this time, I had written intermittently, yet consistently, for the Huffington Post, the Ms. magazine blog, the Haitian Times (later HT magazine), and Tikkun Daily; and I was invited to do guest blogs on several niche sites by friends and strangers alike. Each one had its own benefits and challenges. The Huffington Post offered the most freedom as a less mediated space, with little oversight and a vetting process. The Ms. blog provided hard-core fact checking with phenomenal editorial supervision. This was particularly rewarding for the way it influenced me to retain a feminist perspective on issues while being action oriented, keeping the blog’s readership in mind.
The Haitian Times did offer the ultimate audience who possessed background knowledge of never-ending tales of a Haiti continuously maligned in the media. As this readership was more broadly based, the new editor, Manolia Charlotin, began a scholar’s corner to foreground more critically diverse voices on contemporary social and political issues. The Tikkun Daily’s emphasis on repair and transforming the world provided an interfaith community that allowed me to be even bolder where religion is concerned.
While I enjoyed addressing varied and smaller audiences, this compounded the likeliness that I had to keep repeating myself. Still, I enjoyed the practicality of these online blogs that required short-term, albeit intense, focus to respond and deliver. I also valued the fact that I was writing for the present moment.
During that first year, I accepted invitations to submit three different print pieces and proposed a fourth to the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism—the creation of a small collection of women’s “words” on the earthquake as an archival project. These were particularly challenging, as they took me into diverse directions. The first, “Some Not So Random Thoughts on Words, Art, and Creativity,” was a meditation on several paintings and poems solicited by the curators of an art gallery in Grimma, Germany, for Haiti Art Naïf: Memories of Paradise?, a catalog for an exhibition held in March 2010. I wrote it in tears as I fawned over pictures of the selected paintings. Later, I had to decide whether to allow my writing to be included in the catalog when I strongly disagreed with the curators’ use of the archaic term naïf to describe Haitian art. A mentor encouraged me to stay, noting that more than likely, I would probably be the only Haitian and/or alternative perspective in the catalog.
The second piece was “Why Representations of Haiti Matter Now More Than Ever.” I presented it at the Ronald C. Foreman Lecture at the University of Florida, invited in April 2010 by anthropologist Faye V. Harrison. It turns out the lecture was actually an award that recognized the publicly engaged scholarship of its recipients. The month after, I updated and revised this paper for a special UNESCO plenary on Haiti at the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA) annual conference in Barbados. This panel included sociology professors Alex Dupuy and Carolle Charles, and language and literature professor Marie-José N’Zengou-Tayo, who survived the earthquake. Since I was on sabbatical, I offered to organize this panel for my senior colleagues and compatriots.
“Why Representations” was first published in NACLA Report on the Americas’ July/August issue, “Fault Lines: Perspectives on Haiti’s Earthquake.” It was among the most academic pieces I had written. At the same time, it was also heavily influenced by my public intellectual training, which encouraged clarity, sharpness, and poignancy. I did not hold back, especially since this piece actually recorded my earliest reactions to television portrayals of the quake and its immediate aftermath. It was reprinted with the title “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives Now More Than Ever” in Tectonic Shifts: Haiti since the Earthquake. This extended volume, edited by Mark Schuller and Pablo Morales, contained an unprecedented number of Haiti-based activists and writers. “Why Haiti Needs New Narratives” became something of a refrain I repeated everywhere I presented my work—hence its use as title of this book.
The third print article was a feature story I wrote for Ms. magazine, “Rising from the Dust of Goudougoudou,” published in early 2011. I went on my second trip to Haiti during the summer of 2010 and conducted research with various women’s groups specifically for this assignment—a rare opportunity for an anthropologist to work with a mainstream print outlet from the inception of a story idea. The Ms. editor encouraged me to include as much history as possible to better unpack and contextualize the complexity of the current situation women faced in post-quake Haiti. For example, ever the ethnographer, I was adamant about revealing class and color dynamics among women’s groups to expose the fallacy in abstractions such as “the poorest nation in the hemisphere.” Moreover, since women were actively engaged in their communities, I got an opportunity to reveal this along with their habit of helping each other.
I grew more and more perturbed as a representative voice for Haitians in Haiti, aghast at the politics and realities of who gets to speak for whom. I have always written and spoken reflexively about issues of position, power, and representation, especially given my diasporic privileges. While I recognize I had access that many in Haiti did not have, I strongly believe that the public still needed to hear from those based in Haiti who can speak for themselves.
The fact is I was also ready to go in another direction to make a different kind of intervention. The “new” space was performance. As my understanding of the media’s role in persistent perceptions of Haiti expanded, my artistic expressions took an even more critical and visceral turn, breaking from linearity and narrative, which were instrumental to the earlier stages of my practice.27 Indeed, I have been engaging in public performances in professional settings consistently since 2001, when I first presented “The Passion in Auto-Ethnography: Homage to Those Who Hollered before Me”28 at an American Anthropological Association annual meeting. My commitment to making creative and expressive works undergirds a dedication to interdisciplinarity—as an embodied intellectual embrace of the hyphen as artist-academic-activist, which is fueled by the contention that no one lives life along disciplinary lines. Hence my determination to use performance to both access and re-create a full subject without leaving the body behind. While I have written about my methods and motivations for doing such work,29 in her 2008 book Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age, Faye V. Harrison uses aspects of my creative work to make a broader argument for the significance of poetic and performative voices in expanding anthropological dimensions of conceptual, interpretive, and methodological praxis. In Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom, Mimi Sheller (2012) has also argued that by challenging narratives of dehumanization, my work exemplifies an anti-representational strategy of resisting and returning the tourist and anthropological gazes.
My Order of Things
This book consists of thirty entries that include blog posts, essays, meditations, and op-eds written and published from 2010 to 2012. These are organized chronologically, and thematically divided into three stages that chronicle my intentions, tone, and the overarching theme of my responses.
The first part, “Responding to the Call,” includes writing done in 2010. This was my most prolific year, during which I did more macro-level analysis, paying particular attention to structural matters that have been historically rendered abstract in a mainstream media. My interest and focus on politics was a retort to the potential, however brief, that this moment represented.
The second part, “Reassessing the Response,” begins in January 2011, recognizing the first year marker of the quake. I participated in a march that was held in New York City and wrote about diasporic anxieties around this “anniversary” on pbs.org. Since writers hardly ever choose their own headlines, the piece, which I entitled “Haiti’s Fight for Humanity in the Media,” was published as “The Story about Haiti You Won’t Read.” By this time, both the scope and manner of my discursive and expressive ripostes were changing. Indeed, those of us with nuanced historical knowledge of both local and geopolitics already understood that no matter how well-meaning international efforts and developments, these were performances of progress that would
