A Tribute to Haiti I - Icon, Model and Mirror of the Past, Present and Future of the New World.

To help rebuild Haiti it is needed to understand Haiti, and her heroes from yesterday, now, and ever.

That is a history that I will try to explain from now on, as I, myself, also come pursuing to learn about it. Getting touched more and more by its epic grandeur that seems to have no end.

Understanding the complex Ayiti, we may really understand the why and how to help effectively to rebuild a renewed but coherent Ayiti, as it was at once: INDEPENDENT, proud, generous and strong. That is a matter of honor for the world and specially for the whole Americas.

Moreover, this "Millennium" earthquake should also be the great motivator for us to show ourselves that we can, starting with Ayiti (put again as vanguard and model) ... we can, together and focused, to achieve the Millennium Development Goals and build a New New World in its entirety.

The immeasurable disaster happens at the exact moment of the greatest global crossroads we have in the life of all of us who are alive. 

I have, at each new document or testimony I look at, each untold fact that I find, an even more increased and unshakable certainty that the path, for the better shared Earth we all demand, has now to go through a renewed Ayiti. 

Under our free will is the choice among the possible paths - progress or retrogression. 

"A tragedy is a very huge opportunity - of learning and union - to be wasted."

By now, I stop here. Soon, I will begin to replace my tears for sweat.

By now, rests alone the total feeling of void, occasionally interrupted by the questions that I think will never shut up:

• Why D. Zilda Arns and all who were there (as the UN staff and many others) only to help, to support?
• Why our and other peacekeepers?
• Why all the tens of thousands of our brothers and sisters of the First Free Nation in Americas - without neither overseas owner nor internal slavery -, sons and daughters of The First Black Republic in the World, heirs and heiresses of the heroes that spread the Liberty will abroad the whole Continent? Why such suffering?
• Why - as it may seem absurd to think this time about the cold / blanket fitness (but that is the way I honestly feel) ... Why this heroic country, today already tired of so much prejudice-fighting, wars, natural disasters, domestic and imposed political, economic, and social crisis?
• Why? Why Ayiti?

There is not how to express this feelings into words.

Otherwise, I will do as did Euclides da Cunha - the great Brazilian writer (in his inauguration statement at The Brazilian Academy of Writers, discussing about the Brazilian 100 years anti-slavery struggle, humbled and saying himself wordless) using the verses of our greatest abolitionist poet Castro Alves, whom among other inspirations had the Revolution of Saint Domingue (now Ayiti) as a muse:

God! O God! Where are you that you do not answer! 

On what world, what star have you hidden yourself 
Veiled in heaven? 

For two thousand years I have cried out to you, 

In vain, it has echoed through an empty heaven . . . 

Where are you, Lord God?. (...)

Christ! In vain you died on a mountain 

Your blood will not cleanse my brow of The original stain. 

Yet today, by unlucky fate, 

My children-beasts of burden for the universe 

I---pasturage for all. 

Today my blood feeds America Condor, 

you have made yourself into a vulture, 

Bird of slavery. She draws nearer, . . . traitorous sister! 

Which of Joseph's vile brothers, 

For the other Will sell his brother! 

Enough, Lord! 

Send forth your potent Arm, 

across the stars of space 

Forgiveness for my crimes! 

For two thousand years I have had one cry ... 

Listen to my protest from your everlasting throne, 

My God! Lord, My God!!! (...)  

*Atrocious fatality that the mind crushes! 

Extinguish now the dirt brig, 

The track that Columbus opened in the waves, 

Like an iris in the deep abyss! 

But this is too much infamy!.. 

of the ethereal land Rise, 

heroes of the New World!  

Andrada, rip that flag of the air! 

Columbus, close the door of your seas!

"Voices from Africa" (excerpt) *w/ "The Slave Ship" (excerpt)

Antônio de Castro Alves (died at 24)

São Paulo, June 11, 1868 

(YEAR 77 of the Emancipation in Ayiti)

Dedicated to D. Zilda Arns.