“Whenever I’m invited to speak about my birth country, what I’ve been able to fully articulate is that everything that is wrong about Haiti is also everything wrong about how America treats it and views it and people like them all across the globe,” Maplewood resident and New York Times bestselling author Ibi Zoboi told attendees at the 24th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day Observance at Columbia High School on January 20.
The theme of the event, hosted by the South Orange/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race, was “upholding Dr. King’s legacy in challenging times.”
Zoboi, who is the 2022 recipient of the Maplewood Literary Award, spoke of her Haitian roots and her compulsion in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s re-election to speak to the “longstanding pejorative representation in the media” of Haiti.
Zoboi noted that she received the invitation to speak from Coalition volunteer Mia White during the election season last fall.
“I was staring out of the window of my house, just up the road here in Maplewood, New Jersey. And I was staring at a flag that had been put up days before our last election, a giant flag with the letters T-R-U-M-P 2025. And every day for two weeks, I had to open up my blinds and curtains and see that sign.”
During the campaign, Trump and then-Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance garnered headlines for falsely accusing Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio of abducting and eating pets, leading to threats against the community. Zoboi’s connection with Trump goes further: She is the co-author of the Walter Award-winning Punching the Air, with prison reform activist Dr. Yusef Salaam of the Exonerated Five. In 1989, Trump called for a return of the death penalty after the attack and rape of a jogger in Central Park and has refused to apologize for comments regarding the five men who were wrongly convicted as teenagers.
“So when given this invitation, I had to say yes and talk about the intersection of who I am as a Haitian immigrant, the work of Dr. Martin Luther King and my presence here in this community, Maplewood, New Jersey,” said Zoboi, noting that “Haiti is a huge part of the work of Dr. Martin Luther King.”
“With any of our freedom fighters, with any of our truth tellers, had they lived long enough, I believe that they would truly, truly gain a more global perspective.” Zoboi said she felt that Dr. King “would see the value of what people of African descent or the entire African diaspora and other marginalized communities around the globe, how they would be treated if he were to speak to every country around the world and to live long enough. And one of those countries would be Haiti, the first free Black Republic.”
Mia White and Ibi Zoboi
“At the time that the election was happening,” said Zoboi, “I had to write something that speaks to the reality of being who we are in this country and why is it that we are so marginalized within the context of the globe and … in the American imagination.”
Zoboi described moving to the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, at the age of four. “Back then it was described as resembling a war zone with its burnt out and dilapidated buildings. We lived in some of the well kept pockets in the midst of the urban decay, mostly occupied by immigrants who took pride in their home.”
“I was from what the media described as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. And as someone recently described — a shithole country.” She noted that the portrayal of Haiti in the press “was as if Haiti was not worthy of social political study, making its wanton violence and political turmoil self-inflicted.”
“I was still in elementary school in February 1986 when Haiti’s young president Jean-Claude ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier was ousted by Haitians and their grassroots effort to end the 30-year brutal dictatorship started by his father. Two years later in 1989, the late West Craven’s ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’, a horror movie loosely based on anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis’ book of the same name hit movie screens across the country. Zombies, war, political upheaval and unhinged voodoo ceremonies served as a background for the first major motion picture featuring Haiti.”
However, Zoboi noted that “the narrative that Haiti is synonymous with horror had already been embedded in the American imagination” with the 1932 movie ‘White Zombie’, which was released at the heels of the 19-year U.S. occupation. “Since then, the myth of Haiti as a diseased, superstitious, inherently corrupt nation has been synonymous with zombie war and has satiated the American appetite for the horrific, the vile and the inhumane.”
The author has seen the impact firsthand: “My work as a writer for children and teens takes me around the country to visit schools and libraries, and sharing my experience as an immigrant raised in New York, I always ask the students if they’ve heard of Haiti. Most have. For the few who haven’t, I allow other students to share what they know about the island nation. ”
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“On one occasion,” reported Zoboi, “a student responded that Haiti is land of the dead, the underworld. Another student immediately corrected them, blurting out. ‘It’s Haiti, not Hades. ‘ I laughed at the irony, and in that moment, I remember what a friend had told me about growing up in the Dominican Republic: ‘We say, go to Haiti instead of go to hell.'”
Zoboi said that such portrayals and ingrained perceptions have serious consequences, both geopolitical and personal, such as Haiti being accused of being ground zero for the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and for the abuse of Abner Louima, whose treatment in custody, including being sodomized by police, has been “described as the worst non-deadly case of police brutality in New York City history.”
But “despite its longstanding pejorative representation in the media,” said Zoboi, “Haiti has produced great writers, beauty pageant winners and some of our most innovative thinkers. Even in the midst of all its current troubles, Haiti sent seven athletes to the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris to compete in swimming, boxing, gymnastics and judo.” She noted that Haiti was a popular vacation destination “right up to 1975 when Bill and Hillary Clinton chose the island nation for their honeymoon.”
As Zoboi works to turn the page on Haiti’s representation in the media and arts, she reminded the audience of what was at stake.
“These myths rob an entire people of our humanity as we fight for our own survival and seek out the American dream, even as we navigate the innumerable and pervasive American nightmares. … And in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King and how he spoke and worked for the least among us, this is what I’m doing as I stand here. The least among us are the people who are displaced. The people looking for survival wherever they can find it. The poet Warsan Shire says, ‘No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.’ And this is what I want to leave you with, that displaced people are looking for home. By virtue of being born, by virtue of being living and breathing human beings, they deserve a right to have a home and be home. And this is what Dr. Martin Luther King’s work means for me.”
