How you know you’re sad a book is over:
1. You read the acknowledgments slowly (like you may recognize a name
2. You flip bak to the beginning to reread the introduction (just to make sure the author did what they said they were going to do)
3. You reread the entirety of the pages you dogeared
4. You go back and double underline your favorite passages
5. You contemplate ordering every book in the bibliography
Those are all things I did when I finished Why Haiti Needs New Narrative by Gina Ulysse.
Gina Ulysse for President
When looking at what the President of Haiti needs to possess, I would say- an understanding of the complex and misunderstood history of the country, the challenges, the corruption. But also the beauty. Someone who is motivated by and inspired about the future of Haiti. I nominate Gina Ulysse. She is motivated by one thing: systematic changes in Haiti (42). She has “knowledge of our country’s extremes and knows that change will not come to Haiti without conscious and radial approaches. Otherwise, Haiti’s future will abound with more man-made disasters” (52). She is a self proclaimed “die-hard Haitiphile” (59).
Lot bo dlo & the Haitian diaspora
Gina Ulyyse is a member of the Haiti’s large diaspora. What is known as the tenth department, the 1million+ Haitians "on the other side of the water” yet remain connected to Haiti. 70% were impacted directly by the earthquake, the other 30% were one degree of separation. “Diaspora communities produce various cultural formations that travel back to and are consumed in their place of origin” (Fernandes, 61). Across the ocean, after the earthquake, she wrote and was a voice for many in Haiti. She remained connected to the culture of both Haiti and the US, a transnational feminist.
Why do people hate Haiti?
Gina Ulysse makes it clear that there is a PR problem with Haiti. Throughout her essays she talks about the perceptions and stereotypes of everything from race to class to religion. “The day when Haitians as a people, and Haiti as a symbol, are no longer representatives of or synonymous with poverty, backwardness, and evil is still yet to come” (Ulysse, 26).
“Hate is an intense emotion; it involves a feeling of ‘againstness’ that is always, in the phenomenological sense, intentional. Hate is always hatred of something or somebody… Hate may respond to the particular, but it tends to do so by aligning the particular with the general; 'I hate you because you are this or that’, where the ‘this’ or ‘that’ evokes a group that the individual comes to stand for or stand in for” (Ahmed, 49).
In the same way that Americans responded to Slumdog Millionaire, Haiti itself “provides a safe and uplifting representation of poverty that allows American audiences to both mediate their own economic anxieties and also project these anxieties on an 'other' country that can still be viewed as distant and inferior” (Fernandes, 76).
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