Because When God Is Too Busy: Haiti, me & THE WORLD

by Gina Athena Ulysse

Overview

Gina Athena Ulysse's Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me & THE WORLD is a lyrically vivid meditative journey that is unapologetic in its determination to name, embrace and reclaim a revolutionary Blackness that has been historically stigmatized and denied. Crafting experiments with "ethnographic collectibles" of word, performative sounds, and imagery to blur genres and the lines between the geopolitical and the personal, this collection is a testament to postcolonial inheritances. Ulysse's work remixes samples from a range of references as it beckons readers to bear witness to a coming of age as she shifts between time and place and plays with languages to stretch the margins of aesthetics in the academic. These poems, performance texts, and photographs gather fractured memories—longings laced with Vodou chants confronting a past that looms too largely in the present. Because When God Is Too Busy searches for humility while honoring sacred and ancestral imperatives to recognize and salute power beyond Western attachments to reason.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819577368
Publisher:	Wesleyan University Press
Publication date:	04/07/2017
Series:	Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	112
File size:	14 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

GINA ATHENA ULYSSE is an artist-academic-activist originally from Pétion-Ville, Haïti. Her creative works include spokenword, performance art, and installation pieces. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and collections. She is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica and Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle, and is a professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

Gina Athena Ulysse is an artist-academic-activist originally from Pétion-Ville, Haïti. Her creative works include spokenword, performance art, and installation pieces. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and collections. She is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica and Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Her first book of poetry, "Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me&THE WORLD is based on her one-woman spoken-word performance, which she has presented throughout the US and abroad.

Table of Contents

Introduction 11

Sleeping Temple 13

Peristil an Dòmi 15

Peristil an Dòmi (Sleeping Temple) 36

Because When God Is Too Busy 37

The Hair Poem: "When ate you going to go natural, girlfriend?" 41

Concepts of Home 42

If 47

On Why the Hypocrite is the Righteous One, Or Words Misunderstood 48

I make love like that… 53

Parallels: My Country's in the Newspaper 56

My Country in Translation 59

I Saw The Headlines Yesterday 61

A Poem About Why I Can't Wait, going home again and again and again Or: Why I Prefer The Term Incarcerated When Talking About Agency 64

The Passion in Auto-Ethnography: Homage to Those Who Hollered Before Me 72

Breathing Spaces 75

Circles of Power Children of Resistance, Or My Rules of Engagement 78

Ode to the Metrès Going Home: On Learning How To Glide 84

Basquiat's Lwas 86

Rodin's Kiss 87

New Rules of Engagement: A Remix 88

A Manifesto for Dreamers 89

An Alter(ed)native in Something Other than Fiction 91

'VooDooDoll' What if Haïti were a Woman: On ti Travay sou 21 Pwen 95

I Am a Storm 103

Tranble 105

Skin Castles 106

Athena's Rant on Good & Bad Neighbors 108

I Am A Storm 110

Credits 114

Acknowledgments 155

What People are Saying About This

Diana Taylor

“This beautiful set of reflections on being Haitian, being a black woman by the artist-scholar Gina Athena Ulysse, goes beyond the disciplinary divides established by colonial epistemologies to explore a decolonial space in which poetry becomes philosophy, and anthropology helps us remember our ancestral stories and practices. This is a brave and necessary exploration.”

Edwidge Danticat

“Gina Ulysse is a force of nature. Her work comes alive with such power that I'm surprised it doesn't set the page on fire. Fierce, fearless, and passionate, she delights us, shakes us up, educates us, and after reading her poignant and powerful book, she becomes as indispensable to us as her amazing work.”

From the Publisher

"This beautiful set of reflections on being Haitian, being a black woman by the artist-scholar Gina Athena Ulysse, goes beyond the disciplinary divides established by colonial epistemologies to explore a decolonial space in which poetry becomes philosophy, and anthropology helps us remember our ancestral stories and practices. This is a brave and necessary exploration."—Diana Taylor, New York University

"This beautiful set of reflections on being Haitian, being a black woman by the artist-scholar Gina Athena Ulysse, goes beyond the disciplinary divides established by colonial epistemologies to explore a decolonial space in which poetry becomes philosophy, and anthropology helps us remember our ancestral stories and practices. This is a brave and necessary exploration."—Diana Taylor, New York University

"What – for me – new to this work – a compelling discovery tho i wish i cd hear some of its perform- ance sound : the chants, the rituals, the alive & agony, always the marassa three-line repetition, w/in a work grounded in the catastrophic and tri- umphant births of Haiti – each time each time each reach of time – a one more wonderful vision of the formation  of complex modernity from this young herself Haitian-born woman"—Kamau Brathwaite

"Gina Ulysse is a force of nature. Her work comes alive with such power that I'm surprised it doesn't set the page on fire. Fierce, fearless, and passionate, she delights us, shakes us up, educates us, and after reading her poignant and powerful book, she becomes as indispensable to us as her amazing work."—Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying

Editorial Reviews

09/04/2017
Following in the tradition of anthropologist-writers such as Zora Neal Hurston and Ana-Maurine Lara, Haitian-American scholar-artist Ulysse (Why Haiti Needs New Narratives) forges a powerful poetic manifesto on blackness, methodology, and survival. Recounting her experience as a young woman whose body was “under siege” during a Haitian ritual, Ulysse reckons with gender and race through a return to and reinvention of the ritual: “I was much older, healthier, an anthropologist.” This mix of anthropology, identity, and voodoo permeates this dynamic collection regarding the Haitian diasporic experience. The repetition and lack of capitalization, for example, illuminate these poems’ resistant manner and the ways they unfurl and refuse silence. Through the hierarchies of sugar production and commodification, Ulysse points out that “colored/ raw sugar has no place on tables in hotels/it is colored/because it is not refined.” To resist constrictive “refinements,” Ulysse summons the ancestors’ songs in order to express her own: “I cried and screamed and hollered/about my blackness.” Moreover, Ulysse critiques anthropological writing: “I inserted myself deep into the diss/ I inserted myself into this form that stifles me.” Ulysse’s hybrid work embodies the answer to her question: “Why do they think so many black women in anthropology keep turning to the arts?” Photos. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"This beautiful set of reflections on being Haitian, being a black woman by the artist-scholar Gina Athena Ulysse, goes beyond the disciplinary divides established by colonial epistemologies to explore a decolonial space in which poetry becomes philosophy, and anthropology helps us remember our ancestral stories and practices. This is a brave and necessary exploration."—Diana Taylor, New York University

"This beautiful set of reflections on being Haitian, being a black woman by the artist-scholar Gina Athena Ulysse, goes beyond the disciplinary divides established by colonial epistemologies to explore a decolonial space in which poetry becomes philosophy, and anthropology helps us remember our ancestral stories and practices. This is a brave and necessary exploration."—Diana Taylor, New York University

"What – for me – new to this work – a compelling discovery tho i wish i cd hear some of its perform- ance sound : the chants, the rituals, the alive & agony, always the marassa three-line repetition, w/in a work grounded in the catastrophic and tri- umphant births of Haiti – each time each time each reach of time – a one more wonderful vision of the formation  of complex modernity from this young herself Haitian-born woman"—Kamau Brathwaite

"Gina Ulysse is a force of nature. Her work comes alive with such power that I'm surprised it doesn't set the page on fire. Fierce, fearless, and passionate, she delights us, shakes us up, educates us, and after reading her poignant and powerful book, she becomes as indispensable to us as her amazing work."—Edwidge Danticat, author of Brother, I'm Dying

From the Publisher