Istwa Across the Water ─ Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination?

“Untwines the aesthetic, sociohistorical, and spiritual ties that bind and unbind the first black republic to the African continent.”—Gina Athena Ulysse, author of Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle

“A nonlinear, creative, powerful reflection upon history and the stories we tell about ourselves. What was disconnected is now remembered using the very tools and methodologies employed by Haitians themselves.”—Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, author of Haiti: The Breached Citadel

“Pressley-Sanon’s important book demonstrates that Haitian Vodou is a serious enterprise with its own phenomenology and epistemologies, and that the religion’s unique pragmatic dimensions offer initiatory answers to otherwise unanswerable questions about Haiti’s past, present, and future. A must read.”—Claudine Michel, editor, Journal of Haitian Studies

“Reveals an impressively rich cultural landscape inhabited by women and men whose legendary resilience in the face of adversity clothes a ferocious dedication to their identity as free people.”—LeGrace Benson, author of Arts and Religions of Haiti: How the Sun Illuminates Under Cover of Darkness

Gathering oral stories and visual art from both sides of the Atlantic, Istwa across the Water stitches together fragmented parts of the African diaspora. Toni Pressley-Sanon challenges the tendency to read history linearly and recovers the submerged histories of Haiti through alternative methods rooted in the island’s spiritual and cultural traditions.

Using the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, this book takes parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region—from where many Haitians are descended—as Haiti’s twinned sites of cultural production. It draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite’s idea of tidalectics, the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves, as a way to look at cultural exchange. Above all, it searches out the places where history and memory intersect, expressed by the Kreyòl term istwa, offering a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.

Toni Pressley-Sanon, assistant professor of African and African American studies at Eastern Michigan University, is the author of The Haitian Peasantry through Oral and Written Literature.