Over the weekend, Madison Smart Bell of The New York Times offered up a "literary sampler" of Haiti in order that the people of this suffering land might achieve a more genuine and complex humanity in the eyes of those looking in from the outside. Bell plays the role of editor in about 3/4 of the article, organizing the literary snippets under one-word themes like "song," "death," "grace," "longevity," "tenacity."
Haiti offers, keeps on offering, a shimmering panorama of visual art and a wealth of seductive and hypnotic music, much of it rooted in the rhythms of ceremonial drumming. For the past 50 years a remarkably vivid and sophisticated Haitian literature has been flowing out of Creole, an ever-evolving language as fecund as the English of Shakespeare’s time. The Haitian world is not all suffering; it is full of treasure. Here are a few of the many voices, native and not, inspired by Haiti.
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