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    Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD
    Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD
    Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD
    Ebook131 pages57 minutes

    Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD

    By Kevin Brownlow

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    About this ebook

    Gina Athena Ulysse's Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me & THE WORLD is a lyrically vivid meditative journey that is unapologetic in its determination to name, embrace and reclaim a revolutionary Blackness that has been historically stigmatized and denied. Crafting experiments with "ethnographic collectibles" of word, performative sounds, and imagery to blur genres and the lines between the geopolitical and the personal, this collection is a testament to postcolonial inheritances. Ulysse's work remixes samples from a range of references as it beckons readers to bear witness to a coming of age as she shifts between time and place and plays with languages to stretch the margins of aesthetics in the academic. These poems, performance texts, and photographs gather fractured memories—longings laced with Vodou chants confronting a past that looms too largely in the present. Because When God Is Too Busy searches for humility while honoring sacred and ancestral imperatives to recognize and salute power beyond Western attachments to reason.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateApr 7, 2017
    ISBN9780819577368
    Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD
    Author

    Kevin Brownlow

    Gina Athena Ulysse is an artist-academic-activist originally from Pétion-Ville, Haïti. Her creative works include spokenword, performance art, and installation pieces. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and collections. She is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica and Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Her first book of poetry, "Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me & THE WORLD is based on her one-woman spoken-word performance, which she has presented throughout the US and abroad.

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      Book preview

      Because When God Is Too Busy - Kevin Brownlow

      There was dirt. Heaping piles rested alongside rectangular holes deeply dug into the ground in a faraway room adjacent to a temple with a long entryway barricaded with overlapping rows of barbed wire and cacti. We had come from the city

      When I was young, I took part in a ritual that I can barely recall. I was never meant to speak of it. Part of its protective potency was in the silence that shrouded a too sickly, gangly body too often under siege.

      Decades later, I participated in a reinvention of this ritual with a new priest in a different town. I didn’t need healing. He wanted me there in the room so I could observe and learn. I was much older, healthier, an anthropologist.

      It took a while for me to sew the handmade cotton vest. Did I have one all those years ago? Red on one side and black on the other. Thick strips of white juxtaposed over each other to make slightly crooked crosses. I did not have to pay, but he had specific directives:

      You need to do the digging. Learn other languages. Do more research. Read. Keep doing the work that will take you back to see where this will lead you. No one likes to speak of this. Just keep reading and then tell them everything.

      According to an old tale, A woman who had become barren came to Judas the Pious for counsel; the mystic should succeed where medicine was powerless! He told her that nothing would help except that she be forgotten like a corpse moldering in the earth. To carry out his prescription he had her children place her in a grave; and then armed men, hired for this purpose, make a sudden attack upon them so that they were frightened and ran away, completely forgetting their mother. She arose of the grave, newborn, and in short order proved the efficacy of the remedy. The symbolic internment and rebirth freed her from the misfortune that was her lot in what had now become her previous existence.

      I grew up under a dictatorship. I have a complicated relationship with silence.

      Sleeping Temple

      Peristil an Dòmi

      l’ap kraze

      pa kite li kraze pitit

      pa kite li tonbe

      ranje li epi kite peristil la dòmi

      Peristil an Dòmi

      (Sleeping Temple)

      l’ap kraze

      pa kite li kraze pitit

      pa kite li tonbe

      ranje li epi kite peristil la dòmi

      (It’s breaking down

      don’t let it break child

      don’t let it fall

      fix it and let the temple sleep)

      Because When God Is Too Busy

      The Hair Poem

      When are you going to go natural, girlfriend?

      Dreads

      to her

      they were the essence of being cool

      the essence of being black

      the essence of being woman

      to her they were the essence of being a cool blakk woman

      Revolutionary Commodity

      what exactly constitutes one’s blackness

      i’ve always wanted to ask

      a black woman struggling

      to carve out herself, myself, a sense of self, a me

      with straightened, permed, colonized hair

      what exactly constitutes one’s blackness

      i want to ask

      i

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