Counter-Institutions, 89; my emphasis. 27. Ibid., 95. 28. Derrida, Archive Fever, 2. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Gugelberger, “Introduction: Institutionalization of Transgression,” 13. 31. Moreiras, “The Aura of Testimonio,” 196. 32. Gugelberger, “Introduction,” 13. 33. Significantly, those people offering statements at the hearings are referred to as

270 / notes “witnesses” in the table of contents of the hearings and their statements are referred to as “testimony” (9). 34. The Rules of the Committee on International Relations 111th Congress state that hearings “shall be open to the public except when the Committee or subcommittee, in open session and with a majority present, determines by record vote that all or part of the remainder of the meeting on that day shall be closed to the public, because disclosure of matters to be considered would endanger national security, would compromise sensitive law enforcement information, or would tend to defame, degrade or incriminate any person or otherwise violate any labor rule of the House of Representatives.” 35. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 48. 36. This reliance on written statements is initiated by the rules of the hearings themselves. According to the Rules of the Committee on International Relations, 111th Congress, “Each witness who is to appear before the Committee or a subcommittee is required to file with the clerk of the Committee, at least two (2) business days in advance of his or her appearance, sufficient copies, as determined by the Chair of the Full Committee or a subcommittee, of his or her proposed testimony to provide to Members and staff of the Committee or subcommittee, the news media, and the general public. The witness shall limit his or her oral presentation to a brief summary of his or her testimony. In the case of a witness appearing in a nongovernmental capacity, a written statement of proposed testimony shall, to the extent practicable, include a curriculum vitae and a disclosure of the amount and source (by agency and program) of any Federal grant (or subgrant thereof) or contract (or subcontract thereof) received during the current fiscal year or either of the two previous fiscal years by the witness or by an entity represented by the witness, to the extent that such information is relevant to the subject matter of, and the witness’ representational capacity at, the hearing.” 37. U.S. Congressional Hearings, The Plight of Haitian Sugarcane Cutters, 65, my emphasis. 38. The U.S. invasions are briefly mentioned in Father Edwin Paraison’s statements. See page 24 of the hearings. 39. Ibid., 11. 40. Ibid., 1. 41. Moreiras, “The Aura of Testimonio,” 198. 42. Ibid., 199. 43. Lawyers Committee Statement and Americas Watch statements from hearings. 44. This deportation occurred just after the hearings from June through September of 1991. 45. Martínez, Peripheral Migrants, 50–51. Two days after the hearings the Dominican government responded by heightening the state of exception through the use of expulsions: “Most of those expelled were denied the fair immigration hearing that is due them under Dominican and international law. Rather, they were simply advised of their imminent deportation, without any attempt to determine their citizenship or immigrant status. They were then bused across the border to Haiti, a foreign country to many who speak Spanish as a first language or have few if any remaining relatives there” (Human Rights Watch, World Report 1992, 198). 46. Murphy, Dominican Sugar Plantations, 19–21. Murphy also notes that this was

notes / 271 part of U.S. expansionism—the 1920 Land Registration Law in the Dominican Republic was modeled after one used by a U.S. occupation government in the Philippines. 47. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 4, my emphasis. 48. Cubilié, Women Witnessing Terror, 27. 49. Corten and Duarte, “Five Hundred Thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic,” 5. 50. Ibid. 51. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 10–11. 52. Ibid., 12–13, my emphasis. 53. Ibid., 15, my emphasis. 54. Ibid., 16, my emphasis. 55. Ibid., 16. 56. Ibid., 17, my emphasis. 57. Ibid., 28. 58. It is more likely that the growth of global capitalism affects why Haitians migrate to the Dominican Republic. As Corten and Duarte point out, in the late 1970s and early 1980s “The Haitian poor left for the Dominican rice fields and coffee and cocoa plantations replacing the Dominicans who had gone to work in the international free-trade zones and the New York factories” (“Five Hundred Thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic,” 4). 59. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 2–3. 60. Ibid., 9. 61. Ibid. 62. In 1994, Father Paraison won the Anti-Slavery Society’s Award for his work on behalf of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. http://www.antislavery.org 63. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 20, my emphasis. 64. Beverley, “The Margin at the Center,” 28. 65. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 23. 66. Ibid., 31–32, my emphasis. 67. Two of the activists with whom Paraison had worked died. Dominican soldiers allegedly shot one and the other was found hanged while in police custody. After the hearings, Paraison was under surveillance by the Dominican authorities. (Human Rights Watch, World Report 1992, 200). 68. Joaquín Balaguer, La Realidad Dominicana: Semblanza de un Pais y de un Regimen (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Ferrari Hermanos, 1947), translated by and quoted in Sagas, “A Case of Mistaken Identity,” 3. 69. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 25, my emphasis. 70. Beverley, “The Margin at the Center,” 26. 71. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 67, my emphasis. 72. Corten and Duarte, “Five Hundred Thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic,” 98. 73. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 26. 74. Malkki, “Speechless Emissaries,” 378. 75. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 36, my emphasis. 76. Ibid., 37. 77. Ibid., 35. 78. Ibid., 46–47.

272 / notes 79. Ibid., 46, my emphasis. 80. Murphy, Dominican Sugar Plantations, 15. 81. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 63, my emphasis. 82. Ibid. 83. In fact, Catherine Orenstein compares the situations of Mexican migrant workers in the U.S. with Haitian canecutters in the Dominican Republic in “Illegal Transnational Labor.” She concludes that Mexican laborers are no better off than Haitian laborers in the Dominican Republic. 84. For more on the Fanjul brothers’ corporate interests in the Dominican Republic and the United States, and the enormous sugar subsidies that they receive from the U.S. government, see the 2007 film The Sugar Babies, directed by Amy Serrano. 85. In 1992, five Florida sugarcane companies were sued in a class action lawsuit. While they were initially found guilty of cheating more than 10,000 laborers of their pay, the ruling was reversed by the Florida Appellate Court. The sugarcane companies have since switched from hiring foreign workers to cut cane to mechanical harvesters. As the addendum to the original film points out, the H-2 worker program has increased exponentially since the 1980s, with hundreds of thousands of workers being brought in to work in both agricultural and nonagricultural jobs. Although some workers still come from the Caribbean, the majority are drawn from Mexico and Central America. 86. Over, Human Rights in the International Public Sphere, xxi. 87. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “The Plight,” 11. 88. Paul Farmer, AIDS and Accusation, 218. What is even more paradoxical about the U.S. discrimination of “diseased” Haitian bodies was that in the 1970s Haitian blood was regularly sold on the U.S. market. Noam Chomsky explains, “Precisely such a commerce was assured by the Hemo-Caribbean and Co., financed with U.S. and international capital and organized by cronies of the dictator-president François Duvalier. North American hemophiliacs, who needed factor VIII, a coagulant then distilled from the plasma of thousands of donors, were for years the indirect beneficiaries of the trade.” Chomsky quotes a journalist’s 1972 account of the trade: “The donors receive $3 for a liter of plasma. If they have a series of tetanus shots, the plasma is more valuable. . . . They then receive $5 a liter. Some sell their plasma once a week and earn $150 to $250 a year.” See Chomsky, “Introduction,” The Uses of Haiti, 49. 89. According to Paraison, the first wave of Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic took place in 1916 to work in “public consruction undertaken by the U.S. occupation troops, and others worked in the sugar industry, whose primary capital came from the U.S.”(24). See also Martínez’s discussion of the U.S. occupation and dispossession of thousands of Haitian smallholders off their land (Peripheral Migrants, 57–58). 90. Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 29. 91. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 3. 92. Ibid., preface. 93. Ibid. For further analysis of Anzaldúa’s border theory and critique of her formulation of indigeneity, see Michaelsen and Johnson, “Border Secrets: An Introduction.” 94. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 195. 95. Ibid., 21.

notes / 273 96. Ibid., 27. 97. Ibid., 35. 98. Sagas, “A Case of Mistaken Identity: Antihatianismo in Dominican Culture,” 6. Sagas explains that Dominicans commonly refer to the darker-skinned segment of the population as “indios.” Pointing out that this erasure of the African segment of society was part of Dominican national policy, he states: “the word ‘indio’ is commonly used to describe the great majority of Dominican mulattoes. The Dominican government uses indio as a skin color descriptor in the national identity card that every adult Dominican must have. That way, indio is no longer a slang term, but an official racial category, accepted and used by the Dominican government for identification and classification purposes. Most Dominicans fall within the indio category. Those with a darker skin tone are labeled moreno, but actually very few Dominicans are labeled black, due to the term’s pejorative connotations” (Sagas, 6). See also Torres-Saillant’s essay, “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity.” 99. Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development, 282. 100. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 89. 101. Benítez-Rojo, The Repeating Island, 5. 102. McClintock, Imperial Leather, 14. See also Ray’s En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives. Ray interrogates the ways in which certain constructions of “woman” have been used in colonial British, nationalist, and postcolonial narratives to construct the Indian nation. She also critiques current debates around nationalism, pointing out the failure of many male theorists to interrogate the connection between nation and gender: “In more contemporary inventions, imaginations, and narrations of nations, one can clearly trace an itinerary of forgetting, when in the interest of producing and maintaining a paternal/fraternal extended community, most male theorists fail to critique nationalism’s repressive and homogenizing relationship to gender.” Ray reminds us that “every aspect of our sociopolitical reality is gendered, and the presumption of a gender-neutral methodology perpetuates the fiction of a transgendered universality that is nothing but a euphemism for a universal masculinity” (4). 103. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 7. 104. Ibid., 8. 105. Ibid., 9. 106. Ibid., 11. 107. Ibid., 12. 108. Ibid., 217. 109. Ibid., 17. 110. Ibid., 18. 111. Ibid., 29. 112. Ibid., 35. 113. Quoting from Martin F. Murphy’s unpublished manuscript, Preguicio AntiHaitiano y la Formación de la Identidad Nacional Dominicana (1986), Robert Lawless explains that, “as if personifying the antiblack myth of Dominicans, ‘Trujillo used cosmetics to disguise the phenotypical features that he inherited from his Haitian grandmother’” (Lawless, Haiti’s Bad Press,139). 114. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 103.

274 / notes 115. Ibid., 104. 116. Ibid., 32. 117. Ibid., 19. 118. Ibid., 36. 119. Houlberg, “Magique Marasa,” 268. 120. Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness,” 43–44. 121. Marilyn Houlberg explains the significance of midwives in Haitian culture: “The midwife or sajfanm (wise woman) plays a critical role in the interpretation of the birth. She is the one who notes all of the important signs of the delivery and passes this information on to the parents. . . . Since few but the Haitian elite can afford to have their babies in clinics, most Haitian women use the services of the sajfanm” (270). 122. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 21. 123. Ibid., 19. 124. Ibid., 69. 125. Ibid., 1. 126. Ibid., 47. 127. Ibid., 2. 128. Ibid., 62. 129. Father Edwin Paraison defines “Kongos” as such in his testimony given at the U.S. Congressional Hearings on Haitians in the Dominican Republic (28). 130. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 61. 131. Ibid., 5, emphasis added. 132. Ibid., 63. 133. Ibid., 59. 134. Ibid., 39. 135. Ibid., 63. 136. Ibid., 66. 137. Anzaldua, Borderlands, 91. 138. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault explains that “the body is [. . .] directly involved in a political field; power relations have an immediate hold upon it; they invest it, mark it, train it, torture it, force it to carry out tasks, to perform ceremonies, to emit signs” (25). 139. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 1. 140. Ibid., 5. 141. For example, Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonial begins, “My name is Rigoberta Menchú. I am twenty three years old. This is my testimony.” I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala, ed. Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, trans. Ann Wright (New York: Verso, 1984), 1. 142. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 126. 143. Ibid., 140. 144. Ibid., 157. 145. Ibid., 193. 146. Turits, Foundations of Despotism, 165. 147. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 194. 148. Ibid., 199. 149. Ibid., 263. 150. Ibid., 176. 151. The Dominican intellectual and contemporary of Trujillo, Manuel A. Peña

notes / 275 Batlle, expresses the sentiment of Haitians as “invaders”: “There is no feeling of humanity, nor political reason, nor any circumstantial convenience that can force us to look indifferently at the Haitian penetration. [Talking about the typical Haitian immigrant] That type is frankly undesirable. Of pure African race, he cannot represent for us any ethnic incentive. Not well nourished and worse dressed, he is weak, though very prolific due to his low living conditions. For that same reason, the Haitian that enters [our country] lives afflicted by numerous and capital vices and is necessarily affected by diseases and physiological deficiencies which are endemic at the lowest levels of that society.” Manuel Peña Batlle, quoted in Sagas, “A Case of Mistaken Identity,” 3. The bracketed remarks are Sagas’s. 152. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 200. 153. Ibid., 202, emphasis added. 154. Ibid., 205. 155. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 81. 156. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 206. 157. Ibid., 205. 158. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 27. 159. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 206. 160. Ibid., 207. Here, the Marasa doubling motif can be seen in terms of the victims of the massacre. In the clinic, Amabelle and the amputee become twins for a moment in Amabelle’s mind. 161. Ibid., 210. 162. Ibid., 209. 163. Ibid., 217. 164. Ibid., 209. 165. Ibid., 213–214. 166. Ibid., 207. 167. Ibid., 236. 168. Ibid., 234. 169. Ibid., 246. 170. Ibid., 273, emphasis added. 171. Ibid., 266. 172. Ibid., 260. 173. Ibid., 260–261. 174. Ibid., 261. 175. Ibid., 36, emphasis added. Danticat avoids portraying Dominicans as inherently fascistic by illustrating that nationalism itself, whether Dominican or Haitian, can be detrimental. Man Rapadou, Yves’s mother, confesses to Amabelle that years earlier she had poisoned her own husband for the love of her country. She argues, “I could not let him trade us all, sell us to the Yanquis” (277). And Haitians are also just as capable of romanticizing their own nation as when one survivor expresses nostalgia for past Haitian revolutionary leaders: “When Dessalines, Touissant, Henry, when those men walked the earth, we were a strong nation” (212). 176. Ibid., 227. 177. Ibid., 229. 178. Ibid., 243. 179. Ibid., 281.

276 / notes 180. Ibid., 213. 181. Ibid., 292. 182. Ibid., 294. 183. Ibid., 299. 184. Ibid., 310. 185. Ibid., 203. 186. Ibid., 308. 187. Ibid., 305. 188. Anzaldúa, Borderlands, 13. 189. Danticat, The Farming of Bones, 312.

4 / Corporate Containment: Refugee Seafarers on the Seas of Transnational Labor 1. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 266. 2. Under the flag of convenience system (also known as open registry), shipowners from one country can register their ships under the flag of another country whose regulations are less restrictive and thus more financially advantageous for shipowners. 3. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 267. 4. Compared with asylum applicants from El Salvador and Guatemala, a larger number of Nicaraguan applicants were granted asylum in the United States because they were seen to be fleeing communism, while the United states supported the Salvadoran and Guatemalan regimes. Esteban, of course, does not adhere to the “typical” Nicaraguan asylum applicant. 5. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 267. 6. Ana Patricia Rodríguez points out that “throughout the 1980s, most Central Americans were denied legal political asylum. Although the United States led a decade-long economic blockade and ‘contra-revolutionary’ war in Nicaragua and granted Nicaraguan immigrants political asylum from the Marxist Sandinista government, Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans in flight from right-wing military dictatorships and war conditions funded by the United States were not granted political refugee status. The 1980 Refugee Act, which established political refugee and asylum classifications in the United States, all but rejected most Central American applicants” (“Refugees of the South: Central Americans in the U.S. Latino Imaginary,” 388). It is also important to note that during the 1980s “refugee-producing nations also became refugee receiving nations” with the Sandinista government offering the most liberal refugee policy (María Cristina García, Seeking Refuge, 39–40). 7. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 60, emphasis added. 8. An interesting link between human rights and vessels on the high seas was the 2001 case of a Norwegian container ship on its way to Singapore, which rescued 433 Iraqi, Afghan, and Pakistani asylum seekers on a sinking fishing boat in the Indian Ocean. The ship encountered great difficulty in finding a nation that would allow the asylum seekers into their country. See Cecilia Bailliet, “The Tampa Case and its Impact on Burden Sharing at Sea.” 9. UN General Assemby, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 160. 10. Weis, “The Hague Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen,” 337. At the time, there were an estimated 8,000 refugees sailing the high seas (342). 11. Ibid., 337.

notes / 277 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 341. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 336. 17. Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 327. 18. Ibid.; Strange, “Who Runs World Shipping?” 354–355. 19. Cafruny, “The Political Economy of International Shipping,” 80. 20. By 1974, 26 percent of ships were registered under flags of convenience. See Strange, “Who Runs World Shipping?” 355. 21. DeSombre, Flagging Standards, 71. 22. Ibid., 75–76. 23. Osieke, “Flags of Convenience Vessels: Recent Developments,” 604. 24. Palen, The Offshore World, 52. 25. DeSombre, Flagging Standards, 73. 26. For an extensive discussion of the history of Panama’s registry, see Rodney P. Carlisle’s Sovereignty for Sale. 27. Wendy Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” paragraph 2. 28. Sekula, “Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea,” 28. Sekula writes about an exhibit that traveled on board a cargo ship Global Mariner that circled the globe in protest of flag of convenience working conditions and “the hidden social costs and probable consequences of corporate globalization” (28). 29. Osieke, “Flags of Convenience Vessels,” 604. 30. Ibid., 604–605. 31. Sampson and Schroeder, “In the Wake of the Wave,” explain that the largest number of seafarers come from India, China, the Philippines, and Eastern Europe. Filipinos make up the largest group (63). Meanwhile, Greece, Japan, Norway, and the United States rank among the countries with the highest percentage of ownership (64). 32. Ibid., 62. 33. Ibid., 63. 34. Strange, “Who Runs World Shipping?” 356. Linebaugh and Rediker explain, the “motely crew” characterized the earliest of shipping enterprises: “When we say the crew was motley, we mean that it was multiethnic. This was . . . characteristic of the recruitment of ships’ crews during and after the expansion of the maritime state under Cromwell” (213). They note that the diversity of ship members was initially intended to “defeat” or subjugate by severing members of their linguistic and ethnic ties and therefore, of the possibility of banding together. However, they argue that “defeat was transformed into strength by agency . . . identity was formed from the various ethnicities and cultures” (213). 35. DeSombre, Flagging Standards, 3. 36. Osieke, “Flags of Convenience Vessels,” 615. 37. It should be noted that cruise ships, which are so vital to the tourist industry in the Caribbean, have also come under scrutiny for unfair labor practices. Like other flag of convenience ships, the majority of cruise ships have First World owners, but are registered elsewhere to avoid the stricter regulatory standards of first world nations.

278 / notes The Bahamas registers the largest number of cruise ships in the world and has been criticized for not safeguarding workers’ rights. DeSombre, Flagging Standards, 48. 38. Carlisle, “The ‘American Century’ Implemented,” 176. 39. Ibid., 175. 40. Ibid., 177. 41. Ibid., 178 42. Weiner, “Ex-Leader Stole $100 Million from Liberia, Records Show.” 43. Carlisle, “The ‘American Century’ Implemented,” 179. 44. Ibid., 180. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 182, 183. In fact, Standard Oil “expected . . . to participate in the ownership of the company that would provide ship registry service to the Liberian government.” 47. Quoted in Carlisle, “The ‘American Century’ Implemented,” 181. 48. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 39. 49. Matilda Lee, “Flags of Convenience,” 49. 50. Weiner, “Ex-Leader Stole $100 Million from Liberia, Records Show.” 51. The first company, International Registries Incorporated, operated out of Reston, Virginia. In 2000, a Delaware-based company, Liberia Shipping and Corporate Registry, took over operations of the registry. 52. French, “Liberia War: Nation Adrift.” 53. Quoted in Osieke, “Flags of Convenience Vessels: Recent Developments,” 606. See Osieke for an extensive examination of other approaches to the subject including the Convention on the High Seas (1958), a report published by the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD 1977),and the 1977 UN Conference on the Law of the Sea. 54. Halifax, Canada, is a common place where sailors desert their ships in search of asylum because Canada’s refugee laws are more welcoming than elsewhere. See Susan Bourette and Mark MacKinnon, “More Russian Fishermen Jump Ship.” 55. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 195. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 196. 58. Ibid., 227. 59. Ibid., 228. 60. Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 8. 61. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 12. 62. Ibid., 13. However, as Elizabeth DeLoughrey writes, Gilroy’s history elides the experiences of women in migration. See Deloughrey, “Gendering the Voyage.” 63. Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra, 333. 64. Gruesz, “Utopía Latina,” 74. 65. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 189. 66. Walker, Nicaragua, 91–92. 67. Ibid., 55. 68. Ibid., 55–57. See also María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas in the Age of Development, 109–147, for a discussion of the economic policies, including agricultural reforms, of the Sandinista government. 69. Walker, Nicaragua, 97. 70. García, Seeking Refuge, 20.

notes / 279 71. Walker, Nicaragua, ix. 72. Ibid., 68–69. 73. Ana Patricia Rodríguez locates the novel within the genre of testimonial novels coming out of Central America (404). For another discussion of the role of testimonio and testimonial literature in Central American nation-building, see Linda Craft, Novels of Testimony and Resistance From Central America. 74. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 383. 75. Ibid., 384. 76. In his acknowledgments, Goldman also cites Paul K. Chapman’s Trouble on Board: The Plight of International Seafarers as a source for the novel. 77. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 7. 78. Ibid., 28. 79. Ibid., 38. 80. Ibid., 33. 81. Ibid., 25–26. 82. Ibid., 26. 83. Ibid., 45. 84. Beverley, Testimonio, x. 85. Zimmerman, “Testimonio in Guatemala,” 101. 86. Beverley and Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, 185–186. 87. Zimmerman, “Testimonio in Guatemala,” 105. 88. Ibid., 106. See also Beverley and Zimmerman’s discussion of Omar Cabezas’s narrative of the mountain (the Spanish title of his testimonio is La montaña) as the space where “the process of birth/maturation to a new collective national and personal identity” occurs (186). 89. Zimmerman, “Testimonio in Guatemala,” 107. 90. Beverley and Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, 186. 91. Specifically, Esteban was a soldier in a BLI, Irregular Warfare Battalion (Batallón de Lucha Irregular). These battalions were known for their counterinsurgency tactics. 92. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 79. 93. Ibid., 40. 94. Ibid., 207. 95. Ibid., 208. 96. Ibid., 204. 97. Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas in the Age of Development, 78–80. 98. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 169. 99. Ibid., 203. 100. Ibid., 80. 101. Ibid., 80–81. 102. Ibid., 65–67. 103. Ibid., 49. 104. Ibid., 50. 105. Ibid., 49.

280 / notes 106. Ibid., 50. 107. Ibid., 36–37. 108. Ibid., 50. 109. Ibid., 81. 110. Ibid., 172. Beverley and Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, note the strong tradition of poetry in Nicaraguan literature that serves as a precursor to Sandinista testimonio (74–78). 111. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 173. 112. Ibid., 188. 113. Ibid., 38. 114. Ibid., 17. 115. Ibid., 195. 116. Beverley and Zimmerman, Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions, 201. 117. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 193–194. 118. Ibid., 162–163. 119. Ibid., 195. 120. Ibid., 189. 121. Ibid., 196. 122. Ibid., 193. 123. Ibid., 211. 124. Ibid., 210. 125. Ibid., 212. 126. Ibid., 212–213. 127. Ibid., 214. 128. Ibid., 211. 129. Ibid., 211. 130. Ibid., 210. 131. Ibid., 212. 132. Ibid., 214. 133. Ibid., 217. 134. Ibid., 270–271. 135. Ibid., 361–362. 136. Ibid., 363, emphasis added. 137. Ibid., 322–323. 138. Ibid., 330. 139. Ibid., 59. But his viewpoint is of a previous era in shipping as the cook tells him, “Corner cutting everywhere, the profits aren’t the same, and you don’t even expect to know your ship owner’s name anymore . . . owners can get away with a lot now.” 140. Ibid. 141. Ibid., 120–121. 142. Ibid., 369. 143. Ibid., 381. 144. Ibid., 138. 145. Robbins, “Introduction Part I: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanisms,” 1. 146. Ibid. 147. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 150–152.

notes / 281 148. Ibid., 143 149. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions, 11. 150. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 150. 151. Ibid., 152. 152. Ibid., 44. 153. Ibid., 154–155. 154. Ibid., 371. 155. Ibid., 339–340; emphasis added. 156. García, Seeking Refuge, 166. 157. Goldman, The Ordinary Seaman, 381. 158. Ibid., 379. 159. This scene also recalls Esteban’s remarks about the use of poetry to indoctrinate soldiers in revolutionary ideals (172). 160. Ibid., 242–243.

5 / Crossing the Threshold of Asylum: Dominican and Cuban (Post)Refugee Narratives 1. Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 393. 2. Ibid., 360. 3. While Dominican migration to the United States began as early as the 1920s, the current massive migration began in the early 1960s and peaked in the 1990s. Castro and Boswell note that between 1988 and 1998, 401,646 Dominicans were admitted to the United States. They state that Dominican migration “does not fit easily into convenient narratives of the right or the left. Unlike Cuba, the Dominican Republic has a free-market economy, representative government, and, at least in recent years, increasingly fair elections. Unlike Haiti, the country has not suffered under brutal military rule in recent years” (“The Dominican Diaspora Revisited,” 2). While much of Dominican migration “occurs through safe, normal, legal channels” there is also “a large clandestine movement of Dominican boat people from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico” (1). 4. See William Luis, “A Search For Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”; Lucía M. Suárez, “Julia Alvarez and the Anxiety of Latina Representation”; Ricardo Castells, “The Silence of Exile in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents”; and Jennifer Bess, “Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.” For a discussion of Alvarez as a migrant writer, see Mardorossian, Reclaiming Difference. See also Kelli Lyon Johnson, Julia Alvarez. 5. Alvarez, Something to Declare, 14. 6. Ibid., 19. 7. Alvarez, ¡Yo! 29. 8. Ibid., 32. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid., 34. 11. Wright, “Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees,” 58–60. See also Malkki, Purity and Exile, 11. 12. Alvarez, ¡Yo!, 33. 13. Ibid., 31. 14. Ibid., 22.

282 / notes 15. Ibid., 24. 16. Ibid., 35. 17. Ibid., 306–307. 18. Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, 198. 19. Ibid., 147. 20. Alvarez, ¡Yo! 293. 21. Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 201–202. 22. Derrida, Of Hospitality, 29. 23. Ibid., 25. 24. Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 203. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 201. 27. Ibid., 202. 28. Ibid., 204. 29. The subsumption of maids’ narratives within that of the host/employer is described in ¡Yo! when, years after the García family has settled in New York, Sarita, the daughter of the family’s “imported” maid, Primativa, comes to live with her mother in the García’s home. Sarita’s and Primitiva’s agency is displaced from the familial narrative because when Primitiva returns to the Dominican Republic and reveals that her daughter’s father was her employer, part of the de la Torre clan (Mami’s family), she is not acknowledged and Primitiva is shunned by the family for whom she worked most of her life. Thus, while she is biologically linked to the de la Torres, Sarita remains outside the boundaries of the family. Nevertheless, Sarita’s very presence threatens to disturb the boundaries between employer and employee, social classes, host, and stranger. The de la Torres’s denial of Sarita’s paternity only serves to continue her heritage of displacement as she had previously learned that her mother was also illegitimate; her grandmother conceived her with the landowner upon whose land she squatted. Without the recognition of paternal heritage and with the death of her mother, Sarita has no ties to her native land, which makes her claim to that space nearly impossible. 30. Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, 128–129. 31. Alvarez, García Girls, 218. 32. I am using the term as it is spelled in the novel. 33. Ibid., 218. 34. Other maids at the family’s Dominican compound are portrayed through their racialized physical traits. One maid, Nivea, is described by the girls’ mother as being “black, black” and was named for a “face cream her mother used to rub on her, hoping the milky white applications would lighten her baby’s black skin” (260). One maid in particular, Pila, seems to embody an amalgam of “difference” for the Garcías through her vodou practice and her skin-tone. Yoyo describes Pila: “She had splashes of pinkish white all up and down her dark brown arms and legs. The face itself had been spared: it was uniformly brown, the brown skin so smooth that it looked as if it’d been ironed with a hot iron. . . . She was Haitian, though obviously only half . . . She was a curiosity” (280). When she is discovered to have stolen from the family, Mami says, “Pity for her: . . . she won’t get far with that skin” (279). 35. Ibid., 220–223. 36. Ibid., 223–224. In her reading of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents

notes / 283 through the Prospero/Miranda dynamic of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Jennifer Bess asserts that Chucha’s voodoo practices can be seen as a moment where Chucha “enjoys the magic power[s] of Prospero” (98), despite her subjugated role in the García household. I would argue, however, that because Chucha remains exoticized, her powers would be more appropriately aligned with those of Sycorax, the outcast “witch” of Shakespeare’s play, who is ultimately effaced. 37. Alvarez, ¡Yo! 298–299. 38. Ibid., 306–307. 39. Alvarez, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 309; my emphasis. 40. Ibid., 216. 41. Elsewhere, I have explored the theme of familial fracturing in Cristina García’s 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban. Shemak, “A Wounded Discourse.” 42. Alvarez-Borland, Cuban-American Literature of Exile, 4–5. 43. Ibid., 6. 44. This was established in 1995 following a period of economic crisis in Cuba when thousands of Cuban attempted to make it to the United States on balsas (rafts). An agreement between the Clinton administration and the Cuban government, the policy allows that Cubans who make it to U.S. shores are allowed to stay, while those who are intercepted at sea are returned to Cuba or sent to a third country. As a way of regularizing migration, the United States agreed to grant 20,000 visas annually to Cubans. It was an amendment of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. While the interception of Cubans at sea places them on par with Haitians who are interdicted, for several years a Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue actively worked to save Cuban boat refugees by flying over the seas searching for and rescuing refugees on the seas. 45. Freedom flights were chartered flights that took place daily between Cuba and the United States between 1965 and 1973. They were the result of an agreement between the United States and Cuba and followed a period of cessation of air travel between the two countries after the 1963 Bay of Pigs invasion. See García, Havana USA, 35–36. 46. “Your Opportunity to Help Worthy Cubans Help Themselves,” www.latinamericanstudies.org. See also the digital Cuban Refugee Center Records, Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami. http://merrick.library.miami.edu/cubanHeritage/ chc0218/ 47. “Your Opportunity to Help Worthy Cubans Help Themselves.” 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. “Resettlement Re-cap (August 1962),” www.latinamericanstudies.org. 51. Loescher, Calculated Kindness, 63. 52. Over 100 exiles died in the Bay of Pigs invasion while nearly 1,200 were captured by Castro’s army. Exiles received funding from the CIA until May 1963. See ibid., 64–65. 53. Many other Cuban American narratives focus on solely or in part on boat migration including Achy Obejas’s “We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?” (1994), which takes place in an INS processing center after the protagonist and her parents were rescued from their boat. See also J. Joaquín Fraxedas’s The Lonely Crossing of Juan Cabrera (1993), Virgil Suárez’s The Cutter, Margarita Engle’s Skywriting (1996), and Josefina Leyva’s The Freedom Rafters (1993). 54. Lamazares, The Sugar Island, 3.

284 / notes 55. Marc Zimmerman, “Testimonio in Guatemala: Payeras, Rigoberta, and Beyond,” 105–106, discusses the characteristic traits of Guatemalan guerrilla testimonios as “the formation and full emergence of revolutionary commitment under the most grueling circumstances,” and “[m]atters are spatial, events tend to be anecdotes that better help define the space, the jungle, and the actual or potential actors. Thus, in human terms, the first question is apprenticeship in the jungle.”. 56. Lamazares, The Sugar Island, 3. 57. Ibid., 4. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 6. 60. Ibid., 10. 61. Ibid., 145. 62. Ibid., 147. 63. Ibid., 152. 64. Ibid., 153. 65. Ibid., 157. 66. Ibid., 159. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 159–160. 69. Ibid., 160. 70. Ibid., 161. 71. Ibid., 166. 72. Ibid., 176. 73. Ibid., 177. 74. Sadowski-Smith, “‘A Homecoming Without a Home,’” 278. 75. Lamazares, The Sugar Island, 182. 76. Ibid., 197–198. 77. Ibid., 204. 78. Quoted in Loescher, Calculated Kindness, 184. 79. García, Havana USA, 229, n. 88. 80. Ibid., 69. 81. Portes and Rumbaut, Immigrant America, 153–154. 82. Portes and Stepick, City on the Edge, 29. 83. Ibid., 31. 84. Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality, 18. 85. Milanés, Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles, 22. 86. Ibid., 19. 87. Ibid., 14. 88. Ibid., 15–16. 89. Ibid., 27. 90. Ibid., 25. 91. Ibid., 43. 92. Ibid., 102. 93. Ibid., 100. 94. Ibid., 101. 95. Ibid., 104. 96. Ibid., 105.

notes / 285 97. Ibid., 103. 98. Ibid., 88. 99. Ibid., 92. 100. Ibid., 93. 101. Ibid., 99. 102. See Derrida, Of Hospitality, 27–29.

Epilogue: Diverted Testimonies: New World Refugees in the Twenty-first Century 1. Bruno Waterfield, “Haiti Earthquake: U.S. Ships Blockade Coast to Thwart Exodus to America.” 2. Spencer S. Hsu, “Officials Try to Prevent Haitian Earthquake Refugees From Coming to U.S.” 3. David Brooks, “The Underlying Tragedy,” my emphasis. 4. Mark Hetfield and Charles Kuck, “Get Rid of the ‘Shout Test.’” 5. Bernstein, “Rushed From Haiti, Then Jailed for Lacking Visas.” 6. Daniel Shoer Roth, “Tension Grows in the Border with Dominican Republic as Haitians Try to Escape.” 7. Edwidge Danticat, “A Little While.” 8. “Ask the Author Live: Edwidge Danticat.” 9. U.S. Congressional Hearings, “Detention and Removal: Immigration Detainee Medical Care,” 45. 10. Ibid., 4. 11. H.R.1268 Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act for Defense, the Global War on Terror, and Tsunami Relief, 2005. DIVISION B—REAL ID ACT OF 2005, my emphasis. 12. Ibid., my emphasis. 13. Many people who once would have been considered refugees without doubt are now seen as terrorists for having contributed money to organizations deemed “terrorist”—even if under duress (i.e., paying a ransom)—or participating in revolutionary movements, or having been unwilling child soldiers. 14. Barbara McMahon, “Australia and US to Swap Refugees.” 15. The United States has granted a relatively small number of Iraqis asylum. See UNHCR, “Statistics on Displaced Iraqis around the World.” 1 April 2007. 16. Seeking Refuge, 167. 17. Derrida, Paper Machine, 132.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 2002. ———. “We Refugees.” Translated by Michael Rocke. Symposium 49, no. 1 (1995): 114–19. Alvarez, Julia. How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Plume, 1992. ———. Something To Declare. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 1998. ———. ¡Yo! New York: Plume, 1997. Alvarez-Borland, Isabel. Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ———. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 3–63. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Arias, Arturo, ed. The Rigoberta Menchú Controversy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Arthur, Charles, and Michael Dash. Editors. Libète: A Haiti Anthology. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, Inc. 1999. Bailliet, Cecilia. “The Tampa Case and its Impact on Burden Sharing at Sea.” Human Rights Quarterly 25 (2003): 741–774.

288 / bibliography Bartlett, Sandra. “Proud to Be an American.” Public Affairs. www.uscg.mil. Batalova, Jeanne. “Spotlight on Refugees and Asylees in the United States,” Migration Policy Institute, http://www.migrationinformation.org/USFocus/ display.cfm?ID=415#3 (accessed May 2010). Baucom, Ian. Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Behdad, Ali. A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Benhabib, Seyla. The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Translated by James E. Maraniss. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992. Bermann, Sandra. “Introduction.” Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood, 1–10. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. Bernstein, Nina. “Rushed From Haiti, Then Jailed for Lacking Visas.” The New York Times, March 31, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/01/ us/01detain.html. Bess, Jennifer. “Imploding the Miranda Complex in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” College Literature 34, no. 1 (2007): 78–105. Beverley, John. Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. ———. “The Margin at the Center.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg Gugelberger, 23–41. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Beverley, John, and Marc Zimmerman. Literature and Politics in the Central American Revolutions. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. ”DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation.” In Nation and Narration, edited by Homi K. Bhabha, 291–322. New York: Routledge, 1990. Bitter Cane. DVD. Directed by Jacques Arcelin. New York: Haiti Films, 1983. Bourette, Susan, and Mark MacKinnon. “More Russian Fishermen Jump Ship.” The Globe and Mail, August 19, 2000, A3. Brathwaite, Kamau. “Caliban.” The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy, 191–195. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. ConVERSations with Nathanial Mackey. New York: We Press, 1999. ———. DreamStories. New York: Longman, 1994. ———. DS (2): dreamstories 2. New York: New Directions, 2007. Braziel, Jana Evans. “Haiti, Guantánamo, and the ‘One Indispensable Nation’: U.S. Imperialism, ‘Apparent States,’ and Postcolonial Problematics of Sovereignty.” Cultural Critique 64 (Fall 2006): 127–160.

bibliography / 289 Brooks, David. “The Underlying Tragedy.” The New York Times, January 14, 2010, Sec. A. Brown, Stewart. “Introduction.” In The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, 7–12. Seren: Poetry Wales Press Ltd., 1995. Brown, Wendy. “Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy.” Theory & Event 7, no.1 (2003). http://muse.jhu.edu/ Bush, George W. State of the Union Speech. January 20, 2004. http://www. gpoaccess.gov/sou/index.html Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. New York: Seagull Books, 2007. Cafruny, Alan W. “The Political Economy of International Shipping: Europe Versus America.” International Organization 39, no. 1 (Winter 1985): 79–119. Carlisle, Rodney. “The ‘American Century’ Implemented: Stettinius and the Liberian Flag of Convenience.” The Business History Review 54, no. 2 (Summer 1980): 175–191. ———. Sovereignty for Sale: The Origins and Evolution of the Panamanian and Liberian Flags of Convenience. Annapolis, MD: United States Naval Institute, 1981. Carr, Robert. “Crossing the First World/Third World Divides: Testimonial, Transnational Feminisms, and the Postmodern Condition.” Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, edited by Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan, 153–172. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Castells, Ricardo. “The Silence of Exile in How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Bilingual Review 26 (2001): 34–42. Castro, Max, and Thomas D. Boswell. The Dominican Diaspora Revisited: Dominicans and Dominican-Americans in a New Century. Coral Gables: NorthSouth Center, 2002. Cavanaugh, Joanne. “Sent to Haiti, Kids Now Living in the Streets, Repatriated Children Had Family Here, Report Says.” Miami Herald, May 9, 1995, 1A. Chambers II, John Whiteclay. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Chan, Sucheng. “Politics and the Indochinese Refugee Exodus, 1975–1997.” In Remapping Asian American History, edited by Sucheng Chan, 171–222. Lanham, MD: Rowman Altamira, 2003. ———. “An International Refugee Crisis.” The Vietnamese American 1.5 Generation: Stories of War, Revolution, Flight, and New Beginnings, edited by Sucheng Chan, 78–85. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006. Chapman, Paul K. Trouble on Board: The Plight of International Seafarers. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992. Charles, Carolle. “Political Refugees or Economic Immigrants?: A New “Old Debate” within the Haitian Immigrant Communities but with Constesta-

290 / bibliography tions and Division.” Journal of American Ethnic History 25, nos. 2–3 (Winter-Spring 2006): 190–208. Charles, Jacqueline. “U.S. Won’t Release Detained Haitians.” The Miami Herald, April 24, 2003: 1B. Cheah, Pheng. “Introduction: Part II.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 20–44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. ———. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007. Chierici, Rose-Marie. Demele, “Making It”: Migration and Adaptation Among Haitian Boat People in the United States. New York: AMS Press, 1991. Chomsky, Noam. “Introduction.” The Uses of Haiti. Paul Farmer, 13–44. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994. Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Clark, Vèvè. “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marasa Consciousness.” In Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text, edited by Hortense Spillers, 40–61. New York: Routledge, 1991. Clawson, Victoria, Elizabeth Detweiler, Laura Ho. “Litigating as Law Students: An Inside Look at Haitian Centers Council.” Yale Law Journal 103: 2337–2389. Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, 1–26. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Coast Guard Magazine. Katrina Special Edition. United States Coast Guard. 2005. “Coast Guard Rams Boat Filled with Haitians.” CNN, November 20, 1997. http://www.cnn.com/US/9711/20/coast.guard.hatians/index.html (accessed July 2007). Conway, Frederick J., and Susan Buchanan Stafford. “Haitians.” In Refugees in America in the1990s: A Reference Handbook, edited by David W. Haines, 170–190. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. Corten, André, and Isis Duarte. “Five Hundred Thousand Haitians in the Dominican Republic.” Translated by Consuelo M. Soto and Viviana Fridman. Latin American Perspectives 22, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 94–111. Cosentino, Donald. Divine Revolution: The Art of Edouard Duval- Carrié. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 2004. Craft, Linda. Novels of Testimony and Resistance From Central America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997. Cuban Refugee Center Records. Cuban Heritage Collection, University of Miami. http://merrick.library.miami.edu/cubanHeritage/chc0218/ Cubilié, Anne. Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005.

bibliography / 291 Dalleo, Raphael, and Elena Machado Sáez. The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post Sixties Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Danticat, Edwidge. “A Little While.” The New Yorker. 1 February 2010. http://www. newyorker.com/talk.comment/2010/02/01/100201taco_taco_talk_danticat. ———. “AHA!” In Becoming American: Personal Essays By First Generation Immigrant Women, edited by Meri Nana-Ama Danquah, 39–44. New York: Hyperion, 2000. ———. “Ask the Author Live: Edwidge Danticat.” The New Yorker, 25 January 2010. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/ask/2010/01/questions-for-danticat. html. ———. Brother, I’m Dying. New York: Knopf, 2007. ———. ”Children of the Sea,” Krik? Krak! New York: Vintage, 1996. 3–29. ———. “Introduction.” In The Butterfly’s Way: Voices From the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, edited by Edwidge Danticat, ix-xvii. New York: Soho, 2001. ———. “Not Your Homeland.” The Nation, September 8, 2005. http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20050926&s=danticat. ———. The Farming of Bones. New York: Soho, 1998. Dash, J. Michael. Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. ———. The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998. Dayan, Joan. “A Few Stories About Haiti, or, Stigma Revisited.” Research in African Literatures 35, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 157–172. de los Angeles Torres, Maria. The Lost Apple: Operation Pedro Pan, Cuban Children in the U.S., and the Promise of a Better Future. New York: Beacon Press, 2003. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. “Gendering the Oceanic Voyage: Trespassing the (Black) Atlantic and the Caribbean.” Thamyris: Caribbean Women’s Writing/Imagining Caribbean Space 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1998): 205–231. ———. “Heavy Waters: Waste and Atlantic Modernity.” PMLA 125, no. 3 (May 2010), 703–12. ———. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007. ———. “Routes and Roots: Tidalectics in Caribbean Literature.” In Caribbean Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Annie Paul, 163–175. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2007. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M., Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley. “Introduction.” In Caribbean Literature and the Environment: Between Nature and Culture, edited by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, Renée K. Gosson, and George B. Handley, 70–82. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. “Joseph Nozius

292 / bibliography Dantica.” Reports of Investigations. March 31, 2005. http://www.dhs.gov/ xoig/assets/OIG_foia_dantica.pdf. (accessed October 22, 2007). Derrida, Jacques. “A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text.” Translated by Rachel Bowlby. In Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today, edited by Michael P. Clark, 180–207. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. ———. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998. ———. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. New York: Routledge, 2001. ———. Demeure: Fiction and Testimony. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. “Hostipitality.” Translated by Barry Stocker with Forbes Morlock. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 5, no. 3 (Dec. 2000): 3–18. ———. Of Hospitality. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. ———. Paper Machine. Translated by Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. ———. “The Principle of Hospitality.” Interview with Dominique Dhombres for Le Monde. Dec. 2, 1997. Translated by Ashley Thompson. Parallax 11, no. 1 (2005): 6–9. DeSombre, Elizabeth R. Flagging Standards: Globalization and Environmental, Safety, and Labor Regulations at Sea. Boston: MIT Press, 2006. Dorfman, Ariel. Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey. New York: Penguin, 1998. D’Souza, Dinesh. “Fraudulent Storyteller Still Praised.” The Weekly Standard, 1999. http://www.boundless.org/1999/departments/isms/a0000074.html (accessed Jan. 10, 2008). Dubinsky, Karen. “Babies Without Borders: Rescue, Kidnap, and the Symbolic Child.” Journal of Women’s History 19, no.1 (Spring 2007): 142–150. Dupuy, Alex. “Globalization, the World Bank, and the Haitian Economy.” In Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Teresita Martínez-Vergne, 43–70. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Durst, Ilene. “Lost in Translation: Why Due Process Demands Deference to the Refugee’s Narrative.” Rutgers Law Review. Fall 2000. http://academic.lexisnexis.com. Edmondson, Belinda. Making Men: Gender, Literary Authority, and Women’s Writing in Caribbean Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Edwards, Nadi. “Notes on the Age of Dis: Reading Kingston through Agamben.” Small Axe 25 (Feb. 2008): 1–15. Erard, Michael. “Immigration by Shibboleth.” Legal Affairs. (Nov/Dec 2003) 69–71. http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/November-December-2003/story_ erad_novdec03.msp.

bibliography / 293 Farmer, Paul. AIDS and Accusation: Haiti and the Geography of Blame. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. ———. “Haitian Refugees: Sovereignty or Globalization.” America: The National Catholic Weekly 189, no.7 (Sept. 15, 2003). http://www.americamagazine. org/content/article.cfm?article_id=3159 ———. Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. ———. The Uses of Haiti. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1994. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. “Caliban: Notes Toward a Discussion of Culture in Our America.” In Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker, 3–45. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989. Fischer, Sibylle. “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life.” Small Axe 23 (June 2007): 1–15. Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. “OAS to Investigate Interdiction and Forced Return of Haitian Refugees.” March 25, 2004. http://www.fiacfla.org/ pressreleases.php#12. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison System. New York: Vintage, 1995. Frelick, Bill. “Hardening the Heart: The Global Refugee Problem in the 1990s.” In Refugees in America in the 1990s, edited by David W. Haines, 372–382. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996. ———. “In Country Refugee Processing of Haitians: The Case Against.” Refuge 21, no. 4 (Dec. 2003): 66–72. French, Howard. “Liberia War: Nation Adrift.” The New York Times, May 12, 1996, sec 1. García, María Cristina. Havana USA: Cuban Exiles and Cuban Americans in South Florida, 1959–1994. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. ———. Seeking Refuge: Central American Migration to Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Gavigan, Patrick. Beyond the Bateyes: Haitian Immigrants in the Dominican Republic. National Coalition for Haitian Rights. Executive summary. www. nchr.org. May 1996. Gibney, Matthew J. The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Response to Refugees. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Gilboy, Janet. “Deciding Who Gets In: Decisionmaking By Immigration Inspectors.” Law and Society Review 25, no. 3 (1991): 571–600. Giles, Paul. “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature.” PMLA 118, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 62–77. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard University Press, 1993. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. ———. The Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

294 / bibliography Goldman, Francisco. The Ordinary Seaman. New York: Grove Press, 1997. Good, Carl, and Anne Cubilié. “Introduction: The Future of Testimony.” Discourse 25, no.1/2 (Winter & Spring 2004): 4–18. Grosfoguel, Ramón. “Migration and Geopolitics in the Caribbean: The Cases of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica.” In Free Markets, Open Societies, Closed Borders? Trends in International Migration and ImmigrationPolicy in the Americas, edited by Max J. Castro, 225–246. Coral Gables, FL: North-South Center Press, 1999. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. “Utopía Latina: The Ordinary Seaman in Extraordinary Times.” Modern Fiction Studies 49, no. 1 (2003): 54–83. Gugelberger, Georg. “Introduction: Institutionalization of Transgression: Testimonial Discourse and Beyond.” In The Real Thing: Testimonial and Latin American Discourse, edited by Georg Gugelberger, 1–19. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. “Haitian Migrant Images.” United States Coast Guard. October 20, 2004. http:// www.uscg.mil/hq/g-o/g-opl/AMIO/hapic.htm (accessed January 10, 2006). Handley, George. Postslavery Literature in the Americas: Family Portraits in Black and White. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Harris, Wilson. History, Fable and Myth in the Caribbean and Guianas. Wellesley, MA: Calaloux Pub., 1995. Healy, Lisa Danielle. “Forcing Haitians Home.” The Virginian-Pilot. January 7, 1994. A1. Hetfield, Mark, and Charles Kuck. “Get Rid of the ‘Shout Test.’” The Miami Herald, February 3, 2010. Holman, Philip A. “Refugee Resettlement in the United States.” In Refugees in America in the 1990s: A Reference Handbook, edited by David W. Haines, 3–27. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996. Homans, Margaret. “Adoption Narratives, Trauma, and Origins.” Narrative 14, no.1 (Jan. 2006): 4–26. Houlberg, Marilyn. “Magique Marasa: The Ritual Cosmos of Twins and Other Sacred Children.” In The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, edited by Donald Cosentino, 267–283. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995. Hsu, Spencer S. “Officials Try to Prevent Haitian Earthquake Refugees From Coming to U.S.” The Washington Post, January 19, 2010. Human Rights Watch. World Report 1992. http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/1992/WR92/AMW-06.htm#P439_164427 (accessed July 2009). H-2 Worker. Dir. Stephanie Black. 1990; New York: Docurama, 2008. INS Asylum Program. History of the United States INS Asylum Officer Corps and Sources of Authority for Asylum Adjudication. Sept. 1999. American Immigration Law Center. http://www.ailc.com/services/asylum/history. html.

bibliography / 295 Jackson, Stephanie L., and Joel Engelhardt. “‘I Prefer to Die!’ Haitian Screams.” The Palm Beach Post, May 31, 1992. James, Cynthia. “The Unknown Text.” World Literature Today 68 (Autumn 1994): 758–764. Johnson, Kelli Lyon. Julia Alvarez: Writing a New Place on the Map. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Jones, Bridget. “‘The Unity is Submarine’: Aspects of a Pan-Caribbean Consciousness in the Work of Kamau Brathwaite.” The Art of Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Stewart Brown, 86–100. Brigend, Wales: Seren, 1996. Kadir, Djelal. “Introduction: America and Its Studies.” PMLA 118, no. 1 (2003): 9–24. Kant, Immanuel. Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History. Edited by Pauline Kleingeld. Translated by David L. Colclasure. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Kaplan, Amy. “Homeland Insecurities: Some Reflections on Language and Space.” Radical History Review 85 (Winter 2003): 82–93. ———. “Left Alone With America: The Absence of Empire in the Study of American Culture.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, 3–21. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. ———. “Where is Guantanamo?” American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (Sept. 2005): 831–858. Kaplan, Caren. Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourses of Displacement. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Kenny, B. K. Script for documentary on Haitian Interdiction. Unpublished. Haitian Migration Papers. Washington, DC: U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office. Knudsen, John Chr. “When Trust is on Trial: Negotiating Refugee Narratives.” In Mistrusting Refugees, edited by E. Valentine Daniel and John Chr. Knudsen, 13–25. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Kracauer, Siegfried. “Photography.” Translated by Thomas Y. Levin. Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 421–436. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Kutzinski, Vera. “Borders and Bodies: The United States, America, and the Caribbean.” CR: The New Centennial Review 1, no. 2 (2001): 55–88. Lacey, Marc. “A Rights Advocate’s Work Divides Dominicans.” The New York Times, Sept. 29, 2007. Laguerre, Michel. Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998. Lamazares, Ivonne. The Sugar Island. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Lamming, George. The Pleasures of Exile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991.

296 / bibliography Lawless, Robert. Haiti’s Bad Press: Origins, Development, Consequences. Rochester, VT: Schenkman Books, 1992. Lawyers Committee for Human Rights. Refugee Refoulement: The Forced Return of Haitians under the U.S.-Haitian Interdiction Agreement. New York: Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, March 1990. Lee, Matilda. “Flags of Convenience.” Ecologist 33, no. 5 (June 2003): 48–49. Linebaugh, Peter, and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000. Little, Cheryl, and Charu Newhouse al-Sahli. Haitian Refugees: A People in Search of Hope. Miami: Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, May 1, 2004. Little, Cheryl, and Wendy Young. “Crisis in Haiti: Bush Administration Should Stop Turning Refugees Away.” The Miami Herald, March 9, 2004. Liu, Catherine. “Getting to the Photo Finish: Photography, Autobiography, Modernity.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 519–539. Loescher, Gil and John A. Scanlon. Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America’s Half-Open Door, 1945–Present. New York: The Free Press, 1986. Love, Mary Cusimano. “Broken Promises.” America: The National Catholic Weekly 196, no. 17. http://www.americamagazine.org/content/article. cfm?article_id=5465 Luis, William. Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. ———. “A Search For Identity in Julia Alvarez’s How the García Girls Lost Their Accents.” Callaloo 23, no. 3 (2000): 839–849. Mabe, Chauncey. “The Struggles of Haiti Take Personal Turn in Memoir.” September 30, 2007. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/topic/orl-bkdanticat093007sep30,0,7674626.story (accessed August 2009). Malkki, Liisa H. “National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity among Scholars and Refugees.” Cultural Anthropology 7, no. 1 (Feb. 1992): 24–44. ———. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among the Hutu Refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” In Annual Review of Anthropology 24 (1995): 495–523. ———. “Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization.” In Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 3 (August 1996): 377–404. Mardorossian, Carine M. Reclaiming Difference: Caribbean Women Rewrite Postcolonialism. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005. Margulies, Peter. “Difference and Distrust in Asylum Law: Haitian and Holocaust Refugee Narratives.” 6 St. Thomas Law Review 135–152 (1993). http:// academic.lexisnexis.com. Martí, José. “Our America.” In José Martí Reader: Writings on the Americas, edited by Deborah Shnookla and Mirta Muniz, 111–120. New York: Ocean Press, 1999.

bibliography / 297 Martínez, Samuel. Peripheral Migrants: Haitians and Dominican Republic Sugar Plantations. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. Martínez, Samuel. “From Hidden Hand to Heavy Hand: Sugar, the State, and Migrant Labor in Haiti and the Dominican Republic.” Latin American Research Review 34, no. 1 (1999): 57–84. Martínez-Vergne, Teresita, and Franklin W. Knight. “Introduction.” In Contemporary Caribbean Cultures and Societies in a Global Context, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Teresita Martínez-Vergne, 5–11. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. Masud-Piloto, Felix Roberto. With Open Arms: Cuban Migration to the United States. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988. McKlintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995. McMahon, Barbara. “Australia and US to Swap Refugees.” The Guardian. April 18, 2007. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/apr/19/australia.usa/ (accessed August 2009). Memo. Undated. Haitian Migration Papers. U.S. Coast Guard Historian’s Office, Washington DC. Menchú, Rigoberta. I, Rigoberta Menchú, An Indian Woman in Guatemala. Translated by Ann Wright. Edited by Elizabeth Burgos-Debray. New York: Verso, 1984. Michaelsen, Scott, and David E. Johnson. “Border Secrets: An Introduction.” In Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics, edited by Scott Michaelsen and David E. Johnson, 1–39. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. “Invisible Empire: Visual Culture, Embodied Spectacle, and Abu Ghraib.” In Radical History Review 95 (May 2006): 21–44. Mitchell, Christopher. “U.S. Policy Toward Haitian Boat People: 1972–93.” Annals of the American Academy of Political Science 534 (1994) 69–80. Moreiras, Alberto. “The Aura of Testimonio.” In The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg M. Gugelberger, 192–224. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Murphy, Martin F. Dominican Sugar Plantations: Production and Foreign Labor Integration. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1991. National Coalition for Haitian Refugees and Americas Watch. Half the Story: The Skewed U.S. Monitoring of Repatriated Haitian Refugees. June 30, 1992. http://www.nchr.org/reports/story.pdf 1–15. Navy League of the United States. www.navyleague.org/about_us/index.php (accessed August 9, 2006). Nyers, Peter. Rethinking Refugees Beyond States of Emergency. New York: Routledge, 2005. Nzengou-Tayo, Marie-José. “Kamau Brathwaite and the Haitian Boat People: Dream Haiti or the Nightmare of the Caribbean Intellectual.” In Caribbean

298 / bibliography Culture: Soundings on Kamau Brathwaite, edited by Annie Paul, 176–186. Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2007. Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. ———. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Opitz, Götz-Dietrich. Haitian Refugees Forced to Return: Transnationalism and State Politics, 1991–1994. Lit-Verlag, 2003. Orenstein, Catherine. “Illegal Transnational Labor: Mexicans in California and Haitians in the Dominican Republic.” Journal of International Affairs 48, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 601–625. Osieke, Ebere. “Flags of Convenience Vessels: Recent Developments.” The American Journal of International Law 73, no. 4 (October 1979): 604–627. Over, William. Human Rights in the International Public Sphere: Civic Discourse for the 21st Century. Stamford, CT: Ablex Publishing, 1999. Palen, Ronen. The Offshore World: Sovereign Markets, Virtual Places, and Nomad Millionaires. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Pallis, Mark. “Obligations of States towards Asylum Seekers at Sea: Interactions and Conflicts between Legal Regimes.” International Journal of Refugee Law 14, no. 2/3(2002): 329–364. Paquet, Sandra Pouchet. Caribbean Autobiography: Cultural Identity and SelfRepresentation. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, and Martha Daisy Kelehan. “The ‘Children of the Sea’: Uncovering Images of the Botpippel Experience in Caribbean Art and Literature.” In Displacements and Transformations in Caribbean Cultures, edited by Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, 127–161. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Parikh, Crystal. An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Patrick, Peter L. “Linguistic Human Rights: A Sociolinguistic Introduction.” http://privatewww.essex.ac.uk/~patrickp/lhr/lhrasylum.htm. Patterson, Orlando. “The Emerging West Atlantic System: Migration, Culture, and Underdevelopment in the United States and the Circum-Caribbean Region.” In Population in an Interacting World, edited by William Alonso, 227– 260. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. Payen, Nikòl. “Lavalas: The Flood After the Flood.” Callaloo 25, no.3 (Summer 2002): 759–771. ———. “Something in the Water. . . Reflections of a People’s Journey.” In The Butterfly’s Way, edited by Edwidge Danticat, 66–82. New York: Soho, 2001. Pérez, Lisandro. “The End of Exile? A New Era in U.S. Immigration Policy Toward Cuba.” In Free Markets, Open Societies, Closed Border? Trends in International Migration and Immigration Policy in the Americas, edited by Max J. Castro, 197–211. Miami: North-South Center Press, 1999.

bibliography / 299 Portes, Alejandro, and Rubén G. Rumbaut. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Portes, Alejandro, and Alex Stepick. City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. “President Bush attends Briefing on Comprehensive Immigration Reform.” June 1, 2007. http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/06/20070601–12.html. Ray, Sangeeta. En-Gendering India: Woman and Nation in Colonial and Postcolonial Narratives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. ”The Nation in Performance: Bhabha, Mukherjee and Kureishi.” In Hybridity and Postcolonialism: Twentieth-Century Indian Literature, edited by Monika Fludernik, 219–238. Stauffenburg: Verlag, 1998. Renda, Mary. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 1915–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. “Resettlement Re-cap (August 1962).” Announcement. http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/refugee-center.htm Ricardo, Roger. Guantánamo, the Bay of Discord: The Story of the U.S. Military Base in Cuba. Translated by Mary Todd. Melbourne, Australia: Ocean Press, 1994. Ricouer, Paul. “Imagination, Testimony and Trust: A Dialogue with Paul Ricouer.” In Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, edited by Richard Kearney and Mark Dooley, 12–17. New York: Routledge, 1999. Rigby, Graeme. “Publishing Brathwaite: Adventures in the Video Style.” World Literature Today 68 (Autumn 1994): 708–714. Robbins, Bruce. “Introduction Part 1: Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism.” In Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, edited by Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 1–19. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. Rodríguez, Ana Patricia. “Refugees of the South: Central Americans in the US Latino Imaginary.” American Literature 73, no. 2 (2001): 387–412. Rodríguez Milanés, Cecilia. Marielitos, Balseros and Other Exiles. Brooklyn, NY: Ig Publishing, 2009. Rohlehr, Gordon. “Dream Journeys.” DreamStories. Kamau Brathwaite. New York: Longman, 1994. iii-xvi. Roorda, Eric. The Dictator Next Door: The Good Neighbor Policy and the Trujillo Regime in the Dominican Republic, 1930–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Rosello, Mireille. Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. Roth, Daniel Shoer. “Tension Grows in the Border with the Dominican Republic as Haitians Try to Escape.”Miami Herald, January 16, 2010. http://www. miamiherald.com/2010/01/16/1428997/tension-grows-in-the-border-with. html.

300 / bibliography Sadowski-Smith, Claudia. “‘A Homecoming Without a Home’: Recent U.S. Cuban Writing of Diaspora.” In Cuba: Idea of a Nation Displaced, edited by Andrea O’Reilly Herrera, 267–284. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Sagas, Ernesto. “A Case of Mistaken Identity: Antihatianismo in Dominican Culture.” May 1996. Center for Latin American Studies http://www.latam. ufl.edu/sagas2.htm. Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. The Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas and the Age of Development. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Saldívar, José David. The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Sampson, Helen. “Powerful Unions, Vulnerable Workers: The Representation of Seafarers in the Global Labour Market.” Seafarers International Research Centre. Cardiff University. August 2007. Sampson, Helen, and Torsten Schroeder. “In the Wake of the Wave: Globalization, Networks, and the Experiences of Transmigrant Seafarers in Northern Germany.” Global Networks 6, no. 1 (2006): 61–80. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schrag, Philip G. A Well-Founded Fear: The Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America. New York: Routledge, 2000. Scott, David. “Preface: Soul Captives are Free.” Small Axe 23 (June 2007): v-x. Seeman, Bruce Taylor. “No Exit: Stopping Haiti’s Desperate Flow.” The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, May 10, 1987, sec. A. Sekula, Allan. “Between the Net and the Deep Blue Sea (Rethinking the Traffic in Photographs).” October 102 (Autumn 2002): 3–34. ———. “Reading an Archive: Photography Between Labour and Capital.” In The Photography Reader, edited by Liz Wells, 443–452. New York: Routledge, 2002. ———. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (Winter 1986): 3–64. Sharpe, Jenny. “Is the United States Postcolonial?” In Post-Colonial America, edited by C. Richard King, 103–121. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. ———. “The Middle Passages of Black Migration.” Atlantic Studies 6, no. 1 (April 2009): 97–112. Shemak, April. “A Wounded Discourse: The Poetics of Disease in Cristina García’s Dreaming in Cuban.” Postcolonial Text 2, no. 3 (2006): 1–23. Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. Sommer, Doris. Proceed With Caution When Engaged By Minority Writing in the Americas. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: A History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.

bibliography / 301 ———. “The Rani of Simur.” In Europe and Its Others. Proceedings of the Essex Conference on the Sociology of Literature, vol. 1, edited by Francis Barker et al., 128–151. Colchester: University of Essex Press, 1985. Stalin, Black. “Caribbean Unity.” Roots Rock Soca. 1991,1979 by Rounder Select. Compact Disc. Starrett, Gregory. “Violence and the Rhetoric of Images.” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 3 (August 2003): 398–428. Stepick, Alex. “The Refugees Nobody Wants: Haitians in Miami.” In Miami Now! Immigration, Ethnicity, and Social Change, edited by Guillermo J. Grenier and Alex Stepick III, 57–82. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1992. Stepick, Alex, and Alejandro Portes. “Flight into Despair: A Profile of Recent Haitian Refugees in South Florida.” International Migration Review 20, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 329–350. Stepick, Alex, Carol Dutton Stepick, Emmanuel Eugene, Deborah Teed, and Yves Labissiere. “Shifting Identities and Intergenerational Conflict: Growing Up Haitian in Miami.” In Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America, edited by Rubén G. Rumbaut and Alejandro Portes, 229–266. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Strange, Susan. “Who Runs World Shipping?” International Affairs 52, no. 3 (July 1976): 346–367. Suárez, Lucía M. “Julia Alvarez and the Anxiety of Latina Representation” Meridians 5, no. 1(2004): 117–145. Sutherland, Jonathan. African Americans at War: An Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2004. Swarns, Rachel L. “U.S. May Be Mishandling Asylum Seekers, Panel Says.” New York Times. Feb. 8 2007. Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez. DVD. Directed by Heidi Specogna. Montreal: Atopia, 2006. The Sugar Babies. DVD. Directed by Amy Serrano. New Orleans, LA: Siren Studios, 2007. Thomas, Jr., Vincent C. “Search and Interdict.” Seapower 27, no. 9 (August 1984): 35–43. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. “The Tribulations of Blackness: Stages in Dominican Racial Identity.” Callaloo 23, no. 3 (2000): 1086–1111. ———. “The Trials of Authenticity in Kamau Brathwaite.” World Literature Today 68 (Autumn 1994): 697–707. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon, 1995. Turits, Richard. Foundations of Despotism: Peasants, the Trujillo Regime, and Modernity in Dominican History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002.

302 / bibliography Tyrangiel, Josh. “The Jihadi Next Door?” Time, June 25, 2006. http://jcgi.pathfinder.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1207821,00.html. UN General Assembly, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 28 July 1951, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 189, p. 137, http://www.unhcr.org/ refworld/docid/3be01b964.html (accessed 3 June 2010). UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen, 23 November 1957,  available at: http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/ docid/3ae6b3614.html (accessed June 3, 2010). ———. “Statistics on Displaced Iraqis around the World.” April 1, 2007. http:// www.unhcr.org/461f7cb92.html (accessed August 2009). United States Coast Guard, Public Health and Disease Concerns Related to Coast Guard Operations. Commandant Instruction M6220.9. Washington DC, August 1994. http://isddc.dot.gov/OLPFiles/USCG/006746.pdf (accessed October 20, 2006). United States Coast Guard, Public Affairs Manual. Commandant Instruction M5728.2D. Washington DC, January 2008. http://www.uscg.mil/directives/ cim/5000-5999/CIM_5728_2D.pdf (accessed October 20, 2006). United States Coast Guard. U.S. Coast Guard: America’s Maritime Guardian. January 1, 2002. http://www.uscg.mil/overview/Pub%201/contents.html (accessed October 20, 2006). United States Congressional Hearings. “Detention and Removal: Immigration Detainee Medical Care.” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law. 110th Congress. 1st sess. Washington, DC: GPO, 2007. http:judiciary/house/gov (accessed July 2009). United States Congressional Hearings. “The Plight of Haitian Sugarcane Cutters in the Dominican Republic.” Hearing Before the Subcommittees on Human Rights and International Organizations, and on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs. 102nd Congress. 1st sess. Washington, DC: GPO, 1991. United States Congressional Hearings. Rules of the Committee on International Relations 111th Congress. http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/about.asp?sec=rules (accessed July 2009). Villiers, Janice D. “Closed Borders, Closed Ports: The Plight of Haitians Seeking Political Asylum in the United States.” Brooklyn Law Review 60 (Fall 1994): 841–928. Walcott, Derek. “The Sea is History.” Derek Walcott: Collected Poems: 1948–84. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1987. Waligora-Davis, Nicole A. “The Ghetto: Illness and the Formation of the ‘Suspect’ in American Polity.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 40, no. 2 (2004): 182–203. ———. “Phantom Limbs.” Mississippi Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Fall 2003): 657–674.

bibliography / 303 Walker, Adrian. “Haitian Orphan’s Story Draws No Crowds.” Boston Globe, April 18, 2000: A4. Walker, Thomas W. Nicaragua: Living in the Shadow of the Eagle. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003. Warren, Mame. “Focal Point of the Fleet: U.S. Navy Photographic Activities in World War II.” The Journal of Military History 69 (Oct. 2005): 1045–1080. Waterfield, Bruno. “Haiti Earthquake: U.S. Ships Blockade Coast to Thwart Exodus to America.” www.telegraph.co.uk January 19, 2010. Weiner, Tim. “Ex-Leader Stole $100 Million from Liberia, Records Show.” The New York Times. September 18, 2003. Weis, Peter. “The Hague Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen.” The International and Comparative Law Quarterly 7, no. 2 (April 1958): 334–348. Well-Founded Fear. DVD. Directed by Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini. New York: Docurama/POV. 2001. Winn, Peter. Americas: The Changing Face of Latin America and the Caribbean. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Women’s Commission on Refugee Women and Children. “Women’s Commission Gravely Concerned About the Plight of Haitian Refugees.” Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children. October 31, 2002. http:// www.womenscommission.org/ (accessed January 10, 2006). Wortham, Simon Morgan. Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University. New York: Fordham University Press, 2006. Wright, Terrence. “Moving Images: The Media Representation of Refugees.” Visual Studies 17, no. 1 (2002): 53–66. Young, Wendy A. “Briefing on U.S. Policy Towards Haitian Refugees” Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights. October 1, 2002. http://www.hagcoalition.freehosting.net/custom2.html “Your Opportunity to Help Worthy Cubans Help Themselves.” Announcement flyer. http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/refugee-center.htm Yúdice, George. “Testimonio and Postmodernism.” The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg M. Gugelberger, 42–58. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Zimmerman, Marc. “Testimonio in Guatemala: Payeras, Rigoberta, and Beyond.” In The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America, edited by Georg M. Gugelberger, 101–129. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Zolberg, Aristide R., Astri Suhrke, Sergio Aguayo. Escape From Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Zucker, Norman L., and Naomi Flink Zucker. Desperate Crossings: Seeking Refuge in America. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.

Index

abject, 76–77, 122, 262n148 Agamben, Giorgio, 8–9, 15–16, 30, 254n97. See also homo sacer; state of exception Agreement Relating to Refugee Seamen, 179–181, 187 Alvarez, Julia, 27, 43, 215–216, 223–227, 234, 257n138; How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, 43, 215–216, 219–222, 224, 229, 282nn34,36; Something to Declare, 216; ¡Yo!, 43, 215–219, 223, 230, 282n29 anti-testimonio, 198 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 158–159, 166, 170, 176 Appadurai, Arjun, 15–16 Apter, Emily, 61, 68 archive(s), 29, 90–91, 93; of U.S. Coast Guard photographs, 41, 89, 90, 92–94, 96, 116, 120, 124, 126–127,129, 242, 264n7; U.S. congressional hearings as, 139–140, 150; Derrida on, 93, 140; bodies as, 165, 174 asylum interview, 1–2, 30–35, 48, 52, 59, 65, 134, 226 asylum seeker. See refugee asylum speaker(s)/asylum speaking: agency, 86; considered illegitimate, 31, 237–238; contributes to poetics of hospitality, 16; different contexts of, 40; effectiveness, 248–249; granted legitimacy, 214, 217, 223, 245; Haitians

as, 47–48, 156; in limbo gateway, 19; literary qualities of, 35–36; locations of, 39; mediation of words, 25; photograph as, 94; translation and, 61, 67; truthvalue of, 27–29, 90; within both ethical and juridical realm, 30; within refugee community, 206 audit culture, 139–140 bare life, 8–10, 64, 71, 82, 184, 196 bateyes, 10, 134–135, 144, 179, 268n7, 269n25 Behdad, Ali, 88, 92, 94 Benhabib, Seyla, 16, 253n51 Benítez-Rojo, Antonio, 21–22, 97, 159–160, 225 Beverley, John, 26–27, 149, 151, 172, 197–198, 203, 255n100, 279n88, 280n110 Bhabha, Homi, 20–21 biopolitics, 8, 9, 189 Bitter Cane, 90, 126–130, 133, 268n93 boat refugees: Burmese, 247; Cuban, 231, 247, 283n44; Haitian, 20, 23, 41–43, 46–48, 50, 53, 55, 60, 72, 80, 85–86, 90, 95, 127, 131, 134–135, 201, 247; Sri Lankan, 247; Vietnamese, 50 border control, 13, 242. See also Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS); interdiction; laws of hospitality; U.S. Coast Guard

index / 305 Brathwaite, Kamau, 41, 72, 77, 201, 263n164, 179, 264nn182,184; “Caliban,” 41, 86–87, 264n184; “Dream Haiti,” 41, 47, 77–87 Brother, I’m Dying. See under Danticat, Edwidge Bush, George H.W., 53, 62 Bush, George W., 14, 88, 242, 245, 247, 252n17 Butler, Judith, 36, 38 Cabezas, Omar, Fire from the Mountain: The Making of a Sandinista (La montaña es algo más que una immensa estepa verde), 195, 197–198 “Caliban.” See under Brathwaite, Kamau Central American refugees, 5, 36, 43, 51, 177–178, 194, 206, 246, 248, 276n6 Cheah, Pheng, 132, 186, 188–189, 210 “Children of the Sea.” See under Danticat, Edwidge citizen(ship): Caribbean, 15–16; colonialism and, 9; economic refugees and, 14; errantry and, 19; Haitians in the Dominican Republic and, 134, 138, 145, 150, 164, 169; immigrants as, 213, 216, 245, 247, 264n3; liminal, 20; neoliberalism and,132, 183, 194; refugee testimony and, 17, 32; seafarers as, 178–179, 191. See also limbo citizen(ship) Cold War politics: and contras, 193; Cuban refugees and, 225; U.S. asylum policy and, 10–11, 178, 276n4 colonialism, 9, 15, 38–39, 91, 97, 132, 160, 181 contras/counterrevolutionaries, 192–193, 198 cosmopolitanism, 12, 132, 208–210 creolization, 19, 191, 206 Cuban-Haitian entrant, 51, 232 Cuban refugees: balsero migration, 225, 227, 283n44; Bay of Pigs and, 225, 266n41, 283nn45, 52; Cuban Refugee Center, 225–227; freedom f lights, 225, 231, 283n45; Mariel Boat Lift, 50, 225, 254n89; Mariel refugees, 232–239 Cuban Revolution, 4, 7, 26, 225, 227, 251n13 Cubilié, Anne, 145

Dantica, Joseph, 1–3, 20, 29–30, 94, 244– 245, 252n17. See also under Danticat, Edwidge, Brother, I’m Dying Danticat, Edwidge, 27, 30, 40, 81, 87, 263n155, 275n175; Brother, I’m Dying, 1–3, 36, 244–245, 255n107; “Children of the Sea,” 41, 47, 72–77, 85–86, 120, 129, 229; The Farming of Bones, 42, 134, 157–176, 195, 211 Dash, Michael, 5, 49–50, 63, 98–99, 258n21 Dayan, Joan, 126, 266n51 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 46, 72, 77, 83, 254n85, 263n165, 278n62 Derrida, Jacques: the archive, 93, 140; asylum processes, 12, 55; hospitality, 13, 17, 124, 220, 239, 252n21, 255n107; literature as witness, 255n107; performance of the witness, 32; testimony, 25, 29, 31, 140, 254n97; translation, 33–34; and vocabulary of refugee, 248 diaspora, 4, 22–24, 38, 40, 62, 203, 206, 252n19; dyaspora, 77, 263n155 Dorfman, Ariel, 37 “Dream Haiti.” See under Brathwaite, Kamau Dupuy, Alex, 133 Duval-Carrié, Edouard, 90, 129–130 Duvalier regime,10, 49, 52, 57, 99, 126–127, 136–137, 258nn21, 23, 272n88 economic refugee (labor refugee), 10–12, 22, 42, 192, 194, 204–205 expert witness, 141–143, 245 Farmer, Paul, 49, 111, 122 Farming of Bones, The. See under Danticat, Edwidge flag of convenience (open registry), 10, 14, 23, 177–179, 181–190, 276n2, 277n28; in The Ordinary Seaman, 201, 208. See also Liberian ship registry; Panamanian ship registry Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, 52 Foucault, Michel, 8, 65, 167, 274n138 FSLN (Sandinista National Liberation Front), 193, 197 Gilroy, Paul, 22–23, 83, 96, 190, 278n62 Glissant, Édouard, 18–19, 22, 38, 58, 75, 80, 246, 249, 253n67

306 / index global capitalism. See neoliberalism, neoliberalist practices Goldman, Francisco, The Ordinary Seaman, 27, 43, 177–178, 190–212 “green card” soldier, 247–248 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 190–191 Guantánamo, 41, 53, 59–62, 64–65, 70, 97, 102–103, 111, 125–126, 242, 247, 261nn79, 89, 103; 267n79. See also Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Guatemalan refugees, 10, 28, 51, 206, 248, 276nn4, 6 guerrilla testimonio, 197, 228, 283n55 guest worker, 14 Gugelberger, Georg, 140 H-2 Worker, 154–155, 272n85 Haitian refugees: denial of asylum, 24, 28; Dominican Republic and, 269n24; Haitian earthquake and, 243–244; as labor refugees, 131–157; as liminal citizens, 20; literature and, 47–48, 60–86; Middle Passage and, 9; repatriation, 37, 51, 259n46; testimony and, 55, 57–58, 60; U.S. asylum process and, 41, 46; U.S. Coast Guard photos of, 89–130. See also boat refugees; Brathwaite, Kamau; Danticat, Edwidge; Immigration and Naturalization Service; interdiction; limbo citizen(ship); Payen, Nikòl; photography; refugee; search-andrescue; U.S. Coast Guard; U.S. congressional hearings Haitian sugarcane cutters. See U.S. congressional hearings, The Plight of Haitian Sugarcane Cutters in the Dominican Republic; Danticat, Edwidge, Farming of Bones, The Harris, Wilson, 19–20, 22, 41, 76, 171, 264n184 homo sacer, 8–9, 74. See also Agamben, Giorgio hospice, 16, 60, 63; for Cuban boat refugees, 229; for Haitian earthquake survivors, 241, 242; U.S. Coast Guard discourse of, 41, 93–94, 104–105, 107–109, 119–120, 127 hospitality, 4, 12–13. See also hostility; hospice; laws of hospitality; poetics

of hospitality; politics of hospitality; unconditional hospitality hostility: in belief that refugees are liars, 31; of border control, 42, 94, 110; domestic hospitality as, 220; etymological roots, 17; linguistic, 67; nativism, 238; toward economic refugees, 192, 200, 206; translation and, 61; and treatment of stranger, 12; United States government and, 244 How the García Girls Lost Their Accents. See under Alvarez, Julia human rights: discourse, 17, 18, 25, 27, 35–36, 41–42, 54–60, 139, 142, 151; documents, 46–48, 52, 54–60, 86; “freedom” and, 189; lawyers, 52; Liberian ship registry and, 185–186; and literature, 3; migrant workers and, 188, 190; organizations, 9, 53, 138, 141, 152–157, 245; ships and, 276n8; tied to nation-state, 8; United States and, 140, 145; violations, 11, 132–133, 134, 139 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 24; attitude toward Haitian refugees, 53, 55–59, 91, 99–100, 126, 143; distrust of asylum seeker testimonies, 31; policy of splitting up families in detention facilities, 122; translators and, 61–62, 264n3; treatment of children in detention facilities, 267n79; U.S. Coast Guard interdiction of Haitians and, 48, 52, 94, 101, 103. See also Guantánamo immigration legislation: United States, 7–8 interdiction, U.S. policy of, 23, 41, 45; bars to asylum process, 46, 52–53; criticism of, 54 55; definition, 46–47; history of policy, 51–54; human rights organizations’ evaluation of, 55–60; and laws of hospitality, 48; U.S. Coast Guard, 89, 94–97, 99, 101, 104, 107, 110, 111, 119, 120, 182, 242, 258n21, 259n34, 264nn3, 16, 265n22, 266n48. See also Brathwaite, Kamau, “Dream Haiti”; Payen, Nikòl; U.S. Coast Guard inter-diction, 47, 61, 72, 74, 77, 78, 84, 85 International Labour Organization (ILO), 179, 187

index / 307 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 11, 131, 193–194 Iraqi refugees, 247, 276n8, 285n15 Kant, Immanuel, 12, 13, 16; Benhabib on, 253n51; Derrida on, 13; on ships, 22 Kaplan, Amy, 39, 123, 267–268n85 Katrina refugees, 89, 264n5 Kennebunkport Order, 53. See also interdiction Kracauer, Siegfried, 124 Kristeva, Julia, 76–77, 262n148 Laguerre, Michel, 20, 47, 64 Lamazares, Ivonne, The Sugar Island, 44, 225, 227–232, 234 Lamming, George, 257n2 “Lavalas.” See under Payen, Nikòl laws of hospitality, 13; Dominican, 157; family and, 214; language and, 17, 18, 45, 61; translation and, 60, 63; United States and, 14, 48, 130, 205, 221 Lawyers Committee on Human Rights, 52, 55–57, 141, 144, 152, 259n30, 260n58 Liberian ship registry, 185–187, 206. See also Stettinius, Edward limbo citizen(ship), 20–21; Haitian boat refugees and, 41, 55, 73, 77, 85–87; Haitian cane cutters and, 134; Haitians detained at Guantánamo and, 63, 69; limb/o citizen and, 101, 171, 247; seafarers, 179, 184 limbo gateway (limb/o gateway), 19–20, 41, 48; corporeality of, 20, 76, 167, 171; language reassembly in, 78, 84, 85, 86, 178; midwife figure in, 163–164; translation in, 62; vodou as, 129 Linebaugh, Peter, 181, 190, 277n34 literary studies: and refugee narratives, 38–40, 239–240 Malkki, Liisa, 3, 9, 28, 102, 118, 152, 256n130 Manley, Michael, 155 marasa, 163, 275n160 Marielitos, Balseros, and Other Exiles. See Rodríguez Milanés, Cecilia Martí, José, 36–37, 225 Martínez, Samuel, 136–137, 144, 269n17 McClintock, Anne, 104, 160; “scopic imperialism,” 111

Menchú, Rigoberta, 28, 274n141 Middle Passage, 22–23, 41–43, 46, 70, 75, 77, 79, 81, 86, 160, 176; as limbo gateway, 19; as state of exception, 9 migration in the Americas, 4, 21; Caribbean, 16, 22, 252n19, 257n2; Central American, 51; Cuban, 44, 225–227, 231–235, 246, 283n44; Dominican, 281n3; for economic reasons, 132–134, 158, 194; forced, 19, 24, 40, 248; Haitian, 41, 49, 52, 71, 86, 89, 93, 96, 101, 126, 243, 269n17, 272n89; literature and, 38–39, 46–47, 157–158, 176, 215–216, 224–225, 240; Operation Vigilant Sentry and, 242; of sugarcane workers, 136–138, 151, 157, 176; U.S. Coast Guard and, 89–90, 94–99, 101 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 106–107 Moreiras, Alberto, 26, 27, 140, 143 mothers: and childbirth, 75, 159–161, 175; mother of the nation, 161–163, 176; “mother tongue,” 17, 64; mothers excluded from the nation, 164; refugee mothers, 75–77, 120, 122, 217–219, 227–231 National Coalition for Haitian Refugees and Americas Watch, Half the Story, 54–55, 58 60, 142, 259–260n51 nation-state, 4, 8, 13; asylum processes and, 55; border theory and, 158–159; disintegration of, 15, 133, 183, 188, 189; in relation to refugee testimonial narrative, 25, 27, 28, 36, 134; role in defining political subjectivity, 14, 16, 133. See also citizen(ship); f lag of convenience; hospitality; laws of hospitality; limbo citizen(ship); neoliberalism; politics of hospitality neoliberalism, neoliberalist practices, 10–11, 127, 186, 248; in the Americas, 131–133; and flag of convenience registries, 178; and Haiti, 127, 133; and Nicaragua, 193–194 New World refugee, 4–5, 9, 11, 18–22, 36, 63, 213, 225, 239–247 Nicaraguan refugees, 51, 178, 193, 276n4 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 10, 15, 35, 37, 55, 139, 242

308 / index non-refoulement, 54, 114, 126, 253n51 Nyers, Peter, 3, 11, 101 Ong, Aihwa, 15, 189 Operation Vigilant Sentry, 242, 246 Ordinary Seaman, The. See Goldman, Francisco orphan (discourse), 118, 120–123, 157, 164, 224, 242–243. See also refugee, children; photography, of Haitian refugee children Panamanian ship registry, 182–184, 186; in The Ordinary Seaman, 177, 190, 196, 210–211 Paraison, Father Edwin, 141, 148–152, 270n38, 271nn62, 67, 272n89, 274n129 paternalism, 41, 118, 120, 122, 124, 243 Payen, Nikòl,”Lavalas” and “Something in the Water,” 34, 41, 47, 60–72, 75, 78, 81, 86, 87, 102, 114, 214, 231 phantom limb, 20, 76, 171, 254n79 photography, 16, 88–126, 133, 148, 179, 242, 264nn7, 265n22; border patrol and, 92; colonialism and, 91; as containment, 92, 100–101; evidentiary value of, 90; as “eye-witness,” 89, 90; of Haitian refugee children, 118–123; and hospice/ hospitality, 93–94, 104–105; of hygiene, 107; public relations and, 95; race and, 91; of United States Coast Guard, 41–43, 46, 88; as voyeurism, 106. See also archive; Haitian refugees; interdiction; orphan (discourse); U.S. Coast Guard poetics of hospitality, 16–20, 24, 45, 248; of asylum interview, 30–32; for those granted asylum, 214, 220, 229, 239; human rights reports and, 55; literary forms, 47, 84, 157, 169, 192, 209, 240, 245; translation and, 33, 63, 72, 201, 204; U.S. congressional hearings and, 134, 139, 151; visual forms of, 89, 129, 130. See also hospitality; poetics of hostility; testimony/testimonial discourse poetics of hostility, 220. See also poetics of hospitality political membership, 13–15, 17, 20, 29, 31, 38–39, 83 politics of hospitality, 12–14, 45, 67; Cuban exile community and, 234; Danticat,

Edwidge and, 245; Dominican Republic and, 157; family and, 214; “green card” soldier and, 247; and Haitian earthquake, 241–242; refugee death and, 129; U.S. Coast Guard and, 98, 130. See also hospitality; poetics of hospitality; poetics of hostility postcolonial studies, 4, 36, 39–41, 46, 132, 213–214 postnation, 15 race: and Caribbean immigrants in Britain, 46, 257; Gilroy, Paul and, 190; Haitians and the Dominican Republic and, 135, 150, 156, 158–162, 166–167, 169, 171, 176, 221–222, 273n98, 274–275n151, 282n34; Haitians and the United States and, 49, 63, 85, 90, 103–104, 156; New Immigrant native informant and, 214; photography and, 91; and refugee status, 5, 54, 266n95; United States and, 7, 43, 81, 88, 197, 267–268n85 REAL ID Act, 246 Rediker, Marcus, 181, 190, 277n34 refugee: alterity and, 34, 64, 67–68, 92, 101, 107, 130; children as, 42, 68, 76–77, 116 123, 134, 137–138, 148, 150–152, 154, 217–219, 228–230, 238–239; credibility/ truth value of, 3, 24, 27–31, 55, 59, 67, 139, 244–246; criminalization of, 252n17; death and, 1–3, 22, 25, 30, 71, 74, 77, 84–85, 94–95, 124, 129, 157, 169– 170, 175, 201–202, 217, 222, 244, 247, 249; definition of, 5–6, 10–12; detention of, 1–3, 21, 45, 47, 50–53, 60, 62, 64, 68, 70, 83, 101, 104–105, 122, 127–129, 135, 242–244, 260n58, 261nn89, 103; gender and, 73–76, 214, 216; history of, 5–7; HIV/AIDS and, 63, 66–67, 68–69, 156, 261n103; humanitarian organizations and, 3, 9, 28, 102, 118; illness and, 3, 63, 66, 71, 107, 237, 261n103; in-country processing of, 53, 122; as native informant, 3–4, 18, 23–25, 36, 60, 62, 64, 68, 134, 148, 195, 227; as New Immigrant native informant, 212–214, 217, 223–224, 234, 237, 239; nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and, 15, 35, 37, 242; as stranger, 12–13, 17, 31, 61–62,

index / 309 81, 107, 109, 220–221, 234, 238, 254n89, 282n29; and trespassing, 21, 34, 45, 83, 113; viewed as animal,101; wounding and, 25, 29, 71, 171, 196. See also asylum interview; boat refugees; Central American refugees; Cuban refugees; Haitian refugees; Guatemalan refugees; Nicaraguan refugees; refugee seamen; Vietnamese refugees Refugee Act, 1980 (United States), 7, 11, 51 53, 232, 251n15, 276n6 refugee seamen, 42, 43, 179–181, 187, 189, 201, 212 Renda, Mary, 98, 118, 122 repatriation, 51, 60–61, 70, 117, 122, 124, 146–147, 258n21 Ricouer, Paul, 25 Rodríguez Milanés, Cecilia, Marielitos, Balseros, and Other Exiles, 44, 225, 233–239 Rosello, Mireille, 221, 234 Said, Edward, 37 Sandinista, Sandinista Revolution, 11, 43, 177–178, 191, 193–194, 197–200, 205, 212, 276n6, 280n110 Sandino, Augusto César, 192–193 Scarry, Elaine, 170, 173 Schrag, Phillip, 11, 251n13 seafarers, 10, 14, 43, 190–191, 201, 202, 210; as migrant labor, 178, 179,194, 248, 277n31; and open registries, 184, 186, 207; rights, 179, 180, 181, 187–188, 207, 209–210; sailors, 80–81, 124, 204, 278n54. See also refugee seamen; flag of convenience search-and-rescue (SAR), 41, 68, 84, 89–90, 94, 99–100, 107, 113, 115, 124, 126, 133, 264–265n16, 265n22. See also U.S. Coast Guard Sekula, Allan, 90–91, 93, 183, 277n28 shipping, 43, 179, 180–186, 191, 196, 202, 204, 208, 210, 280n139. See also flag of convenience ships, 22–23, 43, 70, 181, 182, 208, 209; cruise ships, 277n37; desertion from, 278n54; motley crew, 277n34; “refugee from,” 177–178; slave trade 201, 207; United States Coast Guard, 82–84, 94–98, 127, 182, 266n41. See also flag of convenience

Short Life of José Antonio Gutierrez, The, 248 Slaughter, Joseph, 18, 256–257n132 slavery. See Middle Passage “Something in the Water . . . Reflections of a People’s Journey.” See under Payen, Nikòl Somoza regime, 192–193, 200 Sontag, Susan, 90 Spivak, Gayatri, 23, 24, 64, 213–214 Standard Oil Company, 186, 278n46 state of exception, 8, 9, 62, 74, 134, 270n45. See also Agamben, Giorgio Stettinius, Edward, 185–186, 206. See also Liberian ship registry Taylor, Charles, 186. See also Liberian ship registry terrorism, 126, 246, 268n92 testimonio, 25–27, 36, 149, 151, 255n100, 255–256n109; as commodity, 255n101; Cuban Revolution and, 26, 199, 227–228; gender and, 227–228; institutional appropriation of, 140, 143; limits of, 198, 208, 211–212; in literature, 42, 43, 158, 167–168, 171–172, 194–195, 197–199, 227–228, 279n73; return to origins and, 203; Sandinista Revolution and, 43, 197–198; solidarity and, 149, 153, 200. See also Ménchu, Rigoberta testimony/testimonial discourse, 27; and asylum seeking, 3, 24–25, 31–35, 55, 246; and the body, 2, 20, 74; and credibility, 28, 29, 31, 58; and death, 67; and disease, 63, 66–67; ethical requirements of, 3, 24, 30; and evidence, 140; Holocaust and, 254n97; human rights organizations, 152–157; juridical requirements of, 24, 30; and literature, 41–42, 157–176, 207–209, 223, 229–231; mediation, 26; as narrative device, 3, 77; as performative act, 32–33, 141, 178, 230; and political membership, 18, 20; as unprovable, 25, 29; and U.S. congressional hearings, 141–156, 244–245, 269n33, 270n36; to violence, 73–75 translation, 3, 33–35, 41, 60–62, 65, 67–69, 72, 86, 128–129, 142, 204, 234, 238, 260n62, 268n93

310 / index transnationalism, 4, 14–16, 23, 37, 40–41, 43, 176; and identity, 164; sailors and, 190; seas, 22–23, 96; transnational capital, 42–43, 132, 134, 155, 157, 179, 192, 202, 212; transnational labor, 3, 10, 14, 42–43, 131–133, 135, 144, 154, 170–190, 195, 207–208, 212 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 142, 157 Trujillo regime, 43, 135; and Dominican sugar industry,136–137, 145; antiHaitian racial politics, 150, 157; portrayal in The Farming of Bones, 159, 162, 167, 168, 169, 170, 172, 176; as subject in Julia Alvarez’s writing, 215, 217, 219, 220 Tubman, William, 185 unconditional hospitality, 13–14, 17, 19, 45, 85, 221; U.S.policy towards Cuban refugees as, 225–226, 232–233 UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 187 UN Conference on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), 187 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951), 5, 7, 54, 126, 179 United Fruit Company, 182 United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), 6, 51 USA PATRIOT Act, 246 U.S. Coast Guard: aid to Cuban boat refugees, 50, 229, 254n89; ambivalent hospitality, 94; cleansing and hygiene, 103–107; Coast Guard Academy, 88; deaths of asylum seekers, 124, 129, 246–247; discourse of hospice, 93, 94; familial rhetoric, 42, 116–121; and Haitian refugees, 23, 41, 45–50, 52–60; health and sickness, 107–110; history as Revenue Cutter Service (RCS), 97, 265n34, 266nn41, 48; interviews onboard ships, 52, 53, 55, 56, 61; language/translation, 114, 116, 264n3; maternity, 122; and military ship, 96, 110; paternalism, 118, 122; photographic archive, 88–126; Public Affairs, 93–94, 95; Seapower, 95, 265n28; and surveillance, 23, 72, 98, 112–114, 242; and technology, 107; and weapons, 127. See also archive;

Brathwaite, Kamau “Dream Haiti”; interdiction; search-and-rescue (SAR) U.S. Congressional Hearings, The Plight of Haitian Sugarcane Cutters in the Dominican Republic, 14, 42; as archive of audit culture, 139–140, 142, 148; history of cane workers in the Dominican Republic, 136–138, 144; human rights organizations and, 144, 152–156; and humanitarian discourse, 133; as poetics of hospitality, 134, 139; Rules of the Committee on International Relations, 270nn34, 36; testimonial discourse and, 134, 139–141, 143; testimony of Father Edwin Paraison, 148–152; U.S. involvement in Dominican sugar industry, 138–139, 145; U.S. State Department testimony, 145–147 U.S. expansion, 37, 96, 97, 132, 182, 192, 270n46. See also U.S. military intervention U.S. military intervention: Dominican Republic, 135, 221; Haiti, 48–49, 127; Nicaragua, 192; Panama, 183. See also U.S. expansion U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), 138, 148 Vietnamese refugees, 50–51, 66, 259n44 Walcott, Derek, 21, 46, 55 Well-Founded Fear, 30–34 well-founded fear, 5, 11, 17, 25, 51, 53, 69, 89, 232 West Indies Federation, 15 witness, 3, 25; literature as, 29, 176, 255n107; photograph as, 41, 89–90; refugee as, 36, 245; to migrant worker conditions, 133, 134, 212; testimony, 27, 29, 30, 32; U.S. congressional hearings, 140, 142, 149, 150, 156, 270n36; writer as, 244–245. See also expert witness; testimony/testimonial discourse; U.S. Coast Guard World Bank, 11, 131, 133. See also International Monetary Fund Zimmerman, Marc, 26, 197, 198, 203 zone of indistinction, 10, 62, 74. See also Agamben, Giorgio