Many Haitians support his presidential bid, however, his former Fugee bandmate Pras is not endorsing his friend’s presidential candidacy.
Wyclef Jean’s holed up in his recording studio in a basement in New Jersey laying down the final track of his latest album, the Haitian Experience. “One more time,” he says to his producer, and then brings the microphone up to his mouth and sings: “Wyclef, the Haitian president!”
Warming to his theme, he lets rip: “To all my DJs around the world, all hands on deck! The Haitian president: Wyclef!”
Now that the world knows the former singer with the multi-platinum group the Fugees turned solo star is running for president of Haiti, the key question is: why?
Jean answers the question in a roundabout way. He recalls a visit he made to Haiti just before Christmas with his four-year-old daughter Angelina. Ever one for the expansive gesture, Jean decided to spread a little joy for the children of Cité Soleil, the notoriously poor and at times violent slum in the capital, Port-au-Prince.
“I wanted to bring Santa Claus to the slums because these kids were poor but I didn’t feel like they shouldn’t have a Christmas, so I brought a carnival into the slum and I took a helicopter and I landed with my daughter and a Santa Claus right in the middle of Cité Soleil.”
He was staying as he always does in Haiti in the Hotel Montana. Three weeks later, on 12 January, the entire building was reduced to rubble in the massive Haitian earthquake.
“We escaped death by a few weeks. So that’s why I’m standing [for president]. Maybe I could have waited another 10 years for this, but this is urgent. Singing about policy is not enough. I’ve seen musicians sing about it all their life. I’ve taken the position to not only exercise what we are singing about, but to see if we could take five years to move this country into a better direction.”
The Jean candidacy will have an explosive impact on the presidential elections on 28 November. Unusually for Haiti, the race is wide open, with no obvious frontrunner. The current president, René Préval, cannot stand, having already served two five-year terms.
Into this mix blasts Jean, Haiti’s most famous son. He left the country when he was nine, relocating first to Brooklyn and then to northern New Jersey, later forming the Fugees with his cousin Pras Michel, and Lauryn Hill. Their second album, The Score, sold more than 18m copies worldwide and won two Grammys.
No one doubts that Jean is likely to have an electric presence when campaigning begins. But there are other doubts, like why should anyone in Haiti vote for a pop star as president at such a dire moment in its history?
“People can say, ‘Clef what do you know about politics and running the country, it sounds pretty insane Clef.’ But when you think of the connections and allies I’ve assembled around the world, I feel I can help move this country forward.”
Jean adds that if he were the kind of rapper who went around saying “’shake my booty, pop the champagne, let’s go,’ I would say we definitely don’t want a pop star like that running the country.” But he insists he is not like that at all, that he has always been political, even in his music.
He starts talking about himself in the third person: “This pop star was not necessarily trying to be famous. His first album was called Blunt on Reality. It talked about human rights, social issues.”
He says, even in naming the group they were thinking politically. “We wanted to call the group Refugees but when we went to register it we saw there was already a group with that name so we called it Fugees. So this pop star stands up, this pop star has always been an activist for the people.
“In my world and the stereotypes we usually have, us hip-hop artists are going to go to jail. Here you have an artist who says: my idea is not to go to prison, my idea is to run my country as president. He decides he’s at a point to transform music into policy.”
Jean has been actively involved in Haitian affairs since 2005, when he set up his charity Yéle Haiti that works with poor young people, helping them to read and write and awarding other educational scholarships. But as his Santa Claus story illustrates, it was the earthquake that really convinced him of the need to get directly involved in the running of his country.
He reached Port-au-Prince the day after the quake and says he was instantly sucked in. “I would say for two days I went missing. Two days underground, picking bodies up, taking them to a morgue, finding my friend [the rapper] Jimmy O dead in his car with a building toppled on him. I had his daughter in my arms.
“Then on the other side of town, my man gets shot. He’d been working for Yéle Haiti. At that point I lost it. Two days, just like being in the apocalypse.”
He says the experience made him question his faith, even as the son of a Nazarene preacher. “The streets filled with bodies of children and women that are pregnant, at that moment you think if there is a God why did he let that happen? But then you see a man with a nail in his hand, and he says we are building a new Haiti, and that’s how I came out of it.”
Almost seven months on from the earthquake, Haiti remains in an apocalyptic state. Hundreds of thousands of people are still living under plastic sheets despite the onset of the hurricane season, scrabbling for scarce food or work. Were Jean actually to win the election, where on Earth would he begin?
“There’s nowhere to go but up in Haiti right now, because everywhere you look there’s disaster. So the first thing you do is engage education and job creation.”
Secondly, he says, he would encourage people to move out of the ravaged capital by building new agrarian villages in the countryside. “Each village would be associated with a different food – mango village, sugar cane village. If you can provide a job opportunity and a home for people you can start to decentralise Port-au-Prince.”
Education would be the key, he says, because “until you learn to read and write, it’s called modern slavery”. [GUARDIAN UK]
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