15 If I Were President … : Haiti’s Diasporic Draft (Part I), 41
16 Staging Haiti’s Upcoming Selection, 42
17 Haiti’s Fouled-Up Elections, 45
PART II: REASSESSING MY RESPONSE
18 Why I Am Marching for “Ayiti Cheri,” 51
19 Rising from the Dust of Goudougoudou, 53
20 The Haiti Story You Won’t Read, 59
21 When I Wail for Haiti: Debriefing (Performing) a Black Atlantic Nightmare, 62
22 Pawòl Fanm sou Douz Janvye, 67
23 The Legacy of a Haitian Feminist, Paulette Poujol Oriol, 72
24 Click! Doing the Dishes and My Rock ’n’ Roll Dreams, 75
25 Constant: Haiti’s Fiercest Flag Bearer, 77
26 Haitian Feminist Yolette Jeanty Honored with Other Global Women’s Activists, 79
27 Why Context Matters: Journalists and Haiti, 81
PART III: A SPIRITUAL IMPERATIVE
28 Fractured Temples: Vodou Two Years after Haiti’s Earthquake, 89
29 Defending Vodou in Haiti, 92
30 Loving Haiti beyond the Mystique, 94
Coda: A Plea Is Not a Mantra, 95
FOREWORD Robin D. G. Kelley
We say dignity, survival, endurance, consolidation
They say cheap labor, strategic location, intervention
We say justice, education, food, clothing, shelter
They say indigenous predatory death squads to the rescue
— Jayne Cortez, “Haiti 2004”
The longer that Haiti appears weird, the easier it is to forget that it
represents the longest neocolonial experiment in the history of the West.
— Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean, and the World”
In my circles, there are two Haitis. There is Haiti the victim, the “broken nation,” the failed state, the human tragedy, the basket case. Depending on one’s political perspective, Haiti the victim was either undermined by its own immutable backwardness, or destroyed by imperial invasion, occupation, blockades, debt slavery, and U.S.-backed puppet regimes. The other Haiti, of course, is the Haiti of revolution, of Toussaint, Dessalines, the declaration at Camp Turel, of C. L. R. James’s magisterial The Black Jacobins. This is the Haiti that led the only successful slave revolt in the modern world; the Haiti that showed France and all other incipient bourgeois democracies the meaning of liberty; the Haiti whose African armies defeated every major European power that tried to restore her ancien régime; the Haiti that inspired revolutions for freedom and independence throughout the Western Hemisphere. Rarely do these two Haitis share the same sentence, except when illustrating the depths to which the nation has descended.
Gina Athena Ulysse has been battling this bifurcated image of Haiti ever since I first met her at the University of Michigan some two decades ago, where she was pursuing a PhD in anthropology, focusing on female international traders in Jamaica. Then, as now, she was an outspoken, passionate, militant student whose love for Haiti and exasperation over the country’s representation found expression in everything else she did. She had good reason to be upset. Both narratives treat Haiti as a symbol, a metaphor, rather than see Haitians as subjects and agents, as complex human beings with desires, imaginations, fears, frustrations, and ideas about justice, democracy, family, community, the land, and what it means to live a good life. Sadly, impassioned appeals for new narratives of Haiti do not begin with Ulysse. She knows this all too well. Exactly 130 years ago, the great Haitian intellectual Louis-Joseph Janvier published his biting, critical history, Haiti and Its Visitors—a six-hundred-page brilliant rant against all those who have misrepresented Haiti as a backwater of savagery, incompetence, and inferiority. With passion, elegance, grace, and wit matching Janvier’s best prose, Ulysse’s post-quake dispatches and meditations about her beloved homeland demolish the stories told and retold by modern-day visitors: the press, the leaders of NGOs, the pundits, the experts. Of course, it is easy to see how the devastation left by the earthquake would reinforce the image of Haiti-as-victim, but representations are not objective truths but choices, framed and edited by ideology. Poor refugees sitting around in tent cities, a sole police officer trying to keep order, complaints over the delivery of basic foodstuffs and water—this is what CNN and Time magazine go for, not the stories of neighborhoods organizing themselves, burying the dead, making sure children are safe and fed, removing rubble, building makeshift housing, sharing whatever they had, and trying against the greatest of odds to establish some semblance of local democracy.
Ulysse is less interested in “correcting” these representations than interrogating them, revealing the kind of work they do in reproducing both the myth of Haiti and the actual conditions on the ground. Now. The sense of urgency that pervades her essays is palpable. As she does in her performances,