Delinking: For Michel-Rolph Trouillot

There I sat reading

on the fifth floor of Hatch,

amidst a mountain of

right angles, features of

varying width, demeanor and stance.

Some looked hard, swellin’

their chest as if waiting

for its next debate.

Others pushed back, unassuming

yet resolute.

I was driven there.

Moments before, after

my introduction to hummus

and the inexplicably difficult question of

“What do you work on?”

came the obligatory, “Well, have you read…?”

    Which really isn’t a question,

  but more of an expectation

  that may or may not have the

  intention of belittling,

  yet certifies that a scholarly probe

  should’ve occurred

yesterday.

And so I embarked, back to

Onè and respè,

back to charred August nights in Le Cap

where the wails of the non-event echoed.

Testimony—that Truth

for the world is a chimera.

Selectively scorching ideas and voices,

yet creating the source/

the fact/ remains that as

I set up camp along

the ridge of my Athenaeum,

dust mites as companions,

I celebrated my 1804 moment.

There I sat, reading—

a promising act

to offend my mind,

to unearth “the fiction of Haitian

exceptionalism.”

Ayiti pa bon

Se yon bel peyi, men li glise.

A schizophrenic djaspora mantra

for the many who suffered the winter of exile—

analysis lost in a cloud of unicorn politics.

I needed to see this myth,

to shout it out in the still

of the peaks. I needed

to sleep with it, be swept up

in it in order to disrupt it,

and to believe that I can explain it.

Here I sit, reading

and writing.

Wondering

if I will ever celebrate 1804 again.