Why are you spending so much time on a dead white guy?
By Brian Concannon
On April 30, 2022, the following remarks were delivered by Brian Concannon, a lawyer and executive director of the Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti, as a tribute to Paul Farmer at the Haiti Solidarity Network of the North East & St. Anastasia Haiti Support Group.
It is a great honor to join the Haiti Solidarity Network of the North East and the St. Anastasia Haiti Project today. It is also a great solace to be with you today. I miss Paul, and there is ample frustration and sadness in Haiti work these days. But it is revitalizing to spend time with old friends and new friends committed to solidarity with Haiti’s poor.
It is hard to appropriately capture Paul’s life, but I will try with a story. Just before Christmas in 2005, Paul visited Fr. Gerard Jean-Juste, a Haitian priest, in prison in Haiti. The jailers had allowed the visit on the condition that it be a visit from a friend, not a medical evaluation. Dr. Paul and Fr. Gerry respected this condition, mostly. Towards the end of the visit, Fr. Gerry asked the guards if the two could pray together. The guards gave Paul and Gerry a little more privacy as they knelt down shoulder to shoulder. The priest took out his rosary, prayerfully. The doctor took out his syringe, and very prayerfully—at least in the doctor’s telling of the story—obtained a sample of Fr. Gerry’s blood, without the guards noticing.
A few hours later Paul and some of Fr. Gerry’s blood were on a plane to Miami. A week later results confirmed a diagnosis from another friend of Gerry, Dr. John Carroll but denied by the Haitian government and the US government, that Fr. Gerry had cancer. A week after that, Fr. Gerry was released from prison and was in Miami for treatment.
When Paul is remembered publicly, he is most often remembered for going to great lengths to treat the sick. He certainly went to great lengths to treat Fr. Gerry and so many others. But that day, as on most days, Paul did not see his job primarily as fighting disease; he saw his job as fighting injustice.
Fr. Gerry was sick, but he needed Paul because he was in prison and deprived of medical treatment. He was in prison not because he committed a crime, but because he insisted on speaking out against the repression his government was inflicting on Haiti’s poor. Haiti’s government had the opportunity to repress its people because two years earlier our government in the US had overthrown Haiti’s elected government, and flown a “new” Prime Minister in from Florida to run the country.
Paul getting Fr. Gerry out of prison improved Gerry’s health, but it also allowed him to continue to fight for justice. It allowed Fr. Gerry to speak out against policies--by the Haitian government and the US government--that kept Haitians among the very least of our brothers in terms of prosperity and freedom. It allowed him to advocate for elections, which led a few months later, to the replacement of the illegal government chosen by the US with a democratic one chosen by Haiti’s voters, and the release of Haiti’s remaining political prisoners.
Paul saw his work as fighting for justice every other day too. When he built wonderful hospitals in Haiti, Rwanda and elsewhere, he did it to treat the sick in those places. But he also built those hospitals to demonstrate to people in our places that Haitians, Rwandans and other poor people deserve those wonderful hospitals because they have a human right to basic healthcare. Paul built the hospitals to demonstrate that the obstacles to achieving the human right to healthcare were not technical, or a lack of human resources in places like Haiti. He built the hospitals to show us that the obstacles to the human right to healthcare were an unacceptable tolerance of injustice among people in places like New York and Washington.
Almost all of Paul’s writing was done to fight injustice. Paul is best known for Mountains Beyond Mountains, but he did not write that book. Paul was actually ambivalent about Mountains Beyond Mountains because it was not as much about justice as he wanted. When someone told Paul they had read Mountains, he would usually say “Good. Now read The Uses of Haiti, or The Pathologies of Power, or A Path Out of Poverty” or any of the other books that Paul did write, and that challenge us to directly confront the structural injustice that keeps Haitians poor, and keeps people in the US relatively prosperous.
I met Paul’s ideas in 1995, when I read Uses of Haiti in preparation for my first visit to Haiti. 27 years later, I can’t think of another book that has been so important to my understanding of Haiti today. I met Paul in person a year later, at dinner at the Oloffson Hotel following a ceremony where he received a human rights award. At the time I was working for the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux, BAI, a human rights law firm, that was working to make Haiti’s justice system responsive to Haiti’s people. At the dinner, Paul went around the table, graciously asking what people were doing in Haiti, offering his typical enthusiastic encouragement to everyone-mostly. When he got to me, Paul gave me a severe, skeptical look. Instead of optimism, he offered a distrust of lawyers and a suggestion that Haiti’s justice system would never be made to serve Haiti’s poor.
I was crushed. But I had fortunately read enough of Paul’s work that I could push back with his own words, just substituting legal rights and the justice system for health rights and the public health system. Paul immediately realized that the BAI was trying to make an option for the poor in Haiti’s justice system, just as he and PIH were making an option for the poor in health. Paul’s face lit up in his trademark smile, sparking a quarter century of friendship, and collaboration. We had the privilege of working with Paul on Fr. Gerry’s case, in a project in Haiti’s prisons, and advocating for a more just US policy to Haiti, among other things. Paul helped establish the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, and served on its board of directors for 18 years until his death.
I am not sure we have disproved Paul’s conviction that Haiti’s justice system would never serve Haiti’s poor, yet. My Haitian colleagues have won some inspiring victories over the past 25 years, many in collaboration with the Haiti Solidarity Network of the Northeast. But as we all read in the news, and you hear from your partners in Haiti, injustice is a constant and overwhelming presence for most Haitians today. But after that first meeting in 1996, Paul never again opined on whether we would ultimately succeed. Once he realized that we were attacking the unjust structures, in both Haiti and the US, Paul knew that our fight would be long, and that we might not succeed in any of our lifetimes. Paul also knew that even if success is not assured, we needed to try. He knew that making an option for the poor in any domain is not only justified, it is essential.
We hear in the US news, that Haiti is a “basket case”- a country where bad things just happen- earthquakes, assassinations, gangs, poverty, corruption. Projects fail. There is even an implication that somehow Haitians deserve this. Thinking about the basket case scenario makes me even more grateful to be with you today. Because you, like Paul Farmer, are in solidarity with Haitians. You speak with Haitians enough to know that most are wonderful people, and none deserve the misfortunes inflicted on them. You learn from them, as Paul did and I do, that bad things don’t just happen in Haiti any more than anywhere else, but that destructive policies-- many made in Haiti, but many made in the US—succeed in inflicting destruction in Haiti. Most important, you learn from your Haitian friends, as Paul did and I did, that calling Haiti a “basket case” is not an effective description of the country, but calling Haiti a “basket case” is an effective device for ducking our own responsibility to dismantle unjust structures that benefit people in the US while keeping Haitians poor.
Over past two months, whenever I spend time reflecting or writing about Paul, I am interrupted by a vision of him in heaven. In the vision, Paul is not enjoying the company of angels or the celestial music. He is not, as Georgette hoped, resting in peace, or smiling down as Dr. Jim sees him. In my vision, Paul is looking down at me with the same severe and skeptical expression he had when he first met at the Oloffson, an expression I have learned he uses for people who could be doing better. He somehow has a slight mischievous smile too, as he asks me “Have I taught you nothing? When there is so much work to do, why are you spending so much time on a dead white guy?”
Paul is looking down at all of us right now. But I think we can all push back and justify our coming together to Paul. We have to admit that we are here to remember him, of course. But we can tell Paul that our way of remembering him is by networking, planning, and organizing to take his work forward. We are remembering Paul when we treat the sick. We are remembering Paul when we feed the poor, or take in strangers and insist our government does too. We remember Paul when we visit the prisoners and get them out of jail. We are remembering Paul in this work because we are doing it in a way that dismantles the structural injustice that keeps Haitians impoverished. And we are really remembering Paul when work to hold our own government accountable for actions that limit Haitians ability to build a stable and prosperous country.
Thank you
Brian Concannon is the Executive Director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti. Connect with him on twitter @HaitiJustice.