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Category: language

  • Matter

    The contemporary world’s work has become policing, forming policy regarding, and trying to administrate the perpetual movement of people. Nationhood—the very definition of citizenship—is marked by exile, refugees, guest arbiter, immigrants, migrations, the displaced, the fleeing, and the under siege. Hunger for home is entombed among the central metaphors in the discourse on globalism, transnationalism, nationalism, the breakup of nations, and the fictions of sovereignty. Yet these dreams of home are frequently as raced themselves as the originating racial house that has defined them. When they are not raced, they are, as I suggested earlier, landscape, never inscape; utopia, never home.

    Toni Morrison, Race Matters, The Source of Self-Regard.
    0404150742
    040415, Aquin, Haiti.

  • AG2016_1030667aBBbg2 or desirable condition realized

    AG2016_1030667aBBbg2

    “What one does not wish to change can be the desirable condition realized, and it’s where aesthetic and ethical standards meet.”

    “…beauty can be both what one does not wish to change and where one wishes to go…”

    “Beauty is not only formal…it lies in patterns of meaning, in invocations of values, and in connection to the life the reader is living and the world she wants to see.”

    RS

  • 040315 or element in this field guide

    AG2022-haiti0403151813c (2018_05_26 23_06_40 UTC)a
    Aquin, Haiti. April 2015.

    quoique d’origine rurale, … la manifestation des bandes de Rara est loin d’être quelque chose d’exclusivement champêtre. En effet, de la campagne à la ville comme dans la capitale d’Haïti, c’est une période rythmée, entre autres, par les tambours et les vaksin.

    Abimaël Lindor, Palmes Magazine, 13 Août 2021.

    De son site ou lakou (espace comprenant plusieurs unités de logement, souvent un lieu de culte vodou), une bande se déplace avec quelques dizaines de personnes et augmente en cours de route

    […]

    Les déplacements des bandes avaient surtout lieu la nuit et se déroulaient dans les sites vodou et leur périphérie. L’activité d’une bande de rara était comparable à celle d’une petite armée appelée à défendre un territoire. La dénomination de plusieurs bandes à Léogâne en témoigne : «Chien méchant», «Renommée», «Taureau lakou», «Tirailleurs», ce dernier étant le nom d’une ancienne unité d’élite de l’armée d’Haïti. L’effectif d’une bande de rara ne dépassait pas une cinquantaine de personnes, souvent des adeptes du vodou. Les musiciens jouaient de petits instruments traditionnels : coquille de lambi, vaksin, râpe en fer blanc, tige de fer et tambour.

    Avec l’organisation du festival de rara à partir de 1992 et l’arrivée de nouveaux dirigeants scolarisés et/ou issus de la diaspora, le rara s’est transformé totalement. Il est devenu, lors des fêtes de Pâques, le rendez-vous de plusieurs milliers d’Haïtiens.

    Joseph Ronald Dautruche, l’Inventaire du patrimoine immatériel d’Haïti

    One thing you find running through Haitian music throughout its history is a focus on
    Haitian identity. Haitians are really keenly aware that they are a small nation, a particular
    people, with a very singular identity.

    […]

    Haitians are always aware that they’re in a transnational, global order, in a hemisphere full of other
    nations    .

    Elizabeth McAlister

    Transcript of podcast. More in archived page rara.wesleyan.edu

    Related : obscénités et vulgarités–catharsis pour les Haïtiens de toutes les classes sociales

  • AG2022_1520977ab

    AG2022_1520977 (2019_03_30 13_34_43 UTC)ab

    Place imprinted by and seen through “great blobs of purple and red emotion” (ZNH), not so much red.

  • AG2022_2060618a

    AG2022_2060618a

    Happiness seems to require having a well-ordered life avoiding difficulty or discord, while joy can and does show up anywhere, often unexpectedly.

    […]

    Joy is a desubjectifying process, an unfixing, an intensification of life itself. It is a process of coming alive and coming apart.

    […]

    Plants are anything but passive.

    […]

    They made the world.

    R.S.

    Black woman joy is like this:

    Mama said one day long before I was born

    she was walking down the street,

    foxes around her neck, their little heads

    smiling up at her and out at the world

    […]

    This day was for foxes and hip rhythm

    and musical perfection and folks on the street joining in the celebration

    of breath and holiness. And they did too. In color-coordinated ensembles,

    they kicked and turned and grinned and shouted like church

    or football game, whatever their religious preference. The air

    vibrated with music, arms, legs, and years of unrequited

    sunshine.

    The Language of Joy by Jacqueline Allen Trimble

  • AG2022_2110201b

    AG2022_2110201b

  • AG2022_2060763b

    AG2022_2060763b

    the sweet, dulcet pipes of tomorrow
        In their preluding rhapsodies trill

  • AG2022_2110186a

    AG2022_2110186a

    […] been comforted by things staying the way they are; (staid, vanitas, elegiac)