I feel so privileged to have witnessed an amazing multimedio.
Alanna Lockward was the facilitator.
It was an event that represented important border crossing. A recentering of decolonial actions through a dialogue that was intentional and moving. It made me think about how the U.S. portrays Haiti-Dominican Republic relations in ways that focus on the legacies of trauma and violence, as though it is delinked from U.S. imperialisms and colonization. The multimedio grappled with the killing abstraction of racism that has real implications – dividing people through the circulation of dominant narratives. How does one walk across the multiple borders that are reified in categories reinscribed on the body, the land, and in the mind – and dualities of legal/illegal, us/them, citizen/noncitizen, victim/criminal, and human/nonhuman. Where are the possibilities of healing? This multi-medio inspired through reading, listening, speaking, and being together, the decolonial maneuvers of reaching out, to be together, even in times when narratives of violence and difference (i.e., the circulation of the lynching of a Haitian man), continue to hold the center. The multimedio was a intervening in these divides – a desire to come together, alliance, and the speaking to what resonates across boundaries.
An important part of the multimedio is a collective reading of a fragment of Jacques Viau Renaud’s epic poem “Permanencia del llanto” (The Permanence of Weeping). The idea is to document this collective reading of people in both parts of the island and elsewhere, in Spanish, French and English.
Monday February 16 @ 11 am, Saint-Domingue time / 5 pm Europe time
Wednesday February 18 @ 11 am, Saint Domingue time / 5 pm Europe time
Annie Isabel Fukushima 