ABOUT TANAMA
This new superhero is a female character named Tanama, which means butterfly in the Taíno language of the extinct original inhabitants of Haiti. The name Haiti itself comes from another Taíno word, Ayiti, which means “land of mountains.”
Thony, who has several other superheroes to his credit including one called Djatawo, had already begun work on Tanama when he connected with the Smallholder Farmers Alliance (SFA). Together they added elements to her backstory so that she now starts life as Rachel, the daughter of smallholders in rural Haiti. Rachel is hurt when her parent’s cotton farm is attacked, and while in a coma she is taken to the forest where tree spirits protect and keep her alive for 30 years. She re-emerges in the present time as Tanama with a mission focused on smallholders and tree planting, with her powers linked to two crops of relevance to contemporary Haiti: moringa and cotton.
Tanama wears a moringa flower around her neck, and the leaves that float around her at certain times are also from the moringa tree. Moringa is how she maintains her powers, and so Tanama has a secret network of women farmers who grow moringa trees and process the protein-rich leaves into powder for her. She also depends on these women farmers to help carry out her environmental mission with an emphasis on tree planting and together they call on other superhero characters created by Thony Loui.
Cotton is another important factor in Tanama’s story. She went into a coma because of a fire set by evil forces on her family’s cotton farm. Shortly after this happened in the late 1980s, cotton disappeared from Haiti. This was a big blow to the country because it had been, in real life, the fourth largest agricultural export in addition to a robust local market. Although the connection is mysterious, Tanama is only able to safely be brought out of her coma in the present day when cotton is once again being grown by smallholder farmers in Haiti.
Tanama’s environmental mission is to help Haitian smallholder farmers, both women and men, to fulfill their destiny of saving the country by restoring its tree cover and making the land productive again. Although these farmers have been largely forgotten and abandoned—and constitute the majority of the poor and undernourished among the general population—they still grow most of the locally-produced food on close to a half-million small-scale farms throughout the country. And Tanama knows these farmers are the only ones with the power to change the destiny of Haiti.