Malaria Monsters

Side eye-ing the fuck out of this article, but here it is:

Excerpt:

It is one of the most remarkable attractions in the Western Hemisphere, but the Palace of Sans-Souci in northern Haiti is seldom visited by foreigners.

Decades of political instability and lawlessness mean much of Haiti is avoided by tourists.

But the story of the sprawling palace complex, whose name means “Without Worry”, had fascinated me for more than 40 years.

It was the home of independent Haiti’s first monarch, Henri I, also known as Henri Christophe.

Continue reading the main story

Slave who crowned himself king

• 1767: Henri Christophe born, probably in Grenada. Taken to Saint Domingue as a slave
• 1791: Slave rebellion breaks out in Saint Domingue
• 1804: Haiti wins independence, abolishes slavery
• 1807 - Haiti divided in two; Henri Christophe leads northern Haiti, his rival Gen Alexandre Petion heads the southern Republic of Haiti
• 1810 - Henri Christophe starts building Sans-Souci Palace
• 1811 - Crowned King Henri I
• 1813 - Sans-Souci completed
• 1820 - Henri Christophe commits suicide
• 1842 - Earthquake damages Sans-Souci
• 1982 - Unesco designates Sans-Souci as World Heritage Site

Henri Christophe was one of the most prominent figures of the Haitian slave revolution of 1791-1804.

The end of French rule meant the colony of Saint Domingue, renamed Haiti after its original Taino Indian name, became the first black-led independent nation in the world.

But after independence Haiti split into two. Henri Christophe embarked on construction of his palace in 1810 and a year later declared himself king in northern Haiti. His sweetheart became Queen Marie-Louise.

Sans-Souci was completed in 1813, at the cost of hundreds, maybe even thousands of labourers’ lives.

A recent holiday in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, seemed too good an opportunity to miss to see the ruins.

I wondered if my 12-year-old daughter, Isabel, would share my fascination with this story.

I had first encountered it when I was roughly her age, enthralled by a play about King Henri I performed by a French modern theatre troupe.

As there are no organised tours to Haiti from the Dominican Republic, and very few taxi drivers willing to take the risk, finding a well-disposed man-with-a-van in Santo Domingo was like pulling teeth.

But eventually the man, Jose, materialised.

He turned up with a roomy, air-conditioned people carrier outside the Jaragua Hotel on Santo Domingo’s seaside drive.

“Yes, let’s go,” Jose said, adding: ”But remember, this is not a good time to visit there.”

“So when would be a good time?” I asked.

“Never, really,” he replied with a crooked smile.

Excerpt:

When Zev Al-Walid walks through an airport security scanner, he more or less willingly parts with his belt, his shoes and his pocket change, just like any other traveler. But by the time Walid - a man who was designated female at birth and later transitioned - is ready to reclaim his personal items, there’s often an extra hurdle blocking the path to his gate.

Walid, who travels frequently to the United States and countries around the world from his home in Western Europe, remembers a particularly bad trip through a US airport’s backscatter scanner machine.

“I wasn’t really privy to what the picture looked like or anything,” said Walid. “I could just hear the guy, in front of me, talking on the radio, presumably to the person looking at the image. And he was like, ‘Yeah. No. He’s right here. I’m telling you, he’s a man. I’m looking right at him.’”

“I felt physically ill after that,” said Walid.

Man, Woman, Terrorist

Since when did travelers’ gender become the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) business? Since at least September of 2003, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an advisory warning against “Al-Qaeda’s continued efforts to plan multiple attacks against the US and US interests overseas.” The advisory included a list of potential terrorism targets, a mention of recent arrests of unnamed terror suspects and this warning: “Male bombers may dress as females in order to discourage scrutiny.”

Maybe there was verifiable intelligence about male terrorists who like to slip women’s wear over their explosive devices. Or maybe the wardens of the security state read one too many spy novels. But either way, bringing gender into the security arena has major consequences.

“My experiences shifted somewhat after 9/11,” Walid told Truthout, “but I’d say they shifted even more a few years after 9/11, when I started to get read not just as a brown person, but as a brown man.” Walid, who is Muslim, said that, before he transitioned, “My faith wasn’t visible, as I didn’t wear a headscarf, so there was nothing to set off alarm bells.”

“The whole, ‘You are a terrorist,’ kind of thing didn’t really play into the equation, because I don’t think women are seen that way as easily.”

Since the DHS advisory, at least two other factors have brought gender further into the national security equation. One is Secure Flight, the program begun in 2009 requiring passengers to disclose their birth date and gender to airlines to be compared with their government-issued photo ID, purportedly in order to reduce the number of false matches to names on the federal watch list.

The other is the widespread use of body scanners.

Because gender has become one of the first markers in the technology-centric race for body-based data - known as “biometrics” in surveillance-speak - transgender and gender non-conforming people have been some of the first and most directly affected.

In an investigation begun during our “Surveillance in the Homeland” series on civil liberties in post-9/11 America, Truthout uncovered how their experiences illustrate what’s at stake when the human body becomes a data point in the war on terror.

Excerpt:

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 16, 2012 (IPS) - The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, unanimously adopted by 178 governments at the June 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil, specifically recognised that “women have a vital role in environmental management and development.”

And Principle 20 of the Declaration was emphatic that sustainable development can be achieved only with the “full participation” of women.

At the same time, chapter 24 of Agenda 21, the action plan for a sustainable future, contained 11 different commitments with specific recommendations to strengthen the role of women in sustainable development and the elimination of all obstacles to their equal and beneficial participation, particularly in decision-making.

But 20 years later, there is an attempt to renege on these commitments at the upcoming Rio+20 summit in Brazil in June, says a coalition of women’s groups.

Taking a strong stand on the gender issue are two women’s organisations: Women in Europe for a Common Future (WECF) and Women International for a Common Future (WICF), described as a network of over 100 grassroots women and environmental organisations worldwide.

Asked what gender equality principles have been deleted so far from the Rio+20 draft outcome document, Sascha Gabizon, executive director of WECF/WICF, said the Vatican, represented by the Holy See, proposes to delete gender equality and also all references to sexual and reproductive rights.

In an interview with IPS, Gabizon said, “It is of course very strange the Holy See can make these types of proposals, because they are not a country.

“And women, as 50 percent of the world’s population, should have at least as much a right to propose text proposals (which they are not permitted to do).”

She pointed out the United States has also proposed deletion of references to equity.

And specific references to human rights, such as the right to water and sanitation, which the U.N. General Assembly has already adopted in a 2010 resolution, are proposed for deletion by several countries and groups including the European Union (EU) and Canada.

She said the United States also supports deletion of human rights language, while the 132-member Group of 77 (G77) developing countries has proposed deletion of a reference to women’s right to land tenure.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Excerpt:

For all the shameful sucking up to multimillionaire mom Ann Romney after Democratic pundit Hilary Rosen accused her of never having worked “a day in her life,” the reality is neither Republicans nor Democrats treat most parenting as work, and thousands of poor women are living in poverty today as living proof of that fact.

Do we need to state the obvious? Women of different classes are beaten with different rhetorical bats. For the college-educated and upwardly aspiring, there’s the “danger” of career ambitions. Ever since women started aspiring to have men’s jobs, backlashers have told those women that they’re enjoying their careers at the expense of their kids’ well being. They really can’t have it all. They’ll raise monsters, or worse, they’ll grow old on the shelf. Remember the Harvard/Yale mob that made headlines with a “study” showing that unmarried women over thirty had a slimmer chance of matrimony than they had of being taken out by a terrorist? Susan Faludi took them apart in Backlash! But the evil spawn of that story still circulate. The media still love stories about stay-at-home moms and professional women are still punished for wanting to succeed. For the poor, though, it’s very different.

Following Rosen’s remark, Ann Romney tweeted her first tweet: “I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work.” Her husband’s campaign hoisted that cudgel high and they have been beating Rosen and the Democrats with it for almost a week.

It was a relief, then, to see this gotcha clip from Mitt Romney at a campaign event in January, in which he said mothers on welfare should be forced to get a job outside the home or lose their government benefits. Cruel? No: “I want those individuals to have the dignity of work,” said Romney.

The remark, made to a Manchester, New Hampshire, audience, was aired during Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show Sunday. Nice. But pushing poor women out to “work” wasn’t just a Republican trick. For half a decade, from President Clinton’s pledge to “end welfare as we know it” to his signing of welfare reform (the pointedly named 1996 “Personal Responsibility Act”), pundits and politicians of both parties took aim at poor moms and skewed statistics to cast mothers on welfare—especially women of color on welfare—as dependent, lazy, greedy and breeding for benefits. For their good and ours, we were told, welfare “queens” needed to be forced out “to work.”

Yes, please and thank you!

by Raha Iranian Feminist Collective

Excerpt: 

While building solidarity between activists in the U.S. and Iran can be a powerful way of supporting social justice movements in Iran, progressives and leftists who want to express solidarity with Iranians are challenged by a complicated geopolitical terrain. The U.S. government shrilly decries Iran’s nuclear power program and expands a long-standing sanctions regime on the one hand, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad makes inflammatory proclamations and harshly suppresses Iranian protesters and dissidents on the other. Solidarity activists are often caught between a rock and a hard place, and many choose what they believe are the lesser evil politics. In the case of Iran, this has meant aligning with a repressive state leader under the guise of anti-imperialism and populism, or supporting targeted sanctions.

As members of a feminist collective founded in part to support the massive post-election protests in Iran in 2009, while opposing all forms of US intervention, we take this opportunity to reflect on the meaning and practice of transnational solidarity between US-based activists and sections of Iranian society. In this article, we look at the remarkable situation in which both protests against and expressions of support for Ahmadinejad are articulated under the banner of support for the Iranian people. In particular, we examine the claims of critics of the Iranian regime who have advocated the use of targeted sanctions against human rights violators in the Iranian government as a method of solidarity. Despite their name, these sanctions trickle down to punish broader sections of the population. They also stand as a stunning example of American power and hypocrisy, since no country dare sanction the US for its illegal wars, torture practices and program of extra judicial assassinations. We then assess the positions of some anti-imperialist activists who not only oppose war and sanctions on Iran but also defend Ahmadinejad as a populist president expressing the will of the majority of the Iranian people. In fact, Ahmadinejad’s aggressive neo-liberal economic policies represent a right-wing attack on living standards and on various social welfare provisions established after the revolution. And finally, we offer an alternative notion of and method for building international solidarity from below, one that offers a way out of lesser evil politics and turns the focus away from the state and onto those movement activists in the streets.

We hope the analysis that follows will provoke much needed discussion among a broad range of activists, journalists and scholars about how to rethink a practice of transnational solidarity that does not homogenize entire populations, cast struggling people outside the US as perpetual and helpless victims, or perpetuate unequal power relations between peoples and nations. Acts of solidarity that cross borders must be based on building relationships with activists in disparate locations, on an understanding of the different issues and conditions of struggle various movements face, and on exchanges of support among grass roots activists rather than governments, with each group committed to opposing oppression locally as well as globally.

About:

Women Writers of Haitian Descent, Inc. is a literary organization established in 2000 to encourage the development of Haitian women writers and to foster greater public awareness and appreciation of their work through local, national, and international education programs, lectures, and events.

The organization’s activities and services include a literary contest, writing workshops, a bookclub, a writer’s group, readings and various social and literacy-oriented projects. WWOHD also provides forums for Haiti’s literary daughters to connect and for the preservation of their works in a special collection.

My Mom LOVES this band! Every Sunday morning we’d listen to them and Tropicana while preparing food for the day.

Excerpt:

Since the founding of the Orchestre Septentrional in 1948, the band’s homeland, Haiti, has endured the nearly three-decade Duvalier family dictatorship, 26 other governments, a foreign intervention, a devastating earthquake and, most recently, a cholera epidemic.

Through it all Septen, as the group is known to its fans, has been that rare Haitian entity that functions flawlessly.

Onstage, whether playing an elegant ballroom or an outdoors festival in the countryside, Septen is a dynamo, with a heady combination of drums and horns driving dancers onto their feet. But to Haitians, Septen’s ability to thrive when all else seems to be falling apart makes the orchestra something more — a bulwark and a solace.

“They’ve created a community institution that is really unlike anything else in Haiti,” Gage Averill, author of “A Day for the Hunter. A Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti” and an ethnomusicologist at the University of British Columbia. “It’s amazing. Few countries can speak of the political swings and economic challenges that Haiti can, but here’s this orchestra that even as it changes with the times, has carved out a distinct sound and approach to music making. In terms of longevity and impact, they are remarkable.”

Excerpt:

Anacaona
Cléante Valcin
Annie Desroy
Janine Tavernier
Jacqueline Beaugé-Rosier
Jessica Fièvre
Madeleine Sylvain Bouchereau
Madeleine Gardiner
Marie-Alice Théard
Myriam Chancy
Yanick Lahens
Kettly Mars
Evelyne Trouillot
Virginie Sampeur
Mona Guérin
Jacqueline Scott Lemoine
Paulette Poujol Oriol
Barbara Bastien 
Cynthia Bastien
Marie Chauvet
Lilas Desquiron
Marie-Célie Agnant
Edwidge Danticat
Emmelie Prophète
Jaira Placide
Katia Ulysse