Pittsburgh poet’s debut collection explores Haiti past and present

In 2010, at age 19, Sony Ton-Aime was introduced to English. Born in Haiti, he’d grown up speaking Haitian Creole at home and French at school. Now he was enrolled at Kent State University, where he’d spend a semester in the English as a Second Language program.

Sixteen years later, it’s safe to say Ton-Aime is up to speed as far as English goes. He’s well into his third year as executive director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures, the region’s premiere showcase for visiting authors. And he’s just published his first book of poetry, “Konbit,” as part of the Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series.

‘Your time has come’

The 93-page collection evokes the Haitian Revolution of 1791 and its contemporary echoes. Its theme is reflected in its title: “Konbit,” said Ton-Aime, is a Haitian Creole word for any project that requires the collective to achieve, whether that’s bringing in the harvest, staging a wedding, or pulling a car out of a ditch.

Many of the nearly 60 poems invoke the Bois Caiman ceremony, a religious gathering in August 1791 attended mostly by enslaved Blacks at which they resolved to overthrow French colonizers. Ton-Aime draws on both the historical record and the folklore surrounding the event to depict leaders like Dutty Boukman and Cecile Fatiman.

“Fatiman Contemplates the Knife on the Eve of the Bois Caiman Ceremony” begins, “blood-tinted blade / rusted yet never dull / prayer in waiting / always out of reach / you so many times have failed / you for far too long / have been hidden / your time has come …”

Poems in the latter portions of the book depict the Haiti of the 1990s and thereafter, when Ton-Aime grew up and came of age. Verses like “In the ’80s the U.S. Destroyed Haiti’s Rice Culture” (“a country / on its knees with promise of a full belly”) and “1994” collapse the history into a contemporary world of earthquakes, automobiles, HIV, corrupt aid workers and the effects of climate change.

But there is also joy, typically experienced in community. In the book’s title poem, Ton-Aime writes, “The children fill the holes with handfuls of corn. It is life. Men dig holes, children occupy them, and women mend the world.”

The book is replete with mothers and mother figures, a theme Ton-Aime said honors his own mother but also Haiti as “a nurturing place” and the women who looked after him as a child when his mother went off to sell secondhand clothes in the market. “She left me with the folks in the village, the women in the village,” he said. “And so many of them really took care of me and I came to see them as really mothers, in a way.”

In highlighting figures like Boukman, Fatiman and the unsung mothers of Haiti, Ton-Aime also seeks to emphasize the resourcefulness and creativity of marginalized people. He said their example can be a powerful one in troubled times.

“We have faced existential threats as well in the past, and I wanted this collection to be a way to connect them and for folks to feel a sense of optimism that our ancestors, our forefathers and foremothers, survived this,” he said. “And we can as well survive them.”

‘I can tell my own stories’

As a child, Ton-Aime loved reading and writing. At Kent State, in a practical move, he studied accounting and worked in that field back home. But the love of poetry he found in Kent State’s writing community brought him back to earn a master’s degree in poetry through the Northeast Ohio MFA Program.

A new career in arts administration led him first to the Cleveland-based nonprofit Lake Erie Ink, and then, in 2020, to New York’s famed Chautauqua Institute, where he became director of literary arts.

But even at PAL, as he was hosting authors like Zadie Smith, Percival Everett and Elizabeth Gilbert, he continued working on poetry. He especially credited as an inspiration the work of Jamaican-born American poet Shara McCallum.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I do not need to be an American to write poetry in [the] United States. I can keep my own authentic voice. I can tell my own stories that will relate to folks, right? And Shara McCallum was really the first person that gave me this permission to be my authentic self.”

Ton-Aime’s other literary projects include the Haitian Creole translation of “Olympic Hero: The Lennox Kilgour Story” and co-authoring the Haitian Creole course on Duolingo.

McCallum, who is a Penn State professor, and poet Joy Priest, who teaches in the University of Pittsburgh’s master of fine arts program, will join Ton-Aime at the “Konbit” book launch on Sun., March 15. The event, at Alphabet City, on the North Side, is free, but registration is recommended.