Haitian Quotes

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.

The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.

Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.

In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.

Along the way we have even lost the right to call ourselves Americans, although the Haitians and the Cubans appeared in history as new people a century befire the Mayflower pilgrims settled on the Plymouth coast. For the world today, America is just the United States; the region we inhabit is a sub-America, a second-class America of nebulous identity.

Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.

The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry.

Beyond mountains there are mountains.” - Haitian proverb

Freedom is an inmost power. That is why society limits it.

Anytime one tries to take fragments of one's personal mythology and make them understandable to the whole world, one reaches back to the past. It must be dreamed again.

god gives but does not share" --haitian proverb

That was the beginning of the revolution. Many years have gone by and blood keeps running, soaking the soil of Haiti, but I am not there to weep.

It is with this surety that we must stand with Haiti, a country whose spirit and people will never be broken, and work in solidarity toward the future the Haitian people deserve.

It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.

Even today, most US history textbooks tell the story of the Louisiana Purchase without admitting that slave revolution in Saint-Domingue made it possible. And here is another irony. Haitians had opened 1804 by announcing their grand experiment of a society whose basis for citizenship was literally the renunciation of white privilege, but their revolution’s success had at the same time delivered the Mississippi Valley to a new empire of slavery. The

The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.

By creating a society in which all people, of all colors, were granted freedom and citizenship, the Haitian Revolution forever transformed the world. It was a central part of the destruction of slavery in the Americas, and therefore a crucial moment in the history of democracy, one that laid the foundation for the continuing struggles for human rights everywhere. In this sense we are all descendents of the Haitain Revolution, and responsible to these ancestors.

She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.

There’s a Haitian saying, “Pitit moun se lave yon bò, kite yon bò.” When you bathe other people’s children, it says, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty. I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people’s children not to give over their whole hearts, because they will never get a whole heart back.

You know what I mean,’ she huffed. ‘She’s not Haitian. She’s French. And I just don’t see why she has to be so difficult.

Speak, breathe, prophesy, get behind a pulpit and preach, mark exam papers, run a company or a nonprofit, clean your kitchen, put paint on a canvas, organize, rabble-rouse, find transcendence in the laundry pile while you pray in obscurity, deliver babies for Haitian mothers in the midwifery clinic—work the Love out and in and around you however God has made you and placed you to do it. Just do it. Don’t let the lies fence you in or hold you back.

The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains,” which meant that when you’d solved one problem, you couldn’t rest because you had to go on and solve the next.

One time I listened to Farmer give a talk on HIV to a class at the Harvard School of Public Health, and in the midst of reciting data, he mentioned the Haitian phrase “looking for life, destroying life,” Then he explained, “It’s an expression Haitians use if a poor woman selling mangoes falls off a truck and dies.” I felt as if for that moment I could see a little way into his mind, It seemed like a place of hyperconnectivity, At moments like that, I thought that what he wanted was to erase both time and geography, connecting all parts of his life and tying them instrumentally to a world in which he saw intimate, inescapable connections between the gleaming corporate offices of Paris and New York and a legless man lying on the mud floor of a hut in the remotest part of remote Haiti. Of all the world’s errors, he seemed to feel, the most fundamental was the “erasing” of people, the “hiding away” of suffering. “My big struggle is how people can not care, erase, not remember.

It would make sense, for the purposes of this study, to determine whether the idea of the zombie is in fact one of the traps of colonial history—something Haitians might have internalized and integrated into their own worldview. I

A message of consolation to Greek brothers in their prison camps, and to my Haitian brothers and Nicaraguan brothers and Dominican brothers and South African brothers and Spanish brothers and to my brothers in South Vietnam, all in their prison camps: You are in the free world!

The view reminded me of the Haitian proverb “Beyond mountains there are mountains,” which meant that when you’d solved one problem, you couldn’t rest because you had to go on and solve the next. The view of the Péligre Dam and its immense lake and the land it had drowned was, so to speak, another mountain to Farmer. It was a story of exploitation and disaster for at least a hundred thousand Haitians, and in one way or another, Farmer had to deal with it every day.

If someone you know knows something about you that you didn't tell 'em, reevaluate your circle.

Fear is a vice that takes root once it is cultivated. It takes time to recover from it.

Haitians,” Trump said. “We don’t need more Haitians.

It was amusing to look at that colorful case so symbolic of an entire nation. Haiti, it is said, is the place to discover how much can be done with little.

Spoon goes to bowl's house; bowl never goes to spoon's house. --Haitian proverb

Ostensibly designed for the benefit of the Haitian

Dominicans are, in fact, Haitians by default Since the natives named the whole Island Ayiti Ignoring this fact makes you a dolt We are all Creole, just different mentality

Dominicans are in fact, Haitians by default. Since the natives named the whole island named Haïti, stop being a dolt.

On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.

Frederick Douglass, who had entertained hopes for the Haitian post, graciously conceded defeat. “Your appointment,” he told Bassett, “is a grand achievement for yourself and for our whole people.

Much as slavery in the United States was part of a larger Atlantic Slave System, so America’s War of Independence was an outgrowth of Europe’s Seven Years’ War — from 1756 to 1763 — and also a precursor or harbinger of the French and Haitian revolutions and of the subsequent Latin American wars for independence from Spain.

A teacher once described the Haitians in her class as very obedient and polite. I said that's because their families will beat them if they get in trouble. Sensing my disapproval, she said it is good that they discipline their kids. Yes, but it can be taken too far when they instill fear of authority and beat the spirit out of their children.

Nia learned that our self-identity and connection to our roots is so powerful it can impact not only the course of our lives but also that of generations to come.

I am not naive: a servant is faithful when it is in her interest.

I would call purity a total ignorance of the torments of the flesh or the triumph of the will over them.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth [...]

Academics keep writing about the glorious slave revolt of Haiti (1791-1804). As if it still is the best thing that could have happened to Haiti. But it is the worst thing that happened to Haiti. Ever since the slave revolt against the French, Haiti has been in chaos. Massive human suffering, lasting destruction. Why celebrate that? But no: Let’s hold another conference on that fantastic Haitian Revolution.

There is a Haitian saying that might upset the aesthetic sensibilities of some women. ‘Nou led, nou la,’ it says. ‘We are ugly, but we are here.’ Like the modesty that is common in rural Haitian culture, this saying makes a deeper claim for poor Haitian women than maintaining beauty, be it skin-deep or otherwise. For women like my grandmother, what is worth celebrating is the fact that we are here, that against all odds, we exist.

We all know about the Clintons, who went from zero to $200 million since Bill Clinton left the White House. The Clintons made money every which way: by renting out American foreign policy, by selling pardons, by siphoning off earthquake aid intended for poor Haitians. I have written about this previously, so I won’t go into it here. But in profiting handsomely from their office and connections, the Clintons are not alone; rather, they are part of a Democratic trend.

Most Blacks may not be aware that the “American system” is designed for “us” to “suffer peacefully”.   However, Blacks are starting to get fed up.  We are tired of being mistreated and suppressed.  Blacks are speaking up and are we are standing up.  We are now calling things out for what they truly are.  No more keeping silent, no more turning the blind eye.  We are tired of the lies and broken promises. Just as the Haitian African Slaves revolted from the French, Blacks are starting to revolt.

It's a marriage of convenience. Temporarily, so long as our interests coincide, however long it takes to dispose of that mob of petit blancs at Port-au-Prince. Afterward,' he waved his sticky fingers airily, 'everything will return to the way it was before.

Among the darker nations, Paris is famous for two betrayals. The first came in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte sent General Victor Leclerc to crush the Haitian Revolution, itself inspired by the French Revolution. The French regime could not allow its lucrative Santo Domingo to go free, and would not allow the Haitian people to live within the realm of the Enlightenment's " Rights of Man." The Haitians nonetheless triumphed, and Haiti became the first modern colony to win its independence. The second betrayal came shortly after 1945, when a battered France, newly liberated by the Allies, sent its forces to suppress the Vietnamese, West Indians, and Africans who had once been its colonial subjects. Many of these regions had sent troops to fight for the liberation of France and indeed Europe, but they returned home emptyhanded. As a sleight of hand, the French government tried to maintain sovereignty over its colonies by repackaging them as " overseas territories." A people hungry for liberation did not want such measly hors d'oeuvres.

50,000 workers at the Yue Yen Nike Factory in China would have to work for nineteen years to earn what Nike spends on advertising in one year. Wal-Mart's annual sales are worth 120 times more than Haiti's entire annual budget; Disney CEO Michael Eisner earns $9,783 an hour while a Haitian worker earns 28 cents an hour; it would take a Haitian worker 16.8 years to earn Eisner's hourly income; the $181 million in stock options Eisner exercised in 1996 is enough to take care of his 19,000 Haitian workers and their families for fourteen years.

■    All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared.         ■    Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides.         ■    Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests.         ■    The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them.         ■    You can bend your counterpart’s reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from.         ■    People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.

Was it? It helps to dig back into the origins of Ebonics. Enslaved Africans formulated new languages in nearly every European colony in the Americas, including African American Ebonics, Jamaican Patois, Haitian Creole, Brazilian Calunga, and Cubano. In every one of these countries, racist power—those in control of government, academia, education, and media—has demeaned these African languages as dialects, as “broken” or “improper” or “nonstandard” French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, or English. Assimilationists have always urged Africans in the Americas to forget the “broken” languages of our ancestors and master the apparently “fixed” languages of Europeans—to speak “properly.

Even he knew he had more in common with Asian Henry Young, with Malcolm, with Willem, or even with Jude, than he had with them. Just look at him: at Court Square he disembarked and walked the three blocks to the former bottle factory where he now shared studio space with three other people. Did real Haitians have studio space? Would it even occur to real Haitians to leave their large rent-free apartment, where they could have theoretically carved out their own corner to paint and doodle, only to get on a subway and travel half an hour (think how much work could be accomplished in those thirty minutes!) to a sunny dirty space? No, of course not. To conceive of such a luxury, you needed an American mind.

As the Haitian proverb puts it: Behind mountains are more mountains. Elysium is a myth. One does not overcome an obstacle to enter the land of no obstacles. On the contrary, the more you accomplish, the more things will stand in your way. There are always more obstacles, bigger challenges. You’re always fighting uphill. Get used to it and train accordingly. Knowing that life is a marathon and not a sprint is important. Conserve your energy. Understand that each battle is only one of many and that you can use it to make the next one easier. More important, you must keep them all in real perspective. Passing one obstacle simply says you’re worthy of more. The world seems to keep throwing them at you once it knows you can take it. Which is good, because we get better with every attempt.

[in response to Jean-François, who claimed that, "there is no irrevocable liberty for the former slaves except that which the Spanish monarch would grant them because, as a legitimate king, he alone has the right to legitimate that freedom"] . . . [W]e are free by natural right. It could only be kings . . . who dare claim the right to reduce into servitude men made like them and whom nature has made free.

After his initial homecoming week, after he'd been taken to a bunch of sights by his cousins, after he'd gotten somewhat used to the scorching weather and the surprise of waking up to the roosters and being called Huascar by everybody (that was his Dominican name, something else he'd forgotten), after he refused to succumb to that whisper that all long-term immigrants carry inside themselves, the whisper that says You do not belong, after he'd gone to about fifty clubs and because he couldn't dance salsa, merengue, or bachata had sat and drunk Presidentes while Lola and his cousins burned holes in the floor, after he'd explained to people a hundred times that he'd been separated from his sister at birth, after he spent a couple of quiet mornings on his own, writing, after he'd given out all his taxi money to beggars and had to call his cousin Pedro Pablo to pick him up, after he'd watched shirtless shoeless seven-year-olds fighting each other for the scraps he'd left on his plate at an outdoor cafe, after his mother took them all to dinner in the Zona Colonial and the waiters kept looking at their party askance (Watch out, Mom, Lola said, they probably think you're Haitian - La unica haitiana aqui eres tu, mi amor, she retorted), after a skeletal vieja grabbed both his hands and begged him for a penny, after his sister had said, You think that's bad, you should see the bateys, after he'd spent a day in Bani (the camp where La Inca had been raised) and he'd taken a dump in a latrine and wiped his ass with a corn cob - now that's entertainment, he wrote in his journal - after he'd gotten somewhat used to the surreal whirligig that was life in La Capital - the guaguas, the cops, the mind-boggling poverty, the Dunkin' Donuts, the beggars, the Haitians selling roasted peanuts at the intersections, the mind-boggling poverty, the asshole tourists hogging up all the beaches, the Xica de Silva novelas where homegirl got naked every five seconds that Lola and his female cousins were cracked on, the afternoon walks on the Conde, the mind-boggling poverty, the snarl of streets and rusting zinc shacks that were the barrios populares, the masses of niggers he waded through every day who ran him over if he stood still, the skinny watchmen standing in front of stores with their brokedown shotguns, the music, the raunchy jokes heard on the streets, the mind-boggling poverty, being piledrived into the corner of a concho by the combined weight of four other customers, the music, the new tunnels driving down into the bauxite earth,

Felix Wenceslao Bernardino, raised in La Romana, one of Trujillo’s most sinister agents, his Witchking of Angmar. Was consul in Cuba when the exiled Dominican labor organizer Mauricio Báez was mysteriously murdered on the streets of Havana. Felix was also rumored to have had a hand in the failed assassination of Dominican exile leader Angel Morales (the assassins burst in on his secretary shaving, mistook the lathered man for Morales, and shot him to pieces). In addition, Felix and his sister, Minerva Bernardino (first woman in the world to be an ambassador before the United Nations), were both in New York City when Jesus de Galíndez mysteriously disappeared on his way home at the Columbus Circle subway station. Talk about Have Gun, Will Travel. It was said the power of Trujillo never left him; the fucker died of old age in Santo Domingo, Trujillista to the end, drowning his Haitian workers instead of paying them.

I'm all for supporting entrepreneurship, especially within one's personal sphere. Still, be wise. Careful who you do business with (especially someone handling sensitive information i.e finances, records, contracts). It takes one "falling out", and your entire life is laid bare over hard feelings. Business ethics and diplomacy tend to get lost in the fog of anger, jealousy, and/or resentment. Everything is not for everyone. Vet a friend, like you would a stranger. It's business, not personal.

drawn from the African idiom, their profession, or color." (The family of Julien Raimond complied grudgingly by switching from the "Raymond" of their French father to "Raimond.") A 1779 regulation made it illegal for free people of color to "affect the dress, hairstyles, style, or bearing of whites," and some local ordinances forbade them to ride in carriages or to own certain home furnishings. By the time of the Revolution free-coloreds were subjected to a variety of laws that discriminated against them solely on the basis of race.4

I was in Nebraska yesterday and when I said I was going to San Francisco, people started talking about AIDS,” Kurtis said, smiling. “Somebody said, ‘What’s the hardest part about having AIDS?’” Kurtis paused for his punch line: “It’s trying to convince your wife you’re Haitian.” An uncomfortable laugh skimmed the surface of the crowd. Most people did not think it was funny. Several reporters nodded knowingly to each other, as if to say, “This is what you can expect from somebody who lives in New York.” Kurtis clearly had misjudged his audience. Nevertheless, the joke reflected the dormant feeling among national news organizations, all of which were headquartered in Manhattan. AIDS remained something of a dirty little joke. Moreover, it was something you could josh about in crowds of reporters because you could safely assume that the disease had not touched the lives of the people who wrote the news and scripted the nightly newscasts. Homosexual reporters, particularly in New York, tended to know their place and keep their mouths shut, if they wanted to survive in the news business.

All negotiations are defined by a network of subterranean desires and needs. Don’t let yourself be fooled by the surface. Once you know that the Haitian kidnappers just want party money, you will be miles better prepared. ■​Splitting the difference is wearing one black and one brown shoe, so don’t compromise. Meeting halfway often leads to bad deals for both sides. ■​Approaching deadlines entice people to rush the negotiating process and do impulsive things that are against their best interests. ■​The F-word—“Fair”—is an emotional term people usually exploit to put the other side on the defensive and gain concessions. When your counterpart drops the F-bomb, don’t get suckered into a concession. Instead, ask them to explain how you’re mistreating them. ■​You can bend your counterpart’s reality by anchoring his starting point. Before you make an offer, emotionally anchor them by saying how bad it will be. When you get to numbers, set an extreme anchor to make your “real” offer seem reasonable, or use a range to seem less aggressive. The real value of anything depends on what vantage point you’re looking at it from. ■​People will take more risks to avoid a loss than to realize a gain. Make sure your counterpart sees that there is something to lose by inaction.

Later, on April 15, 1999, a crowd of protestors led by the Reverend Al Sharpton shut down half of the Brooklyn Bridge, capping ten weeks of demonstrations following the killing of a twenty-three-year-old West African immigrant, Amadou Diallo, by four white New York City police officers. The officers had sprayed forty-one bullets into Mr. Diallo's apartment building vestibule, striking him nineteen times. Mr. Diallo was unarmed and had no police record. New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a Republican, declined to criticize the police department whose tactics he had historically endorsed. As the crowd, estimated from fifteen to twenty-five thousand, gathered at Brooklyn's Cadman Plaza, jury selection proceeded next door in the trial of four different white New York City police officers accused of torturing Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, in a Brooklyn police station in 1997. The demonstrations, growing larger and more multiracial, had begun to spread around the country in response to the horrific acts of police brutality. The canvas, stood back from, had a chilling Kafkaesque quality about it. Instrumentalities of the state had been used to spectacularly kill one completely innocent and defenseless man and brutally maim another. Mayor Giuliani appeared to accept this as a reasonable price of effective law enforcement.

Because after all,” Bob said, “any wealth gained by a person beyond what he can produce by his own labor must have come at the expense of nature or at the expense of another person. Look around. Look at our house, our car, our bank accounts, our clothes, our eating habits, our appliances. Could the physical labor of one family and its immediate ancestors and their one billionth of the country’s renewable resources have produced all this? It takes a long time to build a house from nothing; it takes a lot of calories to transport yourself from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. Even if you’re not rich, you’re living in the red. Indebted to Malaysian textile workers and Korean circuit assemblers and Haitian sugarcane cutters who live six to a room. Indebted to a bank, indebted to the earth from which you’ve withdrawn oil and coal and natural gas that no one can ever put back. Indebted to the hundred square yards of landfill that will bear the burden of your own personal waste for ten thousand years. Indebted to the air and water, indebted by proxy to Japanese and German bond investors. Indebted to the great-grandchildren who’ll be paying for your conveniences when you’re dead: who’ll be living six to a room, contemplating their skin cancers, and knowing, like you don’t, how long it takes to get from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh when you’re living in the black.

place; it’s a mind-set. A strange coincidence: for my project on roots, I was reading a staggering book from 1980 called Le Corps noir (The Black Body) by a Haitian writer named Jean-Claude Charles. He coined the term enracinerrance, a French neologism that fuses the idea of rootedness and wandering. He spent his life between Haiti, New York, and Paris, very comfortably rooted in his nomadism. The first line of one of his experimental chapters is this: “il était une fois john howard griffin mansfield texas” (“once upon a time there was john howard griffin in mansfield texas”). I was stunned to find the small town that shares a border with my hometown in the pages of this Haitian author’s book published in France. What in the world was Mansfield, Texas, doing in this book I’d found by chance while researching roots for a totally unrelated academic project? The white man named John Howard Griffin referred to by Charles had conducted an experiment back in the late 1950s in which he disguised himself as a black man in order to understand what it must feel like to be black in the South. He darkened his skin with an ultraviolet lamp and skin-darkening medication and then took to the road, confirming the daily abuses in the South toward people with more melanin in their skin. His experiences were compiled in the classic Black Like Me (1962), which was later made into a film. When the book came out, Griffin and his family in Mansfield received death threats. It is astounding that I found out about this experiment, which began one town over from mine, through a gleefully nomadic Haitian who slipped it into his pain-filled essay about the black body. If you don’t return to your roots, they come and find you.

Early in the colonys history, he argued, the European men who came to the colonies "burning with the desire to make a fortune" but "weakened by the heat of the climate, often sick, and deprived of the aid wives of their own color could have given them," turned to "African women." These slave women cared for them assiduously, hoping to gain "the greatest recompense, their liberty." "These first whites," Raimond explained, "lived with these women as if they were married" and had children with them. Some freed the women and married them, as the Code Noir stipulated whites who had children with slaves should do. Many whites left land and slaves to their partners and children. Indeed it was generally expected that they would do so, and Saint-Domingue whites resisted royal attempts to institute laws outlawing such bequests. As a result, a class of property-owning free people of color emerged in the colony.s

it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true. If a sermon promises health and wealth to the faithful, it isn’t true, because that theology makes God an absolute monster who only blesses rich westerners and despises Christians in Africa, India, China, South America, Russia, rural Appalachia, inner-city America, and everywhere else a sincere believer remains poor. If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true. If doctrine elevates a woman’s married-with-children status as her highest calling, it isn’t true, because that omits single believers (whose status Paul considered preferable), widows, the childless by choice or fate or loss, the divorced, and the celibate gay. If these folks are second-class citizens in the kingdom because they aren’t married with children, then God just excluded millions of people from gospel work, and I guess they should just eat rocks and die. If it isn’t also true for a poor single Christian mom in Haiti, it isn’t true. Theology is either true everywhere or it isn’t true anywhere. This helps untangle us from the American God Narrative and sets God free to be God instead of the My-God-in-a-Pocket I carried for so long. It lends restraint when declaring what God does or does not think, because sometimes my portrayal of God’s ways sounds suspiciously like the American Dream and I had better check myself. Because of the Haitian single mom. Maybe I should speak less for God. This brings me to the question at hand, another popular subject I am asked to pontificate on: What is my calling? (See also: How do I know my calling? When did you know your calling? How can I get your calling? Has God told you my calling? Can you get me out of my calling?) Ah yes, “The Calling.” This is certainly a favorite Christian concept over in these parts. Here is the trouble: Scripture barely confirms our elusive calling—the bull’s-eye, life purpose, individual mission every hardworking Protestant wants to discover. I found five scriptures, three of which referred to

The rocks in the water don't know how the rocks in the sun feel.

My name is Herb and I'm not poor; I'm de Herbie that you're lookin for, like Pepsi, a new generation of Hatian determination- I'm the Herbie that you're looking for.

The roads to the city were covered with sharp pebbles only half buried in the thick dust. I chose to go barefoot, as my mother had always done on her visits to the Massacre River, the river separating Haiti from the Spanish-speaking country that she had never allowed me to name because I had been born on the night that El Generalissimo, Dios Trujillo, the honorable chief of state, had ordered the massacre of all Haitians living

Cooper, a host of works by American nature writers, and I’ve never in reading a single one of those pages felt one tenth of the emotion that fills me before these shores. And yet I’ll keep on reading, and writing. Two or three times an hour, a sharp crack breaks up my thoughts. The lake is shattering along a fault line. Like surf, birdsong, or the roar of waterfalls, the crumpling of an ice mass won’t keep us awake. A motor running, or someone snoring, or water dripping off a roof, on the other hand, is unbearable. I can’t help thinking of the dead. The thousands of Russians swallowed up by the lake.5 Do the souls of the drowned struggle to the surface? Can they get past the ice? Do they find the hole that opens up to the sky? Now there’s a touchy subject to raise with Christian fundamentalists. It took me five hours to reach Elohin. Volodya welcomed me with a hug and a “Hello, neighbor.” Now there are seven or eight of us around the wooden table dunking cookies in our tea: some fishermen passing through, myself, and our hosts. We talk about our lives and I’m exhausted already. Intoxicated by the potluck company, the fishermen argue, constantly correcting one another with grand gestures of disgust and jumping down one another’s throats. Cabins are prisons. Friendship doesn’t survive anything, not even togetherness. Outside the window, the wind keeps up its nonsense. Clouds of snow rush by with the regularity of phantom trains. I think about the titmouse. I miss it already. It’s crazy how quickly one becomes attached to creatures. I’m seized with pity for these struggling things. The titmice stay in the forest in the icy cold; they’re not snobs like swallows, which spend the winter in Egypt. After twenty minutes, we fall silent, and Volodya looks outside. He spends hours sitting in front of the window pane, his face half in shadow, half bathed in the light off the lake. The light gives him the craggy features of some heroic foot soldier. Time wields over skin the power water has over the earth. It digs deep as it passes. Evening, supper. A heated conversation with one of the fishermen, in which I learn that Jews run the world (but in France it’s the Arabs); Stalin, now there was a real leader; the Russians are invincible (that pipsqueak Hitler bit off more than he could chew); communism is a top-notch system; the Haitian earthquake was triggered by the shockwave from an American bomb; September 11 was a Yankee plot; gulag historians are unpatriotic; and the French are homosexuals. I think I’m going to space out my visits. FEBRUARY 26 Volodya and Irina live like tightrope walkers. They have no contact with the inhabitants on the other side of Baikal. No one crosses the lake. The opposite shore is another world, the one where the sun rises. Fishermen and inspectors living north or south of this station sometimes visit my hosts, who rarely venture into the mountains of their

What’s the use of religion if it oppresses instead of consoling? If it offers despair instead of relief? If it takes away instead of preserving?

One thing remains true: hatred only breeds hatred.

The development of the sugar industry was to have a significant impact on the politics and culture of the island, since it lead to a huge increase in Cuba's slave population. This in turn helped to fuel the growth of the island's white racism, fueled by the migrants from Santo Domingo and Louisiana. The image of the Haitian revolution, and the inflated memory of its excesses — echoed not just in Cuba, but in the United States and Latin America as well — was to hover over Cuba throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, a permanent intimation of what might happen to the white population if faulty political or administrative decisions were made. Many whites in Cuba felt that they lived permanently in the shadow of a slave rebellion on the Haitian model.

Toussaint affirms an irreconcilable contradiction: flight is to occur alongside an inalienable freedom that, as his own descriptions attest, is actually not a given but struggled for and fought over. Toussaint conceives freedom to be inalienable once acquired, but this admission disturbs the freedom as natality narrative. Freedom is not immutable. Flight is first experienced after bondage and is not an originary naturalism. Toussaint has a late realization of the nonuniversal quality of revolutionary republicanism, the rift between the self-reflexive hero and the crowd desiring the hero to put them ahead of the sovereign self, and conflict between the Haitian state and the Haitian nation with the latter’s non-sovereign conception of freedom.

They treat Haitians like dogs in the Bahamas, a woman says. To them, we are not human. Even though their music sounds like ours. Their people look like ours. Even though we had the same African fathers who probably crossed these same seas together.

Incidentally, there's a little historical footnote here, if you're interested. The oil company that was authorized by the Treasury Department under Bush and Clinton to ship oil to the Haitian coup leaders happened to be Texaco. And people of about my age who were attuned to these sorts of things might remember back to the 1930s, when the Roosevelt administration was trying to undermine the Spanish Republic at the time of the Spanish Revolution in 1936 and '37―you'll remember that Texaco also played a role. See, the Western powers were strongly opposed to the Spanish Republican forces at that point during the Spanish Civil War―because the Republican side was aligned with a popular revolution, the anarcho-syndicalist revolution that was breaking out in Spain, and there was a danger that that revolution might take root and spread to other countries. After the anarcho-syndicalist organizations were put down by force, the Western powers didn't care so much anymore [anarcho-syndicalism is a sort of non-Leninist or libertarian socialism]. But while the revolution was still going on in Spain and the Republican forces were at war with General Franco and his Fascist army―who were being actively supported by Hitler and Mussolini, remember―the Western countries and Stalinist Russia all wanted to see the Republican forces just gotten rid of. And one of the ways in which the Roosevelt administration helped to see that they were gotten rid of was through what was called the "Neutrality Act"―you know, we're going to be neutral, we're not going to send any support to either the Republican side or the Fascist side, we're just going to let them fight their own war. Except the "Neutrality Act" was only 50 percent applied in this case. You see, the Fascists were getting all the guns they needed from Germany, but they didn't have enough oil. So therefore the Texaco Oil Company―which happened to be run by an outright Nazi at the time [Captain Thorkild Rieber], something that wasn't so unusual in those days, actually―simply terminated its existing oil contracts with the Spanish Republic and redirected its tankers in mid-ocean to start sending the Fascists the oil they needed, in July 1936. It was all totally illegal, of course, but the Roosevelt administration never pushed the issue. And again, the entire American press at the time was never able to discover it―except the small left-wing press: somehow they were able to find out about it. So if you read the small left-wing press in the United States back in 1937, they were reporting this all the time, but the big American newspapers just have never had the resources to find out about things like this, so they never said a word. I mean, years later people writing diplomatic history sort of mention these facts in the margins―but at the time there was nothing in the mainstream.

Thank God they didn't know about it, all those people who feared and needed and sucked up to Palmer Stoat, big-time lobbyist. All those important men and women clogging up his voice mail in Tallahassee... the mayor of Orlando, seeking Stoat's deft hand in obtaining $45 million in federal highway funds--Disney World, demanding yet another exit off Interstate 4; the president of a slot machine company, imploring Stoat to arrange a private dinner with the chief of the Seminole Indian Tribe; a United States Congresswoman from West Palm Beach, begging for box seats to the Marlins home opener (not for her personally, but for five sugar company executives who'd persuaded their Jamaican and Haitian cane pickers to donate generously--well beyond their means, in fact--to the Congresswoman's reelection account).

Cixin would write a version that embodied the hardest of hard science fiction. This edition would be aimed at the male demographic. Haitian, on the other hand, would get to work on a version that was the softest of soft fantasy literature. It would be aimed at the female reader.

the Haitian Revolution was the inspiration for the pursuit of liberty in the Americas.

Despite these rules, however, atrocities were committed against slaves by their masters and their masters’ agents regularly. Rape and torture were common occurrences. Even when the worst kinds of human brutality were not unleashed, just the nature of work and discipline put thousands upon thousands of souls into an early grave. It was no wonder that so many chose to risk running away.

Thus, by 1758, the situation in Saint Domingue was tense and volatile. That year, new laws were passed by the colonial government that aimed to consolidate power at the top for whites and control the populations below, both free and slave. This new system was more heavily based on race than on class, unlike what had reigned previously.

As discussed above, because of the insanely high rate of mortality, many of them were African-born. Africa was a very diverse place, however, and this diversity meant that many of these slaves could not even communicate with each other. Therefore, over the years and the generations, Creole languages and cultures emerged. These languages and practices blended those of many diverse peoples of Africa. They provided a base on which these people could unite, and much of it survives today in modern Caribbean culture. It allowed African slaves to create some semblance of home and community in the worst circumstances imaginable (at least for those who survived).

No matter what its name or provenance, it is believed that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed fukú on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since.”—Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Kenbe fèm.

The Chief cut the Gordian knot: “Enough!” Great ills demand great remedies! He not only justified the massacre of Haitians in 1937; he considered it a great accomplishment of the regime. Didn’t he save the Republic from being prostituted a second time by that marauding neighbor? What do five, ten, twenty thousand Haitians matter when it’s a question of saving an entire people?

C'est avec ma main et avec mon cœur que j'écris, pas avec mes yeux

Mais le Père Angelo se refusa tout net à serrer la main au prêtre du vaudou

A perfume collects these fragmented histories into a single borderless substance, a seamless composition of oils and resins distilled from plants that might be strangers in nature, from countries with a violent colonial relationship, like French lavender and Haitian vetiver.

Anjali is Guyanese, and her braid looks like a thick rope that lays heavy against her back, curly baby hairs tamed by coconut oil. Michaela is Haitian and likes to mimic her parents’ French accents on the school bus (Take zee twash out! she says, as we clutch our sides in laughter), and Naz’s family is from the Ivory Coast—I mean, we’re practically cousins, she says to Michaela. Our teachers snap at Sophie to STOP TALKING NOW, but call her Mae’s name. Sophie, who is Filipino, clamps a hand over her big-ass mouth, which is never closed—she loves to gossip and flirt with the boys we call “Spanish”—while Mae, who is Chinese and polite to teachers, at least to their faces, jolts from the bookshelf where she’s stealthily shuffling novels from their alphabetical spots, in order to disrupt our English class two periods later.

When you think about it, there's a whole novel behind the voice of a Haitian in Montreal, a German in Paris, a Laotian in Chicago...

Fanon remained faithful to the ideals of the French Revolution, hoping that they might be achieved elsewhere, in the independent nations of what was then known as the Third World. He was a “Black Jacobin,” as the Trinidadian Marxist C. L. R. James described Toussaint Louverture in his classic history of the Haitian Revolution.

by 1739 Saint-Domingue was the world’s richest and most profitable slave colony.

forms of resistance already endemic to the region continued to thrive and spread. The practice of Africans fleeing their enslavers, for example, was already a tradition of long standing at the turn of the eighteenth century.

devised clandestine ways to transmit information quickly and effectively.

powerful religious mystic

As Sutherland writes: “In the 18th century, Saint-Domingue, as Haiti was then known, became France’s wealthiest overseas colony, largely because of its production of sugar, coffee, indigo, and cotton generated by an enslaved labor force” (Sutherland, 2007). There were three general groups of African descent: those who were free (est. 30,000 in 1789), half mixed-race and identified as mulatto, who were quite wealthy; those who were enslaved (close to 500,000 people); and those who had run away (called Maroons) who had retreated deep into the mountains and lived off subsistence farming. Despite the harshness and cruelty of Saint-Domingue slavery, there were rebellions before 1791. As Carroll writes: “One plot even involved the poisoning of masters” (Carroll, n.d.; Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020). Sutherland notes that “the Haitian Revolution has often been described as the largest and most successful … rebellion [and revolution] in the Western Hemisphere.

the planters and the commercial bourgeoisie undertook the similar task of supporting the Revolution while at the same time working to keep the social forces which it unleashed from spilling over into the colonies.

sailors took the lead by mounting violent protests against the exploitative working conditions of the slave trade.

During the course of the eighteenth century, Britain overtook all other European nations as the single largest exporter of Africans from Africa. By the end of the century, more than half the captives transported from west Africa were carried across the Atlantic in British ships. It was only after a vigorous campaign by anti-slave trade campaigners that Britain finally banned British ships from engaging in the trade. In fact, there had been a wide international movement against the trade and slavery itself since at least the 1780s. Northern US states had been banning the institution of slavery from that time. In France, the revolutionary government imposed a partial ban – the emancipation of second-generation slaves in the colonies – in 1791, which sparked the Haitian Revolution, although Napoleon reversed the ban in 1802.

Former slaves and natives. Eskimos and Hiroshima people, Amazonian Indians and Chiapas Indians and Chilean Indians and American Indians and Indian Indians. Australian aborigines, Guatemalans and Colombians and Brazilians and Argentineans, Nigerians, Burmese, Angolans, Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Bolivians, Afghans, Cambodians, Rwan-dans, Filipinos, Indonesians, Liberians, Borneoans, Papua New Guineans, South Africans, Iraqis, Iranians, Turks, Armenians, Palestinians, French Guyanese, Dutch Guyanese, Surinamese, Sierra Leonese, Malagasys, Senegalese, Maldivians, Sri Lankans, Malaysians, Kenyans, Panamanians, Mexicans, Haitians, Dominicans, Costa Ricans, Congoans, Mauritanians, Marshall Islanders, Tahitians, Gabonese, Beninese, Malians, Jamaicans, Botswanans, Burundians, Sudanese, Eritreans, Uruguayans, Nicaraguans, Ugandans, Ivory Coastians, Zambians, Guinea-Bissauans, Cameroonians, Laotians, Zaireans coming at you screaming colonialism, screaming slavery, screaming mining companies screaming banana companies oil companies screaming CIA spy among the missionaries screaming it was Kissinger who killed their father and why don’t you forgive third-world debt; Lumumba, they shouted, and Allende; on the other side, Pinochet, they said, Mobutu; contaminated milk from Nestle, they said; Agent Orange; dirty dealings by Xerox. World Bank, UN, IMF, everything run by white people. Every day in the papers another thing! Nestle and Xerox were fine upstanding companies, the backbone of the economy, and Kissinger was at least a patriot. The United States was a young country built on the finest principles, and how could it possibly owe so many bills? Enough was enough. Business was business. Your bread might as well be left unbuttered were the butter to be spread so thin. The fittest one wins and gets the butter.