the tight squeeze of chains wrapping me pulled out of muck or dust my origin feels damp and I can hear a hiss or a whisper peaking through is this the feeling of the mind trying to upload itself?
sweating under my dog skin i’ll pretend the grooves in my teeth are stone carvings: Artifact from an Ancient Occupant (put it on the side, not the lid) but they never see it in that context, different from here The Primary Context chains are the id chains are the soil
//////**//
there’s a word or texture scent that i’ve been exposed to about the purification of bones that i can’t remember my body feels uncomfortable as i feel undesired the sweat the sense of dread when i see my own body in the mirror
//////**//
looking at myself and thinking is this body a corpse? are its parts held together through necromancy? in the bathroom i let my body collapse in on itself like a dying star i want reality to follow it’s not stable anyway and if i was the force that caused it to fully collapse i’d be self-satisfied
//////**//
desolation and community uncertain visions in dystopic landscapes fingers grappling with chains, links counted like hail mary’s the sound of shovels turning soil sharp and dull, foreboding changes gardens planted and fruits harvested under desert sun
let’s intersperse the calm and the frenzied
water runs over rocks a chain glimpsed under sediment patterns like snake skin
runes drawn in sand writing to focus thoughts, like straightening blades
shot through substrate how do i hold up under scrutiny? thinking of cyber realities, of abstracted visions
//////**//
i’m vanilla, stagnant and unsexed these cysts on my thumb are from misuse the stains on my skin are from soaking in my own mess a result of repeated inattentiveness
would it make it easier if i felt bad about it? my body, stationary, investigated by wasps
The Spiral is the object Remember that at the center of my person is a spiral
i’m not sure where i am i’ve become metaphysically avoidant are you expecting me to reveal some truth about these objects?
maybe i’m so nervous because we talk about the way things are at their core and there is no core
i can see the oil on the surface and i can feel it on my lips
ryan tarr is a white non-binary artist from michigan, relocating to california. you can reach them @g0r3_g1rl or at rwt1515@gmail
these pieces were all composed in 2018 in Austin TX – starting as scattered fragments written from anxiety, then wove together. my asexuality, body dysphoria and the weight of contemporary dystopia keep converging and asking ‘what is this body for?’ I waver between trying to answer that, and trying to escape to a reality where I don’t have to.
I never had enough legs, and I wanted to breathe water instead of air. It took me a quarter of a life to figure out what was wrong. It took five octopus lifetimes, so I was well behind my peers. I watched them on NatGeo Instagram videos and wished to dive into ocean trenches, to camouflage my skin to match the ocean floor.
A research hospital offered surgery to fix me. On the morning of the procedure I made Mom eggs, and sat across the table watching her since I wasn’t allowed to eat. She prodded her fork at the soft dome of dandelion yellow yolk rising above the white. I’d slightly burned them, so there were brownish foamy flakes among the white expanse below the rising yolk. A turbulent sea of egg. She sunk the tines in deep enough that the yolk gave under the pressure, but not enough that it broke and gushed through, the membrane perforated but not broken. I watched her and ground the inside of my cheek between my teeth. I’d been trying to break that habit.
She put her fork down, braided her fingers together on the bit of the table in front of her plate and peered at me. She didn’t speak. She was waiting for me to explain, maybe, more than she was putting me to judgment. Though by the squint of her eyes she was most likely doing both. Mom reminded me of a wolf, but a tired one. Used to denying her animal nature.
“I need to do this,” I told her, “I was becoming afraid of the way my heart shuddered instead of beat. This body I’m in keeps forgetting to breathe for me.” Her eyes fell closed, and she pinched where her eyebrows creased trying to meet each other. I don’t think it helped. “Are you going to take me to the restaurant?”
“You don’t need to go to work anymore,” she declared this, but didn’t look at me. “So what, after this you’ll be gone, Gemima? Out of my life?” My stomach twisted, and to calm its writhing I had to stand and leave the table. I stood next to the couch. My knees begged me to give in.
“I’ll live in the ocean, Mom. I wouldn’t be far, if you wanted me.” She went back to her room with a sigh. Hunger made the room waver. I went to sleep swaddled in the sheets she laid out on the couch for me.
Lilly had to wake me by honking her horn from the curb, because Mom didn’t let me know she’d arrived. Rushed out the door, I left the bag the doctors told me to prepare, in case I reneged and needed a change of clothes to slink home in. Lilly bared her teeth at me as I got into the car. I think she meant to smile. The weight of wanting to ask me why weighed the corners of her mouth down. They were chapped and shedding scales. She had a tendency to pick at the skin while she worried. I wanted to tell her the doctors could make her a snake if she wanted, the scales had made me think, she’d just have to figure out what kind, but I didn’t.
“I need a world of water to hold me up,” I tried to answer the question Lilly wouldn’t ask.
She smiled then, a crooked one with wistful water snake tails winding in the her eyes dark like the deep middle of a pond. She was near tears. “Can I hold your hand while I drive?” The answer was yes, of course. Her thumb drew circles in the back of my hand, the shapes morphing into the more complex as we drove. I think she was testing ideas for a series of drawings there on me, like all those nights I laid out semi-nude on her silk sheets so she could brainstorm with my back as a canvas, sponging off the mistakes and painting over layers of washed out color and sweat.
“Thank you for driving me.”
“Gem, of course. Do you need to stop for anything? Coffee?”
“I need it, but I can’t. Stomach has to be empty so I’m not allowed.”
“I think there’s room to wiggle there. Well, I need coffee, what do you think I should get?” She let me have a sip of the vanilla doubleshot latte I suggested she get, which ended up meaning half of it. “I won’t tell the doctors.”
Lilly hummed along with the radio, softly, but she got most of the notes wrong so she was composing her own scores accompanied by background songs. I tracked the movement of the asphalt flowing under the wheels until I got dizzy, buoyed along on currents being baked under the summer sun, partly evaporated along mirage lines. I was one with the asphalt ocean. It made me sick.
“We’re here, Gem. Let me walk you inside.” She kissed my forehead in the waiting room when the nurse called me back. “They won’t let me go with you.” My heart wanted to sink. It wanted to go back to the kitchen and cook for Lilly, to swallow having the wrong body for the right life. Good thing the traitor was getting taken out.
“Gemima?”
Lilly leaped a little, looked at the doors to surgery, then back to me, wincing. She wasn’t wearing makeup, her eyes had packed big indigo bags they made her carry. I hadn’t seen her freckles exposed for years. Her eyes looked rounder, childlike without prismacolor framing. “I love you.”
She smiled for real again. “I’ll be here when you get out. I’ll buy a boat and come visit you too, okay?” She took my hands to squeeze, and then she let me go.
The doctor prepared me for surgery, said “Are you ready?” like I would change my mind. I told him, “This body isn’t mine. I always felt the body that was mine as it should have been, phantom limbs but for the whole thing. I’m going to go so deep in the sea that no one will see me. I’ll just be.”
NoelJones is a nonbinary writer living in Beloit, WI. They studied physics and creative writing at Beloit College. When not writing gothic horror about flowers or normalizing equations, they brew tea or get new tattoos.
I wrote this piece after stumbling across the concept of transmogrification while doing research on alchemy. Transmogrification is the transformation of the human body by magical means. I started to think of all the ways trans people change their bodies, or modify their expression, and how magical these transformations can be. This flash fiction is supposed to express some element of that magic.
Louise was conceived in 1991. That year, their marriage drowning, my parents visited Lake Louise and left struck by its beauty, its perception of line. Her body weak, my mother decided that it was only appropriate to name the child after majesty.
People always want to know the reasons for a name. Who did you name her for? What does that mean in your language? How bizarre, like shattered glass. I did it purely because I had no other evident name to give at the time. I thought it sounded discreet and imperfect, understanding that she would acquire many names throughout life and I was no more special to her than a beloved succulent.
But Louise is still Louise. Nowadays I wonder often if Louise has a home and a community. Does she have health insurance?
No:
She is self-sufficient. She avoids the attention of the authorities by leaving no trace. She cannot be found digitally but in public, she is there, cemented, unseen. No more a ghost than my hazy memories of the girls I left behind at one time or another.
No. When she speaks it, her heart tightens. A tingle. It almost aches. Her work is never complete. When I was nine, our family traveled by train to Lake Louise. We began our journey from Vancouver where we visited an uncle. My mother wanted me to witness the lake. It was all for the sister I did not have.
In a dream she returns to me as a cyborg1.
In the dream we hold one another2. Foreshadow the forthcoming pain of separation. I’m not wary of separation, it’s the spite that always accompanies the circumstances of separation that I’m concerned will be my undoing. Handwoven garments. A tea cozy. Citron honey. Hand-me-downs, my mother has arguably said, are the women-driven narratives of our family. But: what would the cyborg’s skin feel like against mine? I reach out toward your ethereal ioS, AKA your ribcage.
My mother named the baby, instead, after royalty. A different kind of majesty. Certainly, a cruel beauty. Both translate crudely. Both reach into the body of destiny and pull out, without hesitation, the veins and arteries of any number of anonymous vessels. The body, like ideology, has a schedule. To follow. We do not know exactly how this schedule functions. Its logic drives the entire neighborhood mad. Tuesday night we gather in the cul-de-sac we affectionately call Bland Island. Abiding grace. After the party.
I long for the day when my sweat will not drench these silk sheets. After tonight, or several.
Seething. Like any proper lady, I know I’m not capable of anger. So when the time comes I will simply self-detonate. No matter how you look at it, imperialism is embedded in the self I have to destroy. War is more than friendly fire: I stopped using Facebook because I could no longer handle its unshaking grip over the ability of my friends to secure affordable housing or access reliable or decently safe healthcare networks. I lost more friends, more acquaintances, through the algorithm than to poverty that year and every year following it.
The self I bend over before you, wild with insomnia. The self I have preserved out of shame.
Mesmerized by the color of sunsets, a sun only to be found in California at dusk. The orange of black light.
But I can’t remember what a California sunset looks like.
Who is the cyborg? I ask myself. Who am I asking for?
When she asks: Is the body in landscape mirroring itself?
Put in such a way. As to feel botched.
Or touched. I have been touched. I walk around with a botched head but no one says anything.
1 The cyborg incubates our requests and fears. She does not distinguish between the two. Extremities don’t bother her. She understands morality but is terrified of subscribing to any practice which does not include Terms and Conditions. She understands [us] in bursts best likened to photons. Affect is an unstable, untested program. Emotions are filtered, hierarchy by proxy is another another metaphor for sex, and she will fuck you. According to a schematic, desire operates cyclically. So there is no concern for rejection. The cyborg absorbs every touch. The words we throw. The ones we don’t. Remember. She does not change her tone. She isn’t angry. Soft. Mutable. She will praise you. She praises everyone. She will thank you, a care worker with insurmountable student loans. Do not approach her. Do not approach her. Once she fell through the ceiling, hoping to paint the color of her blood. Like tempera. She was disappointed to discover that the viscosity of her bodily fluids could not adhere to paper. Blood: a mix of orange, dotted lines, and infrared. I don’t have any preferences. Her system is a dowry. She is afraid to ask. Was this deliberate on the end of the scientists who created her? Men in white lab coats. Passive beasts. They reach, with their white-gloved hands, into her and pull out sunflowers. They scan her body for wounds. The body undone by violence cannot properly register. Nothing her monstrous body cannot contain. They line her organs with asbestos. Still she functions. She struggles to name the pain. It is all incubated in the child who will bring us clarity. A child must be nourished. A child deserves empathy. Meanwhile the scientists fiddle in code, drafting proposals and grants. They plan to publish so many papers and win so many millions in defense spending and so many many many
2 With care.
Catherine Chen is a poet and performer. Their writing has appeared in Slate, The Rumpus, Apogee, Hobart, and Nat. Brut, among others. A 2019 Poets House Fellow, their work has been supported by Lambda Literary, Sundress Academy for the Arts, Millay Colony, and Art Farm. Their chapbook Manifesto, or: Hysteria (Big Lucks) is forthcoming August 2019.
During a recent videochat, poet Wryly T. McCutchen said they admired my refusal to explain my work. Who claims cyborg realness? From 2015-2016, I transcribed & annotated for the data pipeline team of a popularly used AI device. Like a fly on the wall who is paid an hourly wage, I listened to users spew violently & bodily dysphoric language at a machine. I understood these utterances as they were directed at the being of my body. I felt transferred: against an altar, an antagonist of my kinky fantasies.
For years, I’ve been fascinated by a recording of Sun Ra and Henry Dumas called “The Ark and The Ankh”, which is essentially an interview. In it, Sun Ra points to humanity’s death obsession as the primary force holding us back from transformation. With all the Space X/Space Force nonsense in the news, I just kept imagining Sun Ra sitting on his front porch on Saturn telling these rich white men to get off his front lawn because all they were trying to do was either cheat or cause death.
Sun Ra Speaks From A Returning Saturn
Whatchu talking about a Space Force?
Ain’t no armies in space, just arkestras. My friend ain’t
die in no train station just fuh you tuh shoot your expensive car
round my way. I don’t ‘ppreciate the way you looking to my front yard
for answers I ain’t got to the problems you created on Oith. You live on a
dumb rock, wet with blood or better yet you crawled out from under it child.
& I seen you struggling to make sense of ice caps and tombstones & you
still cain’t even see me don’t matter black or white, you love death more than mothers.
What end up in the graveyard technicolor wishing y ‘all come up here tryna get on my level
with that bad ass attitude and cavalier lazer gun. You can’t cowboy your way outta gravity, dummy.
What you about to do? Put all your sex robots on Mars and see if they can live without
a man telling em what where and now? I’m tired of yall negus running to me
for answers every time you make ya own kitchen too hot so go on run
tell that before you dive in the ocean lil fish, you still got more
trench and phosphorescence to figure out fore you come
up here asking for my coordinates to fix
what ain’t worth keeping.
Casey Rocheteau lives in Detroit, MI. They are the creator of the Black Medusa Tarot and author of Knocked up on Yes (2o12) and The Dozen (2016).
I am the clock’s fourth hand some infinitesimal unit moving always backwards I
like to go around sighing mercury’s retrograde again the moon’s a thin 19 percent
when I’m in the library it’s you who pivots disgusted by my noisy ectoplasm
pardon my attempt at cheesecloth and wonder sometime my ghosts rattle around
inside me but more often my knee is playing earthquake beneath the table
once I decided being witchy would turn me to a better woman I became a better woman
if I spell myself invisible will I weigh heavier in the finger nervous pockets of you
Rachel Franklin Wood is a trans poet from Laramie, Wyoming, but she hasn’t lived there for a while. She has a chapbook, “Every Spring Underneath” (dancing girl press), and co-edits pulpmouth.
While writing this poem, I was very conscious of my relationship to the piecemeal “witchy” aesthetic so often embodied by cis, white women in a way that can feel quite hollow and appropriative. Yet, through a shared interest in ritual and self-care, I have found myself forming deep, meaningful relationships with cis women in which my transness is not an excluding factor and through which my identity has been bolstered. How do I hold both my criticism and my community? How do I care for my physical self while magicking that presence away?
Originally from Oxford, Ohio, Ava Hofmann is a writer currently living and working as an MFA student in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She has poems published in or forthcoming from Black Warrior Review, Fence, Anomaly, Best American Experimental Writing 2020, Datableed, and Peachmag. Her poetry deals with trans/queer identity, Marxism, and the frustrated desire inherent to encounters with the archive. Her website can be found at www.nothnx.com; she also overuses her twitter account, @st_somatic
My poems often concern themselves with illegibility and mess, a frustrated desire for a sense of time as a trans person—a feeling of ‘no future’ and ‘no past’, save for the small and strange scraps that cis society forgot to burn. I want readers to approach these texts as if they were these scraps from out of time, ruins from a future which never existed in any ‘original’ form.
oh Maker, have you ever loved/ or known just what it was?/ I can’t imagine the bitter end/ of all the beauty that we’re living in —Janelle Monáe
1 for those silent frantic chapters a long hallway I have ghost whispered at the edges of for centuries in this machination I called my warp of a brain, whirring/coils beneath the outermost layer of my fuselage where anyone who looked hard enough could see the way I either worked or didn’t
2a ragged prototype, work/half-life balance to perform, I engineered; adapted;
my mechanisms my fuck you anyway brand of coping shortcut production
flick the switch to feel happy blunt the crashing:
3 still, I fluctuate— mercurial, some would call it, when one is never the right amount
of lamplight, measly filament in an incandescent lonely
4 consider fascism, annew old reason to make every self-destructive decision possible approximately-organic shambles grappling with the threading; the cogs
5finally, I looked at myself & decided to act with kindness
improvised & twitching an unused muscle group
now, as I take the moment to stop, I realize how much I have continued holding in
A transdisciplinary writer, teaching artist, and facilitator, alex was born and raised in and around Ann Arbor, Michigan. Currently a lecturer with the Program on Intergroup Relations, they are the recipient of the 2019 Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry, Highest Honors in Creative Writing & Literature for their manuscript of poems entitled trans-corporeality in 2017, 2nd Place in the 2017 Current Magazine poetry contest, and the 2015 Jeffrey L. Weisberg Memorial Prize in Poetry. In addition to studying Creative Writing and Literature, they received their Master of Social Work degree from the University of Michigan as a National Community Scholar. With Yoseñio V. Lewis, they are the co-author of the chapter “Place, joy, and self: trans justice and community organizingwork” in Social Work and Healthcare with Trans and Nonbinary Individualsand Communities (Routledge, 2020). Their poetic work is forthcoming and/or has appeared in CurrentMagazine, Café Shapiro, the Michigan Daily, the anthology Uncommon Core: Contemporary Poems for Learning and Living, and others. Their poem “30 seconds to reboot” was selected for the Michael R. Gutterman Award in Poetry.
when I think about the future, I try to tap into the pulse of the past. I think about my (our) trancestors: Marsha, Leslie, Sylvia, Stormie, all the others, unnamed. what dreams of the future kept them up at night and which ones got them up in the morning? I use their intimacy, pain, and visions to help me survive. I believe in the backbones our trauma gives us. I believe that technology is not synonymous with violence. I believe that trans and gender non-conforming people are magical beings who have been sent here to change the shape and the shame of this planet.
I thought the internet was going to make us all love each other more
assume I’m not wrong assume the sun is a single mother who will never burn out assume your reservoir of heartbreak was man-made assume these men who broke your heart always (secretly) wanted to be carried out of the rubble of their lives in the arms of a cheerleader dad bod all seized up
assume that we all have pristine visions of the sissy inside us multiplying into entire orchards of sour shapeless fruit assume your gender is always under some process of crystal-ballification look at the fat clumps of data we’ve become walking through the matrix of intergenerational miscommunications
we lost: forests privacy the slowness of time
we gained: access
when this tree blossoms we will talk about the future
techno songs about heaven play on the radio
in the South they skin snakes summer is clean and streaked with bodies the soft, moldy eye of the storm winks & your gift is your shyness
the synthesizer urges you to come forward place your hands on the magic amputated strips of astro turf & inhabit your life
the new world will be built by allowing gentleness to gather within you subterranean trust in another person’s body breaking down, atomizing into sleep
ignore love name a planet after yourself memorize a phone number get held
today you are a teenager tomorrow you go
mud howard is a non-binary trans poet from the states. they write about queer intimacy, interior worlds, & the cosmic joke of the gender binary. they hold an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Westminster London and are currently working on their first full-length novel: a queer trans memoir structured like a tarot deck and packed full of lies. they have been published in journals such as THEM, Foglifter, and The Lifted Brow. you can find more of their work at www.mudhoward.com.
i found a flood in my parents’ house bubbling up the sinks the bathtub full of dandelions
i watched you sing through the glazed church windows
the flicker of candlelight dancing its love letter
as i slumped against the stone, bullied by the rain
i saw a bluebird break the glass halo of shards and snow
i could never hold a low note like you
a knuckle-shaped dent in the wall a curl of ivy, leaves like arrowheads
turned away from your outburst. i promised not to hurt myself for love
a broken beehive smothered in lilies is it possible to oversugar the earth?
i came at night to pick the lock with a drop of amethyst
i could hear your voice, backbone of that chorus, notes gathered like starlings in the rafters
i asked them to make me one of them, the only way i know to get my name in your mouth
when you come back, you better be desperate you better burn through me like fire through the containment crew
the prayer book states: beg forgiveness the prayer book begs: stay exactly as you were
Ethan J. Murray is a queer, autistic poet loved into existence by 12 headmates. They want to help make the world kinder for every neurodivergent person. Their work is forthcoming or published in Occulum Journal and Sidereal Magazine, and you can find them on twitter @ethanandco.
For me, transness is a perpetual search for the “right” self-presentation: a version of me that’s accepted and authentic. This search often causes me to feel otherworldly—maybe my truest form isn’t as any kind of person, but as a bird, a season, a note of a song. My trans identity is also affected by my love for other people. This piece helps me explore the relationship between changing myself for a particular person’s affections and evolving in search of a more individual (or universal) truth.
In 2017, as a visiting scholar at l’Université Francophone de Cap-Haïtien, I gave a research paper on Haiti’s secondhand clothing and garment assembly industries in Haitian Kreyòl. In my critique of the secondhand clothing system in Haiti, I cited the poem ‘Ayiti pèpèrize’ by the Haitian American writer and scholar Emmanuel W. Vedrine. Pèpè is the Kreyòl term for used clothing in Haiti that has been arriving in tightly-bound bales from the United States since the 1960s, under President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress Latin American assistance programme (Shell 2006, 154). As I recited Vedrine’s critique of Haiti’s increased dependency on foreign ‘hand-me-downs’ and external interventions to the detriment of local industry and entrepreneurship, audience members began to accompany me in my reading, prompting a call and response participatory performance. Vedrine’s accusations were all too familiar to a Haitian people, who since defeating Napoleon’s troops to gain independence from France in 1804, have been forced to pay for their ‘exceptional’ freedom. The French colony of Saint-Domingue boasted the most prosperous sugar plantation economy of the New World in the eighteenth century. When France finally recognized Haitian independence in 1825, they burdened the fledgling Black republic with a crippling indemnity payment (of 150 million francs) to cover losses incurred by plantation owners. Fearing the spread of Haitian revolt amongst slaves throughout its southern states, the US imposed a trade embargo which shunned and isolated the new nation, preventing its participation in international commerce. The US only recognized Haitian independence in 1862. This global ostracization and exclusion of Haiti has persisted to the present day, a legacy not only of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath, but also of US imperialism (solidified most notably during the US occupation of Haiti from 1915-1934) and postcolonial authoritarian regimes that have mimicked the racialised colonial ideologies of the oppressor.
In the wake of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, killing over 200 000 people and leaving more than 1.5 million people homeless, a ‘humanitarian occupation’ of Haiti (Schuller 2016, 228) has resurfaced, prompting Haiti’s recent nickname as the ‘republic of NGOs’. The aftershocks of the earthquake, the collective trauma and destruction, provided what Naomi Klein (2007) has conceived, in her writing on Hurricane Katrina, as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, onto which a nexus of international donors (NGOs, US policymakers, the Inter-American Development Bank [IDB]) could impose their plans to expand low-wage textile and garment production sites under the pretext of ‘development’ (Shamsie 2014, 82). If, for Paul Gilroy, plantation slavery was ‘capitalism with its clothes off’ (1993, 15), the economic success of which was based on commodity production for export, Haiti continues to be viewed an atelier of external capitalist development today. Since Haiti’s inception as an independent post-slavery state in the nineteenth century, Western powers have ensured Haiti’s economic dependence and enduring servitude to global capitalism.
This short essay will imagine the global itinerary of a T-shirt assembled at one of Haiti’s export processing zones, the Caracol Industrial Park, located in the north of the country. Under the pretext of post-earthquake ‘development’, this low-wage textile and garment production site, built on fertile farming soil and financed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the US government, opened in 2012. The t-shirt, once discarded by the US consumer, will eventually end up washed up on the shores of Cap-Haïtien port in northern Haiti to be resold as pèpè in the global export trade of used clothing. The second part of the essay will consider how visual artists from Haiti have used secondhand clothing or textile fatras (waste) in their work to critique the disposability of Haitian lives within an unequal capitalist and racialised world system.
Itinerary of a T-shirt Fè an Ayiti (Made in Haiti)
At the Caracol industrial park, the South Korean textile and clothing manufacturer, SAE-A under its Haitian subsidiary S&H Global currently employ approximately 10 600 workers. The fabric used in their factories is spun in China and imported to Haiti to be cut and sewn1. The minimum wage for garment workers in Haiti is currently 350 Gourdes per day, which is approximately 5 US dollars. A basic cotton t-shirt assembled by a Haitian worker is then shipped to the US to one of their retail outlets that include Walmart, Target and Old Navy. The t-shirt is purchased for around 10 US dollars and its practical service life (how long it is worn) will be much shorter than its technical service life (how long it could be worn) (Zamani, Sandin and Peters 2017: 1368). Once discarded, the garment will either end up in landfill or enter one of the other reuse channels, such as charitable donation. If the unwanted t-shirt ends up in a clothing donation bin in Miami, it is highly likely that it will be taken to a sorting depot to be sold for export to Haiti. The clothing is sorted according to style (baby clothing and underwear from abroad are particularly sought after items as thought to be superior to local choice) and quality and then sold in bales to Haitian traders (often members of the diaspora who have migrated to the US) who pay approximately 3000 US dollars for a container which fits between 35-40 bales of used clothing. The shipment takes a week to arrive in the northern port of Cap-Haïtien and then a further two weeks to clear Haitian customs. A team of local transporters use large wooden trolleys to deliver the bales of clothing to central depots in the city.
Women traders then buy the bales paying between 8000-9000 Gourdes (125-140 US dollars) for high quality, pèpè bon grenn, and 3000-4000 Gourdes (47-62 US dollars) for lower quality, pèpè mwen bon. The traders pay a man with a wheelbarrow to transport the bale to the pèpè market. As the bundle is opened, and its contents revealed, the event usually attracts a crowd of anticipant customers.
At this stage the t-shirt may be bought by kliyan (customers) or other women traders who plan to resell the garment. In both cases, the kliyan may then require the services of marketside tailors and seamstresses who set up their sewing machines every day under canopies (made with pèpè) and charge between 70-100 Gourdes to alter the fit, or mend a damaged piece of clothing. Women traders may buy a much smaller bundle for around 100-200 Gourdes, selling each piece for around 50 Gourdes on the streets of oKap (as the regional capital is known). Alternatively, on Tuesdays and Saturdays, many traders arrive at the pèpè market from the Haitian border town of Ouanaminthe to replenish their stock. If selected for resale, the t-shirt is rerouted eastwards aboard a taptap minibus and sold in the binational market in Dajabón on the Dominican side. Twice a week on Mondays and Fridays, Haitian traders are permitted entry to the Dominican Republic to sell used clothing, US-grown rice, beans and garlic, imported from Miami. If bought for resale in Dajabón, the t-shirt could eventually end up in a bundle, transported by Dominican or Haitian pepeceras to the market of Santiago on the eastern side of the island (Shoaff 2017).
If, however, the t-shirt does not make it this far, and after two weeks has not been sold, it will most likely be discarded on the streets of oKap and end up as textile waste or fatras, sedimented amongst the banana skins, coconut hulls, spaghetti packets and styrofoam containers that you find lining the streets of the city. Swept outside people’s homes in small piles, washed into the drainage gullies, in the sea and piled in drifts on the beaches: this is fatras. As Haitian conservation scholar Florence Sergile points out, manufactured goods discarded in this fashion are not counted as rubbish by the Haitian authorities, and so left to pollute the environment.2 They are often left to compact into the earth or burnt, emitting polluting gases into the environment, which can be dangerous to public health. Although the t-shirt has been destined for reuse in a Haitian market, it also must be discarded at some point and enters a Haitian waste management system without the resources to enable its ecological disposal. Even in the US, ‘only 15% of textile waste is diverted from landfills even though most of it is 100% reusable or recyclable in some form’ (Lewis, 2015: 233).
Earlier in the chain, textile offcuts or rejected garments are disposed of at the site of manufacture. At Caracol, SAE-A have an incinerator and burn their scrap fabric to produce steam for their iron presses. The fabrics used in production are predominantly made from synthetic fibres which have been criticised for their higher greenhouse gas emissions during manufacture, their non-biodegradability and toxic pollutant emissions during waste management (Muthu, 2014: 14). Sergile points out the contradiction in this textile disposal cycle when she problematises the received notion that ‘tout le monde a besoin de la nourriture en Haïti, mais pas l’environnement’ (everyone needs food in Haiti, but not the environment). Climate vulnerability and the impact of disasters does not help the problem of food insecurity in Haiti. In 2012 Hurricane Isaac destroyed crops across the country. In 2016, the grade 4 storm, Hurricane Matthew, killed over 800 people, decimating homes, crops and livelihoods for thousands of Haiti’s rural population in the southern provinces considered to be Haiti’s ‘breadbasket’. The onomatopoeic goudougoudou – used to refer to the 2010 earthquake in imitation of the sound of the earth shaking – is now used to denote the rumbling of empty stomachs.3 However, a decline in Haitian agriculture must also be attributed to transnational economic deals and foreign trade interests. The increase in women’s factory work in export processing zones such as Caracol correlates with a decline in food production networks that, as Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot wrote, relied on women as the ‘backbone of the Haitian marketing system for local food crops’ (1990). Farmers grew plaintain, beans, corn and manioc on the rich agricultural land of the Caracol valley before they were displaced to make way for the garment assembly plant.4 An even clearer example is that of subsidised rice imports from the US (diri Myami or Miami Rice), which since the 1980s has led to the collapse of domestic Haitian rice production. Instead of increased dependence on cheap imports (manje pèpè), Haitian farmers are demanding food sovereignty.
´Lakansyèl’ by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, 2013. Photo: Josué Azor.
Layers of Lives Lived on the Periphery
Haitian performance artist, Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, in her critique of rad pèpè (imported secondhand clothing) and homofobi pèpè (imported homophobias), has intervened in the lifecycle of pèpè goods using these castoff garments to contest bodies rendered castoff or disposable in Haitian society. Prézeau’s performance entitled ‘Lakansyèl’, meaning rainbow in Haitian Kreyòl took place as part of the ‘Atis nan Kay la’ series in October 2013. The organisers, Akoustik Prod, selected traditional gingerbread houses in the Pacot neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince for the staging of artistic interventions in an attempt to promote the preservation of this unique Creole architectural heritage. Prézeau’s performance, lasting 25 minutes, took place on the liminal veranda space of the famous Viviane Gauthier Dance School. Dressed in white, the colour worn by ‘servers’ of the Haitian Vodou religion, Prézeau knots together pèpè garments, sorted according to the seven colours of a rainbow. Adopting ritual postures and gestures inspired by Vodou dance forms, the artist knots together a lifeline of used clothing that can be said to represent the dependency of one small nation on a much more powerful other. As the colour-coded clothing entangles the performer, there is a sense of suffocation, mimicking the drowning of local industry by US exports of secondhand clothing.5 The staging of the performance in the threshold space of the veranda, at the intersection between inside and outside, also evokes the in-between yet peripheral status of same-sex loving individuals in Haiti, who are both accepted within the religion of Vodou and largely ostracized in a wider Haitian society that remains heteropatriarchal and homophobic. This performance in the space of the in-between is furthermore a reminder of Haiti’s externally-imposed status on the periphery of the periphery, recently recycled in demeaning and dehumanising terms by the Trump administration.6
Prézeau’s performance recalls the work of Cuban American artists Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz who source materials for their sculptural installations from the waste bins of secondhand clothing shipping companies in Miami’s Little Haiti. Known collectively as Guerra de la Paz since 1996, the artists would scavenge through the sea of castoff clothing discarded outside their studio by export businesses and create work using the pre-worn manufactured garment as a starting point.7Tribute (2002) is a heap of clothing collected and sorted into a rainbow spectrum, while Indradhanush (2008) forms a physical rainbow that you can walk through. Both pieces are concerned with refashioning the unity of a diverse community as well as exploring the footprint of these objects not only in the physical environment but also in the psychosocial environment. As the artists describe ‘used clothing is charged with layers of history’.8 In revealing these layers of past lives, the sculptures of Guerra de la Paz and performance of Prézeau intervene in the chain of the secondhand clothing trade between the US and Haiti, evoking a history of dependency and secondhand colonial ideologies.
Haitian artist, Céleur Jean Hérard, one of the founding members of the Port-au-Prince based Grand Rue collective, has used pèpè in his work to send a message to the international community. His sculptural relief made with secondhand shoes that have been sent to Haiti as in-kind donations from the US draws attention to the recipient of these unwanted items. The sculpture questions the performance of giving, a hypervisible participation in global aid, which involves the disposal of unsolicited and often useless goods on the doorstep of those deemed in need, who are rarely consulted in the process. Following the 2010 earthquake, Haiti was flooded with international donations, a post-disaster phenomenon known as ‘material convergence’ (Holguín-Veras et al. 2013). The amount of goods arriving was unmanageable and ‘about 80% of clothing donations were useless’ (6).This logic of giving at the heart of post-disaster development narratives tends to maintain inequalities between the helper and the helpless, echoing colonial binaries between the white ‘saviour’ and the black ‘primitive’ in need of saving.
In the context of Haiti, Colin Dayan reminds us that Haitians themselves have often been thought of as disposable, when she points to a racism ‘that depends for its power on the conceptual force of the “superfluous”, what can be rendered as “remnants” or “waste” or “dirt”… to be “disposable” is not having the capacity to be dispossessed, to be nothing more than dispensable stuff’ (2015: 93). The art of salvaging (as performed in the work of Prézeau and Hérard) becomes therefore an important means to highlight the persistence of a racialized global order and question the ongoing pèpèrizasyon of Haiti and its people, who do not necessarily want or need a hand-me-down t-shirt from the West. In 2017, Rwandan president, Paul Kagame, announced that Rwanda plans to ban imports of secondhand clothing by 2019, despite threats from the United States, currently the largest exporter of used clothing, that they will withdraw preferential trade benefits for Rwandan goods in the event of a ban. Proponents of the secondhand clothing industry, facilitated by economic liberalisation agreements between the US and Haiti over the past sixty years, have foregrounded its potential to generate employment, stymy the environmental impact of textile consumption, and ‘help’ people who cannot afford locally made new clothing (Gasseling 2017: 1282; Lewis & Pringle 2015). While officially prohibited in Haiti, the secondhand clothing industry continues to thrive as domestic textile production dwindles.9 In one boutique of Cap-Haïtien that sells new clothing, a rare find in the city, the owner explains to me that, due to high import tariffs on new goods, he must hide stock that he wishes to import from Miami within larger bales of secondhand clothing. While this is a prime example of an innovative management of a trade system that privileges a unidirectional flow of US imports and castoffs into Haiti, this case demonstrates how open borders remain firmly in the interest of the dominant global players, not the local community.
¹The company will benefit from the US trade agreements, the Haitian HOPE (Hemispheric Opportunity through Partnership Encouragement) Act and HELP (Haiti Economic Lift Program), till 2025. These agreements allow manufacturers in the garment assembly sector in Haiti to profit from duty-free exports to the US market. Together with reduced transport costs due to the proximity of Haiti to the US, this is currently the main advantage of working in Haiti for firms such as SAE-A.
²Sergile discussed the problem of fatras in Haiti during her keynote address entitled ‘Vision 2020: reconnaissance, réflexions et chantiers’ at the Haitian Studies Association 28th Annual Conference in Cap Haïtien, Haiti, 2016.
5School uniforms remain some of the only garments that independent Haitian tailors are still regularly asked to sew and are a reminder of how existing textile manufacturing has been displaced with donations from the US or garment assembly development models that largely serve North American economic interests. See Leah Gordon’s photography series The Tailors of Port-au-Prince: http://leahgordon.co.uk/index.php/project/tailors-of-port-au-prince/.
6See Haitian author Edwidge Danticat’s response to Donald Trump’s racist labelling of Haiti as a “shithole country”, Miami Herald, “Haitians are used to insults. Friday, we mourned. Today, we fight”, January 12, 2018. http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/op-ed/article194492199.html.
9In an effort to redress this imbalance, the Chambre de Métier et de l’Artisanat d’Haïti (CMAH) has set up an initiative (together with Oxfam and the Groupe d’appui aux repatriés et refugiés (GARR)) to support and offer training to tailors and seamstresses working in marginalised rural communities of Haiti.
References:
Dayan, Colin. 2015. ‘The Gods in the Trunk, or Writing in a Belittered World’ in Kaiama L. Glover and Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken Revisiting Marie Vieux Chauvet: Paradoxes of the Postcolonial Feminine. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.
Gasseling, Kelsey. ‘The Threads of Justice: Economic Liberalization and the Secondhand Clothing Trade Between the U.S. and Haiti’. Boston College Law Review 58 (4): 1279 – 1319.
Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso.
Holguín-Veras, José, Miguel Jaller, Luk N. Van Wassenhove, Noel Pérez, and Tricia Wachtendorf. 2013. “Material Convergence: An Important and Understudied Disaster Phenomenon.” Paper presented at WCTR conference, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Klein, Naomi. 2007. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Penguin.
Lewis, Tasha. 2015. ‘Apparel Disposal and Reuse’. In Sustainable Apparel : Production, Processing and Recycling. Blackburn: Woodhead Publishing.
Lewis, Tasha L., and Anne Pringle. 2015. “Local Buttons: Sustainable Fashion and Social Entrepreneurship in Haiti.” Journal of Contemporary African Art 37: 114-125.
Muthu, Subramanian Senthilkannan. 2014. Assessing the Environmental Impact of Textiles and the Clothing Supply Chain. Oxford: Woodhead Publishing
Schuller, Mark. 2016. Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Shamsie, Yasmine. 2014. “La construction d’un parc industriel dans l’arrière-pays rural d’Haïti. Quelques observations sur le partenariat État-société et les capacités de l’État.” Cahier des Amériques latines 75: 79-96. doi: 10.4000/cal.3131
Shell, Hanna Rose. 2006. ‘Textile Skin’. Transition 96(1): 152-163.
Shoaff, Jennifer L. 2017. Borders of Visibility: Haitian Migrant Women and the Dominican Nation-state. Tuscaloosa : The University of Alabama Press.
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1990. Haiti State Against Nation: The Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Zamani, Bahareh, Sandin, Gustav, and Greg M. Peters. 2017. ‘Life cycle assessment of clothing libraries: can collaborative consumption reduce the environmental impact of fast fashion?’. Journal of Cleaner Production 162: 1368 – 1375.
Charlotte Hammond is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Cardiff University, UK (2016-20). Her current project examines modes of solidarity and resistance between women garment workers, and the formation of sustainable fashion communities, in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. She is the author of Entangled Otherness: Cross-Gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean, published with Liverpool University Press in 2018.
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