“Haiti Then and Now” Interviews Professor Myriam J.A. Chancy

“Haitian Thinkers in the Public Space: An Interview Series“

“Haiti Then and Now” Interviews Professor Myriam J.A. Chancy

Conducted by Dr. Celucien L. Joseph

July 13, 2020

HTN: Tell us about yourself, your background, education, upbringing, connection to Haiti, etc. Who is Dr. Myriam J.A. Chancy?

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  Dr. Myriam J.A. Chancy

MC: I was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, at the Canapé Vert Hospital, one of the few landmarks from my childhood that still stands post the 2010 earthquake. My parents, both Haitian and both from Port-au-Prince, were transitioning from living in Paris, where they had met some years earlier, to moving to Canada, where both had promise of employment in French-speaking Canada, in the province of Québec. So, I was raised initially between Port-au-Prince and Québec City. My parents relocated permanently to Winnipeg, Manitoba, for work in the French quarter of St. Boniface. I learned English there, between the ages of eight and ten, then continued my schooling, in English, through to my BA in English/Philosophy at the University of Manitoba, after completing high school at the University of Winnipeg Collegiate.  I took the MA in English (focusing on African American literature and with an MA on James Baldwin) at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. While there, I applied for and obtained the prestigious SSHRCC four-year doctoral fellowship and moved to the US to obtain the Ph. D. in Literature in American Literature, with a dissertation in Afro-Caribbean Women’s Literature, at the University of Iowa.  From there, I have gone on to multiple appointments, at various institutions of higher education in the US.; mostly tenured, some visiting, since I obtained tenure 3 years after graduating from University of Iowa at the age of 24.  I obtained early tenure on the strength of having published two academic books in the same academic year, one based on my doctoral dissertation and the other the first book in English on Haitian women’s literature, Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women (Rutgers UP 1997).

HTN: You are a successful author, novelist, and an eminent scholar of many award-winning novels and academic books. You are a specialist in various academic disciplines, including Critical theory, Literary theory, Gender Studies, Women’s Studies, Literary Studies, Caribbean Literature, Haitian Literature, and African Diaspora Studies. In your writings, you write specifically about women’s issues in Haiti and in the world; you articulate what many theorists have called “feminist writing,” and through which you attempt to foster a global feminist consciousness about the global condition of women and girls in the world. Arguably, the woman question is a human question, as many (women) thinkers have brilliantly underscored and demonstrated in their works. 

One of the central themes in your literary corpus is the importance of female mentorship and othermothering as a way to eradicate violence against women and girls in society, as well as a means to combat patriarchal subjugation and abuse of women in the world. Thus, the female characters in your novels, for example, cultivate female solidarity and interconnectedness, and long to find safe spaces to belong, to grow, and to express their agency as equal members of the human community. Female mentorship and othermothering is also a powerful feature in the writings of the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat. Is there such a tradition in Haitian literature produced by Haitian women writers? Is female mentorship a recurring theme in Caribbean Literature and in the literatures of the African Diaspora? Finally, can you address the value of female mentorship and othermothering in the world outside of the text, that is in human relationships in society?

MC: The personal example I have of Haitian women’s solidarity comes from my mother’s side of the family. She was raised by her mother and grandmother in the same household. Her grandmother was a market woman who eventually had her own business in the marché de fer in Port-au-Prince and employed other women. The practices in this household, as told to me by my mother, engaged providing for others less fortunate than oneself with an understanding that that was once you, or could be you again. Although those practices were not consciously gendered, owing to the ways in which women are often left to fend for themselves, they became so in practicality. I learned from this example. As for literary or academic mentors, I think the example of “othermothering” I learned from African American literature, from the time I read Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, which led me to other African American women’s writing, as well as that by African American men, such as Hurston, Hugues, Cullen, and so on. I emulated this practice of naming the work of others in my own when it came to my dissertation on Afro-Caribbean writers, in which I explored the work of Caribbean women writers situated in the US, Canada, and UK. There is a thematic in this literature which concerns the role of grandmothers in Caribbean life, the importance of their “othermothering” in situations where younger generations have been left behind, usually for economic or political reasons, and it falls to an older generation to build the bridge between memory and culture, for survival.  So, I would say that these traditions feed my own work. I think that the practice of mentoring and ‘othermothering’ in academic/literary circles is not as thriving as it used to be, perhaps owing to the mainstreaming of some aspects of our cultures, or perhaps due to our increased mobility transnationally.  There is a kind of diffusion taking place that I haven’t quite put my finger on but mentoring can come in many forms, also remotely, through the reading and absorbing of each other’s works in print, and in recordings.

HTN: Along the same line of thought, your writings also cover the pressing issue of human rights and the problem of injustice in the world. In particular, your novels address both directly and indirectly the social, economic, military, and political matters affecting the human condition in Haiti and the Haitian diaspora.  For example, in your second novel, The Scorpion’s Claw,  published in 2004, you are concerned about the geopolitical circumstances and economic situations under the Duvalier Regime that led many Haitians to a life of forced migration and exile in host countries like Canada, France, and in the United States. Yet these powerful Western nations have been active agents in preconditioning or contributing to the Haitian predicament. In your third novel, The Loneliness of Angels, published in 2010, you addressed similar concerns with an emphasis on memory, hybrid cultural identity, the remaking of the self in the diaspora, and the role of spirituality in the Haitian experience.  Through the agency and voice of your complex characters, not only you are informing your Haitian readers about their social and political conditions; inevitably, you are leading the Haitian people to the path of “conscientization,” to borrow a concept from the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968 and later translated in English in 1970).  Thus, I hope you wouldn’t mind that I view you both as a political writer and an intellectual of social consciousness.

For instance, in October 1988, a transitionary era in Haitian politics with Henri Namphy (February 7, 1986-February 7, 1988) serving as President for only two years and Leslie Manigat serving only for 134 days as President of Haiti (February 7, 1988—June 20, 1988), Désirée, a young female character and University student with a revolutionary conscience and radical ideas in your novel The Scorpion’s Claw, wrote a powerful letter to her friend and University student Josèphe informing her about the plight of the Haitian people:

We’ll need young people to lead when everything falls apart. It’s bound to happen sooner or later. How long can people live in fear? How long can the military knock market women down on the street corners as they try to sell their wilting flowers and meat festooned with hungry flies? At night, the guns go off dozens at a time and I sear I can hear every bullet as it lands in pillars of wood of burrows into the wrinkled flesh of a man who is old enough to have seen the Americans come and go with their filthy green jeeps (23).

Can you discuss the role of literature and ideas to foster social consciousness and political activism in Haitian history? Where do you see yourself or your writings within both traditions: Haitian literary tradition and Haitian intellectual history? Have your intellectual predecessors, I mean individuals like Jacques Roumain, René Depestre, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau, and others been able to achieve similar goals and objectives through their works?

MC: It’s clear to me, and perhaps to all scholars/readers of Haitian literature, that there it’s nearly impossible to find an apolitical Haitian writer within the larger corpus of the Haitian literary tradition, at least until the end of the 20^th century, and especially that literature coming out of Haiti specifically, or penny by Haitian writers exiled under the Duvalier régime from Marie Chauvet to René Depestre, to Anthony Phelps and even Dany Lafferière. What my study of Haitian women’s literature demonstrated, at a time (early 1990s) when it is was still thought that there was no coherent tradition of Haitian women’s literature because so few had been published, is that Haitian women’s writings consistently responds to the political moment of their day.  For instance, the first Haitian women’s novels responded to the US occupation of 1915-34 and the racializations and violent suppression which occurred under the occupation.  This is not to say that there aren’t strains in the tradition which are more populist, for example, romance novels, or those that participate in the exoticization of vodou and aspects of bourgeois society, but those are few and far between, with the exception of a new generation of hyphenated Haitian writers who may locate themselves in other communities outside of Haiti which has changed the themes of their works accordingly.  This aside, Haitian literature is by and large a “literature engagé,” with a political dimension that does not diminish its aesthetics but amplifies it. So, to answer your question more succinctly, my work follows in the tradition set before me.

HTN: In the closing words of another letter in the same novel, dated March 1990, Désirée wrote to Josèphe, she articulated her nonnegotiable conviction toward revolutionary change in the Haitian society:

It has been easy to sit in this yard and wish for revolution. Of course, revolution will never happen if people like me sit on our bottoms and look with pity on the women and men we enslave on behalf of a corrupt economy which passes for capitalism (The Scorpion’s Claw, p. 34).

(It is good to inform our readers that from September 17, 1988 to March 10, 1990, General Proper Avril served as President of Haiti for only 1 year and 236 days. Beforehand, Henry Namphy was President for only 89 days (June 20, 1988-September 17, 1988).          

In Désirée’s reasoning in the provocative letter, there is an intimate rapport between the corrupt economic system and capitalist structure in the Haitian society. Nonetheless, she made a clarion call to conscientious young Haitians to take a stand against economic capitalism and structural violence; hopefully, they would be able to put an end to the country’s unfortunate narrative of corruption and violence through the means of collaborative or general revolution. First, what kind of revolution did Désirée envision that was possible in Haiti at that particular historical moment? Was it a revolution of the mind or the conscience (an intellectual revolution)? Or was she aimed at a revolution through the use of force, arms/weapons in the Fanonian (decolonial) sense and radical Marxism?

By implications, can you also comment on the historic role of young Haitians in challenging the country’s political system and in ameliorating both the civil and political societies in their native land? In the spirit of Désirée, what is at stake if the young people do not act, but “sit on our (their) bottoms and look with pity on the women and men” who have been abused, mistreated, dehumanized, and exploited?

MC: Well, I wrote that novel a long time ago, in the mid 1990s. My recollection of the story is that I was attempting to give voice to the kinds of protests and organizing that were taking place from the period of the déchoukaj (1986) on, into the early 1990s, when there were swaths of the Haitian population who were protesting for their rights, to be free of top-down oppression, and the vestiges of military rule (as you’ve described above in terms of the succession of coup leaders who had ties to the military and to the dictatorship). 

In the novel, Désirée, who is from an upper class family, as the social fabric of the society begins to unravel in the early 1990s, for the most privileged, begins to question her role in the oppression of others, and realizes through her contacts to other youth (to which she is, in some cases, related) who are mobilizing for democracy at this time. You have to remember, too, that the Lavalas movement predated Aristide, who came back to Haiti in order to join the movement, then became its head and representative; I point this out to say that there were major grassroots movements in the years between the end of the dictatorship of 1986 and Aristide’s election in late 1990, assuming the presidency in February of 1991, and deposed by a coup eight months later. Désirée writes her letter in March 1990 so this is a time of volatility and also of hope. She is interested in joining the grassroots movements, which, at the time, were largely led by the working poor, peasant and youth groups.

      Delphi, in the novel, is really the character who is completely involved in such organizing, as a schoolteacher whose mother is working class, and who has no known father.  He loses his life in the process, in armed struggle with the macoutes.

      What the novel attempts to show are the choices available to a group of young people in their twenties, in the early nineties, whose lives have been led completely under the shadow and weight of the violence and terror of the Duvalier régime (begun in 1967). Do they defy class lines and bind together in overthrowing the system? What is, or should be, the role of diasporic Haitians (remembering that, under Aristide, Haitians in the diaspora were wooed to return or invest in Haiti, and were even allowed to acquire citizenship and voting rights, in absentia), if any, in reshaping the nation? Should we always assume that those without privilege in the old system want a democracy or is being conditioned by years of autocracy a recipe for continued forms of systemic oppression? The novel follows a number of young people in their twenties (I was also in my early twenties when I wrote the book) who have to consider the future of the nation without having ever known a Haiti without dictatorship. Some do not make the choices one would expect, coming out of their respective class backgrounds, while others do.

      In this, I was making less of a claim about youth activism in Haiti then, or now. At the same time, however, given that the population is vastly young (because of high mortality rates), it stands to reason that much of the activism falls to younger people, or those not yet having reached middle-age.

      To be more direct in answering your questions, Désirée ends up joining a youth group from the streets (of which, at the time I wrote and did my research for this book, there were many), so, no, her revolution is not solely intellectual, it is one connecting an awakening of consciousness with action.  Josèphe, however, who is receiving the letter in Canada, and does not return, is making a conscious choice, as a young writer telling the story of her childhood friends and what has happened to each of them as they have grown into their twenties, is making the choice to tell their story as a political act, of remembrance, in order for such actions to carry into the archives. I’m not making a claim that either forms of resistance is more or less useful than the other, but perhaps that both are needed for real change to come about.

HTN: I would like us to move forward to discuss further the role of Haitian women in fostering holistic transformation and contributing to the common good and human flourishing in Haiti. Through your novels, you constructed strong female characters with the willpower to alter the human condition in Haiti. Correspondingly, in your academic writings, you also discussed the suffering and plot of women in general in the forms of violence, tragedy, war, and rape they suffered from men and other powerful forces in society; you also accentuated on the importance of women activism throughout the African Diaspora.  For example, in 1997, you published the most important monograph (Framing Silence: Revolutionary Novels by Haitian Women) in the English language with an emphasis on radical fiction books produced by Haitian women novelists and intellectuals.  In the same year, you published another excellent monograph bearing this title Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile.  In both works, you established the important relationship between history, literary theory, and the act of resistance through the art of (women’s) writing and political activism. Also, you showcased how these women writers and intellectual-activists have exercised strength, perseverance, resistance, and demonstrated the capacity to love in the midst of tragedy (not hopelessness) in order to create another and possible world for all people, and especially for girls and women.

According to some literary critics, the novel reflects the human life and relations in society (i.e. sociological criticism), and its message is preconditioned by these intricate matters. Hence, it is the responsibility of the reader to read the text in the light of its social milieu to find its meaning and discover its implications in the individual and/or common life. Correspondingly, others have argued that literature should be studied within its historical context. In Framing Silence, you carefully examined eight major novels written by Haitian women writers (Rey Ghislaine Charlie, Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Anne-Christine d’Adesky, Edwidge Danticat, Annie Desroy, Jan J. Dominique, Nadine Magloire, Virgile Valcin) and demonstrated how various historical trajectories have shaped their message. Consequently, what role has Haitian history played in shaping Haitian women’s literature?  Would you place any of these works you studied under the category of social realist literature?  If this is so, what did these novels (i.e. Breath, Eyes, Memory, Le mal de vivre) reveal about the Haitian society?  What do they (i.e. Le joug, la blanche, les rapaces) inform us precisely about the “woman question” in Haiti?

MC: Sure, I would say that the novels I grouped together in Framing Silence can, by and large, be considered social realist literature, much like works in the male Haitian tradition by Jacques Stephen Aléxis, who first wrote about the social realist tradition in Haitian literature, and its purpose to reveal social realities and also that it should be informed by folk traditions or those proper to the Haitian reality, coming out of the working poor and peasant classes. Although not all the protagonists of the novels by Haitian women I looked out do the latter, most situate their narratives around protagonists who either occupy the underclasses or, if they do not, try to question their position in the upper classes, that is, the unnaturalness of their privileges and the need to combat or under those privileges for greater class equity. This is evident in the work of Marie Chauvet, whether we look at her early work as in Amour, Colère, Folie, or in Les Rapaces, both of which critique the Duvalier régime (with the pretense of looking at the period of the US Occupation, at times) and which focus on characters in the underclasses invested in the written word or in expressing the despair of their social status to reflect on the politics within Haitian society.

What these women writers bring to bear in their writings that male writers often do not do, is center the place of women in these politics – both in their disruption and in the possibility of their complicity with these politics. JJ Dominique’s work, for example, in Mémoire d’une amnésique, looks at the character’s heightened consciousness as she attends college in Montréal, where she encounters mainstream feminism and begins to apply its tenets to Haitian society, only to uncover, for herself, the patriarchalism of the society and how it underpins the régime itself. She also explores father-daughter relations and how patriarchal models, even within resistance models can persist.

      As I relayed in answer to an earlier question, all of the novels I came across by Haitian women for the study, were written in response to particularly historical moments facing Haiti and Haitians. In this, they engage the social realist project. What is different about the tradition is the consistency with which the engagement is entwined with historical milestones and seeks to speak to the Haitian women’s condition. My argument in FS, was that the literature forms a coherent tradition when one considers that few if any novels by Haitian women from the 1920s through the early 2000s fall outside of these trajectories.

      I won’t repeat here what FS does over a few hundred pages, but say only that what the novels reveal is the intense patriarchal precepts at work within the society, the limited avenues for women’s resistance under them, and yet the tenacity with which Haitian women continue to fight or struggle (because they must) for their rights, and those of their children, in a nation that systematically dismisses their contributions to history and to society despite the evidence to the contrary of the multiple ways in which women contribute to both.

HTN: In another excellent book, From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and The Dominican Republic, you dealt with the complex relationships and dynamics between two neighboring countries:  Haiti and the Dominican Republic—with a special attention to the historical trajectories discussed in two significant historical novels: The Farming of Bones by Edwidge Danticat and In the Time of the Butterflies by Julia Alvarez.  You wrote, “I would argue that historical Caribbean novels have a common goal with the texts of the traditions preceding them in the European context: the desire to ground their texts in the historical moment to which their present is tied, while also giving voice to the popular within those nation-states they seek to illustrate (or question) in their works” (xi).

Based on this thesis, I would like to ask you the following related questions: (1) how have the race concept, racism, (military) imperialism, and migration shaped Caribbean literature and the history of these three Caribbean nations: Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic? (2) What historical lineage and geopolitical connections do these three Caribbean nations share together?

MC: The statement above, cited from the preface to the book isn’t so much as a thesis as a statement of observation with regard to how to situate historical fiction by Caribbean writers within the wider scope of contemporary Euro-American literature. I meant to highlight the fact that, too often, literature produced by Caribbean and Latin American writers become subsumed under umbrellas of “magical realism” or the fabulous, without there being an understanding of the underpinnings of the ‘magical real’ as anchored in social realism.  Having made this claim, I then proceed to outline the ways in which scholars of Caribbean and Latin American literature may want to pay attention to how these three nations have been arbitrarily disconnected from one another, or connected in only strategic (read political) ways when it suits the purposes of the investigation or scholarship while, at the same time, denying the socio-political and historical ties that bind the three nations together. 

The thesis of the book is that Haiti, Cuba and the Dominican Republic share discreet histories having to do with colonization, racialization and histories of armed and ideological resistance to both which means that they have more in common than not, including resistance to imperialism emanating from the United States through their “manifest destiny” and “gunboat diplomacy” schemes, as well as through military occupation. I also demonstrate that, ironically, Cuba, as a nation, has consistently seen its own path as being tied with or related to Haiti’s while the Dominican Republic, owing to its development, most explicitly in the early twentieth century, of blanqueamiento ideologies that were meant to “whiten” the nation did so to stigmatize Afro-Dominicans, to create a second-class citizenry of its darker-hued population, and to discourage dissent through alliance with Haiti in organized resistance movements which took place side-by-side through to 1922 (during the US Occupation of both sides of Hispaniola).  More expansively, I argue that one can trace the intertwined and connected histories of racialization and resistance by following the sugar trade, patterns of extractive labor (including women’s labor both as laborers and in sexual exploitation), and resistance/revolution movements, including movements for sexual/ity liberation, that it the paths through which the three nations are bound together become discernable.  I also argue that women’s literature from the three nations go further than male narratives to uncover the amnesiac nature of national discourses to uncover the patterns of racialization and subjugation that have been resisted and continue to be questioned over time.

My purpose in doing so was to debunk the notion that Haiti can only be studied alongside Cuba and the Dominican Republic when one assigns to it “Latin American” political vectors largely defined by autocratic or dictatorial governments. Haiti is often left out of these discussions on the premise that it has a differing linguistic and colonial legacy.  The fact of the matter is that the Dominican Republic celebrates its “independence” not from colonial powers but from Haiti, defining itself in contradistinction from Haiti while Haiti does not. The fact of the matter is that were it not for the Haitian Revolution, slavery would not have been abolished in the Dominican Republic, nor would its modern systems of governance have been established. It is also true that Fidel Castro claims that his awakening to the cause of the underclasses in Cuba, under the regime of Batista, is owed to the Haitian cane cutters on his father’s land in the Santiago de Cuba region.  As such, one cannot underestimate the cross-pollination of ideas and decolonialization taking place across these regions.

In From Sugar to Revolution, I explore these histories and demonstrate how they contributed to the forming of ties between the nations but also how these histories have been denied and distorted, even denied, to the detriment of building unified visions of each nation state and regional identifications.

I would add, on the issue of militarization, that we have to take care to distinguish between colonial and military incursions in these nations, first by colonial powers such as France and Spain, then followed by occupations by neo-colonial nations such as the USA, and armed resistance against these powers.  Armed resistance took place in both Saint-Domingue and Santo Domingo during the years of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804), against the US Occupation in the early years of the twentieth century (1914-1934 – inclusive dates of both occupations in Hispaniola), and then against the Batista dictatorship during the Cuban Revolution all had for purpose the liberation of the subjugated (whether or not those desired outcomes were achieved). So, another way to think of Haiti, Cuba and the DR, in unison, are those historical moments in which actors in each nation joined forces, or were inspired by one of the other, to foment resistance to racialized and violent subjugation for the extractive powers (resources and labor) of another, dominating power.

 For what more I would have to say on this subject, your readers will have to read the book itself!

HTN: In your newest and most sophisticated book, Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora, published in 2020 with University of Illinois Press, you made a major literary intervention and revolutionary intellectual turn in Black Studies by interrogating a long history of scholarship that focuses on race concepts and national boundaries. You have brilliantly argued against the contemporary deformations, constitutions, and reconstitutions of race-based identities; in the same line of thought, you stated the thesis that African peoples have their own epistemological systems that are not dependent upon the European vision of the universe (17). In addition, you articulated that African peoples have their own gnosis and epistemes and their ontology are communicated and preserved through time (ibid). Basically, you inferred that we should not think that Western epistemology and African epistemology are competing against each other; rather, instead of thinking about alternative modernities, we should conceive multiple, optional, and simultaneous modernities in the history of ideas and world civilizations. Hence, African people, as you have proposed, have their own cosmology and their distinctive way of seeing and being (African ontology) in the world, which is not dependent upon the European vison of the universe and notion of the being (Western ontology).  If that is the case, I would like you to comment on what role and function have African traditional culture and African traditional religion and similarly African-derived religions and cultures in the African Diaspora played in the (local and transnational) transmission process and in preserving these discursive practices?

MC: Well, I am not completely sure of your question here. Transmission of gnosis and epistemes within African traditions are not compellingly different than they are in European traditions in terms of generational transmission.  What I will say is that, having been disrupted by European colonization, enslavement, and displacement, they are, perhaps, less discernable or regimented through institutionalized processes, like the “academe,” for instance. 

In the current work, I am arguing that people of African descent, in various geographies, communicate via their works visions informed by African gnosis and epistemes which are discernable precisely because they do not derive from European models even if the genre of transmission itself owes its form to a European model (for example, long film, the novel, etc.). The content of the works signal African forms of knowledge derived from collective transmissions, through time, via kinship groups, spiritual organizing and other forms of generational transmission.  I locate this transmission as achieved through “lakou/yard” consciousness, which go back to the organizing of kinship groups in African villages, and which were transformed in Caribbean spaces first as kinship space yet, over time, as spaces in which to transmit vital information for survival, and to transmit spiritual and cultural knowledge.  I argue that the ways in which cultural workers of African descent continue to speak to the realities of African descended people in their works reconstitutes the “lakou/yard” and its modes of cultural transmission in virtual space, that is, across space, time, and the borders of the nation-state.

Although I use a primarily Caribbean/Haitian locus in order to articulate the larger argument in the book, this is simply instrumental in terms of my own African-derived knowledge base. I use this perspective as a means to demonstrate how analysis and understanding of work by cultural workers of African descent attains a very different tenor and substance when addressed from the perspectives of their authors and situatedness in African/African Diasporic cultures. I argue that that the treatment of works by people of African descent in the academe is largely incompetent and does not take in consideration the philosophical, spiritual, communal or traditional cultural backgrounds of their creators.  This incompetence spills over into racialized (and racist) (mis)understandings of cultures of African descent which then supplant the complex realities presented in such works, which speak to a much more expansive understanding of African/Diasporic realities, which come out of epistemes that do not hinge on European world views for their expression.  This means that the trajectories of these world views have non-European histories, then expressed through rituals, traditions, both spiritual and non-spiritual, through speech, relationships within community and how communities organize themselves with an understanding of their discrete and cultural underpinnings.

HTN: Furthermore, should you allow me to establish this intellectual continuity and connection,  in the footsteps of Paul Gilroy’s two major works The Black Atlantic (1993) and Against Race (2000), not only you’ve theorized the African Diaspora through its discursive practices and methods of creolization and Kreyolization, what you have phrased the “intradiasporic relations and exchanges” (193)—an important allusion to Edouard Glissant (La Lézarde, 1958; Le Discours antillais, 1981; Tout-Monde, 1993; Poétique de la Relation, 1990; Tout-Monde, 1993) and more recently an echo to the philosophical writings of the Haitian philosopher Edelyn Dorismond  (i.e. L’ère du métissage : Variations sur la créolisation : politique, éthique et philosophie de la diversalité, 2013). Accordingly, these intradiasporic relations and interplays should be examined carefully under a new epistemology to decenter and deconstruct the European-Western intellectual framework and hegemony in the history of ideas. Not only you have called to decolonize how Black and Africana scholars write about the African and African diasporic histories and cultures; you’ve suggested that they need to remap the African and Black Diaspora through a postcolonial optic and a decolonial lens, correspondingly. Yet the driven theoretical concepts that undergird your analysis of diasporic texts in your book is what you have termed “autochthonomy” and “lakou/yard consciousness.” You offered a detailed description of both concepts while showing the inevitable link between the two:

If autochthonomy is the practice of intra-subjective exchanges girded by mobile, local practices, cultural expressions, or beliefs that form that intradiasporic bridge between cultures of African descent, then what I call “lakou” or “yard consciousness” is the virtual space in which such exchanges take place. Virtual because located in no single geographical space, this imagined locus is composed of autochthonous beliefs and practices, preserved, reformulated or syncretized over time, and often in differing geopolitical spaces, which nonetheless form the basis for communication because of their a priori importance to the identifies of those peoples who have continued to practice them—however modified—to subsist, and to persist (17).

In the light of your underlying claim, how has the Vodou religion or the academic method and theory of comparative religion (if this is applicable) informed your theory of “lakou/yard consciousness and your new interpretive lens in rationalizing diasporic texts?

MC: Well, as I try to lay out in the introduction to Autochthonomies, the book describes a process, one by which, because of the over-reliance on Euro-American models in the academe (and society at large), we have to first “un-learn” Eurocentric models in order to assume African Diasporic ones more consistent with the works and their progenitors.  That being said, I am not arguing for “a new epistemology to decenter and deconstruct the European-Western intellectual framework and hegemony in the history of ideas” – because, as you said earlier, my position is that these epistemes operate in parallel fashion; they co-exist.

What has happened, of course, is that one set of epistemes has served to colonize that of others, even as they co-exist, or exist in parallel. There is also the fact that the colonial process has subsumed co-existing epistemes and post-colonial subjects are subject to the existing paradigms that have been imposed over time, even as they have kept alive to and conscious of competing and co-existing epistemes from their own pre-existing traditions, even if these have been interrupted. The purpose of the book, is to engage readers in a process by which they might turn to utilizing other metrics in order to produce more competent analyses of texts by people of African descent in ways that will shift “racial” understandings and their attendant power relations which are tied up in ideological apparatus.  My intervention, if any, is in disentangling this ideological apparatus.

I cannot make a claim that comparative religions have had any impact on my thinking as I am not trained in this area, although I do believe that there is a lot to be gained from it.  As a Haitian, and in my lay studies of Haitian vodou, however, I can say that I have come to understand the ways in which the organizing principles of vodou provide a means for Haitians to live their realities in substantive and enriching ways, derived from African rooted sensibilities, and in resistance to imposed, colonial epistemes, informs my theoretical apparatus in this project. The peristyle of Haitian vodou exists in “lakou” or “yard” space, which is a kinship space, reproduced in the Haitian yard/countryside, gathering spaces, of Haitian communities. This is where beliefs, traditions, collective wisdom is communicated and transferred from one generation to the other.  I drew somewhat from the work of Mimerose Beaubrun, who is a practicioning vodouisant as well as a noted musician of “rasin” music, in order to define what I meant by “lakou” in the study, but this is in concert with other operating definitions of the term, beyond religious or spiritual practices within the greater Caribbean.

The term “autochthonomy,” as explained in the book, has no relationship with vodou or other African derived spiritualities.  The neologism combines concepts of indigeneity with those of agency or, a more largely defined concept of emancipation/freedom.  Here I argue that the practice of autochthonomy is a practice of indigeneity, as peoples of African descent, with distinct epistemes and gnosis pertinent those origins, however transformed over time and through dispersion, and through definitions of agency and humanity derived from such practice.  By and large, the argument is that such understandings of agency/freedom do not hinge upon becoming post-colonial subjects, that is, “becoming” emancipated from enslavement or colonial subjugation, but from an understanding of being in the world with agency, as an already emancipated human being.

HTN: Moreover, in the same book, you pointed out that societies labelled as “indigenous” were able to “bridge precolonial and postcolonial societies and transformed in the process but also retaining salient features of their original indigenous societies and their geographies” (9).  Can we use colonial Saint-Domingue and postcolonial Haiti as laboratory zones to test your theory?  How did the ancestors of the Haitian people in the French colony of Saint-Domingue negotiate these “intradiasporic relations and exchanges”? What was lost and gained in the transitional and transmission process, that is, the ultimate geo-political movement and shift from a colonial life to a postcolonial experience?

MC: I think that this is too large a question for me to answer here but let me say, in brief, that what I do in Autochthonomies, is test the theory of retention or bridging between pre and postcolonial societies for people of African descent, through an understanding of what retentions were occasioned in Saint-Domingue through to the creation of Haiti post-Revolution.  The Kreyol language itself encapsulates such preservations and is one of the reasons I explore how and why Zora Neale Hurston studied Kreyol while in Haiti and how one can trace Kreyolisms within her Their Eyes Were Watching God. I don’t think it is accidental that she found models for self-realization reflected in the Haitian language and utilized these as a prototype to think through and represent an African American’s search for freedom in the American South from within African American society.

            What few people recollect is that the Haitian Revolution was in many ways made possible through the unification across color and class lines of people who shared ritualistic languages (via vodou, the drum, etc.) and who came to create their own (Kreyol) through a blending together of like-African languages and imposed ones.  I can’t cite the reference off-hand, but it has been demonstrated that the Revolution of Saint-Domingue was successful precisely because enslaved Africans (and free Africans/gens de couleur) in the colony, had more in common here, than they did elsewhere in terms of linguistic and cultural practices.  These practices then make their way into the social fabric post-Revolution.  I don’t think there is any argument that the culture is very strong even though all efforts have been made to weaken the nation-state by outside, colonial and neo-colonial powers, to make an example of Saint-Dominque/Haiti, for the temerity of the revolutionaries to have acted upon their understanding, as individuals and as a class, of their right to life, independence and relationship to nature or their immediate environment.

            So, since I deal with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, I am less versed (or perhaps less qualified) in what pre-independence Haitians or Africans in Saint-Domingue negotiated intra-diasporic ties and more interested in the evidence we have today of the intra-diasporic ties which have survived, of which we have evidence in the cultural practices of Haitians from language (Kreyol) to spiritual retentions to cultural ones such as community formations (the konbit).  These then come to be reflected in cultural production, from literature, to dance, to music, to film, as my exploration of Raoul Peck’s Sometimes in April, shows. The point of the book is to point out how retention has by-passed colonial interruption and continued forward, as is evidenced in cultural production.

            What was lost is evident since there was little gain from the colonial experience, only loss upon loss, as is evidenced by the ways in which Haiti continues to be stigmatized and sanctioned politically and economically for rising up and vanquishing colonial powers.  The gains, if any, have only benefited an elite few.

HTN: In Chapter 2 of the same book, you examined the process of autochtonomous transfigurations via race and gender configurations as well as through transnational testimonial narratives of genocide, rape, and trauma. In your analysis of Raoul Peck’s film, Sometimes in April, you highlighted how women in history have been the victims of unbreachable silence and inhumane acts of violence.  You’ve posited that Haiti and Rwanda share some parallel histories and stories. Can you identify for our readers some of these historical similarities between Haiti and Rwanda?  In other words, what is the shared legacy of European colonialism in both countries? How did European Empires and American militarization, colonial violence, and political totalitarianism aggravate the human condition and alter the lives of women in both countries? 

MC: As I explain in that chapter, the history from which Peck draws from as a Haitian filmmaker, in creating or understanding the Rwanda situation, is the history between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  If you look at how colonial powers produced their underclasses in both Haiti and the DR and how these categories were reproduced by the nation-state, it becomes clear that how Haitians came to be defined in opposition to Dominicans (cane cutters, for example, as opposed to cattle herders) is similar to how the Belgians divided native populations into two main camps, Hutus vs Tutsis, with similar kinds of relationships to land, cattle, and labor. These divisions, which create power differentials, are then reproduced by the leaders of the nation-state in order to maintain them.

I haven’t explored the gender question between Haiti and Rwanda so the last of your questions is too large for me to answer here.  Suffice it to say that, as was discovered after the genocide, that Rwandan women were targeted via rape in an effort to wipe out future generations.  This has become a typical weapon of war in modern times and the witness statements made in the Arusha courts in the aftermath of the genocide served to make rape as a weapon of war a criminal act in international law.  What is little known is that testimony from Haitian women from the early 1990s, who were persecuted, tortured and raped under the juntas of that time were also presented in the briefs that made the international law possible.  So, the issue is less, here, about American totalitarianism and colonial violence (although one could argue that modern-day violence in both nations are legacies of the colonial period) and more about the totalitarian post-colonial condition which has replicated the gender inequity embedded in colonial power relations whereby women are not only rendered apolitical agents within the nation-state but also used, through physical violence, as political pawns.  In this sense, understanding the ways in which women are disadvantaged within postcolonial societies still struggling to manifest their non-colonial knowledge and ancestry, or to validate these, is important. Achieving a decolonial process demands it and confirming autochthonomies can only be done by affirming women’s contributions to the realities of African Diasporic societies, including the price they have had to pay for regimes of power that continue to replicate colonial tropes.

HTN: Your intelligent and cogent response to my last question prompted me to ask you to address this pressing issue: Do you believe it is possible for countries like Haiti—whose political system continues to be in a state of disarray and instability—and other developing nations that are still experiencing European neo-colonization and American military interventions “to form a global movement of decolonization” (167). Can they experience a truly postcolonial life and an emancipative future in the twenty-first century? 

MC: Well, imagine if all societies or cultures that defined themselves in some way as “autochthonous” came together to share that information and those realities, what would happen to political and cultural organizing? Autochthonomy does not ignore the realities of history but in order to truly exercise autochthonomy, one has to step into another river, not a colonial one, an imposed reality or set of realities, but into a river of cultural and ontological realities that affirm Africanity as a form of indigeneity with all of the rootedness that that implies. Once that step is made, another world reveals itself, one similar to the one that I uncover in the book, one in which cultural workers of African descent speak to one another across differences of language and geography, speak to one another transnationally, in order to communicate their realities through tropes that each recognizes, whether these are kreyolized forms of language, ritual, or spirituality. These do not have to be negotiated through colonialism or colonialist history.  It demands a looking elsewhere, to other ground and it affirms a much longer, broader history that is not only affirming but life-giving. It offers the building blocks from which our ancestors sprung; there can be no greater strength than this to build into the future.

            The problem is that many of us do not believe that this other world is real, that it still persists. Many of us are seduced by the power structures that simultaneously reject our existence, or the possibility of advancement for a few rather than a whole. What would it mean to operate in this world with a different set of values, with a different understanding of power, with a will to support collective power and a renewed sense of collective identity transnationally, and transhistorically.

HTN: Finally, can you tell our readers who has been your role model? Do you have a favorite woman’s writer? 

MC: I’m sure that I have many role models and they change with every decade, some not in literary studies. My early influences came from French literature, then from Canadian and American literature. James Baldwin has probably had the strongest, all-around influence. I don’t have a favorite woman writer but read widely in women’s literature across a wide-range of ethnicities, with a special focus on Caribbean women’s literature, in which I specialize (in the Anglophone tradition, followed by the Haitian woman’s literary tradition).

HTN: When Dr. Chancy is not doing research for a new book or teaching at the University, what does she do as hobbies? Please tell our readers if you are currently working on a new book?

MC: I love film in general so watch a lot of films. I also enjoy photography (the covers of most of my books, including Autochthonomies, are taken from my own photographs), food culture and cooking.

I have a novel entitled “12” coming out with HarperCollins Canada and Tin House USA, on the Haiti earthquake, slated for Fall 2021 and I recently put together my essays from 2011-2015 on the aftermath of the earthquake and the decision by the tribunal of the Dominican Republic to denationalize its citizens with Haitian ancestry. This collection also includes a photo essay drawn from my post-earthquake photography shows of 2013 and 2020 and I hope this collection will be picked up by a university press in the very near future: wish me luck!

HTN: Congratulations on the new novel! The faithful readers of HTN and I appreciate your scholarship and enormous contributions to various academic fields of study, especially Haitian (Women’s) literature. We thank you for spending time with us. We look forward to reading “12.”