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Epilogue Widening Our Lens on the World In the midst of widespread destruction and suffering, misguided Eurocentric news coverage “explaining” Haitian poverty and its history of political upheavals, and various pleas for donations and relief, the women of Haiti took to the streets and summoned G*d.1 Raising their voices in song to deliver the right notes that “broke the back of words” (Morrison 1987, 321), Haitian women quieted the Big Media conversation heard on various news outlets and refuted the racist words of televangelist Pat Robertson, who blamed the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti on “the pact they made with the devil” (erroneously referencing Vodun and its mythic connection to the historic Haitian revolution that led to the island’s independence and emancipation from slavery). Christocentric white supremacists may have interpreted the devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake—which killed three hundred thousand people and leveled the capital city of Port‑au‑Prince to ash and rubble—as an apocalyptic sign punishing evildoers (in this case, impoverished black third world citizens), but when the CNN cameras panned the marching and jubilant singers and reporters ended their incessant babble to listen in awe to the voices of the subaltern I saw something profoundly different, reminiscent of the same Book of Revelations that was inspiring our apocalyptic visions: These are they which have come out of great tribulation and have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.2 After such a wondrous sight, if some of us could still look upon such a scene and see only black victimization, underdeveloped poverty, and the cruelty of nature, then some of us simply will never recognize the face of G*d. This face may be a mediated version, but what other vision of 163 164 Body as Evidence the divine could we possibly have? Unfortunately, one of the setbacks for those whose worldview has been shaped by global white imperialist patriarchy includes an inability to witness and experience divinity in the image of the Other. And in this failure lies an incomplete picture of how we may strive toward social justice and what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once embraced as the “beloved community.” We rely instead on the superficial trappings of monetary donations and televised spectacles of giving and caring—as exemplified by the multi‑channeled broadcast of the celebrity‑driven Hope for Haiti telethon, which aired on January 22, 2010, ten days after the earthquake. As a nation and as a worldwide community, we mean well, but who could find any of the carefully framed musical spectacles from the telethon more spiritually moving than the spontaneous praise song that we heard from the women in Haiti who seized the opportunity provided by international TV cameras to testify to their survival and undying hope? Will such women forever remain the “subaltern” who cannot speak because they “cannot be heard?” After all, in the wake of the earthquake Haitian women became hyper‑visible even as they keenly felt the invisibility caused by the silencing of their voices. As Gina Athena Ulysse notes, “The poorer women of Haiti are the ones most overtly visible to the West,” even though their voices are often “obscured by middle- and upper‑class women’s groups that have more access to media and decision makers” (Ulysse 2011, 38). Moreover, only 27 percent of the billions of dollars that our telethons helped to raise for earthquake victims reached those who most needed aid (Ulysse 2011, 39). Again, I ask: What spiritual and moral lessons can we discern from such musical spectacles when the spontaneous praise song, sung in Creole, testifies to a different reality? Not only that, but will such voices ever be respected, rather than appropriated, as occurred when Mac McClelland, a white, female American journalist reporting on the increase of post‑earthquake rape among displaced Haitian women, exploited the horrific gang rape of a woman identified as K* by deliberately staging a (controlled) episode of rough sex in order to fashion her own sexual healing from post‑traumatic stress disorder? In response to what many considered to be McClelland’s insensitive and dehumanizing appropriation of a Haitian woman’s experience, celebrated Haitian‑American author Edwidge Danticat sought to give voice to K*, translating her words with permission: “You have no right to speak of my story” (Danticat 2011). How can K* tell her story to a global audience? How can we hear her voice? How can we bear witness to...

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