consciously took an explicit feminist turn. I wrote more about women’s concerns and those who were breaking ground in their own ways, in part to counter my disillusionment with international and national developments. The majority of the pieces in that second phase were published on the Ms. blog. I also edited “Women’s Words on January 12th,” a special collection of essays, poems, photographs, and fiction for Meridians.
The final part, “A Spiritual Imperative,” is the shortest one. I barely wrote in 2012, having taken on another Haiti-related professional task30 that severely limited my time. By then, I had turned from political matters to focus mainly on creativity and art. I was committed to drawing attention to the religious cleansing, or the bastardization of Vodou that was now in full effect. I characterize this shift as an ancestral imperative, as it was driven by a familial move away from our spiritual legacies and responsibilities.
So the last piece, “Loving Haiti beyond the Mystique,” appeared in the Haitian Times (HT) to mark the 209th anniversary of the Haitian Revolution, January 1, 2013. It is actually an excerpt from Loving Haiti, Loving Vodou: A Book of Rememories, Recipes and Rants, a memoir written in 2006. I submitted “Loving Haiti beyond the Mystique” at the request of the editor unnerved by the irony of its relevance seven years later.
Nota Bene: Illuminating Errors
The pieces in this collection are reprinted here lightly edited, as they were originally published with the hyperlinks removed. They also contain errors (including a tendency to refer to the republic as an island) for which I alone am responsible. I came to recognize it for what it is: a subliminal signification constantly made by default.
Additionally, the more diverse my venues, the more I repeated myself. These discursive reiterations, I must admit, are also, in part, a strategic device at play. Indeed, my writing has always entailed a performative component—a purposeful orality if you will, since I actually read pieces out loud as I wrote them. Mea culpa, dear reader, as annoying as they may be to read here, compounding them is necessary to reinforce certain points that I believe are crucial to illuminating Haiti’s past and path.
NOTES
1 The ideas and extensive writings of the late cultural theorist Stuart Hall had a profound impact on my work and thinking. He insisted on the routes of diasporic experiences as opposed to the more essentializing notion of roots, which I explore in detail throughout this introduction. When I was a graduate student, I attended a seminar at the University of Michigan in 1999 where Hall stressed this point: “Instead of asking what are people’s roots, we ought to think about what are their routes, the different points by which they have come to be now; they are, in a sense, the sum of those differences.” Journal of International Institute 7, no. 1 (Fall 1999). Another primary influence on me has been anthropologist Ruth Behar, my dissertation adviser, who not only has used the personal to write culture and to cross borders in her own way within and outside the academy, but whose intellectual and artistic preoccupations with concepts of home entail meditative interrogations of her identity as a Jewish Cuban negotiating her complex diasporas. Besides her ethnographies and memoir, she has written essays, poetry, and used photography and film to better nuance answers to her questions. Her works include The Vulnerable Observer (1996) and An Island Called Home (2007).
2 In a 1998 New York Times article by Garry Pierre-Pierre, Danticat was quoted recognizing the impact of the hip-hop star’s Haitian pride, which he professed whenever and wherever he could. She said, “When we think of Haitian identity, it will always be before Wyclef and after Wyclef.’’ Prior to his presence on the popular scene, stigmatized Haitians (youths especially) often hid their national identity to protect themselves from bullying and other negative responses.
3 I should note that this, of course, is with my full understanding of the complex impact of one’s formative years on development as a social being.
4 Up until 2003, the country used to be divided into nine geographic and political departments. With over one million Haitians living in the United States, Canada, the Dominican Republic, France, and other countries in the Caribbean and elsewhere, the tenth department emerged as an informal category in the early 1990s that has since become more established in as far as Haitians abroad continue to seek political representation, demanding the Haitian Constitution be amended to allow dual citizenship.
5 For the director of the Center for Public Anthropology Robert Borofsky, public anthropology “demonstrates the ability of anthropology and anthropologists to effectively address problems beyond the discipline—illuminating larger social issues of our times as well as encouraging broad, public conversations about them with the explicit goal of fostering social change.” From “Conceptualizing Public Anthropology,” 2004, electronic document accessed July 13, 2013. As I discuss later, this is a contested term among practitioners both inside and outside academe.
6 I have yet to decode the complexity of this position as a Haitian-American among Haitians at home, as a Haitian among blacks in the United States, and/or as an other among white anthropologists, which I have discussed at greater length in my first book, Downtown Ladies, an ethnography of female international traders in Kingston, Jamaica. To make sense of this location, I draw upon Faye V. Harrison’s work on peripheralized scholars engaged in the decolonizing anthropology project. As Harrison so rightfully notes in accord with sociologist Patricia Hill Collins, who deploys this term, “‘outsiders within’ travel across boundaries of race, class, and gender to ‘move into and through’ various outsider locations. These spaces link communities of differential power and are commonly fertile grounds for the formulation of oppositional knowledge and critical social theory”: Faye V. Harrison, Outsiders Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 17.
7 I wrote numerous other pieces about bell hooks, Audre Lorde, President Obama, Oprah, art, feminism, performance, and other topics that went live, as well as others I wrote just for the sake of practice.
8 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti’s Nightmare and the Lessons of History: Haiti’s Dangerous Crossroads, ed. Deidre McFayden (Boston: South End Press, 1995), 20.
9 For more on Mead see Nancy Luktehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).
10 Building on the work of Charles Hale (2006), Michal Osterweil has argued that the notion of “activist research” and “social critique” as disparate is a falsified one since knowledge is a crucial political terrain, and both these approaches actually “emerged as responses to the increasing recognition of anthropology’s role in maintaining systems of oppression and colonization that were unintentionally harming the marginalized communities anthropologist were working with.” See Michael Osterweil, “Rethinking Public Anthropology through Epistemic Politics and Theoretical Practice,” Cultural Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2013): 598–620, and Charles Hale, “Activist Research v. Cultural Critique: Indigenous Land Rights and the Contradictions of the Politically Engaged Anthropology,” Cultural Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2006): 96–120.
11 A big issue is what exactly distinguishes applied, practicing, and public anthropology from each other. Applied anthropology has its origins in (international) development work and is policy driven. Practicing anthropology, on the other hand, often emphasizes collaborative work with communities, also with the aim of using the work to affect public policy. Public anthropology is also action driven, with the aim of transforming societies. While definitions of these approaches vary and depend on the schools of thought from which they stemmed, as Louise Lamphere (2004) has rightfully argued, in the last two decades these approaches have been converging as collaboration, outreach, and policy are becoming more common in certain graduate programs.
12 Setha Low and Sally Merry mapped out the following
