Billions of pounds of used clothing (often called pepe or kenedi) is shipped each year from the United States to Haiti and sold by street vendors. (For an introduction to pepe, check out the film Secondhand (Pepe) or The Afterlife of American Clothes, although the article requires critical reading since its supporting a free market perspective.) I cannot tell you how many people I have seen in Old Navy t-shirts with United States flags, and I have one particularly vivid memory of a woman I passed in Jakmèl with a shirt that said “Hell yeah, I am a redneck woman!” Many people have offered critiques of pepe: demolishing the market of Haitian-made clothing, importing clothes that are totally inappropriate for living in Haiti or that need major re-purposing to work, supporting the idea that Haiti is only worthy of secondhand items, and imperialistically infusing Haiti with more referents to United States culture. The artists of the Gran Rue offer an excellent critique of pepe in their work, which you can read about on the Atiz Rezistans website or watch in Leah Gordon’s film. At the inaugural Ghetto Biennale, Frau Fiber collaborated with folks in Port-au-Prince to ingeniously repurpose pepe, and you can read about their ongoing project on the Made in Haiti website. Kwochè Ayiti draws on these critiques of pepe and will incorporate repurposed t-shirts into our project in Port-au-Prince as both way to do sustainable crochet in Haiti and as a statement against United States imperialism.
This technique is new for me and Shannon, but he found a very helpful instructional video on YouTube. We have had a couple t-shirt yarn making sessions where we turned piles of materials into ready-to-crochet yarn with the help of our friends. Now we have lots of yarn balls like the ones that Flo McGarrell used in his work.