Photographs made in Oxford, Mississippi (2018-2019)
As a poet and photographer of Haitian heritage navigating the American landscape, I am also a descendant of women survivors grappling with personal traumas in my work. The What Endures series interrogates questions of survival and danger, specifically concerning the lives of Black women who experience disproportionately high rates of state and interpersonal erasure and violence in the United States, Haiti, and elsewhere. While our experiences can be characterized by suffering, we also survive, transcend, reimagine the self, and reimagine what’s possible for their futures. Using my body and my mother’s body as the Woman in White, I perform an effective relation of the Black female subject to the natural landscape, asserting it as a place of freedom and communion, as well as a place of haunting and alienation. I present these images as a form of homage to the departed and the living. They are also a form of embodied resistance to that which and those who have inflicted harm upon us as Black women. I seek to unearth questions and truths informed by subjective narratives, mythologies, and spirituality, examining how we hold on to memories and discover liberation through their release.