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Dessalines
Is Rising!!
Ayisyen: You Are Not Alone!
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Ezili
Danto Witness Project
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 Little
Girl
in the Yellow
Sunday Dress
***************
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| To subscribe,
write to erzilidanto@yahoo.com |
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Carnegie
Hall
Video Clip |
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No
other national
group in the world
sends more money
than Haitians living
in the Diaspora |
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The
Red Sea |
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Ezili Dantò's master Haitian dance class (Video clip)
Ezili's
Dantò's
Haitian & West African Dance Troop
Clip
one -
Clip two |
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So
Much Like Here- Jazzoetry CD audio clip
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Ezili Danto's
Witnessing
to Self
Update
on
Site Soley |
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| RBM
Video Reel
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Haitian
immigrants
Angry with
Boat sinking
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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)
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Dessalines'
Law
and Ideals
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Breaking
Sea Chains |
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Little
Girl
in the Yellow
Sunday Dress
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| Anba
Dlo, Nan Ginen |
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Ezili
Danto's Art-With-The-Ancestors
Workshops - See, Red,
Black & Moonlight series or Haitian-West African
Clip
one -Clip
twoance performance |
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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 |
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other national group in the world sends more money than Haitians
living in the Diaspora |
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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.
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,
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."
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.
"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 |
