This is an intercession season for sports fans. These summer games are not just games; they’re tests of the spirit for some recognizably soul-weary tribes, and fans work to intervene on the outcome using whatever resources are at their disposal. After the Knicks’ destabilizing loss to the Spurs in Game Three of the N.B.A. Finals, New Yorkers burned bundles of sage outside Madison Square Garden—an attempt to clear out the bad energy that some believed had been carried in by President Donald Trump, who arrived in the city like smog.
The story of the Knicks’ long, long embattlement has a kind of mirror, I’ve been feeling, in the arc of the Haitian men’s soccer team, also known as Les Grenadiers, and their return to the World Cup stage. Not since 1974 had Les Grenadiers qualified for the Cup; not since 2021, after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse extinguished the already tenuous government order, has the team played on Haitian soil. They have been relegated to meeting on fields in Curaçao, while their coach—a white Frenchman named Sébastian Migné, appointed by the Haitian Football Federation in 2024—does his managing over the phone. For seven days and seven nights, Pitit Manman Mari, a Catholic church based in Port-au-Prince that has flourished as a sort of digital-assembly area for the diaspora, devoted its YouTube and radio broadcasts to the project of fortifying the team against its many obstacles, in preparation for the Cup. In one video service, the Reverend Frantzy Petit-Homme was backgrounded by a pixelated image of the players as he entreated his Lord to fortify Les Grenadiers with sheer power: “Give them the capacity to read the game before it develops.”
The prophet, the figure who laps his contemporaries in his acquiring of knowledge—there is little romance in his situation. A spokesman for the divine, his relationship to humility is complex. It’s a narrative that doesn’t have much appeal in the West, which would find the soothing underdog story more applicable to the Haitian situation, and, indeed, that’s the story which has taken hold. Ever since Louicius Deedson, then an attacker for the national team, sliced through Nicaragua’s defense to score the winning goal in the World Cup qualifiers, back in November, there has been a rallying around not only the team but the notion of Haitianness itself, a kind of unofficial campaign to “pitch” the country as nothing like the aspersions cast upon it by the slanderous West. You think Haiti is necklacing, cholera, and coups d’état? Here is a lesson on konpa, a tour through Haitian cuisine, a primer on the painter Hector Hyppolite. Culture is hinging itself like a horsefly on the cart of the games; the musician and producer Michaël Brun is staging Bayo, his fabulous Haitian concert series, in Boston, on the eve of Haiti’s first game against Scotland, at the New England Patriots’ stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts. The NPR South Florida reporter Wilkline Brutus, who is as much a journalist as he is a diaspora mediator, untangling the love and the recriminations between Haitians in Haiti and Haitians in the States, reports that “Across industries, Haitians say they are experiencing an undeniable renaissance, gaining the kind of humanization and mainstream visibility that wasn’t always afforded to them.”
Is there a word more volatile than “humanization”? In the Haitian context, humanity was not granted to the people by the other; it was seized. I wouldn’t say that Haitians are a supplicant people; we have not enjoyed bending and folding to court the exploitative beneficence of the States. But I am using “we” too freely, given the political, linguistic, and geographic sprawl of the diaspora.
Jaspora has gone through its evolutions. As Edwidge Danticat wrote, earlier this year, in The New Yorker, “The first documented arrival of Haitian refugees in South Florida dates to 1972, when a wooden sailboat, the Saint Sauveur, ran aground off of Pompano Beach, carrying sixty‑five asylum seekers fleeing the ruthless dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier.” In the nineties, the Haitian American, the child of this refugee generation, negotiated her status—proud at home, pariah outside—in cities like Montreal, Brooklyn, Miami, and Boston. The jaspora kid could seem pitiful, especially from the vantage of those back in Haiti, a kind of cultural mutt. As for this generation? Anti-Haitianness has never been more politically entrenched, with Trump’s virulent expulsion campaign against the population; and yet Haitianness has also never seemed more alluring. Little Haitis abound. Influencers ride Sunrise Airways to Cap-Haïtien, showing off the “real” Haiti that the media doesn’t want you to see. There is this correction of Haitian image for the foreigner and then for diasporic Haitians themselves.
The more inaccessible Haiti becomes, the more vividly it’s imagined, depicted, and reclaimed. Toussaint Louverture Airport, the international gateway in Port-au-Prince, remains suspended to commercial flights. The homesick anthem has become a staple for Haitian artists. The band Zenglen made the phrase “Ouvè Peyi a,” Kreyòl for “open up the country,” into a song of mother-country longing; Ayiiti, a young Haitian singer, collaborated with Boukman Eksperyans, a legendary Haitian band; and their founder’s son, Paul Beaubrun, retooled their populist carnival song released in 1990, “Ke’m Pa Sote”—translating, idiomatically, to “ I Am Not Afraid”—into a new piece of protest music, “Ayiti Nan Batay,” meaning “Haiti Is Embattled.”
What is fascinating about the current roster of Les Grenadiers is that it doubles as a microcosm of the demographic, a schistic one, its identity forged through the realities of diaspora diffusion. It is only Woodensky Pierre who plays for a Haitian club; Markhus (Duke) Lacroix and Derrick Etienne, Jr., are American-born; the majority is Franco-Haitian. Many of our players who were born in Haiti—there are ten—have left in childhood and in adolescence, pursuing opportunities with European clubs.
Watching Game Four of the N.B.A. Finals the other day, my father—who is from Ti Rivière, like the Haitian footballer Hannes Delcroix, and who left Haiti for New York in the eighties—felt a little disdain. “Basketball is not as difficult as fútbol,” he said. “The hand has too much dexterity.” Fútbol in Haiti is revered because it demands that the recumbent man resist his evolutionary nature. He must master his feet, and, in doing so, transcend his limitations. In “Death of the Soccer God,” a novel published in May, Dimitry Elias Léger grafts this elevated, mythic register onto his tragic hero, Gil Chevalier, who at times serves as a fictionalization of the Haitian player Joe Gaetjens. At the 1950 World Cup, in Brazil, Gaetjens, who played for the United States, scored the winning goal against England.
In Haiti, fútbol can provide an alternative plane of experience, one in which the victory of independence can be relived again and again. Pelé, who visited Haiti in 1975 during the height of the Duvalier regime, is revered almost as if a saint, and Brazil is the country that Haitians root for in their own nation’s stead. Now Haiti will play Brazil on l’étage mondiale, bringing to a close some fifty years of fan surrogacy. Much is often made of soccer diplomacy, but this year’s World Cup promises more than hand-shaking and symbolic gestures. The background of the pitch is repression, autocracy, and corruption. For Haiti, the beautiful game will be about the confrontation of a certain psychological displacement.
Modern Haitianness presents itself, almost masks itself, through its history: proud, world-defining, the real embodiment, we all know, of the Enlightenment ideal of the equality of man, a history we are constantly made to invoke, a history we are proud to invoke. Shortly after the November qualifying match, an awed anchor on “Morning Footy” asked Delcroix—the defender who moved, as a child, from Haiti to Belgium, where his play was developed through the country’s youth-league system—about the spiritual significance of dates. It had been two hundred and twenty-two years, on that exact day, November 18th, since Jean-Jacques Dessalines and his army defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Vertières. The date does ring in any Haitian’s mind. We tout our dates. Delcroix spoke in that tenor, saying that he’d felt a torrent of hope from his people, who, in no metaphorical sense, live everywhere.
Days after the World Cup friendlies had passed, earlier this month, yielding one win and a surfeit of thrill, FIFA rejected the Haitian jersey, citing its depiction of the Battle of Vertières as a violation to its regulation on political speech. The censure echoed an incident at the Winter Olympics, when the designer Stella Jean, who is Haitian Italian, broke a similar rule, and was made to redo her look for the country’s athletes, which depicted Toussaint Louverture astride his horse. Jean decided to erase Louverture, leaving the horse galloping unmanned, eerily, a more imposing image. How the Haitian team will erase Vertières, I’m curious to see. The Reverend Frantzy Pitit-Homme, on his stream, urged his flock not to fall prey to Western censure. “If you visit the museums in France,” he said, speaking of Haitian independence, “you won’t see this at all.” Is Haiti embraced in its underdog hour because the country cannot be seen as a threat to Western hegemony? The Reverend asks you to keep vigilant. ♦