The Vortex Family

Desiring to read some Haitian fiction before plunging into science fiction and other topics, I came across the English translation of Jean Metellus's The Vortex Family. Translated by Michael Richardson, the text comes off as very poetic and oblique, with the occasional UK slang or expressions. The text's lack of exposition and shifting, poetic nature in its several short chapters or snippets can be occasionally beautiful and lyrical, despite its depressing themes of exile and political corruption in Haiti. Loosely based on the tumultuous falls of Estime, Magloire and Fignole, the novel focuses on the various descendants of Solon Vortex who, due to their response or involvement with politics, are forced into exile. The Vortex, descendants of Africans and Indians, are of the 'middling' sector in Haitian society that came to power in the post-1946 years, encompassing doctors, military professionals, university lecturers, teachers, chemists, and Catholic clergy.

The novel felt particularly strong when covering the fall of Estime (and Edgard Vortex), detailing the various social classes in conflict that made it seem almost inevitable that a coup would occur. The same process recurs with the fictionalized versions of Magloire and Fignole, demonstrating how Haiti's political chaos of the immediate pre-Duvalier years paved the way for the full terrors of Duvalierism. Some of the literary symbolism of the novel is also quite convincing, particularly the cockfight in Saltrou between a Dominican and a Haitian with a conclusion showing just how powerless the victor becomes. Olga, the matriarch of the Vortex family, is also worth mention. As the last descendant of an "Indian" family tracing its origins back to the Arawaks, Olga is the only character in modern Haitian fiction that I can think of who is "Amerindian." Whether or not the author actually believed there were Haitian descendants of the indigenous population who also inherited aspects of their culture is beyond my knowledge, but it is an interesting example of the Native heritage of Haiti as a living tradition, albeit still en route to extinction despite Olga's seven children. The indigenous past of the island seems to be invoked to tie together the African antecedence of Solon and the Arawak heritage of his wife to proffer the Vortex clan as the rightful heirs of Haitian autonomy. 

Despite its interesting, fictionalized interpretation of Haiti before the even more horrendous days of Duvalier, the novel's lack of exposition can, at times, make for a thinly-plotted novel. Out of nowhere, characters are suddenly targeted by the military as dissidents without any real explanation or plot development. Some passages are actually a little confusing when this occurs. But the novel makes up for its thinness with passages of rare beauty and longing for a better Haiti. Despite its shortcomings, it helps us understand the social and economic conditions that led to the Duvalier dictatorship through the lives of people who, willingly or unwillingly, found themselves engulfed in the political conflicts, coups, and civil unrest of an era of great promise.

La Charca

Although the translation of La Charca has its problems, it's a wonderful way to learn about rural Puerto Rico in the 19th century through literature. The peasantry depicted in this highland barrio are depicted as sick beings under colonial society. However, author Manuel Zeno Gandia included the landowner elites as part of the problem of this stunted, ailing society. Blackness is largely omitted here, although the racially mixed campesinos, presented as descendants of the indigenous population and European conquerors, are the racialized others who are compared to black slaves.  In many respects, this novel brings to mind Salvador Brau's writings about the mixed-race peasantry of Puerto Rico and their indolence inherited through indigenous forebears. And though the novel's critical of the Spanish colonial period, it's also critical of greed and unbridled capitalism, represented by Andujar and Galante. 

However, for this blogger, this tragic novel, in which Silvina appears to be an allegory for the island of Puerto Rico, beaten, abused, violated and manipulated by others, brought to mind Zoune in Justin Lhérisson's novel. Like Silvina, her peasant upbringing was one of abuse, illness, and ignorance, but Haitian writers, for the most part, were less likely to invest themselves in racial theories of degeneration to explain the appalling conditions in which post-emancipation Caribbean peasants often faced. But the narrator of Lhérisson's novel, when commenting on the improvements in the physical, mental, and social development of Zoune after living in a proper home, suggests optimism. In the case of La Charca, Juan, Padre Esteban, and the town doctor debate different solutions for the Puerto Rican peasant "problem," never coming to an agreement on if the solution will be found in "public" wealth, religion, or physical health and nourishment. Needless to say, hacendados like Juan are part of the problem, despite their self-proclaimed liberalism. 

Yet, despite the pessimism and theories of racial miscegenation operating in the novel, one cannot help but feel that there is some hope of change for Puerto Rico, even as the rising world of business and profit did proceed to further immiserate the Puerto Rican countryside. Moreover, as part of realist and naturalist literature, the novel is a priceless document of the daily lives, customs, entertainment, and conflicts of the campesinos in Puerto Rico's highlands. This author couldn't help but think of Bonó's El montero, which is set in a rural Dominican peasant setting, although the influence of Romanticism is stronger. The florid prose vividly brings to life Puerto Rico's beauty in the midst of its anemic, diseased coffee world.

Solibo Magnificent

      Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent translated from the French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov, the same duo that translated Chamoiseau’s Texaco, is a wonderful novel of short length on the battle between French and Creole in Martinican sociolinguistics. A meta-text in the form of a mystery, Chamoiseau inserts himself into his often humorous critique of Martinique turning its back on its Creole oral literature in favor of French. The oral tradition, represented by the titular character, Solibo Magnificent, is killed, “throat snickt by the word” in the middle of a story told to an audience in the evening during Carnival time in Fort-de-France. Solibo’s death becomes a police investigation to determine the cause of his death, or the death of Creole oral tradition as Martinique “modernizes” and adopts more of the French language and written literary tradition. Now, Chamoiseau, a pupil of Edouard Glissant and part of the reolite literary movement, sees Creole as the authentic language for Martinican (and other Caribbean writers of the French Caribbean) as best suited to represent Martinican reality and culture in the written literary forms because the language itself is a reflection of the totality of peoples and experiences of the Caribbean. A response to the weaknesses of the monolithic blackness assumed by the negritude movement, famously espoused by Aime Cesaire, creolite celebrates and embraces European, African, indigenous and Asian peoples and cultures that form the basis of the Caribbean sociolingustic reality. 

Chamoiseau, who inserts himself into the text as the author-narrator endeavoring to capture the oral Creole spoken by Solibo, experiments with fusions of French and Creole, oral and written literary traditions, and the inevitable loss of meaning and distortion that occurs through endeavoring to represent oral traditions in the written form. Thus, Chamoiseau’s character in the novel admits his own failure to fully capture the strength of oral traditions, but endeavors to embrace both the written and spoken word, a synthesis rooted in the creolite movement to embrace all cultures within Martinique. Indeed, that is most likely why the text is not entirely Creole either, since French, though part of the colonial heritage and legacy of racism and slavery, reinforced by the corrupt police department and its repression of lower-class residents of Fort-de-France, remains at the core of Martinique as the island remains an overseas department of France with whites in possession of most economic and political power. Chamoiseau’s character in the novel also represents his experimentation with the traditional novel form as known in the West. Here, the author’s character becomes a participant in the plot, allowing it to be read on many levels and include the reader, who must decipher the clever wordplay and multiple forms used in the text. Chamoiseau also divides the novel into 3 parts: an incident report, as typed by the police in the investigation, the “body” or chapters of the text written by Chamoiseau himself, with frequent changes in narration, the use of footnotes to explain and translate Creole phrases, Martinican cultural references, and lack of traditional grammatical structures, and finally, an “After the Word” that attempts to represent Solibo’s last words before his death. Chamoiseau’s text, a nuanced, multi-layered endeavor to embody Martinique’s contradictory and essentially Creole identity, also shows off the author’s writing ability because few could successfully write about the battle between French and Creole language and identity in a way that successfully fuses both irrevocably, with shortcomings and losses to both. Referring to himself as the “word scratcher,” as he later does in Texaco, Chamoiseau tries to represent the craft of writing as an alternative form of ‘drawing’ the world that must also incorporate Creole, oral, and lived experience in its depiction of the world to describe Caribbean societies, since the “oraliture” of Creole is the key component of Caribbean societies. 

In addition, Solibo Magnificent challenges the hegemony of French rationalism and European perception of the world. Like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Chamoiseau criticizes French (European) worship of reason, which leads to overlooking the personal, lived experiences and requires an often unnecessary division or measurement of the world, leading to dehumanization or oppressive unequal conditions through binary oppositional thinking. For Chamoiseau, both the real-life writer and the narrator of the text, embracing both the spoken and written word is a rejection of binary oppositional thinking, which is a perpetual result of western European worship of reason. Inspector Evariste Pilon, a Francophile black Martinican, perpetuates the hegemony of rationalist binary thinking throughout his investigation, which leads to false assumptions on who murdered Solibo because his rationalism (inherited from time spent in the land of Descartes, the French language which is always used by Pilon) cannot accept the fact that Solibo dies because of “internal strangulation” caused when speaking before the witnesses under the tamarind tree in La Savane of Fort-de-France. His investigation, which relies on police brutality and torture of the suspected witnesses, causes the death of two men because he cannot accept the scientifically impossible death, which also demonstrates magic realism, another writing technique Chamoiseau utilizes to illustrate the fantasy of the lived world and oral tradition. Indeed, Solibo’s death is not only impossible from a rational standpoint, but his body miraculously gains weight and becomes as light as a feather when the police remove the corpse, and shows no signs of poison or illness. Pilon’s rational epistemology, ignoring the highly personal and Creole realities of the witnesses, cannot accept what fourteen human beings saw with their own eyes because of his narrowly prescribed perceptions of the world. Moreover, Pilon’s interrogation of the witnesses ignores the multiple layers of meaning attached to time, occupation, age, and other qualifiers of human life that are measured or defined by measurements of time in hours, minutes and seconds. Indeed, when asking the witnesses their age, occupation, and address, the sadistic Chief Sergeant translates the questions into Creole as, “The Inspector asks you what hurricane you were born after, what do you do for the beke, and what side of town do you sleep at night?” Pilon’s French, rationalist outlook does not allow him to accept the nuances of time, occupation, and alternative approaches to understanding one’s life. For the witnesses, speakers of Creole, their lived experience determines the meaning of Pilon’s questions in personal ways based on local culture, geography, and economics, which means natural disasters play a strong role in how one records time, Martinican whites control the distribution of jobs, and transitory lives are common for lower-class Martinicans of the shantytowns of Fort-de-France. French rationalism, an inherent component of French (and European colonialism in general) power in the Caribbean therefore supports the persistence of white rule in Martinique. Due to language’s ties to power, the imposition of French and denigration of Creole by elites maintains the colonial social order in economic, linguistic, political arenas. 

Another avenue through which Chamoiseau proclaims creolite is the text’s numerous references to Martinican music, Creole, history, politics, the description of the urban shantytowns, and the plethora of footnotes and sectors of the Martinican population represented by the witnesses to Solibo’s death. The witnesses themselves represent light-skinned blacks, shantytown dwellers, street vendors, unemployed musicians, a writer (Chamoiseau himself), a “Syrian” bastard, an ancient former agricultural worker insultingly referred to as Congo for his way of speaking Creole and his very recent black African ancestry, coolies, a drummer who accompanies Solibo’s storytelling, and the radical nationalist desiring independence. This diverse array of the people of Martinique, separated by varying degrees of class, ethnicity, politics, and individual expression, all comprise the already heterogeneous social reality of the island. And these aforementioned individuals all share a Creole identity originating from their shared experiences of slavery, colonialism, economic exploitation, and an appreciation for the oral traditions of Creole, though by the time of Solibo’s death, fewer people were listening to his stories and he fulfilled his griot role less as the younger generation turned its back on its cultural origins. Chamoiseau’s espousal of creolite as the basis of Caribbean identity also manifests in the world he creates in the novel, a world filled with magic realism, musical and cultural practices of the island, the Carnival celebrations that storm through the capital, and the insertion of Creole expressions and using the written form to represent orally in the novel form. The novel’s constant allusions to politics and contemporary issues tearing Martinican society apart, such as the Martinican Progressive Party’s support for autonomy or independence from France, the continued police repression and corruption abusing the poor and black, and the cuisine, zouk and Haitian music (Nemours Jean-Baptiste) constitute a microcosm of the Caribbean, and by extension, the entire world. Martinique’s internal heterogeneity symbolizes the Creole reality of the entire Caribbean, which also marks its essential role in world history as one of the birthplaces of modernity. Creolite is the hallmark of real modern culture, if one defines modernity as something universal or capable of incorporation disparate traditions while embracing the contradictions. As a result, Martinique’s creolite designates the island as an important example of human progress by its capacity to include so many seemingly combative cultural forces, such as the African, indigenous, European and Asian influences developed into the wholly unique island Chamoiseau honors.

Solibo Magnificent unfortunately may not be for all. The novel loses a lot in translation since the reader no longer has the mixed Creole-French language of Chamoiseau-ese. Of course the novel’s focus on language and Martinican culture will be totally alien to most English readers, despite the aid of the translators’ footnotes and glossary of Creole terms that appear in the novel. The plot and the format of the novel that fuses oral and written word may initially confuse others or appear meaningless to those unfamiliar with Chamoiseau’s creolite. For those interested in learning about other cultures and willing to expand their knowledge of an important area in the world should read this novel, which is all about multiculturalism and the necessity to respect all cultural traditions of different races or ethnicities, a value that still remains underutilized by much of the world. In order to support his celebration of human totality and universality, Chamoiseau demonstrates the weaknesses of the fetishization of rationalism that reinforces French colonialism, racism, and the power of the French language over Creole. Chamoiseau also critiques complete rejection of the aforementioned characteristics of the French colonial legacy, since complete denial of reason and French will isolate Martinique from a much larger world and will not change the conditions of illiteracy, poverty, and technological advancements that made some of the novel’s characters, such as Solibo and Congo, almost obsolete in society. Hence, the death of Solibo while speaking to his audience while speaking the word, as a consequence of his rejection of the written word, symbolizes the death of oral tradition that remains opposed to the written tradition. Solibo’s total rejection of French and written traditions repeats French rejection of alternative expressions of language, literature, and philosophy, which contributes to Solibo’s increasingly less relevant words of wisdom to the people of Fort-de-France. Overall, this is a fascinating experimental novel on the power of language and its relation to cultural practices and identity. Lacking the historical depth and detail of Texaco, which explores the history and culture of Martinique through the family of Marie-Sophie Laborieux, Solibo Magnificent is a shorter novel and fast read.  

Strange Words

Patrick Chamoiseau's Strange Words, translated from French by Linda Coverdale, is his reinterpretation of Creole folktales of Martinique he heard as a child. It was also published in English as Creole Folktales. Writing down these orally-transmitted stories inherently changes the fundamental process through which these stories were told in Martinique, usually by a storyteller with an audience. Indeed, the storyteller also inserted him or herself into the tale, which Chamoiseau replicates in the written form, using several humorous self-referential statements regarding the storyteller's relation to characters in the story, for example.

Unfortunately, the tales themselves are quite short, and with only 12, the journey into the nighttime stories of Martinique ends just as its beginning. That said, these tales are often very dark and full of supernatural phenomena and magic, such as witches, zombi, demons, rainmakers, and tricksters. Indeed, this novel serves as a nice complementary reading to Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnifique, a short novel about the death of orality and the battle between the spoken Creole word and the colonial French written word. This collection of Creole folktales illustrates how these different languages and their respective worldviews fused to create them in the first place. Thus, Ti-Jean Horizon, the mulatto son of a slaveholder and a black slave, becomes a hero according to the trickster ideal in African-derived folklore, but uses his guile at the end of the tale to simply takeover the plantation of his beke father. If collective liberation were the ethos of this story, which was told in communal settings of slaves, how come an individual's escape from slavery would become more important than the liberation of all slaves on the plantation? Clearly, the individualism and rationalism of "the land of Descartes" clashes with African communalism and solidarity as well as clashing due to differing stances on supernatural occurrences.

Anyway, one should read this short collection of folktales to better understand the worldview and context of the lives of slaves and ex-slaves throughout Martinican history. The horrors of the slave trade, brutality and dehumanizing practices of white planters, poverty and hunger, and resilience of the people themselves become quite apparent. Moreover, women emerge as significant characters, often as female heads of their households. Now, this is not the place or time to discuss in depth gender dynamics in the colonial French Caribbean, but women in these stories run the gamut from helpless beauties to strong, independent heroines. Indeed, in many stories families are introduced with only a mother as the parent, and no mention of fathers appears, which, historically was related to lack of legitimacy in their unions with black men in the eyes of whites and the slave trade, but also related to rape and other factors. Beyond analyzing the stories for how they reveal the historical and cultural background of Martinique and the French Caribbean, these short stories are often fables with important morals against sins or defects like gluttony, or for simply explaining the origin of certain animals, the vegetation, etc. Overall, this was a fun, fast read that aroused the reader's hunger for more oral and written literature of the French Caribbean.

Texaco

Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, a French-language novel published in 1992, was brilliantly translated from French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokurov in 1997. The novel, named after a shanty town of Fort-de-France, Martinique, is essentially Chamoiseaus’s assertion of créolité as the core of Caribbean identity and reality. I first heard of the novel from Junot Diaz, author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Chamoiseau uses language, the countryside/urban divide, history, and the family of Marie-Sophie Laborieux as an allegory for Martinican identity. Créolité, an idea proposed by Edouard Glissant, an ideological successor and Martinican intellectual in the tradition of Aimé Césaire, the proponent of negritude. Negritude was essentially an assertion of black cultural nationalism embracing African-derived traditions, music, poetry, and Marxist political theory to resist colonialism and racism in francophone colonies. Though most developed in Martinique, Senegal, and other francophone nations, negritude developed in contact with the Harlem Renaissance and cultural/political developments in the 20th century. 

Of course negritude’s focus on African cultural origin and problems of an ideological monolithic Africa made negritude less appealing to future generations of Caribbean intellectuals. Thus, Glissant, or Chamoiseau, for example, celebrate the heterogeneity that makes up West Indian (an in particular, Martinique) identity. Instead of solely focusing on the black Martinicans, Indians (coolies), békés (colonial whites who stayed in Martinique after abolition in 1848), Chinese (also coolies), Caribs, mulattoes, and French identities are each thrown together to weave a complex family history using elements of magic realism to display the Creoleness, or cultural miscegenation that comprises Caribbean peoples. Indeed, Caribbean peoples cannot be reduced to a simply African origin (despite the overwhelming majority of Caribbean peoples being descendants of African slaves), but considered Creole due to the vast numbers of cultures mixed through the colonial process. Thus, negritude’s limitations become more apparent when one considers the long history of the entire West Indies, which has never been a monolithic Africa, but a product of centuries of cultural mixing. Indeed, even in Caribbean societies that are predominantly ‘black’ and do not appear to be Creole, such as Haiti, one finds that cultural heterogeneity predominates through the long history of mulatto, white, and black competitions for political power and social dominance.

Chamoiseau explores créolité especially through the use of language and internal intertextuality and points of view throughout the novel. The novel has four narrators, the author himself (humorously referred to as Oiseau de Cham, or bird of Shem), the urban planner, known as Christ in the shantytown, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, who dictates her story to Oiseau de Cham and the urban planner, and Ti-Cirique, a Haitian intellectual exiled from Haiti after a failed attempt to overthrow Papa Doc’s regime in Haiti. Each of the aforementioned characters influence the novel’s use of language through editing, excerpts and transcripts of their own notes, which are ultimately layered and reorganized into footnotes and sections by Oiseau de Cham, who divides Marie-Sophie Laborieux’s history into 4 sections or eras in Martinican history, beginning with slavery. The irony of Ti-Cirique, the dark-skinned Haitian intellectual and Francophile, who tries to use the mulatto French that is more French than European French, is overwhelming. Despite his noirist, or negritude-influenced ideology, Ti-Cirique embraces France more than the French, and his voice is best represented through attempts to “correct” Marie-Sophie’s narrative into proper French. This is doubly ironic since many proponents of negritude saw Haiti as the birthplace of the movement, due to the successful slave revolt that gave birth to the nation and the ideological ties to 19th century Haitian intellectuals such as Antenor Firmin. The urban planner, on the other hand, embraces both the “mulatto French” and Creole spoken by the majority of Martinicans, which follows créolité ideology since the truest form of Martinican identity requires both Creole (which is a mixture of African languages, French and other tongues) and French, the colonial language that is part of the core of Martinican linguistics and the state. The Urban Planner also believes in the value of the shantytowns, such as Texaco, which represent the Creole majority and are necessary for the history and culture of the island. 

Thus, he becomes one of the main supporters of the slum, despite government pressure to eradicate Texaco and force the population into subsidized housing within the city proper. Indeed, Texaco developed as part of the City (Fort-de-France), but because mulatto and white control effectively limited the possibilities for the ex-slaves and former rural workers (hill folks) to actually attain political power or become a significant economic power in the City, despite being a majority. So the shantytowns develop based on rural culture, which is a remnant of slave culture, but through contact with whites, Asian laborers, Syrian merchants, mulatto politicians and bosses, and white colonial overlords, and employers, the shantytown dwellers are forced to adapt to a multiracial, urban society based on caste. Marie-Sophie and Oiseau de Cham, concur with the Urban Planner on the necessity of ensuring the survival of Texaco, although Marie-Sophie herself wants her narrative to be “proper” French, due to her father Esternome’s preference for French. So the text of the book (in the original French publication and English translation) is a little confusing since Creole expressions and religious and cultural practices are thrown in, alongside proper “mulatto French.” Furthermore, the novel also explores language through the competition of various types of the Word: oral tradition, Marie-Sophie’s edited narrative (Ti-Cirique edits her notebooks, which are used by Oiseau de Cham, and the Urban Planner hears her stories in person, as does Oiseau) and the final version offered by the author. The notebooks and various points of view represented throughout the text reveal the manipulation of language by different parties and the power of each medium of storytelling. Indeed, Oiseau de Cham considered the written word not capable of truly capturing the strength of Marie-Sophie Laborieux’s stories, which exemplifies a preference for Creole, the spoken language of the Martinique.

In addition to the interesting use of language and its historical ties to French colonialism and creole identity, Texaco uses magical realism and the family history of a Marie-Sophie as an allegory for the nation. Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende did this more famously for Colombia and Chile, but it’s still a powerful allegory for getting to the root of Latin American and Caribbean identity, since a family is a product of the nation’s society. Like Garcia Marquez and Allende, Chamoiseau is also thorough in his coverage of the nation’s history, and due to the use of magic realism, seemingly impossible events occur without explanation. Beginning with Laborieux’s father’s experiences as a slave and 19th century Martinican life, the world of the plantation and early rural migration to urban centers such as Saint Pierre, which was totatally destroyed in a 1902 volcano eruption that caused the death of Esternome’s first lover, Ninon. Elements of rural Martinican culture survive the progression of time, such as the Mentohs, or spiritual healers and advisors, who save the lives of both Esternome and Marie-Sophie. They’re seemingly eternal beings, and their supernatural powers are never explained, despite Marie-Sophie’s attempts to get answers from Papa Totone, one of the Mentohs. The use of magical realism also suggests that the world of the Caribbean is really “not real,” in that the process through which Caribbean societies developed is unreal due to a lack of historical precedent and the incredible amount of creolization that occurred in the 500 year history, which is more evidence of Creoleness. 

Furthermore, Martinique becomes significantly less “African” over time, with the disappearance of Mentohs and miraculous events in the 20th century. Major events in Martinican history are also part of the story: the abolition of slavery in 1848, the volcanic eruption that destroyed Saint Pierre in 1902, WWI, WWII, the election and rise to prominence of Aime Cesaire, De Gaulle’s visit to Martinique, and the perpetual conflict between the “proper” city of Fort-de-France and the impoverished shantytowns. Marie-Sophie and her family provide a powerfully personal interpretation of Martinican history, and highlight Creolity throughout the piece. Indeed, Marie-Sophie Laborieux herself is multiracial (a capresse, or daughter of a mulatto and black), and her experiences working for mulattoes, upper-class blacks and whites as a domestic provide a window through which one can view the hierarchy of power. As a woman, and not light-skinned enough to pass for mulatto, she also exemplifies feminist thinking through her actions. She rejects child-rearing, subservience to men, and begins the initial hutch that gave rise to Texaco, becoming its leader and main opponent of the white man whose land she builds on. Marie Sophie’s life therefore brings to the fore the importance of woman as agents in history in addition to demonstrating the cultural syncretism that has occurred in Martinique and the rest of the Caribbean.

Moreover, Chamoiseau directly critiques negritude and its impact French Caribbean identity through Aime Cesaire’s character and Ti-Cirique, the Haitian bibliophile and Francophile. Indeed, when Aime Cesaire first speaks to the masses of blacks as their first black mayor and Marxist, Esternome tells his daughter that Cesaire is a mulatto. One of the protagonist’s employers, a middle-class mulatto, also attacks Cesaire for critiquing France and colonialism, yet all of his education came from France. These internal contradictions of Cesaire completely severing Martinican ties to France ideologically and his inability to connect to rural, lower-class blacks show negritude’s shortcomings because France is irrevocably part of Martinique, and Cesaire’s education and speaking illustrate that. Thus, Cesaire endeavors to represent Fort-de-France’s urban poor and shantytown folks, but his refusal to recognize the mixed heritage of Martinique because of presumptions of “African” cultural predominance excludes a large proportion of the population, including those more closely tied to Africa, such as ex-slaves like Esternome. However, Cesaire was able to reconnect to Marie-Sophie Laborieux and the people of Texaco in future decades, ensuring that the city council brings electricity and modern amenities to the poor of the region. Cesaire also remained very popular among blacks in the city, despite the flaws of negritude, which actually bought into a lot of European assumptions about Africa. Regardless, Marie-Sophie Laborieux reads and quotes a line from his Notebook of a Return to My Native Land to finally convince him to help Texaco when she and a group of other residents invite themselves into his home. Ti-Cirique, the Haitian exile living in Texaco also highlights the problems of negritude. Like Cesaire, the negritude literary figures never create a truly unique form of expression that is independent of European or French because they do not write in Creole, the language of the people. Negritude-influenced authors reject European standards, yet continue to write in the language and styles of the colonizers, and Ti-Cirique, despite being part of a group of Haitian literary figures opposed to Duvalier, cannot find value in literature unless it is written in the languages of Europe.

Overall, Texaco does live up to the hype Junot Diaz gave it. Only about 400 hundred pages long, it’s actually quite readable for the most part. The first half, the story of Esternome and his generation is actually more compelling than most of Marie-Sophie’s personal life, but the novel’s use of magical realism in a Caribbean context and approach to Creole identity is fascinating. Moreover, the use of multiple languages and its multiple points of views illustrate the complex nature of Martinican identity, which is essentially a struggle between French and Creole. Like Junot Diaz’s masterpiece, Texaco uses a single family to tell the history of a Caribbean nation, and by doing so personalizes history, mixing the oral and written word to display the undoubtedly Creole identity of Martinique. And despite what some may suspect, my sympathy for negritude is not as great as one would think. It was an important part of black transnationalism and cultural movements throughout the francophone African diaspora, but like any ideology that embraces a single identity or “race,” could never encapsulate the Caribbean world. 

Between Two Worlds

Simone Schwarz-Bart's Between Two Worlds, translated from the French original, Ti-Jean L'horizon, by Barbara Bray is an enchanting magical realist tale about slavery and identity in Guadeloupe, the author's homeland. While clearly specific to Guadeloupe and its rural communities, this postcolonial tale incorporates elements of pan-Caribbean culture and history (slavery, the zombi, a quote from Jacques Roumain, and a return to Africa) to tell the tale of Ti Jean, a young man from Fond Zombi who must return the Sun and save his community, which falls into reenslavement as eternal darkness reigns over the world. Along the way, Ti Jean experiences love, friendship, travels to Africa, France, and the Kingdom of Shades, and is forced to accept himself for what he is and take root in Guadeloupe. 

Although multilayered and at times a bit confusing (the numerous chapters where Ti Jean travels to Africa, for instance, and the dense mythological allusions and history can be hard to follow at times), Ti Jean's tale emphasizes the importance of Guadeloupe and its people's right to live free and with pride. The protagonist's grandfather, the 'Immortal One' who represents the maroons of the days of slavery, and the world of the descendants of slaves who meekly accept their condition, must learn to take pride in their land and free themselves of colonial thinking. Yet, the author does not fall entirely into negritude thought, since Ti Jean's return to Africa is not accepted by Wademba's people, thereby making the people of the Caribbean a branch of the African tree which must find roots in Guadeloupe. 

The text is full of local colors, supernatural events, travels across oceans and rivers, and last, but certainly not least, fully-fleshed symbolism and heroic archetypes. Ti Jean, compared to the Sun multiple times, ultimately frees it (metaphorically freeing the people of Guadeloupe from slavery and white domination) from the Beast (a cow with a pelican nesting in its ear), reminding one of Haitian literary giant Jacques Stephen Alexis, who also wrote of the Sun as an ally of the poor. In addition to ties with that tradition, the text quotes Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew in the final section, thereby linking itself with broader trends and a tradition of peasant novel and anti-colonial significance in the French Caribbean world. Needless to say, I could rant without end about the book, its cyclical message, the passionate critique of colonialism, and the numerous worlds the protagonist lives between, but I'll end here. Those eager to read of a fictionalized but highly integrated worlds of death, Africa before colonialism, and 20th century Guadeloupe should be highly interested in this novel.

General Sun, My Brother

And yet, General Sun is a great man—he has always been the friend of poor black men, the guiding spirit who shows only one yellow eye to the living, but he fights for us at each turn and always shows us the way. Just as he always conquers night and wrests a season that he controls each year, workers can change the times and find a season to live without misery.

Compère Général Soleil (1955), by Jacques-Stephen Alexis, a Haitian novelist, Communist, and victim of Duvalier’s regime, is widely considered required reading in Haitian and Francophone Caribbean literature. Alexis, a man of the elite committed to democratization and socialism, lost his life when he landed with a small group of revolutionaries from Cuba in a poor attempt to overthrow Papa Doc in 1961. Though a descendant of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the father of Haitian independence, and other black Haitians of social prominence, Alexis clearly identified with the poor, peasant majority of Haiti exploited by white American imperialism, Haitian dictatorships, Trujillo’s anti-haitianismo, natural disasters such the flooding of the Artibonite, and extreme social inequality. Translated into English as General Sun, My Brother, Alexis, as the sympathetic third person narrator, ‘humanizes’ nature by using the Sun as a metaphor for the struggle of the poor. Indeed, the narrator’s voice in this narrative is fascinating, for the excessively described natural wonders and animal life of Haiti abound in the novel’s pages, as well as the narrator’s tangents on life, parenthood, and the world of the 1930s, when this novel is set.

However, I cannot help but feel a little disappointed with the novel since I was expecting a much longer portion of the text to focus on the 1937 genocide of Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans by Trujillo’s soldiers, targeting Haitians by asking dark-skinned Dominicans to pronounce the word perejil, parsley, knowing that Haitians often have trouble with the Spanish r. Edwidge Danticat wrote her Farming of the Bones as a tribute and reinterpretation of the genocide through the lens of a female character rather than Alexis’s Hilarion, but I was surprised to find that most of the novel is set in Port-au-Prince and Leogane rather than the Dominican Republic and the massacre. Nevertheless, Alexis’s novel succeeds in demonstrating how the poor majority of Haiti participated in a much larger world of ideas, nation-states, and struggles than one would think, especially the Communist movement in Haiti. Indeed, the character of Pierre Roumel, founder of the Haitian Communist Party, is based on Jacques Roumain, Haitian Communist, writer and political prisoner of the Haitian state forced into exile. Pierre Roumel opens up Hilarion’s eyes, helping him see himself in a larger historical struggle in the forces of capitalism, imperialism, and workers’ organization.

Unfortunately, much like Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood and Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, the explicit socialist undertones do limit the story since everything can be reduced to pro-Communist propaganda rather than fully developed characters. In this case, however, Alexis’s narrator and the life of Hilarion help avoid the limits of socialist parable tales because of the universal themes of race, gender relations, and religion, in addition to the critiques of the disconnected lives of Marxists themselves, who are often unable to ever truly connect with the masses of workers. Hilarion, child of Haitian peasants, formerly a restavek due to his mother’s poverty, and previously ignorant and unaware of the larger struggles taking place around himself and the world, eventually applies the lessons he learns from Communists like Roumel and Jean-Michel to understand the power of collective worker actions. In fact, the lessons of the ‘Reds’ pays off when the Haitian sugarcane workers (including Hilarion and his cousin, Josaphat, who fled to the Dominican Republic after killing a Haitian policeman who was raping his sister) join a strike inspired by Communist activists and succeed in getting most of their demands met by the American management.

There also are several references that praise peasant and lower-class Haitian culture that reaffirm the humanity and dignity of the black poor. Like Jean-Price Mars, a Haitian intellectual founder of negritude, best known for Ainsi parla l'oncle, which praised Haitian folklore and traditions, perhaps going as far as romanticizing it. Throughout the novel, the narrator commends Haitians for their work ethic, their skills and experiences as musicians, the cuisine, and the beauty of the natural landscape (the sea, the mountains, the Artibonite river) as a tribute to Haiti, and the island of Hispaniola. Furthermore, the narrator inserts several Creole expressions, proverbs, and words that are not translated to present the world as seen through the eyes of Hilarion, his wife, Claire, and others. The narrator’s reliance on Creole phrases and the mix of French, Spanish and Creole in the text’s original French form reveals the multi-ethnic, pan-Caribbean dimensions of the Communist movement, too. Alexis’s mother, of Dominican descent, would have encouraged Alexis’s pan-Caribbean framework, as well as the fact that the viejos, or Haitians who worked in Cuba or the Dominican Republic during this period often returned to Haiti with tales of the outside world or brought more Haitians to neighboring islands. 

These transnational communities, as well as the spread of communist ideas led to creations conducive for international communism, labor movements from Cuba to the Dominican Republic, and negritude. Once one gets past the exterior differences between Haitians and Dominicans, such as Spanish versus Creole, Alexis’s narrator points out the numerous similarities that unite the two nations, despite Trujillo’s attempts to eradicate those unable to pronounce the Spanish word for parsley with the Spanish, rolled r. Haitians and Dominicans share a common culture rooted in cock fights, a common status as oppressed workers under the thrall of American imperialism, merengue (of Haitian origin, but popular in the Dominican Republic), a mixed Creole-Spanish language near the border, and mutual African ancestry. Moreover, the narrator goes out of his or her way to explain how it was Trujillo and his followers, not the Dominican people, who carried out the killings of Haitians. Dominican soldiers, with guns and machetes, were the ones who pursued, killed, and tortured Haitians and Haitian-Dominicans. Dominican people, such as the cowherd, or Concepcion, help Hilarion, Claire, and their baby escape from Macoris, fleeing toward the Haitian border. Some of the Dominican characters who help them flee also cannot escape feeling some sense of responsibility for the massacres, despite the risks of being caught helping them.

Overall, this novel is able to overcome its possible limits from the strong undercurrents of Communism. Hilarion’s transformation from petty thief of Port-au-Prince to a dedicated father, husband, and worker with class consciousness is only partly due to his education by Marxists, and partly due to the unique experiences of Haitians oppressed by American occupation, Vincent, the corrupt president, and the elite classes that profit from the hyperexploitation of the Haitian poor. In addition, Hilarion and the series of disasters he overcomes are partly due to economics and class, but also due to the natural world around him (the flooding of the Artibonite, which forces thousands of peasants to come to Port-au-Prince in search of food and work). Likewise, his informal marriage to Claire and becoming a father help Hilarion develop into a mature, rational human being with purpose in his life. Now that he is a father, a life of crime and meaningless leeching on a society of other poor will not provide for his child. 

Alexis also demonstrates the importance of recognizing the common threads that unite humanity, beyond class to include music, language, and religion in the case of Haiti and the Dominican Republic. General Sun, My Brother also delivers a scathing critique to social elites on both sides of the island, as well as the exploitation of the poor by religious officials and leaders, including a houngan who overcharges the Haitian peasants in Josaphat’s village near Leogane for a burial service. In the end, like the Sun, the people must take their lives and put it in their own hands to make the world around them a better place. Like the Sun that conquers night, individuals have the ability to improve their lot in life, and cannot meekly accept the established social order. Thus, compared to Masters of the Dew, Hilarion breathes more a real human being than Manuel, who seems to only be a spark for the collective, koumbite consciousness necessary to restore his village.

The Festival of the Greasy Pole

Depestre’s Le mat de cocagne, translated into English by Carrol F. Coates, is a scathing critique of Papa Doc’s noirist regime. Though Depestre begins the novel with a disclaimer, stating that this story is entirely fiction, the characters, setting, and language (Creole expressions and words appear) make it clearly Haiti. Depestre names the capital Port-au-Roi, and turns Fort Dimanche into Fort Samedi, but it is clearly Papa Doc’s Haiti and infamous tonton macoutes who rule. The novel is also quite ingenious and reminiscent of postmodern African-American literature, such as Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed. The novel lacks differentiated chapters or sections, save an epilogue which reveals the narrator to be a Haitian writing in Paris about the novel’s protagonist, Henri Postel, an ex-Senator of mulatto extraction whose family was slayed by Zoocrates Zachary (Francois Duvalier, or Papa Doc). Instead of killing him outright, Zoocrates has Postel turned into a zombie forced to sell groceries in the city of Port-au-Roi. The novel then follows his gradual transformation from zombified slave to the Zachary regime to a powerful, regenerated man who will ascend the greasy pole. The pole, an obvious phallic symbol, also symbolizes Zoocrates Zachary himself, alongside his regime. Our protagonist, a middle-aged, overweight mulatto, in addition to seven other men, compete to climb the greasy pole in the Square of Heroes, which is an enormous spectacle for the masses as well as an opportunity for Zachary’s propagandists to praise the mercy of the government for allowing the disgraced, former senator who had initially opposed Zachary’s electoral coup in 1957 (the real Papa Doc also took power in 1957) to enter the competition.

A key part of Henri entering the competition instead of fleeing aboard a Canadian cargo ship was to put his destiny in his own hands, which would restore his humanity instead of slaving as a zombie or running away to exile. In addition, his ascent to the summit of the greasy, disgusting pole would serve as an example to waken the electrified, zombified souls of the people, who have accepted Zoocrates Zachary’s brutal, dehumanizing regime. In fact, he wins support from a coalition of young people prepared to use violence to unseat Zachary’s regime founded on a principle of violence, led by Jean-Jacques Brissaracq. If the name Jean-Jacques did not immediately evoke the memory of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, founder of Haitian independence and a believer in violence himself, then the reader is unfamiliar with Haitian history. But the two men collaborate due to a shared goal of liberating the consciousness of the masses, slaves to the National Office for the Electrification of Souls controlled by the Electrifier of Souls himself, Zoocrates Zachary. Thus, the ideological message of this novel is not the socialist background of Depestre, but empowering the individual. Since a dictator’s power relies on fear, docility and violence to perpetuate its brutal dehumanizing existence, enough individuals must stand up. Henri Postel does just that, standing up, recovering his humanity, and in the process, restoring his manliness both metaphorically and sexually. Moreover, the novel argues against blind faith in the loas of Haitian Vodou, or any sense of fatalism that encourages subservience. Thus, Depestre’s socialist background clearly influenced the novel in that regard, since socialists emphasize the role and potential power of individuals to shape their destiny.

Zoocrates, formerly a doctor, like the historical Papa Doc, relies on violence, exploitation of Haitian Vodou, sorcery, and economic support from the US to fund his reign of terror. His majestic greasy pole symbolizes his Papa Phallus fucking the Sky vagina of freedom (63), which explains why Postel must reach the summit. On another note, the fascinating part of Deprestre’s novel is the presence of what has been referred to as ‘marvelous realism’ or magical realism. Beginning with Cuban author Alejo Carpentier’s Kingdom of this World, marvelous realism sees the world from the perspective of the Afro-Caribbean peoples themselves, meaning their religious, mythological, and cultural lens determine what occurs. Like Jacques-Stephen Alexis, another Haitian writer who came of age and participated in the 1946 student strike that brought down the regime of Elie Lescot, both writers have used this concept of marvelous realism to create a world rooted in the worldview of Haitians. Vodou, with its plethora of loas, the fear of bakas and zobops who abuse their power for evil, and the importance and omnipresence of the loas means that supernatural events are widely believed by the characters of the novel. Although Henri Postel and his friend, Horace Vermont, educated Haitians, doubt the power of Vodou, their own lives are fundamentally changed by it. Indeed, after seeing his family eradicated by Zachary’s soldiers, he is turned into a zombie aware of his condition, which is widely believed by the people of Port-au-Roi as well as Postel’s decaying body. Though initially disdainful and resistant to the help of the loa Papa Loko, who Sor Cisa says is necessary to ensure that Postel’s body can resist the death curse of Baron Samedi on the pole, after she calls Papa Loko through the cheval in the neighborhood, and she becomes mounted by Erzulie, the loa of love, Postel’s body changes entirely. He becomes physically capable of mounting the greasy pole after he can achieve erection, which requires the help of Sor Cisa’s beautiful cousin, Elisa Valery. If he was not a zombie prior to this healing, regenerative vodou ceremony, why could he not get an erection? In addition to Postel and Vermont’s own experiences observing the power of vodou and bokors who use sorcery for evil purposes, Zoocrates Zachary’s regime lives on vodou. Gloomy-Simon-Seven-Days, a zobop in a secret society of sorcerers, serves as Zachary’s witch for inserting Zachary into the pole, which culminates in the insertion of a hernia in the pole (132). Every character accepts these supernatural occurences, calling of the loas who possess their human ‘mounts,’ and the general craziness of life in a nation where the supernatural becomes the norm in the daily experiences of the people.

The pole, constructed from a tree, symbolizes living principle that endlessly regenerates the cosmos, which is a area of residence for the loas. Zachary, however, uses sorcery to defile a natural bridge between the spirits and the natural world, and endeavors to use racial divisions to further his own power. His propagandist journalist turns the Greasy Pole, “for anyone knowing the history of the island, will symbolize from today onward the Force of the Black Man, of the Maroon with his red eyes, black and shining like ebony, polished by three centuries of slavery…” (46). The Maroon, an icon of Black liberation and humanity, is also embued with Vodou symbolism, since the red eyes suggest someone possessed by the loas. Furthermore, the widespread belief among black slaves in the 18th century concerning the French execution of Macandal, that he turned into an insect rather than be killed by whites, illustrates the centrality of Vodou in the minds of Haitians. Indeed, to Haitians, Papa Loko was the protector of Dessalines during the Haitian Revolution (52). Seeking the help of Papa Loko, the escort chief for Atibon-Legba, loa of the crossroads, is also highly significant because the tree that makes up the pole is a vertical road that connects the human world and spirits (51). Fortunately, both Postel and Vermont realize that “We’ll never make citizens of our peasants with materialist discourse,” affirming the centrality of Vodou in the lives of the people they seek to liberate (51). Thus, the best way to achieve social change, or awaken the consciousness of the black masses to their extreme exploitation and inculcate resistance is through the use of Vodou in positive ways that empower humans. Therefore, Papa Loko and Sor Cisa healing and restoring Postel to humanity allow him, as an individual, to alter his own fate. Thus, one need not choose one or the other in a world of Manichean dualism, but both the spiritual, religious traditions of the Haitian people and recognition of the power of humanity to alter its own fate can be fused, just as the syncretistic religion of Vodou demonstrates.

Unfortunately for the fictionalized world of Haiti depicted here, Depestre’s protagonist does not succeed in toppling the regime. His life, death, and resurrection changes the consciousness of the people, however, revealing the weaknesses and division within Zachary’s own government. His daughter, Angel, a whore, and his right-hand man, Clovis Barbotog, fight for control, culminating in the deaths of a few prominent officials in the administration. At the novel’s conclusion, the struggle to for mental and physical emancipation continues, but the resistance is stronger, and its spirit lives on through Elisa Valery, the lover of Postel who kissed his feet before his death at the summit of the Greasy Pole (130), which means Postel’s life and death turned him into a mobilizing Christ-figure. The eeriness of the novel comes into play with how well it parallels the actual recent history of Haiti, which faced the longer reign of Baby Doc after Papa Doc’s death in 1971. Baby Doc, a wealthy fool, could not retain power and fear like his father, and was eventually forced to flee to France after the enraged waves of humanity of Haiti rose in revolt. However, even after expelling dictators who wished to keep them trapped like zombies, the struggle for emancipation never ends with the removal of one leader, but remains a perpetual battle to create conditions propitious for human rights. Men and women, like Postel and his lover, Elisa, who remains a symbol of resistance, remain necessary to incite rebellion and shock the people into motion, just as Jean-Bertrand Aristide did for millions of Haitians through Lavalas. Of course, that did not work out so well either, and the battle continues to this day in the streets of Port-au-Prince.

Depestre, an astute writer, succeeds in encapsulating the world of Haitians depicted in this novel, which succeeds in paralleling Haitian history, emphasizing the supernatural and the natural as two sides of the same reality through the novel’s characters, and how movements to injustice must emanate from the local conditions of the oppressed peoples themselves. As an exile that lived in several different countries, the novel is also a powerful tribute to those Haitians who remained in Haiti to resist Duvalier and the excesses of the successive corrupt government and military rule. Depestre also highlights the contradictions and problems of negritude and its capability to be manipulated for political agendas, since Zoocrates Zachary, like Papa Doc, began his career as a ‘black power’ intellectual writing in Les Griot, which resulted in extreme violence against mulattoes, whose opposition to his regime could easily be deemed illegitimate due to the long history of mulatto misrule and exclusion of blacks from the political system. Thus, the character of the mulatto, educated, Haitian willing to sacrifice himself for others is an allegory for racial reconciliation, emphasizing all the peoples of Haiti as one, despite the legacies of slavery and racism. In fact, the extreme negritude of Duvalier, or Zachary in the novel, works against the interests of the black majority, in addition to overlooking the obvious syncretism of Haitian vodou, which symbolizes the syncretism of Haitian society overall. The Syrians, mulattos, black peasants, middle-class urban blacks, and urban proletariat have a mutual interest in survival, since neither one is totally impervious to the extremes of the predatory Haitian state. So this novel could also be read as a critique of negritude philosophy and its vagaries, which overlook the creoleness of the Caribbean.