How Do We Haitian?

When I land at Kennedy Airport

My eyes bug out of my head

This is it, man! A beautiful country!

But when I get to Jamaica Ave.

Where are the money trees?

When I get to Flatbush

Oh, oh, what did I get myself into?

Looks like they sold me a bad ticket.

From “New York City” by Daniel Simidor, published in The Portable Lower East Side (volume 6, number 1, 1989)

This article grew out of a dialogue between Haitian-American artists Vladimir Cybil Charlier and Rejin Leys about the current wave of anti-Haitian and anti-immigrant sentiment in parts of the United States. The socio-political situation of Haiti inserted itself into our work early on. And here we are, years later, thinking about how to contextualize this crisis from the vantage point of our art practice.

For such a small country, with a fraction of the population of the United States, Haiti occupies an outsized space in the minds of presidential and vice presidential candidates Donald Trump and JD Vance. We know they hate immigrants and believe immigration should be restricted only to people who look like them (and, in Vance’s case, a select few Brown people who tolerate him.) But Haiti in particular has terrified White Americans for more than two centuries, so her people make a particularly attractive target.

It’s ironic that Haitian immigration, largely driven by decades of US policy, stirs so much anger among Americans. Malcolm X spoke of “chickens coming home to roost” when he described the climate of hate that led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy more than 60 years ago, yet the lesson still hasn’t sunk in.

Vladimir Cybil Charlier: My own place in this fraught transnational legacy has profoundly shaped my art. My lifelong artistic journey, thinking of a visual language to express a diasporic identity, has been molded by my position as what I call “a half generation.” My parents arrived in New York in the 1960s. My great-uncle Lucas Premice’s house in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where he had settled during the Harlem Renaissance, became the gateway for many new Haitian arrivals. His house was a meeting point not only for Haitians but also for the African-American intellectual and artistic community.

Although I was born in Elmhurst, Queens, what was intended to be a brief visit to Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince when I was four months old turned into a year of hiding. After the disappearance of my maternal uncle and three cousins, my great-aunt Marie Chauvet sheltered me and my grandmother for several months. Eventually, she fled to New York to publish her book, Love, Anger, and Madness (1968), which denounced the autocratic regime of François Duvalier (nicknamed “Papa Doc”) that was responsible for the disappearance of her nephews.

In hindsight, works from my Indigo Blues series (mostly from 2023), which use denim as a representation of the Vodou deity of agriculture Zaka, also evoke the uniforms of the Tonton Macoutes, Papa Doc’s brutal private militia — ghosts of a not-so-distant past. 

Rejin Leys: My family’s immigration to the States coincides with another one of the many crises in the pages of the Haitian-American story. My parents arrived more than 50 years ago, during the time when the US was propping up Papa Doc because at least he wasn’t a communist. 

Though I was born here, hearing stories of Haiti’s “good old days” was the narrative of my childhood. It was only much later that I learned the details of people’s arrival, like the aunt who arrived at JFK Airport late one night, with only her four little children and no luggage. And how my godmother had taken the bus to go pick them up and bring them to her Brooklyn apartment, where they waited and hoped that my uncle had made it out safely. Or that my father left in a hurry, without a visa, after the attempted assassination of his boss at the Census Bureau in Port-au-Prince. Though half a century separates these stories from those of many Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, today, we all share the same desire for peace and safety — no different from any other immigrant community.

And yet, imagined stories of Haitians feasting on pets make the front page of news outlets, serving as periodic reminders that, after two centuries, the Western world has yet to fully accept the country that defeated Napoleon and helped finance José Martí and Simón Bolívar. Haiti remains a challenge to what bell hooks called the “white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” 

Haiti’s fight for independence holds a significance on par with the Tulsa massacre of 1921; the genocide of hundreds of thousands of Taíno people by Christopher Columbus draws parallels to the Trail of Tears. The impact of Papa Doc’s regime in Haiti echoes in contemporary US politics, reminding us how deeply historical and current events are interconnected. 

VCC: As Haiti is consistently held up as a cautionary tale by the Western world. I’m reminded of my father’s enigmatic last words: “Haiti is not the past, but the future.” His statement suggests that Haiti’s significance transcends its historical struggles and prompts reflection on the enduring challenges faced by African-American and Indigenous communities within the US.

Despite the venom Trump and Vance direct toward our community, Haitians are not the impoverished, alien invaders they want us to be. Haitians have long been woven into the historical fabric of America. 

RL: “Mud-eaters,” “AIDS-carriers,” ” pet-eaters,” “boat people” — these slurs vilify Haitians. In the ’90s, during a previous crisis in Haiti and a wave of people migrating away from danger back home, I thought a lot about the term “boat people.” It was used to dehumanize vulnerable people. Not real people, not human. Savages. Aliens. Historically and currently, such language and accusations were precursors to violence by angry mobs, to the bomb threats and hostility that Springfield’s Haitian community is now facing. 

Here we are once again, enduring another crisis on the island, this time worsened by weapons illegally exported from the United States. Yet, those fleeing the violence are met with more hostility and violence. 

The brutal plantation system of Saint-Domingue was designed to break newly enslaved people who were then sent to the American South. The culture they brought from the Antilles left its mark on everything — from blues music to architecture, from Louisiana’s Creole cuisine to Martha Graham’s modern dance. Our children will come to see Malcolm X as the warrior god Ogou, Billie Holiday as the goddess of love Ezili.

The border as we know it is a modern invention. The children of Anacaona, of Dutty Boukman, of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, have always been here — and are here to stay.