Under contract with University of Pennsylvania Press

Atlas of Nanm: Bodily Openings and Encounters in Haiti is an ethnography of health risk and healing among women healers in Arcahaie, Haiti, rooted in the transnational Black feminist tradition. Each chapter of the book considers how women (trans-inclusive) care for and manage a physical site of "opening" on their bodies. Among all the residents of imperiled Haitian communities, women and infants are considered the most likely to be harmed by structural risks, evidenced in the high maternal and infant mortality rates in the nation. Instead of framing themselves as victims of these risks, many women call upon their disproportionately high experiences of illness and loss as a source of expertise into bodies and energies, which are animated by a life-energy known as “nanm.”  I argue that women’s experiences of diagnosing, overcoming, and managing the loss of their own nanm, and the intrusion of other nanm, lead them to become theorists of bodies more broadly. These mothers, healers, and laywomen wield their lived experience as an authoritative source of insight into the way bodies should interact with one another, into decisions about whose bodies demand care, and how or if social injuries can be meaningfully healed through collective bodily practice. Organizing these revelations according to the sites of mouths, uteruses, eyes, skin, and dreams, this book is envisioned as a multimedia atlas of life force, of nanm, as it moves into and out of women’s bodies at corporeal frontiers. I tell this story using ethnographic prose and theoretical interludes that are interwoven with “collaborative illustrations”, graphic concoctions compiled from photographs, diagrams, and medicines made by and with interlocutors. 

Medical Anthropology Quarterly

What does it mean that hospitals in Haiti have become widespread sites of “kidnapping” for mothers and babies? In at least 46 countries, including Haiti, indebted patients are extralegally held prisoner in hospitals until family members, kin, outside groups, or charities pay their outstanding bills. The majority of those detained globally are women following complicated births. This article introduces and situates the global problem of “hospital detention” as it is practiced in Haiti, tying it to transnational carceral architectures that target Black reproduction in global health. Drawing from a trauma-informed collaborative storytelling workshop in the North of Haiti, I share Senisha and Mari’s experiences of detention, which reveal the practice as continuous with other forms of coercion, neglect, and violence they face in seeking safe births, and highlighting the communal care, refusals, and acts of self-liberation that oppose these oppressions.

An essay accompanied by video, audio, and artwork that was the outcome of the “Lopital Pa Prizon” Reproductive-Justice Storytelling Workshop held in Okap, Ayiti, in June 2022. The workshop brought together 11 women survivors of hospital detention (and their family members) with Haitian artist Danipy Georges, anthropologist Alissa Jordan, Haitian midwife “Ani,”[1] Haitian human rights organizer Jean Denis Aureleus, and an experimental Haitian documentary team, including Maredel Pierre-Louis and Robensor Exantus. Following the end of the closed workshop, the film team invited mothers to share their experiences on film before going home. Although it was late, and many were tired, 10 of the 11 women waited for more than two hours for a chance to speak and the story reflects on what they shared, especially Geraldine’s insistence that—for her—justice requires “shame”. Speaking on camera, she explained, could make doctors and administrators and international NGO boards and obstetricians and hospital guards “feel shame” [santi wont]. What does an engaged ethnographic praxis look like at this kind of affective frontier?