As I was returning home after all the tests, the sound of the instruments in the hospital was still echoing in my ears, faint but persistent, the way a struck bell keeps ringing long after the hand has left it. A strange sense of silence had begun conquering me, settling somewhere beneath the noise of the traffic and the ordinary business of the evening. This was not the first time, it was the second, and the doctor’s words had followed me out of that room and into the car and now into this quiet, the plain clinical sentence that my heart had begun to fail, that years of unwatched hypertension had gone on to leave something structural, something changed in the architecture of the thing that had kept me alive without complaint for so long.

I was not afraid of dying. I want to say that plainly, because it surprised me too, how calm that thought sat inside me, almost as though some part of me had already made its peace with the idea long before the tests confirmed anything. What frightened me, in the silence of that drive home and in the weeks that followed, was a much smaller and much larger question at once. What happens to my three little girls if I am not here to stand between them and the world. Their mother will be there for them, I have no doubt of that. But a father is a father, and what he gives a daughter cannot be replaced by anyone else, however capable they are.

Life, until then, had been a long negotiation with struggle. I had built things, dismantled things, moved cities, started again more times than I could count without a certain tiredness entering the counting itself. And through all of it, one thing had remained undone. I had never managed to build a home, a shelter on the earth that my daughters could call theirs regardless of where I was or was not.

So I began, with far less money saved than the work would ever need, carried mostly by the kind of urgency that makes a man pour a foundation before he has finished the arithmetic. Kerala, close to where I had grown up, seemed the obvious place, and for a while the walls of that house rose the way walls do, slowly, stone by stone, each one a kind of promise. Then, one by one, difficulties arrived that I will not recount here in detail, only to say that they were persistent enough, and strange enough in their timing, that I eventually stopped. I left that foundation standing half formed in the earth like a sentence I had begun and could not finish. When I moved from Kerala to Mysore to begin again from nothing, I asked my mother to have even that foundation removed. I did not want a half built thing marking the place where an idea of home had failed. I wanted, if I was starting from zero, to start from an honest zero. With what my uncle gave me, I started my journey holding tight my little girls with some strange faith in the universe.

But the question that had sent me looking in the first place had not gone anywhere. My daughters still needed a home, wherever life eventually settled me, and so on my next visit to Kerala I began again, this time looking to buy rather than build, since building had already cost me more than money once. A house with land attached, I thought, would save both time and heartbreak. What I found instead was an education in something I had not expected to learn.

The first house belonged to a woman now living in Mangalore. Her father had built it for her, brick by careful brick, with the patience of a man who wanted his daughter’s whole future held safe inside walls he had raised himself, imagining perhaps her children playing in its rooms one day. He had died of a sudden cardiac arrest, and his daughter, settled elsewhere, wanted now only to be rid of the place. The house stood there, complete and empty, waiting for a buyer to give it a use its own family no longer wanted.

The second house belonged to a man who had worked at a college nearby. He had spent his entire life’s savings building it, and only a few years after its completion, he too had passed away. His family had returned to the southern part of Kerala, and now, years later, they were trying, without much urgency or hope, to sell a house none of them had any wish to return to.

The third house carried a story heavier than the first two combined. A man from a little further away had bought the land the moment his marriage was fixed, and by the time the wedding took place, the house stood ready with every comfort he could give his bride. Those were, by every account, happy days, the kind that make a whole village quietly envious of a young couple’s fortune. He had gone to work in the Gulf, taken his wife with him, and then, for the ordinary bureaucratic reason of a visa process, sent her home ahead of him. Within a week of her return, she had left with another man. He remarried eventually, but the house he had built with such hope stood closed, and he now lived far away, in the place of his work, a man visibly diminished by a betrayal he had never fully set down.

Three houses. Three men who had built, or bought, or dreamed toward the same purpose I was reaching for, and three houses that had ended up empty, unwanted, or shut against the very lives they were meant to hold. I remember sitting with that for days, feeling something close to despair. If this was where the effort led, again and again, then what exactly was I building toward. Whom was I building the house for, if a house could stand perfect and still be abandoned by the very love it was built from. I let the dream go quiet inside me. I stopped looking.

It was one of my relatives who would not let the matter rest. He called one day, almost apologetically, to say there was another place I should see before I gave up entirely. I went, mostly so as not to disappoint him, without any real expectation.

The road there left the main highway and its familiar dryness behind, and turned instead onto a narrower path that seemed to lead into a different climate altogether. The land opened into a valley, cool and green in a way that felt almost private, arecanut and coconut groves stretching in every direction, a slender tributary moving quietly through it, and a lake holding the sky’s colour without complaint. There was almost no one there. Only three old houses stood in that entire stretch of green, and something about their stillness made me ask.

The agent told me their story as though it were an old, familiar sadness he had grown used to repeating. A father had built all three houses, one for each of his three daughters, imagining them settled and returning, imagining grandchildren perhaps, imagining a valley full of the sound of a family he had raised with everything he had. All three daughters had married and moved away, each into a life of her own, none of them ever wishing to return to this valley, however beautiful it was. The father and mother had eventually passed away, and the houses had simply stood there since, going slowly to ruin, waiting for daughters who were not coming back, offered now for sale at whatever price a buyer would give.

I noticed, some distance from the houses, a small concrete structure I did not recognise, and when I asked, the agent said, simply, that it was the tomb of the father and the mother, and I do not think I can describe fully what moved through me in that moment, a man who had built three houses with his own hands, each one an act of pure, exhausting love, arriving in the end at the one structure that still belonged entirely to him, the one built to hold his own remains, and I found myself asking where they were now, those daughters, and where those dreams had gone to wait.

I think of that valley often. The grief in it is real, a father’s years of labour standing empty under the sun, and yet somewhere underneath that grief a kind of clarity has settled into me as well. A house, however carefully built, however lovingly furnished, cannot by itself carry forward what a parent hopes to give a child. Walls do not teach a person how to meet loss without breaking. Land does not teach a daughter how to recognise a good marriage from a hollow one, or a son how to survive betrayal without disappearing into a life half lived. What I have to give my daughters, I understand now, is a mind and a heart capable of building a life anywhere, out of anything, water finding its own way through even the most stubborn ground, and that matters far more than four walls waiting somewhere for them to arrive.

An education that opens doors rather than closes them. Values that hold steady when the ground beneath them shifts. A way of seeing the world that lets them recognise, early enough to matter, the difference between what looks like love and what actually is. If I can give them that, then it will not matter whether the roof over their heads was built by my hands or found by their own, because they will already carry, inside themselves, the only home that no one can ever leave empty.

My home is still a dream, and I would not mind if it remains one, for I have made up my mind to leave this place leaving nothing behind. All I would need would be a place where I am burned to ash, and even that space, after the ritual is done, would no longer be mine. Why build walls when the world itself has none. There is a road that begins at every threshold and does not announce where it ends, and I have come to think that the only inheritance worth leaving my daughters is the courage to walk it without asking.

The poet says –

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.

Preeth Padmanabhan Nambiar

Among the sociologists and educators who have shaped contemporary Haitian intellectual life, Professor Obrillant Damus occupies a distinctive position. His career, spanning linguistics, sociology, and education, illustrates a sustained engagement with the social conditions of Haiti as well as with the broader francophone academic world in which he was trained. This article presents a biographical and academic account of Professor Damus, tracing his educational formation, the scholarships and honors that marked his early career, his doctoral and postdoctoral research, and the institutional roles he currently holds at the State University of Haiti, the University Quisqueya, and Laval University in Québec. In doing so, it situates his individual trajectory within the wider context of Haitian higher education and its historical ties to the francophone academic networks of France and Canada.

Origins and Early Educational Formation

Obrillant Damus was born in Petit-Goâve, a coastal commune in the department of Ouest, Haiti, a region historically associated with commerce, agriculture, and a strong tradition of communal life. It was in this setting that his early formation took place before he pursued higher education at the State University of Haiti, where he enrolled in the Department of Applied Linguistics. His performance within this department distinguished him early, culminating in a certificate of excellence awarded by the Haitian Students Association in recognition of his standing as laureate of the department’s admission contest.

This early distinction proved consequential for the remainder of his academic career. The recognition secured him a four-year scholarship, sponsored by the French government and spanning the years 2001 to 2005, which allowed him to pursue advanced study without the financial constraints that limit the trajectories of many Haitian students. The scholarship functioned as more than a financial mechanism; it inaugurated Damus’s long-standing relationship with French academic institutions, a relationship that would define much of his subsequent scholarly formation.

Graduate Studies Across the Caribbean and Metropolitan France

In 2006, Damus received a further grant from the French government, this time to pursue graduate study at the University of the West Indies and Guiana (Université des Antilles et de la Guyane, UAG). This stage of his education situates him within a network of Caribbean scholarship that bridges Haiti with the francophone Antilles, a region whose universities have long served as intermediaries between Haitian intellectual life and the institutions of metropolitan France.

During his time at UAG, Damus received the support of Pascal Saffache, then Dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, whose backing was instrumental in Damus’s subsequent scholarship from the French Embassy in Haiti. This scholarship enabled him to complete a second master’s degree, referred to in the academic nomenclature as the M2, at the University of Paris 8, an institution recognized for its tradition of critical sociology and its historical association with post-1968 French intellectual movements.

His master’s thesis, submitted within the Master’s program in Sciences of Education and Training, specializing in Education Throughout Life, addressed questions situated at the intersection of medical ethnology and anthropology. The thesis was upheld with an honors mention, achieving a grade of 18 out of 20, a result that in the French academic grading system signifies work of exceptional distinction. The thesis was further recognized by Cancéropôle Île-de-France, an organization dedicated to cancer research within the Île-de-France region, which acknowledged both the quality of Damus’s analysis and its potential relevance to the scientific study of illness and care.

International Recognition and the Francophonie

The year 2008 marked a significant moment of public recognition in Damus’s career. During the commemoration of the International Day of the Francophonie in March of that year, the International Organization of the Francophonie (Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, OIF) awarded him a literary prize. The ceremony was notable for the presence of Abdou Diouf, then Secretary General of the Organization, as well as the attendance of French President Nicolas Sarkozy. This recognition situates Damus not merely as an academic researcher but as a participant in the broader cultural and literary life of the francophone world, an identity that complements his sociological and linguistic scholarship.

Doctoral Research: Solidarity and Cancer in Haiti

Between 2008 and 2011, Damus undertook doctoral research in sociology, a period that represents the methodological and theoretical culmination of his earlier training in linguistics, medical anthropology, and education. His doctoral thesis, titled Solidarity and Cancer in Haiti, was defended at the University of Paris 8 on December 7, 2011, and was upheld with the mention Très Honorable, the highest distinction awarded within the French doctoral system.

The subject of the thesis, examining the social structures of solidarity that emerge around the experience of cancer within Haitian communities, reflects a broader concern that runs throughout Damus’s scholarship: the manner in which illness, vulnerability, and care are mediated by social and cultural frameworks rather than being reducible to purely biomedical categories. This orientation toward the sociology of illness, informed by his earlier work in medical ethnology, positions his doctoral research as a bridge between the fields of medical anthropology and sociology proper, and reflects an effort to understand Haitian social life through the lens of shared vulnerability and collective response to suffering.

Postdoctoral Study under Michel Maffesoli

Following the completion of his doctorate, Damus undertook postdoctoral study at the Centre d’Étude sur l’Actuel et le Quotidien (CEAQ), housed at Paris 5 Sorbonne, under the coordination of Michel Maffesoli, a sociologist whose work on the sociology of everyday life, postmodernity, and the sociology of the imaginary has exerted considerable influence on French sociology since the late twentieth century. Maffesoli’s theoretical concerns, particularly his attention to the affective and communal dimensions of social life, resonate with the themes present in Damus’s own research on solidarity, ritual, and vulnerability. This postdoctoral period consolidated Damus’s position within the intellectual lineage of French sociology while allowing him to further refine his analysis of Haitian social phenomena through frameworks developed in dialogue with Maffesoli’s school of thought.

Academic Positions and Institutional Affiliations

Damus holds professorial appointments at two of Haiti’s principal institutions of higher education. At the State University of Haiti, he serves as professor of anthropology and is assigned to the Institute of African Studies and Research of Haiti. He taught and supervised research for many years in the master’s program in history, memory, and heritage. He co-led the doctoral seminar “Epistemology of the Social Sciences” at the postgraduate studies office of the State University of Haiti. He was a member of the research laboratory LADIREP, whose full designation, Langage, Discours, Représentations, indicates a sustained institutional focus on the relationship between language, discourse, and social representation, a focus consistent with Damus’s own training in applied linguistics and his later sociological work.

At the University Quisqueya, a private institution recognized for its contributions to Haitian higher education, Damus served as coordinator of the doctoral program in education, a role that places him at the center of doctoral training and curriculum development within the field. He also served as director of the university’s educational research center. 

Beyond Haiti, he holds the position of associate professor at the University of Sherbrooke (School of Law, Center for Contemporary Religious Studies) in Québec, Canada, an appointment that reflects the continuation of his engagement with francophone academic networks beyond both Haiti and France, extending his scholarly reach into the North American francophone context. He is a member of the supervisory committee for doctoral students at the Center for Contemporary Religious Studies at the University of Sherbrooke. He is the national representative of the UNESCO Chair in Education and Health. He is a member of the Athens Institute for Education and Research. He is an associate member of the UNESCO Janus Korczak Chair in Social Pedagogy (Maria Grzegorzewska University). He is a member of the Laboratory of Linguistics, Language Engineering, and Language Teaching at the University of Rennes 2. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Observatory of the French Language of the International Organization of La Francophonie (OIF Representation for the Americas, representative for the Caribbean).

Taken together, these appointments describe a career that operates simultaneously within multiple institutional and national frameworks: the public university system of Haiti, the private university sector represented by Quisqueya, and the international francophone academic community represented by University of Sherbrooke. This multiplicity of institutional roles is consistent with the broader pattern of his formation, which from its earliest stages was shaped by movement between Haitian, Caribbean, French, and eventually Canadian academic contexts.

Research Program and Intellectual Contributions

The range of Damus’s research interests reflects the interdisciplinary character of his formation. His documented areas of research include the rituals surrounding birth, the sociology of solidarity, disability, nursing rituals, the social and cultural dimensions of rape, local and indigenous knowledge systems, ontological vulnerability, prostate cancer, culturally specific diseases, the relationship between Creole and French within Haitian linguistic life, education oriented toward love and peace, and the social practice of breastfeeding.

He also works on exciting and innovative topics such as regenerative and restorative pedagogy, education for regenerative and restorative global citizenship, and education for global consciousness. Published by UNESCO and The University of Sherbrooke Press, his work on these topics has led him to develop the concept of regenerative and restorative Francophonie, which is featured in the International Organization of La Francophonie’s new quadrennial report on the French language around the world.

Professor Obrillant Damus has a growing body of international experience. In fact, he has served as a lecturer and visiting professor at several foreign universities (Laval University, University of British Columbia, Rennes 2 University, Maria Grzegorzewska University, Federal University of Rondônia,etc.). He has won several academic writing competitions organized by UNESCO. In particular, he has collaborated on multiple occasions with UNESCO’s “The Futures of Education” team in the education sector, as well as with the natural sciences sector (LINKS, Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems).

He edits the journal “Anthropologie des Savoirs des Suds” published by Éditions de l’Université de Sherbrooke, as well as the “La Documentation haïtienne” series published by Éditions l’Harmattan (Paris). 

The academic trajectory of Professor Obrillant Damus illustrates the interconnections between Haitian, Caribbean, French, and Canadian institutions of higher learning, and demonstrates how individual scholarly formation can be shaped by, and in turn contribute to, these transnational academic networks. From his early distinction in applied linguistics at the State University of Haiti, through his graduate studies in the French Antilles and Paris, to his doctoral research on solidarity and cancer and his subsequent postdoctoral work under Michel Maffesoli, Damus’s career reflects a sustained inquiry into the social dimensions of vulnerability, care, and language within Haitian society. His current appointments at the State University of Haiti, the University Quisqueya, and Laval University position him as a figure whose influence extends across national boundaries while remaining rooted in the study of Haitian social life. His scholarship, taken as a whole, constitutes a significant contribution to the sociology of illness, the sociology of solidarity, and the study of language and education within the francophone Caribbean world.

There is a particular kind of light that falls on a man waiting at a red signal, engine idling, food growing cold in the box behind him, and somewhere in that light a line of verse arrives uninvited. This is how Wang Jibing has written most of his poems. Not at a desk. Not in the hush of a study lined with books. But between orders, between elevators, between the small immovable delays that make up the working day of a delivery rider in Jiangsu province.

Wang was born in 1969 into a poor household in a village in Pizhou. He left school after junior high, and the years that followed him were the years that follow so many in that part of the world who are given labour instead of leisure. He dredged sand from riverbeds. He worked construction. He collected waste. He carried, in whatever sense a body can carry, the weight of a life that had no obvious place in it for poetry. And yet in the evenings, after the sand had been dredged and the day accounted for, he would find some scrap of a table, in some shed barely large enough for it, and there he continued to write. Not because anyone was waiting to read him. Because something in him needed to set the day down in words before it disappeared.

In 2019, at fifty, Wang became a food delivery rider. It was, on the surface, simply another manual trade, one more uniform to wear in a life that had already worn several. But something in that particular work, the waiting, the traffic lights, the elevators that rise and fall without hurry while a rider stands inside them thinking of nothing and everything, gave his writing a new register. He began to compose poems in these intervals, on his phone, between the ordinary tasks of delivering someone else’s dinner. In 2022, one of these poems, “People in a Hurry,” was shared by a fellow admirer of poetry and found its way to millions of readers. A man on a scooter had, without meaning to, become a voice for a generation of workers who move through cities unseen.

This month, that voice reached the country’s highest literary threshold. Wang Jibing’s poetry collection, translated as Low Flight, has been named among the winners of the ninth Lu Xun Literature Prize, one of the most prestigious honours in Chinese letters, awarded once every four years by the China Writers Association. The prize carries the name of Lu Xun, a writer remembered for looking without flinching at the century he lived through. It has, for decades, been understood as an arena for professional writers, for those whose lives were arranged around literature rather than around survival. This year, that arrangement loosened. Alongside Wang, a market vendor who has tended a general goods stall for eighteen years was nominated for a collection of essays. A shift, quiet but unmistakable, has entered the way a nation decides whose life is permitted to become literature.

What makes Low Flight more than a curiosity, more than the story of an unlikely man in an unlikely place, is the labour behind it. To complete the collection, Wang did not simply mine his own days for material. He sought out some hundred and forty fellow delivery riders, paying small sums from his own pocket so that they might answer his questions, so that their days too might be set down somewhere permanent. He wanted the book to hold not one man’s exhaustion but the shared and largely invisible exhaustion of an entire trade, the small griefs and endurances of the more than ten million riders who move through Chinese cities each day carrying other people’s meals while their own lives go mostly unrecorded. “I am one of them,” he has said. “I face pressure, and I have moments when I break down.” The poems do not ask to be admired for overcoming this. They simply ask to be read as true.

Asked what winning meant to him, Wang did not reach for triumph. He said that on the day of the announcement, what he wanted most was to return to his scooter and continue his rounds, because it is only in staying grounded, in remaining close to the actual weight of the actual day, that a clear mind for writing can be found. There is something here worth sitting with quietly. He did not treat the prize as an arrival, a door through which he might now pass into some other life. He treated it as confirmation of a discipline he had already been practising in silence for years, the discipline of noticing.

He has described the honour as something closer to a signpost than a summit. Not proof that ordinary people must now become poets, but proof that any life, however plain its surface, carries within it the possibility of being expressed and understood. This is, perhaps, the quiet argument his whole body of work has been making without raising its voice. That literature does not begin where hardship ends. That it often begins exactly there, in the gap between one delivery and the next, in the pause at a red light, in the tiredness that a man carries home and somehow transforms, before sleep, into a line worth keeping.

An English edition of Low Flight is expected to reach American readers by the end of this year. Wang is already at work on a collection of essays. Whatever comes of it, something has already shifted. A door that literature kept narrow for a long time has, for one delivery rider from Jiangsu, opened. And through it, perhaps, others will begin to see that the ordinary hours of their own lives, the waiting, the weariness, the small unremarked persistence, were never as far from poetry as they seemed.

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Writers Capital International Foundation www.writerscapital.org | care@writerscapital.org

The Athens Institute, established in 1995 as an independent, world-wide body of academics and researchers, organizes small academic meetings while also promoting research and producing publications. Over 1000 such academic events have been organized since 1995 attended by scholars from all over the world. Besides the publication of over 200 books, a series of conference papers have also been published as well as the introduction of a series of e-journals.

For Greece’s national anniversary marking the War of Independence of 1821 against over 400 years of Ottoman rule, the Athens Institute held its 3rd Special Event under the auspices of the Athenian Academic Periodical, titled “Revolutions of National Independence and the Birth of the Nation-State during the 18th and 19th Centuries” on Monday, March 30, 2026.  The topic chosen is very appropriate as it refers to the struggle for independence that reshaped the ideas of sovereignty, citizenship and identity not only on a local scale but on a global one as well through the political, social and cultural dimension that it expressed. This transition from empires to sovereign states was filled with wars and conflicts, ideologies and international interventions as well as the influence of transatlantic revolutionary ideas. It was a time when the ‘Old World’ was coming to an end and the ‘New World’ beginning.

The date of March 25th for celebrating the Greek War of Independence is deeply symbolic as it combines both religious meaning and national identity.  It was not chosen to mark the exact beginning of the war for independence as uprisings had started much earlier in various parts of the Peloponnese, but because it symbolically blends faith and freedom. March 25th is the day of the Annunciation in the Orthodox Christian calendar, the moment when the Archangel Gabriel announces to the Virgin Mary she will give birth to Jesus Christ. This symbolizes good news and hope as well as a new beginning for humanity. By linking the war of independence to this day, the uprising was portrayed as a spiritual rebirth of Greece, unifying scattered uprisings and strengthening the connection between Greek identity and Orthodox Christianity. It turns the revolution into not just a political revolt, but a moral and spiritual mission.

The lecture by Obrillant Damus (Full Professor, State University of Haiti, Haiti, Visiting Professor, Laval University & adjunct professor, University of Sherbrooke, Quebec) threw light on another aspect of the Greek War of Independence as it referred to the benefits gained from Haiti’s ‘regenerative and restorative pedagogy’, which refers to ‘a set of methods and knowledge aimed at regenerating ourselves, regenerating others, and repairing the past and the present with a view to human, ecological and planetary sustainability.’ (Damus, 2024). This knowledge is important as it helps the oppressed to overcome the traumas that they experienced under suppressive regimes such as that of the Ottoman Empire. These traumas and experiences are passed on from one generation to the next and therefore it is important for both sides, the oppressed and the oppressor, to understand this and to come to terms with it. This is the difficult part.

Greece benefited from Haiti’s regenerative and restorative pedagogy because Haiti not only sent a shipment of coffee that could be sold for the buying of arms, but also moral support by sending 100 volunteers to fight alongside the Greeks in their fight for freedom, who unfortunately lost their lives on the way to Greece. This supportive act bolstered the self-confidence, the self-esteem, and the determination of the Hellenes to put an end to centuries of Ottoman ‘cultural genocide or ethnocide, physical genocide, the destruction of the Byzantine heritage, and the destruction of religious architectural heritage.’ (Excerpt from Obrillant Damus’s lecture titled “Towards an Analysis of Haiti’s Contribution to Greek Independence in Terms of Regenerative and Restorative Pedagogy, as well as Global Citizenship Education”, Athens Institute on March 30, 2026)

Learn more: Damus, Obrillant (2024).  Regenerative and restorative pedagogy: the foundation of new contract for cognitive justice, UNESCO-Prospects. 

Sam Zylberberg, 2019 : https://jeretiens.net/le-genocide-grec-pontique-1914-1923/.

Haiti, being the first “Black” republic, set an example for others to follow as its independence in 1804 after a 12-year fight against France marked a turning point for those under colonial rule and slavery. The success of their fight led to the support of other national struggles such as the Greek War of Independence in 1821, ” universalizing human rights and citizenship” (Excerpt from Professor Obrillant Damus’s lecture at the Athens Institute on March 30, 2026)

Although Greece was still fighting for its freedom against Ottoman rule, the 1st National Assembly convened at the township of Epidaurus, where a Decree was signed in January 1822 abolishing slavery. This made Greece the first country in modern Europe to abolish slavery on its soil and globally the second only to Haiti. Such examples of moral and material support set a standard for others to follow. 

Haiti responded to the call for help sent on August 20, 1821, by the Greek intellectual Adamantios Korais, a member of the Philhellenic Committee of Paris. The rest of Europe preferred to ignore this plea as they did not want to disturb the status quo.

On January 15, 1822 (the 19th year of Haiti’s independence), Jean-Pierre Boyer, Haitian military officer and president of Haiti from 1818 to 1843, replied to Korais’ letter.  A part of his letter was directed to the Greek citizens, giving them the moral strength to continue their struggle. 

“Citizens! Convey to your co-patriots the warm wishes that the people of Haiti

send on the behalf of your liberation. The descendants of ancient Hellenes look

forward, in the reawakening of their history, to trophies worthy of Salamis. May

they prove to be like their ancestors and guided by the commands of Miltiades,

and be able, in the fields of new Marathon, to achieve the triumph of the holy

affair that they have undertaken on behalf of their rights, religion and motherland.

May it be, at last, through their wise decisions, that they will be commemorated

by history as the heirs of the endurance and virtues of their ancestors.”

Source: https://200years.mfa.gr/en/recognitions-first-period-revolution-en/haitien/#:~:text=15%20January%201822.,leader%20of%20an%20independent%20State

It can be said that Jean-Pierre Boyer was also influenced by the ancient Greek officers and statesmen such as Leonidas, Miltiades and Themistocles, who had also given their lives for the freedom and independency of their country against the Persian invasion. Such examples are interconnected as one influences the other. 

“The regenerative and restorative pedagogy implemented by the New State of Haiti helped to curb the processes of identity destruction (identicide)—whether state-sponsored, religious, or linguistic—in Greece. The moral and political support Greece received from Haiti served as fertile ground for the country’s de-Ottomanization (strengthening of Christianity, reduction of the process of cultural mixing, particularly in the areas of language, music, and cuisine). It is worth noting here the role of the Orthodox Church in preserving the Greek language and culture in the face of centuries-long Ottoman oppression.) 

Source: Excerpt from Professor Obrillant Damus’s lecture at the Athens Institute on March 30, 2026. 

In conclusion, the political, social, and cultural dimensions of struggles for independence continue to shape nations long after formerly oppressed peoples have secured their freedom and sovereignty. The former ruling power must likewise undergo a process of adjustment to the new geopolitical reality, so that tensions between the two sides may gradually evolve toward a balanced coexistence. In the absence of such adaptation, these tensions risk escalating into renewed conflict, as evidenced in various regions of the contemporary world. At the same time, newly independent states, to preserve and fully realize their freedom, must remain vigilant and committed to its defense, demonstrating resilience in the face of emerging challenges and adversities.

Despena Dalmaris

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About the Author

Despena Dalmaris is an educator and literary professional serving as Chief Coordinator of Australia. She has extensive experience in English language instruction across Papua New Guinea and Sydney, with expertise in individualized teaching and preparation for international examinations, including Cambridge and Michigan certifications. She is an executive member of Writers Capital Foundation and serves as Editor of Writers International Edition, contributing to the advancement of global literary initiatives.