Visual Narratives of Cultural Memory and Diasporic Identities: Two Contemporary Haitian American Artists

An examination of cultural production is useful to the understanding of the experiences of diaspora and how the conditions of displacement and migration inform the definition of Caribbean cultural identities. This essay foregrounds the importance of the visual arts within the formation of cultural identity. Bringing together folklore and historical memories to discuss the cultural production of two contemporary Haitian American artists, I look at how their work illustrates the complexities of diasporic cultural identities.

In his comprehensive and insightful article about Caribbean culture and identity, "Negotiating Caribbean Identities," black British cultural critic Stuart Hall traces the complex processes of assimilation, resistance, and negotiation that are characteristics of all diasporas. Identity, Hall argues, is no mere rediscovery of roots but a remembering of the past and a reworking of the future. Hall addresses the essential role that history and memory play in grounding cultural and diasporic identities. Hall rightly reminds us of some of the quintessential defining characteristics of a diasporic identity—cultural memory and cultural narratives.

Accordingly, to expand on the notion of diaspora and cultural memory, several artists of Caribbean descent employ images of migration (rafters, boats, and ships) to examine how forced, induced, or voluntary migration has been central to the cultural formation and national identity of African diasporic peoples.¹ What unites these contemporary artists is their desire to invent a language that better equips them for a visual discussion of the hybrid and complex nature of cultural and diasporic identities.

Multimedia artists Rejin Leys and Vladimir Cybil are part of a diaspora—the Haitian diaspora. Not a Haitian diaspora associated with the classic meaning of the word (dispersion and scattering) but a Haitian diaspora of rebirth—a diaspora that speaks of struggle, survival, and re-creation of a people. As Michel S. Laguerre suggests in Diasporic Citizenship: Haitian Americans in Transnational America, "The study of the Haitian immigrant community in the United States propels us to look at broader issues that link the diaspora to both the homeland and the receiving country. ... Thus, immigrant life may be interpreted in terms of continuity rather than disruptions, and rerootedness rather than uprootedness."² It is through their artwork that these continuities and this rerootedness take place.

The term "diaspora" acknowledges the physical movement across geographical, national, and cultural borders. It oftentimes refers to the movement of peoples from a country of origin to another place of settlement. Simultaneously, the notion of diaspora contains the intricate and fluid patterns of movements and the intellectual and cultural connections to the homeland, as well as the numerous artistic, physical, and spiritual ways in which homelands are created.

This essay explores the ways in which two contemporary Haitian American artists create a visual diaspora and evoke a cultural memory while recognizing the increasing frequency with which various forms of visual culture blur artistic and national boundaries and specificities. In this context, diaspora means that living or being part of a second homeland has become a fundamental yet fluid part of becoming a diasporic citizen.

James Clifford said of Aimé Césaire, "Perhaps there's no return for anyone to a native land—only field notes for its reinvention."³ As such, one of the guiding questions for this essay is how diasporic identity is connected to and lived through cultural history and culturalremembering. In addition, this essay is guided by a set of larger questions: how does one live and create diasporically and how does one "return" to "home"? By engaging in artistic activities, Leys and Cybil have come to understand the social and cultural contexts in which a diasporic cultural identity is celebrated as it is reproduced and transformed in everyday life. They have chosen to recall memories embellished with historical and cultural brilliance yet burdened by contemporary maladies.

Images of travel and migration have been central to modern and contemporary art of the Caribbean. In contemporary art, migration takes on many appearances. As art historian Edward Sullivan suggests, in Cuban art of the 1960s and 1970s, artists both living on the island and working abroad have employed...