Bwa Kayiman—Lakouzémi

In Haitian Creole, the word lakou is used to describe more than a physical piece of land or a small yard; it also refers to the locus where all important aspects of community take place. It is a home, a place of kinship. Departing from this holistic social institution, and continuing deliberations on the political, philosophical, and cultural legacies of the Haitian Revolution and the Caribbean region, Bwa Kayiman reaches its third edition in 2025.

This year’s festival considers notions of sovereignty by taking the lakou as a core reference for thinking and practicing collective (re)construction, refusing dehumanization, and ideas of return and belonging. The lakou entails cohabitation and long-term sustenance organized around a shared small plot of land. Often involving a matriarchal and multi-generational familial structure, community and spirituality are intertwined with everyday practice at the site. Having emerged from Haiti’s colonial plantations, the lakou model was adapted following independence and survives today in rural areas of Haiti—even amid ongoing exploitation and destabilization. Along with the Creole Garden, the Creole language, as well as Haitian Vodou and artistic practices, the lakou is part of what Jean Casimir calls a counter-plantation system.[1] Through these endeavours, the Haitian people affirmed their sovereignty, radically imagining anew social institutions and relations that rejected colonial systems and customs in favour of reciprocity, mutual care, rootedness, and respect for plurality. Drawing upon this, Bwa Kayiman—Lakouzémi: On Sovereignty as a Relational Practice presents different histories and traditions of establishing self-organized communities and plural societies, and how these shifting imaginaries, shaped over time, have proposed respectful and dignified ways of living.

The three-day programme unfolds reflections not only on how sovereignty is practiced, but also how it is asserted, defended, and manifested. The term Lakouzémi references the work of poet, thinker, and community organizer Monchoachi, whose 2007–2009 project of the same name encompassed a magazine as well as a yearly series of gatherings.[2] As Monchoachi explains:

Lakou is the place of exchange, it is the place from which speech unfolds from difference and keeps it gathered and in harmony. Zémi is the spirit, the demand for both height and depth, for density. Lakouzémi is therefore a thought investigating the spirit of places in everything. … Lakou can open the way to a model of ‘democracy’, if we are so attached to this word, in any case to a prodigious creativity in all areas of life, from the organization of life in common, in architecture, bokantaj [exchange]... in short, a poetic way of living.[3]

In contrast to the monoculture of the plantation, the lakou embraces difference and mutual support as essential for resilience and sustainability. Understanding sovereignty along similar lines—as a relational practice—places an emphasis upon the interdependency between human and non-human beings and the land, regarding them as irreducible parts of a mesh of support that requires constant (self-)adaptation to maintain its life-preserving equilibrium. Of value here is not just mutual understanding among these entities but the strength of their cooperative relationships. Manthia Diawara’s reading of Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relations echoes this sentiment:  ‘...difference is more constructive when viewed as a by-product of solidarity and conciliation… relation and difference link entities that need each other’s energy to exist in beauty and freedom’.[4] Seen through this prism, sovereignty is not only the capacity to (self-)govern, but a practice that maintains relations that are both political and poetic, in that they depart from difference to create richness in all senses. This is a sovereignty that transcends that of the state, which since its inception has enabled and perpetuated dynamics of imperialism, racism, and exploitation on a global scale.

Accordingly, Bwa Kayiman—Lakouzémi engages with sovereignty as rooted in community. The programme opens with Invoking Eleguá (Legba): Ogún & Obatalá by Silvia Garde, mambo, and her son, houngan Yeser Sipriano. The family is part of a lineage shaped by Haitian labour migration to Cuba, where their lakou continues to cultivate spiritual and communal life across borders. Together they call upon the guiding spirits of connection, justice, and clarity to support the work of the festival. On the second day, Garde and her community reappear in the film Una Sola Sangre (2018), which serves as prologue to a kongossa on migration, exile, diaspora, and the impossibilities and creative potential of return. Guests include Toronto-based director Ésery Mondésir, the Port-au-Prince based poet, novelist, and songwriter Lyonel Trouillot, and Dakar-based writer Ken Bugul. Una Sola Sangre is one of the two films from Mondésir’s Radical Empathy Trilogy on view during the programme. The other, What Happens to A Dream Deferred? (2020), is shown as an installation and depicts the resilience of Haitians stranded at the Mexico/US border, who use their cultural practices to navigate and resist racist and exclusionary policies and infrastructure. 

The first evening proceeds with Souveraineté, de quel côté es-tu? [Sovereignty, which side are you on?], a two-part articulation on how sovereignty has been adapted according to various social, economic, and geopolitical realities. A keynote by playwright and poet Wole Soyinka is followed by a conversation with Port-au-Prince-based author Évelyne Trouillot, both eminent commentators on the political histories of their countries and the abuses of state powers. Following this, multidisciplinary artist Julien Creuzet and choreographer Ana Pi, in collaboration with a vocal ensemble that includes soprano Makeda Monnet, premiere Quatuor & Quantum—Larmes marées de la lune (2025), expanding on the lyrics and movement scores made for Creuzet’s exhibition at the French Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024). This body of work poetically and sensorially reflected on water, seas, and oceans as vehicles for the multidirectional movement of peoples, ideas, and cultures, as well as their exchange and hybridization.

That same night, in a new chapter of the ongoing Tongue and Throat Memories programme, the Toronto-based Chef Craig Wong’s food offerings draw upon his Jamaican and Chinese family background, summoning the cuisine and conviviality that originated through the presence of Asians in the Caribbean. The introduction of exploitative systems like indentured labour capitalized on the displacement of members of various Asian communities, leaving them little to no chance of return, thereby extending the logic of the plantation beyond the abolition of slavery. These communities’ presence and exchanges resulted in alliances, hybridization, and new forms of cultural expression that became integral to local customs—the use of curry as well as many Indian spices in Jamaican cuisine, for example, or the Diwali festival of lights, which is celebrated in Guyana, Jamaica, Dominican Republic, and Trinidad and Tobago. Later in the evening, the audience is welcomed into an assembly entitled Plidetwal [rain of stars]–Enacting Lakouzémi, with poetry readings by Évelyne and Lyonel Trouillot, Ken Bugul, and Jean D'Amérique. The night ends with VIBRATIONS, TRANSLATIONS (2023), a performance by DJ and artist Slim Soledad that employs sonic and ritualistic practices to bridge material and immaterial experience, or the so-called human and the spiritual.

The second day of the programme opens with Looking back to move forward: Boukman Eksperyans, resonance to the dissidence, a conversation between Ésery Mondésir and Manzè & LòLò Beaubrun. Both are founders and members of the family who formed the acclaimed band Boukman Eksperyans in the late 1970s. Their mizik rasin (roots music) mixes many other Afro-diasporic rhythms and stimulated many spiritual, political, and social forms of resistance in Haiti, most acutely during periods of military rule in the late twentieth century. The band’s name points directly to Dutty Boukman, freedom fighter and houngan who, together with Cécile Fatiman, officiated Bwa Kayiman in 1791, the revolutionary ceremonial congress to which jazz musician Jowee Omicil dedicates his album Spiritual Healing: Bwa Kayiman Freedom Suite (2023). Both artists play in a double bill concert that simultaneously closes both HKW’s Sonic Pluriverse Festival and the second day of Bwa Kayiman—Lakouzémi, expanding on the interlinking sonorities of ritual, protest, procession, and carnival.

On the final day of the programme, a movement lecture by Laura Beaubrun facilitates Yanvalou—Ceremonial Dance of Water. An Initiation to Lakou, fostering connections between body, voice, and community. Beaubrun’s formative years spent practicing the lakou model, as part of the Boukman Eksperyans family, have become central to her pedagogical and artistic work. The festival closes with the European premiere of Awam Amkpa’s film The Man Died (2024) based upon the book The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka (1972), a narration of the writer’s twenty-two months in detention following efforts to prevent Nigeria descending into civil war. After the screening, Ampka and Soyinka take part in a conversation about the making of the film and the political impact of artistic expression.

Bwa Kayiman—Lakouzémi invites reflection on sovereignty as a relational, poetic, and communitarian practice viewed through the historical and contemporary lens of collective sensing-thinking-doing emanating from the Caribbean. This is a history and present of back-and-forth influences, of exiles, of longing and the desire of return and its impossibilities, of fluxes through oceans, of vulnerability, and of alliances that have shifted and created worlds. 

[1] Jean Casimir, The Haitians: A Decolonial History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

[2] Lakouzémi is a concept coined by poet, thinker, and community organizer Monchoachi, whose 2007–2009 project of the same name encompassed a magazine as well as a yearly series of gatherings held in the agoras of disused cockfighting pits in Sentann, Martinique. The gatherings encompassed poetry, discourse, dance, music, theatre, art, and gastronomy, among other modes of expression and took place across three historically significant dates, one of them being 14 August, the date of the ceremony at Bwa Kayiman that heralded the Haitian Revolution in 1791. Contributors to the project expanded creatively and critically on the relations enlivened and revealed by the Creole language, generating (poetic) discourse on the burdens inherited from colonial regimes, and exploring how to (re-)gain sovereignty by drawing upon the remarkable legacy of their ancestors’ emancipatory practices. For more about the project, visit https://lakouzemi.blogspot.com/.

[3] ‘Lakou c’est le lieu de l’échange, c’est le lieu d’où la parole se déploie depuis la différence et la tient rassemblée et accordée. Zémi, c’est l’esprit, l’exigence à la fois d’une hauteur et d’une profondeur, d’une densité. Lakouzémi, c’est donc une pensée en quête de l’esprit des lieux dans toute chose. … Lakou peut ouvrir la voie à un modèle de « démocratie », si l’on tient tant à ce mot, en tout cas à une créativité prodigieuse dans tous les domaines de la vie, de l’organisation de la vie en commun, en architecture, bokantaj…bref, un mode poétique d’habiter.’, ‘Entretien avec Monchoachi : la parole sauvage à l’assaut de l’occident’,  reproduction of an interview for the newspaper France-Antille, lundimatin (14 September 2016), https://lundi.am/Entretien-avec-Monchoachi-la-parole-sauvage-a-l-assaut-de-l-occident.

[4]  Manthia Diawara, ‘Édouard Glissant’s Worldmentality: An Introduction to One World in Relation’, South #6 [documenta 14 #1] (2015), https://www.documenta14.de/en/south/34_edouard_glissant_s_worldmentality_an_introduction_to_one_world_in_relation.