Fan Mail: Rebecca Thomas

A few weeks ago, after the tragic earthquake in Haiti, my mail box was inundated with emails from friends, acquaintances and strangers expressing their sympathy for my family and what ever they can do to help. The interesting thing is, I’m not Haitian! However, I do have plenty of friends who are. With that said, there was one particular email that stood out amongst the rest.

A good friend, Rebecca Thomas, shoots me a touching email giving her testimony and celebration of her country, HAITI. She is a proud Haitian, who grew up in Queens, NY (my hometown,) and family stands firm with many of the West Indian/Haitian traditions. Take a second to read while Rebecca aka “A Black Girl Named Becky” puts a positive spin on the tragedy experienced by our Haitian bretheren.

Peace.

-Rasu.

Coup d’etat

For its legions of fans from Brooklyn to Benin, Coup d’État is a clothing and lifestyle brand dedicated to raising consciousness with every stitch on every sleeve, but for my fellow Haitian–Americans and me, coup d’état was a subject typical of family dinner conversations long before it was a T-shirt.

To be Haitian is to be musical, resilient, is to mix profound spirituality with a soupcon of superstition, is to be argumentative, but perhaps above all, our inheritance as descendants of slaves who pulled off the unthinkable is to be politically-minded.

Sundays in our Cambria Heights, Queens, house were a swirl of activity: church (and buying patties afterward), then turning the radio dial to WLIB, a pile of newspapers from the New York Times and Newsday to the Haiti Observateur fanned out in the dining room while flavorful sause-pois noir ak poule cooked in the kitchen.

Neighbors regularly dropped in unannounced, slapping palms, debating elections, recounting last night’s dreams and their corresponding lotto numbers, borrowing Zin cassettes, and spreading gossip in hushed Kreyol. We were in Elmont, Flatbush, Boston, Miami, yes, but always we were connecting to “home”—Cayes, Port-au-Prince, Croix de Bouquets, Camp Perrin…

One bright February morning in 1986, my tiny feisty grandmother, who ran her Long Island home as if it were the Haitian Embassy, told my brother and me not to bother catching the school bus. We were celebrating!

We were too little to understand why, but a crush of family and friends were packing into the house; the landline buzzed with international calls. Happy to skip school for once, we joined in dancing, yelling, crying, and chanting “Duvalier Tombé!!”

A popular uprising had forced into exile the brutal Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, who’d ruled with a bloody machete since the age of 19, when his father and predecessor, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, anointed him President for Life.

Years later, I came to understand that February day was supposed to have been a watershed moment in Haiti’s embattled history of foreign interference and homegrown corruption. Instead, a 1991 coup d’état led by a faction of the army unseated the democratically elected President Aristide and became a portent of political unrest and crippling poverty to come.

Now, days after the earth shifted and shook Haiti, turning homes to rubble and lives upside down, the streets double as graves and destruction is as pervasive hungry bellies. There’s so much to be done.

Yet somehow—and maybe it has something to do with images of my people singing, heads turned upward, even in their misery—in the distance I see the path to reclaiming the legacy of 1804. In time…From the ashes—Rebecca Thomas aka blackgirlnamedbecky