Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance

by Beverly Bell, Edwidge Danticat (Foreword)

Haiti, long noted for poverty and repression, has a powerful and too-often-overlooked history of resistance. Women in Haiti have played a large role in changing the balance of political and social power, even as they have endured rampant and devastating state-sponsored violence, including torture, rape, abuse, illegal arrest, disappearance, and assassination. Beverly Bell, an activist and an expert on Haitian social movements, brings together thirty-eight oral histories from a diverse group of Haitian women. The interviewees include, for example, a former prime minister, an illiterate poet, a leading feminist theologian, and a vodou dancer. Defying victim status despite gender- and state-based repression, they tell how Haiti's poor and dispossessed women have fought for their personal and collective survival. The women's powerfully moving accounts of horror and heroism can best be characterized by the Creole word istwa, which means both "story" and "history." They combine theory with case studies concerning resistance, gender, and alternative models of power. Photographs of the women who have lived through Haiti's recent past accompany their words to further personalize the interviews in Walking on Fire .

Genres: Essays, Feminism

288 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2001

About the author

The founder of Other Worlds and more than a dozen international organizations and networks, Beverly is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. Beverly has worked for more than three decades as an organizer, advocate, and writer in collaboration with social movements in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. Her focus areas are just economies; democratic participation; and justice for women, indigenous peoples, and other excluded peoples. In addition to hundreds of articles, reports, and book chapters, Beverly has authored Fault Lines: Views Across Haiti's Divide; Walking on Fire: Haitian Women's Stories of Survival and Resistance; Birthing Justice: Women Creating Social and Economic Alternatives; and Harvesting Justice: Transforming Food, Land, and Agriculture Systems in the Americas.

Reviews

[Peace · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing book. I want to buy copies for everyone I know!

The oral histories from a variety of women cover a lot of ground. I learned a ton about Haitian culture and day-to-day life, and realized that I had had some preconceived ideas of people in lesser developed countries that the book debunked.

I did have a couple of problems with the book. I'm not sure why a white American was the one to lead the project. And I wish the book could have been released in Creole as well as English.

[Rich · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was one of the hardest books I had to read. Certain stories were just really draining to make it through, most notably the machete attack survivor. But this collection of memoirs proves just how resilient people can be even in the hardest of situations.

[Naori · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was a little surprised by this book. I thought it would be much more satisfying than it was, mostly because the stories for at least the first half weren’t very diversified. The layout was a little confusing and it wasn’t as visually appealing as most of the things online suggested, which is not something that’s important to me at all but the formatting was odd. I thought, based on everything I read, that the focus would be on each woman’s story and that they would be collaborative. However, for almost 90 pages they were incredibly repetitive, some of which were only a page in length. I felt like there was an attempt to contextualize it, but it was a movement between the author sitting around a campfire setting with some women written in the first person, to longer third person narratives on politics and globalization. There were some female activists later on in the book that wrote essays that were not necessarily personal stories and they were very exploratory, as well as focused and well edited. Honestly, everything in the book except for most of the women’s personal vignettes was really interesting, which was disappointing. I think I would have felt differently about the book if I had gone into knowing the format rather than expecting it to be a cohesive set of stories about one woman after another. I would say knowing that would help when you sit down to read this, and this would also be a great book for research.

[Judy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The strength of these women in the light of Haiti's history was (is) amazing. On the other hand, the fact that so little progress has been made is depressing. Current events underline the problems of extreme poverty, illiteracy and low status of women which haven't changed much on 100s of years.

[Bethany Stoelting · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eye-opening and heart-wrenching yet truly inspiring. Anyone concerned with poverty and injustice and ways to organize in order to end such injustice should definitely read this book as Haiti is the poorest, worst-off nation in the Western hemisphere.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful stories and perspectives from Haitian women living through the coup and beyond.

[Joshua Nomen-Mutatio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book I read for a Social & Political Activism course, which is rife with glaring injustices to boil the blood and get one's wheels turning about complex issues of ethics, social order, etc.

[Marilyn Louis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sad and heartbreaking to read thru