This decision to go back, which I have written about ad infinitum, reveals as much about my personal journey as it does my professional one. With more time, the two would intertwine in curious ways, never to be separated, as I embraced yet another set of hyphens, this time as artist-academic-activist. These identities would become increasingly distinct, especially as I transitioned from relying less on the social sciences and more on the arts. Moreover, irrespective of my chosen medium, I was already out there as a politically active and vocal member of Haiti’s “tenth department.”4
Out There in the Public Sphere
I often say I did not set out to “do” public anthropology,5 but that’s not exactly true. It’s also not a lie. The fact is I decided to seek a doctoral degree in anthropology for a singular reason, Haiti. I became progressively frustrated with simplistic explanations of this place that I knew as complex. I became determined to increase and complicate my own knowledge of Haiti, always with the hope of eventually sharing what I learned with others.
My plans did not immediately work out as intended; I ended up doing my dissertation research on female independent international traders in Kingston, Jamaica. Yet once I began to teach, I regularly offered a seminar that sought to demystify the Haiti in popular imagination, and to help students envision a more realistic one. Besides that course, for many years, my anthropological engagement with Haiti was off the grid of my chosen professional track. It was the subject of my artistic pursuits—poetry and performance—and the focus of occasional reflexive papers I presented at conferences. That changed drastically one day in January 2010.
My transformation was punctuated by the fact that one month before that afternoon, I did the unthinkable: I set out on a trip to Haiti for the first time without informing my family. As an artist, and a self-identified feminist made in the Haitian diaspora, I was curious about the impact of migration. I experienced it as a rupture, and I continuously wondered about my personal and professional development—whom I might have become had I remained in Haiti. The plan was to go there and see if it was possible for me to have a relationship with Haiti that was entirely mine.
Where exactly would I fit?
Three weeks after I returned, circumstances would not only force me to rethink that question, but thrust me into the public sphere in the shadow and footsteps of other engaged anthropologists who resisted the urge to remain in the ivory tower. As fate would have it, I had already taken calculated steps to get there.
“Write to Change the World”
That’s the tagline of the one-day seminar I attended in October 2009 at Simmons College in Boston. Among other things, the Op-Ed Project sought to empower women with the tools and skills needed to enter the public sphere as writers of opinion pieces. The premise was to engage the fact that upper-class white men submit more than 80 percent of all published op-eds. The project worked to change these statistics by showing women, especially, how to write and pitch to editors. I remember pondering the reality of the remaining 20 percent, inevitably white women and a few minorities. As a black Haitian woman, I wasn’t even a decimal point.
I had briefly dabbled in this medium before. In 1999, fresh out of graduate school, I wrote “Classing the Dyas: Can the Dialogue Be Fruitful?”—a piece about returning to Haiti from the diaspora and the brewing tensions with those who live at home. It was published in the Haitian Times. Nearly a decade later, I penned another piece, this one on Michelle Obama, which appeared in the Hartford Courant days before the 2008 elections. The newspaper editor’s headline, “Michelle Obama: An Exceptional Model,” topped my piece instead of my feistier “She Ain’t Oprah, Angela or Your Baby Mama: The Michelle O Enigma.”
I was always interested in having my say; I have been labeled opinionated (not a compliment). It is a fact that black women who speak their minds have historically been chastised for “talking back.” In that sense, I am not at all special. Since I did not possess the know-how necessary to negotiate this world of opinion pages, I sought to understand it from an insider’s perspective. So I signed up for Simmons’s seminar.
I learned not only how mainstream media functions, but also how gatekeepers operate—the importance of networks and connections. Most importantly, I gained critical insights on how notions of expertise are socially constructed, what is required to increase readership, and how to expand one’s “sphere of influence.” While seminar participants were encouraged to put newly acquired skills to the test, I was not inspired to write an op-ed until early the following year. Still, this experience did motivate me to keep on learning.
To that end, in December 2009, I applied and was selected for the Feminist Majority Foundation’s Ms. Magazine Workshop for Feminist Scholars—a three-day boot camp that trained activist-oriented academics to become public intellectuals. The intent was quite specific: Ms.’s ultimate goal was to show us how to put our academic knowledge to work by making it more accessible to the public. Participants were also encouraged to write for the Ms. magazine blog, which I eventually began and continue to do intermittently.
From both of these seminars, I not only obtained critical understanding of my voice and style, but also saw how and where aspects of my nuanced perspective might actually fit in the world of fast media. Although quite scary at first, the best incentive was the knowledge that I would be restricted to limited space (five to seven hundred words maximum) and had to gain a reader’s attention quickly, often in just the first sentence. This new approach to writing meant undoing earlier academic training, eschewing professional attachment to the value of jargon-laden prose and a method of slowly developed storytelling that emphasized covering all bases. While it was challenging, it was also freeing to use my ethnographic eye and sensibilities to creatively unpack cultural complexities knowing the endpoint was to introduce readers to potentially alternative views. With more experience, I really liked this medium.
No Silence after the Quake
My first op-ed was a commentary on James Cameron’s blockbuster film Avatar. I used the Op-Ed Project mentor-editor program to get feedback before pitching my piece, “Avatar, Voodoo, and White Spiritual Redemption.” I discussed various aspects of the film, including its connection to New Age spiritualism, which hardly ever incorporates Haitian Vodou, as it is still marked as evil in interfaith circles. My op-ed went live on Huffington Post on January 11, 2010, and the next afternoon the earthquake struck Haiti. A couple of days later, the Reverend Pat Robertson publicized the infamous evangelical belief that Haiti was being punished for its pact with the devil. Similar views would find space in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, the two most widely read papers in the United States.
I began a writing spree that lasted well over two years. The sense that there was so much at stake was a feeling I could clearly articulate, and it was quite evident in my first post-quake op-ed, “Amid the Rubble and Ruin: Our Duty to Haiti Remains,” published January 14 on npr.org. I recounted the impact of my recent trip and the realization that indeed, I could have a relationship with my birth country as an independent adult. What I also found were people with whom I could work in solidarity and who were determined to contribute their collective effort toward transforming the Haiti they had inherited. I say “they” because as a Haitian-American living in the diaspora, I am only too conscious of the fact that I have the privilege of making my life elsewhere. I can always leave, and thus would always be akin to an “outsider within.”6 Only those with concrete knowledge of infrastructural conditions in Haiti truly understood the full devastating impact of that disaster at the time.
In the days, weeks, and months that followed, words, sentences twirled in my head at all hours. I often found myself waking in the middle of the night, driven to writing stints until I got to a point where I felt I had no more to say. Most of the pieces I penned went live. Some (not all of them were about Haiti) were rejected, and others