Elizabeth Jaikaran

To think of haunting as abstract and divorced from a present history is to depoliticize the present moment in which brown bodies actively resist oppression — be it from corrupt governments, institutional racism, and/or misogyny sponsored by a patriarchal culture. Yes, there is a past that haunts Caribbean poetic and imaginary landscapes: slavery, indenture, and colonization.

Elizabeth Jaikaran was born in Brooklyn, raised in Queens, and currently resides on Long Island with her husband. She graduated from the CUNY City College of New York in 2012 and from New York University School of Law in 2016. She has written for numerous platforms, most prevalently for Brown Girl magazine, and has published along a spectrum of genres, from legal analysis to comedy. As an author and a lawyer, Jaikaran hopes to be a voice for communities residing in underrepresented margins. She is the proud child of Guyanese immigrants.

Jane Wong, author of Overpour (Action Books, 2016), puts Asian American poetry into conversation with the sociological text by Avery Gordon. In her video “Going Toward the Ghost” she asks, how do these specters arise? She defines the poetics of haunting as “where our history dwells in the strange liminal space of the past, present, and future combined.” She asks why she, the child of immigrants, feels the pains of her past so intensely when she herself did not undergo the horrors of her ancestors or parents.