(un)sunken place series / field notes from somewhere in the unfinished
2013 - present
Chairs placed in front of homes, in a way that suggests continued use — evocative of the lives inside who come outdoors to enjoy the weather or be in the company of others — can be visual representations of a city.
Stoop life.
Porch sitting.
Block parties and barbecues.
They signal the aesthetics of a community. What was once a space for gathering, to be among one’s neighbors in rituals of belonging, is now a place one bears witness to the transformation of their hood into something else.
Chairs abandoned in front of a home or apartment building sit as evidence of the gentrification process underway in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities throughout the country, particularly in Oakland. Commuting around the city, chairs, sofas, child seats and more are the castaways of individuals and families who’ve moved away, the latest in a trail of people whose arrival (and departure) contribute to devastating displacement.
Some, having moved to the Bay Area for their careers, leave behind what was always temporary housing for them. While for long-time and generational residents, who called Oakland home before it became the “West Coast Brooklyn,” for them, it will never be a permanent refuge again.
“Oakland stands at the center of a perfect storm” PolicyLink, a national research and action institute for advancing racial and economic equity, states in a brief about the city’s ongoing housing/displacement crisis.* The Bay Area’s surrounding economy is fueling the overwhelming displacement of Black families. While a record 150,000 new jobs are slated to be added to the East Bay’s economy by 2020, neither housing production nor affordable housing has mirrored the expected growth. As a result, housing and rental costs have increased and Oaklanders are being priced out, with Black and Brown families enduring the highest cost burdens per household. According to PolicyLink’s research 34,000 Black residents were “lost” from the City of Oakland, a 24 percent decline, between 2000-2010.*
In turn, each seat is a reminder — its presence tied to the absence of a body — that some Black lives don’t live here anymore.
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Excerpt from an essay: “notes from somewhere in the unfinished”
*Kalima Rose, “Oakland’s Displacement Crisis: As Told by the Numbers,” PolicyLink.org, accessed May 25, 2018, http://www.policylink.org/sites/default/files/PolicyLink%20Oakland's%20Displacement%20Crisis%20by%20the%20numbers.pdf, 1.
field notes from the tenth department
2013 - present
In 1864, Fyodor Dostoevsky published Notes from Underground. Heralded as the first existentialist novel, Notes confronts through an unnamed narrator, generally referred to as the Underground Man, the human experience and universal desire to ascribe meaning to one’s life.
Inspired by Dostoevsky, Ralph Ellison released Invisible Man in 1952. Ellison’s protagonist, also unnamed, confronts the meaning of his existence, but in a world that renders him socially invisible — a racialized other who is both hypervisible and erased by the white gaze.
As a teenager, I read both Dostoevsky and Ellison and was moved by their invitations to bear witness through the lenses of unnamed protagonists. My takeaway from these texts was a sense that both characters embody the plight of “the every wo/man,” the faceless person who struggles to make sense of the chaos that surrounds her and to reconcile the Self that emerges. As a child born in the States to immigrant parents from Haiti, my Self-concept is caught between several realms. Tethered to memories of a "time before" and "across the water," Haiti is crucial to the ways in which I contemplate my positioning within the diaspora.
Haiti’s relationship to history and its impact has long suffered the silence of erasure. Approximately sixty years before the publication of Notes and a century before Invisible Man, in 1804 Haiti became the first non-European and Black republic to form from a successful slave rebellion and the second independent nation-state, after the United States, in the Western Hemisphere.
Although this was a "Big Bang” moment for the West, with ripples that would reach far across the waters of the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean, the dream of Haiti has yet to be realized.
The post-revolutionary Haitian landscape underwent a process of departmentalization and the country was divided into nine geographical departments over two centuries by various national administrations. The subsequent tenth department, conceptualized by Haitian President Bertrand Aristide and his administration in the 1990s, became recognized as an extra-territorial unit of the republic, or more simply, the Diaspora. Haitians who occupy the tenth department remain tied to the island and cultivate their ties vis-à-vis a transnational identity. Even those who were born elsewhere and have never traveled to Haiti, engage in diasporic citizenship through their own long-distance nationalism.¹
Inspired by the notion that diaspora exists as both a liminal and tangible site, I call this ongoing series of black and white photographs taken in transit, The Tenth Department.
The images are “field notes” — evidence of my presence in places where I’ve wrestled critically with how my body, Black, female, and Haitian (American) is marked by a racialized, gendered, and cultural invisibility.
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'¹Michel S. Laguerre, Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 162
