Brooklyn, USA - Haiti is featured in the newest installment of the video game series Assassin's Creed. Haitian-American Evan Narcisse of Kotaku wrote about Haiti in the number IV installment of Assassin's Creed, Black Flag.In Narcisse's first piece published in July he talks about the connection to slavery, that can sometimes be distant for descendants of slavery living today, and how the game brought him a little closer.Here is an exerptI wouldn’t exist if not for the ugly historical fact of slavery.Somewhere along my family tree, ancestors of mine were traded into bondage, most
Haiti Featured in the new video game series "Assassin's Creed"
likely from somewhere in West Africa. And then other forebears wound up on the island of Ayiti—known today as Haiti—where slaves fought for their freedom in the 18th Century. I have no way of knowing what it felt like to be a slave or to fight my way out from someone else’s ownership. Those ideas have fascinated me for a long time, though. In 2013, a video game is going to offer me a glimpse of these time-lost realities.The newest chapter of the Assassin's Creed series gives me some of the things I've always wanted in a video game: a heroic fantasy that lets me control a warrior fighting against slavery. Part of it happens in Haiti, where my parents were born. Characters talk in Antillean Kreyol, the mosaic tongue made of French and West African words that I heard while growing up. But, mostly, it reminds me of going to church with my mother. It makes me happy and sad at the same time.Whether it was a first communion, wedding or funeral, someone nestled in the crowd would start singing the Haitian
national anthem. For no reason other than a deep longing for the home they'd left behind. Freedom Cry calls up the same combination of mournfulness and pride that I'd hear in those moments of song. I'm seriously thinking about having my dad over to play it.
