I do not arrive with trumpets.
Royalty rarely needs the band.
I enter rooms the way tide enters shore—
inevitable, unhurried,
carrying centuries in the bones.
Yes, I am Haitian.
Which is to say
I come from a people who looked an empire in the eye
and said, Non.
Then, they turned the word into history.
My lineage is not timid.
It walks upright.
Somewhere between the drums of Bois Caïman
and the salt of the Caribbean wind,
my blood learned a simple truth:
Freedom is a crown
no colonizer could ever confiscate.
So forgive me if I move
with a certain quiet authority.
It’s ancestral.
I have the audacity of a people
who liberated themselves
before liberation was fashionable.
My humor is inherited, too.
You must laugh a little
when the world tries to humble
a descendant of revolution.
Royalty, after all,
doesn’t mean diamonds at breakfast
or a parade in one’s honor.
It means knowing exactly who you are
without convening a committee.
It means standing—
Even when the room tilts slightly, it feels uncomfortable
around your certainty.
And yes,
sometimes my stillness unsettles people.
A woman who knows her worth
without advertising it
is considered suspicious in certain circles.
But I am Haitian.
We have always been suspicious
of those who preferred us small.
Let them wonder.
My crown is not ornamental.
It is historical.
Forged in rebellion,
polished in resilience,
and worn—quite comfortably, I might add—
with a little elegance,
a little sass,
and the calm understanding
That divinity sometimes speaks Creole.
No coronation required.
The ancestors already approved—
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