Political Violence and the Public Eye

Glen A. Perice

Aristide was president... and everyone was talking politics and talking about change in Haiti. The walls were covered with pictures of Aristide and pictures of cocks.

Then people came to my house one day with ten dollars to buy paint. They said I had to do it and they said if I didn't do it then I wasn't for Aristide and I should get out of the country. I wanted to yell at them that if I could leave the country, I would. But I was for Aristide too. He was telling those in power that they were criminals which is what everybody said anyway, only he was saying it in crowds of people and on the radio.

So begins the story of my friend Jean-Pierre, with whom I spent much time in Port-au- Prince. I used to visit his house every day. He lived in one room with the rest of his fam­ily. There were two metal cots that he and his sister slept on, and three other people slept on cardboard on the floor. His neighbors lived in different rooms of the same house, and to visit Jean-Pierre I had to pass their doors, which were always open. They always said “hello” and asked me what was going on. Jean-Pierre's mother was always worried that I would attract too much attention to her son. One could hear everything that happened on the street outside. There is a sensitivity to what goes on beyond one's household, into the next room, and then into the neighborhood itself. The boundaries are as far as one can hear about things, and hear literally, in the everyday noise of the street.

These days we talk about the gaze of power as if power had eyes, as if it could see. Nothing is more prevalent than the connection between seeing and power, or being seen and subordination to power. Being seen instigates discursive features as well, for to be seen is to be communicated and “known” to those in power. Speaking and seeing are linked by power. “Seeing and speaking are always already completely caught up within power relations which they presuppose and actualize” (Deleuze 1988: 82). Power cannot exist if it does not colonize these two productive social sites of meaning. In cultures of terror, this colonization of identity itself becomes a medium of domination as an individ­ual crosses over into the shadow lands, and sees himself being seen by power, perpetu­ally within the boundaries of power.

When imagining the gaze of power, the mind turns back upon itself and sees itself as subjected to that power. There is a nebulous zone of fantasy, of fear, of paralysis between the I and the self caught in a field of visuality. This shadow zone is seeing ourselves be­ing seen by power. I want to keep this thought in mind as I probe this aspect of power as

it rises up in the words of dissidents in Haiti. At the end of this essay I will contrast the visual field of the culture of terror with the Public Eye.

If the strange but now familiar image of the Panopticon looms over us in the post­modern milieu as an icon of terror or an obsessive paranoid delusion, states corner us with the feeling of being seen and mapped by their “security forces” and “intelligence agencies.” Since governments have been constituting themselves as separate from their citizens, these citizens have been mapped along boundaries of visuality and information.

A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation... He who is subjected to a field of visibility and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself.

In other words, within a relation of visibility the subject becomes subjected to the boundaries of that field. Being “subjected to a field of visibility” does not physically con­strain a subject, but the recognition of such (“who knows it”) influences the construction of social identity. It is possible to extend the notion of visibility to include any relation of power that locates the subject vis-a-vis certain spatially defined fields.

De Certeau, looking at the Panopticon from the underside, reflects that Foucault over emphasizes the machinery of power (he was famous for that) rather than the formative processes upon the subject:

This “micro-physics” of power privileges the productive apparatus (which produces the discipline), even though it discerns in “education” a system of “repression.” (de Certeau 1984: xiv).

Foucault says that a field of visibility produces the subject of power—and if we fol­low de Certeau’s criticism, we can uncover a hidden assumption in Foucault’s discussion of the field of visuality—one must “learn” to see one’s self in a field of power. If there is a “system” of repression then there are discursive practices that aid in that repression. Along with violence, one learns to see one’s self being seen, through “hearing” stories of terror and violence. Seeing one’s self is neither theorizing the self nor to be in direct con­tact with the I one sees: it is in between. Between the eye and the I is a space of negative identity where political identity is fashioned.

I painted a beautiful cock... People would stop by and stare at it and comment about how good it was. Some American journalists came to take pictures of it. That was because it was not far from the Episcopal Church, where all the famous paintings are inside. It took me two days to complete. Some of my friends came around and brought girls to see it. “He’s my friend,” they would say. At the time, I felt good about it. That’s when I started my sign painting business.

A wave of political violence swept through Haiti after the coup d’etat of 1991 that ousted democratically elected President Aristide. Aristide was sent into exile and the popular movement that elevated him to president, Lavalas, was destroyed. Duvalierists once again covered Haiti with a reign of terror and violence. De facto regimes popped up, all under the thumb of the Haitian military. One report on Haiti after the coup d’etat of 1991 says:

... the situation of human rights [is] dismal, with no freedoms of speech, assembly, or association. We received testimony that at least one thousand and possibly several thousand people have died in coup-related violence. We saw direct evidence of both intentional and arbitrary killing or wounding of civilians... fear grips the population across all social groupings. (The Haiti Commission 1991.)

After the coup, military attaches (those connected with the military, often spies) again became a familiar sight, and the worry about them became a constant theme of people’s lives. Who was watching and who was listening? The Haitian military set up roadblocks to check cars on a random basis. Soldiers waited along major roads to ques­tion people entering small towns and villages. People dropped out of sight. One ac­quaintance of mine was never home when I went to his house. No one was home. No neighbors were around. Then he would show up a few days later knocking at my door and say, “I heard you were looking for me.” One fellow told me:

If someone in my neighborhood goes away for a few months and then returns, I don’t talk to him until I can find out where he’s been and what he was doing. You never know.

People were afraid. The organization of military intelligence whereby the Haitian army gathers information about civilians “[was] not known by the Haitian people, who are its constant victims” (Laguerre 1993: 84).

Prior to Aristide’s electoral victory, a wave of violence against Duvalierists took place. The dechouckaj, the uprooting, as it is known, was revenge and justice against the violence and terror perpetuated by Duvalerists and the Makout. The period of the dechoukaj was very short, a few years, in relation to the decades of terror and violence instigated by both father and son Duvalier and their cronies. It was more spontaneous than organized violence.

In 1992, one year after the coup, I was told a story by a young man (rumored by some people to be a military attache, a spy) who lived near Hinche and whom I often met while waiting for a mail plane to land on a grassy field used for cattle and goat grazing. Also standing around us were soldiers in their uniforms. When the plane landed, the sol­diers searched the plane and took whatever they happened to like, or they received pay­ment not to take things. The young man turned to me and asked,

—Are you afraid of zombis?

—No. I’m more afraid of a chef seksyon. [rural policeman]

He laughed and paused.

—There is a boko [practitioner of magic] who lives around here, just down the road to Pappaye. He and his brother, who is an attache in Thomond, tried to make a zombi but failed. The strangest thing happened to them.

—What’s that?

—When they dug up the zombi he went crazy and started to attack them. The attache grabbed the shovel and broke the zombi’s head. When it was over the attache was covered with the blood of the zombi. The boko and his brother were both very scared.

—Not so easy to make a zombi.

—Well, now they always carry their guns with them.

“Now they always carry.. This story, told to me sometime in October of 1992, speaks of redemption and violence. Resistance is quelled with violence. “Now,” the Haitian military is everywhere.

This story is a rumor about power, but it also hints at the power rumors: the contours of power as outlined in the story. It is noteworthy that the boko is aligned with the atta­che.

Rumors were and are everywhere. There is the rumor I heard that Jean Claude Duva­lier was secretly back in Haiti, the rumor of the two soldiers with their eyes cut out, the rumor that the military from Hinche were going to come and kill everyone in the town where I was sleeping, the rumor that Jean-Pierre's aunt was killed by the military be­cause no one had seen her for months, the rumor that a dead body in the street near the Catholic Cathedral was a Lavalas supporter, the rumor that military spies were following me around. Rumors about deaths, rumors about Aristide supporters maimed and killed, rumors about the ambush of a soldier.

In Haiti, where reliance upon personal contact and word-of-mouth outweighs all other forms of communication, rumors and gossip make the socially real, real (Perice 1994). In hear/say the visual field is formed as a real relation to the speaking subject. It is the rumors of deaths, of disappearances, stories of mutilated bodies, headless bodies, bodies without faces, that recall death. And death is the story of the culture of terror, death becoming the fixating focal point of the subject's subjugation. There were rumors of murdered soldiers as well. Rumors were always spinning about the Haitian military, the habits of the de facto leaders, the American C.I.A., and so on. A rumor, once while I was living in the countryside, that the local military was coming to wipe out everyone in the area, caused some people to leave for a while. Couldn't we say that speaking and see­ing are linked in these rumors, not in a cognitive sense, but in a profoundly social sense?

Neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince and in the countryside are public spaces of dis­course, discursively bounded, not private properties. People do not cover themselves in the cloak of anonymity; they do not hide in the everyday both nameless and faceless. People know each other's business, and this is part of the everyday banter. Neighbor­hoods are places where gossip and rumors flourish and anyone can be the subject of gos­sip; gossip and rumors are oriented around place as much as around specific people. The “feel” of a neighborhood becomes the stories that one tells and hears about it. The bour­geois public sphere, the space where anonymity is established, and the high walls and spatial enclosures of private property are not part of the everyday experience in the poor areas of Port-au-Prince or the houses in the countryside. It is also the case that Haiti is a society built around networks, whom you know and who knows you is important.

“I came back to my neighborhood,” my Haitian friend Steve, living in New York for several years now, told me,

and everyone still talks to me as if I had never left... Everyone knows you and everyone knows your business; in my section of Port-au-Prince they still refer to me by the positions and views I had ten years ago. You can't get away from their talk about you and someone always sees you and tells someone and soon everyone knows your business. The same people live in the same houses, their children keep in touch with the neighborhood even if they move away... even in New York I get news of what's happening in this little part of the world from my mother.

When anthropologists talk about social knowledge they are often talking about rumors, gossip, and hearsay as discursive forms that mark the boundaries of self and the social world.

The New York Times man in Haiti, Howard French, wrote about a dissident in Haiti named Ferleau who was beaten by police and tried to seek asylum at the U.S. Embassy. The story ended by Ferleau saying:

If democracy returns to my country in a month or two, perhaps I'll be fine... But in Haiti, what is difficult is that everyone knows everyone else, and if you are branded as a militant, eventually you will be crushed. (The New York Times, 2 February 1993.)

“Everyone knows everyone else,” and this can be used against anyone. Of course, among certain classes, so small, everyone knows everyone else. Is it through the visual field of the culture of terror that the very networks between people become a figure of domina­tion itself? Being named as a subversive means being seen around, being spotted, being located, being known. Ferleau describes a situation where there is a feeling among people that people know each other's business. The very networks so vital for support become utilized by those in power as ways of tracking people down. The very networks and daily routines necessary to sustain one's self become the object of dread, because along any nodal point the state can be looking. And that eye will tell someone who will tell some­one until ultimately it reaches the ears of power. “Knowing,” as Ferleau uses it, is a prac­tice of seeing and power and crucially, revealing. Knowing reveals someone to the state: It is a reflexive function of the culture of terror. People are “known by their positions” as Steve said, or “branded,” as Ferleau says, and in normal times this poses problems for people, but it has even more far-reaching consequences in a culture of terror. For at the juncture of the gossip about people, the “public sphere of private life,” those who oppose the power of the military or the paramilitary-like forces that prop up de facto regimes, can be used against them. It also means that people will talk about you, teledjol (grape­vine) about who you are or what you have done. Ferleau spells it out in terms of “know­ing,” but the implication is that you can be turned in, informed upon. Somewhere, some­one must be connected to an attache, a Makout or the military. The danger of being spotted is a real and present danger today for many supporters of democracy. The gaze of power becomes instituted within the very spaces one occupies.

If, as Ferleau says, “everyone knows everyone else,” this becomes a danger because people can inform on others for a favor, a pittance, or perhaps just to get in good with the local military. In such a situation, acquaintances can easily turn into liabilities. This is the danger of such times when everything is difficult and life itself is hard to come by; any­one may decide to see what a piece of information may get them. I carried on fieldwork in Haiti both before the coup d'etat of 1991, and after, and the change in people's atti­tudes was noticeable and understandable. After the coup, people did not establish casual relationships with strangers. People may move from living in the Public Eye of power to becoming that eye—they may move from a position of being seen to being a seer, by turning someone in, lying about someone. Underneath the statement that “everyone knows everyone else,” there is the fear of the terrifying possibility that anyone at all can become the eyes (mouths and ears) of power.

A few weeks after the coup... a man came around and asked for the fellow who painted the cock. I was standing right around the corner at the time and my neighbor told him that the fellow he was looking for was out of town. “Too bad,” he said, “because if he was here I would kill him with the six bullets in this gun,” and he pointed to the gun in his holster. Then he said, “Tonight someone will come and paint over this,” and he pointed to the cock. And when two fellows came to paint over it they made all kinds of noise to let everyone know what they were doing.

The next morning there was an ugly brown spot painted over the cock. All this time I have been scared. I left my street and stayed at friends' around Port-au-Prince. I went home once in a while. But I always kept thinking, if they really wanted to kill me, they could have found me.

The necessary corollary to sight is site: seeing must have a field of vision from which to see. Nothing can be seen without a background and a foreground. Spatial constraints on seeing means that the city becomes a grid in de Certeau's sense of vision and of “shadows.” To some extent all spatial routes are grids of power where paths are overde­termined and certain routes charged with narrative meaning. Secret paths can save one time—short-cuts through yards, short-cuts through buildings. In Haiti this “routing” in­volves the imposition of political violence where routes and places inspire the dread and fear, where narratives about people missing and people found infiltrate the streets. Secret paths, safe houses, asylums, anything. These make up the deterritorialized landscape in which one must develop tactics of survival.

In Port-au-Prince walking itself entails risks. Jean-Pierre has a number of places he won't walk. Another friend, Charles, also has places within the rhizome of Port-au- Prince where he will not venture. They have different grids reflecting different concerns, spatial insertions, and political identities. For Jean-Pierre, not up Rue Casserne, never past the Palace guards, go far around the Palace, and never get caught walking anywhere in cite Soleil without a definite reason and many friends around you. Walking down the street of the national prison (Rue Internment) is permitted during the night when people are out, but not in the day. Never past the house of a known Makout or attache.

These decisions are perhaps only at first conscious—it is in walking around Port-au- Prince that one senses the feel of the city, of danger zones and places of relief. The city becomes a maze, a series of feelings, tactile swatches of possibilities and dangers. Even loitering in Port-au-Prince is not always safe. Every zone has its Makout and others who watch over these places—especially where there are outdoor markets set up. Just as pub­lic discourse was forced into the back alleys of rumor, so too people were often forced to walk the back roads, or to stay at home much of the time, and not to go out at night past a certain time.

The Public Eye in Haiti is the memory of political violence.^[7] The Public Eye is an al­legorical reference to seeing and remembering. In Haiti it was the moral messianic movement of Lavalas that kept the names of the dead and their memories alive. Aris­tide’s picture was painted on walls throughout Port-au-Prince, as well as pictures of cocks—these were the specular images of the Public Eye in Haiti. The Public Eye is the memory of the dead killed by the military and the Makout. In the stories and rumors of the killings, memories were ignited and fanned.

The absence of anonymity in Haiti is the cultural basis for both the structure of the visual field of power and the Public Eye. As I mentioned, before Aristide’s rise to power there was the dechoukaj. Both in Port-au-Prince and in the countryside I heard tales of Duvalierists being chased out and even killed by angry people seeking justice. Many Haitians suffered under the hands of the military and paramilitary forces for years, but they didn’t forget who brutalized them. A group called Pa Blye, “Don’t Forget,” was ac­tive in Port-au-Prince after Jean-Claude Duvalier (Baby Doc) was chased out of the country. I interviewed key members of this group before the coup d’etat and the group’s dissolution. People had kept accounts and revenge in their heads for many years. Some big Makout carried around with them reputations for brutality and violence and these reputations were sometimes their downfall after Duvalier fled the country.

Charles worked hard to get Aristide elected president. He spent many nights explain­ing Haitian society and culture to me. He worked with community groups in his old neighborhood and organized a medical clinic there. Because of his training in economics and his ability to speak Kreyol, French, and English fluently, he obtained a good job working as a clerk in an agency of the government. After the coup d’etat of 1991, he was fired from his job and arrested. After his release, he maintained a low profile and I saw him only once in a great while. Sometimes he complained about the difficulty of keeping out of sight:

People here know each other’s business. I hate to take the bus down here

... someone might see me.

Not only was he afraid because of his work in Lavalas, but after Aristide’s victory in the presidential election, he was involved in chasing a Makout out of his old neighborhood. After the coup of 1991, that same Makout returned to the neighborhood to settle the score. Charles knew he was on that Makout’s list of enemies.

I should get a gun and shoot him. Instead, I’ll wait till the day that everyone burns him.

Charles once met Jean-Pierre in my room in Port-au-Prince and became obviously nervous. It turned out later that he was afraid to speak around Jean-Pierre because he said that young guys like Jean-Pierre, guys with no future and no political conviction, are dangerous because they become the eyes and ears of the military, the police, or the pa­ramilitary groups such as the Makout. The same fear that gripped Jean-Pierre because of his cock on the wall haunted Charles, a committed activist, but no less subjected to the visual field of power. I was in the strange position of having to defend Jean-Pierre with­out being able to tell Charles about Jean-Pierre’s problems with the Makout, because he asked me not to talk to him about it.

A few days after Aristide returned... to Haiti some people wanted me to paint another cock, in the same place. I said, ‘No! God saved me once before.’ This time they offered me twenty dollars, but I couldn’t spend the money if I was dead, could I?

In Bataille's essay “Eye” (first published in Documents 4, 1929), we are informed that shortly before his death the illustrator Grandville had a nightmare of the gigantic eye which flies through the air and chases down a criminal. Bataille explicitly linked this eye to the police and to the expectation of torture: all are bound by the horror and seduction of violence—the seduction of horror. The eye that initially chases down the criminal is the eye that rises out of the unprovoked murder of the victim. This eye is the eye of jus­tice, the imaginary eye of justice that pursues the criminal unto death. Bataille explicitly linked this eye with the expectation of violence. Bataille was interested in the contradic­tion between the desire for repugnance, for horror. It almost appears that Bataille natural­izes this scopic drive, yet his later essays (especially “The psychological structure of Fas­cism”), he explicitly links psychology and politics. I have noted in my own way here the clash between the field of visuality of power and the Public Eye to see, to know, and to remember enemies.

The field of visuality of power that will spot Ferleau and track him down is linked to the Public Eye that pursues the Makout, and the Duvalierists, and once in a great while, kills them. From the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier until the 1991 coup d’etat, the Makout were subjected to the magical form of punishment: Pere Brun—being burned alive by putting a tire over the victim’s head and setting it ablaze. In 1992, Charles told me, in a defiant tone, confirming the existence of the Public Eye,

We know every Makout in this city. We even knew which church Cedras [General Cedras—Leader of the Haitian Military] was going to a few weeks ago.

Jean-Pierre later told me:

Now, I want to learn English and... leave Haiti. I don’t know when, but there is no life for me here. Aristide has been back and nothing has changed for me. I am studying English for the day I can leave Haiti. I don't want someone to come around looking for me to kill me because I painted a cock on the wall. That is Haiti. It's not for me. Things change here so fast that the president today might be lying dead in the street tomorrow. What chance does someone like me have, someone who is so poor?

I saw Jean-Pierre when the U.S. soldiers were newly stationed around Port-au- Prince, and he was happy to see the Haitian military out of power, but the fear of those days had not left him, and he doubted that he would actively get involved in politics. He was content to work on his art and his English, and find a way to leave the country for the United States.

[Thanks to Steve Coupeau, Kate Stewart, and Donna Plotkin for their insights into and criticisms of the ideas discussed here. Special thanks to Sean Harvey.]

References

Asturias, Miguel Angel. (1985). El Senor Presidente, Translated by Frances Partridge. New York: Antheneum.

Battaille, Georges. (1987). Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, edited with an introduction by Alan Stoekl. Translated from the French by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Canetti, Elias. (1984). Crowds and Power, Translated by Carol Stewart. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux.

de Certeau, Michel. (1984). The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steve Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Deleuze, Gilles. (1988). Foucault. Translated and edited by Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Foucault, Michel. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Allen Lane.

The Haiti Commission for Inquiry into the September 30th Coup; Ramsey Clark et al. (1991).

Lageuerre, Michel. (1993). The Military and Society in Haiti. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press.

The New York Times, 2 February 1993.

Perice, Glen A. (1994). Rumors and Politics in Haiti. Ph. D. dissertation in anthropology. University of Texas, Austin.

Sini, Carlo. (1993). Images of Truth: From Sign to Symbol (Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences), translated by Massimo Verdicchio. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press.