On Course: Haitian Dance and Reading Recommendations

But Flanagan cautions that the country should not be written off only as a place of suffering—she says the country's literature offers another avenue into Haiti's culture and rich history.

“I teach literature, but the literature I teach is mainly connected to history,” Flanagan says. “How are we going to understand anything about the American Revolution, or the French Revolution for that matter, if we don’t understand something about Haiti? When I tell students that enslaved people in Haiti staged the first successful rebellion of enslaved people in the western hemisphere, their eyes open—they had never heard that before.”

Flanagan will teach a course on Caribbean literature this spring. Through stories, she hopes to foster an atmosphere where students can ask questions about the history of Haiti and the ways in which the Haitian Revolution is connected to the United States.

“It’s important to me when I teach the literature of the Caribbean,” she says, “to show students that we cannot and should not think about America in isolation of the Americas, of which Haiti is an integral part.”

Flanagan’s connection to the Caribbean is personal. A high school dropout, she left a job at a cannery in Trinidad with two bottles of rum, a pint of pepper sauce, a scrap of paper bearing the name of an American social worker she'd met three weeks prior, and unspoken aspirations to attend college. A week after setting foot in the United States for the first time, she landed a job as an au pair working for prodigious talent and ‘High Priestess of Soul' Nina Simone.

That life-changing experience set Flanagan on the path to university and ultimately to a career as an award-winning novelist, essayist, poet and playwright. She has represented the United States as a cultural ambassador in 12 countries. These are her reading recommendations.

I am first generation American—my parents are white Jewish South African and Israeli. As a non-Haitian person invited into this dance culture, I learned early on how enduring colonial stigmas against African culture bear on Haitians’ and Haitian Americans’ relationship to this practice. The Haitian artists with whom I work courageously protect and promote their culture despite innumerable barriers, and I aim to support their efforts by advocating for the luminescent power of these practices with integrity and humility.

The dance and music traditions I teach stem from the Haitian folkloric repertoire—codified artistic renditions drawn from the culture of Haiti’s sacred ancestral religion of Vodou, then shaped and innovated by many brilliant artists over time. Crediting the artists who crafted the form as well as my many teachers, I also emphasize the inherent Vodou principles foundational to these practices. I feel it is my duty, as someone who has the privilege to promote Haiti’s beauty and depth, to make visible these cultural roots and histories. Haiti has much to teach the world about respectful connection with nature, ancestors, and each other as living beings on Earth, and Haitian dances also carry forward urgent lessons for understanding the true meaning of human rights, dignity and freedom for all.

–Dasha Chapman, Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance

This article was originally published in the Fall/Winter 2021 print issue of the Davidson Journal Magazine; for more, please see the Davidson Journal section of our website.