Le poème O Femme fait partie de “Ten Lives in Queens, A Collaborative Zine”, “Dix Vies à Queens, Un Project de Collaboration”.

Il s’agit d’une publication réalisée au cours de l’été 2010 sous la direction de Paul Lambermont, éditeur, curateur et coordonnateur.

Dix artistes contribuent leurs oeuvres d’art- écriture, photographies, dessins – sur leur vie à Queens.

J’ai choisi de présenter l’histoire de mon amitié avec Glorious que j’ai rencontrée à Queens (“These Were Glorious Times”) et une réfléxion sur ma collaboration avec la dessinnatrice Beatriz Ollivetti pour le Zine. Le poème s’intitule O Femme.

Des informations supplémentaires sont disponibles sur le site du projet à:
http://tenlivesinqueenscountry.blogspot.com

En fait il s’agit du seul poème que j’ai composé, je ne sais trop comment, inspirée par les dessins de Beatriz sur mes écrits.

O Femme

Le temps d’un regard
Et un lien s’est créé
Une reconnaissance réciproque
Une appréciation mutuelle
– Mystères-
Je raconte des histoires d’amitiés perdues
Femme sensuelle
Femme lesbienne
J’enregistre et me souviens.
Femme Créatrice
Ton image et mon écriture s’interpellent, s’accordent
Et s’entrelacent
-Magie du Talent –
– Miracle du Verbe –
Tu dessines les formes du récit qui prend corps
En noir et blanc
Et de tes tableaux se dégage la vérité de mes mots.
Maryse Noël Roumain

Ready or not you cannot remain a child. Life forces changes upon you making you an adolescent and you have new tasks and developmental stages facing you. Whether or not you come to this time prepared depends upon the circumstances of your life and the affective support you had gotten.
At around age 15, I experienced three big losses, that of my father and, in a way, that of my best friend whose family moved to the capital city Port-au-Prince. I also lost the belief in God as my protector in heaven.
This situation left me vulnerable but after a while it was time to leave behind my childhood and face up to the challenges and experiences of adolescence. It was time to form new relationships with both young girls and boys that would nurture me and accompany me throughout my adolescent years.

And, in turn, my adolescent years prepared me for adulthood.

But this is another story. I may tell it some day. Stay tuned.

So world culture came to us and impacted upon us through various channels including radio, cinema, literature, and, in the capital city, for a few, television.
In Aux Cayes, my hometown, the southern Haiti Baptist church established Radio Lumière in 1959. I remember listening to classical music and the news on this radio station. It was the voice of the Protestant church in Haiti and probably an instrument of American influence but I remained untouched by the politics as well as the rivalry between the Protestants and the Catholics. I was too young to be concerned with this serious business. My father had an old radio and there I learned of the assassination of President J.F. Kennedy which shocked everybody. I wasn’t concerned with the politics. He was a head of state of international reputation who got shot abruptly. That’s all you needed to be appalled and filled with sadness.
Through the radio stations broadcasting from Port-au-Prince, we heard the songs of Francoise Hardy, Sylvie Vartan, Johnny Halliday, Eddy Mitchell of the Ye-ye period. And later on, Charles Aznavour, Dalida and others charmed us through the air waves. The local music groups en vogue: Raoul Guillaume, Nemours Jean-Baptiste, Des Jeunes, Webert Sicot. In our town, Meridional and Panorama took the stage at the new movie theater. We also appreciated Latin American music especially coming from Cuba and Mexico. The Mexican woman singer Amalia Mendoza was a great star in Haiti and although our Spanish was rudimentary we all loved Daniel Santos, Celia Cruz, Edyie Gorme, danced the cha cha cha, and the bolero. We sang the rancheras and played the guitar with the group of local troubadours.
There was also the influence of Anglo-Saxon and Black American music: The Beatles were big in Haiti as well as Bob Dylan; we learned to dance the twist. We appreciated the music of Elvis Presley, Ray Charles and the Platters. The great Nat King Cole charmed our ears and delighted our emotions. And so on…
We were mostly mimicking the West but did not feel oppressed by Western culture. It had more to do with being part of the world, like adolescents go through similar experiences and feelings, dreams and pleasures. Besides, this participation to world culture did not assume a rejection of our own. We also enjoyed our local musical groups and folklore. At least I did.
There was jazz and instrumental music, too; especially by the black American Sydney Bechett, and the Italian Fausto Papetti. There was a true passion for music of different genres including classical music.
Movies were important as a form of entertainment and an influence on our ideas, values and lifestyle. Those shown at our local movie theater came from Europe especially France as well as the USA. The people from Aux Cayes were particular in their relationship to cinema. Once they loved a movie they wanted to see it over and over again. So such films as Marie Madeleine, the musical Seven Wives for Seven Brothers, The movie The Blue Angel, Carmen de Granada, the Ten Commandments, Cleopatra, the Count of Monte Cristo, Scheherazade, Sinbad the Sailor and others were shown over and over again.
During the mid- sixties more serious themes were introduced. In the U.S. and France, adolescents began to question traditional mores and wanted to imprint their own ideas and values on society. Times were changing. The movies began to show the moral hypocrisies in small U.S. towns as well as the sexual revolution that was happening. Love and sex were portrayed as natural psychological and biological phenomena that were oppressed in a society hung on false morality. We loved “Peyton Place” and the “Return of Peyton Place” which were adapted in French. I also had a special preference for the film “The Children’s Place” played by Audrey Hepburn, Shirley Mc Lain. From Italy, we were getting great films with the stars Sophia Loren, Gina Lollobrigida, Claudia Cardinale and Marcello Mastroiani. The movie “Divorce, Italian Style” developed the themes of crumbling marriages, breakups, divorces and extra-marital affairs. Of course in those times, divorces were forbidden so the issues raised by the movie were of special interest. From France, we got Brigitte Bardot’s movie “And God Created Women” which was explicit about sexuality and nudity. I was not allowed to see it because of my young age although I wanted to. I was eager to be exposed and participate to the new debate and options about sex and other philosophical and political ideas which put into question our society, traditions and mores and stimulated the intellectual discussion.
There were, despite the enormous differences in our societies, parallels with our small town life where a ban was placed on adolescent sexuality and scandals like abortion, illegitimate children, bigamy and adultery as well as premarital sex did occur. There was a definite shift from the lifestyle of the fifties as the adolescents of that period were getting ready to put forward their own ideas and viewpoints and claim the right to participate in the struggle for sexual liberation, feminism and against social divisions and racial oppression, thus affirming themselves as different from their elders.

And of course I was an avid reader. I recall among numerous others the volumes of Comtesse de Ségur’s Les Malheurs de Sophie, Grimm’s fairy tales Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, the Three Little Pigs… and the Book of One Thousand and One Nights in which imagination went wild with the stories of Ali Baba and the forty thieves, Scheherazade and Sinbad the Sailor. I remember being profoundly touched with Les Misérables of Victor Hugo recounting the life of Cozette at the Thénardiers.
I was also reading the books and magazines my brother brought home. That’s how I became involved in the stories of Blek le Roc, the hero who fought for the freedom of his country, America. They take place in the times prior to American independence when Great Britain considered North America as its property for commercial and military dominance. It is in this context that Blek helps the fight and represents an ideal of liberty and resistance against the oppressor. As a people who promoted independence for all nations after we fought for ours and obtained it in 1804, we all identified with Blek and waited impatiently for the next issue of Kiwi magazine.
I was very moved by St Exupéry’s The Little Prince. This book became my favorite for the longest time. I still remember from it that idea: friendship is to create bonds, to be attached to somebody in a special manner…forever. That was the book that reflected an important theme and preoccupation of my childhood years.

The class and color question in Haiti goes back to colonial times. The colony had three social groups or castes: the whites, the affranchises composed mainly of mulattos, and the slaves composed mainly of blacks. The affranchises were much more important in the south where I came from than in the north. As the name indicates, they had been freed from slavery and, in addition, had possessions: In 1789, they owned 2/3 of the land and ¼ of the slaves.
The conflict between André Rigaud, a southern mulatto born of a French nobleman and a black woman, and Toussaint Louverture, a northern black, is of particular interest. A champion of the rights of the free ‘people of color’, meaning the affranchises, André Rigaud’s army established itself during the mid-1790s as a leading force in the South and was given authority to govern this region by the French.
Toussaint Louverture, however, was his superior in rank in the French Revolutionary Army of Saint-Domingue, then, Haiti’s name. Rigaud refused to acknowledge the authority of the black revolutionary leader causing the bitter “war of the knives” as it was called. The two men fought over the control of Haiti after defeating foreign forces. They, later on, were both made prisoners by the French who wanted to re-establish slavery on the island and were both imprisoned in Fort de Joux in the Jura Mountains in France.
History books report that Rigaud believed in a class system with mulattos just below whites and blacks at the bottom. Toussaint, of course, would have none of this. To him mulattos and blacks were equal. In Rigaud’s army, no blacks rose above the rank of captains. He was to return to Haiti with the Leclerc expedition on behalf of Napoleon; however he reunited with the army of Dessalines to proclaim Haiti an independent nation. Later, he joined the forces which separated the south from the north and two of his protégés, the mulattos Pétion and Boyer, became presidents of the south of Haiti.
The American occupation of Haiti during nineteen years (1915-1934) reinforced mulatto economic, political and social predominance. Haiti went back to Pétion and Boyer times where government was entirely staffed by the mulatto elite. There were Blacks in the government but not at the top. Social clubs tended to become limited to members of a particular group…
Under President Elie Lescot, the mulattos had unchallenged political supremacy…
In 1946 a “revolution” took place where the blacks returned to high positions in the government when the two chambers elected Dumarsais Estimé as president of the republic. Estimé was the first black president in thirty years. “It is recognized by all that it was a peaceful and yet profound change: it was a social and nationalist explosion. The 30-year lid placed on the black middle class by the mulatto oligarchy had blown off. Overnight there rose to power members of the black lower, middle and upper class of Port-au-Prince and of the provinces” (Lyonel Paquin: The Haitians, Class and Color Politics).
From 1950 to 1956, Paul Eugene Magloire, a black colonel of the army, became president of Haiti. He understood the need for a ‘balanced’ government, between the mulatto and the black, Paquin writes.
I was born under president Estimé who was a black man and promoted blacks but I became aware of racial and social relations under President Duvalier when the war within the political class among mulattoes and blacks reach a culminating, violent point. As time went by, color prejudice became less ostentatious and less obvious although the black political class delighted in courting and marrying light skin young women. In fact I remember the economic elite composed of both mulattos (the Bayard, the Bourgeois, the Blanchet families) and blacks (the Pierre family) and the political elite equally composed of both mulattos (Déjoie) and blacks (Edgar Nere Numa, Rene Condé, Lesage Chery). But color prejudice still prevailed.
Our family belonged to none of these “elitist” categories. We were modest people who distinguished ourselves by our intelligence and tried to build an acceptable life for ourselves through education. Too many of us in the family were women and despite the progress (right to vote, right to become medical doctors and so on), women were still oppressed. Besides, we refrained from relationships with people from the government who would exchange upward mobility for sexual favors, and kind of were prepared and expected to make it on our own.
In Aux Cayes, in fact, poor mulattos married into the middle class black families to improve their social condition. Beauty was not exclusively related to the mulatto category neither was wealth. In 1960, the black beauty from the bourgeoisie, Claudinette Fouchard beat contestants from 42 other countries of the Caribbean and Latin America to win Haiti’s Sugar Queen Title. She visited the town of Aux Cayes and I remember seeing her motorcade from the balcony of my house and being proud and filled with admiration. Later, when a mulatto woman from our town, Micheline Condé, won the title of Miss Haiti, she did not replace her in my heart. Everybody in Haiti was in awe with the black (or brown if you prefer) beauty queen. I, at least, felt that way.