Dodo ti pitit

A Haitian Creole lullaby, passed on by ear, with no known author. Dodo means sleep, the same baby word as in French faire dodo. The singer tells the child that mama has gone to the market and papa to the river.

The deal is blunt: sleep, or the crab will eat you. The crab even ends up in the pot: “krab nan kalalou”, crab in the stew. That is a lullaby doing what lullabies have always done, wrapping a fright in a tune so the child falls asleep instead of arguing. The scare is the soft part. The harder part is that both parents are out of the house at the same time, and the child has to sleep through it. Nobody ever said lullabies were reassuring.