"Sometimes home speaks where we least expect it. At the mairie in Bordeaux, a port city inextricably bound to Saint-Domingue, France’s richest colony until Haiti won its independence, I met Joséphine Antoinette Espérance, born in 1802 in Jérémie, the birthplace of my great-grandparents. Both our names mean hope."
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Fanm se poto mitan. Women are the central pillar.
This living archive honors Haitian women who hold up the sky in the land of high mountains.
It weaves family photographs, documents, and proverbs with stories carried through generations, while the voice of my mother sings from a book she dedicated to me.
Nou la. We are still here.
Time in many forms.
Deep, when mapou trees shelter Taíno, African ancestors, and the lwas.
Rebellion, when Anacaona’s legend survived her execution by the Spanish and Sanité Bélair’s by the French.
Sovereign, when Queen Marie-Louise reigned over Haiti’s brief monarchy.
The recovered time of Jeanne Duval and Carmen Lahens, still visible in the art they inspired.
The exiled time of writer Marie Vieux-Chauvet, whose words survived silencing.
The contemporary time of Italian-Haitian designer Stella Jean, who carried our history to other mountains.
The reverse side traces a family in diaspora through photographs, letters, celebrations, grief, and love.
Sankofa. Time to retrieve what was left behind, so it can be carried forward.
Quipu. The knotted time of the ancient Andeans, whose fragments hold memory.
Ancestral time, refusing erasure.
Together, a compass for a home not found on any map.
Nou la.
With deepest gratitude to my mother, Claudette Pierre-Noël Pinede (1938–2021), Erick Janssen, and Raina Stinson for helping me breathe this archive to life, and to Cecilia Vicuña, whose contemporary reimagining of the Andean quipu helped me find its form.
Reframing Haiti: https://nadinepinede.com/index.php/teaching-haiti/