THE PROJECT

I became interested in this topic while studying abroad in Nantes, France, a city which was France's largest slave port during the 18th century. My program offered a history course called France and the Atlantic World in which we explored le commerce triangulaire or the Atlantic Slave Trade. In French it's called le commerce triangulaire because of the triangle created between Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean and/or North America depending on the century. Upon my return to Grinnell, I enrolled in a French literature course entitled Francophone Caribbean World in which we analyzed literature written by Haitian, Guadeloupian, and Martiniquais authors. In another seminar taken the same semester, Anthropology of Disaster, I analyzed Le Monde, a French newspaper, to determine France's level of accountability in the role that the colonization of Haiti (Saint-Domingue) played in creating the high-level of vulnerability that the country exists in in the present day (See "pages" on the right hand side for a copy of the paper).

All my encounters put together led me to want to make something in response to what had happened and its continued effects on today's world. I discovered a love of dance when I came to college and wanted to use performance as a way to react to the subject and share the knowledge I had learned with a larger audience.

As an anthropologist, however; I am very apprehensive about inserting myself where I don't belong. It should be noted that I am not French nor Haitian nor Guadeloupian nor Martiniquais nor African. A key inquiry of this choreographic exploration is how to talk about a subject or a history that is not your own. I do not want to speak for a group of people, acceptance or judgment is not my place. But I do think that subjects such as these need to be brought to light because they continue to affect the world today and I believe knowledge and understanding are the only way to move forward. It's a fine line that I'm trying to find. I haven't found the answer yet and maybe I never will but I'll fill you in on the progress through this blog!

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Wanna be an accomplice?


Pages Matam, a spoken-word poet, came to Grinnell yesterday evening. He's amazing. Anyone who's interested in spoken word should definitely check out his work. (http://www.pagesmatam.com/) He created a very relaxed environment where people felt comfortable to engage in conversation with him or each other between his poems. It was great to watch as he switched seamlessly between being a person in the room to the performer we had all come to watch.

Anyway, while he was a great performer, the reason I'm writing about him is that he made a point that really stuck with me. He made this point in the context of talking about women's rights as a man but it resonated with me as a Caucasian American trying to create work addressing French Colonialism and slavery.

He was recounting a discussion with a friend of his who said he was sick of having allies. Instead, he wanted accomplices because that suggests they have something to lose as well.

I think this is an interesting distinction that captures the trouble I have with academia sometimes. It can seem like all we do is talk and talk and talk about issues with no real personal involvement. What's at stake for those who sit in the ivory tower?


The example Pages Matam gave for how he becomes an accomplice is that when he's hired to do a show he asks how many women were also hired. If the answer is none or not very many he gives them the numbers of female artists he knows and tells them to book them over him. I was thinking about this and it seems like he's helping women to be recognized but I don't think it's a sustainable practice. If he continues to turn down jobs, people will stop trying to hire him so he won't be able to promote female artists any longer.

Celeste and I talked about this idea this morning in my MAP meeting. We were trying to figure out ways people could be accomplices instead of allies in a sustainable way. I'm really struggling to figure out how to become an accomplice that's not economic without ending up in the unproductive conversation of expressing all the different ways we're individually oppressed so that we aren't perceived as the most privileged in the room. I don't think the point is to 'empathize', spreading the oppression to include more people in counter productive. But then how do you put something at stake to really make a difference?

We didn't come up with an answer but we did decided that being an ally isn't bad. One might be an ally the whole time and then in small, specific instances figure out how to become an accomplice. It's something to think about.

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