Water is a reoccurring theme throughout Kathia St. Hilaire's work, as a symbol of uncontainable fluidity while also carrying with it the tragic history of Transatlantic slave trade. In David, Kathia St. Hilaire depicts a hurricane, in particular, referencing those that form around the coast Africa. Today, many hurricane paths over the Atlantic overlap with recorded slave trade routes. Thus, rainfall from these hurricanes symbolizes the sadness of former ancestors, while also bringing forth new beginnings.
David is the name of a hurricane that hit Haiti in August 1979, causing major structural and environmental damage. St. Hilaire recalls her mother describing the event to her many times as a child. The disaster was memorialized in a song by Haitian singer, Ti Manno, whose kreyòl lyrics spoke to feelings of hope and belonging in the wake of the disaster. As the chorus goes, "When we heard about David in Haiti / We thought everyone would perish / In fact, we feel liberated / When we learned our families were spared / While we were in danger / We asked to return.” The structure of David extends from the wall into the space of the viewer, suggestive of the way natural disasters penetrate into our daily existence and tragically impact people with increasing frequency, particularly in Haiti.
In conceiving this piece, St. Hilaire considered the mythical belief that hurricanes are the avenging spirits of the millions of enslaved Africans who died during the Middle Passage (1517- 1867), stemming from the fact that the hurricane belt of the Atlantic follows a prime route of the Transatlantic slave trade, beginning in West Africa and making landfall in the Gulf South.