hikikomori

[recent article from NYTimes Magazine...cultural differences b/t US teen angst / ennui and Japanese]

Women, Sex, and Gender in Haiti

[note: I recently received a question from a woman on MySpace regarding Women and Gender in Haiti. This was my unresearched response]

I was standing in the garden of the mission house in Port-au-Prince, between the house and the church, looking out over concrete block walls lined at the top with barbed wire and woven with razor wire. Some boys in the alley below began a conversation with me; and though their english was only slightly better than my nearly non-existent creole, partway into the conversation it became clear that, among other of their curiosities, they wanted to know if I would be intersted in their finding me a girl to have sex with. It seemed like they were offering their sister, but I wasn't exactly sure.

I told them no, I wasn't interested.

In the small settlement where I traveled later that week, it was as you might expect: Women walking to the well to gather water in plastic buckets or large wash basins, carrying them back to small houses or huts on their heads. One of them seemed to scowl at me when she saw my camera; I was surrounded by a dozen kids laughing and yelping and wanting to have their picture taken. Haiti is a young country, and the older woman maybe knew what the children didn't, and what I didn't want to admit: that having your picture taken doesn't make you famous, and certainly doesn't put food on the table or cure you of AIDS.

At the crossroads, where the only north-south road bridges the Riviere la Quinte, women stand at their make-shift food stalls, selling meals and snacks to passerby. The stalls are sometimes shipping containers of corrugated metal, other times tarpulins hung by string from the walls of the school and mission house that anchor the two downstream banks. They sell frybread, rice and beans, cooked sorghum; culligan purified water bags, or anything else they can come across to sell.

As I walked around the corner of the church down the road, where a water pump serves the local community, I was startled by the sight of a girl, in her teens or early twenties, squatted down and naked from the waist up, washing herself. We looked at eachother awkardly for a moment, then I looked away. I couldn't bring myself to take a picture. Some time later, I saw a man, fully naked, bathing in the middle of the river.

I believe women work in the fields, along with the men; in a condition of largely subsistence agriculture there is not a highly stratified or specialized labor force. Men tend to be the truck drivers, herdsmen, and quarry workers; boys drive scooters as taxis. Women still seem to be dominant in the informal economy (domestic labor), if you can even consider there to be a formal economy in Haiti.

Like many nations, men seem to be the ones left most idle by the near collapse of commerce and industry, which is perhaps why there is the violence there is: Idle, hungry men, feeling useless, unable to take pride in caring for their families, grumble amongst themselves and explode against the government or eachother; while the women keep surving, supporting, as they always do: making babies, whether willingly or not; tending to them, feeding them, and holding the house together, often without much help from a man. That it is cliche makes it no less true; that the situation is not unique makes it no less sad.


In the city, there are beauty shops, where in the first black democracy the tiny elite, and the image of beauty, the object of the female, is still light skinned. So which is it then, really: race, class, or gender? What is the lens through which we might understand the mystery of the misery? [see answer at bottom of page]



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