Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French.

« À quel âge ai-je commencé à lui parler vraiment ? Grand-mère Gigi me passait le téléphone comme on tend un verre d’eau à une enfant qu’on pense assoiffée. C’est ton papa.
J’ai grandi avec cette voix, j’ai appris à interpréter les silences et les pauses… Tout s’arrangera, tu verras.
Au fil des ans, j’appris à déceler le désespoir derrière les mensonges. »
Géraldine grandit en Haïti entre sa grand-mère et sa tante, loin de son père émigré à New-York. 

That childhood should be everywhere at home whatever the circumstances, has been implored by poets. Their powerful voices call on the international community to mobilize to protect the rights of the child. However, there are unfair practices; child domestic work is one of them. These children are called ‘domestic children’, ‘service children’ and les ‘restavèk’. Denounced by humanitarian institutions, child domestic work unfortunately still exists today. This issue has been taken up by writers, thus becoming one of the key themes of literature in French and Creole languages.

Marie-Jeanne, artiste octogénaire, refuse de quitter le quartier et la maison où elle a grandi. Contestataire, rebelle, Marie-Jeanne qui a vécu l’Occupation américaine de son pays, et a connu la prison pendant la dictature, veut décider seule de son lieu de vie malgré les pressions de sa famille

This essay analyzes Caribbean Creolophone women’s speech, para-linguistic sounds, and songs as an underappreciated form of women’s self-fashioning. Afro-Creole women’s speech developed as a tradition within conditions of fugitivity (Derby 2014; Moten 2008). Fugitive speech here refers to speech and vocalized sounds, meant to be understood only by those in a position to know its meanings, under repressive conditions. Caribbean women use vocal expressions to constitute themselves into collectivities that sustain and support them.

What would it mean to reorient the study of Haitian literature toward ethics rather than the themes of politics, engagement, disaster, or catastrophe? Looking for Other Worlds engages with this question from a distinct feminist perspective and, in the process, discovers a revelatory lens through which we can productively read the work of contemporary Haitian writers.