In August 1791, in a wooded clearing in northern Saint-Domingue, enslaved Africans gathered beneath heavy skies. The ceremony at Bois Caïman, part ritual and part oath, would ignite the Haitian Revolution, the only successful slave revolt in modern history. Thirteen years later, Haiti declared independence, becoming the first Black republic in the world and permanently altering the political imagination of the Atlantic world.
It remains one of the most radical acts of collective self-liberation ever recorded.
And yet Haiti’s story, particularly in the west, is too often flattened; either sanctified into myth or reduced to disaster.
In his debut poetry collection Konbit, Haitian poet Sony Ton-Aimé refuses both distortions. More than two centuries after Bois Caïman, he returns to that clearing not to monumentalize it, but to dwell in its tension. He writes toward the waiting before revolt, the breath held before flame, a seer speaking into charged night air. The revolution, he suggests, was not sudden fire but accumulated pressure. It was built from three centuries of forced labor, spiritual endurance, coded communication, and strategic patience.
The book’s title comes from Haitian Creole. A ‘konbit’ is a communal labor practice in Haiti, neighbors gathering to plant, harvest, rebuild, or respond to sudden need. Sometimes it is planned weeks in advance. Sometimes it forms instinctively, as when villagers lift an overturned car. “It is not ideology. It is action. Bodies working beside bodies. Labor no single person could sustain alone,” Ton-Aimé says.
In Ton-Aimé’s hands, konbit becomes both metaphor and structure. The Bois Caïman ceremony emerges as a collective act of imagination made physical.
The poems braid the revolution with contemporary migration and ecological collapse. Historical figures such as Boukman, Makandal, and Toussaint Louverture appear not as untouchable heroes but as strategic and flawed human beings. Leaders may die but the movement continues. The land itself functions as witness; sugarcane fields remember extraction, forests carry prophecy , and soil absorbs spilled blood.
Beneath the historical frame runs a contemporary question. If enslaved people could imagine a world beyond slavery, why does imagining a world beyond climate catastrophe feel so difficult now?
Ton-Aimé, born in Haiti and now based in the United States, writes from a life shaped by movement. Trained first in accounting, he moved toward poetry, translation, and literary leadership, and now serves as Executive Director of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures. His poems enter conversation with writers such as Tyehimba Jess, Natasha Trethewey, Derek Walcott, Shara McCallum, and Adrian Matejka, situating Haiti’s revolution within a broader diasporic lineage. Haitian Creole, forged under colonial constraint, becomes proof that oppressed people have always invented language to carry futures not yet visible.
We spoke with Ton-Aimé about Vodou cosmology, the body as a site of resistance, the risks of mythologizing revolution, why he calls Haiti not “motherland” but sweetheart, and why imagining a future beyond climate collapse may demand the same courage once required to imagine freedom beyond slavery.
Q: You were born and raised in Haiti before coming to the United States. Can you walk me through that journey and how you found poetry?
Sony Ton-Aimé: I was born and raised in a border town in Haiti. I did all of my primary and secondary studies there. In 2010, I received a scholarship to study in the United States, specifically at Kent State University in Ohio. At the time, I could not speak English fluently. I was comfortable with numbers, so I chose accounting. I believed numbers would be more stable for me than language.
In my final semester, I did an internship with the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State. I also took a poetry class. That is when I fell in love with poetry again. In high school, I wrote all the time. I always wanted to be a writer. But when I arrived in the United States and could not speak English well, literature did not feel possible. Accounting felt practical.
In that poetry class in 2014, some of the poems that now appear in Konbit began. They were not yet a collection. They were just poems rooted in what I knew, in Haiti, in memory.
After graduating in 2014, I went back to Haiti and worked as an accountant for almost two years. Then I returned to the United States to pursue my MFA. During graduate school, I realized that I loved connecting writers and readers as much as I loved writing. I began helping with literary events. I asked administrators if I could assist with programming. Bringing people together felt like another form of creativity. But I never stopped writing. Poetry has always been my first love.
Q: You’ve spoken about being shy as a child and learning to tell stories within your family. How did that shape your relationship to poetry?
Ton-Aimé: I was terribly shy outside of my family. I could not speak comfortably in public. Within my family, though, that was the only place where I could really talk. I had so much to share. Sometimes I would bring people together just to talk. Because they were my family, they indulged me. But I knew I had to hold their attention. I had to condense things. I had to make the story worth listening to.
Poetry is economical. You have to say a great deal in very few words. That form suited me. It allowed me to condense emotion and narrative into something precise. In that way, my shyness shaped the medium I chose.
Q: What did Haiti mean to you growing up, and how did that meaning shift once you moved to the United States?
Ton-Aimé: Growing up, Haiti meant the people around me. My parents could provide for me. I did not worry about food or shelter. There was political unrest, especially in the early 2000s, but that was the world I knew. Haiti was the people I loved.
At that time, the United States and Canada were the ideals. The books I read were mostly written by French or European writers. The contrast between their lives and mine was stark. The United States represented wealth, order, possibility.
When I came here, that ideal collapsed in some ways. I saw that the United States has faults. That experience protected me from idealizing Haiti in a simplistic way. Haiti became more than a small town. It became a country with history, with global impact.
One of Haiti’s greatest strengths is its history. The Haitian Revolution remains, in my view, one of the most radical acts in human history. Enslaved people, after three hundred years of bondage, decided they would free themselves. They said they would rather die than remain enslaved. And they did it.
But Haiti is not perfect. You can love something and still acknowledge its flaws. In Konbit, there are poems that do not portray Haiti in a flattering way. That was necessary. You can love a country deeply and still be critical.
In Haiti, we do not call the country motherland or fatherland. We call it “cheri,” sweetheart. That intimacy allows honesty. You can praise your sweetheart, but you can also speak candidly.
Q: Let’s talk about the Haitian Revolution. When did Bois Caïman become the emotional and intellectual center of this book?
Ton-Aimé: It happened both emotionally and intellectually.
Intellectually, I was thinking about climate change. I struggle to imagine a world beyond it. I still participate in systems that harm the planet. I drive a fuel-powered car. I consume in ways that contribute to the problem. I cannot easily envision a life outside of that structure.
Emotionally, I wanted to connect with my ancestors. No one I know has been enslaved. That is six or seven generations removed from me. I cannot fully imagine their daily reality. But they imagined a world beyond slavery. They gathered at Bois Caïman and decided they would fight for independence. They decided they would not stop until they were free.
For me, Bois Caïman was a turning point not only for Haiti but for humanity. It was a moment when people declared that what seemed natural was not natural. Slavery was constructed. It could be dismantled.
Climate catastrophe feels inevitable today. But it is also constructed. It is tied to capitalism, imperialism, systems of extraction. If enslaved people could imagine a world beyond slavery, can we imagine a world beyond climate catastrophe? That question sits at the heart of this book.
Q: You connect climate change directly to the Haitian Revolution. How do you see those struggles speaking to each other?
Ton-Aimé: Both involve systems that appear natural but are not. Slavery was treated as normal. Climate destruction is treated as inevitable.
The Haitian Revolution required people to go all in. It required bodies on the line. It required sacrifice. If we are serious about climate change, it will also require sacrifice. There are people who benefit from the current system. If we dismantle it, some ways of life will not survive. That is uncomfortable to admit.
Toussaint Louverture tried to placate France. He brought former enslavers back to plantations. He believed Haiti needed to remain economically tied to France. He could not fully imagine independence. That hesitation is instructive.
If we attempt to solve climate change while preserving the systems that caused it, we will fail. Change will anger powerful people. That is part of the truth.
Q: You write Toussaint Louverture, Boukman, and other figures as human beings rather than monuments. Why was that important?
Ton-Aimé: I struggle with hero worship. If I turn someone into a monument, I cannot relate to them.
Toussaint Louverture was brilliant. He defeated British, Spanish, and French armies. He was a strategic genius. But he had flaws. He had ego. He forced formerly enslaved people back to plantations. He owned enslaved people after buying his own freedom. He could not initially envision Haiti standing completely independent from France.
Those contradictions matter.
If I portray him as flawless, then freedom seems achievable only by superhuman figures. I am not a superhero. Most of us are not. But flawed human beings changed the world. That is hopeful.
Q: Migration also enters this book. How did contemporary migration shape your thinking?
Ton-Aimé: Around 2016 and 2017, I saw many Haitians migrating to South America. They went to Brazil and Chile because visas were more accessible. The plan was often to work there and then attempt to enter the United States.
The language around migrants became hostile. I wanted to place Haitian migration in conversation with the broader migrant experience. The Haitian Revolution itself was multinational. Boukman was not born in Haiti. There were white allies who signed the declaration of independence. It was not a simple narrative.
Migration, revolution, and collective struggle are intertwined. Borders are political constructions. So is freedom.
Q: The concept of “konbit” is central. Can you describe it in detail, beyond dictionary definition?
Ton-Aimé: A konbit is communal labor. If you have a harvest, the whole village comes. Some dig. Some gather. Children carry baskets. Musicians play. People cook in the corner. By the end of the day, the entire field is harvested without machinery.
It can be planned weeks in advance. That is a planned konbit.
It can also be spontaneous. If someone’s car flips, people gather immediately. They lift it. Some cheer. Some bring water. Afterward, they may sit and talk. That is also a konbit.
It happens for weddings, funerals, first communions, any event that calls for collective effort. It is not ideology. It is embodied action.
In the book, I wanted konbit to be both subject and method. The collection includes multiple voices. It includes poems after other writers. It includes historical figures speaking. That cacophony mirrors the sound of a village at work.
Q: The body is everywhere in your poems. Hands, breath, blood, skin. Why insist on the body?
Ton-Aimé: Change requires bodies. At Bois Caïman, people put their bodies on the line. Boukman was captured and decapitated. Freedom was not abstract.
As a Black man in the United States, I became hyper aware of my body. In Haiti, I did not think about my body in racial terms the same way. Here, I am often defined by it.
Stress lives in the body. History lives in the body. Poetry is often treated as purely intellectual. But writing is physical. It drains you. It moves through muscle and breath.
A konbit requires hands, sweat, skin in the game. So the poems had to be embodied.
Q: Vodou cosmology and oral tradition shape the voice of the Seer in the book. How did that influence your writing?
Ton-Aimé: In Vodou, you have the mambo and the houngan, priestesses and priests. They are spiritual leaders, healers, historians, storytellers. If you want to know the history of a village, you go to them. If you are sick, you go to them. They carry memory.
They are also seen as able to foresee or interpret the future.
I wanted the Seer to embody that wisdom. The Seer speaks from the past into the present. It is a voice that has witnessed cycles and understands that history repeats unless interrupted.
That voice is meant to comfort and to warn.
Q: How did writing this book change your relationship to Haiti?
Ton-Aimé: It made the relationship deeper and clearer. I can look at Haiti and say you made liberty possible for the modern world. At the same time, I can say you struggle with governance and repeated political crises.
It feels like being in an intimate relationship. You see the strengths and the flaws. You love anyway. But you love with open eyes.
Q: If someone from 1791 could read Konbit, what would they recognize and what would shock them?
Ton-Aimé: They would recognize the struggle. They would recognize the desire for collective freedom.
But they would be shocked that we are still confronting versions of the same systems. They might say, we thought we solved this. Why are you still here?
That question should unsettle us. It should push us to continue the work.
