…There is much to despair in the present of Haiti, but the revolution is a lifelong struggle and we will not forget…
—Marlene L. Daut

Grounding
Every year, HKW invites its audience to join artists, scholars, activists, and musicians to commemorate the Haitian Revolution that led to the independence and birth of the first Black nation. Though Haiti claimed its independence in 1804, the foundations for the Revolution were laid in August 1791 during the invocation and ceremony of Bwa Kayiman. On the one hand, Bwa Kayiman is commemorated as a historical premise for emancipation and abolitionism in Haiti, as well as for other enslaved people, societies, and colonized countries around the world. On the other hand, Bwa Kayiman provides the possibility to deliberate on the socio-economic, socio-political, and environmental hurdles that Haiti and other post-colonial societies face in the project of nation-state building and alongside continuous neo-colonial forces, as well as in the mounization (humanization) project of historically dehumanized and disenfranchised communities around the world. What are the historical and economic considerations that have to be looked at to understand Haiti today, 220 years after independence? How are Haiti’s socio-political and economic realities related to other post-colonial realities in Africa, Asia, and the Americas? If the Haitian Revolution preempted abolitionist and independence movements across the globe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, what does today’s Haiti forebode?

Tout Moun se Moun
HKW’s second edition of Bwa Kayiman—Tout Moun se Moun takes its cue from Haitian poet, novelist, and activist René Depestre’s poem ‘Une conscience en fleur pour autrui’ and its emphasis on relationality and humanité:

Ma joie est de savoir que tu es moi
et que moi je suis fortement toi. 
Tu sais que ton froid dessèche mes os 
et que mon chaud vivifie tes veines.  
Ma peur fait trembler tes yeux
et ta faim fait pâlir ma bouche.  
Sans ta force d’être un feu libre 
ma conscience serait plus seule
que la terre morte d’un désert.1

From the first celebration at HKW in 2023 entitled Congressing at the heart of liberation, we continue to follow reparative paths and to reflect on the significance of cultural work in the rehabilitation of Haiti, as well as other peoples that have been subjected to oppressive and exploitative regimes.

At the crux of this edition of Bwa Kayiman is the Haitian revolutionary maxim, tout moun se moun (every human is a human). Contributors are invited to reflect on the central question of how can the world actively advance towards compensating the systematic hindering and underdevelopment of Haiti, a nation whose people contributed materially to the political liberation of and planted the paramount seeds that germinated in places like Brazil, Colombia, Martinique, the US, and Liberia, among other nations. They inspired oppressed peoples from all latitudes, consolidating as the first free state founded by former enslaved people, the first Black republic, and the first to permanently abolish slavery, insisting that freedom could not be achieved till all nations obtained it. Humanity was and is at the core of their story, understood not only as a collective value connected to culture and society. The Bwa Kayiman series also aims to put forth modes of remembrance and reparation for Haiti and its seminal legacy in the context of current political and economic crises that have been forced upon it.

From 2–4 August 2024 at HKW, artists, scholars, priestesses, and other beings from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa stage a series of performative gestures ranging from bodily expressions, discursive gatherings, sound-based offerings, food sharing moments, and communal agoras. These gestures are invitations to practise and advocate for humanity, pay tribute to long-standing projects of emancipation that are highly overlooked today, as well as create possibilities to build solidarities with other struggles and rehumanization projects across the globe, for example with Dalit communities in the Indian subcontinent or with people in Rwanda. In its second year, this iteration of Bwa Kayiman draws guidance from Mawu, the Haitian Vodou spirit of heavenly light and world order, with an emphasis on acts of caring and human acknowledgement that remain instrumental for the construction of collective futures.

Cadence—Rasambleman
The weekend begins with a blessing from singer and mambo Carole Demesmin invoking the primordial spirits of Ayizan and Legba to prepare the prospective initiatives offered by the congress, followed by a keynote lecture by sociology professor Jean Casimir on the counter-plantation system that Haitians have organized since the inception of colonial plantations. Casimir also calls for the linking of chains of solidarity and for reparations at large that can only be made possible by the formation of long overdue alliances between Haiti and other African and Caribbean nations. Following Casimir’s lecture and in the spirit of Bwa Kayiman where a rumour sparked a revolution, author and professor of French and African Diaspora Studies Marlene L. Daut as well as economist and professor of public policy Célestin Monga hold a conversation—expanding on the debt Haiti still pays today for daring to revolutionize—to offer readings on the failures of the world and its human economies pertaining to Haiti. Conscious of the need to dedicate in-depth reflections to this concern, Casimir, Daut, and Monga together draw a map of the strategies of underdevelopment enacted upon the Haitian nation in the frame of postcolonial geopolitics. Dancer and choreographer Lēnablou concludes the first part of the evening with Le Sacre du Sucre, her twenty-five-years long in the making study of gwoka dance traditions as well as bigidi mé pa tombé, a Guadeloupean philosophy of resistance that finds its meaning through imbalance, that is, to stumble without falling.

The evening continues with an invitation inspired by the circular configuration of the lakou—a shared courtyard and supportive community system—with a series of aural contributions, storytellings, and readings with musicians and whisperers Rachelle Jeanty and Riva Précil as well as choreographer Luis Garay. Following the tradition of the Bwa Kayiman ceremony as it historically took place, food is made and shared by various food collectives from Berlin to create gestures of hospitality, conviviality, and soul nourishment. Artist Joël Andrianomearisoa’s installation The Playground of All Possibilities is activated again to host this gathering, which constellates an archipelago of territories, as well as that of multiplicity and collective body making that invites visitors to dream of emancipated futures.

The programme is further enriched by multiple artistic gestures and a combination of performative offerings and conversations centring the body as a tool for expression and resistance that has long been a site of unapologetic resilience. Two different movement lectures during the congress focus on the wisdom, histories, and living strategies kept in Caribbean bodies, and rehearsed and performed in the dance cultures of Jamaica and Guadeloupe. HKW hosts two seminal figures whose work hasn’t been presented live in Germany before: choreographers, dance pedagogues, and scholars L’Antoinette Stines and Lēnablou. Stines shares the dance education system L’Antech, bringing forth the retentions present in ancestral Afro-diasporic dance practices like kumina, bruckins, nyabinghi, tambu, yanvalou, piquet, arara, bambosche, various European classical lines, and daaance'all (dancehall). Lēnablou gives a two part movement lecture on the bigidi filosophy underlying gwoka dance and on the lawonn, the Afro-centric social space where it is practised, followed by an experiential practice of her Techni’ka emerging from her study of gwoka and its adaptative, improvisatory, and joyous dynamics.

Mounization (humanization) as an opposite of dehumanization and as a daily practice can’t be done without the inclusion of the arts and spiritual practices, a key facet that drives liberatory forces. The congress picks up with a concert by houngan, musician, and healer Erol Josué and their Shango band blessing with a musical pilgrimage through the Miriam Makeba Auditorium. Josué’s oeuvre has made strong reverberations across the world as a musical practice of emancipation and undoing misconceptions and discriminatory understandings of Vodou.

Bwa Kayiman—Tout Moun se Moun is also an occasion for the strengthening of voices of the still oppressed communities who seek emancipation today, and for sharing their histories and fight for liberation. Co-curators Sajan Vazhakaparambil Kolavan Kalyanikutty Mani and Shaunak Mahbubani, who work to retell Dalit stories and empower their communities in the anti-caste struggle in and outside of Berlin, invite the audience to reflect on Y. S. Alone’s notion of ‘protected ignorance’, giving an incise perspective into the casteist nature of knowledge production in South Asia and the diaspora. They present a programme that disrupts caste hegemony, expanding on a keynote by professor Alone, and is complemented with a performance by dancer Nrithya Pillai and a response from anthropologist and historian Gajendran Ayyadurai, to imagine unbound futures beyond the stagnant faculty of Brahminical modernity. The resistive gathering is strengthened through text and moving image works by Priyageetha Dia, Mahishaa (Neelavarana ನೀಲಾವರಣ), Rahee Punyashloka, and Lapdiang Artimai Syiem, each delving into the contemporaneity of caste within overlapping spheres of the social fabric.

As this year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the genocide perpetrated against Tutsi communities in Rwanda, the programme also dedicates moments of remembering life and the unlived through a cluster of propositions by Kiki Katese, Samuel Ishimwe, Scholastique Mukasonga, Amelia Umuhire, all echoing philosophies of Mounization and resistance born out of adversity, expressed and experienced in the past three decades.

For the 2024 iteration of Bwa Kayiman, artist Chaveli Sifre transforms the Miriam Makeba auditorium with an olfactory installation that is conducive to communal and personal rest, contemplation, and reimagination. With Rest & Riot (Safe Passage—Rite of Passage—Mona Passage) she recreates a gentle sea-breeze, proposing a moment to ruminate sensorially on oceans as contextual and contested spaces, isolating and uniting people around the world. Jean-Ulrick Désert contributes to this year’s celebration with the central image for the congress, showing a detail of his work Waters of Kiskeya (2017), a map of the material and immaterial wealth of the Caribbean ecosystem that is comprised of plants, soil, water, animals, imaginary creatures, and histories of exploitation and resistance. Kiskeya is the name of the island where Haiti shares territory with the Dominican Republic, a symbol of unity in their shared history. The image depicts a rainbow with passages of famous writers from the Caribbean basin and islands. The rainbow is not only a reference to light, abundance, and a queer ability to create reality on one’s own terms, but is also reminiscent of Ayida-Weddo, the rainbow serpent, that in Vodou is the iwa (spirit) of fertility, rainbows, wind, water, fire, wealth, thunder, and snakes, and is commonly used to depict Haiti. The rainbow serpent is also conceived as the spirit who brought ancient knowledge from Africa to the Caribbean.

Bwa Kayiman’s 2024 rasambleman closes, or rather, further opens, with a poetic reading by Désert where he carries out a divination of the stars above the mythical Bwa Kayiman (Alligator Forest) on the night of 14 August 1791, followed by a blessing and invocation of Zaka, again by Demesmin, the divinity of Earth and harvest. From the initial call to celebrate what the Earth offers to both humans and non-humans alike, Demesmin as well as all the contributors of the three-day congress create a continuum of moments to practice humanity, to sharpen the senses, to shape collective dreaming and embrace the shared responsibilities they entail.

1 René Depestre, En état de poésie (Petite sirène) (Paris: Les éditeurs français réunis, 2012), digital edition, 28. English translation: ‘My joy is to know that you are me and that I am strongly you. You know that your coldness dries up my bones and that my heat invigorates your veins. My fear makes your eyes tremble and your hunger makes my mouth turn pale. Without your strength to be a free fire my conscience would be lonelier than the dead earth of a desert.’

A BEAUTIFUL SET OF DIFFERENCES