28091: Hermantin(News)Wyclef Jean brings hip-hop hope to Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Wyclef Jean brings hip-hop hope to Haiti




By Letta Tayler
Newsday Staff Correspondent

March 9, 2006, 8:51 AM EST



PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- "Yo! Back up!" Wyclef Jean, the Haitian-born hip-hop 
star, was shouting to a mob of Carnival revelers. "We can't be responsible for 
somebody being eaten by a lion!"

It was supposed to be the realization of Jean's childhood dream. Decked out as 
Haiti's revolutionary hero Jean-Jacques Dessalines, complete with a 
tri-cornered hat, swashbuckler's boots, glittering sword and ruffled shirt, the 
former Fugees front man would ride a float in Haiti's biggest festival, a real 
lion at his side, capping a heroic return to his ravaged birthplace from his 
adopted homes of Brooklyn and New Jersey.

But the king of beasts wasn't having it.

Seven times a trainer tried and failed to coax Major, the 450-pound feline, 
from a truck into a display cage on the Carnival float. One foray was aborted 
after Major leapt into some bushes, dragging the trainer by the leash. 
Eventually, the float left without him.

Seemingly impossible dreams are nothing new to Jean. With the same vision - 
some would argue naiveté - that prompted him to try bringing a contrary lion 
onto a Carnival float, he is vowing to rebuild his broken country largely 
through the power of music, aided by Yéle Haiti, the nonprofit group he founded 
last year.

"Just when you think it's over, that's when the lightning and the thunder is 
going to come," vowed Jean, a Nazarene preacher's son. "You know what I'm 
saying? Maybe Haiti won't change in a dramatic way, but it will change. It 
already has."

"The wind is turning!"

Jean jumped on the float, grabbed a microphone and began to belt his pumping 
Carnival chant: "Van vire! Van vire!" (Haitian Creole for "The wind is turning! 
The wind is turning!") Then he rolled into the reveling throngs of 
Port-au-Prince.

For five days last week, Jean moved through Haiti at breakneck speed, rallying 
support from grassroots leaders, gang members and socialites in a country 
convulsed by lawlessness and divided by class and race.

But in the hours before Carnival, he was enjoying a rare quiet moment on the 
sweeping terrace of a luxury hotel perched high above the stifling capital. He 
wore camouflage pants and a Yéle Haiti T-shirt. His hair was braided in 
immaculate corn rows. A diamond-studded medallion of Christ's face dangled from 
his neck.

Far below him stretched the capital's squalid slums, including the notorious, 
gang-ruled shantytown of Cité Soleil. "Just to think that I went from there to 
here," he said, his voice incredulous, as a waiter in a white uniform served 
him pasta with julienne vegetables.

As a young boy, Jean lived in the rural counterpart to Cité Soleil, sharing a 
mud hut with five relatives in the dirt-poor town of Laserre in central Haiti. 
The hut had no running water or electricity.

"I rode a donkey to school. I never had more than two pairs of pants and one 
pair of shoes," Jean said. Sometimes, he added, he had no pants or shoes at 
all.

The tough Marlboro housing projects in East Bensonhurst, where he arrived from 
Haiti when he was 9 and spoke only Creole, seemed luxurious in contrast. "We 
got yellow cheese, government cheese. I thought I was rich - the white man be 
giving us cheese," Jean remembered. "And he was wearing a uniform!"

Worried that Jean was getting into trouble, his mother got him a guitar to keep 
him busy. The family moved when Jean was a teenager to East Orange, N.J. It was 
there that Jean helped form the Fugees - short for refugees - a band that sold 
more than 20 million records with its innovative, reggae-and-R&B-inflected 
hip-hop.

Now 36, Jean has millions of dollars, a lavish home in suburban New Jersey - he 
won't say where, wanting to protect his privacy - and is trying to give 
something back.

"Yéle Haiti is about making kids feel that no matter what, their dreams can 
come true," he said. "I stand up for them. The story of me is them."

"Yéle," the title of one of Jean's songs, is a cry for freedom in Creole. With 
a budget of $1 million last year, mostly from a Haitian telecommunications 
company, Yéle Haiti rebuilds schools and provides scholarships and soccer 
programs to slum children. It also helps run a program to clear the mounds of 
garbage that pile up everywhere by paying legions of street cleaners.

Some skeptics say Yéle Haiti's programs are a drop in the bucket for this 
former French-ruled slave colony, where half the population is illiterate, more 
than two-thirds of the people live on less than $2 a day, and more than 70 
percent of the workforce is unemployed.

"These rich people come, they make big plans, and they go," said Jean Roland, 
22, an unemployed construction worker, as he loitered on a filthy street corner 
in the capital. "We're left here with the same old mess."

Jean, Roland said, may be more interested in returning to Haiti to boost his 
own fame than to change Haiti.

But supporters say Jean is onto something far more intangible and powerful than 
cleaning a road or building a school: restoring hope and pride in a country 
that has lost much of both.

"He sends an important message to Haitians of similar humble origins, that he 
was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth and if he can make it, they can," 
said Mamadou Mbaye, the Haiti director of the United Nations World Food 
Program.

And one of the best ways to make it, Jean tells this country, is through music.

For months, the World Food Program couldn't deliver food in Cité Soleil because 
shootouts between gang members and UN peacekeepers made it too dangerous to 
enter. But using his contacts in the Haitian hip-hop community, Jean last 
summer enlisted Cité Soleil rappers to persuade gang members to let local 
musicians truck in the food.

The shipments still are far too infrequent and some food still is being looted 
as it leaves the trucks. Still, said Mbaye, "Wyclef has opened doors for us. He 
can communicate with people in Cité Soleil to gain their trust. He walks the 
walk. He talks the talk."

Indeed, Jean has so much street cred that he has convinced aspiring young slum 
rappers to compete for the best jingle about such socially conscious topics as 
cleaning streets or protecting the environment. He plans to record the winning 
jingle for broadcast on Haitian radio and transport buses.

"Clean! Clean! If you want to build a better future, keep the country clean!" 
rapped a tough young performer named Mad Ass during an outdoor show for Jean in 
the impoverished neighborhood of Bel-Air.

"Pwop! Pwop!" ("Clean! Clean!") hundreds of spectators sang along, pumping 
their fists.

By returning to help his homeland after making it big - even skipping this 
year's Grammys and flying here on the red-eye to vote in last month's 
presidential elections - Jean also sends a powerful message to Haiti's tiny 
ruling class.

"He's a thorn in the backside of the elite, a pressure on them to help change 
their country," said Robert Duval, an influential 
industrialist-turned-philanthropist who runs a soccer program for slum youths 
with Yéle Haiti.

Jean draws a weary world's attention to Haiti the way that U2's Bono raised 
consciousness about developing nations' debt. It was Jean who wrapped himself 
in the Haitian flag when he went onstage in 1997 to accept the Fugees' two 
Grammys for their breakthrough album, "The Score." It was Jean who brought 
Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt here in January to urge the world to help this 
country. And it's Jean who constantly plugs his homeland's vibrant culture and 
gorgeous Caribbean beaches, exclaiming, "Haiti is the eighth wonder of the 
world."

Their life's work

Jean says his inspiration comes from his mother and father, who immigrated to 
the United States in the 1970s to escape the Duvalier dictatorship. (They took 
Jean up several years later. ) The Jeans re-established their Nazarene church 
in their adopted country and made it their life's work to help Haitian refugees 
and orphans.

"My parents taught me that one of the reasons in making it was coming back to 
help," Jean said.

Sedeck Jean, a music producer and one of Wyclef's three siblings, said the 
Fugee also inherited their preacher-father's ability to connect. "Our dad was 
incredibly charismatic, and 'Clef is like that," he said. "When he gets into 
his work it's 159 percent."

So skillful is Jean at building social bridges, some Haitians wonder if he's 
angling to run for president. Jean roundly denies it. "What I want to do for 
Haiti is what Sammy Sosa did for the Dominican Republic or what Bob Marley did 
for Jamaica," he said.

Perhaps Jean realizes his dreams are too flamboyant for public office. One 
minute, he's talking about buying an island off Haiti's coast to build his 
version of the Atlantis Resort, a massive, manmade complex of waterfalls, 
lagoons and a casino in the Bahamas. The next minute, he says he'll donate two 
of his 36 antique cars to Port-au-Prince slums to remind kids that they can 
make it out of the ghetto - undeterred by the risk that people who must 
scrounge food and shelter might strip the vintage sheet metal for roofing 
material.

And no matter that the lion he flew in from Los Angeles didn't get on the 
Carnival float. Jean is already looking into bringing an entire circus to the 
tour the country next year.

"Ninety-seven percent of kids in Haiti have never seen a lion," Jean said. 
"We've got to change that. We've got to open kids' eyes, make them say, 'Wow.'"

Jean is equally unorthodox about his security.

When he cruised with a bunch of Haitian and Haitian-American musicians into 
Cité Soleil, a neighborhood where most Haitians fear to tread, his only 
protector was Beast, his bearded, 6-foot-8-inch bodyguard. But there were no 
guns in sight on this day, only throngs of fans chanting, "Van vire! Van vire!"

Indeed, the event became one big love fest as the ebony Jean appeared on an 
outdoor stage with Roberto Martino, the light-skinned, affluent leader of the 
Haitian pop group T-Vice.

"The color divisions must end!" Wyclef shouted through a bullhorn.

Onstage with them were Cité Soleil gang members who'd helped let in the food 
aid. "Wyclef's visit will change things in Cité Soleil," said a reputed gang 
leader named Ti Blanc. "The tension between the bourgeoisie and the poor will 
soon clear up."

Maybe, but not on this trip. At Jean's next stop in Cité Soleil, a soccer 
program funded by Yéle Haiti, Martino suddenly found some of the cheering 
spectators stripping him of his wallet, his sunglasses and his bandanna.

"They were even trying to steal my hair," Martino said after he fled into the 
bus.

A powerful performance

And when Jean left his float at the end of Carnival, hordes of people stormed 
it, carting off instruments and a laptop. The crowds also tried to let the lion 
loose. "I thought they were going to kill me," said the lion tamer. The looting 
followed one of the most powerful performances of Jean's career.

"Everyone who wants kidnapping to stop, raise your hands!" he hollered in 
Creole as he dove on and off the carnival float. Hands shot up among an 
estimated half-million revelers who'd packed streets and climbed trees, 
tombstones and rooftops to catch a glimpse of the superstar.

Crooning to the melody of Bob Marley's "No Woman, No Cry," Jean sang an 
imaginary conversation with Haiti's President-elect René Préval, a darling of 
the poor.

I called Préval before the show and I said,

Dear President, the Haitian people need food.

Dear President, the Haitian people need jobs.

Dear President, the Haitian people need security.

Jean's band cranked up the tempo to a boisterous rah-rah, the rhythm of 
Carnival.

"And the president said," Jean bellowed, "Van vire! Van vire!'"
Copyright © 2006, Newsday, Inc.