With my office, library and meditation room located on the second floor of our home, on any given day I move up and down the steps twelve to twenty times.  At the top of the landing is an exquisitely framed, late 19th century, mint condition lithograph of Francois Dominique Toussaint L'Overture.  My brother Leonard rescued it from a dumpster behind a funeral home in Petersburg, Virginia. He gave it to me in 1994, for my 50th birthday.

L’Overture’s powerful portrait resides opposite a photograph of activist Matt Crawford, a mentor to former Congressman Ronald L. Dellums and long time friend of Langston Hughes and Louise Patterson. Flanking the L’Overture lithograph on the other side is a photograph of Shirley Graham DuBois and Malcolm X taken in Ghana.  These pieces are amongst the scores of esteemed ancestors and family members who serve as spirit guides, prophets and bold visionaries I continue to honor and respect.

With fearless eyes and a face etched in intelligence and dignity, L’Overture serves as another daily reminder of how much freedom means to me, my family and billions of black people around the world.  Slavery does not sit well with our spirits or visions of ourselves.  And many of us are conscious and committed enough to recognize it in its “globalized” state as well.

L’Overture led the 1791 Great Haitian Slave Revolt.  Haiti’s more than half million enslaved Africans set fire to plantations and began the largest slave revolt in history.  Though not an initial participant in the setting of the fires that ignited the revolt, L’Overture stepped up, trained the slaves and built an army that eventually resulted in the liberation of Haiti.    

For more than two centuries, Haiti’s liberation has remained a burr in the side of US and French powers and policies.  The US has enforced a unilateral embargo and cut off humanitarian aid to the poorest country in the hemisphere. The idea of Black people managing our own destiny, under democratically elected leadership, simply is not acceptable.  When my father was alive, he often said, “Them boys in Washington salivate like a snake on a rat to take it out.”  Dad was a butler who from the mid-50s to early 80s worked in homes, private clubs and embassies along the Eastern Seaboard.

According to democratically elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, he was driven from his leadership role in Haiti by the United States, in a “coup.”  American officials continue to insist that they did not force President Aristide to resign, claiming it was made clear to Aristide if he clung to power, they could not protect him. With his safety their alleged goal, the Administration offered him safe passage out of Haiti, if he would leave immediately.  Well, what’s the difference between that and a city official or local drug dealer coming in and taking over my legally purchased home, because they don’t like the color or its location in relationship to their political or business interests and then insisting I sign a document noting I wanted to leave? 

Using the usual euphemism that’s now become a mantra for this administration, American officials say their ultimate goal is to help put in place a transitional government and prepare the ground for new legislative and presidential elections.  Well, leaders from around the world better be on notice that the Bush Administration will coup you out of power, and divest you of your leadership before you can look up at a “waving in the wind flag” and wonder where you really are.

This deep, in the dark swoop of power harkens back to the early days of colonialism, when European nations focused their attention on seizing and enslaving millions of women and men to help them build “the new world.”  Now joined by France and Canada, the Bush administration also seeks assistance from Jamaica, Brazil, Chile and Argentina – a country having dire problems feeding its own people.

Aristide now unwillingly resides in the Central African Republic, a country slightly smaller than Texas and just north of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Lest we forget, in March 2003 President Francois Bozize was “couped” in as the leader of the Central African Republic, a former French colony.  Unlike Haiti, the Central African Republic remains under the foot of France.

For those of us who hold Democracy dear in our hearts, I ask that we sing a rousing “Redemption Song for Haiti” that can be heard from the corridors of the United Nations to the Haitian sugar plantations from which Barbancourt Rhum flows, to the palace of President Bozize and the streets of the United States.  Support the efforts of TransAfrica and the Black Caucus; write letters to the editor and mount demonstrations so that the rousing choruses of this redemption song can be heard from here to Haiti and beyond.

Reeling from thirty-five coups, embargo-enforced economic destabilization and decades of intervention, it seems next to impossible for Haiti to become a viable, truly independent nation. As I went down the steps the first thing this morning and looked up at that proud portrait of Toussaint L’Overture, I wondered what he would do to lead his valiantly fought for land out of its ravaged, coup weary state?

This essay was broadcast on the morning show at Berkeley, California’s Pacifica radio station KPFA-FM. Daphne Muse is a writer, social commentator and poet. Visit her website, www.daphnemuse.com