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Mainstream news coverage of the catastrophic earthquake of January 12, 2010, reproduced longstanding narratives of Haiti and stereotypes of Haitians. Cognizant that this Haiti, as it exists in the public sphere, is a rhetorically and graphically incarcerated one, the feminist anthropologist and performance artist Gina Athena Ulysse embarked on a writing spree that lasted over two years. As an ethnographer and a member of the diaspora, Ulysse delivers critical cultural analysis of geopolitics and daily life in a series of dispatches, op-eds and articles on post-quake Haiti. Her complex yet singular aim is to make sense of how the nation and its subjects continue to negotiate sovereignty and being in a world where, according to a Haitian saying, tout moun se moun, men tout moun pa menm (All people are human, but all humans are not the same). This collection contains thirty pieces, most of which were previously published in and on Haitian Times, Huffington Post, Ms Magazine, Ms Blog, NACLA, and other print and online venues. The book is trilingual (English, Kreyòl, and French) and includes a foreword by award-winning author and historian Robin D.G. Kelley.

An obituary for Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, who died on Jan 5, 2018, is presented. As the first known Haitian manbo-scholar or scholar-manbo within this long genealogy, Rachel--anyone familiar with her would still tell you--possessed unmatched encyclopedic knowledge of both worlds. She was at the avant-garde as an early initiate who had received the Ason, or sacred rattle, in the final stage of becoming a priestess before doing doctoral studies in social anthropology at Oxford University. The daughter of the late Max Beauvoir--the Ati National, or Supreme Leader, she chose scholarly and activist paths only to take on spiritual inheritance and responsibilities at mid-life, which placed her at the helm of a family temple.

This small collection of Haitian women's reflections on the earthquake offers readers a kaleidoscopic view of how several women at home and in the diaspora lived through this moment, their responses and the continuous impact on our lives. The works are composed in various genres that they thought best captured their voices, their feelings. Thus, the words recounted here are in the form of personal essays, poems, photographs, and even a piece of fiction. Given Haiti's place in the global racial imaginary, and since we are all only too aware of its historical condition, even in prose and poetry, our words from January 12th are laced with strands of critical observation. This collection seeks both to honor the feminist tradition of using different genres to tell stories and also to assure that the blurring of these genres does, in fact, offer a more nuanced landscape, a textured representation of this catastrophic moment. While the collection is by no means representative of the population, nor does it seek to be, it does demonstrate that, indeed, those left behind clearly have stories to tell that must not only be gathered and archived, as they are now part of another chapter of Haiti's history, but also shared, especially as they are also evidence of how Haitians came to each other's aid. Such stories were not the focus of popular media coverage. Within this collection there are stories of courage, stories of solidarity, stories of trauma, stories of hope, stories of despair, stories of contempt, and perhaps most important, stories of will. These are stories to pass on. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

Along with her family, the young woman was bused out of the capital into the provinces, like many others who were put on buses that took them out of the capital into the provinces. Since her return, she has not been the same. Subsequently, with each aftershock, she has become clingier, crying and screaming and asking her father if it will happen again. Since Goudougoudou, the women refuse to sleep indoors, so the men built a tin roof shack in the yard where everyone still sleeps at night.

I take it as part of my work to share some insights on the theme “Haiti: Paradoxes, Contradictions, Intersections in the Making of a People” by speaking to what inspires me today and how my work intersects with Haitian studies and why I believe the arts, performance, matter now more than ever. Let me be clear, I am not here to reflect and review literatures or make any grand contributions that challenge existing archaic or even expanding narratives, any more than I plan to stake any claims on different intellectual histories. The conference program is rich evidence that such work is being taken on by many of you in the room who are dedicated to unsettling fossilized notions about the field, the broader academic and practical worlds that this association inhabits. What I am interested in is “doing the work,” as the late Audre Lorde called it: the deeper, thoughtful, and self-reflective conversations that still need to be had because Haitian studies, as it has been and continues to be done here, in the United States, under the umbrella of this association situated in the diaspora, is still developing. So what I plan to do this morning is offer meditations through performance: not just to comment on why I have turned to this form but to make a case for why Haitian studies must seriously engage other forms beyond the written text. We live in times to eschew the false binary that not only feminizes the arts but also locates it in opposition to the sciences. Our engagement with the arts must go beyond consumption, beyond the notion of arts as a subject to be decoded by “scholars.” It is imperative that we think and recognize art practices themselves as scholarship.