Man, it seems that every week I learn a deeper meaning of the first two Haitian Creole proverbs that I learned:
- Pale Kreyòl, Aprann Kreyòl – to speak Creole is to learn Creole.
- Dèyè Mòn Gen Mòn – Behind mountains are mountains.
The first has to do with the nature of learning a language. Creole is a fashioned-together language using grammatical elements of West African languages Fon and Gbe. To that add a very simplified spelling/pronunciation of French words that have been transmogrified into a consistent method of communication, sprinkled with added words from the vanished Taino/Arawak people, Spanish colonizers (Hispanola, the island where Haiti is found, is also home to the Dominican Republic, and there is a lot of back and forth in the history of Haiti and the DR of rulers and colonizers.) and English occupiers, plus the movement of have also salted the vocabulary with plenty of words that have become kreoyòlized into Anglesyen.
The language of Haiti clearly reflects its history, and clearly reflects another aspect of Haiti, and that is the divide between the upper-level Haitians who speak and write both French and Creole, and the 95-97% of the population who speak only Creole & that does not have much in the way of a uniform education in literacy. The law, the courts, the schools, and the main religious expressions are all in French, a language that’s not spoken by most people. When Haitian leaders speak to the people, they use French—and they aren’t understood. And yet French is held tightly by Haitians who speak it because it is the bastion of a Francophile culture that stands against the syncretizing of English-speaking America, which has tried a few times to make Haiti into an American colony and tried to make Haitian Creole into a language that represented American interests to make Haiti into an agricultural resource for America. The more the Americans tried to make Haitians learn to read their own language, the more Haiti resisted because they say (rightly) that America was trying to get control of their language.
Because, you see, Creole is the language of the people, made by the people. It’s not a language that was developed by the elites. It’s a language hammered out to help enslaved people from Africa find a way to communicate to each other as they were deliberately isolated from their own people to keep them incapable of resisting their enslavement by building a movement to overthrow their enslavers.
We celebrate that movement, though, on August 21, because in 1794 the Haitian people began their revolt that ended with the expulsion of their slave-masters, the French, in 1804. The first independent Black republic in the West.
The language reflects that. The mix, the nature of its widespread use, and the resistance towards accommodating the needs of America to regularize it are all found expressed in the language.
Indeed, you cannot learn to speak the language (pale, speak) without learning the language (aprann, know, learn). A course in teaching you Haitian Creole is going to teach you Haitian culture, history, and national identity. Because to learn the language, you have to learn about the nation.
And the second?
Behind every new thing that I learn there is another new thing yet to be discovered.
I’m reading children’s books to help me gain literacy. Children’s books are good for this because they usually have a simplified set of words and easier grammatical construction. So I can read them and pick up more easily.
And yet, I keep finding landmines of meanings.
In one book that I’m reading, in the very first story on the very first page, it opens with the HC equivalent of “Once upon a time after the great goudougoudou. (goo-doo-goo-doo)…” And I’m thinking, that’s not a word. But what is it?
It’s the sound of catastrophe and destruction when the ground shakes so hard that the world around you falls down and your predictable life is over.
The earthquake of 2010, which was 12 years ago, is the stuff of modern children’s stories.
It’s not just a word for earthquake. It’s a mini history lesson in a children’s story. (Most children’s stories from our past are similar, but we’ve erased the violence in them.)
So the story about the poor mice suffering because their homes were destroyed and they had no clean water is not a story about cute little mice.
And then I came across a word in a children’s story, “restavèk.” Literally “rest-with.” But it refers to the necessity of many families in Haiti, in desperate circumstances, needing to hire out their kids as “servants” for the upper class or the well-off. The children who are hired out become the utility shed for these homes, required to work dreadfully hard under incredibly harsh conditions. And yet what do you do when you are so poor that you cannot take care of your children, but perhaps they can at least be fed in a house where they will find a place to sleep out of the rain?
It’s a terribly harsh story. It is like a Cinderella story. But there is no prince and no castle. The ending is bleak. The adults who see these restavèk and turn away are as much the villains as the adults who use/abuse these children for their comfort.
It is a stark, sad story. And it is a children’s story. Not as a warning. But as a reality.
I believe that most parents want to do the best by their children. To have to give up a child in conditions like this is a choice so dreadful that I can’t imagine any mother or father doing this with anything except the most painful, terrible emotions, and to send off your child would put tremendous, life-long guilt upon your head.
But what do you do when you are incapable of thriving? You try to find that one slim hope that your children just might survive.
That is the story of the restavèk, and it is the mountain behind the mountain.
I know that there are still more mountains.