“Canada’s Moral Optimism and the Limits of Humane Global Leadership: Reflections on Mark Carney”

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s unapologetic speech at Davos in Norway revealed a leader fluent in transnational and global discourse, attentive to the anxieties and asymmetries shaping life in both the Global South and the Global North. He rightly diagnosed the global order as fractured, most notably the U.S.-led model, which he portrayed as not merely strained but structurally broken and perhaps beyond meaningful repair.

Yet Carney’s optimism rests on a familiar paradox. While he called for a more humane and empathetic global order and underscored Canada’s moral responsibility to help craft it alongside the League of Nations, his framework ultimately reinscribes Western authority as the primary steward of global governance. His rhetoric gestures toward anti-imperial critique, but only in its softer form—one that critiques excesses while leaving intact the West’s presumed right to rule.

The speech thus reflects the enduring tension within liberal internationalism: a desire to reform global power without fundamentally redistributing it. Canadians may take pride in Carney’s eloquence and ethical posture, but they should also interrogate the limits of a vision that seeks to humanize empire rather than move beyond it.

If I were Canadian, I would share in that pride, particularly because of Carney’s emphasis on moral leadership, ethical diplomacy, and constructive foreign policies aimed at advancing the common good and human flourishing across the world. Yet I remain deeply grateful to my Haitian ancestors, who recognized far earlier the dangers of imperialism and Western global hegemony in the nineteenth century. Their insight remains instructive today. The Haitian Revolution and the enduring meaning of 1804 still offers lessons the world has yet to fully learn.

In continuity with W. E. B. Du Bois’s seminal claim at the turn of the twentieth century that race would constitute the central problem of modernity, the most consequential impediment to global human flourishing in the present moment is the rearticulation of imperial power. This contemporary imperial formation operates through an intensified nationalism and is institutionalized by the strategic surveillance, regulation, and disciplining of nations in the Global South. Any vision of humane global leadership and moral progress that fails to reckon with the significance and global meaning of the Haitian Revolution remains, at best, incomplete.

It takes hopelessness to exist, but optimism to live.

“On Being Human in a Country That Demands Proof”

Starting today, as a naturalized U.S. citizen, I will carry my passport with me for these simple reasons:

1. I was not born in the United States.
2. I speak English with an accent.
3. I am Haitian.
4. I am Black.
5. I am a Black male.
   Summary: I am a Black Haitian immigrant with an accent.

I understand all too well how this country reads bodies before it reads documents. Experience has taught me that these facts are often interpreted not as natural or intrinsic markers of identity, but as grounds for suspicion. I am not undocumented, and yet this combination still demands proof—as though my humanity itself requires validation, legible only through a U.S. stamp.

Here’s my new poem:

“The Smile of Love”

She whispers into my ear,
revealing love’s quiet secret:
happiness lives in a smile.

She leans toward me,
desiring my peace, my assurance,
resting her head against my chest:
waiting, breathing in slow motion,
as if my heart itself
must learn how to curve into joy,
her delight
the soft seduction of love.

I feel it rise slowly,
that gentle awakening,
a smile forming not just on my lips
but in the quiet spaces between us,
where breath meets breath
and longing softens into warm embrace .

A smile, I say to her, is
an eternal gesture
of bliss,
of desire,
of memory being born
in the fragile now.

A smile has a soul, she whispers.
It dwells at the edge
where love and happiness
speak in silence,
where tenderness becomes knowing,
where intimacy
is the quiet secret of commitment.

Pure.
Sublime.
Mesmerizing.

“Notes from a Fragile Love”

My second poem of January unfolds as a narrative of emotional exposure: raw, unguarded, and aching. It speaks to the quiet devastation of loving deeply while remaining unloved. The speaker stands as a witness to a fragile relationship he labored to nurture and protect, only to lose both the beloved and the love he poured into her.

“Notes from a Fragile Love”

I let you go
because the tenderness I offered
was never returned.
The passion I carried
became too heavy to hold alone.

When I told you I missed you,
you turned away,
as if longing were a foreign language
you refused to learn.

When I reached out for comfort,
you said, “You’re a man; deal with it.”
In that moment, you taught me
that vulnerability had no shelter with you.
You wanted emotional connection in theory,
but when it was mine,
it became inconvenient.

You wanted to hold my hand in public:
not for love,
not for passion,
but to be seen,
to borrow visibility without commitment.
You wanted the appearance of us,
not the responsibility.

You rationed the words “I love you,”
as if they were scarce.
I gave them freely,
infinitely,
to seal your heart and mine.
You wanted us hidden when it mattered,
a secret folded into convenience.
I wanted love that could stand in the light.

I carried your words inside me like scripture;
you erased mine as if they never mattered.
I remembered your heartbreak line by line,
while you put on earbuds
to silence mine.

I treasured your moans during lovemaking,
the way your body spoke
trust
intimacy
desire
connection
yet in motion,
you called his name,
and I learned my presence
was never singular.

When I spoke of a future with you,
you said you weren’t ready.
When I imagined a child,
a son bearing both our names.

You laughed,
and my hope became a joke.

That is when I understood:
I was listening with my whole soul
to someone who had already tuned me out.

And that is why
I let you go.
Not because I stopped loving you,
but because I finally loved myself enough
to stop offering intimacy
where it could not rest.

Most of us do not know how to live. Untrained in the art of the good life, we move forward by learning how to endure the circumstances that shape and constrain us.

The co-edited books that I have written: Part 2

At an academic conference at the University of Texas at Dallas!

Year: 2010

In my presentation, I discussed the concept of Négritude in the poetry of Léopold Sedar Senghor.