The Avril Family Method of Haitian Machete Fencing

Haitian machete fencing is a functional martial art with deep roots in Haitian history.

Our project is defended to promoting and teaching this organization worldwide. Over the form of a x-year apprenticeship with main fencer Alfred Avril, we have been privileged to document this fine art form in ways never before seen by the wider globe, first through our many rough-cut preparation videos , and afterward through collaboration on the documentary short moving-picture show Papa Machete . We have likewise been honored to welcome many serious-minded foreigners to our training intensives at the Avril family homestead in Haiti. Though Professor Avril passed abroad in December 2014, his sons and other committed students take received his approval to continue his practice.

After a hiatus due to COVID-19, we began hosting our 9-twenty-four hour period grooming intensives in Haiti again this by summer. Our next plan is scheduled for July 2022. If yous are interested in joining usa, please come across our training in Haiti folio for details, so if you think you might be up for it feel complimentary to contact us.

Master fencer Alfred Avril

In Haiti, the traditional art of machete fencing goes by many names, among them Tire Machèt ("Pulling Machetes"). Tire Machèt has roots in the Haitian Revolution, when the revolutionaries were often forced to fight with fewer guns than soldiers. Its combination of ancestral African combat systems proved highly constructive both in battle and as a means of individual self-defence. Since that fourth dimension, a multitude of styles and grooming methods have proliferated. Though many of these practices remain shrouded in secrecy, Haitian primary fencer Alfred Avril extended an invitation to foreigners serious virtually learning this martial art to come to Haiti to train with him. Over the course of our ten-year collaboration, we had the opportunity to learn and to innovate many others to his do.

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Alfred Avril, whose homestead lies on the wooded slopes of Cap Rouge, just outside the city of Jacmel, was the repository of one such family unit fencing tradition. At first glance a balmy-mannered subsistence farmer, he was a master martial artist who had trained in Tire Machèt since childhood, initially nether the tutelage of his father. Over the form of his life, he continued the tradition as a respected professor of Tire Machèt in his ain right, training his sons, grandsons, nieces, nephews, and other members of his tight-knit community in the esoteric art of machete gainsay.

In general, Tire Machèt is practiced in relative secrecy. Family traditions are a closely guarded possession to be passed down through the generations, and only trusted members of the customs are permitted to participate in (or even observe) training sessions. Students from farther afield must demonstrate great loyalty to their fencing "professor" in order to proceeds admittance.

In 2004, Haitian Machete Fencing Projection founders Reginald Turnier and Michael Rogers met Professor Avril through one of his sons, and because of this connection were invited to begin training. Over the years, we built a human relationship of trust with the Professor and his customs such that we were permitted to train with much greater openness, and to bring our own guests to the fencing circle. He encouraged the states to make videos of the grooming in gild to introduce this relatively unknown martial fine art to the world. As time went by, we were fortunate to be able to interact with the production company Third Horizon to create the brusk documentary picture show well-nigh the Professor and his art – Papa Machete –  which was an official selection of the 2014 Toronto International Motion picture Festival and the 2015 Sundance Flick Festival. Professor Avril often expressed to us his promise that our projection might increase the prestige of Haitian machete fencing equally an fine art form, both at home and abroad, and give the younger generation another reason to retain this piece of their cultural heritage into the futurity.

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Professor Avril with his grandson Mackinley

On Dec 1st 2014, Professor Avril succumbed to a fever and died. The following summer, after a menstruation of mourning, the HMFP staff spent several weeks training in private with Professor Avril's sons Roland, Jean-Paul and Fredo, and came upwards with a cooperative plan for continuing our annual training programs each summer. Since that fourth dimension, the Avril brothers take connected to abound into achieved masters in their own correct, each preserving and refining a particular aspect of their father's fencing fashion. While Roland is a motorcycle taxi driver, Jean-Paul a painter, and Fredo a journeyman mason – and all three brothers piece of work the family unit agricultural country for food – our projection helps them provide their family with additional resources to become through harder times. Together, we go on the work of perpetuating the Avril family and its traditional method of martial-arts training for hereafter generations.

Left to correct: Roland, Jean-Paul, and Fredo Avril

A brief history of Tire Machèt

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In Haiti, before the Revolution of 1791-1804 (when it was called Saint-Domingue), slaves of African ancestry struggled to keep live their traditional practices of stick and blade gainsay by holding hush-hush competitions called Kalenda . At the aforementioned time, many of the free people of color sought social advancement through service in the French military, where they absorbed the techniques of European dueling culture . Notably, the Haitian fencer Jean-Louis Michel was among the about accomplished European-style fencers of the Napoleonic era. When widespread coup finally

bankrupt out, the art of machete fencing emerged to play an important part in combat, since the insurgents were ofttimes unable to provide guns and ammunition for all of their soldiers. Since that time, Tire Machèt has served by and large as a means of individual cocky-defense among farmers who work day in, 24-hour interval out with a machete in their hand to this day.

No one tin say for sure whether Tire Machèt represents a completely African lineage of martial arts or whether instead it represents the gradual merging of African and European combat traditions over time. Though in some ways Tire Machèt resembles historical European methods of fencing, that may exist zero more than than coincidence due to the universality of body mechanics and the fencing principles that stem from them. Indeed, longstanding traditions of blade combat are known to take existed in Africa as well, though many were suppressed past European colonization during the 19th century and therefore remain less well known. What is articulate, however, is that Tire Machèt bears a strong family unit resemblance to other roots-African martial arts like Capoeira and the forms of traditional stick fighting still practiced in Africa, and its historical connection to the practice of Kalenda is well documented.

The survival of such roots-African traditions in Republic of haiti is a great source of its cultural wealth. Maybe surprisingly, some of these traditions are today stronger in Haiti than many places in Africa because of the degree to which, during the 19th century, when most of Africa itself was being overrun by colonial powers, Haiti suffered the virtually complete international isolation imaginable. The fact that slaves had succeeded in overthrowing their masters and setting up their own government was anathema to the racist credo of the slave-holding societies all around them, and these societies responded by cutting off almost all contact with Republic of haiti (other than trading on the most disastrous terms) for more than than 100  years. This isolation, though devastating economically, besides provided protection for African traditions – from music and dance to organized religion and painting – to thrive.

To learn more almost the history of Tire Machèt and other martial arts of the African diaspora, see the excellent work of T.J. Desch-Obi. You can read sections of his volumeFighting for Honor: The History of African Martial Art Traditions in the Atlantic Globe here . To learn more almost the Haitian Revolution, meet especially Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution by Laurent Dubois, excerpts of which are available here .

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Source: https://www.haitianfencing.org/

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