A Play on Words

I've been thinking about how salient symbolism can be, and how folks draw on the experiences of others to inform their own. For example, a soloist on Father Hayes and the Cosmopolitan Church of Prayer's "Worked It Out" singing "the water went up on both sides!" What does the Israelite escape from Egypt mean to African Americans in the 21st century? 

Here are a few pics from a play that I attended in Jacmel. Authored by Aime Cesaire, the play is titled "La Tragedie du Roi Henri Christophe" (Tragedy of the King Henri Christophe). The staging of this play in 2014 is a triumph of sorts, many times over. The tragedy is this: Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, established a kingdom in the north after independence, but committed suicide after falling both ill and unpopular. The triumphs? His Citadelle Laferrière remains (pictures of that another day!). The story of Haiti's birth inspired a 1963 play by one of Martinique's foremost public intellectuals (in the best, warmest sense of that term). And in these pictures, we witness the return of the play to the land of its ideological birth. 

Yet another way that Haiti represents. Haiti matters.