2/ The chains of servitude may have broken, and still, freedom remained elusive for the majority. Hard work = Surplus value. For those without and who-will-never-own the means of production. Disposable, the proletariat will be eaten alive. Toiling the land. Since its emergence, this racial capitalism has always been gothic, cruel and monstrous, “constantly sucking in living labor as its soul, Some contend Marx knew: “Capitalism is a crime whose most obvious analogue is cannibalism … We are only our capacity to work … bodies and brains are mutilated into This structural violence cannot be extricated from black ontology. From the experience, always gendered, of living in a system that seeks daily to obliterate the most

These are les damnés de la terre, the masses left behind by a Revolution that worked but did not fix everything. IT could NOT fix everything. AYITI has been at the avant-garde. On a fast track. Manmade and natural disasters. During the last two centuries, the former Pearl of the Antilles has remained at the forefront of economic, political and social mechanics and machinations ushering in dystopic futurity. This contradiction was captured by André Eugène in conversation with literature scholar Sibylle Fischer. Commenting on Atis Rezistans’ sculpture “Freedom!” Eugène said “Haitians fought for their freedom many years ago, but that’s not freedom if you don’t have anything, no food, no electricity, no books and can’t send your children to school. People in my country are fighting for this Fischer punctuated his point: “Freedom from slavery as just another monster, a monster that rose from the debris of the monstrous society that was defeated in That monster continues to morph, taking its shape from both external and internal pressures. Geopolitical out-maneuverings. Occupations. Dictatorships. More occupations disguised as humanitarian aid. Class War. Illegitimate elections. And the mortals continued to do things. Indeed, insofar as it has been dubbed prebendary, or predatory, the state treats the dead as they do the living, prompting a rallying cry: “nou se mo vivan!” In the aftermath of the January 12, 2010 earthquake: we are the living dead!

3/ Or are we? Are they the living dead? Is PÒTOPRENS not a visual requiem? Does pondering over Fred Moten’s question—“What is the relation between political despair and —allow us to resituate Haiti, with its longue durée of suffering, as a point of departure in explorations of radical Black diaspora traditions? Without simply reducing artistic expression to one’s conditions, how do we recognize and honor the verve? The will to live? The impulse to oppose? RESIST. Meanwhile, Jean-Claude Saintilus’ mo vivan, his spectral figures from the Grand Rue, continue to exist in liminality between life and death in a country many deem invivable. Unlivable. They have nothing to lose. “God Money… I’d rather die than give you control. Bow down before the one you serve, you’re going to get what you The longest neocolonial experiment in the West The people are in the midst of a rebellion at the time of this writing: #KoteKobPetwoKaribea. A hashtag campaign demanding accountability for state corruption developed into a series of mass protests culminating in what organizers called Operation Lockdown. The country was brought to a standstill in February There have been uprisings elsewhere: Brazil, Mexico, Pakistan, Turkey, Venezuela, South Africa, the United States. People are rebelling against BIG CAPITAL. In that regard, the first Black Republic is no exception. It is not lost on the poorest that they are structural casualties of a new gilded age typified by an ever-vaster gap between the wealthy and the rest that makes a mockery of the Gilded Age.

This inequality, for those among us who inherited sacrifice, is not new. Being cheap labor demands an embrace of precarity as daily practice. Yet, in this land every breath still offers promise. Who gets to breathe? Who is suffocating because they must hide? Who is safe to walk alone? Who must walk together to survive? Manbo Madame Jacqueline told me, “When you do a rasanblaj, you have to gather EVERYTHING.” Nothing gets left behind. Needing to discern creative survival from artistic production, we struggle to make sense of what fuels expression, because the western modernist frame relies upon a racialized taxonomy that requires Black art to answer to Europe in order to be perceived as ART. U.S.-born artist Kerry James Marshall whose work sits in at the crossroads of the Black Atlantic espouses the notion of a “black aesthetics,” which he describes as “an atmosphere, a tone, a ‘vibe’… (I)t is glamorous and impoverished, structured and improvisational, naïve and sophisticated, brash and abject. Its first principle is a desire for self- A desire to be SEEN and understood NOT as Other but as self. Nuanced. It is in this discursive and embodied Black diasporic landscape, a space of self-referentiality formed against the translucent shadow of global anti-blackness that we find the tenets of rasanblaj. Imperatives. Ancestral. Liberation. Agony. Love. Defeat. Regeneration. Vibrations. This “vibratory art,” as Patricia Donatien calls it, stems from Yoruba heritage that survived the Middle

It is work imbued with the poetics and aesthetics of Vodou. Refusal. SELF rooted in the foundation of one’s being. As Amiri Baraka described it in his poem “Leadbelly Gives an Autograph”: