Interestingly enough, and luckily for me, I found various points of connections with Alexakis’s Foreign words and my memoir paper. What connects Alexakis and I is more his experience with Sango and his journey in Bangui rather than his personal life and his quest to reinvent himself.

On one hand, there is a correlation with Haitian Creole and Sango in the sense that both languages are spoken by the population as a whole but they are banned in favor of French Language. This, clearly , is the aftermath of years of colonization. Both the people carry the  the stigmata of colonization. The struggle faced by Haitian who only speak Creole are beating. To think that people who only speak Creole are sometimes considered pariahs is very striking. Growing up, Many times the question posed by the ambassador’s wife recured in Haiti as well  :”Is Creole a real language’? this again leads us to the question what are the benchmarks to weight  a real language? It is measured by how many people who speak the language or how many books are published in Creole. The rare books published in Creole are the New Testament and some poetry by authors like Georges Castera who wants to promote the language and show its beauties. In fact to understand the Haitian culture, one must understand the people and one way to get to the people is through Creole. When I went to school, the Fables I learned was Lafontaine’s Fable. But the Creole folktales I learned  were tales counted to me at home  in “clandestinity” at night  not at school .

On the other hand, I sometimes do find myself in Alexakis’s shoes when I go back to Haiti for the holidays per example, the Haitian people do not alway consider me essentially Haitian, in creole they say ” Ayisyen natif natal” . They consider me as ‘diaspora” because I live abroad and I speak other language. In fact, it is very disturbing to see that because I speak English and French, people approach me a different way. It is very intriguing to see how language refers to status; and unfortunately in Haiti the more one strays from Creole, the more status  he or she has. Just like Marcel Alingbingo resents it when it comes to Sango, I resent that the language is being suppressed by not only French but by also English.

These are the correlations with Foreign Words and my memoir.