A poetic journey through
silence, rebellious rage, love, and the sacred
Gina
Athena Ulysse's Because
When God Is Too Busy: Haïti, me &
THE
WORLD
is a lyrically vivid meditative journey that is unapologetic in its
determination to name, embrace and reclaim a revolutionary Blackness
that has been historically stigmatized and denied. Crafting
experiments with "ethnographic collectibles" of word,
performative sounds, and imagery to blur genres and the lines between
the geopolitical and the personal, this collection is a testament to
postcolonial inheritances. Ulysse's work remixes samples from a range
of references as it beckons readers to bear witness to a coming of
age as she shifts between time and place and plays with languages to
stretch the margins of aesthetics in the academic. These poems,
performance texts, and photographs gather fractured memories—longings
laced with Vodou chants confronting a past that looms too largely in
the present. Because
When God Is Too Busy
searches for humility while honoring sacred and ancestral imperatives
to recognize and salute power beyond Western attachments to reason.
