From ‘home’ to Haiti

I first picked up African-American dancer, intellectual and social activist Katherine Dunham's 1969 ethnographic memoir Island Possessed with no ulterior motive, no particular scholarly intent. Having relatively recently earned tenure at my institution, I had decided to grant myself the gift of reading for the pure pleasure of the exercise. I had no plan for the text; I did not see any specific way I would incorporate it into any of the work I was doing (or had promised to do) at the time – those at once heady and oddly disconcerting three months between my promotion and the beginning of the fall term. I was fairly certain, of course, that the book would fall at least to some extent within the scope of my ‘professional purview’ as a Caribbeanist with a particular interest in Haiti. Written by Dunham during the 1960s at her home in Senegal, and based on fieldwork conducted in Haiti in the mid-1930s, there was no question but that the narrative would be a ‘fit’ within the intellectual collage I had been building over the course of my academic career to that point. But again, I had picked up Island Possessed without any expectations regarding its usefulness to my scholarly work. I was simply curious to know something about Dunham's story. Acting on this curiosity felt like an indulgence in that moment.

This wasn't the first time that, out of curiosity and with some time on my hands, I had traced the path of an intentionally lone, perpetually expatriated black woman across the Atlantic. There was some precedent for this.