Disenchanted Images: Haiti and Haitian Women in Two Stories by Edwidge Danticat

Abstract

Images elude and challenge us. Concrete and abstract, they percolate in our ways of interpreting the world. Constructing and constructed from our understanding of the contextual, they appear in a presumed innocence sustained in a mimetic conception of the image. However, in the tensions between what is built and what is given, the social permeates the visual and the visual the social and in these interstices there is the possibility to reflect upon regimes of (in)visibility (Reguillo, 2023). The images of Haiti that the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat constructs in her narratives bring into play stereotypical geopolitical notions while addressing gender issues. From a reading anchored in the power of images (Mirzoeff, 2011; Didi-Huberman, 2015) and the intersectionality of oppression (Hill-Collins, 1990/2000), a possible reading of “Hot-Air Balloons” and “The Port-au-Prince Marriage Special” is offered, both texts published in an anthology of stories by Edwidge Danticat entitled Everything Inside (2019). In the narratives, the alleged dichotomies between past and present, paradise and destruction, local and migrant, oppressor and oppressed are blurred and interwoven, enabling new ways of seeing.