![]() ![]() This has resulted in kidnappings and murders, lessening in some Port au Prince neighborhoods. But as Isaac stated, some of the gang members fear venturing outside of specific areas for fear that they might face an anti-mob group of people. While some outlets, such as Al Jazeera, have referred to the vigilante group's actions as modern-day lynching, others have referenced this as community self-determination. The return meant that Isaac spent fifteen years of his childhood in Haiti, so, unlike me, Haiti was home.Ī country road near Port de Paix, on the northwest coast of Haiti. Yet, his mother chose to return after the Duvalier regime’s fall, while my parents remained in their adopted country. Isaac’s mother and my parents left Haiti around the same time, and for similar reasons-they opposed a dictator. ![]() Isaac was born in Montreal but moved back with his mother to Haiti in 1986, after Pap Doc fell from power. Pierre-Paul especially was relentless in exposing the structural problems under the Duvalier regime, resulting in multiple death threats by the then Haitian government, which led her to live in exile for six years. Isaac, 41, said that in Port au Prince, he “feels at home.” He continued with a soft laugh, “It's not what folks would expect to see when they come, but this is where I live.” Like his mother, Lilianne Pierre-Paul, a prominent Haitian journalist for Radio Haiti International during the 1980s, he became a journalist. We spoke in mid-May, before the rainy season and the forthcoming heat, so the late spring generated some serenity, and he sounded at ease. Through social media, I contacted Harold Isaac, a Haitian journalist living in Port au Prince. If I wanted to answer this question, I would have to speak to Haitians who’ve remained and who continue to work toward unsettling the predictive narratives. Looking beyond the news cycle or the photography left me wondering: What was it like to watch what was happening to Haiti from the inside, and how are people making sense of the political situation and the different layers of violence? Residents cross a submerged national road 30 km west of Port-au-Prince during heavy rains, June 2023. At sixteen, I began embracing the country’s literary riches: the poet Ida Faubert, who fought feminist struggles in the early twentieth century the novelist Jacques Roumain, who found some popularity among members of the Harlem Renaissance when Langston Hughes translated his work from French into English translated poems. Impoverishment is the avatar of how contemporary Haitians are perceived-which precludes reflection on anything else we offer.Īs a part of the diaspora, I shoulder a responsibility to find the nuance beyond the myopic poverty narrative, to celebrate the Haitian spirit. The rhetoric of chaos and terror is what most Americans are taught about Haitians and Haiti. I learned very early that being Haitian meant having a memory of the country that contradicts the news. While the natural and manufactured disasters are not insignificant, it is unsettling that there is an overabundance of stories about Haiti’s suffering rather than the narratives that I had known. Haiti’s myriad problems are partly due to bad governance, but also other factors: natural disasters, an unfair global economy, and Haiti paying reparations to former French enslavers for its freedom. He’d last just eight months before being ousted by a U.S.-backed militia, leading to another wave of Haitian migrants to the United States, including relatives I met at my uncle’s wedding.Ī demonstration after a gang attack on a police station in Port-au-Prince that left six officers dead, January 2023. In December 1990, Jean-Bertrand Aristide would be elected president in the first democratic election in Haiti’s history. In a few months, the government would hold its first democratic election since the fall of longtime dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier four years earlier, which had led the county to be besieged by the struggle over who would govern. ![]() This was a liminal state for my family and the country just as I first learned about Haiti, it was transforming. I remember family members moving together with a lightness no longer separated by our passports, our wrenching desire to gather was finally relieved. I remember splashing through the warm waves, the sheen of sweat from extreme humidity, and the luscious palm trees that provided both reprieve from the sun and coconuts to cut down and quench our thirst. I remember petals strewn across the ceremony floor, adults clamoring for rum concoctions at the reception, everyone dressed in early nineties Caribbean chic-floral prints, straw hats, prominent shoulder pads. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |