Church of the Incarnation

The following is excerpted from an article that was written by Br Francklin Armand, PFI and translated by Br John Mahoney. Br. Francklin led Incarnation’s initial efforts in Pandiassou, and his impact in the community is still a large force. The article deals with the Haitian culture from the perspective of one who lives daily in it.

Understanding Haitian Culture
Br. Francklin Armand, P.F.I. June, 1993

To understand an individual is difficult enough; a family more so; and a culture even more. There is a mysterious, untranslatable side to a culture that escapes the understanding of even the most intelligent, perspicacious native. The passage from one culture to another is not only a change in geography, language, mentality, and way of living; but, also, and especially, it involves the passage from life to death.

It isn't easy to grasp a people like the Haitians people who have experienced deportation, three centuries of slavery, nineteen years of foreign occupation, and more than thirty years of inhuman, barbarous dictatorship. To really understand the materially poorest people of the Americas, one of the poorest in the world, is a challenge.

THE COUNTRY AND THE PEOPLE

Still close to the African reality as far as customs, traditions, certain points in the culture and mentality are concerned; the peasants represent 80% of the present population. While providing food for everyone, it is this population, from the beginning, that has borne the country on its back; built itself; has profited little from social services; hardly ever participates in politics; and lives on the edges of the country's economic activity. The peasant is called moun andeyo (that is, people from the back country).

It is a modern slavery. A mass of more than 80% illiterates which works for the well-being of 20% of the "literates" in revolting, sub-human conditions, and the upper class leads a Westernized existence in the manner of pirates. For this group, Haiti is a large field which it has been cultivating for years without fertilizing, without crop rotation or culture rotation, with the resulting fallout: a country in complete bankruptcy and on the road to extinction. But the majority wants to rise to the challenge; it doesn't want to die; it wants to live, to build a country with its own hands, its courage, its dynamism, and its determination.

HAITIAN MEN AND WOMEN

The Haitian loves to share. He is hospitable, happy, accepting, loveable, sensitive, family and community oriented; he is also open, kind, tolerant, patient, obliging, untiring in physical effort, etc. He loves life. He is an extrovert; has a sense of confidence; of the joy of living; is aware of his dignity and freedom. He accepts and respects the poor; has a capacity for contemplative prayer. He has a sense of religious law and mercy; he accepts heroically the will of God, loves the Virgin Mary, the Way of the Cross, pilgrimages, and feast days. He is easy to meet. He is tender and affectionate. He loves song, dance, and music while he can drown his problems, his sufferings, and his heartaches in laughter.

A victim of his past and his educational system, poorly adapted to his needs, the Haitian has developed a system of personal self-defense. He shows himself as jealous, demagogic, a megalomaniac, ambitious, sentimental, talkative, lacking perseverance, negligent. He is afraid of responsibility and lacks confidence in his own possibilities; the source of his lack of initiative and the short duration of many of his development projects. He loves great discourses (an inheritance from French politicians) all the while knowing that they will hardly ever become reality. He is not very logical in his actions and comes up short in his ideas. Nature, long dictatorships, and lack of means haven't taught him foresight or serious planning. He prefers to trust in Bondye bon (the Good God). As in all tradition-oriented societies he looks for the causes of his problems outside of himself, his family, his Church. He constantly looks for scapegoats: God and others.

The Haitian considers intellectual activity as being nobler than manual labor; believes he can get ahead without any preparation or effort; it is the source of the abundance of beautiful in a speech and that at all levels. He is even capable of pedantry, dropping a Latin phrase or two from ancient writers or from the Bible, etc. He can be upset, get excited and break everything in his path when he gets angry; yet, he has a tendency to bring everything to the same level and returns constantly to mythical heroes to resolves problems.

THE HAITIAN AND FOREIGNERS

Very often foreigners think that we do not know their language and say disparaging things about Haitians thinking that we don't understand them. Disparaging things that are verified soon after in behavior, to wit: Black people are lazy, emotional, superstitious, thieving liars, pretentious, sensual, crude; they lack hygiene; they aren't serious; they are deceitful, lying, dishonest, murderers, backward, disorganized, etc.

Some foreigners wear themselves out working to free us from our poverty and hunger that they no longer have time for prayer. Now, as you know, it is precisely prayer and union with God which have kept us alive in the midst of all our poverty.

We always admire the dedication of the missionaries, their love and the risks they take for Haiti; we admire, likewise, their spirit of service and availability; their love of God, for the Gospel, and God's reign; their knowledge, sense of the serious; of responsibility and generosity. They willingly accept going to the most backward and inaccessible comers of the country. The first missionaries deserve a lot of credit especially because of malaria and yellow fever, but also for other reasons. Most of them died within two years after their arrival in the country. However, that did not discourage the young missionaries. The most respected among them haven't necessarily done great deeds; rather they have left the memory of true men and women of God.

A CHURCH COMMITI'ED AND DIVIDED

Colonial Catholicism is the twin of the conauista (conquest). I weep as I tell of all the misdeeds that our ancestors from Africa suffered, those who were baptized, according to the Black Code, a week after their arrival in the colony. Certainly, it must be recognized that many missionaries took up their cause while others, like the defrocked priests, simply chose the side of the colonists, keeping slaves totally ignorant, they themselves owning ''black persons", about whom they didn't know whether they had a soul or if grace would be efficacious in them. Let's not be snivelers; let's go on.

Thanks to the dedication of many committed lay persons, notably the directors of the chapels; thanks, too, to movements of lay persons, priest, and religious for the past twenty-five years, the Roman Catholic Church has burst upon the social and political scene through an authentic evangelization of the poor but also through the Catholic Base communities, the hope of the Church of tomorrow. It is that, moreover, which makes it (the Church) more sympathetic and now more than ever closer to the masses of the poor. However, it is now shaken and frightened by internal divisions. Rightly or wrongly, it is equally strongly criticized in its hierarchy. Many people forget that the problems of the Church are settled according to tradition and the Gospels, in charity, truth, and dialog. Many Church people want to make use of means employed by the Haitian civil society to resolve conflicts in such a way that the strongest argument wins, that machismo and overthrows prevail along with a lack of respect for others and dialog, lack of tolerance and pardon. Without knowing it, we are playing the enemy's game.

CONCLUSION

Every culture has its values. It is always necessary to relativize one's own in relation to others at the risk of a cultural shock. If Haiti is materially poor, each Haitian is a millionaire in human values. It must be said that Christian values are human values Christianized. The Haitian, male and female, is already almost Christian. It is an honor to be Haitian.