Haiti’s Hidden Archives and Accidental Archivists: A View on the Private Collections and Their Keepers at the Heart of Safeguarding the Nation’s Classical Music Heritage

Private archives play a critical role in the safeguarding of Haitian cultural heritage, even as they are often precariously held collections. In this article, I take a closer look at the vulnerability of these documents as unique remnants of history that are often located exclusively in personal collections. Although this article specifically addresses tangible records of Haitian mizik klasik (European-style art music)—musical scores, for example—the considerations and arguments advanced herein may extend to heritage documents, tangible culture, and patrimony in more general terms. With this study, based on long-term ethnographic and archival work, I attempt to demonstrate, through a few key examples, the critical importance of private archives for maintaining the history of Haitian mizik klasik; to document losses, and near losses, of musical texts from the nation’s most heralded composers—among them, Occide Jeanty, Werner Jaegerhuber, Édmond Saintonge, Justin Élie, and Lina Mathon Blanchet—to support future scholarship on Haitian mizik klasik; to highlight a range of issues and obstacles that routinely affect archives and impede the safeguarding of cultural materials in Haiti; and to draw attention to broader dialogues that accompany local conceptions of cultural heritage and therefore affect decisions about whether any of this material is worth saving for future generations, and, if so, how to go about accomplishing that task.