Ouvri baryè pou mwen. Open the gate for me.

Before the drums rise, before the dancing begins, and before another lwa can be called, Haitian Vodou turns first to Papa Legba—keeper of the crossroads, master of communication, and gatekeeper between the human and spirit worlds.

In Diaspora: The Soul of a People — Haitian Soul, host Marie explores who Papa Legba actually is, where he comes from, and how his identity transformed as Vodou crossed the Atlantic from West Africa to Haiti.

The episode traces Legba’s roots to the Fon traditions of the Kingdom of Dahomey and the closely related Yoruba figure of Eshu or Elegba. In West Africa, Legba appears young, energetic, and virile. In Haiti, he becomes the familiar elderly figure with a cane, straw hat, pipe, and dogs at his side.

Why did that transformation happen?

Marie explores two interpretations found in scholarship and practitioner traditions: that Legba aged beneath the historical weight carried by enslaved Africans, or that the image of a frail old man became a form of camouflage for an immensely important spirit of communication, movement, and roads.

The episode also examines how enslaved Haitians preserved Papa Legba under forced Catholic practice by associating him with Saint Peter, Saint Lazarus, and Saint Anthony—figures whose symbols and functions allowed an African spiritual tradition to survive in plain sight.

Listeners are taken inside the opening of a Vodou ceremony, from the drawing of Papa Legba’s cornmeal vèvè and the sacred poto mitan to the prayer “Papa Legba, ouvri baryè pou mwen. Ago é.” and the slow rhythm of Yanvalou drums.

Marie also follows Legba across the African diaspora, examining related—but distinct—figures such as Eleggua in Cuban Santería and Exu in Brazilian Candomblé and Umbanda.

And finally, the episode confronts one of the most persistent distortions of Papa Legba in American popular culture:

Papa Legba is not the devil.

The demonic figure portrayed in productions such as American Horror Story: Coven bears little resemblance to the spirit recognized in Haitian Vodou tradition. Papa Legba is associated with communication, thresholds, honesty, roads, and the ability to make contact between worlds possible.

He opens the gate.

And when the ceremony ends, he is called once more to close it.

In this episode:

• Who Papa Legba is in Haitian Vodou
• The meaning of Ouvri Baryè
• Papa Legba’s origins in Dahomey and West African Vodun
• Why Haitian Papa Legba appears as an old man
• Saint Peter, Saint Lazarus, and Saint Anthony
• Catholic syncretism during slavery
• Vèvè, the poto mitan, and Yanvalou drums
• How a Vodou ceremony begins
• Papa Legba as keeper of the crossroads
• Eleggua, Exu, and related diaspora traditions
• Papa Legba in New Orleans
• Why Papa Legba is not the devil
• Correcting portrayals of Vodou in American popular culture

Follow Diaspora: The Soul of a People — Haitian Soul at @DiasporaHaitianSoul.

Share this episode with someone who has heard the name Papa Legba in a movie, television show, costume, or joke—but has never heard the real story.

Who is the gatekeeper in your life? Who makes it possible for others to be heard?

In this episode of Diaspora: The Soul of a People, host Marie welcomes her close friend Yvey “Eevee” Valsa, a Seattle-based hair stylist, fashionista, and owner of YV Salon, for a heartfelt conversation about Haitian culture, family expectations, and the courage to pursue an unconventional calling.

Marie and Yvey explore the traditional boundaries that shape many Haitian childhoods: lekòl, legliz, and lakay—school, church, and home. Education is often treated as the path to security, with children encouraged to pursue respected professions such as medicine, law, or engineering. For creative young people, however, following a different path can feel like disappointing the very family members whose sacrifices made opportunity possible.

Yvey shares how his passion for styling began around age five while watching his older sister, Norita, do hair in their Haitian community. Because hair styling was considered an unusual interest for a young boy, Norita quietly became his first mentor, teaching him away from their parents’ attention.

Determined to honor his family, Yvey attended college and earned a degree in environmental technologies and sustainable practices. Although he completed his education, he eventually realized that professional stability could not replace personal fulfillment. With encouragement from a friend who recognized how naturally focused and joyful Yvey became while cutting hair, he made the bold decision to attend beauty school and embrace the gift he had carried since childhood.

Yvey also explains why he considers the stylist’s chair a sacred space. His salon is not merely a workplace—it is a judgment-free environment where clients can feel seen, heard, and valued. Through hair, style, and conversation, Yvey connects with people from different cultures, identities, and life experiences.

The conversation also addresses assumptions about sexuality and gender within the beauty industry. As a straight man working in Seattle’s gender-fluid Capitol Hill neighborhood, Yvey approaches labels with confidence and grace. Rather than feeling threatened by comparisons to stylish members of the gay community, he accepts them as compliments and refuses to allow stereotypes to define his identity or his work.

For aspiring creatives, Yvey offers a powerful message: do not allow fear to keep you from your passion. Your gift should be nurtured, protected, and developed. As Yvey explains, a genuine creative calling can become an “ultimate visa to the world.”

Follow @YveyTheStylist on Instagram and TikTok.

Visit YV Salon in Capitol Hill, Seattle, and watch for its upcoming Bellevue location.

In this deeply personal episode of Diaspora, Marie sits down with her producer and “little brother,” Juming Delmas, founder of Juming Delmas Studios, for a powerful conversation about identity, tragedy, Haitian heritage, and reclaiming your own story.

Marie and Juming first connected through LinkedIn, but what stood out to Marie was his last name: Delmas, a name tied to a well-known area in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. That connection opened the door to a much deeper conversation about Juming’s family history, his complicated relationship with his Haitian roots, and the journey that led him to embrace the name he once felt disconnected from.

Juming shares the painful story of losing his father on March 12, 1993, the same day as the historic “Storm of the Century.” He opens up about the violence that shaped his early life, including his father’s dangerous life between Haiti and America and the tragic home invasion that took the lives of his father, his father’s pregnant girlfriend, and a young sibling.

Raised by a loving and supportive American stepfather, Juming grew up separated from much of his father’s side of the family and from Haitian culture. He speaks honestly about once feeling embarrassed by the negative stereotypes surrounding Haiti and how media portrayals shaped his understanding of where he came from.

Marie and Juming also discuss the broader Haitian diaspora experience, including how mainstream media often reduces Haiti to crisis while ignoring its power, history, beauty, and importance as the first Black republic. Together, they reflect on Haiti’s legacy of defeating Napoleon’s army, winning independence in 1804, and carrying a history of resistance that deserves to be remembered with pride.

The conversation also explores how Juming chose to build a new legacy through Juming Delmas Studios. By putting his full name on the business, he made a conscious decision to bring prestige, excellence, and pride to the Delmas name — proving that his story, his heritage, and his identity belong to him.

This episode is about survival, identity, family, legacy, and the courage it takes to reclaim your narrative.

Content note: This episode includes discussion of family tragedy, violence, and loss.

Learn more about Juming Delmas Studios at jdelmasstudios.com.

Listen to The Un-Traditional Entrepreneur Podcast on all major platforms.

In this episode of Diaspora: The Soul of a People | Haitian Soul, host Marie offers a historical and cultural correction that has been owed for a long time: the word is not “voodoo.” The word is Vodou.

For generations, Haitian Vodou has been distorted by movies, colonial narratives, early anthropology, and popular culture. It has been portrayed as evil, frightening, primitive, or superstitious — but those images were never the truth of the tradition. In this episode, Marie traces Vodou from its roots in the Kingdom of Dahomey, present-day Benin, through the Middle Passage, into Saint-Domingue, and across the wider African diaspora.

This episode explores Vodou as a complete worldview: a religion, a system of medicine, a philosophy, and a framework for justice built on the relationship between the visible and invisible worlds. Listeners are introduced to Bondyé, the remote supreme creator; the lwa, spirits who bridge the human and divine; the oungan and manbo; the peristil; and the meaning of possession not as horror, but as sacred liturgy.

Marie also examines how enslaved Africans from multiple nations — including Fon, Yoruba, Kongo, Ewe, and others — created a shared ritual structure in Haiti under the unimaginable violence of slavery. Through the règléman, they preserved different spiritual traditions and gave them order, meaning, and survival.

The episode then turns to the Code Noir, the 1685 French colonial law that required Catholic baptism and outlawed African religious practice. In response, enslaved people used camouflage and spiritual brilliance, hiding the lwa behind Catholic saints and keeping their traditions alive inside the very churches meant to erase them.

From there, Marie discusses the Bois Caiman ceremony, the Haitian Revolution, and the role Vodou played in helping enslaved people recognize one another, organize, and imagine freedom. The episode also addresses the demonization of Vodou after Haiti’s victory, including the role of Western scholarship, Hollywood horror, zombie mythology, and the false association between Haitian Vodou and “voodoo dolls.”

At its heart, this episode is about survival. Vodou survived slavery, colonial law, occupation, religious campaigns, academic misrepresentation, and a century of horror films. It survived because the people carried it — across water, across language, across violence, and across generations.

This is not a story about superstition. It is a story about memory, resistance, spirit, and the religion that helped make Haiti free.

Find us at @DiasporaPodcast25.

In this episode of Diaspora: The Soul of a People, Marie Stuppard reflects on the meaning of Haitian Flag Day, a celebration rooted not only in national pride, but in revolution, memory, sacrifice, and identity. Observed every year on May 18, Haitian Flag Day marks the creation of the Haitian flag in 1803 during the Haitian Revolution, when the people of Saint-Domingue were moving toward the birth of the first free Black republic in the modern world. The flag was adopted during the Congress of Arcahaie, and Haitian tradition remembers Catherine Flon as the woman who sewed the first Haitian flag after the French tricolor was transformed into a symbol of unity and liberation. 

Marie explores why the Haitian flag carries so much weight for Haitians both at home and throughout the diaspora. The blue and red are not simply colors. They hold the memory of a people who fought slavery, colonialism, and erasure — and who dared to imagine freedom on their own terms. This episode looks at the flag as a living symbol: one that has been carried through schools, churches, parades, family gatherings, street celebrations, and quiet moments of remembrance across generations.

The conversation also reflects on the emotional meaning of Haitian Flag Day in the diaspora. For many Haitian families outside Haiti, May 18 becomes more than a holiday. It is a way to teach children where they come from, to speak the language of belonging, to honor ancestors, and to remember that Haitian identity was forged through courage, survival, and collective will. In cities with large Haitian communities, Haitian Flag Day has become a visible celebration of culture, music, food, history, and pride. 

At its heart, this episode is about more than a flag. It is about what a people choose to remember, what they refuse to surrender, and how symbols can carry the soul of a nation across oceans, borders, and generations. Haitian Flag Day reminds us that Haiti’s story is not only one of struggle, but also one of imagination, dignity, and revolutionary possibility.

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#HaitianFlagDay #HaitianCulture #HaitianHistory #HaitianRevolution #CatherineFlon #HaitianDiaspora #DiasporaPodcast #CaribbeanHistory #BlackHistory #Haiti

In this episode of Diaspora: The Soul of a People, Marie Stuppard turns to one of Haiti’s quietest yet most enduring staples: mayi moulen, the ground corn dish that has nourished generations without glamour, prestige, or fanfare. Rather than treating it as a simple recipe, Marie uses maïmoulin as an entry point into a much deeper story about memory, survival, dignity, and the foods that sustain people even when the world refuses to celebrate them. 

The episode begins by restoring corn to its proper history. Marie traces its origins to Mesoamerica, where Indigenous peoples cultivated it thousands of years ago, and then follows its journey into the Caribbean, where the Taïno of Ayiti were already growing corn long before European arrival. From there, she shows how maïmoulin became one of Haiti’s most dependable foods — not because it was considered luxurious, but because it was accessible, grounding, and reliable. In that sense, this episode is not only about a dish. It is about what people learn to trust when survival is never guaranteed. 

Marie then explores the many ways mayi moulen appears in Haitian life: served with sòs pwa, prepared kolé-style with beans mixed in, eaten with herring or avocado, enriched with coconut milk, or transformed into other corn-based forms like labouyi and akasan. These details matter because they reveal maïmoulin not as one rigid recipe, but as a family of foods shaped by region, household practice, necessity, and love. 

One of the episode’s sharpest insights comes in its comparison between mayi moulen and other globally celebrated cornmeal dishes like polenta, grits, ugali, pap, mămăligă, coucou, and angu. Marie asks why one bowl of ground corn can be described as rustic or artisanal in an upscale restaurant while another is dismissed as poor people’s food. Her answer is clear: the difference is often not the food itself, but class, race, cultural power, and who has the authority to tell the story. That question feels especially relevant right now, as food media continues to show growing interest in heritage cuisine, cultural storytelling, and long-overdue recognition for underrepresented food traditions. 

The episode also connects mayi moulen to Haiti’s larger political and agricultural history. Marie reflects on the collapse of the Haitian rice industry after tariff changes allowed imported rice to flood the market, undercutting local farmers and weakening food sovereignty. Through all of that disruption, maïmoulin remained. It stayed on the table. It kept feeding people. 

From there, the conversation moves into the sacred. Marie explains that cornmeal in Haiti is not only food for the body, but also part of the spiritual language of Vodou, where it is used to draw vèvè — sacred symbols that call the lwa into ceremony. In that way, the same substance that nourished the body also became a medium of memory, ritual, and resistance. The episode’s closing message is especially powerful: mayi moulen was never just survival food. It is a food of history, spirit, endurance, and belonging. 

In this episode of Diaspora: The Soul of a People, Marie Stuppard explores the long history behind charcoal in Haiti and asks listeners to rethink one of the country’s most misunderstood environmental stories.

“Chabon: Smoke, Soil, and Survival” begins before colonization, in Aiti — the Taíno “land of high mountains” — where fire was already part of cultivation, cooking, and artistic expression. From there, the episode traces how French colonial rule transformed a balanced relationship with the land into a system of extraction, stripping forests for plantation wealth and leaving behind damage that independence did not erase.

Marie connects that history to the indemnity Haiti was forced to pay after 1804, showing how debt, foreign pressure, and limited economic options helped turn charcoal into a survival fuel for rural communities. She also examines the present-day charcoal economy: who profits, who labors, who breathes the smoke, and why the burden falls so heavily on producers, market women, and poor households.

The episode also looks forward, highlighting Haitian-led alternatives such as sugarcane bagasse briquettes and community-based reforestation efforts that make living trees more valuable than cut ones. This is not just a story about fuel or deforestation. It is a story about indigenous knowledge, colonial violence, economic survival, public health, and the resilience of Haitian people navigating systems they did not create.

This episode is for listeners interested in Haitian history, diaspora studies, environmental justice, Caribbean politics, postcolonial economics, and sustainable development.

In this episode of Diaspora: The Soul of a People, host Marie Stuppard reflects on the deeper meaning of one of the most familiar foundations of Haitian life: rice and beans.

For many Haitians, this is more than a meal. It is a grounding presence — something recognizable in the steam rising from the pot, in the rhythm of preparation, and in the quiet understanding that food is never just about individual hunger. It is about community, care, and making sure everyone is fed.

Marie explores how this dish was shaped not by trend, but by necessity, survival, and inherited knowledge. Rice cultivation practices carried from West Africa, combined with beans as a vital source of protein when meat was limited, created a meal that was dependable, nourishing, and repeatable. Together, they became part of the food infrastructure that sustained families through hardship and through the long legacy of life after independence.

This episode also examines the Haitian practice of “stretching” — stretching resources, time, labor, and love. Rice and beans has long been the kind of meal that appears at Sunday tables, funerals, and difficult seasons when money is tight, quietly reinforcing a core value: no one eats until everyone can eat.

As Haitians moved across the diaspora, food habits shifted in response to new environments, smaller households, and more individual ways of eating. But some instincts remain. The tendency to cook in large batches, to prepare for more than yourself, and to make room for others at the table runs deeper than geography.

Marie honors the quiet power of this dish — a meal that asks for no praise, but has always done the work of holding people together. This episode invites listeners to remember the people who modeled that kind of care, the ones who stretched the pot, made it work, and fed others without ever making a show of it.

This is not just a conversation about food. It is a reflection on memory, survival, and the unspoken ways love is carried through the kitchen.

#DiasporaPodcast #HaitianCulture #HaitianFood #RiceAndBeans #MarieStuppard #Diaspora #CulturalMemory #Community #Heritage #Podcast

In this episode of Diaspora: The Soul of a People, host Marie Stuppard explores the powerful history behind Soup Joumou, the traditional Haitian soup shared every year on January 1st.

More than a beloved dish made with Caribbean pumpkin, garlic, thyme, and other rich ingredients, Soup Joumou carries a deeper meaning rooted in power, exclusion, resistance, and liberation. During the colonial era in Saint-Domingue, the soup was reserved for French colonists, while the enslaved people who grew the ingredients and prepared the meal were forbidden from eating it themselves. It was not scarcity that kept them from the table, but control.

After Haiti declared its independence on January 1, 1804, everything changed. The people who had once been denied the soup claimed it openly, transforming it into a living symbol of freedom, dignity, and defiance. In that moment, Soup Joumou became more than food — it became a declaration of liberation.

Marie reflects on how this tradition has been carried forward through generations, often preserved not in textbooks, but in kitchens, by the women and families who refused to let its meaning disappear. This episode invites listeners to think more deeply about the traditions they inherit and to ask what histories of survival, refusal, and remembrance may be hidden inside them.

This is not a cooking demonstration. It is a story about memory, culture, and the ways people practice freedom.

#DiasporaPodcast #SoupJoumou #HaitianHistory #HaitianCulture #MarieStuppard #Liberation #Resistance #CulturalMemory #Haiti #Podcast

What does it really mean to leave your home country and start over somewhere completely different?
In this powerful episode, Marie opens up about her journey migrating from Haiti to the United States and what it truly feels like to live between two worlds. She shares the emotional reality of leaving behind family, culture, and familiarity while navigating the opportunities and challenges of building a life in America.
Marie talks candidly about the culture shock she experienced—from language barriers and social expectations to the differences in lifestyle, community, and identity. She reflects on the moments that were difficult, the lessons she learned along the way, and how her Haitian roots continue to shape who she is today.
This conversation explores the deeper reality of immigration: the resilience it requires, the identity shifts that happen along the way, and the strength it takes to honor both the place you came from and the life you are creating.
If you’ve ever wondered what it feels like to balance two cultures, two identities, and two homes, this is a story you won’t want to miss.
🎧 Listen now and hear Marie’s powerful story of migration, culture, and belonging.