Sony Ton-Aime, executive director of Pittsburg Arts and Lectures, is coming to read at Murphy Auditorium in Rockwell Hall tonight to celebrate his debut poem collection, Konbit. A Haitian poet, essayist, translator, and community leader, Sony got his start as an intern at the Wick Poetry Center nearly a decade ago. As part of the next generation of Wick interns, I sat down for a half-hour for an interview with Sony where he told me about Konbit (the book), konbit (the communal practice), and everything in between. The following are the questions I asked and paraphrased versions of Sony’s answers.
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Mercury: What’s something you learned while interning with the Wick Poetry Center that you brought into your professional life?
Sony: Wick taught me the importance of community. I brought the lessons Charlie taught me into my life in Pittsburg. For example, I lead poetry workshops with students, which I trace back to the Teaching Poetry in the Schools class.
Mercury: “Konbit,” as a Haitian-Creole concept, is a traditional form of cooperative labor where the able-bodied help prepare one another’s fields. What is the true definition of konbit in your words? If it’s a concept applicable to American communities, how could such a communal bond be forged?
Sony: Konbit is a concept in Haiti that comes from harvest time. Things that require more than one person to do require konbit, where family members, neighbors, and the town bind together to harvest, sow, and maintain each farmer’s crops. This concept undergirds communal life in Haiti. I do think it is possible to foster konbit in the United States as well. We as human beings are predisposed to community, to walk together. I suspect that the thing that has interrupted that is the advancement of technology that allows people to survive without community. If a farmer can take care of acres of land without others, it gives them the illusion that they can survive on their own—gives us the false impression that we can do things on our own. As a result, we become individualistic. I truly believe that we cannot live without others. Doing everything alone is an illusion. By doing the work by yourself, it is as though you are overshadowing the work of thousands of others that make it possible for you to live. In US, we need to acknowledge other people’s work. Come back to the realization that we need one another. The crisis that we currently face is the result of viewing other people as disposable. The US is built on individuality, where we need a car to live, where we can’t walk around our neighborhoods, where everything is built to divide us. In this type of world, konbit is a revolutionary concept.
Mercury: You write in your new collection of poems Konbit: “LaWomann is made of important griefs.//Apollinaire stole her kinky hair and//replaced it with blonde weaves… Baudelaire gave her a big bottom, a creole complex.” You’ve previously published a chapbook about LaWomann, whose character in Konbit I interpret as a representation of the colonial alienation France inflicted upon Haitian women, but Konbit places LaWomann in the context of a wider community, allowing her to appear in poems across the book in an active role, not one solely being influenced by her mother, husband, and son. Is LaWomann free? What are you trying to say about identity, colonialism, and generational trauma through her defiance and/or compliance with the world around her?
Sony: I did write a chapbook centering her. LaWomann is a statement on Haitian nationality. A woman can be a city, be a country. The French created characters out of Haitians in their literature and Haiti internalized their messaging. The Haitian became subpar in their physical and cultural features, creating a complex where Haitians do not see themselves as beautiful and must change to be more like the French. I wanted to challenge that with a postcolonial subject, elevating colonial beauty as the Self to go against the French Others. I was using Konbit to create a modern myth about Haiti, one that may not set the past as the gold standard, but also does not disparage and in fact dignifies our history.
Mercury: Bois Caïman, the first major spiritual and political meeting of enslaved Africans in Haiti, features prominently in Konbit. Phrases and sometimes entire lines are written in French. Can you tell me about how you intertwine your Haitian-Creole heritage with your modern storytelling methods and language in order to connect your forebearers’ struggles to the modern day?
Sony: When I was writing these poems, they may feel clunky in their language and how certain phrases in English are only completed in French. I decided to keep that clunkiness. I very much had the voices of Haiti with me whilst writing this book, and that’s why some poems are stylized the way they are. Bois Caïman was the first step of the Haitian Revolution, where slaves rose up to make their country their own. At that gathering, they swore to fight until they became free, which was unprecedented in the New World. Nobody born looking like them were free and viewed as a complete human being. For 200+ years, nobody had dared to imagine a free Black person. Bois Caïman was a spiritual gathering, not specifically Voodoo or Christian or Muslim, but it was a democratic process where everyone was welcome. When we think about community, we need to make space for all of its voices to be heard.
Mercury: What tools do communities need in order to collectively develop their reading and writing?
Sony: First: The curiosity and to stay open to new ideas and stories other than ours. Second: Patience, because reading asks us to pause and make time. We need time to absorb ideas, and more time for those ideas to challenge us. Third: Community. We cannot read or write in isolation. We need community to support our causes and challenge our perspectives. Fourth: The discipline to write, sit, read, and be in conversation. That is one of the beauties of higher education. Originally, universities were places to expand your general knowledge, instead of becoming specialized in one thing to the detriment of your development as a whole person. The duty of a university is to make a human being. That type of education is what will heal this nation.
