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In Louis Henderson’s film I build my language with rocks (2017), veins of handwritten Haitian Creole spread across a printed French script, a palimpsest in the making A group of actors and poets pour over the pages of playwright and theorist Édouard Glissant’s 1961 play Monsieur Toussaint debating turns of phrase, contesting imagery, and teasing it line by line into present day Port-au-Prince A camera approaches, peering over shoulders, shooting the words bubbling from their hands   The film opens Louis Henderson’s show ‘Overtures’ at HOME Manchester Henderson is a British filmmaker living in France, and ‘Overtures’ is characteristic of his works to date, which explore the legacies of colonialism and the entanglement of technology and history The exhibition takes Haiti as its subject, and the Revolution of 1791 in which slaves and freed people of colour won independence from French colonial rule As a white European artist, Henderson’s intervention in this time and history has a charged, and under-interrogated, politics   Overtures follows Henderson’s collaboration with a group of Haitian artists, The Living and the Dead Ensemble, to translate and perform Monsieur Toussaint for Port-au-Prince’s Ghetto Biennale (2017) The play dramatises the dying days of Toussaint Louverture who, born into slavery, went on to lead the Haitian Revolution Louverture died a prisoner of France in 1803, a year before Haiti’s sovereignty, betrayed by his successor Jean-Jacque Dessalines Condemned to a cell in French Jura, and banned from writing, he nonetheless spent his final days penning his clandestine memoirs in an early Haitian Creole tongue, hiding the handwritten pages in a handkerchief bound to his head Henderson takes Louverture’s ghost as the protagonist of ‘Overtures’  In so doing, Louverture becomes a proxy through which Henderson can enact his critique of history   Monsieur Toussaint puts French into the mouths of some characters The project of Henderson with The Living and the Dead Ensemble is to ‘creolise’ the play, filtering out the sediments of colonial power that persist through language Monsieur Toussaint becomes slam poetry, the betrayal of Toussaint by Dessalines bouncing between actors in a rhythmic call-and-response of Haitian Creole The group worked collaboratively on this