kiskeácity daily is out ! Editions of Saturday, Aug. 13 and Tuesday, Aug. 16, 2011

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Haiti - Head of Oxfam Haiti resigns (two articles, EN). Martelly's Chile visit: housing projects and Haitian community there (FR, EN). Martelly's back to school plans: 146,000 children in age of being schooled for the first time (FR). More on parliamentary crisis.


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From the blogs -  From www.Culture509.com, fiction about a restavèk named Ti Man Maille potentially slated to be filmed in Belgium (post is not clear). Haitian-American artist and educator Ella Turenne makes a plea for more stories of Haitian agency in rebuilding Haiti and less of ... Sean Penn (Huffington Post).

Caribbean - Toronto film about Caribbean diasporas from Suriname, Guyana, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic and the impact of their tourism in their home countries (MNIAlive.com). Upcoming Caribbean crafts convention in the Dominican Republic (MNIAlive.com). Sixth Gwoka (Guadeloupean drum) festival in Paris (Repeating Islands).

Video - Télé Métropole news for August 12: Martelly in Argentina, crime resurgence near displaced camps in Champs de Mars from the perspective of Senator Youri Latortue, the National Police and of camp dwellers. Jèn Kore Jèn youth summit: youth representative deplores disunity between President and Parliament.









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kiskeácity daily is out ! Edition of Saturday, Aug. 06, 2011

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Emily - Post-Emily assessment by department. (Apparently there was only one reported casualty.)

Politics and general news- Unrest after a student is shot near the National Palace. Martelly's reaction to the rejection of Gousse by Parliament. Death of human rights activist Jean-Claude Bajeux. Write up of recent Caribbean-American business conference held in Atlanta in July.

Culture - Le Nouvelliste showcases the poetry of Josaphat Large. Orchestre Septentrional has a new album. Margaret Papillon's audio book on AIDS. Emeline Michel and James Germain in concert at Fokal. Haiti Cultural Exchange featured in WQXR's Star Initiative.

Technology - Electronic database of Haitian civil records being created.

From the blogs - Defend.ht thinks the Haitian press should not enable the UN's overreaching into Haitian affairs. More under the #haiti hashtag section of the newsletter, including various pictures and a deploge performance by Medjy Toussaint on Chokarella.

Video - Kassav' sings its classic Rete in Miami.

Please note that all Haiti Libre articles featured in the newsletter can be found in both French and English on www.haitilibre.com. 


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kiskeácity daily is out ! Edition of Tuesday, Jul. 26, 2011

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Lots on Creole whether Haitian (Boston Globe), Jamaican (from the blog of Annie Paul) or Swiss-German;  more on Martelly and the CIRH as well as his tourism week tour, his visit to the North where he was attacked and the parliamentary/prime minister crisis including a plea by members of French parliament and Haitian industrialists to reach a consensus; death of a deputy. Nafissatou Diallo's first public appearance caught my eye as well.

The interesting blog posts are under the #Haiti tag. Topics include: Creoles and education in Haiti, Jamaica and Switzerland, a view of P-au-P, library updates by the Bibliothèques sans Frontières blog, upcoming Port-au-Prince arts and entertainment events including a conference on Jean Price-Mars as well as a letter by Haitians in Guadeloupe decrying the Haitian consulate there and OGLHaiti's upcoming radio show on the Haitian environment.

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I Give You Global Voices en Français for Francophonia Day

March 20th was la Journée Internationale de la Francophonie (Francophonia Day) and I had this to say on Global Voices for the occasion. Please please please check out Global Voices en Français and tell your interested friends when you get a chance. (Lire le billet en Français à ... Global Voices en Français, traduit par Claire Ulrich.) And please contact me in the comment section to volunteer if you are a French-English bilingual.




Today is March 20th was Francophonia Day. About 50 French-speaking countries and territories, some belonging to the Organisation Mondiale de la Francophonie and others not, will reflect on what it means to have French as a language --often alongside others. (Not to worry we will tell you what the bloggers said as soon as they've said it.)

At Global Voices, this day has special significance as well. One year ago, I was barely getting my feet wet as a novice Francophonia Editor, translating into English blurbs from the blogs of French-speaking countries who don't get much coverage in other media. Today as Global Voices Lingua team leader, I and wonderful francophones like India-based Haitian blogger Pascale Doresca, French journalist and Le Monde contributor Claire Ulrich and Malagasy blogger and GV author Lova Rakotomalala have been translating in the other direction, i.e. from English to French at Global Voices en Français. The goal is to bring more and more Francophones online into the global conversation. By translating Global Voices content into French, we hope to do just that.

See for yourself, the Global Voices en Français site is a work in progress but volunteer translators have been generating French-speaking GV content for Francophones for over a month. If you are a French-English bilingual, please contact us to join the team at francophonia [at] globalvoicesonline [dot] org.

Flashback. Inspired by Global Voices Latin-America Editor David Sasaki's workshop on GV and language at the GV 2006 Summit in Delhi, a group of francophone bloggers approached Global Voices co-founders Ethan Zuckerman, Rebecca MacKinnon and Portnoy Zheng about starting a Francophone GV page similar to Portnoy's then year old GVO China site over lunch at Delhi Day 2. Other language communities expressed interest and Project Lingua was born.

Lingua, which is still in its infancy, brings you more than just GV en Français. It comes in:

-Bangla http://bn.globalvoicesonline.org/
-Chinese (simplified) http://zh.globalvoicesonline.org/hans/
-Chinese (traditional) http://zh.globalvoicesonline.org/hant/
-French http://fr.globalvoicesonline.org/
-Portuguese http://pt.globalvoicesonline.org/
-Russian http://ru.globalvoicesonline.org/
-Spanish http://es.globalvoicesonline.org/

Please join me and the whole Lingua team by contributing your language skills to any of the above groups.

Francophonia Day is truly a multilingual day for us at Global Voices.

Technorati Tags: journée internationale de la francophonie, francophonie, global voices en français, lingua, claire ulrich, lova rakotomalala, pascale doresca, bangla, russski, portugues, french, chinese, español

Zouk Song Opened French César Awards (Videos)

Check out Valérie Lemercier, the hostess of the French César awards this year, performing a boisterous rendition of Zouk Machine's 80's hit Maldón, and in Creole too. The Césars are the French equivalent of the Oscars. Check out francophone blogger reactions to both the zouk performance and the Oscars and Césars in my latest Global Voices post: Francophone Bloggers on Oscars and Césars.

VALERIE LEMERCIER AUX CESAR

Oh and to take some of you down memory lane or for other's viewing pleasure, here is the original's video:

Zouk Machine - Maldon

Technorati Tags: césar, oscars, valérie lemercier, zouk machine, maldón, zouk

Carnaval Here, Carnaval There, Carnival Everywhere

Trinidad

• Georgia's pictures of the last hours of the trini bacchanal.

Brazil/Lusosphere

• Lusosphere: Reporting Carnival, Jose Murilo Junior's roundup at Global Voices of what local bloggers are saying about carnival in Brazil.
  

Martinique

• Pictures of Miss Carnaval 2007 and more by Amandine.
  

Guyane

• Walking, dancing Mother Natures by Photoblog de la Guyane.
  

Guadeloupe

• Carnaval Beignet recipe (FR).
  

Haiti

• Just in case you haven't been reading this blog in the past couple of days: the whole enchilada.
  

Photo by CaribbeanFreePhoto

Technorati Tags: brazil, carnaval

Carnival Kickoff & Digicel Soccer Cup in the Tropics

My latest Global Voices post is about carnival kickoff in the French Caribbean Overseas Departments (Guadeloupe, Martinique, Guyane). The post features 3 video clips of Guadeloupean mas bands Mas a Kle and Akiyo that I'm sure you'll want to see.

What's going on in Haiti on that front? Not sure. Bloggers have been preoccupied with other things but I'm sure there has been some sort of kickoff there too. (Update: HaitiXchange has just the answer to this question. Apparently, pre-carnaval festivities in Port-au-Prince have been attracting about as many people as carnival itself due to regained security.)

Not to mention, Kiskeyans are probably too busy celebrating the Caribbean Digicel Soccer Cup Championship title, subject of another post on GV and for which you can see soccerfabulous pictures here.

Photo by Alex DeCarvalho

Technorati: Digicel- Mas A Kle - Akiyo

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Bob Marley Survey + Wrong Song

• Caribbean blogger Geoffrey Philps had the marvelous idea of conducting a survey about Bob Marley and rastafari on his blog. Here are the results. Maybe I'll comment on them when I have more time. For now digest on your own. Too bad he did not include any questions on Bob and rastafari's views on the family and gender relations. That would have piqued my interest.
  

• I was browsing through some new guadeloupean blogs the other day and one, Bouillante Actualites, posted this YouTube video promoting Guadeloupe. I found slightly bizarre though that the lovely song chosen for the clip is ... Haitian?! (Michael Benjamin's Ou Pati Kite Mwen on the first Haiti Twoubadou album.) In this age of globalization and creolization, I don't really care about those distinctions, but the least the maker of the clip could have done is remove the part of the song where Michael screams "Haiti Twoubadou!". I mean the point of the thing is to promote Guadeloupe ... Is that common sense or did I wake up on the wrong foot?

bob marley - jamaica -haiti - guadeloupe - caribbean

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What Exactly is a Creole?

• Whatever the word Creole means, tons of people --or at least their elites-- claim they're it. But the word hardly ever means the same thing depending on where it's used and it is thus surprising that an IOCP (International Organization of Creole Peoples) exists.

A person of mixed-race or a person who speaks creole?

• In Louisiana and Trinidad, Creole seems to mean person of mixed race, some of their ancestry being French. In Haiti, mixed-race people are called Mulatto or Grimo but not Creole--despite what a recent Village Voice article seemed to imply-- and Creole designates the French-derived language spoken by all of the population, French proper only being the second most spoken language.

Creole Haitian style v. Creole Gwada style...

• In Martinique and Guadeloupe where the power structure is still French from France, Creole designates anything that is local (and therefore results from a mix of cultures that has been simmering ever since Columbus' arrival) and cannot be said to come from France alone: the cuisine, for example and more broadly the culture and language too of course.
• Creolite the academic movement was concocted in Martinique and Guadeloupe ("M&G" for short) by the likes of acclaimed novelists Raphael Confiant and Patrick Chamoiseau apparently to begin forging a Caribbean consciousness 1) in order to redress some of the lopsided Negritude of Cesaire, Senghor and their hyperintellectual buddies from Paris who believed in a (pan-African) Negro essence; 2) in the face of an uneasy French presence on M&G soil; 3) in the face of crushing European competition after France and all its overseas territories and departments--M&G included-- joined the EU. (Not only were locals having to compete with the french born who occupied most of the top bureaucratic spots in the two overseas departments, but they now had to contend with any Europeans who wished to do business there.)

• When Haitian roots band Boukman Eksperyans sang Se Kreyol nou ye (meaning We Are Creole) a decade or so ago, the statement had a significance somewhat distinct from M&G's Creolity movement. After all, Haiti has long ago severed ties from the French colonial structure, making it wholly unnecessary to assert anything vis-a-vis France or the relatively few French officials on Haitian soil. If anything, the statement was more about forcing Haitians to maybe think of themselves as belonging to the Caribbean (something our english-speaking West Indian counterparts had been thinking of for quite a while while building CARICOM), as opposed to wallowing in its historical isolation.
• And perhaps because in Haiti but also in M&G, the biggest association with the word Creole is still the language rather than Caribbeanity, increasing Caribbean consciousness is being expressed more and more with the words Caribeen, Caraibe, Cariban or in creole Karibeyen and only academics or ideologues use the word Creole to designate people. So Wyclef's song with Guadeloupean dancehall artist Admiral T opens with "Karibeyen nou ye, se Karibeyen nou ye." All of the new dancehall from M&G not only bandies about the word Caribbean --in english-- but also does its best to sound as Jamaican or Trini as possible despite singing in Creole, almost invariably ending rhymes and singing whole choruses in english-derived Patois.

Kreyol, French Caribbean or simply Haitian?

• That being said, certain groups of Haitians in America are reclaiming Creolity, probably to make the notion of Haitianity seem familiar i.e. Louisianian... So there is now an annual Haitian music festival in New York called Kreyolfest, there is a Haitian beauty pageant called Miss Creole, and there is a Haitian internet forum called Lounge Kreyol... That coining may be something of a novelty but still sounds much much better than a euphemism that SOB's used for years to designate Haitian Music Fridays: French Caribbean Fridays. Ack! How many Haitians ever say "I'm French Caribbean" when asked where they're from? (Cf. Jean Dominique intro on Wycleff's Welcome to Haiti--Creole 101.) SOBs --which has made mucho bucks off of Haitians for years what with consistently sold out $25 a pop Friday nite concerts-- is now finally okay with calling its cash cow constituency what it is: H-A-I-T-I-A-N. So French Caribbean Fridays is now Manhattan H-A-I-T-I-A-N Dance Party. (Please post away about what YOU think prompted this cultural shift. That should make for a fun discussion in the comments section.) And next Saturday's Haitian Jazz Festival-not to be missed- won't have to be French Caribbean Jazz Festival.

Something having some connection to the French colonial project?

• So in short, the lowest common denominator in defining Creole is that it is said of an entity (person or non-person depending on the country) that results from a mixture of cultures, at least one of which is French. If you're Caribbean or Louisianian, some African is probably presumed in the mix. If you're from Reunion, some Pacific Islander is probably part of the swirl. So when surfing IOCP, enjoy the pictures and the culture, the shift from English to French to one of several Creole languages but keep in mind that each of the Creole people featured has a different definition of what a Creole person is...

 UPDATE 11/24/2013


Legacy of 1804 with Professor Patrick Sylvain on: "I'm a Haitian, not a Creole and I speak Haitian"

Current Culture Podcasts at Blog Talk Radio with Black Whole Radio on BlogTalkRadio