[Scholar Series-Ep. #81]"Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic." A Conversation w/ Dr. Sophie Maríñez.

This conversation with Dr. Sophie Maríñez is less an interview than a reckoning for me, an excavation of Haitian and Dominican ghosts, of histories silenced and distorted, the way the past never quite stays in the past–“The past is never dead. It’s not even past”. She walks us through the troubled narratives of Haiti and the Dominican Republic—not as distant, separate nations, but as entangled siblings, bound by history, betrayal, and resistance.

At the heart of her book (and this discussion), Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is the idea that history is not linear. Instead, it circles back on itself, shifts, adapts, repeats but never in quite the same way. This is Spiralism, a framework born from Haitian literature that seeks to make sense of the cycles of oppression, revolution, and return. The Haitian Revolution, the Parsley Massacre, the decimation of the island’s Indigenous people—these are not separate moments in time but echoes, reverberating through centuries.

Frankètienne, one of the fathers of the framework, said that Spiralism “…defines life at the level of relations (colors, odors, sounds, signs, words) and historical connections (positionings in space and time). Not in a closed circuit but tracing the path of a spiral. So rich that each new curve, wider and higher than the one before, expands the arc of one’s vision.” (From: Ready to Burst.)

Dr. Maríñez dismantles the neat, binary notions of identity and conflict. Hispaniola? That’s a colonizer’s name. Kiskeya? A myth born from a European chronicler who never set foot on the island. Haiti/Ayiti? One. the true Indigenous name, the other, rendered politically fraught by the weight of nationhood. She insists that there is no singular name, no singular story, only a mouthful: “the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic.”

Dominicanidad, she argues, is no less complex. It is a construct, an essentialist shape-shifter, used and abused by political forces to serve shifting agendas. What does it mean to be Dominican, when the definition shifts by geography, race, class, and time? What does it mean to be from a place that has been “ghosted,” rendered illegible by the very scholars and institutions that claim to study the Caribbean? Ouch.

Let’s stay with the ghosts:

The massacre of 1937 was not just an act of violence but an act of memory, or rather, forced forgetting. The rhetoric of the “peaceful invasion” of Haitians into the Dominican Republic is not about immigration but about erasure, a convenient distraction from the economic and political structures that extract Haitian labor while denying Haitian humanity. The elite, the state, and the power brokers of both nations collude in this, enforcing borders not just of land but of belonging. And yet, the past lingers, history an apparition, unresolved, unatoned for, demanding reckoning.

Maríñez sees spiralism as a decolonized way out of the binary nightmare imposed by the Global North–a more liberating way to understand the history of the island occupied by Haiti and the DR, not as a series of conflicts between two nations, but as a struggle between those who hold power and those who resist it. It is the repetition of violence, but also the repetition of rebellion, of solidarity, of culture that refuses to be erased.

She calls for deeper connections, for a rejection of the cliches and stereotypes that keep Haiti and the Dominican Republic estranged. “We need to get to know each other,” she says. “Not just the stories we’ve been