by Régine Michelle Jean-Charles
In How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (2017), Keeanga Yahmatta-Taylor celebrates the 40th anniversary of a groundbreaking feminist organization whose pioneering vision has left an indelible mark on Black feminism. Named after Harriet Tubman's 1853 raid on the Combahee River, The Combahee River Collective was one of the most important feminist organizations in history---a radical Black feminist organization with progressive politics. As an anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-capitalist group, Combahee was "actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression."1 How We Get Free includes interviews with several of Combahee's original members including Barbara Smith and Demita Frazier who discuss the early days of the collective's work. In Yahmatta-Taylor's interview with Barbara Smith, Smith passionately proclaims the global origin of Combahee's Black feminist vision. She explains:
[I]nternationalism...is not a part of our politics that has necessarily been uplifted widely, but that's where we were coming from.... We were third world women. We considered ourselves to be third world women. We saw ourselves in solidarity and struggle with all third world people around the globe. And we also saw ourselves as being internally colonized within the United States. We identified as third world people. And that kind of solidarity was not just true of the very new Black feminism that we were building.2
By identifying as third world women, the Black feminists of Combahee intentionally built a movement of solidarity that was global in scope.
Smith notes that the international dimension of their Black feminist project has been de-emphasized over the years in accounts and evaluations of it. The Black feminists who made up the collective always identified as third world women and envisioned Black feminism as being inclusive of women throughout the world. This was always one of its strengths. Smith's observation is crucial. Wresting the term "Black feminism" from its so-called "Third World" and Global South connections that the collective always intended it to have has had widespread effects that we should consider today. The move away from the term "Third World" has hindered feminists from connecting with one another in solidarity across geographic, national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. The increasing specialization of academic feminist subfields such as transnational global feminisms, postcolonial feminisms, African feminisms, and Caribbean feminisms has intensified the impression that Black feminism is exclusively rooted in the United States. Equating Black feminism with African American feminism makes the international vision articulated by Smith more difficult to achieve. Too often the impression is given that Black feminism as a vision and project originated in the US and then circulated throughout the world. Contemporary Black feminism as a transnational movement is less considered as a result. To be clear, Black feminism is an intellectual project that is unquestionably indebted to African American women. It certainly has its roots in the trailblazing work of African American activists and writers like Anna Julia Cooper who in the 19th century wrote that Black women are "confronted by the woman question and the race problem." Likewise, Frances Beale deployed the term "double jeopardy" to describe the conditions of Black women's lives, foreshadowing intersectionality's focus on multiple oppressions. But a Black feminism whose US dimensions overshadow and neglect its other sources, traditions, and derivations needs to be contested. This is the task I take up in this essay. It matters enormously how we understand the "Black" in Black feminism both as a field of scholarly inquiry and as a social and activist project. We, like the founders of the Combahee River Collective, need to be invested in the global dimensions of Black feminism.
This imperative was forcefully brought home to me as I was recently completing my book Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism, Literary Ethics, and Haitian Fiction. I encountered resistance in describing Haitian feminism as Black feminism. For many, Black feminism seemed restrictively equated with African American feminism. This indicated to me that the international dimensions of Black feminism were not only underemphasized but far too little known. The "other worlds" that literature enables us to discover finally depend on the history we use to give the concepts we use in our search solid grounding. We must be careful to distinguish and scrutinize the "Third World" or "Global South" or "emerging nation" sources and dimensions of Black feminism as it developed in the US. We otherwise run the risk of reinscribing a first world centrism and essentialism at the heart of our critiques of precisely that world's forms of domination.
What is the Black in Black feminism? Is it broad enough to encompass Black women from all over the world, or does it refer only to African American women? I am committed to "Black" as a capacious term that accommodates people of African descent throughout the diaspora. This commitment underpins my understanding of Haitian feminism as Black feminism. My appreciation of "Black" as a capacious term that accommodates people of African descent throughout the diaspora also informs my commitment to Haitian feminism as Black feminism. This is not to deny the specificity of Haitian feminism. But that specificity, I believe, should be used not to assert priority or differential national credit but to further Black feminism's deep preoccupation with dissolving binaries like local and global, or typical and universal. It is against this backdrop that I hew closely to the definition of Black feminism succinctly given by Angela Davis as: "a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit."3 Black feminist theory, I will argue, is the best tool we have for reading and understanding the inscriptions of race, gender, class, and sexuality in all modes of cultural expression. It is the best tool we have for developing an ethic that is sensitive and attentive to all the intersections Davis alludes to.
I am not proposing a return to using a "third world" framework in conversations about Black feminism. In light of the troubling origins of the term "Third World," coined by the French demographer Alfred Sauvy in an essay entitled, "Three Worlds, One Planet," scholars and activists have rightfully abandoned its use. Vijay Prashad explains in his The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World thatthe "Third World was a project" through which the West conceptually distinguished and divided camps during the Cold War. But this should not detract from the fact that feminists all over the world found utility in the use of the concept of the Third World. It was the source for them of gestures toward global solidarity. In the trailblazing collection Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, editors Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres relied on the term to provide a conceptual framework. They wrote, "[I]t is third world women's oppositional political relation to sexist, racist, and imperialist structures that constitutes our potential commonality."4 What the founders of Combahee intended to signal by identifying as third world women was a similarly unifying politics of recognition of potential commonalities.
In Looking for Other Worlds I use Davis's definition of Black feminism to explore the Black feminist imagination of the three contemporary Haitian authors: Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, and Évelyne Trouillot. I purposefully use "Black feminism" rather than "Haitian feminism" to establish the work of these Haitian writers within a broader feminist project that is transnational and global. I emphasize Haitian feminism, a distinct tradition championed by such authors as Paulette Poujol Oriol and activists such as Myriam Merlet, to foreground that specificity as a manifestation of a larger Black feminism that is integral to a global project. Part of that specificity lies in embodying the ways a multi-dimensional Blackness circulates in the Caribbean.5 My use of Black feminist rather than Haitian feminist or Caribbean feminist is intentionally recuperative. It is crucial for the project of Black feminism to underscore its global dimensions that have been there since its origins. When the Combahee River Collective penned their originating Black feminist manifesto, they argued for "Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face" [referring to not only women in the United States, but also to Black women throughout the world].6
Yanick Lahens (b. 1953), Évelyne Trouillot (b. 1954), and Kettly Mars (b. 1958), three authors closely linked by generation, publicly and explicitly espouse feminist politics. The term feminist is not only one they embrace personally, but one that they urge others to take on in service of human rights and equality for all. Being born in the 1950s means that each of these women came of age during the Duvalier dictatorship. For each of them the regime in particular, and the Haitian sociopolitical context in general, figure prominently. I will briefly situate and describe each author before turning to their feminist politics and poetics.
Yanick Lahens (Photo: Hartwig Klappert)
Yanick Lahens was born in Haiti in 1953 where she began her education prior to moving to France as a teenager. In France, she studied modern literature at the Sorbonne and wrote a thesis on Haitian author Fernand Hibbert. When she returned to Haiti as an adult, she began teaching literature classes at École Normale Supérieure---Université d'État d'Haïti where she remained for many years. In addition to her work as a professor, Lahens has also worked for the Ministry of Culture, co-hosted a program for Radio Inter, and served as an editor for the Haitian publishing house Henri Deschamps. As one of the founders of the L'Association des écrivains haïtiens [Association of Haitian Writers] she regularly hosts programs for writers throughout the island and abroad. Lahens's contribution to the Haitian literary scene has also come through her work with Institut français through which she also has editorial responsibilities for the literary and cultural journal Conjonction. Lahens's first literary publication, Tante Résia et les dieux [Aunt Résia and the Spirits], is a collection of short stories that appeared in 1994 four years after the publication of her landmark literary essay "L'exil: entre l'ancrage et la fuite [Exile : Between Anchor and Escape]." Lahens's renown is international. Most recently she was elected to the Collège de France, and she received the Prix Fémina in 2014 for her novel Bain de lune [Bathing by Moonlight].7 Yanick Lahens is the author of five novels and five short story collections as well as two books of essays.
L'exil: entre l'ancrage et la fuite (1990)is a work of literary criticism in which she explores the topic of exile from multiple perspectives. Among the salient points she advances in this study is a plea to flee from binary formulations of Haitian literature. She writes,"[I]l nous apparaît possible et urgent à la veille du XXIe siècle de repenser la question de l'identité, de la nationalité et de l'origine de manière à quitter le cadre de l'alternative dedans/dehors [It seems possible and urgent to us on the eve of the 21st century to rethink the question of identity, nationality and origin so as to abandon the framework of the inside/outside dichotomy]."8 Lahens's first publication, this work established her as a consequential literary critic. She eventually adopted fiction as her primary literary form. Her first study focuses almost exclusively on male writers and barely signals her investment in, and indebtedness to, Haitian women writers. She nevertheless notably credits Marie Chauvet (along with Frankétienne) for introducing "techniques du monologue intérieur en cassant la linéarité traditionnelle, en jouant des points de vue du narrateur et en donnant une dimension psychologique intéressante, individualisé à leurs personnages, qui n'apparaîtront plus comme personnages-clichés [inner monologue techniques that break traditional linearity by playing with the narrator's points of view and by providing an interesting psychological dimension, individualized according to the characters' personalities, who no longer appear as stock figures ]."9 Attention to interiority and the complexities of individuated selves is central to the fiction I examine in my book. Yanick Lahens continues to participate in a broad range of literary and cultural activities in Haiti and abroad.
Évelyne Trouillot (Photo: M. Henri)
Évelyne Trouillot is the author of seven novels, five collections of short stories, four books of poetry, four children's books, and one play. She was born in Port-au-Prince in 1954 and educated there through secondary school. It is often noted that Trouillot was born into a family of intellectuals: her uncle Hénock Trouillot was a venerated historian. She and her siblings have all flourished as celebrated writers and academics. In 1972 her family departed for the United States where she completed her education. Trouillot obtained a bachelor's degree in French from Florida International University in 1985 before returning to Haiti in 1987, one year after the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship. Her first collection of stories, La Chambre Interdite [The Forbidden Room] was published in 1996, followed by two more collections in 1998 and 1999. Although her short stories were published first, Trouillot has also always written poetry and novels. Discussing her use of multiple genres, she writes, "je pense que les textes viennent à l'écrivain...avec leur forme, leur genre et je ne peux pas choisir d'écrire à l'avance des romans ou des nouvelles. Je pense que le texte vient avec ses propres contours. [I think that texts come to the writer. . .with their own form and genre and I cannot choose in advance whether I write a novel or short stories. I think that each text comes with its own contours]."10 Though most of her works are in French, one of her children's books La**fille à la guitare / Yon fi, yon gita, yon vwa appears in a bilingual edition of French and Kreyòl, and her poetry collection Plidetwal was written and published in Kreyòl.
Trouillot has been the recipient of numerous prizes for her writing including the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone for her first novel Rosalie l'infâme [The Infamous Rosalie] published in 2004; the Beaumarchais award from ETC Caribbean for her first play Le bleu de l'île [The Blue Island],and the coveted Barbancourt prize for Le Rond-point [The Traffic Circle]. She is currently a professor of French at the Université d'État d'Haïti. A passionate advocate for the rights of women and children, Trouillot's public writing and lectures regularly center on these topics. In 2002 she authored "Restituer l'enfance: enfance et état de droit en Haïti [Restoring Childhood: Childhood and the Rule of Law in Haiti]" in which she advocates for the rights of children specifically with regards to education. More recently, in an essay published at the end of 2020, she tackles the subject of disparities in publication with suggestions for how Anglophone editors and translators can better accommodate the linguistic complexity of the African diaspora.11
Trouillot is also one of the co-founders, along with several members of her family, of the Centre Culturel Anne-Marie Morisset whose mission is to promote the arts in the lives of young people.12 Named after her mother, the center honors Morriset's commitment to education by offering cultural enrichment and resources to children. With her daughter, literary scholar Nadève Ménard, and her brother Lyonel Trouillot, she also founded Pré-texte, an organization that sponsors reading and writing workshops in Haiti. Trouillot speaks widely internationally and has been featured in festivals like the Yari Yari Celebration of Women Writers that last took place in Accra, Ghana. For Trouillot, to be a contemporary writer carries with it a serious responsibility: "Aujourd'hui plus que jamais, écrire en Haïti c'est dire non à la laideur, non à la médiocrité et non à la paresse pour un peu plus de bonheur au bout du chemin. [Today more than ever, to write in Haiti is to say no to ugliness, no to mediocrity, and no to laziness for a bit more happiness at the end of the road]."13
Kettly Mars (Photo: Stéphane Haskell)
Born in 1958, Kettly Mars is the youngest of the three authors whose work I examine. Indeed, Mars "incarne parfaitement le jeune auteur haïtien de cette génération ayant grandi dans les années soixante et commençant à publier dans les années quatre-vingt-dix [perfectly incarnates the young Haitian author of this generation having grown up in the sixties and started to publish in the nineties]."14 Born one year after the beginning of the Duvalier regime, her entire childhood took place under dictatorship. The youngest in a household of five children, Mars grew up in a middle-class family with four older brothers. Her literary career was launched in 1997 when she began writing poetry after several years working in the private sector. Unlike the other two writers in my study, Mars has lived in Port-au-Prince her entire life. She is the author of ten novels, four collections of short stories, and two books of poetry.
While in her thirties Mars began writing poetry, then moved on to the short story genre and eventually the novel. Describing her own "arrivée tardive à la littérature [late arrival to literature]" (borrowing the phrase from novelist Maryse Condé from Guadeloupe), Mars describes her first verses as "expression d'une musique intérieure qui cherche ses couleurs propres [an expression of an interior music in search of its own colors]."15 From poetry Mars transitioned to popular writing creating her Kool-Klub series which appeared in the form of roman feuilleton (serial novels published in magazines). Mars's first novel, L'heure hybride [The Hybrid Hour]was published in 2005. She has authored eight novels and won several literary prizes, including the 2015 Prix Ivoire for Je suis vivant [I Am Alive]. Despite this steady stream of fiction in the early 2000s, it was not until 2010 that Mars began to devote herself entirely to writing as her only profession. Of this transition she says, "Après le 12 janvier 2010, j'ai décidé de prendre le temps qui me manquait. De vivre pour et par ma passion d'écrire... De libérer mon souffle. Le béton c'est aussi fragile que du papier quand les plaques tectoniques se rompent sous nos pieds. Il y a urgence. Je décroche. Un saut dans le vide. Un acte de foi en la vie [After January 12, 2010, I decided to take the time I was missing. To live for and by my passion for writing...to free my breath. Concrete is as fragile as paper when the tectonic plates break under our feet. There is urgency. I pick it up. A leap into the void. An act of faith in life]."16 Currently the president of PEN Haiti, Mars is actively engaged in promoting Haitian literature internationally. As the francophone literary scholar Joëlle Vitiello has observed, "Elle est devenue véritablement un auteur mondial [She has truly become a global author]."17
Each of these women was born during the early years of the Duvalier regime (1957-1986). All are undoubtedly marked by the legacy of la terreur as well as subsequent periods of unrest and military crackdown that have punctuated life in Haiti during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Duvalier was responsible for tens of thousands of murders, imprisonments, kidnappings, tortures, and disappearances. After his death in 1971, his son Jean-Claude continued this reign of terror with the help of the notorious private militia, the Tonton Macoute, which perpetrated unmitigated violence against the Haitian population.
Feminist scholars, beginning with sociologist Carolle Charles, have argued that the contours of Haitian womanhood transformed under Duvalier because women were routinely subjected to political violence in ways they had never been before. As Charles explains in a well-known essay, state violence became gendered in particular ways during this period, and the "particular relationship of gender to the authoritarian state under the dictatorial Duvalier regime has shaped the configuration of women's consciousness, demands and claims, and forms of organizing."18 Building on Charles's work, Nadège Clitandre explains that "[d]uring the Duvalier regime...Haitian women writers tackled issues of history, nationality, gender and class from a female point of view to critique Haiti's political and social circumstances and expose the ways in which Haitian women have been oppressed and rendered invisible."19 As feminists who came of age during the regime, Lahens, Trouillot, and Mars all wrote under the pressures exerted by the specter of Duvalierism. Each wrote at least one novel inspired by, and set within the time frame of, the dictatorship.20
Yanick Lahens, Évelyne Trouillot, and Kettly Mars are prolific authors. Their publications span a wide diversity of genres and languages. They are locally rooted contemporary writers whose work appears regularly in Haitian venues and in prominent publications such as Le Nouvelliste. They are frequent guests on local programs and radio shows in Port-au-Prince and beyond. Having achieved an international audience, these women now have a global reach that expands conversations about Haitian literature.
In an interview organized at the Morisset Cultural Center in Port-au-Prince, Mars reveals her approach to writing in world-making terms. The title of my book is derived from her words taken from that interview: "Écrire, pour moi, c'est prendre des engagements. C'est aussi prendre des positions. C'est pourquoi quand j'écris, je prends des positions. Je cherche d'autres univers, pousser aussi loin que possible mes audaces et arpenter des lieux inconnus. [To write, for me, is to make commitments. It also means taking positions. That's why when I write, I take positions. I look for other worlds, pushing my daring as far as possible and exploring unknown places]."21 What Mars calls a search for autres univers---the idea of looking for "other worlds"---is instructive. Writing as a generative process of looking and seeing animates all these authors' works. World-making characterizes their fiction. That Mars sees writing as "taking a position" relates directly to the importance of ethical questions in her work.
Évelyne Trouillot has also referred to the need to create new worlds in her writing. In an interview with Chantal Kénol, published in Écrits d'Haïti, Trouillot explains that while her lived experience informs her positionality, as a writer she must be capable of imagining beyond that lived experience. "Je voulais entrer dans ces êtres là et je pense justement que c'est ça le défi de l'écrivain. S'oublier soi-même et entrer dans un autre univers [I wanted to enter these beings and I truly think that is the challenge of the writer. Forget yourself and enter another universe]."22 Like Mars, Trouillot envisions writing in terms of universes, a world-making impulse reflecting the reality of her intersecting identities. Through fiction Trouillot wrestles with the unbounded task of parsing who she is:
Je suis tout à la fois femme, écrivaine, haïtienne. C'est difficile de faire un tri et de privilégier un aspect sur un autre...Il y a des gens qui ont peur du mot féministe. Moi, ça ne me fait pas peur, parce que selon moi ceux qui pensent (femmes et hommes) et veulent des changements dans l'intérêt de tous ont une responsabilité par rapport au traitement que la société fait aux femmes. 23
[I am a woman, a writer, and a Haitian all at once. It's hard to sort and prioritize one aspect over another. . . . There are people who are afraid of the word feminist. I am not afraid of it because in my opinion those who think (women and men) and want changes in the interest of all have a responsibility for society's treatment of women.]
Trouillot affirms that the various locations of identity are multiplicative and inter-imbricating. Her approach to feminism invokes its universal appeal. Men and women alike stand to benefit from feminism.
Similarly, Yanick Lahens has openly reflected on how race, class, and gender operate for her as a Haitian writer. When asked if there is a Haitian-specific version of écriture féminine, she responds:
Et je suis femme, haïtienne, noire. Je ne peux pas m'empêcher d'écrire à partir de ma situation de femme aussi! Je n'ai jamais milité pour la cause féministe. Mais quand je lis Marie Chauvet, ou les contemporaines comme Évelyne Trouillot et Kettly Mars, je remarque qu'on écrit les choses différemment. Parce qu'on a des vécus différents de ceux des hommes.
[And I am a woman, Haitian, Black. I cannot escape from writing with my own situation as a woman as a point of departure! I have never fought in the feminist movement, but when I read Marie Chauvet, or contemporary writers like Évelyne Trouillot or Kettly Mars, I notice that we write things differently. Because we have life experiences that differ from those of men]."24
Lahens's passionate response and her reference to past and present Haitian women authors mirror the objectives of my own project. By naming Chauvet, Mars, and Trouillot, she identifies herself as part of a longer tradition of Haitian feminist writing and locates herself within a cadre of contemporary feminist writers. In what follows I extend her point to pursue the shared "difference" that she notes, which in my view, is their adherence to a Black feminist ethic.
While working on my book and moving through the publication process, I was particularly struck by what I read as an intellectual contestation of my forthright situating of Haitian feminism as Black feminism. In fact, Caribbean feminists have always been involved in contributing to Black feminist theorizing even when they were not recognized for doing so. Scholars such as Carole Boyce Davies, Joan Anim-Addo, Kaiama Glover, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs have acknowledged and often bring to light Caribbean women's contributions to Black feminism. These writers have acknowledged the foundational role of theorists like Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Barbara Christian all of whom are of Caribbean descent. But as Glover astutely points out, too often, these examples are not included in the canon of Black feminism "as Caribbean women."25 This is especially true in the case of Lorde, correctly described by Michelle Wright as "a global feminist par excellence who made explicit and frequent connections between Black women from the United States and the Caribbean and the working classes, gender relations, labor relations, colonialism...."26 Also emphasizing the fact that thinkers like Lorde and Jordan are embraced as Black feminists but not regarded as examples of Caribbean feminism existing within Black feminism, Alexis Gumbs excavates that tendency further by drawing on her own experiential knowledge. She explores her own sensibilities as a feminist of Caribbean descent whose entry into Black feminism occurs because of the Caribbean strands. For Gumbs, the exposure to Lorde and Jordan as both Black and Caribbean feminists not only resonated with her personally but helped to spark her now deeply entrenched feminist consciousness.
At the same time, Boyce Davies rightfully points out that "Black feminism is sometimes reduced to one generalized category which hides all kinds of differences and subsumes all sorts of submerged identities." This has given rise to a healthy ambivalence toward a totalizing Black feminist standpoint rooted in an American centered discourse.27 We can understand the resistance to an all-encompassing Black feminism as a call to affirm the specific within the universal that holds both together. As Joan-Anim Addo notes, "[T]he voices of Black women represent a key part of the literary whole within the [Caribbean] region. In a socio-political context premised upon hierarchical racial divisions riddled with issues of oppression, dominance and resistance, in the first instance, Black women's writing is a vital sign...the umbrella term 'Caribbean literature' however, is, by intention, antithetical to the pointing up of social divisions."28 In my work, I frame that primary intellectual problem identified by Anim-Addo and other Caribbean feminists of the 1990s and 2000s as a possibility for exposing how a dialectic of recognition and lack of recognition is a doggedly persistent tension in all our thinking, scholarship, citational practices, and intellectual work. Caribbean feminist scholars have done much to stretch these critical frames and make them more fluid, capacious, and dynamic. To this end, Tonya Haynes insightfully notes that "Caribbean feminism has been forced to confront plurality, privilege and the multiple axes of oppression which Caribbean women face. These continued negotiations, tensions, and contestations that fill the interstices between two equally contested concepts with multiple meanings---Caribbean and feminism---are not resolved (nor do they need to be) by a move to the plural feminisms."29 Haynes's point resonates deeply. She is unequivocal in her stance that a mere addition of the plural form is not sufficient to resolve or even accommodate the tensions in Caribbean feminism. If I initiate this conversation holding Black feminism and Haitian feminism together, it is because, like Gumbs, my own entry in these fields has always been shadowed by a generative doubling. To riff off Gina Athena Ulysse's productive concept of rasanblaj: by bringing Black feminism and Haitian feminism together, m'ap fè yon rasanblaj [I make a re-assemblage]. In my work and life, I purposefully place these traditions alongside one another to attend to how they overlap and intersect. My goal is to facilitate a conversation between Black feminists from different geographical contexts and acknowledge multiple feminist genealogies within an overall, universalizing project of Black Feminism.30 By referring to it as a form of rasanblaj, I am acknowledging, as Ulysse and Alexander do (and embody) in their conversation that "when people from different areas, different reaches, different geographies, different disciplines, different practices are all calling for the same thing, some Spirit of re-assembly is already at work."31
Still, it is worth noting that Haitian feminists have not figured prominently in discussions of Caribbean and global Black feminism. Probing the various webs of affiliation woven around feminism for Black women in the diaspora, M. Jacqui Alexander challenges us to ask bolder questions about the genealogies of "Pan-African feminism" to which we lay claim. She asks, "Shall we continue to read Edwidge Danticat while Haiti remains, like the Pacific, on the rim of consciousness, or enters our consciousness only in relation to continued U.S. dominance?" This question is revelatory and extremely relevant.32 I take Alexander's point to mean that the popularity of Danticat as a Haitian-American author has not led to more sustained and more meaningful engagement with thinking and theorizing about Haiti. I would add to this that the inability to see Haitian feminism as a manifestation of Black feminism stems from a similar lack of knowledge and an unwillingness to engage Haiti beyond the most commonly clichéd signifiers. Of course---and as Évelyne Trouillot has recently pointed out in an essay on the power dynamics of language and translation---how Black feminist thought circulates is also related to the languages of publication. One of my primary aims is to complicate and expand traditional notions of Black feminism by not only including Haitian feminist authors but also by placing them in productive dialogue with US-based, African diasporic, transnational global, and postcolonial feminists. Under present conditions Black feminism is US-centric in ways that are detrimental to feminist theorizing.
I begin my book with an author from a different generation---Paulette Poujol Oriol (1926-2011), a Haitian feminist intellectual, artist, and activist. Paulette Poujol Oriol is a venerated figure of twentieth-century Haitian literature who deserves far more scholarly attention than she has yet received.33 A trail-blazing feminist, prolific essayist, and inspiring creative writer, Poujol Oriol worked first in theater, then as a feminist organizer, and finally as a fiction writer. As an educator and a writer whose prodigious body of work spans the twentieth century, she explored crucial social issues, each time approaching her ideas intersectionally. She wrote about how class, race (color), and gender operate multiplicatively and inform the lived experience of diverse Haitian women. A devoted champion of the arts and an artist herself, Poujol Oriol was the founder of Piccolo Teatro and for many years the director of École nationale des arts. Her impact on the theatre scene in Haiti was immense. Paulette Poujol Oriol is also one of the few Haitian authors to receive, in 1988, Le Monde'scoveted prize for the best short story written in French in that year. She also received Haiti's prestigious literary prize Le Prix Henri Deschamps.
In her activity with La Ligue féminine d'action sociale [Women's Social Action League] (Haiti's first official women's organization founded in 1934), Poujol Oriol advanced gender justice from her exuberantly feminist perspective.34 Describing the origins of this organization, Poujol Oriol explained in a 2011 interview with historian Chantalle Verna that these Haitian women "started to go to the public hospitals to see how the women were treated, not only for medical treatment but also to see if [the female patients] were being treated like human beings. They started visiting the prisons, and the asylums." These women were unabashed at highlighting their advocacy for more ethical and humane treatment of all Haitian women, but especially the most marginalized.35 Many of the concerns addressed by the Ligue align with the questions that I attend to in this study---organizing, the needs of the elderly, women's human rights, moral and intellectual life---were central to their platform.36 That Poujol Oriol explores these themes in her fiction underscores the productive alliance between her activism and her art. An examination of her oeuvre reveals that ethical reflection shaped her creative project. She was compelled to inform her creative and intellectual work with feminist principles. The foremost Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste wrote at the time of her death, "Romancière, metteur en scène, comédienne, [elle] est considérée comme l'une des figures majeures des lettres haïtiennes. C'est une grande perte pour le monde littéraire [Novelist, director, actor, she was considered one of the major Haitian women of letters. This is a huge loss for the literary world]." She was undeniably "une des grandes figures du mouvement féministe haïtien [One of the great figures of the Haitian feminist movement]." Her imprint remains on the generations that have followed her.37
My book begins with Paulette Poujol Oriol because she pre-figures the contemporary authors I most want to bring forward: Yanick Lahens, Kettly Mars, and Évelyne Trouillot. For them as for Poujol Oriol, literature creates a space for ethical reflection, and their novels can be read as part of a tradition of feminist writing in which ethics and aesthetics intertwine. Their approach, like hers, is undergirded by Black feminist principles including the relational dynamic between the individual and the collective, a dialectical relationship between oppression and activism, the linking of experience and ideas, and the centrality of social justice.38
My emphasis on the theme of a Black feminist ethic begins with Poujol Oriol through whom I chart writing that attends to intersectionality. I am also in conversation with contemporary Haitian and Haitian-American feminists including Gina Athena Ulysse, Darline Alexis, and Sabine Lamour.Contemporary Haitian and Haiti-associated feminists are especially important to my project because they openly embrace and identify as Black feminist in their scholarship and activism. That consummate champion of women's rights Myriam Merlet (1956-2010) envisioned her feminist work as an effort to center the lives of Haitian women in a way that allowed scholars and activists to remain attentive to the social world:
I look at things through the eyes of women, very conscious of the roles, limitations, and stereotypes imposed on us. The idea is to give women the opportunity to grow so that we may end up more complete human beings who can really change things. Individuals should have the opportunity to be complete human beings, women as well as men, youth as well as old people, the lame as well as the healthy.39
Merlet's reference to "more complete human beings" underlines the recognition of the humanity of Haitian women, situating feminism as a universal human project. Looking at things through the eyes of women is a central concept in my work. My use of the gerundive phrase "looking intentionally" is meant to echo and celebrate Barbara Christian's explanation of "theorizing" as "active and dynamic."40 Merlet's attention to looking through the eyes of women while being conscious of the social context performs the necessary Black feminist work of observing and critiquing how intersectionality compounds oppressions in myriad ways and contexts. As bell hooks declares with the precision of simplicity, "There is power in looking."41 Looking is a form of encounter and therefore is implicated inescapably in the dynamics of power. Because literature a form of looking for other worlds, itengages ethics by offering an invitation to readers and critics to pose ethical questions while looking at the world in search of both others and the Other.42
Post-colonial theorist Gayatri Spivak identifies ethics as "continual questioning from below," an expansive formulation that resonates because it focuses on inquiring rather than concluding and on recognizing the power differentials involved in ethics.43 The need for a theoretical-analytical framework called Black feminism that equips us to explore the ethical complexity of these novels emerges from the questions, challenges, and problems that these authors' body of work forces us to confront and live out imaginatively in our own lives no matter where we find ourselves situated.
1 "The Combahee River Collective Statement," How We Get Free, 15.
2 Taylor, How We Get Free, 45.
3 Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle, 3.
4 Mohanty et al., Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 7.
5 "Black feminism emerged as a theoretical and practical effort demonstrating that race, gender, and class are inseparable in the social worlds we inhabit." Angela Davis's simple definition of Black feminism is useful. Freedom is a Constant Struggle (3).
6 Feminist scholars like Carole Boyce-Davies, M. Jaqui Alexander, Michelle Stephens, Carole Boyce-Davies, Omi'seke Natasha Tinsley, Alexis Gumbs, Laurie Lambert, Kaiama Glover, Curdella Forbes and others have been instrumental in calling attention to the global, and more specifically Caribbean dimensions of Black feminist writing.
7 I analyze Bain de lune in the final chapter of this book.
8 Lahens, L'exil..., 65.
9 Lahens, L'exil..., 50.
10 Ménard, Écrits d'Haïti, 274.
11 Trouillot, "Respecting the Diversity of Creativity," https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article/january-2021-international-black-voices-respecting-the-diversity-of-creativ
12 <https: data-preserve-html-node="true"//lenouvelliste.com/lenouvelliste/article/95899/Inauguration-du-Centre-culturel-Anne-Marie-Morisset>
13 Danticat, "Évelyne Trouillot," 52.
14 Vitiello, "Douceurs et violences dans l'écriture de Kettly Mars," 369.
15 https://kettlymars.com/biographie/
16 https://kettlymars.com/biographie/
17 Vitiello, "Douceurs et violences dans l'écriture de Kettly Mars," 369.
18 Charles, "Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti," 136.
19Clitandre, Edwidge Danticat, 72.
20 I am referring to Saisons Sauvages and La Mémoire aux abois.
21 http://www.lenational.org/kettly-mars-melissa-beralus-centre-anne-marie-morisset/
22 Ménard, Écrits d'Haiti 272.
23 Ménard, Écrits d'Haiti 273.
24 Lahens entretien, "Je ne peux pas m'empêcher..." http://africultures.com/je-ne-peux-pas-mempecher-decrire-a-partir-de-ma-situation-de-femmeaussi-12055/
25 Gumbs, Glover, and Navarro, "Writing Home" Episode 2.
26 Wright, "Feminism," Key Words for African-American Studies, 88.
27 Boyce Davies, Migrations of the Subject, 55.
28 Anim-Addo, Framing the Word: Gender and Genre in Caribbean Women's Writing, xi.
29 Haynes, "Interrogating Approaches to Caribbean Feminist Thought," 29.
30 Ulysse's concept of rasanblaj takes into account its different configurations of the term. She clarifies further that there is: "rasanblaj (as an organizing principle, of sorts) without even attempting to do a rasanblé (gather as people), especially knowing the nuances and multi-layered significations in this term. It is defined as assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping (of ideas, things, people, spirits. For example, fè yon rasanblaj, do a gathering, a ceremony, a protest)."
31 Ulysse, "Groundings on Rasanblaj with M. Jacqui Alexander."
32 Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 186.
33 Special Issue of Journal of Haitian Studies devoted to Paulette Poujol Oriol's work.
34 Although La Ligue has the honor of being Haiti's first feminist organization, scholars like Ann Marty and Natasha Tinsley have pointed out that "various nonfiction texts by women appeared...decades before the date commonly given for the beginning of the Haitian feminist movement." (Thiefing Sugar, 107).
35 Verna and Poujol Oriol, 246.
36 In an interview with historian Chantalle Verna, Poujol Oriol explains the origins of La Ligue as follows: "The Ligue was founded in 1934 by a lady who was the first lawyer in Haiti, Madeleine Sylvain. The first year the committee was made up of the founders, maybe 10 or 12 [women]. [Madeleine Sylvain, Alice Garoute, Fernande Bellegarde, Olga Gordon, Thérèse Hudicoirt, Marie Corvington, Alice Téligny Mathon, Esther Dartigue, Maud Turian, and Georgette Justin]. The first year they tried to study...to assess what were the real fundamental problems [...] Those women, the founders they wanted to help where help was mostly needed. They started to go to the public hospitals to see how the women were treated, not only for medical treatment but also to see if [the female patients] were being treated like human beings. They started visiting the prisons, and the asylums." Verna and Poujol Oriol, 246.
37 Augustin, "Décès de Paulette Poujol Oriol."
9 Here I am referring to the six distinguishing features outlined by Patricia Hill Collins in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. To paraphrase are that Black feminism: 1) is intersectional 2) links of experience and ideas 2) includes activism 3) incorporates intellectuals and acknowledges that intellectuals exist outside of the academy 4) is dynamic, changing, and evolving
39 Merlet, Walking on Fire, "the more people dream, the more likely that power can change. The more people share in the same dream...the more likely we will achieve it collectively." Intro. Beverly Bell.
40 Christian, "The Race for Theory," 12. Here I am thinking of the full quotation: "For people of color have always theorized (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun). And I am inclined to say that our theorizing is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking."
41 hooks, Black Looks, 115.
42 For looking as a Black feminist practice, see also bell hooks, Black Looks.
43 Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, 32. Spivak is especially compelling to me in this study due to what has been called her "unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political..."