fractured the subject. Determined to not leave the body behind, the alter(ed)native is a mindful and loving attempt at a gathering of the fragments in pursuit of integration. In that sense, the alter(ed)native is unapologetically a political project.
On the stage, I am motivated by a sheer will to step into and confront the growing and gnawing web of a recurring black Atlantic nightmare with unspoken gendered dimensions that remains archived in our bodies. It is trapped in aspects of what Carl Jung calls our collective consciousness, for lack of a better term.
I did not intend to do this, nor was it completely par hasard. Rather, the auto-ethnographic process of deconstructing the personal, in which I engaged in my first book on Jamaica (where I did my doctoral research), spilled into my internal dialogues about Haiti. As a result, I found myself using my past to make connections to the social that further revealed national and international trends that have been inscribed ad infinitum and could still benefit from more visceral explorations.
The more that I perform, the more it has occurred to me that, in fact, we actually know very little of the primordial of Haitian experiences. Though we have seen countless images and heard the cries, the wails especially recently. Random women covered with dust roaming the street. Searching for their loved ones. Screaming. These are roving disoriented beings historically perceived as devoid of logic.
The show always begins with me chanting somewhere on the premises or in the audience (never backstage). The chant becomes a loop as I walk through the parameters of the space (often to form a circle) until I face the audience, then take center stage. Prior to the earthquake, I chanted the original lyrics I remember from childhood:
Nwaye n ape nwaye
(Drowning we are drowning)
Nwaye m ape nwaye
Ezili si wè m tonbe lan dlo, pran m non
Metrès, si wè m tonbe lan dlo, pran m non
Sove lavi zanfan yo, nwaye n ape nwaye
(Drowning I am drowning
Ezili, if you see us fall in the sea, take us
Goddess, if you see us fall in the sea, save us
Save the lives of your children, because we are drowning)
After the quake, I changed the words. By the time I performed on February 4, there had been over fifty aftershocks. Estimated death was being reported then at two hundred thousand, and the mass graves were being filled with the unidentified. So then drowning became trembling. Trembling the earth trembled. Trembling we are trembling. Ezili, should we tremble again, hold us. Save the lives of your children because the earth is trembling.
I used repetitions of this chant as a portal—to access the body and keep it present. It is interwoven between pieces as a reminder of the ultimate aim of the work. We had gathered here to process and discuss a major catastrophe. I stopped the performance halfway through to present a dispatch from Haiti. I closed the show with words of a conversation with a friend.
After that night, I began to improvise in other performances. I shortened the “me” parts of the original text (and analyses of past moments of conflict in Haiti, as these were becoming less immediately consequential, given the urgency of the current situation) and began to include voices of people in Haiti. By the time I did my last performance at La MaMa on December 13, all the original pieces were abruptly interrupted with dispatches from Haiti, of people whom I had either encountered online or interviewed during my two post-quake trips. Their voices made the performance current. Most importantly, the stage became a platform to give immediate visibility to those without. The show then became a hybrid living newspaper.
With each performance I did in the past year, I became increasingly aware of the fact that we do not know or have never confronted Haiti’s pain. We have talked about it. Written about it incessantly. Some have actually engaged with it. Still we have never sat with it in its rawest form and let it be. It has always been smothered. Shhhhhh. Not in public and certainly not in mixed company. Somatic theories tell us that in many ways some of it is still there. Trapped. It remains unprocessed trauma.
This past year, in light of the impact of the earthquake at home and abroad, I began to think more and more about the absence of discussions of psychoanalytical explorations of the experiences of Haitians in the aftermath of the Revolution. We have no substantive record of those moments of fracture, of pain when screams stemmed from deep within before they found constructed expression, sometimes in rage. The little we know of those moments comes from the fearful gaze of colonizers. What did we sound like to ourselves? I keep wondering what could Ayiti—this land where spirits inhabit permanent resting places in nature—tell us about the collective and individual sounds we made in the aftermath of the Revolution.
The earthquake for me is another pivotal moment of collective horror that must not be smothered, especially since we have so many tools with which we can record and are recording it. In the latest installment of the show, I interrupt the personal with individual quotes and statistics about post-quake conditions. The Vodou chants are there as signification of the ethical that is to highlight the moral imperatives at play. Coupled with history, this weave is now deployed to foster more textured and multi-vocal possibilities. This approach is particularly relevant, especially since daily life is not compartmentalized. Indeed, people live, make and remake themselves in a messy world that continuously begs for interdisciplinary crossings. I begin with the premise that theory alone simply cannot enclose the object of study, as anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has succinctly put it.21 So I go deep within. I collect what I call my ethnographic collectibles (excess bits unfit for publication because they were too personal, too raw, or seemed trivial) and recycle them. I shut out the world to access that which I have been socialized to repress. Trained academic. Repress. Digging deep to find ways to express a history of violence. Repress. I consciously and rather expertly manipulate my voice and let it out knowing I am crossing boundaries. Re-sowing seeds that caused white fears of a black planet. Exposing bourgeois attachments to the restraint. Trading with different forms of capital. Undoing reason. More specifically undoing enlightened reason.22
To perform a reassembly of the fragments Toni Morrison insists needs to occur in a clearing,23 I select the stage to confront the visceral embedded in the structural. Performance becomes a public clearing of sorts, a site to occupy and articulate the embodied. The primeval. Releasing sound bites of the horror. Unhinging the raw. That which for black women must too often remain unspeakable.
Wailing is my chosen method of intervention.
22
Pawòl Fanm sou Douz Janvye
February 21, 2011 / Meridians
Fòk ou gen volonté pou viv.
(You must have will to live.)
—Solange Veillard David
Anyone you ask, at home or abroad, who can and wants to speak of it, will tell you exactly where they were that afternoon on January 12 at 4:53:10 p.m. when the 7.0 earthquake ruptured Léogâne. Its epicenter sixteen miles from Port-au-Prince, the quake ravaged parts of the capital and decimated cities in the southern parts of the already fragile republic. Over fifty aftershocks followed in the next two weeks, and tsunamis were reported in Jacmel, Les Cayes, Petit-Goâve, Léogâne, Luly, and Anse-à-Galets.
According to official
