I felt, to honor Danielle, it was necessary to engage in conversation with her poems, specifically “Hostage” and “Poem for the Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere,” which explore identity, dehumanization, and the capacity of Haitian society to be resilient in the face of racial and colonial denigration and marginalization.1 My poem “Hostage” (for Danielle Legros-Georges) attempts to show the currency of this marginalization and denigration, while also revealing a subtle potential for Black folks to continue fighting for freedom.
Hostage (for Danielle Legros Georges)
[We] should be called beacon. [We] should // be called flame.
—Danielle Legros Georges
We don’t know yet what a force we are, what a single force—all the peasants, all the Negroes of the plain and hill, all united.
—Jacques Roumain
In this country,
Somebody always wants to hold my skin hostage,
Mold it into something sinister,
Eating dogs, other people’s pets—
A cannibal of sorts;
Recalling stories of dead babies on spikes,
Maligned black skin,
Featured as zombie maker, murderer, and rapist,
For daring to fight for its kin.
Incurring a debt,
The inanest of them,
That should never have been paid.
In this country,
Of bloody hibiscuses,
Sun-burnt mangoes,
And tender fleshed guineps,
I find myself uncomfortable in an accent,
That surely used to be mine,
But no longer rolls off this exiled tongue.
Yet this skin,
Sugary brown,
And wet with the ocean’s tears,
Remembers . . .
This debt of theirs,
How will we get it paid?
Malica S. Willie is a lecturer in Black British and African diasporic studies at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. She is the winner of the Orlando Palmer Prose Fiction award (2018) and has published creatively in journals such as Interviewing the Caribbean, MOKO, Lolwe, Journal of West Indian Literature, Poui, and the Caribbean Writer, among others.
[1] Danielle’s “Hostage” appeared in her first collection, Maroon (Cub Stone Books, 2001), and was later included in the anthology African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young (Library of America, 2020); see Library of America, “Danielle Legros Georges Reads Her Poem ‘Hostage,’” 12 March 2021, YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCydqHv0pa0 (accessed 23 October 2025). Her “Poem for the Poorest Country in the Western Hemisphere,” first featured on Bill Moyer’s Journal (PBS), 22 January 2010, was published in PREE, 10 April 2018, https://preelit.com/2018/04/10/poem-for-the-poorest-country-in-the-western-hemisphere/.