The reality of shared human experiences: from Hungary to Haiti
Essay and Photography
A longer version of this essay was published in the Journal of Free Black Thought, on September 29th, 2021, with the title: From Hungary to Haiti: Unique Histories, Universal Stories.
I am an author and documentary photographer. I work with words and images. In recent years, like many other fellow Americans, I found myself scrambling to make sense of the words and the images that dominate the public narrative space in the United States, of the elements that inform our conversations, shape our individual as well as our collective mental and emotional states. Beyond making sense of the conversation, I was also trying to figure out a way forward, to discover a walkable path among the multitude of competing versions of what our reality, history, society ‘really’ looks like and what it is that we would want it to be.
Ten years ago, the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave a TED talk which received over six million views on Youtube. It is titled: The Danger of a Single Story. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Ihs241zeg). While I recognize that we, in the United States, appear to live a somewhat reverse cultural moment today than the one that inspired her talk, I nevertheless find the wider message of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to be acutely relevant in current day American society: there is a danger to stories that are “single”. Just like there is a danger in forgetting that the way to overcome such singular stories is to move outside the boundaries set by them, to look beyond the horizons and narratives of the space in which they were born.
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One story that appears to have become a fundamental marker of anti-racist stance and moral behavior in recent years is that there is an unsurpassable boundary between the way “white people” and “people of color” view and understand the world. In this configuration of reality, the umbrella term “white” is typically applied to people with European ancestry, while “people of color” signals African, South American or South Asian origins, although the categories are, for obvious reasons, fluid. Countless articles loudly claim and receive thousands of ‘claps’ in support, such as this one: https://medium.com/age-of-awareness/yes-all-white-people-are-racist-eefa97cc5605, along with a book that has made it to the New York Times bestseller list, and aims to become material taught in public schools (https://robindiangelo.com/publications/ ) that whites, as a unified group and by the nature of them being white, cannot possibly understand “the lived experience” of what oppression means, that white people, or, “Europeans,” as a single, undifferentiated mass, are collectively complicit and mainly responsible for the conquest and subjugation of other human groups, primarily “people of color.” The argument goes further, claiming on the one hand that this experience as oppressor permeates the mind of all white people, and, on the other, that simply by their participation in American society today, white people assist to the maintenance of a pervasive racist structure, whether it is their intention or not.
I will not point out the theoretical flaws inherent in this ideology, many public intellectuals (John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, to mention only a few) have already done so. I will, however, use words and images to show that it reflects a very limited view of wider human reality. It is not simply historically untrue, but driven by an ambition to become a truth-statement that seeks to cast collective guilt and punishment, it is also very dangerous.
Coming from a small country located in the Eastern part of Europe, from a country which has repeatedly been on the receiving end of conquest and political oppression by various power players of a variety of skin colors (Mongols, Ottoman Empire, Habsburg Empire before 1867, Soviet Union) I am somewhat confused to see how the story of my region and of millions of people who have immigrated to the US from that area over the past hundred years seems to have been forgotten. Erased, I would say, if I wanted to join the group of the vulnerable. I do not. I simply want to point out that while it seems to be widely accepted as truth that “white history,” in its entirety, along with all the conclusions that can possibly be drawn from it, are already thoroughly known in the United States, my experience tells me that they are not.
There is an important point I want to make here: I am using certain expressions and tools of argument in this essay which are typically used by people who position themselves in a certain subsection of the political left. The reason for that is not because I want this piece to be political or because I agree with that kind of terminology. It is simply to show that that kind of reasoning, even on its own terms, has limited applicability. Another important point to make is that I bring stories and experiences of “people like me” to the conversation not because I want to add to the already tumultuous field where various groups of people demand voice and recognition. I neither wish to displace one collective story with another, nor intend to delegitimize the historic and contemporary experiences of many African Americans and other people of color. The goal of this piece is not to ‘displace’, or to ‘re-center’, rather it is to call for unity; it is to show that shared human experience across ethnic and racial boundaries is a reality, and that authentic understanding is possible not only along but also across what is being described as “the color-line”. It takes the reader on a journey from Hungary to Haiti.
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My paternal great-grandmother comes from an orthodox Jewish family from a small village located in current-day Slovakia. She married a Hungarian Protestant man after having converted to Christianity; as a result, she was disowned by her family and by the Jewish community in which she grew up. She was never permitted to visit them again. She was someone they saw as a dissenter, a person not worthy of support. My great-grandmother had several children, and she died of tuberculosis when my grandfather was 2 years old.
My grandfather thus was raised as a Protestant, he had no knowledge of his own Jewish origins. Given the context of anti-semitism in early twentieth century Eastern Europe, such ancestry was frequently kept a secret. My grandfather married a woman of Transylvanian Protestant origins and they had a son, my father. They divorced when my father was 2 years old. My grandmother, who remarried, refused to keep my father, and sent him to live with her parents in Transylvania, which is in Romania and is home to a large ethnic Hungarian minority population. This happened in the late 1930s, early 1940s, during the second World War. In 1944, when the Soviet army was pressing ahead and the frontline threatened to reach the town where they lived in Romania, my father was sent by train to Budapest, the Hungarian capital, to be with his mother. He traveled alone during occasional air raid attacks. As my grandmother’s new husband refused to allow my then seven-year-old father to live with them, my father was left to the care of my grandfather, who, regardless of his Protestant upbringing, was Jewish by force of the laws in effect. He was not sent to a concentration camp, but he was taken to a forced labor unit organized by the German army during the siege of the Hungarian capital, where he was one of many other men tasked with transporting explosives in the middle of shelling and bomb raids from one part of the town to the other. My father remained alone in a city under siege. He was taken in by a woman from the countryside; she is the reason he survived the war. (A memoir I wrote about him, titled Mother, can be read on Medium).
My maternal grandfather was the son of a washer woman, who made a living by going to middle class homes, collecting the laundry which she washed by hand as was the custom at the time, and then returning the clean clothes. Even though she lived in the capital, up until the early 1970s her home was in a huge apartment building where the individual apartments had no bathrooms. There were shared bathrooms, one or two on each floor. In areas like hers in the city, this was not an exceptional situation at the time.
In the late 1940s, following more than 5 years of war and a right-wing system of terror, countries in Eastern Europe came under the control of left-wing dictatorships. Poverty, political oppression, generalized fear and collective punishments, now for different social groups than before, continued to be the norm. Right after the war, within the framework of so-called population exchange agreements, individuals belonging to ethnic groups deemed collectively guilty of genocide were relocated en masse, forced to leave their homes, and deprived of citizenship in countries where they were born and had been living up until that point.
During the early part of the Soviet era part of the family on my father’s side was deported to a small village in Hungary, as part of an internal displacement plan for members of the former aristocracy, the middle-class and certain professionals. On my mother’s side, in 1968, my uncle swam to freedom, from a small village in the former Yugoslavia to Italy across the sea, in the middle of the night. He left with two other young men, one of whom, his best friend, drowned on the way. My uncle and the other person who survived the roughly five hour-long night crossing were taken to a refugee camp in Italy from where they later on escaped, because the Italian authorities planned to send them to Australia. White faces against the backdrop of a blue sea that separated them from the opportunity to have a better life, or to seek out freedom.
Even during the later years of communism, when the communist regime had somewhat loosened its grip on society, suspicion, forced silence, and meager material means were our everyday reality. Which does not mean that we were perennially unhappy, incapable, or forever victimized. What it actually meant was that we became very adept at overcoming such difficulties both in our daily, physical lives and in our souls.
Travel outside the borders of the Soviet-block countries was difficult. People in Hungary had two different passports: a red one to travel to Socialist countries, and a blue one to travel to countries outside of that block. The blue passports were not automatically granted by the government and they could be denied on political grounds: the opportunity to travel to the West was used as a leverage, as a tool of control to ensure that people, at least openly, stayed in line. Such passports were not true passports in the sense we think about them today, people could apply for them only once in three years, later once every year, and they were valid for one specific trip only. Beyond the issue of receiving a passport, Hungarians, like anybody else from the Eastern European countries, needed a visa to travel outside the Soviet Block. The lines for visa applications in front of embassies of desirable destinations countries, such as Germany or the United States, were routinely many hours long, at times starting the previous night.
The stories could go on. Stories of human beings who happen to have white skin but who are definitely not “white” in the political sense of that word today.
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I moved to the United States in 2000. A few years ago I started pursuing an MA in Africana Studies, I graduated in 2017. My thesis work, with a focus on belief systems and their connection to political rhetoric, led me to Haiti. In absence of meaningful funds available for MA students it was not part of the requirements of the program that I travel to the country I write about, but I felt uncomfortable handing in a thesis work without having some personal experience, and conducting at least a minimum of on-site research. I arranged to travel to Haiti on my own, not as part of any institution, organization, or mission group. I had a guide, a Haitian journalist whom I have continued to work with since the first time we met.
Before my first trip to Haiti I had been warned many times that I was going to a place not much short of the belly of the beast and that, particularly in my quality “as a white person” I would likely be shocked to see the realities on the ground.
While daily life in Haiti is undeniably very demanding both physically and emotionally for the majority of people living there, my emotional reaction to what I saw was not bewilderment or the activation of the ‘savior instinct’ expected of me, rather, it was a vague feeling that, after almost two decades of living abroad, I was finally at home. Not in the geographical sense, clearly, but in the sense that I recognized the way individual people reacted to daily conditions in which they could only rely on their own ingenuity. I felt at home in the car repair place located in the neighbor’s dusty yard, and I felt at home in situations where things routinely simply did not work. Where service, as such, was not something people are entitled to, but it was something that one received if the person in charge of giving it was in the mood to give it to you. I felt at home in the small stores where the shelves were either empty or carried prepackaged and wilting products that had clearly seen better days. In spite of all the apparent, but in the end superficial, differences such as language and skin color, I instinctively knew how to work and live within that system, more than I knew how to comfortably or efficiently operate within the highly regulated system of the United States when I first arrived here.
None of this is to say that when I am in Haiti I am unaware of the larger context, or of the very real meaning of my skin color in it, and the position it assigns to me whether I like it or not. Of a certain amount of privilege, to put it in a fashionable way. It does, however, mean that the position I enjoy in that context has neither been a constant in my life, nor has it defined my lived experiences and my identity. It does not irreparably hinder the understanding I can have of individual Haitians or of the larger context they live in. To take a concrete example: I have been to Haiti five times over the past three years, working on a free-lance project, and I have always had the choice to not have to stay there, to take a plane and leave. A privilege in and by itself, regardless of skin color, of which I am acutely aware, perhaps exactly because growing up we were so grounded in a reality from which one could not simply decide to leave.
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The road that leads a person from Hungary through the United States to Haiti is not typical. Not many people have taken that path. But the rest of my story, or that of my family and of many people who “look like me”, are not in any way unusual, or unrepresentative. Generations of people with white skin color grew up in a large area of the European continent (and partly the Asian, in the former Soviet Union or Russia) who have intimately known and personally experienced oppression, poverty, political persecution and a very realistic fear of state authority figures such as the police or gun-wielding border guards. For us, who grew up in that region during those years, and also for our parents, these are facts of life that everybody knows, facts that we do not need to talk about unless we want to keep repeating the obvious. In 2020, as a citizen of the United States who has lived on this side of the Atlantic for 20 years, I realized that the time has come to talk about it. That none of this was obvious.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie emphasized “how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story”. The history of the twentieth century is a reminder that this is particularly true of stories repeated over and over again. Stories, when they are part of a varied landscape, enlighten; when they stand as the only morally acceptable version, they become prisons that we, as members of a given community, lock ourselves in. The claim that there can be no genuine overlap between the lived experiences, and therefore no authentic understanding between people with different skin colors is a story that conflicts with the personal memory and life experience of many of us living in this community. Elevated to the position of truth it becomes a “single story”, one that carries the dangers that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned her listeners about. Single stories are not the way to fight prejudice, they create prejudice. They are not a meaningful path to fight for social justice and to establish a more equal society.
All the photographs from Haiti included in this essay are the property of the author.
A more academic versions of this essay is scheduled to appear in the Journal of Free Black Thought. A shorter iteration has been featured on the site of The Equiano Project and Dontdivideus.
A recent non-fiction piece I wrote and photographed in January of 2020, the month that marked the 10-year anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti can be reached here: http://columbiajournal.org/photo-essay-haiti-beyond-the-headlines/
A collection of photographs which document life as lived in Haiti today through a non-sensationalist, non-commercial lens can be viewed on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPS1umCkl0Q
If the link does not work, please search for Beyond the Headlines, Haiti, 10 years after the earthquake Tillmann, on Youtube.
