Why Haiti Needs New Narratives. Gina Athena Ulysse
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 ultimately uphold the status quo.
I 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