ezili_sm_button
writings_sm_button
perform_sm_button
bio_sm_button
workshops_sm_button
contactus_sm_button
guest_bu_button
law_sm_button
merchan_bu_button
  ezilidanto@margueritelaurent.com  
BACK
Carnegie Hall RBM Reel Video ReelsPress Kit BioDance Clips
 

Black is the
Color of Liberty

An Interview with Haitian Attorney Marguerite Laurent

by Wanda Sabir
, San Francisco Bayview, June 3, 2004


Marguerite "Ezili Dantò" Laurent
*
**************

*********
Haiti is 3rd largest Dominican export over US $147 million in 2006
******************
The Western vs Real Narrative on Haiti

*********************
Does the Western economic model and calculation of economic wealth fit Haiti, fit Dessalines' idea of wealth? No!
*********************
No other national group anywhere in the world sends more money home than Haitians living abroad

*
********************
Note from Yves to the Network on UN operations in Site Soley:

Site Soley is prime waterfront real estate. Under pretext of killing bandits and apprehending kidnappers, the coup d'etat UN forces are depopulating Site Soley in order to steal the land for the elite sectors without compensating the impoverished occupants

******************

***************
90% of the Agricultural Workers in the DR are Haitians (Haiti's most valuable asset: Its people)

*********





Dessalines Is Rising!!
Ayisyen: You Are Not Alone!


 



*********************
Ezili Danto Witness Project
*********************

Little Girl
in the Yellow
Sunday Dress

zilibutton
***************


Most Requested Performance
Pieces of
Marguerite Laurent



So Much Like Here

(Jazzoetry audio clip and text)


Red, Black & Moonlight
08 RBM Video, 04Video and text)

Breaking Sea Chains


Litte Girl in the
Yellow Sunday Dress ack & Moonlight
(Text and Public comments)


Capsized
(live performance audio recording
and text)

The Red Sea
(live performance audio recording and text)

Ezili Danto's Art-With-The Ancestors' Workshops

Master, Teenage and Children's Haitian Dance Workshops
(video clips)

 

 

To subscribe, write to erzilidanto@yahoo.com
campaigns_button
different_button
zilibuttonCarnegie Hall
Video Clip
No other national
group in the world
sends more money
than Haitians living
in the Diaspora
Red Sea- audio

The Red Sea


Ezili Dantò's master Haitian dance class (Video clip)

zilibuttonEzili's Dantò's
Haitian & West African Dance Troop
Clip one - Clip two


So Much Like Here- Jazzoetry CD audio clip

Ezili Danto's

Witnessing
to Self

zilibutton
Update on
Site Soley

RBM Video Reel

Haitian
immigrants
Angry with
Boat sinking
A group of Haitian migrants arrive in a bus after being repatriated from the nearby Turks and Caicos Islands, in Cap-Haitien, northern Haiti, Thursday, May 10, 2007. They were part of the survivors of a sailing vessel crowded with Haitian migrants that overturned Friday, May 4 in moonlit waters a half-mile from shore in shark-infested waters. Haitian migrants claim a Turks and Caicos naval vessel rammed their crowded sailboat twice before it capsized. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Dessalines' Law
and Ideals

Breaking Sea Chains


Little Girl
in the Yellow
Sunday Dress

Anba Dlo, Nan Ginen
Ezili Danto's Art-With-The-Ancestors Workshops - See, Red, Black & Moonlight series or Haitian-West African

Clip one -Clip two
ance performance
zilibutton In a series of articles written for the October 17, 2006 bicentennial commemoration of the life and works of Dessalines, I wrote for HLLN that: "Haiti's liberator and founding father, General Jean Jacques Dessalines, said, "I Want the Assets of the Country to be Equitably Divided" and for that he was assassinated by the Mullato sons of France. That was the first coup d'etat, the Haitian holocaust - organized exclusion of the masses, misery, poverty and the impunity of the economic elite - continues (with Feb. 29, 2004 marking the 33rd coup d'etat). Haiti's peoples continue to resist the return of despots, tyrants and enslavers who wage war on the poor majority and Black, contain-them-in poverty through neocolonialism' debts, "free trade" and foreign "investments." These neocolonial tyrants refuse to allow an equitable division of wealth, excluding the majority in Haiti from sharing in the country's wealth and assets." (See also, Kanga Mundele: Our mission to live free or die trying, Another Haitian Independence Day under occupation; The Legacy of Impunity of One Sector-Who killed Dessalines?; The Legacy of Impunity:The Neoconlonialist inciting political instability is the problem. Haiti is underdeveloped in crime, corruption, violence, compared to other nations, all, by Marguerite 'Ezili Dantò' Laurent
     
No other national group in the world sends more money than Haitians living in the Diaspora
 
 
 
 
 







 

***************
Haiti's most valuable asset: Its people - Their land, Gods, Culture and Dessalines' legacy

The Haitian Gods, the Gods of immemorial Africa, cannot be embodied without Haitian corporeal existence. The Gods are part of the land and depend on human devotees for their embodiment on earth. (The Revolutionary Potential of Haiti, its creeds, values and struggle)
********

Breaking Sea Chains - RBM Video Reel


Black is the color of Liberty
An interview with Haitian attorney Marguerite Laurent
by Wanda Sabir, San Francisco Bayview, June 3, 2004


Marguerite Laurent has a visual presence that is just as striking as her written one, which is how I met her initially. Born in 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.

Marguerite "Ezili Dantò" Laurent Little Girl
in the Yellow Sunday Dress

A founding member of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership (1994), Laurent, who studied law at the University of Connecticut and also has a graduate degree in dance from [The Hartford Conservatory], 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, [to be] followed by a gig on the Bwa Kayiman 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,

Anba Dlo, Nan Ginen (Video clips)

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 Network (HLLN) and the spirit of Ezili Dantò, 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 Maroon, his lineage are all 'Neg Mawon,' those runaway captives who were never slaves. There's a very strong pride in [claiming] “Se Neg Mawon mwen ye”. 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 Neg Mawon.' 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 [Vodun] religion in Haiti is one of the crimes of the European powers, while they advocate freedom of religion in their own countries."

May 2008 Video Reel - (PhotoGallery)

Marguerite 'Zili Dantò' Laurent, lawyer, performance poet, writer and founder and President of the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network (HLLN), performs selections from her award-winning Red, Black & Moonlight monologues, May 3, 2008, celebrating Haitian heritage month

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

Marguerite Laurent: "This is how I became who I am. [Read Papa's Maroon Lineage ] It's a piece I wrote when I went to Haiti in 1995. One of the U.S. ambassadors to Haiti [and] 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: "HLLN is diametrically opposed to USAID's 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.

(Video clips)

"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 irreducible essence will live on forever.

"Even as we deal today with the occupiers - the two greatest Western [Hemispheric] 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 hate upon (the masses) … they do the work of the colonizers, people like