The World Cup and the Changing Psyche of the Haitian Diaspora
Key takeaways
- Critic’s Notebook The World Cup and the Changing Psyche of the Haitian Diaspora For Les Grenadiers and their fans, the game will be about the confrontation of a certain psychological displacement.
- Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Critic’s Notebook, our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist.This is an intercession season for sports fans.
- The story of the Knicks’ long, long embattlement has a kind of mirror, I’ve been feeling, in the arc of the Haitian men’s soccer team, also known as Les Grenadiers, and their return to the World Cup stage.
Critic’s Notebook The World Cup and the Changing Psyche of the Haitian Diaspora For Les Grenadiers and their fans, the game will be about the confrontation of a certain psychological displacement.
Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Critic’s Notebook, our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist.This is an intercession season for sports fans. These summer games are not just games; they’re tests of the spirit for some recognizably soul-weary tribes, and fans work to intervene on the outcome using whatever resources are at their disposal. After the Knicks’ destabilizing loss to the Spurs in Game Three of the N.B.A. Finals, New Yorkers burned bundles of sage outside Madison Square Garden—an attempt to clear out the bad energy that some believed had been carried in by President Donald Trump, who arrived in the city like smog.
The story of the Knicks’ long, long embattlement has a kind of mirror, I’ve been feeling, in the arc of the Haitian men’s soccer team, also known as Les Grenadiers, and their return to the World Cup stage. Not since 1974 had Les Grenadiers qualified for the Cup; not since 2021, after the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse extinguished the already tenuous government order, has the team played on Haitian soil. They have been relegated to meeting on fields in Curaçao, while their coach—a white Frenchman named Sébastian Migné, appointed by the Haitian Football Federation in 2024—does his managing over the phone. For seven days and seven nights, Pitit Manman Mari, a Catholic church based in Port-au-Prince that has flourished as a sort of digital-assembly area for the diaspora, devoted its YouTube and radio broadcasts to the project of fortifying the team against its many obstacles, in preparation for the Cup. In one video service, the Reverend Frantzy Petit-Homme was backgrounded by a pixelated image of the players as he entreated his Lord to fortify Les Grenadiers with sheer power: “Give them the capacity to read the game before it develops.”