“Uncle Gabriel and I will not take long to set off with a bang and rush into the alleys of the seaside: “No, a thousand times no,” he grumbles, like a suppressed cry, “these people deserve more than the pity, mite or condescension. There are other horizons than that of dispossession of the things of the world”. […] And I, Narcès Morelli, am twenty years old. I live in a crazy world, full of turbulence, noise and arms of flame. Although I widen my eyes, I cannot see the new dawn dawning. My strained ears do not hear the first chords of the long-promised party. I’m twenty years old. How can you shake off the night and contemplate, somewhere in the distance, the dizzying whiteness of early morning? » – Émile Ollivier
“May the woman be the farewell become, heartbreak between the rustling of her own bowels; let her no longer linger waiting for dawn since dawn is delayed. » – Yanick Jean
It is time here to take a moment to speak, from the diaspora, which is certainly not ours. Recall for a moment the importance of this place, Haiti, of which we are constantly told about the defeats and possible collapses and consider it on the contrary as the very place of our humanity and our hopes.
Write a word here to our people and make a sign to them, to tell them that, even absent, we are there, like them, to carry as best we can the memory of a stubborn idea: that of our absolute liberation that only this native country carries – because sometimes still, we were born there and raised there; because more and more often, we were not born there and yet we sense and feel this place as the only possible place of our birth, to ourselves and to the world.
This word about Haiti, we know that it is not completely ours, whose bodies are withdrawn, because it belongs only to those who are still busy inhabiting our land, risking their lives, their future and all the most precious things they possess. It is up to Haitians alone — at least to those who still understand Haiti without selling it to the highest bidder or to the least carnivorous — who will decide the destiny of the nation that they continue to preserve and protect. build, against all odds.
From the places where we are, we can at least refuse to give in to reassuring mythifications. We will sometimes even try to show the powers of destruction the path to shame, we will support the country’s struggles as best we can, we will sometimes even give, from a distance, advice that we were not asked for.
Perhaps we will hold out to ours replacement existences, on the other side of the ocean, which are advertised as better; or will we work diligently to create living spaces for our people inside and out, without waiting for the delayed dawns.
And no doubt we will do all this, but we will do even better: we will continue to do what we have always done: carry this thought of liberation hard with our people from the country within; from these ethics of life, we will grow improbable gardens in our wasted or sated places; we will continue to create without ceasing or interruption the beautiful forms of these ideas too lofty for us; we will listen to present violence with those who experience it in their flesh and who still resist it daily; with our ancestors who experienced greater and more desperate ones; we will finally hear the voices of women who have never ceased to show us the path to a nation composed of a radical project of freedom.
We will say, in our gestures and everything we do, Haiti.
We will bear within ourselves the heavy responsibility of this hope which makes us stand, alongside those who are constantly crushed, but who always build, governors of the dew and founded women. by themselves like the empires they defeated, deep and numerous passages, underground roots of fresh water towards life.
In addition to mine, this text contains the words or spirit of: Émile Ollivier, Yanick Jean, Toussaint Louverture, Marie-Thérèse Colimon-Hall, Jacques Roumain, Marie-Célie Agnant, Jacques-Stephen Alexis, Magloire-Saint-Aude , Massillon Coicou, Ignace Nau, Ida Faubert, Boisrond Tonnerre, Jan J. Dominique, Virginie Sampeur, Davertige, Farah Martine Lhérisson and Marie Vieux Chauvet.