Angeline Duroseau

Being born in the slums of Haiti, I knew pain like it was my favorite song, playing itself over and over in the boom box that is my head. I knew music and held on to it like it was my last breath, because it was all you could depend on when you were born in the struggle. My people lacked the higher level of knowledge, and spoke a broken language, but somehow like the two pianos, we were the harmonies to each other’s melodies, supporting, and understanding each other because no one else would.

If you knew nothing else you had to know music, or you look like a complete fool when the carnivals came around town, blasting loud grooves, with an infinite amount of people tightly grinding together like solid molecules forced to all share the same space. Rap, rock, jazz, hip-hop, we didn’t care, because as long as it had a banging beat, and a jamming rhythm we made it ours.

I imagined my people to be beautiful in everything that they did, because of the fact that they were different. The way their melodic voices glided through the atmosphere like a calm river. The way the fabrics of their colorful, hand sewn clothing danced with the orchestra that is the wind, reminded me of a rainbow that is way too beautiful for the human eyes, but way to beautiful not to stare.

I still saw beauty in them, even when I moved to the battlefield known as lil Haiti, where instead of falling asleep to the sweet hyms that the wind played, I got used to falling asleep to the sound of gun shots. Somehow I managed to create a tempo that would dive into perfect sync with the shots that roared through the sky that resembled my tone of my skin like percussion would roar over a hyped marching band.

Somehow the sound of these gunshots became like a soothing lullaby that hummed in my ears, rocking me and my five siblings to a promising slumber. In that slumber I saw the people that I had left to rot in a perdition like struggle, laughing, and dancing to my lil Haiti band, and for that moment we were all free.