Student Essay #1

Beyond the Plantation: Notes on the Creole, and the Diaspora, and the Imaginary

by Abidel Josue López

Citizenship remains a contentious topic in our global contemporary social fabric. To belong to a place is to belong to a people, a shared history, a shared vernacular, a shared trauma. To this extent, Haiti becomes a critical site of inquiry and of thought for En Voyage: Hybridity and Vodou in Haitian Art because it reimagines a landscape wherein a process of colonization and decolonial praxis has taken place and shaped discussions around the constructions of the Caribbean and the “modern world.” These processes, specifically creolization, play a pivotal role in how we imagine the archipelago and how the archipelago imagines itself from within and without its borders.

Borders create a critical intervention to engage in discourse shaping contemporary configurations of citizenship and belonging at a transnational level. As delineations of space and territory, borders map a geographic imaginary of a group of people and open up conversations about cosmologies. These walls, both cognitive and physical, become emblematic of the interpellative project on the social body of people both within and without these borders. Discussion of the diaspora conjures up conversations about identity. Cultural theorist Stuart Hall once suggested that “we should think… of identity as a ‘production,’ which is never complete, always in process, and always constituted within, not outside, representation.”1 Inasmuch as identity is a never finished project, diasporic identity is manipulated by forces that exist outside of borders, yet is nonetheless shaped by the violence of geography. To this extent, the Haitian diaspora uncovers a critical constellation that maps two of the principal tenets of our exhibition: hybridity and, thus, creolization.

While creolization plays a critical role in the development of Haiti, the roots of this process can be found at the linguistic level. The birth of a hybrid form of communication on the island helps shape discourse surrounding the enduring legacies of colonization, slavery, plantation economies, and Africanness that have shifted the paradigms within which Haitians experience their subjectivities. Because the history of Haiti is one that is marked by Hall’s persuasive argument of entanglement,2 to bring the process of creolization forward is to bring cultures of power to light. The power regime that framed the process of creolization is one that is all too familiar to that of the rest of Latin America, which is the idea of cultural mixing, or mestizaje. These two processes — creolization and mestizaje — are interlinked by the powers that became visible during the period marked by colonial interests and the development of plantation economies.

Coloniality is a hot topic in the academy because of the persistent and rapid change contemporary globalization presents. Yet these discussions often ignore the notion that global exchanges and interactions predate the “new economy.” In fact, globalization of the early modern period arguably brought the most change in human history and geography with the atrocities Christopher Columbus (1451-1506) and the Spanish crown committed in the Americas. Many historical accounts often relay Columbus’s colonialist endeavors but fail to include that Columbus in fact landed on the north side of contemporary Haiti in 1492.3 Consequently, while indigenous and native peoples already inhabited the island, the Spaniards and Columbus decided these names were irrelevant and instead christened the island composed of contemporary Haiti and the Dominican Republic, La Española, or Hispaniola. The politics of naming and remapping geographies aided this colonial project.

This colonial project that provides a framework for understanding creolization has thrived in the history of the Caribbean archipelago. But to understand creolization and the history of the Caribbean population, it is necessary to foreground the history of violence in the history of this region. Both Edouard Glissant and Stuart Hall echo the call to shed light on the enduring legacy of violence within the Caribbean context. Hall writes:

[I]t would be strange to describe the thematics of Caribbean vernacular culture without also including the notions of trauma, rupture, and catastrophe: the violence of being torn from one’s historic resting place, the brutal, abruptly truncated violence in which the different cultures were forced to coexist in the plantation system, the requirement to bend and include to the unequal hegemony of the Other, the dehumanization, the loss of freedom….4

The different cultures Hall refers to in this passage is an acknowledgment of the violent removal of the African diaspora and their carving out of spaces in the “New World.” African slaves found themselves in territories once inhabited by indigenous peoples and dominated by European colonizers. The intermingling of these three different groups provided a social fabric in which cultural and linguistic mixing occurred. The cultural mixing or creolization provided fertile terrain for a hybrid aesthetic. In many ways, this globalized aesthetic paved way for the art displayed in this exhibition. As discussed below, many works explore the question of diaspora through means of migration, while others show the products of cultural mixing as part of the everyday life and belief systems of Haitians today. While the removal and displacement of African peoples seem distant to our epoch, the legacy of the act remains present today with the contemporary Haitian diaspora.

But themes of displacement also fueled ideas of the third space — a liminal space wherein different cultures mixed to create a creolized identity. In her book Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination, Michaeline Crichlow writes,

Creolization, so aptly described by Balutansky and Sourieau as ‘that syncretic process of transverse dynamics that endlessly reworks and transforms the cultural patterns of varied social and historical experiences and identities,’ has figured significantly in the Caribbean’s complex histories of globalization, nationalization and regionalization.5

This legacy of removal and, consequently, of cultural mixing persists today. But to talk about this hybridization, an assessment of terror and violence must be brought to the forefront. Historian Brian Axel discusses the importance of foregrounding the constitutive force of terror within a diaspora.6 Axel argues that by placing the focus on the original territory of the diaspora, discussions around the embodiment of the trauma caused by displacement are shadowed by imaginary perceptions of the origin story of such peoples. This process of imagination has worked in favor of creating an Other in relation to the European and American “us.” A notable example of the creation of the Other is located in Edward Said’s seminal text Orientalism, in which he illustrates how the process of cultural representation has molded the imaginary to create negative and racist perceptions of “The East.”7 Taking this as a point of departure, my argument is to understand how these diasporic peoples experience their subjectivities outside of the borders of Haiti. These experiences help create cultural representations of their narratives in order to promote the amalgamation of pain and perseverance and, in the process, dispel any notion of Haitian identity as homogenous and provide a futurity in which the Haitian is understood as a complicated subject in the history of the “Modern World.” To this extent, Hall’s theory of identity-as-a-lifelong-process rings true. Such a process is also accentuated by the constant migration between and among national borders. Haiti and its diaspora in particular have become subject to the constant act of moving back and forth, both within the island (to the Dominican Republic) and throughout the Caribbean and the Americas.

This act of literal and metaphorical movement is not a strange act for the Haitians. In fact, Wanick Louis’s series of three boats depict the political turmoil of Haitian peoples today. The entrance of the exhibition situates Haiti’s contemporary migrations and their relation to history for the viewer. The first boat, likely created in 2001 near the end of the United Nations’ Political and Peacemaking Missions in Haiti, depicts a group full of armed white men with some black figures interspersed throughout the United Nations boat. The second boat, Peace and Love from the mid 1990s, depicts nonwhite figures dressed in army attire on a boat with “Paix-Amour” (Peace and Love) sprawled across the side. Notably, the first and second boats both carry the United States flag on the right sides while two men help each other with the sewing of the Haitian flag. Finally, culminating the series is another work, Jeremie Port au P from the mid 1990s, which depicts a boat full of black people in motion and interacting with each other. The green boat includes the words Jeremie-port-aup, referring to its travel destinations: Jeremie and Port-au-Prince, 117 miles away from each other. This boat carries a fully restored Haitian flag while the people appear to be more animated and dynamic with their movements than in the other two vessels.

The Wanick Louis series, while created over a decade, alludes to the racially diverse people who constantly interact with the landscape. It is also not a coincidence that Wanick Louis situates the subjects and narratives in the middle of turbulent waters. As art historian Fredo Rivera points out in the Preface of the catalogue, Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant, opens up his book, The Poetics of Relation, with the imagery of an open boat.

To carry this point further, the ships in Louis’s series help to create a stratum in which mechanisms of power take place especially within the context of taking and reclaiming. Simultaneously, Bien-Aimé’s Untitled work (undated) makes power its central focus. The image depicts a group of nine black subjects in a makeshift wooden boat caught in the middle of turbulent waves. In the image, one mermaid and two sea creatures approach the boat while the subjects create hand signals. The image also includes a U.S-owned ship and helicopter with “Hamilton” written across both engines.

The water below the ships in the four images presented at the entrance of our exhibition aims to point out the normalized effect of the tumultuous relationship between the Haitians and foreign aid. By depicting the water differently in the four artworks, the images effectively convey the notion that, while insular in nature, the boats are always affected by the outside world around it. In this case, the boat is a site in which Haitian people are protected yet still affected by foreign sources and the nation-state. Similarly, Giles Deleuze introduces the importance of ships — especially that of slave ships — on discourses surrounding the mechanisms which produce one’s subjectivities. Deleuze turns to the metaphor of the boat because it acts as the “interior of the exterior.”8 He continues to write that the interior of the boat provides shelter and protection from the forces controlling the world outside the boat. Despite the protection, the interior is constantly manipulated by the exterior world around it. This theoretical framework of the insular dynamics represented in the motif of the boat also help elevate Michel Foucault’s argument of the heterotopia within a utopic fabric represented by the African diaspora in the Haitian context.
Taking Sir Thomas Moore’s early idea of a utopic 16th-century England as a point of departure for his theoretical ruminations on self-contained enclaves within a larger society, Foucault builds upon such theory to propose heterotopia. He suggests,

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places — places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society — which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.9

The heterotopia presented by Foucault echoes the similar function of the Third Space theory coined by Homi Bhabha. Foucault’s description of heterotopias, however, argues that it becomes a site in which the other non-heterotopic sites are contradicted. In the case of Haiti, the heterotopia can be found in moments of movement and of displacement from one’s origins. Similarly, the Third Space theory provides an understanding that every person is unique because of their position as a “hybrid.”10

We hope that, in creating the exhibition, we have forged a Third Space of our own in Grinnell, Iowa, where the creolized art forms speak for themselves. As Gayatri Spivak would have it, the aim of this exhibition is to let the subaltern speak for itself through the myriad of themes that dispel myths of homogeneity on the island.11 However, this essay ends where the exhibition begins: with the concept of using the boat as a reference point for imagination into the cosmology and world of Haiti. Echoing Glissant’s use of the boat, Foucault writes: “the boat… has been… the greatest reserve of the imagination…”12 To this extent, En Voyage affords the world of Grinnell, Iowa, an opportunity to employ its imagination and cross the different borders in which it exists to conceptualize the various narratives of those with a history tied closely with that of Iowa — the state with the largest collection of Haitian art in the world. But just as much as the histories of Iowa and Haiti are closely connected, so is the theme that prevails across our country today: that of exile.

While the works presented in En Voyage depict the marvelous minds of contemporary Haitian artists, their status of exile situate them within a framework “in which the pathos of summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring are nearby but unobtainable.”13 We hope, too, that En Voyage provides a platform for the exiled and displaced to “cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience”14 through their artistic conventions and beg you to ask: Why En Voyage? Why now? Why Iowa? While the answers to these questions may not become apparent immediately, your willingness to explore your relationship to the art presented in this exhibition will provide you with a bridge to cross because, if nothing else, we know this to be true: “no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar (there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks).”15

1 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 222.
2 Stuart Hall, “Creolité and the Process of Creolization,” in Documenta 11_Platform 3, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatzje Cantz, 2003), 31.
3 Matthew Sparke, “What Postcolonial Theory Tells Us about Haitian History and Struggle,” Washington University, accessed December 7, 2017, http://www.washington.edu/omad/ctcenter/ projects-common-book/mountains-beyond-mountains/postcolonial-theory/.
4 Stuart Hall, “Creolité and the Process of Creolization,” in Documenta 11_Platform 3, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatzje Cantz, 2003), 35.
5 Michaeline A. Crichlow, Globalization and the Post-Creole Imagination: Notes on Fleeting the Plantation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 15.
6 Brian Keith Axel, “The Diasporic Imaginary,” Public Culture 14, no. 2 (Spring 2002): 411-428, Project MUSE.
7 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1979).
8 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006), 121.
9 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Architecutre/Mouvement/ Continuité 5 (1984): 46-49.
10 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004), 55.
11 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66-111.
12 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” Architecutre/Mouvement/Continuité 5 (1984): 49.
13 Edward Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 148.
14 Ibid, 147.
15 Gloria Analdúa, “Foreword,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1984), iv.