“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
Michel DeGraff, 2022
Originally published in The New York Times
Editor’s Note: The excerpt in this chapter is included on the basis of fair use.
Hashtags
#exclusion, #education, #colonialism, #multilingual, #language discrimination, #trauma, #self-hatred, #protest, #assimilation, #journalistic
Frame
ET: As my co-authors and I considered late editions to the reader, we wanted to include other genres and styles of writing that also speak to themes established elsewhere in the book. As an op-ed, this piece offers a more direct and cutting critique of the effects of colonialism and the resulting self-hatred of one’s language and identity as it plays out in the classroom and national curriculum.
Excerpts
In 1982, a decree known as the Joseph Bernard Reform promised change. It required that Kreyòl be the language of instruction for the first 10 years of schooling and sought to make French a second language of instruction in the sixth year. That would have given Haitian students a chance to function in both languages while prizing their national identity. But for the past 40 years, this decree has largely been either ignored or misinterpreted. Haitian education has suffered across every academic subject — even French, in which the adults at the front of the classroom may be only marginally more proficient than the students in the seats. Many teachers use their native Kreyòl to approximate a narrow range of French sentences that they have simply memorized.
In October 2014, Michel Martelly, the Haitian president at the time, asked his French counterpart, François Hollande, to send retired French teachers to Haiti to help rebuild “the Haitian mentality and the Haitian man.” The next year, Mr. Hollande pledged to repay France’s so-called moral debt to Haiti, in part by investing in its educational system and more fully honoring its place as a Francophone nation. As recently as last year, experts at the Ministry of National Education and Vocational Training, with help from the French Development Agency, produced a curriculum guidance framework for the Haitian education system that would make French the sole language of instruction from the fifth year onward.
I consider the description of Haiti as the poorest nation of the Western Hemisphere to be a gross misrepresentation; Haiti is, rather, the nation most impoverished by the effects of white supremacy. The emissary of Charles X imposed an insurmountable financial ransom, but the French educational model, a supposed war bounty, was every bit as brutal: a linguistic ransom, a powerful tool for mental colonization. Haiti’s French-speaking elites, who have enforced that mandate, have always lived as far away as possible — geographically, socially, culturally, religiously and linguistically — from the majority Kreyòl-speaking population. They have never created a system to adequately teach French to those who did not grow up speaking it. Instead these Haitian elites favor teaching in French — an option that’s guaranteed to multiply the privilege they already enjoy and to ensure that most of their fellow citizens cannot share it.
You may access the full text here on The New York Times website.
Text Version
Wide Shots:
- How is school designed to exclude? How does it value exclusiveness, and why? Consider the benefits of thinking of schools as instruments of inclusion and exclusion.
- Think about what you would like the purpose of school to be. What markers do we use to judge if a school is a “good” school? How do those markers compare to how Great Schools ranks schools in Vox’s video “How online ratings make good schools look bad”?
- What is self-hatred? Where and how do we learn to hate ourselves? What outside narratives produce self-hatred?
Close Shots:
- Look at the sentences below and examine how they each approach expressing opinion differently:
- “Even UNESCO, which declares its commitment to local cultures and languages, favors French on its website and social media in Haiti”
- “I was also made to write hundreds of lines saying ‘I will never speak Kreyòl again.’ Some parents and teachers even make children scrub their tongues with soap, lemon and vinegar to metaphorically wash away Kreyòl.”
- “Unshackling Haitian minds and society from centuries of linguistic discrimination is the first step to help Haiti overcome the disastrous consequences of its colonial and neocolonial history.”
- Perspective-taking and contextualizing that perspective is important to opinion writing. How does DeGraff turn the narrative around by changing the perspective on Haitian poverty in the last paragraph of the excerpt above?
- Consider the phrases “moral debt” and “financial ransom” in the above excerpt. How does that economic inequality provoke an internalized colonialism amongst some Haitians? What does DeGraff seem to think of that?
Mid Shots
- See “Historical Contexts” for an activity on rebuilding the historical context that is hinted at, elided, or implied throughout the article.
- See “Building an Opinion” for an extended writing prompt that invites students to practice developing arguments through the form of an op-ed on related issues as they appear in their local contexts.
Possible Transitions
JS: For a wide-ranging discussion of different histories of colonialism, I would pair this essay with the podcast episode by NPR Codeswitch, “Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak” as well as Robin Wall Kimmerer’s, “Asters and Goldenrod.”
DU: I’d consider teaching this text alongside Audre Lorde’s, “The Transformation of Silence into Action.” Both of these authors clearly lay out their own processes around identifying particularly oppressive discursive and material forces and then offering concrete acts for transgressing those forces.
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
"Connecting the Dots"
“Three Ways to Speak English”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
Insufficient Definitions (exploration)
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
“Gun Bubbles”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
"To Speak is to Blunder"
“Vão/Vòng A Conversation with Katrina Dodson"
Against the Grain: Listening for Controversy (exploration)
Historical Contexts (exploration)
Parsing Themes (exploration)
Translations Across and Within Languages (exploration)
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
“The Contract Says: We’d Like the Conversation to be Bilingual”
“How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
“Place Name: Oracabessa”
“Puerto Rican Obituary”
“Three Ways to Speak English”
“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action”
Dialogue Over Time: A New Boogaloo: “How Beautiful We Really Are” (exploration)
a nonfiction genre typically found in newspapers and magazines like interviews, op-eds, or feature articles
See:
“As a Child in Haiti, I Was Taught to Despise My Language and Myself”
“Saving a Language You’re Learning to Speak”
“Vão/Vòng A Conversation with Katrina Dodson"
