Haiti Liberte 28 Octobre 2020

This week in Haiti
Haitian-Americans Line Up
for U.S. Early-Voting before
Nov. 3
The early-voting line in front of the voting center at Kings Theatre in
Brooklyn, NY on Sat., Oct. 24
Garry Pierre-Pierre
Haitians In Smaller States Highly Engaged In Elections,
Despite Lack Of Data
by Larisa Carr
As Nov. 3 fast approaches, Connecticut
resident Bianca Shinn-Desras is
doing everything she can to galvanize
her state’s Haitian-American community.
Taking a boots-on-the-ground
approach, Shinn-Desras and other volunteers
are knocking on doors in the
state’s small Haitian enclaves to provide
information on how to vote, combating
misinformation on Facebook
and WhatsApp, and working with pastors
to deliver useful updates to their
congregations.
“Connecticut is one of 10 states
in the U.S. that has a large Haitian population,”
said Shinn-Desras, who lives
in Stamford. “It’s often neglected because
it’s not Florida or New York, but
it is in that corridor — between New
York, Massachusetts and the Northeast
— and that’s powerful.”
At an estimated 20,000,
Haitian-Americans in the Constitution
State are few compared to New York
and Florida, where they are a visible
voting bloc. Nonetheless, Connecticut’s
dynamic Haitian-American residents
are intensely involved in turning out
the vote in their communities.
Without accurate, easily accessible
data to support their participation,
however, numerous advocates
and academics have said, the community
will miss out on resources it is due.
Census data, they say, doesn’t reflect
the true larger numbers of Haitians.
The lack of data has left
many, like Shinn-Desras, who is an associate
data strategist for a non-profit,
calling for a deeper level of detail about
voters.
“This is inequity in data collection,”
said Shinn-Desras, 39. “You
have a population that you’re not gaining
information about, not providing
open data, and it’s a problematic practice.”
Feeling invisible
Statistics from election boards in nine
states with large Haitian populations,
as well as official numbers by the
U.S. Census Bureau, do not reflect the
visible political participation of Haitian-American
communities across
the country. The majority of local and
statewide election boards only record
voter statistics by race, not by ancestry
or ethnicity.
In politically active Connecticut,
the state only provides a voter’s gender.
The absence of data on Haitian-American
voters feels as though
Connecticut is treating them like a forgotten
population, Shinn-Desras said.
Were these statistics to become available,
she would use them in promoting
political discourse and engagement
throughout her community.
“In the future, we definitely
have to be able to capture the data because,
while we are Black Americans,
our ethnicity is still very important,”
Shinn-Desras said. “We need to be able
to capture that, and I think by not having
that, we’re losing momentum.”
Others say different generations
participate in politics in their own way,
making the need for data a necessity
to guide effective voter outreach toward
each group. The methods used across
generations, for one, could be adjusted
with the appropriate data to support
outreach.
“There is the question of transnational
identity, where many Haitian immigrants
continue to remain focused on
Haiti and not on the realities in America,”
said Georges Fouron, a professor
at SUNY Stony Brook who has written
about Haitian political participation in
the United States. “This is not the case
with the second and third generation.
I’m not basing my hope on the immigrants
themselves, but instead on the
children and grandchildren.”
Increased visibility and
participation
Despite feeling overlooked, many Haitian-Americans
actively work to influence
voter turnout by mobilizing their
community in the U.S. and even by
working through loved ones in Haiti.
In South Carolina, with an estimated
1,106 Haitians, Patrick Gué is
currently in the process of helping to
form an association, tentatively known
as the American Haitian Organization,
to start combining political participation
efforts by individual Haitians.
“Our Haitian community has to
continue to call each other in our state
and in our country to motivate us to
vote,” said Gué, a Greenville County
pastor. “We are even calling people in
Haiti to reach out to their friends and
family who are U.S. citizens to encourage
them to vote.”
Courtesy of Bianca Shinn-Desras
Bianca Shinn-Desras walks doorto-door
educating her community
in Stamford, Connecticut’s thirdlargest
city
In Georgia, which has a Haitian-American
community of 30,763,
Haitian-Americans were intensely focused
on completing the Census as one
way to build cohesion across the state.
“We’re engaging with voters by
ensuring that we can count them,”
said Saurel Quettan of the Georgia Haitian-American
Chamber of Commerce.
With people living in the exurbs,
the lengthy commutes make uniting
the community a challenge, Quettan
said. Nonetheless, the Atlanta resident
said, he is optimistic about the growing
level of Haitian-American political
engagement.
An increasing number of Haitian-Americans
are beginning to run
for office as commissioners and mayors
in small cities he said. Recently, community
members walked to a polling
site to encourage participation in the
elections.
Such increased visibility is part of
the solution to be recognized as a significant
voting bloc.
“We need to [focus] on ourselves
here and encourage each other to vote,
so we can continue to participate in the
political arena,” said Gué, a Cap-Haïtien
native. “If we are organized and start to
do things in the community, politicians
will see that and come to us.”
The original version of this article
was published on the website of the
Haitian Times.
Art, Immortality, and the Haitian Masses
Emmanuel Merisier: June 2, 1929 – May 3, 2020 (2 nd part)
by Onz Chery and Sam Bojarski
Thousands of Haitian-Americans
queued up in early-voting lines
across the United States this past
weekend, joining millions of other voters
primed to participate in the 2020
elections.
In heavily Haitian Brooklyn,
NY, where early voting started Sat.,
Oct. 24, lines at Brooklyn College and
Kings Theatre in Flatbush stretched
and wrapped around blocks for half a
mile — with social distancing. Some
voters waited up to three hours to cast
their ballots at their designated neighborhood
sites.
In Florida, where early voting
began Oct. 19, the line in front of the
North Miami Public Library snaked
from the front door to the other side of
the building on Oct. 24.
Across both states, where the
majority of Haitian-Americans live,
their reasons for turning out sounded
very similar. As the Democratic Party’s
Joe Biden and the Republican Party’s
Donald Trump go neck-and-neck for
the highest office in the land, Haitian-Americans
are driven to vote in
response to Trump’s perceived animus
against Haitians. Even more so, they
see Trump’s handling of issues that
have plagued the U.S., COVID-19 in
particular, as a total failure and a precursor
of much worse to come if he
wins a second term.
“A virus came in, [he] knew
suite à la page(15)
Undated photograph (probably the co-op space, Kean Mason Gallery,
c. 1982.) From left: Hervé Méhu, Gerald Thomas (gallery personnel),
unidentified person, Merisier. His painting, “The Saint,” 1980, appears
at the top left corner
by André Juste
A Difficult Childhood for a Late-
Bloomer
The tendency to read Merisier’s work
mostly as it relates to that of great
European artists and to its connection
solely to Haitian themes, without the
filter of his individuality and the specific
social and art- historical context
from which it emanates, might have
seriously hampered the development of
his art career. But if it seems that he
made some headway relatively late in
his life, it’s in great part because he was
a late bloomer, which is hard to understand
when one sees the bracing and
prepossessing aspects of what could be
taken as mere post-impressionist takes
on the folksy imagery in his paintings
from the late seventies to early eighties.
I have not seen any of his work
predating his arrival in the United
States in 1968. But Edgar François,
an apparently skilled draftsman from
Haiti’s Centre d’Art, described Merisier’s
images in the 1982 exhibition as
“coarse” and not unlike his old drawings
and watercolors “back in Haiti.”
This, ironically, is a promising description
for the works in question. Indeed,
one could already detect in Merisier’s
small, loosely painted “Nature morte”
(1972) – illustrated in Michel Philippe
Lerebours’ 2018 Bref regard sur deux
siècles de peinture haitienne (1804-
2004) – the symbolic dramas and tenebrous
gleams that the artist favors in
his more mature works.
But unlike peers such as Spencer
Depas and Lucner Lazard, reportedly
quick studies who started to make their
names for their forays in mainstream
modernist styles in the late forties and
to whom Merisier was quite close, especially
in New York (and sought behind
their backs to rival), he did not start to
hit his stride until about the mid- or late
seventies. Much of the explanations
suite à la page(16)
Vol 14 # 17 • Du 28 Octobre au 3 Novembre 2020
Haiti Liberté/Haitian Times
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