Articulating the need to abandon the hegemonic Western epistemology – that is, the binary regime – is one thing. Actually abandoning it, and doing so within the academic constraints of a book project published by a US university press – an endeavour very deeply entangled with such epistemology – is quite another. Toni Pressley-Sanon, in her book Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination, offers us a luminous path for such achievement. The book is a bold statement and a robust demonstration of the extraordinary capacity of African and Caribbean peoples, who are always on the move, to produce forms of knowledge, art and bodily practices that absolutely refuse to settle, be it colonially, financially, corporally or territorially.

Precisely as the result of the constant, never-ending, shift of forces between subjugation and freedom, the Caribbean and, most especially Haiti – in light of its revolutionary istwa (see below) – endure. Pressley-Sanon unyieldingly insists on thinking and analysing Dahomean and Haitian cultures – both material and immaterial – within the framework, first, of Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite's concept of tidalectics: a constant between and betwixt, a refusal of the ‘or’, an affirmation of the ‘and’, the condition of being both and neither. In a word, this is a book at sea, which, rather than implying ‘lost’ or ‘confused’ as it does in the dominant Western epistemology, signifies becoming, feeling and thinking exactly as we should.

As a thinker interested in exploring Haitian tidalectical cultures, in both object and story forms, Pressley-Sanon rightfully recognises Vodou as an eminently tidalectical force and concept. ‘More than a religion, Vodou has been central to Haitian history from the first moments of the nation's inception’ (p. 5), and since it is characterised by its anti-hegemonic and syncretic origins, Vodou provides a second epistemological standpoint that is liberated from the binary regime. There are no stark divisions to be made in Vodou practice between thought and emotion, knowledge and belief, life and death, the seen and the unseen, the past and the present, the present and the future, water and land.

Thus, in studying culture through and with Vodou, Pressley-Sanon produces the method of analysis that stands closest to the third, most important concept of the book, istwa. A ‘Haitian Kreyòl term encompassing both history and story and facilitated by memory’ (p. 5), istwa, understood through and with Vodou as a tidalectical, essential cultural practice for a formerly enslaved people, allows her to consider, on the same wavelength, stories, objects of material culture and several kinds of visual and sculptural art. Although the book neglects to scrutinise the problematic gender dynamics present in most of the material and immaterial pieces and practices it includes (for instance, the supreme importance of the heteronormative phallus in most of the examined sculptural art and the absence of women – or non-male – protagonists in most of the stories considered), Pressley-Sanon's tidalectics–Vodou–istwa method of analysis is still very illuminating. By way of examples, I will briefly examine three of the cases contained in Istwa across the Water.

In Chapter 1, Pressley-Sanon re-evaluates Bokọfíó’s story, as retold by the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, who heard the story recounted in Dahomey. As Herskovits retells the story, he affords it no significant attention, ‘except to note, as would be expected, that a diviner was consulted to determine the identity of the various characters who participated in the experience’ (p. 32). Failing to understand the deep connections between story, history and memory, Herskovits is blind to the story as a tidalectical coding of the transatlantic experience of enslavement (p. 33). In contrast, by reading the story from within, with the epistemological framework afforded by tidalectics–Vodou–istwa, Pressley-Sanon is able to draw parallels ‘between Bokọfíó [the story's captured and, later, saved protagonist], bociọ [a Dahomean sculptural power object], and bòkò [sorcerers in Haiti “who use their powers to both heal and harm”, p. 29]’ (p. 30). These parallels allow the author to conclude that ‘the story, as istwa [which necessarily joins the “storytelling tradition with its audience participatory practice” (p. 30)], offers insight into the history of the transatlantic slave trade and people's fraught relationship to it’ (p. 27).

The second case concerns zonbis, perhaps the most negatively overdetermined figure of the Haitian cultural imaginary, primarily as a result of Hollywood's wilful misrepresentation. In contrast, Pressley-Sanon tidalectically interweaves Dahomey and Haiti by discussing ‘how the cakatú, a Dahomean cultural icon and form of societal control, may have also made its way across the water and been folded into the Haitian zonbi, another cultural icon with origins in Dahomey and the Kôngo’ (p. 54). This process allows the author to understand and believe the zonbi’s eminently liminal status as the simultaneous need to forget, which is associated with the ‘trauma around slavery … on both sides of the tidalectical divide’, and to remember, affirming the ‘diasporic memory’ that ‘was/is able to be summoned when, in Saint-Domingue and later in Haiti, at various times, revolutionary consciousness was/is sparked’ (pp. 64–5). These times are described by Pressley-Sanon as ‘metaphorical grains of salt’ (p. 65), since ‘with the tasting of salt, zonbi become conscious of their terrible servitude’ (p. 68).

The third example of Pressley-Sanon's achievement to be considered here is the contemporary work of the Atis Rezistans museum in Haiti, examined from the tidalectics–Vodou–istwa standpoint in Chapter 3, alongside the sculptural work created around the Ouidah ’92 exhibition in the Benin Republic (formerly Dahomey). Pressley-Sanon finds common traces around Vodou lwa (spirits) and the Dahomean power object, bociọ. The author's immanent method of analysis once again proves revealing, since it allows her to go beyond a typical capitalist art market's interpretation of Atis Rezistans's work as recycled trash. Although the Haitian artists recognise that ‘in Haiti, nothing is ever totally discarded’ (p. 88), and that there is an immense pressure to confront the transformation of Haiti into a ‘trashcan’ (p. 108) through ‘tax-exempt donations’ by the global bourgeoisie, Pressley-Sanon shows us that Atis Rezistans's work is also about istwa in the present. André Eugene, one of the Haitian artists extensively interviewed by the author, aptly summarises the argument:

As a last (and perhaps first) word for the endless dialogue a book review should nurture, I declare to be writing this text from Puerto Rico, Haiti's tidalectical neighbour, with whom we share the bonds of istwa, the unfathomable pain of recurrent colonisation, the bleeding that results from neoliberal rampage amid ‘natural disasters’ and planned exploitation, as well as the absolute refusal to settle. Of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, with which Pressley-Sanon concludes the book's final chapter, she writes: ‘It is my contention that the rupture both between Haiti's visible and invisible population and between the nation and its sites of origin shifted along with the earth's tectonic plates during goudougoudou, creating not only a profound physical opening but also a metaphysical one’ (p. 120). Indeed, I could write the same after Hurricane María ripped through the Puerto Rican archipelago in 2017. Between and betwixt Haiti and Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean Sea that unites the coastal imaginaries of our archipelagos, at once besieged and enduring, I thank Toni Pressley-Sanon for contributing to putting ‘back together that which has been torn apart’. ‘Only then’, I conclude with her, ‘will new truly liberating narratives emerge’ (p. 145).