been depicted as desperate, pathetic, and needy.” Moreover, she added, “I don’t think we are being represented any differently than we have been represented my entire life.”
Haitian-born Mario, a taxi driver in Manhattan, told me, “They never show you what is functioning in the country. Even before the earthquake, all you ever see is what doesn’t work. Even before the earthquake, you never see the provinces. You never see Jacmel or Labadie.” Both are tourist destinations that used to draw visitors, especially from Canada and Europe.
Indeed, the slew of one-year-later documentaries that have been shown this week have mainly focused on the capital, Port-au-Prince. These reified singular notions of Haiti. As a result, we actually know less about the state of things in the other nine departments of the country. Equally important, they have rendered the capital synonymous with Haiti. As NYU’s Sibylle Fischer, author of “Modernity Disavowed,” a study of the impact of the Haitian Revolution in Latin America, says, “It’s like the earthquake hijacked the entire country.”
As an anthropologist, I have been a critical observer of such portrayals. For the last decade, I have taught a seminar titled “Haiti: Myths and Realities.” I use an interdisciplinary approach grounded in history to trace the origins of the most popularly held beliefs, including notions of Haiti as a “nightmare republic” or how Vaudoux became “voodoo,” among other views. In the process, I not only debunk some myths but also discern them from the realities they purport to represent. In the end, I make a strong case for the different ways the past occupies the present.
Outside academe, we tend to be less inclined to deal with history, especially since stories are restricted to word count. The mainstream depictions of Haiti that we continually see are actually reproductions of narratives and stereotypes dating back to the nineteenth century, when, in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, the new free black republic that ended slavery and disrupted the order of things in the world became a geopolitical pariah and our humanity was disavowed.
For Brunine David of Coconut Creek, Florida, even when portrayals attempt to give our humanity, they are usually skewed. “When they dare to talk about our courage and strength or perseverance, they change the meaning and take all the good from it and leave us with resilience; a kind of people who accept any unacceptable situation, people who can live anywhere in any bad condition that no one else would actually accept.”
As far as I am concerned, at 4:53:10 p.m. last year, when the earth cracked open, Haiti once again was being asked to cause changes in the world. What’s at stake this time is the unfinished business of the Revolution: reclamation of the humanity we have been denied.
Watch. After the anniversary coverage, the cameras will retract and journalists will depart even before filing their bylines. And you won’t hear about Haiti again unless or until there’s another big disaster. And given the current state of things, I must admit, there will surely be more man-made disasters. There will be new Haiti stories, albeit not in our voices and certainly not from our perspectives.
21
When I Wail for Haiti Debriefing (Performing) a Black Atlantic Nightmare
February 13, 2011 / Postcolonial Networks
We wonder… if it is the sound of that rage which must alwaysremain repressed, contained, trapped in the realm of the unspeakable.
—bell hooks, killing rage
And if that rage is not uttered, spoken, expressed then what becomes of it? So much has been written deconstructing the mad white woman relegated to the attic. Less is known of black female rage for there is usually no place for it. Its very articulation is a social death sentence especially in mixed company. Her rememories stay crushed in her body, her archive. She dare not speak. Shut your mouth. Careful. There is a place for unruly little girls like you who do not know when to be quiet. When not to offend white sensibilities. When not to choke. When to submit. Shhhhhh—Take a deep breath. Swallow.
There is no safe word.
Days after January 12, 4:53:10 p.m., when the earthquake ravaged my birth country, I told one of my dearest friends that part of me secretly wished I could just go on top of Wesleyan University Foss Hill, get on my knees, raise both arms in the air, and just scream on top of my lungs until I was totally spent.
Just don’t let anybody see you, he warned me. We laughed it out and talked about consequences of being deemed unhinged. Indeed, the last thing I need is for people to think I have come undone. I am already outside the box and something of an endangered species. I am a tenured black woman. A black Haitian woman at that. A black Haitian woman who has always spoken her mind way before tenure. A black Haitian woman without a recognizable last name as I like to say to those unfamiliar with my birth country’s class and color politics. I have ascended to and made a space for myself in a new social world that in many ways eluded generations before me without such access or had other freedom dreams. As Bill T. Jones has so aptly put it, I have had as much freedom as I have been willing to pay for. That said, I am an “established” faculty member at a small but well-respected university, albeit one whose expressive breadth and professional maneuverings upset disciplinary lines to create “nervous conditions”20 among purists. Though I was trained as a cultural anthropologist, I cannot afford to lose it, and certainly not in public. I am also an activist, a poet/performance artist, and a multimedia artist.
So, I did the next best thing. I consolidated all my energies and exposed my pain and rage onstage.
I had been performing my one-woman show, “Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me, & THE WORLD,” for several years now. In one of its earliest renditions, I describe this work as a dramatic monologue that considers how the past occupies the present. In it, I weave history, theory, and personal narrative in spoken word with Vodou chants to reflect on childhood memories, social (in)justice, spirituality, and the incessant dehumanization of Haitians.
My first full post-quake performance was on February 4 at the chapel of my home institution. Although I was on sabbatical, I volunteered to perform in part because I simply needed to let it out. This work, which contains musings on my relationship with Haiti from the aftermath of migration in my early teens through a grueling graduate school experience, is part coming of age, part conscientization, and part hollering.
It was during the early years of my graduate training that I began to actively perform, in part to retain my childhood dream of wanting to be a singer, to ground myself and allow my creative spirit to breathe through a restructuring process that threatened to desensitize me. Performance for me then was a cathartic act of defiance. It became a platform to express my newfound acceptance of the fact that silence is just another structure of power that I simply refused to re-create. A rejection of docility. It was a determination to disclose That Which Must Be Kept Private if we are not to disrupt the order of things and reap the rewards of playing along. Complicity is condemned. After earning the doctoral degree, and once I began teaching full-time, performing became a lifeline, a space to exercise an opposition to the contained or bifurcated self required by professionalism. Most importantly, it has always provided me with the space to continually engage my commitment to Haiti.
Performance for me is what I call an alter(ed)native—“a counter-narrative to the conventionalities of the more dominant approaches in anthropology…. It connotes processes of engagement from an anti- and post-colonial stance, with a conscious understanding that there is no clean break with the past. With that in mind, alter(ed)native projects do not offer a new riposte or alternative view, rather they engage existing ones, though these have been altered … co-opted and manipulated to ‘flip the script’ and serve particular anti- and post-colonial goals.” Hence, I begin with the unequivocal premise
