When the Mapou Sings: Haiti’s History in Verse and Silence
The minute I opened When the Mapou Sings, I was grateful that I did not suffer from agoraphobia. All that white space. Vast, open, uncharted. The kind that makes you pause before stepping forward, uncertain of whether you’ll find ground beneath your feet.
And yet, in that emptiness, in those careful silences, Nadine Pinede maps an entire nation—its ache, its defiance, its survival.
Coming from a background in math and computer science, I have always found poetry to be a familiar, if unexpected, companion. Certain verses hold meaning the way an equation holds infinity—layered, demanding, refusing to reveal themselves too easily. You must sit with them, turn them over, hold them against the light until the full shape of their truth emerges.
Some passages refuse to let me go.
“Why does a cook/look like she’s starving?”
And there it is, the unbearable paradox of Haiti—where the hands that feed are often the first to go hungry. Where labor is a performance of dignity, and dignity is the last thing that laborers can afford.
And:
“We all know/men like young flesh,/but this is too much!…Will those kind never let girls/just be girls? Never let them/grow into their bodies/and decide for themselves/whose touch they want?”
A single stanza, and yet it unspools an entire history of violence. Haiti—a land where blood is currency, where a girl’s first bleed marks her worth in the market of suffering. A country where exploitation is tradition, cloaked in silence, carried in whispers, passed from one generation to the next like an heirloom no one wants but everyone inherits.
Pinede does not write to make us comfortable. She does not fill the empty spaces with unnecessary words. She lets them stretch, unrelenting, daring us to sit in their discomfort. And in that space—between breath and break, between wound and witness—Haiti sings.
Not a hymn. Not a dirge.
Something older. Something truer.
A song as deep as the roots of the mapou tree.
