"Indeed, over the course of the occupation paternalist discourse constructed Haiti as a nation orphaned by parental neglect, sometimes figuring France as the father who abandoned Haiti and Africa as the single mother incapable of raising her illegitimate child alone."
--Mary A. Renda, Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of US Imperialism, 1915-1940, 2001, pg. 16.
"We Haitians, we certainly get around. We know how to achieve. That's one good thing the French left us."
--{sigh} my mom
It's hard to really engage with this today. These two epigraphs say it all--all that I have to understand and work against.
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