Rooted in Kreyòl cadence, Haitian sayings carry sun and storm in the same breath. They prize community over bravado, measure wealth in shared labor and laughter, and turn hardship into sly, salt-edged wisdom. Voices of maroons, market women, drummers, and elders braid history with everyday bread, faith threaded with doubt, tenderness with iron resolve. These words walk from the lakou to the shoreline, balancing memory like a calabash on the head: practical, poetic, unafraid to bless, tease, warn, and spark courage for the road ahead.
"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"
"Or even the state of Florida, where they are prepared to execute children. Umm, well, you hope that at least that there is something there to be claimed"
"I really can't blame anyone but myself, because I didn't have to deliver the album. But when you get caught up in the gas, and you're young, and there's so much helium going on around you, you can't decipher the real end"
"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"
"Especially moments when things are very difficult and complicated for me and I am still trying to grasp what is happening and I am still trying to understand and to reach family back home"
"More and more people are able to access information - thank goodness we have the Internet and if you are interested you can find things. Which is different than even 20 years ago"
"Creating these messes that go from administration to administration and then you swoop in and clean them up - with that heroic Delta force - people not realizing that they were always there but doing different things than what we see them doing at the moment"
"In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of"
"On some levels, you can also have this feeling that we are being duped, somehow. And that the world is at play for something you would understand more if it were pure ideology. It is a very strange time and also basic things are being taken away"
"On some level, now, we are joining the larger world and realizing that we are connected with people in these very scary ways, sometimes. What happened recently in Spain affects us here and brings questions up. It is too bad that people have to be shaken up in that way"
"In fact that is the struggle that most Americans - As rich as this country is, most Americans are very limited in their interaction with the world, unless the world comes to us in a very shocking way"
"I wanted to raise the voice of a lot of the people that I knew growing up, and this was, for the most part, poor people who had extraordinary dreams but also very amazing obstacles"
"Also, people are not often aware of the way the United States' policies influence what happens in places like Haiti or El Salvador or Nicaragua. Or in Columbia right now"
"You have all these people in the city and everything has become centralized. If you live outside the city and you need a birth certificate or some official paper from the government, you have to travel to the city"
"There is a frustration too, that at moments when there's not a coup, when there are not people in the streets, that the country disappears from people's consciousness"
"That's whatever news topic, whatever political process any country is going through - whenever they are in the news, that's when they exist. If you don't see them they don't exist"
"The record Clef and I did was just sitting there. So I said, Clef, I got a record, hit a verse on it. He just went in, messed around and ended up doing the hook too"
"People in the record business would say, Well, Pras, you know, you haven't been out in a while, maybe you should get today's hottest producer or rapper to do something"
"As far as we are concerned, we are ready to leave today, tomorrow, at any time, to join the people of Haiti, to share in their suffering, help rebuild the country, moving from misery to poverty with dignity"
"As we all know, many people remain buried under tons of rubble and debris, waiting to be rescued. When we think of their suffering, we feel deeply and profoundly that we should be there, in Haiti, with them, trying our best to prevent death"
