Lisette quitté la plaine c.1757-2025

We have folk songs that carry earlier memories, but Lisette quitté la plaine remains the oldest printed song in Haitian Creole. Like its melodic source, Que ne suis-je la fougère, it has defied genre, crossed borders, and resisted a single meaning for nearly three centuries. It first appears in the archival record as a contrafactum in the plains outside Port-au-Prince before taking over colonial Saint-Domingue. Lisette’s Haitian Creole text replaces the languishing shepherds of the French pastorale with the plight of enslaved Black lovers. It exposes the sharp contradiction between the refined colonial salon in which it thrived and the brutal, extractive system of slavery that sustained elite culture. Why perform such a work, let alone celebrate it?

 

This project follows Lisette from Saint-Domingue to France, where it sparked abolitionist reflections in a dying Jean-Jacques Rousseau, then snuck itself into one of the most reprinted French song anthologies in history. From there, we follow it to the United States alongside French and Haitian people fleeing the Haitian Revolution. There, even anti-abolitionist writers like Moreau de Saint-Méry used it to demonstrate the expressive force of early Haitian Creole to white readers, even as Black families in New Orleans passed down their own version, Zélim to quitté la plaine, to the next generation. Later, African American concert musicians reshaped Lisette ma chère amie as an art song and carried it from Southern parlors onto recital stages across the country as a celebration of Creole heritage.

Finally, the Lisette of modern Haiti takes center stage, first as a repurposed colonial relic, danced as a nationalist méringue de salon by reactionary intellectuals in twentieth-century Port-au-Prince, and today in its latest incarnation: Lizèt fò’n kite Laplenn, commissioned by the Lisette Project from Haitian poet Lunise Jules and Haitian composer Amos Coulanges. Our Lizèt returns the story of these resilient lovers to Haitians still making their way across the world from La Plaine du Cul-de-Sac.

 

I began the Lisette Project in 2021 with the conviction that these songs preserve a difficult history that still asks something of us. This album does not celebrate the colonial world that first produced Lisette. Rather, it traces the journey of this iconic text through time, singing its transformations alongside contemporary works that together celebrate our musical and cultural legacy across the globe.