Rumors and Politics in HaitiAuthor(s): Glen A. PericeReviewed work(s):Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 70, No. 1 (Jan., 1997), pp. 1-10Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3317797 .Accessed: 31/01/2012 15:40

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RUMORS AND POLITICS IN HAITI

GLEN A. PERICE

This article considers rumors the backbone of what Michael Taussig calls "the nervous sys- tem." For the last three decades Haiti has been a thoroughly nervous, sometimes terrifying place, struggling in the grip of violence, fear, and despotic repression. The grapevine in Haiti is a dangerous and highly charged place where stories of violence and magic can paralyze people with fear and confusion, but it is also the place of a type of speaking that limits the ability of any institution or government to define social knowledge totally. Authoritarian forces depend upon word of mouth to help spread terror and fear. To accomplish this they must drive speaking out of open public debate and into the back alleys of rumors. But in passing rumors speakers create an alternative public sphere and maneuver to speak in oppositional voices. It is the task of a critical anthropology to interrogate these forms and to work out methods of explanation that are appropriate to such practices. [rumor, Haiti, violence, oppositional, cul- tural poetics]

Silence is Healthy

In 1974 "El Silencio es Salud" is what Argentina's notorious Minister of Social Welfare, Lopez Rega, had wrapped around Buenos Aires' central monu- ment, the Obelisk. It should be pointed out that Rega is reputed to be the initiator of the infamous death squads of Buenos Aires. Although crackdowns on journalists and writers stopped the flow of infor- mation, surely this warning to maintain healthy si- lence was aimed at the people of Argentina. Yet, how strange it is when we consider that it was the

very activities of the death squads that made terror

widespread and stoked the very kinds of talk the Obelisk warned against. When Argentine writer Ri- cardo Piglia commented on the situation of terror and violence in Argentina, he opined that in such a situation "reality is not the truth" (cited by Caistor 1988: 7). Truth is not a reflection of reality since all realities are themselves socially constructed. What Piglia sees as the cause of this is "so many attempts to hide reality in order to concentrate power" (p. 7).1

In this essay I examine the constitution of polit- ical reality in Haiti through hearsay and rumors. I am concerned with rumors about politics and the politics of rumors. The time frame is several months after the coup d'etat of September 1991 which ousted democratically elected President Jean- Bertrand Aristide. Those months were undoubtedly crisis times in Haiti, but not unlike the past few dec- ades in that country. The use of violence and terror in Haiti was similar to Argentina as well as other places where terror and violence have taken root. In Haiti stories of violence perpetrated on citizens by

the army were common. Walking down crowded streets in Port-au-Prince or little paths out in the countryside, you ran into someone you knew who told you about a politically motivated killing, or someone being hauled off to prison. You heard of people shot in broad daylight by soldiers or makout (the infamous paramilitary forces used by Francois Duvalier in his reign of terror). You went to find a friend and learned that he had "disappeared." You heard all the time that Aristide was coming back next week.

Rumors are the backbone of what Michael Taussig (1992) calls "the nervous system."2 In vio- lent and dangerous situations the throng of rumors told over and over and over again calcify into ac- cepted representations of social reality and political life.

Violence, Terror, and the Creation of the Socially Real

All societies live by fictions taken as real. What distin- guishes cultures of terror is that the epistemological, onto- logical and otherwise philosophical problem of representa- tion-reality and illusion, certainty and doubt-becomes infinitely more than a "merely" philosophical problem.... It becomes a high powered medium of domination (Taussig 1986: 121).

The phenomenon of terror appears then as the fundamental instrument of power. It is neither fear of authority nor force of coercion that characterizes the relations with power, but terror that traumatizes the people, paralyzes the willpower, disturbs consciences and prostitutes personali- ties (Pierre-Charles 1973: 51; my translation).

Some realities live on not as something so ab-

1

2 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

stract as fictions or philosophies, but as real as the rumors and the stories in your ear. Beginning with the ascendancy of Franqois Duvalier (Papa Doc) to the presidency in 1957, political violence has been constant and intractable (Pierre-Charles 1973; Fergu- son 1987; Wilentz 1989; Trouillot 1990). Violence in Haiti is the result of the historical class conflict in Haiti and the continuing imperialism of the United States towards the Caribbean. A typical report on Haiti after the coup d'dtat 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 wound- ing of civilians... . [F]ear grips the population across all social groupings (The Haiti Commission for Inquiry into the September 30th Coup d'Etat, New York, 1992).

Formations of violence are composed not only of specific events but also by the narratives that pre- cede these events and the narratives that live on af- ter they have ended (Feldman 1991). It is wrong to look at rumors of violence as unimportant to the dis- tribution of power-as if this talk were merely an

unexpected after effect. Violence and terror initiate narratives and rumors reveal the developing ideolog- ical terrains of terror and the power of violence to reconstitute social relations. Violence is a socially productive and autonomous social institution where narratives, spatial configurations, and ideologies are generated.

"For a whole week in September 1988," Jean- Bertrand Aristide writes,

rumors were flying around town: Sunday the Tontons Macoutes would come to attack us at St. Jean-Bosco. Of course, it was not the first time I had heard such rumors. They were always saying that the Macoutes would come to stamp us out, to kill us, to ransack the church (1990: 13).

Rumors are weapons that spread terror by working as predictions of violence. Rumors are like the spir- its sent to cause harm in that they appear to come from nowhere. Rumors fly around like the evil spir- its. Like maladi Satan, an illness sent to harm, ru- mors can harm.

Rumors restage violence within discursive con- structions. Rumors are not imperfect copies of real events, they are generative productions of language. Here is one story that you would have heard in Haiti in late 1992. Walking down the street someone spots you who knows you and pulls you to the side--a kind of spontaneous intimacy is created:

FRAPH broke into her house on Delmas looking for her husband ... and tore her nursing baby off her breast.. . [T]hey gang raped her right there on her bed and then, before leaving, they said, pointing to the crying baby, "We'll rape her too when she grows up!"

The excessive violence of FRAPH (Front pour l'Avancement et le Progres Haitien) is reinscribed in this rumor. The story is shocking and it disrupts the continuous flow of the street in Port-au-Prince, with the cars chugging along, the people passing by. The

story shows that violence re-maps the social bounda- ries of person and property-boundaries swept away in the storm of violence.

Rumors and Narrative Poetics

Rumor (14c) n vt 1: talk or opinion widely disseminated with no discernible source, 2: a statement or report current without known authority for its truth, 3: archaic: talk or re- port of a notable person or event, 4: a soft low indistinct sound.

The literature on rumors and gossip has staked out a place in the social sciences. Many earlier works tried to nail down rumors with a staunch methodological positivism, and these studies were often motivated by an attempt to control rumors.3 This positivism often started with a hard-and-fast distinction between rumors and information, which, as Jean-Noel Kapferer informs us, is wrong because "the watershed between information and rumors is not objective. They take as 'information' what they believe to be true and as 'rumors' what they believe to be false" (1990: 12). He concludes that "all cer- tainty is social" (p. 264).

My own understanding of rumors follows from the work of such rumor theorists as Tomatsu Shibutani, Terry A. Knopf, and Kapferer, all of whom emphasize that rumors are responses to the social and political milieu in which they are trans- mitted. Shibutani's book Improvised news (1966) is

particularly important because it took a more inter- pretive approach than previous studies by recogniz- ing that rumors are explanations. If rumors are ex-

planations, then speakers are interpreters, not merely conduits of information. I also take into account that Shibutani's hermeneutic position has been criticized

by Knopf for its lack of specificity in regards to po- litical context (1975). Anthropology helps us with this problem by virtue of its attention to social and political context.

Anthropologists have begun to see the complex-

RUMORS AND POLITICS IN HAITI 3

ity of speaking and listening as forms of cultural po- etics. From this perspective, rumors are not "texts" but interpretive stances, practices that mediate social

reality, and "performances," as Abrahams calls them (1970). The theory of cultural poetics recog- nizes that culture is dialogically constructed through artful and mediated discourse. Speaking constitutes not only the "products" of research; the subject po- sitions and political identities of speakers are them- selves effects produced by discourse. As Stewart writes:

In a transformable, dialogic world it is necessary to say not

only that discourse is socially constructed but also that so-

ciety is discursively constructed. Subjects and objects are produced effects (1990: 409).

Some anthropologists and linguists have re- cently called for a greater appreciation for the con- nections between narrative poetics, speech genres, and power (see Bauman and Briggs 1992). The con- nection of language and politics is a difficult one to examine because "language itself is torn between complicity with a totalizing law and complicity ... that escapes that law" (Stoekl 1985: 82). Language itself is "torn," meaning that we cannot assume it to be stable or systemic, either ideological or opposi- tional. "[A]ll utterances are potentially splintered, formally open to contradictory uses" (Frow 1986: 63).

Rumors are not the result of confusion between reality and truth, but of beliefs about such things. Rumors become information when they are believed to be true. Speakers produce different versions of stories, because there is no basic story that is the real one; the reproduction of a story means that it is torn from its originary state and refunctioned within the speech context. "[T]here is no single basically basic story subsisting beneath it but, rather, an un- limited number of other narratives that can be con- structed in response to it or perceived as related to it" (Hermstein-Smith 1981: 217, emphasis in origi- nal). Because rumors are constructed in response to other rumors, they are not only narratives, but in- tertextual in nature. Rumors are nothing but retell- ings, layers of story and meaning, fragments of frag- ments, in which context is best seen not only as performed, not only as "functional" to some other cultural process, but also as movement through net- works of people and society, and a moving practice of reading heterogeneous signs and meanings. Ru- mors are "about" events but also about reinscribing events; rumoring is the cultural practice of reinscrib-

ing reinscriptions.

Teledjfl and Zen4

They say in Haiti that we live on the telediol day and night-thus many people live their lives in terms of the grapevine. For them it is the master of thought ... alas (Brax 1991: 194; my translation).

Se pa teledjdl You heard it over the teledjbl. Kote tande sa? Where is it?

Robert Tata writes that "personal contact is the major way in which information is disseminated in most of the country" (1982: 30). My own observa- tions confirm that people rely heavily on word-of- mouth. People pass rumors around and "pepper is added to them," as people in Haiti say; rumors are more than "improvised news" as Shibutani calls them. When people "add pepper" to stories and gossip, they add speculations that both further the story and give an interpretation of it.

Given the censorship of the Haitian media after the September 1991 coup d'6tat and the silencing of all oppositional voices, there was very little public confirmation of everyday repression. The Haitian journalists who reported about the situation were beaten, as was reporter Jean-Mario Paul, or killed, as were Jacques Simeon and Felix Lamy. Only a small percentage of Haitians had access to television, and the radio stations still left on the dial were heavily censored, so what was the point? Haitians could talk about things. This they did. The lines of the teledj6l stayed open. The dead became names on the tongues of people who know them, and concealed in these names was the moral messianic power of Lavalas (the political movement behind President Aristide).

The question above (in Krey6l) was put to me by a woman who sold coffee and bread rolls on a street corner in Port-au-Prince. She recognized that the teledjbl makes distant things seem near; some- times obvious and near things seem confusing and distant. Worse still, this place can strip away politi- cal resolve with fear.

The narrative poetics of the teledj61 is consti- tuted by indirection, ambiguity, and discretion. Peo- ple use a poetics of distance and nearness, things that imply but do not always come out and say. Peo- ple tell me, "These are things I heard. Because I know you, I will tell, but I can't say whether they are true or false" (M-pa ka di ou se vre osno se pa vre).5 The teledjbl is an allegorization of discourse which subverts the transparency of a purely referen-

4 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

tial language. It signifies the density of the language and the necessity of the intervention of both the

speaker and the listener in using the endless drift of

signifiers. It is speaking within the culture of terror that

makes the teledjbl in Haiti different from other types of rumors in other places. In 1993 a Haitian refugee told me while we were riding the Brooklyn-bound F train that the teledjbl is a dangerous thing. It is never what you think it is: "You may hear things, you know, that are not true. Or they could be true but you would never know it ... or they could be false but everyone is saying it so you think it's true.... "

Telling rumors is like using a back door out of

speaking. It can be very dangerous to believe what

you hear. Haitians condemn the practice of spreading rumors: they often talk about other who rumor, who can be trusted, whom not to talk with about any- thing important. This daily gossip thus constructs

speaking subjects who all have the power to rumor.

Everyone and anyone can be a makout or attache (a spy or minion of the military), or as some people said-a C.I.A. spy. In Haiti one fellow put it to me this way:

If someone in my neighborhood goes away for a while, say three or four months, I don't talk too much with him until he is around for while and people can check out where he was and what he was doing... . You never know. Even if it is someone I have known for a long time. You never know.

During difficult times someone could turn you in to the police just for what you told them.6 You must be able to deny that what you said means anything more than repeating what you yourself heard. And more, people might perceive that you are spreading rumors to hurt someone, confuse people, or frighten them. People may tell you strange things just to watch you and suss out your reaction. (Feigning nonchalance and concern are part of it.) In this case

again the speaker must disassociate himself from what he said.

There are many Haitian proverbs that warn against talking, which reveal the suspicion Haitians have of loose talk. "Je we bouche pe," (The eyes see, the mouth is silent); "Rat konnen chat konnen barik mayi-a ret la," (literally: the cat and the rat both know the corn is in the barrel; You know it, I know it, why should we talk about it?); "Si-m te konnen toujou deye," (Be careful in what you are doing or saying; if not, you can be sorry later).7

The Legacy of Franpois Duvalier

Duvalier ordered that former Army Captain Blucher Phi- logene's head be cut off, packed in ice, and brought to the palace in an Air Force plane. News spread around Port-au- Prince that Papa Doc was having long sessions with the head, that he had induced it to disclose the exile's plans (Burt and Diedrich 1969: 357).

Word spread quickly that Duvalier had ordered Jumelle's body brought to him ... so that Jumelle's heart could be removed to make a potent Wanga [a magic charm] (p. 139).

Rumors are integral to the power of terror and the terror of power. If, in reading these quotations, we see Duvalier's power emanating from his magic, we should also take into account that "word spread quickly." Reports of Francois Duvalier's power give testimony not only to the power of magic but to the power of rumor itself. In telling these tales about Duvalier in the present, historical imagination itself becomes ensorcelled in the magic of authoritarian state power. "He did steal children, he did!" a sec-

retary in Port-au-Prince told me about Papa Doc. Even the dead are not safe: their severed heads can still be induced to give up secrets. Speaking about Duvalier's political hold over Haiti is often preceded by these gruesome tales of the severed head packed on ice, the heart taken from the dead man, the chil- dren stolen from their families. These tales were told to me while a kind of calm astonishment descended over speaker and listener alike, belief mixing with fear and fascination.

Images of the disfiguration and dismemberment of the dead and of the stolen children are mnemonic, overdetermined narrative images of historical imagi- nation. They are not only scary stories, but stories of violations of the individual body, by which the

body's parts can be used in other, magical ways, or in which children are wrested from their families; these stories refashion individuals as subjects of forces outside their control, forces of the authorita- rian state and magical power. An intense, visceral sense of vulnerability permeates these tales. They are also stories that reveal how terror moves through historical time and is not on a par with it. These tales were called up in moments of distress (1992), when violence was once again seemingly every- where. The army, the makout, FRAPH, the attaches, all are linked in everyday talk through the narrativity of violence.

The power of terror is spread by speaking, but power itself is mediated by the circuit of rumors.

RUMORS AND POLITICS IN HAITI 5

Within the poetics of the teledjbl, not only is vio- lence inscribed, but the recent history of the

dechoukaj-the uprooting and killing--of makout and Duvalierists, is inscribed in performative narra- tives, and it is violence that unites these ways of

speaking. For example, in Haiti boko (practitioners of magic) are reputedly able to call on spirits to aid them in killing someone, to change themselves into animals, to make themselves invisible. Gossip about

bbkb is common, and they have come to stand in

many people's minds as a image of Duvalierism. "We chased off a bbkb last year," someone said to me, pointing to the house where he used to live as we were walking by it, "because he was killing peo- ple." (Now I have the story. I tell someone about the bbkb who was killing people near Hinche. They nod their heads; they will tell someone else.)

Paranoia and Panic

But, of course, that's just the way the poor people talk here. They're stupid and they're uneducated. They're su-

perstitious. They don't know anything about how politics works. They can't even read, for Christ's sake. We keep contact with the army and the U.S. State department. They tell us what is really happening. We read the foreign pa- pers. Of course, we also watch American television.

So said one member of the "political class." In the film Killing the Dream (Crowing Rooster

Productions) there is an interview with the wife of

Jean-Jacques Honorat (the first de facto prime minis- ter after the September 1991 coup d'etat). Mrs. Honorat was also the head of a supposed human

rights organization within Haiti--CHADEL. When questioned about all the deaths at the hands the army, the same army that launched her husband's political career, Mrs. Honorat replies without flinch- ing that the deaths were rumors. "They are nothing but rumors." Staring into the camera eye she says that no one has come to her and complained about family members missing. Those in hiding, those missing, indeed the dead themselves were nothing but rumors. Like the speaking obelisk of Buenos Aires, Mrs. Honorat signals the unhealthiness of dis- turbing power's imposed silence. This is the rumor of the authoritarian state.

But when day after day the death toll climbed higher, who could tell who was telling rumors and who was not? Things are like this when reality is being hidden out in the open. Mrs. Honorat was caught in a struggle for the power to name truth,

and it is clear to her that rumoring is a disreputable and damned practice of the marginalized. Because she was the head of a "human rights" organization, her claim took on even more importance. Human

rights were tied to the verification of events that could not be verified to the authorities because that would have made people visible to the eyes of

power. To claim a human right in such. a situation was to make one a target.

Who wouldn't be paranoid in this situation? Both sides of the struggle were afraid. Violence

erupts where no hegemony exists to stabilize the po- litical process. The majority of people (peasants and the urban poor) were poised to step onto the stage of

politics and this made the elites paranoid. The prob- lem is that these paranoid elites controlled a well armed army. When the candidate of the wealthy bourgeoisie, Marc Bazin, ran for president, there was a rumor around that he was a U.S. citizen and a tool of the United States. The American novelist Herbert Gold, who himself has spent much time with the elites in Haiti wrote that "[t]his rumor ... is a symp- tom of the normal paranoia of the powerless" (1990: 258). Subsequent events have "proved" what the

teledjbl knew-that Bazin was in cahoots with the United States government. Bazin went to great lengths to disprove this U.S. connection (he obvi- ously had his ear to the teledjbl) and he failed-we may ask how powerless the "powerless" were in this situation?9

The teledjbl is a linguistic form of life that re- sponds to historical dimensions of power in Haiti. It is not simply a "function" of some other dynamics in some other place. For instance, during Aristide's tenure as President the teledjbl often led to a kouri ("stampede" or "panic"). In August 1991 in Port- au-Prince, a friend warned me: "You better get off the streets because word is that a coup d'etat is in the works."

The rumor of a coup d'etat was spinning all the time. Even before Aristide took office there was a coup that attempted to deny him his presidency.'0 The kouri is a prime example of the way politics and the teledjbl are tied together. What I am describ- ing is not "mob violence," but the recognition that politics in Haiti at this time was a matter of instanta- neous mobilization-political space and time

merged. A coup d'6tat works only by catching the government and the populace "off guard," the re- sponse is an equally rapid mobilization of force by people in the streets to stem the coup.

6 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

Up Country

In December 1992 1 spent Christmas in a small town in northern Haiti as the guest of a friend, Jacques Andre." It is a place high in the mountains, sur- rounded by plots of land that people cultivate. Jac-

ques' family are cultivators, and every year it has become harder for them to make a living. His mother is a large, strong woman called "Saint Ann" as a sign of respect. Saint Ann has had a very bad

cough for several years. Jacques' father is thin, very tall, and nearly blind. He seemed glad to hear our voices when we got in shortly after midnight, but Saint Ann was sick and felt bad that she couldn't do as much for me as she usually could for visitors.

Jacques has three sisters and three brothers. Only one sister stayed in town and worked part time at a near by medical clinic. The rest live in Cap Haitien and Port-au-Prince. Each family member and close friend is a nodal point of a network of speakers.12 Family and friends are important because they are the points of insertion into the teledjbl. Each person has an insider's group when speaking that expands outwards into the society itself. Yet the networks created (sometimes even within the family) are al-

ways of concern. Having arrived in town after a long and diffi-

cult trip, we were called out of the house just after

midnight by Jacques' friend Raymond. Although Jacques' mother asked Raymond to come into the

yard, he remained where he was. Jacques' family came out to greet him in the road and talk.

Raymond: Ten or so fellows were brought to the prison by the chef seksyon [a rural policeman] and held there until their people paid 200 gourdes or so to the soldiers. They claimed that they were passing out tracts for Aristide. A few of them were beaten badly. Some have taken off to the Dominican Republic.

Jacques: And the tracts...? Raymond: Tracts? What could be in them that every-

one doesn't already know? Jacques: And you? Raymond: [becoming animated] They say I had some-

thing to do with it all. [silence] How long are you staying here?

Glen: I don't know. Jacques: We'll be here for Christmas and New Year's. Raymond: Cap Haitien is better. More stuff to do.

And safer.

None of us in the house slept well that night. The next day Jacques, his sister Dieula, and I were

talking in the yard near their house:

Jacques: I'm angry about what had happened but

things are bad all over Haiti. I've heard stories like this. Raymond denies having anything to do with the tracts but people say he is involved in the whole thing.

Dieula: Raymond is involved with all kinds of people. [This question hangs in the air around us; both the expres- sion on her face and the way the question was uttered turns the tables on any claims that he wasn't involved.]

Glen: I think that I'm here and Raymond couldn't tell us anything. He must have been scared.

Jacques: Oh, no. It is because Raymond heard you are here in town that he came and told us anything at all.

Glen: But we just got here. Jacques: He knew, as did many people, you were

coming before you got here. Someone saw you in the town where we were looking for a ride into the mountains.13

A few days later we made the rounds to visit

Jacques' friends. Under a tree several people hung out and played dominoes. There was talk about all kinds of things. The local barber needed to get bat-

tery-powered clippers; the school marks of some- one's brother were too low; Americans are great at basketball but lousy at soccer. And, the tracts. Those too:

Belair: What do they look like? Brino: Did they have Aristide's picture on them? Michel: They were found in the road, or was it on

someone? Gaston: Hey, blan, maybe you brought those tracts

here? [Here I laugh uncomfortably and wonder about this

fellow.] Jacques: No, he's here to check up on things for the

U.S. president. Charles: My God! Those tracts were planted by the

army to crack down on young guys who support Aristide. It is all not true. There are no tracts.

If the army can accuse anybody, I thought to myself, then no one is safe. Accusations are like bullets when the stakes are so high.

Another day Jacques and I ran into two friends of his-Martin and Jenesse-in the mountains.

Martin: The army wants people to believe they made the whole thing up because it scares everybody to do that.

Jenesse: Perhaps the army does that, but they're afraid also.

Martin: Bunch of zombi that are trained to shoot. Jennesse: That's right.

In other words, power spreads rumors too. "They're afraid also." Now I was confused. Everyone, it seemed to me, was afraid. Either the army cracked down on those who made and passed the tracts around or the local military made the whole thing up in order to crack down on known Aristide sympa- thizers. I wanted to talk more with Raymond and I

RUMORS AND POLITICS IN HAITI 7

searched for him, but I had heard a rumor that he was warned not to talk to me at all. I had this terri- ble sense that even bumping into him by accident could have serious consequences for him. And, what about my own safety?'4 Maybe this rumor was launched to scare us both and keep us from talking? Here, it is not just silence, but silence that was

proactive: silence under terror is never quiet-it speaks. The army was coming down hard all over the area and they feared the possibility of the resto- ration of democracy. Makout had been uprooted and some killed just a few years ago. But I was warned that even if the tracts were a sham that the military had made up, it was not wise thing to go around and say that it was a sham.'5

Nobody admitted seeing the tracts, but every- body had heard about them. Were they real? That

depends upon whom or what you believed. Some

people were cynical about the whole thing, either because the tracts did not exist or because they did. Some people expressed contempt at the thought of tracts being used against the overwhelming power of the military. But even the cynical-minded were caught into speaking about them. Speaking about the tracts, was, essentially, a political tract itself.

One afternoon while playing kasino-the favor- ite card game in the area-I asked about the vodou ceremonies in the area.'6 I was quickly rebuffed. (It was a bad subject and their faces told me so.) The ougan (vodou leader) in the area, I was told, was the same chef who made the arrests. I asked Jacques about this and he told me that it was indeed true that the chef was a ougan. When I asked him if the chef could use magic for political reasons, to stop Lavalas, he replied, "Of course!" Thus the chef himself was an object of rumors. Because he was talked about but absent, he somehow influenced peo- ple from afar. This is magic from a distance. There was also talk about how he would be "uprooted" when Aristide returned. And he knew that people said this about him, I was told. He had people who listened for him. The image "he knows this" shows that despite his power, he was subject to the media- tion of power. And perhaps this is the return of magic at a distance.

Conspiracy

Sovereignty itself is conspiracy (Burke 1969: 166).

Konplo pi fo Wanga. (Haitian proverb: A conspiracy is stronger than magic.)

After the 1991 coup the army charged that every meeting where they did not have a presence was a conspiracy against the state. For example, outside of the town of Hinche the local military for- bid any meetings by the local peasant organization unless a military representative was present. On the other hand, people of the organization worried about informants who might accuse them of trying to re- store Aristide to power and give their names to the military.'7 Rumors mediated these two sites of

"worry" at the boundaries of the military's paranoia and an individual's concern over informants. Into this cauldron of uncertainty and doubt, of violence and fear, rumor stirs up the anticipation of knowl-

edge and the danger of that knowledge. When peo- ple did speak openly in my presence I had the un- easy feeling of hearing what they were saying. Even talking about events created a conspiratorial "tone" in the teledj6l. Listening to people talk was complic- itous with them. For example, in the rumors about the tracts everything spun around the image of a clandestine group operating against the army. These socialized fantasies fueled the army's paranoia: "They're afraid also."

Not only did the chef crack down on Aristide supporters, he made it clear over the teledjbl that the crackdown was going to get worse.

Oppositional Discourse and Messianic Rumors

The trick, in short, is to keep on talking: to talk one's death, not live it. (That is perhaps the most radical defini- tion one can give of oppositional discourse) (Chambers 1991: 166).

The very forces that banished public speaking about events in Haiti depended upon the teledjbl to spread terror. Duvalier's magic could not have ex- tended into the historical and political imagination without "word spread quickly." The infamous "Commander Zed" (Major Charles), a military man who ruled Hinche like a little dictator, could not have distributed power around the town had there not been continual rumors and gossip about his ac- tions and the violence he perpetrated. It is this con- tradiction that speakers were able to exploit. The military and the elites who controlled the mass me- dia tried to present an orderly and unified front of control, of unmediated power, but the very necessity of utilizing the speaking of people reflected the me- diated quality of power. Oppositional speaking does not try to overturn power like resistance; instead it

8 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

maneuvers for a position within the confines of

power. Rumors have the power (of the weak) to detotalize the inherent totalizing effects of domina- tion. For example, the teledjbl itself gave figuration to the mediated aspect of power in the rumors that were always around, saying that the army was frac- tured and ready to make war on itself, and that

many of the soldiers secretly supported democracy. Even speaking about politics in Haiti in 1992

often meant that the teller of rumors became anony- mous within a constantly changing network. "Ru- mors," Maurice Blanchot has written, "are reported without anyone transmitting them ... because the one who transmits them accepts being no one"

(1988: 17). There is no "author" position within the

teledjbl. The linguistic slot of no one is always an- other context that inscribes alterity to the actual situ- ation of the speaker. In telling, the specific context of the speaker is enacted along with the political context wherein the speaker is no one-"Who told

you that?" "No one did... . I just heard it on the street"-the empty category of word-of-mouth. No one can also be seen in this context as a figuration of word-of-mouth itself. Raymond's not coming in the house was a reflex of being "no one"-the no-

body who transmits rumors. He was not stopping by for a social visit. Coming inside a house is a state- ment of presence in Haiti and invokes the reciproc- ity of a visit.

What does it mean to "talk one's death," as Chambers says of oppositional speaking? Raymond figuratively "talked his death"-erased his inscrip- tion in the events he was speaking about. His brief but revealing conversation showed his own shift in position between actor in an unfolding drama, and a teller who stands back from the story he is telling. Blanchot writes that the person who transmits ru- mors "knows all, but cannot answer for it ... be- cause he is not really there" (1988: 13). Speakers in Haiti could not always answer for stories as Blanchot would like, because presence itself is sometimes dangerous. The teledjbl runs against equating presence with answerability: the speaker is not "there" because he is not "living his death," but talking it. When people talked about things like the military's cracking down on resistance fighters who produced "tracts," they moved into a space where oppositional speaking as a practice of the weak was possible. People daily overcame their fear in order to talk about events. Talking and listening are not neutral places in such a situation. A story like the one about the tracts puts the listener in the

uncomfortable position of being not only the conduit of terror, thus aiding power, but also an accomplice to those who resist authoritarian rule because it is "unauthorized" speaking. Speaking itself became a kind of "tract" about the tracts, passing on informa- tion in spite of domination. It was the experience of the storyteller telling the story itself in the political context that was oppositional.

The rumors about Aristide's return were messi- anic. They talked people hopes into a utopian pres- ent, where Aristide would return, no matter what. Similarly, around January 1993 I had heard for sev- eral weeks that "General Cedras left with fifty soldiers across the border to the Dominican Repub- lic... . He took a suitcase full of American money." Such rumors were not mere fantasies, as a realist might call them, but utopian speculations that kept the notice of change and redemption alive. By far, the biggest danger in such a situation was to become resigned to the fact that Aristide was gone: nothing would have been better for the elites and their mili- tary minions. And, nothing would have been more "common sensical" than to become resigned to the fact that in Haiti exiled presidents do not return. The constant flow of rumors did not confront power head on but sidestepped the forces that were always nail- ing down a realpolitik which said "No Democracy, No Aristide." The rumors about his return were messianic, almost beyond belief, but they were a hermeneutics of hope for those who had no reason to hope.

Conclusion

It is precisely because men do not accept everything at face value that so many rumors arise (Shibutani 1966: 210).

Speaking about events aids the spread of domi- nation over the country causing terror to seep through every crack and crevice. But people caught in such a situation do not fight the advertisements of terror but use them, proliferate them, and all the while keep the space of talking, passing information, and meeting together, alive. In other words, people in Haiti do not always passively submit to the dis- orientations of "epistemic murk" or freeze up with fear caused by violence and terror, but try to maneu- ver within these imposed conditions to achieve their own ends. In such a situation, where terror and vio- lence spread over the country, "reality is not the truth."

RUMORS AND POLITICS IN HAITI 9

Rumors are not a collection of unverified re-

ports and fantasies of the marginalized and power- less, but a speech form used by speakers to maneu- ver into spaces of alterity and opposition. In Haiti

oppositional discourses seek to maintain the mystery of events and shoot events through with messianic

hope. Rumors do that. In one stance, speaking itself becomes the place of an utopian public space. Tell-

ing rumors is a rhetorical practice of everyday life in Haiti, generating terrifying stories, but also allowing spaces where speakers and listeners can maneuver around the dissimulations of power, circulate stories, and struggle to carve out social knowledge of "the way things are" through oppositional discourse rather than through the phantasms of violence and terror.

NOTES Acknowledgments Thanks to Katie Stewart, Mel Tapper, Donna Plotkin, and several unknown readers for their suggestions and criticism of earlier versions of this article.

'One thinks of Georges Bataille's essay "The Obelisk" and the notion that the obelisk is "the purest image of the head and the heavens" (1987). Here the head is that of "reason" which the state embodies.

2At the very least, the difficult concept of the nervous sys- tem involves two things: first, that the culture of terror is differ- ent from other cultural formations, and second, that the very way we understand these formations, whether in "exotic places" or in the heart of a city such as Los Angeles, defies easy understand- ing. One shifts back and forth between violence (and stories of violence) and creepy calm-which is a good description of Haiti after the coup d'etat of 1991.

3Allport and Postman (1947) published The psychology of rumor, a major work that took a psychological approach. These writers construe individuals as isolated monads. Information moves between persons as something isolated, separate, and thing-like. The authors observe that rumors are motivated by anxiety. Yet, it is ironic that their text displays its own anxiety about the uncontrollability of rumors. What Patricia A. Meyers Spaks writes about gossip applies to rumors: "those nominally in control ... may feel nervous about what by definition they can- not control" (1985: 30). Contemporary positivism links the spread of rumors to the lack of authoritative information (Fine and Rosnow 1975; Brax 1990). From the nationalistic hysteria of World War H to the hyper-paranoia of the Cold War, what stays theoretically center to the study of rumor is anxiety over the in- ability of the state to control rumors. This focus has not changed in mainstream sociology. Witness the title of an article in the New York Times: "Anatomy of a Rumor Fear Feeds It." When we read the fine print we discover that the story is written from the point of view of those "social scientists studying the anat- omy of rumors in order to find better ways to control them" (NYT 6/4/91, Section C). The aim of this research is to help multi-national corporations defend themselves from the harmful effects of rumor. (The obvious questions are: Where does this paranoia come from? Why are academics and multi-national cor- porations afraid of rumors?)

41 use a spelling consistent with Edner Jeanty's Kreydl Dic- tionary. The Haitian Creole-English-French Dictionary (Valdman 1981) spells the word: Teleydol: Grapevine, Gossip. See also, Zen: Gossip. But it is more than this; it is political gossip.

5"The very fact that no precise attribution of origin is given implies an element of vagueness and the possibility of inaccu- racy. Such an expression [implies] ... at least a suspension of the story as correct. It also disassociates the speaker from the state- ment in advance" (Firth 1956: 123).

6In an unpublished manuscript I deal with the question of "accusations" made against Aristide supporters and the politics of accusation in Haiti.

7The historical legacy of repression in Haiti created a situa- tion where people seldom spoke publicly about national politics. President Aristide and the Lavalas movement changed that be- cause it was a movement about public space and speaking in public as much as it was a political movement. For the first time since most people remember, speaking about politics publicly was permitted. As result of Lavalas there is conflict between older family members and younger people about the open ex- pression of political beliefs. I owe this insight to Gaston Sylves- ter. After the coup of 1991 even mentioning Aristide's name was dangerous: "Fortel Jacques was arrested on February 28 in Limbe after his son was overheard speaking of Aristide. He was forced to sell a cow to pay $190 dollars for his freedom" (Haiti Insight, March/April 1992: n.p.).

8Yet, even in saying this in the tone of the social scientist, why was I caught up in these rumors, why are they so terrifying and fascinating to hear so many years later? No matter how much I ruminated about Duvalier's power, I could not get to the bottom of it. I knew that Duvalier's power was a matter of con- trolling resources and organizing the state, a matter of extracting surplus labor and foreign money, a matter of inspiring allegiance in his followers. But there was more to Duvalier's power than these things. As I listened to the stories of magic, I began to be cultivated in the arts of talking terror.

9Bazin was recipient of National Endowment for Democracy funds in his campaign bid which he lost badly to Aristide.

"O"Three weeks after Aristide's inauguration, fourteen peo- ple died in an uprising stemming from just a rumor of an im- pending coup" (Shahin 1991: 93).

"All informants' names have been changed. '2Rumors move along their paths from person to person.

The physical figuration of rumor can be seen in the little paths that lead from house to house in the countryside. Every Thurs- day is market day in a nearby town and people leave from this place and walk about two hours on a narrow road to get there. People meet family and friends and talk about events. Walking along the road to market and around the market itself people can meet without attracting too much suspicion. News of the tracts traveled this route.

13Often people knew about me before I got to where I was going. The teledjbl works around you and you must deal with it. I had another self hovering around about me and originating in hearsay. While things were not making sense to me, I was being made sense of. Or, maybe I wasn't.

141 was called on by the local military to explain my pres- ence. I was taken to the local prison for questioning. When I ar- rived I was asked questions for about an hour. Several times af- ter that an attach6 stopped by to see how I was doing and to ask if there was anything he could do for me. It was in these situa- tions that I would repeat to myself what I had heard from an- other American: "They never mess with Americans here." I never bothered to find out if it was true. But, generally, this held

10 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

up as a unwritten law among the paramilitary thugs and the army.

15Telling these rumors could possibly remove you from any danger. Possibly. That is the strange thing about the teledjbl. You can claim that you heard something somewhere and just passed it on. If you heard a story about two soldiers who turned up dead in another part of the country, you spoke about it at your own risk. Who knows, maybe that is all you did? Also, the story was everywhere that Aristide was coming back with then Presi- dent-Elect Bill Clinton. Sometimes the stories said Aristide was

coming with the president of Venezuela, sometimes with the Prime Minister of Canada. Where do people hear this? Where else than from someone who heard it on Vwa Damerik (Voice of America)? These stories are continual, habitual, and messianic.

'6Games such as kasino and domino are "sociable forms" in Haiti that provide a dialogic ground for speaking. They reveal a cultural poetics where talk is in interplay with the game itself.

'7See Laguerre (1993) for a discussion of the political gossip (zen) of the Haitian military.

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