Legacy of 1804 Show #8 with guest Prof. Patrick Sylvain #Haiti #Language

This Friday at 9pm  Eastern, Alice Backer of www.kiskeacity.com welcomes guest Prof. Patrick Sylvain on 'Do Haitians speak Creole or Haitian'? The answer might surprise you.

Want a preview? Check out his article ‘I am Haitian, not a Creole, and I speak Haitian’ http://www.bostonhaitian.com/2011/‘i-am-haitian-not-creole-and-i-speak-haitian’

 
Patrick Sylvain is a poet, writer, and scholar and is a faculty member at Brown University’s Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies. Additionally, Sylvain is also a lecturer in anthropology at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is published in several anthologies, academic journals, books, magazines, and reviews, including Agni, Callaloo, Caribbean Writers, Haiti Noir, Human Architecture: A Sociology Journal, Poets for Haiti, Fixing Haiti and Beyond, The Butterfly’s Way, Tectonic Shifts, The Best of Beacon Press, and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse. Recently featured in PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio’s Here and Now and The Story, he is also a contributing editor to the Boston Haitian Reporter.

Listen Online http://www.blogtalkradio.com/blackwholeradio/2013/11/23/legacy-of-1804-with-guest-prof-patrick-sylvain-haiti or on the phone at (323) 927-2913.

You can listen to past shows on iTunes by searching keywords 'Legacy of 1804'. Past shows are also available under LOF 1804 tab at www.kiskeacity.com

UPDATE 11/23 (SHOW AUDIO):

Amazing show! 

Discover Culture Internet Radio with Black Whole Radio on BlogTalkRadio

Kiskeácity Daily | @kiskeacity| Facebook

kiskeácity daily is out ! Commented edition for Sunday, Nov. 06, 2011 #Haiti #Bélizaire

VIEW PAPER


Today's edition is all videos. The two on the Bélizaire affair are below and contain commentary by parliament members Latortue and Joazil and by Manigat as well as Senator Benoît's rant about President Martelly's disregard for the rule of law. He refers to him as Sweet Micky adding "Carnival is in February!". 



Télé Image Spécial Bélizaire






Spécial Bélizaire - Benoît v. Sweet Micky








Other videos are:

• Carel Pèdre showcasing the various apple products with which he broadcasts his radio show from home. 
• Spot for Ralph Thamar's concert in P-au-P on Nov. 11.
• Metro Newz for Thursday mostly on the Bélizaire affair. (Click on YouTube in Headlines Section.) 

Enter your Email

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

VIEW FULL PAPER

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. 


Enter your Email

kiskeácity daily is out ! Editions of Monday, Aug. 1 and Tuesday, Aug. 02, 2011

 VIEW YESTERDAY'S (SHORT) EDITION 


Great article on last weekend's national conference on culture. 

 VIEW TODAY'S EDITION


Highlights

Hurricane watch continues as Emily hits Martinique. Still uncertain whether and how it will hit Haiti.


Politics - Corruption scandal involving members of parliament's lucrative consulting contracts with Ministère de l'Intérieur. Martelly's tourism tour continues. Deputy Dionald Polyte's assassin turns out to be a prison escapee. Bellerive to testify in front of Justice and Security Commission.

From the Blogs - Blog Carel La Wi! posts a caricature of the deputies and senators who made extra $$$ consulting for one of the government's ministries.

Video - From yours truly,  a clip of Haiti Cultural Exchange E.D. Régine Michèle Roumain explaining what the New York-based organization is about. Clip number two is of Wyclef making a cameo appearance at Kassav's concert in NY last Saturday.




Enter your Email

Remembering

• Languichatte, the late Haitian comedian and father of Lolo and Daniel Beaubrun of Boukman Eksperyans. See the Facebook page dedicated to him, complete with the Haitian TV show's theme song! A treat full of memories of Friday evening laughter. 1,037 nostalgic fans have joined it. I found this joke and this slideshow on youtube. They're in Creole and hopefully someone can translate some to English on DotSUB.

• Aimé Césaire, the late Martiniquan poet and politician. Memories of bloggers from the world over are summarized on this blog post by Jen Bréa at Global Voices. Césaire was one of the theoreticians of the Negritude movement. He passed away last week. He penned La Tragédie du Roi Christophe, a play about an early Haitian statesman.

Technorati: languichatte - aime cesaire

Enter your Email

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

Enter your Email

A Martinique Christmas

Loulou Boislaville chante nwel
Video sent by matinikphoto

This video was posted on Daily Motion today. It is a biguine Christmas carol performed by some of Martinique's music greats including Ralph Thamar and Loulou Boislaville. The video is dated Dec. 24,2006 on Dailymotion and technically aired on Martiniquan television last night. Why does it look so vintage to me? Could it be that Ralph Thamar looks not a day older than 20 -- not a wrinkle, not a gray hair? I wonder if this was not a re-airing of a 70's recording. Maybe our Martiniquan friends can chime in...

In any event, Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it.

technorati: Ralph Thamar - Loulou Boislaville - Martinique - Caribbean - Christmas

Enter your Email

Global Voices Won the Knight-Batten Award!

Photo by Georgia Popplewell.

This morning in DC, Rebecca McKinnon, Georgia Popplewell and I (pictured in that order) represented Global Voices Online at the Knight-Batten award ceremony in DC.

We won!!! Our 6 co-finalists were all amazing and came from all over the country so it was quite an honor to go home with the main prize. They included an impressive hurricane information site by the Sarasota Tribune and several interactive community-based news sites. (See Knight-Batten press release.)

It was both exhausting (we each made a presentation) and exhilirating but in the end all the emotions were worth the while. I talked about starting my blog to amplify a more complex set of voices from Haiti than usually featured in mainstream media. Then I showcased three of the bloggers in Francophonia: Tony Katombe from the DRC, Pierrot Dupuy from La Reunion and Le Blog de [Moi] from Martinique. Hopefully video of the presentation will be up soon on the Knight-Batten site.

Georgia live-blogged the conference over at Caribbean Free Radio here, here and here. The Global Voices community is ecstatic! Rachel Rawlins, our Managing editor, posted this on the GV website to announce the news.

It is great to see all the hard work that gets put into GV rewarded.

See more photos from this morning.

global voices - knight-batten

Enter your Email

Have a comment? Please post it by clicking Comments below.
To send this post to a friend, click on the envelope icon below.

Happy (Belated) BlogDay

BlogDay 2006

Call this the late edition. This is very very late. But better late than never. Blogday was August 31. An important day when bloggers celebrated their existence and highlighted the work of other bloggers dear to them. I was obviously "out to lunch" or out partying somewhere, enjoying time off from my day job.

In this great post on the topic, Rebecca McKinnon, co-founder of Global Voices, asked bloggers the world over to answer several questions on their blogs so that the community of bloggers could be better understood. She also explained the significance of BlogDay: bloggers' free speech and filling of gaping holes in mainstream media.

Here is my list of belated answers to some of the questions she asked of bloggers. Ive decided to do that instead of the 5 blog picks the rest of the world is doing so as not to piss off any of the french-speaking bloggers I cover for GV, all of whom are superstars in my opinion.

If you are a blogger, it is not too late for you to partake too, BTW. Rebecca just asks that you leave a link or trackback in her initial post's comments section .

###

• Why did you start blogging?

To get a couple of misconceptions about the place I come from (Haiti, and more broadly the Caribbean) off my chest. Not to portray it "positively" mind you but to portray it in its complexity, good and bad -- not bad alone.

• What do you blog about mainly?

Caribbean current affairs, with a broad understanding of the Caribbean and including its various non-Caribbean metropoles, Brooklyn where I live and of course Miami.

• Do you blog in your first language or in another language, and why?

I blog in English because lots of Haitians both in Haiti and abroad understand the language and because I live in the United States. Also english blogging about Haiti helps Caribbean partners better understand the country. My understanding is that many other non-American bloggers for whom English is not the 1st language do the same.

• When you blog, how would you describe what you write? Is it part of a conversation? Is it ranting? Is it a daily diary? Is it journalism? Is it some or all of these things at different times? Does the definition matter?

The definition matters little to me but I'm pretty sure that I synthesize and analyze information that is hard to find in MSM and that I package it with my own brand of uniqueness.

• Have blogs started to have an impact on politics in your country? Have they started to influence what stories get covered in your country’s media? We’d love to know some examples.

Not that I know of. Although there is a vivid and opinionated Haitian internet (mostly run from abroad) there is not yet a proper Haitian blogosphere either in our out of Haiti.

###

It is worth noting that on BlogDay, Le Blog de [Moi] named me as one of her 5 picks for the day, finding me to be gay-friendly and well written. If you can't read French, here is a translation:

Wanna know what's going on in the francophone or anglophone Caribbean via local bloggers? Just click! All live from Brooklyn.

Thanks [Moi]! You have a hell of a blog too and it's always a pleasure to read you. Click here for translations of [Moi]'s often hilarious, always biting posts that I made for GV.


BlogDay 2006 - blog de [moi]

Enter your Email

Have a comment? Please post it by clicking Comments below.
To send this post to a friend, click on the envelope icon below.

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