Istwa Across the Water

Gathering oral stories and visual art from both sides of the Atlantic, Istwa across the Water stitches together fragmented parts of the African diaspora. Toni Pressley-Sanon challenges the tendency to read history linearly and recovers the submerged histories of Haiti through alternative methods rooted in the island’s spiritual and cultural traditions. Using the Vodou concept of marasa, or twinned entities, this book takes parts of Dahomey (the present-day Benin Republic) and the Kongo region—from where many Haitians are descended—as Haiti’s twinned sites of cultural production. It draws on poet Kamau Brathwaite’s idea of tidalectics, the back-and-forth movement of ocean waves, as a way to look at cultural exchange. Above all, it searches out the places where history and memory intersect, expressed by the Kreyòl term istwa, offering a bold new approach for understanding Haitian histories and imagining Haitian futures.