A K.I.S.S. for Ayiti

One serviteur's reflection on what we can learn from Ayiti and Haitians during times of upheaval in the United States, even as Ayiti and Haitians, at home and abroad, reel from that same upheaval.

It was Sunday morning February 23rd, as I was in a flurry of multitasking in the Social Hall of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Charlottesville (UUC'Ville), Virginia - recording gratitudes in my Passion Planner, listening to the worship offered by Rev. Tim and Greg Townsend, trying to channel my own thoughts onto a screen, taking notes on what Greg and Tim were saying, - when the K.I.S.S. moment came. And yet, amidst all this, my Spirit was in fact (as it often is) far away - in Ayiti¹.

Let me back up and explain that for the last however-long-it’s-been since I published something on Substack, especially since the period leading up to the US presidential elections, I’ve been awash in writing - just not publishing. Everything I wrote either felt too intimate to release to the world, or was too complicated and involved, demanding more time to bring to final draft form than I’ve had to work with. And as one wave after another of personal, national and global events washes over me, I become distracted from my previous writing project by a flood of demanding thoughts related to the latest wave, even as the urgency not simply to write but to publish increases.

As I was describing, it was Sunday February 23rd, as I was multitasking in the Social Hall during the worship service, when a familiar thought came to me: ‘keep it simple.’ Actually, the exact thought was the acronym K.I.S.S. - ‘keep it simple, stupid’. (But thanks to Syleethia, a Central Virginia Community Justice colleague and friend, I now think of it as ‘keep it simple, sweetie’.) The thought came as Greg Townsend - whose accomplishments include Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the UVA Medical School - was addressing the timely and relevant topic of the disparagement of programs promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) by highlighting how these practices actually enhance businesses and communities. Rev. Tim went on to explore why Unitarian Universalism is committed to the values of DEI, and what embracing them looks like in action.

While my Spirit is often in Ayiti, on Sunday morning it was more specifically in Potoprens (Port-Au-Prince), in the LaLue neighborhood where I’d spent a brief time on my way to Jakmel the last time I was in Ayiti in the summer of 2022. For days leading up to Sunday, I’d been feeling dread for our Haitian sisters, brothers and siblings who’d sought refuge in the US (and elsewhere) from the violence in the capital, as well as for those who’d remained behind - like the 19-year-old young man, Charles, from LaLue who’d called me the day before to report the latest updates of his family’s situation: they were still living in a shack they’d sought refuge in somewhere outside of their neighborhood, and he was still travelling regularly back to their home - which they’d finally reluctantly fled a few months before after paramilitary (labelled reductively in American mainstream media as ‘gangs’) burned down most of the houses on their block. Their home - where I’d been received with impeccable hospitality, and slept when I was in LaLue back in 2022 - being a rare exception. At the point when they’d fled, their neighborhood had already been a ‘war zone’ for over a year; it had become normal to receive phone calls from Charles - and his other family members and friends I’d met in 2022 - during which they were hiding under their beds with the sound of heavy gunfire in the background, or bored and requesting the Netflix password because school was closed for a period of time due to a spike in the violence, or lamenting that even going out to get water was a harrowing task, or reporting that someone else they knew intimately had lost their life amidst this war on the masses disguised as something else…

The same night in late December 2024 when my younger 19-year-old son, Amar, had graduated from Marines boot camp and a close circle of family and friends were gathered in celebration, Charles called and confided he’d recently witnessed at close range a dear friend of his and an adult woman from the neighborhood being shot and killed by a member of the paramilitary, and then witnessed that paramilitary being shot and killed by police. In March, I learned that John Exdes Germain - the protege of my friend, Azibe, in Boston who was the liaison between me and his community in LaLue - had been killed by a stray bullet in gunfire between police and paramilitary in their neighborhood. When John was tragically killed he was not much older than my 22-year-old oldest son, Che. And though we try not to have favorites, John was my favorite person in LaLue to receive phone calls from; the brilliance of his Spirit was always a consolation, even over the phone, and I appreciated the depth of our calls about the state of the world and the complicated - yet widely unknown or tragically misunderstood - history in which Ayiti and the U.S. are embroiled.

At the time of John’s young transition to the Ancestral realm I’d submitted a ‘prayer of concern’ to UUC’Ville, and I’d also submitted one early morning of Sunday February 23rd, following a cluster of communications with Charles:

• an initial call at the beginning of the weekend in which he reported that now the paramilitary were trying to recruit children, and confessed (after over a year of interrupted schooling, living amidst regular gunfire and multiple periods of fleeing from their home, months of living in a shack, and witnessing multiple murders) that he couldn’t stay and therefore needed to leave Ayiti and, unbeknownst to his mother, had begun to make forays into attempting to do so;

• another call with him and his mother who, in spite of everything she’s been dealing with, somehow always makes me feel encouraged when we talk;

• a video Charles sent early Sunday morning, which he’d made surreptitiously while his phone stayed hidden in his pocket, lest the paramilitary demand it, while he and a few other young men had gone back to their home to retrieve a final item of value, only to be confronted by paramilitary threatening and shooting at them, which they had somehow miraculously survived.

I could go on and on, telling more and more stories about the ways in which the crisis unfolding in Ayiti and around Haitian people in the Diaspora not only breaks my heart but is finding - and has found, since my tender teenage years - ways into the most intimate parts of my life. But that’s not the point of this ‘K.I.S.S. for Ayiti’ essay. For now, suffice it to say that the most recent series of calls detailed above and Trump’s rollback of Biden’s extension of Temporary Protective Status (TPS) - which predated the calls by just a few days - led me to submit the following ‘prayer of concern’ [edited here for typos & clarity] to UUC’Ville in the early morning of Sunday February 23rd:

I am both worried for my friends who are living in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince, and for those who have migrated to the US from their capital in the last few years. The capital of Haiti, the only nation in the 'New World' to end colonization and chattel slavery by revolution and the first to found a Black republic which opened its arms to enslaved and oppressed people around the world, has been besieged by paramilitary violence for the last several years. There are no gun or arms manufacturers in Haiti but international and transnational forces have managed to orchestrate local paramilitary to internally displace over half a million Haitians, and drive a similar number to leave the country, yet American corporate media represents this quasi war on the masses as simply 'gang violence'. The United States' democracy - despite its poetic odes to the equality of all men - was built on the back of chattel slavery - much like the Greco-Roman 'democracy', to which the US traces its 'noble' democratic roots, was inseparable from a permanent non-voting enslaved class. The US has undermined and intentionally destabilized Haiti since it's Independence in 1804; the role that the US, other nations built on slavery and colonization, such as France, and the international institutions they dominate, such as the UN, have played in Haiti essentially amounts, according to scholar Jemima (pronounced Juh-MEE-muh) Pierre, to a 200+-year counterinsurgency against Haiti: the world's only nation that was truly forged in collective self-determination i.e. freedom, and continues to stand for that. In spite of US involvement in the factors that created present circumstances in Haiti's capital, and that others fleeing such circumstances would generally be categorized as refugees, the US immigration system has created the designation of ‘Temporary Protected Status’ for Haitians fleeing these war-like conditions. On Thursday, although conditions are worsening rather than improving in the Haitian capital and therefore throughout Haiti, the current US administration rolled back the previous administration's 18-month extension of legal immigration protections for over half-a-million Haitians temporarily residing in the United States.

But when Greg read an abbreviated version of my prayer of concern that Sunday morning during worship, something didn’t sit right with me. Ayiti is often portrayed in Western corporate media as an impoverished, illiterate, tragic people and country, and although I’d attempted in my prayer to capture the complexity of the current violence happening both to Haitians from the capital still in Ayiti and to those taking refuge in the US, I’d failed to represent the profoundly positive aspects of my relationship with Ayiti and - I would argue - the profoundly positive impact Ayiti and Haitians have had and continue to have on the rest of the world.., in spite of how hard states built of chattel slavery and capitalism, such as the US and France, have endeavored to undermine, misrepresent, marginalize and ultimately silence Ayiti, Haitians and their astoundingly powerful history.

The blessing of Ayiti and Haitians - how they have blessed me, and they can bless all of us, if we chose to lean in, to learn and then to sit with the difficulty - hit me when Rev. Tim’s part of the worship turned to ‘anticipatory resistance’ and, finally, courage. Amidst my attention to other tasks, my ears first perked up at ‘anticipatory resistance’. But it was really ‘courage’ that made everything click into place; as much as loving Ayiti and my Haitian fam has brought me closer to and in more regular contact with deep pain, suffering and violence than I might have otherwise been exposed to as someone born with American citizenship and relative privilege in a body that looks like mine, it has also opened my eyes - and my heart.

I’ve written elsewhere on my Substack - and am continuing to write - about the ways in which Ayiti can open the eyes of all those who wish to see. But such seeing takes courage. So I’ll begin to wrap up what could be a much longer essay (and indeed is not as simple, sweetie, as I’d first envisioned) with the prayer that I submitted this past Sunday March 2nd to UUCV’ille -- this time, a prayer of joy for Ayiti:

I am grateful to Greg & Tim for lifting up, amongst other things, courage and 'anticipatory resistance' in last week's worship service. And I'm grateful to Haitian elders, teachers, family, friends and even strangers for the following: for modelling and teaching me about courage; for the Haitian practice of saying 'kouraj' (pronounced kou-RAJ) - courage - to each other in the face of innumerable difficulties & injustices; for sharing their kouraj with me so that - even though I am sometimes frustrated or worried, often enraged, and on rare occasion even afraid - what I feel most is kouraj; for teaching me to 'never be afraid to start over' and that the root of kouraj is 'coeur' - in English, heart - and to truly embody kouraj is to lead with the heart, to lead with love; and, finally, that love is not just a feeling but an action. And sometimes that action is building a whole culture that looks like 'anticipatory resistance'.

I was not multitasking furiously in the Social Hall at UUCV’ille this past Sunday when Rev. Tim read this prayer to the congregation, punctuated by a solemn but powerful ‘Amen!’ Instead, I was amidst a small but mighty group of women listening over Zoom as we prepared a beautiful meal together. Later, we would bathe, dress and construct a simple yet stunning altar in honor of Danbala Wedo and Metres Ezili Freda, singing songs and making music for them, before sitting in the presence of these great Spirits to channel and receive wisdom and blessings which - days later - continue to bring me great joy, peace and faith.

Earlier that morning, when I referenced the terrifying violence gripping the capital, one of these beloved women had asked a brilliant clarifying question: did I mean the capital of Ayiti, or did I mean the capital of the entire Western Hemisphere? As much as I love - and think and talk about - Ayiti, I’d never thought to frame it in such simple terms: Ayiti as capital of this hemisphere - this ‘New World’ -- or why not the world, even? It all depends, I suppose, on whose vision of the world and our purpose in it you’ve allowed to colonize your mind. I didn’t know it when she asked the question - even though I’d spoken to her about Ayiti many times before - but my friend had visited the country as a child with her American missionary parents; her question revealed the vast distance between the missionary’s stunted understanding of Ayiti and the far deeper understanding of one open enough - courageous enough - to be touched by Ayiti’s truth: the people and the nation who sacrificed the only thing they had left - life - to liberate themselves and the world from colonization, chattel slavery and the ancestor-denying, spirit-killing, brainwashing, earth-&-humanity-endangering system of white supremacy and other interlocking systems of oppression.

If, in this moment, for whatever reason, you feel this has nothing to do with you, consider me snatching you by the lapels with my words right now: preceding and concurrently with the rise of the United States, the same rise of interlocking systems of oppression which tried so hard - and in many cases succeeded - to erase your memory of who you really are, and which serves up Ancient Greece & Rome as our heritage but which represents a time when Indigenous Europeans still widely practiced earth-bound ancestral healing traditions as the “Dark Ages” and sweeps under the rugs the 9 million women and other people who were violently murdered in the witch hunts of Europe, and which convince rational people who valorize science to live at odds with the scientific reality that the vast majority of all our human Ancestors lived on the Afrikan²continent and even looked ‘Black’ for the majority of the much shorter period of time they lived outside of Afrika (yes, even those in Europe)... that same rise of interlocking systems which did all that to YOU is trying to subjugate Ayiti and Haitians, whether at home or abroad, while simultaneously omitting or twisting Ayiti’s proud past. Only unlike the witch hunts, etc which some of our Ancestors lost, Haitians won.

As much as the marginalization and neglect of Ayiti’s history and current events, and both the asset and later exploitation of its natural and human resources, has been part and parcel of the rise of the American project, in this critical moment - when the White House is self-destructing from the inside out, and compromising with it this same American project - it behooves Americans to open their eyes and hearts to what can be learned from Ayiti. Not just about the past but also about the way forward. Ayiti, rooted in both the Africana ways of the majority of its inhabitants whose Ancestors were brought there in chains and those of the indigenous Taino people who peopled the land when Columbus and his men invaded: Ayiti - its history, culture, ways of knowing, movement of memory, people and Spirits - is the most powerful source of freedom in history and the world, of which too many in the US (and beyond) who claim to value freedom and democracy are unaware, let alone turning towards in this critical moment. Perhaps this little butterfly K.I.S.S. will change that; this is my hope and prayer.

During Black History Month - what Baba Carr refers to on his various platforms as ‘the Blackest History Month’ - in reference to the current historical moment of blatant white supremacy and blatant disregard for both political custom and the rule of law from those in the highest places of power in the American political-economic system, Carr provoked his Africana audience to learn, study and look to their Ancestors’ achievements of the deep past as well as their historic resistance to the same powers-that-be which enslaved their Ancestors and master-minded the American project but whose current onslaught is now seen and felt by a wider swath of the population. Including, I would add, those who’d previously been seduced - and/or remain faithful to - this American nightmare. Although Baba Carr did not directly reference Ayiti or the Haitian Revolution in that moment, he often does. And so in closing this parallel discourse about how to resist - and survive - this moment, I draw on the same wise words he shared with his audience: “How are you gonna fight if you don’t know what weapons you have?”

1. ‘Ayiti’ is the Haitian Kreyol name for ‘Haiti’. Please note that in this essay, I am using Haitian Kreyol spellings - minus the accents. Forthcoming is a glossary for frequently used Kreyol and Africana vocabulary on this Substack.

2. ‘Afrikan’ is the preferred spelling of ‘African’ among a subset of Africana scholars and activists. Forthcoming is a glossary - including more in depth context - for frequently used Kreyol and Africana vocabulary on this Substack. To learn more about this spelling, see the first essay published on this Substack : “Why I write, Why now, and Why ‘BlakBlan’…”