SYDNEY ROSE MAUBERT

I wish I could testify that I came to know my heritage through an easy feeling of belonging. But it was a foreign intimacy that first showed me how much heritage mattered. As I went out into the world, I was troubled by the dispossessive force of disruptive stories—when my innocent questions were met with tales of poisons, zombies, and capture; of unreliable actors and insurgency; of riches, pearls, and unfounded debts. I was both troubled and fascinated by these stories, which blurred the boundaries between history and humor, and I found myself struggling to untether from what might be a great folktale or might be a vital lineage.

I longed for the fleeting sense of freedom I knew as a child, when my father would tell me stories of my heritage—of Haitian heroes and of the Haitian Revolution. It broke my heart, as I grew older, to hear him say over and over, “Did you see Haiti is on fire again?” I’d witness distorted images: a church engulfed in flames, women dazed in the street, and those terribly beautiful photos of bedrooms, couples still tethered to each other in embrace.

I hesitate to represent these images, though I feel compelled to call attention to the ease with which we make a spectacle of Haitian suffering—and to illuminate how Haitian women’s brilliant experiments with homemaking, intimacy, and the performance of daily life are so often overlooked.