This post is also available in: Kreyol
These are the very girls who represent our blue and red on the international stage, who defeat countries we’re not expected to beat, who leave everything they have on the field to be our source of national pride. Yet, we’ve failed them in the worst way imaginable.
I was 11 years-old the first time I was street harassed in New York.
It wasn’t by one of the many teenage boys who lived on my block or the other neighboring ones.
It was the older man who lived two floors beneath me and my family. The one whom my parents greeted each time they saw him in the building lobby or on the streets. A familiar adult whom, up until that time, I had no reason to feel uncomfortable around.
When I approached an older cousin with this story, she smiled and replied “Si w pa t bèl, li pa t ap fè w sa.” If you weren’t pretty, he wouldn’t do that. While this wouldn’t be the first time I’d experience street harassment, it was one of the first lessons I received on women being blamed for men’s actions.
I’m 31 now and like most women I carry within me several stories of sexual assault and harassment. I suppose this is the reason I grew numb while reading the Guardian’s exposé on the accusaitons of sexual abuse carried out by Yves “Dadou” Jean-Bart, the president of Haitian Football Federation, towards adolescent female football players at the nation’s primary training center. Line after line, I inhaled accounts of coerced sex, forced abortions and the deafening silence that followed the cycles of abuse.
These are the very girls who represent our blue and red on the international stage, who defeat countries we’re not expected to beat, who leave everything they have on the field to be our source of national pride. Yet, we’ve failed them in the worst way imaginable.
To make matters worse, just days after the initial report, a pro-Dadou protest took place where young female athletes forcefully became shields to protect the accused abuser in question. The girls carried protest placards which claimed that the allegations against Dadou were, in fact, attacks against their own reputations as girls and players.
As a Haitian-American, sometimes both my worlds collide because of forces beyond my control, and other times I feel both cultures living in me are as far from each other as the Pacific is to the Atlantic.
This week, I’m feeling the former.
I watched in actual time as the cases of American predators became headline news, their names etched deeply in my brain. Bill Cosby, Larry Nassar, Jerry Sandusky, Harvey Weinstein. And now, I’m watching this nightmare replay once more, but this time in Haiti.
Rape culture has no nationality. It holds no passport, respects no currency. It sullies cultures and societies all over the world. I’ve experienced just as many men go up for R. Kelly’s music as I have had to listen to jokes by Martelly’s supporters excusing his attacks on women.
As I’m writing this, I am witnessing the fall of the #MeToo movement in America as the same women who railed against rapists like Weinstein and Donald Trump build massive fortresses to protect Joe Biden against allegations of sexual assault. I am watching both Haitian men and women use troll accounts on social media to attack women using the #PaFèSilans hashtag to educate others.
And I am wondering just what kind of world are we leaving for those coming up after us?
We are living in a moment of reckoning, a time where every false and illusionary comfort we’ve ever relied on is being pulled out of our hands. When a cousin shared the translated version of the Guardian’s report on Facebook, another commented, “This is sad, but Haiti doesn’t need this right now.” I suppose that is the refrain one should come to expect any time a conversation on accountability and responsibility enters our home sphere.
But we cannot lull ourselves into a trance with this mantra. These hardships, these hard conversations are providing a pathway to acknowledge these crimes, truly care for victims, hold abusers accountable and begin creating another Haiti. They allow us a chance to call out the men who prey on women and children for sport, but also to grieve over a faux-conservative society whose principal blood supply is the silence of the poto mitans we pacify with false acknowledgement once or twice a year.
We’re being given an opportunity to create a new Haitian society where rapists no longer get to jeer “men madanm mwen” when they see their victims on the street, a Haiti where a woman’s ankle bracelet isn’t cause for shaming, a Haiti where mothers in the states no longer feel the need to whisper their stories of abuse to their daughters as if their abusers back home are actually around the corner.
We can build a culture where women denouncing the Weinsteins and Dadous of the world on social media do not have to dread a call from their mother or father begging them to take the status down.
I know this may sound like a fairytale, a pipe dream — an impossibility in the face of impossibilities. But we must hold on to this hope, to this idea that the Haiti we inherited, the unspoken culture of shame our mothers carried lòt bò dlo doesn’t have to be the one must pass down to our girls.
We know the Dadous of our families, our apartment buildings, churches, organizations and communities. We’ve swallowed enough silence and pain to last us a lifetime. It is my dream, my hope for us all that this generational shame ends with us.
