Listen, this is hard work.
Not just the language. That’s hard because it’s new. Learning a new language means learning new sounds and rhythms, learning new ways to think about something because “they don’t say it that way” becomes more and more frequent. You don’t just assemble words and phrases to match English syntax and vocabulary.
For example, there isn’t the idea of passive voice, so saying something in kreyòl ayisyen that’s expressed in English in the passive voice means rethinking what it is you’re trying to say. So learning the language is going to be hard the deeper you go because you’re going to have to learn how to think in the language.
Not just in the words, but in the style and formation. “We don’t say it that way” can lead to interesting insights into the meaning of thinking and the invisible biases we hold because we don’t think “that way” in our native tongue, so we accept without question some things that other people see quite clearly because their language doesn’t block them. Orwell had some great insight, y’all, when he set up his New English that simply blocked words from being spoken, and thereby made it nearly impossible to think about problems that might use those words.
But no, that is not the only hard thing, learning the language.
It’s also hard to learn the culture and learn the meaning of the language itself. Each time I dig into an aspect of Haitian culture I learn something new, something that gives me pause, something that reminds me or clarifies in me the fact that I am learning the language of a distinct, proud, independent, creative, enduring people.
There are some excellent videos on YouTube, for example, exploring the ordinary life of people existing without voice throughout the country, doing the things that people do because they exist. They aren’t the picture of Haiti that we see in the West. Haiti has been catastrophized by the West. Not just in the way that the West has brutally occupied and has attempted to extinguish as an independent entity. But the West also has a trope that Haiti is violent and dirty and chaotic, and not worth our time to acknowledge. Along with that is the heady dose of white saviorism whereby we we go “help” Haiti and go “save” Haitians.
My goodness, it is so very, very real, this attitude.
Either we do everything we can to reject Haitians as people (and frankly as people) in our fierce determination to not allow migration into the U.S. from people who bring all kinds of creativity and energy and value or we think of Haiti as a land of incompetent and ignorant people who are more aligned to mystery religions and death than they are to wholesome family values, who starve their children and keep them ignorant, who live among the ruins of the French and have no existence but to be the things that we must save and correct.
Goodness, what a nasty, negative picture that comes to light. It is apparent from the videos that most of Haiti is like any Caribbean country where people merely are trying to get things done in their lives. There are some truly baffling political & economic conditions that seem to prevent the general prosperity that is seen in the islands around them—but that’s a topic for another post. There are some significant issues in certain districts where violence controls the streets, and I won’t minimize that. But as terrible as that violence is, it is not the face of Haiti any more than an ignorant field worker is.
There is amazing creativity and culture and national identity in Haiti. There are amazing people doing creative things, building creative solutions for the problems that people experience everywhere as they struggle to accommodate themselves to their environment. There are many local and national initiatives to build schools and educate children. There are roads and bridges, sewers and water supplies, national expressions of a government that like most governments does try to get things done that are necessary for the improvement of the nation. (There are some problems in that, but they’re not unique to Haiti.)
In some ways, it’s a developing country that’s experiencing the pains of growth and development in the 21st century. But it also has a long history of culture and expression, and a fierce sense of pride and independence that has developed in spite of the attempts of first the French and then the United States to erase and instead stamp upon Haitians the culture of the West.
Just as it’s hard to learn the language if I keep trying to interpolate Creole words into English syntax, it’s hard to learn about Haiti if I am only learning about the country using the tropes and grids of the West. I can see that people from the West who go to Haiti to “explain” it to us carry that grid with them. The YouTube videos I see from moun blan are embarrassing. “Look at this thing that Haitians do. How exotic! How mysterious!” And the shopkeeper running the boutik just rolls her eyes. They have soursop piled up like apples because soursop are a food commodity that are about as common as apples. It’s not exotic. It’s normal. The desire to interpret Haiti in Western terms leads Western tourists to frequent the places that are most like the West—and perhaps least like Haiti. So you’ll go to the supermarket to get your stuff because “at least it looks like home,” and you’ll avoid the mache because it’s crowded and noisy and feels disorganized. But that’s the ordinary market, as ordinary as our supermarkets. The mache are not exotic. You are.
Anyway, it’s a thing to learn. It’s challenging. It makes me realize that I have to learn much more than a language. And sometimes I think I’m never going to understand any of it, and I’ll always be an outsider, due to my accent or my ignorance or even my appearance.
Still, I’m going to keep on learning. I’m enjoying the insights and the understandings. And I’m thoroughly enjoying the many people I meet along the way as I attempt to learn their language and find a way to perhaps see glimpses of the world they have created.