Final fixings for a Haitian New Year’s celebration in Los Angeles, as promised. Soup joumon, or pumpkin soup, top left. Sòs pwa, or bean sauce, bottom left. Mayi moule, or corn meal mash, right.
And a happy time was had by all.
Butternut squash primed for Soup Joumou, or New Year’s Day pumpkin soup
Apye nou ye is the Haitian Creole expression for Happy New Year! Say it fast and you’ll see that, although literally translated from Creole it seems to mean “We go on foot,” it actually sounds very much like the English words “Happy New Year.” And that’s not surprising, because it supposedly came into fashion as a Haitian New Year’s greeting during the U.S. Occupation of Haiti (1915 – 1934), when marines would greet Haitian passersby with those words.
Well, I am celebrating today.
After years of pressure from KOSANBA, the Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou at UC Santa Barbara, the Library of Congress has agreed today to change its primary subject heading for the establishing religion of Haiti from the old derogatory term “Voodooism” to the more anthropologically and linguistically sound “Vodou.”
Sometimes one has to eat youn ti kras kòbo – literal Creole translation of “a little bit of crow” — in this rushing world. Below, I try to rectify some mistakes in my post of October 24 on the Caracol park in northern Haiti.
One reason for today’s post is that a friend of mine who works in business in Haiti told me he felt I had been too harsh on Caracol – and I respect him, and wanted to give it some more thought. And upon reflection, I found my post to be a little, well, intemperate, which I do well, of course, and naturally! But usually without factual errors.
Many stories about Haiti don’t find a wider audience because they are so…. Haitian; hard to understand, dependent on a complicated base of knowledge about the place, somewhat impenetrable, really.
I recall that when I was working at Time magazine in New York, in the mid-1980s, we would get long “cables” from our valiant, tireless, far-flung Haiti correspondent, Bernard Diederich, who wrote the book Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes. Diederich’s cables would come clattering in over our machines, chk-chk-chking down the old-fashioned paper tracks, page after page.
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