We're Alone, page 8
At the end of a week when nine men and women had been brutally assassinated by a white supremacist in Charleston, South Carolina, and the possibility of two hundred thousand Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent being expelled from the Dominican Republic suddenly became very real, I longed to be in the presence of Lawrence’s migrants and survivors. I was yearning for their witness and fellowship, to borrow language from some of the churches that ended up being lifelines for the Great Migration’s new arrivals. But what kept me glued to these silhouettes is how beautifully and heartbreakingly Lawrence captured Black bodies in motion, in transit, in danger, and in pain. The bowed heads of the hungry and the curved backs of mourners helped the Great Migration to gain and keep its momentum, along with the promise of less abject poverty and more opportunities in the North.
Human beings have been migrating since the beginning of time. We have always traveled from place to place looking for better prospects, where they exist. We are not always welcomed, especially if we are viewed as different and dangerous, or if we end up, as Toni Morrison described in her Nobel lecture, on the edges of towns that cannot bear our company. The nine men and women who were senselessly murdered by a young white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015, were home. They were in their own country, among family and friends, and they believed themselves to be in the presence of God. And yet before they were massacred, they were subjected to a variation of the same detestable vitriol that unwanted immigrants everywhere face: “You’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”
In the hateful manifesto posted on his website, the killer, Dylann Roof, also wrote, “As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there.” I wonder if he had in mind Europe’s most recent migrants, especially those who’d drowned by the thousands in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea while fleeing oppression and wars in sub-Saharan and northern Africa and the Middle East. Or maybe he was thinking of all those nonwhite people who are European citizens, though not by his standards. This white supremacist charged himself with deciding who can stay and who can go, and the only uncontestable way he knew to carry out his venomous decree was to kill.
In The Warmth of Other Suns, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson writes that, during the Great Migration, “The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such.” Nearly every migrant Wilkerson interviewed justifiably resisted being called an immigrant. “The idea conjured up the deepest pains of centuries of rejection by their own country,” she writes.
Tragically, we do not always get the final say on how our Black bodies are labeled. Those fleeing the South during the Great Migration were sometimes referred to not only as immigrants but as refugees, just as the US citizens who were internally displaced by Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005 were given that label after the storm. Dominicans of Haitian descent also thought themselves to be at home in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican constitution grants citizenship to all those who are born in the country, unless they are the children of people “in transit.” Dominicans of Haitian descent whose families have lived in the country for generations are still considered to be in transit. Black bodies, living with “certain uncertainty,” to use Frantz Fanon’s words, can be in transit, it seems, for several generations.
White supremacists such as Dylann Roof like to speak of Black bodies as though they are dangerous weapons. Xenophobes often speak of migrants and immigrants as though they are an invasion force, or something akin to biological warfare. Wallace Best, a religion and Great Migration scholar, writes that “a black body in motion is never without consequence. It is always a signifier of something, scripted and coded. And for the most part, throughout our history black bodies in motion have been deemed a threat.” Along with their vivid colors and sharp symmetrical shapes, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings conjure the hyper-vigilance required to live and love, work and play, travel and pray in a Black body.
A year later, I was in Haiti, on the southernmost border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where hundreds of Haitian refugees either had been deported or had been driven out of the Dominican Republic by intimidation or threats. Many of these men, women, and children had very little warning that they were going to be picked up or chased away, and most of them had fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
It was a bright sunny day, but the air was so thick with dust that as some friends and I walked through the makeshift resettlement camps on the Haitian side of the border, in a place called Pak Kado, it felt as though we, along with the residents of the camps, were floating through clouds. Around us were lean-tos made of cardboard boxes and sheets. Dust-covered children walked around looking dazed even while they were playing with pebbles that stood in for marbles, or flying plastic bags as kites. Elderly people stood on the edge of food and clothes distribution lines, some too weak to wade into the crowd. Later the elderly, pregnant women, and people with disabilities would be given special consideration by the priest and nuns who were distributing the only food available to the camp dwellers, but the food would always run out before they could get to everyone.
A few days after leaving Haiti and returning to the United States, I read a Michael Brown anniversary opinion piece in the Washington Post written by Raha Jorjani, an immigration attorney and law professor. In her essay, Jorjani argues that African Americans living in the United States could easily qualify as refugees. Citing many recent cases of police brutality and killings of unarmed Black men, women, and children, she wrote:
Suppose a client walked into my office and told me that police officers in his country had choked a man to death over a petty crime. Suppose he said police fatally shot another man in the back as he ran away. That they arrested a woman during a traffic stop and placed her in jail, where she died three days later. That a 12-year-old boy in his country was shot and killed by the police as he played in the park.
Suppose he told me that all of those victims were from the same ethnic community—a community whose members fear being harmed, tortured or killed by police or prison guards. And that this is true in cities and towns across his nation. At that point, as an immigration lawyer, I’d tell him he had a strong claim for asylum protection under U.S. law.
Having visited many refugee and displacement camps, I initially thought this label hyperbolic especially when assigned to citizens of one of the richest countries in the world, and on a singular basis, that they are Black. Still, compared to the relative wealth of the rest of the society, perhaps a particular falling-apart Brooklyn public housing project where a childhood friend used to live could have easily been considered a kind of refugee camp, occupying one of the most economically disadvantaged parts of town and providing only the most basic necessities. The nearby dilapidating school easily could have been on the edge of that refugee settlement. Were we all members of an in-transit group?
Parents are often too nervous to broach difficult subjects with their children. Love. Sex. Death. Race. But sometimes we’re forced to have these conversations early. Too early. A broken heart might lead to questions we’d rather not answer, as might an inappropriate gesture, the death of a loved one, or the murder of a stranger. Each time a young Black person is killed by a police officer or by a vigilante civilian, I ask myself if the time has come for me to write to my daughters a letter about Abner Louima and the long list of nonsurvivors who have come after him. By the time you read this …
“What kind of mother/ing is it if one must always be prepared with knowledge of the possibility of the violent and quotidian death of one’s child?” ponders Christina Sharpe in In the Wake. I don’t want my daughters to grow up terrified of the country and the world they live in, but is it irresponsible of me not to at least alert them to the potentially life-altering, or even life-ending, horrors they might face as young Black women who might, even though they were born in the United States, possibly classify for refugee status here?
The night President Barack Obama was first elected (Would he too qualify for refugee status?) my older daughter, Mira, was three years old and I was in the last weeks of my pregnancy with her sister Leila. When President Obama was inaugurated for the first time, I was cradling both girls in my arms.
To think, I remember telling my husband, our daughters in their early years will never know a world in which the president of this country has not been Black. Indeed, as we watched President Obama’s inaugural speech, Mira was shocked that no woman had been president of the United States. The world ahead for my girls seemed, at least that day, full of greater possibilities than that of the generations that had preceded them, both as migrants and hosts. However, it quickly became clear that this one man was not going to take us into a postracial promised land. Donald Trump’s “birther” claims and the bigoted commentaries and jokes by both elected officials and ordinary folk never seemed to stop. Initially one of the most consistent attacks against Obama was that he was not really American.
Like Barack Obama’s father, many of us had come to America from somewhere else and needed to have two different talks with our Black offspring: one about why we’re here, and the other one about why it’s not always a promised land for people who look like us.
In his own version of “the Talk,” James Baldwin wrote to his nephew James in “My Dungeon Shook”: “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.”
That same letter could have been written to a long roster of dead young men and women, including Michael Brown. It’s sad to imagine what these young people’s letters from their loved ones would have said. By the time you read this … Would their favorite uncle have notified them that they could qualify for refugee status within their own country? Would their mother or father, grandmother or grandfather have warned them to not walk, stroll, or jog in certain white majority neighborhoods, to, impossibly, avoid police officers, to never play in a public park, to stay away from neighborhood watchmen, to never go to a neighbor’s house and, even if they were in danger, seek help there?
I am still drafting a “My Dungeon Shook” letter to my daughters in a pocket-size notebook.
By time you read this, will this too have passed?
To my evolving draft of this letter, I often add snippets of Baldwin’s letter.
“I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it,” Baldwin reminded his James. “Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.”
So, as a living letter, my husband and I took my daughters to the Haitian Dominican border between Malpasse and Jimaní, a border redrawn by Americans in 1936. In 1916, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic for the first time, annexing Haiti and the Dominican Republic for eight years, between 1916 and 1924. The occupation of the Dominican Republic, like the 1915–1934 occupation of Haiti, was motivated by regional and commercial interests.
“In the Dominican Republic, American multinationals laid out vast new sugar plantations, which needed more workers than Santo Domingo could provide,” Michele Wucker writes in Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. “Haiti, with the same population but half the land, was a natural source, so the companies moved thousands of people across the border, establishing a steady flow from west to east.”
At the Jimaní-Malpasse border, there was still a flow of laborers dragging empty wheelbarrows past heavily armed guards through a dusty gate into the Dominican Republic, then returning loaded with merchandise. With the court ruling allowing for the expulsion of Haitian residents of the Dominican Republic and Dominicans of Haitian descent, there was also another kind of flow. At a nearby school and church on the Haitian side of the border, we met dozens of people who told us how they were picked up by police and soldiers in the Dominican Republic, put in the back of pickup trucks, and dropped at the border. Some were Haitian-born, but many were Dominican-born, especially the children. Many had cards saying that they had registered for a “regularization” program, which was supposed to guarantee them some protection, but did not.
At the school, my daughters helped to comfort children who had been rejected by a country they considered their own, and were waiting to see whether their parents’ and grandparents’ homeland would accept them.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” James Baldwin wrote.
By the time you read this …
Chronicles of a Death Foretold
Sè Laura, a forty-three-year-old self-proclaimed prophetess, spent months trying to tell Haitian president Jovenel Moïse that he was going to die. She wrote him letters that she unsuccessfully tried to deliver to him at the National Palace in Port-au-Prince. She traveled to his hometown in the northeast of the country and tried to meet with his son at their banana plantation. She even attended his mother-in-law’s funeral, passing herself off as a well-wisher. When they finally came face-to-face after the service, she asked if she could meet with him alone so she could deliver her message privately. He shrugged her off and moved on to the next person. She had no choice, she said, but to take her message to the airways, via some of Haiti’s most popular radio stations: President Jovenel Moïse would die while he was in office. Six months later, he was assassinated.
During the final moments of his life, the fifty-three-year-old Moïse was as abandoned and unprotected as Haiti’s most vulnerable citizens. His body and face riddled with at least twelve bullets—including one that gouged his left eye—he was killed in the early morning hours of July 7, 2021, in the bedroom of his home on a narrow street in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Haitian government and police officials immediately reported that he was killed by a band of foreign mercenaries, among them two Haitian Americans and twenty-six Colombian nationals, who the authorities claimed were recruited by a sixty-two-year-old Florida-based Haitian pastor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who was plotting to replace Moïse as president, with help from CTU, a Miami-area security firm owned by Venezuelan and Colombian émigrés. According to cell phone video recordings taken by Moïse’s neighbors, the assailants gained access to Moïse’s residence by declaring that they were part of a United States Drug Enforcement Agency operation. No casualties were reported among the presidential guard or any other security agents whom one would expect to defend the premises. Though two of the presidential couple’s grown children were also in the home, Moïse’s wife, Martine, was the only other person wounded in the attack. (She was shot in her right arm.) Martine Moïse was taken to a local hospital by a police official, who arrived after the assailants left, and then she was medevacked to Miami’s Ryder Trauma Center.
Jovenel Moïse came to power after a two-round election cycle, in 2015 and 2016, with the lowest turnout in Haiti’s brief history of postdictatorship elections. In a country of eleven million people, he received around six hundred thousand votes. Moïse was unknown to most Haitians until he was handpicked by his predecessor, Michel Martelly, a konpa singer known as Sweet Micky, who came to power, in 2011, through another set of contested elections. Moïse at the time was a banana exporter (with the nickname Nèg Bannann, or Banana Man), and he was sold as a self-made, successful rural entrepreneur from outside of Haiti’s political class. In fact, Agritans, Moïse’s banana company, had received millions of dollars from Martelly’s government—funds that, according to Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes, were among those pilfered from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe oil program, through which the Haitian government bought oil from Venezuela, paid 60 percent of the purchase price within ninety days, then deferred the rest of the debt, at a 1 percent interest rate, over twenty-five years. This debt to Venezuela grew to $2.3 billion. In early 2024, the debt was settled for $500 million.
On July 6, 2018, I was in Haiti when Moïse’s government announced that it was raising the price of gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. Nationwide demonstrations demanding his resignation followed, and lasted for months. In response, Moïse vowed to complete his contested term, reform the country’s constitution, and hold the next legislative and presidential elections. During Moïse’s time in office, government-connected gangs carried out thirteen massacres in poor opposition neighborhoods. The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the Haitian Observatory for Crimes Against Humanity studied three of these thirteen massacres that they defined as crimes against humanity.
Two days before his assassination, Moïse named Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon and former interior minister, as his seventh prime minister. Soon after he was sworn into office on July 20, 2021, phone records revealed that Henry had spoken to one of the assassination’s lead suspects between 4:03 a.m. and 4:20 a.m. on July 7, around three hours after the president was killed. That suspect, Joseph Felix Badio, a former Ministry of Justice Anti-Corruption Unit employee, who had been fired for possible corruption, happened to be near the president’s home at the time he’d allegedly called Henry. Henry has said that he does not remember the call. Badio was arrested more than two years later, in October 2023.
After Moïse’s assassination, I thought a lot about Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In the novella, twin brothers Pedro and Pablo Vicario announce to everyone who will listen that they will kill Santiago Nassar for deflowering their sister, who’s forced to return home in shame on her wedding night. Though many people know what’s about to happen, no one tries to save Santiago Nassar. Even the investigative judge probing Santiago Nassar’s murder is perplexed that “life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold.”
Human beings have been migrating since the beginning of time. We have always traveled from place to place looking for better prospects, where they exist. We are not always welcomed, especially if we are viewed as different and dangerous, or if we end up, as Toni Morrison described in her Nobel lecture, on the edges of towns that cannot bear our company. The nine men and women who were senselessly murdered by a young white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17, 2015, were home. They were in their own country, among family and friends, and they believed themselves to be in the presence of God. And yet before they were massacred, they were subjected to a variation of the same detestable vitriol that unwanted immigrants everywhere face: “You’re taking over our country, and you have to go.”
In the hateful manifesto posted on his website, the killer, Dylann Roof, also wrote, “As an American we are taught to accept living in the melting pot, and black and other minorities have just as much right to be here as we do, since we are all immigrants. But Europe is the homeland of White people, and in many ways the situation is even worse there.” I wonder if he had in mind Europe’s most recent migrants, especially those who’d drowned by the thousands in the waters of the Mediterranean Sea while fleeing oppression and wars in sub-Saharan and northern Africa and the Middle East. Or maybe he was thinking of all those nonwhite people who are European citizens, though not by his standards. This white supremacist charged himself with deciding who can stay and who can go, and the only uncontestable way he knew to carry out his venomous decree was to kill.
In The Warmth of Other Suns, the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson writes that, during the Great Migration, “The people did not cross the turnstiles of customs at Ellis Island. They were already citizens. But where they came from, they were not treated as such.” Nearly every migrant Wilkerson interviewed justifiably resisted being called an immigrant. “The idea conjured up the deepest pains of centuries of rejection by their own country,” she writes.
Tragically, we do not always get the final say on how our Black bodies are labeled. Those fleeing the South during the Great Migration were sometimes referred to not only as immigrants but as refugees, just as the US citizens who were internally displaced by Hurricane Katrina in the summer of 2005 were given that label after the storm. Dominicans of Haitian descent also thought themselves to be at home in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican constitution grants citizenship to all those who are born in the country, unless they are the children of people “in transit.” Dominicans of Haitian descent whose families have lived in the country for generations are still considered to be in transit. Black bodies, living with “certain uncertainty,” to use Frantz Fanon’s words, can be in transit, it seems, for several generations.
White supremacists such as Dylann Roof like to speak of Black bodies as though they are dangerous weapons. Xenophobes often speak of migrants and immigrants as though they are an invasion force, or something akin to biological warfare. Wallace Best, a religion and Great Migration scholar, writes that “a black body in motion is never without consequence. It is always a signifier of something, scripted and coded. And for the most part, throughout our history black bodies in motion have been deemed a threat.” Along with their vivid colors and sharp symmetrical shapes, Jacob Lawrence’s paintings conjure the hyper-vigilance required to live and love, work and play, travel and pray in a Black body.
A year later, I was in Haiti, on the southernmost border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, where hundreds of Haitian refugees either had been deported or had been driven out of the Dominican Republic by intimidation or threats. Many of these men, women, and children had very little warning that they were going to be picked up or chased away, and most of them had fled with nothing but the clothes on their backs.
It was a bright sunny day, but the air was so thick with dust that as some friends and I walked through the makeshift resettlement camps on the Haitian side of the border, in a place called Pak Kado, it felt as though we, along with the residents of the camps, were floating through clouds. Around us were lean-tos made of cardboard boxes and sheets. Dust-covered children walked around looking dazed even while they were playing with pebbles that stood in for marbles, or flying plastic bags as kites. Elderly people stood on the edge of food and clothes distribution lines, some too weak to wade into the crowd. Later the elderly, pregnant women, and people with disabilities would be given special consideration by the priest and nuns who were distributing the only food available to the camp dwellers, but the food would always run out before they could get to everyone.
A few days after leaving Haiti and returning to the United States, I read a Michael Brown anniversary opinion piece in the Washington Post written by Raha Jorjani, an immigration attorney and law professor. In her essay, Jorjani argues that African Americans living in the United States could easily qualify as refugees. Citing many recent cases of police brutality and killings of unarmed Black men, women, and children, she wrote:
Suppose a client walked into my office and told me that police officers in his country had choked a man to death over a petty crime. Suppose he said police fatally shot another man in the back as he ran away. That they arrested a woman during a traffic stop and placed her in jail, where she died three days later. That a 12-year-old boy in his country was shot and killed by the police as he played in the park.
Suppose he told me that all of those victims were from the same ethnic community—a community whose members fear being harmed, tortured or killed by police or prison guards. And that this is true in cities and towns across his nation. At that point, as an immigration lawyer, I’d tell him he had a strong claim for asylum protection under U.S. law.
Having visited many refugee and displacement camps, I initially thought this label hyperbolic especially when assigned to citizens of one of the richest countries in the world, and on a singular basis, that they are Black. Still, compared to the relative wealth of the rest of the society, perhaps a particular falling-apart Brooklyn public housing project where a childhood friend used to live could have easily been considered a kind of refugee camp, occupying one of the most economically disadvantaged parts of town and providing only the most basic necessities. The nearby dilapidating school easily could have been on the edge of that refugee settlement. Were we all members of an in-transit group?
Parents are often too nervous to broach difficult subjects with their children. Love. Sex. Death. Race. But sometimes we’re forced to have these conversations early. Too early. A broken heart might lead to questions we’d rather not answer, as might an inappropriate gesture, the death of a loved one, or the murder of a stranger. Each time a young Black person is killed by a police officer or by a vigilante civilian, I ask myself if the time has come for me to write to my daughters a letter about Abner Louima and the long list of nonsurvivors who have come after him. By the time you read this …
“What kind of mother/ing is it if one must always be prepared with knowledge of the possibility of the violent and quotidian death of one’s child?” ponders Christina Sharpe in In the Wake. I don’t want my daughters to grow up terrified of the country and the world they live in, but is it irresponsible of me not to at least alert them to the potentially life-altering, or even life-ending, horrors they might face as young Black women who might, even though they were born in the United States, possibly classify for refugee status here?
The night President Barack Obama was first elected (Would he too qualify for refugee status?) my older daughter, Mira, was three years old and I was in the last weeks of my pregnancy with her sister Leila. When President Obama was inaugurated for the first time, I was cradling both girls in my arms.
To think, I remember telling my husband, our daughters in their early years will never know a world in which the president of this country has not been Black. Indeed, as we watched President Obama’s inaugural speech, Mira was shocked that no woman had been president of the United States. The world ahead for my girls seemed, at least that day, full of greater possibilities than that of the generations that had preceded them, both as migrants and hosts. However, it quickly became clear that this one man was not going to take us into a postracial promised land. Donald Trump’s “birther” claims and the bigoted commentaries and jokes by both elected officials and ordinary folk never seemed to stop. Initially one of the most consistent attacks against Obama was that he was not really American.
Like Barack Obama’s father, many of us had come to America from somewhere else and needed to have two different talks with our Black offspring: one about why we’re here, and the other one about why it’s not always a promised land for people who look like us.
In his own version of “the Talk,” James Baldwin wrote to his nephew James in “My Dungeon Shook”: “You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being.”
That same letter could have been written to a long roster of dead young men and women, including Michael Brown. It’s sad to imagine what these young people’s letters from their loved ones would have said. By the time you read this … Would their favorite uncle have notified them that they could qualify for refugee status within their own country? Would their mother or father, grandmother or grandfather have warned them to not walk, stroll, or jog in certain white majority neighborhoods, to, impossibly, avoid police officers, to never play in a public park, to stay away from neighborhood watchmen, to never go to a neighbor’s house and, even if they were in danger, seek help there?
I am still drafting a “My Dungeon Shook” letter to my daughters in a pocket-size notebook.
By time you read this, will this too have passed?
To my evolving draft of this letter, I often add snippets of Baldwin’s letter.
“I tell you this because I love you, and please don’t you ever forget it,” Baldwin reminded his James. “Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.”
So, as a living letter, my husband and I took my daughters to the Haitian Dominican border between Malpasse and Jimaní, a border redrawn by Americans in 1936. In 1916, the United States invaded the Dominican Republic for the first time, annexing Haiti and the Dominican Republic for eight years, between 1916 and 1924. The occupation of the Dominican Republic, like the 1915–1934 occupation of Haiti, was motivated by regional and commercial interests.
“In the Dominican Republic, American multinationals laid out vast new sugar plantations, which needed more workers than Santo Domingo could provide,” Michele Wucker writes in Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. “Haiti, with the same population but half the land, was a natural source, so the companies moved thousands of people across the border, establishing a steady flow from west to east.”
At the Jimaní-Malpasse border, there was still a flow of laborers dragging empty wheelbarrows past heavily armed guards through a dusty gate into the Dominican Republic, then returning loaded with merchandise. With the court ruling allowing for the expulsion of Haitian residents of the Dominican Republic and Dominicans of Haitian descent, there was also another kind of flow. At a nearby school and church on the Haitian side of the border, we met dozens of people who told us how they were picked up by police and soldiers in the Dominican Republic, put in the back of pickup trucks, and dropped at the border. Some were Haitian-born, but many were Dominican-born, especially the children. Many had cards saying that they had registered for a “regularization” program, which was supposed to guarantee them some protection, but did not.
At the school, my daughters helped to comfort children who had been rejected by a country they considered their own, and were waiting to see whether their parents’ and grandparents’ homeland would accept them.
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read,” James Baldwin wrote.
By the time you read this …
Chronicles of a Death Foretold
Sè Laura, a forty-three-year-old self-proclaimed prophetess, spent months trying to tell Haitian president Jovenel Moïse that he was going to die. She wrote him letters that she unsuccessfully tried to deliver to him at the National Palace in Port-au-Prince. She traveled to his hometown in the northeast of the country and tried to meet with his son at their banana plantation. She even attended his mother-in-law’s funeral, passing herself off as a well-wisher. When they finally came face-to-face after the service, she asked if she could meet with him alone so she could deliver her message privately. He shrugged her off and moved on to the next person. She had no choice, she said, but to take her message to the airways, via some of Haiti’s most popular radio stations: President Jovenel Moïse would die while he was in office. Six months later, he was assassinated.
During the final moments of his life, the fifty-three-year-old Moïse was as abandoned and unprotected as Haiti’s most vulnerable citizens. His body and face riddled with at least twelve bullets—including one that gouged his left eye—he was killed in the early morning hours of July 7, 2021, in the bedroom of his home on a narrow street in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Haitian government and police officials immediately reported that he was killed by a band of foreign mercenaries, among them two Haitian Americans and twenty-six Colombian nationals, who the authorities claimed were recruited by a sixty-two-year-old Florida-based Haitian pastor, Christian Emmanuel Sanon, who was plotting to replace Moïse as president, with help from CTU, a Miami-area security firm owned by Venezuelan and Colombian émigrés. According to cell phone video recordings taken by Moïse’s neighbors, the assailants gained access to Moïse’s residence by declaring that they were part of a United States Drug Enforcement Agency operation. No casualties were reported among the presidential guard or any other security agents whom one would expect to defend the premises. Though two of the presidential couple’s grown children were also in the home, Moïse’s wife, Martine, was the only other person wounded in the attack. (She was shot in her right arm.) Martine Moïse was taken to a local hospital by a police official, who arrived after the assailants left, and then she was medevacked to Miami’s Ryder Trauma Center.
Jovenel Moïse came to power after a two-round election cycle, in 2015 and 2016, with the lowest turnout in Haiti’s brief history of postdictatorship elections. In a country of eleven million people, he received around six hundred thousand votes. Moïse was unknown to most Haitians until he was handpicked by his predecessor, Michel Martelly, a konpa singer known as Sweet Micky, who came to power, in 2011, through another set of contested elections. Moïse at the time was a banana exporter (with the nickname Nèg Bannann, or Banana Man), and he was sold as a self-made, successful rural entrepreneur from outside of Haiti’s political class. In fact, Agritans, Moïse’s banana company, had received millions of dollars from Martelly’s government—funds that, according to Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes, were among those pilfered from Venezuela’s Petrocaribe oil program, through which the Haitian government bought oil from Venezuela, paid 60 percent of the purchase price within ninety days, then deferred the rest of the debt, at a 1 percent interest rate, over twenty-five years. This debt to Venezuela grew to $2.3 billion. In early 2024, the debt was settled for $500 million.
On July 6, 2018, I was in Haiti when Moïse’s government announced that it was raising the price of gasoline, diesel, and kerosene. Nationwide demonstrations demanding his resignation followed, and lasted for months. In response, Moïse vowed to complete his contested term, reform the country’s constitution, and hold the next legislative and presidential elections. During Moïse’s time in office, government-connected gangs carried out thirteen massacres in poor opposition neighborhoods. The International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School and the Haitian Observatory for Crimes Against Humanity studied three of these thirteen massacres that they defined as crimes against humanity.
Two days before his assassination, Moïse named Ariel Henry, a neurosurgeon and former interior minister, as his seventh prime minister. Soon after he was sworn into office on July 20, 2021, phone records revealed that Henry had spoken to one of the assassination’s lead suspects between 4:03 a.m. and 4:20 a.m. on July 7, around three hours after the president was killed. That suspect, Joseph Felix Badio, a former Ministry of Justice Anti-Corruption Unit employee, who had been fired for possible corruption, happened to be near the president’s home at the time he’d allegedly called Henry. Henry has said that he does not remember the call. Badio was arrested more than two years later, in October 2023.
After Moïse’s assassination, I thought a lot about Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In the novella, twin brothers Pedro and Pablo Vicario announce to everyone who will listen that they will kill Santiago Nassar for deflowering their sister, who’s forced to return home in shame on her wedding night. Though many people know what’s about to happen, no one tries to save Santiago Nassar. Even the investigative judge probing Santiago Nassar’s murder is perplexed that “life should make use of so many coincidences forbidden literature, so that there should be the untrammeled fulfillment of a death so clearly foretold.”
