Hell yeah, baby...
It's about time, I know: I've been here 6 weeks and this is the first Haiti gig I've been to. Apart from that small Karnaval thing. But my God, the Boukman Experience were fucking amazing. Screaming guitars, merciless hypnotic djembe drums, haunting vocals... Got to that part of the night when I was so tired I was falling asleep on my feet but still couldn't stop dancing. Give me some dead chickens and I'm so there.
This isn't really typical of their music but I really love the retro feel of this video. This probably says a lot about me but I find the bit when the signer unceremoniously kicks the woman off the stage to be really funny:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBSuIy-C0Dg&feature=related
And while I'm in a YouTube mood, here's THE Karnaval song for 2008 sung by Ram with an appropriately cheesy video. You laugh but don't tell me you're not tapping along...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6PFMTSFseo&feature=related
The song's about Jean-Jacques Dessaline, the man who defeated the French and declared Haitian independence in 1804. He's the one who ripped out the white out of the French flag (the Haitian flag is still blue and red) and declared that no white man could possess property in Haiti. Of course, he also massecred any remaining whites on the island declaring that "we have repaid these cannibals, war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage." Not surprising that he's less of a popular figures outside Haiti than his predecessor Toussaint L'Ouverture who had the good fortune to die in a French gaol before having his chance at revenge. And needless to say, he is an extremely popular patriotic hero over here.
Looking back on what I've written on this blog so far, it's been mostly navel-gazing and very little about Haiti itself. This is mostly because I haven't had the chance to find out much about the country -most days I work, go home, work some more, read a little and then sleep - yes, tres exciting. I'm very sheltered from the realities of life here - I've been so busy at work, I haven't even had the chance to visit the field proper to see the kinds of projects we do. And even outside work, because of security we normally drive everywhere (yes, in those 4WD that I used to sneer at before I became an aid worker), and most of the people that I mix with socially outside work are other expats. Hoping to change this in the near future...
In terms of my initial impressions of the country, I'm not sure how much they can be trusted. For instance, I feel very safe walking around Petionville - it was only when I started to hear more and more stories of kidnappings for ransom and near misses that I started to take the security guidelines a lot more seriously - especially when most of the stories came from local staff.
Another thing I have trouble with is the male/dynamic: when I was talking to my flatmate last night about the case studies she's been evaluating as part of the micro-finance project - one of the things that she mentions that really struck her was how socially acceptable it is for men among the poorer classes to not only have a number of women "on the go" in mostly informal relationships (which is sadly not all that uncommon in the world) but also to not suppport their resultant families in any way when they leave. Even middle-class men apparently have this attitude of "why not". What's more surprising is that the women apparently expect this from the very beginning but still allow themselves to be used - and this is more out of emotional needs rather than economic necessity being as these jerks don't stay around long enough to be economically useful.
In my experience, this only seems to happen when there is a large power gap between men and women, and where there are no other compensating social pressures such as religion or custom which, whatever their faults, do force a certain amount of responsibility on the men. However, my impressions were that gender inequality in Haiti was much less than in other countries I've worked or travelled in. A large amount of this is evidently class-based, but Haitian women as a rule don't seem to be wilting flowers who are prepared to swallow any amount of abuse from their menfolk.
Anyway, don't know how this blog went from voudou rock to gender issues but probably should stop there. All the best and hope no one sticks any pins into your doll tonight...
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