Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. Gina Athena Ulysse
to remain vigilant of the aftermath.
The morning after, I would check websites to assure that the text of this new interview actually contained the correct spelling of Vodou instead of “voodoo,” which is used in media style sheets. (The latter spelling reinforces the stereotype and is the popularly recognized term guaranteed to get more hits on search engines.) There were instances in which “allies”21 and advocates in the mainstream and other media would represent Haiti in the most deprecating ways, at worst rendering Haitians invisible and at best, one-dimensional. While awareness of and attempts to address this were excruciatingly exhausting, these misrepresentations were also ripe for critical sociocultural analysis. Enter the native as sidekick.
This is not at all surprising; as I previously stated, the face of public anthropology is predominantly white and male in certain contexts. Although writer Edwidge Danticat and rapper Wyclef Jean were the most prominent Haitians in the media, with his high international profile it was Harvard medical anthropologist and physician Paul Farmer (founder of Partners in Health) who was practically synonymous with Haiti, along with Sean Penn and Bill Clinton.22
Where, if, and how “natives” fit in this visual (economic) order,23 especially in the areas of humanitarian work and post-disaster reconstruction, given their domination by a white-savior-industrial complex, remained unanswered “burning questions,” as Michel-Rolph Trouillot would have dubbed them a decade earlier.
Such moments and insights only reinforced Trouillot’s assertions in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (2003) about the status of the native voice in the production of anthropological knowledge. Ethnography was his site of inquiry, while I was surveying the media—in some cases, “leftist” or “alternative” branches of this world. Yet the social hierarchies and other issues were variations on a theme. Like the ethnographer, the journalist serves as mediator; in neither case can the native be a full interlocutor. Moreover, this only reconfirmed the need to address a problem I had been mulling over: “Who is studying you, studying us?”24
I stopped writing about Haiti months later, uncomfortable with speaking on behalf of Haitians, especially given that I had not been there since the quake. Although I had a specific viewpoint to offer on how Haiti and Haitians were being portrayed, I pondered its significance. I made my first trip back the last week of March and stayed through Easter weekend, spending a little time in Port-au-Prince so I could volunteer with a clinic in Petit-Goâve.
I returned feeling desperate. At the same time, I understood that not having hope is not an option for the ones left behind, for those trapped inland, because “nou se mo vivan” (we are the walking dead), as a friend said quite bluntly. Once again, thoughts of social responsibility re-emerged. My public writing entangled with my artistic work in unexpected ways. Invitations to colleges and universities meant audience members gained access to a social scientist, artist, and public commentator simultaneously.
This placed me in a position I have yet to fully decipher. I have at least recognized that with performance, I offer people a visceral point of entry from which critical conversation could develop. This overshadowed audience interest in my artistry, however, as discussions often remained content-driven. Still, the tripartite connection informed my works in multifaceted ways, making me aware of the limits of each, as well as how they complemented each other, and prompted me to reexamine their overall effectiveness in their own rights.
With that in mind and given my initial impulse—responding to a call—I had to negotiate my position within different forms of media. One thing remained indisputable: online publication provides access and extends one’s reach in ways print does not.25 Print, which entails a different process, still has merit, and it is a form of documentation that is more accessible for some, plus it meets a different professional criterion with regard to scholarship, although these writings were not in refereed journals. In any case, I found myself drawn to do more creative projects for my already unconventional career. This was work I was not only determined to do, but could not be kept from. So could it, would it, have any professional value? That remains to be seen, considering recent debates about how to evaluate nontraditional scholarship and university commitments to civic engagement.26
The Making of a Chronicle
The idea to compile these writings into a book came from Claudine Michel, a professor of black studies and education at the University of California–Santa Barbara, and the editor of the Journal of Haitian Studies. In our conversations, she mentioned she was too busy to keep up with my pace, so she had begun to put my pieces into a folder. Then, she insisted I too assemble them as a collection, given the immediacy, frequency, and scope of my purview. She said that as a native daughter anthropologist-performer situated on the margins, I offered a multifaceted insider/outsider perspective on this developing moment in Haitian history, a post-quake chronicle. (I think of it as a memoir of sorts.)
During 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