ProperGander

[Jan KLIMKOWSKI]

Lindsay writes:
"One interesting place to take this thread (brought to mind partly by your
description of Port au Prince) would be this issue of paranoia, but examined 

from the premise that there are two "histories" (a self-evident truth to the 

Pynchonized).  One is endlessly churned out by the Official Media.  The
other is Actuality."

This is a jan e-mail, and I now don't explicitly mention our Hero for 3 
paragraphs, so please go to Para 5 if you're desperate for a fix....

Our anthropologist who has lived in Cite Soleil for 12 years now is an 
American woman, who started her project whilst an undergraduate.  Very early 
on in our discussions she said, "Don't ever think I got my politics from 
East Coast Professors.  When I first came to Haiti I was as unpolitical as 
you can imagine.  I got my politics from the slums, from listening to these 
people's stories, from following their lives, from seeing with my own eyes 
their dignity and their suffering."

The first ever mass use of high-dosage oral Pills took place in Haiti in the 
1950s.  Scientific data - of a sort - was collected, identifying pretty much 
all the side effects we now associate with high-doses of hormonals.  The 
data was never published.  Four decades later, the oral Pill has never been 
widely available as a means of contraception in Haiti because They don't 
think the women can be relied upon to take it on a regular basis.  (This is 
of course patronizing nonsense and demonstrably untrue.)  The hi-dose Pill 
experiments set the tone for the ensuing years, the consequence of which is 
that the rate of contraceptive usage in Haiti is 8%; in most developing 
countries it's up around 60-70% (ie 60-70% of women use some sort of 
contraceptive).  Women in Haiti want contraception, they want control over 
the size and spacing of their families, but they avoid donor agency family 
planning clinics like the plague, because their experience tells them that 
the contraceptives they are offered are usually either not approved for use 
in First World countries or are at the early experimental stage or are 
variants of sterilization - which is cultural suicide for Haitian women. 
 (Don't believe me?  Check out the scarcity of condoms in Haiti ever since 
HIV & the 1980s Four Hs scam.)

The women are convinced that they are seen not as women but as wombs (for 
the Population Control databoyze) or guinea pigs (for Those looking for new 
ways of controlling female fertility but unable to get proper clinical 
trials approved in First World countries).  The Official Media tell us that 
population is out of control, and effectively any Means are justified in 
controlling it.  The women of Haiti look at the Means offered them and see 
that the contraceptives available have this unfortunate knack of destroying 
their health.  Take away the health of a woman who lives in Cite Soleil and 
you take away the only thing she, and her family, have.  This is Actuality. 
 It's also readily classifiable as Paranoia, as those of you who - like me - 
have sincere and valued friends who work in aid agencies will know.

The territories Lindsay sketches - Official Media, Actuality, Paranoia - 
have their uses, and Pynchon's oeuvre brilliantly explores the view from 
each position, and how one shifts into another, how endless exposure to the 
Official Media renders even those experiencing Actuality wondering if 
they're not rilly, just a tiny leetle bit, uh, well dareIsayit, PARANOID.... 


Sisterly
jan


PS I'm fortunate enough to work in documentary rather than news, since news 
really can't bear ambiguities, the blurring of those hard, sharp lines, all 
that but what's the angle Jack, ya gotta gimme an angle, hard, straight and 
(true)....  This is a genuine structural problem that rarely gets a mention 
outside of, say, Chomsky's political work.