Didier William: Opaque Bodies/Spiritual Futures

Julián Sánchez González: Haitian art and artists have been claiming more visibility and space in the contemporary art world. What’s your perception of Caribbean and Haitian art collection building over the course of the last decades?

Didier William: This begs the question of what museums think the Caribbean is, and the kind of othering that gets projected on the Caribbean. Having said that, I think that it is amazing and impressive to see more and more institutions today becoming interested in the richness, the histories, and stories that come out of the Caribbean. I am thinking about artists who are making work about mythology, science, geography, and politics, which is a shift away from the typical depictions of a beach scene or women with large baskets on their heads or men with machetes cutting down sugar cane. Or, conversely, about the blighted postcolonial wasteland that the West often thinks we inhabit. There is this full spectrum in between that presents a complex humanity that is not just about a Western gaze on a tropical paradise. As someone who was born in the Caribbean, in Haiti, but grew up in the US, I am looking at what happens to a Haitianness, a Caribbeanness, that is not bound by geography. What are the historical, mythological, personal, maybe even cosmic resonances that stay and that get built up when nationhood and geography are partially taken away? How do we find a truth in that? It is encouraging to see museums starting to do this work as well.

Vodou religion has been at the center of Haitian cultural expression. How has the understanding of Vodou changed?

When my family moved to the United States in 1989, no one was affirmatively identifying themselves as Haitian in South Florida. You simply didn’t talk about Vodou. Even today, conservative Haitians blame Vodou for the country’s struggles. But then there are those of us who see it as an intrinsic, very intimate part of who we are on a cellular level. Vodou can’t be disentangled from how you understand Haiti and its history as the largest colony of Blacks stolen from the African continent, an aspect critical to its success as a sugar plantation. Enslaved Africans maintained the worship rituals that they brought with them, allowing them to have a sense of community and collective identity in the face of the horrors of colonization inflicted by the French, British, Germans, and Americans. That was the path to salvation and liberation for Haiti, so you can’t remove Vodou from the country’s identity and expect to understand Haiti and its trajectory since 1791, when the Revolution began.

This religion is intimately tied to who we are personally and nationally. This intimacy crosses collective and individual boundaries, and in some cases also serves as a container and archive for historical, familiar, and personal memory, even after death. My piece Poto Mitan 2, which is a sculpture at a recent Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami exhibition is about this very idea. The body acts as the historical container that builds up the poto, or pole center. This would normally be something like a living tree, but in my work it was a tower of bodies that hovered in the middle of the exhibition. For my family, and for many families that emigrated to the United States and elsewhere in the West, the poto mitan illustrates how we retain our sense of self and our proximity to those who have passed.

Baptism: We Cannot Drown, Nou Beni is a work where I was thinking about the Caribbean Sea, a body of water between Haiti and the United States, as a type of baptismal space. Instead of claiming the many bodies it has claimed on their journey to flee their country, this water becomes a superhuman fluid that actually produced titans or superhuman characters who could withstand something like myriad bolts of lightning.

In Dezabiye 2, on the other hand, the characters are beginning to uncloak their sight and they are beginning to present themselves without an armor of eyes, the motif my work is mostly known for. The eyes aren’t disappearing, they are becoming this other interlocutor, a kind of second character that the bodies can interact with and speak back to, becoming one of my first paintings of this nature. I started to think about the expulsion of energy that would happen when they are able to do that. What would it look like if these characters, who have been secured with this chainmail of eyes for a long time, finally removed it? Are they removing this armor willingly, intentionally? Are they encountering us when they remove it, or are they encountering each other?