Dear Editor,
This week’s ‘In the Diaspora’ column features a piece by Caribbean diplomat Reginald Dumas dealing with the de-nationalisation of Haitian descendants by the government of the Dominican Republic.
A measure has been adopted which has as its legal effect the denial of citizenship to Dominicans born of Haitian parents. The matter created the expected shock and outrage in the rest of the Caribbean, then seems to have slipped into the spheres of indifference in which some public and political matters are left to hover. It is a refusal to engage with one of the greatest human rights scandals of the twentieth century and to admit that we, as a region, have harboured, in the same century characters as genocidal as those produced on other continents.
That human rights scandal is the slaughter of Haitian and Haitian descendants by the Dominican state in October 1937, on the orders of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, concerned at the entry and birth rate of Haitians. (In fact Trujillo was later to encourage inward immigration by white European settlers.)
The human rights scandal to which I refer, is now known as the ‘Parsley massacre’; it was a genocidal episode that pre-dated the Nazi extermination of Jews and other racial minorities, or the Rwanda killings and the episodes of mass extermination that marked the last hundred years. Recorded as a deliberate state-ordered act, it was reported that the ‘Haitians’ were identifiable by their inability to pronounce the Spanish word perejil (parsley), since Haitian phonetics has no sound for the aspirated ‘h’ and trilled ‘r’ found in the Spanish word. Figures vary, but the death toll has been set as high at 37, 000 and as low as 800.
It is not something we learnt in Caribbean history class. It is an episode that occurred in another universe, almost.
In the Dominican Republic in the late nineteen eighties for a journalists’ conference, I am gifted a book by an admirer of then President Joaquín Balaguer who was himself a known apologist for Trujillo’s actions. It is his famous La Isla al revés ‘The island upside down’ in which he expounds the most shocking anti-Haitianism and anti-black racism. I could not believe, even after my experience of Brazil, that extremism of this flagrancy existed among us.
Part of it, for the Dominicans, all of whom are mixed race, is the fear of racial flooding and re-absorption into the africaneity that the Haitian immigrant represents.
The immediate translation of the title would be “the island in reverse.” It is the sense of the book. That the African elements in the Haitian culture and in the world represent a retrogression from which the republic would protect itself. The thesis found wide approval in that country. This was the president of a Caribbean nation in the twentieth century. The book became a best seller. The lady who presented it to me, herself of mixed ethnicity, was close to the Balaguer family, visibly mixed themselves. She had worked on his re-election campaign as a sort of press director. The fact that he had written outrageous nonsense on the social and political conditions of the island at the time, far from disqualifying or embarrassing him, was seen as a plus.
In short, Dominican culture admits of racial categories in which the Haitian particularity, is deprecated. Officially, there are no blacks native to the place. Hardly people of mixed race even. Trujillo had them all re-christened ‘Indios,’ understood to mean, in its way ‘mixed.’ Which was the label the lady had in her passport under ‘race.’
It therefore comes as a shock that the Caribbean foreign ministries, manned by Afro-Caribbean people, failed to react more vigorously to the message the Dominicans sent by their anti-Haitian measure.
Mr Dumas’ article addresses, indirectly, many other issues, the principal for me being the question of how we should respond to race-baiting and racial narratives in our corners of the civilised world.
Those of us intolerant and shocked at the anti-black racism we read here from some writers in the local newspapers, hear in the campaigning of some political parties, and see expressed in the politics of some working for the state, have emerged from the twentieth century the way some, like Hannah Arendt or Sartre, came out of theirs. Impatient, hostile and dismissive of the racists among us. As the recent events in the Dominican Republic make clear, in some cases vigilance remains necessary. Some traits interwoven with the value systems of some cultures, expressed in the discourse a people makes its own, underpinning the political psychology of this or that group, have got to be taken for what they are… toxic and diabolical elements that are dangerous in the modern worlds of racially plural communities.
A distinction has to be made between relatively harmless group identity politics and a racism that is only amplified by access to power. In short, some groups need to be kept as far away from government as is possible.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
