I've been marinating over the past few days with friends and all by my lonesome about this story that Mother Jones reporter Mac McClelland posted about her PTSD and its ties to Haiti. I am by no means dismissing the seriousness of PTSD nor McClelland's ordeal as I have seen people close to me suffer through it. McClelland's narrative, however, did not stress the significance of this mental condition as a result of covering a rape victim's story or the turbulence of an earthquake ravished country struggling to regain some sort of stability. Oh no. THIS narrative focused on violent sexual experiences that she used to ease her anxieties. And Haiti made her do it.

I cannot speak from the perspective of McClelland or the women journalists that held her accountable or responded. As a literary scholar, I immediately made a mental note of Conrad's Heart of Darkness and eerie similarities between McClelland's disposition and Kurtz, a European gentleman turned noble savage. Kurtz was consumed by the African continent. It ate him alive. I thought about the insinuations Conrad nuanced throughout his text, how Africa's literal and figurative darkness "changed" incorruptible, civilized whiteness.  McClelland paints Haiti in a similar way, an update to the "dark continent" that is seemingly just as corrupted and irremediable. The difference between Conrad and McClelland, however, is how McClelland nearly romanticizes Haiti as a Xanadu of dangerous black sex that she engages to cope with her distress.

While the article suggests she is not raped, McClelland constructs a second hand rape discourse in which she borrows from the actual rape victim's experiences to signify her violent sexual desires. McClellands sex narrative also heavily paralleled the rape fantasy trope discussed in black male narratives like Himes' If He Hollers Let Him Go, Wright's Native Son, and Ellison's Invisible Man. McClellands predatory Haitian partner alludes to if not resuscitates and updates the hyperviolent and hypersexual insatiability of black men and their incessant lust for white women trope for a 21st century audience.

Perhaps most penetrating about McClelland's post is the Haitian woman Sybille. Oooooooh wee. Where to begin with that? The fact that Sybille was a mentally unstable AMERICAN white woman with multiple personalities and situated within a different social-cultural landscape? The fact that Haitian Sybille suffered immense psychological and physical trauma without the privilege of being able to seek treatment while being at fault for her "crime?" Or the fact that for Haitian Sybille's literal and figurative silence (McClelland reports earlier that Sybille's tongue was bitten off by one of her rapists) to be validated a non-Haitian, American woman needs to speak for her. The same woman who THEN attempts to situate her own sexual anxieties within Haitian Sybille's oppressed narrative?  I'm sayin'.  Where's the objectivity in that?