Illustrated by kaya joan
Defending Haiti feels like defending a beloved family member that I have never met directly, but who I have known of my whole life – through family stories and the gifts shared in the mail. I love this family member in the same way my children feel affection for my deceased mother, who they know only through the stories I pass onto them. They might not know the smell of her perfume or the warmth of her hug, but their eyes light up at the mention of her name.
I am a diasporan—born in Brooklyn into a large family whose migration from Haiti to the US, Canada and back again extends from the 1920s to today with no linear story. Within this 100-year cross migration there are layers of stories and identities. In my family, some of us are third-generation Americans or Canadians. Some of us have never left Haiti and some of us have never set foot on Haitian soil. Some of us are fluent in Kreyòl, and some of us only know slips of our mother tongue.
I have always known Haiti through the mouths of others, only learning through them about the smell of its air, the feeling of its soil, the sound of its breath.
My friend Rose-Stella has not been back to Haiti since 1997, but her memories about it are visceral, tangible. “Haiti is my mother,” she tells me. “She calls to me. When I hear her, she’s asking me to tell her story.”
Did you hear is an echo that has followed me from childhood into adulthood, a voice worming into my ear from phone calls and WhatsApp messages, all whispering about another crisis in Haiti. I still remember the conversations between my mother and her siblings or my grandmother in 1986 when the violent dictatorship of Haiti’s then-president Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s regime crumbled, and he fled the country in disgrace. Four years later, I watched footage on CNN of long, winding lines of Haitians casting their votes as they made Jean-Bertrand Aristide the country’s first democratically-elected president. I was still a child, but I knew this moment was special, revolutionary, different from the typical negative coverage of Haiti; I could see my mother leaning forward on the living room couch, eyes glued to the television and her lips pressed together in that way she fixed her mouth when she was in deep focus or in wonder. But the hope of this moment was soon replaced with another wave of violence; only eight months later, Aristide was ousted in a coup.
Later still, when I was in college, CNN played footage of what they described as a “swarm” of Haitians trying to reach the shores of Florida, desperate for a better life. The news coverage included all the demeaning buzzwords about Haitians and Haiti, about “illegal immigrants,” about “the poorest country in the western hemisphere.” One image from this footage imprints itself on my brain: a little girl, perhaps seven or eight years old, dangling from the boat, her expression calm, her beautiful frilly lemon-yellow dress billowing around her slight body, her hair impeccably styled in a bouquet of sun-yellow ribbons. I looked at this child and knew that she had been prayed over. All the hopes and dreams for her young life were present in her careful attire for this uncertain voyage.
When I was a recent graduate working at my first job in New York, Goudougoudou struck, the Haitian Kreyòl term for the 2010 earthquake that devastated the country, killing thousands and displacing millions of people. A maelstrom of corruption and misused donations, as well as a devastating cholera outbreak followed the earthquake.
And more recently, I received a fresh wave of new WhatsApp alerts coming through my phone’s lock screen—most in English, although a smattering in Kreyòl—about the extreme violence that has surged in the streets of Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince as gangs armed with American-made guns step into the power vacuum left after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and the resultant unpopular interim leadership of Ariel Henry. Beginning in 2023, airlines started to shutter flights to Haiti, and commerce, schools, and churches in the capital closed, and Port-au-Prince’s people hid in their homes with limited or no access to food and water. White text and colorful emojis were all I had to convey the magnitude of this new terror. On the other side of these messages, I could hear the cluck of tongues of the senders, their uncertainty about what to do beyond writing and forwarding messages.
These headlines are like clicks through a Viewfinder. Click, a dystopian image passes. Click, another dystopia comes into view. Click, click, click. But just like a Viewfinder’s perspective, there is more beyond the fixed point of the sliding screen. In the millisecond, when the eye blinks, we miss entire worlds. There, another Haiti exists, one that lives outside of the headlines and the oft-repeated denigrating phrases. Here, a Haiti of nuanced truths.
There are no headlines about the Haiti of my grandmother’s basement fêtes, those parties that were epic in scope and frequency, where a plethora of immigrated family members would gather to talk loudly and passionately of the happenings “back home.” It has always been a failure of both imagination and of historical evidence, to only center Haiti in crisis.
I would like to write you something that centers Haitian joy, Haitian possibility, Haitian softness. These things exist, I promise you they do.
Haiti’s problems are caused by many spores that have sprouted countless layers of complexity. They are grounded in deep histories of intentional destabilization, political corruption and power mongering, and international special interests, all ensuring that the country could not and would not thrive. The French charged Haiti for its own freedom, making them pay millions of francs over the course of sixty years. The United States levied trade embargoes against Haiti during multiple periods throughout its history. This brief sketch of the outsized impact that external actors have wrought on the country barely scratches the surface, but it begins to paint the picture of why so many people lose hope when thinking and speaking about Haiti.
“Haiti is a massive elephant,” Chris Jeanty tells me. Chris is the founder of SeeJeanty, a media company committed to showing the positive images of Haiti that often go unseen – its pristine beaches, its welcoming boutique hotels, its incredible music, food, and nightlife. I learned of his work when conducting research on Jérémie, my grandmother’s hometown in the Grand’Anse department.
“You cannot touch the whole elephant.” he says, “You can only touch a part of it. But it is going to take all of our hands to move it forward.”
Something clicks and settles for me when I hear this metaphor. I have long been drawn to elephants—their slow but intentional movements. Their steady wisdom. Their insistence on remembering. Their beauty. Their matrilineal orientation. I think, yes, Haiti is an elephant. She has never forgotten her revolutionary and liberatory history. She has never forgotten her sons and daughters, no matter how far they roam. The elephant has been hunted and feared. And still, it persists.
“There is no better Haiti without the diaspora,” says Jeanty. I sit with his words, turning them over in my mind. I have always viewed my relationship to Haiti as a diasporan as different from born and bred Haitians, cognizant of my western privilege and acculturation, my so-called “luck” to be born where so many of my family members have fought to be. But the cost of this access was the loss of language of my lineage, of the ability of my children to know their mother tongue from the womb.
Which part of the elephant is mine to touch? The question rests just at the nape of my neck. I can feel the elephant’s hide beneath my hands—rough like it has existed since the beginning of all time. I can feel its desire to move. My hands shake against it. You can move the elephant even if the Kreyòl is shy on your tongue. You can move the elephant even if your work is in your Western city. But you cannot move the elephant alone.
The front cover of Haiti’s passports used to be inscribed with the well-known Haitian proverb, “men anpil chay pa lou”—with many hands, the work is light.
Years ago, I spent time traveling in Benin. There, I learned that the majority of Haitians can trace their lineage back to the Kingdom of Dahomey before it was conquered by the French and integrated into the colony and that later would become the free nation of Benin. I visited the old Dahomey port city Ouidah, and was amazed to learn that the town had deep ties to Haitian Vodou. The image of hands holding up a gourd was everywhere in Benin –in carvings, paintings, on the sides of buildings. I took many pictures of this image, but forgot about them until Rose-Stella returned from her own trip to Benin recently, and reminded me—anpil chay pa lou. In the photos Rose-Stella shows me, the images of the hands and gourd in Benin now include the phrase, “l’union fait la force,” which is also the slogan emblazoned on Haiti’s flag, official emblem, and its passport. Union makes strength. And when you replace the gourd with an elephant, with the strength of many hands united, you can move forward.
There are approximately 3.5 million Haitians in the diaspora. “Imagine if 20% of us got laser focused and didn’t lose hope,” Chris says. “If we had almost religious faith in what is possible, we will get the Haiti we all deserve.”
The Viewfinder shifts. Click, and you will find the Ouanaminthe irrigation canal project in northeastern Haiti. Built along the Massacre River, and the border with the Dominican Republic, the project has seen hundreds of Haitian volunteers working side by side to build a canal to support agricultural and economic development in the region. Since it was built, the Maribaroux Plain has already begun to see an increase in its agricultural production. Click again, and you will find the story of Anseye Pou Ayiti, a nonprofit operating in rural Haiti in partnership with the local community to educate children in Kreyòl. Click again, and you will find the diaspora—evidence of Haiti’s pervasive insistence on life, on hope, on birthing new generations at home or abroad.
“Imagine we are seeds spread out all over the globe,” Rose-Stella tells me. “Imagine we use our skills and mindset and speak up as Haitians on behalf of Haiti, the impact that will make. There are plenty of leaders on the ground in Haiti who are ready to be sovereign. We don’t need to come in and save anything. Our job is to help others back home and to be under their leadership, and not beneath the corruption.”
What part of the elephant is mine to touch? I know one piece that is mine to do; I will not allow this language, this culture, to slip through my fingers and out of the lives of my children. When the Viewfinder stills on the singular images of Haiti as broken, as nothing more than a litany of failures, it is my responsibility to shift the lens.
One weekend in September 2024, I am in The Finnish Hall in Berkeley, Calif., celebrating RASANBLE!, a Haitian dance and cultural festival put on each year by Portsha T. Jefferson and her dance company Rara Tou Limen. Sheets of sweat drip from my body as I follow the commands of the drummers. Dozens of fellow dancers surround me. We line up, side by side, and move across the hardwood floor, our long skirts sweeping the ground as we follow the movements of the instructor—who, herself, is in an ecstasy of emotion and freedom, her body a kinetic map telling the story of the Haitian revolution. The drums do this sometimes—awaken something in the bones, blood and muscle that language cannot. My knees and ankles will be screaming in 24 hours, but for now, my body holds me. We pound our feet, move through the lexicon of Haitian folkloric dance—Yanvalou to Petro to Parigól. Some of us are strangers to one another, many traveling from out of town or out of the country for this gathering. There is a palpable feeling in the air—safety. Outside, there are people who are stirring up anti-Haitian rhetoric in small towns in battleground states. But here, in this cocoon, this womb of a room, there is freedom to laugh, crack jokes, eye one another shyly and then with burgeoning familiarity, trusting that in this space, regardless of what is being said out there—Haiti lives in us, in this liberatory, revolutionary joy.
