Culture

Transplanted to a new environment where most people speak French but speakers of English and other languages are present as well, Haitian immigrants fully preserve their day-to-day languages: French for educated people, Creole for others. This is true even for the small number of Haitians who arrived during World War II. In some upper-class and upper-middle-class families, French is given higher priority (as a “civilized” language) or contrasted favourably with Creole (characterized as a “lower-class language”). For many middle-class and lower-middle-class families, French is identified with the myth of upward mobility. Some people dismiss Creole as a patois, while others see it as part of a common Haitian cultural experience.

The capacity of the oral tradition to resist acculturation contributes to the preservation of Creole. Written language plays a role as well, in the form of literature published by study and research centres and publishing houses (such as CIDIHCA and La Voix du Sud): scholarly journals, popular magazines, and specialized works on Haiti and the diaspora. However, the experience of many young immigrants and Haitian Canadians born in Canada is different; these people never learn Creole or stop speaking it over the course of time.

Newspapers, periodicals, radio programs, and the like also contribute to giving new prestige to the Haitian cultural heritage. In particular, it is an avowed aim of these efforts to give young Haitians a positive image of their origins. There is a weekly television program produced by the Communauté Haïtienne de Montréal on Montreal’s community-access cable channel, as well as radio programs produced in Montreal since 1981 by the Maison d’Haïti and the Haïtiana athletic association. There has also been a Haitian program on Quebec City’s community radio station since 1978. A number of magazines published in Montreal have also featured Haitian culture, including some that have ceased publication, to be replaced by new ones: Collectif paroles (1979– ), Haïti presse (1978–83), and Terre et liberté (1980–85). The Maison d’Haïti has published a Bulletin since 1976, with a hiatus between 1977 and 1979; the Association des Citoyens d’Origine Haïtienne au Canada also publishes a Bulletin.

Painting, sculpture, and music have also been major instruments of expression and dissemination of Haitian culture in Canada. There are a significant number of Haitian painters and sculptors in Canada, although most of them are not well known. A notable exception is Enna Auguste of Sainte-Foy near Quebec City. Auguste won the Prix de la Ville de Québec in 1989 for her Hibiscus (oil on canvas). In 1994 she won the Prix du Musée de la Civilisation du Québec and a competition organized by the Galerie Montserrat in New York. Her canvases and masks have been shown at the international symposium in Baie Saint-Paul and, since 1995, at the prestigious Galerie Antoinette Jean in Paris. Until recently, Haitian music in Canada has largely been the work of upper-class guitarists, pianists, bassists, and violinists, who until 1960 or so were mostly trained at the École des Arts et Métiers de Montréal. The last ten years have seen the emergence of a new generation of bassists, drummers, and tambourine players, most of whom cannot read music. These musicians have formed several groups specializing in Haitian songs and rhythms, and the Montreal groups compete with similar groups in New York.

All these artists have affirmed Haitian culture as such. At the same time, a hybrid Haitian culture of the diaspora has grown up. In the area of “multicultural music,” such artists as bassist-composer Eval Manigat, who won a Juno award in 1994, and guitarist-composer Harold Faustin work closely with musicians from Quebec, Ontario, and other places and ethnic origins. In their own description, they try to “hybridize” their musical heritage. However, Haitians who were born in Quebec or arrived there when they were very young tend to have little interest in traditional Haitian music, which they generally see as “foreign” to their direct experience of the North American environment. They tend to be most interested in American disco or jazz, Jamaican reggae, or contemporary African rhythms. Older Haitians still listen to Haitian, French, and Latin American songs that speak of their past, mostly on old records.

Another element of the development of a hybrid Haitian culture is in the linguistic realm: the use by some Haitian families of Creole sprinkled with Québécois expressions or mixed with English. Thus, for “I don’t want anything to do with this,” someone might say, “Moin pa vlé ça, pantoute,” adding the Québécois “pantoute,” meaning “not at all” to the Creole phrase. Or to say “I don’t pay attention even to important people,” someone might use a mixed French-Creole-English expression like “People qui people, moin pa occupy.” An original trans-border cuisine has also developed, in which north and south meet in surprising harmony; restaurants that serve this cuisine have become known as “Haitian-Québécois” or “Québécois-Haitian.”

Finally, a number of Canadians of Haitian origin have received significant recognition for their novels, stories, poems, and readings, in which their particular Haitian, Caribbean, or black experience is sometimes a window onto universal insights. Thus, Alix Renaud received a prize at an international story competition in Bordeaux, France in 1970 and has been invited to read his poetry at international book fairs in Senegal (Dakar, 1993) and Belgium (Brussels, 1994). In 1991 Émile Ollivier received the Prix de la Ville de Montréal for his novel Passages (19How to Make Love to a Negro (91). There is also Dany Laferrière, the well-known author of How to Make Love to a Negro (1985), which was made into a film co-produced in France and Quebec. In 1992 Laferrière won the Prix Carbet des Caraïbes for his An Aroma of Coffee (1991).