We have folk songs that carry earlier memories, but Lisette quitté la plaine (c.1757) remains the oldest printed song in Haitian Creole. It has defied genre, crossed borders, and resisted a single meaning for nearly three centuries. In a colonial context that seldom acknowledged the emotional lives of enslaved people, "Lisette" is unusual. Yet it exposes the sharp contradiction between the refined colonial salon and the brutal, extractive machine of slavery that sustained it. Why perform such a work, let alone celebrate it in 2025?

From Saint-Domingue, Lisette traveled to France, where it sparked abolitionist reflections in a dying Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It then migrated to the United States with French and Afro-Creole refugees of the Haitian Revolution. There, writers like Moreau de Saint-Méry used it to demonstrate the expressive force of Creole to white readers, even as Black families in New Orleans passed down the folk variant Zélim to quitté la plaine to their children. Decades later, African American concert musicians carried Lisette ma chère amie, now transformed into an art song, from domestic parlors of the American South onto public recital stages across the country as a celebration of Creole heritage. In modern Haiti, the Noiriste movement revived Lisette as a merengue de salon performed among reactionary intellectuals in Port-au-Prince, this time signaling Black pride during the cultural and political assault of the American occupation.

I pursued this research project with the conviction that these songs embody the truth and reconciliation we urgently need today. This project follows six musical incarnations of Lisette, at times situating them among intertextual and contemporary works that amplify a larger story of Haiti's role in world music history and Black liberation. In 2024, I commissioned the modern adaptation Lizet fo’n kite la plaine from Haitian poet Lunise Jules living in Philadelphia, PA, and the renowned Haitian composer Amos Coulanges, residing in Paris, France. Their Lisette returns the story of these resilient lovers to Haitians still making their way across the world from a hostile Plaine de Cul-de-Sac. 
                   
                         -Jean Bernard Cerin, Artistic Director