Cultural Journalists Without Culture

In Haiti, the world of compas possesses the strange virtue of producing, almost spontaneously, a hybrid species called "cultural journalist," but who, in reality, has no other skill than holding a microphone. Fortunately, for semantic honesty, they are often called "presenters." The word saves the dignity of the language and the media space: it describes someone who speaks loudly, fills the void, occupies time, but provides neither analysis, nor depth, nor rigor. The presenter, in the Haitian context, with a few exceptions, animates: they do not think. They occupy the space; they illuminate nothing. Conceptual poverty is a style, their style, and the absence of culture is disguised under a noisy omnipresence of anecdotes and gossip: Ritchi is a beautiful, well-established maestro; So-and-so is the most beautiful woman in the HMI; so-and-so is a good bassist and a wanderer…

To understand this phenomenon, it is necessary to recall what cultural journalism is, and above all, what it should be. It is neither chatter about musical news, nor the distribution of superficial opinions, nor promotional complicity with artists seeking an audience. Cultural journalism is not a marketing relay. Cultural journalism is a work of interpretation. It is the difficult art of placing a work within the history of art: its forms, its influences, its ruptures… It is reading a song as a text, listening to an album as an aesthetic gesture, understanding a performance as a proposition of imagination. The cultural journalist is a mediator: they build a bridge between the work and society, between creation and collective intelligence. The cultural journalist is not an analyst of popularity data. On the contrary, they often must maintain a critical distance from trends.

It is sad to note that the Haitian cultural space, saturated by the compas-business, produces a deliberate confusion: it confuses culture with visibility, analysis with presence, knowledge with familiarity. Being in a radio studio every night, being on familiar terms with musicians, knowing their nicknames, their internal frictions, their schedule changes does not constitute knowledge. This falls under the circulation of gossip, not a thought on culture. What many call "cultural journalism" is in reality an extension of musical promotion, a prolongation of stage noise. Often, people congratulate themselves on having asked an impertinent question, yet strictly related to the private sphere, whereas the true impertinence of the cultural journalist consists of questioning the meaning of works, not the moods of artists.

The true cultural journalist is a reader, a spontaneous historian, an archaeologist of forms. They know Léon Dimanche and Kassav, but also Depestre, Fignolé, Latour, Fanon, as well as Tiga, Mangonès, Séjourné, André Pierre, Van Gogh… They see how music translates a world, an era, a social tension; how it fits into a school, a movement, or an artistic dynamic. They know that culture is not entertainment: it is a language. And this language has its codes, its structures, its fractures. The cultural journalist is the one who, when faced with a piece, asks the right question: what does this work tell us about ourselves that we did not yet know?