Rapping our reality: Young people approaching the Haitian future in the subjunctive

Through multimodal, collaborative methods with young people from Delmas, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, I show our joint efforts to investigate and represent their experience of reality, where a tendency toward subjunctivizing practices emerges. Their negotiations of what topics should, or should not, be discussed turned the process of producing a hip-hop song and its music video into a micro-level discussion on larger societal issues. Their negotiations also hold access to a local worldview where the understanding of time and space is collapsed, opening up for perspectives on multiplicity, also of the self. Through these local perspectives, this article provides a deeper understanding of subjunctivizing practices that contribute to current anthropological debates on temporality and decoloniality, suggesting that subjunctivity should be raised to a more central epistemological and methodological position.