22225: erzilidanto: The color of liberty -Interview with Haitian attorney Marguerite Laurent (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Erzilidanto@aol.com

Black is the color of liberty

An interview with Haitian attorney Marguerite Laurent

by Wanda Sabir

Marguerite Laurent has a visual presence that is just as striking as her
written one, which is how I met her initially. Born in the Haiti, her family moved
to New York in 1968 when her dad couldn't keep steady employment under the
Duvalier regime. Proud of her heritage, more specifically a cultural and
religious legacy vilified by colonists and their henchmen in her homeland, the fiery
sister has taken on the task of rectifying this slander through her poetry,
dance and legal advocacy.

A founding member of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership (1995), Laurent, who
studied law at the University of Connecticut and also has a graduate degree in
dance from Harvard, was all ready to spend her time touring with her
dance-theatre company in celebration of Haiti's bicentennial - this included a kickoff at
Carnegie Hall in January, followed by a gig on the Cruisin' Into History tour
this August - when the coup foiled all of her plans.

Back in riot gear, Laurent is armed with her literary tools, shooting off
multiple articles a week as she keeps her index finger of the pulse of her
homeland.

In town for the recent Haiti forum at Pro Arts Gallery Sunday, May 2,
sponsored by PEN Oakland and the Haiti Action Committee, I was able to speak to the
busy woman the following morning at length about Haitian history, her work with
the Haitian Lawyers Leadership (HLL) and the spirit of Erzilidanto, her
patron goddess. Quite dramatic even on the phone, the sister held me spellbound as
she shared her life story, which is the story of an African nation, the first
pan-African nation, Ayiti or Haiti. Laurent credits her parents for her
consciousness.

Marguerite Laurent: "My father always had a saying - he was a Marron, his
lineage are all 'Nig Marron,' those runaway captives who were never slaves.
There's a very strong pride in Nig Marron. It's like Dessalines said, that 'if
that's a civilized nation (referring to the Europeans), I'll gladly be a savage
African.' My father said, 'We'll always be Nig Marron,' which meant the same
thing as Dessalines - if the blood of the European tribe is how they get their
sort of civilization, then I'd rather be a savage African. Here was a father
whose father was a Vodun priest."

I'm kind of blown away … for a moment.

Marguerite Laurent: "Really, every Haitian has this history, but they don't
want to talk about it because they've been colonized by the priests and the
captors who tell them that what they're representing is satanic. Meanwhile, (the
Europeans) are out there studying it and getting Ph.D.s in it, while Black
people say it's not important. The suppression of religion in Haiti is one of the
crimes of the European powers, while they advocate freedom of religion in
their own countries."

Wanda Sabir: Your poem that you read Sunday at ProArts spoke to the colonial
influence on Haitian culture.

Marguerite Laurent: "This is how I became who I am. If you go to
windowsonhaiti.com, go under contributors and click on that and you'll see "Red Black and
Moonlight" - this is an older versions of this. It's a piece I wrote when I
went to Haiti in 1995. One of the U.S. ambassadors to Haiti, USAID, when they
saw a group of Haitian American lawyers who wanted to help Haiti, they saw
depleted funding sources - they saw us as a threat. And so they spent a lot of time
trying to throw us out of Haiti, and eventually they did."

Wanda Sabir: You're not welcome in Haiti?

Marguerite Laurent: "HLL is diametrically opposed to USAID ideals. We want to
develop Haiti; they want to keep it dependent. That's the fight that we
fight. That's the struggle that we try to expose to the world, that Haitians for
years and decades and centuries have tried to become independent and that it is
of course the imperialist drama to keep you dependent.

"If you're educated in your own liberty and in self-reliance, self-reliance
begins with understanding your own heritage and your own culture. But if you're
dependent on their god, their sort of democracy, their military to take you
out of chaos into order - their sort of order - then you are dependent, and
that is the colonial blueprint for debt, dependency and foreign domination.

"That's the cycle that we try to break, and Haitians have been trying to
break that cycle for 200 years. Our commitment, as Dessalines said, is to live
free (and) independent or die. And many of us have been dying, but because of our
culture and what we believe about death: the corporal body, the spirit never
dies because spirit triumphs over temporality.

"That's why Haitians were able to walk into European canons - men, women and
children. The song that they sang while they were doing it was 'Bullets are
dust. Bullets are dust.' The spirit overcomes. The irresistible essence will
live on forever.

"Even as we deal today with the occupiers - the two greatest Western
superpowers are on our land - Canada and the United States, and they brought with them
our old colonizer, France, something our founding fathers said would never
happen - and they're there in 2004 to say 'Yes, we can.'

"But they always come through the economic route, through Black opportunists.
They always come through them because they hate being African and so they
project that upon … they do the work of the colonizers, people like André Apaid
and the Mafia families in Haiti who have exploited the Haitian people.

"What people don't understand is that there is a certain level of propaganda
in trying to create certain realities to project this reality. Haiti is the
poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. What they don't tell you is not only
do we have (poverty, but we also have) the most millionaires in the entire
Caribbean. They won't advertise that. Naturally people would wonder, well, why
aren't you developing the country? They prefer to project all that on Aristide
and say, why is he a millionaire?"

Marguerite says that her point is, if "the American Dream is to 'pull
yourself up by your bootstraps,' to rise from humble beginnings, why is it that the
first time it's done by a poor Haitian that for some reason, he's corrupt?"
This was in response to a question raised by Ishmael Reed the previous day at the
Haiti Forum, a question he had received via email.

Why is the U.S. so interested in Haiti, is a question many people ask. One
answer is unskilled and cheap labor. Another reason is that when there is no
democracy and people are being oppressed, there is no time off, overtime, or
benefits … then poverty is systemic.

Marguerite Laurent: "At the height of the coup in 1994, Disney made
(according to the National Labor Committee) $1.1 billion in profit in Haiti. This is
when you had 70,000 fleeing Haiti."

People do not leave Haiti because they are poor; they leave because their
lives are in danger. If one looks at the period when Lavalas was governing Haiti,
the people were not trying to escape.

I ask Marguerite about Disney's divestment.

"I can't speak to that, but one way corporations keep from paying taxes is
they get a Haitian organization, such as Apaid, whose sweatshop is a
subcontractor. It's a Haitian business front, which means, as a Haitian business, it's
not subject to certain laws," she said.

"Apaid and the elite in Haiti are so used to exploiting and robbing people
blind, they don't want to lose that, which is why they want to be in control of
the government in Haiti. When they're not in control, you have the people in
control for the first time in 200 years in Parliament asking the local
representatives, 'Listen, I worked 70 hours and they only paid me for 20.' Now there's
no one to go to."

"There's another thing I have to say. Wal-Mart made $2.8 billion in profit in
1994. When they try to give you this idea that Haiti is poor, that they have
nothing to give, they don't let you know that those in the know have been
leaching that country dry. This is what they're defending in Haiti now, the right
to greed and profit and exploitation and labor, almost slave-like."

"There's no safety. Apaid had a factory where they were making some product
that had chemicals in it that ate people's skin off. The people - there's so
many Haitians - and people are trying to find jobs, so they'll work under the
most coldest circumstances. And that's why the Haitian Lawyers Leadership is
here. One of our campaigns is to confront these companies. HLL wants to tell
Americans what their companies are doing abroad."

"They're always asking," says Marguerite, "why are you complaining when all
of these people are coming to America? If Haitians in America work, at least
there are laws that protect them. They will get paid every week in the Untied
States, but in Haiti they could decide that 'the local situation is too bad, so
I'm not paying you.' I always say Haitians would stay in Haiti if American
companies down there would treat them the way they treat American (workers) in
America.

"But they don't. If you look at the statistics, Haitians do not leave Haiti
for poverty. They don't leave just because they're poor, (which is) one of the
reasons the United States gives, that they are 'economic refugees not
political refugees.' Our (American) laws provide refugee status for political
refugees.

"It's only when the government is killing them (as it is now) and they have
no choice and they are trying to save their lives that they run away from
Haiti. For instance, during the 10 years that you had Lavalas leading Haiti from
1990 to 2004, the only time you had Haitians leaving in droves was during the
32nd coup d'état, 1991-94. There was no one leaving in droves from 1995 to 2004.
But there are people leaving Haiti in droves right now even though the U.S.
has circled Haiti and is turning back those who are making it through. It's
survival.

"If the world would stop and let Haiti live, this migration would stop. It
would also stop if Haitians were able to develop Haiti. If (only) these greedy
corporations could see Haitian workers in the same manner they see American
workers with the same human rights. We have a minimum wage - it's the lowest
minimum wage in the Western Hemisphere, perhaps the world, okay? - yet the
corporations feel deprived that they have to pay that money.

The minimum wage is $1.60 a day. Before, it was 60 cents. But people like
Apaid feel it's highway robbery, that people don't deserve to get paid that much,
Marguerite says. The workers have absolutely no benefits, and if they work
overtime, they have no compensation.

"Of course the unions get help. Just recently in the free trade zone (visit
haitisupportgroup.com or her site for favorite links), the workers had
unionized, (but) the Guy Philippe people sent death squads to come in and beat up the
workers so that they would renounce the union. This is the work of the
mercenaries the United States is paying."

Wanda Sabir: Is this recent?

Marguerite Laurent: "Yes. In Quanamitha, a border town to the Dominican
Republic, is a corporation (Groupo M) out of the Dominican Republic that
subcontracts for Wal-Mart, Tommy Hilfiger, to these indigenous corporations who are
doing the work. These workers had unionized."

The HLL formed to get Aristide back, then, once he returned, they wanted to
"institutionalize the rule of law. At that time, earlier that year or the end
of 1993, the Haitian Minister of Justice Guy Malary was killed by one of the
FRAPH people, the same people running Haiti now."

"Malary was killed because he was President Aristide's justice minister and
he was working to bring back democracy to Haiti, obviously, as a lawyer, and as
someone who worked very heard all his life to create democracy for Haiti
defending the 1987 Constitution. We took up, we wanted to honor Malary, so we
wanted to pick up his work and not let it to have been in vain. One of his primary
things was the Constitution rewritten by the occupiers, like Roosevelt in
1915."

She laughs at my bafflement. I hadn't realized that the Haitian Constitution
had been rewritten by this government. It was of course to benefit those white
men who wanted to own land, something Dessalines disallowed when Haiti was
liberated in 1804.

Marguerite Laurent: "One of the things Dessaline and the Haitian
revolutionaries put in the Constitution was that if you were not Haitian, you could not
own land. And of course that was something to protect (the people) because we
had nothing. We had that little territory, and we bled for it for 300 years.
There were a lot of ways Europeans tried to own land - they married Haitian
women, all sorts of things. But up to (the time of) the illegal Constitution, there
was a prohibition against it. You had to become a Haitian citizen and there
were certain rules to protect Haitians. It was the only place in the entire
Caribbean and in the world, because the rest of the world was colonized, where
all you had to do was step on it and, if you were a captive, you became free.
Dessalines paid (about) $50 a head to anybody who brought a freed person, who
commandeered a boat that was going to the Carolinas or anywhere in the
Caribbean.

"Haiti is the only place, I'm glad to say as a lawyer, where a Black man
could testify against a white man. Up until the Civil Rights Movement, it had
never happened in America. For all of those reasons the HLL wanted the people to
know our legal heritage as well as our revolutionary heritage."

Wanda Sabir: Which Constitution is Haiti operating under now?

Marguerite Laurent: "They are trying to destroy the 1987 Constitution, which
is the Constitution that was written, and a lot of blood was spilled for Haiti
to have that Constitution. One of the things that happened with that
Constitution, every time a military government would come into power they would amend
the Constitution to extend the length of their tenure. One of the things the
people who wrote the 1987 Constitution (did) was to amend the Constitution. You
had to have two different parliaments. One parliament could do the amendment,
the another would have to ratify it."

That's what happened with regards to getting rid of the military. It was
amended, and this parliament, prior to Aristide's "coup-nap," would have had the
opportunity to ratify it.

Marguerite Laurent: "The same thing happened with dual citizenship. As
lawyers, we saw that 2-3 percent of the Haitian population in Haiti were
millionaires, and they refused to pay taxes and they refused to have any social
responsibility, and we felt that all those Haitians who left Haiti from 1967 to now,
they have a right to participate in Haitian development."

"One of the things we stood for and still stand for is to try to have dual
citizenship so Haitians living abroad could participate. So we were working
towards that, and we did get that passed - the dual citizenship law. We needed to
have the new parliament ratify it this year. We're talking about 10 years of
work here.

"Those who we struggle against definitely do not want anyone except their
puppets to lead Haiti. For them it was horrible to think that with one more
parliament Haitians (abroad) would have had dual citizenship in Haiti.

"There are almost 3 million Haitians outside of Haiti, 8.5 million (inside),
definitely more. Our detracters know - she references the Ottawa Initiative -
at the end of it, it says that by 2019 if nothing is done, there will be 20
million Haitians. That is scary to those who are authors of the initiative. Tend
the herd, put them in prison - there's no reproduction. Look at America's
population control."

Look at Palestine, Rwanda, I add.

Marguerite Laurent: "Look at how the Duvaliers repackaged the U.S., (along
with other) ex-Black people (more recently) who for one reason or another didn't
get the job they wanted or were disappointed with Aristide, who made certain
deals with the devil, such as agreeing to privatize certain state-owned assets
- all of those things we had to do to have a voice to see the light of day.

"A lot of people blame President Aristide who live in the United States, or
who are very well off, as they sit in front of their TVs and think that 200
years of corruption and exploitation, somehow this man (Aristide) is going to
change it in the term he didn't have the first time (because of the coup in
1991), and now the second time."

When one adds the U.S. embargo against the people that prevented humanitarian
aid, fresh water, food, and much needed services to reach them, it's amazing
that Aristide was able to accomplish as much as he did - all this while a
media campaign of disinformation and the Civil Society or Group 184 (funded in
part by the U.S.) did everything to stop him.

"Haiti was paying interest on this loan it didn't get, while the
International Monetary Fund was making the Haitian government pay $30 million on loans
Duvalier took out. Those are the abuses and the crimes the Haitian people have
had to face in the last three to four years. But those are not the things you
hear about on CNN.

"The Haiti Lawyers Leadership in the last 10 years is pushing for dual
leadership. We are also trying to put together (the ability) for Haitians who live
abroad who maintain their Haitian citizenship to vote. Most major countries
allow their citizens living abroad to have a procedure to vote. We've been
pushing for that also.

"Our work was to enfranchise, empower the people, allow them to participate
in the process. As part of our work was also to study, promote and educate the
people about our culture - how beautiful Haitian language is, how colorful,
and how it has these wonderful adages and life wisdom embedded in it. Just the
proverbs alone are a rich resource of wisdom.

"Haitians Kreyòl is a language of proverbs as ancient, more ancient than
Hebrew. It's a language made out of an amalgamation of the (languages of the
Africans who settled in Haiti). It's a language that teaches. Our language is like
our value. Kreyòl reflects the values of an ancient people.

"My father spoke in proverbs. Every time we did something wrong, he recited a
proverb. Even in the Bible, a lesson is not taught directly. The details can
always bury you.

"Pierre Labossiere and I were talking about certain things. While I was in
Jamaica, for the first time in 200 years the defense minister from France went
to Haiti and I saw a picture of her with this interim person, Latortue, in the
Jamaican papers. I hope someone from the leadership, I hope someone from the
Aristide community is responding to this. Part of our Campaign No. 7 is to
continue to pursue the $21.8 billion (and counting) France owes Haiti, for them
using our grand grands as property. After the meeting with the French foreign
minister, Latortue came out and denounced the request for that money back.

"I said to Pierre Labossiere, "What gives him the legal competence to
denounce the people's right to justice? He quoted the proverb, 'The dew's going to go
wild until the sun rises. They will do everything until the sun of truth
comes out.' In one little proverb, we have (multiple) meanings. That's what
Haitian Kreyòl is about."

She speaks of Boukman and Cecil Fatiman, a sister who is one of the biggest
Vodun priestesses and a champion for human rights. The two met in a secret
place in a wood clearing called Dwakayima, Aug. 14, 1791, along with 200
delegations from various plantations who agreed to begin the Haitian revolution. They
called on Ezilidanto, the goddess whose veve (cosmogram) is a heart with a
dagger in it. Because Vodun was outlawed, the African people had to meet in
secret, Marguerite said.

Marguerite Laurent: "What's so great about Haiti is the women, in terms of
their spiritual powers, sometimes are even greater in their connection to the
universe than men. It was a woman who led that secret ceremony that started the
Haitian revolution. And it was a woman's spirit that inhabited that woman -
and that woman's spirit was Ezilidanto, the Haitian love goddess. Her symbol is
the heart with the dagger going through it."

"She is the irreducible spirit, irreducible essence of the mother/goddess.
She is a warrior. She chose Boukman. She told Boukman through Cecil Fatiman. I
don't know if you've ever seen possession? The body is the only mechanism to
communicate with the ancestors. The body is the sacred temple.

"Which is why they could never understand how the Europeans could defile the
body and make it work to produce profit, because the body is sacred. It's the
realm of the spirit, where the irreducible element will push out all of this
small personality, so the small personality of Cecil Fatiman was pushed out and
the great goddess came through. But you have to have some sort of discipline
for that to happen. You can't be just anybody.

"That's why in my lineage, my grandfather was the Vodun priest of that era or
that arena. Most Haitians have that in their families - a place where the
family portal is. In my family, it's the place where that first original African
went. A lot of the Africans, after they fought in the revolution, wanted to go
back to Africa. There is a lot of folklore about these Africans. A lot of
them didn't want to live in the Western Hemisphere.

"The African within our family found a place in Fond Deselan (Southern Haiti)
where a clay pot is filled with water. That portal connects us to our 'line
going back to the beginning of time.'

"In Haitian cosmology we are descendents of God. We have everlasting life. As
human beings we are sacred vessels of spirit. She compared this to the
Christian notion of kinship with Jesus the son of God.

"Today you go where my parents are from, where my grandfather is from, you'll
find that little house of spirits - generations upon generations of Haitians
have gone to touch or draw through sounds or veve (cosmogram) those gods or
universal spirits, whomever one wanted to call. So if you wanted to call on the
spirit of love, Ezilidanto, or the creative spirit Daneala-wedaon Ayda

"In Haitian cosmology, you have to have male and female to create. Out of
Adam's rib came creation? That doesn't make sense to Africans."

Marguerite says in answer to a question about Vodun that "Haitians are 80
percent Catholic and 100 percent Vodun." So even though her parents, once they
came to America, didn't practice the religion, all the stories and songs she
learned from her mother and her father were a wealth of information too.

"I'll ask her, Mom, what happened at this ceremony? And she'll respond, 'I
only went to eat the food.' We're been trained not to take it seriously, but if
a child got sick he would go to a Vodun priest, when she was in Haiti, that
is. For most Haitians, Vodun is a way of life. It isn't just spirituality. It's
about bad vibe makeovers. It's a part of my play. Hold on, I'll read you a
piece. I talk about my parents and where they were from - 'Red, Black and
Moonlight.' Visit the website http://www.margueritelaurent.com/index.html.

"Vodun is metaphysical and practical. It's also healing. It has a
mythological aspect. I have a degree in dance from the Harvard Conservatory. I learned
those songs from my mother, who said she didn't know any of this," Marguarite
says.

Clearly proud of Haitian history, Marguarite is a great storyteller, the time
we have all too short.

"Not only did Haiti do away with slavery, winning combat with the greatest
army of that time, Napoleon Bonaparte, they also freed five Latin American
countries: Columbia, Ecuador, Bolivia… (she can't recall the other two.)

"Bolivar was the founder of Bolivia. We gave him sanctuary. We are the first
Pan-Americans and the first Pan-Africans. We kept our mother (Africa's)
culture. That's revolutionary, (especially) at a point in time when you had the
Arabs conquering North Africa.

"Haiti is the first African country that didn't take its conquerer's religion
or culture. It's the mother of African mother cultures. It's something that
is not analyzed enough. We are fighting a spiritual fight with the sky god,
whom we need to bring back to the earth again.

"We want to work to fulfill our revolutionary legacy - a Pan African task
force for Haitians to live freely and work in the Americas. That's our ultimate
goal. We have freed many, many nations, and it's because we started freeing
many nations that the world stands as it does and chattel slavery is gone. Yet,
we have been isolated and we can't get asylum anywhere in the world, and we
can't come out of Haiti, which is one of the reasons why we are contained in
poverty.

Getting back to the Haitian Lawyers Leadership, Marguerite says, "As someone
who has passports, I believe that it's (incumbent ) upon me to fight for all
Haitians (and articulate legally) the reasons why they should have passports to
be in the Americas, just like the European Union has it so that if you're
from France you can go work in Italy. They have a universal passport. You don't
lose your French citizenship.

"I think that (for) Haitians, our fulfillment of a revolutionary legacy would
be for Haitians to have a Pan-American passport. That is why the U.S.
ambassador kicked us (the Haitian Lawyers Leadership) out of Haiti because of our
revolutionary ideas. We weren't looking for democracy, we were looking for
justice, universal, primary justice for all of Latin America. The entire region has
a history of suppression by death squads supported by the United States."

France is back, and with this deliberate affront, Haitians are geared for a
fight that reaches back hundreds of years to Boukman and Fatiman and that
meeting on the mountaintop. The courage under fire Haitians live with daily is
dauntless - the rallying cry, "Bullets are dust," revived if the incidents on Flag
Day last week, May 18, are any indicator.

However, the world should not stand by and watch innocent people murdered for
demanding justice and liberty and their right to unimpeded leadership of
their democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Email Wanda at wsab1@aol.com.

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Forwarded by the Haitian Lawyers Leadership
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"Men anpil chaj pa lou"  is Kreyol for - "Many hands make light a heavy load."

See, The Haitian Leadership Networks'  7 "men anpil chaj pa

lou" campaigns to help restore Haiti's independence, the will of the mass
electorate and the rule of law. See,
http://www.margueritelaurent.com/pressclips/haitianlawyers.html ; http://www.margueritelaurent.com/campaigns/campaigns.html

and Haitiaction.net

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