Marilene Phipps-Kettlewell Continued (Part 2)

“There are times when I feel that I no longer have a home anywhere—homelessness is the acquired state of the exiled—once you have left, you can never return . . .

And there are times when I am in Haïti, and it all feels, so, so singularly familiar, woven so deep in the very fabric of my being, the thread in my skin, the color or my blood, that I know for sure that this is Home.”

Part 2 of the VoicesfromHaiti INNERview

Quote and the painting, Green fields Atop Tomassin,

are by MARILÈNE PHIPPS-KETTLEWELL

(Green Fields Atop Tomassin: 11″ x 14″ on Linen Canvas)

Marilène Phipps Kettlewell: A VoicesfromHaiti INNERview

“My Haïti is torn and unsettled, haunted by memories of a paradise I could never see or inhabit again, because it either never existed but in my inner being’s sensibility, or it is gone for good. Life is movement. To hope for things to remain the same is to hope for death.” Marilène Phipps-Kettlewell

MARILÈNE PHIPPS-KETTLEWELL (formerly Marilène Phipps) is a painter, a poet and a short story writer who was born and grew up in Haiti. She has held fellowships at the Guggenheim Foundation, and at the Bunting Institute, the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research and the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard University, and has been a recipient of a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts. In 1993, she won the Grolier prize for poetry. Her poetry collection Crossroads and Unholy Water (Southern Illinois University Press, 2000) won the 1999 Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. (It was also a finalist for the Walt Whitman prize from the Academy of American Poets.) Her collection The Company of Heaven: Stories from Haiti won the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award, published by the University of Iowa Press.

Her work has appeared in magazines such as CallalooPloughshares and River Styx and in the anthologies Sisters of Caliban: Contemporary Women Poets of the Caribbean (Azul Editions, 1996), The Beacon Best of 1999 (Beacon Press). Her poetry was published inEngland by Carcanet Press Ltd, England in a 2007 antholgy of 7 poets. Her short fiction was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2003, as well as listed in The Best American Short Stories 2001.

The INNERview

The INNERview Part TWO

Ountògi: (Frisner Augustin) ~ Written by Dr. Loïs Wilcken

September opens with a VoicesfromHaiti exclusive INNERview of master drummer Frisner Augustin: Ountògi ~ Written by Dr. Loïs Wilcken Go to the INNERview. Simbi Dlo 1_45

Lois Wilcken (PhD, Ethnomusicology, Columbia University), a native New Yorker, has had the pleasure of researching the traditional music and dance of Haiti in Port-au-Prince and New York City’s Haitian neighborhoods. She shares her experiences with academic and general audiences. Her essays appear in academic journals, collections, and encyclopedias, and she presents frequently at meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Haitian Studies Association, the Latin American Studies Association, the International Council for Traditional Music, and other scholarly organizations.