This message is dedicated to my fellow Francophiles
who get alarmed or even offended at the thought of eliminating French
as one of the official languages of the Republic of Haiti.
I am speaking today as a Haitian who is
truly madly in love with the French language.
I confess that my fascination and my respect for not only the richness
of the language but equally for those who master it without boundaries.
However, these days, I reject the French language.
I look down on it as much as some of my fellow Haitians
look down on the Creole language.
Therefore, I have a lot of trouble expressing myself in French.
Some may even say that I'm losing my French.
I think it is sad how Haitians always think they are able to lose something
that in no way and at no point in time belonged to them.
I say all that and still today I'm pushing to deliver this message in French.
It's because I'm addressing those of us who would have a hard time
taking me seriously if I had chosen to share my ideas in my native language.
I want you to understand the damage you are causing to your country,
to be fully concious of this damage and I hope I'll manage to do that, in French.
What I observed especially from the Haitians living in Haiti is that
French isn't a tool for communication that facilitates and allows the exchange of ideas,
the passing of customs and culture or the expression of convictions.
On the contrary, this languages diminishes the most remarkable and precious aspects
of the human experience from us, which is conversation.
French has become nothing more than one more way
to segregate the Haitian population.
To be able to tell from the get-go who deserves your good manners
and who you will snub, who you will barter with, and who you will charge double.
So it really doesn't help us to communicate properly.
I've also witnessed the mistreatment Haitians receive in Haiti
simply because they cannot speak French; a colonial language,
a language that we don't even teach to most of our people,
a language that is so foreign to us,
a language that despite the fact that it has dominated our educational system
for over two centuries is still lost among our people who are far from mastering it.
So that is rather deplorable.
I remember well that in Haiti, French was reserved for the formalities of meeting for the first time.
It was the initial move to affirm one's social class.
And to identify at which level a relationship could evolve between two people
And it was not a language that was used in familiar settings
or with those that we were close with
There is a very restricted group of people in Haiti who insist on
always speaking the French language, but we consider those people to be
pretentious and full of it
and often, their conversations remain very superficial
and because of that, they struggle to maintain relationships with people
outside of that very restricted circle.
So to say that French is an official language of the Haitians would be a huge exaggeration.
What I can tell you is, the percentage of Haitians that are able
to easily and clearly express themselves in french is probably less than those
who can fluently speak German or Mandarin.
Of course, there are Haitians in the french diaspora like in France and Canada
They speak french because that is the language they speak in those countries.
It's like me, I speak English and English has become my first language
Because I am obligated to speak well in English in the United States.
But to say that Haitians speak French, again, is completely false.
What also happens in Haiti, is that we substitute someone's ability
to read a few phrases in French with their intelligence or wisdom.
We attribute the ability to get by in French as wisdom
and now there are a lot of Haitians who fall into this trap because they
kill themselves trying to learn French and imitate the "elite" pretentious
francophones of Haiti.
And they completely lose because not only, are they not able to acquire
the french language, but they're not fully able to develop Creole which is their
native language.
So what happens is we end up with a population that is not able to properly
express themselves.
And Creole loses in its vocabulary and is constantly blocked by a stigma of
inferiority.
So it's quite a bummer.
If you have the intention to not agree with what I'm saying, consider
that to truly acquire a language, you need to really learn it in advanced
classes, or even further in college to really be able to manipulate a language
enough to be able to fully express your ideas and to be understood.
In Haiti, the majority of students do not make it past elementary courses.
And even if we obtain a High School Diploma in Haiti, it's not a very
robust diploma.
So the ability of Haitians to really express themselves in this forced language
becomes very minimized.
So what I want to tell you and leave you all with this message is,
think about communicating, think about sharing your ideas.
What you say is far more important than the language you are using.
We have to remind ourselves that each time we talk to someone in Haiti
or another Haitian, we really need to think about how what we say is what we say is
what's really important.