TANBOU

HAITI IS HER NAME
— An allegory in celebration of Haiti's independence —

Today, May 18, 2025, is the day of celebration of the Haitian flag, created on this date in 1803, in the city of Arcahaie, to symbolize Haiti's independence from France. According to history, Jean-Jacques Dessalines himself removed the white from the French tricolor flag and created the Haitian bicolor flag, blue and red, symbolizing the union between Blacks and Mulattoes.
This year marks another important anniversary, that of April 17, 1825, when French King Charles X imposed on Haiti the payment of 150 million gold francs, (todays value equivalent of 30 billion euros) as indemnity for the supposed loss of revenue the French slave masters incurred due to the Haitian revolution. That demand — muscularly accompanied by 14 French warships stationed on the bay of Port-au-Prince — as absurd and extortionary as it certainly was, profoundly and negatively affected Haiti's development project, to this very day.
It's a good starting point that French President Emmanuel Macron recently recognized the "impact" of that "very heavy financial compensation" [the indemnity] on Haiti, but he must also be willing to repair this historical injustice and pay Haiti back — preferably in infrastructural development assistance — the considerable amount of money his predecessor extorted from the newly independent country.
At this moment, when armed gangs of bandits are occupying most of the capital city Port-au-Prince, threatening to overrun the entire country, a time when Haiti and Haitians are associated with images of dysfunction, and divisive, violent and corrupt governance, I would like the following poem to serve as a reminder that Haiti is other than the projection of those images.
At a time when Haitians are particularly targeted by the scorn of the racist Trump administration, making them face terror both at home and abroad, I would like today’s poem to reenact deeper meaning and truth in the history of this formerly colonized people rather than the sensationalized clichés and negative narratives perpetuated by the western media and their local sycophants.
Haiti's history of exemplary solidarity with other peoples' struggles remains remarkable, especially at a time when the new nation was vulnerable to the powerful European colonialist nations' wrath. The country's currently lamentable condition of poverty and self-destruction has a direct correlation to its history of defiance and, as its people's continued struggle and resilience has shown, it is also a testimony to the nation's unchanged aspiration for liberty.

Haiti Is Her Name
— An allegory in celebration of Haiti's independence —

She was born
against all odds
on the other side
of the long shore
amidst triangular rascality
among empires and kingdoms
the tactful puppeteers
masterfully running the game
their warships and canons
ready at their service. (1)

Her existence is a defiance
as her wounds could attest
just as her perilous mountains
reflect the mystique of her past glory.

Grand-daughter of the Mandé Charter (2)
in 13th-century Mali in agony
when human rights were first made sacred
long before the Universal Declaration
or even the Bill of Rights.

She refused the edicts of the new plantations
holding high her ancestors' quest
for justice, equality, and solidarity
the most elevated longing for freedom.

My mother compared my birthing
in a hurried taxi on a stormy night
delivered on the way to the hospital
to Haiti's accidental independence
brought about by fire, anguish, and cry
among sharks, oppressors of all kinds.

Haiti was a scandal
an ideal of being not supposed to be
something the world's masters
could neither condone nor digest.

Over two centuries in our time
she was brought to bear the rancor
of the most powerful of nations
seeking to tame her rebellious soul
to keep her from spreading
beyond her frontiers and shores
her contagious freedom quest.

The world's imperials made her a pariah
to this day her children spread wide
across oceans and continents
still paying the heavy price
for her insolence and intrepidity.

She could not abide living
in chains nor taking orders
from the new Colonists and henchmen
nor reduced to the lowest state;
she couldn't endure too long
the conditioning of the mind
that would pervert the soul
to the point of folly
for only insanity and cupidity
would explain such cruelty.

She was born the rebel
that was put in quarantine,
the outcast and the trouble-maker
that disturbed the dance.

Her offspring, noble people
inspired by the spirits of their Ginen (3)
couldn't be forced to accept
this ignominious fate
even under duress and brutalization.
Alas, disunion and vile pecuniary pursuit
have overcome at times the honorable cause.

Haiti is her name
she is among the richest of nations
when evaluated for her worth
by different ontological standards
when we count the myriad of writers, poets,
storytellers, musicians, painters, sculptors,
and humanists of all stripes in her midst.

Haiti is her name
she was a miracle of existence
that only History could produce;
the French colonists' Code Noir (4)
that defined and prescribed their conduct
considered transplanted Africans
as less than a full human being
they couldn't predict the deliverance day.

Independence was not just a word
for Haiti's valorous framers
tired by years of calamity
and struggle for human dignity;
independence had a ethical dimension
attached to the infinity of possibility
humans living together in space-time
reinvented as imperative for camaraderie
in a society built on humanist foundations,
on the blossoming of a better state of being
in a beautiful world for us all to enjoy,
this is the dream that's being deferred today
— and yet still lives on.

— Tontongi

___________

Notes

1. Haiti gained and declared its independence on January 1st, 1804, from France following a 13-year long armed revolt launched by formerly enslaved, displaced Africans. As an advocate for enslaved people's freedom all over the world, the new country was made to become a pariah state by the powerful countries of the time (France, England, Spain, and emerging power, the United States).

2. The Mandé or Manden Charter proclaimed in 1222 in Mali is "one of the oldest constitutions in the world albeit mainly in oral form, [it] contains a preamble of seven chapters advocating social peace in diversity, the inviolability of the human being, education, the integrity of the motherland, food security, the abolition of slavery by razzia (or raid), and freedom of expression and trade." [Source UNESCO: https://ich.unesco.org/en/RL/manden-charter-proclaimed-in-kurukan-fuga-00290]

Photo Caption: "Dessalines Ripping the White from the Flag", oil on canvas, by Madsen Mompremier, 1995.

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COLUMBIA U SAVES THE SOUL

(Dedicated to the Columbia University students and to the students all over the US and the world who courageously stand against the politics of oppression, terrorization and annihilation of the Palestinian people pursued by the Israeli government. I have walked many times through the Columbia campus in NYC, in nocturnal, wandering promenade, with no thought of Gaza. This has forever changed.)

The student bodies in encampment
are fighting for decency and elucidation
holding high the conscience of our time.

The student bodies in encampment
rebel against enmity and exclusion,
they are not about celebration of pogroms.

The student bodies in encampment
decry all anti-Jewish malevolence, the kind
of discourse of hate we saw in Charlottesville.

The student bodies in encampment demand
honesty from governments and institutions,
they demand equal rights for colonized peoples.

Instead of shallow narratives that vilify
and demonize such compassionate souls,
we shall all be proud of their intrepidity.

The student bodies in encampment
shall not be made political scapegoats
for exposing genocidal intent and act.

They are about human solidarity in motion
beauty at its peak; they represent our inner best
despite divisionary attempts to shame them.

They are about the destroyed villages, the siege,
the destruction of schools, hospitals, mosques,
soup kitchen, sudden and slow death of Gaza’s children.(1)

The students are of many creeds and ethnic provenance,
a university of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Vodouists,
and Buddhists joining hands to elevate our humanity.

Repression, militarized police response, fear mongering,
efforts to harm the students’ studies and future
only make the moral imperatives more urgent.

The student bodies in encampment
are about the affinities which bring us together,
human empathy in the face of horror and pain. (2)

Glory to the student bodies in encampment!
They are the hope still left in a cynical world;
they are our tomorrow, our shining light in the darkness.

—Tontongi May 8th 2024

FOOTNOTES

(1). The mention of “soup kitchen” is in allusion to the killing by the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) on April 1st, 2024, of seven volunteers of the World Central Kitchen (WCK) founded by José Andrés.

(2). We denounce all acts of oppression and massacre of human beings, be they perpetuated in occupied Palestine, in Ukraine or in Haiti. It is in the spirit of that principle that I write this poem, now third in a series. As of May 3rd, 2024, and counting, more than 34,568 Palestinians have been killed, including 13,800 children and 77,765 injured, not to mention the desert of ruins and suffering that Gaza has become. Here in the US, language itself has been deployed to demonize the student protesters who empathize with Palestinian suffering: thus what my friend Cathy Hoffman calls “community support” for the protesters is distorted in news reports as “outside agitators” coming to “radicalize” the naive students. Despite all of that, I rejoice to see such a great manifestation of self-sacrifice and compassion for the benefit and liberation of others.

—This poem is also published in tne trilingual online magazine Tanbou.com