Is there a word more volatile than “humanization”? In the Haitian context, humanity was not granted to the people by the other; it was seized. I wouldn’t say that Haitians are a supplicant people; we have not enjoyed bending and folding to court the exploitative beneficence of the States. But I am using “we” too freely, given the political, linguistic, and geographic sprawl of the diaspora.

Jaspora has gone through its evolutions. As Edwidge Danticat wrote, earlier this year, in The New Yorker, “The first documented arrival of Haitian refugees in South Florida dates to 1972, when a wooden sailboat, the Saint Sauveur, ran aground off of Pompano Beach, carrying sixty‑five asylum seekers fleeing the ruthless dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier.” In the nineties, the Haitian American, the child of this refugee generation, negotiated her status—proud at home, pariah outside—in cities like Montreal, Brooklyn, Miami, and Boston. The jaspora kid could seem pitiful, especially from the vantage of those back in Haiti, a kind of cultural mutt. As for this generation? Anti-Haitianness has never been more politically entrenched, with Trump’s virulent expulsion campaign against the population; and yet Haitianness has also never seemed more alluring. Little Haitis abound. Influencers ride Sunrise Airways to Cap-Haïtien, showing off the “real” Haiti that the media doesn’t want you to see. There is this correction of Haitian image for the foreigner and then for diasporic Haitians themselves.

The more inaccessible Haiti becomes, the more vividly it’s imagined, depicted, and reclaimed. Toussaint Louverture Airport, the international gateway in Port-au-Prince, remains suspended to commercial flights. The homesick anthem has become a staple for Haitian artists. The band Zenglen made the phrase “Ouvè Peyi a,” Kreyòl for “open up the country,” into a song of mother-country longing; Ayiiti, a young Haitian singer, collaborated with Boukman Eksperyans, a legendary Haitian band; and their founder’s son, Paul Beaubrun, retooled their populist carnival song released in 1990, “Ke’m Pa Sote”—translating, idiomatically, to “ I Am Not Afraid”—into a new piece of protest music, “Ayiti Nan Batay,” meaning “Haiti Is Embattled.”

What is fascinating about the current roster of Les Grenadiers is that it doubles as a microcosm of the demographic, a schistic one, its identity forged through the realities of diaspora diffusion. It is only Woodensky Pierre who plays for a Haitian club; Markhus (Duke) Lacroix and Derrick Etienne, Jr., are American-born; the majority is Franco-Haitian. Many of our players who were born in Haiti—there are ten—have left in childhood and in adolescence, pursuing opportunities with European clubs.

Watching Game Four of the N.B.A. Finals the other day, my father—who is from Ti Rivière, like the Haitian footballer Hannes Delcroix, and who left Haiti for New York in the eighties—felt a little disdain. “Basketball is not as difficult as fútbol,” he said. “The hand has too much dexterity.” Fútbol in Haiti is revered because it demands that the recumbent man resist his evolutionary nature. He must master his feet, and, in doing so, transcend his limitations. In “Death of the Soccer God,” a novel published in May, Dimitry Elias Léger grafts this elevated, mythic register onto his tragic hero, Gil Chevalier, who at times serves as a fictionalization of the Haitian player Joe Gaetjens. At the 1950 World Cup, in Brazil, Gaetjens, who played for the United States, scored the winning goal against England.

In Haiti, fútbol can provide an alternative plane of experience, one in which the victory of independence can be relived again and again. Pelé, who visited Haiti in 1975 during the height of the Duvalier regime, is revered almost as if a saint, and Brazil is the country that Haitians root for in their own nation’s stead. Now Haiti will play Brazil on l’étage mondiale, bringing to a close some fifty years of fan surrogacy. Much is often made of soccer diplomacy, but this year’s World Cup promises more than hand-shaking and symbolic gestures. The background of the pitch is repression, autocracy, and corruption. For Haiti, the beautiful game will be about the confrontation of a certain psychological displacement.

Modern Haitianness presents itself, almost masks itself, through its history: proud, world-defining, the real embodiment, we all know, of the Enlightenment ideal of the equality of man, a history we are constantly made to invoke, a history we are proud to invoke. Shortly after the November qualifying match, an awed anchor on “Morning Footy” asked Delcroix—the defender who moved, as a child, from Haiti to Belgium, where his play was developed through the country’s youth-league system—about the spiritual significance of dates. It had been two hundred and twenty-two years, on that exact day, November 18th, since Jean-Jacques Dessalines and his army defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Vertières. The date does ring in any Haitian’s mind. We tout our dates. Delcroix spoke in that tenor, saying that he’d felt a torrent of hope from his people, who, in no metaphorical sense, live everywhere.

Days after the World Cup friendlies had passed, earlier this month, yielding one win and a surfeit of thrill, FIFA rejected the Haitian jersey, citing its depiction of the Battle of Vertières as a violation to its regulation on political speech. The censure echoed an incident at the Winter Olympics, when the designer Stella Jean, who is Haitian Italian, broke a similar rule, and was made to redo her look for the country’s athletes, which depicted Toussaint Louverture astride his horse. Jean decided to erase Louverture, leaving the horse galloping unmanned, eerily, a more imposing image. How the Haitian team will erase Vertières, I’m curious to see. The Reverend Frantzy Pitit-Homme, on his stream, urged his flock not to fall prey to Western censure. “If you visit the museums in France,” he said, speaking of Haitian independence, “you won’t see this at all.” Is Haiti embraced in its underdog hour because the country cannot be seen as a threat to Western hegemony? The Reverend asks you to keep vigilant. ♦