Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces [1st ed.] 9783030459383, 9783030459390

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xxiii
Introduction: The Border Is Not at the Border (Myriam Moïse, Fred Réno)....Pages 1-15
Front Matter ....Pages 17-17
“Borderisation” Versus “Creolisation”: A Caribbean Game of Identities and Borders (Fred Réno)....Pages 19-41
Labouring on the Border of Inclusion/Exclusion: Undocumented CARICOM Migrants in the Barbadian Economy (Natalie Dietrich Jones)....Pages 43-69
Caribbean Migration Spaces and Transnational Networks: The Case of the Haitian Diaspora (Cédric Audebert)....Pages 71-93
Front Matter ....Pages 95-95
Borders and the Question of Citizenship: The Case of the Dominican Republic and Haiti (Suzette A. Haughton)....Pages 97-114
The Seeds of Anger: Contemporary Issues in Forced Migration Across the Dominican-Haitian Border (Bridget Wooding)....Pages 115-137
‘When Dialogue Is No Longer Possible, What Still Exists Is the Mystery of Hope’: Migration and Citizenship in the Dominican Republic in Film, Literature and Performance (Maria Cristina Fumagalli)....Pages 139-161
Front Matter ....Pages 163-163
To Be or Not to Be… Giddy: Walking the Language (Border) Line (Bernard Phipps, Sally Stainier)....Pages 165-177
Blurring the Borders of the Human: Hybridized Bodies in Literature and Folklore (Giselle Liza Anatol)....Pages 179-191
Borderless Spaces and Alternative Subjectivities in Narratives by Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson and Olive Senior (Myriam Moïse)....Pages 193-217
Reimagining the Nation: Gender and Bodily Transgressions in Breath, Eyes, Memory (Simone A. James Alexander)....Pages 219-239
Back Matter ....Pages 241-248

Citation preview

Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces Edited by Myriam Moïse Fred Réno Foreword by Carole Boyce-Davies

Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces

Myriam Moïse · Fred Réno Editors

Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces

Editors Myriam Moïse Laboratoire Caribéen de Sciences Sociales (LC2S / CNRS) Université des Antilles Schoelcher, Martinique

Fred Réno Laboratoire Caribéen de Sciences Sociales (LC2S / CNRS) Université des Antilles Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe

ISBN 978-3-030-45938-3 ISBN 978-3-030-45939-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Original book cover illustration by Martinican artist Ricardo OzierLafontaine (www.ricardozierlafontaine.com) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword: On Fragmentations---Borders, Walls, Nations

Ironically, we live in a world in which human beings still see the necessity of constructing physical borders in order to protect their selfdefined/imagined communities. Those external to these borders are defined as outside of protection. Those seeking refuge—“refugees”— from the traumas of prior and contemporary imperial operations— continue to increase.1 The idea of the nation as a recent invention, continually reconstituted internally and externally, factors into any contemporary understandings of what seems solid and fixed.2 While sovereignty is always permeable, the idea of the nation state still turns on the idea of boundaries even when they are not physically or obviously present as in built walls, fences or border posts. While, in ancient times, city walls and national walls were constructed as defense against invasions from warmaking external actors, as in the case of The Great Wall of China (seventh century BCE and 1368–1644), in the most recent versions, it is less about protection than a racial, political assertion in order to maintain a certain ethnic purity which drives the logic of the border. Today physical walls,

1 According to UNHCR statistics for 2017, an unprecedented 68.5 million people have been displaced. Nearly 25.4 million are refugees. An estimated 10 million stateless people have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement. 2 See discussion in Carole-Boyce Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity. Migrations

of the Subject. London: Routledge, 1994: 11–12.

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as those already constructed, threatened or planned between the United States and Mexico or Israel and Palestine mirror the political logic of separate and discreet national identities but carry with them dominant and subordinate relationships, ethnocentric and xenophobic thinking. “Sovereignty” in international law today refers to the maintenance and control of defined national boundaries from outside incursion as it offers simultaneous protection and control of its internal residents but initially even in its language “sovereignty” referred to ownership of a particularly territory by a sovereign power initially meaning the “crown” or a sovereign ruler. Today, the definition of sovereignty still refers to: The possession of sovereign power; supreme political authority; paramount control of the constitution and frame of government and its administration; the self-sufficient source of political power, from which all specific political powers are derived; the international independence of a state, combined with the right and power of regulating its internal affairs without foreign dictation; also a political society, or state, which is sovereign and independent.3

Thus, nations as they exist today, even when in ostensible uniting organizational structures like The African Union, (2002 from the original OAU 1963), still prize themselves on this principle of sovereignty in international law to forestall external intervention, but also to maintain the internal political structures and leadership paradigms, even when destructive to their national interests. The play between inside and outside, internal and external, defines the logic of borders as it does “border transgression” which is the bane of the nation-state. In this context, it is worth recalling Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands /LaFrontera which described the constructed borderlands as a zone of movement, instability that extends beyond physical borders and into social identities. In her definition: “Borders are set up to define that places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary (3).”4

3 Black’s Law Dictionary https://thelawdictionary.org/sovereignty/ (accessed 2/26/2019). 4 Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands /LaFrontera, San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.

FOREWORD: ON FRAGMENTATIONS—BORDERS, WALLS, NATIONS

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But borders, in most extreme cases, also create “border patrols” which tend not only to police or militarize physical borders but personal identities as well in order to determine who belongs and who does not.5 The American context, according to Greg Grandin in his book The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America, using this model gives rise to a certain racial nationalism in which racist policing begins to determine the nature of the state itself. Immigration posts move inwards way beyond the border at times; immigration officials are free to visit cities to find people deemed as illegal. But informal or unofficial “border patrols” operate not only physically in the space of the geographical border at times, but often internally as certain identities are policed by certain self-appointed citizens themselves, defining the nature of belonging. The racial versions of this are clear in documented instances of racial policing of parks, buildings, swimming-pools and other public places. If we extend the thinking about borders beyond continental locations, we can attempt to understand what happens contemporaneously in the Caribbean context where the geopolitical boundaries are pre-organized via the island topography itself which creates a water/land border of sorts. Thus, it is easy for each island to maintain its own national integrity unless prior regional arrangement allows some kind of limited federation as say St Vincent and the Grenadines or Trinidad and Tobago. And while there was an attempt at a formal Federation of the English-speaking Caribbean in 1958, it lasted only until 1962. Still, while the sea can create a natural boundary, we know that via oceanic conquest the sea was also a means of transportation for trade and other socio-economic reasons, as it was a conduit for the actual landing of foreigners looking to conquer other lands.6 This is what Derek Walcott documents well in his classic poem “The Sea is History” which concludes still: “It’s all subtle and submarine.7 In fact, Walcott describes it deliberately this way: “In terms of the English-speaking Caribbean, what has happened is that there has been a fragmentation of the whole area into nations. Absurdly, we now have

5 Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. Metropolitan Books, 2019. 6 Antonio Benitez_Rojo, The Repeating Island. The Caribbean and Postmodern Perspective. Duke University Press, 1997. 7 “The Sea is History” from Selected Poems. Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2007).

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a nationalist literature in small places like Jamaica and Trinidad….”8 In fact, the Caribbean is seen by leading historians as irredeemably fragmented, through historic imperial and contemporary nationalist projects, as expressed even in the titling of Franklin Knight, The Caribbean. The Genesis of Fragmented Nationalism.9 Still while Caribbean fragmentation discourses have had a certain intellectual and political dominance, in many ways, as I argue in Caribbean Spaces, more advanced readings still demand a different imagination to think beyond fragmentation and instead define a different geography in which seascapes are not so much barriers or non-places, but points of connection. Space in this formulation is expansive, open and allows intellectual, cultural, social, familial extensions if not always executed via the nation-state and their attempts at limited political unifications. The premise of this collective study of “Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces” allows a challenge to normative colonial geographies and the borders they instituted. These borders, though often conscribed to island space, also exist sometimes internally on particular island geographies as in what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Historically, a unified territory of Quisqueya though with five subdivisions, what is now Haiti was the territory ceded to France in 1697 under the terms of the Treaty of Ryswick. According to historians, the island initially consisted of five related regions inhabited by the Tainos. Edwidge Danticat’s Anacoana. Golden Flower, Haiti, 1490,10 though a novel of childhood follows the available research to describe movement across what is now divided spaces. Indeed what are now considered borders reflect the largely colonial operations of European powers (French, Spanish, English, Dutch) who established ownership of islands deemed terra nullius (empty, unowned or nobody’s land) in order to justify acquisition. In this framework, to do this, indigenous peoples had to be defined as non-persons or outside of humanity. In “Americanity as a concept, or the Americas in the Modern WorldSystem,” Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein 11 begin by asserting

8 Edward Hirsch, “An interview with Derek Walcott” Contemporary Literature, 20: 3 (1977). 9 Oxford University Press, 2012. 10 New York: Scholastic, Inc., 2005. 11 International Social Science Journal, No. 134, November 1992.

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that the “creation of this geosocial entity, the Americas, was the constitutive act of the modern world system.” Thus, “all the states in this interstate system were new creations” thus “all the boundaries were new” but significantly “the boundaries of these states have constantly changed over the centuries” (550). Thus, we have to be clear that what we define today as fixed borders were all colonial creations for the administrative benefit of European states. In Caribbean Spaces 12 I was deliberate about the need to re-define ontologically the meaning of Caribbean Space beyond imposed boundaries of islands, coloniality, and other limited geographies: “‘Caribbean Spaces’ is my way of describing plural island geographies, the surrounding continental locations as well as Caribbean socio-cultural and geopolitical locations in countries North, South and Central America. (1)” The idea there was to challenge the thinking which limited the Caribbean to small, fragmented island geographies which existed in the imagination of European cartographers and contemporary political powers which operate from North-South constructions in which whatever is in the “global south” is considered subordinate. This project which in its titling assumes the “Reconfiguring of Caribbean Spaces” is organized to provide some of the specificities of new ways of thinking of Caribbean spaces as it challenges the very meaning of assumed or inherited borders. The volume is organized into three major sections which provide scope for the examination of this topic. This spans from the section “Liberal Globalization and Border Identities” that examines the nature of “social practices” which emanate from historical and contemporary borders to “Migration across Borders and Staggering Citizenships” and “Blurring the Borders, Envisioning Alternative Spaces, Bodies and Tongues.” We are offered here then, by these means, an opportunity to advance the thinking about the Caribbean. This collection also aims, according to its editors, “to interrogate the border within the specificities of the Caribbean context, its socio-political dynamics and its literary and artistic representations.” But it does so also by not looking only at external borders but internal borders as well. Gisele Anatol’s “Blurring the Borders of the Human: Hybridized Bodies in Literature and Folklore” offers one such reading of the body itself. The land we know can function similarly in blurred borders but also in the boundaries

12 University of Illinois Press, 2008.

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created artificially in one island space: Haiti and the Dominican Republic as example, occupying the same island but with two discreet nation-states. And in the still colonized context, St. Maarten divided between the Dutch and the French provides another example. In the final analysis, this project, transdisciplinary in its orientation and intellectual approach, refuses to surrender the issue of borders and citizenships at the academic level as to the nation-state and its interests. Border transgression, intellectually, socially, culturally and physically remains intentional. We learn here too that the new, in-between spaces, in the final analysis, can become the sites for new realities, and definitely transcendence beyond limitations to fragmented and therefore reductive space. Carole Boyce-Davies Cornell University Ithaca, USA

Acknowledgments

Our thanks to each of the scholars who have contributed to this volume for their input, patience and good spirit. We are grateful to have received institutional support from our home research unit The Caribbean Research Lab of Social Sciences (LC2S, CNRS, UMR-8053) and our home institution Université des Antilles (Martinique and Guadeloupe). Our special thanks to Martinican artist Ricardo Ozier-Lafontaine for generously granting us the right to use his visual creation on our book cover. Our thanks to all colleagues and friends who have provided enthusiastic pieces of advice during informal conversations.

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Contents

1

Introduction: The Border Is Not at the Border Myriam Moïse and Fred Réno

1

Part I Liberal Globalization and Border Identities 2

3

4

“Borderisation” Versus “Creolisation”: A Caribbean Game of Identities and Borders Fred Réno Labouring on the Border of Inclusion/Exclusion: Undocumented CARICOM Migrants in the Barbadian Economy Natalie Dietrich Jones Caribbean Migration Spaces and Transnational Networks: The Case of the Haitian Diaspora Cédric Audebert

19

43

71

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CONTENTS

Part II Migration Across Borders and Staggering Citizenships: The Specific Case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic 5

6

7

Borders and the Question of Citizenship: The Case of the Dominican Republic and Haiti Suzette A. Haughton

97

The Seeds of Anger: Contemporary Issues in Forced Migration Across the Dominican-Haitian Border Bridget Wooding

115

‘When Dialogue Is No Longer Possible, What Still Exists Is the Mystery of Hope’: Migration and Citizenship in the Dominican Republic in Film, Literature and Performance Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Part III

8

9

10

139

Blurring the Borders: Envisioning Alternative Spaces, Bodies, and Tongues

To Be or Not to Be… Giddy: Walking the Language (Border) Line Bernard Phipps and Sally Stainier

165

Blurring the Borders of the Human: Hybridized Bodies in Literature and Folklore Giselle Liza Anatol

179

Borderless Spaces and Alternative Subjectivities in Narratives by Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson and Olive Senior Myriam Moïse

193

CONTENTS

11

Reimagining the Nation: Gender and Bodily Transgressions in Breath, Eyes, Memory Simone A. James Alexander

Index

xv

219

241

Notes on Contributors

Simone A. James Alexander earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and holds Master of Arts degrees from Rutgers University and Universitet Druzhby Narodof, Moscow, Russia. Her primary fields of research include Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Caribbean Literature, Migration and Diaspora Studies. Her courses, Major Authors: Toni Morrison, Postcolonial Women Writers, and Migrations and Diasporas directly engage students with feminist and gender studies. Dr. Alexander also teaches Contemporary Russian Literature and graduate courses in Postcolonial Literature. She is an affiliated faculty of the Women and Gender Studies Program and the Russian and East European Studies Program. Dr. Alexander’s book African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival and Citizenship (University Press of Florida, 2014; reprinted May 2016) is the recipient of the 2015 College Language Association Creative Scholarship Award. The book also received an Honourable Mention from the African Literature Association Book of the Year Scholarship Award, 2015. She is also the author of Mother Imagery in the Novels of Afro-Caribbean Women (University of Missouri Press, 2001) and co-editor of Feminist and Critical Perspectives on Caribbean Mothering (Africa World Press, 2013). Alexander is currently working on Bodies of (In)Difference: Gender, Sexuality and Nationhood in Caribbean Women’s Literature and Black Freedom in Communist Russia: Great Expectations, Utopian Visions.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Giselle Liza Anatol As a professor of English at the University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS), Giselle Liza Anatol currently teaches classes on Caribbean literature, African American literature, and writing for young people. In 2011, Anatol published Bringing Light to Twilight: Perspectives on the Pop Culture Phenomenon, an edited collection of essays by an international array of scholars. The vampire theme crosses over from her study of young adult literature to her work on narratives by writers of African descent; she published The Things That Fly in the Night in 2015 with Rutgers University Press. That book explores representations of female vampires in folklore and writing from the Caribbean and African diasporas. Anatol has also edited two volumes of essays on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series— Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays (2003) and Reading Harry Potter Again: New Critical Essays (2009)—and published numerous articles on writing by authors such as Jamaica Kincaid, Jacqueline Woodson, Nalo Hopkinson, Derek Walcott and Langston Hughes. Cédric Audebert holds a Ph.D. in Social Geography. He is a Senior Researcher affiliated to the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), at the Laboratoire Caribéen de Sciences Sociales (Caribbean Center for Social Sciences) in Martinique. He has been the Director of MIGRINTER (International Migration, Space and Society Institute) from 2014 to 2017. He is the author of La Diaspora Haïtienne: Territoires Migratoires et Réseaux Transnationaux (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012) and has co-edited Migration in a Globalised World: New Research Issues and Prospects (Amsterdam University Press, 2010). His research focuses on the territorialisation of Caribbean migrations, with two main concerns: The geopolitics, geoeconomics and history of Caribbean migrations and the social and spatial consequences of Caribbean migration in the metropolitan areas of settlement (in the US and to a lesser extent in France) through the socio-economic insertion of Caribbean migrants. Carole Boyce-Davies is a Professor of English and Africana Studies (Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters) at Cornell University. She has held distinguished professorships at a number of institutions, including the Herskovits Professor of African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literary Studies and African American Studies at Northwestern University. She is the author of Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (Routledge, 1994) and Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke University Press, 2008). In addition to numerous scholarly articles, Boyce Davies

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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has also published the following critical anthologies: Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature (Africa World Press, 1986); Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature (Africa World Press, 1990); and a two-volume collection of critical and creative writing entitled Moving Beyond Boundaries (New York University Press, 1995): International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (volume 1), and Black Women’s Diasporas (volume 2). She is general editor of the three-volume, The Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008), and of Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiography, Essays, Poetry (Banbury: Ayebia, 2011). Her most recent monograph is Caribbean Spaces: Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (Illinois, 2013) and a children’s book, Walking (EducaVision, 2016). Natalie Dietrich Jones is Research Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies Mona campus. Her interests include geographies of the border, managed migration, and intra-regional migration in the Caribbean. Dr. Dietrich Jones is Chair of the Migration and Development Cluster, an interdisciplinary group of researchers exploring contemporary issues concerning migration in the Caribbean and its diaspora. She is also Coordinator of the course Small States’ Development: Challenges and Opportunities, which is offered in the MSc Development Studies programme at SALISES. Maria Cristina Fumagalli is Professor in Literature at the University of Essex, UK. She is the author of On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015), the first literary/cultural history of this often troubled border region the writing of which was supported by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust). Other publications include Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze (2009) which redefines modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view is universal. She is also the author of The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001), the editor of Agenda: Special Issue on Derek Walcott (2002–2003) and co-editor of The Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities (2013) and Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio (2013). She has just been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship to work on a monograph on Derek Walcott.

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Suzette A. Haughton is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Government, The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Kingston, Jamaica. She obtained her Ph.D. from the Department of War Studies, King’s College, London. Her research spans security threats affecting the Americas, border security, border disputes and their impacts on the nation-state and on the lived experiences of citizens. Myriam Moïse is an Associate Professor of English and Gender Studies at the Université des Antilles, a Fulbright scholar and a researcher at the Caribbean Social Sciences Research Lab (LC2S/CNRS-UMR 8053). She holds a Doctoral degree in Anglophone Studies from Paris Sorbonne Nouvelle University and a Ph.D. in Literatures in English from the University of the West Indies. Her research fields include Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Discourse Analysis, with a special focus on the literary and artistic productions by women of African Caribbean descent. Her research has been supported by several visiting research fellowships: New York University (Summer 2009), Brown University (Spring 2012), University College London (Erasmus fellow, 2018) and Emory University (Fulbright scholar, 2020). Dr. Moïse has published a number of articles in peer-reviewed scholarly journals (Commonwealth Essays & Studies, PoCo Pages, Vertigo, Wagadu) and book chapters in edited collections, namely in Diasporic Women’s Writing of the Black Atlantic: (En)Gendering Literature and Performance (Routledge 2014), Ville et Environnement: Regards Croisés sur le monde postcolonial (Michel Houdiard 2014) and Anthology Vodou I Remember (Lexington Books 2016). Dr. Moïse is the Secretary-General of Universities Caribbean, the regional organisation of Caribbean Universities and Research Institutes and an Executive member of the Caribbean Studies Association (CSA). Bernard Phipps is a lecturer in English at the Université des Antilles where he has taught for the last twenty years at the legal and Political Science department of Guadeloupe. He has an agrégation in English with a special mention in utterer-centred approach linguistics developed by French linguist Antoine Culioli, which has led him to be interested in the interconnections between language and power in the French-Creole speaking Caribbean. Fred Réno is a Professor of Political Science. After lecturing at the University of Rennes in France, he has taught Comparative Politics, Caribbean Political Systems and Political Sociology at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane. He is the author of several articles on identity, creolisation policy in the Caribbean, social mobilisation, and the politics

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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and culture of the French West Indies. He is the editor of several books on Caribbean identity and political culture, including French and West Indian (with Richard Burton, 1995), Identité et Politique: de l’Europe et de la caraïbe multiculturelles, 1995, The Politics of identity: Migrants and minorities in multicultural states (with Robert Hudson, 2000), The modern political culture of the Caribbean, (with Holger Henke, 2003), and Mobilisations sociales aux Antilles (with Jean-Claude William and Fabienne Alvarez, 2012). Professor Reno is very involved in international cooperation, particularly with the OECS and the wider Caribbean region. He has been nominated as responsible for regional cooperation with Higher Education institutions in the Caribbean by the President of Université des Antilles and regularly represents his institution at the Executive committee of regional Higher Education organisations such as Universities Caribbean and CORPUCA. Fred Réno is particularly committed to serving the wider Caribbean region as he is currently militating for the development of a common core knowledge and curriculum of Caribbean Studies across Caribbean universities. Sally Stainier is a Political Science Ph.D. candidate at the Université des Antilles, working on language policy as public policy in the context of Guadeloupe’s school system. An active teacher, translator and conference interpreter, her academic research is continuously stirred by a practical experience of local politics as well as first-hand observation of language choice/power struggle in the regional, transnational public sphere. Bridget Wooding has specialised in the field of human development, migration, gender, human rights and statelessness. After many years working with international cooperation in the insular Caribbean, she is currently the Coordinator of the think tank Caribbean Migration and Development Observatory (OBMICA), based in Santo Domingo. Her research interests focus on human development, migrations, border politics, gender and labour. She is the author of several books and articles on these topics, published in English, French and Spanish. She has authored Needed But Unwanted: Haitian migrants and their descendants in the Dominican Republic (2004) and has co-edited with Wilfredo Lozano Los Retos delDesarrollo Insular. Desarrollo sostenible, migraciones yderechos humanos en las relacionesdominicohaitianas enel siglo XXI (2008).

List of Tables

Table 3.1 Table 3.2

Distribution of interviewees, by nationality and gender CARICOM nationals resident in Barbados, by country of birth

46 50

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Border Is Not at the Border Myriam Moïse and Fred Réno

A visible or invisible dividing line, the border is usually perceived in terms of separation and rupture, but it is also a principle of organization of international relations. It is therefore a site of tension with regard to identity construction and assertion; the border is often at the very origin of contestations, negotiations, and other conflicting patterns of inclusion/exclusion of subjectivities. Exclusion and separation usually result from historical narratives whose complex contents deserve as much attention as their outcomes. While the political dimension is evident, it is often accompanied with multiple approaches that should also be explored. The sociological approach teaches us that “where we may find borders is not necessarily where we expect them to be, and that the right appreciation of the situation of the borders supposes the consideration of many

M. Moïse (B) English and Gender Studies, Laboratoire Caribéen de Sciences Sociales (LC2S / CNRS), Université des Antilles, Schoelcher, Martinique e-mail: [email protected] F. Réno Political Science, Laboratoire Caribéen de Sciences Sociales (LC2S / CNRS), Université des Antilles, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_1

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M. MOÏSE AND F. RÉNO

other parameters than the sole voluntary and brutal limitation of the crossing of an imaginary line drawn on the ground” (Lévy 2010).1 It is precisely these alternative parameters facilitating the movement beyond linear patterns and normative representations of the border that this scholarly book sets out to look into. In its material and symbolic dimensions, the border is associated with territory and migration, two very influential factors in the reconfiguration of space. Far from being limited to strictly structural and institutional transformations, the notion of reconfiguration is a process of multidimensional recomposition which is anchored in the very meanings engendered by social actors.

Transhipment of Identities The exploration of space as conceived in this book integrates the symbolic dimensions and is not limited to the sole Caribbean basin. Beyond the traditional island and continental geography that allows to circumscribe the Greater Caribbean, it now appears fundamental to integrate new territories which were born out of the fact that a growing number of Caribbean people have settled in the major cities of North America and Western Europe. Defining the Caribbean as a space of migration bears two major meanings. First, it recalls the colonial history of its settlement after the Amerindian genocide and the establishment of European and African populations within the framework of a slave system. This traumatic history has profoundly marked Caribbean societies and may explain the choice made by some researchers to place coloniality at the center of all research on migration (Cervantes-Rodriguez et al. 2009). These first demographic waves occur within the violent conditions of the plantation system and are followed by the arrival of indentured servants from India after the abolitions. The region later sees the settling of a number of Levantines, many of whom have fled conflicts and wars in the Middle East. Defining the Caribbean as a space of migration also means the mass exodus of local populations, especially after the Second World War, for economic reasons mainly. This diaspora, who lives and works in American 1 « Si l’on trouve des frontières, ce n’est pas forcément là où on les attend et que l’appréciation juste de la place des frontières suppose la prise en compte de bien d’autres considérations que la seule limitation volontaire et brutale du franchissement d’une ligne imaginaire tracée au sol » (Lévy 2010).

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and European capitals, strongly contributes through substantial remittances, to the improvement of material living conditions of relatives who have stayed in the country. This dual migratory movement leads us to reconsider any given relations with the territory and with the border as such (Hudson and Réno 2000). The Creole universe that emerges from this meeting of populations cannot possibly be reduced to its cultural components. If the Amerindian, European, African, Asian, and Levantine contributions are visible, they exist only in a maelstrom that goes beyond them and reveal an original Creole culture. The Caribbean is probably one of the first regions in the world to have experienced this evolution and arguably one of the richest areas of cultural hybridization. The product of colonization and slavery, hybridity also marks the political culture of the region (Puri 2004). “Caribbean histories and cultural processes are multidirectional, making for complex postcolonial creolization processes. Creole citizens in the Caribbean have always negotiated and maneuvered within intertwined histories of diverse but linked places constituting the world economy/society, and they have done so often from their local transnational vantage point” (Crichlow and Northover 2009: 2). This “raceless” culture limits ethnic claims and transcends borders. It allows any inhabitant of any Caribbean country to share with any inhabitant from any neighboring country a genuine sense of relation that defies root identities (Glissant 1990). The concept of creolization as conceived by Glissant on a Caribbean scale is considered as the foreshadowing of the world of the future. The contemporary world experience is that of an accelerated circulation of people and cultures that favors encounter and miscegenation. One can therefore consider this movement as facilitating transnationalization insofar as through its conception, Creole culture is itself symbolically cross-border and meta-national. Borders embrace a variety of meanings; depending on contexts and perspectives, they can be separating territories and regions but can also constitute actual contact zones which unify cultural spaces beyond geographic division. Water spaces, oceans, seas, and rivers, come to complexify the definition of the border which is often not static but fluid and even volatile to some extent. Crossing the border thus allows connection and disconnection, stability and movement, inclusion and exclusion, as well as the construction and deconstruction of cultural, socioeconomic, and political realities.

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The Caribbean experience provides a stimulating heuristic framework to capture a renewed reality of territories in a transnationalized global context. This is the idea that Cédric Audebert develops through the study of the Haitian diaspora. Borders are now being shaped by new territories, transnational and reticular in which new social solidarities can take place. The dynamism of the diaspora in the host countries and its influence on the social activity of the native country contribute to the reconfiguration of spaces. For instance, cultural spaces are constantly enriched by the transshipment of cultures and the reconfiguration of Creole identities. Music and cultural practices repeatedly emerge from revisited traditions. Examples of popular music such as Salsa and Zouk are interesting from this point of view. While the former has its deep roots in Cuba and the latter in the French Caribbean, their development takes place in New York and Paris with musicians of various origins. In other words, migration is bound to take its own autonomy in relation to the country of origin. So for example, the Caribbean immigrant associations in France rarely defined themselves using Guadeloupe or Martinique only), but more often called themselves “West Indian” or “Caribbean” at a time when, in each of these islands, nationalism is on the increase (Giraud 2000: 68). However, despite these characteristics, creolization does not always translate into the transnational solidarity practices that one might expect. Nationality still remains the framework of the relationship that elites and populations tend to opt for. Creole cultural cosmopolitanism runs up against national resistance and socioeconomic realities. More specifically, the national sentiment remains particularly vivid. It resists cultural affiliations that would unfold outside the legally circumscribed framework of nationality. There has been a Creole political discourse aiming to transcend ethnic boundaries and build Caribbean nations (Hintzen 2002). It however requires a meta-national approach to creolization to go beyond borders (Morin 1990). This is one of the conclusions of Fred Reno’s chapter. These remarks are expressed in his analysis of the link between “frontierization” and creolization. Migration may have the effect of reterritorializing the collective identity of migrants, but it does not create an international Creole. The transshipment of identities paradoxically tends to (re)activate national affiliations thus revealing an ambivalent borderlining.

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The Ambivalence of the “Frontierization” Governments are often the main border builders but they may also be the most favorable to border transgression if specific contexts and their interests incite them to do so. Borderization needs a global approach. It manifests itself first and foremost through a nationalist and performative identity discourse whose aim is to reinforce the inclusion of nationals and to stigmatize and even exclude those who are perceived as foreigners. “Nationalism is the opposite of a cosmopolitan approach that assesses migration in terms of global well-being or the resources and opportunities gained by individuals regardless of their national origins” (Dumitru 2009: 12). The nation is resistant to internationalization. In reality, the process of border-crossing is often associated with the process of transgression because, in practice, the two realities seem dialectically indissociable. There are few forbidden borders that have not been crossed or will not be crossed. The international situation and the massive arrival in the economically developed or politically stable countries of poor or persecuted populations illustrate the permanence of the transgression dynamics. Border violations usually have economic and political causes. It most often results in circumvention of the rule of law. But the relationship with the law is also ambivalent. It refers to the principles of humanity while legitimizing the unacceptable. The offense is often committed by illegal or “undocumented” migrants. The latter term is preferred by Nathalie Dietrich Jones to avoid criminalizing migrants. In the example of the Guyanese workers in Barbados, which she presents, many of them arrived on the Englishspeaking island as seasonal employees, so legally before becoming “Undocumented”. This status is often temporary. Many undocumented migrants can be regularized but sometimes choose not to because the cost of regularization is economically unbearable. Their experience reflects original strategies for transgressing borders by both “victims” and the authorities. Citizenship acts as a border between nationals and others. By this legal means the State decides on the beneficiaries and the content of the citizenship. From this point of view, the situation of the undocumented migrant is ambiguous. Both inside because they are physically present in the territorial space and outside because they find themselves legally excluded from the benefit of citizenship and social and health measures.

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Excluded from citizenship, the migrant remains a player in the development of the host country. If the law tends to exclude offenders from the social space, the market tends to include them. The paradox is that the undocumented is tolerated by the authorities as an exploited labor force, without rights, while at the same time, the universal and inalienable nature of the human rights is proclaimed. At the time, Hannah Arendt had raised the question in very topical terms. “No paradox of contemporary politics is filled with more poignant irony than the discrepancy between the efforts of well-meaning idealists who stubbornly insist on regarding as ‘inalienable’ those human rights, which are enjoyed only by citizens of the most prosperous and civilized countries, and the situation of the rightless themselves” (Arendt 2004: 355). The citizens of Guyana, whose country faces economic difficulties, are numerous to emigrate to Barbados, carrying out activities neglected by Barbadians. They reveal the dependence of the island economy and the need for foreign labor in the agriculture and construction sectors. Exclusion therefore does not prohibit measures favorable to the reception of immigrants for mainly economic reasons. If highly skilled migrants are sought, the under-qualified and exploitable workforce is also welcomed to meet a demand where local supply is lacking. This situation questions the notion of human rights but also that of border with respect to the principles of liberty and equality claimed by liberal theory. If the interest of the migration is verified, in the name of which principle should the normative logic privilege those of the interior to the detriment of those coming from the outside? Why then would the migration be abnormal and the sedentary normal? Would the principles of liberty and equality be compatible with the limitation of individual mobility and aspiration to a better life? (Carens 2007). The performative exclusionary discourse and the legal validation of rejection measures on the one hand and the theoretical attachment to human rights on the other hand are now classic strategies of migration policies in many states. This strategic duality raises the question of the ethics of migration and border-crossing (Dumitru 2009). It applies to Haitians in several countries of the Caribbean, including the French Antilles and the Dominican Republic. Election periods are generally conducive to observing this duality. In the Caribbean and French Guiana, the result of the election reveals the xenophobia of a number of citizens against the populations of the rest of the Caribbean. In the French

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Republic of human rights, immigration is now one of the stakes of political competition. As in France, Brazilians in Guyana, Dominicans and Haitians in the Caribbean are perceived as threats by a minority but still a growing part of the electorate. In the Dominican Republic, the logic of border control has recently reverberated with the authorities’ decision to deprive many Dominicans of Haitian descent of nationality. The importance of this issue has led us to devote the second part of this volume to relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and the topic is also emphasized in some of the articles of the last part. The Haiti/Dominican Republic border is emblematic of the very complexities of border dynamics in the Caribbean and this volume highlights this border as presenting specific issues that are relevant to the region. Without denying their cultural identity and sometimes their national belonging, many migrants seek to integrate and obtain the nationality of the host country. If inclusive law allows this integration it can also promote and legitimize the exclusion of non-nationals. This is suggested in Suzette Haughton’s text on the experience of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic. On this binational island, the geographical boundaries seem supplanted by highly efficient symbolic lines of separation. Race, language, and a reconstructed collective memory found an imagined Dominican identity, supposed to protect the Dominican people from the Haitian invader. In this context, Suzette Haughton shows that the law makes an internal border. It legitimizes a form of racism because it includes in the same category Haitians living in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans of Haitian descent by the denationalization of the latter. The purpose is to separate this constructed category from the rest of the population by the invention of an exclusive identity. What Bridget Wooding calls “antiHaitianism” is deeply rooted in the oligarchy and part of the Dominican people. This rejection of the Haitian is enshrined in a representation of the Dominican identity which would be first European and above all Hispanic, obscuring the African contribution common to all territories of the Caribbean. This construction of the symbolic frontier relies to a large extent on the recall of dramatic historical sequences and consequently the use of emotion as a driving force for politico-identity mobilization. Anti-Haitianism manifests itself in various abuses and sometimes the imputation to Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian descent of crimes and offenses that would authorize sending them “back” to the

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neighboring territory where many of them fall into the status of stateless. But it is less this imputation than the violation of a discriminatory decree which is alleged to legitimize these deportations. Many of these deportees are parked on the Haitian-Dominican border in a place called Gift Park which is far from what the word “gift” means. It is more like what Bridget Wooding sees as a makeshift camp and one of the “death zones” of the world. Maria Cristina Fumagalli’s text completes this picture by offering an artistic vision of the constraints of Haitian migration in the Dominican Republic. The films, news, and documentaries that serve as a basis for her analysis illustrate the living conditions of the irregular migrant. As racism, negrophobia, denationalization and deportation fuel border enforcement policies, these media all contribute to pointing at the practical and symbolic effects of the commodification of human misery. The frontier does not simply disperse itself in a multitude of state institutions that would previously escape its authority and control; it spreads visibly beyond and below the national form. Beyond because it is always inserted in unequal international production relations of which it is at the same time one of the decisive gears and the determined product. Below, because it also tends to be internalized by the subjects it defines in the form of an exclusive nationalist ideology (Deleixhe 2016: 169). This remark applies perfectly to the history of relations between the two parts of the territory. However, exchanges between Haitians and Dominicans are not reduced to a permanent conflict. In crisis situations like the one that followed the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, Dominican President Leonel Fernandez was the first head of state to offer help to his neighbor, notably by opening the border. On the issue of statelessness, the solidarity of civil society actors, particularly the religious sectors of the two territories, is clear. In the Caribbean, another island is home to two territories. Saint Martin includes a Dutch part and a French part crossed by an “elastic” border. The elasticity of the frontier illustrates the original experience of a bistate society. If history tends to confer a cultural unity on the island, Saint Martin’s society is politically divided by an almost invisible border which tends to materialize and become active in times of crisis. English is the lingua franca of Saint Martin but nationality is French or Dutch. The island is perhaps the most successful example of cross-border identity in the Caribbean. “Until August 2007, Saint-Martin was an exception with regard to the administration of its borders. First of all the French

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government had no means of monitoring foreigners entering the island regardless of whether they were visitors or residents” (Benoît 2008: 218). As a result, the multilingual society defies official boundaries. There are many people in both parts of the country who speak English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Creole indifferently when governments speak in national languages. In Saint Martin, the frontier is elsewhere. In the absence of effective control of migration flows, deportation would have served as a border (Benoît 2008). The damage caused by the last hurricanes and the insecurity it generated reminded one of the existence of a border that is sometimes forgotten as it seems virtual in normal times. In the case of Saint-Martin, transgression of the border is permanent and reactivation exceptional. The reconfiguration it entails concerns in particular the taking into account of the different communities in the sociopolitical space, thus defying the French political tradition (Schnapper 1994). A candidate for an election on the French side confessed that if you want to win, you must now have at least one Haitian and one Dominican on your list. Are the “Francophones” on the point of adopting principles of accommodation that hitherto characterized the Dutch political tradition (Lijphart 1968)?

Borderless Bodies and Tongues The ultimate part of this book is devoted to discourse analysis with an emphasis on the borders of tongues and bodies. This part may mark a certain rupture with the first two sections in terms of forms and objects of study, but it does not establish an actual borderline between the texts of the two sections. In fact, this final section demonstrates the extent to which the linguistic and bodily borders are epitomized through various patterns of fluidity, transcendence, and transgression, and how these borders proceed to recreating and reconfiguring forms, objects, and subjectivities. In these four chapters devoted to language, culture, and literature, the frontier becomes a metaphor of liminality and multidimensionality, as it follows multiple paths which may lead to reconstructed forms. This part of the book opens on a chapter whose originality allows smooth transition with the two first parts and illustrates this very oscillation between academic narrative and personal experience. This co-written piece by Bernard Phipps and Sally Stainier indeed interrogates one’s

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capacity to master one’s tongue and even to move beyond the language border. Beyond signifies spatial difference, marks progress, promises the future, but our intimations of exceeding the barrier or boundary—the very act of going beyond—are unknowable, unrepresentable, without a return to the “present” which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and displaced. The imaginary of spatial distance—to live somehow beyond the border of our times—throws into relief the temporal, social differences that interrupt our collusive sense of cultural contemporaneity. The present can no longer be envisaged as a break or a bonding with the past and the future, no longer a synchronic presence: our proximate self-presence, our public image, comes to be revealed for its discontinuities, its inequalities, its minorities (Bhabha 1994: 6). Through the metaphor of the bigidi, a popular dance figure of Guadeloupean gwo ka, Phipps and Stainier emblematize the unstable movement of the body and the dizziness of the tongue as a way to move beyond given lexical borders. This movement is reminiscent of what Dominique Aurelia calls “the poetics of staggering”, “this space in between that suggests a certain emptiness, a void between two places, is full and vibrant. Being an interstice, it is never safe, never stable, but unpredictable and disrupted; it is therefore a complex place of life and death, of permanent re-creation and reinvention of the self” (2011: 81). Drawing on their transgenerational experiences as well as on the diglossic nature of the French-Caribbean linguistic situation on the edge of French and Creole, Phipps and Stainier proceed to deconstructing the hierarchization process which sets European and vernacular languages apart. Sociolinguist Joshua A. Fishman defines diglossia as a stable and long-lasting process which “in its most general terms, both represents and requires the maintenance of intercultural and intracultural boundaries” (1991: 358). He also contends that “a culture that can no longer control its own boundaries is doomed to a cultural version of the acquired immune deficiency syndrome,” hence, according to him, “there must be a boundary that cannot be overstepped” (1987: 138). Contrastingly, Phipps and Stainier deconstruct these very boundaries which they choose to overstep as they allow French and Creole to coexist within the staggering rhythm of the bigidi and as they transcend the expected borders of a scholarly article to blur the theoretical and the anecdotical. As they put it, they seek to “embrace this region’s linguistic plurality as an interwoven and mutually nurturing set of communication resources.”

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Plurality operates at every level in this last section of the book which literally transcends genre boundaries and allows the fictional and the magical as well as the human and the non-human to interact and overlap. The previously mentioned dancing figure of the bigidi as well as the wellknown figure of the limbo are popular Caribbean dances inherited from Africa. Caribbean authors Wilson Harris and Kamau Brathwaite associate the limbo to Anancy, the spider-figure and trickster-hero who survived the Middle Passage, among the other numerous cultural heritages from Africa. A folktale hero in the English-speaking Caribbean, Anancy’s “capacity as artist-creator of a new world lies in his release from a single enclosing cultural matrix” (Tiffin 2001: 57). Transporting Anancy stories as well as other animal stories in the diasporic spaces and turning them into non-traditional and transcultural entities is a recurrent process among African Caribbean writers. Diasporic Caribbean women writers in particular appear to reinvent their own Anancy stories, thus depicting the female self as existing in-between discourses and spaces as some of the chapters of this section envision. The second chapter discusses bestiality in a straightforward way as Giselle Anatol analyzes how frontiers may be blurred between the human and the non-human. Drawing on two literary pieces by diasporic women writers, Anatol interrogates the normative framework of differentiation and forces us to reconsider given binary categorizations and accepted borders between humans, non-humans, animals, and plants. Through the questioning of the given sovereignty of humans, Giselle Anatol questions all the preconceived borders which contributed to feed a system of injustices and oppressions. Above all, Anatol’s chapter moves beyond borders as it considers discourses by African-American women writers and aims to stretch the borders of the Caribbean to Florida and North America’s Gulf Coast, underlining those regions’ common “culture, architecture, and historical trauma.” Referring to the tradition of storytelling, this chapter blurs the border between mules and men and between spiritual and physical bodies. As the analysis refers to drumming, Vodou, and chant-rhymes, among other Caribbean cultural practices, alternative religions and indigenous rites which were previously dismissed are progressively rehabilitated as borders break down. As Mimi Sheller puts it, “we must look for subaltern histories below the surface of the image, tangled in the roots of trees, close to the ground, submerged in the water” (2012: 139). As the discussion moves forward, Myriam Moïse’s chapter allows an exploration of these stories

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that are situated below the surface, hence below the visible. In her analysis of “borderless spaces and alternative subjectivities,” Moïse examines the specific discourse and the construction of identities beyond normative frameworks in three selected pieces of short fiction by diasporic Caribbean women writers. Notions of placelessness and borderlessness are discussed with regard to the specific discourse of Caribbean women of African descent. Throughout the third section overall, one is immersed into these “diasporic elsewheres” that Carole Boyce-Davies theorizes, and into this black female discourse that “crosses the borders, journeys, migrates and so reclaims as it reasserts” (Boyce-Davies 1994: 37). Myriam Moïse’s chapter may be discussed jointly with Simone Alexander’s article as they both shift the discussion toward the actual reconfiguration of bodily spaces beyond given borders. In fact, the black female body is depicted as divided rather than unified, as multiple rather than single, as fluid rather than stable, hence numerous alternatives are offered to move beyond dominant discursive regimes on the body. Going beyond fixed national borders, the process of fragmentation can be seen as recreative and as allowing identity (re)construction within a certain border de-territorialization and reterritorialization of national identities. National borders are therefore displaced and questioned; national identities are delocalized and stretched beyond the given limits of the nation-state. “Such identities are not unified or stable, but are fluid identities which constantly push at the boundaries of the nation-state, thereby re-defining themselves and the nation-state simultaneously” (Schultermandlt and Toplu 2010: 11). This final section of the book theorizes the experience of in-betweenity and discusses fluidity and subjectivation to ultimately demonstrate that the diasporic female body becomes a borderless space itself as it is constantly shifting, moving, and fragmenting to achieve recreation and rehabilitation. Moïse and Alexander both show interest in the work of Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat whose obsession with unbordering the body is pointed out. In Danticat’s fiction, discursive and cultural bodies are able to transcend the borders of the traumatized flesh and achieve self-renewal and self-empowerment. Danticat’s female protagonists in particular may indeed experience what Wilson Harris theorizes in the Womb of Space as “the dual death of Man, a cultural death followed by a psychical death as threshold to the savage paradox of re-birth” (60). Alexander’s chapter develops a substantial analysis of Danticat’s debut novel which

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shows the extent to which bodily spaces may be transgressed through creative literary discourse. She focuses on the representation of bodily fragmentation as an alternative space for self-expression and recreation beyond historical trauma. Through her analysis of Danticat’s novel which relates the rape of the young protagonist’s mother, Martine by a Haitian Tonton Macoute and her subsequent border-crossing as she moves to New York, Simone Alexander reconsiders the notion of nationhood itself. Transgressing the borders is thus seen as allowing the reinvention of subjectivities and the assertion of alternative discourses against patriarchal powers. Hegemonic normative frameworks tend to envision identity as fixed and static, but when referring to diasporic subjectivities, the two final chapters, and the third section overall, highlight the fact that a subject may not manage to construct identity if this means remaining within given delimited borders. Whether it means moving beyond the borders of a sovereign language, body, or genre or acknowledging instability and rupture as recreative processes beyond accepted fixity, this section depicts identification as a constantly shifting process rather than a static self-positioning. In his theorization of identification, Stuart Hall foresees a subject who “assumes different identities at different times, identities which are not unified around a coherent ‘self’. Within us are contradictory identities, pulling in different directions, so that our identifications are continually being shifted about” (Hall 1996: 27). The final section of the book genuinely proceeds to shifting the identification process beyond canonical borders and to deconstructing race, gender, class, and genre categories, so as to envision new territories allowing self-recreation and self-reinvention. Overall, this collection of scholarly chapters contributes to tackling the phenomena of spatial reconfiguration within a transdisciplinary perspective which combines a multiplicity of research fields, including geopolitics, social sciences, cultural geography, and discourse analysis. Beyond the social practices linked to the persistence of the border and within the constant reconfiguration of spaces beyond borders, the concepts of nation, language, cross-border mobility, gender, and race are thoroughly explored within a multidimensional perspective.

Works Cited Arendt, H. (2004) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Schocken Books. Aurelia, Dominique (2011) “In Search of a Third Space”, Small Axe, 36 (November), pp. 80–88.

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Benoît, Catherine (2008) “Saint Martin’s Change of Political Status: Inscribing Borders and Immigration Laws onto Geographical Space”, NWIG: New West Indian Guide, 82 (3/4), pp. 211–235. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994) The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boyce-Davies, Carole (1994) Black Women, Writing and Identity, Migrations of the Subject. London: Routledge. Carens, J. (2007) « Etrangers et citoyens: un plaidoyer en faveur de l’ouverture des frontières », Raisons Politiques, 26, pp. 11–39. Cervantes-Rodriguez, M., Grosfoguel, Ramón, and Eric, Muelants (eds.) (2009) Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States: Essyas on Incorporation, Identity and Citizenship. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Crichlow, M. A., and Northover, P. (2009) Globalization and the Post-creole Imagination. Duke University Press. Deleixhe, M. (2016) Aux abords de la démocratie. Contrôle des frontières et politique de l’hospitalité. Paris: Classiques Garnier, coll « Politiques ». Dumitru, S. (2009) « L’éthique du débat sur la fuite des cerveaux », Revue européennes des migrations internationals, 25 (1), pp. 119–135. Fishman, Joshua A. (1987) Ideology, Society and Language: The Odissey of Nathan Birnbaum. Ann Harbor, MI: Karoma Publishers Inc. ——— (1991) Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. Giraud, M. (2000) “Identity and Migrants”, in Hudson Robert and Fred Réno (eds.) Politics of Identity, Migrants and Minorities in Multicultural States. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Glissant (1990) La Poétique de la Relation. Paris: Gallimard. Hall, Stuart (1996) Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. London: Sage. Harris, Wilson (1983) The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination. Westport: Greenwood Press. Hintzen, Percy C. (2002) “Race and Creole Ethnicity in the Caribbean”, in Verene A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (eds.) Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture. Kingston: Ian Randle. Hudson, R., and Réno, F. (eds.) (2000) Politics of Identity, Migrants and minorities in Multicultural States. Basingstoke: MacMillan. Lévy, Jacques (2010) « Penser aux/les limites de nos limites », SociologieS [On line], Dossiers, Frontières sociales, frontières culturelles, frontières techniques, published 27th December 2010, consulted 11 August 2020. URL: http:// journals.openedition.org/sociologies/3305. Lijphart, A. (1968) The Politics of Accommodation: Pluralism and Democracy in the Netherlands. Berkeley: University of California Press. Morin, E. (1990) Penser l’Europe. Paris: Gallimard.

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Puri, S. (2004) The Caribbean Postcolonial, Social Equality, Post/Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schnapper, D. (1994) La communauté des citoyens. Paris: Gallimard. Schultermandlt, Silvia, and Toplu, Sebnem (eds.) (2010) A Fluid Sense of Self: The Politics of Transnational Identity. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Sheller, Mimi (2012) Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Tiffin, Helen (2001) “The Institution of Literature”, in Albert James Arnold (ed.) A History of Literature in the Caribbean: English and Dutch-Speaking Regions, pp. 41–66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

PART I

Liberal Globalization and Border Identities

CHAPTER 2

“Borderisation” Versus “Creolisation”: A Caribbean Game of Identities and Borders Fred Réno

Introduction Traditional borders between states are being jeopardised by globalisation. In fact, in a world where networks are bound to transcend such boundaries, their very existence is being challenged. Territories1 as we know them could thus become obsolete due to globalisation, thereby setting aside a cornerstone of the nation-state model. A disputed theory that suggests state divides is bound to decline gradually. The territorial principle would in that sense be called into question by transnational networks and flows, as they challenge the rationale of sovereignty and act as operational substitutes to national regulation. Still, it seems that borders are not only resisting but getting stronger— which might be a salient feature of the twenty-first century. Now, before we proceed, we must clarify the terms of reference governing the 1 Bertrand Badie, La fin des territoires, Fayard, 1995.

F. Réno (B) Laboratoire Caribéen de Sciences Sociales (LC2S / CNRS), Université des Antilles, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_2

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following discussion. A border may be construed as a boundary between two states. However, it is also, quite often, a living space that cannot be scaled down to a mere geographical divide. It can also be comprehended based on its functions. From an economic standpoint, it is a corridor where goods are being traded. From a strictly legal perspective, it defines a state’s political jurisdiction—which also embodies the state’s sovereignty. In that sense, borders still serve a purpose. Globalisation has impacted—but not obliterated—traditional territories and the borders meant to delineate their shape and meaning physically. Many believed that the end of the Cold War and fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 would wipe out boundaries between peoples. “Nearly thirty years later, walls and fences have spread exponentially all around the globe. All border experts agree on the fact that these are building times, walls are trendy. From walls, fences, barricades and even the electronic and virtual ‘wall’ that Brazil wants to build along its border with ten countries – mirror today’s political arena.”2 These observations implicitly highlight the pervasiveness of fear and the resulting security policy. Borders are a political response to a general craving for safety. Walls mirror the fear of losing control over a given territory and identity—and convey, first and foremost, the reassertion of state sovereignty. Migration, combined with heightened security requirements, now tend to trigger identity claims that end up fuelling destructive self-confinement policies. The thousands of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, whose corpses have been littering the Mediterranean Sea or drifting towards South European shores, epitomise these unreasonable confinement rhetoric or practices. This shifting state of things defies transnationalisation—yet another reality strongly embedded in modern agendas. While relying on antagonistic principles, borders and transnational matters are deeply intertwined, based on mutually providing purposes. Transnational flows are expanding because borders have proven ineffective in a globalised context where state regulation is receding and adjusting to societal shifts.

2 Le Monde, February 5, 2018, pp. 14–15.

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More than ever, migration is being used as an excuse to increase territorial borderisation.3 This process translates, for the most part, a willingness to make territories safer—which results in a variety of claims operating through multiple platforms. It is a symbolic ensemble that builds on notions of territory, collective memory, language and more generally, culture. Here, “borderisation” is identity’s partner in crime in that it delineates material and symbolic spaces for better and for worse. While the sense of belonging is what makes territories meaningful, it can also give way to “murderous identities.”4 Migration flows typically reveal the border’s protective purpose. Hurdles and walls are rising as a result of migrants being construed as competitors in the realm of wealth distribution and as threats to readily essentialised lifestyles and cultures. Borderisation is a permanent hazard for those who endure it and have no other choice but sheer survival—yet it reflects how others entrench themselves in the name of allegedly besieged identities, and use that process as a guillotine (as noted by Patrick Chamoiseau).5 The sense of belonging can thus foster isolation based on the selfpreserving and sometimes, belligerent rationale that may be observed nowadays. However, when it comes to liberal globalisation, identities and borders do not necessarily blend so smoothly. This is most apparent in the migration of Creole populations from the Caribbean to major American and European cities. Exodus has brought them to reconfigure their native identities and territories in keeping with a world where diversity is challenging monoculture borders. Mass displacement has paved the way for an archipelagic world, as defined by Edouard Glissant.6 Our planet seems to be embracing this new, archipelagic spatio-cultural set-up—one made of perpetually regenerating identities. Especially in the light of constant demographic and cultural flows across an interconnected world where distance is not so much about miles and kilometres anymore. While America displays profound (yet, unaware) creolisation dynamics, such might also be the case of Europe,

3 Paolo Cuttitta, La « frontiérisation » de Lampedusa, comment se construit une frontière, L’Espace Politique [Online], 25 | 2015-1, uploaded on April 8, 2015, read on January 12, 2018. 4 Amin Maalouf, Les identités meurtrières, Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1998, 189p. 5 Patrick Chamoiseau, Frères migrants, Seuil, 2017. 6 Edouard Glissant, Traité du Tout Monde, Gallimard, 1997.

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making it a fertile ground for observation of such dynamics.7 According to Edouard Glissant, “Europe is indeed creolising.” It is turning into an archipelago. It comprises several vibrant languages and literatures that influence and permeate each other, with students learning and speaking several tongues at once — and not only English. Also, Europe is home to several local islands of sorts, ever more vibrant, ever more engaged in the global arena, such as the Catalan, Basque or even Breton islands. Not to mention the presence of communities from Africa, North Africa, the Caribbean — each endowed with century or millennium-old cultures, some of them displaying self-withdrawal tendencies while others commit fiercely to creolisation, such as young Beurs 8 in the projects or French West Indian populations. The fact that insular spaces exist within Europe, construed as an archipelago, further blurs the very notion of intraEuropean borders.9

How do creolisation (as defined above) and borderisation connect in Creole arenas where multicultural identity is inherently open and “porous to all the breath of the world”?10 Such is the fundamental question addressed in this paper. The Creole Caribbean provides, indeed, an ideal observation post regarding the relationship between borders and identity. Socio-economic constraints and its long history of colonial deportation and acculturation reveal the peculiar and contrasting features of that relation. In a region characterised by ancient migratory traditions, creolisation is embedded in transnationalisation as a process but is now facing identity tensions that seem to challenge its very core. Wherever social unrest goes hand in hand with increasing politicisation, regional specificities, as well as local and national allegiances, are often used against intercommunity and universalist solidarities. A reality which migration flows between Caribbean societies and major American and European cities 7 Encarnacion Gutierrez Rodriguez, Shirley Anne Tate, Creolizing Europe, Liverpool University Press, 2015. 8 Translator’s note: colloquial term used to designate people of North African descent, who were born in Europe. 9 Frédéric Joignot (interview by), According to Author Edouard Glissant, the World’s Creolisation Is “Irreversible”, Le Monde, February 4, 2011. 10 Aimé Césaire, Return to My Native Land, bilingual edition, Présence Africaine, 1971, p. 119.

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has come to expose. The electoral success of the far right across French dependencies in America, in 2017, is yet another illustration of that phenomenon.

A Culture, “Porous to All the Breath of the World” One of the Caribbean’s core features is that it is an area where identities are being rearranged almost constantly. Migration’s primary effect is that of relocating such Creole identities. Transnationalisation of Creole Identities Creolisation as pictured by Barbadian author Brathwaite or Glissant, in Martinique,11 is a historical process triggered by the encounter of European and African cultures amidst the brutal and dehumanising context of the plantation system. It lies first and foremost in the mutual acculturation of masters and slaves who, while retaining some of their native cultures, now share a brand new and heterogeneous culture—despite the abuse inherent in their relationship. These dynamics paved the way for intra-Caribbean migration and West Indian populations moving to North-American and European megacities—a recent shift that might not be as brutal, but proves nonetheless confrontational. As a process based on cultural entanglement, creolisation unravels the partition of rootidentities and fosters relocation as well as border transcendence, to a certain extent. Such is the narrative shared by the entire Caribbean and American continent—albeit to diverging extents, based on socio-historical backdrops and political cultures. Thus, creolisation in Jamaica does not resonate with the process depicted by Glissant with regard to the French West Indies. Its Anglo-Saxon heritage characterises the former. In contrast with root-identities and just like its French-speaking neighbours, it incorporates various cultural inputs. And yet, the African root has come to dominate its specific Creole canvas. 11 Kamau Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820, Clarendon Press, 1971; Edouard Glissant, Identité comme racine, identité comme relation, in Comité culture, éducation, environnement: Identité, Culture et Développement, Paris, Edit. caribéennes, 1992, p. 199.

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According to Rex Nettleford, “The battle between Europe and Africa continues for an African centrality in the indigenising process, if not for uncontested supremacy: and neither Guyana and Trinidad with their growing East Indian aggregates, nor Cuba with its predominantly European population or Jamaica with its overwhelming African majority can escape the fact of the African Presence in the national cultural ethos. This is a fact of Caribbean life!”12 According to the French-speaking fathers of In Praise of Creoleness, on the other hand, creolisation cannot be reduced to any of its single components. “Neither Europeans nor Africans nor Asians; we proclaim ourselves Creoles.”13 The creole identity is an inevitably inclusive patchwork, spreading through massive waves of migration, which contribute to “deterritorialising” the Caribbean and showing the limits of a sheer geographic definition. While the geographical aspect cannot be ignored, the border is, first and foremost, a spatialised sociopolitical reality. Due to factors related mostly to the colonial history and socio-economic opportunities, Paris, London, Amsterdam, New York, Miami, Montreal and Ottawa have become Caribbean territories of sorts. Entire communities have chosen to settle in these big capitals, without forfeiting their Creole identity. This relocation phenomenon has been impacting both host and Caribbean societies in multiple ways. In order to understand what is at stake as far as these relocation dynamics are concerned, one must grasp the continuum between the diaspora and the homeland. Embracing the host society’s citizenship does not keep the diaspora from nurturing its original identity, which grows and shifts according to the new living location. Its identity remains fundamentally Caribbean. One may even speculate that it often proves even more vibrant in host societies as if heightening the features of that collective sense of belonging were vital in ensuring its survival. Recent research seems to challenge such assumptions. New US citizens thus seem to

12 R. Nettleford, Cultural Action and Social Change: The Case of Jamaica; An Essay in Caribbean Cultural Identity, Ottawa, ON, IDRC, 1979. p. 7. 13 J. Bernabé, P. Chamoiseau, and R. Confiant, Eloge de la créolité, bilingual FrenchEnglish edition, Gallimard, p. 13.

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be gradually forfeiting their Caribbean allegiances to fully embrace the American model.14 In truth, the Creole identity fuels transnationalisation. Communities are taking steps to provide transnational financial support precisely because they still have family in the Caribbean and feel attached to the homeland. Hence, the sense of belonging to that whole, and family, in particular, has been fuelling the diaspora’s overall engagement.15 Practical Implications of Cultural Relocation Even imagined, that sense of belonging is performative. Shared identity drives the “diasporisation” of national and sometimes, strictly local engagement which is the case for French dependencies and their mainland-based communities. Many mayors, overseas, sustain significant ties with associations whose members come from the city they run. The ensuing politics endow the act of voting with a specific meaning. Indeed, voting is not only about casting a ballot and dropping it in the dedicated box. The path leading to that box is just as fundamental. Funding associations, even located outside of the mayor’s jurisdiction, partaking in their celebrations, helping the city’s natives or mainland-based relatives, are typical steps taken by candidates or elected representatives. As a result, the act of voting appears as a transaction that has little to do with programmes or ideological considerations. An ironic effect of said relocation dynamics is that they tend to strengthen the ties between both ends, and may exert significant influence on political engagement in the homeland. While research remains insufficient on that matter, many studies have examined the economic impact of such diasporas; they typically revolve around developing countries and the associated diasporic remittances.16

14 Roger Waldinger and Lauren Duquette-Rury, Emigrants Politics, Immigrant Engagement: Homeland Ties and Immigrant Political Identity in the United States, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, N°3 (June 2016), pp. 42–59. 15 Mary Chamberlain, Caribbean Kinship in a Global Setting, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 32, N°1 (January–June 2004), pp. 73–98. 16 Rosa Titouche Haddadi, Impacts économiques et sociaux sur les pays en développement des envois de fonds des émigrés sur leur région d’origine, Insaniyat, Vol. 62 (2013), pp. 121–146.

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In 2015, 676,000 Haitians were living in the United States. Following Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica, Haiti is the Caribbean territory with most citizens residing in the United States.17 The relocation of entire communities also results in the territorialisation of their transplanted collective identities. Such population concentrations in foreign cities often go hand in hand with a toponymical appropriation of these domains.18 Thus, deterritorialisation is not the end of territories. Little Havana or Little Haiti in Miami are tangible proofs that Caribbean identities are being reterritorialised. Creolisation does not prevent the national fragmentation of Creole identities against inevitably racialised backdrops. Such spatialisation does not homogenise transnationalisation, which is fundamentally driven by a small group of players engaging on a regular basis with the homeland. In reality, most migrants are only sporadically in touch with the latter.19 For the time being, Creole solidarities have yet to replace national allegiances. Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States has further stiffened the country’s migration policy, especially towards Haitians with a temporary protected status (TPS). Donald Trump’s decision has fuelled objections on all sides. “It makes no sense to repatriate 60,000 Haitians to a country that cannot provide for them” stated a Florida senator, for instance.20 This migration policy could directly impact Haiti’s economy, as it is fuelled to significant extents by the diaspora’s remittances. In 2016, these money transfers displayed a 7% growth compared to 2015, amounting to over two billion dollars and 25% of Haiti’s gross domestic product.21 The tensions engendered by this migration policy and the significant volume of said remittances show how transnationalisation is impacting the home country.

17 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/haitian-immigrants-united-states? 18 Cédric Audebert, La diaspora haïtienne: vers l’émergence d’un territoire de la dispersion?, in Carlo Célius (ed.), Le défi haïtien: économie, dynamique sociopolitique et migration, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. 19 José Itzigsohn, Incorporation and Transnationalism Among Dominican Immigrants, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 32, N°1 (January–June 2004), pp. 43–72. 20 Bill Nelson, Floride Senator, The New York Times, 59,000 Haitians Must Leave U.S. As White House Ends Protections, November 21, 2017. 21 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/haitian-immigrants-united-states.

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A representative of a Jamaican bank thus points out that “The significance of these remittance ratios for the Jamaican economy has raised increasing interest among academics and policymakers alike about the role remittances play in poverty alleviation, and the impact of these flows on economic development and social welfare. In Jamaica, more than half of total remittance inflows come from the US, particularly New York and Florida, about one-fifth from the UK, about one-tenth from Canada, and about 7–8 per cent from the Cayman Islands. They are an essential source of financing to many Jamaican remittance recipients in order to supplement household income for necessities such as food, utilities and education.”22 The trend does not only affect the economy. One of the latest questions to be raised asks whether migrants could be catalysts of change and political change in particular.23 How do we know for sure that certain behaviours or developments do result from political transnationalisation? How may creolisation support transnational regulation of policy matters? The first question requires a multi-level approach to migrants’ political engagement in both the homeland and the host country’s political arena. The second question, on the other hand, demonstrates that creolisation provides no clear alternative to state regulation—and does not aim at doing so, either.

Creole Discourse: From Nation States to Meta-Nations? Globalisation is a reconfiguration process that proves both stimulating and doubt-generating. In the Caribbean, the Creole rhetoric has gone hand in hand with independence waves and nation-state building in a context where part of the elite seemed tempted by ethnic considerations. Nonetheless, on a transnational scale, it could support the rise of a metanation with somewhat elusive borders and substance.

22 Eliud George Ramocan Remittances to Jamaica, Findings from a National Survey of Remittance Recipients, Bank of Jamaica, Survey, 2010, p. 2. 23 Steven Vertovec, Transnationalism and Modes of Transformation, The International Migration Review, Vol. 38, N°3 (Fall 2004), p. 971.

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Transnationalisation: Identity Tensions and Politics Most research dealing with the political aspects of transnationalisation tend to underestimate the state’s influence in regulating the process as if freedom of movement were the starting point of all migration flows. Because of its political regime, drive for control and even its failures, the state is ubiquitous24 —still a driving force in politicising transnational relations. General collapse, repression and anti-democratic features may push its citizens to flee or become political activists. Protectionism and ultranationalist leaders can bring the host state to restrain migratory inflows, thereby fostering conflicting relations with the issuing country. Poor communication between the two institutions is a crucial factor in the politicisation of both diasporas and the public opinion. State regulation stands because the territorial principle lies at the core of the migration policy paradigm and “its primary asset is the clear and unambiguous definition of the border as a concept and a reality…”25 Ironically enough, territoriality is being vocally promoted while the role of said regulation is fading. As if transnational flows, increasingly triggered by migration and non-governmental players, were acting as operational substitutes to territories.26 The nation-state model is being challenged by new forms of regulation that overstep traditional borders. The international arena seems to expose the revenge of nations and the simultaneous isolation of state entities. In a Caribbean, ethnicised context, it appears primarily as improvised nationalist rhetoric. Creole discourse has been the bonding agent of Caribbean society. It has functioned in the interest of the powerful, whether represented by colonialist or nationalist elite. It is the identifiable glue that bonds the different, competing and otherwise mutually exclusive interests contained within Caribbean society.27 In a globalised world, Creole discourse may be construed as both transnational and

24 Roger Waltinger and David Fitzgerald, Transnationalism in Questions, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 109, N°5 (March 2004), p. 1178. 25 B. Badie, Nous ne sommes plus seuls au monde, La découverte, 2016, p. 13. 26 Badie, la fin des territoires, op. cit. 27 Percy C. Hintzen, Race and Creole Ethnicity in the Caribbean, in Vera Sheperd and Glen L. Richards (eds.), Questioning Creole, Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, Ian Randlers, James Currey Publishers, 2002, p. 93.

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“meta-national” experiences. A country like Haiti could thus be seen as a transnation made of both people back home and in diaspora.28 Political parties in the homeland, migrant associations and organisations abroad as well as other non-governmental bodies are now contributing to “deterritorialising/reterritorialising” identities. On a strictly political level, empirical research conducted in Dominican, Haitian, Colombian and Salvadoran communities in the United States reveal many constants and specificities that show how tricky it is to define that phenomenon. Thus the meaning and scope of political transnationalism is not uniform. Although there are common forces bearing on all immigrants, the particular circumstances of each community also affect the extent and character of these activities. For some immigrants, transnational politics is a mean to maintain an active presence in their country’s centres of power, for others, it is a means to avoid such centres in order to provide direct assistance to their native regions, and for still others it is a practice to be avoided in order to leave a violent and unsetting past behind.29 Conducting a political campaign abroad is a way of acknowledging the expatriate community’s political influence. Campaign activism and mobilisation against injustice or in favour of a given political cause in the homeland are recurring aspects of transnational political engagement. Comprehending a migrant’s activism demands that we consider not only domestic realities but also political socialisation fostered by life in the host society. Concern for host country politics is what drives, to a significant extent, part of the diaspora’s transnational agenda. Cédric Audebert assesses this mechanism as follows: “… growing engagement of Haitian natives in the political arenas of their host countries (the United States and Canada in particular) does not seem inconsistent with their commitment to Haitian politics; on the contrary, it appears to be a primary pillar of that engagement.”30

28 Laguerre, State, Diaspora, and Transnational Politics: Haïti Reconceptualised, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 28, N°3 (1999), pp. 633–651. 29 Luis Eduardo, Alejandro Portes, and William Haller, Assimilation and Transnationalism: Determinants of Transnational Political Action Among Contemporary Migrants, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 108, N°6 (May 2003), p. 1235. 30 Cedric Audebert, op. cit., p. 26.

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The scientific community how the experiences of migrants in their new environment might determine said engagement—given the lack of comparative data regarding their behaviour before and after departure from the homeland.31 Also, as far as the Haitian case is concerned, discussions typically focus on how migrants contribute to democratising Haiti. The political weight of money providers informs in no small extent said political influence; in addition to the economic aspect, come sheer political considerations such as the naturalisation of migrants in host societies, actually supported by Caribbean authorities. Dual citizenship is likely to foster the diaspora’s political influence on the host country’s foreign policy.32 Advocacy by public figures of Haitian descent can also prove influential on US policy towards Haiti, as is the case in the following example: “Dr. Mathieu Eugene, who represents the predominantly Caribbean 40th Council District in Brooklyn, New York, told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) on Saturday that he will be joined Sunday at a rally in Brooklyn by immigration advocates, elected officials, clergy members and constituents reiterating their calls on the Trump administration to extend the status granted to almost 60,000 Haitians. Eugene, the first Haitian to be elected to New York City Council, said he will also re-launch an online petition requesting that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant an 18-month extension of TPS for Haitians and protect the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Programme (DACA), initiated by former US President Barack Obama that Trump plans to rescind”.33 Lobbying and the Black Caucus are other platforms where such influence may be exerted not only in favour of African and Caribbean countries but the Black diaspora as a whole. Being members of a racial diaspora with affective transnational ties to ancestral African homelands, black members of Congress feel an obligation to represent a global black community, and act to advance the interests of that community through their effort

31 Anar K. Ahmadov and Gwendolin Sasse, Empowering to Engage with the Homeland: Do Immigration Experience and Environment Foster Political Remittances?, Comparative Migration Studies, Vol. 4, N°12 (2016), pp. 1–25. 32 José Itzigsohn, Immigration and the Boundaries of Citizenship: The Institutions of Immigrants’ Political Transnationalism, International Migration Review, Vol. 34, N°4 (Winter 2000), pp. 1126–1154. 33 http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/latestnews/Haitian_legislator_reiterates_appeal_to_ US_President_to_extend_TPS_for_Haitians.

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as legislators and committee chairs.34 The fact that former President Aristide—demoted from his position after the 1986 military putsch—was able to return to Haiti in 1990 is an excellent example of how efficient the Black Caucus can be in that sense. In truth, the diaspora’s direct influence on national politics should no longer be doubted. Just like the existence of a Ministry dedicated to Haitians living abroad is yet another indication of Port-au-Prince’s keen interest in the “Tenth department,” established in the 1990s by Haitian authorities with regard to Haiti’s nine electoral and administrative districts. No matter how symbolic, this recognition is undeniably political and the chosen title, all but incidental. It shows how human dispersion has been construed as both a unified political arena and a deterritorialised national player. Which is quite ironic, to say the least, for dual citizens living abroad, as is often the case, can neither vote or run for office back home. The constitution forbids their electoral participation despite what their affiliation to the “Tenth department” could suggest. Authorities have gone to absurd intellectual lengths to justify this contradiction. For an entire community of Haitians living abroad are thereby being kept out of homeland politics and yet acknowledged as citizens of that very nation. And yet, being acknowledged as such bears no legal implications, despite the diaspora’s undeniable impact on said nation’s economic and political life. Underneath what may be construed as blatant incompetence or mere technicalities, lies the fear of seeing the diaspora—whose economic influence is crystal clear—seize the political power it has already begun to impact. This political dismissal is typically legitimised by the notion that prospective returnees should not become active electoral players in a country they barely know. In 2010, as the presidential race was being launched, the Minister of Haitians abroad pointed out those diasporic candidates failed to comprehend Haiti’s background and to command both official languages. Arguments opposing diasporic vote also suggest that national parties lack the technical ability to establish relays abroad and to sustain continued ties with the diaspora. “None of Haiti’s political parties has an official 34 Walter Clark Wilson and William Curtis Ellis, Surrogates Beyond Borders: Black Members of the United States Congress and the Representation of African Interests on the Congressional Foreign-Policy Agenda, Polity, Vol. 46, N°2, Constructing Boundaries (April 2014), p. 256.

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office abroad to provide fellow citizens with proper training or to enable political activism,” said that same Minister.35 Yet another dubious claim blamed the failure to complete on time the electoral reform meant to branch out a large number of polling stations abroad.36 In reality, it seems that the elites have agreed to restrain the diaspora’s political involvement to sheer power of electoral suggestion if we look at how reluctantly public authorities have been considering amendments to the constitution in that sense. The symbolic aspect of the situation should also be noted. The politicisation of the diaspora stems from the experience of exile shared by many Haitians as a result of chronic instability, coups and dictatorship. Dual citizenship and voting rights would formally ensure freedom of speech to Haitians who used to be deprived of it in Haiti. This statutory exclusion does not keep migrants from getting politically involved, as noted by that Minister, “convinced that the diaspora can truly influence votes in favour of their chosen candidate via economic support to relatives and friends.”37 An observation that captures one of the Tenth Department’s preferred paths of political activism—which implicitly explains why official candidates would take campaigning across the Tenth Department so seriously, along their electoral journeys. Miami, Boston, New York or Cayenne is all mandatory stops on the presidential route. In 2015, the diaspora’s political engagement could not be more transparent. On October 4, all presidential candidates were invited to present their programme and debate in the city of Miami. The event was broadcasted live on over fifty Haitian radios and diasporic media. In other words, national elections are no longer bound by national borders. While casting ballots is reserved to Haiti’s residents, the election, henceforth denationalised, does transcend the borderline. A shared identity and money transfers thus allow for the transnationalisation of politics because they are kept from voting or running for office, Haitians abroad seek to influence the elections by converting the act of voting into a symbolic transaction. On a national scale, securing votes may entail calling upon a relative or a friend living abroad. Political influence is the diaspora’s asset in its relations with candidates and public 35 http://www.haitilibre.com/breve-1024-haiti-elections-tous-les-candidats-de-la-diaspo ras-exclus.html. 36 http://www.haitilibre.com/article-825-haiti-elections-la-diasporas-exclue-des-electi ons-2010.html. 37 Ibid.

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authorities in general. In return, it gains recognition and a symbolic status as a domestic player. Haiti is not the only territory in the Caribbean where diaspora remittances go hand in hand with pleas for political recognition, voting and office rights in homeland institutions. The following remarks, with regard to the situation in Jamaica, hint at palpable tensions between national authorities and migrants when it comes to the terms of said transaction. What exactly is remittance? It is members of the diaspora taking care of the barrel children they left behind, the elderly grandparent who raised them, and the family members who are too lazy to work and who benefit from the favourable exchange rate. One of the primary justifications for a diaspora vote in parliament is to represent the intentions of those who claim a strong emotional connection to Jamaica. They do not share the anxiety induced by the tax system, nor do they endure long bouts of drought. They do not join the needed volunteers; do not engage with the churches and social organisations to offer guidance to the youth to enhance their quality of life. They seem only to want the power of representation in Parliament to tell us how it must be done… No vote should be accorded to the diaspora.38

This seemingly unbalanced transaction also relies on the symbolic player status granted to this scattered community, but also on its undeniable political influence—as shown by official candidates deterritorialising their campaigns and becoming the (unwilling) wannabe leaders of a borderless nation. Creole discourse could endorse this transnational entity for, no matter how symbolic, it also has practical implications. In a critical approach to transnational studies, Waldinger and Fitzgerald note that connectivity between source and destination points is an inherent aspect of migration, but migration networks generate a multiplicity of “imagined communities” organised along different, often conflicting principles. Consequently, what immigration scholars describe as transnationalism is usually its opposite: highly particularistic attachments antithetical to those by-products of globalisation denoted by the concept of “transnational civil society.”39

38 Ronald Mason, Attorney-at-law and Supreme Court Mediator, The Gleaner, April 24, 2016. 39 Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald, Transnationalism in Question, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 109, N°5 (March 2004), p. 1177.

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Ironically, in the Caribbean, both local specificities and symbolic borderisation prevail—typically because of the politicisation of challenges faced by Creole societies, whose varied cultures usually bring social players together, beyond socio-economic disparities. Immigration and insecurity, which have been unduly correlated, are part of the campaign topics picked by candidates with a tendency to over-dramatise the political discourse and bolster existing borders. The 2017 presidential election in French Overseas dependencies is yet another illustration of that reality. Meta-Nations: A Response to Borderisation in the Caribbean? Diasporas have been fostering the emergence, on the international stage, of transnations through which peoples and their Diasporas end up defying traditional borders. Nevertheless, these symbolic entities are still caught in between reterritorialised borders. Historically speaking, the Caribbean has been the stage of a profound migratory and cultural entanglement. However, it is also a region where migrants undergo significant stigmatisation. After the age of nation states and the transnation era, it might be about to enter that of the meta-nation. Typically, times of turmoil and feelings of insecurity underlie isolationist tendencies as well as actual or symbolic border shutdowns. As noted by Glissant, “still-identities are hampering the sensibility of the modern man who engages with the chaos-world and lives in creolised societies. Relation-identity or ‘rhizomatic identity’ as described by Gilles Deleuze, seems to depict the situation more accurately.”40 But Creole identities also tend to tribalise and may be construed as ethnic in a context where migration is perceived as a threat. The same effect permeates multicultural societies such as French Guiana, where Creoles are asserting themselves as a community competing with others for access to and preservation of resources.41 From that perspective, political elections put voters’ motives to the test and are opportunities to examine how they perceive a given situation as well as foreigners. Despite its construction as an integrative matrix, creolisation cannot prevent the clash of identities. It is ill-equipped 40 Frédéric Joignot, op. cit. 41 Fred Réno and Bernard Phipps, The Dichotomy of Universalism and Particularism in

French Guiana, in Rosemarijn Hoefte, Matthew L. Bishop and Peter Clegg (eds.), Postcolonial Trajectories in the Caribbean: The Three Guianas, Routledge, 2017, pp. 46–58.

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to face strategies based on the over-dramatisation and stigmatisation of foreigners. A realisation inherent in the following observation by sociologist Michel Giraud: “The French West Indian and Guianese people (who) actively marginalise Caribbean migrants who have to the French West Indies or Guiana to earn a living, share with the latter a joint history of overall similar colonial predicaments and are, at the very least, cultural cousins.”42 An excellent example of this trend is the result of the last presidential election, all around the French Departments in the Americas (DFA). First of all, the growing feeling of immigration-related insecurity has fostered massive voting numbers in favour of Marine Lepen, the National Front’s (FN) candidate. This is a party that has become expert at building its xenophobic rhetoric on the rejection of migrants. “Immigration encompasses all fears; economic (“they take advantage of welfare programmes ”) cultural (“they disrespect our values ”), and political (“a Muslim mayor tomorrow?”). FN voters see immigration as the most crucial issue, even more so than unemployment”.43 In France, Muslims and Arabs are the primary targets of that discourse. In French Guiana, social turmoil and crime—which is often associated with Brazilian immigration—have been instrumental in favouring the farright vote. On April 21, 2017, after a one-month long social campaign, an agreement was signed between the state, elected representatives and the group of protestors. An evident motive underlying this entire standoff was the blend of insecurity and severe migratory pressure. The territory attracts mostly Brazilian, Haitian and Surinamese migrants; 35% of the whole population is allegedly foreign. In 2016, 4000 individuals were deported by local authorities.44 French Guiana is allegedly the deadliest French collectivity, with 42 homicides in 2016 for a population of 252,000. Over 50% of all inmates held in Guiana are foreigners.45 Figures that have been fuelling a certain feeling of insecurity as well as

42 Michel Giraud, Racisme colonial, ethnicité et citoyenneté. Leçons des expériences migratoires antillaises et guyanaises, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 32, N°1 (January–June), p. 164. 43 Nonna Mayer: « Marine Le Pen fait encore peur », http://www.lemonde.fr/idees/ article/2017/04/11/nonna-mayer-marine-le-pen-fait%20peur_5109156_3232.html#YUf 4GJi7DA0ygCii.99. 44 Laurent Marot, Les Guyanais dénoncent les défaillances de l’Etat sur l’insécurité, Le Monde, March 30, 2017. 45 See Le Monde, La Guyane en proie à des blocages, March 22, 2017.

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defiance towards public authorities, thereby translating into substantial voting numbers in favour of the far-right candidate during the French presidential elections in 2017. In Guiana as in Guadeloupe and Martinique, that vote mirrors not only the rejection of foreign citizens but also a drive to “control the border” in the name of safety and preservation of local identities. Even a quick comparison between the 2007 and 2017 presidential elections shows a shift in public opinion towards greater rejection of the cultural cousins mentioned by Michel Giraud, as well as even broader symbolic borderisation. In 2007, voting numbers to the presidential election broke several records with a 59.16% turnout in Guadeloupe and a 58.97% turnout in Martinique. Ten years later, it lies below 55%. In 2007, the National Front gathered 3.8% of all votes. Ten years later, it reached 21.9% and garnered more ballots than any other French party in the overseas as a whole. In St. Barth, it led the first round with 42.99% and gained 64.89% of all votes—topping Emmanuel Macron in the process. In Guiana, Marine LePen reached unprecedented heights with 24.21% (6521 ballots), right behind Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his leading 24.72%. In Guadeloupe, 13.51% (15,159) of all voters allowed her to rank fourth in the race, far ahead of the socialist candidate. Martinique stood out in that only 10.94% of ballots were cast in her favour, although such figures are still substantial and equal Guadeloupe’s rankings. These high scores echo equally significant abstention rates, which tend to favour candidates with a clear pool of voters such as the National Front. In Guadeloupe, Guiana and Martinique, these rates exceed 60%—as opposed to 21% for France as a whole. In the French West Indies, there is no correlation between immigration and insecurity since very little crime is committed by foreigners, even though public opinion tends to think otherwise. When it comes to Haitians, who are the primary target of such xenophobic penchants, rejection draws first and foremost from the negative image most Guadeloupe and Martinique natives have of Haiti, which proves quite ironic, considering that these very individuals show considerable passion for the culture and especially the music of those they reject. Haitian konpa has achieved unprecedented popularity across the French West Indies and Guiana, to the point where local bands have embraced it at the expense of zouk. This dismissal of their Caribbean neighbour, despite a shared Creole identity, stems primarily from a refusal to share public resources. “If in the French West Indies, as in Guiana and everywhere else, xenophobia is

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fueled by the competition for access to decidedly scarce resources; it is also particularly fostered by identity-related tensions…”46 The case of the French West Indies and Guiana quash post-nationalist theories according to which identity claims are to fade along with the rise of human right claims47 —for this theory hardly applies to Guadeloupe or Martinique. A survey shows that in the early 2000s, immigration ranked second among the Guadeloupean population’s list of concerns. The fact that a conference was called by local representatives to discuss that very matter—which is supposedly state jurisdiction—shows that it has been significantly politicised in response to what is being construed as social demand.48 However, even against a divisive and often politicised backdrop, a border is much more than a simple wall. It can also be an ecosystem where original forms of human interaction may emerge as illustrated by relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, or life on the border-river between French Guiana and its neighbours. Guiana’s river border with Suriname (the Maroni), in the West, is 323 miles long. The river-border acts as a legal divide between two states, as well as a transportation route and living areas for the Bushinengue— who reside on both banks and have always construed it as such. That particular border thus takes on a specific meaning for those who live around it and thereby challenge the established legal frameworks. That French territory, located in South America, also has a river-land border with Brazil comprised of 188 miles of land followed by 265 miles of river (the Oyapock). Just like the Bushinengue, Amerindian communities with distinct nationalities (either French or Brazilian) but living on both sides of that border are holding on nonetheless to their original identities. River identities rule out border politics and support the notion that borderisation arises from over-dramatised social interactions. Therefore, it challenges the perspective of “setting up more adequate and additional means of intervention along rivers and streams, to enforce the French border with Brazil and Surinam in particular”49 as worded by the National Front party.

46 Michel Giraud, op. cit., p. 176. 47 Y. Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe,

Chicago University Press, 1994. 48 Fred Reno, les élus ont le peuple qu’ils méritent, in Yvan Combeau (ed.), Le vote de l’outre-mer, présidentielle et législatives de 2007 , Les quatre chemins, 2007. 49 https://www.frontnational.com/pdf/PROGRAMME_OUTRE_MER_2016.pdf,

p. 8.

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In response to a perceived menace to their identity, people are voting for candidates who contend that unemployment and insecurity can be solved by deporting foreigners and building walls. Undermining the jus solis principle is part of the protectionist arsenal envisioned by the farright champion. As a matter of fact, she promised to “abolish jus solis across the entire national soil to deter from the mid to long-run — potential migrants from settling in mainland France or the Overseas. This alteration of our citizenship rights is expected to boost, overseas, the people’s national pride and send of belonging, while also encouraging genuine candidates to French citizenship to engage in a larger-than-self, committed approach to assimilation.”50 This situation is by no means exclusive to the French West Indies. On a global scale, it mirrors the nation state’s intrinsic limitations and calls for the rise of a meta-nation as imagined by Edgar Morin with regard to European construction.51 As both a province and a meta-nation, Europe could foreshadow a political structure tailored to a global reality where territory and sovereignty alike are growing ever more ineffective. An idea rehashed as follows by Patrick Chamoiseau: “The nation-state as it stands, cannot deal with issues embedded in the Whole-World paradigm. Hence, which sort of state, which type of structure could nations — organic or not — be expected to embrace? How can a meta-nation come into being? That is the main difficulty.”52 What, then, could be the meaning of a Creole, Caribbean meta-nation?

Conclusion Like Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, one may “see Creole cultures as almost entirely new creations which seek to adapt to new social and geographical environments…”.53 Historically speaking, they result from the founding international displacement and deportation scheme that involved European and African populations as part of the transatlantic

50 Ibid., p. 9. 51 Edgar Morin, Penser l’Europe, Gallimard, Paris, 1990. 52 Patrick Chamoiseau and Silyane Larcher, les identités dans la totalité-monde, Cités,

Vol. 1, N°29 (2007), pp. 121–134. 53 Veren A. Shepherd and Glen L. Richards (eds.), Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture, Ian Randler Publishers, 2002, p. xiii.

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colonial trade. Fertilised in the plantation, its integrative purpose characterises Creole culture. Indo-Asian populations thus arrived after the abolition of slavery, while Levantine communities experienced creolisation to diverging extents from one location to the other. It is supposed to enable the integration of migrants who are, just like their host society, Creole. The relative failure of Creole discourse in adjusting this role to a global arena struck by borderisation is rooted in our homogenising approach to creolisation. Hence, this discussion benefits greatly from Nigel Bolland’s input— or the theory according to which Creole society does not require a dialectical approach to sociocultural trends. The Creole society thesis offers an approach to national integration by seeking to unite people of diverse origins in an overarching ethnicity based on the recognition and creation of a developing Creole culture. Conceptually, however, creolisation and the Creole society remain ill-defined and ambiguous. On the one hand, the vision of a Creole nation rests on the axiom that the individual is the elementary unit of social life and hence that “society” is the aggregate of its individual citizens and cultures are simply the aggregate of what individuals believe and do in a society. This dualistic view of society leads to the portrayal of creolisation as a blending process, a mixing of cultures that occurs without reference to structural contradictions and social conflicts.54 Beyond a sheer dialectical approach, this train of thoughts brings new leads to the table for a sociopolitical assessment of creolisation.

References Ahmadov, Anar K., and Gwendolin Sasse. “Empowering to engage with the homeland: do immigration experience and environment foster political remittances?”, Comparative Migration Studies, Vol. 4, N°12 (2016), pp. 1–25. Audebert, Cédric. « La diaspora haïtienne: vers l’émergence d’un territoire de la dispersion? » in Carlo Célius (ed.), Le défi haïtien: économie, dynamique sociopolitique et migration. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. Badie, Bertrand. La fin des territoires. Paris: Fayard, 1995. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant. Eloge de la créolité, bilingual French-English edition. Paris: Gallimard, 1989.

54 Nigel Bolland, Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History, in Verene Sheperd and Glen Richards, op. cit., pp. 29–30.

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Bolland, Nigel. “Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History”, in Verene Sheperd and Glen Richards, op. cit., pp. 29–30. Brathwaite, Kamau. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820. London: Clarendon Press, 1971. Césaire, Aimé. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, bilingual edition. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1971. Chamberlain, Mary. “Caribbean Kinship in a Global Setting”, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 32, N°1 (January–June 2004), pp. 73–98. Chamoiseau, Patrick. Frères migrants. Paris: Seuil, 2017. Chamoiseau, Patrick, and Silyane Larcher, « Les identités dans la totalitémonde », Cités, Vol. 1, N°29 (2007), pp. 121–134. Cuttitta, Paolo. « La « frontiérisation » de Lampedusa, comment se construit une frontière », L’Espace Politique [Online], 25 | 2015-1, uploaded on April 8, 2015, read on January 12, 2018. Eduardo, Luis, Alejandro Portes, and William Haller, “Assimilation and Transnationalism: Determinants of transnational Political Action Among Contemporary Migrants”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 108, N°6 (May 2003). Giraud, Michel. « Racisme colonial, ethnicité et citoyenneté. Leçons des expériences migratoires antillaises et guyanaises », Caribbean Studies, Vol. 32, N°1 (January–June 2004). Glissant, Edouard. « Identité comme racine, identité comme relation », in Comité culture, éducation, environnement: Identité, Culture et Développement. Paris: Edit. caribéennes, 1992. ———. Traité du Tout Monde, Paris: Gallimard, 1997. Hintzen, Percy C., “Race and Creole Ethnicity in the Caribbean”, in Vera Sheperd and Glen L. Richards (eds.), Questioning Creole, Creolisation discourses in Caribbean Culture. Ian Randlers, James Currey Publishers, 2002. Itzigsohn, José. “Immigration and the Boundaries of Citizenship: The Institutions of Immigrants’ Political Transnationalism”, International Migration Review, Vol. 34, N°4 (Winter 2000), pp. 1126–1154. ———. “Incorporation and Transnationalism Among Dominican Immigrants”, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 32, N°1 (January–June 2004), pp. 43–72. Laguerre, State. « Diaspora, and Transnational Politics: Haïti reconceptualised », Millennium Journal of International Studies, Vol. 28, N°3 (1999), pp. 633– 651. Maalouf, Amin. Les identités meurtrières. Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, 1998. Marot, Laurent Marot. « Les Guyanais dénoncent les défaillances de l’Etat sur l’insécurité », Le Monde, March 30, 2017. Morin, Edgar. Penser l’Europe. Paris: Gallimard, 1990.

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Nettleford, Rex. Cultural Action and Social Change: The Case of Jamaica; An Essay in Caribbean Cultural Identity. Ottawa, ON., IDRC, 1979. Ramocan, Eliud George. “Remittances to Jamaica”, Findings from a National Survey of Remittance Recipients, Bank of Jamaica, Survey 2010. Réno, Fred, and Bernard Phipps. “The Dichotomy of Universalism and Particularism in French Guiana”, in Rosemarijn Hoefte, Matthew L. Bishop, and Peter Clegg (eds.), Post-colonial Trajectories in the Caribbean: The Three Guianas, Routledge, 2017. ———. « Les élus ont le peuple qu’ils méritent », in Yvan Combeau (ed.), Le vote de l’outre-mer, présidentielle et législatives de 2007 . Editions Les quatre chemins, 2007. Rodriguez, Encarnacion Gutierrez, and Shirley Anne Tate. Creolizing Europe. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015. Sheperd, Verene, and Glen L. Richards (eds.). Questioning Creole: Creolisation Discourses in Caribbean Culture. Ian Randler Publishers, 2002. Soysal, Y. Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe. Chicago University Press, 1994. Titouche Haddadi, Rosa. « Impacts économiques et sociaux sur les pays en développement des envois de fonds des émigrés sur leur région d’origine », Insaniyat Vol. 62 (2013), pp. 121–146. Vertovec, Steven. “Transnationalism and Modes of Transformation”, The International Migration Review, Vol. 38, N°3 (Fall 2004). Waldinger, Roger, and Lauren Duquette-Rury. “Emigrants Politics, Immigrant Engagement: Homeland Ties and Immigrant Political Identity in the United States”, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 2, N°3 (June 2016), pp. 42–59. Waltinger, Roger, and David Fitzgerald. “Transnationalism in Questions”, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 109, N°5 (March 2004). Wilson, Walter Clark, and William Curtis Ellis. “Surrogates Beyond Borders: Black Members of the United States Congress and the Representation of African Interests on the Congressional Foreign-Policy Agenda”, Polity, Vol. 46, N°2, Constructing Boundaries (April 2014).

CHAPTER 3

Labouring on the Border of Inclusion/Exclusion: Undocumented CARICOM Migrants in the Barbadian Economy Natalie Dietrich Jones

HENRY: But what I find in Barbados right, like different nationality ain’t welcome in Barbados at all. Barbados is for Bajans. That what me think

This is revised version of a chapter from my PhD dissertation, which was entitled ‘Living with(in) borders of in/exclusion’. The current title is based on the following quote, which prefaces that chapter: ‘Relied upon but unwelcome, among us but uninvited, undocumented workers labor on the border of inclusion and exclusion…’ (Núñez 2010, p. 819, sic). N. Dietrich Jones (B) The University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_3

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CHRIS: And the white people RAJEEVE: Yeah1

Introduction Islands are interesting places and spaces, which enable the exploration of inclusion/exclusion. They are simultaneously source, destination, and transit points for a number of excluded migrants (Carling 2007; King 2009). ‘Are islands unwelcoming places to outsiders who are seen as potential threats to established social orders and networks? Or perhaps some immigrant groups are welcomed, others tolerated and others rejected? How is the key triangular relationship between islanders, wealthy foreign settlers and poor labour immigrants played out?’ (King 2009, p. 68). As implied in these questions, and the interview excerpt above, islands are caught between the protection of national boundaries, and the reception of outsiders who contribute to the development of their economies. They are thus simultaneously characterized by two binaries: openness and closure (Baldacchino 2012). The objective of this chapter is twofold, on the one hand, it seeks to contribute to the literature which conceptualizes islands as spaces of inclusion/exclusion, by using the case of Barbados to explore the lived experiences of undocumented intra-regional migrants in the informal labour market. Secondly, it adds empirically to the literature on contemporary migration within the Caribbean, a space which has historically been shaped by b/ordering. The case study examines labour mobility within the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) context.2 This chapter is divided into nine sections. A brief discussion of the qualitative approach engaged during the research project follows this introduction. The chapter then moves on to establish the theoretical framework—anchored in the border studies genre—which underpins the

1 Int11_GM_GM_GM_22.01.2011. 2 CARICOM is a regional integration mechanism comprised of fifteen member states from the insular Caribbean. Its membership includes Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Haiti, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. Free movement of skilled professionals is facilitated under the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME). The Bahamas and Montserrat do not currently participate in the CSME.

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analysis. It links the border, undocumentedness, in/exclusion and agency, key terms utilized throughout this chapter. The fourth section contextualizes immigration to Barbados by discussing the factors that shaped the border. Readers should note that the research examines the Barbadian context circa 2010, the year I commenced fieldwork in Barbados. The research focuses in particular on events leading up to and following the 2009 amnesty, which represents a milestone in the development of immigration policy in Barbados. This context setting is important as it helps to elucidate the (re)production of the border and the shifting parameters of inclusion and exclusion of the undocumented. The chapter then outlines the various legal domains of belonging within the labour market, in order to clarify the parameters of inclusion for undocumented migrants. This is followed by two empirical sections, each of which discusses how migrants negotiated the borders of inclusion and exclusion. The central thesis is that migrants’ undocumentedness produces parallel geographies of inclusion and exclusion in the labour market, which migrants negotiate through the exercise of agency. The chapter concludes by discussing the application of lessons learnt from the Barbados case study, to the wider Caribbean. Before I proceed to discuss the methodology, I would like to note a few caveats. The first is that the term undocumented is utilized throughout this chapter. ‘Undocumented’ is preferred to ‘illegal’ or ‘irregular’, which are more popular terms, as it does not perpetuate the criminalization of migrants (Khosravi 2010). Most migrants interviewed had engaged in licit entry, but fell into undocumentedness after their arrival by overstaying the time granted by immigration officials at the border and/or working without a permit. However, the term also refers to persons who engage in illicit/clandestine entry. This underscores that there are degrees of nonconformity with immigration regulations which can produce undocumentedness (Ruhs and Anderson 2010). Secondly, race, though an influence on (some) migrants’ embodied experience of undomentedness in Barbados, did not impact significantly migrants’ incorporation in the labour market. Emphasis is therefore placed on the legal parameters of inclusion and exclusion, rather than the social criteria of difference, which impacted migrants’ mode of being in the world in their everyday experiences, such as running errands, travelling, and socializing (see Dietrich Jones 2014).

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Finally, based on the timing of research, most of the migrants interviewed were no longer undocumented, and held various forms of documented status (Anderson et al. 2012). Their accounts were therefore largely reconstructions of border realities and experiences, which they had encountered whilst undocumented.

Methodology The research was informed by an intensive qualitative approach (Sayer 2000) based on my interest in migrants’ border experiences whilst undocumented. Fieldwork was conducted over a five-month period between October 2010 and March 2011, approximately a year after the regularization exercise, which had ended in December 2009. My arrival in the post-amnesty period brought additional complications to undertaking research with a hard to reach and vulnerable population. A significant number of migrants, in particular Guyanese migrants, had returned home voluntarily, or by force (deportation). I therefore relied extensively on snowballing and gatekeepers to gain access. Data was obtained using a combination of interviews and ethnography, through my engagement in participant observation at various sites, including birthday parties, football games, work sites and public meeting places. Notes on observations were recorded in a diary, and it is essentially these notes, and co-constructed stories of migrants’ border experiences acquired during interviews, which form the basis of the narratives analysed. These are complemented by interviews with subject experts who clarified questions regarding immigration and labour in Barbados. A total of 30 migrants were interviewed. As is reflected in the Table 3.1, Guyanese constituted 70% of interviewees. This was the case, Table 3.1 Distribution of interviewees, by nationality and gender Nationality Guyanese St. Vincentian Jamaican St. Lucian Grenadian Total

Male

Female

Total

%

15 3 1 2 1 22

6 0 2 0 0 8

21 3 3 2 1 30

70 10 10 6 4 100

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notwithstanding attempts to limit sampling bias by diversifying migrant networks. Guyanese were the most dominant migrant group in Barbados despite the exodus, which occurred post-amnesty. In keeping with the practice of research with the undocumented, and in order to protect the identity of interviewees, participants were promised anonymity (Düvell et al. 2008). All names were therefore replaced with pseudonyms.3 Every effort was made to represent the voices of migrants, in order to accurately capture their retelling of their lived experiences. Excerpts from migrants’ narratives are therefore interspersed throughout the chapter with minimal changes. Migrants spoke in local dialects largely based on the English language, with some deviations depending on nationality. For readability, English parallels of words that may be unclear to a non-native speaker are included in brackets.

Theorizing the Border, Undocumentedness, in/Exclusion and Agency Border studies is a divided narrative, which spans a variety of disciplines. The term ‘border’ is itself a matter of debate, and is differently denominated, conceptualized, and defined based on the area of study. Border studies remains ‘today…a “field” made up of many fields’ (Wilson and Donnan 2012, p. 4). Several authors have pointed to the need for greater exchange on theoretical (Bauder 2011) and methodological fronts (Megoran 2006; Newman 2006; Donnan and Wilson 1999) in order to bridge this divide. Bordering extend beyond the mere geographical/political delimitation of national boundaries. It is a socio-spatial process whereby nations and communities order and differentiate social groups (Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002). Insiders are delimited from outsiders using a combination of legislation and policy, internal and external control mechanisms and practices, as well as official and unofficial rhetoric, which emphasize difference. B/ordering is thus an inherently exclusionary process (Sibley 1995). Moreover, understanding the border entails understanding the motives and power of those who exclude. B/ordering involves the ‘securing and governing of the “own” economic welfare and identity’ 3 In addition to the pseudonyms, migrants are identified by a code comprising nationality, gender, and date of interview. This is in order to retain referential information without revealing sensitive data (cf. McLellan et al. 2003).

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(Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002, p. 125) as well as the welfare of those within the in-group (McLaren and Johnson 2007). The primary basis for exclusion of the undocumented is their legal status. Migrants’ nonconformity with the law positions them as other, outside of juridico legal criteria of membership, that is, citizenship. Citizenship is used by the state to not only denote legal recognition, but also determine the benefits of such recognition (Menjivar 2006). Thus, those without legal status—the undocumented—are without rights normally accorded to those considered members of the state, occupying a subjectivity which is marked by exclusion. The border is therefore represented by a duality in undocumented migrants’ lives—they are physically present inside a territorial space, but outside of the ‘law and social body’ (BilberCoutin 2000). Migrants experience differential exclusion in spheres such as labour, health, housing, and welfare (Engbersen and Broeders 2009; Lazaridis and Koumandraki 2007; Van der Leun 2006; Hatziprokopiou 2003; Iosifides and King 1998) on the basis of their nonconformity with legal criteria of membership (read citizenship). Inclusion and exclusion thus operate dialectically, reproduced through both formal and informal social practices.4 This dialectic of inclusion and exclusion is explained by the interaction between constraints and enablement of bordering practices, and migrants’ agentic capacity. Migrants are actors who appropriate their subject positions in order to ‘challenge, redefine, or honour the border’ (Canning and Rose 2001, p. 431). Migrants’ actions shape the conditions of their existence, that is, they shape the border realities—or geographies—which confront them on a day-to-day basis. Application of critical realist ontology—one which prioritizes the interplay between agency and structure—thus sheds further light on the conceptualization of the border.5

4 Chavez (2007), for example, indicates that this simultaneity produces a schizophrenic environment for the undocumented. Other scholars use terms reflecting varying degrees of in/exclusion of migrants, based on this dialectic understanding. Khosravi (2010, p. 95), for example, refers to the undocumented as the ‘included but excepted’. Similarly, BilberCoutin (2000) indicates that migrants occupy spaces of existence and non-existence. Finally, Monforte and Dufour argue that the undocumented are ‘the “excluded” among the excluded’ (2011, p. 7). Migrants’ simultaneous inclusion and exclusion. 5 For critical realists, structure and agency are irreducible, although there is ‘interplay’ between structure and agency. Structures hold causal powers which influence actions, and actors also can transform structures via a process of structural elaboration (See also Sayer 1992; Iosifides 2012).

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Setting the Context Barbados is the eastern most Caribbean island, located on the periphery of the Leeward Islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. At just 430 square kilometres, and with a population of approximately 270,000 (Barbados Statistical Service 2002),6 Barbados easily falls within the United Nations classification for small-island developing states (SIDS) devised by the United Nations Office of the High Representative for Least Developed Countries Landlocked Countries and Small Island Developing States/UN-OHRLLS (UN-OHRLLS, n.d.).7 Notwithstanding, the island is consistently ranked as a country of very high human development. For example, in 2011 it was the only English-speaking Caribbean country included in the very high human development category, with a ranking of 47, in the UNDP Human Development Report. This placed it fifth among other countries in the Americas, such as the United States, Canada, Chile, and Argentina, which were ranked 4th, 6th, 44th, and 46th, respectively (UNDP 2011, p. 127). Barbados has historically had a fairly stable economy, and until the recession of 2008, the island had experienced moderate but consistent levels of growth averaging just over 2% between 2000 and 2007 (ECLAC 2009). Between 1991 and 2000, the annual rate of growth averaged 1.4%. After recovering from a fall in gross domestic product (GDP) precipitated by a decline in tourism after the events of 11 September 2001, the economy grew on average 3.6% between 2003 and 2005. Whilst tourism contributed significantly to the island’s performance, developments in the non-traded sector, such as construction, fuelled growth in GDP. A number of public sector initiatives including road infrastructure projects and the expansion of the Grantley Adams International Airport, tourism developments, and the rebuilding of the main cricket grounds in preparation for the hosting of the Cricket World Cup (held in 2007), ensured that the construction sector yielded positive returns, peaking in 2005 (Central Bank of Barbados 2002–2008). In 2000, Barbados had one of the highest rates of inward migration among Anglophone Caribbean states (ECLAC 2006). A number

6 The current population is estimated at approximately 280,000 (Barbados Statistical Service 2013). 7 http://www.un.org/special-rep/ohrlls/sid/list.htm.

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of factors contributed to Barbados’ popularity as a regional destination. Migratory patterns mirror development trends in the region, with countries experiencing expansion and growth attracting large numbers of migrants. This, in conjunction with its proximity to other less developed states with the Eastern Caribbean, such as St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and St. Lucia, has encouraged migration from these islands. Guyanese migrants now constitute the majority of intra-regional migrants to Barbados, representing approximately 40% of CARICOM migrants to the island (Barbados Statistical Service 1990, 2002). Guyanese migrants, in particular, were thought to play an invaluable role in the labour market—‘If it were not for Guyanese labourers in this country doing work that Barbadians no longer seem to want to do, agriculture would have collapsed’ (Niles 2006 quoting former Prime Minister of Barbados Owen Arthur) (Table 3.2). Before 2008, immigration policy was shaped by the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) administration, which had been in power since 1994. The BLP has traditionally been supportive of an open migration system. Under the BLP, a ‘laissez-faire’ migration regime, which granted amnesty to individuals who had resided continuously without ‘papers’ for a period Table 3.2 CARICOM nationals resident in Barbados, by country of birth Country Bahamas Dominica Grenada Guyana Jamaica St. Lucia St. Vincent and the Grenadines Trinidad and Tobago Other CARICOM Total CARICOM countries

1990

2000

2010

% Change, 1990–2000

% Change, 2000–2010

54 446 559 2529 615 3279 3635

53 410 504 4349 844 2805 3791

47 321 371 6277 947 2073 2964

−2 −8 −10 58 27 −16 4

−12 −27 −35 69 21 −35 −27

1829

1730

1419

−5

−21

641 13,488

605 15,190

387 14,610

−6 12

−56 −3

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of five years operated in Barbados, had been in effect (Comissiong 2009).8 The Democratic Labour Party (DLP) defeated the Barbados Labour (BLP) in national elections in 2008. The DLP had issued calls for a managed migration regime as early as 2006 at its annual conference (Niles 2006). In its 2008 manifesto, the DLP had pledged to ‘introduce policies to manage immigration in the interest of the local labour force and the foreign worker who may otherwise be subject to exploitation’ (Democratic Labour Party 2008, p. 35). Six months after entering office, the incumbent government established a subcommittee to undertake a comprehensive review of immigration policy. The subcommittee determined that undocumented migration to Barbados was ‘unacceptably high, increasingly difficult to control and pose potentially negative socio-economic challenges for the country’ (Thompson 2009, p. 1, sic). The turn to a restrictionist migration policy approach was formally instantiated with the announcement of an amnesty, by the then Prime Minister David Thompson, in May 2009. Effective from 1 June 2009 to 1 December 2009, undocumented migrants who had resided in Barbados for at least 8 years prior to 1 December 2005, who were gainfully employed and who had not had any record of criminal activity, would have been able to apply to regularize their status (Thompson 2009). The amnesty was directed only at undocumented CARICOM nationals. Undocumented non-CARICOM nationals were not asked to participate in a similar exercise. Regional scholars and politicians decried the amnesty, as well as its basis—the unacceptably high rate of undocumented migration, emphasizing instead the important contribution of undocumented intra-regional migrants to the Barbadian economy and society (Comissiong 2009; Davis 2009). Indeed, the proposed changes to immigration policy in Barbados were seen as opposed to the spirit of the regional framework of mobility within the context of CARICOM (Singh 2009; BBC 2009; Ferguson 2009). The proposal for the elimination of the award of reside and work status as a condition of amnesty challenged the de facto immigration policy. It was creatively exclusionary as it had pushed upward the residence requirement from five to eleven years (Comissiong 2009). A number of 8 Migrants referred to documentation such as work permits and IDs as ‘papers’. Whilst Comissiong dates the origin of this policy to 1995, Symmonds (2008) indicates that it emerged during the 1970s.

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undocumented migrants were automatically disqualified from the amnesty based on more stringent requirements placed on migrants with respect to the duration of their residence (Ferguson 2009). It also (inadvertently?) resulted in exclusion of Guyanese migrants, who felt themselves the primary targets of the new policy agenda, since they were the most dominant migrant group. The prime minister refuted claims that this was the case (Stabroek News 2009). However, it could not be denied that there was significant resistance among the local population to Guyanese nationals (BBC 2009; CADRES 2006, 2009).

Undocumentedness and the Legal Bases for Exclusion9 The Barbados Immigration Act (the Act) enshrines the provisions governing migrants’ access to the labour market. With the exception of citizens, permanent residents and immigrants, all non-nationals require a permit in order to engage in work.10 There are two categories of work permit in Barbados. Short-term permits are granted for periods of up to eleven months. Long-term permits have durations of up to three years. Applications for work permits are made in advance of arrival to Barbados. Part III (Section 17, 1) of the Act reads as follows, A person other than a citizen, permanent resident or immigrant may not in Barbados engage in any occupation or accept employment without having first obtained a written permit for the purpose granted by the Minister.

Applying for a work permit is a documentation heavy process, requiring several different layers of biodata including fingerprints, police and medical records. Work permit applications are facilitated only if employers have unsuccessfully filled vacancies locally. Once approved, permits are 9 Here, emphasis is placed on the legislative provisions directly related to the sphere of work, although there are other provisions concerning undocumentedness, such as prohibition of the entry of persons not in possession of a passport (First Schedule, 10). Similarly, Sections 7(6), 8(3), 13(6), 14(b), 16(b), 20, 21, 22 and 24 outline the procedures relating to the detention and deportation of the undocumented. 10 The term immigrant refers to a person who travels to Barbados with the intention to eventually make an application for permanent residence, after having resided in the country for at least 5 years (Parliament of Barbados 1979).

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tied to the employer, who submits the application on the migrant’s behalf (Barbados Immigration Department 2012).11 CARICOM skilled nationals (CSNs) and service providers also do not require a permit to engage in work in Barbados (and in other member states of CARICOM participating in the CARICOM Single Market and Economy/CSME). However, only ten categories of CSNs and service providers are currently allowed to move freely within the Community.12 Other categories of workers must therefore abide by provisions regarding the need for work permit. In addition, CSNs and service providers are only allowed to move freely within the region if issued with the relevant certification by an approved accreditation council. It is important to mention this framework governing intra-regional migration among CARICOM states as its implementation in 2006 would have created an additional layer of documentation for persons seeking to move to Barbados within the context of the CSME. However, with the exception of five individuals, all interviewees had arrived prior to the implementation of the CSME. The ensuing sections therefore focus on Barbados’ national policy framework regulating access to the labour market. As indicated in the provisions below (Section 17, 2 and 4), working without a permit and engaging the services of an undocumented individual are offences. A person may not engage or employ another person who is not a citizen, permanent resident or immigrant unless there is a work permit in force in relation to that other person and for the purpose of that engagement or employment. Any person who (a) contravenes subsection (1) or (2); or (b) being the holder of a work permit, contravenes or fails to comply with any condition subject to which that permit was granted, is guilty of an offence under this Act.

The Act later goes on to criminalize the hiring of non-nationals not in possession of a work permit, as well as working without a permit, with

11 http://immigration.gov.bb/pages/ImmigrantStatus.aspx. 12 The ten categories of CSNs are university graduates, media personnel, sportspersons, artists and musicians, teachers, nurses, artisans, persons with associate degrees and domestics. At the time of the research, domestics had not yet been added to the list of CSNs.

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the penalty of a fine and/or imprisonment for persons found guilty of breaching immigration regulations.13 The labour market in Barbados is thus grounded in a framework, which defines the parameters for inclusion of documented non-national labour (with the requirement for a work permit), and exclusion of undocumented labour (through the criminalization of undocumented work). However, as explained below, social practices produced an environment shaped by inclusion/exclusion of the undocumented. This is the case, as structural conditions of the Barbadian economy facilitated undocumented migrants’ embeddedness in the labour market. The legal parameters for exclusion therefore need to be juxtaposed against these structural conditions.

Embedded Migrants and Their Informal Inclusion in the Labour Market Migrants’ incorporation in the Barbadian labour market reflected the interplay between the forces that encouraged their inclusion and their strategic agency. A stable macro-economy and a shortage of labour resulted in dependence on migrant labour, in particular, labour to fill the deficit of low-skilled professions. Migrants’ strategic agency was reflected in their negotiation of this enablement to their inclusion, when they opted to work without a permit in jobs, which fit with their current skill profile, and which satisfied their financial needs in their host and home countries. The growth of the Barbadian economy, discussed above, had created a need for additional employment, in the formal and informal sectors. These jobs were not readily filled by local Barbadians due to a combination of factors. High rates of emigration, an ageing population, and a deficit of low-skilled workers due to the transition of educated Barbadians to more highly skilled professions, resulted in a demand for external labour (Barbados Ministry of Labour and Immigration 2009). Barbados became dependent on neighbouring countries to supply labour and ensure continuity of key sectors of the economy. SADIQ: Well ahm, well at the time, construction was booming in Barbados. So, finding a job was very easy. I mean like, you coulda

13 The current Act states a maximum fine of BDS$5000 and/or a period of imprisonment not exceeding twelve months (Section 30).

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(could) get a job today and you coulda (could) walk off the job the same day, and probably before the day out, another job offer come.14

The private sector in Barbados routinely relied on the undocumented migrant population from CARICOM countries as a source of cheap and reliable labour. A ‘shadow economy’ was created as workers and their employers circumvented legal provisions regarding work permits (Walcott, personal communication, 24 November 2010). Employers’ complicity with undocumented migrant labour was a means to ensure reliability and consistency of labour, especially during the pre-amnesty period. Before the 2009 amnesty, demand for labour outpaced supply, producing conditions for the (hyper) mobility of labour, as discussed by Sadiq above. Non-conforming employers ignored regulations and procedures governing the application for work permit, which they saw as burdensome. DAVID: Yes, I met [names employers] in St. Lucia, and then he say I should come. So after I came here I call him, ‘cause my cousin was here already. So my cousin call him and told him I was here and I got the job. NDJ: And he knew that you were undocumented when he hired you. DAVID: He knew that, yeah. NDJ: And, so he just hired you without the work permit? DAVID: I told him that I would need a working permit to work here in Barbados. So he told me that he doesn’t go into all this trouble and all this stress is a lot of stress, like for Immigration. NDJ: Ok DAVID: So they might like fine him, or ask him why he employed a foreign national, when you have a lot of Barbadians not working here a lot of Barbadians who need jobs, why he is not employing a Barbadian. So he said that he is not doing it, I should just take a chance. NDJ: And you took it? DAVID: I took the chance and I know ‘bout the risks so I took the risk.15

Some migrants knew in advance of travelling to Barbados, that they would engage in undocumented work. 14 Int18_GM_23.02.2011. 15 Int2_LM_29.10.2010.

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NDJ: So you would have had [a] work permit before? RICARDO: Never had [a] work permit before. NDJ: But you were working? RICARDO: Yeah, everybody come and work without a work permit. That ain’t true?16

There were others who ‘happened into undocumentedness’ by commencing work on trips which were initially intended as vacation. Both options were facilitated by provisions which enabled short-term visitors to apply for extensions of stay.17 STEPHANIE: Yes. I mean you know that it is wrong ‘cause they are saying that you [are] not supposed to overstay your time.. but ahm, I mean at the same time you are thinking, well, I’m here, I could actually make more money than I’m actually working for in Guyana and ahm, I could do so much things, actually work for a couple of years, own your own home. If you are there, you can’t actually work, I mean, you have to have a good job or something in order to own your home. So it’s a[n] opportunity that staring you in your face so a lot people will just, you will decide to grab, grab at it, you understand and decide, well I’m gonna stay, work, save my money, the time that you’re illegal, you tend to save more than when you on ting [extension]18

Migrants thus used extensions as a means to continue residing and working in the island, without applying for a work permit. They circumvented the legislative regulations regarding work permits, whilst creatively utilizing other procedures related to short-term stay to facilitate their employment. Some migrants, however, avoided making applications for extension for fear of detention (and repatriation). In some cases, breaches of immigration regulations included attempts to procure fraudulent work permits. PAUL: Yeah, you pay that (had previously specified amount for fraudulent documents) because you tell yourself you done overstay a month and

16 Int6_GM_14.1.2010. 17 The time allowed was subject to the discretion of the immigration official. A 2007 CARICOM Heads of Government decision had recommended a definite entry period of six months for all non-nationals (CARICOM Secretariat 2007). 18 Int8_GF_21.11.2010.

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the person going get it for you. You watching that if you get work six months you could make back the money, ok, you understand.19

As indicated in the excerpts above, migrants’ long-term horizon and migration ambition led to arguments, which justified their breach of immigration policy. Migrants also rationalized breaches by locating their actions within a broader culture of overstay—and implicitly the culture of informality, which acted as an enablement to their employment. Migrants were often aware of, and at times had been encouraged by, other migrants who had lived for extended periods in Barbados in breach of immigration rules. This was the case with Paul referenced earlier, whose uncle, himself undocumented, had influenced his decision to travel to Barbados and work without documentation. Migrants also opted for undocumentedness because they perceived documented status as less secure than an undocumented trajectory. This is linked to the earlier argument regarding migration ambitions, articulated aptly by Stephanie. Undocumentedness enabled migrants to remain in Barbados undetected for extended periods and to work to fulfil their goals. The comments from Ricardo and Leighton below highlight the vulnerability of documented status, since work permits are temporary documents, which can be revoked by the Immigration Department or not be renewed on expiry, resulting in undocumentedness. LEIGHTON: Doing the right t[h]ing, go in Immigration get a permit, meaning they go through the right procedure. You going be hurt more, because they know everything about you. They know when to come and get you. They will make you undocumented.20 RICARDO: People who have permits and all these things, some of them they revoke them and make them illegal.21

These comments should, however, be read within the larger context of deportability of the undocumented (De Genova 2002), which is discussed further below. Undocumented migrants in Barbados were able to avoid detention by Immigration, whilst living with the overhanging threat of raids being conducted by the Immigration Department at their places of

19 Int10_GM_07.12.2010. 20 Int7_GF_GM_GM_14.11.2010. 21 Int6_GM_14.11.2010.

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employment, or elsewhere. In fact, migrants lived very circumspect lives in order to avoid detection, detention, and deportation (Dietrich Jones 2014). Migrants also demonstrated agency by being selective about the type of employment they sought once in Barbados. Interviewees were concentrated in low to semi-skilled areas of employment, primarily construction (dominated by men) and hospitality and care-giving (women only). In addition to demand for labour, these informal sectors were less stringent and employers much more open to the hiring of undocumented workers. CYNTHIA: … but I think it’s difficult to work with the government as a non-national. To get an office job. That’s a no-no. You got to go in the private sector.22

It is important to note that migrants’ work did not result in de-skilling based on their levels of education and professional experience. This is not always the case in undocumented migration, where migrants must choose lower skilled jobs in the informal sector in order to conceal their undocumentedness (Hatziprokopiou 2003). However, migrants’ incorporation in the labour market was not without consequences. Migrants experienced, as a result of their lack of documentation, a number of exclusionary practices.

Conditions of Exclusion in an Environment of Inclusion Migrants’ experiences of exclusion in the labour market are consequence of their positionality as labourers from poor(er) countries, suppliers of cheap and low-skilled labour. This abject position, coupled with the potential of deportation (De Genova 2002),23 makes migrants highly vulnerable to exploitation in the labour market. Migrants’ exclusion thus

22 Int7_GF_GM_GM_GM_14.11.2010. 23 De Genova (2002) argues that undocumentedness (what he refers to as ‘illegality’) is a legal construct, a by-product of a capitalist political economy devised to guarantee an exploitable work force. ‘Illegality’ constrains migrants, who encounter constant surveillance and policing, though not actual deportation, as a result of their legal nonconformity. In this respect, illegality is a socio-spatial condition of heightened vulnerability.

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relates not to the (mere) existence of explicit limits to their participation—the preceding section demonstrated that migrants were included in the labour market despite the existence of legal prohibitions against the contracting of undocumented labour. Rather, it concerns migrants’ exclusion due to exploitation on the basis of their undocumented status. This exploitation manifested in three principal ways: the misappropriation of taxes paid by employees, remuneration of wages not commensurate with services rendered, and entrapment. Notwithstanding their undocumented status, migrants routinely paid National Insurance (NIS) and income tax.24 This was in keeping with national regulations that all employees (including those earning minimum wage) are expected to pay taxes; employers are then to pay over these contributions to the government (Burnett, personal communication, 11 March 2011). However, some employers misappropriated funds by taxing non-taxable pay or failing to remit the funds. This practice was especially lucrative for employers who had contracted a number of undocumented workers. Dominic explains, .. I go to work with a white fellow name (gives name). Oh my God, and now I ain’t got no papers, you wukking (working) for the money, right, they tekking (taking) out the tax and the NIS. Listen, I never pay so much tax yet! One time I work fi (for) $1200, right, fi [for] one week. And I had to pay seven hundred and something dollars in income tax, you understand. I say no, no, no. So that time I stop wuk (work). We used to work overtime and ting right, which is overtime money. You don’t supposed to tax overtime money. But the man just taxing it.25

The misappropriation of taxes was only one of the ways employers exploited undocumented labour. Other avenues included demanding extensive work hours and paying undeservedly low wages. Migrants were engaged by employers as their level of productivity was considered higher than that of locals; however, their industry was subsequently exploited. MAYA: if you Guyanese people will take you to work like a snap of finger, cause they know that you will work, they know that you will come to 24 NIS is a contributory social insurance scheme, which allows contributors to make claims for a range of benefits, during periods of unemployment. 25 Int13_GM_31.01.2011.

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work, you understand me? Compared to a Bajan who feel that they got a right and if they feel like they don’t want to go to work today they won’t go to work.26 CAMILLE: … you would encounter persons, like they will work you, and then they will tell you, “look, if you doan (don’t) move from here I will call the Immigration”, you know. One time I went to the cleaning firm and it was like, three days, $75. And I mean hard work, you out there with a broom, and you rubbing and you scrubbing and I mean you work till, you gotta be scrubbing all dem (those) little tings, sometimes you got these little scrape things, you know these scraper things clean off the stuff off the tiles and all a dat [that]?…27 RICARDO: Once they find out you illegal, they gwan (are going to) hire you to do this and that do, and when you come they doan (don’t) want to pay you. ‘Cause they know there’s nothing you could do, right. And they will quarrel about you, they call immigration to get you back on the plane. So, these are some of the injustices that people face.28

As indicated by Camille and Ricardo, migrants’ undocumented status precluded them seeking redress, as they faced the possibility of deportation. Ricardo’s experience confirmed this to be the case. Aware of their status, some employers used this as leverage, threatening employees with deportation. The threat of deportability resulted in entrapment to employers. Employers’ knowledge that migrants were driven to earn an income, and that they were likely to accept any conditions which enabled them to realize their goals, contributed to an imbalance in power relations. Other migrants reported similar experiences shared by Camille and Ricardo. For example, Joy recounted her disappointment with and anger at her employer who refused to apply for a work permit on her behalf. Despite receiving poor treatment from this employer, who refused to grant her leave after she received an injury on the job, Joy continued to work there. Entrapment also occurred when migrants were recruited by their employers, especially for work in the sex industry, as was the case with two female interviewees. The situation of women demands special emphasis, for their entrapment was linked to the financial obligation to repay their employer who had advanced the monies to enable the purchase of airfare. 26 Int5_GF_12.11.2010. 27 Int17_GF_19.02.2011. 28 Int6_GM_14.11.2010.

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NDJ: so you came in’98 …. somebody brought you over, you can describe to me how [does] that work? CAMILLE: That is more like, ok somebody come to the country and – some people lie to you, some people tell you exactly what you getting involved in, and ahm, not having the money to buy the ticket…back then a ticket would have been between six to eight hundred dollars, depends on which airline you choose. NDJ: That’s US? CAMILLE: No Barbadian dollars, right. And when we get here depends on who bring you, you would either have to pay back two five to three thousand dollars, for that ticket, right. Other than paying back for the ticket you still have to pay back for the room that you in, which is $120 a day, a week, sorry. And if you decide that you going take a client to the same room, you still have to pay $10 out the money that you charge the client. Likewise if you work in the club is the same ting. So you would have to pay $10 per client. It doesn’t matter if you use the club or the same room that you chose to dwell in. NDJ: So you worked at a club then? CAMILLE: Yeah, you work at a club, or you work from home. Based on what you client want because not everybody like the club scene. NDJ: So how you felt about doing that, ‘cause you said you didn’t like it? Why do it then if you didn’t like it. CAMILLE: Well, ok. It was like a situation whereby you end up owing for things in between. Cause sometimes you move away from that scene, as I tell you before, and you try to work for youself honestly and then you find that look, you illegal, you out here, people unfairing you, you can’t look after youself, so you have to go back right there because is faster money, you understand. You could make about $1000 per night or more, depends on the person that you nookie (have sex with). NDJ: $1000? CAMILLE: Or more, you understand. That’s if you can cope with what is coming you way. Ahm, I mean to me, if I had to do this again, to come to Barbados, it would be a ‘no’, a big ‘no’.29

The gendered dimensions of this example of trafficking and debt bondage ought not to be overlooked, since Camille’s entrapment included not just constrained rights and choices, but also loss of control over her own body. Camille explained that women were not able to leave the sex industry until their recruiter/employer was fully recompensed, a process which 29 Int17_GF_19.02.2011.

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could take years, especially in the light of the linking of this repayment for monies advanced, with payment of dues for on the job activities (cf. Chimienti 2010). The men interviewed, who were employed before they left for Barbados, did not have this added dimension of entrapment since they either paid for their tickets from savings, or borrowed from family members.

The Post-amnesty Context In the post-amnesty period, the management of immigration, in particular labour migration, became one of the top priorities of the Barbadian government. Highly skilled labour was identified as a key driver for the revitalization of the Barbadian economy. Successful participation in a highly competitive global economy dictates that Barbados must enhance its attractiveness as a destination of choice in which to conduct business. Part of this attractiveness rests on having a readily available pool of highly qualified and skilled human resources on which businesses can draw. A flexible and creative immigration policy which understands and responds to the dynamics of business and the international market place is a critical element in achieving the desired level of competitiveness…. Government’s policy, therefore, must enable it to attract and retain the requisite numbers of highly qualified and skilled immigrants in enough time to make a critical difference to the country. (Barbados Ministry of Labour and Immigration 2009, p. 14, emphasis mine)

The prioritization of highly skilled labour was done in tandem with the devaluing of low-skilled labour, which was linked to undocumentedness. The problem of illegality is likely to be more prevalent for persons at the lower end of the skills distribution, such as agriculture, construction, or domestic services…A more orderly form of “guest workers” programme is therefore essential. (Barbados Ministry of Labour and Immigration 2009, p. 16)

In order to dis-incentivize the hiring of undocumented workers and the practice of seeking employment whilst undocumented a suite of reforms were proposed, in particular an increase in fines (from BDS$5000 to

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$50,000) and prison terms (from three to twelve years).30 In addition, the introduction of a guest worker programme was recommended. However, as mooted, the guest worker programme was intended to target workers in the agriculture and construction sector only, and if implemented would have excluded several other categories of workers from the informal sector. The proposed reforms on increased penalties were publicized in the press (Stabroek News 2009) and became common knowledge among migrants. The new reforms created an exclusionary environment, as employers were reluctant to breach regulations due to possibility of hefty fines and/or imprisonment. It should be noted that the increase in fines and sentencing had yet to be enacted in legislation but had a tremendous impact on the collective imagination, leading to less contracting of undocumented labour, and an exodus of the undocumented. ANTHONY: you could work with a company couple years ago without permit and ting, right. They used to employ people. And they stop all a dat now, and things get hard, and ting. So a lot of them just go back home…[….] if you ain’t got no papers, they not taking you, no matter how good you is, right.31 CHRIS: Because [the] change of government they had at one time was targeting strictly Guyanese… Guyanese alone, nobody else. LEIGHTON: Everybody stop hiring you because they gonna charge you. CHRIS: They gonna charge you a lump sum of money and if you caan pay the money they gonna lock up the contractor. You know so they make you scared that if certain things not right for you you caan go out to work. HENRY: And some of them pack up and run home. LEIGTON: Hundreds. HENRY: ….A whole heap a dem.32

30 Additional reforms included: (1) for persons deported, the increase from a one year to three year bar on returning to the island; (2) implementation of a ‘qualifying’ period for marriages of non-nationals to nationals; (3) refusal of citizenship to children born to non-nationals who are not immigrants, permanent residents or citizens; and (4) the revocation of reside and work status for persons who fail to meet the terms and conditions of their immigrant status. 31 Int23_JM_GrM_17.03.2011. 32 Int7_GF_GM_GM_14.11.2010.

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The shift to a restrictive migration policy environment must however be located in the wider context of a recessionary environment. The dramatic contraction of the economy made it increasingly difficult for some migrants to find work. In addition, the threat of detention became more palpable, as raids were conducted throughout the island (Ferguson 2009). A number of migrants were detained and some returned voluntarily, for fear of detention. These changes spoke to the transformation of the Barbadian informal labour market from one of complicit inclusion to one of overt exclusion. Yet, there were migrants who were able to obtain employment in this restricted environment, in particular, in the construction sector doing sub-contracted work. Their decision to remain in Barbados demonstrated agentic capacity, as they strategically included themselves by seeking work with individuals who were willing to operate in contravention of the increasingly restrictive migration policy regime. Thus, even within what on the surface appears to be an exclusionary geography, there was inclusion of the undocumented.

Conclusion By using the borderized space of the labour market in Barbados as an example, this chapter has demonstrated that undocumentedness produces parallel geographies of inclusion and exclusion in the life of migrants. Interviews revealed that migrants’ agency (and the agency of their employers) worked together with a demand for migrant labour, to enable the unemployment of the undocumented. However, migrants’ undocumentedness was also the basis on which they experienced differential exclusion through exploitation—low pay and demanding work hours—and entrapment to their employers. Returning to the three questions posed at the beginning of the chapter, this research has confirmed that islands can be hostile spaces for the undocumented. This is so, although host economies, in particular those with high rates of net emigration (as are most CARICOM member states), are dependent on migrant labour to ensure the stability of key growth sectors. The comparison of the pre- and post-amnesty periods provides a nuanced view to the inclusion of the undocumented, which this study reveals is not a static process. Shifting parameters mean that

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environments, which were conditionally receptive, can become explicitly exclusionary and change the patterns of inclusion to which the undocumented might have grown accustomed. This study provides important lessons for a region that has been shaped by a migratory culture, and which has been dependent on intraand extra-regional labour. The first is that restrictive border management practices will not necessarily curtail migration in the light of the CSME framework, which facilitates definite and indefinite entry in CARICOM destinations for intra-regional migrants. In a context where emphasis is placed on clandestine entry, in particular, movements which are linked with illicit trans-boundary flows of drugs, weapons, and money, such a statement may seem controversial. The suggestion is therefore made, not to devalue efforts which contribute to national and regional security, but out of recognition that restrictive border practices may heighten the vulnerability of migrants, where they create an environment that is organized to limit the exclusion of non-nationals. Secondly, notwithstanding legal provisions, which attempt to limit undocumented migrants’ inclusion, socio-spatial border practices facilitate the inclusion of the undocumented. Governments should therefore be encouraged to consider more analytically, migrants’ contribution to the social and economic fabric of their societies. Such an understanding may facilitate receptivity to migrants even during times which are less favourable to their incorporation, ensuring the protection of their fundamental human rights. Thirdly, the chapter implies the need for deeper collaboration between CARICOM member states. Deteriorating economic conditions in sending countries is one factor which encourages outward migration to more stable economies. Restrictive border practices are therefore a shortterm solution to sustainable development challenges impacting the lesser developed countries (or countries experiencing economic crises) in the region. Data Availability Statement The data sets generated and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available. A condition of ethical approval for the fieldwork conducted was that participants would be guaranteed anonymity and confidentiality. To ensure anonymity, participants’ names have been replaced by pseudonyms, as explained in the chapter. To ensure confidentiality, only this author has access to the data, which has been stored as encrypted files and which will be destroyed after ten years have elapsed.

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MCLAREN, K. & JOHNSON, M. 2007. Resources, group conflict and symbols: Explaining immigration hostility in Britain. Political Studies, 55, 709–732. MCLELLAN, E., MACQUEEN, K. & NEIDIG, J. 2003. Beyond the qualitative interview. Field Methods, 15, 63–84. MEGORAN, N. 2006. For ethnography in political geography: Experiencing and re-imagining Ferghana Valley boundary closures. Political Geography, 25, 622–640. MENJIVAR, C. 2006. Liminal legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants’ lives in the United States. American Journal of Sociology, 111, 999–1037. MONFORTE, P. & DUFOUR, P. 2011. Mobilizing borderline citizenship regimes: A comparative analysis of undocumented migrant’s collective actions. Politics and Society, 39, 203–232. NEWMAN, D. 2006. Borders and bordering towards an inter-disciplinary dialogue. European Journal of Social Theory, 9, 171–186. NILES, B. 2006. Are Guyanese welcome in Barbados? BBC Caribbean, 6 September. NÚÑEZ, D. C. 2010. Fractured membership: Deconstructing territoriality to secure rights and remedies for the undocumented worker. Wisconsin Law Review, 817, 817–873. PARLIAMENT OF BARBADOS. 1979. Barbados Immigration Act, Cap. 190. RUHS, M. & ANDERSON, B. 2010. Semi-compliance in migrant labour markets: An analysis of migrants, employers and the state in the United Kingdom. Population, Space and Place, 16, 195–211. SAYER, A. 2000. Realism and Social Science. London: Sage. SAYER, S. 1992. Method in Social Science. London: Routledge. SIBLEY, D. 1995. Geographies of exclusion: society and difference in the West. London: Routledge. SINGH, R. 2009. CARICOM’s migrant problem. Trinidad Express, 3 June. STABROEK NEWS. 2009. Guyanese are being raided in Barbados. Stabroek News, 17 June. SYMMONDS, A. 2008. Towards a regional policy on migration. Sir Arthur Lewis Memorial Conference 2008. St. Augustine: University of the West Indies. THOMPSON, D. 2009. Ministerial statement on a new comprehensive immigration policy for Barbados. Bridgetown: Parliament of Barbados. UNDP. 2011. Human Development Report 2011 Sustainability and equity: A better future for all. Geneva: UNDP. VAN DER LEUN, J. 2006. Excluding immigrants in the Netherlands: Between national policies and local implementation. West European Politics, 29, 310– 326. VAN HOUTUM, H. & VAN NAERSSEN, T. 2002. Bordering, ordering and othering. Tidschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 93, 125–136.

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WILSON, T. & DONNAN, H. 2012. Borders and border studies. In: WILSON, T. & DONNAN, H. (eds.) A companion to border studies. Chichester, Sussex: Wiley Blackwell.

CHAPTER 4

Caribbean Migration Spaces and Transnational Networks: The Case of the Haitian Diaspora Cédric Audebert

Introduction Over the past few decades, the deep-rooted structural crisis underlying the economic, social and political alienation of the vast majority of the Haitian people has reached an unprecedented magnitude—thereby unveiling the diaspora’s crucial role in Haiti’s economy and local social structures. Given the diaspora’s demographic weight and influence on the local economy, culture and politics, challenges to the Haitian society’s future can no longer be tackled separately from the spread of its population beyond national borders. As a result of systemic insecurity affecting all

This article is an updated and revised version of French text “La diaspora haïtienne: Vers l’émergence d’un territoire de la dispersion?” published in 2011 in Le défi haïtien: Économie, dynamique sociopolitique et migration (The Haitian challenge: Economy, socio-political dynamics and migration) (dir. Carlo Célius) Paris: L’Harmattan. C. Audebert (B) LC2S/CNRS, Université des Antilles, Schoelcher, Martinique, France e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_4

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aspects of daily life—especially in the economic, political and environmental spheres—emigration gradually spread across all social classes and regions in Haiti throughout the twentieth century. The two million Haitian nationals that currently live abroad account for about 20% of their homeland’s population. The outcome of this dynamics on the transnational structure of Haitian social relations is remarkable (Audebert 2002, 2004a, 2012). Pionner research has shown that transnational practices embedded in family, economic, logistic, cultural and informational networks have grown more structured in the context of the development of historical relations between Haiti and the United States, as well as of transnational practices resulting from the multiple identity strategies embraced by migrants according to shifting political contexts in both host and home societies (Basch et al. 1994; Laguerre 1998; Glick Schiller and Fouron 1999; Stepick 1998). However, core Anglo-Saxon sociological and anthropological research on Haitian migration has mainly been limited to the North American context. In other words, it fails to consider the experience of the majority of Haitian migrants throughout the World. Several collective works have recently attempted to take into consideration the diversity of Haitian migration contexts, mostly through monographies or comparative assessments of their Caribbean journeys (Jackson 2011; Joint and Mérion 2011). Their international and transdisciplinary perspective has undoubtedly contributed to a better understanding of the plurality of Haitian experiences abroad. They have but partially fulfilled the challenge of comprehending the global space dynamics and rationales embraced by transnational agents from a diasporic perspective. My research on the Haitian diaspora aimed at facing that recurring scientific challenge by looking at the full range of diasporic locations as well as migration territories and transnational networks in view of grasping the uniqueness and coherence of that globalised social body (Audebert 2012). Nonetheless, much remains to be done to grasp the complexity and richness of the processes underway within this diaspora. Over the past thirty years, social science studies have come to define diasporas based on a minimum of four criteria: geographic dispersion, the existence of a distinctive diasporic identity, an internal diasporic structure grounded on the linkages between its hubs, as well as significant symbolic ties to the homeland (Sheffer 1996; Anteby-Yemini et al. 2000; Ma Mung 2000, 2012; Dufoix 2003; Prévélakis 1996, Hovanessian 1998). Unlike the “transmigrant” figure, whose incentives for transnational ties come

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down to social status and prestige in the hometown, diasporic migrants sustain relationships that connect them around the world through a strong sense of national belonging (Bruneau 2004). In that light, a geographical approach focused on the diasporic dimension is bound to fill the gaps found in previous research, especially as it allows for a more global and dynamic perspective on how the Haitian migration space and its networks operate over time (Audebert 2012). While The Haitian Diaspora did bring out the connection between global and local scales—not to mention close interactions between cities, migration routes and diasporic structures—it has failed to account for more recent geographical dynamics in Latin America—Chile, Ecuador, Peru and Brazil in particular. Especially after the 2010 earthquake, Brazil has become an increasingly popular destination among Haitian migrants. While the need to establish migration networks involving Suriname and French Guiana—another major migration destination for Haitians— initially played a significant part in boosting the Brazilian destination, Haitian migration to Brazil is now self-sustaining, as shown by the expansion of labour migration networks that connect the Amazonian states to Sao Paulo, and Brazil’s southern states (Silva 2012, 2017; Joseph 2015; Nieto 2014). By way of a theoretical and conceptual preamble, we will focus on the transnationalisation of Haitian social networks and the spatial system of interactions that caracterise it. This spatial model results from a survival strategy that implies uprooting personal, family and collective destinies from Haiti while actively preserving pre-existing core social structures. In that view, the emergence of a collective organisation abroad endowed with a certain continuity in time and space redefines the relationship of the Haitian people to its homeland and to migration. While local social ties paradoxically rely more and more on long-distance connections, migration does not seem to be perceived so much as a fracture—or a hiatus—as a way of expanding one’s social networks and living space. Therefore, I examine how diaspora as a territory affects social reproduction, social cohesion and Haitian identity. Hence, it proves crucial to identify the key agents in such a spatial dynamics in order to grasp how not only specific networks but locations affect that scheme. For the originality of the territorialisation processes of Haitians abroad stems from their ability to articulate their migration project and experience on both local and global scales.

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The Diasporisation of the Haitian Society: The Spatial Manifestation of An Internationalised “Marooning”?1 For most Haitians, their country’s troubled history (from the plantation system to the present day) is one of an everlasting quest for justice and freedom. However, the perpetuation of the plantation system after independence, the isolation and embargo that affected Haiti during the nineteenth century, or the State’s willingness to extend its commercial, tax and political control to even the most remote rural areas—not to mention the social consequences of US military occupation and Duvalierist dictatorship throughout the twentieth century—have caused economic, political and cultural freedom to continuously dwindle for a majority of Haitians. Individuals began to leave the country as a result of historico-structural and situational constraints. Haitians have gradually come to construe that “someplace else” as one of the last realms of freedom and growth within their reach, although at a heavy price. Their international dispersion has taken place in the dual context of the home country’s complicated political and economic course along with the international division of labour implemented by the United States in the Caribbean.

Declining Living Standards, US Interventionism and Mass Migration Economic and political choices made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sowed the seeds of exponential mass migration flows throughout the twentieth century. The plantation-based economic system, designed to maximise short-term profit, caused severe damage to both the workforce and natural resources. The depletion of lowland soil resources caused by the extension of sugar cane plantations, and deforestation in hilly areas as an outcome of the development of coffee plantations, have come to epitomise the country’s early environmental decay and engendered severe poverty levels among peasants. At the same time, the surge in export agriculture at the expense of subsistence farming, fuelled by the 1 Originally referring to the West Indian slaves who risked their lives (trying) to flee the coercive plantation system—this term now refers increasingly to the case of Haitian migrants (Hurbon 1987).

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State’s dire need for currencies, went hand in hand with the militarisation of the countryside and the expansion of coercive labour. Hence, peasant mobility within national borders became a matter of survival and freedom, while also foreshadowing later migration dynamics. Besides historical and structural circumstances, the direction and essence of early twentieth-century migration flows are embedded in the geopolitical context which enabled them. Haiti entered the era of mass migration as US economic interests began pervading the Caribbean through interventionist strategies. The first large-scale Haitian migration waves to neighbouring countries coincided with US military occupation (1915–1934). As a matter of fact, foreign supervision of the Haitian nation-state, massive land expropriations and forced labour meant to boost large plantation farming models, as well as the deterioration of rural living conditions. Hundreds of thousands of peasants migrated in response to massive evictions from their lands. In parallel, half of the Dominican Republic’s plantations had been transferred to US capital by 1925, following a decade of military occupation—while North American sugar-related investments in Cuba proved a hundred times superior to similar investments in Haiti (Lemoine 1981). Hence, peasant migration was fostered by Haiti’s new position in the US backyard: a bountiful and cheap labour pool expected to work in North American-owned plantations across neighbouring countries. Under US occupation, an estimated 200,000 Haitian peasants thus left to work in the Dominican Republic and twice as many in Cuba (Anglade 1982; Lundhal 1982).

Present-Day Political and Economic Insecurity and the Diversification of Migration Flows The specificity of present-day migration compared to previous migration waves lies in the diversification of both the geographical direction and social makeup of these later flows, which contributed to making Haiti’s international migration arena broader and more intricate. The joint political terror and economic slump that characterised the second half of the twentieth century resulted in two socially distinct migration waves. As of the late 1950s, Duvalierism, which featured absolute political control over the social, economic and cultural aspects of Haitian society, fuelled political paramilitarisation, persecution of the opposition as well as tensions along class and colour lines. It was during that period that the country

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recorded its first massive migration waves of both wealthy and middle social classes. During F. Duvalier’s dictatorship, 50,000 of them officially migrated to the Northeastern coast of the United States, and 3600 more emigrated to Quebec.2 The dictatorial reign of his son, J. C. Duvalier, further strengthened emigration as all of the country’s regions and social groups became affected. In the wake of earlier emigration waves involving welloff, urban and educated populations, the 1970s would thus see new flows of low-income, rural and urban populations depart towards the United States. The diversification of both destinations and migration patterns—epitomised by the exodus of at least 200,000 boat people to Florida throughout the last three decades of the twentieth century— mirrors the sharp decline of living standards in Haiti. The spread of soil erosion, land deprivation and wealth redistribution at the expense of peasantry had plunged the countryside into poverty. The ensuing rural exodus and expansion of shanty towns aggravated the decay of urban living conditions. In the 1990s, the post-Duvalierist transition paved the way for renewed political instability, worsened the economic downturn and revived emigration. As a result, lower-income populations who could not migrate to North America built or reopened other migration streams towards mainstream regional destinations such as the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas or later on, the neighbouring Turks and Caicos archipelago as well as the French overseas territories.

An International Migration Space Characterised by Dispersion The past century’s constant migration flows have thus widened and diversified Haiti’s international migration space, gradually embedding neighbouring Caribbean countries followed by North America and more recently, Europe (France). New migration networks have built bridges between specific Haitian provinces and destination countries. Once these networks were set up, the associated flows thrived, barely affected by the changing labour demand in destination countries—except in Cuba. Thus, while Haiti’s Southern, Southeastern and Northeastern provinces 2 These official statistics widely underestimate the actual scale of migration flows towards both nations. An estimated 300,000 Haitians were living in New York by the end of the 1970s (Stepick 1998).

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have established migration fields for at least a century, the Northwest has only been part of the international migration scene for about two generations, through the emergence of migration networks with the Bahamas and Florida. On a global scale, new migration dynamics also capture the geopolitical reality of Haiti’s more or less ancient and shifting relations with the outside world. Haiti’s destiny is still governed by its position within the United States’ political, economic, geostrategic and cultural sphere of influence—and the resulting communication and transportation networks. A powerful neighbour whose multifarious presence did not, however, hamper the conservation of cultural ties—inherited from the colonial and post-colonial era—with the former French metropolis and its overseas territories across the region… nor the simultaneous emergence of relatively structured networks involving the rest of the Caribbean. The extraordinary dispersion of Haitians abroad thus equally echoes their desire to escape harsh living standards at home, the rise of migration networks, and the multiple ways in which Haiti relates to the outside world. Also, the extent of Haitian presence abroad is still hard to assess due to the extent of non-formal migration schemes and significant statistical variations from one host country to the other. Nonetheless, cross-checking various official sources (censuses,3 consular estimates) reveals three significant geographical clusters underlying this two million-strong international migration space: the Caribbean, North America and Western Europe. About 650,000 Haitians have moved to neighbouring Caribbean countries—half a million of which have crossed the border into the Dominican Republic, while an additional 200,000–300,000 Haitians were born in the Dominican Republic. The remaining 150,000 migrants are scattered across the region; from the Bahamas, French Guiana or the Turks and Caicos archipelago, to the French Antilles. The ultimate goal of many migrants in the Caribbean region, North America hosts 900,000 natives of Haiti: 810,000 of which are officially registered in the United States—two-thirds in Florida and New York—and 80,000 in Canada. The

3 Sources: US Census American Community Survey 2011–2014; Statistiques Canada Enquête Ménages 2011; INSEE RGP 2010.

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100,000 Haitians that are officially registered in Europe live in France for the most part, and to a lesser extent in Belgium and Switzerland.4 However, the Haitian diaspora’s latest and perhaps most dynamic front lines are in Latin America. Before the new millennium, Haitian presence in that region was limited to territories hugging the Caribbean Basin— French Guiana, Surinam and Venezuela. After the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, migration from this country expanded quickly to other countries further south, especially Ecuador, Chile, and Brazil. While national censuses reported barely a few hundred legal Haitian workers in each of these countries in 2010, the situation changed noticeably in the years that followed. While Ecuador’s role in this migration scheme is more of a transit country, Chile and Brazil stand as the “next frontier” of the Haitian diasporic journey. Between 2011 and 2015, 10,000 Haitians were granted permanent residence in Chile (Migraciones Chile 2016), in addition to 50,000 in Brazil (Conselho Nacional de Imigração 2015, cited by CNIg 2017); thus accounting for the country’s leading economic migrant community, ahead of the Portuguese. Over 200,000 Haitians now live in Chile and around 100,000 reside in Brazil. This remarkable geographic dispersion requires a reflection on the very nature and dynamics of social ties with Haiti, and of those that link the scattered poles of the diaspora.

Migration Routes as Baselines for Diasporic Networks The Haitian migration space is a shifting and polycentric system characterised by a wide range of settlement locations, whose impulse centres are no longer solely based in the homeland. Many Haitians are neither recognised as permanent economic migrants nor political refugees upon arrival in host countries. In response to this legal limbo, they have developed informal migration network.5 The inception and subsequent diversification of new migration routes set the stage for various network structures whose participants have sometimes been labeled “diasporic citizens” (Laguerre 1998).

4 These statistics consistently underestimate the actual volume of Haitian migration. For instance, according to Haitian associations, mainland France alone is thought to be home to at least 70,000 individuals. 5 About 50–78% of Haitian migrants residing in the Caribbean and at least 18% of them in the United States are thought to be forced into clandestinity (source: Minority Rights Groups International 2003; U.S. Department of Homeland Security 2003).

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Migration Routes as Bypass Mobility Strategies With somewhat limited academic, professional and financial capital to offer, considering their host societies’ standards, most Haitian migrants fail to meet the requirements of increasingly selective immigration policies that favour educated and qualified workers. Besides, general misconceptions of Haiti abroad, cultural stereotypes affecting its population and the scale of migration flows—especially to small island territories—sometimes generate contingent hostility within host societies. In keeping with the public’s opinion, local authorities tend to consider but the economic aspect of migration and prove reluctant to grant Haitians a refugee status—which sometimes contradicts their democratic values (Stepick 1998). The challenge of obtaining legal status and a work permit abroad keeps immigrants in situations of dire economic precariousness that result in abusive layoff practices, employment insecurity, non-compliance with labour legislation and human rights as well as arbitrary deportation. In response, local and transnational networks have emerged within and between diasporic locations in order to by-pass institutional barriers and discrimination, as well as to improve the living standards of migrants and help them provide for their families’ basic needs in Haiti. In the face of economic and migration policy shifts in host countries, family and hometown strategies rely as much on the exploitation of migration channels already open as on the creation of new migration fields. This selfstructuring process has brought the Haitian diaspora to gradually develop an internal dynamics that is distinct from the homeland’s, as shown by migration routes or the functional specialisation of migration spaces, and more generally speaking, individual mobility. Haitian settlements across the Caribbean act, in fact, as transit spaces as well as immigration locations. Spatial mobility and/or chain migrations are designed as both survival and social mobility strategies by the people who experience them.

Genesis and Reconfiguration of Haitian Migration Routes in the Caribbean Accordingly, the Caribbean basin displays three established patterns of Haitian migration. The first route, originating from Northwestern and Northern Haiti, developed in the 1950s towards the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos islands. Fishermen who were already trading with those territories and operating in their territorial waters started settling there

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with their families to escape the rural economy’s meltdown and the environmental degradation plaguing Northwestern Haiti. Actively involved in the agricultural and tourism-related construction sectors in Nassau and the Family Islands (Bahamas), their settlements propelled the emergence of migrant networks connected to the same Haitian localities: in the 1970s, three out of four Haitian migrants came from the Northern provinces (Marshall 1979). With the Bahamian independence in 1973, the ensuing repression of immigration flows and increasing abuse against foreigners from Haiti, Haitian communities expended their migration field and began to consider Florida as a desirable destination. During the second half of the decade, 50,000 of them used the Bahamas as a transit hub on the path to Florida, where they worked in tourism, agriculture, construction, household services, transportation and security while also developing ethnic entrepreneurship (Audebert 2006). However, other networks developed in response to increased control of boat people flows by US Coast Guards: the Interdiction Program launched in 1981 was extended to Bahamian and Haitian territorial waters. Hence, an alternative route emerged, via several islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles with the ultimate goal of settling in New York or Miami—which entailed a swift rearrangement of migration strategies. As a matter of fact, Haitian migrants travel to Puerto Rico through Dominican networks before attempting to enter the United States. However, increased control of the Coast Guard in the Mona Canal and constant Immigration scrutiny in Puerto Rico have led Haitians to embed the Lesser Antilles into their circuits: the US Virgin Islands and Saint Martin have thus become attractive as both transit and settlement locations given the strong local demand in cheap labour in tourism and construction in the 1980s and 1990s.

French Caribbean Networks: Economic Rationales and Cultural Affinities The third route, which originates from Southern Haiti combines two consecutive migratory steps with the first stop in Suriname or the French West Indies, before settlement in French Guiana and a possible continuation towards Europe. It stems from a renewed need for unskilled labour in the service-oriented economies of the neighbouring French territories. Among foreign communities living in French Guiana, Haitians workers are most represented in the least skilled positions in farming

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and construction (Audebert 2004b). Initial flows were quickly structured along broader transnational lines revolving mostly around the area of Aquin in Haiti, which counts a large number of natives in Cayenne. The relative cultural—and linguistic—proximity could also explain that these flows redirected towards the French Caribbean, where speaking Creole and French eased the newcomers’ cultural adjustment and contact with local populations.6 Official estimates of the Haitian migrant population for these territories were around 50,000 individuals in 1999—24,000 of which had kept their original citizenship (ibid.). As the migration policies of the countries of the North tightened up, transit destinations gradually converted into permanent settlements playing an ever-larger part in attracting, structuring and redirecting migration chains. Hence, a complex hierarchy of settlement locations within Haiti’s international migration space has emerged, based on attractiveness.

Shifting Migration Routes Within Host Countries: The Case of the United States In the United States, an initial route towards the Northeastern United States involved relatively well-off educated migrants, mostly from Portau-Prince and with extensive experience in the US education system, institutions and employment market. After settling in New York or Boston between the 1950s and 1970s, they have been prone to moving to Florida over the past thirty years. In addition to the appeal of better weather, two rationales underlie their choice. Well integrated, these long-established migrants are entering a new life cycle in which access to homeownership is becoming a priority in view of retirement—and given the increasingly unlikely prospect of returning to Haiti. Moreover, real estate in Florida is 40% cheaper than in Brooklyn and Queens, where buying a home is prohibitively expensive for many Haitian immigrants. Also, Florida’s unique appeal to these middle-class Haitians in the 1980s and 1990s was predicated on the emergence of a significant demand for specific services (health, administration, the institutional and legal defence of migrants, ethnic entrepreneurship) as a result of the rapid growth of an underpriviledged Haitian boat people community. Over the

6 Which does not prevent xenophobic tendencies from affecting Haitian communities, as seen in Guadeloupe over the past few years.

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past thirty years, the Miami metropolis alone has thus welcomed an annual average of about one thousand Haitians from the Northeastern United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Florida has now become the preferred destination for Haitians migrating to North America. Over the past two decades, 300,000 Haitians have gained legal immigrant status in the United States, 45% of whom have settled in Florida.7 However, this permanent spatial dynamic displayed by the Haitian diaspora can also be noted on a smaller scale. While Haitians in Florida have long settled in Miami, it is home to only 40% of them approximately, for many are increasingly attracted to other “pioneer” locations across the state (Boca Raton, Orlando, etc.).

Brazil and Chile, The New “Frontiers” of Haitian Migration? As aforementioned, several Latin American countries have recently been integrated in Haiti’s international migration sphere. Brazil and Chile’s growing presence in Haiti since the 2000s stems from their participation to the MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) in addition to various Brazilian NGOs thriving across the country and Brazil’s positive image when it comes to football and culture—not to mention Brazil’s rise as a place of economic opportunities for Haitian migrants. Over the last decade, Panama, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia have become established transit territories towards Brazil, as well as Chile where over 200,000 Haitians now reside. In 2013, with 14,000 admissions, Haiti was among the top 20 countries fuelling migration flows to Ecuador. 80% of these newcomers were working-age men passing through the Quito and Guayaquil airports. Almost all newcomers from Haiti entered with a temporary tourist visa, valid for three months. However, less than 8% of them returned to Haiti, as most aimed to reach Brazil via Peru through the Iquitos region in particular. The States of Acre (Brasiléia) and Amazonas (Tabatinga) have thus become the main gateways into Brazil for Haitian migration, spawning several new patterns in the process. One route rallied Cayenne via Amazonas (Manaus), Para and Amapa, while another route emerged via

7 Source: US Immigration Services.

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Amazonas, Rondônia (Porto Velho) and Mato Grosso (Cuiaba, Rondonopolis) towards the country’s economic heartland: Sao Paulo—and even further South to the States of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul (Albertin de Moraes et al. 2013; Joseph 2015; Silva 2013, 2017). In Brazil, the volume of Haitians with a legal work permit increased from 800 to 14,600 between 2011 and 2013—a rise experienced by no other nationality in Brazil. Over the recent years, Haitians have become the primary labour migration force in the country—ahead of the Portuguese—and account for 40% of all permanent residence permits delivered to immigrants in Brazil. In the manufacturing sector, Haitian workers are now twice as numerous as Bolivians, whom they have been gradually replacing in Sao Paulo factories. The Haitian migrant workforce is also experiencing a rapidly growing presence of craftsmen and unskilled laborers in the manufacturing industry. Three out of four Haitian workers fall into that sector—while it barely employs about a quarter of all other foreign workers (Cavalcanti et al. 2014). This explains, to a large extent, why the Sao Paulo industrial area may have proven so appealing.

Haitian Migration: A Polycentric and Network-Based Space Transnational family and community structures seem to be the pivotal frames of this network-based and polycentric space. However, does the continuity of these multifaceted ties across borders indeed mirror the dawn of a network-based society?

A Global Space Structured by Transnational Community Ties The strong metropolisation of the Haitian international migration space has clearly improved migrants’ access to modern transit and communication technologies in large cities embedded in global networks: 87% of Haitians in France and Quebec live respectively in Paris and Montreal, while 73% of Haitians in the United States live in the New York and Miami metropolitan areas according to the latest official censuses. Improved as well as cheaper transportation and communication technologies have fostered ties with the homeland and between migration clusters, thereby preserving and strengthening family ties. Along with the

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growth of immigrant communities and emergence of new markets abroad, new TV channels (Haitian Television Network), radio broadcasters (Radio Haiti International ) or digital media (Haiti Global Village, Haiti On Line) have also come forth on transnational lines, enabling an unprecedented, daily and collective dissemination of Haitian identity. On a meso-social scale, the multipolar geographic structure that characterises a growing number of Haitian families enables full information flows connecting relatives back home and abroad, as well as the various diaspora communities. Our survey among 164 Haitian families in Miami revealed that 90% of our contacts still had close family in Haiti, and 27% of them had close relatives in other US cities and 13% in other foreign countries—with the Bahamas, Canada and French territories being the most prominent ones (Audebert 2004a). Haitian churches and entrepreneurship also tend to operate beyond borders, drawing on each migration hub’s specificities. Haitian churches abroad are transnational in that they replicate a familiar cultural environment at mass—based on the homeland’s music and cultural codes—and host community events. Re-enacting the original social networks abroad is a significant stake, as church followers often come from the same Haitian hometowns or neighbourhoods. The church then becomes akin to a large family whose members have enough in common to allow for periodic solidarity campaigns meant to benefit specific localities back home. In addition, emigration hubs are strategic locations from which Haitians may expand their transnational trade networks. The madan sara,8 who initially travelled between Haiti and Miami or Haiti and the Dominican Republic, have thus extended their reach to the entire Caribbean and currently operate destinations such as the Bahamas, Puerto Rico, Saint Maarten, Curaçao, Panama and the French West Indies.

Circular Migration, Network-Based Rationales and Enduring Ties with Haiti The networks woven by this wide range of actors underlie strong flows of population, goods, capital and information. Thus, Haiti annually records 300,000 visits of its nationals living abroad, while 70,000 Haitians legally go to the United States for short periods—11,000 of

8 Female Haitian vendors who conduct informal business on a transnational basis.

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which, for business trips. However, it seems irrelevant to examine such flows separately from non-legal migration strategies, which account for a susbstantial part of Haitian international mobility. According to official reports issued in several destination countries, an estimated 30,000– 40,000 Haitians attempt non-legal emigration each year—half of which target the Dominican Republic. At the same time, most legal migrations occur within the family circle: half of all Haitian admissions into the United States over the past two decades fell under family reunification schemes. Transnational families and entrepreneurship also appear as preferred settings for the circulation of goods and capital between the diaspora and Haiti. Mobility routes established by the madan sara typically assign a given “value” and role to each place abroad. Their business transnational space take position in the most profitable supply locations (Panama, Curaçao) and in marketplaces that offer a wide range of opportunities for global trade (Miami). The functional specialisation of informal, transnational trading locations builds on the demand for certain types of products: cosmetics, household goods and clothing in Santo Domingo and Puerto Rico; rice, alcohol, used cars and electronics in Miami; jewellery and luxury goods in Panama. Estimates for annual remittances (related to informal transnational trade) to the country’s financial institutions account for $30 million, while family remittances amounted to $3.2 billion in 2019 according to the World Bank—which represents a third of the gross national product. Besides measurable transactions, money transfer locations reveal a polycentric structure in which a handful of global cities seem to structure the diaspora’s ties with the homeland. It also mirrors spatial and income distribution within the migrant community: the Haitian banking network thus established five money transfer agencies in Northeastern United States, two in Canada and two in Florida. The diaspora enjoys higher living standards as well as better coverage in New York and Quebec than in Florida where migrants are more numerous but are also poorer. Caribbean poles, where poverty levels are highest among Haitian communities, are almost unaccounted for—which suggests that they are no priority for Haitian banks striving to advantageously channel the remittances of the diaspora.

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Diasporisation and Societal change in Haiti At this stage, it seems necessary to engage in a broader reflection and ponder to what extent diasporic networks may help tackle societal challenges in Haiti—especially when it comes to fostering economic well-being and the emergence of a democratic society. Because few opportunities exist locally that match their level of education, Haitian graduates are most likely to consider and use diasporic spaces to get a fresh start. Estimates suggest that over the past four decades, emigration has affected 30% of Haitian workers with a secondary level of education, and 84% of those with a university level of education (Docquier and Marfouk 2005). The brain drain is all the more tangible in critical fields like education and health—to such an extent that nowadays, more physicians of Haitian descent can be found in a city like Montreal than in Haiti. Haitian transnational networks thus act as “pumps” that deterritorialise the country’s brainpower and part of its workforce. As current European and North American migration policy tends to favour skilled immigration, these dynamics are bound to endure in a Haitian context where professional prospects are close to naught. In return, however, the volume of financial remittances to Haiti has been multiplied by ten over the last two decades. More than regulating the “brain drain”, what is indeed at stake for the future is the diaspora’s commitment to building a more stable, more prosperous and above all fairer society. Brokering the terms of that commitment is a crucial aspect of the Haitian challenge (one that both the Haitian government and the diaspora are accountable for). Following the earthquake, increased NGO presence and renewed foreign interference in Haiti (Schuller 2012) may thus hamper the diaspora’s potential reach and opportunities to help the reconstruction process. Ultimately, Haitian migration and international mobility go hand in hand with the outsourcing of original social and trade networks, which now operate along both transnational and interpolar lines. But is the fact that living spaces have gone global and multipolar as a result of migrant communities being driven and disseminated by multifaceted transnational networks sufficient to consider the collective Haitian experience abroad as a diasporic one? As mentioned by M. Hovanessian, “diasporas are no longer measured solely in terms of spatial dissemination and migratory mobilities but in terms of identity projects” (Hovanessian 1998). Thus, one may wonder to what extent these specific social structures and the resulting solidarities and regular interactions, might generate one (or

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more) original collective identitie(s) likely to capture both the homeland’s legacy and the full range of migration experiences.

Haitian Identities: The Diasporic Shift Considering the difficulties underlying Haitian migration—including settling abroad and gaining legal status in the host society—it is essential to examine how and to what extent Haitian identity lives on away from the homeland. In that view, we must take a closer look at the core of Haitian identity awareness within the diaspora, and at ways in which cultural traditions are being revisited in host societies whose socio-institutional systems are significantly different.

Pillars of Haitian Identity Awareness in Diaspora The relative conservation of shared cultural traditions and permanence of community ties abroad seem to have fostered the emergence of diasporic identity awareness. There is no better reflection of that heritage than the use of Creole: it remains the primary medium of communication for 80% of Haitian households in Florida (Audebert 2006) and over half of them in Quebec. Musical and culinary traditions also put that shared Haitian cultural heritage on display. One of our investigations thus revealed that half the migrants we met in Florida recognised Haitian religious music and konpa as their favourite genres, while four-fifths continue upholding their homeland’s culinary traditions—even after several decades spent in the United States (ibid.). The most famous Haitian orchestras typically perform on the diasporic scene—which their names (Afro Combo de Boston, T -Vice named in reference to ‘Miami Vice’) or song titles (New York City by Tabou Combo) strongly echo—while the most common theme in Haitian music is, besides love, that of geographic dispersion.9 Moreover, ethnic businesses hint in myriad ways at that identity awareness: in Miami, 30% of all storefronts highlight Haitian history and culture and/or use their homeland’s tongues (Creole or French), arts (Haitian murals) and colours (the national flag’s blue and red). Conservation of the homeland’s cultural heritage and the subsequent development of identity awareness rely on material means facilitating 9 Over the past thirty years, konpa music has contributed to turning this theme into an identity construction tool for individuals.

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the exchange of information with Haiti but also between the diaspora’s various poles at both individual and collective levels via Internet. The Haitian Television Network broadcasts Haiti’s National Television news daily in the United States, while the magazine Haiti en Marche has sales outlets in five major North American and European diasporic centres. Awareness of their specificity as a community is also rooted in the memory of key historical events such as Haiti’s early and singular independence in 1804, or more recent events such as the Duvalierist and post-Duvalierist repressions—which triggered significant migration flows. At the same time, the Haitian community’s solidarity was moulded by resistance to a US migration policy that has been all but favourable to them. Hence, diasporic identity awareness is also political, and therefore shouldered by institutions striving to defeat dictatorial rule in the homeland (Veye Yo) or to improve migrants’ rights and integration in host societies (National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, Haitian Refugee Center in Florida, Movimiento Socio Cultural de los Trabajadores Haitianos in the Dominican Republic).

A Cultural Heritage Revisited in the Diaspora The overall assertion of a diasporic identity should not, however, obscure the fact that its shape and scope varies from one immigration context to the other. In Metropolitan France, where Haitians are relatively few, and republican principles do not encourage the expression of cultural differences in the public domain, this heritage is mostly confined to family and associative settings. While growing more tangible through new Haitian and Afro-Antillean evangelical churches or the nascent ethnic entrepreneurship found in the Paris metropolitan area, the strength and substance of Haitian diasporic identities diverge significantly from one end of the Atlantic to the other. In the United States, where particularistic community rationales facilitate official recognition of cultural differences, and where citizenship is rooted in ethnic claims, migrants and their children use their Haitian heritage as a collective gateway to resources, power and prestige (Stepick 1998). Thus, in Miami-Dade County, Haitian Creole was promoted to third official language alongside English and Spanish in 2000, while public schools have proven instrumental in celebrating Haitian culture and history—a prime example of how the Haitian community has been benefiting from such multicultural policy in terms of social recognition.

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However, even in this socio-institutional context, diasporic identity is by no means a carbon copy of the homeland’s identity: neither rigid nor essentialised, but reshaped to adapt to the host society, and based on how individuals go on to embrace its cultural values and patterns. The second-generation’s self-identification tendencies mirror that complex and nuanced cultural process: nearly a quarter of the students interviewed in Miami public schools claimed a hybrid Haitian-American identity in 2000 (Audebert 2006). In the Caribbean, attempts at conveying that identity and re-enacting the homeland’s culture have been widely influenced by the migrants’ status. In the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos archipelago, where Haitians make up a quarter of the local population, they are mostly undocumented, stigmatised by local populations and living in relatively separate communities. However, the fact that they continue to pass on their cultural heritage and to sustain ties with their Florida relatives10 has fostered a diasporic culture. In the Dominican Republic, Haitian migrants have had to deal with the consequences of difficult bilateral relations, colour prejudice and the perception of Haitian immigration as a threat to local identity and economy—all of which are echoed in the political arena and the media. As a result, although a third of Haitians now live in Santo Domingo and its vicinity, 45% of the estimated half a million Haitian migrants still live either near the border with Haiti or in plantation areas (often in bateyes ), with implications on the conservation of cultural practices inherited from Haiti. However, unlike the situation in North America, the latter has not typically engendered networks connected to other diasporic poles, due to the general isolation and low economic and technical resources of migrants living in the Dominican Republic.

Collective Memory Outlets The fact that scattered communities are upholding shared cultural specificities and mutual ties in a transnational networking context does not trump the importance of location in the structuration of the diasporic space. Diasporic identity stems from the linkage between disbanded spaces of Haitian migration. That identity’s territorial markers express the diaspora’s collective memory as well as social and political endeavours meant to improve its people’s integration into host societies. These endeavours 10 Haitians living in the Bahamas and the ones who landed in Florida in the 1970–1980s come from the same North-Northeast locations in Haiti.

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unfold mainly in the religious, associative (cultural, professional, housing), educational and electoral fields. Thus, two key groups of players embody diasporic identity on a local scale. The former show strong symbolic value for they preserve Haitian collective memory. They are mostly churches with two distinct ways of construing and embedding location in their endeavours: Protestant churches display—safe for rare exceptions—a block- or street-level influence while Catholic churches radiate on a district or city scale. Churches stand as preferred locations for the Haitian community’s social events and cultural traditions. Ethnic entrepreneurship also helps maintain collective memory through storefront aesthetics: with signs referring to Haitian history (including migration), using Creole or French, colours of the Haitian flag, etc. (Audebert 2006). The second category is embodied by institutions striving locally to improve migrants’ integration into their host society. For instance, the participation of HaitianAmerican political organisations in the US political arena includes the creation of ethnicity-based electoral territories—Miami-Dade, Brooklyn, Connecticut, Massachusetts in particular (Audebert 2009). Furthermore, the names given to specific settlement locations also mirror the existence of a diasporic territory: districts (Little Haiti in Florida), streets (Avenue Felix Morrisseau-Leroy in Miami), churches (Notre Dame d’Haiti) or yet schools (Toussaint Louverture Elementary School ) bear the mark of the homeland’s history and culture. In sectors with a robust Haitian presence, symbolic territorialisation resonates with preferred settlement locations based on shared origins: since the 1970s, Little Haiti has thus sheltered large numbers of migrants from Port-Salut on 72nd Street and Port-de-Paix on 59th Street. Social reproduction, as captured by such settlement strategies, therefore nurtures attachment to places of origin based on the replication of their original social networks. The new territories occupied by these re-enacted communities thus assert themselves as memorial arenas, and the diaspora’s relation to geographic location translates into a dual relationship between settlement locations and home localities.

Conclusion Substantial and steady migration flows, fuelled by Haiti’s challenging economic and political situation and the resulting (family, religious, trade) networks, contribute to preserving and reshaping the linkage between the

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diaspora’s multiple clusters. The stakes of its diaspora’s exponential demographic, economic and political weight are well known to Haiti’s public authorities who, after seeking to discredit that influence, now wish to build on it in view of channelling its economic power while also using it as a diplomatic weapon in the global arena. Haitian migrants, however, did not wait for the Ministry of Haitians Living Abroad to be created, nor for the revision of Haitian nationality policy to be debated, to grow a collective diasporic awareness fostered by institutions set on defending migrants abroad. The question of how sustainable that diasporic identity and solidarity should still be raised, as it appears that the Haitian diaspora’s reality comprises myriad different experiences and issues related to each host society’s integration scheme, the migrants’ social status, migration seniority or the overall integration of immigrants and their children. Acculturation is ubiquitous despite rising forms of ethnicism and host societies being increasingly open to apparent cultural differences. However, differentiated acculturations—as a result of migrants having to adjust to very diverse social and institutional contexts in host societies— have generated a culturally heterogeneous diaspora. Strong endogamy endures, within Haitian communities—while also allowing for relatively recent interethnic dynamics to emerge; which again raises the issue of intergenerational cultural legacy. Likewise, the fact that new generations are growing noticeably more prominent in several diasporic locations— accounting for 40% of the community in Quebec, 35% in the Dominican Republic, and 24% in the United States—makes it difficult to replicate the more traditional forms of Haitian-ness. It is fading in New York or Miami, for instance, where younger generations are constructing their identities based on select cultural codes drawn from other communities (especially the United States’ Black community). Last but not least, the stagnating political and economic situation and ever-growing feeling of hopelessness as to Haiti’s future—not to mention the unprecedented trauma generated by the earthquake of 12 January 2010—have further dwindled the likeliness of permanent return projects. In this context, the Haitian diasporic bond is bound to rely more than ever before on the continuity of large-scale migration flows feeding multiple locations at once.

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References Albertin de Moraes, I., Alencar de Andrade, C.A., Rodrigues Bessa Mattos, B.A. imigraçao haitiana para o Brasil: Causas e desfios. Conjuntura Austral, v., n. 20, pp. 95–114, 2013. Anglade, G. Atlas critique d’Haïti. Montréal: Centre de Recherches Caraïbes, Université de Montréal, 1982, 80 p. Anteby-Yémini, L., Berthomière, W., Sheffer, G. Les diasporas: 2000 ans d’histoire. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005, 497 p. Audebert, C. Le fait religieux dans l’insertion et l’organisation spatiale de la communauté haïtienne de Miami. Géographie et Cultures, n. 43, pp. 107–127, 2002. Audebert, C. Immigration et insertion urbaine en Floride: le rôle de la famille transnationale haïtienne. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales, Poitiers, v. 20, n. 3, pp. 127–146, 2004a. Audebert, C. Immigration et insertion dans les départements français d’Amérique: une mise en perspective régionale. Espace Populations Sociétés, Lille, n. 2, pp. 253–264, 2004b. Audebert, C. L’insertion socio-spatiale des Haïtiens à Miami. Paris: L’Harmattan, coll. Populations, 2006, 298 p. Audebert, C. Residential patterns and political empowerment among Jamaicans and Haitians in the U.S. metropolis: The role of ethnicity in New York and South Florida. Human Architecture, Boston, v. 7, n. 4, pp. 53–68, Fall 2009. Audebert, C. La diaspora haïtienne: territoires migratoires et réseaux transnationaux. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, coll. Géographie sociale, 2012, 196 p. Basch, L. et al. Nations unbound: Transnational projects, postcolonial predicaments and deterritorialized nation-states. New York and London: Routledge, 1994, 344 p. Bruneau, M. Diasporas et espaces transnationaux. Paris: Economica, 2004, 249 p. Cavalcanti, L., Oliveira, A.T., Tonhati, T. A inserçao dos imigrantes no Mercado de Trabalho brasileiro. Brasilia: Cadernos do Observatorio das Migraçoes Internacionais, 2014, 110 p. Docquier, F., Marfouk, A. International migration by educational attainment: 1990–2000, Release 1.1. Washington: World Bank, 2005. Dufoix, S. Les diasporas. Paris: Que Sais-Je?, PUF, 2003, 127 p. Glick Schiller, N., Fouron, G. Terrain of blood and nation: Haitian transnational social fields. Ethnic and Racial Studies, v. 22, n. 2, pp. 340–366, 1999. Hovanessian, M. La notion de diaspora: usages et champs sémantiques. Journal des Anthropologues, n. 72–73, pp. 11–29, 1998. Hurbon, L. Culture et dictature en Haïti: l’imaginaire sous contrôle. Port-auPrince: Deschamps, 1987, 207 p.

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Jackson, R.O., ed. Geographies of the Haitian diaspora. New York and Oxon: Routlegde, 2011, 316 p. Joint, L.A., Mérion, J., eds. L’immigration haïtienne dans la Caraïbe: Quel défi pour l’unité des peuples? Pointe-à-Pitre: Nestor, 2011, 335 p. Joseph, H. Diaspora. As dinâmicas da mobilidade haitiana no Brasil, no Suriname e na Guiana Francesa. Rio de Janeiro: Tese (Doutorado em Antropologia Social) – Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro, 2015. Laguerre, M. Diasporic citizenship: Haitian Americans in transnational America. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998, 222 p. Lemoine, M. Sucre Amer. Paris: Encre, 1981, 291 p. Lundhal, M. A note on Haitian migration to Cuba: 1890–1934. Cuban Studies, v. 12, n. 2, pp. 21–36, 1982. Ma Mung, E. La diaspora chinoise. Géographie d’une migration. Paris: Ophrys, 2000, 176 p. Ma Mung, E. Continuité temporelle, contiguïté spatiale et creation d’un mondepropre. L’Espace géographique, Paris, n. 4, pp. 352–368, 2012. Marshall, D. The Haitian problem: Illegal migration to the Bahamas. Cave Hill: Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1979, 239 p. Nieto, C. Migracion haitiana a Brasil. Redes migratorias y espacio social transnacional. Buenos Aires: CLASCO (Coleccion Estudios sobre las Desigualdades), 2014. Prévélakis, G., ed. Les réseaux des diasporas. Paris and Nicosie: L’Harmattan/KYKEM, 1996, 444 p. Schuller, M. Killing with kindness: Haiti, international aid and NGOs. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012, 254 p. Silva, S.A. “Aqui começa o Brasil”. Haitianos na triplice fronteira e Manaus. In: SILVA, S. A. (Ed.) Migrações na Pan-Amazônia. São Paulo: Hucitec/FAPEAM, 2012, pp. 300–332. Silva, S.A. Brazil, a new Eldorado for immigrants? The case of Haitians and the Brazilian immigration policy. Urbanities, v. 3, n. 2, pp. 3–18, 2013. Silva, S.A. Imigraçao e redes de acolhimento: O caso dos Haitianos no Brasil. Revista Brasileira de Estudos de Populaçao, pp. 99–117, 2017. Sheffer, G. Wither the study of diasporas? In: Prévélakis, G. (Ed.) Les réseaux de diasporas. Nicosie: Kykem, 1996, pp. 37–46. Stepick, A. Pride against prejudice: Haitians in the United States. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998, 134 p.

PART II

Migration Across Borders and Staggering Citizenships: The Specific Case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic

CHAPTER 5

Borders and the Question of Citizenship: The Case of the Dominican Republic and Haiti Suzette A. Haughton

Introduction Historically, borders act as separators of political entities. That is, they separate one state from another. Yet, borders are also tools of control. They control movement of people, goods and ideas (Laitinen 2001). According to Donnan and Wilson (1999), borders are also invisible demarcations between peoples and are powerful in shaping peoples actions and thoughts. Hence, governments are important border agents as they can construct thoughts and propel actions by their pronouncements or through the passage of laws. Debates about state security and the need to defend political borders have stimulated public opinion against “the other”, “the outsiders” and “the foreign workers”. Public opinion may further propel governments to construct borders. In this regard, borders can be seen as zones of separation and exclusion or they might be integrating zones which foster lasting relationships and cooperation.

S. A. Haughton (B) The University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_5

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As people are the beneficiaries of states’ border decisions, they must be given prime consideration when governmental decisions are being made. Legal borders, such as those imposed on the Dominicans of Haitian descent, have severely impacted on personal, social, geographical and economic well-being of the Haitians residing in the Dominican Republic. Identity signifiers inclusive of language and race depict a dividing line. This dividing line separates Dominicans of Dominican Republic origin from Dominicans of Haitian descent. Such division breeds discrimination and places the Dominicans of Haitian descent in an inferior position as it marginalises them to the fringes of life in the Dominican Republic. The first part of this chapter forges a discussion between borders and citizenship, which lays the basis for a clearer understanding of such issues given their fluid nature. This chapter then moves on to discuss the non-geographic borders propelling Haitians to enter the Dominican Republic territory. Economic, political and even environmental borders have accounted for Haitians border crossings into the Dominican Republic. The third part of the chapter addresses the challenges faced by Haitians once they are in the Dominican Republic. They suffer racial discrimination as well as legal borders which impacts their nationality and even have rendered some stateless. The chapter also discusses the Haitian-Dominican Republic cooperative border initiatives. These initiatives are critical in fostering greater border relationships between both states. In addition, they assist in reducing border tensions emerging from the imposition of the Dominican Republic legal borders.

Borders and Citizenship Citizenship and national identities are at the heart of border studies in the twentieth century. Citizenship is a legal status that confers identity to a person. It is also a social status as it determines the distribution of economic and cultural principles within a state. Practically, citizenship can be established through identity cards or passports. Recognition of such citizenship documents expands across borders. This happens due to travel mobility of people, ideas, images, products and values across varying borders. As an area of border studies, citizenship has grown significantly at the end of the century (Van Houtum 2005). Early writings on borders classified them as natural and political ones (Minghi 1963). According to Van Houtum, natural borders were desirable ones but political ones were

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bad ones. Yet currently, there is much discourse on political borders. The construction of man-made political borders shape the lives of persons in bordered regions, impact on border crossings, distort relationships between states and may receive condemnation or admiration from the international community of states. Hence, political borders provide basis for a unique kind of border representation that captures the lived experiences of people. This representation is more profound than those generated by natural borders. Anderson (1996) categorises borders in terms of institutions and processes. In this regard, borders are administrative political features. As institutions, Anderson notes that they delineate state sovereignty and determines the rights of individual citizenship. As processes, borders function as mechanisms of state policy and markers of national and political identity. Hence, borders are critical in the maintenance of nation states’ jurisdiction and in academic discourse on nationalism, citizenship and issues concerning identity. As borders represent both state institutions and processes, borderlanders sometimes face abuse of state power. This normally happens as agents of the state aim to exercise their administrative authority over the state and over persons within the state. In delimiting a state’s sovereignty, the passage of laws may indicate acceptable norms for that state but such laws may be oppressive for some minority groups within the state. Further, laws act in guiding national power. Hence certain laws, whether favourable or unfavourable to certain groups of persons, are effective means of constructing borders. Laws construct borders through border controls and immigration policies. Such policies and controls are implemented in order to manage the jurisdictional movement of individuals’ into or out of a state. However, laws also construct the rights of citizenship. They also determine the non-citizenship of individuals within a state. Legal divisions are perhaps the worst ones to eliminate once they are fully established. The status of people in borderlands is often represented through immigration and citizenship policies. As a function of state policy, borders may also include or eliminate individuals based on such policies. One important representation is that of the characterisation of illegal immigrants. Such characterisation denies individuals’ access to certain social services and political participation in the democratic life of the state. Two features emerge from such representation. First, illegal immigrants are sometimes relegated to the margins of the state and open to abuse from citizens

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as well as the state. Second, the state’s response often results in militarised policing along borders to curb border crossings. This has become an administrative feature of states’ border control mechanism. Border crossings have raised discussions on the issue of citizenship. One such discussion involves the cross-border movement of persons into new spatial zones and the mechanisms in place to integrate these persons into the receiving state. Integration is important to reduce racism. It is also a critical feature in adjusting the “outsiders” into the norms of life within the receiving state. Integration is therefore essential in increasing migrants’ feelings of belongingness within their new state. Kratochwil (1994) argues that two core issues attached to the notion of citizenship are belonging and status. He claims that these two issues shape the individual’s views on citizenship. Two broad issues reflect the discourses on borderlanders’ experiences in receiving countries. First, such discourses were framed in terms of their current experiences in the host states. Second and related to the first are discussions on the diverging cultural realities existing between their experiences at home and those in their new state. Clifford (1994) has advanced the notion of diasporic communities, which bridges this gap by providing individuals with what he refers to as “collective homes away from home” (Clifford 1994: 308). Diasporic communities therefore provide migrants with a sense of belongingness within the new state. Such belongingness support familiarity with their cultural norms experienced in their home state. However, at times, this does not extend or translate automatically to feelings of belongingness to the space and culture of the new state (Donald 1996). Through international border crossings, migrants represent a hybrid of the space, culture and identity of both their home and host states. They portray a continuum consisting of experiences of displacement from their home state to that of re-territorialisation as they settle in the new state. Gilroy (1993) calls this process, a double consciousness as migrants’ identities are made and re-shaped. Like Kratochwil (1994) and Joppke (2007) noted the importance of status in citizenship matters. Joppke (2007) argued that transformations in citizenship surrounded status, rights and identity. He believed that status had become a positive feature of citizenship as it allowed liberalising access to it. However, rights, inclusive of social and minority ones, were been eroded. Joppke also found that citizenship identities

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are universal. Joppke (2007) findings are in accordance with the practical expression of citizenship evident in the majority of sovereign states within the international community. It is normative among states that stringent rules and criteria must be used in determining citizenship status for membership or naturalisation. Typically, states’ processes are complex and lengthy. The imposition of a citizenship test requires applicants seeking such status to be knowledgeable about the society they wish to join. Dual citizenship is sometimes seen as a threat because of the question of a person’s divided loyalty between the states in which he or she holds such citizenship status. Hence, the possibility of holding dual citizenship is diminished as individuals may opt for mono citizenship rather than dual citizenship. Despite this however, some states rely on utilising dual citizenship as a way to expel unwanted residents or citizens without having to make them stateless by such expulsion. The explanation of the relationship between borders and citizenship lays the foundation for a better understanding of a specific border, the Haitian-Dominican Republic Border, the basis of this chapter. Hence, the section below presents the Haitian-Dominican Republic Border crossings and happenings.

Haitian-Dominican Republic Border Crossings and Happenings The island of Hispaniola is shared by both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The smaller western region of Hispaniola belongs to Haiti and the larger eastern region is under the jurisdiction of the Dominican Republic. Both countries share a border of 122 miles, which acts as a separator between the peoples of these countries. Economically, Haiti ranks as the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere with approximately 60% of its 10.85 million people living below the poverty line (CIA 2016). In 2010, Haiti suffered a catastrophic earthquake, which measured 7 on the Richter Scale. The epicentre happened 25 kilometres off Haiti’s capital city, Port-au-Prince. Haitian government estimates indicate that approximately 230,000 persons died from this earthquake with a displacement of more than 3,000,000 Haitians (BBC 2010). This earthquake affected infrastructure and severely impacted on Haiti’s already poor economic situation.

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Since the 2004 ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti has displayed democratic stability. Historically however, Haitian politics was unstable and marked by coup d’états, internal disruptions and regime change. In the 1980s, when the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier ended a number of Haitians opted to migrate. There were approximately 676,000 Haitian migrants living in the USA as at 2015 (Schulz and Batalova 2017). Alongside the internal political dynamics in Haiti, other push factors that propel Haitians to leave for other countries are widespread poverty and environmental degradation, which compound the harsh effects from natural disasters, such as hurricanes and earthquakes. Diamond (2005) noted that Haiti’s environmental problem has its roots in its 1804 independence when it opted to embark on deforestation as a means to obtain money in the absence of French financial support. Among other things this resulted in soil erosion and given the hilly terrain of Haiti, it did not provide many options for farmers who wanted to plant crops as their means of livelihood. Mobility opportunities are the driving force propelling Haitians to migrate to the Dominican Republic. Haiti’s population occupies only a third of the island of Hispaniola, which means that it has a high population density when compared to land mass. Employment opportunities are few in Haiti, with unemployment figures as at 2010 been 40.6%, reflecting widespread unemployment. A large number of the Haitian citizens’ livelihood involves slash and burn farming. This type of activity yields basic subsistence for the farmers but also depletes the environment and is an unsustainable farming practice. Haitians have opted to cross the border into the Dominican Republic to obtain employment. In 2016, the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita income in Haiti was 1800 dollars compared to Dominican Republic which stood at 15,900 dollars for the same year. With a population of 10,606,865 million and situated on two-thirds of the island of Hispaniola, the Dominican Republic appears more lucrative for Haitian migrants due to better employment prospects and opportunities to acquire land for cultivation (IndexMundi 2017). Hence, official estimates have indicated that Haitians currently comprises 12% of the population of the Dominican Republic. This figure does not include the undocumented illegal Haitian workers, so at best, this estimate is modest since it excludes Haitians living and working illegally in the Dominican Republic.

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A long-established phenomenon is the inter-generational migration of Haitians to the Dominican Republic. From as early as 1920, Haitians were entering the Dominican Republic to obtain work in the sugar industry and by the 1960s Haitians obtained jobs in the Dominican Republic as household helpers and as construction workers. This allowed both male and female Haitian family members to move to the Dominican Republic. During these periods, in order to build the Dominican Republic economy such migration was supported as cheaper Haitian labour was required. Race is a dominant border highlighted in the literature on the HaitianDominican Republic border. The Haitian population is predominantly of African descent, with 95% comprising of blacks and only 5% is mulattoes or whites. The Ethnic composition of the Dominican Republic is different. It comprises only 11% of blacks, 16% whites and 73% mixed (IndexMundi 2017). Language and race are intricately connected to social classes within Dominican Republic, with those of white and lightskinned pigmentation possessing a higher economic and social status within the society. Those of dark and black skinned are stratified in a lower class. Racial discrimination is therefore a present feature within this society. Also, Haitians migrants have complained of experiencing such discrimination. Blake (2014) has argued that race remains an underlining feature of statelessness among the Dominicans of Haitian descent. She postulates that racial prejudice, xenophobia and intolerance are the practical expression of race-based statelessness. At first, she claims race-based statelessness was informal but later became legal and then constitutional. Another border existing between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is that of language. Wucker (1999) argues that the Treaty of Ryswick of 1967 resulted in the effective division of the island of Hispaniola into two states, Santo Domingo or the Dominican Republic and SaintDomingue or Haiti. The official language of the Dominican Republic is Spanish while French and French Creole are the spoken language for Haiti. This language difference reflects the deeply divided history of Spanish and French colonialism which evolved in French domination in western Hispaniola and Spanish dominance in eastern Hispaniola. Economic and political borders are merely two borders forcing Haitians to migrate. However, the legal borders they face are even more critical as they are forced to operate outside of the realm of organised political society.

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The Dominican Republic Legal Borders Man-made borders are possibly the worst types of borders impacting on travel mobility globally. The impact of legal borders in the Dominican Republic acts not only as a separator but also as a disruptive force in the lives of many Haitians residing in the Dominican Republic as well as Dominicans of Haitian descent. These legal borders make no special allowance or distinction between these two categories. Haitians who were born in Haiti but resident in the Dominican Republic and Dominicans who were born to Haitians parents in Dominican Republic were treated in the same way and subjected to the same Migration Law. The imposition of laws acts as protection of the values of the state. Yet, they also emerge as dividing elements between the peoples of the Dominican Republic and those of Haiti. In many countries of the world, the law is the basis for nationality. Kosinski (2009) have argued that the legal right to nationality is based on principles of law known as jus soli and jus sanguinis. Jus soli nationality is based on one’s birthplace or birth territory while jus sanguinis is based on one’s bloodline or on the nationality of one’s parents. However, there exists no customary international law on whether states should use both principles combined or if one or the other principle should be used in ascertaining the right to nationality. Hence, some states have opted to use jus soli, some use jus sanguinis and others use a combination of both principles in determining the right to citizenship. Since 1929, Dominican nationality was granted to children born in that country. Hence, Dominicans obtained their nationality based on jus soli. Article 11 of the 1999 Dominican Republic Constitution stipulates the right to nationality for all Dominicans born in the country. The only exception to this Article was children of resident diplomats. In 2004, there was the passage of a new Dominican Republic Migration Law. This law revised the legal practice of granting nationality to children who were born in the country but whose parents held a temporary or permanent resident status. Six years later, in 2010, the Dominican Republic government revised its Constitution to exclude the children of illegal residents from obtaining citizenship in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic Civil Registry Agency is charged with the mandate of granting official documentation and proof of Dominican citizenship. This Agency is monitored by the Central Electoral Board. Such documentation includes the issuance of birth certificates, passports and

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national identity cards. The importance of a birth certificate is that it is the official identification for children under 18 years old. However to obtain a birth certificate for a child, parents must provide both proof of their identity and that the child was in fact born in the Dominican Republic. The effect of the 2004 and 2010 laws meant that children born in the Dominican Republic would be unable to obtain a birth certificate if their parents are temporary or illegal residents in the Dominican Republic. The required legal process of obtaining identity documentation has acted as an implement of exclusion for some groups in the Dominican Republic. At the age of 18, Dominicans must apply to obtain an order of authorisation in the form of a national identity document. This document is called the cédula de identidad y electoral and is needed to participate in the social, economic and political life of the country. Among other things, it is required for voting and taking political office, for registration in higher educational institutions, for participating in the social security system, for opening and maintaining a bank account, for registering a child’s birth and for marrying or divorcing. To obtain the cédula, the Civil Registry Agency must provide a certified copy of an individual’s birth certificate. Thereafter, that individual must use the certified copy of the birth certificate to apply for the cédula. An important way in which legal borders can be created is through the question of Citizenship. Citizenship is a legal concept because it requires individuals’ to possess membership in a state. It also requires that such membership be formally recognised by that state. In the case of the Dominicans of Haitian descent, they have no formal recognition from the Dominican Republic and their membership in the Dominican Republic society is stymied through the requirement of specific documentation, such as the cédula. This document becomes a critical instrument required for registration in order to obtain Dominican Republic citizenship. Symbolically, the cédula can be understood as a dividing tool. It separates the Dominicans of Dominican descent from the Dominicans of Haitian descent. It creates a contested space and a situation of “us versus them” dichotomy, where the “us group” comprises the Dominicans of Dominican descent and the “them” or the outsider group consists of the Dominicans of Haitian descents. This arrangement is a divisive force for a nation because rather than seeing the people as Dominicans, they are considered with an added separating feature, based on their origin or on jus soli.

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Despite the legal borders, the Dominican Republic Government has not embarked on the issuance of formal notice of denationalisation to Dominicans of Haitian descent. The claim that the Migration Law has in principle and practice, rendered Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless is often refuted by Dominican Republic state officials. They argue that Dominicans of Haitian descent can rely on their Haitian nationality and hence are not rendered stateless. However, legal borders also exist in Haiti that may render these Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless. There is no automatic right to citizenship for second and third generation of Haitians who were residing outside of Haiti for most of their lives. The Haitian Constitution stipulates automatic citizenship only to persons whose parents are both Haitians and who are native-born Haitians and have never renounced their citizenship. In order for second and third generation of Haitians to obtain citizenship, they must first reside in Haiti continuously and immediately for 5 years upon submission of their application for naturalised Haitian citizenship. There have always been barriers created by the Dominican Republic Government to the recognition of Haitians aiming to obtain Dominican nationality. Yet the years 1950 to 1990 marked a critical period in which the Dominican Republic Government formally recognised a number of Dominicans of Haitian descent. During this period, the Civil Registry Agency allowed the use of Haitian nationality documents and workplace identity cards as proof of parents’ identity for purposes of registering their children. As such, these children were able to obtain birth certificates, cédulas and passports. These state identity documents allowed these children to participate as normal citizens within the Dominican Republic. However, a group of Haitians have illegal crossed over the border into the Dominican Republic to reside. These persons have become undocumented Dominicans of Haitian descent. As the Constitution provided no specific guidance on how to treat these Dominicans, the Civil Registry Agents were faced with a dilemma. They opted to interpret the Constitution arguing that these persons were “in transit”, as “in transit” was expressed in the law. The 1939 Immigration Act, number 95 as well as the 1939 Immigration Regulation, number 279 stipulates that foreigners “in transit” were persons who entered the Dominican Republic with the objective of travelling to another destination, or to engage in business or leisure activities. These legal instruments also categorise diplomats

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carrying out their official functions in the Dominican Republic as “in transit”. To categorise the Dominicans of Haitian descent as “in transit” is to remove the possibility of them ever obtaining Dominican nationality. The Civil Registry imposed more stringent measures of identity control in the 1980s and 1990s. The earlier practice of using foreign residency cards or Haitian passports to prove identity was reversed. By 2000, some Civil Registries took the decision to turn away all Haitians applying for documentation, on the basis that their “in transit” status barred them even if they could prove their identity. This created an inconsistent application of the Dominican Republic law based on the interpretation and discretion of agents in varying Civil Registries. In some instances therefore, the granting of Dominican Republic nationality displayed disparity and became an abusive tool used against Dominicans of Haitian descent. To effectively execute the new 2004 Migration Law and changes to its Constitution in 2010, the Dominican Republic governmental policy decision had two operational effects on the Dominicans of Haitian descent. First, the Dominican Republic Government militarised the HaitianDominican Republic Border. This policy acted as a means to reduce border crossings of illegal travellers and migrant workers. Second, the Dominican Republic embarked on the deportation of Dominicans of Haitian descent. The Dominican Republic policy decision also created individual decisions among some Dominicans of Haitian descent. This is so as some voluntarily opted to return to Haiti. Returning to Haiti freed them from the harsh reality that marginalises them from effectively operating in the Dominican Republic as normal citizens. Some also opted to return rather than face deportation. The establishment of Operation Shield assisted in militarising the Haitian-Dominican Republic Border. This Operation deployed approximately 2000 military officers along the Haitian-Dominican border to stem the flow of Haitians into the Dominican Republic. With Operation Shield, over 10,000 undocumented Haitians were deported from the Dominican Republic. However, over 300,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent fell outside of the requirements stipulated to acquire Dominican Republic legal residency (Banicki 2017). This was the case because for the Dominicans of Haitian descent, documentation became a requirement for registration for Dominican Republic citizenship or for legal residency. An additional 895 Dominican Republic soldiers were deployed in 2017 to increase patrols and surveillance protection from the northwest region of Montecristi to the southwest region of Pedernales (Dominica

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Today 2017). The increased troop movement at the border is designed to increase the Haitian-Dominican border security, making it less penetrable to illegal immigration, deforestation and transnational organised crimes, inclusive of drug trafficking and terrorism. Border security remains a core sovereign right of the state. However, as the state exercises sovereign rights, it is well established that human beings must enjoy inalienable rights within the state. One such inalienable human right is that of the right to nationality or to enjoy citizenship within a state. The section below discusses the human rights view on the Dominican Republic legal border, which denied some Dominicans of Haitian descent the right to enjoy and utilise their Dominican citizenship.

Human Rights Response to the Legal Borders Recognition and citizenship rights for minorities form a critical aspect of human rights to which nation states are bound. Human rights and citizenship, on the one hand, and state sovereignty and state rights, on the other, are conflicting in terms. States create the rights that citizens enjoy. This happens despite the fact that human rights are innate and inalienable. Such rights are fundamental and enjoyed by citizens through the courts but within the ambit of a sovereign state. Yet, states are sovereign but individuals are not. Individuals exist within the territorial and jurisdictional control of states. Rawls (1999) refers to human rights as urgent and in a special category of rights. This means that human rights should not be disregarded or compromised. Political participation is a critical component of democracy. Such participation requires an indiviudal to have citizenship in a country in order to indicate one’s belongingness to that state. Citizenship is an underlying basis by which citizens can exercise their fundamental human rights in this regard. States have sovereign jurisdiction over who they wish to enter or leave their territorial zone of sovereignty. This well-established principle is known as the right of state’s sovereignty. The Dominican Republic believes it is well within its sovereign rights to impose the legal barriers on the Dominicans of Haitian descent. Notwithstanding, human rights bodies and groups have claimed that the laws and their application are discriminatory and have effectively left the Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination have argued that the way the Dominican Republic interprets the “in transit” exception amounts to some persons of Haitian

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origin losing their Dominican nationality. Many of these persons were born between 10–30 years before the 2004 Migration Law was passed. Article 47 of the 1999 Dominican Republic Constitution stipulates that the application of Dominican Republic Laws can only be done prospectively not retroactively. This provision is also upheld in the Revised 2010 Constitution through Article 110. Therefore, to retroactively apply the 2004 Migration Law to persons of Haitian descent who have obtained their documentation, residency or citizenship before the passage of the law would be a violation of Articles 47 and 110 of the Constitution. The Government of the Dominican Republic has faced both internal and external challenges to its most recent Migration Law. For instance, the United Nations’ Committee on the Rights of the Child raised concern over the large number of stateless children that have resulted from the passage of this law since it rendered their parents within the “in transit” category. Likewise, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism and the United Nations Independent Expert on Minority Issues called on the Dominican Republic Government to bring its 2004 Migration Law in conformity with Article 11 of its Constitution, the highest law of the land. Hence, conformity to Article 11’s provision would extend citizenship to those born within the Dominican Republic. Regionally, Haiti is a member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Dominican Republic holds observer status in that body. It is currently seeking accession for its membership in CARICOM. Like the United Nations Committee, CARICOM, the USA and the European Union have argued that the Dominican Republic’s action concerning the passage of the law and its treatment of the Dominicans of Haitian descent is not in accordance with standard norms. Hence, as a protest, CARICOM suspended the talks involving the Dominican Republic’s application for membership within its regional body. Domestically, a year after the passage of the Migration Law, the Dominican Republic’s Government faced a constitutional challenge from a combined group of local human rights organisations. This group argued that the law violated Article 101 of the Dominican Republic Constitution, which outlines a provision on non-discrimination. However, the Dominican Republic Supreme Court ruled in late 2005 that the Congress had a right to interpret the issue of nationality through Article 11 in the way it sees fit. It also ruled that children of “non- residents” were excluded from the constitutional guarantee of nationality. This position

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upheld the Dominican Republic legislature’s interpretation of the Migration Law. However, the Supreme Court pointed out that the Migration Law was the first law interpreting the Constitution in this way. Against the background of numerous calls for the Dominican Republic Government to address the concerns of the Dominicans of Haitian descent, the government submitted to its Congress on 24 February 2014 a new legislation to allow those born in the Dominican Republic of Haitian descent access to obtaining documentation. This decision was welcomed by the Haitian Government. The Haitian Government proceeded to issue passports and civil documentations to Haitians who were in border posts or in consulates located in the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic also granted one-year work visas to Haitians working in the Dominican Republic and to Haitian students undertaking studies in the Dominican Republic. Travel mobility of those students was enhanced as they could travel between Haiti and Dominican Republic without the imposition of additional charges. Notwithstanding the challenges existing in the Dominican Republic over its legal border, the Haitian and Dominican Republic Governments face similar threats of organised crime and share a critical imperative of how best to manage the resources and people within their bordered region. Hence, there is a need for cooperation between these two countries based on common interests.

Haiti-Dominican Republic Border Cooperation There are many barriers separating Haiti and the Dominican Republic. These barriers can be eroded with coordinated cross-border relationships. Cross-border cooperation acts as a means of breaking down differences between states. The establishment of cross-border relationships assists in circumventing administrative and mental borders, which may create challenges in combating problems affecting states on either side of the border. Cross-border contacts increase state agents knowledge-base on both sides of the border. Knowledge on the political, social, economic, security and cultural motivation about persons sharing a border may foster mutual understanding. Hence, cross-border cooperation is an instrument of mutual development. It is also critical in the solution of structural cross-border problems affecting states.

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Haiti and the Dominican Republic enjoy some features that assist in uniting the countries around similar goals. Such features include cooperation in business and security. This cooperation provides benefits for both nations. To enhance trade and commerce, Haiti and the Dominican Republic have cooperated on normalising their customs regulations, improving diplomatic engagements and standardising their land transportation systems. To this end, in 2015 the governments of Haiti and the Dominican Republic agreed to establish a number of initiatives to address commerce and cross-border security. They agreed to the implementation of a previously signed Bilateral Customs Agreement. This agreement fosters information exchange between customs officers in both countries. It also made provision for technical assistance in the form of equipment and training for customs agents. Further, the countries agreed to an open line of communication between them. In this regard, they both agreed to the re-establishment of diplomatic relations in order to maintain a permanent and formal channel of communication between both states. Two features marked their cooperation on border security. First, both countries agreed to the deportation of illegal immigrants. This was a reciprocal agreement and illegal immigrants would be returned to their home country, be it Haiti or the Dominican Republic, where ever they had citizenship. Second, they both agreed to the development of the Haitian-Dominican Republic border. In this regard, they both committed to the establishment of Plan Quisqueya. As part of this arrangement, both countries agreed that they would cooperate in policing to curb cross-border crime. They also agreed to cooperate on environmental matters. Plan Quisqueya developed the Quisqueya Economic Binational Council (CEBQ). This is an initiative aimed at sustainably developing the Haitian-Dominican Republic border areas. It garnered the support of members from the international community, as well as the private sector and government agencies from both countries. These members worked together on developing public-private partnerships that are of assistance to the lives of people in the bordered region.

Conclusion The Haitian-Dominican Republic case is a good illustration of a border society exhibiting tension concerning the question of citizenship for the Dominicans of Haitian descent. It captures the Dominican Republic legally constructed borders imposed by state power on persons of Haitian

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descent. It displays the elements of exclusion versus inclusion and rights versus obligations which have emerged. Nevertheless, it is clear from the Haitian-Dominican Republic case that cooperation is an important way to erase artificial borders. It is better than discord in addressing the border problems faced on the island of Hispaniola by both Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The legal borders in the Haitian-Dominican Republic case, which effectively denationalise Dominicans of Haitian descent, highlight that states have sovereign jurisdiction over their territories. Harsh borders are sometimes imposed to address problems such as illegal immigration. But in so doing, it may affect diplomatic relations, trade and the movement of legitimate persons. As Laitinen (2001) noted, border exclusion lays the foundation for confrontation. This confrontation may take the form of hostilities between different ethnic groups in bordered regions. But as we have seen from the Haitian-Dominican Republic case, it may emerge in the form of the severance of diplomatic ties between states. What is clear however is that man-made governmental borders have negatively impacted the lives of people. The Haitian-Dominican Republic governmental legal borders negatively impacted the lives of Dominicans of Haitian descent who were denied documentation or who faced denationalisation. It is only through the cooperation of both states that such barriers are being lessened and it is only through continued cooperation that Haiti and the Dominican Republic sharing the island of Hispaniola will be able to do so in a harmonious way. Sharing an island, the futures of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are inextricably linked. Although the Haitian-Dominican Republic relationship has been marked by mistrust, there must be a clear understanding of the importance the states hold to each other. An impoverished and disintegrating Haiti will make the Dominican Republic, its people and its border more penetrable to border violations such as illegal border crossings and for the expansion of organised crime. It will also open the door for the exploitation of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. The man-made borders existing between both states are unlikely to disappear but through serious political governance and greater border integration they can be managed in a beneficial way for both countries.

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References Anderson M (1996) Frontiers, Territory and State Formation in the Modern World. Cambridge: Polity Press. Banicki A (2017) The Dominican Republic Is Cracking Down on Illegal Immigration and over 300,000 are in Jeopardy. The Business Insider, 7 January 2016. Accessed on: http://www.businessinsider.com/dominican-republic-cra cking-down-on-illegal-immigration-2016-1, 24 November 2017. BBC (2010) Haiti Quake Death Toll Rises to 230,000. BBC News, 10 February 2010. Accessed on: https://web.archive.org/web/201105110 74335/http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8507531.stm, 23 November 2017. Blake J (2014) Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Race-Based Statelessness in the Americas. Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives, 6 (2) (14 June): 140–180. CIA: The World Factbook (2016). Accessed on: https://www.cia.gov/library/ publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ha.html, 23 November 2017. Clifford J (1994) Diasporas. Cultural Anthropology 9 (3) (August): 302–338. Diamond J (2005) Collapse: How Society Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Penguin. Dominica Today (2017) Operation Shield Deploys 895 Dominican Army Troops at Haiti Border. 24 July 2017. Accessed on: https://dominicantoday.com/ dr/local/2017/07/24/operation-shield-deploys-895-dominican-army-tro ops-at-haiti-border/, 24 November 2017. Donald J (1996) Citizen and the Man About Town. In Hall, S and Du Gay, P (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity 1996. London: Sage, pp. 170–190. Donnan H and Wilson T (1999) Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. Bloomsbury Academic. Gilroy P (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso. IndexMundi (2017) Detailed Country Statistics on Haiti and Dominican Republic. Accessed on: http://www.indexmundi.com/factbook/compare/ haiti.dominican-republic, 23 November 2017. Joppke C (2007) Transformation of Citizenship: Status, Rights, Identity. Citizenship Studies 11: 37–48. Kosinski S (2009) State of Uncertainty: Citizenship, Statelessness and Discrimination in the Dominican Republic. Boston College International and Comparative Law Review 32 (2): 377–398. Kratochwil F (1994) Citizenship: On the Border of Order. Alternatives 19: 485– 506. Laitinen K (2001) Reflecting the Security Border in the Post-Cold War Context. International Journal of Peace Studies, 6 (2) (Autumn/Winter).

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Accessed on: http://www.gmu.edu/programs/icar/ijps/vol6_2/Laitinen. htm, 29 November 2017. Minghi J (1963) Boundary Studies in Political Geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 53: 407–428. Rawls J (1999) A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schulz J and Batalova J (2017) Haitian Immigrants in the United States. Migration Policy Institute (MPI), 2 August. Accessed on: https://www.migration policy.org/article/haitian-immigrants-united-states, 29 November 2017. Van Houtum H (2005) The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries. Geopolitics 10: 672–679. Wucker M (1999) Why the Cocks Fight: The Dominican—Haitian Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang Inc.

Laws The The The The

Dominican Republic Constitution (as amended in 2010). 1939 Immigration Act. 1939 Immigration Regulation. 2004 Migration Law.

CHAPTER 6

The Seeds of Anger: Contemporary Issues in Forced Migration Across the Dominican-Haitian Border Bridget Wooding

A case which those of us who serve in diplomatic and consular posts in Haiti experience, to a lesser or greater degree is that of black Dominicans who are included in groups of Haitians deported from the Dominican Republic. This subject was already known to the consuls in Belladère in the middle of the third decade of the past century.1

Immigration to the Dominican Republic throughout the twentieth century was largely occasioned by economic growth in the country, initially in the sugar cane industry and subsequently in other productive sectors that no longer attracted native labor. Historically, Haitian 1 Alberto E. Despradel Cabral, current Dominican Ambassador in Haiti, in El Consulado de Belladère en las relaciones dominicohaitianas 1931–1963 (2005: 122). Author’s translation from Spanish.

B. Wooding (B) Observatory of Caribbean Migrants (OBMICA), Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_6

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labor immigration has been the most voluminous in filling this gap, fueled by political instability and the lack of economic opportunities in this neighboring country, which shares a land border on the island of Hispaniola. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the fall in the price of sugar, which depressed salaries, led to Dominican peasants losing interest in cutting sugar cane and the subsequent importing of workers from the Anglophone Caribbean. These so-called cocolos came principally from the territories of St Kitts, Nevis, and Anguilla. The occupation by the United States of Haiti (1915–1934) and the Dominican Republic (1916–1924) facilitated a cross-border workforce. The peaking of the sugar industry thus led to a significant increase in Haitian labor, establishing a system of temporary migrant workers, which apart from some interruptions and variations was to extend into the mid-1980s. The massacre of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian ancestry on the border in 1937 under the Trujillo dictatorship was a focusing event affecting both countries. It marked a decade that was also characterized by the imposition of more military controls on the border and diplomatic tensions impeding the implementation of the contractual regime of groups of migrant workers. The 1939 Foreigners’ Law and its rules of procedure legislated for such groups. While this did not affect the Haitian population already living and working in the sugar plantations, it did lead to a labor shortage. Accordingly, informal arrivals and the presence of new workers from Haiti came to be tacitly tolerated in these sugar cultivation areas. Interstate regulation of temporary migrant workers was promoted in line with the progressive acquisition of sugar mills on the part of the Trujillo dictatorship, which up until 1950 had been largely in the hands of foreign owners. Henceforth, the Dominican Government made annual estimates of the number of workers required and the Haitian Government undertook the recruitment. The companies were responsible for managing the temporary residence permits for the workers with the Dirección General de Migración (DGM) and for assuming the costs of repatriation at the end of the sugar harvest. Recent scholarship demonstrates that government functionaries used extralegal coercion such as the retention of documents (Hintzen 2015). These practices continued and amplified under the Balaguer administration begun in 1966, which succeeded the fall of the Trujillo dictatorship in 1961. Haitian documented and undocumented workers who lived or

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worked outside of the sugar mill areas (known as bateyes ) confronted the threat of involuntary relocation. In implementing such policies, government officials faced resistance from local communities. Likewise, under the Balaguer administration, discussions began on revoking the acquired rights of migrants and their descendants born in the Dominican Republic. The results of these documented debates on proposed nationality stripping materialized only at the turn of the twenty-first century, some four decades later (Hintzen 2015). Immigration increased progressively, especially in the 1970s due to a hike in sugar prices and a consequent demand for more workers. Also on the rise was the traffic of irregular migrants from Haiti and a change in the demographic composition of the bateyes. Although many did return to Haiti at the end of the harvest, a good number made their permanent home in the Dominican Republic (Báez 1986). Economic disparities between the two countries were further accentuated as a result of the earthquake in January 2010, which devastated the metropolitan area of Port-au-Prince and elsewhere in Haiti, stimulating cross-border migration to the Dominican Republic and internationally to other countries. There was greater participation of women and children in these newer arrivals between 2010 and 2012 (Petrozziello and Wooding 2013). This creeping feminization of Haitian immigration postearthquake has been linked to inequalities and gender-based violence in Haiti, which in turn translates into greater difficulties in accessing employment and public services, exacerbated in times of crisis. Added to which there are a high number of female-headed households in Haiti, in part because of the traditionally majority male cross-border mobility. In addition to alluding to increasing numbers of women migrating, the concept “feminization of migration” supposes a change in the motivation for the migration project. From reasons of family reunification, the change means that women decide independently to migrate in search of work, often as the principal breadwinner and head of the household. The continued modernization of the Dominican state has been based on service industries and tourism, such that the demand for Haitian labor has diversified, stabilizing in urban construction and agricultural rubrics beyond sugar cane, where low-qualified and low-paid work is the norm. The modest increase in Haitians, diversification of their presence in the labor market, and increased social visibility outside of the bateyes, including in the informal sector, have generated debate on the possible negative consequences of this so-called pacific invasion. The rejection and

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repudiation by some of this new visibility continues to be used by certain conservative sectors as a call for ratcheting up deportations (Báez 2005). This chapter posits that a cosmetic reconfiguration of how deportations happen at the turn of a new century has not fundamentally altered the way in which this practice compensates ineffectually for an inadequate Dominican migration legislation vis-a-vis Haitian labor immigration (Lozano and Báez 2008). Thus the border continues to be a site of irregular crossings on the part of many incoming migrants navigating the porous land border, with attendant abuses (Petrozziello and Wooding 2013; Schoaff 2017), as well as a safety valve to combat the perceived “pacific invasion” of Haitians, evidenced in a record number of deportations in 2016, according to official Dominican figures (OBMICA 2017). Initially, contestation came from local Dominican officials as to how and why deportations were carried out in the period leading up to the 1937 massacre and in its aftermath, when the euphemistically so-called desalojos (or removals) were instigated in parts of the border which had not been directly affected by the massacre. In recent decades, contestation of ongoing expulsions has been spearheaded by key local civil society actors on both sides of the border, combined with the international community providing a human rights frame for this (Wooding 2018). Notwithstanding, the Dominican deportation regime remains possibly the single biggest unresolved issue in forced migration across the island and, given the wider geopolitical schema of deportation practice in the Americas, significant challenges persist for addressing it, notably when, on Hispaniola, an expansive misuse of expulsions occurs episodically at highly charged political conjunctures.

Effects of the Genocide of 1937 Much scholarship on Haitian-Dominican relations (Howard 2001; Sagas 2000), together with journalistic and international human rights monitoring reporting, holds that most Dominicans are anti-Haitian. AntiHaitianism stems from deep-rooted and ubiquitous prejudices in the Dominican people, especially amid the oligarchy. The perception is that Dominican identity is European and above all Hispanic in spite of the fact that Dominicans have important African roots. These attitudes toward Haiti and Haitian immigrants have foundations in the past, when the Dominican Republic separated from Haiti after twenty two years’ under Haitian rule. Dominican xenophobia had its most violent expression in

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1937 when the dictatorship of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930–1961) ordered the military to carry out a massacre of Haitian nationals and Dominican-Haitians on the border. The Inter-American Commission report on the Dominican Republic (2015) observes that anti-Haitianism and the Hispanic notion of Dominicanidad were promoted by Trujillo and other like-minded politicians and intellectuals as a form of differentiation between Dominicans and Haitians based on racial, biological and cultural attributes (IACHR 2015). As recently as 2015, a history professor writing in the US press described the so-called spontaneous returns and the official deportations of Haitians from the Dominican Republic that started up after the end of registration for the National Regularization Plan for Foreigners (PNRE) as “a slow-motion undercover pogrom” (Grandin 2015). However, current inter-ethnic incidents and issues related to forced migration on the island are a far cry from the reality of the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Dominico-Haitians on the Dominican-Haitian border. This sweeping view presents the two peoples as in permanent struggle, as metaphorical fighting cocks as Michele Wucker affirms (Wucker 1999). Thus the “fatal conflict model” posits that anti-Haitian feeling has for generations pervaded all strata of Dominican society. Some cultural anthropologists and historians have challenged this supposedly all-pervasive trend toward unmitigated conflict, especially in relation to the cross-border zone (Murray 2010; Paulino 2016). More recently, literary scholars have produced a further corrective to the broad brushstroke anti-Haitian school of thought, including richly nuanced studies of the Haitian-Dominican border and a focus on the politics of border crossing (Fumagalli 2015; García Peña 2016). That said, ethnic divisions between Dominicans and Haitians, as well as local understandings of difference between the two groups, certainly existed prior to the massacre. Lauren Derby characterizes pre1937 border communities thus: “Dominican border culture must be understood both as furnishing a common Haitian-Dominican identity in relation to centers of power and outsiders, and as containing fissures of separation, invisible internal indices of difference and differentiation that could become divisive when conflict arose” (Derby 2012). Today a similar view on Haitian-Dominican communities throughout the country could obtain, given the ubiquitous presence of Haitians nationwide in the Dominican Republic. This occurs in the context of the “new Haitian immigration,” where more Haitians are to be found living and working

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outside the bateyes, as documented in the government’s pioneering survey and follow-up one on all immigrants in the country, carried out in 2012 and 2017 (ONE 2013, 2018). Archival records reveal that Trujillo attempted to implement a clandestine plan for mass deportation of Haitians prior to the 1937 massacre on the border (Hintzen 2015). However, this plan failed because local officials resisted government attempts to supersede their authority leading Trujillo to order the massacre in order to compel obedience from rural authorities and to destroy Haitian-Dominican networks. While in the border region these goals were accomplished with violence, Trujillo pursued a different strategy in sugar-producing areas, employing extralegal coercion to force Haitians in the country onto sugar plantations, as noted above. Through combined archival research and interviews with survivors of the 1937 genocide, historian Turits illuminates what happened on the border in the so-called Trujillo era. He explores how up until the late 1936 of the past century a border population composed to a large degree of persons of Haitian ethnicity—most of whom were probably born in the Dominican Republic—integrated with Dominican ethnicity in a world which was fluently bicultural and transnational, along a porous border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He summarizes the effects of the genocide as “a world destroyed, and a nation imposed” (Turits 2002), asserting that the aspirations of the elite for a Dominican nationality which would be mono-ethnic, closed borders and anti-Haitian were only consummated on the border by the violent genocide, especially because it was the most distant region for the central government to contain. In this act of extreme state terror, anomalous even for the Trujillo regime, the Dominican military killed with machetes around 15,000 individuals of presumed Haitian ethnicity on the northern border and coterminous area of the Cibao region. Months later, several thousands more were deported to Haiti from the southern border provinces. This focusing event was followed, but not preceded, by an official anti-Haitian discourse and, finally, seeped into a diluted popular anti-Haitian sentiment on the border. However, survivors’ accounts, eyewitness testimonies and literature from both sides of the border coincide in drawing attention to the inter-ethnic solidarity and commercial ties before the massacre (Baud 1993), as well as around and after the massacre whereby persons at risk were protected by neighbors or whose safety was provisionally assured

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by temporary migration to Haiti (Prestol Castillo 1973; Ramírez 2000; Philoctète 1989; Danticat 1998). Attempting to make a virtue of a necessity, as the Haitian authorities did in some cases, was not always a success. The Haitian author, journalist, politician and agronomist Anthony Lespès recounts in a fictional narrative based on lived experiences how the Haitian attempts at an agricultural colony with persons who fled the massacre at Billiguy on the northern border finally failed. His fictional account, in Les semences de colère, related eloquently that: “They had escaped, leaving behind their belonging, their homes, their field and their livestock. Many even had to abandon their wives and children since this had happened all of a sudden, like a hurricane, and they simply had no time” (Lespès 1949). Unfortunately, as history reveals time and again, Dominican knee jerk anti-Haitian actions in the form of arbitrary and collective expulsions put the Haitian authorities on the back foot repeatedly and do not favor coherent migration policies between the two countries.

Mass Expulsions in 1991 Under President Balaguer and Their Sequel As in other Latin American and Caribbean countries, in the 1980s NGO and faith-based groups mushroomed and focused their efforts on the absolutely poor and excluded sectors. The bateys were the poorest and most isolated rural communities in the country, hence a gamut of civil society organizations, Haitian, Dominican and Haitian-Dominican, began supporting grassroots projects in education and health, especially where the State Sugar Council was perceived to be absent with basic services. In early 1986 Jean-Claude Duvalier was forced to flee from Haiti. In consequence, the interstate agreements on migrant workers lapsed and the first free and fair elections in Haiti since Independence saw President Aristide assume power in Haiti. Immediately prior to the bloody coup in September 1991 which deposed him Aristide made an impassioned speech to the United Nations, denouncing the abuses suffered by Haitian workers in the Dominican cane fields. Notwithstanding, 1991 was a tipping point in the Dominican Republic in revealing the possibilities for local actors to influence international opinion on the Haitian migrant labor issue. Concerns had focused on accusations that children were working in forced labor conditions in the bateys. Moreover, the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights (LCHR)

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based in New York reported on the role of camp guards and the use of written contracts for the braceros in which the version in creole was totally unclear (LCHR 1991). Following its report, the Dominican Episcopal/Anglican Church representative in situ testified to the US Congress, detailing ongoing abuses as regards restriction of movement, on child labor, forced labor, the lack of freedom to organize and injustices in the methods of payment and remuneration. The testimony occurred when the International Labor Organization (on information from the Dominican Government) was affirming the opposite. Apparently to assuage criticism from local church sources which was broadcast internationally, President Balaguer enacted decree 233-91, ordering the expulsion of all undocumented Haitians under the age of 16 and over the age of 60. Portrayed as a humanitarian measure, in which the young and the old were to be exempt from work in the cane fields, in practice indiscriminate deportations of young, adults and the elderly immediately ensued. Estimates of 35,000 persons expelled in a few months were complemented by many more that left on their own initiative in order to avoid harassment and abuse by the military. In the latter case, they were even accompanied by local Dominican civil society organizations, in a transgressive move, as a means of highlighting the vulnerable situation of persons of Haitian ancestry, in a context where inter-ethnic tensions had been whipped up by extreme conservatives sectors in the country. These latter ultra-nationalists, however, used this contestatory humanitarian accompaniment for their own ends, alleging that it was evidence of the widespread broad-based approval for Haitians to be evicted from the country en masse. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission (CIDH 1991) concluded in a report in September of that year that the decree had “imposed a collective expulsion” and “unleashed an indiscriminate persecution against Haitians and their descendants, whether or not they had been born in the Dominican Republic in order to expel them from the country.” Initially, the Haitian Government used soft diplomacy while approaching the Organization of American States, the United Nations and Caricom (the Caribbean Community and Common Market). When dialogue was not forthcoming with the Dominican authorities, the protest was ratcheted up. Delivered just days before a coup ousted him; President Aristide’s hard-hitting oration at the United Nations may be interpreted in this light.

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Immediately after the decree was promulgated, eighteen Dominican civil society organizations visited Haiti, in a pre-emptive solidarity move. These groups were well received by their counterparts in Haiti such that support and exchange began between the two countries. There was an agile exchange of information across the island on families who had been divided by the expulsions. Moreover, a Dominican delegation to Portau-Prince raised the question of the need for documentation for Haitians who travel to the Dominican Republic. International development agencies were active at the time of the crisis, raising emergency funds, notably for the temporary camps established in Haiti, both on the border and near Port-au-Prince, for the deportees. These tense months in Dominico-Haitian relations have been little studied and largely obscured by the fact that the coup against Aristide caused a rapid reverse flow of forced migration, whereby it is calculated that at least 20,000 persons sought refuge in the Dominican Republic, displaced by the Cedras regime that lasted three years until an international military intervention removed it in September 1994. The Dominican authorities did little to encourage political asylum applications in this period. In these circumstances the cross-border civil society contacts brought about coincidentally by the earlier Balaguer expulsions turned their attention to the new drama, entailing cross-border solidarity with putative refugees from Haiti, and the deportee camps were summarily disbanded in Haiti. There has been much speculation as to why the Balaguer administration should have provoked this mass exodus in the middle of 1991. Indeed, before these egregious expulsions, the Dominican Government, contrarily, had called for a regularization program for irregular migrants and had amassed acquired papers from batey workers, allegedly for this purpose. As has been amply documented (Riveros 2014), Balaguer had curried favor in the bateys in giving out Dominican ID documents for electoral ends in earlier decades (without necessarily the persons concerned receiving Dominican birth certificates as should have been de rigeur). Not convinced that these electors were still well disposed to him for the favor, Balaguer may well have sought to dispossess them of this acquired documentation, hence the ruse of the supposed regularization program. In this vein, still others surmise that the timing was calculated not just to subvert acquired rights of Haitian ancestry persons in the Dominican Republic but it was also to gravely inconvenience his new counterpart in

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Haiti, since he had little sympathy for the leftist arriviste half his age, as was his perception of Aristide. It should be remembered that Balaguer had been the Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Trujillo era at the time of the 1937 massacre, and the first government spokesperson to orate in justification of the genocide (Turits 2002).

After Hatillo Palma, 2005 Tensions simmered between the two countries in subsequent years over the issue of deportations, with détente happening at the end of 1999 when a bilateral memorandum of understanding was issued from Port-auPrince with guidelines as to how these should be carried out, and—importantly—allowing for due process. Unconvinced that this agreement would work in practice, at the same time a civil society coalition of Dominican, Haitian and US advocacy organizations began a legal process through the inter-American human rights system in search of regional jurisprudence with which to issue more robust challenges to abuses at the domestic level. This would eventually culminate in the Case of Expelled Dominicans and Haitians v The Dominican Republic being found against the Dominican Republic in 2014 by the Inter-American Human Rights Court (IACHR 2014). A seminal study researched by a law school from the United States with the collaboration of local organizations on the ground local underpinned this new understanding of the broader dimensions of the human rights violations around this type of forced migration at the turn of the century (International Human Rights Law Clinic 2002). A nadir in Dominico-Haitian relations was to occur again in 2005 when once again the topic of collective indiscriminate expulsions was revived, with some new elements added to the mix. In early May in the border town of Hatillo Palma, Montecristi, the assassination of a Dominican trader Maritza Núñez and an attack on her husband led to the eviction of Haitians in the zone, their good were pillaged or burned. Without any proof, Haitians were accused of the misdeed. Those Haitians who took refuge in the nearby police station were deported, supposedly as a precautionary measure against mob rule. As revenge against the alleged assassins, an elderly Haitian pastor was himself later assassinated. A humanitarian crisis developed wherein over a single weekend some 2000 persons, mainly women and children) from Hatillo Palma and a wide radius around it in the north of the Dominican Republic, were deported across the northern border. Eventually, Haitian protests resulted

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in a meeting between the two foreign affairs Ministers and an agreement to call off the deportations, although sporadic xenophobic incidents against Haitians were to be reported during the rest of 2005 throughout the Dominican Republic. Even Dominican President Leonel Fernández was forced to admit, in relation to the Hatillo Palma incidents, that: “I myself regret it. What we are doing, they are mass repatriations which certainly violate the human rights of Haitians ” (Le Nouvelliste 2005). He spoke thus, in late June, at the closure of a seminar in which American, Canadian and Latin American diplomats were participating. But analysis by those within his government went further than this politically diplomatic mea culpa. For example, the eminent Dominican sociologist, Carlos Dore Cabral, at the time the Executive Director of information, analysis and strategic programming of the President’s Office (DIAPE), wrote a powerful article entitled: “After Hatillo Palma: The old and the new with Haitian immigration” in the FUNGLODE Journal (Dore Cabral 2005). The abstract states that: “The tragic events of Hatillo Palma produced a reactivation of the topic of Haitian immigration to the country, positioning new (and repositioning old) elements of the question. Two factors unified these aspects put on the table by the assassination of a Dominican woman by Haitians last May: (a) its ideological nature—which hides economic, social, political and cultural interests and (b) its condition of almost insurmountable obstacles in the search for adequate and modern solutions to the Haitian presence in the Dominican Republic.” Whatever the precipitating reasons for the Hatillo Palma incidents (and these are not developed in the article), the author posits that the ensuing manipulation of events by the ultra-nationalists, causing inter-ethnic antipathy in the process in the Dominican Republic, is unprecedented in this new century and does not bode well for proper governance of migration across the island. The issue is also taken up by an important blueprint for migration policy for Haiti produced by the International Organization for Migration (IOM, Haiti) and official actors in Haiti the following year (the Dore Cabral article features in the bibliography), where the capacity of the Haitian state to respond at times of humanitarian crisis is called into question, with mention of the specific instance of the Hatillo Palma “affaire” (sic) to underscore the point (OIM 2006). In counterpoint to the extreme right capitalization of the humanitarian crisis generated in 2005, the increasing confidence and protagonism of civil society actors defending the rights of Haitian migrants and

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their descendants may also be observed. Fast footwork between civil society groups in Haiti and the Dominican Republic enabled the border branch of the Jesuit Migration Service (JRS) to officially accompany back to the Dominican Republic, across the northern border of DajabónOuanaminthe, some 60 persons, Haitians and Dominico-Haitians, who were shown to have their papers in order, hence should never have been deported. Interestingly, the bulk of the group duly returned was documented Dominicans: 12 adults with their ID cards as Dominican citizens and 29 children with Dominican birth certificates (GARR 2005). This represented an advance from the 1991 mass expulsions when Dominican civil society had been unable to do much more than accompany migrants (or persons suspected of being irregular immigrants) in vulnerable situations to the border in some cases, attempting to limit abuses at the border crossing. A further new development in 2005 was the proven capacity to engage the Haitian and Dominican Diasporas in island issues, due to new connections being made between concerned civil society on Hispaniola and interested parties abroad, especially in the United States. Thus, for example, a Resolution, dated July 17, 2005, was issued in New York by the Mayor’s office, brought by Council Member Martínez, denouncing discrimination and violence committed against Haitians and people of Haitian descent living in the Dominican Republic, and calling upon the government of the Dominican Republic to publicly oppose anti-Haitian violence within its borders, intervene in preventing further xenophobic violence and unequal treatment and take affirmative steps to permanently curtail en masse deportations of Haitians and people of Haitian descent from the Dominican Republic without due process. The precipitating reason for the resolution was the fact that the agreement between the Foreign Affairs Ministers on island to call off indiscriminate deportations was not being respected as of two months after the Hatillo Palma crisis. Specifically, the resolution makes mention of the diasporas of both Haiti and the Dominican Republic as having a stake in what transpires on Dominico-Haitian relations, noting that “Whereas, There are more than one million Haitians and Dominicans living in New York City, who as such are interested parties in this situation…” (Res.LS_3214 of 2005).

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Business as Usual After the National Regularization Plan Registration Ends, 2015 The international spotlight was once more shone on the Dominican Republic in the middle of 2015 on migrant-related issues, as the registration period for the pioneer regularization program for irregular migrants expired. The first National Survey on all Immigrants, carried out in 2012, estimated in that year the volume of Haitian immigrants to be 458,233 persons (ONE 2013). Although it did not take data on the migration status of those persons surveyed, the DGM registers for early 2013 show that only 11,000 Haitians had legal residence. The gap indicates the magnitude of those without a positive migration status prior to the Regularization Plan. In the event and even taking in to account that the sign-up for the plan was considerable by undocumented migrants, according to official figures only 53.3% who registered in the Survey had managed to avail themselves of the Plan. The Dominican authorities faced three acute problems at this juncture. Firstly, a very small number of persons applying for the plan managed to complete their files and get residency status, probably because the bar was set too high in terms of criteria for the category of migrant concerned and the time period was very tight. The preliminary regularization (as non-residents and renewed in mid-2017 up until mid-2018) affords the vast majority of those thus newly documented persons little advantage beyond, supposedly, being exempt from deportation and timid insertion in the Social Security system. However, some persons with this temporary documentation mistrusted the authorities’ final intentions toward them and, in some cases on the eve of renewed deportations, went into hiding or moved to be non-traceable to the authorities.2 Secondly, the presidential decree in late 2013 unleashing the Regularization Plan had instructed the Dominican authorities to suspend deportations during the eighteen months when the Plan was established and operated. The Herculean task of now resuming these and deporting as many hundreds of thousands of persons as had managed to register was daunting and, in terms of logistics, a non-starter. It was against this background that the authorities hit on the idea of encouraging so-called

2 Personal communication from affected persons in the ethnically mixed zone where I live on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, June 2015.

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spontaneous returns for irregular migrants who had not signed up to the Plan, before commencing official deportations two months later. A third conundrum was the need to face up to local and international concerns around the possible expatriation of some of the 133,000 Dominicans of Haitian ancestry (Acento 2016) who had been denationalized by a Constitutional Tribunal Sentence of 2013, most of whom did not have the papers in hand to prove Dominican citizenship. The relevant declarations of the Foreign Affairs Ministry acknowledge that this may be a real possibility: “President Medina has been quite clear. If people appear in this condition, thanks to the mechanisms, by which the deportation protocol has been drawn up, all those who say they were born in the Dominican Republic will be subject to an investigation and will not be deported” (Moreno 2015). Doubtless these latter re-assurances were warranted by expressions of alarm at home and abroad, epitomized in the CARICOM statement of June 2015: The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) calls on the Government of the Dominican Republic not to expel tens of thousands of Dominicans of Haitian descent. This follows statements by the Dominican Ministry of Interior and the Police which indicate their intention to expel Dominicans of Haitian descent whose citizenship status has not been regularized. In reiterating its human rights concerns, the Caribbean Community emphasized that these Dominicans had been made stateless by a ruling of the Dominican Constitutional Court of 2013, which had been made retroactive to 1929, revoking their nationality. The very real possibility that they could be expelled to Haiti, a country of which they are not citizens and with which many have neither family nor language links, was an additional cause for concern. The Community calls on the Dominican Republic authorities to adhere to the above principles and confirm the citizenship status of Dominicans of Haitian descent. The Community also calls on the Dominican Republic not to engage in the expulsion of Dominicans of Haitian descent and avoid creating a humanitarian crisis in our Region.

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Closer to home, the Haitian Government was not heeded in the two pleas President Martelly made to the Medina administration, requesting, firstly, that the deportations be held back until the overdue presidential elections might be concluded in Haiti and, secondly, that the 1999 binational agreement be revisited and possibly revised. Moreover, the much-lauded new protocol drawn up by the Dominican authorities, allegedly to conform better to international human rights standards on deportations was never made public by the DGM in Santo Domingo. Unfortunately, the mix of spontaneous returns, extra-official deportations and official deportations evidenced many of the shortcomings seen earlier in the process of deportations, notably in 1937, 1991 and 2005, when expulsions have happened en masse of Haitians from the Dominican Republic. Thus, on this occasion, this gamut of voluntary and forced migration was voluminous and came about in many cases in ways which were less than transparent. Key monitoring of the phenomenon occurred by the International Organization for Migration (IOM Haiti), using important actors from civil society organizations, because of their acquired knowledge over time, most notably since the Port-au-Princeheadquartered Group for Support to Refugees and Repatriates (GARR) was set up in 1991 and, a decade later, the cross-border Jan Sikse network (RFJS) in 2000. According to the IOM, between June 2015 and December 2016, 96, 476 families, equivalent to 160,452 persons, crossed the border in these mixed flows (OIM 2016, 2017). The bulk of the returns were so-called spontaneous returns (totaling some 97, 854 events), although many of those interviewed alleged that they moved because of heightened inter-ethnic tensions in the Dominican Republic observed from mid-2015 onwards. Assisted returns (initially on offer by the Dominican authorities) totaled some 462 persons. Official deportations observed were 54,510 while 27,445 persons alleged that they had been deported extra-officially. Persons who returned, despite alleging they had signed up for the Regularization Plan, registered 11,193, most of whom moved spontaneously. Although the number of persons born in the Dominican Republic and deported to Haiti was relatively low at an estimated 4.8%, as of April 2016, two worrying trends may be observed. Most of those in this category of Haitian ancestry persons born in the Dominican Republic had moved spontaneously across the border, while of those deported in this category the biggest group was extra-official (OBMICA 2017).

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The humanitarian crisis derived from this intense cross-border movement is perhaps best exemplified by the camps established on the Haitian-Dominican border, the Parc Cadeau complex, especially as a result of the spontaneous movers not having necessarily anywhere to go in Haiti. Accordingly, many of these latter took root in one of the six camps set up in the vicinity of Anse-a-Pitres, on the southern HaitianDominican border. By the middle of January 2016 the total population was 2203, mainly young people under the age of 19 (58.3%) with a high percentage of persons claiming to have been born in the Dominican Republic (45.7%). Human rights organizations bore witness to the precarious living and security conditions which obtained in the camps (GARR et al. 2016). From a biopolitical prism, it is posited that these camps are a shameful example of the bottom-most condition of people navigating vulnerable situations, as explained by a biopolitical lens: “With little exaggeration, the settlement of forced displacement at Parc Cadeau could be included in the ‘death zones’ of the world” (Martínez and Wooding 2017). For whatever reason, as of early 2019, these camps de fortune have still not been given the attention they deserve by the international community or other stakeholders, despite the IOM attempting to relocate, with limited success, some people from them to the interior of Haiti. Notwithstanding, these makeshift border settlements remain an emblematic blot on the humanitarian landscape. In early 2018 a social organization, operating from Port-au-Prince, which provides humanitarian support to these camps reported that the families remaining there are undergoing a very difficult situation. The organization reports that: “They have been left by the wayside. For the two Parc Cadeau sites, several families who had benefited from the relocation program of the IOM have returned and re-established themselves in the camps. By contrast, the families in the camp Tête à l’Eau are more numerous. Around one hundred families. They were categorically opposed to the IOM program. They are holding out for houses for relocation.”3 Clearly the Moïse administration in Port-au-Prince (as had the Martelly administration which preceded it) still faces internally displaced persons under canvas elsewhere in the country, where the final persons requiring 3 Author’s translation from French of email communication from this Haitian NonGovernmental Organization, February 1, 2018.

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housing solutions after the 2010 earthquake still clamor to be heard. An apparent complicity of no response on the part of international organizations to the tent settlements at the Parc Cadeau complex may in part be due to the desire of the latter not to create a honey-pot attracting more cross-border movers who might believe they will be more visible and hence eligible for long-term solutions to their problems, if they remain in such hideous conditions. To all intents and appearances, the IOM relocation scheme was not fit for purpose because it did not provide sufficient resources nor accompaniment for re-integration in Haiti. In these circumstances, civil society organizations become last resort service providers and, simultaneously, those who advocate for more appropriate long-term solutions.

Whither the Deportation Regime Affecting the Island Many decades of unregulated migration of Haitians who have come to live and work from the neighboring country have resulted in a significant population in the Dominican Republic whose status is uncertain, and who are vulnerable to widespread discrimination and abuses of human rights, including the stripping of the right to nationality for descendants born in country. Within the insular Caribbean region, migration is the norm and, despite significant extra-regional migration to the global north, two-thirds of Caribbean migrants move within the region (OBMICA 2017). Historically, Haitian cross-border labor migration to the Dominican Republic has been salient, despite recent dynamics where certain countries in South America, notably Brazil and Chile, have become new destinations for Haitians on the move, particularly after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. For over a decade, at the turn of the twenty-first century, progressive sectors and conservatives debated the need for and content of a new migration law to replace the obsolete 1939 regulatory framework which was almost exclusively dedicated to outmoded Haitian groups and omitted new Dominican out-migration. Increasing exponentially in the 1960s, today net emigration is double immigration to the country. It was difficult to reconcile polarized proposals, such that the DGM wrote recently with diplomatic understatement that the dynamic had been “protracted and sinuous” (DGM 2016). A decade later, given that the National Regularization Plan for Foreigners (PNRE) should have

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preceded the adoption of the migration law in 2004, the executive authority in December 2013 decreed the PNRE. Independently of the ambitions of the Plan which were undoubtedly laudable, the upshot has been that some 250,000 Haitian migrants who applied in good faith have had a fragile temporary status since the middle of 2015 with no clear path to gaining permanent residency, as per the original goal of the Plan. Given this weak implementation, not only irregular migrants who did not apply for the Plan but also some of those who did move of their own accord to Haiti due to extreme inter-ethnic tensions or were forcibly removed there by the Dominican authorities when deportations resumed in 2015, after a hiatus when registration for the Plan was underway. Unless and until the regularization plan is adjusted to suit the category of migrant concerned, properly executed and concluded, the border will continue to be a bone of contention as a crossing-point for forced migration. The emblematic scenarios of makeshift settlements on the HaitianDominican border as a sequel to mass expulsions, in 1937, 1991 and 2015 as earlier illustrated, signpost the difficulties faced by the Haitian authorities in coping with such large influxes of incomers. In the future the situation could become even more untenable for the Moïse administration in Haiti if the Trump administration in Washington carries through with the current plan to suspend Temporary Protection Status (TPS), available to Haitian migrants in the United States who were there prior to the Haitian earthquake in 2010. Due to a lawsuit, on March 1, 2019, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) extended TPS for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan until January 2020. In consequence, the Haitian authorities could face the potential mass repatriation from the United States of nearly 60,000 Haitians in 2020. This figure, because of the short period in which repatriation would be implemented, dwarfs the total of 66,000 Dominican deportees (95% male) mainly from the United States which the Dominican Republic has received between1993 and 2016, over a period of 23 years (Jiménez 2017). Concerned civil society organizations across the island understand that the Dominican authorities should not be Janus-faced, that is, concentrated exclusively on the way in which deportations are carried out for Dominican ancestry persons from the United States, and how those returnees may be integrated into the country. If due process is expected and advocated for potential Dominican deportees in the United States,

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the Dominican authorities, it is argued, need to reform the current Dominican migration law and rules of procedure to ensure that due process is legislated for and that those irregular migrants they may seek to deport (mainly Haitians) receive minimal international protection norms. A further complication is the fact that because of stigma and hence limited job opportunities in their “home country,” some Haitian deportees move across the border in to the Dominican Republic to look for a living while some Dominican deportees from the United States correspondingly move across the border to Haiti for similar reasons.4 Ethnographers and criminologists Brotherton and Barrios have analyzed the immigration/deportation process through the concept of social bulimia. Drawing on life history interviews with Dominican deportees conducted in the Dominican Republic and the United States during the years 2002–2010, as well as in situ field observations of deportees and archival research related to Dominican deportation and the settlement of that community, the authors focus on three stages of the bulimic cycle: the seduction of the American Dream, Integration, and Othering; blurred boundaries, drifting, and pathways to crime; and the vindictiveness of prison and deportation (Brotherton and Barrios 2011). The situation is markedly different for deportees of Haitian ancestry removed from the Dominican Republic for several reasons. More women and children are involved in these latter processes despite the masculinization of the immigration which still prevails in contrast to the feminization of Dominican emigration to the United States. The deportations on the island happen almost exclusively for reasons of alleged administrative infractions of migration law and the criminality aspect is absent. Whereas the Dominican Republic has little say (beyond consular support to potential deportees) on how the putative deportees are treated prior to arriving in Santo Domingo, Haiti and the Dominican Republic boast a Bilateral Commission (CMBDH), established in 1996, one of whose agenda points is repatriation. Left to their own devices, it is argued that the Haitian and Dominican state will not necessarily make sufficient progress on these matters without pressure from civil society actors, heavily reliant on the international human rights frame within which they operate. Moreover, civil society actors also believe that robust regional jurisprudence obtained on the 4 Personal communication with deportees in the ethnically mixed neighborhood where I live on the outskirts of Santo Domingo, January 2018.

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question, as it has been in the judgment of the Inter-American Human Rights Court (IACHR 2014), does not automatically generate compliance (Martínez 2014). Renewed efforts need to be made so that the persons affected are enabled to advocate for their rights and a better legislative framework on the ground, and society at large needs to be sensitized to the issue, alerted to the misuse to which the deportation regime is routinely put for political ends. The revolving door syndrome of a broken migration system, whereby a porous Dominican-Haitian border encourages irregular migration in the absence of an adequate legislative framework to encourage regular, orderly and safe migration is combined with corresponding arbitrary deportation practice, needs to and must be challenged. Laureate Rita Indiana (Dominican author, winner of the “Grand Prix littéraire of the Association of Caribbean Writers” in 2017) has developed the urban novel in the Dominican Republic, including making visible the Haitian presence, in urban as well rural scenarios. In her novel Nombres y Animales (2014) a young Haitian immigrant occupies an important role in the narrative and at the end of the text he simply disappears without trace. For a readership in the Dominican Republic, this would be “normal,” in that the norm is little transparency as regards immigration raids, detention and deportation. Civil society “transgressors” will continue the uphill struggle until and when that unacceptable norm may become the exception and not the commonplace it remains today.

References Acento (2016) “ACNUR reitera que existen 133,770 personas apátridas en la RD, y que podrían ser más.” Acento, 8 January. Báez F (1986) Braceros Haitianos en la Republica Dominicana. Editora Taller: Santo Domingo. Báez F (2005) “La Incapacidad de Ofrecer una Vida Digna.” Informe de Desarrollo Humano, República Dominicana. PNUD: Santo Domingo. Baud M (1993) “Una frontera para cruzar: La sociedad rural a través de la frontera dominico-haitiana (1870–1930).” Estudios Sociales 26, no. 64: 5–28, Santo Domingo. Brotherton D C and Barrios L (2011) Banished to the Homeland: Dominican Deportees and Their Stories of Exile. Columbia University Press: USA. CIDH (Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos) (1991) Informe sobre República Dominicana, Costa Rica. Danticat E (1998) The Farming of Bones. Penguin: New York.

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Derby L (2012) “Haitians in the Dominican Republic: Race, Politics and Neoliberalism.” In Bernd Reiter and Kimberly Eison Simmons (eds.), AfroDescendants, Identity and the Struggle for Development in the Americas, 51–66. Michigan State University Press: East Lansing. Despradel Cabral A E (2005) El consulado de Belladère en las relaciones dominicohaitianas 1931–1953. Editora Manatí: Santo Domingo. Dirección General de Migración (2016) Carta de compromiso al ciudadano. DGM: Santo Domingo. Dore Cabral C (2005) “Después de Hatillo Palma: Lo nuevo y lo viejo de la inmigraci´on haitiana.” Revista Global 3, no. 8: 5–10. Funglode: Santo Domingo. Fumagalli M C (2015) On the Edge: Writing the Border Between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Liverpool University Press: Liverpool, UK. Garcia Peña L (2016) The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction. Duke University Press: Durham, NC. GARR (2005) Rapport Migration Haïtienne et Droits Humains 2005 en République Dominicaine, dans les Caraïbes, et en Amérique. Unpublished: Port-au-Prince. GARR et.al. (2016) Human Rights Situation of Families in the Anse-àPitres camps, 1 March. http://www.ijdh.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/ 04/GARR-Report-Anse-a-Pitres-2016-ENG.pdf. Grandin G (2015) “Are You Haitian?” Nation, July 27. Hintzen A (2015) “A Veil of Legality: The Contested History of Anti-Haitian Ideology Under the Trujillo Dictatorship.” New West Indian Guide 90: 28– 54. Howard D (2001) Coloring the Nation: Race and Ethnicity in the Dominican Republic. Boulder: Lynne Rienner. IACHR (2014) Case of Expelled Dominicans and Haitians v The Dominican Republic. http://corteidh.or.cr/docs/casos/articulos/seriec_282_ing.pdf. IACHR (2015) Report on the Situation of Human Rights in the Dominican Republic. Organization of American States: Washington. Indiana R (2014) Nombres y Animales. Editorial Periférica: Santo Domingo. International Human Rights Law Clinic (2002) Unwelcome Guests: A Study of expulsions of Haitians and Dominicans of Haitian Descent from the Dominican Republic to Haiti. Berkeley, Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California. http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/Unwelcome_Guests.pdf. Jiménez L (2017). “Foro migrantes revela RD tiene 66,000 retornados.” Hoy, 24 June. Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights (1991) A Childhood Abducted: Children Cutting Sugarcane in the Dominican Republic. LCHR: New York. Le Nouvelliste (2005) «Le Président Fernandez reconnait les abus perpétrés contre les immigrants haïtiens lors des rapatriements», July 1. http://lenouv

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elliste.com/lenouvelliste/article/18909/Le-president-Fernandez-reconnaitles-abus-perpetres-contre-les-immigrants-haitiens-lors-des-rapatriements.html. Lespès A (1949) Les Semences de la Colère. Deschamps: Port -au- Prince. Lozano W and Báez F (2008) “Políticas Migratorias y relaciones DominicoHaitianas: De la Movilidad Insular del Trabajo a las Presiones de la Globalización.” In Lozano Wilfredo and Wooding Bridget (eds.), Los Retos Del Desarrollo Insular. Desarrollo Sostenible, migraciones y derechos humanos en las relaciones dominico-haitianas en el siglo XXI . FLACSO/CIES UNIBE: Santo Domingo, pp. 237–276. Martínez S (2014) “The Price of Confrontation: International Retributive Justice and the Struggle for Haitian-Dominican rights.” In George Andreopoulos and Zehra Arat (eds.), The Uses and Misuses of Human Rights: A Critical Approach to Advocacy. Palgrave: New York. Martínez S and Wooding B (2017) “El anti-Haitianismo en la Republica Dominicana: ¿un giro biopolítico?” Migración y Desarrollo 15: 95–125. http://rimd. reduaz.mx/revista/rev28/4.pdf. Moreno P 2015. RD no repatriará extranjeros digan que nacieron aquí. El Nacional, 31 de agosto. http://elnacional.com.do/rd-no-repatriara-extran jeros-digan-que-nacieron-aqui/. Murray G F (2010) Sources of Conflict Along and Across the Haitian—Dominican Border. Pan American Development Foundation: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. OBMICA (2017) Estado de las Migraciones que atañen a la Republica Dominicana 2016. Editora Búho: Santo Domingo. Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas (ONE). 2013. Primera Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes en la República Dominicana [First National Immigrants Survey in the Dominican Republic]. Santo Domingo. Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas (ONE). 2018. Segunda Encuesta Nacional de Inmigrantes en la República Dominicana [Second National Immigrants Survey in the Dominican Republic]. Santo Domingo. OIM-Haiti (2006) Document de Politique Migratoire Haïtienne. Unpublished: Port- au- Prince. OIM-Haiti (2016) Border Monitoring SITREP, 29 de diciembre de 2016. http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/border_monito ring_sitrep_lxxv.pdf. OIM-Haiti (2017) Border Monitoring SITREP, 9 de marzo de 2017. http:// reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/border_monitoring_sitrep_ lxxxv.pdf. Paulino E (2016) Dividing Hispaniola: The Dominican Republic’s Border Campaign Against Haiti 1930–1969. University of Pittsburgh: United States. Petrozziello A and Wooding B (2013) “Borders, Buscones, Brothels and Bi_national Markets: Haitian Women Negotiate How to Get Through.”

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Cultural Dynamics: Insurgent Scholarship on Culture, Politics and Power 25 (2): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374013498141. Philoctète R (2005) Massacre River, trans. Linda Coverdale. New Direction Books: New York; original title: Le peuple des Terres Mêlées [1989]. Prestol Castillo F (1973) El Masacre se pasa a Pie. Editora Taller: Santo Domingo. Ramírez G. ed. (2000) Mis 43 años en La Descubierta. Editora Centenario: Santo Domingo. Riveros N (2014) Estado de la Cuestión de la Población de los Bateyes Dominicanos en Relación con la Documentación. OBMICA, Editora Búho: Santo Domingo, República Dominicana. Sagas E (2000) Race and Politics in the Dominican Republic. University of Florida Press: Gainseville. Schoaff J L (2017) Borders of Visibility: Haitian Migrant Women and the Dominican Nation-State. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Turits R (2002) “A World Destroyed, a Nation Imposed.” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3: 635–689. Wooding B “Haitian Immigrants and Their Descendants Born in the Dominican Republic.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Oxford University Press. Article published January 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/ acrefore/9780199366439.013.474. Wucker M (1999) Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang.

CHAPTER 7

‘When Dialogue Is No Longer Possible, What Still Exists Is the Mystery of Hope’: Migration and Citizenship in the Dominican Republic in Film, Literature and Performance Maria Cristina Fumagalli

Across-the-border exchanges along the frontier which divides the island of Hispaniola in two between Haiti and the Dominican Republic have often been characterized by conflict and violence. The first clashes between the Spanish, who arrived on the island in 1492, and the French, who slowly began to invade the northern side of Hispaniola, took place in the seventeenth century and the French colony of Saint-Domingue was officially established in 1777. The warfare produced by the 1791 revolt and Haitian Revolution, during which the border between the two sides often shifted or disappeared altogether, the Haitian occupation of the Spanish side between 1822 and 1844 and, more recently, the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans in the Dominican borderland have all

M. C. Fumagalli (B) University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_7

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contributed to cast island and borderland as sites of violent confrontation. As a result, the relationship between the two nations sharing Hispaniola has often been framed according to what some scholars have called ‘the fatal conflict model’ (Martínez 2003) which posits the two sides as incompatible neighbours constantly at each other’s throats (Wucker 1999). This model, however, has been questioned by others because it tends to overlook many collaborative linkages and productive exchanges between the two peoples of Hispaniola (Derby 1994; Derby and Turits 2006; Fumagalli 2015; Martínez 2003; Matibag 2003; Turits 2002). Yet, even those who oppose the ‘fatal conflict model’ admit that ‘there is a struggle taking place on the island of Hispaniola [which] focuses on the specific issue of immigration’ (Martínez 2003, p. 94, italics in the original). Caught in this local ‘struggle’, which, however, has often seen the involvement of the global community and international organizations‚ are the Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans who live in the Dominican Republic and whose status as migrants or Dominican nationals has never been properly regularized. Dominicans of Haitian descent‚ Haitian migrants with irregular status or long-term residents in the Dominican Republic, in fact, have often found themselves in a difficult predicament and have routinely been subjected to the threat of deportation or expulsions, especially when politically expedient. In September 2013 the heated debate on citizenship and migration came to a head when the Dominican Constitutional Court ordered that all birth registries from 1929 should be audited for people who had been (allegedly) wrongly registered as Dominican citizens. This ruling followed a series of laws and administrative procedures aimed at affecting the status of Dominican-born children of Haitian parents and at removing Dominican nationality from Dominican citizens of Haitian ancestry who had previously been granted Dominican identity documents. In 2010, for example, the right to Dominican citizenship was restricted to those born in the country and who could prove that one of their parents was a ‘legal’ resident. However, in the preceding decades, a substantial number of long-term residents of Haitian descent were brought into the Dominican Republic to work for the Dominican sugar industry as a result of business agreements which did not provide them with the documents which were requested in 2010. In 1952, for example, an agreement signed by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo and ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, the then President of Haiti, enabled Trujillo to control and channel the flux of migrants and allowed Duvalier and the Haitian authorities to earn $7

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million per year for providing Haitian labour to the Dominican Republic. This agreement clearly benefited the political elites of both countries at the expense of the dispossessed‚ and different variations of it were in force until 1986 (Martínez 1995, p. 46; Matibag 2003, p. 155). Furthermore, despite the fact that until 2010 ius soli was supposed to grant birthright citizenship to those who were born in the Dominican Republic, birth certificates were often arbitrarily refused to children whose parents were of Haitian descent by the Dominican Junta Central Electoral (‘Central Electoral Committee’) which was in charge of registering them. Such refusals effectively deprived of their citizenship a number of children who were instead legally entitled to it, concomitantly denying them name, nationality, access to health care and education, and seriously hampered their ability to find a ‘formal’ job, secure a pension fund, get married, open bank accounts, purchase a house, obtain an inheritance: a life without a birth certificate, in fact, has been described as the life of ‘an underclass non-citizen’ (Wooding and Moseley-Williams 2004; Amnesty International 2013; Kristensen and Wooding 2013, p. 5). Most importantly, the absence of birth certificates made it impossible for parents to register one’s children’s births: as a result, these arbitrary denials have had the effect of perpetuating irregular status from one generation to the next. The Constitutional Court’s ruling of September 2013 was harshly criticized by the international community and the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights concluded that it arbitrarily deprived thousands of people of their nationality, in violation of their right to a juridical personality and affected in ‘a disproportionate manner those of Haitian descent who are also people of African descent and often identified on the basis of color, a fact that constitutes a violation of the right to equality and nondiscrimination’ (Organización de los Estados Americano [OAS] 2013). In response to international pressure, in November 2013, the Dominican Republic announced a national plan (Plan Nacional de Regularización de Extranjeros ) aimed at regularizing the status of long-term migrants with irregular status and, in May 2014, the Dominican Parliament passed a new law which established a process to restore nationality to some of those who had been deprived of it as a result of the September 2013 ruling and allowed the descendants of migrants born in the Dominican Republic before 2007 who had never registered to apply for ‘naturalization’ (therefore implicitly admitting they were ‘foreigners’ and not Dominicans).

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Nevertheless, due to lack of information, administrative and political interference, timetable and quota restrictions, financial issues and the difficulty in obtaining some of the necessary documents, only a tiny fraction of the affected population had a chance to apply and see their rights restored. As a result, a very large number of people were (and still are) left officially stateless and at risk of being deported to Haiti, a country that many of them have never seen, where they have no family or acquaintances and whose official languages (French and Kreyol) they cannot speak while some were forced to move and live in extremely precarious conditions in makeshift camps on the Haitian side of the border. In the following pages I will analyse a film, a novel, a documentary and several visual performances concerned, in different ways, with unregulated migration, the threat of deportation, the status of long-term residents and the predicament of Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic immediately before and after the 2013 ruling. Only a month before the Dominican Constitutional Court passed its controversial ruling, the Dominican artist Polibio Díaz received an award from the Santo Domingo Museum of Modern Art for his video-performance Manifiesto. Manifiesto features two irregular Haitian immigrants driven around the city of Santo Domingo on 18 December, International Migrants Day as they read the International Immigrants Movement Manifesto in Spanish and Kreyol. The Manifesto was conceived by the Cuban artist Tania Bruguera and her collaborators on a five-year project called Immigrant Movement International which invited artists from all over the world to produce works which would illuminate the conditions and experience of migration (Bruguera 2011). The International Immigrants Movement Manifesto comprises ten principles on which the migrants who have authored it fully converge: the third principles states that ‘to be a migrant means to be an explorer; it means movement’. As anticipated, in Díaz’s Manifesto, the ‘movement’ of the two migrants driven around Santo Domingo is at the core of the performance but Díaz seems to be concerned simultaneously with the migrants’ ‘right to move’ and their ‘right to not be forced to move’ (Principle 3). The fact that they are neither in charge of the vehicle nor responsible for its itinerary clearly alludes to both the way in which deportees are bussed to the other side of the frontier as if they were parcels and the conditions in which irregular migrants are smuggled or trafficked across the border in confined and hidden spaces at the back of trucks or other forms of transport.

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In Manifiesto, the car drives by a number of important sites, the first of which, the offices of the Junta Central Electoral, reminds viewers that arbitrary discrimination has played a crucial role in preventing many from regularizing their status. Other places on the migrants’ tour highlight the presence of established communities where people of Haitian descent have long resided (‘Little Haiti’) and the existence of ongoing exchanges between the two countries (a flea market which takes place every Sunday in the Dominican capital where secondhand garments and re-exports from Haiti are being sold). The country’s history of violent anti-Haitian policy is instead signposted by the monument erected in the spot in which Rafael Trujillo, who was responsible for the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans in the Northern borderland of the country, was assassinated. At the end of the video-performance, the couple read the final line of the International Immigrants Movement Manifesto—‘dignity has no nationality’, exit the car, and disappear in the hustle and bustle of El Conde, the main thoroughfare of the Zona Colonial of the Dominican capital, surrounded by Dominican and Haitian souvenirs which are sold side by side. The sale of Haitian products— which, however, more often than not are made to pass, at least tacitly, for Dominican souvenirs—reminds one of the many unacknowledged contributions made by Haitians to the economy of their neighbouring country; it also suggests the commodification of irregular migrants like the man and woman featured in Díaz’s video-performance. El Conde, the pedestrian road chosen by Díaz to close Manifiesto, connects Columbus Park and the Cathedral of Santa María la Menor, the oldest of the Americas, with the Puerta del Conde, one of the old city gates. In the nineteenth century, the Puerta del Conde was the scene of the proclamation of Dominican Independence from Haitian rule on 27 February 1844 and the place where the Dominican flag flew for the first time. The remains of the founding fathers of the Dominican nation (Francisco del Rosario Sánchez, Pablo Duarte and Matías Ramón Mella) are sheltered in the Altar de la patria (Altar of the Fatherland) which is only a few steps away in what is now called Independence Park. Significantly, for a short time after 1844, El Conde was also rechristened Avenida de

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la Separación (‘Separation Street’) to celebrate the ‘separation’ of the Dominican Republic from Haiti.1 Walking from Independence Park to Columbus Park and the Cathedral, therefore, amounts to a walk through the history of the Dominican Republic where one’s stepping-stones are a set of icons which have been deployed to forge a Hispanophilic and anti-Haitian notion of Dominicanness. The symbolic value of these icons, however, is complicated by the fact that while the two migrants walk along El Conde, Haïti Chèrie, the unofficial Haitian national anthem, is played as a soundtrack. Arguably, an intriguing possibility is created between what the audience can hear—Kreyol and a celebration of Haitian identity—and what it can see—two figures disappearing amongst the crowd in Santo Domingo, entirely indistinguishable from the other pedestrians. This simultaneous, non-antagonistic but complementary evocation of different visual and aural emblems of national identification illuminates the complex identities which inhabit Hispaniola and celebrates the ‘international connectivity’ that, as The International Immigrants Movement Manifesto insists, ‘is the reality that migrants have helped create’ (Principle 1). Yet, if the two migrants seem to have re-acquired freedom of movement once they get out of the car and begin their walk, blending with the rest of the pedestrians, one has to be mindful of the extreme precariousness of their situation: while pleading for a more humane treatment of migrants and for the respect of their human rights, Díaz’s performance also highlights how, regardless of their status, Haitian irregular migrants and Dominicans of Haitian descent often try to keep a ‘low profile’ and ‘blend’ in with the crowd for fear of deportations or expulsions. It is worth pointing out, in this respect, that the portion of the Manifesto warning that ‘when the rights of migrants are denied the rights of citizens are at risk’ (Principle 10) is read aloud and translated while the two migrants are exiting Santo Domingo’s Little Haiti, an area not too far from El Conde and home to many Dominicans of Haitian descent. The locus of enunciation of these words, if reconsidered retrospectively in the light of the denationalizing effects of the September 2013 ruling, makes them sound sinisterly prophetic.

1 Information displayed in January 2013 on a public information board situated on the Conde and prepared by the Santo Domingo City Council and the Santo Domingo Tourist Board.

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The threat of deportations and expulsions is also brought to the fore in the opening scene of the film Cristo Rey, directed by Leticia Tonos Paniagua who co-wrote the script with Alejandro Andújar. The story features the interconnected lives of Dominicans, Haitian-Dominicans, long-term resident Haitians and recent migrants in Cristo Rey, a poor barrio or neighbourhood of the Dominican capital. The protagonists are two star-crossed lovers: Janvier, who was born in Santo Domingo from a Dominican father and a Haitian mother, and the Dominican Jocelyn who is the sister of El Bacá, the leader of a gang which controls the territory. Jocelyn is also the love interest of Janvier’s half-brother, Rudy, who shares with Janvier the same Dominican father but is the legitimate son of two Dominican parents. Cristo Rey premiered in Santo Domingo on 25 December 2013, only three months after the Constitutional Court’s ruling of September 23, while the debate over denationalization was becoming particularly fierce and journalists, intellectuals, human rights groups, faith-based organizations and NGOs from within and without the Dominican Republic were expressing their opposition.2 The subtitle of the film, ‘One Island: Two Worlds’, seems to lock, at least discursively, the two countries which share Hispaniola in ‘the fatal conflict model’ since it suggests the existence of insurmountable differences and, possibly, antagonism between the two countries sharing Hispaniola, and then superimposes this template on the community of Cristo Rey, leaving little hope for a future of communality. During a collective interview to promote the film, however, the director Leticia Tonos Paniagua and her three main actors (Yasser Michelén, James Saintil and Akari Endo) expressed their desire to transmit to the viewers a positive message of love, tolerance and solidarity (‘Entrevista en Mariasela’ 2013). The cast of the film, moreover, seems to implicitly counter the ultranationalistic notion of the Dominican Republic as ‘the most Spanish people/nation in the Americas’3 (Balaguer 1994, p. 63) since it reflects instead the complexity and heterogeneity of those who nowadays live in 2 Only a couple of weeks earlier, for example, after a visit to the Dominican Republic (2– 6 December 2013), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had condemned the Constitutional Court’s ruling discrimination’ (Organización de los Estados Americano [OAS] 2013) and the group Dominican@s porDerecho (‘Dominicans for Human Rights’) and the Comité de Solidaridad con las personas desnacionalizadas (‘Solidarity committee with denationalized people’) organized Abrazo Solidario (‘Solidarity Embrace’), a one-day event in support of those affected by the ruling (Episcopal News Service 2010). 3 In Spanish, the word ‘pueblo’ used by Balaguer means both ‘nation’ and ‘people’.

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the Dominican Republic: while Janvier is played by James Saintil who was born in Haiti but resides in the Dominican Republic, Akira Endo (Jocelyn) is a Dominican of Japanese descent, and Yasser Michelén, the name of the actor who plays Rudy, suggests instead a Levantine heritage. The fact that El Bacá is played by Leonardo ‘Big Mato’ Vazquez, a wellknown American-Dominican reggaeton/Latin singer from Queens, New York, provocatively includes diasporic identities in what can be seen as an implicit attempt to rethink and redefine the parameters of ‘Dominicanness’. Proponents of ultranationalism and anti-Haitianism, in fact, often consider American-Dominicans guilty of polluting traditional Dominican values with their ‘foreign’ influence as much as Dominicans of Haitian descent and Haitian migrants (Núñez 1990, p. 55).4 As anticipated, Cristo Rey begins with what seems an anti-immigration raid in the streets of the barrio. When Janvier is caught in the confusion and disparagingly addressed as ‘Haití’ by the police, he reaffirms his individuality and his citizenship by firmly replying: ‘My name is not Haití, it is Janvier and I have my cédula’. A Dominican cédula or identity card should protect him from the abuses that irregular migrants face on a daily basis but, after throwing Janvier onto the ground and pointing a gun to his head, Colonel Montilla, the man who masterminds this police operation, reveals that documents are inconsequential: in actual fact, it is up to him to decide who can stay and who has to leave. The film here courageously denounces the many abuses perpetrated by those who are supposed to uphold the law (but also seems to put the blame solely on corrupt individuals) and the effects that these abuses have on the community itself: later in the film, Montilla is described as the kind of person whose presence makes it impossible for Haitians, Dominicans and Haitian-Dominicans to live together in peace. Considering that it is this corrupt policeman who, ultimately, seems to be the one who really calls the shots and controls the territory, it is only appropriate that El Bacá is named after a supernatural being who, in both Haitian Vodou and Dominican Vodú, takes the shape of an animal and protects the estate of his ‘master’. During the raid, while Montilla is threatening Janvier, his mother, fearing for her son’s life, intervenes pointing her machete at the Colonel’s 4 Diasporic Dominicans, moreover, frequently experience various forms of discrimination in the United States where they often realize the wrongness or at least the impracticality of anti-Haitianism (Torres Saillant 2010, pp. 51–56).

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throat but, quickly overwhelmed by the police and the military, she gets captured and deported to Haiti. Determined to bring his mother back to Santo Domingo by paying for her return passage across the border, Janvier accepts a job that El Bacá’s gang offers to him, namely to become the bodyguard of Jocelyn, El Bacá’s sister. When Janvier begins to protect Jocelyn, she does not seem to be happy with her brother’s arrangements and tries to get rid of Janvier. Jocelyn, however, is surprised and charmed by Janvier’s kindness, intelligence, sensitivity and his ability to read and write in French and Spanish. Janvier, in fact, is seen constantly negotiating his position as a Dominican of Haitian descent in his day-to-day life in Cristo Rey by carefully and strategically deploying his bilingual status. While he always speaks Kreyol with his mother, in the Haitian café where he hangs out with other Haitians and/or Haitian-Dominicans, he switches between Kreyol and Spanish but, during a brief confrontation with his estranged father, in order to confirm that he is proud of his Haitian side, he provocatively refuses to speak Spanish, a language he speaks fluently, albeit with a perceptible accent, everywhere else. His mastery of Spanish, moreover, is highlighted when we are shown that he is reading a canonical novel by a Haitian writer, namely Les Gouverneurs de la rosée by Jacques Roumain, in its Spanish translation rather than in its original language, a fact that implicitly celebrates transcultural exchange and translatability of experience between the two sides of the island, particularly because love, migration, community dynamics—not to mention death—are also important themes in Roumain’s novel. Significantly, according to Léon-François Hoffmann (2003), Roumain used for the first time in print the expression ‘gouverneurs de la rosée’ (‘masters of the dew’), which refers to those in charge of irrigation in a rural community, in November 1937, in an article in which he commemorated the Haitian and Haitian-Dominican victims of the 1937 massacre in the Dominican borderland. Janvier, however, reads aloud to Jocelyn a passage of the novel focused on the two lovers Annaïse and Manuel. The rivalry between Janvier and his half-brother Rudy is what causes the tragic ending of the film since Jocelyn progressively falls in love with Janvier, who reciprocates. When Janvier and Jocelyn plan to leave Cristo Rey together, Rudy, aware of their plans, frames Janvier for the murder of El Bacá who is in fact eliminated by Montilla.5 Amongst those duped 5 Significantly, Rudy’s plan to frame Janvier is successful because, as he puts it, resorting to crude but dubious raciologic essentialism, ‘all Haitians look alike’: rather implausibly,

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by Rudy is Pedro Lee (Moisés Trinidad), El Bacá’s closest associate, who, keen to revenge his former boss, engages in a machete duel with Janvier. This confrontation sharply divides the inhabitants of the barrio into two factions with the Haitian and the Haitian-Dominican community firmly on Janvier’s side while the rest support Pedro Lee. In the heat of the fight, Rudy incites Pedro Lee to show no mercy towards Janvier, reminding him that ‘These people [the Haitians] take all we have’: in other words, while Pedro Lee, who is of Chinese descent—when he refers to Janvier as ‘el haitiano’ he also refers to himself as ‘el chino’—is regarded by default as part of this (Dominican) ‘we’, Janvier is, one more time, identified as a ‘Haitian’ and as an outsider in his own community and nation, and, crucially by his own half-brother. Santo Domingo has a substantial China Town or Barrio Chino but descendants of Chinese migrants can be found throughout the city and the national territory. Chinese are generally widely accepted as part of Dominican society and ‘Dominicans try to include them in the “us” category’. This does not mean, however, that they are automatically accepted as ‘part of’ the Dominican national identity or ‘raza dominicana’ but, while a ‘Chinese racial identity can be a barrier to achieving la raza dominicana, [it] is not [an] insurmountable [one]’ (Chen 2008, pp. 29–31). In Cristo Rey‚ when Janvier has the upper hand on Pedro Lee‚ Rudy shoots him and Janvier dies in Jocelyn’s arms. One could argue‚ therefore‚ that the three male characters who die in Cristo Rey, namely El Bacá, ‘el chino’ Pedro Lee, and ‘el haitiano’ Janvier are, in different ways, presented as some sort of ‘outsiders’ in Cristo Rey either because of their descent (Haitian or Chinese) or because, in the case of El Bacá, they do not actually reside in the barrio: despite ‘controlling’ Cristo Rey, in fact, El Bacá no longer lives there—the fact that the character is played by the American-Dominican Leonard Vasquez obviously further reinforces this notion. Overall, if Jocelyn’s personal trajectory testifies to the fact that prejudice can be overcome—at least on an individual level—the deaths of the ‘outsiders’ Janvier, Pedro Lee and El Bacá seem to seriously hamper hopes for better intercultural relations. This is even more evident if we consider that it is the Dominican anti-Haitian Rudy who is bound to control Cristo Rey as the new accomplice of Montilla.

in fact, Rudy manages to persuade everyone that El Bacá’s killer was Janvier when, in fact, he was another young ‘Haitian’ (or ‘Haitian-looking’) man sent by Rudy.

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One could argue, however, the real ‘tragedy’ at the core of the film has nothing to do with its ending but is located in its non-diegetic elements: Cristo Rey, in fact, is prefaced by the following words which are supposed to clarify the context in which the action takes place: 1.2 million Haitians and their descendants are estimated to live in the Dominican Republic. 80% of them are undocumented. This is the story of one of them. Born of a Haitian woman and a Dominican man, Janvier lives in Cristo Rey.

The figure of 1.2 million is impossible to verify, particularly because it mostly refers to ‘undocumented’ people but, more to the point, Janvier is not an ‘undocumented Haitian’ but, as all children who have at least one Dominican parent, he has a constitutional right to Dominican nationality in accordance with Article 18 of the Dominican Constitution. The fact that here he is summarily referred to as an ‘undocumented Haitian’ is a significant and problematic slippage which denationalizes Janvier and puts him de facto in the same position of many of those threatened with denationalisation by the September 2013 ruling, many of whom, like Janvier, have never been to Haiti, are in possession of Dominican documents and have always considered (and still consider) the Dominican Republic as their own country. While Cristo Rey takes place in a poor neighbourhood of Santo Domingo, Rita Indiana Hernández’s novel Nombres y Animales (‘Names and animals,’ 2013a), written before the controversial ruling by the Constitutional Court but also published in the annus terribilis 2013, gives us an insight in a more affluent section of Santo Domingo through the eyes of a Dominican teen-age girl who slowly establishes a bond of transnational (and trans-class) friendship with a poor young Haitian migrant while her parents are in Seville to visit EXPO1992—an event which celebrates the global networks of capitalism while upholding the national(istic) paradigm. It is worth noting that Rita Indiana Hernández was one of the first to denounce the September ruling in an article for El País Internacional in which she condemns the exploitation of Haitians, argues that their contribution to Dominican economy should be acknowledged and celebrated and insists that their rights should be respected and not denied (Hernández 2013b), an argument which is also evident in the novel. Nombres y Animales explores the issues of exploitation of this

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vulnerable workforce as well as human (but not only human) rights violations by establishing an open dialogue with H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). The Island of Dr Moreau raises a number of philosophical issues, including moral responsibility and the limits of cruelty, human identity, human interference with nature, the proximity between humans and animals, but also the ways in which the law can be arbitrarily mobilized to support subjugation and the barbarous treatment of others. H. G. Wells’s novel provides epigraphs for all of Hernández’s chapters and for the book as a whole, subtly ‘translating’ Dr Moreau’s island into Hernández’s Santo Domingo, a place where the boundary between humans and animals is often blurred in metaphorical ways, and where, as one of the characters in Nombres y Animales points out, ‘animals have no rights and people are animals’ (14). Hernández’s interest in this topic is better understood if one remembers that her novel is set in 1992, the year of the commemoration of the ‘discovery’ of America which resulted in the genocide of the indigenous population of Hispaniola and the introduction of slavery on the island. Genocide, slavery, exploitation, trafficking, racism and other forms of oppression and discrimination have often depended (and continue to depend) on the arbitrary categorization of others as animals and on the implication that it is in fact acceptable to be cruel to animals. The harsh conditions of irregular Haitian migrants are approached in Hernández’s novel as one of the by-products of an exploitative and hypocritical society where those who enjoy power and wealth are incapable of empathy and solidarity with their fellow humans and push to the margins those who are most vulnerable (Haitian migrants but also animals, the poor, the elderly, the mentally ill), often turning them into disturbing versions of Wells’s ‘Beast People’. It is noteworthy that, with just one consonant change, the Spanish title Nombres y Animales becomes Hombres y Animales, that is ‘men and animals’ or ‘men and beasts’. Most of these undesirable and disquieting creatures, unsettling symptoms of the sick society in which they live, orbit around the veterinary clinic of the protagonist’s uncle: primary examples include a one-eyed German Shepherd locked in a cage, a crack-addict called Micki-Mau or ‘rat’, a pug dog which drinks plum juice from a feeding bottle, a maid with a hyena’s laugh, policemen who look like gorillas in uniform, and different pets pampered by the irregular Haitian migrant Radames, who becomes their coiffeur. It is significant that when Radames explains that

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his ‘hair-stylist’ skills derive from the fact that, back in Haiti, he used to cut his little sisters’ hair, the veterinarian immediately rebukes him for the improper comparison because‚ he insists‚ ‘his little sisters are humans and not animals’ (53). The reader soon realizes, however, that the vet’s words just amount to hypocritical political correctness: Armenia, his servant for fifteen years, is provided with living conditions which a dog, the narrator insists, would find unacceptable (88) and his clinic was bought with the money that his wife made (and continues to make) in the construction industry through the exploitation of thousands of irregular Haitian migrants (Radames used to be one of them) whom she clearly regards as interchangeable property and expendable labour force rather than as human beings (203). It is not surprising, therefore, that, time and time again, when one of the ‘patients’ of the veterinary clinic requires assistance in the night, it is Radames who, provided with just a mat to sleep on, has to spend the night with the animals. On one of these evenings, the narrator decides to keep him company for a little while: at this point, in fact, she has overcome her initial embarrassment and the anxiety of being seen in public with a ‘haitiano’ (106). Unfortunately, when Radames goes to a nearby shop to buy her a drink, he falls victim of an immigration raid and is thrown on a truck directed to Haiti with other deportees whose eyes, we are told, resemble those of ‘cows going towards a slaughter house’ (194). While for some eyewitnesses of his arrest, Radames was just another ‘monkey’ taken to the ‘zoo’ (195), the narrator is totally distraught by his disappearance and begs her aunt to find a way to bring Radames back. Annoyed because she has lost one of ‘her Haitians’ and not at all worried for or sympathetic to Radames’ predicament (203), the aunt, who privately considers all politicians as ‘scoundrels’ but, for pure expediency, officially supported Balaguer in the 1986 election (121), agrees to mobilize her contacts at the border, that is the informal scouts and corrupt officers who generally provide her with Haitian labourers for her construction business. The end of the novel, however, suggests that she will be too busy travelling to India on holiday to pursue the matter further, a sad reminder of how expendable irregular migrants are for those who profit from their work. The issue of the Haitian contribution to the construction industry in the Dominican Republic was also raised in 2005 by the Dominican artist David Pérez-Karmadavis with Mano de Obra Barata (Karmadavis 2005). For this performance Karmadavis contracted a Haitian builder working in Santo Domingo and asked him to prepare a block of concrete which

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was allowed to set with a shovel positioned in it vertically: this ensemble formed a ‘statue’, a provocative monument to the contribution that irregular Haitian migrants make to the Dominican economy while living in very precarious and vulnerable conditions. That this vulnerability is not necessarily the migrants’ fault is made very clear by Delecha, a short film by the young Haitian director Dominique Télémaque who lives and works in the Dominican Republic (Télémaque 2012). In 2011, Delecha won the first prize in the ‘Festival Minuto Anticorrupción’ and features a Haitian (played by Télémaque himself) who refuses to pay a corrupt Dominican official to obtain false papers to legalize his position in the Dominican Republic, insisting instead that things should be done in the right way (‘delecha’ is the Spanish word ‘derecha’—‘right’—pronounced by a Kreyol speaker who finds it difficult to pronounce his ‘r’). The migrant’s inability to pronounce his ‘r’ reminds one of the 1937 massacre of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans which is also known as the perejil (‘parsley’) massacre because some historians have argued that, since there were few physical and cultural markers to separate Haitians from Haitian-Dominicans and Dominicans in the borderland region, in an effort to identify ethnic Haitians in the mixed population of the borderland, Dominican soldiers asked their prospective victims to pronounce the word perejil. Since Haitian Kreyol uses a wide, flat r, Haitian Kreyol native speakers find it difficult to pronounce the trilled r in the Spanish word for perejil: if the word came out as the Haitian pe’sil or a bastardized Spanish pewehi, the victim was condemned to die (Castor 1987, p. 26; Aquino García 1995, p. 120). It is significant, therefore, that in ‘Delecha’, pronouncing ‘l’ instead of ‘r’ becomes a trait which distinguishes a honest and law abiding aspiring Dominican citizen from a corrupt official who puts his own personal profit above his own country’s legislation. The 2015 documentary Citizens of Nowhere, directed by Regis Coussot and Nicolas-Alexandre Tremblay, also underscores how unregulated migration has traditionally benefited unscrupulous civil servants and members of the oligarchy. In one of the interviews featured in the documentary, this point is confirmed by the journalist Juan Bolívar Díaz, a vocal opponent of the September 2013 ruling who was vilified in the media, included in the so-called Album of the Traitors, and made the target of death threats for his uncompromising views. Bolívar Díaz explains that human trafficking of Haitians across the border is a lucrative business that has existed for many years: Haitians, he adds, are preferred

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to other migrants because they are readily available and ‘a cheap and servile workforce without the power to make any claim’. Citizens of Nowhere is punctuated by the image of a young migrant walking across the Haitian-Dominican borderland with a small rucksack: we see him with or without shoes, hiding behind trees, crossing main roads very quickly not to be seen, climbing over walls, marching through woods and semi-desertic areas. Many people cross Hispaniola’s border on foot, either resorting to the help of smugglers or following the steps of friends and relatives who had previously embarked upon this journey and can suggest where to find a network of safe houses and, eventually, how to reach the capital or other destinations. At the end of the documentary, the man is seen fording the Massacre River with water up to his chest; he then eats tinned food alone, in the street, at night, and in the company of stray dogs. The juxtaposition of human and animals here reminds one of Nombres y Animales where the migrant Radames—who also crossed the border walking for miles, swimming across the river and feeding himself with what he could find on the way (‘bananas, oranges, sugar cane, soil’ 178)—signposts a condition which often seems to be inscribed in a liminal ‘interspecial’ space. This solitary man (or man-dog) is not the only border-crosser in Citizens of Nowhere. For example, when the gate on the bridge on the River Massacre which separates Haiti from the Dominican Republic is opened by a soldier on market day, a myriad of people from Haiti, mainly women with their wares on their heads, start running into the Dominican town of Dajabón in order to secure a good place to sell their products; at the same time, under the bridge, we see others crossing on foot from one shore of the shallow river to the other. The frontier markets which take place on the Dominican borderland can also function as a point of entrance for irregular migrants because, according to a special migration arrangement, Haitians are allowed to enter Dominican territory on market days. Strictly speaking, they can only travel as far as the market town and are supposed to return to Haiti on the same day but the very large number of people that cross the border on these occasions and the confusion in which their entrance takes place (as the documentary shows, it is very often almost a stampede) makes it impossible to check that all those who have entered in the morning are actually going back in the evening. Citizens of Nowhere focuses on the issue of denationalization in the aftermath of the September 2013 ruling and analyses both its causes and effects. While the Dominican sociologist and political scientist Wilfredo

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Lozano explains that the ultra-nationalist parties and the elite who have traditionally profited from irregular migration put pressure on the government for a new migration law in order to block access to citizenship for Haitian-Dominicans and long-time resident Haitians, the Dominican historian and economist Bernardo Vega reminds viewers that many of those who lived for decades in the Dominican Republic and now risk to be sent to Haiti (together with their descendants who were born in the Dominican Republic) were in fact brought in the country with the consent of both governments. The old Delinois, who recounts his experience directly to the camera, is a case in point: he arrived in the Dominican Republic when he was eleven and Trujillo was still in power and, while working for the sugar industry, he had an accident in the canefields as a result of which he lost a leg. After many years of neglect he is still hoping for a form of compensation or a pension to make ends meet. Delinois, who, significantly, speaks only Spanish during his interview, is in possession of the photographic form of identification issued to him when he was employed in the sugar refinery of Rio Haina. In 2012 this kind of document was deemed acceptable, at least theoretically, to apply for a pension but, since 2014, it is no longer possible to apply for a pension with the photographic forms of identification provided to workers by sugar refineries, a fact that deprives many elderly people like Delinois of social security: by the end of 2014 out of 16,000 workers only 2090 had obtained their pension while an extra 6000 applicants had not yet received an answer (Riveros 2014, p. 130). The irregular status of the first generation who worked in the sugar cane fields is shown to have had serious repercussions on the status of subsequent generations. Roberto and Anderson, two young Dominicans of Haitian descent whose main ambition is to pay back their parents who spent all their lives working in the canefields by pursuing their studies and a professional or artistic career, explain that the 2013 ruling has stripped them of their nationality and prevented them from going to university or finding a job. The ruling has also made them vulnerable to expulsion from the country of their birth which is also the only country they have ever known. Roberto and Anderson proudly repeat, over and over again, that, despite the fact that they cannot get a birth certificate or a cédula because of their parents’ status, they feel Dominican and are Dominicans and deeply resent that the only option they are given to regularize their own status is to register as ‘foreigner’, that is to implicitly admit that they are not Dominicans. Their determination to reassert their nationality at

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all costs invites us to rethink the very title of the documentary: far from considering themselves stateless ‘citizens of nowhere’, they feel they fully belong to a specific place and are adamant that they are in fact citizens of a specific country, namely the Dominican Republic. Roberto and Anderson, moreover, are well aware that they are actively being transformed into the ‘others’ against whom ultranationalistic exclusionary discourses encourage Dominicans to imagine both themselves and their nation and enthusiastically use their music and the Dominican language to refute not only their (alleged) ‘foreignness’ but also their ‘non-existence’. They lament, in fact, that the 2013 ruling makes them feel as if they ‘do not exist, as if [they] were not part of this world’, extending the parameters of their exclusion beyond national boundaries and into an ontological dimension. In other words, rather than a society where, as in Hernández’s novel, ‘people are animals’—a statement that can mean, simultaneously, that some people are mistreated but also that some people treat others inhumanely—Roberto and Anderson depict to us a frightening situation—a ‘civil genocide’, as the Dominican journalist Bolivar Díaz has put it (Díaz 2011)—in which human beings are turned into expendable and alien ‘non-beings’. The stories and life experiences of Delinois, Roberto, Anderson and others are interspersed with the commentaries of journalists, human rights activists, academics, historians and members of the public. Members of the Junta de Vecinos of Santiago de los Caballeros, a group of activists who vehemently oppose Haitian immigration, explain that the Dominican Republic is a very poor country which cannot afford to welcome or regularize hundreds of thousands of Haitian immigrants. They are worried about what they call ‘the fusion of the island’, namely another Haitian invasion and occupation of their territory which, they claim, is spearheaded by irregular migrants (‘a Trojan horse’) who, with the tacit support of human rights organization and the United States, aim to kill all Dominicans by poisoning the water reservoirs. Disquietingly, this ‘plot’ sounds remarkably similar to Makandal’s conspiracy to poison the water of all the houses in Le Cap in the 1750s (Fick 1990, pp. 61–62) but it is hard, here, to draw the line between mystification and misinformation. For example, an allegation is made that lethal chemical products smuggled by Haitians were found in the Bay of Montecristi: in actual fact, toxic waste was found in the port of Montecristi between 2002 and 2003, but Haitian migrants had nothing to do with it.

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In 2007, the North American Applied Energy Services (AES) corporation, in fact, agreed to pay $6 million to settle a lawsuit when the Dominican Republic accused AES of having conspired with Dominican Republic officials in order to dump rockash in Dominican waters without observing the correct protocol for the depositing and disposal of toxic material. According to Dominican Today, moreover, rockash was also dumped ‘at the mouth of the Massacre river, on the Haitian side of the border’ (Adams 2005; Fumagalli 2015, pp. 293–303; Pancrazi 2009; Zapata 2007). According to the member of the Junta de Vecinos, the ultimate objective of Haitians is to put an end to la raza dominicana (which they describe as ‘European’) by targeting Dominican girls (the ‘golden geese’ who ensure the continuity of the ‘European’ genetic pool) and resorting to war tactics which, it is claimed, all Haitian children are taught at school, precisely for this purpose. Their point of view is put across with astonishing conviction and the danger inherent in such antiHaitian rhetoric is all too real, as footage of recent violent mob attacks to Haitians and/or Haitian-Dominicans included in the documentary clearly highlights. For these attacks, many blame the attitude of the media which dangerously foment anti-Haitianism; as Bolivar Díaz explains, despite the fact that ultranationalists (like the members of the Junta de Vecinos ) are a minority, the majority of the Dominican newspapers actually tend to assume and defend the ultra-nationalist position. Racism and negrophobia are invoked repeatedly in the documentary as root causes of the 2013 ruling and anti-Haitianism but, since Dominicans have in fact a rather complex relationship with race, what the audience hear often appears to be at odds with what they see: for example, it is evident that many of those who carry out attacks against ‘Haitians’ are as dark-skinned as their victims, and that some of those who define Dominicans as ‘Europeans’ would in fact be described as coloured or ‘black’ in, for example, Europe or the United States. Coloured Dominicans, in fact, have always been encouraged to join the white minority in embracing Eurocentricism and Hispanophilism and in dismissing the importance of the African heritage in the national culture, a legacy which is often attributed only to the presence of Haitian migrants. In the process, many have developed what has been called a ‘deracialized consciousness’ which has hampered the establishment of alliances along ethnic lines and the development of a discourse of black affirmation as a counterpart to intellectual negrophobia and an anti-Haitianism predicated on racist terms (Torres Saillant 2010, p. 33). While Dominican attitudes towards race

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and colour could have been better explained in Citizens of Nowhere, also some the causes of Haitian migration could have been further explored. Migration (to the Dominican Republic or elsewhere) is presented as the only option for Haitians: at the very beginning of the documentary, the commentary, written and read as voice-over by the Haitian writer Jean-Claude Martineau, explains that migrants choose to leave to look for a better life ‘because staying [in Haiti] means poverty, hunger and misery’. It is undeniable that life conditions in Haiti are extremely difficult but it is also important to avoid the risk of endorsing the ultranationalist argument that the Dominican Republic is unfairly given the task to sort out Haiti’s problems. Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic has a long, complex and diversified history and its causes are less straightforward than this statement accounts for. Towards the end of Citizens of Nowhere, the camera shows us a cockfight—a visual reference to the ‘fatal conflict model’ which posits the two nations as two fighting cocks locked in mortal combat. Importantly, the animosity between the two countries sharing the island of Hispaniola is re-qualified here as the product of governmental ‘divide and rule’ tactics to oppress the poor. Across-the-border solidarity amongst the disenfranchised is highlighted instead when the documentary presents us with a group of homeless Haitian and Dominican children and teenagers who live together in a dilapidated building of the capital. Often harassed by the police, they survive washing windscreens, shining shoes or ‘doing whatever they can, without hurting anyone’. They appear to feel reasonably safe within their little community and their experience seems to support principle 5 of the International Immigrants Movement Manifesto which states that ‘solidarity is [the migrants’] wealth’. Solidarity is also posited as what fuels hope for a better future as Citizens of Nowhere challenges the construction of Haitians and Dominicans as hereditary enemies: for example, the help which, during the 1937 massacre, many Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans received from Dominicans who put their lives at risk in order to protect them is celebrated together with the assistance provided by Dominicans to Haitians in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake (in a devastated Port-au-Prince the camera zooms in on the Dominican Red Cross). Martineau’s voiceover further highlights transnational communality: along the border, he argues, people have used the same churches and shared the same food for generations: ‘we help each other, we come together’, he concludes. Crucially, these across-the-border collaborative linkages have often been

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established against the directives of the central national authorities. It is not surprising, therefore, that for those who promote across the border dialogue and cooperation, the borderland is the very place which can facilitate a better knowledge and understanding of the question of citizenship (Torres Saillant 2004) while Dominican ultranationalistic discourses have repeatedly referred to the border as the ‘fracture in the national territory’ and the all too porous point of entrance of Haitian immigration which can ‘disintegrate the moral and ethnic values of the Dominican family’ (Núñez 2004; Balaguer 1994). Immediately before or in the aftermath of the 2013 September ruling, therefore, Manifiesto, Cristo Rey, Nombres y Animales and Citizens of Nowhere (through the communal experience of the young squatters) rethought the transnational borderland of Hispaniola no longer as a geographical area but as an intercultural reality which shapes the lives of many in the urban dimension of Santo Domingo. In January 2014, instead, the artist Karmadavis returned to the geopolitical borderland itself with the performance Comedor familiar (‘Family Meal or Family Dining Room’). Comedor familiar was given a special mention at the XXV Concurso de Arte Eduardo León Jimenes and recognizes the borderland of the island as a contact-zone which can play a decisive role in positing Hispaniola as a place where one could develop a national identity in relation with and not in opposition to one’s neighbours. First of all, Karmadavis placed a dining table straddling a small stream on the borderline between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, a visual reminder that the frontier often runs alongside a river—the Massacre in the north, the Pedernales in the South and the Artibonite, which has its sources in the Dominican Republic but empties on the Haitian coast, in the central portion of the borderland. Then, equipped with a cooking stove, Karmadavis (who is a trained chef) prepared a delicious lunch for a family of Haitian-Dominicans (mother, father and a little boy) who live nearby. The meal that Karmadavis prepared with the assistance of the artist Eduard Severino in the kitchen (while the photographer Pedro Genaro Rodríguez recorded the action) was a gastronomical fusion of ingredients and dishes typical of both nations. Comedor familiar means both ‘family meal’ and ‘family dining room’—that is the (safe) place where members of a family sit together, share food and renew their bonds of intimacy; the English subtitle of the performance, namely ‘Binational Kitchen’, reaffirms that such

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family and such bonds can transcend the limits of national identification. Karmadavis’s performance, therefore, both reflects and celebrates the transnational character of the Haitian-Dominican community and welcomes its three representatives as full members of the nation/family, openly defying the exclusivist notion of ‘Dominican family’ (‘white’ and with Hispanic origins) promoted by ultranationalistic and anti-Haitian discourses which have traditionally demonized the frontier and its inhabitants. However, the table on which the family ate had only three legs, to indicate the extreme precariousness of mixed families who now live not only near the border but throughout the national Dominican territory. At a troubled time when many Haitian-Dominicans were (and still are) de facto stripped of their nationality or were even relocated in precarious camps on the Haitian side of the borderland, Karmadavis’s Comedor familiar was and remains a provocative, timely, but, ultimately hopeful, act: as the epigraph to the performance explains, ‘when dialogue is no longer possible, what still exists is the mystery of hope’.

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Resource Centre (NOREF), October 2013, http://www.peacebuilding.no/ var/ezflow_site/storage/original/application/273b4770daf48a18c60d724a 641f0470.pdf [accessed 12 December 2017]. Martínez S (1995) Peripheral Migrants: Haitians and Dominican Republic Sugar Plantations. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press. Martínez S (2003) Not a Cockfight: Rethinking Haitian-Dominican Relations, Latin American Perspectives, 30(3): 80–101. Matibag E (2003) Haitian-Dominican Counterpoint: Nation, Race and State on Hispaniola. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Núñez M (1990) El ocaso de la nación dominicana. Santo Domingo: Alfa & Omega. Núñez M (2004) La Frontera y la Fractura del Territorio Nacional: Obstáculos en la Percepción del Problema. In Secretaría de Estado de las Fuerzas Armadas (ed) La Frontera: prioridad en la agenda nacional. Santo Domingo: Editora de las Fuerzas Armadas Dominicanas, pp. 47–61. Organización de los Estados Americano (OAS) (2013) CIDH culmina visita a República Dominicana, 6 December 2013, http://www.oas.org/es/cidh/pre nsa/comunicados/2013/09 7.asp [accessed 29 November 2014]. Pancrazi J-N (2009) Montecristi: Roman. Paris: Gallimard. Riveros N (2014) Estado del arte de las migraciones que atañen a la República Dominicana 2014. Santo Domingo: Observatorio Migrantes del Caribe/Editora Búho. Télémaque D (2012) Delecha, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivbYi4 SD5Wk [accessed 15 December 2017]. Torres Saillant S (2004) La Condición Rayana: La Promesa Ciudadana en el Lugar del ‘Quicio’. In Secretaría de Estado de las Fuerzas Armadas (ed) La Frontera: prioridad en la agenda nacional. Santo Domingo: Editora de las Fuerzas Armadas Dominicanas, pp. 220–28. Torres Saillant S (2010) Introduction to Dominican Blackness. New York: Dominican Studies Research Monograph Series—CUNY Dominican Studies Institute. Turits R L (2002) A World Destroyed, a Nation Imposed: The 1937 Haitian Massacre in the Dominican Republic, Hispanic American Historical Review, 82(3): 589–635. Wooding B & Moseley-Williams R (2004) Needed but Unwanted: Haitian Immigrants and Their Descendants in the Dominican Republic. London: The Catholic Institute for International relations. Wucker M (1999) Why the Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians, and the Struggle for Hispaniola. New York: Hill and Wang. Zapata R (2007) AES Settles Waste Suit with Dominican Republic, Law 360, 1 March 2007, http://www.law360.com/articles/19606/aes-settles-wastesuit-with-dominicanrepublic [accessed 15 December 2017].

PART III

Blurring the Borders: Envisioning Alternative Spaces, Bodies, and Tongues

CHAPTER 8

To Be or Not to Be… Giddy: Walking the Language (Border) Line Bernard Phipps and Sally Stainier

Borders. Frontiers. Lines. Borders, frontiers and lines. For compulsive wordsmiths like ourselves, the mere idea of discussing collective speech frontiers and related borderlines sounds like the most exquisite yet, vulnerable exercise. Because our scholarly line of work does not exactly allow for linguistic giddiness, nor does the general perception of our position as translators and teachers… language teachers. Juggling from one lingo to the other, never feeling entirely at home with either. Living off words and meanings and accuracy, in the shadow of speech loss and thoughts betrayed. Is language our medium or is it really the other way around? Where does the shift operate? When do we become the puppets of our own tongues, when do our thoughts get lost in the abyss of unsolved riddles?

B. Phipps · S. Stainier (B) Université des Antilles, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_8

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Neither language nor speech are a given.1 Nor is the tongue supposedly bequeathed to the child by his mother who, for motives shared by millions, refused to nurture it. The primal border. She spoke only Creole, the people’s tongue. Forbid her son, in words unvoiced, to walk that line alongside her. So the child grew up uttering French—the oppressor’s tongue.2 The child spoke with no assurance that his words were understood or at least, fully grasped. Later on, he spoke with no assurance, tout court,3 which he desperately hid behind a passion for fancy terms— or full sets of words he did not know the entire meaning of. As if to match the intersubjective opacity he vaguely sensed talking was all about. Returned from school and read his lessons out loud in hope or regardless of a mother’s response, perhaps just happy to pass on the divine substance of a supposedly emancipatory koine. This uncanny situation unfolds in Guadeloupe, years after the 1946 assimilation law that converted the butterfly island4 into a full-fledged French region attached to the mainland’s administrative apparatus. Nearly a century after the abolition of slavery, a chiefly rural society thus entered the march towards tertiary modernity—one dominated, in this case, by the quick expansion of civil service and associated generalisation of public education (Audebert 2012). School, until then, had been the privilege of a few, mostly determined by class rather than talent or equalitarian principles. The even 1 Ferdinand de Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics” defined language as a structured ensemble; a relatively stable system. He argued that a word’s existence as such relies on its relation to other words bound to contextualise its meaning. Which implies that no language can possibly display perfect synonyms (Auroux 2013). With the field of sociolinguistics emerged a different conceptualisation of language, described by Louis-Jean Calvet as a semi-chaotic, semi-multi-systemic “social institution” moulded through practices by the underlying linguistic ecology (Blanchet et al. 2014). 2 The rise of nationalist and separatist claims in the 1970–1980s, fostered a symbolic dichotomy between Creole, allegorised as the language of the people—lang a pèp-la— and French, associated to (neo)colonialism. The distinction relied significantly on the notion that Creole was the general population’s mother tongue (Phipps 2012)… A reality that dwindled steadily, however, with the spread of public education, as showed by Sally Stainier’s recent doctoral fieldwork on sociolinguistic representations among local teachers. Preliminary results show that French has asserted itself as the last generations’ first (acquired) language. 3 French idiom for “period!”. 4 Along with three other French colonies: Martinique, Guiana and La Réunion (in the

Indian Ocean).

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fewer chosen pupils from impoverished backgrounds did not only get the chance to earn a degree and the subsequent opportunity to escape the harsh realities of plantation work and urban hustle. They earned a holy Graal called French, primordial step up the social ladder and invaluable symbolic distinction from the uneducated, Creole-speaking masses (Phipps 2012). Hence, the democratisation of government jobs and access to general education marked a subtle-not-so-subtle turning point in the status of French as a language, which still acted as the key to economic achievement and social prestige, but was no longer a vanishing point on the horizon. Which is probably why Bernard’s mother, like countless others, chose to draw an early (fault)line in their communication scheme, that demoted Creole to the rank of the unfit while French rose to unprecedented prominence, in keeping with broader societal dynamics. The age of prohibition had begun, and many a child was found in a situation of hijacked intersubjectivity with the parental unit (Bébel-Gisler 1976; Hazaël-Massieux 1978). Bernard was taught not to speak his mother tongue (or is it his mother’s tongue?) just as he was compelled to forfeit left-handedness—another flaw, another inadequacy to get rid of at once. Inadequacy also affected the patriarch, who commanded both the dominant and dominated varieties of the local language ecology5 but had given up, for obscure reasons, on an Anglophone ancestry nonetheless revealed by his unusual last name. While recent history of the Caribbean area is one of intense migration flows, it is also one of pervasive stigma. And in a region as fiercely rhizomatic6 as ours, linguistic identities constitute the most visible markers of alterity. Because in a context of global decolonisation, its renewed affiliation to mainland France entailed significant economic and social benefits contrasting harshly with the surrounding precariousness, Guadeloupe attracted and continues to 5 For while French is the language of power (a legitimate medium in both formal and informal settings), the use of Creole in official or formal situations suggests either subversiveness or illiteracy. In both cases, its perceived inadequacy typically springs from symbolic rather than mere technical reasons (Phipps 2012). 6 Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concept, Martinique author Edouard

Glissant opposed rhizomatic thought—which envisioned identity as defined by One’s relation to Others—to the notion that identity could be comprised in and drawing from a single root. This substantial shift means to account for creolisation processes as profoundly diverse and inclusive, in sharp contrast with bipolar world views inherited from the West’s nationalist and colonial ideologies (Glissant 2007).

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attract a wide variety of Caribbean nationals from Dominica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic… Xenophobic patterns blossomed on linguistic grounds, exposing an extraordinary nativisation of State monolingualism as well as a fantastic rejection of the reflection in the mirror. Stereotypes flourished that joyfully equalled Spanish-speaking to prostitution, English-speaking to drug-related crime and (Haitian) Creole-speaking to unbearable misery—let alone voodooistic retardation. On the other hand, some migrants felt that passing on their mother tongue amounted to conveying harrowing pasts and memories, thereby preferring not to foster their spawns’ relation to such treacherous lingoes, or forgoing the transmission process altogether. Double-nested diasporas and domestic diglossia. No Creole for children born and raised in the mainland. For certain accents do not sit well with the Jacobine quest for perfect homogeneity.7 The Guadeloupean way of vocalising r’s, not to mention intonation patterns, stands for such undesirable distinctiveness. As he strove to embrace the Parisian standard for French8 and bury his sheet metal days underneath a fragile cover of late-acquired literacy, a father decided that his children’s future would not be hampered by the loud reminiscence of dire poverty and social nothingness. They grew up hearing Creole at parties, but were carefully kept out of a restricted domain that they have yet to enter to this day. Perhaps, the mixed-couple parental reality soothed the sense of cultural deprivation and paternal exclusion, inevitably induced by a unilateral choice once again driven by the fear of shackling the next generation’s shot at social progress. When Sally’s maternal grandfather landed in Nantes, a young professional soccer player with no Hexagon-based family, the BUMIDOM era 7 The French ideal of linguistic homogeneity is deeply rooted in the late eighteenthcentury revolutionary events, which brought Republican powers to construe language diversity as a two-pronged threat to national unity and the ongoing ideological shift. On the one hand, said plurality was perceived as a hurdle to the spread of revolutionary ideas—which had also been widely endorsing French as a medium. On the other hand, several regional tongues were suspected of potential subversiveness, due to their geographic and linguistic proximity to neighbouring countries (and rival powers). As a result, French was promoted simultaneously as a pillar of the nation-building process and champion of the revolutionary agenda (Benoit-Rohmer 2001). 8 In line with the Jacobine penchant for highly centralised power schemes, linguistics standards for French were built around a Parisian strain that does not account for the full range of French varieties found on the mainland and beyond (Calvet 2007; JeannotFourcaud 2017; David 2011).

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had yet to begin. In 1963, year her mother was brought into the world, the office for migrations from overseas dependencies commenced an eighteen-year reign that would lure in about seventy thousand Reunion, Martinique and Guadeloupe natives, seeking employment as all three islands (allegedly) suffocated under severe demographic pressure—a clear collateral damage of the collapsing sugar industry. Mostly confined to low-qualification jobs during the programme’s first decade, these internal migrants and the ones who followed soon seized the capital importance of speech standardisation as a means of (somewhat) overcoming educational gaps and systemic racist thereby advancing the central position of French in the next generation’s education—overseas as at home. Multiplying borders in the process. By the time Yvon’s daughter became Sally’s mother, language prohibition had turned into oblivion and oblivion was quietly passed on through the maternal link. So what do we refer to as mother tongue? Is it the tongue whispered, sung and shouted by a mother to her child? Could it be the unspoken part of a mother’s feelings and imagination or a child’s initial gibberish? Must there be a mother? What if she were to refrain from speaking—or her child, from responding? Or maybe, just maybe, is it a comfortable mirage eluding uncomfortable questions. For if Sally’s mother truly identified with Yvon’s roots but was denied access to his koine; how could she possibly speak and pass on French; a default language that she had no other choice but to embrace in the face of an unfathomable void?9 Even if that default option were, as a matter of fact, her mother’s tongue?10 9 Yvon deliberately chose not to pass on his first language to his children born in France to a French(speaking) mother, thereby stranding his daughter in a place where all things French (mother, society, culture, language) failed to account for her hybrid self and experience while Creole, a tangible rescue line, was kept out of her reach right from the start. A speaking subject left adrift, quite unlike Bernard, who learned Creole from his unwitting mother but never felt as if speech were taboo, regardless of any truncated intersubjectivity. 10 This joint contemplation on the mother tongue notion stems from its strong symbolic connotation, which should question its conceptual validity compared to that of first language, for instance. Despite the prevalence of symbolic value at the expense of scientific functionality, mother tongue continues to pervade official discourse and collective representations alike. Quite an elastic idiom, mother tongue may thus be used to refer to a heritage language, first language, native language, the language one speaks best or identifies with the most… which in multilingual contexts has proven a rather deficient and inaccurate definition (Béacco and Byram 2003; UNESCO 2003).

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The paternal branch is also one filled with linguistic cracks, intricate indicators of a multilayered exile. In fact, it was Sally’s father who showed her the way to the linguistic border zone. A place where identity is not so much defined by the language one speaks first, best or the most, but by the complementary logic of interlaced lingoes; a loose ensemble rather than a string of singular entities. There, he happily switched from French or English to Dutch, equally empowered by a non-hierarchical approach to any and all mediums of speech. He did not seem to care much for long lost Kinyarwanda, his father’s mother tongue, nor German—his mother’s. Embracing life at the border is simple enough, once you accept that no single language may characterise you but only the sum of all linguistic skills and resources collected along the path of perpetual nomadism. Having found early refuge in this personal, polyglot haven, Sally never regarded French as her mother tongue. Nor the concept of mother tongue as universally valid or applicable. For while her father ruled over his own linguistic no-man’s land, a fully free multilingual agent, her mother appeared a linguistic orphan, her halved tongue still swollen from a never healed removal. Must a child be heir to such amputations? And go on to inhabit such sacred wounds ?11 Is the idea of a father tongue even decent an alternative?12 Tackling notions of borders and frontiers from a scientific standpoint is no easy task. The former typically refers to man-made delimitations that might not always be literally visible but can at least be examined as social constructs or geopolitical markers. Natural borders do exist too; mountain chains, deserts, rivers… and the ocean obviously, one that the Caribbean archipelago is fundamentally acquainted with. Frontiers, however, engulf a much more symbolic sphere, evoking a breaking point between the

11 In his poem “Calendrier Lagunaire”, Aimé Césaire wrote that he inhabited a sacred wound… that we like to think of as language or rather the perpetual conflict between two inherent components of a single language ecology. 12 Embedding such strong connotations as maternity in a matter as non-neutral as

language is a topic worth discussing from both a philosophical and sociolinguistic standpoint. Especially as Western thought will more likely associate mother with instinct and father with authority, one might wonder how and to what extent this gendered linguistic terminology might affect multilingualism management on both individual and collective scales.

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known and the unknown—as opposed to varying degrees of continuity between two distinct but recognisable areas.13 It is no doubt a bit of both meanings, seventeen-year-old Bernard took on as he travelled to Montserrat, along with a small group of young Guadeloupeans with probably no other motive than visiting a nearby island. Why, the Phipps had originally come from that tiny but extremely volcanic piece of Commonwealth land14 —which more or less consciously inspired young Bernard to charter a small plane and knock at the Chief Minister’s door no later had he set foot on the fatherland. Boldness paid off and the group was invited by the local head of government for tea the next day. Looking back, the author wonders what might have gotten into his teenage self, whose fluency in English had yet to emerge and yet, the move had to be done if anything, for the sake of curiosity. Considering the two-pronged parental silence aforementioned, this attempt to fill in a few gaps seems quite rational to say the least. But the quest unearthed tremendous anxiety, a life and death projection that would deter Bernard from ever considering a long-term stay in any Anglophone territory, which is where vertigo kicks in because seeking answers in two opposite directions at once leads to self-drawing-andquartering situations. Because searching for the missing paternal link appeared as a terribly irrelevant and even treacherous endeavour as long as the mother tongue sinkhole was left wide open, like building a skyscraper on quicksand. In Creole, bigidi refers to the act of wavering or more figuratively, to speech loss. Even more interestingly, it has come to define a particular way of dancing gwo ka, one of Guadeloupe’s afro-descending art forms—which involves hybrid conversations between three drums and a procession of bodies caught in a codified trance. The upright drum, called markè,15 appears to be leading this convoluted dialogue but actually responds to the dancer’s convulsive phrases, which in the bigidi tradition resemble the faltering steps of a drunkard, boding an imminent fall before regaining some balance and going on. One might wonder why a Frenchbased Creole would picture speech failure and general dizziness in the 13 These areas, however, might not be recognised as distinct or separate by all—making so-called borders and frontiers even more relative constructs (Canut 2001). 14 Although the family name was eventually traced all the way back to good old England. 15 Literally “marker” (of beats).

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words of a… foreign (and even enemy) tongue—regardless of past British presence in the now French Antilles or its evident lexical legacy.16 As if trespassing the language borderline was a schizophrenic endeavour per se, as if being giddy were the logical result of pushing past the impalpable frontiers of suppressed voices. The semi-conscious struggle to overcome the paternal rift while repossessing the unwillingly demised mother tongue urged Bernard to embrace English as a place of compromise; a place to wander in and around, free of any accountability but with a sense of half-rootedness. Finding solace in teaching an alien language he knew all too well he did not know; a shadow language of sorts that he was not too familiar with. A hypothetical parricide he had never been bold enough to actually commit—yet feared to be arrested and tried for at any time. Except for rare epiphanies, French remained his bedrock and Creole, a kingdom-for-a-horse, dubious battle or an estranged relative. Language matters have a lot more to do with emotions and mental objects than with technicality (Darvin and Norton 2016; Matthey). Sally’s upbringing brought her to consider such matters not so much as communication dealings but rather as infinite routes of creativity that could also turn into paths of mass destruction if mis- or ill-used. Growing up bilingual in Northern France, representations of linguistic adequacy did not entirely play in her favour since from the collective perspective, strict fluency may be disregarded depending on how distant from the prevailing norm. Accents and pronunciation translate the part of individuality embedded in speech, exposing one’s cultural anchors more than language alone—for language is but a generic system fiddled by the inescapable veracity of human diversity. Thus, speaking English with a non-French accent did not suit the general perception and little Sally soon relegated that slice of her voice to less public stages than school and linguistic subjects. The border zone still sufficed at the time. Experiencing otherness as an established minority was but a sensible annoyance. If not to be accepted, dynamics of exclusion were to be expected and therefore, oddly embraced to some extent. Failure to conform to sociolinguistic standards as an acknowledged part of the majority, on the other hand, entailed a whole new range of dilemmas. A twenty-two-year-old stranded in Guadeloupe where she had only set 16 As part of the centuries-long dispute for West Indian territory between eternal rivals France and Britain, Guadeloupe came to be a British possession as late as 1763.

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foot once before, Sally’s inability to speak local Creole—which she had construed, until then, as the natural extension of her mother’s truncated education—resembled a prosthetic limb, a valid response to misfortune but an incalculable handicap nonetheless. Belonging was a matter of speech more than a question of genes. An unanticipated frontier had risen from the ashes of oblivion in the shape of sociolinguistic malfunction. French childhood had given way to a Barcelona-based adolescence followed by a higher education debut in the United States, further entrenching Sally’s multilingual repertoire on the borderline. A rather balanced repertoire in fact, that included English as unconventional parental legacy turned academic lingo, Spanish as a linguistic rite of passage into adulthood and French as a de facto, granted but unchosen and univocal koine. A centred, equilateral triangle surrounded by more or less accomplished bits of Catalan, German, Italian… bound to gracefully crumble before Guadeloupe’s diglossic features. The term diglossia, now a staple concept in the field of sociolinguistics, was first coined by Charles Ferguson in 1959, to depict status disparities between at least two coexisting languages: with a high variety monopolising official arenas and uses, thereby enjoying considerable social prestige, opposing a low variety confined to informal spheres of speech (Ferguson 1959; Bernabé and Confiant 2002; Manzano 2005). In Guadeloupe, the former would be French and the latter, a Frenchbased Creole. Lambert-Félix Prudent, however, noted that local interactions displayed much more complex patterns, based on various levels of language within and between each koine (Prudent 1981). Given the French obsession with (language and speech) uniformity, practices such as code-switching and interpenetration phenomena—extremely common in multilingual contexts—have been sternly frowned upon in Guadeloupe.17 Its peculiar take on Molière’s language, no more peculiar nonetheless than others developed across the francophone world, continues to endure negative representations on both local and national scales, as shown in classrooms and the media alike (Blanchet et al. 2014; Canut 2001). Where does crossing the border become trespassing? Is code-switching an act of transgression or transcendence? Unless it happens to be open, going across the border requires some sort of authorisation, a passport, 17 Code-switching is switching from one language to the other within a same sentence or from one sentence to the other (Calvet 2013). Interpenetration refers to mutual syntactic and lexical inputs in language contact situations (Prudent 1981).

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a visa and a free pass. It also implies that the existence and equivalence of both sides, no matter how tangible or symbolical, is acknowledged to a sufficient extent as to provide for their interconnection. In contrast, trespassing suggests clandestinity—due to lack of permission (from an individual perspective) or recognition (from a broader standpoint). In other words, multilingualism and code-switching, both forms of bordercrossing skillsets or practices, are only as legitimate as their components benefit from equal approval and recognition, official approval and recognition, that is. Word choice matters. Distinguishing diaspora as a collective, bordertranscending—rather than a border-crossing—migratory experience (and culture) is key to understanding our relation to language diversity on both individual and societal levels. For the migrant figure evokes restricted freedom of being and upfront confrontation: it is expected to conform, at the very least, to entry and exit regulations as well as sociolinguistic norms. That ability and willingness to conform is what gauges its right to exist—the French integration motto being a perfect example of how perceived Otherness is required to give into an imagined Sameness, no matter how arbitrary and groundless (Lemière 2007; Fargeas 2007; Young 2011). As such, migrants can be compelled to sweep their distinctive background under the mat and attempt to fit in their host country’s designated boxes. Diaspora, in contrast, continues to imply—despite significant etymological shifts over time—statelessness and either literal or emblematic return to an original homeland. Thus, it suggests that as much as the community’s core identity should be preserved, it is bound to grow a composite identity of its own as a natural result of displacement (Ma Mung 2000; Hovanessian 1998). However, denial of this intrinsic and statutory plurality has countless diasporic players sway from checkpoint to checkpoint, when their experience at the border could/should really be that of an open crossroads. Which explains why so many end up stuck in linguistic homelessness or placed under linguistic house arrest, instead of experiencing multilingualism as a wall-free palace. Their diasporic backgrounds led both authors to settle right on a language borderline. Their journeys, however, differ ever so slightly. Prematurely deprived of a place where he could stammer in peace, Bernard must shed skins as he goes from one tongue to the other— and yet always finds himself fearing sudden muteness or an unfortunate lisp to come hamper his speech or deceive his train of thoughts. Which also resonates with a reluctance to expatriation fuelled by the dread of

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severing the few ties allowing him to be through speech, even to a selfconstrained extent. In contrast, Sally’s apprehension of sedentary living stems from a reliance on constant drifting for keeping her (linguistic) identities balanced—which proves a particularly daunting task on French soil given the permanence of the exclusion and oblivion playbook. The case for language co-officially18 and a paradigmatic shift in educational agendas draws from such transversal observations and travels. Here, the archipelagic nature of the Caribbean region and Guadeloupe’s ongoing interconnection with mainland France demands recognition of diasporic constructs as a matter of public wellness and democracy. Starting with practical consideration of language as a fundamental human right (Hamel 1995; Oakes 2017) and multilingualism, a widely predominant trait of human societies (UNESCO 2003) that should be fostered, not fought. In this instance, reassessing our general and individual approach to such diversity of speech, tones and phonemes could act as a stepping stone for a gradual but essential redefinition of Caribbeanness as a multifaceted but inalienable canvas rather than a shattered ensemble. Given the resonance of our shared history as Caribbean nationals and descendants, it indeed seems crucial to overcome the myriad layers of physical and mental insularity fomented by colonisations past and renewed, and embrace this region’s linguistic plurality as an interwoven and mutually nurturing set of communication resources. For State monolingualism as practised by the French Republic as far as its (former) empire stretches, has led generations of citizens to ignore a multilingual competence (Béacco and Byram 2003; Auger 2014; Blanchet et al. 2014; Castellotti and Moore 2002) embedded in most societies—if only allowed to see the light. Ideological and utilitarian hierarchisation of languages, which uses the school institution as a prime platform, is the reason why so many Creole-speakers in Guadeloupe and abroad, disregard their own bilingual skills and identity.19 The reason why so many of them struggle to use their tongues for what they are: mediums of both outward and inward communication. Upgrading the status of Creole as an entirely legitimate lingo alongside French must go hand in hand with a revision of language teaching

18 Meaning that both languages are legally considered equal in the formal arena. 19 As great Caribbean philosopher Bob Marley once said: “Don’t let them fool you, or

even try to school you”.

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paradigms and methodologies, so as to reflect both the complementary and indissociable nature of all koine in such overlapping diasporic contexts. As active language professionals, we are accountable for fostering freedom of speech and self-expression as non-negotiable prerequisites for democratic participation and interaction with an increasingly globalised world—more than false ideals of language perfection bound to perpetuate wrongful domination at the expense of long-due social peace and self-fulfilment. In that sense, co-officially is but a simple yet crucial stride from undue linguistic giddiness, to a place of free and happy stuttering.

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Castellotti, Véronique, and Danièle Moore. Représentations Sociales Des Langues et Enseignements. Guide Pour L’élaboration Des Politiques Linguistiques Éducatives En Europe — De La Diversité Linguistique À L’éducation Plurilingue. Division des politiques linguistiques, Conseil de l’Europe, 2002, 29 p. Darvin, Ron, and Bonny Norton. “Investment and Language Learning in the 21st Century.” Langage et Société, vol. 157, no. 3, 2016, pp. 19–38. David, Jacques. “Variétés de Langue et Diversité Des Approches Grammaticales Francophones.” Le Français Aujourd’hui, vol. HS01, no. 5, 2011, pp. 41–58. Fargeas, Catherine. “Démarches Pédagogiques Dans L’enseignement Des Langues et Cultures D’origine.” Le Français Aujourd’hui, vol. 158, no. 3, 2007, pp. 68–75. Ferguson, C. “Diglossia.” Word, vol. 15, 1959, pp. 325–340. Glissant, Édouard. Mémoires Des Esclavages. Gallimard, 2007. Hamel, Rainer Enrique. “Derechos Linguisticos Como Derechos Humanos Debates Y Perspectivas.” Alteridades, vol. 5, no. 10, 1995, pp. 11–23. Hazaël-Massieux, Guy. “Approche Socio-Linguistique de La Situation de Diglossie Français- Créole En Guadeloupe.” Langue Française, no. 37, 1978, pp. 106–118. Hovanessian, Martine. “La notion de diaspora: usages et champs sémantiques.” Journal des Anthropologues, no. 72–73, 1998, pp. 11–29. Jeannot-Fourcaud, Béatrice. “Contact de Langues En Guadeloupe et Acquisition Du Français Standard.” La Linguistique, vol. 53, no. 1, 2017, pp. 107–128. Lemière, Jacques. “De La Continuité Entre Deux Prescriptions. De L’‘intégration’ à L’‘identité Nationale’.” Journal Des Anthropologues, vol. Hors-série, 2007, pp. 185–199. Ma Mung, Emmanuel. La diaspora chinoise. Géographie d’une migration. Ophrys, 2000, 176 p. Manzano, Francis. “Les Langues Régionales de France Sont-Elles Égales Dans Le Recul?” Marges Linguistiques, 2005, pp. 133–156. Matthey, Marinette. Contacts de Langues et Representations. Edited by Marinette Matthey, Tranel, Neuchatel Univ. Inst. de Linguistique, 1997. Oakes, L. “Normative Language Policy and Minority Language Rights: Rethinking the Case of Regional Languages in France.” Language Policy, vol. 16, no. 4, 2017, pp. 365–384. Phipps, Bernard. “Le langage en mouvement,” in Mobilisations sociales aux Antilles — Les évènements de 2009 dans tous leurs sens (Dir. J.-C. William, F. Reno, and F. Alvarez), Karthala, 2012, pp. 215–241. Prudent, Lambert-Felix. “Diglossie et Interlecte.” Langages, vol. 15, 1981, pp. 13–38. UNESCO. L’éducation Dans Un Monde Multilingue. 2003. Young, Andrea. La Diversité Linguistique À L’école: Handicap Ou Ressource? La nouvelle revue de l’adaptation et de la scolarisation, no. 55, 2011, pp. 93–110.

CHAPTER 9

Blurring the Borders of the Human: Hybridized Bodies in Literature and Folklore Giselle Liza Anatol

Salvage the Bones, a 2011 [US] National Book Award-winning novel by Mississippi writer Jesmyn Ward, might seem to be a strange choice for discussion in a collection of essays in the field of Caribbean Studies. I argue, however, that the novel’s setting, along the US Gulf Coast just prior to, and then in the midst of, the devastating Hurricane Katrina, challenges the representation of the United States as isolated from the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas—much in the same way that Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) challenged geographical, cultural, and genre borders eighty years ago in its portrayal of Janie’s life journey and her experiences in a Florida community called the Muck. Both the US South and much of the Caribbean share similar climates, landscapes, and comparable histories of profiting off the African slave trade and plantation system, with people traveling freely and being trafficked between the Caribbean and North America’s Gulf Coast, making those regions analogous in terms of culture, architecture, and

G. L. Anatol (B) University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_9

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historical trauma. This essay follows in the legacies of Martinican theorist Édouard Glissant, Cuban writer Antonio Benitez-Rojo, US literary historian John Wharton Lowe, and scholars such as Keith Cartwright who trace the deep-rooted, yet often neglected, connections between the concepts and compositions of writers from the Caribbean and the US South. This sense of permeable national and regional borders runs counter to traditional literary study and the publishing industry, which have institutionalized rigid categories tending to preserve Eurocentric and Global North-centered canons. I contend that Ward’s novel follows in the footsteps of Hurston’s, with both striving to transcend and transgress boundaries, pushing readers to contemplate social inequalities in innovative ways. I will focus in particular on the two writers’ disparate perspectives on the borders between humans and non-human animals, although both perspectives serve, in the posthuman vein, to disrupt notions of what it means to be human for the audiences of their times. Both also trouble the primacy of Eurocentric definitions of American subjectivity hiding beneath a guise of pluralism. Editors Brian Russell Roberts and Michelle Ann Stephens and their contributors to Archipelagic American Studies: Decontinentalizing the Study of American Culture explore how “America,” typically conceived as a continental space, is in fact composed of, highly influenced by, and simultaneously answerable to various groupings of interconnected archipelagoes, islands, and coastlines. Although the redefinition of American Studies might initially be perceived as remaining US-centric, in that the States are still ostensibly at the center of the discourse, the collection of essays grew out of a series of conference sessions not focused on the United States, including “Rethinking Postwar Anglophone Caribbean Literature” at the 2015 West Indian Literature Conference, “The Grave Wave Off the Shores: Pacific and Caribbean Island Ecologies and Imaginaries” at the 2014 American Studies Association Convention, and “Archipelagic Thinking: Redefining Caribbean Studies in Dialogue with Archipelago and Island Studies” at the 2013 Caribbean Philosophical Association Conference. The editors, conference participants, and book contributors all reveal investments in (1) chipping away at notions of continental exceptionalism that confine Americanist scholarship and (2) expanding thinking about the insularity and provincial nature of archipelagoes. The same might be said of the work of critics such as Belinda Edmondson and Donette Francis, editors of “American Studies:

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Caribbean Edition,” a special forum of The Journal of Transnational American Studies. But Zora Neale Hurston’s position in Caribbean Studies is still a complicated one. As an ethnographer who traveled around African diasporic communities in the United States and the Caribbean recording the dialogue, folktales, and cultural practices she observed, she has been praised for her accurate rendering of voice and culture in Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938). While parts of the latter monograph critique French political, religious, and cultural imperialism, others reveal a distinctly US/American point of view, such as the report of her conversation about the US military occupation of Haiti in which she intimates that Haitians refuse to take responsibility for some of their political and economic problems, and she appears to dismiss the role of the United States in the island’s state of affairs (84–85). The titles of both books suggest a certain blurring of the typical rigid boundaries between animal and human. The phrase “mules and men” can be read as a subtle critique of the animalization of enslaved peoples of African descent—the “mules” forced to toil for the generation of capital of the [White] men who own them. And based on the brutality and inhumane nature of the system, Hurston suggests, along with other African diasporic writers, who is truly the Man, and who is the Beast? The collection also posits African-American women as the true “mules of the world,” oppressed in terms of race and gender. And in the title Tell My Horse, the “horse” refers not to a literal animal, but to the human host temporarily possessed by one of the loa in the vodun religion. Deity, human being, and the essence of the animal—a body being “ridden”—all occupy the same form. In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Hurston blends fiction with folklore, incorporating long passages on the exploits of Big John the Conquer (232), chant-rhymes (232–233), descriptions of dice “show-off game[s]” (233), and the art of Bahamian drumming (233–234). These sections cause a shape-shifting of the novel into a hybrid text. The narrative also describes the gradual integration of Caribbean people into a predominantly African-American community in the Everglades without being required to assimilate into the US-American “melting pot.” Janie and Tea Cake befriend the Bahamians, called “Saws,” who “had been gradually drawn into the American crowd” (228). At one time segregated by culture and nation of origin, the Bahamians eventually “quit hiding out

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to hold their dances when they found that their American friends didn’t laugh at them as they feared. Many of the Americans learned to jump and liked it as much as the ‘Saws’ (228). Tea Cake promises the character of Motor Boat that he will be crossing the geopolitical border in the opposite direction and ‘goin’ over tuh Nassau fuh dat visit widja when all dis [hurricane] is over” (242). Thus, the all-Black space of the Muck is rendered as a realm of collaboration and ethnic integration without the cultural imperialism and appropriation associated with mainstream culture, and without a sense of insularity and superiority that suggests it is the only place to be. Hurston is quick to point out, however, that other people of color— the Seminoles in particular—still live apart and do not mix with the Black population. They are subject to extreme prejudice from within the African diasporic community, reflective of mainstream bigotry: “Indians are dumb anyhow, always were” (229). Unity between all oppressed groups and the decolonizing of knowledge would certainly benefit everyone: If Janie, Tea Cake, and the rest of the Muck community would follow the Seminole migrants to higher ground and listen to their warnings about the imminent storm, many lives would be saved. The expertise of the indigenous people is denigrated, however, just as the “knowledge” possessed by the region’s animals is ignored: Some rabbits scurried through the quarters going east. Some possums slunk by and their route was definite. One or two at a time, then more. [….] Snakes, rattlesnakes began to cross the quarters. The men killed a few [….] Several times during the night Janie heard the snort of big animals like deer. Once the muted voice of a panther. (229–230)

The Caribbean people’s ability to interpret the landscape also comes into play in this moment, when “[o]ne of the Bahaman boys stopped by Tea Cake’s house in a car and hollered” (230). ‘Lias offers Tea Cake and Janie a ride in his car, choosing to read the behaviors of animals as more reliable than the behavior of men: [Lias] “De crow gahn up, man.” [Tea Cake] “Dat ain’t nothin’. You ain’t seen de bossman go up, is yuh? [….] It’s liable tuh fair off by tuhmorrer. Ah wouldn’t leave if Ah wuz you.” (230)

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When ‘Lias continues to argue, “De Indians gahn east, man, it’s dangerous” (231), Tea Cake responds: “Dey don’t always know, Indians don’t know much uh nothin’, tuh tell de truth. Else dey’d own dis country still. De white folks ain’t gone nowhere. Dey oughta know if it’s dangerous” (231). Tea Cake confuses aggression with intelligence and assumes the mantle of intellectual superiority held by his white neighbors. ‘Lias is almost persuaded, but his uncle will not let him stay. The older Bahamian man reprimands Tea Cake, “you gointuh wish you follow crow” (231). As the hurricane hits, borders between animals and humans get broken down. Janie and Tea Cake observe a dead man sitting on a knoll, “entirely surrounded by wild animals and snakes. Common danger made common friends. Nothing sought a conquest over the other” (243). Significantly, however, the storm itself is embodied as predatory animal: a “monstropolous beast [who] had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed his chains” (239). The waters “pursue” those who try to flee on foot and “growl” with apparently voracious intent (240). Hurston’s imagery recalls the tracking of enslaved people throughout the Americas who escaped their masters and were hunted down with the use of dogs. Hounds were trained to maim and sometimes kill “property” (vs. “human beings”), in the name of a capitalist enterprise founded on strict racial hierarchies. The hurricane passages in Their Eyes Were Watching God might be interpreted as Hurston’s critique of the bizarre and arbitrary definitions created to separate (White) human from (Black human-cast-as-object/) animal. The conflict between dogs and African diasporic communities is reinforced in the scene when Janie must share room on a swimming cow with a rabid dog. Unlike the dead man sitting on the hillock, peaceably surrounded by various creatures, the dog does not obey the rules of “common danger”; instead, it “growl[s] like a lion, stiff-standing hackles, stiff muscles, teeth uncovered as he lashe[s] up his fury[.…] The dog raced down the back-bone of the cow to the attack and Janie screamed” (245). As it attempts to preserve its “territory”—causing the further objectification of the cow, now simply a type of boat—and insists on the separation between human and animal, the dog is cast as utterly unnatural.1 1 Dogs typically take to the water, but the animal’s dread of the water not only signals its rabies infection, but its refusal to cross the border between dry “land” and the flood waters. In contrast, Tea Cake dives into the water “like an otter” (245) to save Janie.

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Notably, however, when the hurricane ends and the danger has passed, Hurston appears to realign her protagonists with a hierarchy that renders humans as superior to all other species. A doctor advises Janie to admit Tea Cake to the hospital for his rabies infection, so that he can be restrained and tended to, but she cries, “Ah can’t stand de idea us tyin’ Tea Cake lak he wuz uh mad dawg” (263). Rather than using a purely posthumanist lens to criticize her choice as positing humans as exceptional beings, akin to sovereign colonizers who dominate their non-human natural environments, one must take race into consideration; Janie’s opposition cannot be extricated from Europeans’ animalization of African American subjects. Hurston soon shifts the canine metaphor to a more literal transformation: Tea Cake’s dog- and wolf-like behaviors are signs of the severity of his illness; he is unable to connect properly with his “civilized” human traits. Janie finds him on the kitchen floor, crawling on all-fours like an animal, and she must “pet” him to soothe him (265). He craves only “to put his head in Janie’s lap” (266), much like a tamed pup. When she prepares to go out, “[h]e almost snarled,” looks at her with “blank ferocity” (269), and returns from the outhouse “with a queer loping gait, swinging his head from side to side and his jaws clenched in a funny way” (271). Tea Cake’s transformation is complete when he pulls a gun on Janie and she witnesses “the ferocious look in his eyes and went mad with fear as she had done in the water that time” (272). And just as the rabid dog bit Tea Cake, Tea Cake bites Janie, “clos[ing] his teeth in the flesh of her forearm” (272). All of these actions are cast as unnatural and disturbing, reinforcing the notion that animals and humans are completely distinct beings. Janie conveys the tragedy as Tea Cake’s inability to get “rid of that mad dog that was in him” (278, emphasis added). Significantly, the blurred boundary is cast as a type of possession: The spirit of the dog was in him but not him. The events in Salvage the Bones also involve the havoc wrought by a hurricane: they occur over twelve days in the summer of 2005, during the season that Hurricane Katrina ravaged the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Ward very carefully constructs a sense of the catastrophic impact of the hurricane, but also the environmental slow violence that has occurred and its injurious effects on human, animal, and “inert” natural populations. Readers see the sensational effects of Katrina in the same way that the Caribbean is often constructed in terms of disaster, devastation, and disease (when not longed for as the realm of eternally sunny beaches), but the author also brings one’s attention to the fact that the Batiste land has

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fallen into a state of disrepair and neglect over the course of several generations. The property is called “the Pit,” an undesirable name suggesting emptiness as well as the family’s place at the bottom of economic and social hierarchies. However, a pit is also the seed at the core of a fruit— an object that is the inedible remainder, commonly thrown away as trash, but also the potential source of a new sprout and (eventually) yearly crops of fruit. There are resources, but they are not being harvested for the benefits of those who reside here—much as is the case throughout the Caribbean, where forests have been demolished and the wood exported to Europe and other parts of the Global North.2 Esch Batiste, the fifteen-year-old African-American narrator of the story, and her family are clearly subject to “the Biopolitics of Disposability” (Giroux 175): an attitude that perniciously constructs “black people as less than human, closer to nature, […] primitive […], subhuman, savage, and disposable” (Carrico 27). One might consider media stories about natural disasters in Haiti and the rest of the Caribbean that not only reveal only Giroux’s “biopolitics of disposability,” but also repeat the dangerously static and simplistic story of the Caribbean as “undeveloped.” Haiti is commonly cast as “the poorest [to be read as the most pitiable, most primitive, etc.] country in the Western hemisphere,” and in the wake of the massive 2010 earthquake, language surfaced about Haitians’ inability to pull themselves out of poverty and despair. Christian fundamentalist Pat Robertson even stated that Haitians had brought the trauma on themselves by making a pact with the devil in order to escape colonial rule at the end of the eighteenth century. Ward’s “emphasis on both recycling and salvaging constitutes a powerful counter-discursive gesture” (Moynihan 565)—one that is crucial for understanding rural, African American, and poor regions of the deep South in the United States, but also for understanding the ideological strands that cross into depictions of Haiti, the Caribbean, and much of the rest of the Americas. As mentioned in the discussion of Their Eyes Were Watching God, dogs occupy a loaded space in much literature of the African Americas. Hounds were used to hunt down people who had escaped from slavery,

2 News stories typically do not explain that present-day “deforestation is due to the fact that people cut trees to make charcoal so they can cook [and eat]. While logging and the environmental devastation in Haiti has been the object of ongoing debates for decades, too often ecologists and other scholars do not make the link between colonialism, poverty, deforestation and capitalism” (“Tips”).

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and in the wake of slavery, people of African descent struggled to establish their separateness from animals. Richard Toler, recalling his experiences of enslavement in Virginia, noted: “The dog was superior to us; [at least] they would take him in the house.” He also recollected being “fed […] in a trough, jes’ like the hogs.” And for the subsequent hundred years, signs were visible in some US restaurants and other establishments that read “No dogs, negroes, or Mexicans.” Equating the three was a way to humiliate people of color, and turned on the notion of common subordination. It is not surprising, therefore, in Ward’s novel, to learn that Esch’s father and oldest brother Randall are adamantly opposed to having dogs in the house. Daddy constantly struggles to preserve the border between human animals and other species, saying to his second son, Skeetah: “You ain’t going out [to sleep] in no shed […] with no dog” (212). Skeetah insists on bringing his dog and her puppies into the house for the hurricane, revolting against Daddy’s and Randall’s belief that “This is a house [….] For humans. Not for dogs” (211). As was likely the case for Hurston while writing Janie’s story, part of this strict adherence to the boundary between human and animal spaces and species continues to result from attempts by colonized peoples—despite relentless images to the contrary—to prove their humanity and existence as beings with civic and cultural relevance. Ward’s erasures and muddling of the distinctions between animals and humans, alongside certain characters’ attempts to shore these boundaries up, serve to illuminate how injustices against non-human animals mirror the injustices against the most discriminated-against sectors of humans in contemporary society. Therefore, although Esch embraces the ancient Greek myth of Medea and Jason through much of the novel, misunderstanding it as a romantic love story, Ward does not allow her narrator to embark on the anthropocentric and individualistic epic journey of the typical hero of European/Western culture. According to this conventional storyline, “evil” is often embodied by the animalistic, dark Other.3

3 Ward’s weaving of the Medea story into her novel is a much more “Caribbean” political and aesthetic act of resistance than might be recognized in the United States. It resonates with Jean Rhys’s re-visioning of Jane Eyre in Wide Sargasso Sea (1967); Michelle Cliff’s portrait of Clare Savage in No Telephone to Heaven (1987), who imagines that her foremother is Jane Eyre before realizing that she is truly a descendant of Bertha; Derek Walcott’s adaptations of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Dante’s Inferno (among others) in Omeros (1992); Aimé Césaire’s and Elizabeth Nunez’s refashionings of Shakespeare’s The

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Obscuring the lines between human and animal in Salvage the Bones effectively unravels the hierarchy of human beings and non-human animals, as well as the hierarchy of races and complexions that has plagued the Americas. Examples of the obscured animal-human boundary abound in Ward’s text. When going to steal medicine for one of his puppies, Skeetah tells Esch, who stands lookout, to run if the homeowners return. “Don’t stop,” he says, looking me in the face, his head forward and down like a dog standing across from another at the end of his leash, straining, ready to fight” (68, emphasis added). When the two of them, plus big brother Randal, baby brother Junior, and friend Big Henry must run to escape getting caught, “we are a pack” (80). Big Henry is also described early on in the novel as “drinking from the faucet, wetting his head, and shaking it like a wet dog to make me laugh” (13). Esch remembers that Mama “cleaned us like kittens” (69), but also recalls that she “leaned over […], her strong hand soft on the back of my neck, steadying me like a dog” (199). Skeetah gets configured as China’s parent when, during the hurricane, he swaddles her as the family tries to escape the rising waters: “She is his baby in a sling” (231). Ward constantly works at portraying the sympathetic humans as non-human animals, and focuses on the communally-oriented and pack-like behaviors in which they engage, countering mainstream US culture’s privileging of an individualism and exceptionalism. In recent Caribbean scholarship, Monique Allewaert engages in a similar project, reconsidering the imposition of distinct categorical boundaries between humans, non-human animals, and plants to assert the place of the “parahuman”—a zone of connection that integrates rather than divides. She invokes anti-slavery rhetoric that challenged the dehumanization and dismemberment of enslaved peoples, contending that “the forced juxtaposition and confusion of humans, animals, and plants during slavery put into question the notion of a discrete and sovereign category of the human” (Loichot). In addition, she focuses on the ways that enslaved human beings themselves contested hierarchies by assimilating non-human forms to assert agency and put “animals, parahumans, and humans, in horizontal relation (that is to say para- or beside each other) without conflating them” (86). However, peril lies in the fact, just like Tempest; Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem as well as Windward Heights, and the list goes on.

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in Ward’s novel, that this approach might be said to reaffirm the trope of the animalized slave, or the perception of people of African descent as bestial, or simply just closer to nature. Where Ward concentrates her efforts for the most intriguing effect is in the unusual combination of brute strength and gentle intimacy. Esch reports that Skeetah’s friend Marquise owns a dog that he never puts into the dogfighting ring: [S]he is almost as clean as China. [….] Skeetah once told me that Marquise’s dog sleeps in the bed with him, in the house, every night. Skeetah had shrugged and sort of smiled when he told me, [… and] made me think that if Daddy weren’t here, China would sleep at the foot of Skeetah’s bed every night, too. (161)

There is a love affair at play in the narrative, more compelling than the one Esch dreams of having with all-too-human father of her child. Esch eventually grows to claim her female power. The way she perceives her relationship to China—erasing their species difference and claiming a nuclear family connection—is what gives her potency. She declares: China. She will return, standing tall and straight, [….] [S]he will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought. China will bark and call me sister. (258)

It seems especially significant for this analysis of Salvage alongside Their Eyes that China is a pit bull—a breed that is an ambiguous blending of two recognized lines (terrier and bulldog), hence more murky borders, and one that was largely associated with young men of color and criminal activity in the 1980s, and is still a highly stigmatized breed in many areas of the world, mirroring the Batiste family’s highly stigmatized position in society because they are Black and poor. Pit bulls have the reputation of being among the most dangerous breeds of dogs and have been banned in several cities even though controlled studies reveal no increased risk of bite from these animals. Ward’s choice to make Skeetah’s pet a pit bull seems intricately linked to issues of skewed Eurocentric perception, bias, and stereotyping—issues with which African diasporic communities, and particularly young Black males, have also struggled.

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While Zora Neale Hurston shatters the delicate wall between humans and non-human animals only to build it up again, Ward persistently works toward entangling, rather than disentangling, animals from humans in her novel. She accomplishes this through the relationships she crafts, the plot structure, and the layers upon layers of human–animal metaphors. In part, these efforts serve to undermine the human–animal hierarchy— and the long-standing racial hierarchy perpetuated by the enslavement of African peoples—by depicting the human characters as sometimes better, or superior, for acting more like animals than like themselves.

References Allewaert, Monique. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. American Veterinary Medical Association. “Dog Bite Risk and Prevention: The Role of Breed” (May 15, 2014). https://www.avma.org/KB/Resources/Lit eratureReviews/Pages/The-Role-of-Breed-in-Dog-Bite-Risk-and-Prevention. aspx. Accessed November 15, 2016. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. Carrico, Rachel. “Un/Natural Disaster and Dancing: Hurricane Katrina and Second Lining in New Orleans.” The Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research 46.1 (February 3, 2016): 27–36. Cartwright, Keith. “Voodoo Hermeneutics/The Crossroads Sublime: Soul Musics, Mindful Body, and Creole Consciousness.” The Mississippi Quarterly 57.1 (2003): 157–170. Cirrito, Meghan. “Asking Really Big Questions: Jesmyn Ward on Reading and Writing.” The Hub: Your Connection to Teen Collections (March 23, 2012). http://www.yalsa.ala.org/thehub/2012/03/23/asking-reallybig-questions-jesmyn-ward-on-reading-and-writing/. Accessed February 24, 2017. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth and George Handley, eds. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Giroux, Henry. “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class and the Biopolitics of Disposability.” College Literature 33.3 (2006): 171–196. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. 1981. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia/Caraf Books, 1999. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. New York: Routledge, 2010. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. 1935. New York: HarperCollins, 1990.

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———. Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. 1938. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. ———. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Johnson, Andy. “Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward (Review).” Callaloo 39.2 (Spring 2016): 493–495. Web/Project Muse. Accessed September 23, 2016. Lloyd, Christopher. “Creaturely, Throwaway Life After Katrina: Salvage the Bones and Beasts of the Southern Wild.” South: A Scholarly Journal 48.2 (Spring 2016): 246–264. Web/Project Muse. Accessed January 7, 2017. Lowe, John Wharton. Calypso Magnolia: The Crosscurrents of Caribbean and Southern Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Malewitz, Raymond. “Climate-Change Infrastructure and the Volatilizing of American Regionalism.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 61.4 (Winter 2015): 715–730. Web/Project Muse. Accessed September 23, 2016. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011. Noel, Katharine. “Where Is All the Sibling Literature for Adults? Katharine Noel on the Centrality of Sibling Relationships to YA.” Literary Hub (December 2, 2016). http://lithub.com/where-is-all-the-sibling-literaturefor-adults/. Accessed February 24, 2017. Parris, Brandy. “Difficult Sympathy in the Reconstruction-Era Animal Stories of Our Young Folks.” Children’s Literature 31 (2003): 25–49. Plate, Liedeke. “Remembering the Future; or, Whatever Happened to Revision?” Signs 33.2 (2008): 389–411. Roberts, Brian Russell, and Michelle Ann Stephens, eds. Archipelagic American Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Robertson, Pat. https://www.onfaith.co/onfaith/2010/01/13/haiti-the-deviland-pat-roberton/2342/. Sehgal, Parul. “The Wind and the Rain.” New York Times Book Review (January 1, 2012): 13. Accessed September 23, 2016. “Tips for Avoiding ‘Voluntourism’ in Haiti.” KU Institute of Haitian Studies (October 2016). http://haitianstudies.ku.edu/tips-avoiding-volunt ourism-haiti. Toler, Richard. Recorded in The American Slave, Vol. 16: 97–101. https:// owlcation.com/humanities/Slavery-in-America-Slave-Codes-in-Virginia-The1705-Virginia-Slave-Act. Accessed October 18, 2016. Ward, Jesmyn. “Jesmyn Ward on Salvage the Bones.” Interview by Elizabeth Hoover. The Paris Review (August 30, 2011a). ———. Salvage the Bones. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011b. Watt, Yvette. “Making Animals Matter: Why the Art World Needs to Rethink the Representation of Animals.” In Considering Animals: Contemporary Studies in

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Human-Animal Relations. Eds. Carol Freeman, Elizabeth Leane, and Yvette Watt. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2011. 119–134. Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930–1990. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.

CHAPTER 10

Borderless Spaces and Alternative Subjectivities in Narratives by Edwidge Danticat, Nalo Hopkinson and Olive Senior Myriam Moïse

Our body is not in space like things; it inhabits or haunts space. It applies itself to space like a hand to an instrument, and when we wish to move about we do not move the body as we move an object. We transport it without instruments… since it is ours and because, through it, we have access to space. (Merleau-Ponty, Phénoménologie de la perception 5)

In his 1945 theory on the corporeality of the consciousness and intentionality of the body, French philosopher Merleau-Ponty asserts that one’s bodily experience depends on one’s spatial positioning. Contrastingly however, African diasporic bodies’ access to space has long been denied, restricted and controlled by hegemonic forces. As for the African diasporic female body, it is an incorporeal subject where place, race and gender interlock. It is a body which suffers from the “placelessness” that

M. Moïse (B) Laboratoire Caribéen de Sciences Sociales (LC2S / CNRS), Université des Antilles, Schoelcher, Martinique e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_10

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feminist Luce Irigaray theorises in Ethics of Sexual Difference, a body which “is assigned to be place without occupying a place” (Irigaray, Ethics 45). To represent her bodily identity, the diasporic African Caribbean woman writer must defy space, she must “take space / make space” as Carole Boyce-Davies explains, “she must move out in areas not allowed” and transgress “restricted space” (“Carnivalised Bodies” 341). Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat and Jamaican Canadian writers Nalo Hopkinson and Olive Senior all depict alternative female subjectivities that exist beyond normative borders, as though their aim was to redefine the boundaries of diasporic African Caribbean female spaces. Hence, central to this chapter are three short stories by Hopkinson, Danticat and Senior whose discursive analysis demonstrates the extent to which borderless spaces may facilitate the emergence of alternative subjectivities that transcend given borders and reshape beyond normative frameworks.

Fluidity, Mythology and Multidimensionality Nalo Hopkinson’s short story “Money Tree”, extracted from her collection Skin Folk, allows the readers to visualize Jamaican geo-cultural spaces and discover African Caribbean mythologies through the water motif and the praise of maternal aquatic divinities. The River Goddess that is depicted, River Mumma, is a hybrid figure embracing African, Caribbean and European myths. According to American folk specialist Martha Beckwith, the myth is about “a blue hole near Lucea in Jamaica where the Spaniards are supposed to have sunk a table of gold, and then murdered a man whose ghost was set to guard it” in such a way that nobody has never managed to extract this table of gold from the river (102). But what Beckwith defined as a ghost is actually a water deity in African Caribbean folk narratives which draw on African mythologies, more specifically on Oshun, the Yoruba Deity associated with the power of water. “According to Yoruba elders, Oshun is ‘the unseen mother present at every gathering’ because she represents the cosmological forces of water, moisture and attraction” (Alvarado 34). A very prominent figure in Jamaican folk tales, River Mumma is believed to rest in one of Jamaica’s major rivers, the Rio Cobre. In Jamaican folk tradition, she is known as the guardian of the golden table and “is attributed the double role of sovereign of the waters and of possessor of precious lodes that are below the waters” (Pradel 148); hence, she masters the river’s surfaces and depths. “In

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Jamaica, Oshun reappears as the River Mumma of folklore and religion, both myal and revival” (Cooper, “African Diaspora” 292), and the followers of Myalism1 would give sacrifices and offerings to River Mumma at the Rio Cobre, where the gleaming waters often look like copper, a yellowish colour which further associates River Mumma and Oshun. A number of different names designate River Mumma across the Anglophone Caribbean: “Mamadjo” in Grenada, “Mama Glo” in Trinidadian folklore, “Watermama” in Suriname and Guyana (Rudiger and Gross 153). This river deity in the Caribbean is therefore a transcultural myth which transcends borders to situate itself at the crossroad of European and West African cultural histories. This creature has fused with the European mermaid but, as is characteristic of other such water women of Caribbean mythologies, is associated with river rather than with the sea, as happens in Europe. Also, as in West African beliefs about river goddesses, the Caribbean mermaid grants wealth and material success at the expense of fertility or happiness in marriage. (Monteith and Richards 94)

If numerous Jamaican tales portray the water spirits as both bringing benefits and taking revenge, the River Mumma tales tend to depict her as a revengeful spirit who punishes people for their greed or their excessive interest in their own financial profit. Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison’s poem “River Mumma Wants Out” ironically pictures a water deity who no longer wants to assist human beings without getting financial compensation: “Mumma no longer wants to be guardian/ Of our waters […] She no longer wants to dispense clean water/ To baptize and cleanse (at least not gratis)” (Goodison, Controlling the Silver 54). In “Money Tree”, Hopkinson chooses to situate the story outside of Jamaica; the main protagonist is a Jamaican young woman Silky who lives in Toronto with her brother Morgan, the latter being only referred to through Silky’s dreams and thoughts thus within an internally localised narrative. As the mythical and the personal merge throughout the short story, the diegesis is presented to the readers as embedded in the “golden table myth” that Hopkinson connects to a Jamaican family living in Canada, a fact which stretches the boundaries of the story to the diaspora: 1 “Myalism is an amalgamation of religious observances in Jamaica”; it contains “African and Christian religious elements, concepts and practices” (Pinn 323).

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After Mummy and Daddy died, the children’s grand-father came from Spanish Town to take care of them. He was the one who had told them the story about Jackson, a man who had lived just outside Spanish Town in the 1600s. People hadn’t known it at the time but Jackson had been a carpenter turned pirate. He was a greedy man. He had drugged the crew with doped rum and scuttled their ship at sea while they were in it. He had drowned his mates so that he could retire rich with their booty. “Guilt drove Jackson crazy,” Granpy told them. “The ghosts of the drowned pirates called from their grave in the sea and asked the river spirit for her help. They say she could have their gold if she gave them revenge”. (13)

The River Mumma legend is introduced by the narrator and told to Silky and Morgan by their grandfather who has travelled from Jamaica to Toronto, thus the short story progresses within a meta-narrative pattern: there is a tale within the tale, a common characteristic to Danticat’s short fiction which will be discussed thereafter. The appeal to River Mumma marks a discursive shift as it corresponds to the introduction of a dialogic pattern in which Silky and Morgan sometimes interrupt the story with their anxious questioning about the forthcoming events; hence, the storytelling context with a speaker and an audience is fully established, a somewhat Krik Krak narrative pattern which surely echoes Danticat’s dialogic dimension yet to be explored. “River Mumma told him she would have revenge, and she would have his gold. Jackson was afraid but he was more greedy than scared. He wasn’t going to let her have the doubloons. He used his carpenter’s skills to make a huge table of heavy Jamaican mahogany, then he nailed every last gold coin onto it. Hid it in his cellar. He stopped bathing, stopped talking to his neighbours, stayed in his house all the time.” “Then what happened?” Silky had whispered […]. It rained so hard that the Rio Cobre River that ran beside his property swelled up big. […] The house was demolished. River Mumma sent the water for him”, Grandpy said. […]. “What happened to the table?”, Morgan had asked. […] “No one ever fetched the table out of the Rio Cobre. They say that at the stroke of noon every day, it rises to the top of the water, and it floats for exactly twelve seconds, then sinks again, dragging anything else in the water down with it”. (13–14)

Here, the series of short narrative sentences interrupted by the children’s questioning emphasise orality and dialogism. The character of River Mumma is depicted as vengeful on behalf of the murdered mates,

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as she aims to do justice to the oppressed. Jackson on the other hand is only defined through his greed and stubbornness, but also through a sort of fixedness, specifically after his choice to nail the gold onto the wood. As he stops bathing as well as communicating with people, his choice to avoid contact with humanity and watery spaces contrasts with his sister Silky who appears as connected with the river deity from the very beginning of Hopkinson’s narrative. As Morgan abruptly interrupts the storytelling to inquire about the golden table hence demonstrating his inclination for money and material gain, Silky smoothly interferes in the grandfather’s tale as she whispers her speech, a similar utterance to River Mumma’s who also communicates by whispering into peoples’ ears at night. As a matter of fact, if the tale-within-the-tale announces Silky’s spiritual connection to River Mumma and Morgan’s financial greed, the water motif foreshadows Silky’s progressive self-awareness and inner exploration. Hopkinson adapts the myth and draws on River Mumma’s ambivalent maternal identity as the deity is both a punishing and loving mother, and her interest not only lies in transferring spiritual values on humanity and showing the right path, but also in transferring her heritage to her daughters. Silky’s mother herself is depicted as an heiress of River Mumma through her capacity to dive and swim beneath the water which marked Silky’s memories: She remembered her mother diving from the jetty into the dark water, circling down past the parrot fish and the long-snouted garfish, until Silky could barely make her out, her plum body shimmering greenish in the deep water. She seemed to stay under forever and it scared Silky and Morgan, but Daddy would simply smile. “is by the riverside I first met your mother. She was in the water swimming, like some kind of manatee. Mamadjo woman, mermaid woman. Happy in the sea, happy in the river!” He laughed. “What a man your daddy must be, he, to make a fair maid from the river consent to come and live on dry land with him. (10)

If the children’s anxiety at their mother’s diving contrasts with their father’s relaxed attitude, the whole episode contributes to associating Silky’s mother with a River Mumma figure, half human and half fish. Beyond the father’s apparent boasting about seducing a mermaid, his exclamatory accumulation of names comes to assert Silky’s mother’s fluid identity and her transferable spiritual powers. As the mother is compared

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to the parrotfish and the garfish and defined as a “mamadjo”, a “mermaid” as well as a “manatee” (sea cow), she becomes a sort of “fishwife”, an image used by Erna Brodber’s pregnant protagonist Nellie in Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home (71). At the close of Brodber’s novel, trans-aquatic fertility is illustrated through Nellie’s dream of being pregnant with “a large sized parrot fish, so large that it stretched (her) belly to the point where it became a square gold fish bowl with one fish stuck crossways with it” (147). Hopkinson’s imagery of the parrotfish works twofold as it implies repetition and mimicry as well as transformation and subversion, an ambivalent pattern, which can be applied to Silky’s mother. In fact, the latter is both an aquatic and human mother, hence she has the power of self-transformation; as she gave birth to a “fish-daughter”, she transferred her powers onto her while giving way to her individual identity. The parrot is emblematic of the discourse of repetition and the parrotfish associates discourse and water. As Silky is transformed into a water heiress, her intrinsic link with water is constantly put forward through the omnipresence of the diving and drowning motifs in the main narrative as well as in the protagonist’s dreams. During the narrative, Silky has three interconnected dreams linked with water, the first picturing “a flood drown(ing) the city below, then ris(ing) to engulf her” (8) and the last dream taking place by the Rio Cobre where she witnesses the Golden Table “sink(ing) back into the depths of the river” (16) with her brother whose voice confirms his gold quest as well as his fear for “the spirits to drag (him) down” (16). Everything appears to recall drowning or diving and real memories mix with dreamed realities, more specifically in Silky’s second dream, which is reminiscent of the Middle Passage: In it, she had survived the flood from the previous nightmare. She was swimming on the surface, above the drowned lands. Bloated corpses bumped her from time to time. The horror made her skin prickle. She put her face into the water to inspect the damage below her. She could see submerged roads, tiny fish nibbling at dissolving lumps of flesh, a sea anemone already blossoming on a disintegrated carcass that had sunk to the sea bed. The sea gave a greenish cast to the rotting flesh of the drowned people. (11)

While this episode recalls the Transatlantic crossing, it also suggests a certain oscillation between life and death. Contrasting with the rotten

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flesh and the dead human bodies, the tiny fish and the sea anemone survive and feed themselves on human remains. Sea animals eating human flesh may be interpreted as a subversion of Charles Darwin’s well-known theory of “Natural Selection or Survival of the Fittest” (1872). In fact, if it is acknowledged that aquatic creatures are the fittest to survive in a watery environment, Silky’s survival goes beyond natural selection and inscribes itself within a process of supernatural selection as her survival resides in her hybrid identity transcending accepted definitions of biological species. In Nalo Hopkinson’s short story, fluid spaces appear as gendered as while Jackson does not manage to overcome the obstacles raised by River Mumma and ends up engulfed by the river, both Silky and her mother have the power to occupy spaces which are usually inaccessible and inhospitable to humans: Silky’s mother indeed becomes a sort of “diving duppy” after her death, a “spirit of the dead, believed to be capable of returning to aid or harm living beings, directly or indirectly” (Cassidy and Le Page 164). Whispering into her daughter’s ear, she will help her to realise that she has inherited her water powers and her capacity to master aquatic depths and transcend borders. Before Silky achieves self-discovery, several episodes work within a foreshadowing dynamic throughout the story to announce her limitless powers. Whether it is the river or the sea, the water running from the tap or the hot baths she soaks in and even voluntarily sinks in at times, water appears as a part of her body, Silky “felt almost invulnerable, as though she could swim through air, or breathe in water” (19). The story actually explores a diversity of watery spaces from “the billions of gallons rushing over that mountain” in Silky’s first dream (7) to the Rio Cobre River and the sea, ending with the swimming pool at the very close of the story. Guided by her maternal “diving duppy”, the young protagonist soon comes to the awareness that her brother can also survive thanks to her water powers as in her second nightmare, Morgan takes the shape of a drowning man asking for her assistance. The final scene actually replicates Morgan’s need for assistance through the voice of an old woman swimming beside Silky in the pool and immediately compared to a walrus hence recalling previous comparisons between her mother and the aquatic animals. As a matter of fact, the old woman’s discourse echoes Silky’s mother’s as though she were a spiritual messenger from the aquatic realm: “Stubborn, greedy boy. But he’s my son from your mamadjo mother, so I’ll let you pull him out. You have to dive, though. You’re changed enough to do it now. But hurry daughter’s daughter!” (21).

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The old woman’s speech reveals her identity and her familial ties as she is Silky and Morgan’s grandmother and in this sense, despite his greed, Morgan may survive. As the swimming pool water transforms into an agitated watery space, Silky fully understands her powers and her connection with River Mumma and her daughters. “The river had found her” (21). Transcending her fears and doubts and “breathing in the strength of the river, she swam down with strong strokes to get her brother” (21). Hopkinson therefore confirms the myth of the Golden Table but chooses to transform it as Silky eventually embraces her mother’s water powers and manages to save her brother from drowning. The character of Silky may represent a modern version of River Mumma as her power manifests itself in the swimming pool; hence, Hopkinson extends the presence of water spirits to a first-world city space such as Toronto. In this sense, the narrative not only oscillates between Jamaica and Canada, between reality and dream, and between history and myth, it also enlarges the river motif associated with Oshun, to the artificial watery space of the swimming pool,2 above all, to the historicised space of the ocean. Fluid spaces thus appear as embracing multiple realities and as constantly redefining the borders so as to allow the (re)creation of alternative subjectivities.

Traumatic Spatialities, Borderless Bodies In Edwidge Danticat’s short story “Children of the Sea”, it is the traumatic space of the ocean which allows the creation of alternative subjectivities at the very bottom of the sea. In Danticat’s narrative, the metadiscursive pattern is materialised by the alternate use of bold and standard typologies, so as to identify a dual narrative pattern, the first story occurring on the boat, and the second in Haiti. In the storyline which occurs onboard the boat, fluidity appears as intermingling with trauma and pain: the sea water, the last drops of drinking water, the water sack of the young pregnant girl, and the urine. As in Hopkinson’s narrative, fluidity operates as a leitmotiv. As the sea water starts invading the boat, even the borders of the material space of the boat appear as fragilized through water. From the very beginning of the story, the bodies 2 Hopkinson’s narrative also resonates with Indian Canadian writer Rohinton Mistry’s 1995 story “Swimming Lessons” in which the swimming pool in Toronto is one pole of the East/West axis and Chaupatty beach in Bombay the other. See Concert of Voices: An Anthology of World Writing in English. Ed. Victor J. Ramraj: 248–267.

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themselves are depicted as borderless and distanced from their physical envelope; the “thirty-six deserting souls” who are drifting away are both epitomes of freedom and enclosure. In Danticat’s “Children of the Sea”, spaces are depicted as never-ending, as the first lines of the story state: «They say behind the mountains are more mountains. Now I know it’s true. I also know there are timeless waters, endless seas and lots of people in this world whose names don’t matter to anyone but themselves». As watery spaces are depicted as borderless by the narrator who points out that there is no borderlines at sea, identities are also depicted as fluid, but as needless because people’s names do not matter; hence, it is implied that neither the identities nor the physical bodies of the migrants actually matter on the boat. The space of the boat is multivocal and embodies the dialogic perspective of Danticat’s Krik? Krak! short stories, especially when the passengers kill time by telling folk tales: The sun comes up and goes down. That is how you know it has been a whole day. I feel like we are sailing for Africa. Maybe we will go to Guinin, to live with the spirits, to be with everyone who has come and has died before us. They would probably turn us away from there too. Someone has a transistor and sometimes we listen to radio from the Bahamas. They treat Haitians like dogs in the Bahamas, a woman says. To them, we are not human. Even though their music sounds like ours. Their people look like ours. Even though we had the same African fathers who probably crossed these same seas together. Do you want to know how people go to the bath-room on the boat? Probably the same way they did on those slave ships years ago. They set aside a little corner for that. When I have to pee, I just pull it, lean over the rail, and do it very quickly. When I have to do the other thing, I rip a piece of something, squat down and do it, and throw the waste in the sea. I am always embarrassed by the smell. It is so demeaning having to squat in front of so many people. People turn away, but not always. At times I wonder if there is really land on the other side of the sea. Maybe the sea is endless. Like my love for you.

From the space of the boat, the narrator reflects on Africa and the land of Guinea, the mythical space from which it is implied that Haitians could be rejected after all, as it is ironically stated. From the notion of rejection, the narrator then describes the Bahamas as a space from which

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Haitians are rejected, to move very swiftly to the practicality of finding a private space for bodily rejection. Indeed, after mentioning the mythical spaces of Africa, and then the discursive space of the Bahamas as it is only mentioned on the radio, the narrator abruptly takes us back to the violent reality of the space of the boat, and the physical necessity to find a private space within this open space. Spaces thus appear as even more borderless and bodies have to accommodate to this space, these migrant bodies which are depicted as reduced to a state of nothingness. Another central space onboard the boat is actually the physical space of Célianne’s body, as African American theorist Hortense Spillers would put it, it is “a body whose flesh carries the female and the male to the frontiers of survival” (“Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”). In fact, the first-person narration centres on Célianne, the young pregnant girl whose past traumatic story in Haiti has led her to this boat. […] Célianne is not bleeding at all. Her water sack has broken. The only babies I have ever seen right after birth are baby mice. Their skin looks veil thin. You can see all the blood vessels and all their organs. I have always wanted to poke them to see if my finger would go all the way through the skin. I have moved to the other side of the boat so I will not have to look inside Célianne. People are just watching.

In the above excerpt, the fluidity of the bodily space is highlighted through the imagery of the blood and the water sack. The narrator’s metaphor on baby mice does not only convey the bestiality of the scene, it also implies a physical rape through the narrator’s naive wish to push her finger through the mice’s skin. Like the mice, Célianne’s body is visible inside-out and as the boat is invaded with fluidity, Célianne’s sack breaks. The final scene with the baby’s body being thrown overboard by the mother, who then throws herself overboard thus dying with her baby, is reminiscent of a dual death: «They went together like two bottles beneath a waterfall». While the sea is depicted as having no mercy, it is however at the bottom of the sea that the narrator foresees her spiritual healing, within the fluid spaces of below. I must throw my book out now. It goes down to them, Célianne and her daughter and all those children of the sea who might soon be claiming me.(…) Perhaps I was chosen from the beginning of time to live there with Agwé at the bottom of the sea. (Emplacements Kindle 325–326)

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The throwing of the body is followed by the throwing of the discourse pictured by the book. This scheme is reminiscent of the imagery of the middle passage which is vivid in Danticat’s narrative as in Hopkinson’s; above all, fluid spaces allow to move beyond borders and recreate spiritual and discursive bodies which transcend the traumatised flesh. In fact, Célianne may experience what Wilson Harris theorises in the Womb of Space as “the dual death of Man, a cultural death followed by a psychical death as threshold to the savage paradox of re-birth” (60). As a matter of fact, both Silky in Hopkinson’s story and Célianne in Danticat’s narrative find self-expression in fluid spaces. Fluid spaces and the spaces of below become those borderless spaces which allow African diasporic female subjectivities to exacerbate and multiply, these alternative spaces of spiritual empowerment beyond normative framework. As Mimi Sheller puts it in Citizenship from Below, Beneath the dominant discursive regimes, there are subaltern projects of counter-claim, counter-gaze, and counter-performance, including the performance of alternative moral orders, alternative masculinities, alternative sexualities, alternative spiritualities, alternative spatialities of everyday life, and alternative identifications beyond and beneath the nation, tunnelling under its borders and escaping its governance. (Sheller 247)

In Danticat’s novel Breath, Eyes, Memory, the womb is itself a borderless space as it is both re-creative and destructive and embraces the consequences of alien pregnancies on the body. Developing an “other” within the self for the second time is in fact a conflicting situation for Martine, who already had difficulties when expecting Sophie, the fruit of a rape. In New York, Martine’s unexpected pregnancy for her partner Marc will thereby have retroactive effects on her body. Martine’s love for her daughter had developed once she managed to have her live with her in New York. Nevertheless, this love had grown incommensurate and hence, while testing her daughter, Martine would often tell her about the Marassas, the “inseparable lovers”. They were the same person, duplicated in two. They looked the same, talked the same, walked the same. When they laughed, they even laughed the same and when they cried, their tears were identical. […] Admiring one another for being so much alike, for being copies. […] You and I we could be like Marassas. (76)

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Martine’s wish to assimilate to her daughter denotes her unstable identity and her struggle within her inner self. The repetition of the adjective “same” conveys her wish for similarity in every aspect, including physical appearance, speech, and behaviour. The trope of the Marassas is central to the narrative and duality is constantly depicted as a survival strategy. While Hopkinson’s science fiction easily pictures invisible bodies, Danticat uses Haitian Vodou to enhance bodily performances of doubleness. There were many cases in our history where our ancestors had doubled. Following in the Vaudou tradition, most of our presidents were actually one body split in two: part flesh and part shadow. That was the only way they could murder and rape so many people and still go home to play with their children and make love to their wives. (146–147)

The omnipotence of Haitian men is further emphasised, as they demand virginity of their future wives while they often deprive other young women theirs through rape (e.g. Martine’s rape by a TontonMacoute in the cane fields). Doubleness is regarded as an ambivalent process in itself as on the one hand, it is used by hegemonic and patriarchal systems to multiply bodily oppressions and on the other hand, it is exploited by women in order to survive. While being tested by her mother, Sophie “had learnt to double. […] [she] would close her eyes and imagine all the pleasant things that [she] had known” (147). The doubling as depicted by Danticat is reminiscent of W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of “two-ness” and “double consciousness”, “two souls, two thoughts, two un-reconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body” (12) and also echoes Vèvè Clark’s highly influential essay “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marassa Consciousness” in which she distinguishes several “intriguing discursive strategies” (1991: 41). While Martine’s discourse materialises her double within her own daughter, and as she hopes for a Marassa-like relationship, Sophie’s double is an imagined one. Besides, if Sophie first exploits doubleness in order to escape the traumatic experience of testing, she also doubles herself during private moments with her husband Joseph (147). Both Sophie and Martine’s bodies experience trauma to different extents as they hate their bodies and resent them; but Martine’s difficulties lie more precisely in her inability to differentiate materiality from immateriality and negotiate her multiple voices beyond normative space.

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As she unconsciously refuses to make space for the new baby growing inside her, she sees it as alien to her body, a fact which recalls the foreignness that the protagonist Avey felt within her body in Barbadian American author Paule Marshall’s novel Praisesong for the Widow. Towards the end of the narrative, Martine’s growing madness and paranoia are central issues for when Sophie doubles, she imagines herself comforting her mother and experiencing the doubling: He reached over and pulled my body towards his. I closed my eyes and thought of the Marassa, the doubling. I was lying there on that bed and my clothes were being peeled off my body, but really I was somewhere else. Finally, as an adult, I had the chance to console my mother again. I was lying in bed with my mother. I was holding her and fighting off that man, keeping those images out of her head. I was telling her that it was all right. That is was not a demon in her stomach, that it was a child, like I was once a child in her body. […] Even if she had forced it on me, of her sudden will, we were now even more than friends. We were twins, in spirit. Marassas. (191)

Through the doubling, Sophie eventually foresees a spiritual connection with her mother and can now acknowledge their twin souls. While Sophie’s material body is depicted as static and lying on the bed, her spiritual body displaces to meet her mother’s. Danticat’s narrative technique allows swift movements from the material to the immaterial, thus picturing a materialised mind, one that displaces in and out. The assimilation of the cutting and sewing of the African female genital organs to “slicing open the soul” and to “an untouchable wound” (193–196) convey the impossibility to describe some physical wounds because of their horrendous nature. This constant chiastic pattern which blurs the physical and the spiritual further tends to erase the accepted differentiation and hierarchisation between body and soul. Martine’s body is a site of tensions par excellence as she has not dealt with her past ghosts and is still striving to construct her future. The conflict that lies within her soul is even worse as it is not pictured as reparable since she is having recurrent nightmares about the rape, “being raped every night” for the last twenty-five years (211), and this rapist cannot be named nor condemned. Martine “Was like two people; someone who was trying to hold things together and someone who was falling apart” (209). The baby that she sees as alien destroys her immaterial body, hence leading her to extract it herself. The blurring between the

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material and immaterial, the physical and the psychical reach its paroxysm when Martine eventually stabs her own stomach with a knife in order to kill the alien other within herself. “In blood, she was lying there in blood” (215). Martine’s act of despair and bodily speech echoes Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison’s vision in “Songs of Release”, of a wound which cannot be expressed through discourse, this condition “causing (us) to speak blood” (1992: 78). Martine’s impossibility to voice her wound has transformed into a bodily discourse as she speaks blood and rejects the foreign other, thus repossessing her body and soul. This schizophrenic condition is reminiscent of Doris Lessing’s engagements with insanity in her most influential novel The Golden Notebook, where she blurs the accepted distinction between sanity and madness. Danticat’s authorial choice to have Martine liberate the insane other hence reclaiming her own bodily speech, dramatically highlights the rejection of given borders and a quest for new strategies to liberate bodies, tongues and souls.

Shifting Subjectivities, Experiencing “in-Betweenity” In Senior’s short story “The Two Grandmothers” (from Arrival of the Snake Woman) which is central to the following analysis, the protagonist’s identity construction oscillates between tradition and modernity, between the storytelling of her paternal grandmother living in the country and the voice of her middle-class maternal grandmother. The story is divided into seven sections which describe the child narrator’s experiencing different sociocultural spaces as her vacation time is shared between the houses of her two grandmothers. Her paternal grandmother Grandma Del is an Afro-Caribbean rural working-class Jamaican whereas her maternal grandmother Grandma Elaine is a Brown middle-class Jamaican woman, a paradox which is reminiscent of Senior’s race and class dichotomies in a number of her narratives. Here, the young narrator faces difficulty in her construction of identity as she zigzags between the two grandmothers’ homes. The originality of the story resides in the fact that it is told exclusively from the young narrator’s point of view; hence, it is a sort of monologue as the girl addresses her mother throughout the story and transports her lived experiences beyond the boundaries of each of her grandmother’s house. The mother’s presence is implied and she is indeed the listener in the same way as the reader who discovers the child’s inner feelings as well as the complexities of her familial and social environments,

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and their impact on her self-definition. The mother and grandmothers’ voices actually emerge throughout the narrative, as the child reports their speech and beliefs; the child narrator indeed depicts the deepest cultural, racial and social discrepancies which occur in Jamaican society. The child narrator is actually situated at the crossroads of two different lifestyles and value systems, and her subjectivation depends on her self-positioning with regard to these different systems. Senior’s originality resides in her strategies to shift the borders within Jamaican society itself, particularly with regard to its treatment of social, racial and gender differences, as she depicts a young girl shared between homes, codes and identities. In the opening section, the reader immediately discovers the country environment of Granma Del who embraces nature, religion and tradition: Mummy, you know what? Grandma Del has baby chickens. Yellow and White ones. […] Mummy, I really like Grandma Del’s house it’s nice and cosy and dark and cool inside with these lovely big picture frames of her family and Daddy as a baby and Daddy as a little boy and Daddy on the high school football team…. […] Mummy, do you know that Grandma sends me to Sunday School? We stay over for big church and I walk home with her and all the people, it’s so nice. (62)

Senior’s narrative technique allows the reader to imagine the talkative child addressing her mother and multiplying her questions, while describing the particular environment of her paternal grandmother. The length and breathlessness of the sentence structures denote the child’s talkative nature but also recalls the speech flow which characterises gossiping. The semantic field is meliorative as the child expresses her amazement and satisfaction through adjectives such as “nice” and “lovely”. The childish nature of the discursive pattern appears through the accumulation of adjectives (“it’s nice and cozy and dark and cool inside”) as well as the repetition of the conjunction “and” which further conveys the breathlessness of the discourse. From the beginning of the story, the child’s voice is made obvious as she calls her mother and soon expresses her fears to her: “I don’t like to go out the back alone because the turkey gobbler goes gobble! gobble! gobble! after my legs and he scares me, and Mr SonSon next door has baby pigs I don’t like the mother pig though” (62). As the girl materialises the sounds of the turkey through onomatopoeia, the humorous context is set for the reader to enter the story from a childish point

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of view. The opening section therefore focuses on Grandma Del’s traditional ways as she has no TV and no electricity, she takes care of her farm animals, she sows dresses for her granddaughter to wear and complains about her coming with “nothing but blue jeans and T-shirts and shorts and not a single church dress”. Teaching the little girl how to “gather eggs”, how to clean the oil lamp and taking her to Sunday School, she initiates her to a Christian country life and above all she cherishes her: When Grandma dresses me up for church I feel so beautiful in my dresses she made with lace and bows and little tucks so beautiful and my hat, I feel so special that my own Grandma made these for me with her own two hands and didn’t buy them in a store. Grandma loves to comb my hair she says it’s so long and thick and she rubs it with castor oil every night. I hate the smell of castor oil but she says it’s the best thing for hair and after a time I even like the smell. Grandma Del says my skin is beautiful like honey and all in all I am a fine brown lady and must make sure to grow as beautiful inside as I am outside but Mummy how do I go about doing that? (64)

The above excerpt illustrates the growth of the narrator’s selfconfidence as well as her incline for human feelings rather than material belongings; hence, she appreciates her grandmother’s effort to sow the dresses specially for her. This paragraph underlines the African Caribbean grandmother’s valuing of her brown granddaughter’s physical appearance as she takes great care of her hair and skin, a scene which is recurrent in Senior’s short fiction. Here, Grandma Del is more concerned with her granddaughter’s inner identity than her outside appearance, which she already qualifies as “fine”. If the child’s question about how to fulfil beauty both inside and outside further contributes to the humoristic tone of the narrative, this episode foreshadows the growth of the child’s consciousness. The inside/outside dialectic is omnipresent throughout the story and seems to work in correlation with a dark/light pattern. First Grandma Del has no electricity and her house is “very, very dark. No street lights or any lights” (64), the repetition of the adverb “very” amplifying the adjective “dark”. During the night, the house is lit with oil lamps but during the day it is always dark inside but one can “peek through the louvers Grandma calls them jalousies […] and you can see the people passing by. But they can’t see you” (62), thus the paradox of what is seen/outside/in the light and what is unseen/inside/in the dark is emphasised. Then, the

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dark/light dialectic is reinforced through the episode of the bats inside the church in the middle of the day: The first time I went to Grandma’s church, I was so scared of the bats! The church is full of bats but usually they stay high up in the roof. But as soon as the organ starts playing on Sunday the bats start swooping lower and lower and one swooped so low I nearly died of fright and clutched Grandma Del so tight my hat flew off. Did I tell you Grandma made me a hat to wear to church with her own hands? She pulled apart one of her old straw hats, leghorn she said, and made me a little hat that fits just so on my head with a bunch of tiny pink flowers. (63–64)

The child’s fear of animals is a recurrent pattern, and in the same way as she described the sound and movement of the turkey gobbling “after her legs” within a triplication (gobble! gobble! gobble!), she also uses a triple scheme here which enhances the swooping movement of the bats (lower, lower, so low); sounds and movements are further associated as the bats react to the music of the organ. As a matter of fact, the hyperbolic description of the innocent child narrator reveals an implicitly regular pattern, which in a sense, allows the reader to notice the authorial voice. It seems indeed that the authorial voice sometimes transpires, especially when the narrator’s discourse sounds regular beyond its childish nature, and at times, the child’s speech almost sounds poetic, which perhaps betrays Senior’s narrative strategy. The anecdote of the bats and the hat shows an apparent rhyme pattern with an obvious assonance in [ae] in the words “time”, “Grandma”, “high”, “organ”, “starts”, “died”, “fright”, “tight” as well as in the many occurrences of the words “bats” and “hat”. Along with the rhythm conveyed by duplications, triplications and expressions such as “just so”, the child’s creolised discourse therefore sounds poetic and this exemplifies Senior’s strategy to allow heteroglossic voices to emerge within the same narrative. Heteroglossia was Bakhtin’s term to define “another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech constitutes a special type of double-voiced discourse” […] “It serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking and the refracted intention of the author” (Bakhtin 1981: 324).

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Senior’s “refracted intention” surely implies Grandma Del’s attempt to transfer her values onto her granddaughter. Developing her granddaughter’s self-confidence, she however attempts to shape her identity, hence the metaphor of the small hat sewn out of her own hat demonstrates Grandma Del’s project of culture and value transfer. The fact that the hat “fits just so” on the girl’s head as well as her eventual liking the smell of castor oil on her hair denotes her progressive adoption of the country codes and ways of life. Besides, the stories Grandma Del tells every night, “not stories from a book […] but stories straight from her head” (64) further inspire the child and motivate her wish to “learn stories from Grandma”, to “remember and tell [her] children”, hence to participate in this process of cultural transfer. Grandma Del appears to be a word whisperer in the same way as in Senior’s poem “My Granddaughter Learns the Alphabet”, but the child’s unanswered question at the end of Section 1 (“Mummy, do you think I will?”) announces the difficulty of the task. The second section of the story opens on a similar monologue, where the child narrator addresses her mother but this time, she discusses her maternal grandmother’s lifestyle and the reader is thrown into a totally different context: Mummy, you know Grandma Elaine is so funny she says I’m not to call her Grandma any more, I’m to call her Towser like everybody else for I’m growing so fast nobody would believe that she could have such a big young lady for a granddaughter. […] I said to her ‘Grandmother, I mean Towser, Grandma introduces me to everyone as her granddaughter she calls me her “little gran”. And Grandma Elaine says, “Darling, the way your Grandmother Del looks and conducts herself she couldn’t be anything but a grandmother and honey she and I are of entirely different generations. (65)

From the beginning of the second section, the child’s discourse appears as different, as if it had been shifted at the same time as spaces and codes which now correspond to the middle-class city lifestyle of the narrator’s maternal grandmother. Although she questions Grandma Elaine’s attitude and constantly refers to her Grandma Del’s sayings and pieces of advice, the narrator’s speech seems more elaborated and close to standard English; hence, her inner evolution is somewhat foreshadowed. Grandma Elaine’s focus on modernity and outside appearances contrasts with Grandma Del’s traditional ways and the clash between the two

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grandmothers occurs in discourse as the child persists in referring to her maternal grandmother, quoting her incessantly in the manner of a pupil referring to her headmistress’s words: I said, “Grandma, you shouldn’t paint your face like that you know, it is written in the Bible that it’s a sin. Grandma Del says so and I will never paint my face.” And she said, “Darling, with all due respect to your paternal grandmother, she’s a lovely lady or was when I met her the one and only time at the wedding, and she had done one absolutely fantastic thing in her life which is to produce one son, your esteemed father, one hunk of a guy, but honey, other than that your Grandmother Del is a country bumpkin of the deepest waters and don’t quote her goddam sayings to me”. Mummy, you know Grandma Elaine swears like that all the time? I said “Grandma you mustn’t swear and take the word of the Lord in vain.” And she said, “honeychile with all due respect to the grey hairs of your old grandmother and the first class brainwashing your daddy is allowing her to give you, I wish my granddaughter would get off my back and leave me to go to Hell in peace.” Can you imagine she said that? (65)

The child’s discourse is a mixture of many voices as it entails her own voice, her grandmother Del’s, the biblical discourse as well as her mother’s delocuted speech as the child stops at times to query about her opinion about Grandma Elaine’s attitude. The more serious and religious the child’s tone gets, the more anti-religious and rude Towser’s speech grows; hence, the narrator’s rehearsal of her paternal grandmother’s speech creates tension. The multiplicity of voices which intermingle within the child’s monologue confirms the heteroglossic and polyphonic dimension of Senior’s prose, which reflects “a fundamental, sociolinguistic speech diversity and multilanguagedness”: Heteroglossia is by and large always personified, incarnated in human figures with disagreements and oppositions individualised. But such oppositions of individual wills and minds are submerged in social heteroglossia, they are reconceptualised through it. Oppositions between individuals are only surface upheavals of the untamed elements in social heteroglossia, surface manifestations of those elements that play on such individual oppositions, make them contradictory, saturate their consciousness and discourse with a more fundamental speech diversity. (Bakhtin 1981: 325–326)

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Speech diversity and humour characterise Senior’s narrative strategy to allow the reader to transcend borders and explore two opposed homes where the girl child circulates and with regard to which she must construct her own identity. The fact that the mother is delocuted mother’s presence is only implied may translate the author’s wish to demonstrate that grandparents had a greater impact on shaping the child’s consciousness than the parents themselves, a common fact in African Caribbean societies. Towser’s criticism is directed at Grandma Del and reveals a deeper fissure between the two families who have not seen each other since the wedding. Towser’s urge to remain young is typical of the modern global world and her attack at Grandma Del grows more and more acerbic as she downgrades her rural identity and despises the values she transfers on the child. She’s really mad that you allow me to spend time with Grandma Del. She says, “Honey, I really don’t know what your mother thinks she is doing making you spend so much time down there in the deepest darkest country. I really must take you in hand. It’s embarrassing to hear some of the things you come out with sometimes. Your mother would be better advised to send you to Charm School next summer you are never too young to start. Melody-Ann next door went last year and it’s done wonders for her from a tomboy into a real little lady” (Though Mummy, I really can’t stand Melody-Ann any more, you know.) “And your mother had better start to do something about your hair from now it’s almost as tough as your father’s and I warned your mother about it from the very start I said ‘Honey, love’s alright but what about the children’s hair?’ If you were my child I would cut it right off to get some of the kinks out”. (65–66)

Towser here asserts her wish to transform her granddaughter into a proper lady-figure; hence, she wishes to shape her race and gender identity in order to make her suitable to her class. Towser’s preference for physical appearance rather than human feelings is emphasised as well as her complete disdain for her granddaughter’s African side. Where Grandma Del enjoyed combing her granddaughter’s hair with castor oil, Grandma Elaine wishes to cut it in order to “dekink” it, recalling Senior’s poem “Colonial School Girls”. While Del sent her to Sunday School for her soul (the inside/the unseen), Towser wished to send her to Charm School for her to turn into a “real little lady” who would not embarrass her (the outside/the visible). The child narrator is therefore in a position of inbetweenity where she has to navigate between two systems of codes, two discourses and two conceptions of female identity.

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The seven sections of the short story actually depict alternately the two Grandmother’s environments and ways of life and beyond the child’s talkativeness which may not seem regular, the story is constructed in a rigorous parallel structure enhancing the contrast and the child’s complex liminal position. Whenever a new section starts, the narrator’s speech is directed at the other grandmother, her home, her code and her discourse, hence the religious and spiritual discourse of Grandma Del always contrasts with Towser’s liberated way of life where materialism takes over spirituality. While the narrator’s story may reflect a common narrative of development when a girl child grows and her points of view and perspectives on the world forcibly change, Senior’s short story emphasises the brown skin Jamaican girl’s complex construction of identity throughout. Although she rejects Grandma Del and her lower-class entourage, she is not happier at Towser’s place where she herself is rejected in terms of race. The more she asserts her class superiority with regard to the country people, the more the narrator seems to question her own identity in terms of race. This confusion and her quest for identity are expressed in the two final sections of the story which truly depict the contrast between her straightforward assertion of her class and her obvious difficulty to situate her racial identity. While she had her hair relaxed and adopted the ladyhood codes of behaviour, she is still despised by her maternal family because of her African origins; she therefore rejects her paternal family, but is not fully accepted by her maternal side. This in-betweenity truly emerges in Section 6 when the narrator questions her own identity because she is constantly being reminded of her race by Towser and her maternal aunt Rita: Mummy, please don’t send me to stay with Auntie Rita in Clearwater again. Ever. Nothing, Mummy….. It’s that Maureen. She doesn’t like me. …Mummy, am I really a nigger? That’s what Maureen said when we were playing one day and she got mad at me and she said, ‘You’re only a goddam nigger you don’t know any better. Auntie Evie married a big black man and you’re his child and you’re not fit to play with me.” Mummy I gave her such a box that she fell and I didn’t care. (73)

The author’s use of the term “goddam” reminds us of the beginning of the story when Towser used the same word when despising Grandma Del, and in this sense, Maureen now performs Towser’s speech to the detriment of her cousin who she despises in the same way as Towser

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downgraded Grandma Del. The “us/them” dynamic is here troubled as the rejection occurs within the same family unit and despite her punching her cousin as a response, the child remained speechless at her disdain. Far from questioning Maureen’s biased attitude, the child interrogates her own construction as she states: “Mummy, why can’t I have straight hair like Maureen? I’m so ashamed of my hair, I simply can’t go back to Clearwater” (74). Despite chemically straightening her hair, the child narrator remains alienated as she is ashamed of her true self and above all because she cannot even identify with her mother: “My skin is so dark, darker than yours and Maureen’s and Jason’s and Auntie Rita’s. And my hair is so coarse, not like yours or Maureen’s but then Maureen’s father is white. Is that why Maureen calls me a nigger?” (74). The recurrent accumulation of phrases beginning with the conjunction “and” marks an acceleration of the child’s discourse and conveys a form of panic in the child’s reaction and search for explanation. The mother’s silence takes all its sense in this context, and her speechlessness is even materialised through the use of omission marks. As the penultimate section of the story ends on the child’s definite assertion that she can’t go back to Clearwater, the closing section opens on her desire not to go back to Grandma Del’s, hence the two sections convey the child’s limbo situation as she is still staggering in-between the two spaces, one where her class is an issue, and one where her race matters the most. She is unable to empower herself and to “create self-identity out of a personal chaotic history” in Senior’s own words (Thieme 1994: 91). While she refutes Grandma Del’s environment and does not identify with the Caribbean people of African descent who live there, she assimilates with Towser’s language and codes, and she longs to shape her identity with regard to her maternal side, but she is ironically rejected. Rejecting and being rejected, the ending of Senior’s narrative may be considered in terms of failure as identity construction is troubled by the discrepancy between an overvalued white middle-class culture and a despised African Caribbean lower-class culture. However, as Senior points out, there is still hope for the child narrator as “those very same people in later life come to realise- come to appreciate- the real culture, the traditional culture” (Glaser 84). In other short stories such as “The Tenantry of Birds” or “Bright Thursdays” (from Summer Lightning ), Senior chooses to allow the girl child to assert herself and transcend the imposed codes of

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conduct; hence, the author chooses to depict Jamaican girlhood beyond normative borders. The fact that the story ends on the child’s ultimate call to her mother (“Eh, Mom?”) (75) suggests that the latter may be the only one able to respond to her daughter’s subjectivation process and provide her with liminal codes of transculturally thus allowing her to move forward and construct her subjectivity beyond the restraints of race and class. In a sense, like Danticat’s, Senior’s story illustrates Bakhtin’s equating of polyphony with dialogism, “in other words, for a text to be truly polyphonic, it has also (by definition) to be dialogic: the ‘many voices’ are necessarily defined by, and through, their relationship with one another” (Waugh 225). Bakhtin differentiates the polyphonic novel from drama as to him, drama is “alien to genuine polyphony; drama may be multi-levelled but it cannot contain multiple worlds; it permits one and not several systems of measurements” (Bakhtin 1984: 34). Senior’s text describes multidimensional, shifting codes, identities, and allows several worlds to coexist as well as several discourses and subjectivities to intertwine. According to Linda Hutcheon, the assertion of identity is actually a constant feature in postmodern thought and “cultural heterogeneity is conceived as a flux of identities contextualized by gender, class, race, ethnicity, sexual preference, education, social role” (3–4). Hutcheon’s perception of feminism as multiple, as opposed to unique, is certainly inscribed in the postmodernist theory of heterogeneity, which puts an end to binary opposites White/Black, Male/Female, Self/Other, intellect/body and opens new possibilities. Hutcheon even refers to new voices of black women writers, and the subaltern is recognised as a potential speaking subject. The contradictory nature of Postmodernism then serves to turn these binary oppositions and exclusions into plurality and heterogeneity. It widens the concept of identity and provides a redefinition of culture, underlining the importance of the “implications of both our making and our making sense of culture” (3–4). The postmodern avowal of fragmentation and multiplicity allows identity, culture and language to be perceived in terms of borderlessness and spacelessness. Hopkinson, Danticat and Senior all draw on the necessity for the heteroglossic voices to be heard as they allow the local and the global to fuse and depict the multidimensionality of the border itself. The three writers truly emphasise the construction of plural identities beyond

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normative frameworks and impose their polyphonic discourse. Ultimately, the authors’ treatment of the body demonstrates their wish to blur given distinctions between wholeness and fragmentation. When it comes to bodily representations, their texts constantly allow the merging of the self and the other, the inside and the outside, the material and the immaterial. They depict borderless subjectivities that are often transformed into discursive testimonies of transcultural reassembling, as they seek to position themselves within new discursive spaces, which allow them to voice the specificities of their integrated subjectivities beyond normative language and place. Nalo Hopkinson, Edwidge Danticat and Olive Senior all offer new perspectives on border transcendence in their fictional narratives. From trauma and dislocation, they allow healing and relocation, thus proving that the feminine Caribbean diaspora has the power to deconstruct and re-envision space through productive alternative discourses, which can be heard even when originating from below or from the margins.

References Alvarado, Denise. Voodoo Hoodoo Spellbook. San Francisco: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2011. Print. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Eds. C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Print. ———. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. C. Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Print. Beckwith, Martha. Black Roadways: Study of Jamaican Folk Life. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969. Print. Boyce-Davies, Carole. “Carnivalised Caribbean Female Bodies: Making Space/Taking Space” Thamyris 5.2 (Autumn 1998): 333–346. Print. Cassidy, Frederic Gomes, and Robert Le Page, eds. Dictionary of Jamaican English. Mona: University of the West Indies Press, 2002. Print. Clark, Vèvè A. “Developing Diaspora Literacy and Marassa Consciousness”. Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex and Nationality in the Modern Text. Ed. Hortense Spillers. New York: Routledge, 1991: 40–61. Print. Cooper, Carolyn. “African Diaspora Studies in the Creole-Anglophone Caribbean: A Perspective from the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica”. The African Diaspora and the Disciplines. Eds. Tejumola Olaniyan and James H. Sweet. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010: 279–297. Print.

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Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Knopf, 1994. Print. ———. Krik?Krak! New York: Knopf, 1998. Print. Darwin, Charles. “Natural Selection or the Survival of the Fittest”. The Origin of Species. 1872. New York: Cricket House Books LLC, 2010: 51–88. Print. Du Bois, W. E. B. “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Signet, 1969. Print. Glaser, Marlies. “‘A Shared Culture’. An Interview with Olive Senior”. Caribbean Writers: Between Orality and Writing/Les auteurs caribéens: entre l’oralité et l’écriture. Eds. Marlies Glaser and Marion Pausch. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994: 77–84. Print. Goodison, Lorna. Selected Poems. USA: University of Michigan Press, 1992. Goodison, Lorna. Controlling the Silver. Champaign: Illinois University Press, 2005. Print. Hopkinson, Nalo. “Money Tree”. Skin Folk. New York: Warner Books, 2001: 7–21. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Irigaray, Luce. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Trans. Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Print. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Monteith, E. A. Kathleen, and Glen Richards, eds. Jamaica in Slavery and Freedom: History, Heritage and Culture. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2002. Print. Pradel, Lucie. African Beliefs in the New World: Popular Literary Traditions of the Caribbean. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2000. Print. Rudiger, Petra and Konrad Gross, eds. Translation of Cultures: Cross/Cultures 106, ASNEL Papers 13. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Print. Senior, Olive. The Arrival of the Snake Woman. Essex, Longman, 1989. Print. ———. Summer Lightning and Other Stories (Trinidad and Jamaica: Longman Caribbean Ltd., 1986). Print. Sheller, Mimi. Citizenship from Below: Erotic Agency and Caribbean Freedom. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012. Print. Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. Diacritics 17.2 (Summer 1987): 64–81. Print. Thieme, John. “Mixed Worlds: Olive Senior’s Summer Lightning ”. Kunapipi XVI.2 (1994): 90–95. Print. Waugh, Patricia. Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Print.

CHAPTER 11

Reimagining the Nation: Gender and Bodily Transgressions in Breath, Eyes, Memory Simone A. James Alexander

For the most part, the nation has been constructed and imagined as male and heterosexual. Women, on the other hand, are regarded as secondclass citizens, constructed as pawns in the national discourse and not as key players. The female protagonists of Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory not only debunk the exclusionary practices advocated in the nationalist/masculinist discourse, but also they rewrite the heteronormative structure of the nation by constructing alter/native spaces beyond the reach of the nation-state. In short, the women act transgressively by speaking out against traditionally accepted value systems that privilege men. The women portray different degrees of autonomy in challenging the masculinist nation-state, in challenging proscribed female relationships. The female characters challenge and transgress bodily (border) restrictions and cultural boundaries, forcing the nation to reexamine its citizenship policy and to rescript the narrative of heteropatriarchy and heteronormativity. In transgressing cultural and other boundaries, the

S. A. J. Alexander (B) Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ, USA e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0_11

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women circumvent cultural constraints, thus allowing for spaces of female empowerment. Atie’s other/mothering practice that is woman-centered is transgressive in that it occupies an alternative (female) space that opposes and challenges patriarchal mothering. Her engaging the art of storytelling reinforces this transgression. Raped by a Tonton Macoute, one of François Duvalier’s militia men, Martine Caco escapes to America leaving her sister, Atie, to care for her biological daughter, Sophie, the product of her rape. Sophie’s paradisiacal existence comes to an abrupt halt when at the age of twelve she joins Martine in Brooklyn, New York, where she struggles to adjust to her new life in the host country. Here, Sophie and Martine’s tumultuous relationship comes to a head—traditional, patriarchal values are challenged, family secrets are revealed, and Martine’s practice of mothering is under scrutiny—as the void left by Atie’s absence magnifies. Newtona Johnson, in assessing Atie’s practice of motherhood, writes: “dis/ease developed when women are unable either to complete fully patriarchally-defined social functions or to define their identity as they see fit. Atie has internalized her society’s patriarchal notion that motherhood and marriage are paramount functions that women must fulfill. Atie is both unmarried and childless, and this makes her feel inadequate as a woman. As if to compensate for her inability to fulfill the functions of wife and mother, Atie pursues with obsessive zeal the role of selfless caregiver” (157). While not overlooking Atie’s desire to become a mother, which for the most part is grounded in traditional patriarchal values, I provide an alternative assessment of her societal role and value, her embrace of alternative m/othering. Atie’s presumed obsession is part and parcel of an extended-family model of parenting that is common in black communities; this is especially true for many Caribbean countries where countless children are raised by othermothers, and not by their biological mothers.1 Hence, Atie’s role as othermother lends legitimacy to other forms of mothering. Elizabeth Brake convincingly argues: “Parenting frameworks could recognize parenting networks such as other mothering in AfricanAmerican communities. Child welfare will be improved if law recognizes and encourages the contributions other mothers, or friends or relations,

1 Martine’s migration is exemplary of the migrations of many real-life biological mothers who have migrated to America and other western countries in search of a better life for themselves and children.

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can make in parenting. An extended-family model of parenting can benefit children by increasing the amount of support available for them” (150). The type of mothering portrayed in Breath, Eyes, Memory is not solely based on biological reproduction; rather othermothering or surrogacy is posited as an alternative to biological motherhood.2 Patricia Hill Collins reminds us: “In many African-American communities, fluid and changing boundaries often distinguish biological mothers from other women who care for children. [These] other mothers … who assist blood mothers by sharing mothering responsibilities traditionally have been central to the institution of Black motherhood” (quoted in Collins 178). Martine’s role as biological mother is challenged by her (ambivalent) relations with things colonial and her (attendant) fractured relationship with Sophie. Whereas Martine embodies a suffocating mother: “She would chase me through a field of wildflowers as tall as the sky. When she caught me, she would try to squeeze me into the small frame so I could be in the picture with her. I would scream and scream until my voice gave out, then Tante Atie would come and save me from her grasp,” Atie inhabits the role of consummate caregiver” (8). This castrating mother image is fully realized in the scene where Martine “tested” Sophie as she perpetuates the haunting to which she herself is subjected in the constant nightmares in which her rapist’s face appears.3 Having completed the heinous act, “She pulled a sheet up over my body,” the way one does over a corpse; the sheet, imitative of a burial shroud, signals the death of Sophie’s former self.4 Fittingly, while “testing” Sophie Martine narrates a parallel story of female violation of the bleeding woman who in an effort to stop the bleeding relinquishes her right “to be a human being” (87). Sophie’s (verbal and physical) silence, her silent pain, rivals Atie’s screams: “I closed my legs and tried to see Tante Atie’s face. I could understand why she had screamed while her mother had tested her. There are secrets you cannot keep” (85, italics in original), as they become one, the Marassas: “When one looked in the mirror, the other walked behind the glass to mimic her” (85). Martine’s expressed desire to become one with Sophie:

2 Throughout the essay, I use surrogacy and othermothering interchangeably. 3 Martine’s “testing” of Sophie is akin to rape. 4 More than likely the color of this sheet is yellow since we are told that Sophie’s sheets are yellow. Later I argue that yellow is the color of complicity and not transgression.

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“You and I we could be like Marassas,” is derailed by the testing; meanwhile the tension between mother and daughter increases (86). We get a glimpse of this fractured relationship in the initial meeting of mother and daughter. The yellow car in which Martine picked up Sophie from the airport had a “long crack across the windshield glass”; Sophie expresses bodily discomfort from “the tattered cushions on the seats … I climbed in and tried not to squirm. The sharp edge of a loose spring was sticking into my thigh” (41–2, italics mine). This cracked windshield, unlike the mirror (image) that Sophie shares with Atie and in which she sees her own reflection, provides Sophie with a distorted self-image. Furthermore, this distortion is epitomized in Martine’s continued ambivalence. She tells Sophie that it is an opportune time for her to transgress cultural boundaries because she has “a chance to become the kind of woman Atie and I have always wanted to be” (44). Yet, Martine sabotages Sophie’s aspirations; her complicity with patriarchy serves as a deterrent to Sophie’s self-actualization.5 Moreover, her action illustrates that Sophie’s body, including her own, and women’s in general, is “shaped in the service of the patriarchy” (Dickerson 203). The phrase: There are secrets you cannot keep resonates with Toni Morrison’s haunting phrase: “This is not a story to pass on” (275). Sharing Morrison’s phrase’s double-voicedness, this story (of female violence) must be shared, must be heard; the silence must be broken. Sophie’s first manifestation of bodily discomfort occurs when she learned that she would be joining Martine in America: “I began to take off my clothes so quickly that I almost tore them off my body … I sunk deeper and deeper into the bed and lost my body in the darkness, in the folds of the sheets” (16–17). This separation (anxiety) from her surrogate mother, Atie, that Sophie experiences sets the stage for Sophie’s eventual disembodiment, her body estrangement. As I argued earlier, Sophie experiences the death of her former self. Her premonition becomes manifest in this scene as she prepares for her proverbial death by burying her body “in the darkness, in the fold of the sheets.” Moreover, in America, Sophie loses her body to food: “I ate like I had been on a hunger strike, filling myself with the coconut milk …,” adopting it as comfort for her loss, her forced separation from Atie, despite Marc’s cautionary tale: “Food is a luxury, but we cannot allow ourselves to become gluttons or get fat” 5 Sophie’s migration to America, her bordercrossing, signals her transcending geographic spaces/borders.

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(56). Characteristically, a hunger strike is a method of nonviolent resistance wherein one fasts as political protest. Now her legal custodian who advocates on behalf of the state, Martine has obtained custody of the hunger striker. While Sophie initiates her own engorging as an act of defiance, namely to silence Martine and Marc: “I tried to stuff myself and keep quiet, pretending that I couldn’t even see them” (56), Martine engenders a force-feeding of sorts on Sophie. She is adamant that Sophie will become a doctor and that she will practice restraint by falling in love when she is eighteen years old. In like manner, Martine’s “testing” Sophie qualifies as a proverbial force-feeding. Figuratively, the food of choice that Sophie gorges on is coconut milk, a subtle call for the alternative nurturing and love that Atie is able to provide, and Martine is not: “My mother had two lives: Marc belonged to her present life, I was a living memory from the past” (56). Sophie registers the ultimate transgressive act by enacting her own self-mutilation: “My flesh ripped apart as I pressed the pestle into it. I could see the blood slowly dripping onto the bed sheet. I took the pestle and the bloody sheet and stuffed them in a bag. It was gone, the veil that always held my mother’s finger back every time she tested me” (88, italics in original text). Paradoxically, this bodily self-violation brought an end to the “testing.”6 Martine’s role as suffocating mother resonates strongly with her embrace of colonial values and principles that further alienate Sophie. This alienation comes in the form of colonial indoctrination: “I never said this to my mother, but I hated the Maranatha Bilingual institution. It was as if I had never left Haiti. All the lessons were in French, except for English composition and literature classes. Outside the school, we were ‘the Frenchies,’ cringing in our mock-catholic-school uniforms as the students from the public school across the street called us ‘boat people’ and ‘stinking Haitians’” (66). This isolation ruptures further a relationship already fraught with an emotional intensity. Unlike Atie, whose mothering is fashioned on “African–influenced conceptions of self and community,” Martine adopts a form of colonial mothering based solely on isolationist principles (Collins 10). For example, Martine forbids Sophie to have a boyfriend, articulating: “She 6 For a detailed discussion of Martine’s proverbial rape of Sophie, see my article “M/Othering the Nation: Women’s Bodies as Nationalist Trope in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.”

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is not going to be running wild like those American girls. She will have a boyfriend when she is eighteen” (56). Martine is livid when she later discovers Sophie’s cultural transgressions in getting romantically involved with an African-American jazz musician, Joseph. Martine’s penchant for the “ideal” finds resonance in her attempts to raise Sophie on Victorian ideals of decency and propriety, purchasing her “long skirts and blouses … to wear to school [and] pick[ing] out a loose-fitting, high-collared dress Tante Atie had bought me for Sunday masses” (53). Adoption of a colonial ideology results in Martine’s fixation on the notion of ideal mothering and motherhood. Questioning Sophie: “Am I the mother you imagined?” and later reframing the question in the past tense: “Was I the mother you imagined? You don’t have to answer me … After you’ve seen me, I know the answer” (59, italics added), Martine unequivocally concludes that she does not fit the bill of an ideal mother. Fittingly because of her idealization of motherhood, her brand of mothering is performative; she subscribes to patriarchal mothering that centers a woman’s reproductive function as her central purpose: “Look at me. I am a fat woman passing for thin. A dark woman trying to pass for light. And I have no breasts. I don’t know when this cancer will come back. I am not an ideal mother” (189). Paradoxically, the above declaration appears to be an advertisement promoting the ideal standard of beauty: a desire for thinness and whiteness. Falling short of what she refers to as an ideal mother, Martine engenders her own self-isolation as she constructs black motherhood within the paradigm of white patriarchal values. Sophie has a more accommodative, caring, and loving relationship with Atie than with her blood mother. Significantly, Grandma Ife recognizes Atie’s role as surrogate mother: “If the wood is well carved … it teaches us about the carpenter. Atie you taught Sophie well” (151); this endorsement lends voice to Collins’s line of reasoning that “organized, resilient, women-centered networks of blood mothers and other mothers are key in understanding this centrality. Grandmothers, sisters, aunts, or cousins act as other mothers by taking on child-care responsibilities for one another children” (178). Sophie’s validation of Atie’s role as surrogate mother is exemplified through her insisting that the mother day’s card is truly Atie’s and not Martine’s: “It is your card, will you let me read it to you? I tucked it under her pillow” (9, 17). “The high status” that Sophie accords Atie “gives credence to the importance that people of African descent place on mothering” (quoted in Collins 181). Amidst Atie’s resistance, Sophie reads the words anyway, intimating that Martine “will not be

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able to see the words” on the card (29). Sophie’s reference to Martine’s proverbial blindness calls attention to the impending fractured relationship between mother and daughter, as the duo does not see eye to eye; it also underscores Martine’s fixation with “ideals.” Atie’s role as othermother is critical to Sophie’s identity-formation. In the following scene in which her discomfort with Martine and her host country, America, manifests in her inability to fall asleep, she is comforted by Tante Atie’s nurturing through reminiscences: “I couldn’t fall asleep. At home, when I couldn’t sleep, Tante Atie would stay up with me. The two of us would sit by the window and Tante Atie would tell me stories about our lives, about the way things have been in the family, even before I was born” (47). Later, she fondly recalls that Atie’s storytelling was both instructive and transgressive: “There was magic in the images that she had made out of the night. She would rock my body on her lap as she told me of fishermen and mermaids bravely falling in love. The mermaids would leave stars for the fishermen to pick out of the sand” (110). Sophie’s departure to America, marked by her reluctance to abandon Atie and Haiti, exacerbates her premature entrance into womanhood: “New eyes seem to be looking back at me. A new face altogether; someone who had aged in one day, as though she had been through a time machine, rather than an airplane. Welcome to New York this face seemed to be saying. Accept your new life. I greeted the challenge, like one greets a new day. As my mother’s daughter and Tante Atie’s child” (49, emphasis mine). Sophie makes a clear distinction between biological mothering and othermothering, refuting biology as the primary criteria of motherhood, emphasizing and giving credence to nurturing instead. As her mother’s daughter, she is Martine’s offspring, and as Atie’s child, she is defined by Atie’s nurturing and loving presence. Her formative years are marked by fond memories, by Atie’s valuation and validation of the African/Haitian storytelling practice. Upon arriving in New York, Sophie relinquishes her role as Atie’s child and forcibly became a daughter as she experiences a rebirth. The challenge to patriarchal mothering manifests in Atie’s role as a surrogate mother or “othermother.” She does not follow the traditional path of becoming a wife and/or mother; in essence, her love affair with Donald Augustin disrupts the neat narrative of nationalism as it does not serve the nation’s interest, but instead unsettles the image of woman as consummate wife and mother. Sophie reminds us of the importance in upholding and safeguarding the image of woman as a paragon of virtue:

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My mother “would test me every week to make sure that I was still whole” (86, italics in original text). A woman’s “wholeness” is essential for the portrayal of the nation’s unity. Atie’s love affair severely challenges respectability politics, it desecrates the institution of marriage that legitimizes the expression and exploration of female sexuality. Brake is quick to remind us that “Even in a secular context, marriage retains sacramental connotations, and in an individualistic age, it retains the aspect of communal sanction” (14). We witness how the community of women at the potluck privileges marriage in their attempt to sanction the institution as the ideal for Atie, as the only alternative to realizing womanhood. Curious to know whether Atie will join Martine in America, they pried, peculiarly linking migration with matrimony: “Will you marry there” (13)? This privileging of a coupled status finds representation in Brake’s coinage “amatonormativity.” Modeled on the term heteronormativity, “amatonormativity” “describes the widespread assumption that everyone is better off in an exclusive romantic, long-termed coupled relationship, and that everyone is seeking such a relationship” (89). In keeping with this theory, “singles are judged inferior due to a relational quality. In this respect, ‘singlism’ is like classism, in which individuals are judged inferior due to membership in a social class” (Brake 97). In his classic song, Love and Marriage, Frank Sinatra calls attention to marriage as covenant, cautioning against the breaking of this covenant.7 As evidenced, the institution of marriage that one supposedly should not and “can’t disparage” is designed to maintain caste, class, and gender hierarchies. Brake is therefore right to assert that “The privileging of marriage marginalizes the unpartnered and those in nontraditional relationships… and same-sex partners, where they are prohibited from marriage” (x). The word “gentry” hints at the exclusionary exercise of patriarchal marriage; similarly, the term “elementary” calls attention to the idealization of marriage. This idealization is voiced further in the sanctioning of sex within marriage: “You can’t have one, you can’t have none.” The “horse and carriage” trope smacks of female dependency, for the carriage, emblematic of the docile, subservient female, has to be carried, 7 The lyrics of the song can be found here: https://www.google.com/search?q= love+and+marriage+go+together+like+a+horse+and+carriage&rlz=1C1GGRV_enUS751 US751&oq=love+and+marriage+go+&aqs=chrome.0.0j69i57j0l4.8227j0j7&sourceid=chr ome&ie=UTF-8.

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has to be hitched up to the horse, the omniscient male, to be rendered effective or mobile. “To get hitched” is slang for to be bound by marriage vows. Contrary to the message of the song, the “illusion” does not reside in the act of attempting to separate love and marriage, but marriage itself can be illusory. Moreover, to intimate that romantic love and marriage are exclusively harmonious categories is misleading to say the least, for it is a known fact that for centuries the primary reasons one entered into a marriage were to fulfill tasks such as raising children and to enhance one’s status and financial situation. This misrepresentation is not lost on Brake who pontificates: “The picture of marriage as governed wholly by affection has always been disingenuous” (104). While not legally married to Marc, the relationship that Martine has with him—she is involved in a committed relationship outside of marriage—is not wholly premised on affection. Rather, Martine’s relationship with Marc is one of convenience, for Marc functions as both Martine’s lover and immigration lawyer who assisted her in attaining her green card (Alexander, 111).8 Brake convincingly argues: “Just as heterosexism undermines strong relationships between women, ‘amatonormativity’ undermines relationships other than amorous love and marriage by relegating them to cultural invisibility or second best” (98). Martine calls attention to the transcultural transgression that defines Marc and her relationship that would not have been impermissible in Haiti because of Marc’s social status: “In Haiti, it would not have been possible for someone like Marc to love someone like me. He is from an upstanding family. His grandfather was a French man” (59). Martine’s reference to love, and not marriage, is significant; they are not mutually exclusive categories. In choosing to forego marriage, Martine denounces the indoctrination of young girls into the virtues of marriage as she refuses to uphold traditional gender roles. Marriage, in her view, is a statesponsored, patriarchal directive that sanctions the private relationships of citizens. She therefore rejects/retaliates against the kind of relationship that the state legitimizes. Martine, nevertheless, has an incongruous or ambivalent relationship with other state-sanctioned ordinances. As I documented earlier, she upholds the preposterous patriarchal tradition of “testing” by repeatedly carrying out the body violation on Sophie.

8 I discussed in detail the class dynamic of this relationship in my book, African Diasporic Women’s Narrative: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship.

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In accentuating the transgression that defines Marc and her relationship, Martine envisions the diaspora as a site of possibilities, a site of reinvention and refashioning of the self. “Diaspora,” Christine VogtWilliams argues, “invokes images of movement, scattering, restlessness, displacement, possibilities of reinvention and desires of belonging. It is rife with possibilities of reinvention, desires of belonging; ambivalence of transgressing, transcending boundaries, physical, psychological, and cultural” (1). Chronicling the boundless possibilities, in the form of upward mobility, in her host country, America, Martine draws a parallel with her home country: “In Haiti if your mother was a coal seller and you become a doctor, people would still look down on you knowing where you came from. But in America, they like success stories. The worse off you were, the higher the praise” (80). Not only is Martine able to forge a relationship with Marc, a Haitian American lawyer in America, but as a rape survivor, she is able to reinvent herself.9 In contrast, back home, Atie’s working-class status hinders her relationship with potential suitors of whom Martine noted they were many; even so, Atie confesses to Martine that she was worthy “until better women came along” (165).10 Moreover, Atie’s illiteracy disqualifies her as an ideal candidate for the role of “Mother of the Nation.” Nevertheless, both Atie and Martine are, in essence, “marriage boycotter[s],” to echo Brake (101), for they destabilize the convention of marriage; furthermore, they do not arrive at “this [foregone] conclusion [that] love and marriage … go together like a horse and carriage.” Temporarily, Atie buys into the belief that women are constructed in the service of nationalist goals. A victim of her own self-silencing, Atie allows Monsieur Augustin to subsume her voice: “I took it on Monsieur Augustin’s advice, that once you got there, you would love it so much that you would beg your mother to let you stay … We have no right to be sad” (17). He then dictates her response/reaction to Sophie’s imminent departure: “It’s good news … Neither you or Sophie should be 9 Martine also envisions Sophie transgressing cultural and physical boundaries by achieving an education: “Your schooling is the only thing that will make people respect you. You are going to work hard here and no one is going to break your heart because you cannot read or write. You have the chance to become the kind of woman Atie and I have always wanted to be. If you make something of yourself in life, we will all succeed. You can raise our heads ” (44, italics in original text). 10 Donald Augustin rejects Atie, who is illiterate, and chooses Lotus, whom he marries later.

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sad. A child belongs with her mother, and a mother with her child” (14). Establishing his patriarchal stronghold, Monsieur Augustin attempts to dictate the terms of the mother–daughter relationship, even as he constructs a narrative of (impending) female separation through a nationalistic/patriarchal framework. An avid proponent of traditional patriarchal mothering, Monsieur Augustin devalues Atie’s role as surrogate mother, reminding her that a child belongs with its mother. In other words, Atie’s grief is misplaced. Paradoxically, Augustin is the self-appointed representative of black motherhood and womanhood, assuming patriarchal authority on the subject, similar to the role assumed by Marc on food, gluttony, and good eating habits. Marc, on the other hand, can bask in his bachelorhood, while serving up recipes about good mothering and exquisite culinary practices. We witness Monsieur Augustin yet again subsuming Atie’s voice and her role and identity as othermother when he informs Lotus about Sophie’s imminent migration to America: “I did not think you would tell your wife before I had a chance to tell the child… When you tell someone something and you call it a secret, they should know not to tell others,” Tante Atie mumbled to herself (15). Symbolically, Atie is served up as the proverbial communal meal at the potluck by Donald and his wife, Lotus.11 Moreover, Monsieur Augustin consumes Atie in more ways than one. Both Donald and Marc are portrayed as privileged; this portrayal places a spotlight on the gendering of privilege, while the women are constructed as second-class citizens at best. Marc chooses not to be married and not to have children; Monsieur Augustin chooses Lotus over Atie. Notably, despite his marital status, Monsieur Augustin is not bounded by societal expectations: He flirts openly with Atie. Furthermore, his noncommittal relationship contrasts obligatory female expectations and commitment. Women are the ones who marry the men and are expected to remain married, a point clearly articulated by Martine: “You know Lotus was not meant to marry Donald. Your aunt Atie was supposed to” (43, italics mine). Thus, the women are portrayed as the sole beneficiaries of this union, skewing their subordination and dependency on men, while the men are absolved from blame: “Lotus came along,” forcing Donald to “not want my sister anymore” (43). Women are conditioned and expected to subscribe to respectability

11 Lotus reveals Atie’s secret at a potluck dinner.

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politics that coincides with Martine’s “good girl” theory, i.e., one who has not “been touched” (60), one who “would never be alone with a man, an older one at that” (72). Duly, married women are accorded respect. Monsieur Augustin’s delegitimization of Atie’s othermothering resonates with the trivial approach he adopts in the illicit affair he has with her. In his estimation, Atie is not only the “real” mother of Sophie, but she is also his illegitimate lover, the “outside woman.”12 As an outside woman, the sexual partner on the side, outside of the marriage, Atie’s participation in impropriety and indecency disqualifies her as the “true mother of the nation,” and consequently, as a respectable citizen.13 Deemed unfit for marriage by the state representative, Monsieur Augustin, he abandons Atie for Lotus. Symbolically, Lotus is named after a delicate flower that exudes purity, beauty, grace, and devotion. Her marital status guarantees and preserves her purity and grace; at the same time, she remains a devoted wife to Monsieur Augustin in spite of his enduring love affair with Atie. One of the many definitions of lotuses is that they hold the most power.14 Fittingly, Lotus exerts power over Atie by the indifference and disrespect she exhibits toward her, especially in public. The lotus is also symbolic of detachment that is exemplified in Lotus’s indifference to Atie’s impending separation from Sophie. Atie’s outsider status is rendered most palpable when Lotus “exposes” her at the potluck, intentionally revealing/publicizing her secret: “I saw the facteur bring you something big yesterday. Did your sister send you a gift? It is not the child’s birthday again, is it? She was just twelve, no less than two months ago. I have it on good information that it was a plane ticket that you received the other day. I saw the delivery” (12, 13–4, italics in original text). Atie’s exposed/unprotected status manifests in her public interactions and encounters with Monsieur Augustin. Sophie recounts: “Monsieur walked Tante Atie and me home. When we got to our door he moved closer to Tante Atie as though he wanted to whisper something in her ear. She looked up at him and smiled … He turned around to look across the 12 This term “outside woman” is used commonly in many English-speaking Caribbean countries, including Guyana, to refer to a lover, a mistress, engaged in a sexual relationship outside the marriage. 13 I argue that Atie transgresses the nation’s definition of citizenship. 14 The lotus flower is deemed especially sacred in religions such as Buddhism and

Hinduism. http://www.flowermeaning.com/lotus-flower-meaning/.

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street. He squeezed Tante Atie’s hand and pressed his cheek against hers” (14). This public/private dichotomy comes full circle in the following scene that I quote at length: Monsieur Augustin crossed the street, took the pails from his wife’s hand and bent down to kiss her forehead. He put his arms around her and closed the front door behind them … [Tante Atie] kept her eyes on the Augustin’s house. The main light in their bedroom was lit. Their bodies silhouetted on the ruffled curtains blowing in the night breeze. Monsieur Augustin sat in a rocking chair by the window. His wife sat on his lap as she unlaced her long braid of black hair. Monsieur Augustin brushed the hair draped like a silk blanket down Madame Augustin’s back. When he was done, Monsieur Augustin got up to undress. Then slowly, Madame Augustin took off her day clothes and slipped into a long-sleeved night gown. Their laughter rose in the night as they began a tickling fight. The light flickered off and they tumbled into bed. Tante Atie kept looking at the window even after all signs of the Augustins had faded into the night. A tear rolled down her cheek as she unbolted the door to go inside. (15, emphasis added)

The Augustins’ legitimate union is captured by the privacy they share in the enclosed, protective space of their conjugal bed/room, while Atie stands on the outside looking in as she demands Sophie’s silence: “Don’t you ever tell anyone that I cry when I watch Donald and his wife getting ready for bed” she said sobbing (17). The bolted door symbolizes Atie’s exclusion/rejection; as Martine puts it: “When Lotus came along, he did not want my sister anymore” (43). The multiple definitions accorded the lotus flower signal Lotus’s mobility that starkly contrasts Atie’s restrictions and limitations. Lotus’s unlaced long braid of black hair epitomizes her sexual freedom and mobility, as do the “ruffled curtains blowing in the night breeze.” Attentive to her social standing and to the fact that her lack of self-articulation is detrimental to self-realization, Atie laments to Sophie: “Do you know why I always wished I could read” (16)? Atie also registers her impermanence, her uncertainty in the following phrase that Sophie recalls: “Tante Atie once said that love is like rain. It comes in drizzle sometimes. Then it starts pouring and if you’re not careful it will drown you” (67). Monsieur Augustin’s mobility is captured in his ability to “cross the street,” to play “both sides.” The rocking chair positioned by the window on which Monsieur Augustin sits, and is later joined by his wife who sits on his lap, furnishes him with physical and sexual access to both the private and the public spaces. We bear witness to his mastery

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of manipulating Atie when he writes her a love note knowing that she is illiterate: “Stuck to the bottom of the kettle was a small note. Je t’aime de tout mon coeur. The note read, ‘I love you very much.’ It was signed by Monsieur Augustin” (27, italics in original text). One would be remiss to overlook the symbolism of the note that was stuck to the bottom of the “silver kettle that [Atie] had always kept on the shelf for display” (27). The “stuck note” epitomizes Atie’s immobility, her entrapment in a nonproductive and futile relationship. Debatably, Atie is becoming cognizant of the futility of this love affair as “She held [the note] upside down and looked at it as though it were a picture, fading before her eyes ” (27, italics mine). “The note dangling from the kettle” that Sophie “reach[es] over to grab” captures the precariousness and impending death of this relationship. Atie fits the bill as both the unpartnered and one who is involved in a nonconventional relationship. Through Louise and Atie’s relationship, Danticat explores forbidden love and desire between women. Atie’s nonconformist, transgressive stance lends validity to Brake’s argument that “amatonormativity is oppressive when it privileges members of one form of caring relationships at the expense of nonconformists, whose opportunities are thereby significantly worsened” (98). Further, Brake contends that the opportunity of friendships is limited in that one’s ability to pursue friendship is diminished (98). Grandma Ife’s constant policing of Atie’s desire heightens the perceived prohibitive nature of Atie and Louise’s relationship; the following exchange between mother and daughter reinforces this line of reasoning: “Do you go there again tonight ?” my grandmother asked Tante Atie. “The reading it takes a lot of time,” Tante Atie said. “Why do you not go to the reading classes?” “You want me to go the whole distance at night.” “If you had your lesson elsewhere,” said my grandmother, “they would be during the day. The way you go about free in the night, one would think you a devil.” “The night is already in my face, it is. Why should I be afraid of it?” “I would like it better if you were learning elsewhere.” “I like where I am.” “Can you read only by moonlight ?” “Knowledge, you do not catch it in the air, old woman. I have to labor at it…” “You can only labor in the night ?” (107, italics added, “labor” italicized in original text)

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Grandma Ife’s repeated reference and objection to Atie meeting with Louise in the night draws attention to predetermined non-discretionary behavior. Not only is the night linked to wantonness and unbridled (sexual) freedom, but Atie’s nightly visits to Louise signal the bodily transgression that this relationship engenders: “If you had your lesson elsewhere … they would be during the day.” Consequently, Grandma Ife intimates that Atie’s unbridled freedom is enlivened at nights, resulting in her inhabiting a devil-like persona. Linked with indiscretion and evil, the night captures the transgression in proscribed female relationship. Atie’s not-so-secret nightly rendezvous with Louise intimates her descent not only into darkness (of the night), but also into debauchery and decadence. This descent/demise is captured in the following phrases: “Before you go into the night;” “I am off into the night. The spirits of aloneness, they call to me,” “She and Louise strolled into the night, like silhouettes on a picture postcard,” “Nothing should have taken you out into that black night ” (108, 109, 135, 140, 143, italics added). Grandma Ife’s allegation: “The way you go about free in the night, one would think you a devil ” that doubles as a cautionary tale resonates with Kincaid’s “Girl” in which the nondescript girl is constantly reminded by her mother, who stood in for patriarchy, of her impending and inevitable downfall, that of becoming a slut. The difference here, though, is that Atie is not a teenager or a young woman, but rather a middle-aged woman. This infantilization of Atie is pervasive; for example, Grandma Ife belittles Atie in Sophie’s presence: “I heard a thump, like a slap across the face” (140). Further, Atie’s mode of dress arguably renders her infantilization more palpable: “[She] was already dressed in one of her pink Sunday dresses” (28), as does Louise’s, who “had on a crisp lavender dress with a butterfly collar” (128). Moreover, the way Grandma Ife condescends to Louise further engenders infantilization: “Why can’t the girl come here and teach you your letters. Atie, can’t the girl walk up to the house” (108, 128, italics added). Grandma Ife’s refusal to call Louise by her name speaks of identity erasure. Along similar lines, her relegation of Louise and Atie’s relationship to the performative: “We’re not a spectacle. You tell her to come to the house” serves to devalue their friendship (128). Erasure stands in stark contrast to Atie and Louise’s public display of affection that is deemed transgressive; Atie’s desire to acquire sexual agency (a transgressive act) is not lost on Grandma Ife who incriminates Louise as a bad influence on Atie: “That Louise causes trouble - everything from her shadow to that pig is trouble” (137).

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Despite Grandma Ife’s unequivocal disapproval of their relationship, having Louise come to the house will regulate this public display. Grandma Ife’s disdain for Louise manifests palpably as she “spat in the dirt as we walked by Louise’s shack” (118). Grandma Ife’s disregard/infantilization of Louise and Atie signals her attempt to diminish, to echo Brake, their friendship/relationship, to render them invisible, but most importantly, to silence same-sex female desire. This delegitimization of their relationship finds resonance in Sophie’s reflection: “Louise and Tante Atie came up the road … My grandmother looked up without acknowledging their presence” (147). Later, posing the rhetorical question to Grandma Ife: “You don’t like Louise,” Sophie witnesses: “My grandmother groaned her disapproval,” which she later expressed verbally: “The gods will punish me for Atie’s ways, my grandmother moaned” (118, 152, 167). Atie’s infantilization is also engendered by cultural expectations ascribed to females; this burdensome responsibility of upholding female respectability has left Atie lost, disembodied: “My life, it is nothing … The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars … I am tired. I woke up one morning and I was old myself …” (108, 136). Governed by conventionality, Atie laments about her aggrieved state and the aggrieved state of women in general: “Great God that made the moons and the stars. You see what you have done to me. You were stingy with the clay when you made this creature” (108, 136). When advised by Grandma Ife that “Most people are born with what they need,” Atie responds: “I was born short of my share” (107); later suggesting that “Maybe a good death” would be preferable to the emptiness she feels (140). Despite the debilitating effect conventions has had on her, Atie remains duty-bound: “I know old people, they have great knowledge. I have been taught never to contradict our elders. I am the oldest child. My place is here” (136). Even as she articulates her disdain for the tradition, Atie, all the same, does not challenge it.15 Nevertheless, Atie’s resistance is noteworthy, she acts transgressively in speaking out against the “testing” to which adolescent girls are subjected; and on a larger platform, she comes to resist female bodies being used as a vessel for male sexual gratification. Of her estranged relationship with Donald Augustin, she, 15 Grandma Ife is aware of Atie’s contempt of the age-old tradition for she informs Sophie that Atie “cannot stay out of duty. The thing one does, one should do out of love” (119).

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very detachedly and dismissively, tells Sophie: “Sometimes people just disappear from our lives and it is not a bad thing” (141). Grandma Ife’s constant surveillance of Atie and Louise (relationship) eventually manifests in verbal disapproval. She recounts to Sophie: “I don’t like the way your Tante Atie has been since she came back from Croix-des-Rosets. Ever since she has come back, she and I, we are like milk and lemon, oil and water. She grieves; she drinks tafia … Why did she come back? If she had married there, would she not have stayed” (118–9). Sophie is acutely aware of Grandma Ife’s policing of Atie: “My grandmother was pacing loudly in the next room as Tante Atie giggled loudly in the yard” (111), for it strongly resonates with her own body surveillance, and the subsequent “testing” administered by Martine: “I came home to find my mother sitting in the living room, she was sitting there rocking herself, holding a belt in her hand” (98). The phallic symbol epitomized by the belt is compelling as Sophie’s proverbial rape is twofold: first, by the belt, and subsequently, by the “testing.” In her assessment of the strained relationship between Grandma Ife and Atie, Nancy Gerber argues that Grandma Ife is “ashamed of having an unmarried daughter” (193). Although Martine resides in the United States, she, like Atie, is unmarried; both her and Atie’s unmarried status illuminates the absurdity of the “testing” that was carried out on young girls in order to guarantee their eligibility and candidacy for the role of respectable wives and mothers. Certainly, Grandma Ife’s ambivalence about Atie’s return to La Nouvelle Dame Marie stems primarily from her disapproval of Louise and Atie’s relationship; her displeasure further manifests in her privileging marriage, engendering “amatonormativy” that “does not simply discriminate against nonconforming relationships; it also precludes their formation by pressuring choice” (Brake 100). Moreover, Grandma Ife’s registered displeasure of Atie’s friendship with Louise: “Why did she come back? If she had married there, would she not have stayed” (119) “sustains the belief that marital and amorous relationships should be valued over friendships” (Brake 98). Grandma Ife’s privileging marriage over Atie’s nonconventional relationship further resonates in her lecturing Atie on respectability politics: “Only good deeds demand respect. Do you want Sophie to respect you?” to which Atie rebuts: “Sophie is not a child anymore, old woman, I do not have to be a saint for her” (111). Mildred Mortimer surmises that Atie’s struggle for “liberation met with Ife’s resistance to her independence. The old woman had counted on her obedient, selfless daughter to tend to her in

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old age. Moreover, Atie, who has been rejected by a suitor because of her social class and illiteracy has turned to a woman for love, entering a lesbian relationship that the women cannot live openly in Haiti” (179). The brutal murder of Dessalines, the coal man, by the Tonton Macoutes gives Louise pause as she reflects on the perilous nature of her forbidden relationship with Atie: “That’s why I need to go … I need to leave” (138). Louise’s unannounced departure to America that left Atie numb and disappointed reiterates both her fear and the inherent danger of their relationship. In short, it calls attention to the perilous nature of same-sex desire and intimacy, thereby capturing both the danger in exploring samesex relationship in Haiti and the threat to the masculinist nation-state. Despite Louise “ignoring stares from the men on their way to the fields” as she urges, “Atie, you come now,” there is undeniable evidence of clear and present danger portrayed in the male gaze (128, italics added). Atie has overcome silence through language; engendering freedom, Sophie celebrates this noticeable achievement: “I think it is very good that she has learned to read … It is her own freedom” (119). This female resistance to masculinist control finds additional representation in Atie and Louise’s transgression, that of recording their names in the national archives “for future generations”: “Louise asked me to go with her to have her name put on the archives as having lived in this valley,” resulting in the rewriting of patriarchal scripts of black womanhood (127–28).16 The women’s close friendship: “Atie giggled loudly in the yard Louise buried her head in Tante Atie’s shoulder. Their faces were so close that their lips could meet if they both turned at the same time. When you have a good friend, you must hold her with both hands. I don’t want to push her into the ocean” registers their transgression against cultural tenets of female propriety and decency (111, 138, 145, 148). Engaging in the unladylike act of drinking: “It sounded like she had been drinking. She drinks tafia. Her breath smelled like rum,” Atie pushes the boundaries of proper female conduct (111,119, 142). Adding to the archive of female transgressors, Sophie recounts Atie and Martine’s transgressions: Their secret escapes to Port-au-Prince, by means of a “tap tap van,” where “young tourists offered them cigarettes for the privilege of taking 16 Despite Grandma Ife’s disapproval of Louise and Atie “cast[ing their names] in stone”: “If a woman is worth remembering there is no need to have her name carved in letters” (128, 9), Atie nevertheless added both Grandma Ife’s and her name to the national archives (131).

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their pictures [and] white tourists flirted with them and held their hands” that infringe on the established standard of female behavior(32–3). Envisioning transgressing female dependency and subjugation by men by becoming “the first women doctors from my mother’s village,” Martine and Atie rallied against accepted and expected cultural practices of female propriety, albeit temporarily: “Imagine our surprise when we found out we had limits” (43). In chronicling her own transgression, Sophie confesses: “I drank my first cappuccino with a drop of rum” (75). She later discovers her propensity for transgressing sexual boundaries with her lover, Joseph: “I felt the music rise and surge, tightening every muscle in my body. Then I relaxed, letting it go, feeling a rush that I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel ” (76, italics mine).17 Recognizing that she has desires, Sophie nevertheless attempts to suppress them, exemplifying the way in which women are conditioned to deny their own sexuality. Rosamond King writes: “The persistent existence of sexual transgression despite all efforts to suppress it demonstrates the power of the erotic and shows that resistance exists in some form everywhere and all the time…” (196–7). Significantly, Sophie’s attempted silencing of her sexual desires: “I knew I wasn’t supposed to feel” has strong resonance with Monsieur Augustin’s cautionary message to Atie who mourns Sophie’s impending departure: “We have no right to be sad.” Despite invoking a sense of community, this message from the selfappointed representative of the state/community (of women) bears the imprint of silencing (of female emotions). A transgressor in his own right, Joseph identifies how Sophie is complicit in her self-silencing by becoming an echo of Martine, how she actively contributes to her own subjugation by living her mother’s dreams of becoming a doctor: “You sound like you are quoting someone. What would Sophie like to do” (72)? Subsequently, Sophie transgresses the boundaries of cultural expectations: She does not become a doctor, but instead is a secretary and female sexuality by wearing “a tight-fitting yellow dress that [she] had hidden under [her] mattress” (82). Wearing a dress the color of Martine’s favorite color is symbolic as it speaks to Sophie’s desire to be accepted both as a woman and as a daughter; it calls attention to her desire for oneness that Martine seeks in 17 Sophie was about to begin college where she had planned to pursue a degree in medicine when she met and fell in love with Joseph who “dared [Sophie] to dream on [her] own” (72).

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the iconic image of the Marassas.18 While Sophie is unable to articulate verbally her desires of belonging because she is fearful that her mother will disapprove of both Joseph and her (relationship), she hopes to convey it bodily. This desire for oneness between mother and daughter is cast aside ultimately in favor of female propriety. We witness a parallel mother– daughter estrangement in Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John. Taking pride at a young age in imitating her mother’s manners and mode of dress, young Annie is devastated when Annie John Senior brutally and unexpectedly curtailed the practice of mother-and-daughter dressing alike. This abrupt separation forces Annie to view puberty, but more specifically, to view a young woman’s coming-of-age as undesirable, even as it reinforces the shaming of the female body. This undesirability finds representation in Sophie chastising herself for becoming sexually aroused. In time, Sophie comes to realize that the color yellow symbolizes complicity; refusing to be complicit in her own unmaking, she chooses the color red that epitomizes female passion and defiance.19 Joseph, who noticeably stands apart from Donald Augustin and Marc, fans the flames of Sophie’s passion and defiance.20 A mere few months into their courtship, he declares: “I am going to marry you” (73). Unsurprisingly, Sophie is enamored by Joseph’s transgressive manner of living through his jazz music. Giving voice to their experiences, the women transcend and transgress boundaries and reinvent themselves as they break free from the stranglehold of a patriarchal culture that requires, and oftentimes, demands their silence. Rejecting the silencing of both their minds and bodies, and instead realizing female (sexual) agency, the women register resistance. Speaking/writing their truths is empowering in that it exposes and archives the violence suffered by the women.

18 After arriving in New York, Martine dressed both Sophie and herself in yellow; Martine drove “a pale yellow car;” the well-adorned doll she presented to Sophie wore “ribbons and barrettes that matched the yellow dress, Sophie’s sheets were yellow (41, 45, 46). In Sophie’s dreams, Martine was “wrapped in yellow sheets and had daffodils in her hair” (28). 19 Unsurprisingly, Sophie buries Martine in a two-piece crimson suit with matching gloves and shoes. 20 Joseph encourages Sophie to find her voice, to speak her truth. He dares her to dream: “You have to have a passion for what you do” (71). Sophie articulates triumphantly: “He even understood my silences” (72).

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References Alexander, Simone (2011) “M/Othering the Nation: Women’s Bodies as Nationalist Trope in Edwidge Danticat’s Breath, Eyes, Memory.” African American Review 43.3 (fall): 373–390. Alexander, Simone AJ (2014) African Diasporic Women’s Narratives: Politics of Resistance, Survival, and Citizenship. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Brake, E (2011) Minimizing Marriage: Marriage, Morality, and the Law. London: Oxford University Press. Collins PH (2000) Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Danticat E (1994) Breath, Eyes, Memory. London: Abacus. Dickerson, V (2000) “Summoning SomeBody: The Flesh Made Word in Toni Morrison’s Fiction.” In Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representation by African American Women, ed. Michael Bennett and Vanessa Dickerson, 195–216. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks (1994) Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Johnson, N (2006) “Challenging Internal Colonialism: Edwidge Danticat’s Feminist Emancipatory Enterprise.” Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora. 6–7.1 (fall-winter): 147–166. Kincaid, Jamaica (1986) Annie John. New York: Penguin Books. ——— (1992) “Girl.” In At the Bottom of the River. New York: Plume. King, Rosamond (2014) Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Morrison, Toni (1988) Beloved. New York: Penguin. Mortimer Mildred, P (2007) Writing from the Hearth: Public, Domestic, and Imaginative Space in Francophone Women’s Fiction of Africa and the Caribbean. New York: Lexington Books. Smith, Faith, ed. (2011) Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Vogt-William, Christine F (2014) Bridges, Borders and Bodies: Transgressive Transculturality in Contemporary South Asian Diasporic Women’s Novels. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Index

A Abolition, 39, 166 Absence, 102, 134, 141, 220 Abuse, 23, 99, 118, 121, 122, 124, 126, 131, 146 African, vi, 2, 3, 12, 23, 24, 38, 141, 156, 179, 182, 183, 188, 189, 194, 203, 205, 208, 212–214, 224, 225 African American, 11, 181, 185, 202, 220, 224 Alternative spaces, ix, 13, 203 Alternative subjectivities, 12, 194, 200 Ambivalent, 197, 204, 221, 227 America, 220 Animal stories, 11 Anti-Haitianism, 7, 118, 146, 156 Asian, 3, 24, 39 Authorities, 8, 30–32, 79, 91, 99, 121, 122, 132, 133, 140, 158, 229 Autonomy, 219

B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 209, 211, 215 Barbados, 44 Belonging, vii, 7, 21, 24, 25, 38, 45, 73, 121, 173, 208, 228, 238 Beneficiaries, 98, 229 Benefit, ix, 5, 33, 39, 48, 84, 88, 111, 130, 141, 152, 167, 174, 185, 195 Bestiality, 202 Bhabha, Homi, 10 Black female body, 12 Bolland, Nigel, 39 Border, 219 Border crossing, 13, 112, 174 Borderisation, 21, 22, 34, 36, 39 Borderlessness, 215 Borderless spaces, 12, 194, 203 Border transgression, vi, viii, x, 5, 9 Border violations, 112 Boundaries, v–vii, ix, 4, 9, 11, 12, 19, 44, 47, 133, 155, 180, 186, 187,

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Moïse and F. Réno (eds.), Border Transgression and Reconfiguration of Caribbean Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45939-0

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INDEX

194, 195, 206, 219, 221, 222, 228, 236–238 Boyce-Davies, Carole, 12, 194 Brathwaite, Kamau, 11, 23 Brazilian, 7, 35, 37, 73, 82 Brodber, Erna, 198

C Caribbean identities, 26 Caribbean migration, 23 CARICOM, 44, 50, 51, 53, 55, 64, 65, 109, 128 Categories, 13, 52, 53, 63, 104, 180, 227 Cédula, 105, 106, 146, 154 Césaire, Aimé, 22, 170, 186 Chamoiseau, Patrick, 21, 38 Christian, Barbara, 185, 195, 208 Citizenship, 48 Civil society actors, 118, 125, 133 Clark, Vèvè, 204 Collective identity, 4, 87 Colonial history, 24 Coloniality, ix, 2 Conflicts, 39 Connection, viii, 3, 33, 73, 126, 180, 187, 188, 197, 205 Construction, ix, 6, 7, 34, 38, 49, 58, 63, 64, 80, 81, 99, 103, 117, 151, 157, 206, 213–215 Contact-zone, 158 Control, vi, 7–10, 20, 28, 36, 47, 51, 61, 74, 75, 97, 99, 107, 108, 116, 140, 145, 146, 236 Cooper, Carolyn, 195 Creole, 3, 4, 9, 10, 21–28, 33, 34, 38, 39, 81, 87, 88, 90, 103, 122, 166–168, 171–173, 175 Creole societies, 34, 39 Creolisation, 21–24, 26, 27, 34, 39 Crisis, 8, 71, 117, 123–126, 128, 130

Cuba, 24, 26, 75, 76 Cultural heritage, 87, 89 Cultural practices, 11, 181, 237 Cultural spaces, 194, 206 Culture, 9, 11, 21, 22, 36, 39, 57, 65, 71, 82, 87, 89, 90, 100, 156, 174, 179, 181, 182, 186, 210, 214, 215, 238 D Danticat, Edwidge, viii, 12, 121, 194, 196, 200, 203–206, 215, 216, 219, 232 Death zones, 8, 130 Denationalization, 8, 145 Dependence, 6, 54 Deportations, 8, 9, 107, 111, 119, 120, 122, 124–129, 132–134, 140, 142, 144, 145 Deportees, 8, 123, 132, 133, 142, 151 Descent, 7, 30, 86, 98, 103–111, 126, 128, 140–144, 147, 148, 154, 181, 186, 188, 214, 224, 233 Development, 6, 27, 44, 45, 49, 110, 111, 123, 156, 213 Diaspora, 2, 4, 24–26, 28–34, 71–73, 78, 79, 82, 85, 87–91, 126, 168, 174, 195, 216 Diasporic Caribbean, 11, 12 Diasporic identity, 87–89, 91 Diglossia, 10, 168, 173 Discrepancy, 6, 214 Discriminatory, 8, 108 Displaced, 10, 12, 123, 130 Dividing line, vi, 1, 98 Division, viii, 3, 74, 98, 103, 119 Dizziness, 10, 171 Dominican Republic, viii, x, 6–8, 26, 37, 75–77, 84, 85, 88, 89, 91, 98, 102–112, 115–134,

INDEX

139–142, 144, 145, 151–158, 168 Drumming, 11, 181 Duality, 6, 48, 204 Dubois, Web, 204 Dutch, viii, x, 8, 9, 170 Duvalier, 74, 75, 88, 102, 140

E Earthquake, 8, 73, 78, 86, 91, 101, 102, 117, 131, 132, 157, 185 Elections, 32, 34, 36, 121, 129 Elites, 4, 32, 141 Emptiness, 10, 185, 234 Encounter, 3, 23, 46, 230 English-speaking Caribbean, 11, 49 Ethics, 6 Ethnicity, 28, 39, 90, 120, 215 Europe, viii, ix, 2, 3, 7, 10, 21, 22, 24, 38, 76–78, 80, 156, 185, 195 Exclusion, 1, 3, 6, 7, 32, 44, 45, 48, 52, 54, 58, 64, 65, 97, 105, 112, 155, 168, 172, 175, 215, 219, 226, 231 Exploitable, 6, 58 Exploited, 6, 59, 204 Expulsion, 101, 118, 121–124, 126, 128, 129, 132, 140, 144, 145, 154

F Fictional, 11, 121 Fishman, Joshua, 10 Fixed national border, 12 Florida, 11, 26, 27, 76, 77, 80, 81, 85, 88, 179 Fluidity, 9, 12, 200, 202 Foreigners, vii, 5, 9, 34–36, 38, 106, 141

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Fragmentation, vii, viii, 12, 13, 26, 215, 216 Framework, viii, 2, 4, 11, 13, 37, 44, 51, 53, 54, 65, 131, 134, 194, 203, 216, 229 France, viii, 4, 7, 35, 36, 38, 78, 83, 88, 167, 172, 175 Frontierization, 4 Fuel, 8, 25, 26, 35, 37, 49, 74, 75, 82, 90, 116, 157, 174 G Geography, viii, 2, 13, 64 Giraud, Michel, 35, 36 Glissant, Edouard, 21, 23, 34, 180 Globalisation, 19–21, 27, 33 Global well-being, 5 Goodison, Lorna, 195, 206 Government, vi, 5, 9, 51, 59, 65, 86, 97, 101, 104, 106, 109–111, 116, 120, 122–126, 128, 129, 154, 167, 171 The Greater Caribbean, 2 Guadeloupe, 4, 36, 37, 166, 167, 169, 171–173, 175 Gulf Coast, 11, 179 Guyana, 6, 7, 24, 195 Guyanese workers, 5 H Haiti, viii, x, 7, 8, 26, 29–33, 36, 71, 73–82, 84, 86, 88, 91, 101–104, 106, 107, 110–112, 116–118, 120, 121, 123–126, 128–133, 140, 142–144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 153, 158, 181, 185, 200, 202, 225, 227, 236 Haiti/Dominican Republic border, 7 Haitian descent, 7, 30, 86, 98, 103–112, 126, 128, 140–144, 146, 147, 154

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INDEX

Haitians, 6–8, 26, 30–32, 36, 73, 74, 77–84, 88, 89, 98, 101–104, 106, 107, 110, 116–120, 122–127, 129, 131, 132, 139, 140, 143, 145–147, 152–157, 181, 185, 201 Hall, Stuart, 13 Harris, Wilson, 11, 12, 203 Health measures, 5 Hegemonic, 13, 193, 204 Hierarchization, 10 Highly skilled migrants, 6 History, 2, 8, 22, 35, 74, 87, 88, 90, 103, 119, 121, 133, 143, 144, 157, 167, 175, 200 Hopkinson, Nalo, 194, 197–200, 204, 216 Host countries, 4, 29, 78, 79 Human, v, ix, 11, 31, 37, 49, 108, 109, 118, 124, 128–131, 133, 144, 145, 150–153, 155, 172, 175, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 189, 195, 198, 199, 208, 212 Humanity, viii, 5, 186, 197 Human misery, 8 Human rights, 6, 7, 65, 79, 108, 109, 118, 124, 128–131, 133, 144, 145, 155 Hurricane, 9, 102, 121, 183, 184, 186, 187 Hybridity, 3

Imaginary, 2, 10 Imputation, 7 Inalienable, 6, 108, 175 In-betweenity, 12, 212, 213 Inclusion, 1, 3, 5, 44, 45, 48, 54, 64, 65, 112 Indentured servants, 2 India, 2, 151 Indigenous rites, 11 Individuals, 5, 35, 36, 39, 50, 53, 64, 74, 81, 89, 99–101, 105, 108, 120, 226 Inequalities, 10, 117, 180 Influence, 4, 22, 25, 28–33, 45, 71, 77, 90, 91, 121, 146, 233 Insecurity, 9, 34–36, 38, 71, 79 Inside, vi, 5, 48, 205, 208, 209, 216 Institutional, 2, 79, 81, 89, 91 Integration, 7, 39, 88–91, 100, 112, 133, 174, 181, 182 Intercultural, 10, 148, 158 Internal border, ix, 7 Interstice, 10 Intracultural boundaries, 10 Invention, 7 Invisible border, 8 Irigaray, Luce, 194 Irregular, 8, 45, 117, 118, 123, 126–128, 132, 133, 140–144, 146, 150–155 Irregular migration, 134, 154 Island economy, 6

I Identities, vi, vii, 3, 4, 12, 13, 21, 23, 26, 29, 34, 36, 37, 88, 91, 98, 100, 144, 146, 167, 175, 201, 207, 215 Identity construction, 1, 206, 214 Ideology, 8, 224 Illegal, vii, 5, 45, 99, 102, 104–108, 111, 112

L Labor force, 6 Language, vi, 7, 9, 10, 13, 21, 22, 31, 47, 88, 98, 103, 128, 142, 147, 155, 165–167, 169, 170, 172–175, 185, 209, 214–216, 236 Legal, 6, 20, 31, 37, 45, 48, 54, 55, 59, 65, 78, 79, 81–83, 85, 87,

INDEX

98, 99, 103–108, 110, 112, 124, 127, 140, 223 Legitimize, 7, 8, 226, 227 Lessing, Doris, 206 Lexical borders, 10 Liberty and equality, 6 Limbo, 11, 214 Liminality, 9 Limitation, x, 2, 6, 38, 231 Linguistic plurality, 10, 175 Literary discourse, 13 Literature, viii, ix, 9, 22, 44, 103, 120, 185, 223 Living conditions, 3, 8, 75, 76, 151 M Magical, 11 Maintenance, 10, 99 Marshall, Paule, 205 Martinique, 4, 23, 36, 169 Massacre, 116, 118–121, 124, 139, 143, 147, 157, 158 Mass exodus, 2, 123 Materialize, 8, 117 Media, 8, 32, 84, 89, 152, 156, 185 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 193 Meta-nation, 3, 4, 27, 29, 38 Metaphor, 9, 10, 119, 150, 189, 202, 210 Migration, vii, ix, 2, 4–6, 9, 20–24, 28, 33, 34, 44, 49–51, 53, 57, 58, 62, 65, 72–88, 90, 103, 117–119, 121, 123–125, 127, 129, 131, 133, 134, 140, 142, 147, 152, 153, 157, 169, 226, 229 Migration policy, 26, 28, 51, 64, 79, 86, 88, 125 Migratory movement, 3 Minorities, 10, 108 Miscegenation, 3 Mistry, Rohinton, 200

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Mobility, 6, 13, 44, 51, 55, 75, 79, 85, 86, 98, 102, 104, 110, 117, 228, 231 Monitoring foreigners, 9 Mother tongue, 167–171 Movement, 3, 10, 28, 65, 97, 100, 108, 112, 122, 130, 142, 144, 209 Multidimensionality, 9, 215 Multilingual, 9, 170, 173, 175 Multiple, 91, 200, 204, 215, 231 N National affiliations, 4 National identities, vi, 12, 98 Nationalism, vii, 4, 5, 99, 225 Nationality, 4, 7, 8, 47, 83, 91, 98, 104, 106–109, 117, 120, 128, 131, 140, 141, 149, 154, 159 National languages, 9 National sentiment, 4 Nationhood, 13 Nation-state, vi, viii, x, 12, 19, 27, 28, 38, 75, 219, 236 Negotiations, 1 Negrophobia, 8, 156 Neighboring territory, 8 New social solidarities, 4 New York, 4, 13, 24, 27, 30, 32, 77, 80, 81, 83, 85, 91, 122, 126, 146, 203, 220, 225 Non-humans, 11 Non-nationals, 7, 52, 53, 65 Non-traditional, 11 Normative frameworks, 13, 194, 216 Normative logic privilege, 6 Normative representations, 2 O Offense, 5, 7 Official boundaries, 9

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INDEX

Oligarchy, 7, 118, 152 Opportunities, 5, 24, 34, 82, 86, 102, 133, 232 Oppressions, 11 Original, vi, 3, 5, 8, 24, 37, 81, 84, 86, 87, 90, 132, 140, 171, 174, 206, 207, 221, 223, 226, 230, 232 Oscillation, 9, 198 Outside, v, vi, viii, 4, 5, 25, 48, 77, 106, 107, 117, 120, 195, 208, 210, 212, 216, 223, 227, 231

P Page, Kezia, 199 Paradox, 6, 206, 208, 223, 224 Paris, 4, 24, 83, 88 Patriarchal powers, 13 Performative exclusionary discourse, 6 Performative identity discourse, 5 Permanence, 5, 87, 175 Permanent conflict, 8 Permanent re-creation, 10 Persistence, 13 Placelessness, 12, 193 Plantation, 2, 23, 39, 74, 75, 116, 167, 179 Policies, 79, 81, 99, 117 Political culture, 3 Political transnationalisation, 27, 28 Popular, 4, 10, 11, 45, 50, 73, 120 Populations, 2, 4–7, 21–23, 26, 35, 37, 38, 46, 49, 54, 71, 72, 76, 79, 84, 89, 102, 103, 116, 120, 130, 131, 184 Postcolonial, 3 Preconceived borders, 11 Production, 8 Progress, 10, 116, 117, 131, 133, 168, 196, 197 Promises, 10, 182

R Race, 7, 13, 31, 36, 45, 98, 103, 156, 181, 187, 193, 206, 212–215 Racism, 7, 8, 100, 109, 150, 156 Reactivation, 9, 125 Reassertion, 20 Recomposition, 2 Reconfiguration, viii, 2, 4, 9, 12, 13, 27, 118 Reconstructed collective memory, 7 Recreation, 12, 13 Regularization, 5, 46, 123, 127, 132 Rehabilitation, 12 Reinvention, 10, 13, 228 Rejection, 6, 7, 35, 36, 117, 168, 201, 202, 206, 214, 231 Relation, 28, 158, 168, 174 Religion, 181, 195, 207 Remittances, 3, 25–27, 33, 85, 86 Residents, vi, 9, 32, 52, 101, 104, 140, 142, 154 Resistance, 4, 52, 88, 117, 223, 224, 234–238 Reterritorialization, 12 Reticular, 4 Roots, 4, 11, 102, 118, 169 Rupture, 1, 9, 13, 223 S Saint Martin, 8, 9, 80 Sedentary, 6, 175 Self-empowerment, 12 Self-expression, 13, 176, 203 Self-presence, 10 Self-reinvention, 13 Self-renewal, 12 Senior, Olive, 13, 206–214 Separation, 1, 7, 97, 119, 144, 183, 222, 229, 230, 238 Sheller, Mimi, 11, 203 Shift, 12, 13, 20, 23, 24, 36, 64, 79, 165, 174, 175, 181, 196, 207

INDEX

Single enclosing cultural matrix, 11 Slave system, 2 Society, vi, 3, 8, 9, 24, 28, 39, 51, 71, 75, 86, 87, 89–91, 101, 103, 111, 119, 121–124, 126, 129, 131, 132, 134, 150, 155, 166, 186, 188, 207, 220 Solidarity, 4, 8, 84, 88, 91, 120, 123, 145, 150, 157 Space, vii–x, 5, 6, 9, 11–13, 20–22, 44, 48, 64, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 83, 86, 89, 100, 180, 185, 186, 193, 197, 199–204, 210, 214, 216, 219, 220, 231 Spatial distance, 10 Spirituality, 213 Stability, 3, 64, 102 Staggering rhythm, 10 Stateless, 8, 98, 101, 106, 108, 109, 128, 142, 155 Statelessness, 8, 103, 174 Status, 5, 8, 30, 33, 46, 48, 51, 57, 59, 60, 79, 82, 89, 91, 98–101, 103, 104, 107, 109, 127, 128, 131, 132, 140–144, 147, 154, 167, 173, 175, 224, 226–230, 235 Stigmatize, 5, 188 Stretch the borders, 11 Structural, 2, 39, 54, 71, 74, 75, 110 Subaltern histories, 11 Subjectivation, 12, 207, 215 Symbolic, 2, 3, 7, 8, 21, 31–34, 36, 72, 90, 105, 144, 167, 170, 174, 230, 237 Synchronic presence, 10 System of injustices, 11 T Temporary, 5, 57, 82, 104, 105, 116, 121, 123, 127, 132 Territorialisation, 26, 90

247

Territory, vi, viii, 2, 3, 8, 20, 21, 26, 33, 35, 37, 38, 73, 90, 98, 104, 145, 146, 148, 153, 155, 158, 159, 171, 183 Thieme, John, 214 Threats, 7, 21, 44, 110, 152 Tiffin, Helen, 11 Tolerated, 6, 44, 116 Tongues, ix, 9, 10, 22, 87, 165–171, 174, 175, 206 Traditions, 4, 22, 87, 90, 206 Transcendence, x, 9, 23, 173, 216 Transformations, 2, 100 Transgression dynamics, 5 Transhipment, 2 Transhipment of identities, 2 Transition, 9, 54, 76 Translation, 90, 144, 147, 150, 172, 212 Transnation, 29, 34 Transnationalisation, 3, 20, 22, 25, 26, 32, 73 Trauma, 13, 91, 180, 185, 200, 204, 216 Trujillo, Rafael Leonidas, 116, 119, 120, 124, 140, 143, 154

U Unbordering, 12 Undocumented migrants, 5, 45, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57, 65, 127 Undocumentedness, 45, 47, 56–58, 62, 64 Unequal, 8, 126 Unified, viii, 12, 13, 31, 125 Universal, 6, 101 Unknowable, 10 Unpredictable, 10 Unrepresentable, 10

248

INDEX

V Vernacular languages, 10 Violation, 5, 8, 109, 124, 141, 150, 221, 227 Vodou, 11, 146, 204 Void, 10, 169, 220

W Water spaces, 3 Waugh, Patricia, 215 X Xenophobia, 6, 36, 103, 118