Women’s Trauma, 24
10 Why Representations of Haiti Matter Now More Than Ever, 26
11 Unfinished Business, a Proverb, and an Uprooting, 32
12 Rape a Part of Daily Life for Women in Haitian Relief Camps, 34
13 Haiti’s Solidarity with Angels, 37
14 Haiti’s Electionaval 2010, 38
15 If I Were President … : Haiti’s Diasporic Draft (Part I), 41
16 Staging Haiti’s Upcoming Selection, 42
17 Haiti’s Fouled-Up Elections, 45
PART II: REASSESSING MY RESPONSE
18 Why I Am Marching for “Ayiti Cheri,” 51
19 Rising from the Dust of Goudougoudou, 53
20 The Haiti Story You Won’t Read, 59
21 When I Wail for Haiti: Debriefing (Performing) a Black Atlantic Nightmare, 62
22 Pawòl Fanm sou Douz Janvye, 67
23 The Legacy of a Haitian Feminist, Paulette Poujol Oriol, 72
24 Click! Doing the Dishes and My Rock ’n’ Roll Dreams, 75
25 Constant: Haiti’s Fiercest Flag Bearer, 77
26 Haitian Feminist Yolette Jeanty Honored with Other Global Women’s Activists, 79
27 Why Context Matters: Journalists and Haiti, 81
PART III: A SPIRITUAL IMPERATIVE
28 Fractured Temples: Vodou Two Years after Haiti’s Earthquake, 89
29 Defending Vodou in Haiti, 92
30 Loving Haiti beyond the Mystique, 94
Coda: A Plea Is Not a Mantra, 95
FOREWORD Robin D. G. Kelley
We say dignity, survival, endurance, consolidation
They say cheap labor, strategic location, intervention
We say justice, education, food, clothing, shelter
They say indigenous predatory death squads to the rescue
— Jayne Cortez, “Haiti 2004”
The longer that Haiti appears weird, the easier it is to forget that it
represents the longest neocolonial experiment in the history of the West.
— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the World”
In my circles, there are two Haitis. There is Haiti the victim, the “broken nation,” the failed state, the human tragedy, the basket case. Depending on one’s political perspective, Haiti the victim was either undermined by its own immutable backwardness, or destroyed by imperial invasion, occupation, blockades, debt slavery, and U.S.-backed puppet regimes. The other Haiti, of course, is the Haiti of revolution, of Toussaint, Dessalines, the declaration at Camp Turel, of C. L. R. James’s magisterial The Black Jacobins. This is the Haiti that led the only successful slave revolt in the modern world; the Haiti that showed France and all other incipient bourgeois democracies the meaning of liberty; the Haiti whose African armies defeated every major European power that tried to restore her ancien régime; the Haiti that inspired revolutions for freedom and independence throughout the Western Hemisphere. Rarely do these two Haitis share the same sentence, except when illustrating the depths to which the nation has descended.
Gina Athena
