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Lenelle Moïse: Postscript, Swimming in the Waters of Endezo

Abstract My essay, “Lenelle Moïse: Postscript, Swimming in the Waters of Endezo,” examines the work of Haitian American poet and performance artist, Lenelle Moïse, who artfully blends Haitian Kreyòl and English in her poems and solo performances. She challenges conventional understandings of gender and sexual difference through interrogating language and positionality in ways that explore the interrelatedness between words, images, and movement. My essay is an exploratory analysis of the solo performance, Madivinez and To Erzulie, the experimental video produced and directed by videographer Mara Alper in which Moïse performs her poem “the number.” Both works, in different ways, illustrate her resistance against a sexualized alterity through the interrogation of cultural memory and spirituality. As a black woman who accepts and identifies with the term “lesbian,” is politically moved by the word “queer,” and theoretically and artistically inspired by the term “pomosexual,” Moïse's work interweaves complex stories and histories that reveal language as a performative and political practice engaged in the creation of black subjects. Her performances illustrate, visually and linguistically, the tensions and slippages of negotiating a diasporic identity. Furthermore, she explores the differences that are created by and embedded in language and ethnicity to produce poems and performances that are infused with explorations of belonging, gendered identities, and sexuality.