First off, I’m spending waaay too much time in the footnotes. Lots of delectable gratins from our history, scattered in the margins—like the term dyaspora, for example.
Dyaspora is one of those words that feels like it has always been there, woven into the rhythm of Haitian speech.
But here it is, a word with an arrival, a moment when it was pulled from the ether and set down in our lexicon, given shape by necessity, by movement, by the shifting tides of a people never meant to be contained.
Dr. Darlène says it arrived by the late 1980s, but dyaspora wasn’t just a word—it was a reckoning. Henri Namphy, with his Office of Diaspora Affairs, saw something forming in the wind. Aristide, ever the visionary, took it further, calling the dyaspora Haiti’s Tenth Department, an extension of the nation/lakou— not exiles but a living, breathing limb of the republic. He understood that Haiti didn’t just exist between its mountains and the sea: it lived in Brooklyn, in Miami, in Montreal, in Paris.
By the time the word entered Haitian parlance, I lived it in my 1980s Brooklyn neighborhood: It pulsed in the hands of Haitian cab drivers; in telediole central—my mom’s beauty shop on Church Avenue; it pulsed at Brooklyn Hospital, where my couzine Fifi worked as an ER nurse; it pulsed over manba avec casave from the local bordega; in so many voices carrying Kreyòl over static-filled phone lines, especially on the weekends, when long distance rates were cheaper; I see the word now pulsing then in my mom’s anticipation, because it was her turn to collect at the next sòl cycle; and the word pulsed to and from JFK, in the suitcases stuffed with banans, coffee from Dondo , those hyper tension inducing Maggi cubes, and bottles of Barbancourt.
This book put me to work. I learned from other sources that the term was first used in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint, to describe the exile of the Jewish people from their homeland—“to scatter”.
This book made me realize that dyaspora is both an echo and a reworking, but baptized in Haitian reality. It carries the weight of our history, of exile and return—the enigma of arrival. Like everybody else, we are a people forever navigating the space between longing and belonging.
The author is reminding me that words don’t just appear; they rise from need, from struggle, from the undeniable fact that a people will always name themselves.
