The Music of Rara Object of Study in UEH

With the support of Knowledge and Freedom Foundation (FOKAL), the Association Caracoli proposes a series of activities on the music of rara in partnership with the History Masters program, Memory and Heritage of the Institute of African Studies and Research Haiti (IERAH-ISERSS) of the State University of Haiti (UEH) aimed at put music rara at the heart of Haitian cultural events.

The "Men rara· project brings together various stakeholders of Haitian cultural world to deepen formal knowledge of the music of rara, participating in its diffusion and produce a current musical work.

Friday, December 5, a one-day seminar brought together diverse human resources around the question of rara music, in its formal aspect. Twenty people, academics, experts, artists, tradition bearers, meet to identify key features of the music of rara under the rhythmic, melodic and harmonic aspects, historical contributions that are constitutive to them, the organological specificities, regional variations as well as the research paths to follow.
This is the first time that UEH pay particular attention to the music of rara, considered not only as an object of entertainment, but also as an object of study.

The day was hosted by Ronald Joseph Dautruche, professor at the UEH, Doctor of Ethnology and heritage, which has produced several publications on the rara.

Haiti sees Drop in Poverty Rates

According to a new World Bank report, the rate of extreme poverty in Haiti is declining.

The report is the first post-earthquake assessment of poverty in Haiti and was conducted in partnership with the National Observatory on Poverty and Social Exclusion (ONEPS). The results, analysts say, are based on a 2012 household survey and looks at changes since 2000.

Recognizing that the gains were led by increases in foreign aid after the Jan. 12, 2010, earthquake, remittances and better paid construction jobs in Port-au-Prince, Bank analysts say the challenge today is ensuring that they lasts. They are calling on the Haitian government to provide more inclusive and efficient government policies to help improve better access to basic services, income opportunities and social protection.

“Almost 60 percent of the population live on $2 a day and the richest 20 percent of households hold 64 percent of the total income in the country,” the Bank said. “These levels of income inequality place Haiti among the most unequal countries in Latin America and in the world.”

After a 7.0 magnitude earthquake shook the ground on Jan. 12, 2010, nongovernmental organizations flew in to Port-au-Prince and camped inside tattered tent cities in the capital and surrounding cities while more than 50 foreign governments and international organizations sent representatives to New York to pledged $5.3 billion over the next two years at a United Nations donors conference to help rebuild Haiti.

As a result, many Haitians for the first time had access to potable water and sanitation, and the collapse of buildings and investments in new construction, meant jobs.

All of this, along with growth in telecommunications and transport jobs, have helped the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area see a drop in its extreme poverty level from 20 percent to five percent compared to 24 percent nationwide in 2012 from a high of 31 percent in 2000.

Haiti’s New Interim Prime Minister

Health Minister Florence Duperval Guillaume was named as Haiti’s interim prime minister on Sunday after the resignation of her predecessor a week ago. Ms. Duperval Guillaume will hold the post for a maximum of 30 days before a permanent choice is presented to Parliament by President Michel Martelly, said Enex Jean-Charles, secretary general of Haiti’s council of ministers. The former Prime Minister, Laurent Lamothe, resigned a week ago amid the bitter political standoff over legislative elections. Mr. Martelly was supposed to call elections in 2011. But several opposition senators have used parliamentary procedures to prevent a vote authorizing the elections while orchestrating protests to call for the president to resign. An independent commission formed to resolve the crisis had recommended that Mr. Lamothe resign, which he did after days of violent protests.

The Best Books on Haiti

The Dew Breaker by Edwidge Danticat

Danticat's novel moves back and forth between 1960s Haiti and present-day New York as it tells the story of a Dew Breaker, a name given to torturers during the repressive regime of François "Papa Doc" Duvalier, who takes victims away "before dawn, as the dew is settling on the leaves".

Nine chapters, each of which could be a standalone short story, provide fragments of the Dew Breaker's life as seen through the eyes of his family and his victims. These fractured vignettes draw the reader into a larger, more complex tale.

The Dew Breaker is now hiding from his bloody past, working as a barber in Brooklyn. But he daily faces the threat of being recognized by one of his victims and exposed for what he once was.

In the novel's final chapter, the disparate stories satisfyingly come together as we meet the Dew Breaker preparing for his final killing before leaving Haiti.

This clever and powerful novel shows how hunter and prey – who are seeking new lives in the US – find their present and future circumscribed by a brutal past.

Danticat was born in Haiti and moved to the US when she was 12. In the acknowledgements, she writes: "For my father, who, thank goodness, is not in this book."

The Comedians by Graham Greene

Greene's classic tragicomedy is set in Haiti under Duvalier and his sinister secret police, the Tontons Macoute.

Three men meet on a boat to Port-au-Prince: the world-weary Brown, the narrator who owns a hotel in the capital; the idealistic but naive Smith, a former US presidential candidate; and Jones, a charming conman with a bogus résumé. These flawed human beings are the comedians of the title, whose fates become intertwined amid Haiti's corruption and violence.

Brown's life becomes increasingly complicated and fraught with danger after the suicide of a government minister in his hotel's swimming pool, his rekindling of an affair with an ambassador's wife and his getting caught up in Jones's foolhardy escapades.

Though Papa Doc never appears in the novel, he casts a long shadow over events. And in a dig at US cold-war policy, we are reminded that the dictator is a "bulwark against communism", sustained by aid from Washington.

Greene vividly evokes the fear and loathing in Haiti, and his elegantly written black comedy-cum-political thriller allows a light of hope to flicker in the darkness.

After the novel's publication in 1966, a furious Papa Doc banned Greene and his book. The British author died in 1991.

Farewell, Fred Voodoo by Amy Wilentz

Wilentz's Letter from Haiti (the book's subtitle) is actually a warts and all love letter to the country.

After Haiti's devastating earthquake in 2010, the author is drawn back to the country she has written about for many years. On arrival, she finds humanitarian aid groups "fighting for a piece of Haitian action", leading her to question their motives – and her own.

Wilentz embarks on a vigorous, intensely personal quest to better understand the country and its people, unafraid to challenge received wisdom and tell inconvenient truths. Along the way, she reveals Haiti's beauty and brutality through personal stories, politics, culture and its tortured history. Home to "the first and last successful slave revolution in history", Haiti became the world's first black-led republic. But it was made to pay a crippling price for its audacity by France – the colonial master – and the US, from which it has never recovered.

She argues that Haiti and its people – Fred Voodoo is the old, politically incorrect term for the man on the street – need to be understood on their own terms, rather than through western misconceptions and prejudices. Her intimate knowledge and her acerbic and fluid prose make Wilentz the perfect guide through Haiti's "post-apocalyptic dystopia".

Wilentz is an American journalist who has closely followed Haiti's fortunes since the fall of the Duvalier regime in the 1980s.

Video- Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe on Bloomberg TV on why he quit

President Michel Martelly is seeking his fourth prime minister since taking office in 2011 after Laurent Lamothe quits in order to defuse growing protests over a delayed electoral law that could lead to parliament’s dissolution.