Family and Kinship

The traditional family in Haiti is an extended family, with grandparents playing an important role, especially in making major decisions, in socialization, and in caring for young children and dependent adults. While the structure of the traditional family is patriarchal, the diffuse but still real influence of grandparents is a limiting factor on the authority of the classic paterfamilias. In addition, because the father, as the breadwinner, is away from home from morning to evening, it becomes the mother’s responsibility to carry out the daily tasks of housekeeping, household management, teaching children, and even meting out justice. In many rural families, father and mother jointly fulfil the role of economic provider. As a result, child care is handled by their parents, by older children, or by neighbours, and these people become alternative agents of socialization.

Roughly since the early 1980s, the pressure of poverty has led some young family members or even husbands or wives to “get along” through the black market, prostitution, loan-sharking, drug dealing, and the like. Sometimes these activities take people away from the family home. Along with the effects of modernity, stimulated by the availability of information from abroad and by the attitudes of Haitians who have lived elsewhere and returned to Haiti, these changes have gradually weakened the social control formerly exercised by parents and grandparents.

In Canada, a number of factors have made it easier for Haitian women and young people accustomed to being restricted by the control exercised by husband, mother, or grandparents to fulfil their dreams of autonomy. These factors include being uprooted from their home country, easier access to the labour market for many women and some young people, and the existence of liberal legislation concerning human rights and the protection of youth and democratic criteria governing relations between men and women. As a result, in some cases conflicts have caused the disintegration of couples and families, while in other cases new models of relationship have emerged.

An unscientific but still interesting study calculated that 30 percent of Haitian men in Quebec as of 1977 were married to white Quebec women. Information on this subject is still highly inexact, especially if common-law unions are taken into account. However, according to an as yet unverified hypothesis, the massive immigration that began in the early 1970s, along with the emergence of a more structured community, would have led to a reduction in the number of racially mixed marriages. A number of factors might have motivated Haitian men to enter into long-term relationships with white Quebec women. For some, white skin would be a discovery; for others, a tasting of forbidden fruit; for still others, a symbol of power and social success. In many cases, a different set of factors would be more significant: force of circumstance, attraction across cultural boundaries, ideological or class solidarity with white Quebec women, an insufficient number of available Haitian women in the 1950s and 1960s, and the desire of more “liberated” Haitians to adapt to new values and norms. At the same time, adherence to a form of “black nationalism” would prevent some Haitians from undertaking mixed marriages.

Among Haitians of all social classes, at home and abroad, the transition from adolescence to adulthood is influenced by both informal institutions (parents, siblings, grandparents, peer groups) and formal ones (school, media, church). In rural areas, especially ones that are geographically isolated or economically self-sufficient, neighbour relationships also play a considerable role, as does Voodoo, whose organization is often intertwined with that of the small community. On the other hand, the socialization of upper-class and upper-middle-class Haitian adolescents may be somewhat different as a result both of indigenous cultural traditions and of education or vacations abroad.

The kind of environment and socialization to which young people have been exposed in Haiti is one factor in determining how traumatic the adjustment to living in a new country will be. Another factor is the quality and appropriateness of the resources available to them. In Montreal North, for example, a third of the requests for abortion at the local CLSC between 1982 and 1985 came from Haitian women. Most of these women appeared to prefer abortion to using birth control pills or intra-uterine devices, generally associated with the myth of promiscuity. This attitude is especially prevalent among middle-class women whose education emphasized respectability and seriousness and who believe they will be lucky enough to find the partner they are waiting for.

On the other hand, using birth control can be motivated by a woman’s desire to free herself from repressive constraints or by the goal of avoiding an unwanted pregnancy, which is seen as an “embarrassment” or even a scandal and can hinder social mobility, at all costs. Similarly, abortion indicates a refusal to conform to a traditional Haitian value, inculcated most strongly in rural areas and among the urban working class, according to which “children are a resource for the future.”