Myriam J.A. Chancy on Haitian American Communities

Following Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s racist smears against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, author Myriam J.A. Chancy joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about Haitian history and independence; imperialism in Haiti; immigration to and from Haiti; the positive and negative impacts social media has on Haitian communities; and how the current discourse obscures both Haitian past and present. Chancy reflects on the importance of translating Haitian literature into English, recommends the work of several other writers, and discusses the Expo of ’49, which brought people from around the world to Haiti. She reads a related scene from Village Weavers.

Check out video excerpts from our interviews at Lit Hub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website. This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

*
From the episode:

Whitney Terrell: There was a Springfield resident named Erika Lee. She made a Facebook post about a missing cat. She wrote that her neighbor had told her that her neighbor’s daughter’s friend had lost her cat and then came home from work to find it “hanging from a branch, like you’d do a deer for butchering” in the yard of her Haitian neighbors. So Erika Lee, who made the post, heard this from the neighbor, Kimberly Newton, who said she heard it from a friend who said she’d learned about it “from a source that she had.” Newton has admitted, “I didn’t have any proof.” Because there’s not any! 

The post was on a Facebook group called “Springfield, Ohio Crime and Information Group.” We all know that those kinds of groups never post terrible rumors that have no facts associated with them. Then it went viral when a conservative X user screenshotted it, and a bunch of large conservative accounts started distributing it. And then it came to the President. I want to talk first, before we get to J.D. Vance and Trump, about the role that social media has played in all this. You mentioned social media when you were talking about the reason that some Haitian immigrants are being told to come to the border.

Myriam Chancy: Yeah. I mean, I think social media can play a good role and it obviously can play a devil’s advocate role as it is in this situation. You know, I wish people wouldn’t post misinformation about groups, especially groups that they don’t belong to.

WT: That’s everybody’s favorite kind of misinformation! That’s the only kind of information! 

MC: I’ll tell you, I got involved in social media in 2010 after the 2010 earthquake, and it was the only way that I could get in touch with people on the ground and help find people. So I don’t think all social media is bad. It’s one of the ways in which a lot of Haitians, and I would imagine every immigrant population, get information and provide information about their culture to others. And now I’m seeing a lot of posts about Haitian food and what Haitian culture really is about. So I think social media can definitely misinform us, and this is why, at least those of us who are educators, really have a burden to help people understand how to use social media in a way that is conducive to improving how we know each other rather than destroying different communities on hearsay.

WT: TikTok went absolutely nuts when Trump brought this up in the speech, and there are songs, right? It became a meme in that sense. One thing they say about misinformation is that if you fact-check it, it doesn’t matter. The fact-checking doesn’t become as amplified as the original misinformation, right? But these crazy songs were amplified, and they were a way of laughing at Trump. Does that work? Is that effective or not?

MC: I don’t know. I personally don’t follow those streams of information, because that’s not where I get my information from. But what I know is that whether you’re on the right or on the left, people want entertainment, and so, I think Vance and Trump were using this misinformation as a way to entertain the troops. They know it’s misinformation, but it’s entertaining, and those who follow them don’t really care whether it’s true or untrue. They are anti-immigration. So whatever works for giving a larger population a sense that immigration is a threat is what they’re going to use, especially in a case where this particular group has been successful in integrating. 

I did a little fact-checking myself, and of different immigrant groups, Haitians are one of the more successful groups who integrate into society, not necessarily because of language or culture, but because of chain immigration and the kinds of positions they’re willing to take, because things are so dire in Haiti itself. 

So people are laughing at the TikTok song and so forth. Lots of different communities are making light of this, because it’s also how you persevere. When you’re being laughed at, when your community is being laughed at, you turn the tables. So I don’t know if there’s anything wrong with that, per se, but I do think we need to put the focus back on what good is really occurring in the community, in Springfield and elsewhere, and what is it that we don’t know about each other’s cultures that maybe could make sure that we extinguish these kinds of lies when they come up immediately. 

V.V. Ganeshananthan: Just thinking about that, it’s interesting, because I remember seeing a social media post, and I can’t remember on which stream at this point, but it said if you laughed at this, or if you made a joke about it, you should also be aware that this posed real danger to people, and it’s not simply funny. And here is a list of Haiti-related nonprofits to which you could donate if you made a joke like that, which was something that I appreciated. The people I hear making this joke are mocking the joke to mock Trump. And it’s sort of like a seven-layer mockery cake where you’re sort of like, “Is everyone going to be able to taste all the flavors?” I don’t know.

I think it’s clear to us, right? And I think that there must be other dark corners of the internet—I mean, presumably, Erika Lee lives in one of these—where the other version of this is going on. So as a person who sometimes teaches comedy, what does it mean to punch up or down? I find this interesting. 

MC: But I think there’s something more complex going on. I went on tour in April, and I was mostly on the East Coast, and different people who came to readings were talking to me about the fact that the U.S. and the U.N. had decided that they’re going to send a Kenyan delegation of troops into Haiti. And this hadn’t happened yet; I think it happened in June or July. There was a lot of conversation about why is this happening? Why is it happening now? And the general consensus was that it’s happening now because it is a way for the Biden administration to show military strength in the hemisphere and somehow divert attention from what’s happening in other parts of the world where they have proxies like the Middle East and so forth. To my mind, I think this is interesting, because what I think is happening is that then the other political side is taking a pot shot at Haiti as a way to say, “Ah, you think you’ve done something that makes it seem as if you’re doing something that’s really helping the tide of immigration, or that is going to set this country on the right course—” forgetting history, forgetting that the U.S. is really responsible for so much leveling of infrastructure in Haiti, it wasn’t just the dictatorship.  And also forgetting that U.N. involvement has been completely catastrophic in Haiti, not only in terms of the rapes of women, children, which has been demonstrated from 2007 to 2017 where women’s groups actually were the ones who got them out. And then the cholera epidemic, which occurred on the heels of the 2010 earthquake, when cholera had been eradicated for something like 100 years in Haiti. 

So there’s a lot that the U.N. and the U.S. has been responsible for in Haiti that can’t be set right. And yet, the idea was let’s send in the Kenyans.  Let’s change the optics, not have white men going into Haiti, but Black men going into Haiti, African men, and hope that that will change something, but we know that the numbers of Kenyan troops that have been sent in cannot do anything. They’ve sent in about 300 people, when you need a force of at least 10,000 to have some result. And we know the path that those results have been ineffective. 

So I think this is about changing the discourse from, “What is the U.S. relationship to Haiti?” to one of ridicule of Haitians specifically, when Haitians who have come to the United States, who have been invited to the United States, have actually been able to make good and demonstrate that there is nothing congenitally wrong with Haitians or Haiti at all. So I think there’s something much larger going on, which a joke or misinformation actually flattened in such a way that we are not able to access the history, either the ongoing history or the long history behind it. I think that’s what’s happening. 

VVG: Thank you for that really useful historical contextualizing and nuance again. I come from sort of a left literary tradition, and I’m used to my friends speaking with me about Haiti as though it is an extraordinary historical example of people seeking and achieving their own liberation.

MC: And it is!

VVG: But that’s certainly not the predominant thread in the United States, right? Not in mainstream American education.

I don’t know why I thought that this person would have known better, but Marianne Williamson, sort of doubled down a little bit on the Vance thing. It was sort of like, “This isn’t totally concocted; Haitians do Vodou.”

MC: And that’s a stereotype too.  There is Vodou, but it is a spirituality, and there’s a long history going back to U.S. films in the 1920s using voodoo, the American version of Vodou, to demonize Haitians, when, in fact, we still go back to the history. Why is Vodou so important in Haitian culture? Because it was the basis for communication amongst African-descended people who did not have the same linguistic roots, and they could communicate with this spirituality and its traditions, and it was also a way to practice healing when you had no access to formal medicine, which is still the case today, which actually was very important during Covid. People used local healing methods and were able to help a lot of people. 

So I’m also shocked, Sugi. I didn’t know she had made those kinds of comments because she is a pseudo-spiritual leader, I suppose. But to not know enough about other people’s spiritualities and to be able to make a declaration like that is a problem. So this is something I do engage in my fiction, which I don’t do in my literary criticism, but is to engage Vodou, sometimes not naming it, so that people, when they read the novels, have a sense of how rich this culture is and how beautiful it is, and that the Vodou is really about connecting to nature and to the healing powers in nature. That’s really all it’s about.

Transcribed by Otter.ai. Condensed and edited by Keillan Doyle. Photograph of Myriam J.A. Chancy by N. Affonso.

*

Myriam J.A. Chancy

 Village Weavers • What Storm, What Thunder • Spirit of Haiti • Harvesting Haiti

Others:

Cléanthe Desgraves Valcin • Yanick Lahens • Marie-Célie Agnant • Valérie Bah • Lyonel Trouillot • Gary Victor • Mackenzy Orcel • Kettly Mars • “‘It just exploded’: Springfield woman claims she never meant to spark false rumors about Haitians” by Alicia Victoria Lozano | NBC News • “Opinion | Trump Knows What He’s Doing in Springfield. So Does Vance.” by Jamelle Bouie| The New York Times • “Marianne Williamson Defends Donald Trump’s Bizarre Haitian Pet-Eating Conspiracy” by Liam Archacki| Daily Beast