The Cultural and Intellectual Role of the French in Haiti

Haiti has been held ransom through language and this is another factor that explained why Haiti has been so impoverished from the very beginning of its history. This role can be so hidden and so invisible that even if a detailed account of the French in Haiti still fails to analyze that aspect of neo-colonialism. So let's stop saying that quote unquote Haiti is the poorest country of the Western Hemisphere. Instead let's understand why it's so poor. Let's understand the roots of Haiti's misery"

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We first interviewed Professor Michel DeGraff back in season 1; he now returns for another episode, diving deeper into issues of culture and identity. He talks about his childhood in Haiti, where he was punished at school for speaking his own mother tongue, and where he was taught by his teachers and even his parents that Kreyòl was not “a real language.” After doing early work in natural language processing that led him to question widespread assumptions about language, Prof. DeGraff shifted his academic focus to linguistics. He now begins each iteration of his course 24.908 Creole Languages and Caribbean Identities by asking his students to write linguistic autobiographies that describe the languages they grew up speaking and examine their own attitudes about language. In addition to discussing that course, he talks in this episode about his efforts to draw attention to language’s role in perpetuating imbalances of power. As an added bonus, we hear from two students from 24.908, discussing how Prof. DeGraff helped cultivate trust in the classroom, and how that trust freed the students to enrich each other’s understanding of the world by sharing personal experiences and insights.

*English Translation of Prof. Michel DeGraff’s Kreyòl Statement:

So, my fellow countrymen,

There's something that is very VERY important to understand:

we must understand the origins of prejudices against Kreyòl.

We must also remember that Dessalines said, so clearly,

that everyone is human. And he also knew that,

if everyone is human, then every language is a perfectly normal language.

So Kreyòl, too, is a perfectly normal language.

That's why he said, since before 1804,

that Kreyòl is our own language,

so we don't need to always look for other languages to speak.

Yes, we must remember, if we did not have Kreyòl as a language,