Brasaj as Haitian Black Feminist Intersectional Thought

I have framed my response to Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (2022) around the concept of brasaj in Kreyòl, or brassage in French and brazing in English, to acknowledge this book’s careful scholarly choreography of “twenty-first-century Black feminists in Haiti.”1 Unless I cite the word in either English or French, in this essay, I use the Kreyòl term brasaj. The term refers to mixing, brewing, and also a specific practice of metallurgy. It functions not only as a noun (brasaj/brassage/brazing), but also as a verb “to braze” in English, or brasser in French, and in Kreyòl it has been used alongside the verb soude (to weld) to designate a specific type of metallurgy.2 With Black feminism as her core framework, Jean-Charles examines the writings of Yanick Lahens, Évelyne Trouillot, Kettly Mars, Paulette Poujol Oriol, and Marie Chauvet, as well as the works of contemporary visual artists, musicians, activists, and scholars of Haitian feminism. In my reading of her study, I first engage with the notion of brasaj as fundamental to the stakes and execution of Jean-Charles’s project of imagining, in Farah Jasmine Griffin’s words, “a more just world.” Griffin’s phrase serves as an epigraph to Jean-Charles’s book: “Black feminism has never only been about Black women, it’s never been this. It’s been about a more just world. And a planet that said if you listen to the insights of the least of these, which is us, that we can do something transformative.”3 It is not only what Jean-Charles puts forward, but also how she does so, which creates multiple articulations of how the translocal specificities of Haitian feminisms—in the plural—manifest as relevant to each other as well as globally. I end my reflection by deliberating on Jean-Charles’s critiques of the notion of woman as poto mitan as over-essentializing and as such frustratingly limiting.