Creole epistemologies in Afro-Caribbean feminisms: A decolonial engagement with Marie Lily Cérat

Introduction

This article engages the lived experiences and knowledges of Haitian women in the United States as a feminist praxis of community politics of hope and transformation. Everyday life for these women involves intentionally supporting one another while simultaneously confronting the dehumanizing realities of race and racism. Haitian women in the United States disrupt poverty, social isolation, gender violence and deep-seated inequalities through resistant, creative subsistence practices linked to their everyday struggles; these practices include the daily living itself, food vending, arts, gardening or re-actualizing familiar modes of living like the Haitian lakou. I ground this study of the everyday in a close engagement with the work of Haitian American activist and scholar Marie Lily Cérat, whose efforts in Brooklyn, New York embody this practice of self-determination and collective transformation. The analysis is supported by a close reading of Cérat's short story ‘Maloulou’. It asks: how does being-with-others in the everyday open up reservoirs for collective existence?

Since 2010, the United States has become a second home for me and my two children, through Temporary Protected Status (TPS) granted to Haitian nationals after the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. Like many with TPS, I have built a life here – one shaped by various communities which include my own journey with Cérat and others in Brooklyn. But building a home in a place where you are not wanted and where you face constant threats of deportation and acute isolation can amount to a radical act of resistance and self-affirmation. And across the United States, Haitian people withstand various forms of discrimination while dealing with the impacts of political unrest, natural disasters and global economic forces that have displaced many of us from our homeland. Our efforts to transform complex governmental and non-governmental bureaucratic infrastructures in both the United States and in our home country – just to survive and support our families – remind us how the formerly enslaved of the Caribbean region dealt with a similar colonial machinery. Highly localized collective practices of subsistence such as slave gardens, creole languages and lakou livings emerge in plantation economies as modalities of collective expressions among people whose experience of slavery, displacement and deportation has become a reservoir of profound connection. As a social researcher, and with the particularities that this inquiry implies for my own life, my engagement with Cérat contends that Haitian women's everyday politics are central to how they reimagine their social, political and physical landscapes.

Embodied collective ways of reworking racialized landscapes like the Haitian lakou – a living arrangement that enabled former slaves in the Caribbean region to work cooperatively and to provide each other with multiple forms of support – shows the process both of challenging the nature of power in everyday life and of building connections against structural and systemic violence. The explicit commitment of people collectively making themselves in the everyday as they remain epistemically negated in unfair, oppressive social structures generates a radical, communal, resistant intentionality that Black feminist theorist Zenzele Isoke terms a ‘reservoir of collective selves’ (Zenzele Isoke, personal communication, 2020). This collective self-affirmation shows the materiality of communities of people forging themselves and one another from different, resistant, uneven points and experiences.

Activist and scholar Marie Lily Cérat's work in Brooklyn engages a similar practice of reconstituting familiar and unfamiliar modes of living in the movements of asymmetry, interdisciplinarity and connections that knit the everyday. I enter Cérat's work by way of the canonical feminist claim that ‘the personal is political’, that our everyday lives are deeply connected to larger political systems. Thus, both personal experiences and everyday grounds are important critical sites for reimagining the social landscape. Drawing from Cérat's 30-plus years of political activism in Brooklyn, I assert that it is in the everyday, and in what people are for each other, that they create meanings and arrange their lives. In this view, the title of this article, ‘Creole epistemologies’, evokes a praxis of place-based cultivation that conjures collective self-governance, critical modes of agency and subjectivity and knowledge creation in collective everyday life.

Following my discussion of Cérat's anti-racist work in Brooklyn, I interrogate the ecologies of everyday life with a close reading of ‘Maloulou’, a short story penned by Cérat. I locate ‘Maloulou’ in the tradition of Black feminist writers who explore and reinterpret their lived experiences through the strategic deployment of acts of creation as wellsprings of possibility for social action. As bell hooks reminds us, the process of telling is not merely about recounting events; it is the longing that one experiences to reclaim oneself in the work of history and to capture the richness of the present (hooks, 1998). My reading of ‘Maloulou’ further demonstrates that Cérat stages the material daily life as a matrix that opens up opportunities for shared connections and visions linked to everyday struggles for freedom and justice.

My attention and accountability to the everyday embeds itself in a Black feminist ethic that calls for a transformative vision of the social rooted in the preservation of human dignity, social justice and the daily existence, which precisely forges our relationships with nature, other humans, non-humans and the spiritual, broadly conceived (Collins, 2019; Jean-Charles, 2022; McKittrick, 2006). Engaging the everyday concreteness of the lived experience thus issues the challenge of centring critical, decolonial, intersectional feminist practices from the experiences of those made less-than-human and fossilized within dominant structures of power.

In the final analysis, I take inspiration from Maria Lugones’ concept of infra-politics and other critical studies scholarship to argue with Cérat that decolonial feminist politics are critical, intersectional lived practices forged in the everyday. They are relational modalities that people deploy to resist, reimagine and rebuild themselves in the face of structural violence. ‘Creole epistemologies’ evokes, ultimately, Afro-Caribbean feminist praxis in its relational doings; forms of worldmaking forged within the textual experience of people seeking to become otherwise within oppressive power structures.

The ethics in the everyday

Cérat came to the United States from Haiti in 1981 as a child and made Brooklyn, New York her home. She has served the New York City Public Schools system for more than 20 years, offering psychosocial assistance, homework help and English and Creole classes to Brooklyn's freshly arrived immigrants and refugees. In 1999, she published a West African folktale in Haitian Creole, Do Tòti / The Turtle's Back. The tale illustrates, through the West African imaginary, Haitian people's profound recognition of their contextual, trans/local, human and non-human relationships, histories and geographies (Cerat, 1999). Cérat's short story ‘Maloulou’ was published in the anthology Haiti Noir (Cérat, 2011) edited by Haitian American writer Edwidge Danticat. Similar to Do Tòti / The Turtle's Back, ‘Maloulou’ outlines Cérat's bridge-building work of actively creating politics and knowledges with others through ever-evolving relationships grounded in a transformative vision of the everyday.

As a member of various Brooklyn community groups engaged in social justice work, Cérat joins with others in multiple ways to both bear witness to their communal needs and build critical relationships that support their fundamental rights and dignity. Cérat is a facilitator for the weekly signature-community radio programme Anba-Tonèl, helping Haitians in Brooklyn stay in dialogue with others on issues that are important to them. The Brooklyn-based organization Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees (HWHR) that Cérat cofounded with Haitian American Brooklyn activist Ninaj Raoul in 1992 is, additionally, a space where local communities and multiple neighbourhoods come together in the dynamics of their everyday lives.

I was introduced to Cérat in the winter of 2009 in Brooklyn, during an event commemorating the International Day of Creole Languages and Cultures. The event was co-sponsored by the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures and the Haitian Students’ Association of the City University of New York at Brooklyn College. I received the invitation to speak at the conference from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. I learned later that Cérat and other Brooklyn organizers contributed collectively to my participation at the conference, by planning it and in paying for my airfare.

The conference took place in the wake of the election of the first Black president of the United States and just one year before the 2010 devastating earthquake in Haiti. I was picked up from JFK airport by the event organizers and stayed with Cérat in her Brooklyn apartment for the duration of the conference. I witnessed folks coming and going across college halls, kitchen tables and living-room sofas to make the event a success. I was also filled with a deepened awareness of the everyday labour and communal work that Haitian women undertake in ways not at all acknowledged by the institutions that house them. Feeding people, cooking together in small kitchens, picking people up and dropping them off to and from places, dancing, singing, listening and other forms of bodily care emerge among the organizers as a deeply feminist work that grounds people with one another and with their communities. Whether by means of institutional events or in their everyday living, they attend to the elderly, combat economic deprivation, relieve social isolation, care for the youth and nourish intellectual life. In this way, food vending, hair braiding, sharing soup joumou and events organizing emerge as critical, creative everyday practices that pivot Brooklyn residents out of prolonged states of precarity, social isolation and injustices. These modes of action come alive as lived praxis interweaving people together within highly localized movements of interconnectedness and mutual support.

The people who gathered to plan and celebrate the International Day of Creole Languages and Cultures at Brooklyn College were embedded in the banality of their everyday communal relations. Cérat and other Brooklyn community practitioners such as Jean Jude Piquant, Marie Carmel Paul Austin, Sherley Cooney, Ninaj Raoul, Dahoud Andre and Menès Dejoie open up their lives and the institutions with which they associate – apartment buildings, colleges and universities classrooms, neighbourhood groups and family living rooms. They reshape these landscapes, and infuse in them their own struggles, spatialities and geographies with an explicit commitment not to exacerbate violence and racism. Some days they watch over the neighbourhood’s young people. During their leisure time they teach English and Creole classes for free or hold community forums. And almost every day they serve as interpreters for newly arrived refugees and immigrants. Their responsiveness constitutes reservoirs of modes of consciousness that allow a people to come together around a shared, transformative vision of the social. Their sensibilities also position the most vulnerable as political subjects who walk on to ideas, alliances and relationships that serve them.

Cérat and other Haitian organizers in Brooklyn also bear witness to how the elders in their communities tell stories, organize and care for others. They do the same as they witness the violence and dehumanization that state, local and federal institutions cause to their families and loved ones. Cérat's activism and organizing acknowledge a mode of becoming attuned not only to constant precarity in daily life but most of all to the connective power of people worlding together the social landscape. They hear people's stories, host people in their homes and share with others the meagre resources they have. They organize marches and community protests to challenge the ongoing deportations and detentions of asylum seekers (Raoul, 2021); and through teaching, play and various modes of organizing, they insist without ceasing on reparative justice for people facing violence and loss both in the United States and in their native country. People wilfully and collectively reworking themselves in their everyday life beyond hierarchies and status quo show us precisely a provocative embrace of their struggles in the pursuit of solidarity and justice. As a member of various immigrant and undocumented groups that weather the violence of the US state in the everyday, I link my own resistance to Cérat and her Brooklyn networks and organizing.

Feminist social activist Grace Lee Boggs affirms tersely and accurately that the everyday is the classroom – and in Cérat's Brooklyn, the ground from which she creates, with others, reservoirs of collective freedom and self-determination. In a time of anti-immigrant and anti-Haitian sentiments, where vulnerabilities and precariousness are managed through mass deportation and the erection of detention centres, everyday life bears spaces of possibility that allow people to interrogate intergenerational poverty, trauma, incarceration and gender relations, as they simultaneously cultivate better futures.

The everyday is a connective matrix with which to explore the possibilities of ethical, relational communities of people whose lives intertwine with one another against hegemonic, categorial logics of the social. People making life together in the everyday invites us to think differently about intersecting hierarchies and asymmetries of power and our place within them. Indeed, it is not only that dichotomous modes of consciousness posit the most vulnerable as spectators of their own struggles or constitute them as negation. They also fail to acknowledge how everyday life puts into question the abstraction of social configurations by power. Certainly, Western conceptualizations of the social in neatly ordered nodes and axes are wilful attempts of a colonial enterprise to hierarchically negate (according to gender, race, place, class, religion and so on) the myriad epistemologies and senses that fill the everyday. To acknowledge this epistemological violence is thus to favour responsive and everyday modes of relations as the work of culture that creates and sustains collective life.

By engaging the atmosphere of differentiated, interconnected, embodied doings that facilitate existence, the ground of the everyday stands as an antidote to hierarchies, inequalities and powerlessness. In the richness and complexity of the everyday, a people cultivate ways to stand together and forge one another, as they challenge conventions and status quo. Chiefly, in the everyday, the most vulnerable can become interlocutors, fully conscious beings who take count of the ways that power operates in their lives, joining with others in modes of being that work for them.

In this regard, Cérat's scholarship and activism illustrate a Black feminist ethic that attends to the relational dynamics between the personal and the collective by raising difficult questions about who makes culture or who carries agency. For, in the dialectic between existing social structures and a people's provocative intentionality, who and what effects change in collective life brings about a decentring of essentialist assertions by power. For this reason, I locate Cérat's work in Brooklyn within the tradition of Afro-Caribbean descended people, locally and globally, grounding their collective liberation in cultivation, recollection and self-recovery.

I shall also bring into this conversation feminist philosopher Maria Lugones, who argues in ‘Toward a decolonial feminism’ that people stand in relation to power and to one another as they organize the social across their infinite senses, arrangements, visions and worlds (Lugones 2003, 2010). Engaging the concreteness of the everyday thus demands that we account for the multifaceted effects of histories, geographies, thoughts, sights, times, feelings, sensations and perceptions that are normalized in exclusionary terms within asymmetrical, hierarchical-based frameworks. To displace the centrality of traditional modes of accounting in everyday political lives is to tear down colonial logics of world making that negate the immeasurable, rich and radical depth of everyday consciousness and experiences (Lugones, 2010: 743–744). After all, the former enslaved of the Caribbean region withstood the violence of the plantation by being alive to their complex, multiple, incommensurable lived experiences. Their resistance enabled modes of action that countered plantation practices as they broke up the carcass of slavery, and summoned up communities that did not yet exist, languages that were not yet spoken and ways of living that were not yet realized. The construction of creole gardens, languages, lakous and proverbs are emancipatory counterhegemonic projects, modes of consciousness and ways of being not enclosed within intersecting axes of power.

Haitian activists in Brooklyn like Marie Lily Cérat are thus world creators who counter the effects of colonial violence from the concreteness of their everyday life. Even as anti-blackness and state violence continue to mark their bodies and relationships, they gather, sing, cook and respond to one another in communal networks of self-affirmation. Their collective geographies enable an intersubjective ground for building ethical, communal modes of action, thus creating alternative worlds from their shared visions and awareness.

Infra-politics in Lakou 22

‘Maloulou’, penned by Marie Lily Cérat, appears in the anthology Haïti Noir (Cérat, 2011). The short story tells the whereabouts of the residents of the Lakou 22 neighbourhood making life against the backdrop of adverse economic injustices. Cérat's story puts on view the spirits of reciprocity and the relations of mutual support that sustain the welfare of Lakou 22 people. Especially, ‘Maloulou’ centres a 13-year-old girl who responds to being sexually assaulted in the neighbourhood by narrating the abuse. The story details her quest for an encounter with Maloulou, the ghost of Lakou 22, in order to demand justice against her abuser, military soldier Uncle Solon, who carries out a relationship with a woman in the lakou. In the story, the 13-year-old encounters Maloulou, and the abuser drops dead. The narrative of the 13-year-old's complicated relationship with place in the small, impoverished Lakou 22 stages the constitution of a subject invested in interrogating the materiality of the neighbourhood social landscape.

The everyday in ‘Maloulou’ is both a frame and a catalyst for critical reflection and social action. The 13-year-old's engagement with the materiality of Lakou 22 uncovers this process of questioning mapped configurations of identity through the conflicting dynamics of space and place sustained in the daily organization of life, in the individual's engagement with the collective and in their mutual relations of caregiving. With ‘Maloulou’, Cérat emphasizes voice, collective personhood and self-discovery as possible itineraries with which the individual creatively reconfigures the self and the collective.

The short story weaves memory, storytelling, black feminist poetics and cultural geography into an acute attention to place and collective liberation. The small independent press, Akashic Books, that published Haiti Noir started with Brooklyn Noir in 2004. The noir anthology series puts forward city-focused noir stories from various regions of the world, and centres the people writing them. The editor of Haiti Noir, Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat, put the anthology together during the period of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The anthology features stories written before and after the earthquake from writers born in Haiti and in the Haitian diaspora. ‘Haitian creativity has always been one of the country's most identifiable survival traits’, Danticat writes in the introduction to the volume (Danticat, 2011: 11). And like the photograph of the city of Martissant that it depicts, ‘Maloulou’ by Cérat hints at the shadows and textures of a city sewn in the lives of its people.

This section of the article engages the geographies of the Lakou 22 neighbourhood, where creative expressions and subsistence practices like micro-farming, songs, prayers, ancestor worship, food vending, poetry, art – the stuff of everyday life – are the means by which people creatively reclaim their negative experiences. In staging a nuanced and revealing portrait of Haitian people's collective self-determination, the short story is evocative of Cérat's own work in Brooklyn. Like her activism, the story braids a praxis of crafting, authoring and creating with others shared visions of collective life in the concreteness of their lived realities.

In Haitian geographies of resistance, the lakou evokes a traditional form of kinship and family arrangement built around a cluster of dwellings, specific land ownership arrangements and other collective practices such as storytelling, childcaring and farming. Beside a shared plot of land, a lakou may also include a cemetery and a communal worship area. Traditional lakous also usually include a potomitan, a centre post, which signifies that people's well-being remains a collective project of complex, uneven and reciprocal relationships of care and contingency. Lakou living evokes a strong tie to land and place, as well as to multiple networks and webs of relations emerging into a closely knit unit. Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (2006), Charlene Désir (2011) and Jean-Yves Merilus (2015) highlight in their work the significance of the Haitian lakou as alternative economies that oppose state-led violence and exploitation. In that regard, the Haitian lakou asks of the individual a sense of ethical responsibility within the intricacies of historical, social, communal and religious experiences. Cérat conceptualizes Lakou 22 people, their everyday survival, sensibilities and perspectives, as forms of negotiation that contribute to the movements and possibilities of history.

In ‘Maloulou’, people come from far away to build their shacks in the Lakou 22 neighbourhood. Some transform abandoned oil drums into coal stoves to make a living. Children walk back and forth from one household to another, attending to their morning chores and listening with excitement to the stories about mysterious footsteps that roam the lakou at night. The paisley-print curtain panels carefully shroud a mother working behind her cinder block-mounted bed, obscuring the dripping sweat running down her back. In Lakou 22, a 13-year-old searches desperately for an encounter with Maloulou, the ghost of the neighbourhood. Cérat deploys in the short story a commitment to multivocality and a conceptualization of the self as inextricable from the communal. In interweaving together art, writings and the author's sensibilities, the story bears a lived praxis of Lakou 22 people incessantly reinventing themselves and their commune. Here 's the beginning paragraph of ‘Maloulou’:

Stay up long enough between midnight and three a.m. any day and you will hear Maloulou. But be careful to never run into her. Everyone in Lakou 22 knew this. Noises in the night defined that yard: husbands, young men, and prostitutes who caused old doors to creak while coming in some nights; lougawou, werewolves that turned skin inside out and jumped about loudly on tin ceilings, eyeing little children for future repasts; noise there always was. But the sounds of Maloulou were unique. With precision, many could reproduce the footsteps mixed with a light clinking of chains: clink, clap, clink, clap, clink-clap: sometimes coming and sometimes going. It even seemed a mark of honor to wake up and recount hearing Maloulou. Older stories about Maloulou that had been abandoned would resurface some nights when the folktales of Bouki and Malis could not be stretched any further. There was the broad cassava-colored hat over an invisible head, going clink, clap a hundred years or so ago after the first African slaves disembarked on the island. (Cérat, 2011: 179)

‘Maloulou’ stages the people of Lakou 22 making life for themselves and their loved ones. Amid the noise in the lakou, a 13-year-old is sexually abused by Uncle Solon, a military soldier and friend of the family, whom she calls uncle. The story itself is the narration that the 13-year-old undertakes in seeking revenge against this man by conjuring Maloulou. As one prominent ancestor of the neighbourhood, the ghost Maloulou is also a protagonist in the story.

The complex chain of events in ‘Maloulou’ takes place in Martissant, a city located in the southern border of Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. Martissant is usually known for its strongly disenfranchised neighbourhoods. Since 2019, heavily armed gangs have taken over the city, resulting in numerous killings, the reduced mobility of its residents and the exodus of many to other regions of the country. One hundred years or so after the 1804 Haitian independence, Lakou 22 people in Martissant wrestle with the extremities of social violence in their everyday life. Drawing attention to the collective nature of their struggles, ‘Maloulou’ grapples with the harsh realities of disenfranchisement, political violence and historical trauma that the residents of Lakou 22 experience.

In the story, some of the people in Lakou 22 live comfortably with access to food, housing and some level of well-being. Many others have little-to-no access to basic necessities and can hardly send their children to school. It is a place deeply rooted in economic disparities and entrenched gender and class hierarchies where women's survival depends on male figures like Uncle Solon, who both financially support and exploit them. In the unsettling dimensions of their colonial past, the geographies of the lakou can certainly be approached from the dynamics of heteronormative hierarchies of gender, sex, class and familial arrangements. At the same time, this apparent structuring does not capture the plot of ‘Maloulou’. Instead, ‘noise there always was’, the narration tells (Cérat, 2011: 179). The noise illustrates how the geographical contours of Lakou 22 reflect its complex, shifting dynamics. It is composed of the unpredictable and multifaceted movements of ghosts, children, werewolves and footsteps that pulse Lakou 22's heartbeat. Like in Cérat's activism, the noise can be ordinary, undistinguished from the ongoing movements of people relying on each other to make themselves whole. It is at the same time a valuable reservoir of survival that cannot find resolve in hegemonic social constructs.

In conceptualizing resistance to oppression, Maria Lugones recalls how marginalized communities (with no presence within formal political systems) resist oppression through everyday acts of accountability, solidarity and mutual aid. Specifically, Lugones’ concept of infra-politics evokes the turn towards each other that people make in forging meaning with one another, and in creating collective reservoirs of self-autonomy within formal and formalizing politics of representation. Lugones writes: ‘Infra-politics mark the turn inward, in a politics of resistance, toward liberation. It shows the power of communities of the oppressed in constituting resistant meaning and each other against the constitution of meaning and social organization by power’ (Lugones, 2010: 746). In the infra-politics of everyday life, both the individual and the collective are sites of struggles rather than projects with closures. In ‘Maloulou’, the narration of the sexual abuse itself and the victim's search for revenge engage an ethical, contextual, practical methodology, allowing the 13-year-old to intervene in the materiality of Lakou 22 according to her own struggles.

Let me reiterate that the 13-year-old herself is the narrator of ‘Maloulou’. Her narration sketches a coming to consciousness that engages the geographies of Lakou 22. She introduces Uncle Solon in the story by measuring her positioning in the neighbourhood in relation to his, and by pointing out his recent change of status in the social hierarchy. She assesses his position in the lakou as follows:

He was mother's steadiest customer. And I could tell that he was one of the best payers since we seemed to eat a bit better after his passages. He was also short, bow-legged, had a receding hairline, and eyes set too far apart, and an unfriendly face that his small, stubby legs and arms did not help. But this had nothing to do with my disliking him. One night, during an early-evening visit as my mother prepared him some plantain porridge, he came over to the table where I was slumped on my schoolbooks, put one hand on my mouth and the other under my dress, and did not stop until he heard my mother returning to the room. That's how and why my deep hatred for Uncle Solon started; and my passion for Maloulou began. (Cérat, 2011: 180)

Through her knowledge of the social dynamics of the lakou and using her personal experiences, the 13-year-old narrates ‘Maloulou’ with a complex awareness of the angles and lengths of her relationships with others in Lakou 22. She maps the uneven terrain of the lakou, the economic status of Uncle Solon and her cohabitation with these hierarchies, all the while seeking alternative ways to stand. This examination shows the 13-year-old chiefly forging her own topographies through the ongoing arrangements, patterns and movements in the lakou.

Her quest is further supported by her representation of the ghost Maloulou as one who will bring her justice and make Uncle Solon disappear: ‘The Bible tells how little David took on the giant Goliath, I recalled. I had two giants in my life and one was going to help me slay the other’ (Cérat, 2011: 184). It is worth highlighting that other encounters with Maloulou did not turn out well for others in Lakou 22. Neighbour Roland Désir, for instance, lost everything after coming face to face with the ghost. The 13-year-old, however, sets the terms of her call to Maloulou by claiming the ghost as an accomplice. She emerges in the infra-politics of her lakou as the hold at the intersection of multiple projects, and with the promise of unforeseeable meanings and alliances. ‘I was determined to risk everything. I was prepared to know Maloulou just as Roland Désir had, if only in the private confines of my head’ (Cérat, 2011: 184). This thirst to know and to push the geographies of the lakou beyond its visible, established boundaries bears the infra-politics of people constituting themselves and each other from the depth of their everyday existence and imaginings. This pursuit is intersubjective, collective and embodied. It involves a subject resistantly reconstituting both herself and the established meanings and structures of Lakou 22.

The girl's quest for justice is further embodied in her connection to the ghost whose complicity symbolizes her resistance to Uncle Solon. This embodied complicity will shape the 13-year-old's positioning within the complex, multilevel geographies of Lakou 22. In this way, the narration is an act of self-making with which the protagonist attains a deeper engagement with herself and with the Lakou 22 landscape. It is for this reason that I place ‘Maloulou’ within Cérat's ongoing anti-racist work in Brooklyn. The author's writing, teaching and organizing are reminiscent of Afro-Caribbean people who find home and citizenship nowhere but in the spiritual, material and philosophical patchwork of the everyday. In fact, Cérat's creativity, activism and intellectual work are a cry towards self-recovery and collective liberation. Shortly after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, she writes in ‘Plea from a Haitian American Teacher’, published in Rethinking Schools, that her work in Brooklyn is to move Haitian history from its footnote status to more in-depth learning experiences. ‘We cry, we wail, but we never lose hope; we know our day will come’ (Cérat, 2010). This plea articulates an ecology of life making worked in the everyday and capable of transforming institutions and bearing better futures. This depth of everyday geographies also suggests that what the social landscape entails within complex webs of social structures are not a given but remain a doing within the ongoing differentiation of specific material relations.

At the same time, we often sense the world from the frames of dominant, hierarchical power structures, not from the aliveness of the everyday. The reader of ‘Maloulou’ who engages with Lakou 22 through its hierarchized landscape may notice the 13-year-old's suffering and how she seems to patiently endure the abuse. They may also assume that in her powerlessness (being poor, a minor and economically dependent), she will not get out of the situation unscathed. The reader may even imagine that she tolerates the abuse or likes it. To put it differently, in the dominant frameworks of Lakou 22, the 13-year-old could appear as the powerless victim with no voice. Such a reading may hardly notice her anger, her awareness of her experiences and her walking towards justice. What enables this reading is the easily visible power relations in the family and in the lakou; these include the high social standing of Uncle Solon as a representative of the state, the silence of the 13-year-old during his visits and other visible markers established from dominant power structures.

In order to notice things taking place in the noisiness of Lakou 22, the reader needs to become a dweller by changing the terrain from which their observation is mobilized. Rightly, Maria Lugones asserts in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes that ‘to witness faithfully is difficult’ (Lugones, 2003: 7). As a witness, we are called to examine our own historical and socioeconomic contexts in relation to the conjunctures that the narrator brings before us. Witnessing also conjures a reading of ‘Maloulou’ that engages the story as both subject and object of inquiry. This shift is crucial to understanding how the 13-year-old is caught in gender violence and economic inequality; it also helps to notice how she reworks these oppressions:

I wore mother's faded black dress that she had worn to almost every burial procession, including that of her own mother and countless members of Lakou 22. The dress blended well with the dark […] I was waiting in the darkness that was as thick and heavy as molasses. (Cerat, 2011: 186)

In becoming a witness, readers of ‘Maloulou’ may also realize how the narrator recreates the patterns of the milieu without anyone in the lakou taking notice:

Her whereabouts in the geographies of the lakou is a playful affair. The narrator actively operates in the hours of darkness, calls the ghost an ally and engages with purpose and intentionality within the noise in Lakou 22.

A witness therefore walks in her company and grapples with how her choices and alliances come into relief in the landscape. Even though the power relations seem unchanged in the neighbourhood, the witness may notice what is taking place, what will be and, most importantly, how Lakou 22 moves along the lives of its peoples. Marking her topography against the dominant feature of the landscape becomes the project with which the 13-year-old shapes the geographies of the neighbourhood: ‘I kept my idea and plan in my head, sharing them with not even the wind’ (Cerat, 2011: 184). Far from being a passive element in the landscape of Lakou 22, her day-to-day makes salient the visions and alliances that mark her path towards justice.

‘Maloulou’ also stages Lakou 22 as an assertion of the nation's geography – a site that exposes the inadequacies and superfluousness of the state deterministic cartographies. The 13-year-old is not detached from the geographies of the city, nor does she live indifferent to how Lakou 22 conceals her own struggles. That same landscape, however, also displays her embeddedness in the traditional political economy of the lakou and her ongoing movements and acts of resistance. The narrative of liberation and quest for justice amidst violence and oppression also speaks to the author's organizing work in Brooklyn, where practices of communal gatherings, like co-teaching, writing, storytelling and co-living, contribute to reimagining the everyday without ignoring the violence of the present. Ultimately, witnessing engages a refusal of the borders between art, activism and scholarship, and between thinking and doing in our everyday world and creative expressions. Differential ways of moving across multiple formal and informal avenues show just that; that people stich ongoing communal reserves to hold onto life and come into being through acts of narration.

I want to conclude this section by recalling Black feminist literary scholar Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, who stresses how a Black feminist ethic animates the multidimensionality of Haitian lives. In Looking for Other Worlds, Jean-Charles (2022) argues that a Black feminist ethic is attuned to everyday livings, sensibilities, habits, languages and ways of being that dynamically intertwine both the individual and the collective. Cérat's scholarship and organizing in Brooklyn bears a geographical awareness that stages her and her various communities of practitioners as having a say in their socioeconomic and political futures. Martiniquan philosopher Edouard Glissant's notion of ‘la barque ouverte’, the open boat, also gives us a generative image of disenfranchised lives epistemically animating the geographies of the tout-monde with two notions: gravity and responsibility (Glissant, 1990: 5–6). The gravitational and response-able movements of the lived experiences articulate ongoing creations of worlds through place-based ma(r)kings. Worlds are bound and respond to one another via a recognition of the violence of the colonial encounter and via the ontological displacement that multiplicitous everyday encounters propel (Radović, 2007: 475). In the Lakou 22 of ‘Maloulou’, people are carried in their aliveness, as they literally move their lives across time, across space and across history, in the multidimensionality of their struggles.

Creolizing the decolonial in Afro-Caribbean storied lives

‘Maloulou’ articulates a liberating function of the narrative act in that it recasts the means by which the narrator apprehends the deep reserves of everyday life in order to chart a path towards justice, healing and self-recovery. The story calls attention to a conscious subject (in the process of becoming) who grasps her historical repertoires and experiences by forcing attention to the lived, human connections that make culture.

When the 13-year-old encounters Maloulou, Haitian maroon and spiritual leader François Mackandal, who led several uprisings ahead of the 1804 Haitian revolution, appears. The apparition of Mackandal propels the narrator to relive and re-envision the teaching of Lakou 22 history teacher Mr Laborde. In the recall of history and history lessons, Lakou 22's sociocultural and political geographies find release from the lived and textual experiences of the narrator: ‘I had imagined the tall, dark, muscular Mackandal in his ascension, the same way I effortlessly believed Christ, Elijah, and the virgin Mary went up to the skies, in flesh and blood’ (Cérat, 2011: 190). What Lakou 22 people have going for them is time, and a sense of history, cultivated in their everyday intimacies, hungers, beliefs, lack, neighbours, ancestors and dreams. The 13-year-old reckons with the past by inserting herself into the historical narrative.

The incorporation of the narrator into dominant historical accounts thus suggests an interdisciplinary relation between history, memories and the personal as counternarratives to the fiction that history tells. This re-examination of the past involves a deconstruction of the binaries and linearities commonly associated with dominant accounts of history. In repositioning time in its pluri-dimensionality, the encounter with Maloulou shows how being and becoming always engage processes of self-recovery and collective liberation nested in past experiences and in the contextual, re-actualized present. For this reason, the narrator's quest can be seen as a decolonial act of emancipation. It evokes the ontological rupture that a people enact against oppressions by drawing from their communal reserves.

In the ontology of domination and hierarchies, the poor, the child, the disenfranchised, the dead do not make culture; they are like waste, and epistemically exterior to dominant historical narratives. In this ontological violence, difference and hierarchy provide the rationale for the organization of the social world. As a result, the wealth of complex, multifaceted struggles, beings and histories always at work deconstructing essentialist assertions of the social hardly finds a place in discourses of liberation. Decolonial thinking/doing as a counter-response to colonial violence is understandably symptomatic of the crushing weight difference and hierarchy imposed on the colonized. This logic presupposes that decoloniality can find its rationale in what coloniality is not, that they are symmetrically two sides of the same coin. In this view, decolonial resistance then takes meanings and directions from the epistemic violence of colonial projects. As ‘Maloulou’ illustrates, Caribbean lives and geographies stand starkly in response to this ontological determinism by how the region stories itself: in holding deep onto hauntological response-abilities with nature and the more-than-human world, and in the inherent interconnectedness and trans/nationalities of the world's various people and cultures (Pierre, 2020; Simpson, 2019).

Rightly, Glissant (2011) writes of the Caribbean archipelago as a sea that diffracts, a sea that opens on radically new dimensions of the new world, of the cosmos. Movements of diffraction account for the slaughter of the Indigenous Caribs and Arawaks of the Caribbean region through colonization, the balkanization imposed by the colonizers and the transplant of African populations to feed the appetite of the colonizers. Diffraction also evokes how diverse cultures, ethnic groups and political economies came into contact through imperial projects and the creation of new realities that these encounters unexpectedly create. Glissant (2011: 11) writes that the basin stands like ‘an archipelago-like reality which does not imply the intense entrenchment of a self-sufficient thinking of identity, often sectarian, but of relativity, the fabric of a great expanse, the relational complicity with the new earth and sea and cosmos’. Cuban writer Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1996), in The Repeating Island, similarly reads the Caribbean basin as a discontinuous conjunction, a signifier saturated with languages, directions and chaos; its geographical fact is that of an archipelago connecting North and South America and bringing together, through its ‘continental foci’, different poles of the world. These archipelagic, revolving movements towards diversity, relation and world creations denote creolization processes that commonly refer to historical, cultural movements particular to the Caribbean region (Glissant, 2011; Lionnet and Shih, 2011).

Creolization marks the historicized contacts and conflicts of cultures emerging from colonial encounters as they simultaneously open up radically new dimensions in the social landscape. The encounter engages multi-sided, differentiated networks that mutually enrich themselves ‘but without a mechanical combination of components characterized by value percentage’ (Glissant, 2011: 14). In this way, differences interweave in a polyphony of networks as they simultaneously keep count of matters of presence, care, self, direction and origin in multiple diffracted ways (Boyce Davies, 1994; Glissant, 1990). The articulation of these processes can bear new languages or bring new meanings and directions to things like salt and pepper, as we witness in the Lakou 22 neighbourhood. In emphasizing the complex, uneven and unpredictable everyday geographies, creolization offers to decolonial thought a conceptualization of the social that entails forging relationships with place.

Consequently, my reading of ‘Maloulou’ grapples with decolonial processes as real achievements, not as resolved projects that exist in ideal, given forms. The dwelling of the 13-year-old in Lakou 22 and her quest for justice illustrate how physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual everyday processes epistemically and contingently engage the dominant geographies of the lakou. This dwelling does not demand that we read the short story from the gestures of foreseeability of western knowledge practices, comprised of dualisms and hierarchies. Instead, it calls to place Cérat's work in a human praxis that is plural, deep and unsettling, and where the narration bears the author's revolving movements between Brooklyn, Haiti and her various communities. This may also translate into not conflating the 13-year-old with its author Marie Lily Cérat. Instead, the unnamed 13-year-old locates ‘Maloulou’ as an act of creation. Like many Black feminist writers, Cérat uses storytelling to show how daily life can be a source of connection and a space for imagining new futures.

In her study of Black women's resistance in Newark, Black feminist theorist Zenzele Isoke (2012) similarly argues that Black women create spaces and places, and preserve them, in order to transform the structures of domination that deny their very existence. In Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance, Isoke (2012) calls attention to how Black women open up dominant structures of power and remap them. Her development of a political theory of homemaking conceptualizes such reconfiguration of Black women's relationship to hostile, deeply racialized landscapes. Their re-imagining of the social engages a worldmaking that belongs to everydayness, to infra-political lives and to collective embodied resistance.

Therefore, a witness in Lakou 22 may become an accomplice who ploughs and re/turns the landscape alongside their neighbours. They may also ask: what is the meaning of justice after all? Can there be complete repair? Following the 13-year-old's encounter with Maloulou, Uncle Solon drops dead. The narrator reflects: ‘It became clear that [Maloulou] had journeyed with me into a world and time long forgotten, misunderstood, and lost within the flimsy confines of yellowed history books’ (Cérat, 2011: 190). To intervene, to witness and to story (in) the lakou is to re-articulate what is broken and disjointed; it is to respond, redress, stitch and rectify the dividing stitches between self and others, between past and present and between world-lines. In her resolve with Maloulou, the narrator expands her membership in Lakou 22 without the presumption of complete healing; but:

Ultimately, finding justice does not necessarily involve healing; nor does it put an end to the pursuit. Rather, it enables an opening of oneself to what is not there yet, to possibilities and to ongoing creations of new dimensions in the landscape. For the reader-dweller, the task of working against ideological overdeterminations implies a refusal to be governed by genealogies settled in yellowed history books that celebrate a categorial, rational, sequenced landscape.

Sa n fè se li n wè: We get what we do, living as theorizing

Afro-Caribbean lives entail a rethinking of dominant cultural practices and knowledge production that often require the dehumanization of the marginalized. It is significant that ‘Maloulou’ emphasizes the lived, intimate and personal experiences of Lakou 22 people by engaging them as theorists of their own experiences. The methodological, practical dimensions of the everyday bring about a remapping of Lakou 22 from the intersubjective doings of its inhabitants. This lived, textual experience replaces duality with multiplicity; and relationality rather than hierarchy provides a logic, a vocabulary and a location against oppressions. Relations of indebtedness and entanglements among Lakou 22 people show that it is in walking together and in rubbing against each other that a group of people gives birth to one another and to their collective selves.

Ultimately, the first-person narrative marks the investment of the narrator in forging herself and in cracking up the geography of the neighbourhood. Her acknowledgement of inhabiting a landscape that is both freeing and violent sketches her being and becoming in hope, possibilities and justice to come. The quest for justice in that regard stages an onto-hauntological condition that bears an ecology of being and a coming to knowledge. Put differently, living is storying, a collective, embodied, everyday-led accounting through which a people collectively make up themselves and one another.

Accordingly, Maloulou's declaration that ‘Sa n fè se li n wè’ (Cérat, 2011: 189) during the nose-to-nose encounter with the narrator shows how differentiation and crossing are resurgent practices of people attuning themselves to one another in shaping the collective landscape. The proverb, meaning ‘what we do is what we see’ or ‘we get what we do’, suggests in fact that there are complex and different chains of events, gestures, movements, geographies and sensibilities out of which the relief of a landscape develops. The narration of the abuse is, in that regard, a rearrangement of the materiality of Lakou 22 by the 13-year-old, according to her own struggles. Certainly, riding the school bus for free or sharing leftovers with a neighbour might not be as politically visible as institutional practices are. However, these ghostly everyday movements in the lakou enable a people to stand on their feet, while they may remain untranslatable or simply ‘other’ in the dichotomic vision of the heteropatriarchal capitalist status quo.

Furthermore, it is the individual who marks the contextual landscape in their everyday experiences of searching for meanings, of creating a grammar of place. It is fair that people go mad in Lakou 22 or display erratic behaviours, as in the case of Roland Désir. The madness hints at the ways in which the co-habitational landscape is filled with multiple vantage points that lie outside the logic of genealogy, difference and hierarchy in dominant structurings of the social. ‘Sa n fè se li n wè’ thus engages an attention to the multiple grounds and networks that animate Lakou 22. It is also a reminder that proverbs function in Haitian sociality as a bond where humans and non-humans, and seen and unseen networks, together hold the topography of life.

The pull that Lakou 22 people enact in the course of history can thus be approached from a sense of history opened to community and to everyday sensibilities. In Muddying the Waters, Richa Nagar (2014: 52) calls on the notion of the ‘fragmented nature of subjectivity’ in reference to how the subject is located within social markers that make possible a certain representation (not a representation certain) of the individual; the fragmentation is enabling, and places the individual in the movement forwards. The subject finds ground not only by standing on these markers but, most importantly, in their forward-looking ways. This is also to say that one leaves their traces behind, while they transport themselves in various other projects and markers. These categories and markers, for Nagar (2014: 52), display ‘a fluctuating composition of differences, multiple intersections, and incommensurabilities that are historically, culturally, and contextually constructed, and constantly transformed in a continuous play of history, culture, and power’. Katherine McKittrick's (2013) scholarship also emphasizes this resistance to racist political economies that marks differences from within, from a material practice of engagement that honours interconnectedness and shared humanity.

The 13-year-old turns over and over the geographies of Lakou 22, its stories and the questions left unresolved in the neighbourhood. She ruminates upon them as she creatively seeks out new modes and patterns of relations. It is not only Uncle Solon who authors her abuse. Each time Mr Laborde, the history teacher, picks up the yellow history book he creates another moment of violence. The 13-year-old is not the only victim; Lakou 22 is too. The death of Uncle Solon does not end the quest for justice but instead opens the field of history for Lakou 22 people. There are ways in which the ghost makes itself known in the lakou: footsteps in the night, the kling kling of a copper pan, a name called at midnight or letting a people produce the time of appearance. A game of moving in and moving out; moving towards and moving from; moving back and forth; moving away and moving up and down. An ethical responsibility towards everyday storied lives discloses the various ways that colonialism impinges upon our lives, while acknowledging the geographies, imaginaries and human and non-human networks from which the collective remakes our presents.

‘Maloulou’ asks us to consider the tensions, asymmetries and possibilities that mark peopled relations. For a witness desiring an encounter with the ghost, engaging a new grammar can make it possible to forge a path in the geographies of Lakou 22 and to plant a shack among its residents.