The Camera as Embodied Knowledge – over Narrating Haitian Memories

By doing so, they aim for the possibility of more inclusive histories that tell the stories of the often marginalised. The Haitian K2D collective (Kolektif 2 Dimansyon) went to Kazal, a rural town in Haiti, to connect with inhabitants who experienced the brutal massacre under the François Duvalier dictatorship in 1969. Duvalier murdered an estimated 30,000 people during his fourteen years regime, from 1957 to 1971, in a bloody campaign against alleged dissidents. His son Jean-Claude Duvalier also over- saw widespread torture and killings when he succeeded his father as ‘President for Life’ the following fifteen years.

Three-quarters of the current population of Haiti were too young to remem- ber the Duvalier dictatorships. For three years, K2D forged connections with the inhabitants of Kazal using different methodologies, not solely talking and listening. Together they narrated and documented memories through the medium of photography. The resulting project explores the ways in which photography can serve as a mode of embodied knowledge, as a means for “victim-survivors” (Régine Michelle Jean-Charles) to break through memories that have been, consciously, forcefully forgotten. They are interrogating how this powerful — yet colonially problematic — medium can function as a way to narrate memories and process trauma. Together the photographers — Edine Célestin, Fabienne Douce, Réginald Louissaint Jr., Mackenson Saint Felix, Moïse Pierre, Georges H. Rouzier — have offered alternative perspectives of a brutal history, hereby envisioning possible futures. They are remembering for those who cannot: a necessary objective, since there are so few survivors of the Kazal massacre as well as the Duvalier regime. The camera here acts as embodied knowledge.

This exhibition showcases six documentary photographers who narrate the memory of the massacre that took place in Kazal, Haiti, in 1969, under the aegis of then dictator François Duvalier, a leader supported by both North American and European economic and political interests. Martinican photographer Daniel Goudrouffe, in speaking about his own adoption of the Magnum process, when questioned about his practice of photography, and what it means to “steal images,” he, explains “J’essaie d’être juste, mais dans quoi? Je suis juste dans ma subjectivité peut-être.” (I try to be fair, but in what? Maybe I am fair in my own subjectivity.) K2D openly acknowledges a certain reference to Magnum’s work, and perhaps Goudrouffe’s words resonate, where K2D literally and figuratively speaking, take the lens, their own gaze, to revisit an event signifying the difficulty of both “remembering and forgetting the Duvaliers.”