Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. Gina Athena Ulysse
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.
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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 estimates, three hundred thousand people lost lives. Unofficial estimates are actually much higher. The same number suffered injuries, and over 1.3 million were displaced. The number of reports of property damage to homes and businesses also reached hundreds of thousands. Places of worship (churches and temples), art centers, schools, and government ministries were flattened like sandwiches (as people call them), destroying familial and fictive ties, already limited resources, and archives of all kinds, for they embodied historical as well as social memories.
In the immediate aftermath, many among the living became part of a new population of amputees, and the psychological effects of the trauma remain trapped in the bodies of those who, to this day, have yet to have access to the psychosocial services necessary to alleviate the post-traumatic stress disorder and other ills that now entrap them.
Those of us lot bo dlo, or “on the other side of the water,” as they say, who make our homes elsewhere, experienced what would become new signifiers for the space that stretches between here and there, making us part of Haiti’s diaspora. We watched the stories develop on television. With phone lines down and others types of communication inaccessible, it would take days and, in some instances, weeks and even months to learn what had happen to some of our kin. In other cases, such news is constructed from deductive reasoning, since it is clear that, at this point, if we have not heard from or of our friends and relatives, then they must have perished. The specifics (when, where, and how) remain mysteries, as the possibility of closure is even more improbable in many cases, given the logistics of displacement, the inhumane government discard of the dead, and the economics of retrieval.
It is said that 70 percent of Haiti’s diaspora (numbered at around one million) has suffered direct loss. The 30 percent who were not impacted directly remain implicated, because all of us know of someone who knows someone who knows someone else who perished in the quake. Actually, in most cases, all it takes is one degree of separation.
As with any other natural disaster, it is women who are disproportionately affected. The situation in Haiti was no different. In fact, in some ways, it was worse. As the potomitan of their families,24 women bear the responsibility of having to be present to care for their children, parents, and other dependent family members. With little to no infrastructure and in the absence of a state that has historically abandoned its nation, services were delivered to very few.
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