On Saturday, June 27, 2026, the association Herit’Haïti brought together more than forty participants online, via Google Meet, connected from France, the Americas and Haiti. At the heart of the discussion lay a question as old as it is urgent: how can culture be turned into an instrument for building citizenship?

To answer it, two leading voices: soprano, researcher and editor Karine Margron, a tireless guardian of Haitian song, and geographer and writer Jean-Marie Théodat, a university professor. Givelt Vilmeus, who holds a master’s degree (Master 2) in diplomacy and international relations, served as moderator. From the very outset, the speakers set the frame: culture is not an ornament; it is a tool for rebuilding the foundations of the Haitian nation.

Karine Margron: A People’s Memory in Song

Karine Margron needs no introduction in the world of Haitian music. Born in Camp-Perrin into a family of musicians, the soprano and pianist has devoted more than a decade to cataloguing, compiling and scoring Haiti’s traditional songs. Her project Chansons d’Haïti, carried out alongside conductor and composer Julio Racine with the support of the Odette Roy Fombrun Foundation, resulted in the publication of eleven music notebooks and six recordings: a preservation effort that extends the work begun as early as the late 1930s by the researcher René Victor and Professor Werner Jaegerhuber.

Drawing on this fieldwork experience, Karine Margron reminded the audience in her remarks that culture, through its various forms of expression, can preserve the memory and identity of a people while also contributing to the development of the human being.

“A song, for example, cannot build a road or construct a school; but it can preserve a memory and pass it on; it can bring together individuals, minds, within a shared space. Music has the power to create social bonds.”

To better understand Haiti’s cultural predicament, the researcher traced it back to its roots: the aftermath of slavery, colonization, the American occupation and the Duvalier dictatorship, which she identifies as the main causes of today’s social inequalities.

“When twelve million Africans were torn from the African continent and then transported under the inhuman conditions we all know, to be reduced to chattel and slaves in the Americas, the goal was clear: a systematic erosion of identity.”

This, she argues, explains the identity crisis that still runs through Haitian society today and the considerable cultural loss affecting, among other things, the nation’s music.

History nonetheless offers encouraging precedents. Karine Margron recalled a moment when Haitian culture was mobilized as a collective project in the service of nation-building: “After the American occupation, the Haitian people, in order to rebuild their confidence as a free and independent nation, took refuge in their culture. We then saw artists give a new color to popular songs; there was the International Exposition marking the bicentennial of Port-au-Prince, and so on.” The dictatorship of the 1950s, unfortunately, weakened these cultural institutions and the social fabric that had formed, giving way to mistrust, fear and the fraying of the invisible ties that bound the people together.

Jean-Marie Théodat: Culture, an Intelligence in Motion

An agrégé and doctor of geography, senior lecturer at Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne University and professor at the State University of Haiti—where he headed the Henry Christophe Campus from 2012 to 2015 as rector—Jean-Marie Théodat is the author of landmark works on Haiti, among them Haïti et la République dominicaine, une île pour deux (Haiti and the Dominican Republic: One Island for Two), Fatras Port-au-Prince and Après Vertières. Haïti, épopée d’une nation (After Vertières: Haiti, the Epic of a Nation). A geographer by training and a writer by vocation, he has spent years observing the relationships between territory, memory and identity.

Before the participants, the professor offered a luminous definition: culture is the memory of other people’s intelligence. It is never fixed; it is always in motion. And for culture and innovation to intersect, he insisted, there must first be transmission. Without those who pass it on, there is no heritage; without heritage, there is no new creation.

The geographer also stressed the fundamental role of language, religion and cuisine in building a people’s identity. Drawing on his own experiences across the country’s different departments, he described how Haitian cuisine, in its regional variations, constitutes a living heritage in its own right. He even suggested a concrete avenue: the creation of a culinary map of Haiti, which would make it possible to present to the world the richness and diversity of the national gastronomy, region by region. A proposal in keeping with his life’s work: anchoring national pride in the land and in the daily lives of Haitians.

Don’t Wait for the State: A Call to Citizen Initiative

Culture as an instrument for building citizenship, then. But what mechanisms make it possible?

To that question, Karine Margron responded with a direct call to individual and collective action, urging every participant to take the initiative without waiting for the state or the government: “If you wait for the state, you will be disappointed. Most of the projects I have been able to carry out were made possible thanks to contributions from people I met along the way or from foundations such as the Odette Roy Fombrun Foundation—not from the Haitian state. Do you know how many substantial projects are still sitting in drawers? How many poets have died of hunger, without any support?”

Among the participants was Philippe Dodard, a major figure in Haitian contemporary art and director general of the National School of the Arts (ENARTS). In his remarks, he drew attention to a structural challenge: the implementation of arts education at the secondary level, all too often entrusted to untrained teachers. He invited the audience to work together to solve this problem, his very presence a reminder that the training of future generations is the indispensable link in any cultural transmission.

By the end of the gathering, a consensus had emerged: Haitian culture is neither a luxury nor a relic. It is a strategic resource, a social cement and, in the hands of engaged citizens, one of the most powerful instruments for rebuilding the nation.