When the Looting Stops, the Sledgehammer Starts

At first glance, it looks like an earthquake. Walls ripped open, roofs torn off, door and window openings left gaping, buildings reduced to their concrete skeletons. Except that earthquakes do not discriminate. They do not hit the university harder than the garage, they do not burn books, they do not spare the doors so that they can be carried off elsewhere. What the images of the areas retaken from Viv Ansanm have been showing for the past few weeks is not a natural disaster. It is a selection. And that selection tells us something that no damage assessment will ever capture unless we name it.

The immediate reflex, faced with these images, is to be stunned. The word that comes next, and that is best set aside at once, is the laziest in our collective vocabulary. This is not barbarism. Barbarism does not discriminate either. What we are witnessing is neither disaster, nor chaos, nor collapse. It is a grammar. And every grammar can be read, provided one is willing to learn its alphabet.

What the images show

Let us start with the facts. A few scenes are enough, because they recur and all speak the same language. All of them come from the official images released by the Communications Directorate of the Haitian National Police (PNH) and from their reposting by online news pages in the weeks after the areas were retaken.

In the courtyard of the Lycée Jean-Jacques Dessalines, embroidered school badges bearing the class years 2010 and 2011 were found scattered across the floors and along the corridors, among the metal clips that once fastened them to uniforms. A badge has no market value. No one could have resold it. No one tried to take it away. It was torn off, thrown down, flung from one room to another, trampled in passing. It is this banal scattering, spread over the length of the occupation, that is the gesture, not the damage to the building that came with it.

In a university library whose images the national police released at the time of the recapture, books from every period lie in heaps on the bare floor. Some are old, bound in leather, with cloth spines, the kind any secondhand bookseller in Port-au-Prince would have taken without a second thought to sell on. None was taken. Some are blackened by fire, others simply trampled. The police set about bringing them back, one by one, to their headquarters, to hand them over to the Rectorate of the State University of Haiti. This act of return is itself a response. It says that what was thrown to the floor still deserves to be picked up, book by book.

Further on, a private university whose motto, displayed on its facade, promised “Work, Leadership, Excellence” was set on fire. The Creole phrase, kraze ak boule, to smash and burn, is typologically exact. The two acts are distinct, and they were carried out together. Elsewhere again, in an area retaken more recently, a Pentecostal church shows gaping holes knocked with a sledgehammer into its facades of concrete block set in a post-and-beam frame, right next to metal doors left intact. The sledgehammer was not used to get in. It was used to tear open. Beside doors that could have been opened. Needlessly.

What these four scenes have in common is that nothing called for them: no market value, no tactical gain, no military function in an occupation secured months before. All of them, however, left the same signature. That signature is the thread followed here.

The selection is not where we think

The first step in reading these scenes is to rule out a false lead. A hasty reading would set two kinds of behavior against each other. On one side, the rational looting of houses, where whatever sells is carried off. On the other, the senseless destruction of universities and churches, where, on this view, people smash away with sledgehammers because they are capable of nothing else. This reading is wrong. There are not two hands. There is a single hand that performs two successive gestures and does not apply them in the same places.

Wherever something can be dismantled, the looting is uniform. Houses are gutted for their doors, their windows, their plumbing fixtures, the wiring pulled out of the walls. But so are the university buildings. So are the hotels. So are the churches. Everything that can be resold on the informal secondhand market for building materials is ripped out, hauled away, sold off. This first regime is present everywhere, and it has a perfectly classic economic signature, documented elsewhere under the name “materials looting” and observed in settings as different as Detroit after 2008 or New Orleans after Katrina. It is a scavenger economy, which thrives wherever buildings have ceased to be protected by their occupants.

What distinguishes the buildings, then, is not whether they were looted. It is what happens once the looting is over. At Mr. X’s house, the sequence ends there. What there was to take has been taken; they have moved on. At the university, the church, the library, they come back. They come back with a sledgehammer. They break open load-bearing walls when no one will get anything out of them. They smash in gates whose hinges they had already ripped off. They strew the books across the floor and burn some of them, though no one was buying them.

This second gesture is neither the logical sequel to the first nor its spillover. It obeys a different grammar. It carries a different message. It cannot be mistaken for the rage of a looter carried away by his own violence, because it is methodical, because it selects its targets, because it applies to some buildings and not to others. It is this selectivity that makes it legible. And it is this selectivity that calls for a name.

Naming things

Several names exist, and they must be called up in order, because they do not say quite the same thing. Scholars coined them in the course of other conflicts. Three are enough.

The first, urbicide, was put forward by the Serbian architect Bogdan Bogdanović during the Bosnian war, then systematized by Martin Coward in Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction (2009). It refers to the destruction of the built environment as such, as the support of coexistence and belonging, regardless of any tactical or economic value. The building is destroyed not for what it contains, nor for what it is worth. It is destroyed for what it means. The diagnostic criterion is precisely the one observed here: little looting and heavy demolition of symbolic markers, where purely predatory violence would do the opposite.

The second, memoricide, was introduced by the historian Mirko Grmek to describe the destruction of the National Library in Sarajevo in August 1992, and developed by Robert Bevan in The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (2006). It specifically targets the institutions of transmission (schools, universities, archives, places of worship), insofar as they physically embody a community’s continuity with its past and with its possibility of a future. Burning the books in a library serves no military or economic purpose, nor even any immediate repressive one. It makes sense only if one considers that the books themselves are the target.

The third concept is more recent. It comes from the expert reports András Riedlmayer prepared for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. In them, Riedlmayer showed, on the basis of 392 sites studied in Bosnia, that the destruction was neither accidental nor proportionate to any military function. In some towns, mosques had been not only shelled but bulldozed away, their very foundations torn out so that no trace would remain. Excess destruction, as the literature that grew out of these reports calls it, is the share of violence that goes beyond any instrumental function. By definition, it yields no return. And it is precisely this technical gratuitousness that makes it a signature. The sledgehammer that tears open a wall next to a door left intact is, almost word for word, an illustration of what Riedlmayer established before the tribunal.

These three concepts do not overlap exactly. Urbicide describes the object targeted. Memoricide describes the type of institution. Excess destruction describes the gesture itself. Taken together, they give what we are seeing in Port-au-Prince a name and a grammar. But that grammar comes into sharper focus still when one looks more closely at what happened to the books.

The book on the floor

The books do not leave. Or rather, not all of them leave, and judging by what the images reveal, most stay where they are. Some are burned. The rest are strewn across the floors of libraries and classrooms. Neither treatment serves any economic purpose. Both serve a symbolic one. And they do not say the same thing.

Burning a book takes time and fuel. It is an active gesture, and a costly one. No one burns books by chance. Hannah Arendt observed, of the German book burnings of 1933, that the pyre of books was never a utilitarian gesture but always a sacramental one. This is not disposal. It is exorcism. The smoke is part of the message.

Strewing books across the floor belongs to another register, more precise still. Mary Douglas, in Purity and Danger (1966), established that desecration is not an absence of respect. It is the deliberate reversal of the rules for handling a symbolically charged object. You do not put a book down on the floor: you shelve it, you lay it flat on a raised surface, you handle it upright. Putting it on the floor and walking on it is a specific transgression, which presupposes knowledge of the rule being broken. It is this prior knowledge that makes the gesture legible as a reversal.

You do not desecrate out of ignorance. You desecrate out of counter-knowledge.

This is where the laziest reading collapses. The word barbarian, etymologically, refers to someone who does not know the codes. The author of a desecration, by contrast, knows them perfectly, and that is why he can reverse them. This inverted competence, surprising in actors often described as having dropped out of school, is precisely the point. Being out of school does not produce ignorance of what school is. It produces resentment at having missed it. You only desecrate well what you have known from a distance and never been able to reach.

The school badges scattered across the courtyard obey the same grammar, taken to its most radical point. The gesture targets precisely what marked the pupil as a pupil, the seal that tied him to an institution, a graduating class, a year. But it does not do so as a ritual, carefully, laying the badge on the ground like a sacrificial object. It does so by scattering. Tear it off, toss it, leave it lying there. The badge becomes one piece of rubbish among others, that is, an object denied even the symbolic charge one would ceremonially reverse. To desecrate by ritual is still to grant the object its power. To desecrate by scattering is to strip it of that power entirely. What remains is to say where this need comes from.

The driving force

To understand what drives this second gesture, we have to be willing to go one level deeper in the analysis and call on two authors whom Haitian commentary rarely invokes.

Max Scheler, in Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), drew the distinction that matters. Ressentiment is not mere hatred. It is impotent hatred, the kind that cannot find outward expression in immediate action and builds up over time until it recasts the desired object as an object to be abolished. Ressentiment does not want to possess. It wants the other to be unable to possess any longer. It is a psychic economy of reversal, which turns frustration into rage and rage into an inverted system of values.

Helmut Schoeck, in Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour (1966), extended the diagnosis to the collective level, showing, on the basis of a vast body of ethnographic material, that societies in which upward mobility is blocked for long periods develop behaviors in which people would rather destroy what belongs to others than own it themselves. This is not an individual pathology. It is a social regulation of inequality from below, which kicks in when the other mechanisms of redistribution or mobility have stopped working. Haiti, where the social elevator has been jammed for a majority of young city dwellers for at least two decades, meets all the structural conditions for this dynamic.

Then there is the dimension of social signaling. Thorstein Veblen, in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), had theorized conspicuous consumption as a marker of rising status. What we see here is its exact inversion. Conspicuous destruction no longer says “I can buy what you cannot” but “I can destroy what you can no longer protect.” And it is precisely the gratuitous nature of the gesture, its economic uselessness, that makes it a credible signal. If the destruction served a purpose, it would mean nothing.

This framework helps explain why the targets of the second gesture are not just any targets. If only universities were hit, one would diagnose a classic anti-intellectualism. If only churches were hit, one would diagnose an antireligious stance. The two together say something else. The target is neither the intellect nor the sacred taken separately. It is what these institutions claimed to offer without delivering.

Two opposite and equally naive readings must be resisted here. The first would idealize these institutions as pure ways out. The private university in Port-au-Prince filters by wallet, the prestigious lycée selects on the results of an education system that is already unequal, and part of Haiti’s evangelical landscape has long preached a patience that objectively serves the established order. These institutions are not innocent of the social gap that surrounds them. The second reading, its mirror image, would reduce them to instruments of domination and read the sledgehammer as a coherent social revolt. But a coherent social revolt comes with a discourse that names it and claims its target. No discourse of that kind accompanies the destruction observed. The leaders do not say they are burning the university because it excludes, or tearing open the church because it subjugates. They say nothing, or they say something else.

What is at stake, then, is neither the pure moral function of these places nor their role in social reproduction, but the precise zone where the two overlap: the gap between the promise on display and the reality dealt out. The university that proclaims “Work, Leadership, Excellence” on its facade and filters by income. The school that trains an elite one will never be invited to join. The ministers of religion who preach a dignity from which their own material circumstances sometimes diverge considerably. It is this duplicity, felt without being named, that is the stuff of ressentiment in Scheler’s sense. The broken promise, physically on display in the building and in the badge, is what the sledgehammer comes to strike. It does not target the institution in its ideal function. It targets its facade insofar as it is a facade.

Added to this, at the level of the individual this time, is what Jack Katz’s criminology established in Seductions of Crime (1988). Katz showed that some forms of transgression are worth less for what they produce than for what they make the person committing them feel. The act is its own reward. The fury of the sledgehammer swung at a wall already broken open is not a loss of control. It is the deliberate pursuit of a state that the gang’s economic routine no longer provides. They smash because they need to smash, and the building collapsing before them confirms with every blow that they have crossed over, however briefly, to the side of those who can. This satisfaction is not an appendage of economic calculation. It belongs to another register, which coexists with it in the same hand.

Foreclosing the horizon

This gesture is not accidental, and it does not need to be thought through to be effective. Émile Durkheim would have said that the regularity of the phenomenon makes it a social fact, one that imposes itself on the actors without any strategist having to formulate it as such. Those who carry it out probably have no coherent political project. But the structural result of their acts, added together, amounts to one. They are destroying what might, tomorrow, have opened to children from the same neighborhood the possibility of a life other than theirs.

This foreclosing of the horizon carries a consequence for reconstruction that no budget, no road map, no official announcement can evade. If the destruction is not the act of ignorant outsiders to the system, but the work of the system’s own castoffs, then rebuilding the walls without rethinking who gets to walk through them amounts to rebuilding the conditions for the next cycle. Putting the university back exactly as it was, reopening the school with the same social selection as before, restoring the church within its usual perimeter, without changing any of what kept these places on the fringe, is preparing the next pyre. Not immediately. Not in seven years. But on the scale of a generation, and no country can afford to lose one yet again.

What is at stake

None of the concepts used here was coined for Haiti. Methodological honesty requires acknowledging it. Urbicide was conceived in ethnonational conflicts, and so was memoricide; Scheler’s ressentiment, in the context of prewar Europe. Haiti fits none of these configurations. There is, to date, no project of ethnic or religious erasure driven by Viv Ansanm. What there is, and this is what makes the transposition legitimate, is a social structure that produces, through its own mechanisms, a kind of castoff whose rage finds the same forms of expression as those documented elsewhere. The form of the gesture always precedes the content attributed to it. What the ruins of Sarajevo and those of certain neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince have in common is not the ideology that produced them. It is the material grammar of one and the same type of violence, which arises wherever one part of a society decides that another part will no longer have a right to its institutions.

A second caveat is in order: how far the framework holds within the Haitian landscape itself. Not all the components of the coalition behave the same way. The expanding rural cells, whose reach is shown by the recent violence in the Artibonite, remain largely in a predatory phase and do not, at this stage, practice excess destruction in the sense analyzed above. They consolidate by force, redistribute selectively, and are beginning to establish a form of local criminal governance, but they do not destroy buildings for what they mean. The second gesture, in its fully developed form, is for now an urban, metropolitan phenomenon, located in the precise phase when the long occupation of a territory gives way to a withdrawal under pressure. This caveat does not invalidate the framework; it marks out its scope. And it indicates that what played out in the retaken areas of the metropolitan region is a specific signature, peculiar to a moment and to a type of occupation, which must therefore be read precisely where it appears.

A society that wants to survive its own collapse must first learn to read its ruins. Not to clear them away. To read them. Because before they are a budgetary cost, these ruins are a text. And wherever men have one day written that text with a sledgehammer, the institutions of international law have ended up giving it a name.

This text says that a nation cannot hold together for long when some of its children learn to wield the sledgehammer against the institutions where others learn to read. It says that walls rebuilt without touching this asymmetry are walls built for the next blow. It says that the badges scattered in the courtyard and the book trampled in the library are the same sentence, spoken in two registers, and that this sentence was addressed to us long before the sledgehammer fell. It says, finally, to those who saw it coming and chose not to see, that silence, too, is a signature.

The window that the recapture of territory opens before us is neither a reconstruction budget nor a calendar of announcements. It is an examination. What we do with the burned universities, the trampled libraries, the gutted churches, the badges scattered in the dust of the schoolyards will show whether we have understood or whether we are getting ready to do it all again. And behind this decision, which is not technical but civilizational, stands a question that no Haitian generation, for a very long time, has had to answer with such gravity.

This time, will we know how to read before we rebuild?

Réginald Surin

Economist