Patrick Bellegarde-Smith.

• Author: Knoll, Erwin
• Position: Haitian-American leader - Interview

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith was born in the United States forty-seven years ago. His father--the Smith part of his name--was, he says, "a cowboy from Idaho." But his mother--the Bellegarde part of his name--was a member of one of Haiti's prominent families, the tiny aristocracy that has held sway there for two centuries, and Bellegarde-Smith, an American citizen, regards himself as "culturally a Haitian." He spent his childhood and young adulthood in Haiti, and since then has returned to Haiti for visits almost every year.

Bellegarde-Smith's apartment, where I spoke with him on a recent Friday afternoon, is crammed with his fine collection of African, African-American, and Haitian folk art--masks, carvings, sculptures, paintings. He lives within easy walking distance--"I've never owned a car," he told me--of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee campus, where he has taught for the last eight years and now chairs the Department of Africology, formerly the Department of Afro-American Studies.

Why the name change?

"To understand African-Americans, one cannot start with 1619, when the first slave ship arrived," Bellegarde-Smith explained. "It's arbitrary and artificial. It explains very little. From 1619 to the present is what I would call the boundaries of bondage. One has to look beyond that narrow framework. For example, 100 years before the arrival of the first Africans in the United States, there were Africans in the Caribbean area. In 1521, Haiti saw the arrival of the first enslaved Africans.

"The seven members of our department teach courses on all parts of the world. We even have a course called 'Capitalism, Fascism, Socialism, and Nationalism,' in relation to the Afro world. I have taught a course on foreign policies of African states. I now teach a course on traditional African religions and social organization."

Bellegarde-Smith holds a master's degree in Latin American studies and a Ph.D. in international studies from American University in Washington, D.C., but he never earned a high-school diploma. "One of these days," he says, "I think I'll get a GED."

His first book, In the Shadow of Powers: Dantes Bellegarde in Haitian Social Thought, was about his grandfather, who served as Haiti's ambassador to the League of Nations. His 1990 book, Haiti: The Breached Citadel (Westview Press), will be issued in a revised edition next year.

In recent months, as Haiti has come to dominate newspaper headlines and television newscasts, Bellegarde-Smith has been much in demand as an "expert" on local and national news media, including the Cable News Network and National Public Radio. As we talked a few days after the U.S. military occupation of Haiti, the telephone in his apartment rang every few minutes. He ignored it and responded to my questions volubly, in animated, lightly accented English.

Q: Tell me about your Haitian family.

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith: The Bellegardes have been prominent in Haiti from the beginning. The name recurs on a regular basis from the first year of Haitian independence--1804--all the way to 1957, when Francois Duvalier came to power, At that time, my grandfather retired, at the age of eighty, from the diplomatic service.

My grandfather was invited by W.E.B. Du Bois to chair the Second Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1921. He carried the resolutions of that Congress--you can tell from the language that they were written by Du Bois--to the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations.

I have a beautiful snapshot of my grandfather, my mother, and Du Bois, taken in Port-au-Prince--one of the things I hold most precious. The two men were very close, but they subsequently diverged. Du Bois became increasingly more radical, and my grandfather remained where he was in 1907--a liberal in classical terms. But since the people of Haiti were moving steadily to the left, by standing perfectly still my grandfather came to be seen as a fascist. He never was a fascist, but he was liberal in the traditional sense of the word. I wrote my first book to explain that.

Q: Your own views, I surmise, are closer to Du Bois's than to your grandfather's. Having been born into the Haitian elite--the 0.8 per cent who rule the country--how did you come to your political perspective?

Bellegarde-Smith: My political consciousness developed fairly early. I went to parochial school, as most Haitians of my class did, and when I was about eleven years old, I befriended two members of the middle class--"middle-class elements," as we referred to them--and my family told me this could not be. They were actually thrown out of my home because we did not know who they were, who their parents were, where they came from, what kind of name they had, and so forth.

These were middle-class children. Of course, the working class did not compute at all, it was not even on our radar screen.

I rebelled against all that. I decided at that point that I would not have any friends. The people I grew up with, the people who were in my classes when I was a young boy, have become very prominent in Haitian politics. We were classmates together, but they were of no interest to me even then.

I left Haiti after the tenth grade. I announced to my parents I was not going back to high school; I was quite sick and tired of it. They were able, somehow, to get me an appointment with the dean of students at the College of the Virgin Islands. On the strength of the fact that I had published little things in French in Haiti, and had studied Latin and Greek, and, of course, had all those years of French, she said she was sure I could do well. I spoke no English at the time, so I became a political-science major.

When I came to the United States, I realized that all my classmates were "middle-class elements," and my professors were "middle-class elements." That troubled me, and unbeknownst to me, my classmates had trouble with me because I was black. Encountering the U.S. brand of racism taught me quite a few things, and the longer I stayed in the United States, the more radical I became.

Q: As a Haitian living in the United States, how do you assess the image of Haiti that is held by most Americans, and their understanding of what is happening there today?

Bellegarde-Smith: The U.S. images of Haiti were created in the course of two centuries, and they have not changed. One is simply amazed to see how closely descriptions that were written about 200 years ago compare, for example, to what was published in The New York Times at the time of the first U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Obviously, people are a bit more cautious about the way they express themselves today, but the analysis remains the same.

Q: What is that analysis?

Bellegarde-Smith: That Haitians are, to be perfectly blunt about it, congenitally incapable of having a democratic system; that Haiti has never been democratic, and therefore it never will be. The analysis I hear over and over again when I'm being interviewed by the mainstream media is that Haiti can't be democratic, so we're wasting our time.

Senator John McCain of Arizona said recently, "We tried to impose democracy on these people in 1915 and it didn't...