Tell My Horse

Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse is an interesting anthropological and religious study of Jamaican and Haitian cultures. Traveling in Jamaica and Haiti during the 1930s, Hurston's personal account reads like a travelogue and fascinating portrait of peasant cultures, religious traditions, and political conditions. Interesting sidenote, Alan Lomax was in Haiti making field recordings of Haitian music and actually recorded Zora Neale Hurston singing folk songs. Anywho, most of the book is centered on her descriptions of life, politics and religion in Haiti rather than Jamaica. Her time in Jamaica, however, does provide insight on race relations (black and mulatto divide in Jamaica exists just like in Haiti), belief in duppies in Jamaican culture, and traditions of Maroons in Accompong, including a dangerous hunt of a giant boar and the feasting that ensued. She also describes with numerous examples the color barrier between blacks and mulattoes in Jamaica, who form an elite separate from the black population because of access to knowledge, white contacts, and political power. Jamaica, like Haiti and other Caribbean islands, has a long history of colorism.

One of the great surprises one encounters reading the book is Hurston's ambivalence on the recently terminated American occupation of Haiti. As an African-American woman associated with the Harlem Renaissance one would expect her, like the NAACP and other black organizations, to unequivocally opposed to US imperialism in Haiti. A close reading of Hurston's text and her analysis of Haitian politics, however, reveals the deep political and economic troubles caused in Haiti by black and mulatto elites that created the conditions where American invasion was seen as preferable to the status quo. As Hurston traces the problems of Haiti back to the colonial period and the century and a half of misrule by black and mulatto elites, one must agree that a fundamental problem of Haitian politics is the use of lies and deception to justify the current status of Haiti. While talking to a Haitian intellectual, one sees it as he lies about Haitian history and overlooks Haiti's enormous structural problems that facilitated the American occupation. To this particular Haitian, lying about the actual events and problems of Haiti becomes truth as he lies to himself and to Zora Neale Hurston. 

Besides her ambivalence on the American occupation, Hurston's account focuses on Voodoo, its rituals, and the overwhelming majority of Haitians who practice the faith. Indeed, even light-skinned elites sometimes practice Voodoo, despite publicly distancing themselves from the "superstitions" of the blacks. Hurston's account of Voodoo actually accepts some of the 'supernatural' or unbelievable things associated with Voodoo, such as zombies. She even took a picture of a Zombie while in Haiti, a woman whose eyes appear dead. Thus, Hurston is not as skeptical of Voodoo and its power, so she succeeds in providing a relatively unbiased account of Voodoo rituals, beliefs, and practices. While discussing the practice of bokors who do specialize in turning victims into zombies with a Haitian doctor, they both concur that its probably caused by some drug crafted by African ancestors. Indeed, these secrets in composing drugs, remedies, and other poisons is part of secret societies, which are not 'real' Voodoo but a small sector of the Haitian populace who practice evil rites to turn their victims into human slaves (zombies), poison them, or even practice cannibalism. Hurston also describes the process of invoking the loas, the dances and music associated with calling the loas, and the 'mounting,' or act of possession by a loa. In addition, Hurston shares short descriptions of the most popular loas of the Petro and Rada rites of Vodou, the former belong to the Kongo tradition (central Africa) and the latter coming from Dahomey (West Africa). 

Overall, Hurston's Tell My Horse is a satisfactory account of Voodoo in Haiti. She dispels racist myths of Haitian voodoo as evil superstition, describing the real practices, origins, and theology of it. For Hurston, it is no better nor worse than any other religion. Her description of some of the flaws of Haiti and Jamaica regarding race and gender are also pertinent for understanding current social conditions of both islands and the Caribbean as a region. She does witness some amazing feats while in Jamaica or Haiti, or hears multiple accounts testifying to their validity, so it's hard to not believe that zombies, possession by loas, and the Ba Mouin rite are not 'real.' This text, loved and praised by Ishmael Reed, does live up to the hype as an important look on Vodou and African-derived religious systems, and highlights the already international black consciousness present in African-Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. Her experiences with Vodou/Voodoo testify to that fact, and illustrate the importance of Voodoo as a syncretistic way of life with potential healing through medicine and rituals.

With a Carib Eye

Edgar Mittelholzer's With a Carib Eye was published in 1958, a fateful year in the British West Indies, but also only 4 years before V.S. Naipaul's The Middle Passage: Impressions of Five Societies - British, French and Dutch in the West Indies and South America. While Naipaul's text is more ambitious and travels beyond the confines of the British colonies of the Caribbean, there are some rather fascinating parallels in how both Mittelholzer and Naipaul approach their region as "natives." Naipaul, coming from the Indian community of Trinidad, for example, does not depict Indo-Trinidadians as entirely creolized as Mittelholzer's text seeks to do. 

Both, however, linger on the Western character of Caribbean society, but for Mittelholzer there is no problem with "mimicry" of British or European cultures and norms. Thus, in a very surprising way, Naipaul's actually "right" in a sense that in the West Indies, the tragedy of the black man is to be recast in so many European moulds, but Mittelholzer accepts this as proof that the West Indies is "modern" and not primitive. One sees their ideological and biases play out in Naipaul's praise for calypso as a Trinidadian art form while Mittelholzer looks down on calypso, preferring to praise the accomplishments of West Indian artists, poets, and writers hampered only by economic conditions. 

This continues in their differing approaches to "modern" as defined in Trinidad, where Naipaul criticizes the notion that modernity in Trinidad's middle and upper classes equals consumption of overpriced Northern products while excellent Trinidadian coffee or furniture is cast aside and equated with the poor. One suspects that Mittelholzer is framing his travelogue in the tradition of J.J. Thomas's Froudacity (both are quick to distance themselves from Haiti and its alleged voodoo, not to mention Mittelholzer's eagerness to identify Barbados as an extension of England or brush aside the African and local influences in Saint Lucia's Creole-speaking population)) just as Naipaul embraces Froude and Trollope as a foundation for his self-distancing from the lack of wholly original or "new" societies legitimately rooted among the people. 

Of course, both Mittelholzer and Naipaul offer problematic views of the Caribbean culturally and historically, but how the two intersect and depart from each other and relate to their respective 19th century ideological forebears provide some interesting contrast on how two well-known writers of Trinidad and Guyana approached region, race, culture, and their sense of themselves in the world. A fine synthesis of Naipaul and Mittelholzer is likely to lead to a more holistic view of the West Indies and its people, one in which creolization and even, God forbid, African influences, are not incompatible with Caribbean modernity and the development of national cultures. Perhaps one could even suggest that time has sided with such a perspective as scholarship and Caribbean literatures point to a much needed nuance of complicated concepts such as  modernization, creolization, colonialism, and racial identity.