Transcript:

0:00 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic music ♪]

0:09 – [ Miriam Makeba: ] Now it is absurd to say that we Africans were not in Africa when white people first came. And secondly, the conqueror writes history. They came, they conquered, and they wrote. Now you don’t expect people who came to invade us to write the truth about us. They will always write negative things about us. And they have to do that because they have to justify their invasion in all of the countries.

0:43 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic continues ♪]

1:28 – [Jean-Claude Fignolé  ( translated from Haitian Creole): ] We discovered that to link Spiralism to other Caribbean currents, it was necessary to link it to the traditions of Afro-Indian storytelling due to their exploded narratives, or what we called “total narratives.” This means the capacity to simultaneously be a novel, poetry, music, etc., encompassing everyone in the narrative follow-through.

2:16 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic continues ♪]

3:58 – [ Jean-Claude Fignolé  ( translated from Haitian Creole): ] In the Caribbean and Africa, the negritude current was marching on triumphantly, although it was denounced as racist by its detractors. At the same time, there was a literary movement in France known as “Noveau Roman,” which claimed to shatter the presence of a direct subject or central character in the novel, thereby disconnecting the account of the story with its principal subject. This led to an explosion within the traditional form of narration to the point whereby the death of the subject within it was proclaimed. At this time, we were also witness to the emergence of the Third World between two hegemonic blocs. In other words, Capitalist and Communist, wherein space for the emergence of a Third World Man was created and allowed to emerge. We in Haiti, therefore, decided that we cannot accept to not be actors, to not be central characters. In addition, we decided this affirmation was not only relevant to just any story but principally pertinent to a story to be created and written together. At this moment, we decided that the death of the character, central to the story, signified the death of the Third World Man as a central actor. So it is between the two postures. In other words, the explosion of the narrative and the death of the subject, we decided to maintain the explosion of the narrative in accordance with its correspondence to Afro-Indian storytelling traditions while rejecting the death of a man in order to affirm our presence as historical actors. From this perspective, Spiralism leaned on Third World ideology based on the solidarity of the Third World to the “exploited man,” and as such, it was grounded philosophically in a Marxist current derived from the fact that all young Haitian intellectuals of the day were from the left. 

6:32 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic continues ♪]

7:00 – [ Saidiya Hartman: ] An example for me, because I think that there’s a lot of stuff that we need to refuse that every day we just say yes to, so I wanted to say, look, wow, they have so much to teach us. And they were also so prescient that they understood what was being laid out as a set of reasonable alternatives or well-trodden paths for some hope of upward mobility. They realized that there was actually no future in that when people were trying to convince them otherwise. And often, too often, we say yes to things even when we know that there’s no future and it’s a dead end; it’s exhausting.

7:50 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic continues ♪]

8:28  [ Saidiya Hartman: ] You know, Morrison makes this distinction between fact and truth. And so there’s, you know, all of this kind of social forces that go into the production of fact, and often fact is simply as we are, you know, living into, is simply fiction endorsed with state power.

8:50 – [♪ mysterious hypnotic electronic continues ♪]

10:00 [♪ ends ♪]

Exhibition: Mapping Ancestries through Sound, Space and Time, Stina Baudin, 2024

Transcription by Dustyn Krasowski-Olmstead, 2024