Soup Joumoun

We weren’t in Haiti on January 1st to celebrate Haitian Independence Day, so we had plans to celebrate it with the Haitian and US American staff together on the first weekend after we returned in January. Well … other things happened … and we just never got around to it –until today!

Haiti celebrates its independence from France on January 1 each year, because after expelling the last French troops in November of 1803, Jean Jacques Dessalines, the revolutionary leader and first president, declared that independence would be proclaimed and celebrated on the first day of the new year. That day, in Cap Haitian, the city on the north coast with the citadel from which the last French ships had sailed the previous November, Dessalines proclaimed the Haitian Declaration of Independence. Somewhat ironically – or maybe tragically – the document was written in French, the language of Haiti’s colonial oppressors, since the descendants of Africans from so many different places did not share a common language of their own. It’s a shocking document, both for the striking resemblance it bears to the language and sentiments of the American Declaration of Independence written about thirty years before, as well as for the very un-Jeffersonian anger and violence which permeates it. Promises to “swear to the entire universe, to posterity, to ourselves, to renounce forever to France, and to die rather than to live under its domination,” are followed by the not so veiled threat to “pursue forever the traitors and the enemies of [our] independence.” Needless to say, after fifteen years of the most horrific violence, this declaration of independence was not sealed with handshakes and the flourish of a quill pen. It was sealed with blood and promises of retribution.

Along with the official pronouncement of independence, Dessalines led the people in a symbolic reclaiming of their rights as free people. That morning, he ate squash soup, the French delicacy long refused to the slaves, and invited the people gathered to do the same. Since then, the tradition in Haiti and in Haitian homes in the US is to greet the new year not with champagne toasts and wild parties, but with family and friends gathered around an early morning breakfast of squash soup. For years teaching in Cambridge, I have heard Haitian kids talk about their unique New Years tradition, and have occasionally enjoyed a Tupperware bowl full of squash soup leftovers on January 3 when school begins again, and I have always wanted to try making it myself.

This morning Benoit and I met in the kitchen at about 4:15. Unfortunately the electricity was out, as it often is at that time of the morning after the batteries have run out of juice and before the sun has come up to get the solar power going again. He chopped open the GIANT green squash, which looks like an orange pumpkin inside, and scooped out the guts. I got to work washing, peeling, and chopping sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, turnips, carrots, onions and garlic. As we worked, more helpers appeared, we drank two pots of coffee, and listened to Wyclef Jean. We boiled the squash, then pureed it – skin and all – in a blender. Benoit had prepared the meat before in the traditional way – by soaking it in citrus juices, then boiling it with garlic and scallions. We then boiled the pureed squash, and added the veggies, meat, macaroni, and lots of salt. (It wouldn’t be Haitian food without lots of salt!) By about 6:45 we were ready and a much larger than usual crowd gathered for an early Saturday morning breakfast. We had so much food that we were able to share it with some of the neighbors – men who were on campus to help with a building project, and some of the women who come to wash the clothes of those of us who are utterly incapable of doing so ourselves. We wished each other Bon Anè, and declared it the new year of 2010 ½ … and frankly, given all that’s happened here since January, it felt kind of good to turn the page of the calendar, even if it was to an imaginary new year.