For the departed

For Haïti

And in reference to Asako Narahashi’s ‘half wake and half asleep in the water’ (photograph) 2001

…under water,

sinking, eyes

closed, listening

to the voices

the sea, hopeful

not to drown

remembering,

arms wide, mantra:

the body is but water

and salt

…will float up

…sooner or later

…deep under,

sky water,

salt swimming

open

eyes….the ocean murmurs

from the depths

her belly

broken, to jagged shore:

“this time,

I would gladly have taken them

in my womb

for all eternity”

…arms stirring blue light

staying afloat…

listening to waves

drumming eulogy…

…remaining under

as long hold of breath, possible

…in fear of… surfacing

….in fear of …the angry aria

of the nameless dead

riding the gales,

tumbling down

defiled mountains over,

in defense of

wreckage

of hurricanes…

the sheet of sheen above

like ice

to break…

treading water, invisibly, slowly, methodically

…waters embracing

like folds of blankets…

treading the dark, pensively

…what could be the answer

to the riddle

tectonics, shifts…

if movement

could stop time,

turn back

clocks,

tread she would

for seven and a day

…to reach the hour of before,

when an afternoon

of slumber

meant nothing more

than heat, sweat, flies buzzing,

the rooster’s cry, thirst

for the sea

…bracing under….

..descending

to the nether,

to Vilokan, to dance

the dead, the living

gods, our ancestors

….never to utter, “I’m swamped”

….”I’m buried alive”

mindless phrases

swimming

against the ether

….all limbs

intact to brace

against the never

…to be ever…

ever again….

the never

of again…

moving

very slowly…

this

is what the sea sung:

to carry the dead,

as our mothers

carried us,

not to remain

submerged, enfolded

in her layers

pulsing waters

….push…the lullaby

…push, push up…

what remains on shore

is for us all

to bear…

the air, fresh of despair,

the stale hope:

Let us carry

our mothers

as they

have carried us….

Myriam J. A. Chancy

Memorial Day, May 31, 2010

Nancy Palus/IRIN; Haitian Woman, Port-au-Prince, 2010

“Hearing Our Mothers: Safeguarding Haitian Women’s Self-Representation & Practices of Survival.”[1]

by Dr. Myriam J. A. Chancy, Professor of English, University of Cincinnati

(Please do not quote without permission or proper attribution)

Revolution is the most dramatic appearance of a conscious people or class on the state of history.

– Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

In the aftermath of the devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010 in Haiti, editorials and opinion pieces flooded the media internationally.  Though initial pieces focused on the tragedy of the catastrophe, news reportage was soon followed by ill-informed and sometimes intentionally ill-informed pieces condemning Haiti’s history and government as if these had engineered the calamity.  The most notorious of these detracting commentators, of course, was Pat Robertson, who declared that Haiti had “swore a pact with the devil.”  The notion that Haiti is “cursed” or “devilish,” is, of course, not new, but in the days following the earthquake, such terms were repeated with such force of purpose that it seemed as if Haiti’s history was unknown to most consumers of the media produced junket on Haiti’s woes.  At a time when how Haiti’s devastation was affecting its vastly impoverished population, the question of whether Haiti and Haitians deserved the catastrophe, seemed more important to some pundits than the loss of life and habitat caused by the massive 7.1 Richter scale earthquake.  As many post-earthquake opeds by reputable journalists and contemporary thinkers have pointed out, by recourse to historical data, Haiti’s “threat” has had a long history. Since the 1800s, the US has operated to “misrecognize” Haiti in ways useful to the tenets of Jeffersonian racial fears – to keep Haiti “black,” and the United States “white” – even as neither nation could uphold such codes of ‘purity’ in an increasingly mobile and hybrid world. Indeed, the Occupation of 1915-1934, as many have noted, and as Tracy Kidder and Colin Dayan both underscore in recent writings, left the country further crippled.  Noting the brutality of the Occupation, Dayan writes of 1919: “more than 3,000 peasants had been killed.  Another 5,000 died in labor camps that the garde supervised for the occupying forces.  When the United States left, she saddled the country with another foreign debt – a massive $40 million—which destroyed any possibility that Haiti might enjoy a stable financial regime” (2)[2].  Dayan thus issues a warning to media consumers to pause when reading US-based reports of lootings, violence, and chaos emerging from Haiti’s ground zero.  “The exaggerations serve a purpose,” she writes, “rationalizing the militarization of aid, pushing for a new status for Haiti, that of U. S. protectorate, like Puerto Rico” (my emphasis 2).  Or, as Rebecca Solnit opines in her piece “When the Media Is the Disaster: Covering Haiti”: “The chaos already exists, and you can’t blame it on. . . people desperate for food and water.  Or you can, and in doing so help convince your audience that they’re unworthy and untrustworthy” (1).  That – in fact, is the point: to represent Haiti and Haitians as both unworthy and untrustworthy in order to justify tutelage, repression, administrative/ political seizure, and, ultimately, the complete obliteration of Haiti’s once heralded history. Kidder, for one, also advances a crucial and critical view regarding on-going ‘humanitarian’ aid to Haiti, which should concern us here, underscoring the fact that “[in] the arena of international aid, a great many efforts, past and present, appear to have been doomed from the start” adding that “[t]here are the many projects that seem designed to serve not impoverished Haitians but the interests of the people administering the projects.  Most important, a lot of organizations seem to be unable – and some appear to be unwilling – to create partnerships with each other or, and this is crucial, with the public sector of the society they’re supposed to serve.”  Kidder ultimately resolves that efforts that result in Haitians “[running] the show”[3] ought to be the goal of any present and future aid schemes in order “to provide one way for Haiti, as it rebuilds, to renew the promise of its revolution” (2).  In all of this, Haitian women’s voices stand the most silence and neglected.  And, if as I have claimed before, Haitian women culturally work out of a “culture-lacune” or a culture made of silence through which they seek to work undercover, women’s voices coming out of Haiti today are telling a different story.

Haitian Women’s representation/self-representation post-earthquake

In Cincinnati, OH, on my way to work in the days after the earthquake, , I am confronted with a Red Cross billboard: a red cross against a black background with the words “Help Haiti, Now.”  There are no images but Haiti is in large letters, unmistakable.  This is a public plea I have never, in my lifetime, witnessed on behalf of my country of birth and heritage. I imagine that these billboards are plastered all over the US, a once in a lifetime, respectful visibility with no images of Haitians, only the call for humane assistance. I wonder how long they will last.  The first week of March, six weeks after the earthquake, the Red Cross billboard has been replaced with a Coca-Cola Ad targeting the eco-conscious: “Inside: Remarkable,” its copy reads: “Outside: Recyclable.”  Coca-Cola – nostalgic sign of childhood for some, of national pride for others, for yet others a sign of global, corporate greed, low-wage factories, of a substance that cannot nourish.  Today, in this context, Coca-Cola’s sign, red colors against white, has replaced the Red Cross, red against black: a vision for viewers to reach for their humanity facilely recycled — so that they, we, might forget the remarkable outpouring of concern and empathy for Haiti and Haitians on the ground, recycled in favor of the consumerism that blinds and cushions us from the need to redistribute resources equitably.

As some begin to forget, calls for compassion replaced with the banal, every day signs of empty nourishment, images of Haitians returning to their own fractured lives without choice of reprieve adorn magazines such as Time Inc.’s March commemorative “Haiti: Tragedy and Hope” issue for which the cover image is of a Haitian woman seemingly balancing the world on her head, face turned away from the camera eye [Image: Time cover photo]. It is not far different from the Alex Webb photograph adorning the [1999] cover of the original Stewart Brown edited Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories [the 2002 reissue makes use of an iguana: Image: Webb photo].  Showed in silhouette, not identified as a Haitian woman, she is both emblem and shadow, visible yet disappearing.  On the back of the Time, Inc. volume, a contrast: a close-up photograph of a man whose face is caked with debris dust, an expression unreadable for lack of context but seeming, without it, like a smile.  [Image: back cover] It is difficult not to read this photograph as part of the lexicon of images by which outsiders distort Haitian life by recourse to representations of Haitians as incomprehensible, ghoulish vodouisants. A survivor turned zombie, the man cannot be uncoupled from the myth-making machine.  Already the ultimate subalterns in the Western hemisphere, Haitians (unlike other recent earthquake survivors), are depicted as violent, child-like, volatile, machete wielding.  Most of all, they are represented as silent, as ghosts, and within these shadows, women and children when represented at all emerge as mute or noble, incapable of representing themselves.  [Image: Fashion for Haiti]

Such lack of audibility is underscored by the news that Myriam Merlet, Magalie Marcelin, and Anne Marie Coriolan, have perished, as have women leaders in the government and in journalism, Nicole Grégoire (in public administration), Gina Dorcena (of Radio Tropic), Mirland Dorvilus and Bernardine Bourdeau, both of SOFA (Jan. 27 reports).  There are and may be many more.  Some died days after the initial quake – Merlet five days after signaling continuously to the outside world for rescue from beneath the rubble above her by cell phone.[4] Merlet, Marcelin, and Coriolan were the current, respective leaders of women’s groups that emerged after the end of the Duvalier regime and that sought to give women voice across class difference – Enfofanm, Kay Fanm, & Sofa– especially under military rule, whether militarization occurred under the Haitian military (in the 1990s) or under US/UN intervention (in 1994; and again, off and on from 2004 to the present).  In these periods, women suffered disproportionate bodily harm ranging from dismemberments in the late 1990s (recall here Alerte Balance who was the first Haitian woman to be granted refugee status in the US as a victim of civil war and whose testimony, along with that of women survivors of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Croatian/Serbian/Bosnian, created with the assistance of representation by feminist lawyers such as Catherine McKinnon, new international laws against gendered warfare [Image: Balance/Enfofanm]) to systemic rapes designed to intimidate and desecrate women’s lives as groups vied for power without adequate leadership.  These women’s organizations provided radio, print and academic outlets through which what was happening to Haitian women was archived, utilizing first person interviews and disseminating the information beyond Haitian borders and, in some instances, providing legal recourse for bodily violation. 

Today, post-earthquake, numerous global women’s crisis organizations, have made clear, even in the absence of first hand reports, that women and children are currently, once again, disproportionately affected, suffering from lack of access to food supplies, lack of access to maternal health as well as post-delivery care, and, primarily, physically vulnerable to violence.   This includes rape in urban areas lacking electricity in the evenings, and in overcrowded shelters and tent cities, and as Colette Lespinasse, Director of the Groupe d’Appui aux Repatriés et Refugiés (GARR), relayed recently at a United Nations’ side event related to the Commission on the Status of Women meeting of March 3, there is also increasing concern “about the protection of orphaned children, who [are] at risk of being sold into forced work or prostitution, especially girls” (www.unifem.org/news_events/story_detail.php?StoryID=1046). The challenge today is to co-assist Haitian women in re-creating the structures and archives that will result in equal representation politically, equal protection civilly, and equal access economically.  As Naéla Mohamed Gabr, head of the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) notes, “[w]hilst the strength and resilience of women are in high demand following such emergencies, they cannot adequately fulfill these roles if their basic needs are unmet and if decision-makers ignore them” (IPS News).  These observations have been echoed by Ninaj Raul in her function as director of Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (HWRC), Dr. Henia Dakkak, in her function as technical advisor in the Humanitarian Response Branch at the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and numerous others. If Haitian women do not have a voice in the back and front rooms in which decisions about Haiti’s future are currently being decided then it will not be possible for them to determine the trajectory of their and their children’s lives.

Elaine Zuckerman, President of Gender Action & former Inter-American Development Bank Programs Officer for Haiti notes that, pre-earthquake, “Haitian women and young girls were victims of rampant rape and violence [and that] individual rape by export-processing factory managers was often a condition for continued employment in jobs that paid a pittance” (CEPR article).  Aid originating with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank loans came with conditions that “required Haiti to remove agricultural tariffs which  swamped the country with cheap US rice.  Haiti’s loss of agricultural tariffs, combined with continuous US and European protective agricultural subsidies, decimated poor Haitians’ farming livelihoods.  Women….composed the majority of farmers” (CEPR Report 16/02/2010).   Zuckerman thus concludes: “When you aid a nation’s women, their children and communities will rise.”

Many organizations, such as the UN-affiliated UNINEM, the HUAIROU Commission[5] and female heads of state such as Chile’s [former] President, Michelle Bachelet ,and Canada’s Governor General Michaëlle Jean, recognize this obvious equation but governmental and international organizations have been slow to follow through.  Good intentions aside, UNIFEM’s director Inés Alberdi, suggested in her address at the recent Beijing +15 meeting held in New York that the UN system’s accountability to women globally is undermined by lack of financial commitment.  Says she, “the four gender-specific entities together have been consistently under-resourced, representing together only a small fraction of …UN agencies.”  She continues: “Women’s groups have been clear from the beginning that if it is to live up to its potential, the entity will need a budget of US$1 billion, perhaps to be achieved in phases over the first few years” (UNIFEM).  The UN Annual budget, according to the Global Policy Organization (NY), is currently $30 billion for its worldwide activities; currently, the UN operates at a nearly billion dollar deficit, (coincidently, exactly the amount needed for the gender-specific entities) half of which is owed by the United States (http://www.globalpolicy.org/un-finance.html).

The world’s population is almost equally divided by gender yet its resources are not[6].  In most countries of the global South, all Caribbean nations, and Haiti in particular, women slightly outnumber men and yet, as Alberdi notes, “women are still outnumbered 4 to 1 in legislatures around the world; the proportion of women’s work in vulnerable employment is increasing in almost all parts of the developing world, reaching 85 percent in some regions; women’s wages still lag behind those of men; and millions endure some form of gender-based violence, often on a daily basis.”  What, then, in the end, are some solutions, to the problems of insecurity, political and economic invisibility?

Political representation of Haitian women must be ensured at all the meetings being planned in, outside, and on behalf of Haiti.  I am also very certain that whether Haitian or not, born in Haiti or descendents of Haitians, those of us who are outside must lend our resources and voices to Haitian women inside Haiti who know best what their true needs are.  As Monika Kalra Varma and Loune Viaud write in their Boston Globe piece of March 8: “The solution is simple, practical, and driven by human rights.  Representatives of donor states, government agencies, NGOs, and international organizations should meet with Haitians to discuss their communities’ needs,” and conclude that “it is time to make a new pledge – to heed and support the experts who can truly rebuild Haiti, the Haitian people” (1).  This does not mean that those of us who are not Haitian or those of us who are but witnessing at a distance must not take part in the rebuilding efforts, but that we must be cognizant of our privileges as we do so, whatever our respective and personal losses might be in Haiti itself. Haitian American poet Lenelle Moïse summarizes it best in her poem, “Quaking conversation” where she writes: “I want to talk about…./How I see a Haitian woman’s face/ every time I look down at a hot meal, / slip into my bed, take a sip of water/ & show mercy to a mirror. / How if my parents had made different/ decisions three decades ago, it could have been my arm/ sticking out of a mass grave.”  We are among the survivors whose privileges can make a difference: we must have the strength to have the difficult conversations that will place our needs beneath those of Haitians on the ground for their efforts are many and can provide a blueprint for organizing going forward.

In an effort to heed the call of Haitian women organizers in Haiti, and in concert with the Global Fund for Women, a coalition of women activists and organizers in the US, under the banner of “Poto-Mitan,” headed by journalist Ann-christine d’Adesky (to be found on WorldPulse.com), seeks to identify Haitian women organizations on the ground for equal access to funds.  Already identified Haitian women’s organizations on the ground in Port-au-Prince and Jacmel have also asked for assistance in reestablishing modes of communication through basic but accessible means, like the rebuilding of Radio Kiskeya;  job and skills training in the arts as reconstruction turns to traditionally male dominated fields ; and assistance in the disseminating of what one of Haiti’s leading feminist journalists, Liliane Pierre-Paul calls “the story of ordinary women” (d’Adesky 2)[7].

We must support and sustain collaborative ventures such as the Solidarity Camp Myriam Merlet, Anne Marie Coriolan et Magalie Marcelin, erected on the Haitian Dominican border in the aftermath of the earthquake and the mobilization efforts from New York to the Dominican Republic of Haitian Women for Refugees partnered with Lakou Radio New York and MUDHA (El Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico-Haitiana), headed by Sonia Pierre, which moved over a ton of supplies from the US in only their first of several planned convoys, through the Dominican Republic and into areas as far as Léogane.  In short, what I am speaking of, as the Huairou Commission advocates, is the need to sustain grassroots organizations as well as what the commission calls “funds for south-south community to community transfer.”[8] This means supporting south to south coalitions and collaborative efforts such that the North-South dynamic which we have seen at play in past aid to Haiti is curtailed; this means providing the resources to transmit and store data, whether in the form of images or of broadcasts as they come out of and are restored to Haiti; this means facilitating connections between groups on the ground such as linking the isolated Haitian women’s collective Atis Fanm Matenwa [Image] to the larger women’s groups in the capital who have recently asked for arts training.  Atis Fanm Matenwa, the original members of which were all women and their children, normally reliant on Port-au-Prince for its goods, have, in the past several years sustained themselves by creating hand-painted silk scarves on which they depict Haitian themes, and by making jewelry. At present, the women of Atis Fanm “are seen as an influential group” within their community and are invited to participate in meetings with community elders and leaders.  The Collective was also giving back to the community by providing a portion of their earnings to other local projects [Image].  Where once young men and women were trying to escape the small island, often to find themselves lost in the slums of Port-au-Prince, they were now banding together to preserve their land and villages, creating community food gardens and an experimental fish farm.  Today, their knowledge stands to make a difference in both theirs and others survival.

Kari Stoever, founder and president of Meliora Global, an organization that seeks to effectively partner “players from the public sector, business and civil society to find long-term solutions to the most challenging global health issues,”[9] suggests in a recent piece entitled “Investing in Haitian Women,” that Haiti might benefit from Mohammad Yunus’ model of micro-financing whereby, by investing in women, poverty and public health paradigms could be reversed.  Writes Stoever, “Today after making his first loan of $27 to 42 women in the village of Jobra in 1976, he has changed the lives of more than 40 million people in Bangladesh alone by making small loans to more than 8 million people, 97% of which are women” (2).[10] Stoever is correct but we must note that such efforts have already been undertaken by larger, transnational organizations such as Fonkoze and the Lambi Fund, and that we do not hear about the efforts of small Haitian and women-run cooperatives within Haiti such as Atis Fanm Matenwa.

In efforts to assist women’s autonomy, some aid groups such as the World Food Programme (WFP) have set up food distribution sites throughout the capital exclusively for women.  Smaller organizations like the local Association for the Promotion of Integral Family Healthcare (APROSIF), reports Beverly Bell, “[have] contracted with…timachan[s] , small food vendors with roots in the community….[to serve] one meal a day to the same ten or fifteen families, usually with upwards of seven members per family” (www.worldpulse.com/node/17677).  Though Bell does not expressly say so, undoubtedly the majority of these timachans are market women.  The food distributed at the grassroots level is all locally grown giving lie to the myth that food aid to Haiti must be subsidized from without: Haiti can feed itself and Haitians each other, given the chance.  Ironically, it is the current lack of post-earthquake in-routes for import that initiatives such as these have half a chance of continuing into the future. In her international women’s day piece, Bell reports also that as in previous periods of insecurity, “women have taken the initiative in protecting each other, as well as children, from rape and other violence” including intervening in rapes-in-progress, while grassroots organizations are paying bus fares for girls to return to countryside families, and feminist organizations offer services of “accompaniment,” to record instances of rapes and other violence and to seek necessary after-care (Bell 2).

Given these examples of perseverance and resistance, perhaps it is time now to observe and learn from those in Haiti who have always sustained themselves in an often unrecognized, parallel economy where sharing what one has with one’s family, friends, even strangers, is more paramount than being recognized; where feeding one mouth and then another, and then another, down through the generations, speaks louder to survival, than words.

I am able to speak to you today because I am the product, three generations removed, of two women who did just this: worked, birthed, worked, fed and nurtured.  They were the women to whom I dedicated my first writings: my great-grandmothers, Euphosia Vilmé Chancy, a laundress who also gardened and raised small livestock to make ends meet, and Aricie César Lamour, a market woman.  They both had single children whose children (my grandparents), and grandchildren (my parents), they helped, respectively, to sustain and raise.  By accident of fate regarding the men they loved (by whom they were widowed while their children were still young), but more so by sheer will and daily, bone-hard work, their women’s labor ensured future prosperity that paved the way for a woman like me to voice their lives, name their names, so they, like so many Haitian women before them, and since, shall not be forgotten.

But what is different today then some eighty or thirty years ago when these women were alive still, and toiling at their functions, their children following in their footsteps in blue-collar trades only a few steps remove from their own (a seamstress; a jack of all trades who ultimately became an undertaker); what is different today than even some ten years ago is the degree to which Haiti’s infrastructures and the ability for south to south connections to be upheld have been eroded.  Today, we stand a chance to make a difference, post-earthquake, but it is a difference that could have been made prior to January 12, 2010, and which will not be solved by UN-sponsored plans for increased factories for a population which workforce will will have suffered massive amputations: it was not a solution for yesterday, and it will not be a solution for tomorrow.  Paul Farmer has said that Haiti needs a Marshall plan.  Well, it might begin by looking at what the women of our past did to make it possible for us to speak together today.  As Michaëlle Jean recently wrote in her communiqué entitled “Aux côtés d’Haïti [At Haiti’s Side]”: “Sans les femmes d’Haïti et sans leurs perspectives et leur concours, la reconstruction n’est pas viable.  Il faut leur rendre homage et soutenir leurs efforts.  Elles ont besoin d’être entendues et que leurs voix résonnent au-delà des frontières. [Without the women of Haiti and without their perspectives and their participation, the reconstruction is not viable.  We must honor them and support their efforts.  They need to be heard so that their voices can resonate beyond national borders.]”[11]

Observing a scene in a damaged kindergarten building turned into a shelter, Beverly Bell writes: “The walls are lined with stacks of bundles tied in sheets.  Above the bundles, white banners read ‘love,’ ‘solidarity,’ and ‘respect.” . . . A two-year old dressed only in a t-shirt toddles towards a photographer’s camera, beaming and calling.  ‘Photo.  Photo.’  One woman in response to whether she wants her picture taken, replies in perfect English: ‘No.  I don’t want my family to see [me] in a shelter.’”   The images coming out of Haiti today are mixed: they are of hope and despair, of shame as well as joy.  Let us ensure that we participate in how Haitians and Haitian women in particular choose to represent themselves before the camera eye in fullness of self or to tell us, in no uncertain terms, what needs to be done, and how, like our grandmothers did.

Today, the question should not be as it was in the days following the earthquake: why did this happen to Haiti? There has been a great deal of loss of life and dignity of life in the last weeks, to be sure, but the cataclysm is not a test of Haitians’ humanity, it is a test of all of ours beyond her frontiers.  Our question to ourselves today ought to be: what are we willing to do in service of Haiti, and Haiti’s women, if we are not already doing it? What are we willing to give, network, sacrifice, to better hear, represent, and to learn from those women who birthed us, our mothers, and their mothers, who are birthing us still, whose every breath and daily work – whether it is in the selling of goods at market, the feeding of a child, cooking, bathing, the daily rituals of life, the making of bricks, the sewing of clothes, the journalist’s story, the activist’s organizing –  instructs us, so that their lives and their children’s lives, so that our common humanity, is not lost as so many have been already, remaining still un-tombed[12], in the catacombs of Haiti’s fallen cities.  As Michaëlle Jean stated on International Women’s Day (March 8, 2010) to Haitian women with whom she gathered in Port-au-Prince: “Nan chemen pou tout moun egal ego a, ki pa fasil, ki chaje ak difikilte, fanm vanyan sa yo te trase wout pou lòt fanm jounen jodya a ak pou lòt jenerasyon fanm. Nou wete chapo devan yo, nou salye memwa yo. E tout sa nou kapab fè se kontinye koken chen travay yo tap fè a. Fò n fè sa pou yo. Pou tout sa ki rete, kap batay, kap espere toujou.”[13]

We must continue their work, for all those who remain, still embattled, hoping for a better tomorrow.

[2] Gates quotes James Weldon Johnson as saying in 1920, in the midst of the Occupation : « If the United States should leave Haiti today, it would leave more than a thousand widows and orphans of its own making, more banditry than has existed for a century, resentment, hatred and despair in the heart of a whole people, to say nothing of the irréparable injury to its own tradition as the defender of the rights of man. »  (http://www.theroot.com/print/38236) It is sad to note that Weldon Johnson’s words then would be just as pertinent today, with the numerical impact of US interventions/occupations/on-going presence multiplying his numerical estimate by thousands more.

[3] Kidder’s model here is Partners in Health.

[4] Information relayed by email via Haitian American poet, Lenelle Moïse, who received first-hand information from Eve Ensler on January 17, 2010.

[5] Mission Statement from http://www.huairou.org/who/index.html: The Huairou Commission is a global coalition of networks, institutions and individual professionals that links grassroots women’s community development organizations to partners. The networks seek access to resources, information sharing and political space. At the same time, it links development professionals to on-the-ground practice. Currently, the network focuses its joint efforts on five campaigns: Governance, AIDS, Disaster, Land and Housing and Peace Building.

[6] See the following data sheet at : http://www.xist.org/earth/pop_gender.aspx.  The table is drawn from the UN’s Statistics Division, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision.  Not surprisingly, population ratios tabled here are summarized by the male gender (see note at bottom : gender ratio = males per 100 females

[7] d’Adesky, Anne-christine, « Holding up Haiti : Women Respond to Nightmare Earthquake » (www.worldpulse.com/magazine) January 27, 2010.

[8] See the reports filed under Haiti on the organizations’ website: http://www.huairou.org/

[9] See : http://www.melioraglobal.com/

[10] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kari-stoever/investing-in-haitian-wome_b_464314.html?view=print

[11] http://www.metropolehaiti.com/metropole/full_une_fr.php?id=17148

[12] Here I mean to say that the buried alive, entombed, are « un » tombed in that they will never have a proper burial : they will never be buried as they should with respect to their humanity.

[13] Michaëlle Jean, « Diskou nan okazyon chita koze pou jounen entènasyonal fanm . » Delivered in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, March 8, 2010.

The following piece was written before the 2005 elections and post the devastations of the 2004 hurricane season.

At present, the Atis Fanm Matenwa Collective is more or less stranded in the interior of l’Ile de la Gonave and seeking to rebuild their community after the devastating earthquake of Jan. 12/2010. Please follow the link at the end of the piece to find the collective’s url & for donation information to assist the women’s collective to continue their life and community-sustaining art works.

By Myriam J. A. Chancy

(Photos by Ellen LeBow)

Scarf painting

With the November 2005 presidential elections fast approaching, things have suddenly gone calm in Haiti’s bustling capital.  It’s the calm before the storm, some say, expecting the violence which has escalated beyond proportion — from drug related killings to economically motivated kidnappings – to start up with even greater force around election-time.  For those watching from afar, the televised scenes of violence eerily mirror the carnage witnessed during the déchoukaj, or uprooting, of the Duvalier régime in the years following the fall of the dictatorship in 1986.  For those on the ground, conditions of tragic uncertainty contain daily existence, as the country seems poised for greater realms of despair.  Yet, even in the midst of such seeming chaos, there resides hope in the pockets of hills and valleys, forgotten slum areas and remote villages where collectives persevere quietly in the eye of the impending storm.

Grassroots organizations such as Atis Fanm Matenwa are weaving new threads into a national tapestry that, from a distance, appears to be unraveling at lightning speed. The women’s collective situated inland on the island of La Gônave off the coast of Haiti produces hand-painted silk scarves that colorfully animate Haitian folk tales, images of vodou gods, as well as record the flora and fauna fast disappearing from the women’s environment. The scarf project evolved as part of an effort to expand the curriculum of the Matenwa Community Learning Center, jointly administered by Haitian co-director Abner Sauveur and Asian-American Chris Low.  Upon the invitation of the directors, two American artists, visual artist Ellen LeBow and music teacher, Lisa Brown, were asked to become involved in the school’s programs and principles.  LeBow and Brown formed the Artisan Center where Atis Fanm was born.  LeBow, captivated by the originality and symbolic dimensions of traditional Haitian art when she came across a book on the subject at her local library in the early ‘80s, jumped at the chance to assist Low when the latter asked for her assistance to find a way to make use of the arts as “an expressive means to earn a living”[1] for the women of the community.  For a country like Haiti, suffering a lack of adequately stocked and maintained public libraries, these delicate and brilliant works of art each comprise a functional archive that both preserves Haitian lore and teaches others the richness of the country’s multiple legacies.

Makilez, child, and handpainted silk scarf

Ironically, the remoteness of the village meant that, when the collective began, the women had “no awareness of their own arts legacy,” and little to no access to art supplies, even to the refuse materials commonly recycled for use in metalwork, for instance, on the mainland.  The women were taught about Haitian art traditions as they learned to paint, the standing agreement being that “any of the young women who learned the skill had to stay in and finish school and their children had to go to school.”

The idea for making scarves was inspired by the mouchwa, the common headdress worn by Haitian women while they work, of which more elaborate versions exist for ritual adornment.  Silk was chosen because it travels well and at little cost, enabling the women to receive 80% of revenue from sales with the remaining 20% going to the purchase of materials, shipping and handling, website maintenance, printing, crafts fair costs and supplies.  Even though the project is garnering the collective a much needed source of income, the American directors often pay out of pocket for the materials needed for the women to carry on their inspiring work.  For this reason, they are currently searching for a small, renewable grant or endowment that would ensure the project’s sustainability while also allowing the women to maintain their independence.

By the time Atis Fanm Matenwa was formed five years ago, the Matenwa Community Learning Center, had already been recognized as one of Haiti’s most progressive schools; it has gone on to assist other schools throughout Haiti. At present, the women of Atis Fanm “are seen as an influential group” within the community and are invited to participate in meetings with community elders and leaders.  The Collective is also giving back to the community by providing a portion of their earnings to other local projects.  Where once young men and women were trying to escape the small island, often to find themselves lost in the slums of Port-au-Prince, they are now banding together to preserve their land, creating community food gardens and an experimental fish farm. Other arts have been introduced to the community such as drapeaux, the sequined flags used in vodou ceremonies that have more recently been recognized as an independent and original Haitian art form; youth have been learning silver and bead jewelry design and a printmaking class has been started this summer.  Music classes form a part of the school’s curriculum and, on their own, local women have started sewing and cooking classes.  Future plans include forming a theater group, building a community oven, and a village coffee house.

Unassumingly, the scarves of Atis Fanm Matenwa have spawned a quiet revolution in a land reknown for insurgency.  They are the rainbow sign between storms announcing that optimism resides here in a land still struggling to reap the fruits of its independence.  As one of the school’s songs expresses: “One by one, we will not be undone, by the violence that surrounds us.”

For further information and to purchase scarves, please visit: www.artmatenwa.org or email Lbo@cape.com .

Naida and sequin Drapo

YOUR HELP IS NEEDED

PLEASE MAKE A DONATION to a Haiti Earthquake Relief Fund TODAY :

• Wyclef Jean’s YELE earthquake relief fund online
  (Small donations of $5 can also be made by texting YELE to 501501)

• International Child Care works in Haiti & the Dominican Republic

• Doctors without Borders

• Partners In Health / Location Boston, MA

• American Red Cross

• UNICEF

• OxFam
  

For direct, up-to-date, on-line information on the current conditions in Haiti (in French), go to: http://www.radio-canada.ca/rdi/

For a longer list of organizations and for further news in English please go to: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34834553/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show ]]> http://www.myriamchancy.com/hello-world/feed/ 1