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The "This is Haiti" public service announcements
can be heard at www.greenff.org/
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"Alan Lomax In Haiti" box set: thehaitibox.blogspot.com/
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1930s recordings preserve 

Haiti's cultural wealth

By JENNIFER KAY, Associated Press Writer

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

(02-24) 04:00 PST MIAMI, (AP) --

 
At 21, Alan Lomax went to Haiti and recorded its citizens making music — songs about Voodoo, carnival politics, children's games and the first airplanes crisscrossing its Caribbean skies in the late 1930s.

He preserved the sounds on aluminum discs for the Library of Congress, but they were largely forgotten for seven decades as they sat in the library's archives.

Recently discovered, they were compiled into a box set released last fall. Haitian music scholars called it a "cultural archive" that documents the daily triumphs that get missed whenever a crisis in Haiti makes the news.

The catastrophic earthquake last month that killed more than 200,000 people was the latest crisis.

Now, the set's curator hopes "Alan Lomax in Haiti" will teach people that Haiti's culture remains intact, even when so many of its arts institutions have collapsed.

Music from the 10-disc box set, released by Harte Recordings, is featured in three radio public service announcements seeking aid for Haiti.

"It's too easy for people to just periodically feel sorry for Haiti," Gage Averill said. "Very few people except those who travel to Haiti understand just how much Haiti has to offer, how lovely a country it is, how generous a country it is."

Lomax was a newlywed ethnomusicologist when he set out to record the music of Haiti in 1936 and 1937, just following a 15-year American military occupation of Haiti.

He lugged his equipment into the mountains beyond the capital, Port-au-Prince, in search of ordinary people instead of polished performers and ended up with 1,500 recordings.

Ultimately, digital copies will be returned to Haiti, as some of Lomax's recordings from other Caribbean countries have been returned to those islands.

He found a wide range of music, from Boy Scout troops, religious processions, dances and bands of sugar cane cutters who brought back rhythms from Cuba.

Many of the Haitian Creole lyrics convey the impact of poverty and life in close quarters.

There also are songs about Haiti's global isolation after its slave rebellion and French ballads.

"The French romances (ballads) are not about courtly affairs and knights, but about the first time someone saw an airplane," Averill said.

When the earthquake struck near Port-au-Prince on Jan. 12, the box set's collaborators looked for a way to use the music to help the relief effort.

It could show a different picture of Haiti than just a country of rubble; it also could immediately restore something that was lost, they thought.

"My feeling was, at a time like this, people don't just think of bread and water all the time," Lomax's daughter, Anna Lomax Wood, said. "They think of everything that is jeopardized in their lives — everything in their culture."

Actor Fisher Stevens and Kimberly Green, president of the Miami-based Green Family Foundation, produced the radio PSAs.

Like other urgent appeals for donations after the earthquake, they feature celebrities — Naomi Watts, Ben Stiller and Sting — seeking pledges to The Clinton Foundation and Partners in Health.

"This is Haiti," the celebrities say over three music clips selected from the box set.

They note the country's stature as the first black republic in the world after a slave rebellion succeeded in 1804, then its proximity to the United States.

Only in closing do they note Haiti's poverty and previous disasters.

The three songs selected for the PSAs share a sense of danger, Averill said.

In each, the singers call out to the gods for help, but they also prepare to take matters into their own hands if an adversary comes to close.

In a carnival song, a community girds itself against an unseen adversary.

A song from a Voodoo ceremony implores the gods to soothe some trauma and relieve the singers' agony.

Lastly, in a procession of sacred music, the band honors a particular supporter with a refrain that's still familiar, more than 70 years after it was recorded.

The refrain of one song indicates some beliefs have not changed much since Lomax's time. "After God, the priest,"   a rara band sings, honoring the entities they considered supportive. After the earthquake, some Haitians uttered a similar refrain, describing the entities most likely to help them: "After God, the United Nations."

Green said she hopes to broadcast Lomax's recordings on Haitian radio stations as they come back on the air, to inspire the preservation of culture even if museums and concert halls won't be rebuilt for years.

"I hope it can provide some solace to people, some strength," Lomax Wood said.
 

------------------------------------------------
Go to Original (SF Gate) >
------------------------------------------------
The "This is Haiti" public service announcements
can be heard at www.greenff.org/
------------------------------------------------
"Alan Lomax In Haiti" box set: thehaitibox.blogspot.com/
------------------------------------------------

Avengers of the NewWorld

“If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint-Domingue who insisted that human rights were theirs too...”
 

Laurent Dubois Avengers of the NewWorld
The Story of The Haitian Revolution

Prologue Excerpts

On new year’s day 1804, a group of generals gathered in Saint-Domingue to create a new nation. Their leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, had once been a slave. So, too, had several of the men who joined him in signing their declaration of independence. Some had been born in Africa and survived the middle passage; others, including Dessalines, had been born into slavery in the French colony. They signed their names next to those of men who had once been slave owners, including one apparently was nicknamed “the good white.” Many were men of mixed European and African descent who had been free long before the Revolution began, several of whom had fought against Dessalines in a brutal civil war a few years earlier. Now, however, they stood behind him to declare that they had forever renounced France, and would fight to the death to preserve their independence and freedom. "I have avenged America". Jean-Jacques Dessalines (1804) Haiti was founded on the ashes of what had been, fifteen years before, the most profitable slave colony in the world Its birth premised on the self evident truth that no one should be a slave. It was a dramatic challenge to the world as it then was. Slavery was at the heart of the thriving system of merchant capitalism that was profiting Europe, devastating Africa, and propelling the rapid expansion of the Americas. The most powerful European empires were deeply involved and invested in slavery’s continuing existence, as was much of the nation to the north that had preceded Haiti to independence, the United States. For decades Saint-Domingue had been the leading example of the massive profits that could be made through the brutal institution. Then, in 1791, the colony’s slaves began a massive uprising. It became the largest slave revolt in the history of the world, and the only one that succeeded. Within a few years these Caribbean revolutionaries gained liberty for all the slaves in the French empire. The man who came to lead Saint-Domingue in the wake of emancipation, Toussaint Louverture, had once warned the French that any attempt to bring slavery back to the colony was destined to fail. Although he did not live to see it, he was proven right. When freedom was threatened by Napoleon Bonaparte’s regime, the people of Saint-Domingue fought successfully to preserve it. Through years of struggle, brutal violence, and imperial war, slaves became citizens in the empire that had enslaved them, and then founders of a new nation… During the nineteenth century an economically and politically isolated Haiti became the object of scorn and openly racist polemic… The revolution began as a challenge to French imperial authority by colonial whites, but it soon became a battle over racial inequality, and then over the existence of slavery itself. The slaves who revolted in 1791 organized themselves into a daunting military and political force, one ultimately embraced by French Republican officials. Facing enemies inside and outside the colony, these Republicans allied themselves with the insurgent slaves in 1793. They offered freedom in return for military support, which quickly led to the abolition of slavery in the colony. The decision made in Saint-Domingue was ratified in Paris in 1794: the slaves of all the French colonies became citizens of the French Republic. These events represented the most radical political transformation of the “Age of Revolution” that stretched from the 1770s to the 1830s. They were also the most concrete expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed in France’s 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen were indeed universal. They could not be quarantined in Europe or prevented from landing in the ports of the colonies, as many had argued they should be. The slave insurrection of Saint-Domingue led to the expansion of citizenship beyond racial barriers despite the massive political and economic investment in the slave system at the time. If we live in a world in which democracy is meant to exclude no one, it is in no small part because of the actions of those slaves in Saint-Domingue who insisted that human rights were theirs too...  

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H. E. Mr. President Lula da Silva sends to Parliament US$ 200M bill on aid to Haiti.

Thursday, January 21, 2010 at 18:29
Memorial to the Brazilian military dead in Haiti

The Bill sent to Congress on Thursday (Jan, 21st) provides financial assistance in more than R$ 350 million (approx. US$ 200M) for Haiti, according to the minister of Institutional Relations, Alexandre Padilha.

The Bill adds for the R$ 15 million already announced by President Lula in the days following the disaster last week, more R$ 205 million from the Ministry of Defense for use in humanitarian aid and R$ 135 million from the Ministry of Health that aims to build and equip 10 Emergency Care Units (UPA) on Haitian soil.

Padilha also said that President Lula has recommended to the Health Minister that he immediately begin the process of construction of the UPAs, as the people of Haiti have urgent demand for primary health care. 

The government also wants to increase military peace forces in Haiti in more than 1.3 thousand military and another message will be sent to Congress. 

By now the Caribbean country will receive more than 900 men of the Brazilian Armed Forces to join the more than 1,200 yet there.