Imagine that you are living your life in your trailer, or an apartment or a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, or a mansion. Now imagine that the neighbor next door in the duplex or in the penthouse or up the road with the bigger suburban house or MTVcrib decides to come around your yard and tell you how to run your affairs. Imagine that forty years ago when your parents were alive in the same house, these neighbors didn’t even talk to them because your ancestors had showed them up. They stepped out of line. But once these neighbors needed your parents, they started to talk to them even though in their eyes, they would never be good enough. So they started to mettle in your household. They have all sorts of advice, because they believe they are better than you. They know what is best for you, which is not surprising as it always serves their interests. Everyone else tells them so, and that includes your own family members who are rightly fearful of what life would be like without their protection.
Imagine that their concern, they say, is because you share the same street corner. You don’t always agree but you need them. They built your roads, they put in electricity and they buy from your garden. They have the power to influence all of your other customers into boycotting your products. How do you deal with them when they cross the line? You feel dissed. Should you, would you… do anything?
If you ask me, not enough has been written about the respect and politeness of a nation that has been invaded and penetrated by its biggest and baddest neighbor. Haiti, like other nations in the hemisphere, is a just another small symbol on a global monopoly board. Indeed, no one has talked enough about the disrespect of all kinds that Haiti has endured over the years by the most powerful nations in the world (especially France, the US and Canada).
1849- 1851 -1857 -1858- 1865- 1866- 1867- 1868- 1869- 1876- 1888- 1891- 1892 - 1902- 1903- 1904- 1905- 1906- 1907- 1908- 1909-1911- 1912- 1913- 1915- 1934.
During every single year mentioned here, United States navy fleets either surrounded Haiti or threatened to come onto the island shores in order to protect their interests. They finally did come onto the island. In 1915, they landed on the shores and stayed until 1934. They came back again in 1994-1996 to offer much needed deliverance and then again for our bicentennial in 2004. All these years don’t even include the times that secret ops of all kinds were going on in the country. Word is that they are not too different from the ways they do it in those spy movies.
Now let’s imagine again that the bully of a neighbor of yours, no no no, not the one next door who farmed bones at the end of their massacre river, the other one. Imagine that this big bad wolf comes sniffing around your pad nearly thirty times and with each visit gets increasingly aggressive. He insists that he is watching out for your wellbeing. You feel scared. Threatened. Under siege. You get increasingly worried. You make friends because that is what will work. Not all of you agree this is the way to go. Others attempt to a file a police report to no avail because the neighbor has not threatened to physically harm you and is smart enough to couch each trespass in terms of your common wellbeing. You can’t get a restraining order, but you know that you are being stalked. So what to do? Get a bodyguard? Go to the UN? Do you hire mercenaries?
Until 2001, in the US, the concept of being vulnerable was especially difficult for most rich people born after the second-world war to grasp. That changed to some degree with 9/11. Now imagine living on an island where the idea that others can come in at will is not strange but an expected occurrence, as we have lived with it for so long. Perhaps, those of us overly fascinated with respect are that way because we, as a nation, never quite received it from most of the world. In fact, we have always had to fight for it. In Haiti, we have been living with terror alerts of one kind or another since before the day we were born.
That being the case, why wouldn’t you want a spiritual bodyguard willing to take a bullet for you?
Mwen di Feray O m’blese.
O feray O m’blese.
Gade’m blese Feray
mwen pa we san mwen.