Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French... and they got together and swore a pact to the devil.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I feel a special connection to Haiti and the Haitian people.
One can't do anything alone in Haiti. Sharing and cooperation are so deeply woven into the culture that sometimes it's hard to have a separate thought.
The French are very bizarre. There is this collective depiction: 'We're in decline, we're being assailed, we must protect ourselves.'
I think Haiti is a place that suffers so much from neglect that people only want to hear about it when It's at its extreme. And that's what they end up knowing about it.
What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this.
Everything bad about France was transferred to Quebec.
It is the destiny of the people of Haiti to suffer.
Both French and Latin are involved with nationalistic and religious implications which could not be entirely shaken off, and so, while they seemed for a long time to have solved the international language problem up to a certain point, they did not really do so in spirit.
Napoleon had been fighting this army of slaves and free people in Haiti and it depleted his forces. And after the Revolution, when the French were driven out, they stopped and sold this big chunk of North America to the Americans for very little money.
Two hundred years ago, our precursors in Haiti struck a blow for freedom, which was heard around the world, and across centuries.