Quelques doc sur L'Histoire D'Ayiti part 2

[babygurl]

1758: The Plains of Northern Haiti
Makandal
Before a large assembly of runaway slaves, Franois Makandal pulls a yellow handkerchief out of a glass of water.
"First it was the Indians."
Then a white handkerchief.
"Now, whites are the masters."
He shakes a black handerkerchief before the maroons' eyes. The hour of those who came from Africa has arrived, he announces, He shakes the handkerchief with his only hand, because he has left the other between the iron teeth of the sugar mill.
On the plains of Northern Haiti, one-handed Makandal is the master of fire and poison. At his order cane fields burn, and by his spells the lords of sugar collapse in the middle of supper, drooling spit and blood.
He knows how to turn himself into an iguana, an ant, or a fly, equipped with gills, antennae, or wings; but they catch him anyway, and condemn him; and now they are burning him alive. Through the flames the multitude see his body twist and shake. All of a sudden, a shriek splits the groune, a fierce cry of pain and exultation, and Makandal breaks free of the stake and of death: howling, flaming, he pierces the smoke and is lost in the air.
For the slaves, it is no cause for wonder. They knew he would remain in Haiti, the color of all shadows, the prowler of the night.

[babygurl]

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1790: Petit Gove
TheMissingMagic
The heft of the purse can at times achieve more than the color of the skin. In Haiti, poor mulattos are blacks, and free blacks who have accumulated enough cash are mulattos. Rich mulattos pay immense fortunes to become white, although few obtain the magic document that permits the offspring of master and slave to become a doctor, to style himself Monsieur, to wear a sword, or to touch a white woman without losing an arm.
From a gallows hangs the mulatto who claimed the rights of a citizen, recently proclaimed in Paris, and high on a pike through the town of Petit Gove rides the head of another mulatto who wanted to be a deputy.

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1794: Mountains of Haiti
ToussaintLouverture
He came on the scene two years ago. In Paris they called him the Black Spartacus.
He was a coachman on a plantation. An old black man taught him to read and write, to cure sick horses, and to talk to men; but he learned on his own how to look not only with his eyes, and he knows how to see flight in every bird that sleeps.

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1816: Port-au-Prince
Ption
Haiti lies in ruins, blockaded by the French and isolated by everyone else. No country has recognized the independence of the slaves who defeated Napolon.
The island is divided in two.
In the north, Henri Christophe has proclaimed himself emperor. In the castle of Sans-Souci, the new black nobility dance the minuet--the Duke of Marmalade, the Count of Lemonade--while black lackeys in snowy wigs bow and scrape, and blacks hussards parade their plumed bonnets through gardens copied from Versailles.
To the south, Alexandre Ption presides over the republic. Distributing lands among the former slaves, Ption aims to create a nation of peasants, very poor but free and armed, on the ashes of plantations destroyed by the war.
On Haiti's southern coast Simn Bolvar lands, in search of refuge and aid. He comes from Jamaica, where he has sold everything down to his watch. No one believes in his cause. His brillant military campaigns have been no more than a mirage. Francisco Miranda is dying in chains in the Cadiz arsenal, and the Spaniards have reconquered Venezuela and Colombia, which prefer the past or still do not believe in the future promised by the patriots.
Ption receives Bolvar as soon as he arrives, on New Year's Day. He gives him seven ships, two hundred and fifty men, muskets, powder, provisions, and money. He makes only one condition. Ption, born a slave, son of a black woman and a Frenchman, demands of Bolvar the freedom of slaves in the lands he is going to liberate.
Bolvar shakes his hands. The war will change its course. Perhaps America will too.

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1943: Milot
RuinsofSans-Souci
Alejandro Carpentier discovers the kingdom of Henri Christophe. The Cuban writer roams these majestic ruins, this memorial to the delirium of a slave cook who became monarch of Haiti and killed himself with the gold bullet that always hung around his neck. Ceremonial hymns and magic drums of invocation rise up to meet Carpentier as he visits the palace that King Christophe copied from Versailles, and walks around his invulnerable fortress, an immense bulk whose stones, cemented by the blood of bulls sacrificed to the gods, have resisted lightning and earthquakes.
In Haiti, Carpentier learns that there is no magic more prodigious and delightful than the voyage that leads through experience, through the body, to the depths of America. In Europe, magicians have become bureaucrats, and wonder, exhausted, has dwindled to a conjuring trick. But in America, surrealism is as natural as rain or madness.
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[babygurl]

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1772: Cap Franais
France'sRichestColony[size=+2]
The monks have denied last rites to the diva of the Cape Comedie, Mademoiselle Morange, whose irreparable loss to Haiti is mourned in six theaters and more than six bedrooms. No dead artiste deserves to be prayed for, the theater being an infamous occupation eternally condemned; but one of the actors, bell in hand and crucifix on breast, in black cassock and shining tonsure, marches singing psalms in Latin at the head of the dead virtuosa's cortege.
Before it reaches the cemetery, the police are already chasing off the baritone and his accomplices, who vanish in a split second. But the people protect and hide them. Who does not feel sympathy for these showfolk who fan the insufferable languors of Haiti with breezes of cultural madness?
On the stages of this colony, France's richest, plays just open in Paris are applauded, and the theaters are like Paris's--or, at least, would like to be. Here, though, the public is seated according to color of skin: in the center, ivory; on the right, copper; and on the left, ebony, a few free blacks.
The affluent sail into the theaters in a flutter of fans, the heat releasing floods beneath their powdered wigs. Each white woman resembles a jewelry store: gold, pearls, and diamonds make a dazzling frame for damp breasts leaping out of silk, demanding obedience and desire.
Haiti's most powerful colonists live on guard against the sun and the cuckold's horns. They do not leave home until after dusk, when the heat is less punishing, and only then dare to show themselves in litters or carriages drawn by many horses. The ladies are notorious for indulging in much love and much widowhood.

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1791: Bois Caman
TheConspiratorsofHaiti[size=+2]
The old slave woman, intimate of the gods, buries her machete in the throat of a black wild boar. The earth of Haiti drinks the blood. Under the protection of the gods of war and of fire, two hundred blacks sing and dance the oath of freedom. In the prohibited Voodoo ceremony aglow with lightning bolts, two hundred slaves decide to turn this land of punishment into a fatherland.
Haiti is based on the Creole language. Like the drum, Creole is the common speech of those torn out of Africa into various Antillean islands. It blossomed inside the plantations, when the condemned needed to recognize one another and resist. It came from African languages, with African melody, and fed on the sayings of Normans and Bretons. It picked up words from Caribbean Indians and from English pirates and also from the Spanish colonists of eastern Haiti. Thanks to Creole, when Haitians talk they feel that they touch each other.
Creole gathers words and Voodoo gathers gods. Those gods are not masters but lovers, very fond of dancing, who convert each body they penetrate into music and light, pure light of undulating and sacred movement.

1802: The Caribbean Sea
NapoleonRestoresSlavery
[size=+2]
Squadrons of wild ducks escort the French army. The fish take flight. Through a turquoise sea, bristling with coral, the ships head for the blue mountains of Haiti. Soon the land of victorious slaves will appear on the horizon. General Leclerc stands tall at the head of the fleet. Like a ship's figurehead, his shadow is first to part the waves. Astern, other islands disappear, castles of rock, splendors of deepest green, sentinels of the new world found three centuries ago by people who were not looking for it.
"Which has been the most prosperous regime for the colonies?"
"The previous one."
"Well, then, put it back," Napoleon decided.

No man, born red, black, or white can be his neighbor's property, Toussaint L'Ouverture had said. Now the French fleet returns slavery to the Caribbean. More than fifty ships, more than twenty thou

[babygurl]

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1772: Logane
Zabeth[size=+2]
Ever since she learned to walk she was in flight. They tied a heavy chain to her ankles, and chained, she grew up; but a thousand times she jumped over the fence and a thousand times the dogs caught her in the mountains of Haiti.
They stamped the fleur-de-lis on her cheek with a hot iron. They put an iron collar and iron shackles on her and shut her up in the sugar mill, where she stuck her fingers into the grinder and later bit off the bandages. So that she might die of iron they tied her up again, and now she expires, chanting curses.
Zabeth, this woman of iron, belongs to Madame Galbeaud du Fort, who lives in Nantes.

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1794: Paris
"TheRemedyforManisMan,"[size=+2]
say the black sages, and the gods always knew it. The slaves of Haiti are no longer slaves.
For five years the French Revolution turned a deaf ear. Marat and Robespierre protested in vain. Slavery continued in the colonies. Despite the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the men who were the property of other men on the far plantations of the Antilles were born neither free nor equal. After all, the sale of blacks from Guinea was the chief business of the revolutionary merchants of Nantes, Bordeaux, and Marseilles; and French refineries lived on Antillean sugar.
Harassed by the black insurrection headed by Toussaint L'Ouverture, the Paris government finally decrees the liquidation of slavery.

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1803: Fort Dauphin
TheIslandBurnedAgain[size=+2]
Toussaint L'Ouverture, chief of the free blacks, died a prisoner in a castle in France. When the jailer opened the padlock at dawn and slid back the bolt, he found Toussaint frozen in his chair.
But life in Haiti moved on, and without Toussaint the black army has beaten Napoleon Bonaparte. Twenty thousand French soldiers have been slaughtered or died of fevers. Vomiting black blood, dead blood, General Leclerc has collapsed. The land he sought to enslave proves his shroud.
Haiti has lost half its population. Shots are still heard, and hammers nailing down coffins, and funeral drums, in the vast ash-heap carpeted with corpses that the vultures spurn. This island, burned two centuries ago by an exterminating angel, has been newly eaten by the fire of men at war.
Over the smoking earth those who were slaves proclaim independence. France will not forgive the humiliation.
On the coast, palms, bent over against the winds, form ranks of spears.

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1937: Dajabn
ProcedureAgainsttheBlackMenace[size=+2]
The condemned are Haitian blacks who work in the Dominican Republic. This military exorcism, planned to the last detail by General Trujillo, lasts a day and a half. In the sugar region, the soldiers shut up Haitian day-laborers in corrals--herds of men, women, and children--and finish them off then and there with machetes; or bind their hands and feet and drive them at bayonet point into the sea.
Trujillo, who powders his face several times a day, wants the Dominican Republic white.


1937: Washington
Two weeks later, the government of Haiti conveys to the government of the Dominican Republic its concern about the recent events at the border. The government of the Dominican Republic promises an exhaustive investigation.
In the name of continental security, the government of the United States proposes to President Trujillo that he pay an indemnity to avoid possible friction in the zone. After prolonged negotiation Trujillo recognizes the death of eighteen thousand Haitians on Dominican territory. According to him, the figure of twenty-five thousand victims, put forward by some sources, reflects the intention to manipulate the events dishonestly. Trujillo agrees

[AnonymousC]

Dear Babygurl,

On a serious note, I would like to commend you on a great job that you are doing in the forum. I wanted to let you know that your efforts do not go unnoticed and to keep it up.I truly appreciate the work that you do in here and itadds a different flavor.
Through it all, a true reflection of your personality can be seen. Very keen sense of who you are and an intelligencestillwith room to grow. A few years down the road you will beonenot to reckon with.
Thank you very much,

[aliza]

dear chris(lol)

ur letter sound so shy


aliza(lol)

[babygurl]

Chris
That was nice of you to say.THANK YOU

[aliza]

a pa'w chanjel chris.. now i look[&:].. anyway's thanx[:@]

c pa manti non baby.. pou yon baby gyal .. ou bon wi.. nice job