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Making Community from Mess: Mapping the Santiago de Cuba Carnival and the Carnivalesque of my Research Journey through Poetry

image of Making Community from Mess: Mapping the Santiago de Cuba Carnival and the Carnivalesque of my Research Journey through Poetry

My communities sustained me, and my poetry preserved my sanity during the pandemic, helping me to navigate the messiness of doing research, living life and producing knowledge. Conceptualising poetry as my voice in my research, I consider in this chapter how I move and perform as a researcher in the ontological community spaces that constitute and inform my lived experience and my research journey. I reflect on how poetry – the reading, writing and performing of it is core to my lived experience as a doctoral researcher and Caribbean diasporic woman negotiating cultural memory, community and embodied knowledge.

Keywords: Caribbean ; carnival ; community ; Covid-19 ; Cuba ; diaspora ; interviews ; lived experience ; poetry ; reflexivity ; research process

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References

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  2. Bakhtin, M. and Booth, W. C. (1984), ‘Discourse in Dostoevsky’, in C. Emerson (ed.) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Bettelheim, J. (1993), Cuban Festivals: An Illustrated Anthology, London, New York: Garland.
     [Google Scholar]
  4. Boyce Davies, C. (1994), Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject, Abingdon: Routledge.
     [Google Scholar]
  5. Boyce Davies, C. (1996), ‘African diaspora literature and the politics of transformation’, Alertnation, 3, pp. 5–27.
     [Google Scholar]
  6. Breidlid, A. (2007), ‘Education in Cuba – An alternative educational discourse: Lessons to be learned?’, Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 37, pp. 617–34.
     [Google Scholar]
  7. Carr, B. (1998), ‘Identity, class, and nation: Black immigrant workers, Cuban communism, and the sugar insurgency, 1925–1934’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 78, pp. 83–116.
     [Google Scholar]
  8. Cutts, Q. M. (2019), ‘More than craft and criteria: The necessity of ars spirituality in (black women's) poetic inquiry and research poetry’, Qualitative Inquiry, 26, pp. 908–19.
     [Google Scholar]
  9. Daniel, Y. (1995), Rumba: Dance and Social Change in Contemporary Cuba, Bloomington : Indiana University Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  10. Davies, N. G. , Barnard, R. C. , Jarvis, C. I. , Russell, T. W. , Semple, M. G. , Jit, M. , and Edmunds, W. J. (2021), ‘Association of tiered restrictions and a second lockdown with COVID-19 deaths and hospital admissions in England: A modelling study’, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 21, pp. 482–92.
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  11. Denzin, N. K. (1999), ‘Interpretive ethnography for the next century’, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 28, pp. 510–19.
     [Google Scholar]
  12. Di Gessa, G. and Price, D. (2021), ‘Changes in health and social well-being in the COVID-19 clinically vulnerable older English population during the pandemic’, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 75, p. 1070.
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  13. Draper, R. P. (1971), ‘Concrete poetry’, New Literary History, 2, pp. 329–40.
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  14. Faulkner, S. L. (2017), ‘Writing practice: A narrative poem’, International Review of Qualitative Research, 10, pp. 238–41.
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  16. Fournier, L. (2021), Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Cambridge: The MIT Press.
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  17. Giampapa, F. (2011), ‘The politics of “being and becoming” a researcher: Identity, power, and negotiating the field ’, Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 10, pp. 132–44.154
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  19. Hall, S. and Morley, D. (2019), Essential Essays, Durham: Duke University Press.
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  20. Hartman, S. (2008), ‘Venus in two acts’, Small Axe, 12, pp. 1–14.
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  21. Heaton, D. W. (2002), ‘Creativity: Between chaos and order or my life as a messy text – A case study and a challenge’, American Communication Journal, 6, p. 1.
     [Google Scholar]
  22. Hernandez-Reguant, A. (2005), ‘Cuba's alternative geographies’, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 10, pp. 275–313.
     [Google Scholar]
  23. Holman Jones, S. L. , Adams, T. E. , and Ellis, C. (2013), Handbook of Autoethnography, Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
     [Google Scholar]
  24. Köhn, S. and Siré, N. (2022), ‘Swap it on WhatsApp: The moral economy of informal online exchange networks in contemporary Cuba’, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 27, pp. 80–100.
     [Google Scholar]
  25. Lapum, J. L. (2008), ‘The performative manifestation of a research identity: Storying the journey through poetry’, Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 9.
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  26. Lorde, A. (2007), Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, Berkeley: Crossing Press.
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  27. MacLean, L. M. , Rahman, N. , Turner, R. L. , and Corbett, J. (2020), ‘Disrupted fieldwork: Navigating innovation, redesign, and ethics during an ongoing pandemic’, Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, 18, p. 8.
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  28. McKittrick, K. (2021), Dear Science and Other Stories, Durham: Duke University Press.
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  29. Meeks, B. (2007), Culture, Politics, Race and Diaspora: The Thought of Stuart Hall, Kingston, Jamaica, London: Ian Randle, Lawrence & Wishart.
     [Google Scholar]
  30. Meyer, M. (2017), ‘Concrete research poetry: A visual representation of metaphor’, Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal, 2, pp. 32–57.
     [Google Scholar]
  31. Moore, A. (2017), ‘Eight events for entering a PhD: A poetic inquiry into happiness, humility, and self-care’, Qualitative Inquiry, 24, pp. 592–96.
     [Google Scholar]
  32. Novák, R. (2019), ‘Contrapuntal text and rondo (in the poetry of Desmond Egan and Jaroslav Seifert)’, Acta Universitatis Lodziensis. Folia Litteraria Polonica, 52, pp. 345–58.
     [Google Scholar]
  33. Owler, K. (2010), ‘A “problem” to be managed?: Completing a PhD in the arts and humanities’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 9, pp. 289–304.
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  34. Queeley, A. (2015), Rescuing Our Roots: The African Anglo-Caribbean Diaspora in Contemporary Cuba, Gainsville: University Press of Florida.
     [Google Scholar]
  35. Soyini Madison, D. (2012), Critical Ethnography: Methods, Ethics and Performance, New York: Sage.
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  36. van Deursen, A. and Anade, L. S. (2018), ‘First- and second-level digital divides in Cuba: Differences in internet motivation, access, skills and usage’, First Monday, 23.
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  37. Wirtz, K. (2017), ‘Mobilizations of race, place, and history in Santiago de Cuba's carnivalesque’, American Anthropologist, 119, pp. 58–72.
     [Google Scholar]

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