Literature and Medicine

When my aunt babysat my siblings, cousins, and me, we would protest. The six of us were not opposing my aunt’s supervision; rather, we were her political subsidiaries, rallying in 1993 against the detention of Haitian immigrants at Guantanamo Bay United States Navy Base in Cuba. Their detainment was predicated on being migrants, Black, and in some cases HIV positive. Guantanamo was and remains an internment camp, and during my early childhood—under Bill Clinton’s administration—200 Haitian refugees at Guantanamo, led by Michel Vilsaint, participated in a hunger strike. Haitians in Miami protested in the streets.

These demonstrations of my youth were family affairs organized by word of mouth, whether it was the Haitian radio station Veye Yo or the flyers scattered throughout local churches and community groups. My cousins and I were receiving a political sermon affirming our connection to the heritage of ancestors, the enslaved who led a successful revolution, tasting the sweetness of freedom, and our caretakers, who stood up for their rights as migrants even at the risk of deportation. My elders—related and unrelated—were disappointed that their newfound home was not a place of refuge, but a place of contradictions—proclaiming itself a nation of immigrants yet providing the fuel to turn the Caribbean into a graveyard for Haitians traveling by sea. During these demonstrations, they were not only concerned about the passage of individual family members who were intercepted at sea or detained by US immigration authorities, they were creating a new diasporic enclave that bestowed dignity grounded on collective affirmation and renewal.

Protesters may not always be effective in achieving their demands, but protests provide them with a space and time for public declaration, to feel less isolated in a society that is callous to one’s suffering. “When an individual is protesting society’s refusal to acknowledge his dignity as a human being,” as the African American Civil Rights organizer Bayard Rustin once lamented, “his very act of protest confers dignity [End Page 15] on him.”¹ Our protests were as viable and stalwart as our history, coming alive through our vision that we were born and continue to be free. Our presence in the street made this resolute.

Protests can be the blueprint for a world people want to create, as I witnessed during my childhood when Haitians led a movement to preserve their right to migrate and live freely in the US, while embracing a protest culture sprinkled with music, dance, and joy. When Black Lives Matter surfaced as a formidable movement in 2014, I saw a new generation of Black Americans like myself, mending the crystalline wounds, searching for absolution with each other on the streets, not from a system that had deemed us less than. For Black people throughout the United States, videos of our kin being murdered by the police provide proof of what we’ve been feeling and saying for some time, namely, that racism is alive and well. We evoked the spirit of African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, who advocated for protests knowing that, “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”² These protests were both epic and intimate, revealing one of the many horrific chapters of American racism, the ongoing violence of settler colonialism, the ever presence of Black death, and the exhaustion that comes when witnessing Black death.

“Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror,” writes the scholar Christina Sharpe, “from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence.”³ Black diasporic existence, to echo the academic Saidiya Hartman, cannot be understood without unpacking the violence incurred during the “afterlife of slavery.”⁴ Yet this violence does not go unchallenged. To read Richard Wright’s essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing” is to constitute literature as a form of African American protest consciously reflecting on and intended to engage with social action. “The Negro writer,” Wright motions, “is being called upon to do no less than create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die.”⁵ African American writers, in...