Journalism in Haiti: A few thoughts

I thought long and hard about whether or not to post the words you are about to read.

As I know how hard it is to be a journalist working in some of the harsher corners of the world - and that if you are doing your job well you inevitably piss off somebody - I generally try hold my commentary on other reporters' work to a minimum unless it is in cases of egregious factual errors or conflicts of interest. There will always be those willing to chatter from the sidelines at the work of reporters good, bad and mediocre, and I feel that, in general, with all the serious issues confronting the countries I myself work on, I would have relatively little to add to the cacophony.

Perhaps it is because I have spent so much time outside of mediacentric cities like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco over the last decade, but I have, in general, never been much moved by the "and I alone escaped to tell thee" confessional pieces of journalists who fly into a desperate place for a few days (or weeks) and then immediately begin reminiscing about how rough the assignment was in print, on tv, etc. I've always felt that, if one can't take it, then one should just get another kind of job. We reporters are rarely the story, though I know such narratives are increasingly fashionable.

Perhaps that will explain my reaction to this story, "I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD," on the GOOD media website. Written by Mother Jones human rights reporter Mac McClelland, the article, as I read it, uses the mass rape of women in Haiti (and later in the Democratic Republic of Congo) as the background for a foreign reporter's journey of self-discovery. I can't speak to the author's motivations, but of the many articles on Haiti I have read over the years that have made me want to throw things, I don't think that I have ever read something that has viscerally struck me as more narcissistic as a piece of writing about this country I dearly love and have been visiting and reporting on for the last 15 years.

By no means do I want to make light of the journalist's trauma, or even less that of those she describes interviewing. Everybody experiences anguish and suffering in different ways. There may be much about the reporter's experiences there that I don't know but from the article itself, though it sounds as if, a rather disturbing and atypical (for Haiti) incident with a driver aside, nothing at all out of the ordinary happened. Haiti can be a rough place and journalists wanting to work there need to be prepared for that. Reading the article, though, I could not help but ask myself, as a foreign journalist who also works in Haiti, some questions.

With a million people still homeless in Haiti after the January 2010 earthquake, with a once-proud system of rural agriculture now on life-support due in no small part to the policies imposed on Haiti by the international community, with women and girls disenfranchised and and with the country's politicians seemingly poised to enter yet another period of poisonous deadlock, is this the best we foreign journalists can do? Is this the future of journalism? Where the suffering and struggle for survival of the majority of the world's population merely provides a backdrop for navel-gazing to even further promote was has already become our incredibly inward-looking, self-referential culture?

I am afraid it may be. On one hand it is good that the author does not pretend - as so many do - to be an authority on a country that she knows little about, but on the other hand, given all this space, isn't there SOMETHING happening in Haiti that deserves notice beyond the experiences and reactions of we foreigners (or, narrower still, we journalists) when covering the place?

Any foreigner who knows a little bit about Haiti will confess freely how much they realize they still don't know about this quite complex country. You learn things about it slowly and through trial and error in places like the desperate bidonville of Cité Soleil, in the moisture-dappled hills of Furcy and Fermathe, along its meandering coasts and amidst its inscrutable mountains.

But there are some things Haiti is definitely not. It is definitely not a therapist for we, the privileged outsiders entrusted with telling its stories. If all we can write about when faced with all of this suffering, resistance and resilience is ourselves, then we might as well stay home.

Their suffering is their suffering. Not ours. Give them at least that.