Gina Athena Ulysse’s Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me & THE WORLD is a lyrically vivid meditative journey that is unapologetic in its determination to name, embrace and reclaim a revolutionary Blackness that has been historically stigmatized and denied. Crafting experiments with ‘ethnographic collectibles’ of word, performative sounds, and imagery to blur genres and the lines between the geopolitical and the personal, this collection is a testament to postcolonial inheritances. Ulysse’s work remixes samples from a range of references as it beckons readers to bear witness to a coming of age as she shifts between time and place and plays with languages to stretch the margins of aesthetics in the academic. These poems, performance texts, and photographs gather fractured memories—longings laced with Vodou chants confronting a past that looms too largely in the present. Because When God Is Too Busy searches for humility while honoring sacred and ancestral imperatives to recognize and salute power beyond Western attachments to reason.
Mengenai Pengarang
Gina Athena Ulysse is an artist-academic-activist originally from Pétion-Ville, Haïti. Her creative works include spokenword, performance art, and installation pieces. Her poetry has appeared in several journals and collections. She is the author of Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, a Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica and Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle. Her first book of poetry, ‘Because When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me & THE WORLD is based on her one-woman spoken-word performance, which she has presented throughout the US and abroad.