Learning a new language is hard, folks.
But yesterday I was talking with my Haitian friends in Haitian Creole for about an hour as we were planning how to set up our class to teach Haitians how to speak American English. Per my request, they talked a little more slowly and with fewer idioms than usual (although they did throw in an idiom that I got right away with my brain rapidly connecting the imagery with cultural aspects of Haiti, and man did that feel good that I did that!).
And I appreciate that putting in the work to learn the language and the culture has opened so many doors for new connections with new friends.
Learning about Haiti is necessary to learn Haitian Creole. No other way to understand the meaning of the language without that. You must understand how fiercely the Haitians fought for their own freedom to the point of developing their own complex-yet-simple language by stealing French vocabulary and grafting into their own grammatical constructions.
There are a lot of connections with the zansèt—the ancestors. They created the culture and the language of resistance, of hidden meanings expressed with open words, of dignifying Black Haitians despite the best efforts of European colonizers and slavemasters to destroy their humanity and make them into mules and oxen.
It’s a primary thing about the culture to understand this. The religion they developed to synchretize* Christianity with their own people‘s religions (vodou) represents this.
When you’ve been robbed of your history as a deliberate act of race extinction, you hold on to what you and others can remember, and the zansèt represent this continuing solidarity with their own people through time and history.
Every time I am talking with my friends my understanding of their lives deepens and extends.
It’s a wild ride, this language learning. I’m changed not just by the ideas of language itself, but by the exposure I have to the world seen through the eyes of another.
* Before you get all up in your feels about Haitians melding Christianity with their own religions, it is exactly the same as white American Christians melding the Christianity of Christ with the white culture of colonialization, empire, and enslavement.
I’m reading a book (“The Bible Told Them So: How Southern Evangelicals Fought to Preserve White Supremacy”) and while it’s nothing truly new to me, it does zero in on the confident religious authority white Southern Christians had toward opposing the equality of Black Americans because “the Bible clearly states that the white race is to be separate and above the Black race.”
The revolution in the Southern states was halted by tremendous federal and state actions to suppress the news about the Haitian revolution from spreading. And the resistance towards the equality of Black Americans is still deeply embedded in white American culture.