Occupying Creole: The Crisis of Language under the US Occupation of Haiti

At the start of the twentieth century, a movement began to dismantle Haiti's entrenched linguistic hierarchy. Haitian writers started using Creole in their works of literature in order to contest the notion that the language was unfit for written and formal contexts. Such a linguistic revolution, it was believed, would allow Haiti's long-neglected monolingual masses to participate in public life. The emergent Creole movement, however, came to an abrupt end with the onset of the US Occupation in 1915. Haitian intellectuals opted to cling to their French cultural heritage as a way of contesting the validity of the Americans' supposedly civilizing mission, and the Creole project was shelved. As it turned out, the Americans had their own reasons for expanding the use of Creole, and they contributed greatly to building an infrastructure for the language. Their actions, however, provoked widespread opposition and undermined their own work on the Creole question. The cause of language legitimation, much like Haitian democracy itself, ultimately regressed under the Occupation.