Haiti’s artistic community continued to produce work that bore witness to the country’s crisis in 2023, with painters, writers, photographers, filmmakers, and musicians creating new works that processed the trauma of violence and displacement, celebrated the resilience of Haitian communities, and demanded international attention to conditions that the world was too easily ignoring. The cultural production of 2023 was among the most politically engaged in recent Haitian artistic history.
Portrait photographers working in displacement sites and in communities affected by gang violence produced powerful bodies of work that put human faces on statistics. Their images — of children doing homework in makeshift shelters, of elderly people sitting amid rubble, of women carrying water through flooded streets — circulated through social media to international audiences who might have seen Haiti only through crisis news coverage and who found in these images a different kind of seeing.
Filmmakers who had been documenting conditions in Haiti for years released work in 2023 at international film festivals, bringing Haiti’s reality to audiences in Europe and North America who had limited direct knowledge of the crisis. The screenings generated both audience engagement and advocacy opportunities, with filmmakers using the platform to call for international action and to amplify the voices of Haitians whose perspectives rarely reached international screens.
The literary output of the year included fiction and nonfiction works in Haitian Creole and French that grappled with the crisis’s psychological and cultural dimensions. Writers described the impossible task of making art amid suffering, the guilt and responsibility of giving voice to experiences that were not their own, and the conviction that bearing witness was itself a form of action in an environment where so many other forms of action were impossible.