The idea for this roundtable started with Madison Smartt Bell, and a post he wrote about Haitian music for the New York Times’s Paper Cuts blog.

I knew Wyclef’s music and a few other names on Bell’s list, but I found myself feeling woefully short on context. I wanted to know what’s going on now in Haiti. What are the big struggles within and behind Haitian music? What should people be listening to? To answer these questions, and others, I enlisted the help of music scholar Garnette Cadogan and brought together Bell with:

Laurent Dubois, who is the author of “Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution,” and is working on a history of the banjo.

Elizabeth McAlister, who writes about Haitian music and religious culture. She is the author of “Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and its Diaspora,” and produced the Smithsonian Folkways CD “Rhythms of Rapture: Sacred Musics of Haitian Vodou.”

Ned Sublette, the author of “The World That Made New Orleans,” “Cuba and Its Music,” and the forthcoming “The Year Before the Flood.”

Edwidge Danticat, a novelist and author of the memoir “Brother, I’m Dying.”

Garnette Cadogan himself, who is at work on a book about rock-reggae superstar Bob Marley.

The conversation is theirs. I’m here only as student and moderator.

I went to Haiti in December 2008 because it was the 20th anniversary of my father's first trip to Haiti since leaving in 1975. Riddled by debt, betrayed by friends, and having recently bottomed out on a series of business ideas, my father went to Haiti in June 1988 for two weeks and ended up not returning until January 1989. That was a pivotal trip in my family and one that as I grow older means different things to me. At twelve it was a six-month vacation from my father's strict rules, at 32 it was one man's response to a world and problems that had gotten the best of him. During that trip to Haiti in 1988 my father was able to convince my grandparents to turn over some of their land to him, which he in turn sold to pay off his debts in the states. This cash infusion opened up parts of my grandparents’ homestead to “outsiders” and initiated the first wave of new construction in their area. Twenty years later, an area previously anchored by my paternal grandparents one-story house now features a number of three-four story homes with balconies and all-sorts of other accoutrements.

Twenty years later, my father (and therefore my parents) wants to go back to Haiti. He realizes that retirement is fast approaching, but he and my mother cannot figure out how they're going to do it. The success of one of their friends who moved back to Haiti in 2004-05 makes my parents optimistic about moving back--but they're still on the fence.

Thinking about my parents' predicament it occurred to me that they're the one's whom their country has been waiting for: the generation of boomers who made their fortunes and misfortunes abroad, and who have something to offer their country. I've recently begun thinking about what a concerted effort to organize Haitians living abroad in anticipation of their returns to Haiti look like? What if instead of looking toward those younger than us to repair our parents' mistakes, my generation of young Haitians looked toward our elders and gave them a chance that so many of them did not get--to make a difference in their country?