This national construction involves working with all those who want it and are ready to commit to it. There are more of them than we think.
It seems to me that it is urgent to find the terms of a national discourse. And to constitute a force that is sufficiently transversal to carry it.
We are inevitably heading towards elections. No political force can win alone. Who should we talk to? Who should we reach an agreement with? Around what? The front to be formed, without claiming to do without class conflicts and the difference in political ideologies, can only be a national front today.
To form this front, we will have to dare to think about the possibilities and limits of the historical-political and historical-ethical moment we are living. To build a radicalism on a background of humility. Radicalism: to oppose everything that does not go in the direction of national construction. Humility: to do with everything that goes in this direction.
Understanding of course that national construction cannot be done without the minimum of equality that we have never been able to establish in this country.
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Have we pushed radicalism enough to ask ourselves what 1806 is the name of? Have we, apart from a few researchers whose work remains salutary exceptions, sufficiently understood what the relations between the State and the nation have been throughout our history? We have fled so many questions, made a pact with so many routines of the worst…
We must dare to adopt this radical principle proposed in the 1987 constitution towards a social republic, keeping in mind the preamble to this Constitution, one of the rare political documents carrying the idea of a habitable country for all.
We have fled from so many questions, made a pact with so many routines of the worst…
Daring to be radical is also showing humility. This national construction involves working with all those who want it and are ready to commit to it. There are more of them than we think. With the contradictions due to their origins, their background, the ideas and reflexes to which they have been exposed, and even more so the ideas to which they have not been exposed. Patriotism is a space of contradictions, its expressions are varied, and no one today can claim to have a monopoly on it.
There are certainly those who are excluded from such an approach by criminal practices and the defense of private interests that are irreconcilable with those of the nation. There are also those who are excluded from an ideology based on an individualism opposed to any republican ethic or on incorrigible prejudices. But there are, with different backgrounds, people of good will who arrive by multiple paths at this need for a habitable republican construction. As was the case at the end of the 19th century.e century and early 20the.
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Radicalism and humility for a citizen group in the sense of national construction. With old figures who have long embodied this dream. (Let’s stop saying and believing that all those on the political scene are vile and corrupt). And no doubt new ones. (Let’s stop believing that this country has exhausted its fund of goodwill and patriotic feeling).
Par Lyonel Trouillot
Cover image edited by AyiboPost, illustrating some of the turbulent times in the country in recent years.
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Poet, novelist, literary critic and screenwriter, Lyonel Trouillot studied law.