Male Wi Cheri (2018)

Male Wi Cheri—a Haitian Creole phrase meaning “I am leaving, my darling”—is a work that stages an imagined departure, framed as an intense exchange between myself and God. Through this fictional leave-taking, I explore the emotional and spiritual rupture that marked my coming of age: growing up queer within the confines of Haitian social norms and a multicultural Catholic upbringing that offered little space for the fullness of my identity.

Faced with erasure, my first instinct was to withdraw, to sever ties with the structures that rendered my queerness illegible. I envisioned transplanting myself to a place where I might be held more gently, where queerness could live without apology.

But I remained.

This work is not about flight, but about the radical act of staying. Of refusing to disappear. Male Wi Cheri becomes both elegy and reclamation, a meditation on what it means to reconcile sexuality, spirituality, and cultural inheritance without abandoning any part of the self. It is a gesture toward wholeness, quiet, deliberate, and enduring.

This work imagines a final utterance, the words I might speak if I were ever to sever myself from my homeland and my faith. Male Wi Cheri becomes a site of speculative departure, where language takes the shape of a reluctant farewell. The imagery evokes forced confessionals, moments of emotional exorcism where each word emerges as both burden and release. To say goodbye to my God, to Haiti, was never something I allowed myself to imagine until this work compelled it into form.

The actions I perform within the piece echo the aesthetics of torment, shaped by the psychological and physical weight of an impossible departure. It would hurt to articulate a disavowal I have never truly desired.

And yet, cheri, I am still here.

I have not departed.

I will not depart.

This is not an exit.

This is an arrival.

Trigger Warning: This work contains imagery involving spit and intense, violent movements that some viewers may find uncomfortable or distressing. Viewer discretion is advised.