thesmithian-blog reblogged
blackpoemusic-deactivated202009
Exercising power. Even if you lose. Liberate your right to be.
Photo: Domicanan Republic
-imaginarythoughts-
This is the hardest picture I’ve seen
[look of the day]
There are border crossings and hyphenations. Dominican, but not. Haitian, but not. Black Latino. Father. Poet. One of the fiercest writers...One of the most tender. Back-and-forth between Spanish and English. Rakim name-dropped alongside Ravitch. Some references cited and explained—Paolo Freire, for example – but the hip hop lyrics aren’t; it’s up to the reader to decode, not to Vilson to translate. That flips the rules of power and culture and literacy...
more.
'an estimated 200K Dominican citizens of Haitian descent may be people without a nation...And in Boston, where large numbers of Haitians and Dominicans have emigrated, people are left to debate how best to protest...
Among local residents of Haitian and Dominican descents, there have protests, including one earlier this month in Boston outside the Dominican consulate in Park Plaza...Estimated at 36,000—with some officials saying it could be as high as 90,000—Massachusetts’ Haitian-American population is among the highest in the country. Massachusetts Representatives Michael Capuano, Joe Kennedy, Niki Tsongas, and James McGovern joined several other members of Congress in a letter of protest to the Dominican government. But some feel only economic pressure will work. There’s talk of a boycott, but, so far, not enough pressure has been exerted to reverse the decision. The United States, overall, has been docile about the controversy.
more.
Haiti and the Dominican Republic have launched talks aimed at resolving [the] dispute triggered by a Dominican court ruling stripping citizenship from hundreds of thousands of people of Haitian descent...
more.
Thousands of critics of Haiti's Pres. Michel Martelly staged protest marches...among the biggest demonstrations against Martelly since he took office in 2011...the crowd in the capital swelled as protesters passed each neighbourhood. Their complaints ranged from the cost of living to high levels of government corruption.
more.
The court's ruling...is an aberration which seems to draw inspiration from Hitler's laws, by which Jews who had lived in Germany for centuries were deprived of their nationality...The judges know well...that immigration from Haiti to Dominican Republic has gone on for at least a century, being positively encouraged by Dominican landlords and businessmen in times of prosperity, and tolerated by the authorities. The country (or at least, its middle and upper classes) has benefited from the existence of a mass of cheap labor, with no job contracts, social security, or legal rights in general. One of the worst crimes committed during the tyranny of Generalísimo Trujillo was the indiscriminate massacre of Haitians in 1937, in which tens of thousands of...immigrants were murdered, mostly by mobs enraged by populist rhetoric. No less grave...is this Constitutional Court ruling, which...orders authorities to conduct a rigorous scrutiny of all birth registrations back to 1929, to determine which persons then had no right to Dominican nationality, so that their descendants may now be deprived of it. These people of Haitian origin, recent or remote, would thus become zombies, unqualified to obtain a legal job, study at a university or leave the country—all the usual rights of citizenship. Why? Well, for the same reason as Hitler's victims. I am aware that racism is a widespread disease, and that no country, however civilized, is quite safe from it, especially when scapegoats are required to distract people from real problems and real culprits. But we have seen this too many times not to speak out against it, to try to prevent the tragedies that sooner or later must come of it.
Mississippi, our own Haiti, land of poverty, despair, and early death, turns down free federal money in order that its poorest don’t get medical care? It can’t even be selfishness among the plutocrats: how is it good for business that its workforce is sicker? It’s simply cruelty, far beyond the possible bounds of policy debate or the scope of ideology, an abomination no religion can countenance. What did these people’s parents raise them to be? What were they told in Sunday School?
Michael O'Hare, at A Reality Based Community
thesmithian-blog reblogged
dlted-deactivated20181019
Haiti, 1950 by George Rodger
[look of the hour]
Often when you’re an immigrant writing in English, people think it’s primarily a commercial choice. But for many of us, it’s a choice that rises out of the circumstances of our lives. These are the tools I have at my disposal, based on my experiences. It’s a constant debate, not just in my community but in other communities...Where do you belong? You’re kind of one of us, but you now write in a different language. You’re told you don’t belong to American literature or you’re told you don’t belong to Haitian literature. Maybe there’s a place on the hyphen, as Julia Alvarez so brilliantly wrote in one of her essays. That middle generation, the people whose parents brought them to other countries as small children, or even people who were born to immigrant parents, maybe they can have their own literature too.
“Remember that love is like kerosene...The more you have, the more you burn.” The question that follows is: Does the burning illuminate or consume? In this novel, both...
more.
among the books author Edwidge Danticat suggests when asked:
What books, recent or otherwise, would you recommend about Haiti?
"This...event is proof of the consequences of continuing forced evictions in Haiti," Javier Zuniga, a special advisor to Amnesty International, said...about the standoff. "They have been living in camps with appalling living conditions. As if this were not enough, they are threatened with forced evictions and, eventually, made homeless again."
more.
If they can’t come up with something that gives...opportunity for immigrants to come from Africa or Haiti yet they can give them to Ireland, I can’t vote for it...
Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX)
A growing number of members in the Congressional Black Caucus say they will not vote for an immigration reform bill that does not include diversity visas. The Senate’s bipartisan “gang of 8″ eliminated the 55,000 slot diversity visa program in their immigration legislation. There are 43 voting members of the CBC in the House.
Ten years of war have brought details of attacks like these to our towns through news, images, and the soldiers who saw and encountered them. Almost every hospital has a surgeon or nurse or medic with battlefield experience, sometimes several. Many also had trauma personnel who deployed to Haiti after the earthquake, Banda Aceh after the tsunami, and elsewhere. Disaster response has become an area of wide interest and study.
Atul Gawande, at the New Yorker.