Music can pull unexpected things into your line of sight. A place in time, a city, a new way of feeling.
How about an entire country.
Enter Mach-Hommy. I was introduced to Mach-Hommy’s music via his rap collaborator Your Old Droog. Droog crafts albums bunged-up with musicality and has a penchant to write very on-point lines — ‘know the ashy life so well/still take them little lotions before I check out a hotel.’ He also hosts a Twitter account like Craig Ferguson hosted a late-night show, replete with recurring bits and scatter-shot, irreverent humour.
One of the enduring themes of his online presence is Mach-Hommy fandom. ‘If I was a major label exec,’ Droog proudly extols in one tweet, ‘I’d cut Mach Hommy a check for 3 mill right now.’ The last time I had heard something like that, it was Akala’s sentiments towards activist and rapper Lowkey. Both statements were designed as a radical challenge to the music industry’s commercial allegiances.
From my outsider’s perspective, they seem very close. Mach-Hommy executive produced Your Old Droog’s album ‘It Wasn’t Even Close,’ contributing two verses. They took their lyrics down at around the same time from the culture-crabbing, dank-flower blossoming empire of Genius, citing copyright. Droog also recently revealed that he has written his first rap verse in Ukrainian, ringing his dad for help with the pronunciation. Mach-Hommy also had something of a hand in that as well, I’m sure of it. Mainly because Mach-Hommy, along with a plethora of other rappers, have incubated a new facet of hip-hop music: bilingual rap.
In America, bilingual citizens are ballooning. Research from the Annie E Casey foundation, providing data on US children and families, shows that 22% of children in 2016 spoke a language other than English in the house. This ever-increasing aspect of American citizenship is making itself felt in rap music.
The bilingual rap is the song or album that transitions between two languages, regardless of fluency. For the creator of bilingual raps, you simply dip your cup in more than one linguistic pools. This is exactly what Mach-Hommy does with Haitian Creole and English.
Mach-Hommy is based out of Newark but has roots in Haiti. In almost all footage I see of him, he is wearing a bandana of the Haitian flag wrapped around the lower half of his face. He sells his physical music for enormous amounts of money. This gives Hommy a guarded image. And a lot of music publications seem unsure as to what they should do with Hommy’s musical output as a result. His most recent EP was described in a Lyrical Lemonade article as ‘spooky.’ That descriptor conjures Scooby-Doo ghouls running in and out of doors in my head, nothing like the genre-pushing rap that Mach-Hommy is curating.
My favourite thing about Mach-Hommy’s music is that it is replete with disjunct, striking phrases, pulled from a seemingly bottomless, under-table canvas bag of inspiration. In Chiney Brush, a song about numbness, he will throw disdainful putdowns (‘Heard you were rubbing on those ugly feet’) at the same rate as reflective statements, briefly resting on how ‘nothing jerk tears like separation.’ All of this deflates into the menacing and confessional hook: ‘I don’t have feelings, sir.’ He moves between places and has the artistic conviction to take you with him.
And where Mach chooses to take you more often than now is towards Haiti. Mach threads Haitian Creole (HC) into his verses with such skill that the transition between languages barely factors. On his song 900k he mutters for you to relax. ‘Rés, trankil. Chill.’ He uses HC to talk to a crowd, to threaten you under his breath. However, most of the time he includes it in his music simply to invoke heritage. One example is him naming a song after the indigenous Taino chief Anacaona, who was hung in 1503 by Spanish occupiers after turning down their offers of collusion and marriage. He raps entirely in Haitian Creole on this track. It’s powerful because it isn’t alienating. His pride can be your pride too.
One of hip-hop’s most enduring quality is engulfing the listener with another reality. Mach-Hommy’s stance is slightly different. He seeks to pull Haiti gently into your consciousness by showing you how it is positioned in his own identity. There’s no gentle introduction into this. It’s simply present from the moment you start listening to him. Just American and Haitian culture riveted together through Mach-Hommy’s rhyme palette.
These are two very different cultures. One is the most visible nation on earth, one of the richest, one of the most outspoken. The other is rarely visible internationally, apart from as the focus of tragedy. Haiti, it is regularly repeated in the press, has the lowest GDP in the world. Mach-Hommy feels how this obscures his country of birth and he speaks on it with an authoritative anger born from pride. In a rare interview, which I have linked below, he said ‘to me it’s a crime to be so called black in America and you don’t know what the fuck is a Haiti, son.’
This divide is mirrored in language. Haitian Creole (HC) continues to be denigrated. It’s is like any other tongue, a tectonic sprawl of influences. And yet it is still perceived as a “broken” form of French. Within Haiti itself, this imbalance has social consequences. The 1987 Haitian Constitution emphasises language as a pillar of nationhood, stating “Sèi lang hi simante tout Ayisyen se Kreyòl.” (The only language that cements all Haitians is Haitian Creole.) However, elitist social strata within Haiti ensures that reality does not match the convictions of the state. HC’s position as the language of everyday activities makes it dispossessed in the official realms of administration and education, where French continues to dominate. According to the dictum of the state, there is a private world and a public world, and Haitian Creole is seen to belong out of public sight.
Mach-Hommy’s stance on language is open and clear-cut. He talks about how, growing up, French was not allowed to be spoken in his grandfather’s home, as French was the language of the coloniser. Haitians are used to fighting prejudice with pride, as we will see, and it feels as if this pride feeds the rap universe Hommy has cultivated. ‘I come from a position of privilege’, he states in an interview, ‘because my family was culturally rich.’
And my god is Haiti culturally rich. Just scratching the surface shoots sparks. The Haitian revolution of 1791 ejected French imperialism and claimed the freedom of all slaves. Over the course of 13 years, they withstood occupation attempts by three empires in order to retain this freedom. They used higher ground to leave imperial forces to waste away on marshy land with rampant malaria, negating their numerical disadvantages — they enlisted the mosquito (amongst other things) to wither the colonial grip on their land.
The Haitian Revolution was enormous. It formed the nucleus of an empire of thought, a glaring declaration of universal rights. Enslaved Africans were previously considered exempt from Enlightenment philosophies of the freedom of man, despite Rousseau and Paine’s fondness for slavery as a metaphor for the inequalities of a monarchic state. Suddenly the issue of enslaved peoples’ claim to liberty was unavoidable, no matter how vehemently imperial powers attempted to ignore it.[1]
Most importantly, it was on the terms of those who had been enslaved. In 1805, Haiti instated a constitution that declared all citizens of Haiti black, regardless of race. They built a clause that folded Polish recruits who changed allegiance to fight on the side of Haiti into the fledgling nation. This is a direct inversion of France’s continued policy to fold its multiplicity of resident ethnicities into its white image of statehood.
The first time I read that constitution as a history student, I felt as if the words knocked dust from the inside of my skull. It is a provocative statement against the rancid grip that racism continues to have on the globe. I have not seen of anything like Haiti before or since Haiti.[2]
Revolutionary Haiti has fluctuated in and out of popular consciousness over the centuries following the revolution. Black activists in New York, campaigning at the time for the abolition of slavery, recognised the symbolic power of Haiti by the 1820s, as Pan-Africanist sentiments receded briefly. Freedom’s Journal wrote in 1827 that Haiti is the ‘revolution unexampled in the history of man.’ Later in the century, Frederick Douglass, upon resigning from his position as consul-general to Haiti in 1891, spoke on the deep irony of America placing its own warped racial hierarchies upon Haiti:
‘They thought it monstrous to compel black Haiti to receive a minister as black as herself. They did not see that it would be shockingly inconsistent for Haiti to object to a black minister while she herself is black.’[3]
This is the narrative that Mach-Hommy is inheriting in part, if only by positioning Haiti in American art. Often he talks in very clear terms about Haiti. In arguably his most popular song, rapping on a single track on an Alchemist artist compilation album, he says ‘Port-au-Prince, swing the ‘chetes at y’all and carve a niche.’ However, sometimes it reveals itself in a more coded way. In Tunnel Vision, someone is begging Mach for forgiveness. ‘Not now,’ Mach replies. Never.’ Then he comes out with a pink-and-blue bruiser. ‘These n*ggas hate when your hoody is off-white/It’s alright, they don’t know you had it on all night.’
…woah.
That line is a Godzilla fisted put-down. It’s an almost perfect way of saying ‘I really don’t give a shit about what you think.’ It goes deeper though. In interview, Hommy alludes to how this stance could intertwine with his Haitian roots. He focuses on the phrase ‘senti bon, couti cher.’ It costs money to smell good. Or you had better be working hard if you want to get what you want to get. Of course your clothes are going to get marks. It’s philosophical, it’s taught, it’s subtly bringing Haitian thought into focus, in an American perspective.
There is the positive Haiti, and then there is the negative Haiti. Mach-Hommy’s music frequently explores inequality and the hopelessness it instils in the residents of his country of birth. His underground classic HBO (Haitian Body Odour in reference to a US slur thrown at those of Haitian descent) features the story of a freezer that Michèle Bennett, the Haitian first lady, bought with state money to keep her furs fresh as a through line. It features the beautiful quote from an interview that Mach-Hommy samples:
‘She was even more greedy than he was himself. Because she had to catch up you see.’
A line is drawn between the tyrannical and the populist. In one of Mach’s own knotted enigma verses, ‘Corporations devour children for profit/Emanations not powers, if the shoe fits then rock it.’
The brutal suppression of Haiti, both internally and externally, is the other half of the broken coin. It is the Haiti we often see swamping headlines today. This has strong historical precedent, with Napoleon’s words to his brother-in-law General Leclerc in 1802 ringing through the centuries: ‘rid us of these gilded Africans and we shall have nothing more to wish.’ This sentiment stretched long into the 19th century, as the empires that Haiti slighted politically and economically isolated the fledgling country. Western culture followed suit. French newspapers characterised Haiti as the France’s ugly shadow-twin, drawing distorted parallels between the divergent governance of the two countries from across the Atlantic.
The U.S. inherited this imperial disdain. They did not recognize Haiti’s nationhood until 1862, preferring to ignore its position as the first black national state of the Americas. This continued as US occupied Haiti in 1915 under the guise of extinguishing insurrection in the capital of Port-Au-Prince. US had in fact continually attempted to seize control of Haitian finances and gain a foothold in the Caribbean Sea. Finally, they could. National sovereignty was once again subservient to industry. ‘Liars…vampires…clients.’
Trump’s assertion that Haiti is one of many ‘shithole countries’ is not nearly as shocking as US’ concealed treatment of Haitian citizens. This is demonstrated in how Haitians were the original detainees in the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, the US government holding 300 citizens without recourse as fears of AIDs continued to grip the US in the early 1990s. Seeking refuge in the wake of an coup d’etat, many fled to the US to seek asylum. The grand majority were returned to the Haiti, despite the treacherous circumstances they were trying to escape. A supreme court case accusing the US of refusing to acknowledge Haitian citizens as refugees, only perceiving them as economic migrants.
This continues today. Of the large numbers fleeing Haiti in the wake of an outburst of vicious political violence, sparked by the misuse of charitable oil money, many have relocated to pockets of South Mexico. Their movements are increasingly controlled, as Washington pressurises President Andrés López Obrador of Mexico to keep them away from the US border. A few months ago, a force of soldiers stood by, waiting until immigrants moving north became fatigued, before shepherding them into vans. It is a bleak and debilitating situation as once again Haitian citizens are forcibly hidden.
Mach-Hommy’s music is spreading, albeit in the fits and bursts typical of internet age publicity. Earlier this year a video circulated on rap twitter of Dr Dre playing 900k in his studio, whooping over the HC chorus. It was disorientating watching that video. Rap-nerd twitter told me that Mach-Hommy’s music was a million miles away from Dr Dre’s. But it’s not. Rap has a long history of shedding light on parts of the world that other people don’t want you to see. With Dr Dre, it was Compton. With Mach, it’s an entire country.
US and Haiti were both bound as nations to revolutionary constitutions, forged in conflict. Principles revolving around the battle for liberty are embedded within the histories of both countries. But it’s the story of Haiti — the victim of imperialism and capitalism, the philosopher-kings who overturned slavery — that blazes with greater relevance at this time in world history.
Mach-Hommy’s music reminds us of the Haiti that is so consistently hidden away. The Haiti that other countries have worked to isolate, mock and sully.
And his ultimate message: so what if your hoodie is off-white.
OD
[1] Susan Buck-Morss talks about this extensively in her brilliant book.
[2] If you’re interested in a bigger picture, I recommend Laurent Dubois’ Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, very readable starting point on Haitian history.
[3] There is deep irony in how Frederick Douglass supported the US purchase of Haiti, arguing that as an abolition process had happened there, it opened the country up to Capitalist engagement and pressure.
NON-ENGLISH RAP SHOUT_OUT
There’s a trend in French Pop at the moment of rapping like you’re on the verge of tears over beats with acoustic guitars in. I like to imagine they’re wailing to Rosalia on the other side of the Pyrenees. It’s great and the Colours channel on YouTube continues to pose challenges to the definition of World Music.
