I found myself staunchly defending the embrace of the hyphen with full knowledge that because of history, my two joined worlds have not been and would never be equal. I strongly believed my identity was not reducible to its point of origin. What I did know then, and I am even surer of now, was that Haiti was my point of departure, not my point of arrival.1
At the time, a moment best characterized by what writer Edwidge Danticat refers to as the post-Wyclef era,2 the consequences of identifying as Haitian in some circles (for example, the academy where I have spent a lot of time) were less hostile or, I should say, had their particular version of hostility. Regardless, the reason I insisted on my Americanness was not shame, as this person presupposed and even verbalized, but a rather simple mathematical equation.3 If I counted the number of years I resided in my pays natal and the number of years spent outside it and in Haitian circles, they would add up to over nineteen. I lived in Haiti for eleven years. Moreover, because of several accumulated years of extensive fieldwork in Jamaica, coupled with other travels and so many different experiences, I was aghast at being boxed in personally, as well as (with notions of essentialism) socially.
The Haiti in the Diaspora
My Haitianness, if you will, was never questionable to me, because I had spent years critically investigating issues of identity as both social and personal phenomena. The social analysis confirmed the individual examination, leading me to realize and make peace with the fact that I would always be part of two Haitis. There was the one that, due to migration, was being re-created in the diaspora, and the one in the public sphere that continually clashed with the one in my memory. Or perhaps there were three Haitis. In any case, the Haiti I left behind was one that was changing in my absence, while the one I lived in, as a member of its diaspora, had elements of stasis, as it was couched in nostalgia. Hence, I live with a keen awareness that negotiating my Haitis inevitably means accepting that there are limits to my understanding, given the complexity of my position as both insider and outsider. Finally, because the Haiti of my family and the socioeconomic world I grew up in encompassed such a continuum of class and color and urban and rural referents, Haiti and Haitians historically have always been plural to me.
These contemplations not only have concrete effects on my relationship with Haiti but also the role I play as a Haitian-American determined to be of service to her birth country somehow. That said, this book, in a sense, is the result of a promise made long ago at the tender age of eleven, when I came to live in the United States. Upon first encountering the Haiti that exists in the public sphere, I had just enough consciousness to vow that I would never return to Haiti until things changed. Of course, I eventually changed my mind.
This decision to go back, which I have written about ad infinitum, reveals as much about my personal journey as it does my professional one. With more time, the two would intertwine in curious ways, never to be separated, as I embraced yet another set of hyphens, this time as artist-academic-activist. These identities would become increasingly distinct, especially as I transitioned from relying less on the social sciences and more on the arts. Moreover, irrespective of my chosen medium, I was already out there as a politically active and vocal member of Haiti’s “tenth department.”4
Out There in the Public Sphere
I often say I did not set out to “do” public anthropology,5 but that’s not exactly true. It’s also not a lie. The fact is I decided to seek a doctoral degree in anthropology for a singular reason, Haiti. I became progressively frustrated with simplistic explanations of this place that I knew as complex. I became determined to increase and complicate my own knowledge of Haiti, always with the hope of eventually sharing what I learned with others.
My plans did not immediately work out as intended; I ended up doing my dissertation research on female independent international traders in Kingston, Jamaica. Yet once I began to teach, I regularly offered a seminar that sought to demystify the Haiti in popular imagination, and to help students envision a more realistic one. Besides that course, for many years, my anthropological engagement with Haiti was off the grid of my chosen professional track. It was the subject of my artistic pursuits—poetry and performance—and the focus of occasional reflexive papers I presented at conferences. That changed drastically one day in January 2010.
My transformation was punctuated by the fact that one month before that afternoon, I did the unthinkable: I set out on a trip to Haiti for the first time without informing my family. As an artist, and a self-identified feminist made in the Haitian diaspora, I was curious about the impact of migration. I experienced it as a rupture, and I continuously wondered about my personal and professional development—whom I might have become had I remained in Haiti. The plan was to go there and see if it was possible for me to have a relationship with Haiti that was entirely mine.
Where exactly would I fit?
Three weeks after I returned, circumstances would not only force me to rethink that question, but thrust me into the public sphere in the shadow and footsteps of other engaged anthropologists who resisted the urge to remain in the ivory tower. As fate would have it, I had already taken calculated steps to get there.
“Write to Change the World”
That’s the tagline of the one-day seminar I attended in October 2009 at Simmons College in Boston. Among other things, the Op-Ed Project sought to empower women with the tools and skills needed to enter the public sphere as writers of opinion pieces. The premise was to engage the fact that upper-class white men submit more than 80 percent of all published op-eds. The project worked to change these statistics by showing women, especially, how to write and pitch to editors. I remember pondering the reality of the remaining 20 percent, inevitably white women and a few minorities. As a black Haitian woman, I wasn’t even a decimal point.
I had briefly dabbled in this medium before. In 1999, fresh out of graduate school, I wrote “Classing the Dyas: Can the Dialogue Be Fruitful?”—a piece about returning to Haiti from the diaspora and the brewing tensions with those who live at home. It was published in the Haitian Times. Nearly a decade later, I penned another piece, this one on Michelle Obama, which appeared in the Hartford Courant days before the 2008 elections. The newspaper editor’s headline, “Michelle Obama: An Exceptional Model,” topped my piece instead of my feistier “She Ain’t Oprah, Angela or Your Baby Mama: The Michelle O Enigma.”
I was always interested in having my say; I have been labeled opinionated (not a compliment). It is a fact that black women who speak their minds have historically been chastised for “talking back.” In that sense, I am not at all special. Since I did not possess the know-how necessary to negotiate this world of opinion pages, I sought to understand it from an insider’s perspective. So I signed up for Simmons’s seminar.
I learned not only how mainstream media functions, but also how gatekeepers operate—the importance of networks and connections. Most importantly, I gained critical insights on how notions of expertise are socially constructed, what is required to increase readership, and how to expand one’s “sphere of influence.” While seminar participants were encouraged to put newly acquired skills to the test, I was not inspired to write an op-ed until early the following year. Still, this experience did motivate me to keep on learning.
To that end, in December 2009, I applied and was selected for the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Ms. Magazine Workshop for Feminist Scholars—a three-day boot camp that trained activist-oriented academics to become public intellectuals. The intent was quite specific: Ms.’s ultimate goal was to show us how to put our academic knowledge to work by making it more accessible to the public. Participants were also encouraged to write for the Ms. magazine blog, which I eventually began and continue to do intermittently.
From both of these seminars, I not only obtained critical understanding
