Tag: Haitian Jonas

Another New Year’s Day is upon us, and it’s time for soup joumou. (Why? You can read about that in a previous New Year’s post, here.) You can also sing the Joumou rap with Haitian Jonas, here. These two things always make me smile.

What also makes me smile, is the knowledge that I’ll be in Haiti again in a week’s time. It’s been ten years, even before the quake that changed everything. Some things of course haven’t changed much – suspended government and a “president” ruling by emergency decree, MINUSTAH still not taking a damn bit of responsibility or concern for causing a cholera epidemic. But I’m sure others have. All the little kids in the lakou will be teenagers now. I won’t get to see my godmother (who died in the quake) or my maman hounyo (who died later), and a few other people who have passed. Coming home is well overdue, bittersweet, but good. See you soon, Ayiti.

And I’ll be back to post about it sooner than I did last year.

Two days ago, I talked to my Mami (she may be Mambo Marie Carmel to everybody else, but she’ll always be Mami to me), and I asked about how everyone in Haiti was. “Oh they’re fine, but they’re waiting for me for the soup,” she said with a laugh.

Two hundred and ten years ago, everybody was waiting for the soup in Haiti, because soup, at least this soup, is a big deal. It’s called soup joumou, or “winter pumpkin soup,” and it’s the best Haitian soup ever for more than culinary reasons. I give a recipe for soup joumou in my book, Haitian Vodou, but I didn’t have the space to explain why it’s a “lucky soup,” or what the big deal about soup is.

Haiti became an independent nation on January 1, 1804, after almost thirteen unspeakably brutal years of revolution and war. Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the successor to Haiti’s liberating general Toussaint L’Ouverture, declared the colony of Saint-Domingue defunct, and renamed the island Ayiti (Haiti in French) after its original Arawak (Taino indigenous language) name.

There are any number of legends about that time. One of them states that soup joumou became a symbol of independence (as well as New Year’s Day) because the French slave owners had forbidden slaves to eat it, and so they shared it with each other as an act of freedom. Is it true? No one really knows anymore, but we do know that as long as people can remember New Years Day/Haitian Independence Day in Haiti, they can remember the soup.