Nou pa gen vizibilite: Haitian Girlhood beyond the Logics of Visibility
The Black Scholar, 2020
In Why Haiti Needs New Narratives Gina Ulysse discusses how the logics of (in)visibility intersect with gender in paradoxical ways. “The world has watched Haiti’s most vulnerable women survive quake, flood, cholera and homelessness…yet those women still feel invisible. What will it take for them to be seen and heard? ‘Nou pa gen visibilite.’ We don’t have visibility, Mary-Kettley Jean said…Her words are ironic…” (53). Taking what Ulysse calls ironic as a point of departure, this essay examines how Haitian girls are seen and heard in post-earthquake texts. I argue that in response to narratives that deny the significance of girls’ subjugated knowledge, the visual and literary texts that I analyze offer stories of Haitian girlhood that center their experiences, amplify their voices, and complicate their subjectivities. Through close readings of photography by FotoKonbit, an organization dedicated to documenting Haitians by Haitians, and analyses of the book Failles by Yanick Lahens, and the poem “Unequal Distribution” by Claudine Michel, I argue that these texts deploy the logics of visibility and invisibility to draw attention to how girls are invisibilized, while they simultaneously refuse to focus exclusively on that erasure by focusing on what and how Haitians girls see for themselves.
