Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. Gina Athena Ulysse
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 that colonialism had 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