Following Water in the Wake of Cholera: Relation, Coloniality, and the Poetics of Osmosis in Haiti's Artibonite Valley

Abstract

Throughout the Haiti cholera epidemic, the Artibonite Valley region, which stretches across the middle of the country, saw some of the highest caseloads. In October 2010, toxigenic Vibrio cholerae, the bacteria that causes the deadly diarrheal disease, had breached a United Nations military base in central Haiti and entered a tributary of the nation’s most prominent waterway, the Latibonit (Artibonite) River. A confluence of structural factors and social forces linked to an enduring “colonial matrix of power” not only mediated these troops’ presence in Haiti, but also allowed for the pathogen-laden effluent to seep beyond the camp and for the exposure of millions of Haitians to contaminated water, sparking the nation’s first cholera epidemic and the deadliest in recent world history. Iterations of coloniality saturate people’s lived experiences of the outbreak as well as the social, religious, ecological, and visceral relations gathering in its wake. In this dissertation, these experiences and entanglements in several communities along the Latibonit serve as a point of departure for theorizing human-water relationality within Haiti.

Using an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach that draws from my training as an MD/PhD student in medicine and sociocultural anthropology, I conducted more than 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork over the course of 2015-2019, accompanied by archival research in several digital collections. I based my studies in Mibalè, a central Haiti town downstream of the UN base; Sen Mak, a coastal secondary city near the mouth of the Latibonit River; and the Fifth Communal Section of Sen Mak, a predominantly rice-growing region bordered by the river. My findings locate cholera as not simply an acute, severe disease, but rather an enduring rupture that, like all ruptures, demands adjustments from those affected—the most salient concerning the waters people drink. How and why, with the occurrence of this epidemic, did relations between humans and drinking-water shift or persist?

In Following Water, I attempt to situate when, where, and how these human-water disruptions occur and the ways in which Haitians are navigating their repair. Though the outbreak began with the leaking of toxigenic V. cholerae into the Latibonit River, the origins of the epidemic multiply within the context of colonial repetitions in Haiti and globally. Waters likewise multiply in their webs of connection, circulation, and flux. An orientation toward the waters both mediating the epidemic and linking pathogen and host is thus a future orientation toward the waters with which people become, and not just suffer from. Embedded in the unfolding of Haiti’s novel cholera epidemic—and the bodies of people it affected—are the recurrences of coloniality as well as creative ways for collectively surviving them. To trace these processes, I begin from the site where vibrios, water, and humans meet: the semipermeable membranes of cells lining the intestinal wall. Amid the cholera epidemic in Haiti, the confluence of vibrios, water, and humans happens not only at the cellular membrane, but also at the semipermeable membranes of reverse osmosis systems increasingly used throughout the country in the wake of the outbreak. By following drinking-water, river water, diarrhea, rice-water, and reverse osmosis water, my thesis explores how membranes—and the osmotic processes they mediate—trouble such alleged binaries as the natural and cultural, human and nonhuman, past and future, ordinary and exceptional, bodies and technology, death and (forms of) life.