This article analyses the use by Danticat of Vodou vernacular in reference to human rights abuses suffered by women in Haiti. Bergner states that Vodou is used as a narrative strategy in her work to explore the complexities of gendered violence during the Duvalier regime. (Summary by Mouka)

Tous droits réservés. Republié avec l'autorisation du·de la détenteur·rice du droit d'auteur et de l'éditeur·rice, CRESFED.

The past few decades have seen an explosion of writing by women from the Caribbean. From Antigua, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Trinidad - women of African, European, and mixed ancestry have explored and manipulated their complex matrix: of languages and subtle linguistic codes; of folk traditions and formal English schooling; of vital politics and tormented histories; of intoxicating natural beauty and devastating poverty. They have written of mothertongues and motherlands, of exile, of the boundaries of bodies, of the politics of owning and not owning themselves.

Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti—a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies—the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women’s Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti’s exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance.

This project is a critical examination of Haitian migration and displacement in North America that engages both a theoretical and literary analysis of exile and diaspora as consequences of migration and displacement. Grounded in literary criticism, this dissertation argues that Haitian writers in North America inscribe migration by troping exile and diaspora to speak of the predicament of displaced migratory subjects and their inevitable crossings of places, landscapes, borders, cultures, and nations.

This chapter delves into the history of women in Haiti and the Caribbean through the African religious legends of the Vodoun goddess and spirit, Erzulie, describing their importance to Haitian culture and identity. The goddess takes many forms and meanings depending on which historical perspective she is representing, whether it be through the colonial lens, the catholic lens, the patriarchal lens or the feminist lens. It highlights the subversion of Western dualisms, gender distinction and colour division in these legends.

In this chapter of Higasida’s book, the author discusses Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996), a novel that shares themes of female rejuvenation with Rosa Guy’s novel The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of Wind (1995). The plot and different themes in the novel are explored against the political and social Haitian background and the centrality of American imperialism.

My dissertation titled "Mambos, Priestesses, and Goddesses: Spiritual Healing Through Vodou in Black Women's Narratives of Haiti and New Orleans" reclaims the practice of Vodou as an integral African spiritual tradition through fiction by black women writers. I discuss how the examination of Vodou necessitates the revision of colonial history, serves as an impetus for reevaluating the literary representation of the black female migrant subject, and gives voice to communities silenced by systemic oppression.