WE THE NEWS — JULY 23, 2017
We the News is a newsstand that distributes and sells black immigrant-focused publications and products. It features zines that archive stories and conversations shared by immigrants and first-generation Americans during a series of story circles lead by artist Lizania Cruz in partnership with the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. We the News first iteration is possible thanks to the support of the Laundromat Project. wethenews.net
Acknowledging History:
Embracing and Honoring Haitian Nationalism
This is an excerpt from a We the News story circle that took place at Caribbeing House in Flatbush on July 23rd, 2017. The story circle explored questions around transnational identity, honoring and embracing heritage and race. Albert (Al) is a second generation Haitian, currently residing in Brooklyn, New York. Below is a conversation between Albert and Lizania Cruz (Interviewer). My name is Albert St. Jean, I’m from Elizabeth, New Jersey, by way of Florida, and I reside in Brooklyn, Crown Heights. My family’s from Haiti. They came here in 1970. My grandmother lived right here on Flatbush and Parkside, on the block we’re on right now, across the street. When my grandmother first came, the way [that] she was able to get in [was by taking] another name. There was a person ahead of her, [my grandmother’s] last name was Prosper. But the person ahead of her, their [last] name was Moreau. When that guy died she basically adopted his name and took his place on his visa to be able to get over here. From that point on, for the next twenty years, my grandmother’s last name was Marole. For very long I didn’t know it was, I thought that was her actual name. When she came, she was working as a domestic for Jewish families and she would tell me about how she was mistreated and everything. One thing though—[this] was a different country when she first got here—she was able to find a job in a factory out in Jersey and she bought a home. In that way, she sent for her husband and started bringing everybody over one by one. By the time I came along in ‘83, our house was basically just a transitional place for people that were coming [from] the island to settle, get themselves situated, get into their own, and then start to establish themselves. The only thing is, by the time these people started coming around, the country wasn’t the same as it was for my grandmother when she first came over. Basically, manufacturing wasn’t there—they didn’t get the factory jobs that she had. [Instead], a lot of them had to drive cabs and if they didn’t do that, some of them got into selling drugs. A few of them got into using drugs. So the generation that came after had to struggle with a bit more than she did. Especially around this time, there was the big issue [with] the [Haitian] refugee crisis. 1
In school, my aunts and uncles would get into fights all the time, and the thing about it was [that] it was mainly other black people that they would have to fight with. My aunts would tell me [about] how they would be friendly with Puerto Ricans, but for some reason, with black Americans, they wouldn’t get along; which I thought was bizarre, because we’re pretty much the same people. Also around this time my father—he had left before I was born—he was with my mother but most of his family was in Miami. Back then there weren’t that many Haitians in Miami, [from what they told me] they were just coming over by accident. [E]verybody was going to the Bahamas to work and they ended up, [accidentally], washing up on the shores of south Florida. My father, he took a boat, not a raft, but an actual cruise ship from [the] Bahamas to Miami. Anyhow, he knew my mother from Haiti, he came up to New York—or New Jersey, they got married, the whole nine. He moved back to Florida before I was born. My mother stayed with me for a few months and then went back, you know, because our family’s Catholic. When you’re Catholic, regardless of what the circumstances are, you have to stick together, you can’t divorce, so on and so forth. Who was the president in Haiti at the time? At that time? It was Duvalier (Papa Doc). By the time my mother came it was Baby Doc, but when my grandmother came it was Papa Doc. At the time that she came they were straight up massacring people. Just straight up. At that time Cubans had the Wet Foot Dry Foot [policy]. In Cuba, unlike in Haiti, they would throw you in jail....In Haiti they would massacre..., [y]et, this was a government that was supported by the United States because they were anti-communist or whatever. So my family, being very left-leaning—and my grandmother wanting better for her children, especially for her daughters—she wanted to get up out of that. She didn’t want to stay there anymore. Plus, some of my grandfather’s family members were targeted. So just like that, people left. When the 80’s came around (in like ’86 when Baby Doc got kicked out of the country), a lot of the people that [were] under their regime, a lot of their assassins and everything, they came over too. So I have family out in Queens, and you have some of these people that were hitmen, they are still alive to this day just roaming freely and everything. That was the backdrop, the political backdrop of what was going on then. 2
Did your parents tell you stories about Haiti that you remember? Yeah, my uncle told me a story about a neighbor of hers who during the dictatorship—this was during the time that my grandmother was in the U.S. working to bring them over—she told me how the Macoute, [a term for] henchmen, how they would go next door to the neighbors and threaten them. Because the neighbor’s wife was pretty, one of the guys had a crush on her. So they had the husband thrown in jail for some frivolous reason, and while he was in jail they told the wife, “If you want to free him, you either have to come up with such and such money or you have to give yourself.” I forget what happened exactly, but she did end up trying to get him freed the other way, but the guy killed himself, or they suspected they killed him anyway. There were worse stories [that they] would tell. A lot of cruelties. What is a [Macoute]? [Macoute] is like the henchmen. My father would tell me about the 70s—and when he would take the boat to Miami before there was a big Haitian community there—that Bahamians were the [first] ones. First they helped build the city and a lot of them were being discriminated against. Places like, where Wynwood is now in Miami— back then [that area] used to be communities where these people would live. African Americans, Bahamian people, and Puerto Ricans. He told me how intense the racism was at that time. My mother was the type to complain about Americans and say, “Americans, they don’t work as hard, they’re lazy...they don’t have morals like we do.” But my father would be like, “Listen, I was here, and it wasn’t even that long ago when you see how they were being treated.” When you see the intensity of discrimination—I [have] seen people who were qualified for things but [were] barred from going to certain places. Someone that’s qualified to be like a surgeon or whatever, can’t get a job at any hospital [here] so he has to work as a maintenance person until he can save up enough money to go elsewhere. He said those type of things could break you down. He’d try to explain that to my mother. Anyhow, my grandmother, her stories, she doesn’t really talk about the dictatorship that much. She doesn’t like to talk about [that] era. A lot of people in my family, they don’t like to. Some of them haven’t even gone back in the 40 years since they left.
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When I was young my mother was afraid of having us go to Haiti. She was afraid of having us go to Haiti because she was afraid that something would happen to us. One day in like ‘92, I was like 9 years old, I was watching the T.V. and I saw [on] the 6 o’clock news that this priest got killed in front of a church down there [in Haiti]. So I go back and tell my grandma about it; I’m like, “They killed a priest over there, that’s how bad they are,” and this was after the Macoute time, after Baby Doc and everything. This was during the reign of a man called [Cédras], [h]e was a general. When my grandmother saw it, she was shocked because that was her cousin. The priest that they killed was her cousin. They killed him basically for speaking out because it was a few months after they had ousted Aristide and everything. Anyhow, all that stuff in the news, growing up, [that] would cause people to look at Haitians negatively. Every time we were depicted on the news we were either helpless, or we just weren’t put in a good light; [j]ust desperate people. But my reality, what I was seeing, was not like that; [e]verybody had a hustle, everybody had some kind of a drive, whether if it was legal or illegal. People weren’t gonna just sit on [their] ass[es]. They just felt like they came here for a reason and they wanted to accomplish something. Mad people in my family went to school, a lot of people went and got their doctorate, but at the same time, some people went to jail, some people got deported. A lot of that just has to do with being black in this county. You know what I mean? Because we live in neighborhoods where you’re always policed, neighborhoods that are economically depressed, we gotta find different ways of making money. I was always surrounded by ambitious people, so when people would say things about Haitians— like, I remember one of the biggest jokes when I was young was HBO. “You got HBO?” and [you] would be like, “No, I don’t have cable, what are you talking about?” and then [they’d say], “No, Haitian Body Odor.” Like, “What?” Yeah, that was something that the Jamaicans and the Trinis used to say. What else was there? I remember one kid, when I moved to Florida, asked me if I ate cat. I was like, “Cat? Where you get that from?” He was like, “Yeah, we heard ya’ll eat cat.” I had never heard this to this day in my life. I [have] never heard of anything like that. I don’t know, that was how it was and the only fights I ever had in my life were, I think, [were] because of 4
nationality… Yeah, stuff like that. Getting into fights over that. A lot of the other Haitian kids I knew, they didn’t wanna say what they were. They were afraid to tell people what they were. I think a lot of that is because their parents didn’t teach them about the history. You know what I mean? They didn’t teach them about the revolution, they didn’t [teach] them about [Haiti being] the first black republic, the first independent nation of Latin America, and how we helped out Simon Bolivar to go fight against Spain in…
Learn about Haiti’s dictators.
You guys started everything. Yeah, we paid for it. Paid out the ass for it. For sure. Still paying for it. Yeah, for real. Yeah. I mean, I learned about all those things, and even though people had all those stereotypes and everything, it was hard for me to become a “Ja-fake-in.” A lot of kids would say they would tell people they were Panamanian, tell people they were Jamaican or Dominican or something like that. Or just try to say they were American and never let their friends meet their parents.
President François Duvalier (b. April 14, 1907), also known as Papa Doc, was the President of Haiti from 1957 to 1971. He was elected president in 1957 on a populist and black nationalist platform and successfully thwarted a coup d’état in 1958. His rule, based on a purged military—a militia known as the Tonton Macoute—and the use of cult of personality, resulted in the murder of 30,000 to 60,000 Haitians and the exile of many more during his presidency.
I had one cousin, he told me when [he] got here (and he was born in Haiti),”Don’t tell people that we’re cousins,” because, ”Everybody knows you’re Haitian.” So he was going around telling people that he was from France. Until people started picking on him, then he was my cousin again. I would tell people to stop fuckin’ with him and everything; people would start [teasing him] because he had a funny accent, you would say a “goofy” accent. He was very boisterous. What do you think made you speak out about being Haitian at such a young age? Instead of like what you were saying, that your friends were not..? Because [of] my grandfather, he was always big on the history. Also the fact that my family [is] very prideful and I was [apart of] the community that we were in, and [that community] wasn’t like what people were saying. It was kind of just being grounded in that reality.
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Jean Claude Duvalier (b. July 3rd, 1951), also known as “Baby Doc” (Bebe Dòk, in Haitian Creole) was the President of Haiti from 1971 until he was overthrown by a popular uprising in 1986. He succeeded his father François “Papa Doc” Duvalier as the ruler of Haiti after the latter’s death in 1971. After assuming power, he introduced cosmetic changes to his father’s regime and delegated much authority to his advisors. Thousands of Haitians were killed or tortured, and hundreds of thousands fled the country during his presidency. He maintained a notoriously lavish lifestyle (including a state-sponsored $2 million wedding in 1980) while poverty among his people remained the most widespread of any country in the Western Hemisphere.
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