I, too, am the afterlife of slavery: Haitian Plight & The World As An Unethical Formation
If the past is another country, then I am its citizen. I am the relic of an experience most preferred not to remember, as if the sheer will to forget could settle or decide the matter of history. I am a reminder that twelve million crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the past is not yet over. I am the progeny of the captives. I am the vestige of the dead. And history is how the secular world attends to the dead. — Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route:
Groggy, disoriented, vexed, ambivalent — minutes ago, I was sitting on the B47 bus on my way to pick up my heart blood pressure medication, a slender, dark-skinned Black man to my left gestured to feel on my black suede puffer coat.
My response to receiving this was delayed, but before I could pull back and ask why this man touched me, he put his hand down and inquired — muttering, attempting to put words together about how long it’s been since he’s been isolated from the world.
I had my headphones on listening to Double jeu / Flam’ compilation album— a work composed of various Haitian artists a mutual of mine once mentioned to me while we were working on translating my work from English to Haitian Creole — with the left earphone slightly poking out of its socket — because one day while I was at work preparing to leave, I forgot that I had put them under my coat and sat on them. Miraculously, they still worked.
He said it was twenty years since he’d been incarcerated — how everything felt new to him and said my coat was nice. His way of articulating his isolation — when he touched my coat — unsettled me for a moment not only in the sense of “why the fuck is this man touching me?” but also, when he briefly began talking about how those twenty years of his life were taken from him. I slowly put my headphones below my ears to listen to the man more attentively. I had a difficult time parsing out some of what he was saying — but he described how his whereabouts changed since he was locked up — how different it was. He was fifty-six years old. Although there was a twenty-three year difference between him and I, I was at a point where our brief encounter had me thinking about my impermanence — thinking about how I, too, have had years of my life taken away from me. Having just turned thirty-three last month — thirty-three — the same year the Palestinian Jesus Christ was executed, the poignant words of Brooklyn-native, Saidiya Hartman immediately came to my mind. Hartman writes in her memoir, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route:
Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of Black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery — skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.
At a level of abstraction, I too, was born on the plantation. I, who knows no one but the immediate members of my family and the name of my grandmother, Laura St. Cyr and my grandfather, who I only met once as a child, lived on the plantation — on that same Slave Route — an innumerable amount of Africans, from West and Central Africa, and other regions from the continent, who were subjected to both the European and Arab Slave trade, were, to my speculation — were themselves Haitians today who were trafficked and exploited.
Let me never forget the reprehensible Spanish, French, and Portuguese settlers — the apartheid state of the Dominican Republic — the Parsley Genocide — the genocidal invasion of the United States in 1915–1934 — the multiracial, imperialist coalition known as CORE group formed in 2003 to establish governance of the interests of the Haitian people — the cholera pandemic of 2010–the Kenyan, Guatemalan, Jamaican, and Salvadoran occupation of Haiti — all of which have taken place this year.
The indomitable Africans of Haiti were the first to end the world in 1791. Numerous pivotal illustrations of world-ending that makes us Haitians exemplary Afropessimists without us having necessarily familiarized ourselves with the lexicon — or the framework, are precursory occurrences like Bwa Kayiman. Another illustration is the subsequent Haitian Revolution — the 1805 constitution of Hayti, promulgated by Jean Jacques Dessalines, who asserted that slavery is abolished. In that same constitution it was asserted that, No white man of whatever nation he may be, shall put his foot on this territory with the title of master or proprietor, neither shall he in future acquire any property therein. Since then Haitians, in the words of Frank B. Wilderson III, continue to “think at a level of abstraction where there’s not any whips and chains and fields of cotton” and “theorize the laws of slavery at the level of abstraction of the relation” between the Black — the Slave and white civil society and their junior partner — the nonBlack person of color.
Skewed life chances bring to mind my being denied access to better healthcare since the beginning of this year — probably even longer than I’ve realized. Requesting for Ozempic, Zepbound, Wegovy, Mounjaro and reportedly being told by the mouth of my former cardiologist and nephrologist that my Healthfirst insurance would not cover it on a matter of me not only not having the financial means to cover the costs, but also for the immoralist fact that my insurance refused to pay for them.
I’ve requested to be seen by a primary care physician — only to never be seen by said PCP — I’ve had suggestions relayed to me by these same so-called “professionals” who have used 19th century Enlightenment pseudoscience to compartmentalize diagnoses of my conditions and arrived at formulaic, conservative, and reductive conclusions — in other words, to “fix” me. I’ve wasted my life away talking to these deputized therapists and psychiatrists.
These medical so-called “professionals” set the stage by appointments and lynch us with their sorry-there’s-nothing-we-can-dos.
They loosely and firmly talk of unethical formations on how I can better my situation as does the Human populous. The said ‘unethical formations’ are the methods — the structures on which we are prescribed with how to do something — namely, how to navigate the plantation. In every which way, any and all services we may look to for support— all institutions, foment Black suffering. All nonBlack clinicians, teachers, scientists, doctors, academics, psychologists of yesterday are the concurrent relatives of today. In my essay, “Stepping Against The Scale: “Health” Is Prescribed For The Human, Never The Black,” I reference Black fat, trans, nonbinary author Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s work, Belly of The Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as AntiBlackness, who reverberates the assertion that The World is sutured by Black suffering — highlighting that European settlers fabricated the notion of health “issues” based on what Black people could and could not endure:
. . .for “race” to be constructed, the Slave had to exist — and had to exist as the antithesis of health — so that European physicians, anthropologists, and other eugenicists could [define]. . .the Slave. . .[t]hese scientists based the idea of health on what Africans could and could not withstand and created health “issues” based on what Africans would not withstand.
Black people, who, over the course of time, have subconsciously taken on the logics of the Human, have adopted a white Western linearity — a teleological concept that suggests life and progress is stringent and linear. To put it differently, Black suffering, virtually, is insurmountably too much to bare, and a lot of us have erroneously wished to bury history and slavery as retrospectively isolated happenstances — what Hartman says a lot of us deemed to be a “burden of a too-long memory.” Consequently, it is an afterthought of the Human and even if Black suffering is perceived, the answer for the Human is to think or will it away from being. Many people in the imperial core finally say fascism is here, forty-seven American war criminals, CIA coups, assassinations, countless genocides, and unceasing mass disabling pandemics later.
These so-called “Leftist” Negrophiliacs don’t need to self-righteously invoke George Jackson, Kwame Ture, Fred Hampton, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X or any other Black revolutionary to remind us of what has been here — before the ubiquity of antiBlackness was even given a name. Fascism is the creation of the United States, Canada and every other colonial settler state.
Black people always knew fascism was here — so too, is slavery.
Libidinal economy, the arrangement of our fears and desires, all things which our collective unconscious is grounded upon — the Human — The World, perpetuates slavery.
The World, as an unethical formation, does not care that the Black is suffering. The World, as an unethical formation, does not care that the Black is. The World, as an unethical formation, is not one in which I, or any other Black person supposedly doesn’t want to help ourselves. Not only is the concept of us “not wanting help” in a world that is sutured by antiBlack suffering a mythology that is rooted in puritanical bootstrap theory, but also, “help” is both obscurely and unambiguously defined. Simply put, psychiatric institutions are antiBlack. Prisons are antiBlack. The pharmaceutical industry is antiBlack. Rent is antiBlack. This goes without saying that the concept of help is fundamentally ineffective. To emphasize in this case, the concept of help is grounded in antiBlackness. Grammar itself is unconvincing because it corresponds only to the logics, sensibilities, and epistemologies of the Human.
The Human is not Black. The Human, specifically Western humanism, articulated by Hartman, was created in the vein of antiBlackness and slavery. It’s ingrained in the psyche — our grammar to be uncritically inclusive, equalist, and universalist of everyone despite the fact that in the collective unconscious, there is an unrelenting vitriol against Black people. In her work, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Hartman states:
Western humanism was born in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and racial slavery. It became apparent that being a subject was not the antidote to being a slave, but rather that these figures were intimate, twinned. I wanted for some other end: a true abolition of property, a leveling of the vertical order of life, a messianic cessation, a way of keeping terror at bay, a rampart against devastation and the dangers of what lived on.
Joseph Winters, who writes in his essay, “Blackness, Pessimism, and the Human,” reflects this assertion on humanism:
. . .humanism is blind to its own condition of possibility because the coherence of the Human relies on the exclusion of blackness. There is no grammar for black suffering within humanism because humanism treats suffering as contingent and resolvable through the process of assimilation.
The Human can always so easily say whatever comes out of their mouth that convinces themselves and the Black to follow suit with the idea that The World works beyond the degree of accepting their illusions. Every condition, whether it be depression, complex so-called “post”-traumatic and intergenerational stress, diabetes, alcoholism, chronic kidney disease, high blood pressure, obstructive sleep apnea, schizo-affective-disorder or otherwise are not coincidental creations. In my poem, “Heed,” is not just a directive poem to the reading subject in which I list the enemies and the structural antagonisms to watch out for like the toxic Pollyanna and the Humanist, it’s a directive reminder to myself should I ever forget The World:
for your own health and what is left of it in this life, i warn you:
steer clear of the toxic optimists, these settlers,
these nonblacks, these black overseers who still
subscribe to imperialism and move like house negros,
the condescendingly excessive partygoers,
the eugenicists, the covid-denialists,
the Humanists, the one-track minders,
the voyeurs who just look at your stories
and revel in your pain — never
materially or mutually support
you — the deadbeat maternal and
paternal caregivers, the cult-join an org
intviters, the two-party system genocidaire voters
Then again, The World, as an unethical formation, will always remind me of itself when I walk into a Rite Aid to pick up my heart blood pressure medication and the security guard is armed with a gun to kill me should I ever steal something I need even if it is for temporary relief. The World, as an unethical formation, will always remind me of itself when it is not enough for one pig to accost me for hopping the turnstile, but two to seven or even ten more pigs to accompany them. The World, as an unethical formation, will always remind me of itself when the landlord installs surveillance cameras in and outside of the apartment I’m living in. The World, as an unethical formation, will always remind me of itself until it kills me and many other Black peoples on the plantation — until we bring The World to an absolute and justified end.
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Patrick Jonathan Derilus is a Nyack-born American-Haitian independent Goodreads author, writer, music producer, and educator who resides in Brooklyn, New York. His pronouns are he, him, his, or they, them, theirs. He writes poetry, short stories, and essays. He is published in RaceBaitR, Rabble Literature Magazine, Cutlines Press Magazine, Linden Avenue Literature Magazine, and elsewhere. He is the author of Perennial: a collection of letters.
