Haiti, History, and the Gods. - book reviews

To know Haiti is to be obsessed by the place. Joan Dayan, a Haitian-American professor of English at the University of Arizona, clearly admits to her obsession. She sets out to chart the "cultural imagination" of the first black republic and to a great extent succeeds in her creative anthropological examination of race, religion, and gender in colonial Haiti. It is almost as if she had diagnosed Haiti's (and everyone's?) original sins and then reconstructed a genesis story to explain their painful contemporary presence. But indeed, she doesn't need to create a myth, she simply recounts the often gruesome history.

Her examination, while offering no conclusions, allows for "conflict and collision" and seeks "to dramatize a complex and perplexing social history too often lost in exposition." Dayan uses a multifaceted methodology, including careful historical, anthropological, and literary analysis. She paints a frightening portrait of colonial Haiti from legal and religious texts, memoirs, letters, and literary fiction.

Saint-Domingue, the French colonial name for Haiti, was the richest and most productive of France's colonies, and provided the impetus for many cultural innovations that shaped republican France, from race and religion to dress, jewelry, and food. The author also describes what happened when the impetus came the other way, "most notably, when Napoleon Bonaparte, wanting to re-institute slavery in his possessions, sent his best troops to Saint-Domingue in order to bring down Toussaint L'Ouverture and make sure no epaulette remained on any black shoulder."

Sensuality, romance, bondage, and despotism are woven through a quilt made up of pairs: black and white, slave and master, voodoo and Catholicism, virgin and prostitute. This methodological tool of "doubling" is pieced together from major Haitian writers. Indeed, la politique de la doublure frames the working out of personal and national identity from Toussaint, Christophe, and Petion to the Duvaliers.

Dayan is at her best in part 2, "Fictions of Haiti." Against a backdrop of Senghor, Cesaire, Fanon, and Zora Neale Hurston, she examines Haiti's tales of "land, women, and gods." She concentrates on the novels of Marie Chauvet, "perhaps the greatest writer of Haitian fiction." Voodoo is the hermeneutical thread throughout the quilt, Catholicism the blunt and destructive needle.

From the earliest days of the republic, voodoo, race, gender, and nation have been intertwined. The author quotes from Jacques-Stephen Alexis's Les Arbres Musiciens: "The lwa (voodoo spirits) were amalgamated to the body of the nation, they fertilized the land like the male fertilizes the female!" Land for sex is a consistent theme. Male jealousy in the face of the grueling labor of women subsistence farmers and small land owners is crudely sexualized by Rene Depestre: "Every woman has a karo (3.3 acres) of land between her legs."

That voodoo and Catholicism are interwoven in Haiti is apparent. However, it is difficult to get clear insights into an amalgamation that defies explanation. In rural areas, Catholic rituals and songs, the lives of Christ and the saints, as well as sacraments and sacramentals were "eagerly adopted by those forbidden the opportunity to become familiar with Christian doctrine."

Dayan claims that voodoo practices "must be viewed as ritual reenactments of Haiti's colonial past," rather than simply holdovers from African religious practices. Authors as diverse as Francois Duvalier and Jacques Roumain, and virtually all of Haiti's women, writers, as well as Dayan herself, present voodoo as a way of rationalizing, and maybe as a way out of, life's daily miseries. The "logic of voodoo" has provided a soothing ointment against the racism and sexism of Haiti's blood-soaked history.

The church remained a foreign institution tolerant of slavery and thereby earned the contempt of the masses. However, for the uneducated the lives of the saints, sacraments, and rituals became purveyors of other beliefs - and other gods. Superficial efforts at Catholic religious education provided the opportunity for the Saint-Domingue black population to revitalize the religion of "Rada, Congo, Ibo, or Naga spirits" brought over on the slave ships. This homegrown reconstruction provided, and for many still provides, something of an intelligibility structure in the face of suffering and oppression.

Dayan points out that in the colonial period, blacks, whether slaves or emancipated, were more religious than most whites. Their syncretistic religion generated "a belief system of unprecedented resilience." How the lwa meet Jesus or how the Virgin Mary meets Ezili Freda is still the topic of much debate; the resilience is not.

Zombis, the "epistemology of whiteness," the "onomastics of color," and the history of bizarre mathematical tabulations to measure racial composition will appear arcane to many readers. But the light Dayan shines on race, gender, and religion illumines the path from the slave trade to the drug trade to the boat people.

The author was right to warn the reader from the beginning not to expect "a unified point of view." Rather, she tells the same story three ways: using ritual, fiction, and history. This work is not for those unfamiliar with Haitian history and culture. However, for readers with some exposure to the country, it is an intriguing way to wander through Haiti's "cultural imagination."

True to her word, Dayan does not draw conclusions. After so many stories and so much detail, such reticence is somewhat frustrating for the reader. Nonetheless, Haitians, like all of us, are immigrants from the past. Many of the burning issues from Saint-Domingue still smolder today. The modern economy is as exploitative as the colonial plantation economy. Outside forces still manipulate Haitian events. Fear and suspicion of racial politics - whether French or American - run deep. Suspicion of U.S. policy can be traced from the Jefferson administration to the current flap over apparent U.S. support of Emmanuel Constant's FRAPH. The complex amalgamation of voodoo and Catholicism, complicated further by the split between the Ti Legliz and the hierarchy, remains a volatile issue. The exploitation of women, whether small farmers or those who stitch baseballs, continues at a galloping pace.

Dayan does hint at a kind of conclusion. Referring to the mutilation of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines's corpse in 1806, she evokes a deeply felt mood of Haiti's past and present. The gory butchering of the emperor's dead body not only recorded a collective frenzy, she notes, but also registered the potential for transfiguration - a resurrection. "Such a hankering after resurrection, repeated and theatrical, still plagues Haiti, with each new hero, with each new government, with every dispensation."

One can only hope a new dispensation has begun. We should pray for a resurrection, but this time round, without a mutilation.

John P. Hogan was director of Catholic Relief Services in Haiti and has written frequently for Commonweal.

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