21669: Craft: Voice for Change (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: david craft <kakadjab@yahoo.com>

Nuestra Prensa
By: Kathy Engel

April 14, 2004

 Haiti

This column is for Haiti.

"...the only successful slave revolution in human
history, begun in 1791, it became -- after a
protracted and bloody war, arguably the first war of
national liberation -- the world's first black
republic, declared in 1804..."* (Amy Wilentz, Forward
to Jean-Bertrand Aristide's "In The Parish Of The
Poor") . Led by Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques
Dessalines, Henry Christophe and so many others.
  For the Haitian people. Visited by waves upon waves
of brutality and domination like a curse. Again. More.
Still. Surviving. Still.

  Who have struggled in the truest sense of that
exhausted word -- Â for more than 200 years to take,
hold, maintain, sustain, imagine and yes, develop
their own sovereign country, a democratic Black
Republic, against the odds, without money, battling
robbery, trickery, the most insidious interference,
deep canals of human nature acting in sheer domination
and greed. Legacy of invasion. Legacy of occupation.
Mass murder. Rape.
 Rape.
History. The big power against the melanin-rich, the
cash poor,  farm fields, the hot lands, river flow,
mountain hiding, the agronomy, the mothers and
children, the heart, imagination.

  I write to remember Jean Dominique, fierce and
passionate, grinning, glaring voice of Radio Free
Haiti, gunned down outside his office four years ago,
who said: "My only weapons are my journalist's pen, my
microphone and my unquenchable faith in true change."

  I write for the small, once green, now
erosion-fighting country of rivulets and dust too, Â
whose people's blood has filled the fields and the
roads for so long, whose children have walked
threadbare with a song, Â a dance to the Gods,  color
running like pulse. Story filled  tongues, music
sifting earth to sky, the wind between, paintings to
dance in.

  This sentence, this space, this paragraph --  for
Haiti. To live, to be Haiti.

I write for the original promise of the Lavalas
movement of poor people, led by  Father Jean-Bertrand
Aristide who became the first democratically elected
President of Haiti, now forced into exile. U.S.
personnel, equipment, tricks.

Horror of invasion. Horror of occupation.

 For Haitians living in the U.S., for those who fled
on cardboard boats, stopped at borders, held on
Guantanamo, severed from family, fighting disease.

    This space is for Kreyol and Voodou.
 Coffee, rice.

A whole meal for every family every day.
   Art still spilling.
 Story still...

Amy Wilentz wrote: "...Events in Haiti take place in
such a rush, with such highs and lows, that it is
sometimes difficult to perceive their general
direction. At the end of a dizzying and dangerous road
to democracy, an election-day massacre suddenly looms
like a terrifying roadblock. In the midst of
dictatorship and repression, a frail sprout of
democracy somehow pushes forward...
...What has been at work in descriptions of Haiti –
and its political systems, its religious structures,
its social mores – is racism, a racism that was
explicit in the decades that followed Haiti's shocking
revolution and that in our more decorous days is still
understood if unspoken..."

  The determined, calculated disruption of the process
of building democracy in Haiti, which must mean
economic democracy -- desperately slow, profoundly
complex, uneven, as it is anywhere in the world,
recovering from legacies of slavery and occupation --
the undermining of the sovereignty of the Haitian
people by the U.S. government, (occupation since
1915), must end.  So Haitians can grapple with their
own Haiti.

 You will find nothing new in the words here.
 Nothing new.
 Silence for Haiti. Listening to Haiti.

  Perhaps, at times it is necessary to say something
again, or in one's own way, or in this space in this
newspaper at this time, because it needs to be said
again and again in different sounds, sometimes
redundant, or screeching, or iron taste in the mouth,
dried blood, or a sigh, until we turn the ideas into
policies and lives and basic dignity,  food,  into
peace that is not a word to be thrown around but a
necessity, a child's right. To say aloud the name of a
place or person like a star planted in the sky.
To remember, the glimmer called solidarity.

Kathy Engel




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