We Won't Won't Forget Nov 12, 1964 | Hidden History Part2/ After the Revolution To Today

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Nov 14, 2017, 6:46:20 PM11/14/17
to Ezili Dantò
Hidden History Part2/ After the Revolution To Today
Airing November 15th at 8pm on WHUTRock Newman Show - Hidden Haiti History, part2/ After the Revolution To Today

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Novembre 12, 1964 - The Public Execution of Freedom Fighters, Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin Jr. 

November 7, 1791 - Boukman Dutty is beheaded by the French

November 18, 1803 - at Vertieres, The defining Battle of Haiti Revolution where Napoleon Troops Surrender to General Janjak Desalin, Haiti Founding Father

"The Afrikan warriors did what Spartacus could not do. What the Biblical Jesus Christ never even tried to do. The Haitian warriors led a revolution that abolished slavery after 1200 years of Arab enslavement on the African continent and 300 years of European slavery in Haiti." -- Èzili Dantò, HLLN/Free Haiti

Following Desalin's assassination in 1806 by the Mulatto sons of France, under the long Mulatto and Eurocentric presidencies of Petion (12 years) and Boyer (25 years), the name Desalin was execrated, declared loathsome, cursed, marginalized and not allowed to be spoken. Neocolonialism had begun in Haiti, would be formalized with Boyer's "Independence Debt" ($22 billion with the last slave-trade payment made in 1947 to US, the richest country in the world by Haiti, the most defenseless and poorest. See the November Vertieres post= HLLN's Open Letter to the People of France - https://goo.gl/LniUVS)
A FreeHaiti November post
We won't forget November 12, 1964

Tout sa malfektè Duvalierist yo fè la, Lemba ap gade.
Nèg yo mouri.
Jete dlo a pou yo ale.
Nèg yo mouri.
Jete dlo a pou yo ale.
Nèg yo mouri.
Jete dlo pou Marcel Numa, Louis Drouin. Pou tout trèz jèn gason sa yo...

Èzili Dantò's Note:
Haiti has been under U.S.-Euro occupation behind United Nations uniforms and guns, fake aid, fake elections and the fake Clinton-Bush self-proclaimed philanthropists since before 2004.

But the world doesn't want to know that the Duvalierists and their criminals are back in power this November 2017, legitimized by the powerful United States, France, Canada, 11 Latin American countries, AFRICOM, CARICOM and the wealthiest and most educated of Black folks in the United States with Obama/Clinton, the U.N. multinatonal rapists and disease carriers. And before that, the Bushes/Colin Powell-Condi Rice brought us the United Nations/NGhoe proxies for U.S.-Euro colonial rule.

FreeHaiti didn't stop fighting back.

It's November 2017 and Free Haiti remembers that we were alone in Vertieres on the 18th day of November 1803 when we face the same devils and General Kapwa Lamò's troops killed them dead to create Haiti. We've survived the last 213 years of containment-in-poverty in retaliation. We fought back - Nou nan goumen. Nou pap janm bliye - We shall never forget the fallen and our triumphs.

Nap toujou sonje, gwo sakrifis Jeune Haiti.
Ane saa fè 53 ans depi Duvalierist yo ak Tonton Makout yo asasinen 13 jèn gason ki te vinn eseye retire Ayiti nan diktati, kwape rejim Francois Duvalier e Tonton Makout li yo. Jodia, Duvalierist yo pran peyi ya bay Blan Kolon fè sa yo vle. Koripsyon an total kapital. Men, an 1964 Nèg yo te mouri. Marcel Numa, nou sonje ou te gen 21an sèlman jou yo asasinen w an Nov 12, 1964 ak Louis Drouin (31yrs). Nou nan goumen. Nèg yo mouri. Nou nonmen non nou, nou pa detounen n: Max Armand, son frère Jacques Armand, Gérald-Marie Brierre,Miko Chandler, Charles Forbin, Jean Gerdes, Réginald Jourdan, Yvon Laraque, Roland Rigaud, Gusley Villedrouin et Jacques Wadestrand. Nou pap bay legen. Nou nan goumen ...tout sa yap fè la, Lemba ap gade.

It's November 2017 and FreeHaiti is still here and also must reMEMBER the 7th of November 1791 when the French beheaded Boukman. The African warriors didn't stop fighting back.

We reMEMBER 12 November 1964 when 13 young Haitians tried to take down U.S. neocolonialism, then headed by Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier... We remember afterwards, Haiti didn't stop fighting back until Baby Doc was gone.

We are the Haitians, from the womb to the tomb our lives is about liberation. We resist despots, enslavers, invaders and tyrants. We'll stop their impunity one day. We shall stop today's PHTK Duvalierists, their Middle Eastern oligarchs, the Bigio, Mevs, Acra, Brandt, Boulou, Apaid, Abdullah mercenary, their deep state corporate funders, private militias, and Satanley Lucifer civilian collaborators. We are the Free Haitians. Nou la!  We're what people mean when you hear "Haitians are resilient." It means the dignity evident in Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin as they faced the firing squads of U.S. puppeteer, Francois Duvaliver. It means we'll die standing up to tyranny like the warriors at Vertieres and Crete a Pierrot, rather than be enslaved ever again, in any way.

We don't integrate with the evil white settlers, the global enslavers and their forces from one generation to the next. No compromise. We don't enable injustice. We refuse to become what we fight against. We die. We die rather than integrate with dishonor. So did freedom fighters, Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, 53-years ago on the 12th of November 1964. Numa was only 21-years old when he left his comfortable U.S. life to fight for Haiti freedom and our liberty. Watch, if you've got the stomach for it, the public execution of freedom fighters, Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin Jr. on 12 Novembre 1964 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hgGacP6SuM 


We will NEVER forget we fought back - Nou nan goumen. Nou pap janm bliye. We shall never forget our fallen, our triumphs and the crimes of the Duvalier regime and their U.S.-Euro bosses. Crimes against humanity, against Jeune Haiti, against the innocent people of Haiti. Not ever. They're back in power now after the Clintons returned Aristide in 1994 as a means to re-image the death squads and Duvalierists as respectable (Georges Soros) civil society. We see it. They're back in power, now in 2017.

We recall that the U.S. Ambassador under the Hillary Clinton's State Department, under the the Obama regime, lied with a straight-face. Kenneth Merten said Michel Martelly was constitutionally qualified to hold the presidential seat in Haiti, that he never held a U.S. passport, which means he never voted in Miami in a U.S. elections. That's like saying Wyclef Jean wasn't stumping for the destroyer of Haiti, Hillary Clinton at the DNC and didn't say he will vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Hillary Clinton and Cheryl Mills lied, cheated and stole the 2010 elections to put the former Tonton Makout, Michel Martelly, a gross mysoginist and his legal bandits back in power with the drug-money laundering, Jovenel Moise. The impunity of the corrupt is butt naked for all to see.

The watchers watch, resist zonbification. The Legacy of Desalin lives. Nou La! Ginen poze.

Nou nan goumen. Nèg yo mouri. Nou nonmen non yo,
nou pa detounen yo: Max Armand, Jacques Armand, Gérald-Marie Brierre, Miko Chandler, Charles Forbin, Marcel Numa, Louis Drouin, Jean Gerdes, Réginald Jourdan,Yvon Laraque, Roland Rigaud, Gusley Villedrouin et Jacques Wadestrand...Jete dlo pou yo.

(Read excerpt on Numa and Drouin from ‘Create Dangerously’  By Edwidge Danticat  - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/books/review/excerpt-create-dangerously.html)

A FreeHaiti Nov. 18 Vertieres Teach-in post:
Promotional link for people to watch live - https://goo.gl/msRbnL
Come join us live November 15, 2017, at 2 pm
Airing November 15th at 8pm on WHUT
Rock Newman Show - Hidden Haiti History, part2/ After the Revolution To Today

The History of Haiti on The Rock Newman Show (Part 1)

 I alone remember it was the eighteenth day of a month called November

Recall the Battle of Vertières, the defining battle of the Haitian revolution.   
Haiti the Rebel by Michel Sanon for Nov 18 Vertieres, Greatest Battle Ever Fought
 https://goo.gl/YvLGSe

      From Èzili Archive links first published Nov 18, 2007 |  https://goo.gl/Haf3q4

‘Create Dangerously’

By Edwidge Danticat  - http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/books/review/excerpt-create-dangerously.html

Chapter One: Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work

On November 12, 1964, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, a huge crowd gathered to witness an execution. The president of Haiti at that time was the dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who was seven years into what would be a fifteen-year term. On the day of the execution, he decreed that government offices be closed so that hundreds of state employees could be in the crowd. Schools were shut down and principals ordered to bring their students. Hundreds of people from outside the capital were bused in to watch.

The two men to be executed were Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin. Marcel Numa was a tall, dark-skinned twenty-one-year-old. He was from a family of coffee planters in a beautiful southern Haitian town called Jeremie, which is often dubbed the "city of poets." Numa had studied engineering at the Bronx Merchant Academy in New York and had worked for an American shipping company.

Louis Drouin, nicknamed Milou, was a thirty-one-year-old light-skinned man who was also from Jeremie. He had served in the U.S. army — at Fort Knox, and then at Fort Dix in New Jersey — and had studied finance before working for French, Swiss, and American banks in New York. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had been childhood friends in Jeremie.

The men had remained friends when they'd both moved to New York in the 1950s, after Francois Duvalier came to power. There they had joined a group called Jeune Haiti, or Young Haiti, and were two of thirteen Haitians who left the United States for Haiti in 1964 to engage in a guerrilla war that they hoped would eventually topple the Duvalier dictatorship.

The men of Jeune Haiti spent three months fighting in the hills and mountains of southern Haiti and eventually most of them died in battle. Marcel Numa was captured by members of Duvalier's army while he was shopping for food in an open market, dressed as a peasant. Louis Drouin was wounded in battle and asked his friends to leave him behind in the woods.

"According to our principles I should have committed suicide in that situation," Drouin reportedly declared in a final statement at his secret military trial. "Chandler and Guerdes [two other Jeune Haiti members] were wounded ... the first one asked ... his best friend to finish him off; the second committed suicide after destroying a case of ammunition and all the documents. That did not affect me. I reacted only after the disappearance of Marcel Numa, who had been sent to look for food and for some means of escape by sea. We were very close and our parents were friends."

After months of attempting to capture the men of Jeune Haiti and after imprisoning and murdering hundreds of their relatives, Papa Doc Duvalier wanted to make a spectacle of Numa and Drouin's deaths.

So on November 12, 1964, two pine poles are erected outside the national cemetery. A captive audience is gathered. Radio, print, and television journalists are summoned. Numa and Drouin are dressed in what on old black-and-white film seems to be the clothes in which they'd been captured — khakis for Drouin and a modest white shirt and denim-looking pants for Numa. They are both marched from the edge of the crowd toward the poles. Their hands are tied behind their backs by two of Duvalier's private henchmen, Tonton Macoutes in dark glasses and civilian dress. The Tonton Macoutes then tie the ropes around the men's biceps to bind them to the poles and keep them upright.

Numa, the taller and thinner of the two, stands erect, in perfect profile, barely leaning against the square piece of wood behind him. Drouin, who wears brow-line eyeglasses, looks down into the film camera that is taping his final moments. Drouin looks as though he is fighting back tears as he stands there, strapped to the pole, slightly slanted. Drouin's arms are shorter than Numa's and the rope appears looser on Drouin. While Numa looks straight ahead, Drouin pushes his head back now and then to rest it on the pole.

Time is slightly compressed on the copy of the film I have and in some places the images skip. There is no sound. A large crowd stretches out far beyond the cement wall behind the bound Numa and Drouin. To the side is a balcony filled with schoolchildren. Some time elapses, it seems, as the schoolchildren and others mill around. The soldiers shift their guns from one hand to the other. Some audience members shield their faces from the sun by raising their hands to their foreheads. Some sit idly on a low stone wall.

A young white priest in a long robe walks out of the crowd with a prayer book in his hands. It seems that he is the person everyone has been waiting for. The priest says a few words to Drouin, who slides his body upward in a defiant pose. Drouin motions with his head toward his friend. The priest spends a little more time with Numa, who bobs his head as the priest speaks. If this is Numa's extreme unction, it is an abridged version.

The priest then returns to Drouin and is joined there by a stout Macoute in plain clothes and by two uniformed policemen, who lean in to listen to what the priest is saying to Drouin. It is possible that they are all offering Drouin some type of eye or face cover that he's refusing. Drouin shakes his head as if to say, let's get it over with. No blinders or hoods are placed on either man.

The firing squad, seven helmeted men in khaki military uniforms, stretch out their hands on either side of their bodies. They touch each other's shoulders to position and space themselves. The police and army move the crowd back, perhaps to keep them from being hit by ricocheted bullets. The members of the firing squad pick up their Springfield rifles, load their ammunition, and then place their weapons on their shoulders. Off screen someone probably shouts, "Fire!" and they do. Numa and Drouin's heads slump sideways at the same time, showing that the shots have hit home.

When the men's bodies slide down the poles, Numa's arms end up slightly above his shoulders and Drouin's below his. Their heads return to an upright position above their kneeling bodies, until a soldier in camouflage walks over and delivers the final coup de grace, after which their heads slump forward and their bodies slide further toward the bottom of the pole. Blood spills out of Numa's mouth. Drouin's glasses fall to the ground, pieces of blood and brain matter clouding the cracked lenses.

The next day, Le Matin, the country's national newspaper, described the stunned-looking crowd as "feverish, communicating in a mutual patriotic exaltation to curse adventurism and brigandage."

"The government pamphlets circulating in Port-au-Prince last week left little to the imagination," reported the November 27, 1964, edition of the American newsweekly Time. "'Dr. Francois Duvalier will fulfill his sacrosanct mission. He has crushed and will always crush the attempts of the opposition. Think well, renegades. Here is the fate awaiting you and your kind.'"
 
All artists, writers among them, have several stories — one might call them creation myths — that haunt and obsess them. This is one of mine. I don't even remember when I first heard about it. I feel as though I have always known it, having filled in the curiosity-driven details through photographs, newspaper and magazine articles, books, and films as I have gotten older.

Like many a creation myth, aside from its heartrending clash of life and death, homeland and exile, the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin involves a disobeyed directive from a higher authority and a brutal punishment as a result. If we think back to the biggest creation myth of all, the world's very first people, Adam and Eve, disobeyed the superior being that fashioned them out of chaos, defying God's order not to eat what must have been the world's most desirable apple. Adam and Eve were then banished from Eden, resulting in everything from our having to punch a clock to spending many long, painful hours giving birth.
The order given to Adam and Eve was not to eat the apple. Their ultimate punishment was banishment, exile from paradise. We, the storytellers of the world, ought to be more grateful than most that banishment, rather than execution, was chosen for Adam and Eve, for had they been executed, there would never have been another story told, no stories to pass on.

In his play Caligula, Albert Camus, from whom I borrow part of the title of this essay, has Caligula, the third Roman emperor, declare that it doesn't matter whether one is exiled or executed, but it is much more important that Caligula has the power to choose. Even before they were executed, Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had already been exiled. As young men, they had fled Haiti with their parents when Papa Doc Duvalier had come to power in 1957 and had immediately targeted for arrest all his detractors and resistors in the city of poets and elsewhere.

Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin had made new lives for themselves, becoming productive young immigrants in the United States. In addition to his army and finance experience, Louis Drouin was said to have been a good writer and the communications director of Jeune Haiti. In the United States, he contributed to a Haitian political journal called Lambi. Marcel Numa was from a family of writers. One of his male relatives, Nono Numa, had adapted the seventeenth-century French playwright Pierre Corneille's Le Cid, placing it in a Haitian setting. Many of the young men Numa and Drouin joined with to form Jeune Haiti had had fathers killed by Papa Doc Duvalier, and had returned, Le Cid and Hamlet-like, to revenge them.

Like most creation myths, this one too exists beyond the scope of my own life, yet it still feels present, even urgent. Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin were patriots who died so that other Haitians could live. They were also immigrants, like me. Yet, they had abandoned comfortable lives in the United States and sacrificed themselves for the homeland. One of the first things the despot Duvalier tried to take away from them was the mythic element of their stories. In the propaganda preceding their execution, he labeled them not Haitian, but foreign rebels, good-for-nothing blans.

 At the time of the execution of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, my recently married, twenty-nine-year-old parents lived in Haiti, in a neighborhood called Bel Air, about a thirty-minute walk from the cemetery. Bel Air had a government-sponsored community center, a centre d'etude, where young men and women — but mostly young men — went to study in the evenings, especially if they had no electricity at home. Some of these young people — not my parents, but young people who studied at the center — belonged to a book club, a reading group sponsored by the Alliance Francaise, the French Institute. The book group was called Le Club de Bonne Humeur, or the Good Humor Club. At the time, Le Club de Bonne Humeur was reading Camus' play Caligula with an eye to possibly staging it.

In Camus' version of Caligula's life, when Caligula's sister, who is also his lover, dies, Caligula unleashes his rage and slowly unravels. In a preface to an English translation of the play, Camus wrote, "I look in vain for philosophy in these four acts.... I have little regard for an art that deliberately aims to shock because it is unable to convince."

After the executions of Marcel Numa and Louis Drouin, as the images of their deaths played over and over in cinemas and on state-run television, the young men and women of the Club de Bonne Humeur, along with the rest of Haiti, desperately needed art that could convince. They needed art that could convince them that they would not die the same way Numa and Drouin did. They needed to be convinced that words could still be spoken, that stories could still be told and passed on. So, as my father used to tell it, these young people donned white sheets as togas and they tried to stage Camus' play — quietly, quietly — in many of their houses, where they whispered lines like:

Execution relieves and liberates. It is a universal tonic, just in precept as in practice. A man dies because he is guilty. A man is guilty because he is one of Caligula's subjects. Ergo all men are guilty and shall die. It is only a matter of time and patience.

The legend of the underground staging of this and other plays, clandestine readings of pieces of literature, was so strong that years after Papa Doc Duvalier died, every time there was a political murder in Bel Air, one of the young aspiring intellectuals in the neighborhood where I spent the first twelve years of my life might inevitably say that someone should put on a play. And because the uncle who raised me while my parents were in New York for two-thirds of the first twelve years of my life, because that uncle was a minister in Bel Air and had a church and school with some available space, occasionally some of these plays were read and staged, quietly, quietly, in the backyard of his church.

There were many recurrences of this story throughout the country, book and theater clubs secretly cherishing some potentially subversive piece of literature, families burying if not burning their entire libraries, books that might seem innocent but could easily betray them. Novels with the wrong titles. Treatises with the right titles and intentions. Strings of words that, uttered, written, or read, could cause a person's death. Sometimes these words were written by Haitian writers like Marie Vieux-Chauvet and Rene Depestre, among others. Other times they were written by foreign or blan writers, writers like Aime Cesaire, Frantz Fanon, or Albert Camus, who were untouchable because they were either not Haitian or already long dead. The fact that death prevented one from being banished — unlike, say, the English novelist Graham Greene, who was banned from Haiti after writing The Comedians — made the "classic" writers all the more appealing. Unlike the country's own citizens, these writers could neither be tortured or murdered themselves nor cause their family members to be tortured or murdered. And no matter how hard he tried, Papa Doc Duvalier could not make their words go away. Their maxims and phrases would keep coming back, buried deep in memories by the rote recitation techniques that the Haitian school system had taught so well. Because those writers who were still in Haiti, not yet exiled or killed, could not freely perform or print their own words outright, many of them turned, or returned, to the Greeks.

When it was a crime to pick up a bloodied body on the street, Haitian writers introduced Haitian readers to Sophocles' Oedipus Rex and Antigone, which had been rewritten in Creole and placed in Haitian settings by the playwright Franck Fouche and the poet Felix Morisseau Leroy. This is where these writers placed their bets, striking a dangerous balance between silence and art.

How do writers and readers find each other under such dangerous circumstances? Reading, like writing, under these conditions is disobedience to a directive in which the reader, our Eve, already knows the possible consequences of eating that apple but takes a bold bite anyway.
How does that reader find the courage to take this bite, open that book? After an arrest, an execution? Of course he or she may find it in the power of the hushed chorus of other readers, but she can also find it in the writer's courage in having stepped forward, in having written, or rewritten, in the first place.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. This is what I've always thought it meant to be a writer. Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them. Coming from where I come from, with the history I have — having spent the first twelve years of my life under both dictatorships of Papa Doc and his son, Jean-Claude — this is what I've always seen as the unifying principle among all writers. This is what, among other things, might join Albert Camus and Sophocles to Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Osip Mandelstam, and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ralph Waldo Ellison. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, a future that we may have yet to dream of, someone may risk his or her life to read us. Somewhere, if not now, then maybe years in the future, we may also save someone's life, because they have given us a passport, making us honorary citizens of their culture.

Continues...

Excerpted from CREATE DANGEROUSLY by Edwidge Danticat. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.


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