N ap fè yon souvni…Menm si m ta mouri, o, m ap kanpe…kasèt la toujou la…mizik ap toujou la…l ap travay pou demen.
We’re making a memory…Even if I die, oh, I’m rising up…the cassette lives on…the music lives on…it’s working for the future.
(Story adapted from a blog entry posted to makandal.org, 26 August 2015)
New Year’s Eve 1987. We weren’t the kind of people who stressed over holiday gifts. Frisner had come up out of a struggling community—he literally slept on a dirt floor as a child. I had developed an aversion to the annual shopping mania, and, as a graduate student, my means were limited anyway. We celebrated only joudlan (New Year’s Day, also Haiti’s Independence Day). We did it the traditional Haitian way, with a ben chans (herbal luck bath) on New Year’s Eve and a nice, steaming kettle of soup joumou (squash soup) in the morning. So as we approached the finish line for 1987—counting five years almost to the day with each other—it surprised me, and touched me to the bottom of my soul, when Frisner presented me with a holiday gift, the very best he had to offer: his music.
The Frisner Augustin Memorial Archive 