Haitians will defend their sovereignty , Ronald Charles

Haitians will defend their sovereignty

From slavery to Sarkozy in Haiti

                                    

From slavery to Sarkozy in Haiti

Editor’s note: Peniel E. Joseph, a Haitian-American, teaches history at Tufts University. His latest book is “Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama.” Patrick Sylvain is a Haitian language and culture instructor at Brown University and a language coach at Harvard. His latest bilingual poetry collection is “Love, Lust & Loss.”

(CNN) — Haiti’s emergence as the first free black republic, forged against the backdrop of Caribbean and North American slavery, is pivotal to today’s discussions of citizenship, democracy, and freedom.

Now, 206 years after its declaration of independence, Haiti’s dire poverty, the earthquake and its massive death toll have triggered yet another global “first,” one with potentially major geopolitical consequences.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy recently visited Haiti, the first French president to set foot on Haitian soil. His historic trip recalled long-standing colonial wounds, even as he graciously offered much-needed economic assistance to a ravaged Port-au-Prince. The visit also offered a glimpse of the Caribbean republic’s paradoxical relationship with its former colonial master.

A country once known as the “Pearl of the Antilles,” Haiti ‘s downfall was not of its own making. Its tragic poverty stems from a brutal history of colonial subjugation, one that caused an unexpected and globally shattering revolution that toppled the colonial rule of France, an imperial power that Alexander Hamilton had dreamed of dismantling in the Americas.

Haiti’s war of independence, from 1791 to 1803, was won through a combination of bravado and a political self-determination embodied in the bracing personality and ingenuity of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Toussaint was helped by U.S. President John Adams, who saw in him a temporary ally in the quasi-war against France, from 1798 to 1801.

The young United States sought to muster its strength through naval expansion and indirectly curtail France’s power in the Caribbean. In 1799, the United States lifted the embargo against Haiti (Saint-Domingue) by providing it with arms, food supplies and naval intelligence that aided Toussaint’s war against the pro-French elites.

But positive U.S. policies toward Haiti and the political gains orchestrated by Toussaint L’Ouverture under the Adams administration were dramatically reversed under Thomas Jefferson. He supported the punishing French blockade of Haiti and allowed the French naval power to rise under the leadership of Napoleon, which culminated in the arrest and deportation of Toussaint to France.

The French blockage and closing of U.S. ports to Haiti stunted the embryonic republic’s economic growth. France demanded reparations from Haiti of 150 million francs — about $21 billion in today’s money. This forced debt crippled Haiti’s economy and took 122 years to repay.

So, on the one hand, President Sarkozy’s visit to Haiti initiated a new chapter between that country and France. Indeed, according to Sarkozy, “Haiti must set the conditions for a national consensus on which to base a national project. Haiti for the Haitians.”

In a very real sense, Sarkozy’s visit offered a glimpse of a more promising future for Haiti, one marked by cooperation with former colonial rulers, in which prosperity replaces endemic poverty.

Haiti’s proud and resilient citizens, who have endured a seemingly endless series of setbacks since independence in 1804, remain hopeful that Sarkozy’s visit ushers in a long-overdue political alliance with France. But they are also aware that the nations’ contentious history cannot be repaired by a single visit from a French president.

Although global observers may interpret French promises of economic aid to Haiti as a gesture of goodwill to the earthquake-stricken nation, Haitians will take a more complex view.

Some observers may also interpret France’s assistance as just another in a long line of handouts, but students of Haitian history know better. That assistance has been paid for many times over in the blood of countless unknown Haitians who toiled and died under French rule.”

 

Égalité for All: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution

Joseph Ademola Adeyemo – The Last Days of Toussaint L’Ouverture – Scene

General Authority, Haitian Novel

 

The Author
Lahiny Pierre was born in Jacmel, south of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Her first public presentations date back to pre-school years at Kindergarten Marie Carline. At the age of fourteen she reunited with her parents in Brooklyn, New York and finished her academic studies. She now resides in Georgia where she is a full time Writer and grassroots community organizer. Her literary works include poetry, literary criticism, screen plays, and two novels, addressing the struggle of migration, loss, and coming to terms with one’s story, which she believes, affects the present in multiple ways.

The Book
Struggles of migration, loss, and coming to terms with one’s history affects one’s present life. When Denis decides to run from Port-au-Prince, he is not sure the fake passport will take him to New York City. For eleven years he has been the leader of the Engagés, a secret society fighting the Militia for the return of the city and a stop to the “Cut Heads Burn Homes” societal renegades. Days before Denis and his troops launch a key attack, one of their top men is assassinated. The Militia commands local thugs after Denis who must flee to save his skin. Denis bounds for the U.S. to escape death and maybe stumble into the American Dream. The problem of adapting to this dizzying new world fades as he suddenly finds himself in the middle of an interracial marital meltdown that could send him straight into the arms of his enemies back in Haiti.

This book illustrates themes of the struggle of migration, loss, and coming to terms with one’s history; exile by choice because of economic circumstances; assimilation – cause and effect; the myth of the American dream, an idea held by people worldwide; cultural alienation; socialization of the immigrant; leaving home; learning new experiences; adapting to a new life; speaking a new language; the reuniting of old friends; friendship; male bonding; spirituality; African Deities; Haitian Culture; Voodoo; facing the past; nationalism; community building; cultural awareness; music and dance in the Haitian culture; political unrest; murder; vengeance; and civic duties.

This book is available on:
www.lahinypierre.com
www.generalauthority.com
www.OrganizingforHaiti.net

There’s a link on Youtube

Making it all New

” We will perhaps be the ones to teach others a new poetic and, leaving behind the poetics of not-knowing, will initiate others into a new chapter in the history of mankind” (Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, 1989:169)

Edouard Glissant

Important works

La Lézarde. (1958)  Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997; Port-au-Prince: Presses Nationales d’Haïti, 2007

Monsieur Toussaint. (1961) Nouvelle édition: Paris: Gallimard, 1998.

L’Intention poétique. (1969)  (Poétique II) Nouvelle édition, Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

 Discours antillais. (1981)  Paris: Gallimard, 1997.

SOS Haiti: A compilation for Haiti | Une compilation pour Haïti

A group of haitian musicians put together a collection of fine lyrics in honor of their country and the Haitian experience.  The artists include the following:

Michael Benjamin – Intro (Haïti)	01mn 28s
	02 –	Ti Coca & Wanga-Nègès – A lanvè (St Valenten)	05mn 50s
	03 –	Adjabel – Cousin Zaka (feat. Ifé)	03mn 56s
	04 –	Maromet de Balan – Cérémonie vaudou mandingue (extrait)	01mn 17s
	05 –	Belo – Ayiti leve	04mn 27s
	06 –	Toto Bissainthe – Papa Danmbalah	04mn 39s
	07 –	Eugénie Thermidor – Erzulie	02mn 18s
	08 –	Melissa Laveaux – Interlude Haiti	00mn 14s
	09 –	Melissa Laveaux – Koudlo	04mn 10s
	10 –	Carlton Rara – Choukoun	04mn 41s
	11 –	Michael Benjamin – Si m’ te gen zèl (Vole)	04mn 28s
	12 –	Ti Coca & Wanga-Nègès – An tan mango	03mn 28s
	13 –	Adjabel – Paren legba	04mn 05s
	14 –	Carimi – Ayiti (bang bang)

SOS Haiti: A compilation for Haiti | Une compilation pour Haïti

                                               

Click on the link below to listen to album tracks

SOS Haiti: A compilation for Haiti

Dr. Claire-Marie Cyprien Is Making a difference in Haiti

Haitian Diaspora Sees an Opening

Source: The Wall Street Journal

By JOSé DE CóRDOBA And CHARLES FORELLE

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—Five days after the earthquake devastated the Haitian capital, Claire-Marie Cyprien stepped into a terrifying scene at the General Hospital.

Young children and old men lay on thin, filthy mattresses. Some screamed, others were silent. The hospital’s Haitian staff was barely in evidence. Volunteers from France and the U.S. rushed from patient to patient.

The Haiti Comeback

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Julie Platner for The Wall Street JournalDr. Claire-Marie Cyprien returned to Haiti to help treat earthquake victims.

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One emaciated man, eyes closed, writhed on the blood- and feces-streaked floor wearing nothing but a thin towel at his waist. A team of French doctors attended to a toddler whose left leg had been amputated above the knee.

Swamped by the tide of suffering, Dr. Cyprien walked up to a French doctor and told him there should be more surgeries, faster. He bristled at the woman suddenly giving him orders. “Are you from here?” he asked.

“I’m from the United States,” said Dr. Cyprien, a 43-year-old anesthesiologist who three days earlier had dropped her practice in Orlando, Fla., to rush to Haiti, the land of her birth. “And I’m a doctor.”

The U.S. is readying for a mass of refugees fleeing the disaster. But a small, well-educated and determined group of Haitians including Dr. Cyprien is heading the other way, into the country from abroad.

Both Haitians and members of the international community say diaspora Haitians represent a reservoir of talent and money that could be put to work in the country’s reconstruction. The Organization of American States said it is organizing a meeting, likely for early March, to bring together Haitian diaspora groups in the U.S., Canada, France and the Dominican Republic to help Haiti.

For generations, Haiti’s chaos, corruption and poverty pushed out many of its most talented people. Haiti has a population of about nine million, but as many as two million more Haitians live abroad, about half a million of them in the U.S. The diaspora—Haitians refer to the émigrés as Haiti’s “Tenth Province”—sends about $2 billion a year home, a sum equal to about 30% of the country’s gross domestic product.

Despite the money, émigrés have often been regarded warily by those who stayed behind. Emigration may offer a way to climb up or break out of Haiti’s rigid class structure. But new wealth inspires jealousy, while distance from the motherland opens émigrés to accusations that they aren’t as “authentic” as those who never left.

Émigrés are sometimes considered “arrogant, insensitive, overbearing and pretentious people,” writes Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian-American author. And many suspect their political ambitions. The 1987 constitution strips Haitians who take citizenship elsewhere of their Haitian citizenship, preventing them from running for office or voting.

“We diaspora, not too many people like us,” says Hilda Alcindor, a nurse who left Haiti for America and stayed 30 years before returning. “But we are needed.”

Officials here say that if Haiti is going to rebuild, the efforts of people like Dr. Cyprien will be crucial.

“The diaspora will play a key role rebuilding Haiti,” says Gérard Brun, who heads the country’s largest construction company and has been tapped by President René Préval to help plan the Port-au-Prince rebuilding effort.

For now, the exodus of talent stands to continue. Aside from the general destruction, Port-au-Prince’s devastated schools have little prospect of opening soon, and many in Haiti’s tiny middle class are likely to send their children abroad to study. That makes luring diaspora Haitians even more important, says Mr. Brun, who advocates a constitutional amendment to let them vote and run for office.

Even before January’s earthquake, economists who have been studying how to fix the Western Hemisphere’s poorest country have agreed the diaspora is one of Haiti’s most important assets. Émigrés “provide Haiti with a massive flow of remittances, a reservoir of skills and a powerful political lobby,” wrote Oxford University economist Paul Collier in a report to the United Nations secretary-general last year.

Dr. Cyprien sees the relationship to her former country in stark terms. “Haiti is a country that has been depleted of natural resources and whose human resources are outside the country,” she says.

Energetic and commanding, Dr. Cyprien was nevertheless momentarily stymied by the chaos around her that Sunday at the hospital. She couldn’t find a surgeon to work with. One of the two makeshift operating tables was occupied by a large man with a festering leg wound who hadn’t been prepped for surgery. “That leg smells like a dead body,” she confided, as she rushed out to find the man’s family so they could move him off the table and free it up for operations.

Worse was to come. Later in the afternoon, another patient appeared: Dr. Cyprien’s older sister, Marie Lourdes Borno, 56. Ms. Borno had escaped the Ministry of Education as the building collapsed around her, but both her hands had been badly injured. Days later, they developed gangrene. There was nothing to do but to amputate. Dr. Cyprien applied the anesthesia in the makeshift ward as her sister’s hands were cut off.

The evening of the operation, Dr. Cyprien’s usual energy had left her. “It was necessary and I did it,” she said.

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That same day, 20 miles from the bedlam of the General Hospital in the outlying city of Léogâne, Ms. Alcindor, the nurse, was getting down to work. Elementary schools were crushed, hospitals flattened. In three days, more than 1,000 people had been buried in mass graves. Local police estimated there were another 10,000 dead buried among the ruins.

Ms. Alcindor had come to Léogâne from Miami in 2005 to become dean of the city’s U.S.-funded nursing college. Until international aid arrived five days after the quake in the form of two volunteer doctors, Ms. Alcindor and her battalion of nurses and nursing students had provided practically the only medical care.

The students’ performance, Ms. Alcindor said, vindicated a promise to return to Haiti she had made to her father years earlier. “There was a calling, coming back,” she said. “To give whatever I have left.”

Ms. Alcindor said she is in debt to the U.S., where she was educated and brought up her daughters. She had made a comfortable living working as an emergency-room nurse in Miami’s Mount Sinai Hospital, among others.

“I am here because of the knowledge I gained in the United States,” she said, standing amid a makeshift tent city in front of the nursing school.

But she also owed something to Haiti. “This is what I am saying to Haitian-Americans: They need to get organized and come back. This is their country,” she said. “The reconstruction of this country needs the skills of Haitian-Americans, Haitian-Canadians, Haitian-French. We need to redo the whole thing.”

Now back in Orlando, where she has taken her sister, Dr. Cyprien said she plans to return to Haiti as many times as she can to help out, especially as international interest inevitably wanes.

The daughter of a justice of the peace, Dr. Cyprien left Haiti for the U.S. as a teenager—the best decision her parents ever made, she said. She attended community college, worked her way through medical school and established a practice in Florida.

Although she owns several properties in the U.S., Dr. Cyprien still dreams about building her retirement home on a plot of land she has bought in Jacmel, an old coffee port and artists’ retreat that, with iron-grille houses imported from France in the 19th century, used to look like a bit of Paris misplaced on the Caribbean. All that is gone.

“I want Haiti to stabilize so I can build on it,” she says.

Ghana dig reveals ancient society

General News of Wednesday, 17 February 2010

Source: BBC

“Archaeologists have unearthed dozens of clay figures in Ghana, shedding light on a sophisticated society which existed before the arrival of Islam.

Experts from the University of Ghana found 80 sculptures believed to be between 800 and 1,400 years old.

They believe the figures, depicting animal and human forms, are part of a burial ground or shrine.

Archaeologists say the societies that constructed the figures simply disappeared when Islam arrived.

“What is interesting is that the people now living in this area seem to have no connection with the makers of the figurines,” said the university’s Benjamin Kankpeyeng.

“That would suggest that that they have more in common with peoples living in other parts of West Africa – but we need to do more work before we can be certain.”

Arab slave theory

The statues were found amid hundreds of mounds in a densely packed 30km-square area.

Mr Kankpeyeng intends to analyse the position and arrangement of the statues with Tim Insoll from the UK’s Manchester University.

Mr Insoll told the BBC very little was known about civilisations in the area between 600 and 1200 AD because no written history was kept and the societies ceased to exist when Islam arrived.

He said experts still did not know why the civilisations came to an end – whether the people converted en masse to Islam, or were captured by Arab slave traders.

The statues, he said, could tell historians what kind of people inhabited West Africa in that time.

“Figures have been found in this area before, but what we can do with the latest find is map their arrangement to find out what their purpose was – whether for sacrifice or some other ritual,” he said.

The northern Ghana site, near the village of Yikpabongo, was first excavated in 1985, and the dig was restarted in 2007.

The latest batch of figures was discovered in January.”

Cruise controversy in Haiti