Synopsis
In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan charts the cultural imagination of Haiti not only by reconstructing the island's history but by highlighting ambiguities and complexities that have been ignored. She investigates the confrontational space in which Haiti is created and recreated in fiction and fact, text and ritual, discourse and practice. Dayan's ambitious project is a research tour de force that gives human dimensions to this eighteenth-century French colony and provides a template for understanding the Haiti of today.
In examining the complex social fabric of French Saint-Domingue, which in 1804 became Haiti, Dayan uncovers a silenced, submerged past. Instead of relying on familiar sources to reconstruct Haitian history, she uses a startling diversity of voices that have previously been unheard. Many of the materials recovered here―overlooked or repressed historical texts, legal documents, religious works, secret memoirs, letters, and literary fictions―have never been translated into English. Others, such as Marie Vieux Chauvet's radical novel of vodou, Fonds des Nègres, are seldom used as historical sources.
Dayan also argues provocatively for the consideration of both vodou rituals and narrative fiction as repositories of history. Her scholarship is enriched by the insights she has gleaned from conversations and experiences during her many trips to Haiti over the past twenty years. Taken together, the material presented in Haiti, History, and the Gods not only restores a lost chapter of Haitian history but suggests necessary revisions to the accepted histories of the New World.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Joan Dayan, Professor of English at the University of Arizona, is the author of Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (1987) and A Rainbow for the Christian West (1977).
From the Back Cover
"By viewing Revolutionary-era Haiti through the lenses of gender and sexuality, Joan Dayan breathes life into an important slice of history."―Karen McCarthy Brown, author of Mama Lola
From the Inside Flap
"By viewing Revolutionary-era Haiti through the lenses of gender and sexuality, Joan Dayan breathes life into an important slice of history." Karen McCarthy Brown, author of Mama Lola
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Haiti, History, and the Gods
By Joan DayanUniversity of California Press
Copyright © 1998 Joan DayanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520213685
1
Rituals of History
The child of savage Africa,
Sold to fall under the colonist's whip,
Founded independence on the soil of slavery,
And the Hill, in its voice, echoed the language of Racine and Finilon!
M. Chauvet, Chant lyrique, 18251
"Rid us of these gilded Africans, and we shall have nothing more to wish," Napoleon Bonaparte wrote to his brother-in-law General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc in 1802. Though successful in Guadeloupe and Martinique, Napoleon's soldiers, commanded first by Leclerc and then by Donatien Rochambeau, failed to reestablish slavery in Saint-Domingue. The only locale in history for a successful slave revolution, Saint-Domingue became the first Black Republic in 1804. As the Martiniquan writer and politician Aimi Cisaire put it, "The first epic of the New World was written by Haitians, by Toussaint, Christophe, and Dessalines."2 When Jean-Jacques Dessalines articulated the meaning of "independence" for Haiti, he realized what Cisaire called a transformative, "prodigious history" of the Antilles. Dessalines tore the white from the French tricolor"Mouchi, chiri blanc l` qui lan drapeau-l`" (Tear out the white from the flag, Monsieur)3 as he would remove the name Saint-Domingue from the former colony. He called the new nation "Haiti," from the original Amerindian word (Ayti ) for the island meaning "mountainous lands."
On January 1, 1804, in Gonaoves, Dessalines proclaimed indepen-
dence. Speaking in Creole, he recalled French atrocities and urged Haitians to fight to the death for their country. Boisrond-Tonnerre, Dessalines's "high-brown" secretary, demandedin a formal French that recalled Maximilien de Robespierre's speeches in 1792"a solemn abjuration of the French nation" in the name of Dessalines: "If there remains among you a lukewarm heart, let him retire, and tremble to pronounce the oath that must unite us. Let us swear to the whole world, to posterity, to ourselves, to renounce France forever and to die rather than live under its domination; to fight to the last breath for the independence of our country."4 In the attempt to drive a wedge between France and Haiti, Dessalines ordered nearly 3,000 French men, women, and children killed with hatchets, sabres, bayonets, and daggers. No gunshot was allowed, no cannon or musketry. Silence and calm were necessary so that from one town to the next no one would be warned of the approaching slaughter.
Yet no declaration of independence, whether spoken in French or Haitian Creole, could sever the bonds between the former colony and its "Mother Country." Speaking of this massacre, which began in February (after the French had been promised protection) and ended on April 22, 1804, Dessalines declared in French: "Haiti has become a red spot on the surface of the globe, which the French will never accost." The violence was consecrated in the language of those who had been annihilated. We should not underrate the horror of this ventriloquy: the implications of a liberation that cannot be glorified except in the language of the former master. Even as Boisrond-Tonnerre warned of the dangers not of the "French armies," but "the canting eloquence of their agents' proclamations," he perpetuated the rhetoric he condemned. Dessalines's proclamation of April 8 (drafted by his mulatto secretary-general, Juste Chanlatte) is also a highly stylized, Jacobin document. By avenging himself on the "true cannibals," the Haitian, no longer vile, earned his right to "regeneration" and understood at last what it meant to breathe "the air of liberty, pure, honorable, and triumphant." Dessalines concluded by making the Haitian Revolution transferable to the Americas: "We have rendered to these true cannibals, war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage; yes, I have saved my country; I have avenged America."5
For whom does Dessalines speak? The majority of the revolutionaries did not know French (it is claimed that Toussaint Louverture knew how to read and write, but Dessalines, like Henry Christophe, was illiterate and could barely sign his name). Yet historians, both Haitian and foreign, present them, with some exceptions, as able to speak
French. When Boisrond-Tonnerre declared independence in the name of Dessalines on January 1, 1804, he recognized this linguistic colonialism with lyric prescience: "The French name still darkens our plains." Though French shadowed Haiti, with writers articulating the Haitian Revolution retrospectively in French, Creole also shared in the task of coercing difference into governable homogeneity. During the revolution, Creole was imposed as the national language by the Creole (Haitian-born) leaders Toussaint, Dessalines, and Christophe. This emerging language, initially used as a means of communication between slaves and masters, was an amalgam of French vocabulary and syntactic contributions from West Africa, as well as Taino, English, and Spanish. The African-born former slaves, who spoke one of at least two or three African languages, were silenced and subjugated to the Creole linguistic monopoly, a creolization that made for a linguistic accord conducive to political control by Creoles.6 What strikes a reader of the various French proclamations during and after the revolution is the astonishing homogeneity of what was said, no matter who speaks or for what purpose. Debates in the revolutionary assemblies in Paris, the words of Georges-Jacques Danton and Robespierre especially, once printed in newspapers in Saint-Domingue, were recycled as formulas or favored shibboleths by those who took on the burden of politics and the prerogative of French in the new republic.
Called variously "Black France" by one nineteenth-century observer (Jules Michelet), this "France with frizzy hair" by another (Maxime Raybaud), and merely a "tropical dog-kennel and pestiferous jungle" by Thomas Carlyle, Haiti forced imagination high and low: expression moved uneasily between the extremes of idealization and debasement. In the background of this textualized and cursedly mimetic Haiti, however, remained certain legends, blurred but persistent oral traditions that resisted such coercive dichotomies as genteel and brute, master and slave, precious language and common voice. Though Haiti's "Africanness," like its "Frenchness," would be used by writers for differing purposes, the business of being Haitian was more complexand the slippages and uneasy alliances between contradictions more pronouncedthan most writerly representations of Haiti ever allowed.
Romancing the Dark World
A series of articles on Haiti appeared in the Petite Presse in Paris from September 8 to December 31, 1881. Written by the black
Martiniquan, Victor Cochinat, the columns reported on everything from vodou to the military, calling attention to the Haitians' love of artifice, their propensity to exaggerate and mime, and their apparent indifference to the continuing and bloody revolutions that followed independence in 1804. Cochinat also turned to vodou and to tales of cannibalism and magic in order to prove to his French audience that Haiti remained unregenerate.7
Louis-Joseph Janvier published his alternately strident and elegiac response to Cochinat in Paris in 1883.8 Janvier, born in Port-au-Prince, descended from peasants, was the first in his family to be educated. In 1877, when he was twenty-two, he received a scholarship from the Haitian government to study in France. There he remained, for twenty-eight years, until 1905. His collection of meditations, called La Ripublique d'Haoti et ses visiteurs, contained long passages from the abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and M. Victor Meignan, and a preface packed with quotations from Jules Michelet, Reni de Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Ernest Renan, Georges-Jacques Danton, Alphonse de Lamartine, and Henry Christophe. Janvier claimed that Haitians were on the road to civilization, arguing that the bloodiest political crimes in his country simply proved that "Haiti always imitates Europe."
Be indulgent, oh sons of western Europe!
RecallI am citing at random, unconcerned about chronologyrecall the Sicilian Vespers, the holy Inquisition . . . the Albegensian massacre, the war of the Two Roses, the massacre of Strelitz, the sacking of ghettos, the religious wars in England, which is to say the papists hanged by the anti-papists, and the anti-papists burned by the papists, Saint-Bartholemew, the days of September 1792, the 10th of August, the red Terror, the 13th Vendemiaire, the 18th Brumaire, the white Terror, the June days of 1848, December 2, 1851; the month of May 1871. . . . be indulgent.9
The historian Michelet was Janvier's idol, "this sublime thinker." When confronting the succession of coups d'itat that imperiled the young nation, Janvier claimed Haiti to be the incarnation of history in Michelet's sense of resurrection: "The history of Haiti is a series of marvelous resurrections."
That Haitian independence had to be sealed in a ritual of blood and vengeance made even more urgent the need to "rehabilitate the black race," to prove that in Haiti everything is French. If we recall Dessalines's proclamation abjuring the French nation after the massacre, which he called his "last act of national authority," we can
appreciate the high costs of such symbolic violence. The imagination of future generations of Haitians would be handicapped by the theatricality of the past.
When Janvier wrote his defense of Haiti, the population was about 90 percent peasants. Romanticized for their pastoral innocence and endurance, those whom foreigners had condemned as remnants of "dark Africa" were transformed by Janvier into French-speaking, God-fearing laborers. The ground upon which he constructed his fable of the Haitian nationproud, vital, earthy, and blackthey served as an appropriate symbol of the new Haiti: a gothic Eden resurrected on the ashes of colonial Saint-Domingue. Whether they inhabited the plains or the mornes (hills), the peasants Janvier idealized were fiercely independent, attached to their lands and devoted to their gods. Yet Janvier's sense of "the Haitian" depended on his refutation of vodou, which he denounced as "primitive." He assured his readers that all Haitians were now Catholic or Protestant, that all traces of barbarism had disappeared, and that most Haitians spoke French. After all, Janvier concluded, "French prose, Haitian coffee, and the philosophical doctrines of the French Revolution are the best stimulants of the Haitian brain."10
Black Skin, White Heart
The turning of Saint-Domingue into Haiti, colony into republic, demanded a new history that would be written by people who saw themselves as renewing the work of the French who had once abolished slavery and declared slaves not only men but citizens . Yet the reactionary conceptual flotsam of the Old Regime, and the appropriate tags of "civilization," "order," and "dignity" would clash with a "fanaticism" that had no proper language and no right to history. Could the history of the Haitian Revolution be told in the language of France? As Haitian historians attempted to gain access to "civilization," someone else's language (and at least part of the history that went with it) was necessary to their entitlement.
In his 1774 The History of Jamaica, the Jamaican Creole Edward Long turned to an Africa he had never seen, wrote of its unimaginable savagery, compared negroes to orangutans, and did his best to prove "the natural inferiority of Negroes." Yet, there was one chance for the black individual to distinguish himself from his dark surround. Long
tells the story of Francis Williamsa native of Jamaica and son of Dorothy and John Williams, free blackswho, once educated into literature, defined himself "as a white man acting under a black skin." Williams had been chosen to be
the subject of an experiment, which, it is said, the Duke of Montague was curious to make, in order to discover, whether, by proper cultivation, and a regular course of tuition at school and the university, a Negroe might not be found as capable of literature as a white person.11
Williams gets a "new" language. He acquires a convertible history. That he composes his poetry in Latin should alert us to the artifices possible in a New World that could be more ancient than the Old. Writing "An Ode" to Governor George Haldane, he disclaims the color of his skin in order to gain acceptance for his poem. Toward the end of the ode, recognition, or proof of rehabilitation, depends not only on the labor of language but the sudden disavowal of an epidermal trait: "Tho' dark the stream on which the tribute flows, / Not from the skin, but from the heart it rose."
"Oh! Muse, of blackest tint, why shrinks thy breast,
Why fears t'approach the Caesar of the West!
Dispel thy doubts, with confidence ascend
The regal dome, and hail him for thy friend:
Nor blush, altho' in garb funereal drest,
Thy body's white, tho' clad in sable vest ."12
If the justification of slavery depended on converting a biological fact into an ontological truthblack = savage, white = civilizedthe descendant of slaves must not only pay tribute to those who enslaved but make himself white, while remaining black . Further, acquisition of the forever unreal new identity is paid for by negation of the old self.
What is significant about Williams's "An Ode" is that he talks both to his black Muse and his white patron: he keeps her black, "in garb funereal drest," yet he also makes her white, assuring his "muse" and his white readers: "Thy body's white, tho' clad in sable vest ." Finally, the poet concludes, "the sooty African " will be white in "manners," in the "glow of genius," in "learned speech, with modest accent worn." These adornments constitute the whiteness that transforms the heart and, once this has happened, turns the man inside out.
The complex working out of personal identity through a duplicity or doubling of color proves crucial to the making of a nation, and
shapes the way the first two major Haitian historians, Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin, introduced themselves. Though a mulatto who lived in Paris for ten years, Ardouin focused on his African ancestry. He announces himself in his introduction as "Descendant of this African race that has been so long persecuted," and at the end of his eleven-volume history (published between 1853 and 1860), he exclaims: "Glory to all these children of Africa. . . . Honor to their memory!"13 Madiou, also mulatto, lived in France from the age of ten until he was twenty-one. Unlike Ardouin, who defended the affranchis (freedmen) and ignored their interest, after the decree of May 15, 1791, in preserving slavery, Madiou refused to account for Haitian history in accord with the "official" mulatto view. He would later be claimed by Haitian ideologues as the noiriste historian of Haiti. His fiery assessment of Dessalines as a Haitian Robespierre, "this angel of death," based on interviews in the 1840s with former revolutionaries, departed from the critical disdain of the more moderate and elite iclairies (enlightened). If Dessalines was savage, Madiou countered that he remained the "Principle incarnate of Independence; he was barbaric against colonial barbarism."14
For both Madiou and Ardouin the labor of writing history demanded that the historian be seen as human while remaining Haitian. They turned to France and the white world, but claimed blackness and repaired the image of Africa, by making Haitipurified of superstition, sorcerers, and charmsthe instrument of reclamation. Throughout Haitian history the recovery or recognition of blackness (nigritude or noirisme ) never depended exclusively on color or phenotype.15 Reading Madiou's and Ardouin's introductions to their histories, it is difficult to specify their color. Sir Spenser St. JohnGreat Britain's minister resident and consul general in Haiti, intermittently from 1863 to 1884reminded his readers in Hayti, or the Black Republic, in a tautology that makes indefinite the need to define: "Thomas Madiou (clear mulatto) . . ."; "M. Beaubrun Ardouin (fair mulatto) . . ."16 Their ability to reclaim and represent their "native land" to a foreign audience depended on their variously authentic and partly spurious claims of color but, most important, on the wielding of proper language. Both Madiou and Ardouin concluded their introductions by apologizing not for color but for style. In Ardouin's case, especially, the apology helped him to prove his nationality, affirmed by nothing less than his resolutely faltering or broken French. He articulated, perhaps for the first time, what Edouard Glissant much later would
name antillaniti, and what Cisaire, speaking about his choice to write poetry in French and not in Creole, would qualify as French with the marque nhgre .
If this work finds some readers in Paris, they will see many infelicities of style, still more faults in the rules of grammar: it will offer them no literary merit. But they should not forget that, in general, Haitians stammer the words of the French language, in order to emphasize in some way their origin in the Antilles.17
Ardouin had no doubt remembered Madiou's introduction. In Histoire d'Haoti Madiou had addressed his readers:
I beseech the reader to show himself indulgent concerning the style of my work; all I did was attempt to be correct, since at 1,800 leagues from the hearth of our language, in a country where nearly the entire population speaks Creole, it is quite impossible that French would not suffer the influence of those idioms I have meanwhile tried to avoid.18
Between Civilization and Barbarism
In Port-au-Prince on April 16, 1848, the very black and illiterate President Faustin Soulouque began the massacre of mulattoes he suspected as conspirators. In Paris a "prince-president," Louis Napoleon, who had just emerged from the other side of the barricades and blood of the June 1848 revolution, exclaimed, "Haoti, Haoti, pays de barbares!"
Soulouque, following Dessalines's and Napoleon Bonaparte's imperial example, declared himself Emperor Faustin I on August 25, 1849. Spenser St. John thought this act typical of a racially particular obsession: "All black chiefs have a hankering after the forms as well as the substance of despotic power."19 Imitating his French model, Soulouque crowned himself, then crowned the empress, and created a nobility of four princes, fifty-nine dukes, two marquises, ninety counts. two hundred barons, and thirty knights. About three years later, in France, Louis Napoleon became emperor and brought the Second Republic to an end. The nephew of NapoleonKarl Marx's "caricature of the old Napoleon"did not have it easy. When he declared himself emperor a year after the coup d'itat of December 2. 1851, he
Soulouque and His Court , by Amidie de Noi (pseudonym:
Cham). Paris, 1850. Courtesy Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
found himself not only described as Hugo's "Napolion le petit" but compared to the Haitian Soulouque.
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851), Marx compared what he called "the best" of Louis Napoleon's "bunch of blokes" to "a noisy, disreputable, rapacious bohhme that crawls into gallooned coats with the same grotesque dignity as the high dignitaries of Soulouque."20 Referring to the counterfeit Bonaparte, Victor Hugo wrote a poem about "A monkey [who] dressed himself in a tiger's skin" ("Fable or History," Les Chbtiments, 1853). Though most obviously referring to the dubious royalty and bombast of Louis Napoleon, the horrific slaughters of Hugo's poem could not fail to remind readers of Soulouque's outrages. Hugo's parting shot in "Fable or History" could be taken as a product of racialist ideology: "You are only a monkey!"
Gustave d'Alaux (the pen name of Maxime Raybaud, the French consul during part of Soulouque's reign), wrote L'Empereur Soulouque et son empire, parts of which appeared as a series of articles in the metropolitan Revue des Deux-Mondes (18501851) and finally as a book in 1856. He introduced his readers to a place where you could find "civilization and the Congo," and "newspapers and sorcerers."21 Even the American Wendell Phillips, rendering homage to Toussaint and the Haitian Revolution in 1861, reminded his listeners in Boston and New York how much events in Haiti mattered to the new Napoleon in France: "the present Napoleon . . . when the epigrammatists of Paris christened his wasteful and tasteless expense at Versailles, Soulouquerie, from the name of Soulouque, the Black Emperor, he deigned to issue a specific order forbidding the use of the word."22
A later Haitian historian, Danths Bellegarde in La Nation haotienne (1938), lamented that the reputation of Soulouque suffered from the illegitimate actions of Louis Napoleon. Soulouque's character was defamed when the French, seeking a safe way obliquely to attack power, made him the vessel for their disdain of their own emperor. Bellegarde's words are crucial to understanding how different history might be if we jostle our ideas of cause and effect:
The crowning of the emperor, celebrated with unmatched magnificence, resulted in cruel jokes about Soulouque in the liberal French press and thus avenged the coup d'itat of December 2, 1851, by Prince-President Louis Napoleon. And when, by the plebiscite of November 20, 1852, he had himself proclaimed emperor, they accused him of having aped [singi ] Faustin I, and the more one blackened Soulouque, the more odious appeared the imitation of his grotesque act by the old member of the Italian Carbonari. The ha-
tred of Napoleon the Little, as the poet of the Chbtiments referred to him, contributed much to giving the chief of the Haitian State his unfortunate reputation as a ridiculous and bloodthirsty sovereign.23
Rereading events in France through the quizzing glass of Haiti is to clarify the reciprocal dependencies, the uncanny resemblances that no ideology of difference can remove. Who are the true cannibals? Who is "aping" whom? Recall Dessalines's words after his massacres of the French: "Yes, we have repaid these true cannibals, war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage." The question must have haunted Beaubrun Ardouin when he found himself in Paris, having escaped from the murderous Soulouque, happy to find himself in the "Republic" he praised in a letter to Lamartine, only to see liberty turn again into monarchy: the country he had turned to as example for his "young Haiti" flipping over, again, into empire. Ardouin, more opportunist than Madiou and an accomplished bureaucrat, had few problems with the change, as long as he was in France and not in Haiti. But he still had to justify his country to a people, many of whom were busy condemning Napoleon III, the very emperor he praised, and gladly advancing their attack by compounding black and white, Haiti and France, Soulouque and Louis Napoleon.
To justify revolution when despots were being recycled as simulacra was no easy matter. And to celebrate Haiti when Joseph Arthur de Gobineau had just published De l'inigaliti des races humaines (18531855), a book that uses Haiti to signal the degeneracy of the black race ("depraved, brutal, and savage"), is a task we should not underestimate. The first volume of Ardouin's Etudes sur l'histoire d'Haoti, published in 1859, enjoyed such success that a second printing followed within a year.24
No Easy Liberty
Ardouin no doubt appreciated the business of politics. Friend and partisan of the tough mulatto, Major General Jean-Pierre Boyer (an ancien affranchi ), who governed Haiti from 1820 to 1843, Senator Ardouin had negotiated the initial financial settlement with France in 1825: 150 million francs indemnity to be paid in five years to the dispossessed French planters of Saint-Domingue in order to obtain French recognition of the independence of its former colony,
which was given in a royal ordinance from King Charles X. This edict, which conditionally recognized the Republic of Haiti as a "Free, independent and sovereign state," was backed up by force, leaving no doubt that the rhetoric of sovereignty would always be subject to severe qualification. France conveyed its recognition to President Boyer by a fleet of fourteen warships bearing 494 guns.25
But Madiou, never one to mince words, imagined what the heroes of the revolution would do if they left their tombs only to see the French flag flying in the cities of the new republic, while Haitians curried favor and became indebted to the descendants of colonial torturers. But it was Boyer's Code Rural (signed at the National Palace in Port-au-Prince on May 6, 1826) that reduced most Haitians, especially those who did not occupy positions of rank in the military or civil branches of the state, to essentially slave status. A small fraction of Haiti's population could live off the majority, collecting feeswith the help of their lackeys, the rural chefs de section for produce, for the sale, travel, and butchering of animals, and even for the cutting of trees. In Les Constitutions d'Haoti (1886), addressed primarily to a Haitian audience, Janvier described Boyer's code as "slavery without the whip." Jonathan Brown, an American physician from New Hampshire who spent a year in Haiti (18331834), recalled his impressions of Boyer's regime in The History and Present Condition of St. Domingo (1837): "The existing government of Hayti is a sort of republican monarchy sustained by the bayonet."26
Boyer did not like "vice" or "laziness" displayed in dancing, festivals, or unsupervised meetings among the population. He demanded order, propriety, and hard work. He would have agreed with Ardouin who later condemned vodou in his Etudes as "the barbarism . . . that brutalizes souls." Borrowing from the Code Henry (that of Christophe in 1812), Boyer reinstituted strict regulations of punishment, work schedules, and forced labor. The Code Rural contained 202 articles, aimed at delimiting and identifying those who are "bound" to the soil. Article 3, for example, prescribes cultivation for those who "cannot justify their means of existence."
It being the duty of every Citizen to aid in sustaining the State, either by his active services, or by his industry, those who are not employed in the civil service, or called upon for the military service; those who do not exercise a licensed profession; those who are not working artisans, or employed as servants; those who are not employed in felling timber for exportation; in fine, those who cannot justify their means of existence, shall cultivate the soil.27
In 1843 and 1844 there were two revolutions that Ardouin would later describe as the "tragedy" of his generation: the popular army of Praslin, led by Charles Rivihre-Hirard, and, the next year, the Piquet rebellion (named for the piquiers, the stakes or spears made by the militant peasant cultivators), led by the black Southerner and police lieutenant Louis-Jean Acaau "to defend the interests of the poor of all classes." The crises of 1843 and 1844 compelled Ardouin to write his history. The "Proclamation de Praslin," though ostensibly speaking for the people, and condemning Boyer's officials (including Ardouin) as traitors, was really a document contrived by Rivihre-Hirard and other mulattoes, disgruntled Boyerists who wanted some of the power. The struggle of Acaau's l'armie souffrante (the suffering army), along with the resistance of members of the black elite, like Lysius Salomon, resulted in Rivihre-Hirard's overthrow. Salomon's petition to the provisional government of Rivihre-Hirard (June 22, 1843) is a marvel of recall and revision: "Citizens! Dessalines and Pition cry out to you from the bottom of their graves. . . . Save Haiti, our communal mother; don't let her perish . . . save her. . . . The abolitionists rejoice and applaud you."28
Recognizing that it would be useless to resist these variously contrived liberation movements, Boyer had addressed the Senate for the last time on March 13, 1843, before leavinglike subsequent overthrown Haitian presidentsfor Jamaica. Then began five years of instability comprising four short-lived presidencies. The phenomenon of Faustin Soulouque and Haiti's crisis of legitimacy resulted from what could be called a comedy of color . The mulatto oligarchs of Haiti reacted to the possibility of yet another revolution by contriving what became known as la politique de la doublure . The politics of the understudy allowed the light-skinned elites to remain in power, but under cover of blackness. The didoublement of color, the splitting in two, qualifies Francis Williams's ritual of conversion. If the Jamaican black Williams proclaimed his white heart with a black skin, in Haiti, mulattoes in the turbulent 1840s were the heart of power, while selecting black skins as masks.
After a trinity of elderly and tractable black illiterates (Philippe Guerrier, 87 years old, directed by Beaubrun and Ciligny Ardouin; Jean-Louis Pierrot, 84; and Jean-Baptiste Richi, 70), Soulouque (then 59) was chosen by those whom Spenser St. John called "the enlightened Ministers of the late General Richi." Beaubrun Ardouin, as head of the Senate, proposed the illiterate, black, and apparently malleable
General Soulouque as president of Haiti on March 1, 1847. When, a year later, Soulouque killed Ardouin's brother Cilignythe former minister of Haiti to the French governmentArdouin returned to France where he wrote his Etudes . But he never lost, even in exile, the capacity to name heroes or to please his patrons. Whether raising the republic of 1848 or the subsequent empire of Napoleon III, Ardouin held fast to France. But he carefully excluded the slave owners, those who fought for the colonial system, from those he called "the true French."
Who is the true Haitian? Ardouin's answer to the question gives definition the utility of not defining. Though he claimed himself as a "Descendant of Africa" and condemned the injustices of the colonial government against "the men of the black race which is my own," he asserted that the road to being Haitian must progress away from the dark continent toward his present audience, those he appreciated as representing enlightened France. He remained uncomfortable with "oral and popular traditions," and most of all with "superstitious practices derived from Africa." Again and again, he emphasized those things that made Haiti worthy of the France he esteemed (and identified Haitians who thought like him as most qualified to command): same religion, language, ideals, principles, customs, and, he concluded, "a taste preserved for French products." For France, he writes, "has deposited the germ of its advanced civilization." Now, under "the reign of a monarch [Napoleon III] enlightened and just," Haiti can profit from the "lights [les lumihres ] of its former mother country."
"Sucking from the breasts of France," as Ardouin had once put it in a letter to Lamartine (who, as minister for foreign affairs in the provisional government of 1848, would definitively abolish slavery in the French colonies), Haiti would turn, emptied of its gods and its magic, to both "the revolution of 1789 . . . this torch of French Genius" and to the Napoleonic eagle. On January 15, 1859, General Fabre Nicholas Geffrard overthrew Soulouque. Ardouin returned briefly to Haiti and then departed again for Paris as minister plenipotentiary.29
Dessalines, Dessalines Demanbre
On October 17, 1806, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, "chef suprjme des indighnes," the first president and emperor of Haiti, was
murdered in an ambush at Pont-Rouge by soldiers from the South on the road from Marchand (now Dessalines) to Port-au-Prince. The assassination order came from a clique of mulattoes and blacks from the West and South, including his friend General Alexandre Pition. General Christophe knew of the plan. A young officer shot Dessalines. General Yayou stabbed him three times. Vaval filled him with bullets from two pistols. Then he was stripped naked, his fingers cut off so that the jeweled rings could be removed. Stories vary about the details of the mutilation. Even Ardouin, not given to melodrama, hesitated before recounting what happened to the corpse after Dessalines was assassinated by the men with whom he had fought: "one must pause at this appalling outrage."30
By the time the body reached Port-au-Prince, after the two-mile journey, it could not be recognized. The head was shattered, the feet, hands, and ears cut off. In some accounts, Dessalines was stoned and hacked to pieces by the crowd, and his remainsvariously described as "scraps," "shapeless remains," "remnants," or "relics"were thrown to the crowd. According to Madiou, American merchants hustled to buy his fingers with gold. "They attached an importance to the relics of the founder of our Independence that Haitians, transported by such horrible fury, did not then feel."31 That foreign merchants bargained for Dessalines's fleshly remnants tells us something about the role of Dessalines as martyr of liberty. Yet this is only part of the story, for popular vengeance turned Dessalines into matter for resurrection. Dessalines, the most unregenerate of Haitian leaders, was made into a lwa (god, image, or spirit) by the Haitian people. The liberator, with his red silk scarf, was the only "Black Jacobin" to become a god. Neither the radical rationality of Toussaint nor the sovereign pomp of Christophe led to apotheosis. Yet Dessalines, so resistant to enlightened heroics, gradually acquired unequaled power in the Haitian imagination.
Dessalines was born sometime in 1758 on the Cormiers plantation, in a parish now known as the Commune of Grande-Rivihre du Nord. Jean Price-Mars, in Silhouettes nhgres (1938), describes the sordid beginnings of the "redeemer of the Negro race in Haiti" in Vii Cailles (Old Homes). In Price-Mars's logic of conversion, the most degraded slave becomes the most admired hero. Dirt forms the backdrop for projected splendor.
Vii Cailles, ramshackle huts, deformed, made ugly by filth, abodes grimacing with a drove of disgraceful beings, lost in misery, it is among you in the sin of
Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Reproduced from Michelle
Oriol, Images de la rievolution ` Saint Dominique
(Port-au-Prince: Editions Henri Deschasmps, 1992).
promiscuity and in the gestation of the new world that was born, one day, the redeemer of the race, this Duclos who, by the transformative power of destiny, became Jean-Jacques Dessalines.32
According to the Haitian historian Horace Paulius Sannon, Dessalines began fighting on the side of the rebel Georges Biassou's band as early as 1791.33 Madiou describes the black Creole Biassou as a vodou adept, surrounded with oungan (priests) whose advice he sought.34
In 1794 Dessalines became Toussaint's guide through Grande-Revihre du Nord. At the time of the revolution, Toussaint was a literate coachman, and later steward of all the livestock on the Brida plantation. Christophe (born in Grenada) was a waiter, then a manager, and finally an owner of La Couronne, an inn at Cap Frangais. Dessalines, first owned by a brutal white named Duclos, was then sold to a black master. Whenever Dessalines wanted to justify his hatred of the French, it is said that he liked to display his scar-covered back.35 We should think for a moment about the figure of the hero who was once a slave, a man who would refer to himself as "Duclos" (his name in servitude), recalling for his listeners, even as emperor, his identity as an item of property. Out of detritus came the redeemer. Then, Dessalines, torn into bits and pieces, would return to the filth, only to rise again as hero, legend, and spirit.
Rejecting things French, unconcerned about social graces, and turning away from the customs, language, and principles Ardouin would see as that part of the Haitian inheritance that made his country worthy of recognition by "civilized" Europe, Dessalines made a vexed entry into history. Perhaps more than either Toussaint (who had the habit of asking the women who visited him, in a tender but nasal twang, "Have you taken communion this morning?") or Christophe, Dessalines recognized the temptations of civilization, which for him meant a new, more subtle servitude. He understood how easily rebels or republicans could themselves become masters. Speaking of the anciens libres, those freed before Liger-Filicite Sonthonax's General Emancipation decree of August 1793which abolished slavery in the North of Saint-DomingueDessalines warned that the actions of "sons of colonists" could disadvantage those he called "my poor blacks." He exclaimed: "Beware, negroes and mulattoes! We have all fought against the whites. The goods that we have won in spilling our blood belong to every one of us. I intend that they be shared fairly."36 Madiou emphasized Dessalines's preference for steering clear of the established
cities, "so that European corruption could not reach him," choosing to establish himself at Marchand, situated in the plain of the Artibonite at the foot of the Cahos hills.37
Spenser St. John recognized "the only quality" of Dessalines as "a kind of brute courage . . . he was nothing but an African savage."38 Dessalines's adamant refusal to be coaxed into spectacles of civility meant that he would be a less acceptable subject for mainstream biographers. Though Toussaint is celebrated in numerous biographies as "the Black Consul," "this gilded African," or "the Black Napoleon," and Christophe is heralded as "Black Majesty" or "Ying of Haiti," not one English biography of Dessalines has yet appeared. Further, the two most important twentieth-century poets of Martinique, Aimi Cisaire and Edouard Glissant, do not write about Dessalines. Glissant wrote the play Monsieur Toussaint (1961). Cisaire turned to Toussaint in his Toussaint Louverture: La Ribolution frangaise et le problhme colonial (1981), as well as writing La Tragidie du Roi Christophe (1963). Perhaps they had difficulty (in spite of their rhetoric or their desire) acknowledging the chief who called his people to arms with the command, "Koupe tht, boule kay" (Cut off their heads, burn their houses), a command recast by Haitians today as "Koupe farm, boule kay" (Fuck their women, burn their houses).
In his first published work, Henri Christophe, published in Barbados in 1950, Derek Walcott presented Dessalines as a butcher, obsessed by rituals of blood. After the massacre of the French, Walcott's "Messenger recounts:
Two hours we raged the city, raping, rioting,
Turning with slaughter the chapels into brothels.
I skewered a white martyr under an altar,
We flung one girl in an uncertain arc
Into the bloody bosom of the pier, and over us
This king rode, looking as though he chewed his corpses.
Why is it that Haiti and its heroes conjure up legends and romanticized gestures of defiance or fustian power? Here is Walcott again in his essay, "What the Twilight Says":
They were Jacobean too because they flared from a mind drenched in Elizabethan literature out of the same darkness as Webster's Flamineo, from a flickering world of mutilation and heresy. . . . Dessalines and Christophe, men who had structured their own despair. Their tragic bulk was massive as a citadel at twilight. They were our only noble ruins. . . . Now, one may see such
heroes as squalid fascists who chained their own people, but they had size, mania, the fire of great heretics.39
Such spurious but compelling heroics led Walcott to sigh in his long poem, Another Life (1973), "for a future without heroes,/to make out of these foresters and fishermen / heraldic men!"
Historians have thus had a difficult time writing about the general whose uncompromising ferocity had become legendary. More embarrassing still were stories of the surfeit and abandon of his reign. Surrounded by cunning ministers, Dessalines recognized too late the need to curb their excesses. Madiou and others recount Dessalines's notorious passion for dancing and women. His favorite mistress was the much-admired dancer Couloute, whom Dessalines met in Jirimie in 1800. The emperor's ardor for her inspired a celebrated and much popularized dance, the carabinier (a wilder, more energetic and undulating kind of meringue ), which was accompanied by the chant: "The Emperor comes to see Couloute dance."40 At one particularly luxurious ball, when a dancing Dessalines leapt into the air and landed on his knee before Couloute, Christophe is reported to have remarked (loud enough for Dessalines to hear him): "See His Majesty! Aren't you ashamed to have such a sauteur [meaning both "jumper" and "temporizer," or "chameleon" ] as our leader!"
Hyperbolized by Madiou as a "thunderbolt of arbitrariness," Dessalines fought at different times against the French and the African born former slaves (nhg bosal, nhg ginen, or nhg kongo, or in French, nhgres bossales ) who never collaborated with the French. These maroons, such as Ti-Nokl, Sans Souci, Macaya, Cacapouleand other unnamed insurgents of the hills who formed armed bands of nearly a thousand menrefused to surrender to Leclerc, as did Christophe and Dessalines after the loss of the battle of Crjte-b-Pierrot and the removal of Toussaint in 1802.41 It is said that when Leclercwho had earlier praised Dessalines as "butcher of the blacks" in a letter to Napoleon in September 1802learned of his defection from the French not a month later, he cried out, "How could I have been so deceived by a barbare !" Yet, if we trust the account of the French naturalist Michel Etienne Descourtilz, imprisoned in Crjete-b-Pierrot during the siege that preceded Dessalines's cooperation with Leclerc, Dessalines left no doubt about his cunning: "Listen well! If Dessalines surrenders to them a hundred times, he will betray them a hundred times."42 According to the historian Hinock Trouillot, writing about Dessalines
in the Haitian newspaper, Le Nouvelliste : "His name alone, in spite of the contradictions of his attitude, was a symbol among blacks."43 In December 1802, his authority was so great that the mulatto general Pition knew he had no choice but to fight under the black who had, only two years before, under Toussaint's orders, bathed the south of Haiti in the blood of mulattoes.
A number of oral traditions haunt the written remains of Dessalines, general in chief of the Army of Independence. In a story reported by both Trouillot and Mentor Laurent, African bands called takos, including a rebel named Jean Zombi and "other types full of fire," surrounded Dessalines in Plaisance, refusing to listen to him, saying "we do not deal with whites." According to Trouillot, Dessalines replied:
Look at my face. Am I white? Don't you recognize the soldier of Crjte-b- Pierrot? Was I white at the Petite-Rivihre of the Artibonite when the expedition arrived? Ask these hills covered with French bones. They will nominate Dessalines as the hero of these trophies.44
Historians disagree about the languages Dessalines could speak. Some say he spoke in "Congo," a general attribution for the specific African "nations" or "tribes" in Saint-Domingue (Arada, Nago, Congo, Fon, Ibo, Bambara) that would also be used to refer to the "secret" or "magic" language of initiates in vodou. In Les Limites du criole dans notre enseignement, Trouillot cites words from Antoine Mitral's Histoire do l'expidition frangaise au St. Dominque which suggest that even though he did not speak their language, Dessalines could gesturally, figurally become African: "His savage eloquence was more in certain expressive signs than in words." Trouillot concluded: "By fantastic gestures Dessalines managed more than once to make himself understood by Africans, so it seemed, when he did not speak the dialect."45 We are dealing, therefore, with a Creole who could take on the role of an African as easily as he could serve the French when he and Christophe fought with the expeditionary force of Leclerc.
Dessalines controlled his own passage between apparent extremes and thrived on the composite histories of his locale. According to Madiou, Dessalines called the populations subject to his authority "Incas or children of the sun," memorializing the 1780 Inca uprising in Peru. For the Haitian Marxist historian Etienne Charlier, when Dessalines called the new black republic "Haiti," retrieving its original Amerin-
dian name, he "transcends his race and presents himself as the avenger of the Indians."46 A story I have heard told in Creole by unlettered informants, in Port-au-Prince, after "Papa Doc" Duvalier's death in 1971, is more puzzling. Dessalines would ask an indighne (a "native" in Haiti) a question in French, and if the person answered, he would be killed for not being a "true" Haitian (i.e., he had not answered in Creole). That this fiction of historical prohibition has no date is not surprising. As I have argued, stories about Dessalines are construed with different meanings by diverse groups over time. I understood the story reinterpreted here as proof of Dessalines's exigence and uncompromising purity. Not only kill off the French, but anyone who speaks French. Though the origins of this story are unknown, its repetition in the streets of Port-au-Prince, after the passing of another imperious Haitian leader, attests to the drama of mimesis and transformation in Haitian history. Whether or not this story was invented by those who despised Dessalinesthe mulatto, literate elites, if not the French themselvesdoes not matter as much as its survival among the unschooled.
A "folk tale" reported to George Simpson by his collaborator Jean Baptiste Cinias, who heard the story from his great-grandmother, tells how Dessalines did "magic" at the Battle of Crjte-b-Pierrot.
Before each battle the spirits enabled him to make himself invisible so that he could inspect the enemy's camp. The most striking example of this protection was at Crjte-b-Pierrot where eighteen thousand French soldiers surrounded his fort with its fifteen hundred men. The French sent a spy to give Dessalines poison, but he threw up the poison. Each night he left the fort, slipping through the French army without being seen, and conferred with Haitian officers outside the fortress. At Crjte-b-Pierrot he solemnly sacrificed a magnificent bull, and his spirits told him he would have the honor of winning independence for his people.47
Yet, Dessalines, though believed to have been a vodou adeptand in some stories, sorcererwas also known to have massacred cult leaders and their devotees. Madiou recounts how Dessalines, as Toussaint's inspector general of cultivation in the West, pursued "the secret societies where they practiced African superstitions." Discovering a meeting of "those sorcerers called Vaudoux," led by "an old black woman" and a number of cultivators who had abandoned their fields in order to participate in these rites, Dessalines and his battalion surrounded the area, seized fifty of the Vaudoux and killed them with bayonets.48 Gustave d'Alaux in L'Emperour Soulouque et son empire explained that
while Toussaint and Christopheobsessed with the trappings of culturepitilessly suppressed vodou practitioners, "Dessalines, in spite of his either sincere or pretended infatuation with African savagery, was himself mixed up with the papas [conjure-men]." D'Alaux reported that once, before going into battle, Dessalines covered himself with magic talismans in order to become invulnerable. But wounded in the first discharge of fire, Dessalines beat up the "sorcerer" and took back the money he had paid for the consultation.49 In another version of the story, when the protective charms failed to work their magic, Dessalines, after asking for his money, killed the "charlatan."50
Any attempt to reconstruct Dessalines historically involves ambiguities, obscurity, and details that do not cohere. But perhaps that is how gods are born. As Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Tell My Horse, her ethnographic account of religious belief and practice in Jamaica and Haiti: "Some unknown natural phenomenon occurs which cannot be explained, and a new local demigod is named."51 The popular and oral canonization of Dessalines, unlike the public and written, is quite comfortable with a Dessalines apotheosized but not purged of incoherence. Practitioners today remember Dessalines as "Papa," a memorial preserved in a Creole poem by filix morisseau-leroy, which concludes:
Pou tou sa l fh m di: papa Desalin, mhsi
Pou tou sa l pral fe
M di: mhsi, papa Desalin.52
(Papa Dessalines, thank you
For everything you did:
For everything you're going to do
I say thank you, Papa Dessalines.)
What then did Dessalines do? Two of the concerns that accounted for the admiration and disdain summoned by his name were race and land. In the Constitution of 1805, he declared that no white, what ever his nation, could set foot on the territory of Haiti as master or owner of property (article 12). Who could be Haitian? For Dessalines, certain whites could be naturalized as Haitians: for example, white women who have conceived or will bear Haitian children, and those Germans and Poles who deserted Leclerc's army during 18021803 in order to fight with the indighnes (article 13). Further, Haitians, whatever their color, would be known as blacks, referred to "only by the generic word black " (article 14).53 Since the most problematic division in the new Haiti was that between anciens libres (the former
freedmen, who were mostly gens de couleur, mulattoes and their offspring) and nouveaux libres (the newly free, who were mostly black), Dessalines attempted by linguistic means and by law to defuse the color issue.
If Dessalines promised a reconciliation of persons of differing grades of color, it was nevertheless a conversion that depended, at least verbally, on the blackening so feared by both colonists and the mulatto elite. In colonial Saint-Domingue the reminder of the stain or corruption of black blood was necessary to the law of difference demanded by racial superiority. "In a word, one could say that a colored population, left to itself is fatally destined to become black again at the end of a very few generations." In Saint-Domingue: La Sociiti et la vie crioles sous l'ancien rigime, Pierre de Vassihre described this lapse, the mixture that can transform white into mulatto and then mulatto "to the most absolute black," as the colonist's greatest fear: the "law of regression" or "reversion."54
Consider what remained of colonial divisions in Saint-Domingue in 1804:
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Though blacks were also libres (free) and not all whites were masters, this tripartite organization of white masters at the top and servile blacks at the bottom, with freed gens de couleur (people of color) in between, operated as the crucial ideological structure in Saint-Domingue. How else could servitude be sustained, except through an accentuation of the color distinction? Dessalines took the "lowest" rung and made it a synecdoche for the whole.55
In his Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie frangaise de l'Isle Saint-Domingue (written between 17761789, published in 1797), Midiric Moreau de Saint-Miry distinguished 128 parts of "blood" that, variously combined, result in the possible nuances of skin-coloring among free coloreds .56 The combinatorial fiction, surely one of the more remarkable legalistic fantasies of the New World, reminded the mulatto, especially, that no matter how white the skin, the tainted blood haunts the body. Dessalines's answer to the hair-splitting subtleties of Moreau de Saint-Miry was to get rid
of the distinctions, but some would argue that he created an overweening category even more coercive than Moreau de Saint-Miry's fable of color.
Dessalines tried to accomplish nothing less than an epistemological conversion: a curse would be removed, and then reproduced as salvation. To be called black on the soil of Haiti would be proof of Haitian identity. Dessalines knew that the elimination of the stain of color and the alliance between noirs and jaunes (blacks and yellows) were necessary to the future of independent Haiti. As Madiou records Dessalines's words: "Maintain your precious concord, this happy harmony between you; it is the gauge of your good fortune, of your salvation, of your success: it is the secret of being invincible."57
But it was Dessalines's attempt to redefine the ownership of land that probably cost him his life. In 1804 he had rescinded all transfers of property made after October 1802, thus removing mulatto claims to valuable plantations. In 1805 he decided that all land titles would have to be verified. Tradition has it that Dessalines would check for the authenticity of land titles by smelling them to discover those faked by smoking into looking old: "ga pas bon, ga senti fumie" (it's no good, it smells smoked). According to many, this was a direct attack on the anciens affranchis, those who had taken, or had been given land formerly owned by their white planter fathers.
In his constitution Dessalines had given equal rights to both legitimate children and those recognized by their fathers but born out of wedlock, thus accepting the prevalence of plasaj, or consensual union, not wishing to coerce his people, those he called "natives of Haiti," to follow the marital rituals of the whites. According to Madiou, Dessalines's law of May 28, 1805, decreed that it would be unjust to establish unequal rights in inheritance among men who had come out of servitude and degradation, since these "indigines had all been . . . legitimized by the revolution." However, for Dessalines there could be no kinship with a white colonist. No mulatto could claim that he was entitled to his father's land. Ardouin, a descendant of the disenfranchised anciens affranchis, argued that land reform was "an attack on the sacred right of property." But for Janvier, and other later Haitian historians, Dessalines "wanted to make the genuine independence of the peasant possible by making him an owner of land."58
When we ask what made possible the second coming of Dessalines as hero and god, we must attend to his vision of the true Haitian. He gave property to those slaves who had, only recently, been consid-
ered property themselves. The division of land, his attempt to destroy "false" property titles, and the violence with which he tried to carry out what has been called "an impossible reform of the mentality of the ruling classes, and perhaps his own mentality,"59 would make him the favorite of left-leaning, twentieth-century novelists Reni Depestre and Jacques-Stephen Alexis.60 As the sociologist and anthropologist Antinor Firmin put it in De l'igaliti des races humaines (his 1885 response to Gobineau's De l'inigaliti des races humaines ):
For us, sons of those who suffered the humiliations and martyrdom of slavery, we could see there [in Dessalines's actions] the first manifestation of the sentiment of racial equality, a sentiment which Dessalines still personifies in Haiti.61
Between Dessalines's death in 1806 and the speech of Lysius Salomon (the finance minister during la politique de la doublure ) in memory of the "emperor-martyr" in 1845, the transition from oblivion to glory had taken place. Speaking at the parish church of Cayes on October 17, 1845, Salomon proclaimed: "Avenger of the black race, liberator of Haiti, founder of national independence, Emperor Dessalines! today is your glory, the sun today burns for you as radiantly as it did in 1804." Before Salomon's daring speech, which blamed "the aristocracy of color" for Dessalines's death (and earned Salomon, who was later called "the eater of mulattoes," their lasting fury), previous governments had ignored or condemned "the Liberator."
One exception was the cunning political move by the mulatto Charles Rivihre-Hirard in January 1844, during the forty-first anniversary of the founding of the state of Haiti. As Madiou put it: "He made a speech where, for the first time since the death of Dessalines in October 1806, these words came out of the mouth of a President of the Republic: 'It is to the glorious Dessalines, it is to his immortal comrades that the Country owes the new era into which she enters.'" Madiou reminded his readers that Rivihre-Hirard was part of the class that despised Dessalines, the large landowners of Cayes, who had most to lose when Dessalines began his call for property reform. He "belonged to a class of citizens who saw in Dessalines nothing but a barbaric despot that they had sacrificed; but since they planned a coup d'itat, they had to draw on the sympathies of the people by glorifying the founder of independence."62 Yet, Madiou concluded, the people were not dupes of these "empty words," for they had heard that Dessalines's remainsunworthy of a mausoleumstill lay in a deserted grave, marked only by a brick tomb with the inscription in Creole:
"Ce-git Dessalines,/Mort ` 48 ans" (Here lies Dessalines,/Dead at 48 years old).63
Some fifty years after Rivihre-Hirard claimed the figure of Dessalines for his own political designs, President Florvil Hyppolite built in France a modest monument in memory of Dessalines. Later, for the centenary celebration of the Haitian nation, which actually marked the beginning of the state cult of Dessalines, Justin Lhirison composed the national anthem, the "Dessalinienne." Sung for the first time on January 1, 1904, the song begins:
For our Ancestors
Let us march together
No traitors in our ranks
Let us be the only masters of the land,
Let us march together
For our Country
For our Ancestors
But the monumentalization that turned October 17 from a day that heralded liberation from a dictator to a day of mourning for his death was devised by literate Haitians in the cities. Repressive governments, such as that of Louis Borno under the U.S. occupation of 19151934, found the erection of a mausoleum for the Liberator easier than affording their subjects liberation from internal oppression and foreign control.
Called by the literate elite "the Great One," "the Savior," "the Lover of Justice," and "the Liberator," the Dessalines remembered by vodou initiates is far less comforting or instrumental. They know how unheroic the hero-turned-god could be. The image of Dessalines in the cult of the people remains equivocal and corruptible: a trace of what is absorbed by the mind and animated in the gut. How inevitable are the oscillations from hero to detritus, from power to vulnerability, from awe to ridicule: a convertibility that vodou would keep working, viable, and necessary.
Not simply master or tyrant, but also slave and supplicant, Dessalines and the religious rituals associated with him keep the ambiguities of power intact. "Do you have the heart to march in blood all the way to Cayes?" Dessalines asked the soldiers of his third brigade before his assassination in October 1806. Unlike the spectacles of sanctification endorsed by the urban literati and the politicians, the history reconstructed by the gods and their devotees is not always one of revolt and
triumph. Gods held in the mind and embodied in ceremony reenact what historians often forget: the compulsion to serve, the potency and virtue of atrocity. The very suppressions, inarticulateness, and ruptures in ritual might say something about the ambivalences of the revolution: it was not so liberating as mythologizers or ideologues make it out to be, and the dispossessed, who continue to suffer and remember, know this.
Dismemberment, Naming, and Divinity
Vodou enters written history as a weird set piece: the ceremony of Bois-Caoman. The story is retold by nearly every historian, especially those outsiders who enjoyed linking the first successful slave revolt to a gothic scene of blood drinking and abandon. David Geggus has written in Slavery, War, and Revolution: The British Occupation of Saint Domingue that "the earliest mention of the famous Bois Caoman ceremony seems to be in Dalmas's Histoire of 1814." Though the French colonist Antoine Dalmas's lurid account in his Histoire de la rivolution de Saint-Domingue seems an unlikely source for the spirit of liberation, what matters is how necessary the story remains to Haitians who continue to construct their identity not only by turning to the revolution of 1791 but by seeking its origins in a service quite possibly imagined by those who disdain it.64
On the stormy, lightning-filled night of August 14, 1791, in the middle of the Caoman woods, Boukman (a oungan, or priest) and a manbo (priestess) conducted the ceremony that began the fight for independence. Madiou, though given to much melodramatic detail, did not include the ceremony in his history. But vodou, once displaced, reared its head a few pages following his descriptions of the uprising in the North. Madiou described Biassou, who, with General Jean-Frangois, led the revolt, surrounded by "sorcerers" and "magicians." His tent was filled with multicolored cats, snakes, bones of the dead, and other objects of what Madiou calls "African superstitions."65 Ardouin described the ceremony of Bois-Caoman, but told his reader that he was "transcribing here an extract from the unedited works of Ciligny Ardouin" that included information he received from an old soldier who resided in Saint-Domingue, in service of the King of Spain.66
Both Madiou and Ardouin recounted how blacks, "phantasiis, " as Madiou put it, by sorcerers, threw themselves at cannons, believing the balls dust. When blown to pieces, they knew they would be reborn in Africa. The naturalist Descourtilz (his life was saved during the retaliatory slaughter of whites by Dessalines's wife, Claire Heureuse, who hid him under her bed) remembered how "the Congo Negroes and other Guineans were so superstitiously affected by the utterances of Dessalines that they even let him persuade them that to die fighting the French was only a blessing since it meant that they were immediately conveyed to Guinea, where, once again, they saw Papa Toussaint who was waiting for them to complete the army with which he proposed to reconquer Saint-Domingue."67
The colonized are not necessarily, as Albert Memmi has written, "outside of the game" of history. Gods were born in the memories of those who served and rebelled, and they not only took on the traits or dispositions of their servitors but also those of the former masters. tough revenants housed in the memories of the descendants of slaves. While de-idealizing, by reenacting to the extreme, a conceit of power, the figure of Dessalines became a proof of memory: something gained by those who were thought to have no story worth the telling.
To reconstruct a history of the spirits in Haiti is no easy matter. How does our thought about a glorified, if ambiguous, past become palpable? How do we get from now to then, to a history beyond the reach of written history? Until the American occupationand one could argue, the publication of Jean Price-Mars's Ainsi parla l'oncle (1928)the Haitian elite looked upon vodou as an embarrassment. Even Duverneau Trouillotwho published his "esquisse ethnographique" (ethnographic sketch), Le Vaudoun: Apergu historique et evolutions in 1885while listing (for the first time, as far as I know) the individual spirits, felt that vodou in Haiti demonstrated the inevitable degradation of ancestral practices, reduced to "a tissue of rather ridiculous superstitions." Trouillot prophesied that Christian civilization would soon absorb these atavistic "remnants" or "debris."68
Born in Haiti, Dessalines is called a lwa krhyol (Creole god). As Ogou Desalin he walks with the African Ogou, the gods of war and politics that remain in Haiti in their multiple aspects. Duverneau Trouillot warned that after the revolution, African beliefs and rituals would continue to degenerate. But the old traditions and gods remained powerful, embracing new events and leaders like Dessalines.
With independence, the underground opposition to the now defeated white oppressor did not disappear, for the spirits, and the people's need for them, was not contingent on being suppressed. Rather, vodou came, to some extent, out into the open to thrive. But haltingly so, as though the people were keeping some of the old secrets hidden, ready to serve in other repressive situations that did not fail to occur.
In transcribing a popular song addressed to Dessalines, a student of oral history faces nearly insurmountable problems of translation and retrieval. Alfred Mitraux in Voodoo in Haiti and Odette Mennesson-Rigaud and Lorimer Denis (Duvalier's comrade in folkloric exploration in the 1940s) in "Cirimonie en l'honneur de Marinette" record the following song, which I heard during a four-day genealogy of the gods in Bel-Air, Haiti, in 1970. The singer, who was also a oungan, concentrated on stories of the spirits or misth (mysteries) who inspired the revolutionaries, particularly the spirit of Frangois Makandal, the prerevolutionary maroon leader and prophet, who, the tale goes, warned Dessalines before his death not to go to Pont-Rouge.
Pito m'mouri passi m'couri (Better to die than to run away)
Pito m'mouri passi m'couri
Dessalines, Dessalines dimembri
Vive la liberti.69
According to Mennesson-Rigaud, this song was sung by Haitian soldiers during the revolution and is preserved in the militant Petwo ceremonies.70 Both Mitraux and Mennesson-Rigaud translate dimembri/demanbre as "powerful." Yet in Creole the word means "dismembered," "beaten," or "battered." How did these two ethnographers come up with power from accounts of Dessalines shot, kicked, and dismembered?
If we take both meanings as possibleindeed, as necessaryrecords of the human capacities for knowledge, courage, and composure, then we have a Dessalines who is battered and powerful, dead and living. Talking with practitioners in Port-au-Prince in 1986, I heard another form of the word, which might be transcribed as denambre . Could denambre be a form of dinombrer or dinommer (to count or to name)? Both activitiesnumbering and namingcarry great power for those who believe in the magic of numbers or the secret of naming; hence the translation "powerful." Further, in Haiti nam means
Oungan sings the genealogy of the gods. Bel-Air,
Haiti, 1970. Photograph by Leon Chalom.
spirit, soul, gist, or sacred power. So, Dessalines denambre either has his spirit taken away, or, since he was feared to be a sorcerer, he has the power to de-soul, to steal someone's spirit.71
The history told by these traditions defies our notions of identity and contradiction . A person or thing can be two or more things simultaneously. A word can be double, two-sided, and duplicitous. In this broadening and multiplying of a word's meaning, repeated in rituals of devotion and vengeance, we begin to see that what becomes more and more vague also becomes more distinct: it may mean this, but that too.
In spite of this instability, or what some argue to be the capriciousness of spirits and terminologies, something incontrovertible remains: the heritage of Guinea maintained in Haiti by serving the gods. Those who live are reclaimed by the ancestors who do not diewho return as vengeful revenants if not properly servedand by the gods who cajole, demand, and sometimes oppress the mere mortals, the chritiensvivants who forget their ancestral origins. The gods are not only in your blood but in the land. In parts of contemporary Haiti the demanbre, or sacred plot of land, marks the "spiritual heritage of the group."72 Defined as "the basic unit of peasant religion," "the common family yard," and "the center of the veneration of the dead," this ancestral land cannot be divided, sold, or given away.73 Haiti was conceived as earth blooded with the purifying spirit of liberation. Serving Dessalines thus reinspirits what many believe to have been his legacy: the indivisible land of Haiti consecrated by the revolution and projected in his Constitution of 1805 as uncontaminated by foreign proprietors or masters. Dessalines demanbre, the dismembered but potent Dessalines of the song, intimates this promise of indivisibility and proof of devotion. Having lost his personal identity, he becomes the place. The dismembered hero is resurrected as sacred locale.
Service for Dessalines records an often grueling attachment to a recalcitrant land, as well as bearing witness to a cruel and demanding intimacy. The song about Dessalines demanbre joins the hero to a powerful "she-devil" or "sorceress," known as Kita demanbre. When Kita or Dessalines demanbre appears in a ceremony, usually in the violent shvis zandr, they reenact a ferocity that annihilates any socialized, or fixed, opposition between male and female. The feared Marinht-bwachhche (Marinht-dry-bones, dry-wood, brittle or skinny arms) said to mange moun (eat people) is also called Marinht-limen-difi (light-the-fire). Served with kerosene, pimiento, and fire, she is the lwa who put
Shvis zandr, at Alvarez's compound. Between Gressier
and Liogane, Haiti, 1970. Photograph by Leon Chalom.
Song to "Papa" Dessalines, shvis zandr. Oungan Alvarez
wears the red scarf of Ogou Desalin. Between Gressier
and Liogane, Haiti, 1970. Photograph by Leon Chalom.
the fire to the cannons used by Dessalines against the French. Marinht, with the possible subtext of the French Marianne, as a national image of revolution and republican fervor, also reconstitutes legends of ferocity distinctly associated with black women. In one of many letters to Napoleon, Rochambeau warned from Cap Frangais: "If France wishes to regain San Domingo she must send hither 25,000 men in a body, declare the negroes slaves, and destroy at least 30,000 negroes and nigressesthe latter being more cruel than men."74 The other Petwo gods that bear the names of revolt, the traces of torture and revenge, like Brisi Pimba, Baron Ravage, Ti-Jean-Dantor, Ezili-je-wouj (Ezili with red eyes), and Jean Zombi, recall the strange promiscuity between masters and slaves; white, black, and mulatto; old world and new. These rituals of memory could be seen as deposits of history. Shreds of bodies come back, remembered in ritual, and seeking
vengeance: whether blacks fed to the dogs by Rochambeau or whites massacred by Dessalines.
The lwa most often invoked by today's vodou practitioners do not go back to Africa; rather, they were responses to the institution of slavery, to its peculiar brand of sensuous domination. A historical streak in these spirits, entirely this side of metaphysics, reconstitutes the shadowy and powerful magical gods of Africa as everyday responses to the white master's arbitrary power. Driven underground, they survived and constituted a counterworld to white suppression. It is hardly surprising that when black deeds and national heroic action contested this mastery, something new would be added to the older traditions.
The dispossession accomplished by slavery became the model for possession in vodou: for making a man not into a thing but into a spirit. In 1804, during Dessalines's massacre of the whites, Jean Zombi, a mulatto of Port-au-Prince, earned a reputation for brutality. Known to be one of the fiercest slaughterers, Madiou described his "vile face," "red hair," and "wild eyes." He would leave his house, wild with fury, stop a white, then strip him naked. In Madiou's words, he "led him then to the steps of the government palace and thrust a dagger in his chest. This gesture horrified all the spectators, including Dessalines."75 Jean Zombi was also mentioned by Hinock Trouillot as one of the takos who had earlier threatened Dessalines in Plaisance. Variously reconstituted and adaptable to varying events, Zombi crystallizes the crossing not only of spirit and man in vodou practices but the intertwining of black and yellow, African and Creole in the struggle for independence.
The ambiguities of traditions redefined by changing hopes, fears, and rememberings are exemplified by the brief mention of Jean Zombi in the 1950s by Milo Rigaud in La Tradition voudoo et le voudoo haotien. "Jean Zombi is one of the most curious prototypes of vodou tradition. He was one of those who, on Dessalines's order, massacred the most whites during the liberation of Haiti from the French yoke. Jean Zombi is actually one of the most influential mysteries of the vodou pantheon: as lwa, he belongs to the Petwo rite."76 According to the anthropologist Melville Herskovits, in Dahomean legend the zombis were beings without souls, "whose death was not real but resulted from the machinations of sorcerers who made them appear as dead, and then, when buried, removed them from their grave and sold them into servitude in some far-away land."77 Born out of the experience of slav-
ery, the sea passage from Africa to the New World, and revolution on the soil of Saint-Domingue, the zombi tells the story of colonization.
An especially important definition is that of Moreau de Saint-Miry, who presents for the first time in writing the night world of what he names revenans (spirits), loupgaroux (vampires), and zombis, which he defines as a "Creole word that means spirit, revenant."78 The name zombi, once attached to the body of Jean, who killed off whites and avenged those formerly enslaved, revealed the effects of the new dispensation. Names, gods, and heroes from an oppressive colonial past remained in order to infuse ordinary citizens and devotees with a stubborn sense of independence and survival. The undead zombi, recalled in the name of Jean Zombi, thus became a terrible composite power: slave turned rebel ancestor turned lwa, an incongruous, demonic spirit recognized through dreams, divination, or possession.
In contemporary Haiti, however, the zombi calls up the most macabre figure in folk belief. No fate is more feared. The zombi, understood either as an evil spirit caught by a sorcerer or the dead-alive zombi in "flesh and bones," haunts Haitians as the most powerful emblem of apathy, anonymity, and loss. Maya Deren locates the terror incited by the zombi not in its malevolent appearance but in the threat of conversion projected by this overwhelming figure of brute matter: "While the Haitian does not welcome any encounter with a zombie, his real dread is that of being made into one himself."79 This incarnation of negation or vacancy is as much a part of history as the man Jean Zombi. In Guadeloupe and Martinique, zombi simply means evil spirit, but in Haiti the zombi undergoes a double incarnation, meaning both spirit and, more specifically, the animated dead, a body without mind or, as the Jamaican novelist Erna Brodber, in her recent Myal, has so aptly put it, "flesh that takes directions from someone."
The phantasm of the zombia soulless husk deprived of freedomis the ultimate sign of loss and dispossession. In Haiti, memories of servitude are transposed into a new idiom that both reproduces and dismantles a twentieth-century history of forced labor and denigration that became particularly acute during the American occupation of Haiti. As Haitians were forced to build roads, and thousands of peasants were brutalized and massacred, tales of zombis proliferated in the United States. The film White Zombie (1932) and books like William Seabrook's The Magic Island (1929) and John Huston Craige's Black Bagdad (1933) helped to justify the "civilizing" presence of the marines in
"barbaric" Haiti. This reimagined zombi has now been absorbed into the texture of previous oral traditions, structurally reproducing the idea of slavery in a new context.
As lwa, then, Jean Zombi embodies dead whites and blacks, staging again for those who serve him the sacrificial scene: the ritual of consecration that makes him god. In this marvel of ambivalence, the zombi is also consumed by the dead who continue to undergo zombification. In Un Arc-en-ciel pour l'occident chritien (1967), Reni Depestre summons "Cap'tain Zombi," who consolidates the pieces of history preserved in the name.
I am teeming with corpses
Teeming with death rattles
I am a tide of wounds
Of cries of pus of blood clots
I graze on the pastures
Of the millions of my dead
I am shepherd of terror.80
Let us return to Dessalines's Constitution of 1805, and to the logic of the remnant turned god. "The law does not permit one dominant religion" (article 50). "The freedom of cults is tolerated" (article 51). Freedom of religion would not again be allowed, in the many constitutions of Haiti, until 1987. Both Toussaint and Christophe had recognized only Catholicism ("La religion Catholique, apostolique et romaine") as the religion of the state. Dessalines remained close to the practices of the Haitian majority. But Dessalines betrayed the gods he served in Arcahaie, in the West of Haiti. According to Milo Rigaud, who does not give sources for his unique details of Dessalines possessed and punished, Dessalines suffered the vengeance of the spirits for ignoring their warnings not to go to Pont-Rouge. Rigaud concludes, "The case of Dessalines recalls an axiom well known by all those who serve the gods in Africa: 'You must never make a god lose face."'81 Nor did the gods forget the general's attack on their servitors when he followed Toussaint's orders in 1802. But what Ardouin called the "misfortunes" of popular vengeance on Dessalines could be a record of something less verifiable and more disturbing. The mutilation of Dessalines not only records a collective frenzy visited on the once-powerful body but reinvests the corpse with the possibility of transfiguration. Such a hankering after resurrection, repeated and theatrical, still plagues Haiti, with each new hero, with each new government, with every dispensation.
General Yayou, when he saw the body of Dessalines, proclaimed: "Who would have said that this little wretch, only twenty minutes ago, made all of Haiti tremble!" When an initiate is "possessed" by the "emperor," the audience witnesses a double play of loss and gain. The "horse" (in the idiom of spirit possession, the god "mounts" his horse) remains him- or herself even when ridden, but is stripped bare, as was Dessalines, of habitual characteristics, the lineaments of the everyday. In this transformative articulation, the essential residue, gist, or spirit, the nam remains. What emerges after the first moments of disequilibrium and convulsive movements is the ferocity commonly associated with Dessalines. It is as if the self is not so much annihilated as rendered piecemeal. Out of these remnants comes the image of the god or mystery who overtakes what remains.
In Divine Horsemen, Maya Deren writes, "The self must leave if the loa is to enter, " alerting us to the risky dependency of the god on the human vessel.82 Each lwa has a variety of character traitsspeech patterns, body movements, food preference, or clothesbut he or she cannot express them except by mounting a horse. Deification is never simply a spiritualization of matter. Spirit and matter, defilement and exaltation do not dwell unperturbed in harmony. The wrinkle or hitch in the business of divinity is what makes vodou resistant to annihilation, whether by the constant persecutions of the Church or, more recently, by "Papa Doc" Duvalier's use of it for political ends.
Difilie
In the last year of the revolution, General-in-Chief Dessalines led an army whose spirit and courage was recorded in numerous accounts by the French military. A song from the days when Dessalines and his columns of men (figures vary from 16,000 men in four columns to 27,000) marched toward victory at Butte de la Charier and Vertihres was sung to a generation of students at the Ecole de Midecine in Port-au-Prince by an old man named Brother Hossi or Josi. Timolion Brutus, one of the students who heard it around 1901, records it in his homage to Dessalines as the battle song celebrating the march of Dessalines to the North, where he would assault Cap Frangais and force the surrender of General Donatien Marie Joseph de Vimeur, vicomte de Rochambeau:
Dessalines sorti lan Nord
Vini vouh ga Ii porti. (bis)
Ga li porti.
Li porti Ouanga nouveau, (bis)
Ouanga nouveau (bis)
Dessalines sorti lan Nord
Vini compter ga li portg (bis)
Ga li porti.
Li porti fusils, li porti boulets, (bis)
Ouanga nouveau (bis)
Dessalines sorti lan Nord
Vini prend ga li porti. (bis)
Ga li porti.
Li porti canons pour chasser blancs, (bis)
Ouanga nouveau (bis)83
(Dessalines is leaving the North
Come see what he is bringing
What he is bringing.
He is bringing new magic,
New magic
Dessalines is leaving the North
Come notice what he is bringing
What he is bringing.
He is bringing muskets, he is bringing bullets,
New magic
Dessalines is leaving the North
Come take what he is bringing
What he is bringing.
He is bringing cannons to chase away the whites,
New magic)
A woman marched with Dessalines's troops, peddling provisions to the soldiers. Known as Difilie, she was born to slave parents near Cap Frangais. When she was about eighteen years old, Difilie was raped by a colonist, her master.84 During the revolution, she must have escaped, though nothing is known about her until she became sutler to Dessalines's troops. But with Dessalines's death, Difilie became the embodiment of the Haitian nation: crazed and lost, but then redeemed through the body of their savior. A woman's lamentation converts a sudden gruesome act into a long history of penitential devotion. The historian and dramatist Hinock Trouillot, in Dissalines ou le sang du Pont-Rouge (1967), gives Difilie the task of condemning
her people: "What the French could not accomplish, have they really done it, these monsters? . . . Haiti has dared what Saint-Domingue tried in vain. Dessalines? Dessalines? Him? The titan? The father of our country? What will they say about us, tomorrow? . . . The blood of the black Christ! The blood of the Emperor!"85
The fall of Dessalines and the excesses committed on his corpse are overshadowed by this final, bizarre drama that writers as diverse as Madiou and Ardouin record. As the people defiled the remains of their "supreme chief," Difilie entered the scene. She is mad, though neither Madiou or Ardouin tells how or why she became so. Madiou recounted how numerous children, joyously shouting, threw rocks at Dessalines's remains. A wandering Difilie asked these "innocent beings who abandon themselves to good as to evil," who this bundle of something was . They answered Dessalines, and her wild eyes became calm: "a glimmer of reason shone on her features." She found a sack, loaded it with his bloody remnants, and carried them to the city cemetery. General Pition then sent soldiers who, for a modest sum, buried Dessalines.86
Ardouin, who would have been ten years old in 1806, claimed to have been an eyewitness to the popular vengeance in Port-au-Prince. Refuting Madiou's version, Ardouin explained that he knew Difilie, and she could not have carried Dessalines. "Perhaps Madiou did not recall that Dessalines was hefty, weighing perhaps 70 to 80 kilos: how could a rather weak Difilie carry such a weight?" According to Ardouin, she followed the officers, and for a long time returned to the site, where she threw flowers over the grave.87 Though Difilie was helped to carry the sack by a well-known madman named Dauphin, most accounts choose to ignore what is possible in favor of the miraculous: Difilie's lone journey with the hero's remains.
The poet and dramatist Massillon Coicou wrote a drama in two acts, L'Empereur Dessalines, performed for the centenary of Dessalines's death in Port-au-Prince on October 7, 1906. In his preface to the published version, Coicou, who was assassinated by President Pierre Nord Alexis in 1908, reminded his readers that "Dessalines, beaten, massacred, abandoned to execration, regained his prestige."88 In this version, Difilie took Dessalines's members, clotted with mud and blood, scorned by everyone, bathed them in tears, and carried them in the folds of her dress. Coicou asks, "Isn't she the most beautiful incarnation of our national consciousness, this madwoman who moved amidst those who were mad but believed themselves sane?"89
"Oh! the murderers!!!
Look! Difilie the madwoman takes you away
The monster. Look at him who sleeps in my dress
I will take care of him, my dear love, for a long time.
I will watch over you, for ten, twenty, thirty, one hundred years."90
Hinock Trouillot, in Dessalines ou le sang du Pont-Rouge, leaves little to the imagination when he presents Difilie busily collecting, examining, and naming the emperor's remains, then putting them in her sack:
"That, it is his head . . . The center of the volcano that activated the hero . . . Here is the trunk . . . he was powerful . . . So many scars! . . . Tokens of his unparalleled bravery . . . Shreds of battered flesh!"91
Other writers, eager to translate social drama into healing miracle, described the encounter between the emperor-turned-fleshly-remnant and the madwoman-turned-sane as a ritual of reciprocal salvation. Windsor Bellegarde asks all Haitians to remember "Difilie-La-Folle [Madwoman] who, on the sad day of October 17, 1806 . . . saw the Founder of Independence fall under Haitian bullets, and when the people of Port-au-Prince seemed suddenly to go mad, she gave to everyone an eloquent lesson of reason, wisdom, and patriotic piety."92 Others described the encounter as verbal confrontation and exorcism, patterned loosely after the stunning vigil of Mary Magdalene. Rid of "seven devils" in Mark and Luke, in the Fourth Gospel she is sole witness of the risen Christ. She waits by an empty tomb, Jesus calls her name, and she then recognizes her resurrected "Master." Difilie names Dessalines (whom she called "this martyr" in the Frenchman Edgar La Selve's account), and this act momentarily chases the demons from her mind.93
Oral tradition, while remembering Difilie, does not try to rationalize or sanctify the terrors of vengeance. Unlike the written accounts, the following song does not depend on schematic reversal: the exchange between sentiment and enlightenment or, more specifically, the possession of the woman in love by the dismembered hero that makes him whole and her reasonable in an ecstasy of expiation.
Parole-a ti pali dij`
Dessalines gangan
Parole-a ti pali dij`
Tous li jours Macandal api pali Dessalines
Dessalines vi pas couti . . .
Difilie oui;
Difilie pi! . . .
Giniral Dessalines oh! gadez misi moin,
Gadez tracas pays-l`
Pays-l` chaviri
L'empirh Dessalines oh! . . .
Ou ci vaillant gagon Pas quitti pays a tombi . . .
Pas quitti pays a gbti94
(The word has already been spoken
Dessalines the priest
The word has already been spoken
Everyday Makandal is going to speak to Dessalines
Dessalines doesn't want to listen . . .
Difilie yes;
Difilie is frightened! . . .
General Dessalines oh! look at my misery,
Look at the troubled country
The capsized country
Emperor Dessalines oh! . . .
You this courageous boy
Don't leave the fallen country . . .
Don't leave the ruined country)
Here, the drama depends on her attachment to the vicissitudes of secular, political life, as well as to the supernatural legend, reported by Rigaud in La Tradition voudou et le voudou haotien, that the spirit of the one-armed maroon hero, Makandal, warned Dessalines not to go to Pont-Rouge.
It is not possible to verify when the Haitian people began to sing this song of worldly regret for the death of their "Papa," their gangan or priest. I suspect that sometime before the literate elite decided it would be wise to resurrect Dessalines as hero, those who suffered under the rule of Christophe and Boyer began to recall Dessalines and their own momentary "madness" in rejoicing over his death. At their moment of greatest failure, still crushed by confounding, persistent oppression, the poor deified Dessalines. This imperiled and particularized deification, so unlike the cult of resurrection adopted by the state, does not necessarily promise a new order of things, nor does it offer Haitians a fantasy of conversion. Note that the Haitian historian Jean Fouchard, reconstructing history according to a dominant agenda, records this song as if it were offered up to the dead hero immediately after his assassination as if by a startled, ignorant, and childlike populace: "the dumbfounded people then sang and still sing in their vodou
ceremonies the ardent supplication of orphans mingled with the terrible omens they did not know about."95
Can a biographical subtext affirm the centrality of the figure of Difilie to both public and popular renditions of revolutionary history? In her "Bibliographie Fiminine, Epoque Coloniale et XIX Sihcle," Ertha Pascal-Trouillot, one of Haiti's numerous acting presidents since the 1986 departure of "Baby Doc" Duvalier, gives a reality to the legendary Difilie. Her name was Didie Bazile. She had spent part of her youth in Port-au-Prince at Fort Saint-Clair, where she followed Dessalines as a vivandihre (sutler) for the indigenous army. According to Pascal-Trouillot, "she had a wild passion for Dessalines that exacerbated the mental troubles caused by the slaughter of her parents by French soldiers." She was not simply a marketwoman or meat vendor, who followed the Haitian Revolutionary Army as it marched (hence her name Difilie, meaning parade or procession), but, unstrung by the loss of her parents and her love for Dessalines, she supplied the soldiers with sex.96
Another story was recalled by the hundred-year-old Joseph Jirimie, known as Monsieur Jirimie, identified in one manual of Haitian literature as "talented writer, storyteller" and "dean of Haitian letters," who told the story to Jean Fouchard in the 1950s.97 According to him, one night Difilie's two sons and three of her brothers, all of whom were enlisted in the army, did not return from a party in the Cahos mountains, where the "slaves" often secretly got together. About six hundred "slaves" were surprised and "pitilessly massacred by the sbirri [sergeants or officers] of the bloodthirsty General Donatien Rochambeau." The news unhinged Didie's mind, but she continued to follow Dessalines's army as a sutler, "with the same spirit, the same faith in final victory." Joseph Jirimie describes how she got the name Difilie. "As soon as the soldiers stopped somewhere to rest, Didie also stopped. Abruptly, the madwoman raised the long stick [used for a crutch] held in her hand, and bravely cried out: difilez, difilez [march, march]. They obeyed her." Whereas Pascal-Trouillot alludes to the effects of unrequited passionDidie's infatuation with DessalinesJirimie is impressed by her inspiring effect on the soldiers and Dessalines's fatherly love for his devotee.98
Difilie, who presided over Dessalines's battles for independence as his sutler and sometime-partner, is the first to stand by him after his dismemberment. Dessalines, turned into pieces of meat, gets reassembled by the woman who used to sell meat to him and his soldiers. She
alone touches the befouled remains. Like Mary Magdalene and "the other Mary," and varying unnamed women who appear in the resurrection scenes in the Gospels (later known in medieval tradition as the "two Marys" or the "three Marys"), Difilie mourns and cares for the body of the Liberator.99 Though Catholic emblems of love, penitence, and devotion pervade the story of Difilie and Dessalines, other elements undergird this national narrative. If Difilie summons the tale of a republic, fallen and then resurrected through transformative love, she also remains an image that goes beyond this blessed conversion. Not only does Didie Bazile, or Difilie, flesh out the sacred in popular incarnations that intermingle promiscuity and power, sex and sacrament, but her drive to collect Dessalines's body parts has more to do with preventing resurrection than enhancing or witnessing it.100
Rather than merely representing patriotic fervor or unmitigated generosity, as the legitimizers of the official cult of Dessalines would have it, Difilie's actions also suggest a preoccupation with proper rituals of burial and fear of the unquiet dead. In describing the West African roots of the ancestor cult in Haiti, Maya Deren notes a concern with the corpse rendered as pieces of magical matter used for harm: "Care is taken . . . that no parts rightfully belonging to the dead matter should remain in circulation in the living world. Such precautions against a false life, which might also be put to magic and malevolent use, are numerous."101 The figure of Difilie transcends the role of witness and devotee. More like the oungan or manbo who prevents the dead from returning to fife to harm the living, Difilie assembles Dessalines's remnants in order to make sure they are suitably buried, thus thwarting their resurrection by a sorcerer. Read in this way, the figure of Difilie transposes apparently contradictory traditions with fluent and convincing ease: the penitent devotee turns into the wise diviner, and the fear of stunted burial is joined to the promise of glorious resurrection.
Lurking in every effusion of ennobling love is the terror of dehumanization. The status of Dessalines as hero and god is restored by the double incarnation of Difilie and Didie Bazile: a problematic but mutually reinforcing union of regenerate love and strong sexuality, legitimate and forbidden practices. To Didie Bazile is attributed the only song of farewell to Dessalines, which Joseph Jirimie says she sang while kneeling before Dessalines's unmarked tomb, and after kissing it three times:
Jacquot tol lt cotoc
Tignan
Jacquot, Jacquot, tol lt cotoc
Tignan
Yo touyi Dessalinn
Dessalinn papa moin
Tignan
Moin pap jam'm blii-ou
Tignan102
(Jack tol lt cotoc
Ti-Jean
Jack, Jack, tol lt cotoc
Ti-Jean
You killed Dessalines
Ti-Jean
Dessalines my papa
Ti-Jean
I will never forget you
Ti-Jean)103
Fouchard explains that the refrain tol lt cotoc was the creolized form of the French tralala . One of Haiti's oldest songs, still repeated as the most moving elegy to Dessalines, it was reputedly composed by Difilie to "her Jacquot that she had loved, admired and so faithfully served, braving bullets, in the retinue of the Army."104
What does the conjunction of hero and madwoman tell us about Haitian history? The trope of long-suffering or mad nigresse and powerful noir became a routine coupling in contemporary Haitian as well as Caribbean texts. The parallels between literary and historical writing raise questions about the myth of the Haitian nation and the kinds of symbols required to make a "national" literature. Haitian history has been written by men, whether colonizers who distort or negate the past, or the colonized who reclaim what has been lost or denied. What is the name of the manbo who assisted the priest Boukman in the legendary ceremony of Bois-Caoman? According to most stories, the black manbo began the attack. "As history tells it she made the conspirators drink the blood of the animal she had slaughtered. while persuading them that therein lay the proof of their future invincibility in battle."105 Arlette Gautier has argued in Les Soeurs de solitude that, as opposed to the men of the revolution, women left no records. "They have remained nameless except for Sanite Belair, Marie-Jeanne Lamartinihre for Saint-Domingue and the mulatta Solitude in Guadeloupe."106
Both Madiou and Ardouin mention women during the revolution. Not only the fierce Sanite Belair, who refused to be blindfolded during her execution, and Marie-Jeanne Lamartinihre, who led the indighnes in the extraordinary Battle of Crjte-`-Pierrot, and Difilie, but also Claire Heureuse (her real name was Marie Claire Filiciti Guillaume Bonheur), the wife of Dessalines, who saved many of the French he had ordered massacred.107 Yet we need to consider how these women are mentioned, how their appearances work within the historical narrative. Their stories are something of an interlude in the business of making history . Bracketed off from the descriptions of significant loss or triumph, the blanches raped and butchered or the noires ardent and fearless became symbols for la bonti, la firociti, or la faiblesse (goodness, ferocity, or weakness). More significant, at least in most standard histories, especially those written by foreigners, the mulatto women who fought with the black rebels, and even took part in the ceremony of Bois-Caoman, are not mentioned. One of the manbo in the ceremony was named Cicile Fatiman. The description of her in Etienne Charlier's Apergu sur la formation historique de la nation haotienne is striking in its portrayal of a light-skinned product of colonial mixing:
Cicile Fatiman, wife of Louis Michel [Jean-Louis] PIERROT, who commanded an indigenous battalion at Vertihres and later became President of Haiti, participated in the Ceremony of Bois-Caoman: she was a manbo. Daughter of an African Nigresse and a Corsican Prince, Cicile FATIMAN was a Mulbtresse with green eyes and long black and silky hair and had been sold with her mother in Saint-Domingue. Her mother also had two sons who disappeared during the trade, without leaving a trace. Cicile FATIMAN lived at Le Cap until the age of 112 years of age, in full possession of her faculties.108
Although Oswald Durand's popular poem "Choucoun" (1883) celebrated the figure of the mulbtresse, the brown-skinned, silky haired "marabout/with eyes as bright as candles," the official poetic dogma of nigritudeboldly politicized in Haiti with Duvalier's cult of noirisme summoned the black woman as muse. The nigresse Difilie, poor and abandoned, became part of a conceptual framework necessary to twentieth-century Haitian writers as diverse as Carl Brouard, Jacques Roumain, and Jacques-Stephen Alexis. How do we read sexuality when locked into the evocation of nationalism or black soul ? Alexis's militant novel Comphre Giniral Soleil (1955) begins with Hilarion, a nearly naked negro in the night, "blue because of his shadow, because of his
blackness." He wanders, thinking about misery, which means thinking about a particular image of woman.
Misery is a madwoman, I tell you. The bitch, I know her well. I've seen her in the capitals, the cities, the suburbs. . . . This enraged female is the same everywhere. . . . Angry female, skinny female, mother of pigs, mother of whores, mother of all assassins, sorceress of every defeat, of every misery, ah! she makes me spit!109
He will later meet Claire Heureuse (his beautiful helpmate named after Dessalines's wife), who promises regeneration from a barbarism represented as female. Hilarion's nigritude, as in so many other dramas of men finding themselves, defines itself against the familiar conceit of the double Venus, women cloven in two as beneficent or savage, virginal or polluted.
What happened to actual black women during Haiti's repeated revolutions, as they were mythologized by men, metaphorized out of life into legend? It is unsettling to recognize that the hyperbolization necessary for myths to be mutually reinforcing not only erases these women but forestalls our turning to these real lives. But such a turn is not my purpose here. Let me attend then to the nature of the feminine emblems underlying and sustaining the nation. The legend of Sor Rose or Sister Rose is a story of origins that depends for its force on rape. In this story, the Haitian nation began in the loins of a black woman. The ancestress must be ravished for the state to be born. Yet, Sister Rose, like Difilie, forms part of a narrative that does not always depend on the facile opposition of virgin and whore. Things are much more complicated. Like the religious calling embedded in her name, the colonial past, once remembered in these reconstructions, is sometimes like a sudden sighting of forced intimacies.
I know of only two written references to this ancestress, both from the 1940s, complementary to the noiriste revolution of 1946: Timolion Brutus's biography of Dessalines, L'Homme d'airain (1946), and Dominique Hippolyte's play about Dessalines and the last years of the revolution (18021803), Le Torrent (1940). In La Tradition voudoo (1953), Milo Rigaud noted that the mulatto Andri Rigaud, ultimately Toussaint's enemy, issued from the coupling of a Frenchman and "a pure nigresse of the Arada or Rada race [in Dahomey], Rose. On his habitation Laborde, he 'served' the Rada mysteries [spirits] from whom his mother had recovered the cult."110
The legend of Rose, like that of the land of Haiti (and, implicitly, like the tale of Difilie), begins with a woman "brutally fertilized,"
as Brutus puts it, "by a slave in heat or a drunken White, a criminal escaped from Cayenne [the French colonial prison]; or a degenerate from feudal nobility in quest of riches on the continent." Summoning this myth of violation, Brutus argues that it is senseless to put mulatto over black or vice versa, since "the origin of everyone is common." No superiority can be extricated from the color and class chaos that began Haitian society. Yet, in this locale of blacks, whites, mulattoes, criminals, slaves, and aristocrats, Rose, represented as the generic "black woman," is singular. In an amalgam of neutralized distinctions, she stands out as victim and martyr.
Let us turn briefly to the legend as dramatized in Hippolyte's Le Torrent, a play celebrating the "flood" and "tempest" of popular revolution that overwhelmed the colonial masters and Napoleon's soldiers. (This apocalyptic drama was recently replayed: Jean-Bertrand Aristide was the leader of the mass movement called Operasyon Lavalas, meaning "flood" or "deluge" in Creole.) Le Torrent, written in collaboration with the historian Placide David, won first prize in a competition of dramatic art organized in 1940 by the self-proclaimed dictator and "Second Liberator," the mulatto President Stinio Vincent.111 In the preface to his Dessalines ou le sang du Pont-Rouge, Hinock Trouillot describes Le Torrent as the "true beginnings of historical drama in Haiti." Praising the play as a "return to the historical sources of the origins of the Haitian nation," Trouillot locates mythic power in the popular struggle against the elites, who lack "national aspiration."112 Performed on May 18, 1940, the play was published in 1965, during the regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier. The play is expertly packaged: its text is preceded by a "communication" from Dumersais Estimi, secretary of state and minister of education under Vincentand in 1946, elected the first black president of Haiti in thirty yearsand by the official report of the jury examining manuscripts, which included Dr. J. C. Dorsainville and Dr. Jean Price-Mars, two leaders of Les Griots, writers who sought a return to the African sources of Haitian life, to Creole, to vodou, and to "authentic" identity. As a government-sponsored spectacle, then, Le Torrent was resurrected in print as a drama worthy of "exalting Haitian patriotism and enhancing the teachings of our National History."113
The folklore manipulated in Le Torrent goes deep into the psyche of the black nation, reconstituted after the national affront of the American occupation, which ended six years before this play was produced at the Theater Rex in Port-au-Prince. Sister Rose presides over the play as the coalescence of all those symbols most gripping to the
black intelligentsia and, hypothetically at least, to the imagination of the black masses: the African ancestral heritage, vodou, revolutionary struggle, and Haitian Creole. Sister Rose is the only character who consistently speaks Haitian, although in the text of the play it is transliterated as French. Her brother Ti-Nokl, taken from Dahomey with Rose and sold to the French planter Robert Delcourt, generally speaks French, even when talking with her. Le Torrent takes place in Hautdu-Cap, not far from Cap Frangais, in Master Delcourt's colonial habitat. This place of wealth and privilege is contaminated not only by the struggle outside but by the question of legitimacy, color, and race in the domestic sphere. The prototypical mythic act is that of white Delcourt sleeping with black Rose, the mistress and housekeeper, who gives birth to the mulatto twins Jean and Pierre. Pierre loves his "dream" of whiteness, Mademoiselle Emilie, the daughter of Captain Jougla, an officer of the Expeditionary Army. The story unfolds as news of General Antoine Richepanse's reinstitution of slavery in Guadeloupe leads to Dessalines's desertion of Leclerc and his temporary alliance with the insurgent black masses led by Ti-Nokl, Macaya, and Jean Zhclh.
The gratifying fantasy of the play is the triumph over colonial color prejudice. Even if you are light-skinned and have fine manners, if your mother is black you will never be accepted by the "pure-blooded" French. Yet, Pierre's initial disavowal of his mother, Sister Rose ("as soon as the young white lady arrives, you will disappear"), turns into recognition when he tells the black woman in the shadows to come forward ("Mom, go get dressed. Go put on your beautiful Indian dress. You will wear your Madras handkerchiefs"). What is most striking about the celebratory reversals of the playDessalines's defection from the French, the mulatto sons joining with the African-born Ti Nokl, and the recognition of "the African soul" and "the regeneration of the race" by none other than the planter Delcourt, as he praises his "black madonna"is that Sister Rose remains constant. In her varying guises, she abides all the changes. Whether called "slave," "mother," "wife," or "servant," whether praised as the incarnation of "love" or "kindness," "luck" or "lady of sorrows," she is the passive recipient of history. Rose, icon of Haiti, ends the play in solitary epiphany. As the white father, the mixed-blood sons, and the black rebels leave (Delcourt returns to France, and his sons go off with Dessalines and his rebels to fight Leclerc), Rose stays where she is told, obedient to the wishes of those who make history: "Sister Rose, alone, the image of the future victorious Country, watches them depart."114
In the legend of Sister Rose, to give oneself to a man, voluntarily or
not, is to give Haiti a history . But what kind of history? And who gets to claim it? In La Femme (1859), Jules Michelet, who had praised Madiou's Histoire, greeted Haiti: "Receive my best wishes, young State! And let us protect you, in expiation of the past!" Yet, while extolling the spirit of this "great race, so cruelly slandered," he turns to Haiti's "charming women, so good and so intelligent."115 A few pages earlier, he had tried to show that those races believed to be inferior simply "need love." Tenderness toward women, as colonial historians had argued in their justifications of slavery, was the attribute of civilized men alone. But Michelet extended the possibility of enlightenment to women in love, specifically to black women who want white men: "The river thirsts for the clouds, the desert thirsts for the river, the black woman for the white man. She is in every way the most amorous and the most generous." Her beneficent desire entitles her, in Michelet's mind, to a particular kind of reverence. Not only is she identified as an icon of loving surrender, but she becomes the land: generalized as an Africa named, tamed, and dedicated to serving Europe. "Africa," Michelet concluded, "is a woman."116
Michelet's words recall descriptions of the femme de couleur in colonial Saint-Domingue, most pronounced in Moreau de Saint-Miry and Pierre de Vassihre, but found in "natural histories" throughout the Caribbean. Not only sensual, but beings who lived for love, they embodied the forced intimacies and luxuriant concubinage of the colonial past. In Haiti, Michelet's Black Venus becomes Sister Rose, beautiful but violated. Yet, it remained for a Haitian, Janvier, in his La Ripublique d'Haoti et ses visiteurs, to be explicit about a perilous history understood as courtship with one aim: possession.
The history of Haiti is such: difficult, arduous, thorny, but charming, filled with interpenetrating, simultaneous deeds, subtle, delicate, and entangled.
She is a virgin who must be violated, after long courtship; but how exquisite when you possess her! . . . She is astonishing and admirable.117
The emblems of heroism or love recuperated in written histories of Haiti often seem to be caricatures or simulations of French "civilization." In this recycling of images, as in the case of Louis Napoleon and Soulouque, we are caught in a mimetic bind. The heterogeneity of vodou syncretism, however, offers an alternative to such blockage. Vodou does not oppose what we might call "Western" or "Christian" but freely associates seemingly irreconcilable elements, taking in materials from the dominant culture even as it resists or coexists with it.
On May 18, 1803, at the Congress of Arcahaie, General-in-Chief
Dessalines ripped the white out of the French tricolor that covered the table. Trampling it under his feet, he commanded that the red and bluesymbolizing the union of mulatto and blackbe sewn together as the new flag and that "Liberti ou la Mort " (Liberty or Death) replace the old inscription, "R.F " (Ripublique Frangaise ).118 In "The Legend of the First Flag" (1927), Luc Grimard renders the theatrical heroics of that memorable night in verse. The gesture of tearing "the white" from "the heart of sublime tinsel" announces the birth of a "new people":
In the nascent Republic, it was for him
A gage of union, a symbolic flag,
It was this somber blue, it was this light red
The mulatto and the black against all the Leclercs!119
But in the minds of many Haitians, the gods or spirits become part of the narrative. In Liogane in the 1970s I heard people recount that Dessalines cut out the white strip of the French flag while possessed by the warrior spirit Ogou. Brutus in L'Homme d'airain (1946) presents an even more compelling version. He tells a story "of undying memory," heard and passed on by Justin Lhirison in his history class at the Lycie Pition in Port-au-Prince in the 1930s. It was not a spirit of African origins that possessed Dessalines, but "the Holy Virgin, protectress of the Blacks." Then, Dessalines cursed in "Congo langage " (the sacred language for direct communication with the spirits) and "then in French against the Whites who dared believe that 'the Independents wanted to remain French.'" Brutus concludes, "He was in a mystic trance, possessed by the spirit when he said: 'Monsieur, tear out the white from that flag .'"120
But who is this spirit? What is the Virgin Mary doing speaking in Congo and in French? Dessalines possessed speaks the language of the spirit who has entered his head and who addresses him as "Monsieur." Ogou, transmogrified as the Virgin Mary, speaks both French and "Congo language" (the generic term for "African languages" and, more specifically, the tongue of vodou initiates). The inherently unreformable quality of this myth goes beyond sanctioned histories and. most important, de-idealizes a "pure" type such as the Virgin. We can begin to understand what happens to the idea of virginity or violation when hooked into the system of local spirituality. If priests violated local women while teaching chastity, if they produced impuritythe mixed blood while calling for purity, how was this violation absorbed into the birth of new gods?
During the chaotic ten-month regime of Jean-Louis Pierrot (April 16, 1845March 1, 1846), the peasant rebel leader Acaau's black lieutenant and chaplain, Frhre Joseph, had great influence in Port-au-Prince. Pierrot, the brother-in-law of Christophe and Acaau's close friend, had, according to Etienne Charlier, married Cicile Fatiman, the mulatto manbo of Bois-Caoman, though her role in the sinister practices that reportedly characterized his time in office is not known. Gustave d'Alaux, in L'Empereur Soulouque et son empire, describes how Joseph (whom he called a "bandit") walked, candle in hand, amid Acaau's bands and edified them with his novenas to the Virgin, and mastered them because of his influence with the vodou spirits.121 D'Alaux makes Joseph's fame coincide with his role as the Virgin's intermediary. One of the most famous political rallying cries from the turbulent years 1843 to 1846 is put in the mouth of the Virgin, who here cooperates with the popular struggle by speaking Creole. Here are Joseph's words, as d'Alaux records them: "Acaau is right, because the Virgin said: Nhgue riche qui connant li ni icri, cila mulbte; mulbte pauve qui pas connant li ni icri, cila nhgue [A rich negro who knows how to read and write is a mulatto; a poor mulatto who does not know how to read or write is a negro]."122 After communicating this Manichean color-and-class conflict as if it were a divine utterance, Joseph began to call himself Frhre Joseph, dress completely in white, and perform his devotions and prayers. He also continued to make prophesies.123
Madiou, writing about the "tempestuous" struggle in 1845 between the two "superstitious" or "pagan" sects, called guyons and saints, revealed how confused spirituality in Haiti had become after independence. African and European materials converged: bags with fetishes, human bones, and snakes were employed in Catholic rituals, while vodou practitioners, called "frhres," carried out priestly functions and recited Catholic liturgy. The guyons, called "loups-garous" by Madiou, and reputed to be cannibals, were thought to carry human flesh in their macoutes (sacks). The saints, equally "fanatical" and "partisans of vodou," considered the guyons "the damned," and "dreaded" and "executed" them. Madiou describes the saints as believing in "the immortality of the soul and in eternal punishments and rewards." They practice vodou, "but under the forms of Roman Catholicism."124
Duverneau Trouillot had argued that after independence, vodou ceremonies had become so "Frenchified," so acculturated to French Catholicism, that the old cult would eventually disappear under the
weight of Christian civilization. The "advantages of liberty" could not help but contribute to the disintegration of what he perceived as increasingly disordered and uncodified beliefs and gods.125 But what Trouillot praised as the benefits of liberation were never available to the Haitian majority. For them, the God, saints, and devils of French dogma, never fully accessible, were accommodated by being remade on Haitian soil. Endowed with new qualities, they lost their missionary or conquest functions. Remnants of texts and theologies, reinterpreted by local tradition, articulated a new history. The Virgin who possessed the militant Dessalines or Frhre Joseph would also haunt Haitians as the djablhs : the feared ghostly she-devil condemned to walk the earth for the sin of dying a virgin.
To serve the spirits is to disrupt and complicate the sexual symbolism of church and state. In answer to Janvier's correlation between the virgin, long desired and finally violated, and Haiti's history, intractable but ultimately apprehended, the most feared spirits, like the most beloved Virgin, were formed out of the odd facts that made up the discourse of mastery permeated by the thought of subordination. A vodou history might be composed from materials such as oral accounts of the possession of Dessalines and his emergence as lwa, god, or spirit, and equally ambivalent accounts of figures like Ezili, Jean Zombi, or Difilie. Sinkholes of excess, these crystallizations of unwritten history force us to acknowledge inventions of mind and memory that destroy the illusions of mastery, that circumvent and confound any master narrative.
Ezili
The despotism of the senses constitutes the source of tyranny.
Emmanuel Levinas, "Freedom and Command"
What is the best kind of submission? You cannot surrender your will, you cannot be possessed unless your body becomes the vessel for the master's desire. The body must be owned, made into property, for possession to take place. In vodou practice, however, such an instrumental seizure does not describe the relationship between a god and mortal. And to talk about possession is somewhat
Wall painting of Ezili Dantr. Bainet, Haiti, 1986
misleading, since those who serve the gods do not use the term. Most often, the experience of being entered, inhabited, and seized by a spirit is described as being mounted (as the horse is by the rider). I want to reflect on a goddess called Ezili in Haiti by thinking about the ways in which a word like possession, so powerful in the Western imagination, becomes in the figure of Ezili something like collective physical remembrance. The history of slavery is given substance through time by a spirit that originated in an experience of domination. That domination was most often experienced by women under another name, something called "love."
In that unnatural situation where a human became property, love became coordinate with a task of feeling that depended to a large extent on the experience of servitude. In his Description . . . de la partie frangaise de I'Isle Saint-Domingue, Moreau de Saint-Miry got at what most characterized Creole society in the colony by concentrating on a cult of desire: "Love, this need, or rather this tyrant of the sensitive soul, reigns over that of the Creole." Love, promiscuity, pleasure, and abandon are words that recur throughout French accounts of the colony of Saint-Domingue. In plantation societyand the same was true on other Caribbean islands and in the United Statesdomination encouraged the brutalization of "enlightened man" and enflamed his unbridled appetite for lust and cruelty. Writing his Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson warned: "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on one part, and degrading submissions on the other."126
But no matter how degrading, how despotic the effects of slavery, there remained a place for love, a kind of excrescence from the everyday oppression and torture, an experience that could be named and claimed by the "civilized" agents of an odious system. How easily the sentiments, when attached to women other than white, became emblematic of lust and debauchery. Yet, the mixed-blood or mulatto mistress somehow became the concrete signifier for lust that could be portrayed as "love." Moreau de Saint-Miry envisioned her as "one of those priestesses of Venus" and then explained: "The entire being of a Mulbtresse is given up to pleasure, the fire of this Goddess burns in her heart only to be extinguished with her life. This cult is her law, her every wish, her every happiness. . . . To charm all her senses, to surrender to the most delicious ecstasy, to be surprised by the most seductive ravishing, that is her unique study."127
If, in the perverse ethics of the planter, the spiritualized, refined
images of white women depended on the violation of black women, the bleached-out sable Venus accommodated both extremes. In the crossing and unsettling of enforced (and contrived) duality, the free woman of color would be served, fed, honored, and adored, and at the same time excluded from marriage, threatened by poverty, and often abandoned. The pervasiveness of this coupling is noted by C. L. R. James in The Black Jacobins : "In 1789, of 7,000 mulatto women, 5,000 were either prostitutes or the 'kept mistresses' of white men."128 But Bryan Edwards reassured his readers in his History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793) that the "free women of color universally maintained by white men of all ranks and conditions, are not prostitutes, as flourished in Europe at that time." In the hybrid New World of forced intimacies and artificial hierarchies, terminologies were conveniently redefined and manipulated. Later, reflecting in Absalom, Absalom! on this cult of desire in the former French colony of Louisiana, William Faulkner would present the Creole octoroon courtesan as exemplary. Wafting through his pages as some "fatal insatiation," she is so highly prized ("they are more valuable as commodities than white girls") and fulfills so well "a woman's sole end and purpose: to love, to be beautiful, to divert," that she goads the male fantasist on to trials of redefinition: "No: not whores. Not even courtesans. . . . No, not whores. Sometimes I believe that they are the only true chaste women, not to say virgins, in America."
What Pierre de Vassihre, writing about Saint-Domingue in the years between 1629 and 1789, called "a very strange familiarity" between those who made themselves masters and those who found themselves slaves, made the old practices of exclusivity unworkable.129
These white women live with their domestics under the weight of the most bizarre intimacy. Nearly every young white Creole owns a young mulbtresse or quarteronne, and sometimes even a young nigresse, whom they make their cocotte . The cocotte is the confidant of all the thoughts of the mistress (and this reliance is sometimes reciprocal), the confidant of her loves.130
In plantation isolation, differences were sometimes collapsed in a reciprocity that made those supposedly inferior absolutely necessary to those who imagined themselves superior. Such intimacy in human bondage also has been noted between black slaves and the free mulatto women they served. As Jean Fouchard puts it, "How could the slave avoid being drawn to . . . that intermediary class whose insolent ostentation gave birth to the war of lace and clothing that involved the entire colony in an all-out competition?"131
Colonial historians of Saint-Domingue were obsessed by the rites of love and the pleasures of the toilette, ceremonies of propriety and consumption. Ezili, known in written representations as "the Black Venus," "the Tragic Mistress," or "the Goddess of Love," remains a commentary on the harrowing reality of Saint-Domingue. A goddess was born on the soil of Haiti who has no precedent in Yoruba or Dahomey. Far more specific in her attributes than Oya, Yemanja, or Oshun, the Ezili (whether Ezili Dantr, Ezili Freda, Ezili-je-wouj, or Marinht) recalls the violent yoking of decorum and lust.
Served by her devotees with the accoutrements of libertinagelace, perfume, jewels, and sweetsthis spirit carries the weight of a history that testifies to the union of profligacy and virtue, thus making a mockery of piety. For not only does Ezili, like Difilie, signal the transcending of violation and whoring through infinite love, but she also tells a rather banal and keenly materialist story. Let me emphasize here that the elaborate dress and the details of service articulate a specific experience of Saint-Domingue that goes beyond the scattered scriptural, classical, and West African materials assembled in the manifestations of Ezili.132 A rage for devotional practices, instead of demanding divestment or abstention, encouraged embellishment and a veneration of luxury. Henry Breen, though writing of Saint-Lucia in the 1840s (which the English and French fought to possess for over a hundred years), explains this rapacious staging of belief, the bond between religious fervor and fashionable ostentation: "In a word, dress and devotion are the order of the day the allengrossing topics of female society; and both are so harmoniously blended that the greatest divotie is often the greatest coquette."133
In his Histoire d'Haoti, Madiou reflected, "If the Spanish and French, in possessing the Queen of the Antilles [Saint-Domingue], left there the bloody traces of their domination, they also left their languages, their mores, their customs, ultimately the germs of this new 'civilization.'" Let us take the spirit surviving today under the name of Ezili as a medium for apprehending the particulars of a society that was not African, not French, and certainly not a civilization as a dominant historiography has taught us to understand it. Transported Africans, uprooted French, and native Creoles found themselves participating together in unprecedented spectacles of civility and barbarism. Imagine a world where grace and "the charm of evenings on the Faubourg St.-Germain" (the Haitian Madiou) coexisted with "a nearly absolute lack of sensibility and even a certain native cruelty resulting
from the harsh and brutal way that they [the planters] treated their slaves" (the Frenchman Vassihre).
Recognized as the most powerful and arbitrary of gods in vodou, Ezili is also the most contradictory: a spirit of love who forbids love, a woman who is the most beloved yet feels herself the most betrayed. She can be generous and loving, or implacable and cruel. As mystery of love, assistance, and beauty, she appears at night to her devotees in the form of a pale virgin. As spirit of vengeance, she is fiercely jealous and sometimes punishes wayward devotees with death, impotence, or frigidity if they dare drink or have sex on those days devoted to her.
In writing about Ezili, most ethnographers, Haitian and foreign, have had recourse to analogy. She is Venus. She is the Virgin Mary or "the sinner" of the Gospels (whether understood as the unnamed penitent or Mary Magdalene). She is Ishtar or Aphrodite. If we forgo limiting ourselves to these external impositions, we can apprehend how Ezili, and the names and practices associated with her, store and reinterpret the unwieldy images of the past. Let us recall the incongruous origins of the cult of the Virgin, the strength of Mariolatry arising from its syncretism of pre-Christian cults of willful goddesses and harlot saints. In practice, there are slippages and uneasy alliances between gods described as antagonistic: Ezili Freda, the pale, elegant lady of luxury and love, identifed with the Virgin Mary or the Mater Dolorosa, represented in Catholic chromolithographs as a young girl, wearing necklaces of pearls and gold, her heart pierced with a golden sword; Ezili Dantr, the black, passionate woman identified with the Mater Salvatoris, her heart also pierced, with a dagger; and Ezili-je-wouj, Ezili Mapian, and Ezili-nwa-kh (black heart) of the militant Petwo family of gods.
When her roles are described, and thus circumscribed in writing, even by Maya Deren in Divine Horsemen and Zora Neale Hurston in Tell My Horse, the discourse on Ezili has most often perpetuated masculine fantasies of women. Split between the "good" Ezili Freda and the "evil" Ezili-je-wouj, between the beautiful coquette "Mistress Ezili" and the old, stooped "Gran Ezili" or Ezili-kokobe (the shriveled), she dramatizes the cult of mystification: the splitting of women into objects to be desired or feared.
In ritual performances this dichotomy is both entangled and blurred. Songs tell of an Ezili Freda abandoned and betrayed, both married and prostituted (both institutions equated by their claims alternately to entitle or dispossess): "Ezili marye, li pa genyen chans! / Ezili jennhs,
Veve of Ezili Freda. Croix- des- Missions Haiti, 1980.
li pa genyen chans!" (Ezili is married, she's unlucky! / Ezili is prostituted, she's unlucky!). Depending on locale, on the particular ceremony, or the composition of the ounfr (in the West of Haiti, ounfr refers to either the temple surroundings or the ceremonial altar), Ezili appears as Ezili-towo (the bull), Ezili-do-ba (low back), Ezili Zandr, and Ezili-sivirine-belle-femme, as well as Ezili Freda, Ezili Dantr, and Ezili-je-wouj. Nowhere is the demolition of an ideal type so pronounced as in the subversive crotics of Mistress Ezili. The pale "lady," alternately sweet and voracious, enters into the head of the black devotee, and together they re-create and reinterpret a history of mastery and servitude. What some have called the "eternal feminine" or
Veve of Ezili Dantor. Port-au-Prince-, Haiti , 1974.
Veve of Ezili Dantr. Bel-Air, Haiti, 1970.
"maternal libido" is reconstituted by varying incarnations that question the very nature of domination.
Though she seems to be the vessel for Western values, bearing the trappings of exquisite formalism and femininity, she subverts the roles she affects. In her many aspects, Ezili reveals a sexual ambiguity and a convertibility of class so pronounced that study of this goddess and her relations with other spirits and mortalsas well as her use in literary representationswould help articulate a phenomenology of eros in Haiti. Her symbol is the heart, or the heart pierced with a dagger, and it appears not only in chromolithographs but in the ritual veve traced out in flour made from corn, or even coffee grounds.
Called the lwa of love, Ezili demands that the word be reinvested. In her rites, notions of affection or attachment undergo strange but instructive metamorphoses. She possesses men as well as women: both sexes take on her attributes and accede to her mystique of femininity. Ezili also chooses women as well as men in "mystic marriage." The customary gendered relations between men and women do not matter. She is no fertility goddess, and except for a song about her lost child Ursule (product of her union with Ogou Badagri), who disappeared under the waters of the Caribbean sea, she is not a mother:
Moin pa gangnin chance, mizan-mi t!
Moin pa gangnin chance!
Moin pa gangnin chance, mizan-mi t!
Moin pa gangnin chance!
Gnou shle ti pitite moin gangnin
L'alli, navigui lan la mh.
Can-note chaviri, avh li!
Lan la mh, cannote chaviri!134
(I'm unlucky, my friends, oh!
I'm unlucky!
I'm unlucky, my friends, oh!
I'm unlucky!
One little child that I had
She went sailing on the sea.
The boat sunk with her!
The boat sunk in the sea!)
Even Gran Ezili, conceived as a stooped matron of prostitutes, is not really maternal. The indeterminacy of this spirit, served by prostitutes, homosexuals, and virgins, is thus oversimplified when portrayed by Maya Deren in Divine Horsemen as "Lady of Luxury" or "Goddess of
Love" or by Zora Neale Hurston in Tell My Horse as the "ideal of the love bed."
What the nigresse observed as a slave in the house of the whites could have contributed to producing a spirit both caring and tender, indifferent and savageshe who is not as lavish with her love as some writers would like, but who alternately hinders and promotes consummation. If we consider the recorded intimacy between slave and mistress, it is less surprising that Ezili changes from Deren's "Goddess of Love" who "protests that she is not loved enough" to "that combined rage and despair which is Erzulie-Gi-Rouge."135
Writing a journal of his voyage to Saint-Domingue in 1782, Justin Girod de Chantrans was concerned about the attachment of white men to free nigresses and mulattas, the devotion to pleasure, the money spent on linen, lace, and jewels for the filles de joie, and the white women's "cruel tyranny," their "extreme brutality" toward their slaves.136 If, as I have argued, the lwa were born out of the slave's awareness of the demands and finery of their masters, the appearance of Ezili in ceremony repeats, perpetuates, and subverts the colonial relation. Whether reactivated in her garb of grace as Ezili Freda or in the fury and violence of her other incarnations, she is not so much a "dream of luxury," as Deren wrote, as a mimicry of excess.
Vodou could be said to signal indigence: a recognition of essential poverty, an economic and cultural lack. But Ezili appears to summon plenitude. In the poverty of rural Haiti, the poorest country in the Western hemisphere, what does serving the implacable, demanding, and luxurious Ezili mean? Never metamorphosed out of history or embellished into dream, Ezili's appearance prods memory, not fantasy. We should not therefore romanticize her as serving the desire for unattainable love or longed-for treasures. Though Maya Deren, in her writing about the spirit, claims to have been possessed by Ezili, she is tempted to render homage to a dream of beauty. "Erzulie is the loa of the impossible perfection which must remain unattainable." Or, "Vodoun has given woman, in the figure of Erzulie, exclusive title to that which distinguishes humans from all other forms: their capacity to conceive beyond reality, to desire beyond adequacy. . . . In Erzulie, Vodoun salutes woman as the divinity of the dream, the Goddess of Love, the muse of Beauty."137 In Deren's portrayal, Ezili yields to a supreme labor, man's right to dream. But she is also served by women, and the bits of lace, the elaborate toilette, the wine and perfumes are part of a social and collective drama that has less to do with a "gorgeous, gracious, and beneficent" woman, who gives herself "in
radiant ecstasy" to men (Hurston's description), than with the continued invitation to retain or repel these extravagances. For Haiti's poor, whether in an urban ghetto or the countryside, she compels an exuberance of devotion that plays itself out in a surfeit of matter. Those who do not have are possessed by the spirit of those who did.
Moreau de Saint-Miry was astonished by the opulence and tyranny exhibited by the white Creoles of Saint-Domingue. We get a picture of men losing control in a tumult of passion, of women burning themselves out in quest of love, victims of jealousy and greed. Writing about "the sensitivity" of the New World mistress, he concluded, "their temperament makes them unable to live without love." He described what happened when white Creole women, overstimulated by chocolate, candies, and cafi au lait, learned of their husbands' betrayals. "Nothing equals the anger of a Creole woman who punished the slave that her husband had perhaps forced to dirty the nuptial bed. In her jealous fury she doesn't know what to invent in order to satisfy her vengeance."138
What some ethnographers have described as fantasies of luxury or collective wish fulfillment might more accurately be seen as the blunt recollection of what those who were abused first by the master and then by the mistress had come to know. This time, however, the rigors of knowing demand a reenactment that goes beyond imitation. The place of torture becomes the scene for a charade of love. The knowledge has to do with the costs and the perils of mastery: a grotesque distortion performed in Ezili's moves from deification to defecation, her confounding of angelic and brute. On a sliding hinge of convertibility, white "ladies," mulatto "mistresses," and black "wenches" merge and expose the falsity of these terms. When men made myths to justify the union of reason and animalitya relation absolutely necessary to the perpetuation of slaveradoration, like abuse, animated and sustained servility, but it was always called by other names.
Service
The lwa don't use bullwhips.
Manbo La Merci Benjamin, Bel-Air, 1970
The lwa depend on sacrifice, on blood and flesh, for life and vigor. One of the problems in discussing the practice of vodou is that, like the shifting languages of the Haitian Revolution, the
Manbo La Merci Benjamin offering
food to Legba. Bel-Air, Haiti, 1970.
terminology used to describe the phenomenon is imbued with a magical or supernatural meaning that originates in European narratives of witches, vampires, and devils. The codes and trappings of Europe contributed to how the spirits of Africa would be received, comprehended, and sustained in the New World. In the appendix to Life in a Haitian Valley, Melville Herskovits referred to the accommodation or "adjustment" to disjunction, to the tension between Europe and Africa, "the two ancestral elements" that "have never been completely merged," as socialized ambivalence . He used the idea to explain the "vacillation" in individuals' behavior and to account for "the political and economic instability of Haiti."139 Ritual services in Haiti exemplify the syncretism, the dual processes of association and interpenetration that Herskovits describes as "selection," "working over," "revamping and recombining the elements of the contributing cultures,
with the result that the ensuing combinations, though of recognizable derivation, differ from their aboriginal forms."140
I refer to Herskovits here because the divergence between a vital African spiritual heritage and European traditions, polarized as either sacred or demonic, makes it difficult to think about what serving the spirits might mean to the devotee for whom the written agenda of priests or ideologues might not matter, or at least not matter as texts do for the literate practitioner.141 Dehumanization or bondage, so much a part of displays of servitude or possession in Europe, where domestic slavery or the bond of property could become a metaphor for unparalleled intimacy or perfect devotion, worked differently for those who were not inventing the institution of slavery, accumulating property, or trying to justify mastery.
The lwa live in the blood (nan san ou ). They are not vampires, though their need for blood might suggest this comparison. There are vampires, called lougawou in Haiti (not like the figure of the werewolf, though the name is the same), who can change themselves into dogs, trees, or horses, shed skin, suck blood, and terrify those who dare walk abroad in the night. The lougawou resemble the European idea of vampire, but they remain totally separated from the lwa and the ancestors; they lurk in a society of evil, cohabiting with other shape-shifters like baka, bizango, djab, or djablhs . Though the lwa drink the blood of sacrificed animals and inhabit the blood and bodies of their human devotees, they do not take away but rather enhance the life of the mortal vessel.
In Haiti the very notion of what constitutes a person or identity is indelibly tied to the lwa, whose lineaments are in turn dependent on the human. The relation between human and god is reciprocal. It is said that when the people are happy, the lwa are happy and show their pleasure by appearing more often. The pitit bon anj or ti bon anj (little good angel), the gwo bon anj (big good angel), and the kr kadav (body cadaver) constitute the three parts of individual identity in Haitian thought. According to "Papa Doc" Duvalier's colleague in ethnographic investigation, Lorimer Denisin his essay "Le Cimetihre" (1956)the ti bon anj, a "guardian" and the source of consciousness, affect, and dreams, depends on the lwa for protection, for keeping the little good angel steady and bound to the person. The gwo bon anj, also called lonb-kadav (shadow-corpse), is the double of the material bodysomething like the idea of spiritus but is understood as the shadow cast by the body on the mind. The gwo bon anj can easily
detach itself from the body. As Denis puts it, "when you dream you're in New York, in Paris, it's the gwo bon anj who visits these places." When Denis's gwo bon anj wanders, it might be seized by a sorcerer, never to return to its fleshly abode.142
The three-part structure of Haitian identity is difficult to comprehend, and accounts are often contradictory. What matters here is that the ti bon anj remains inseparable from all that constitutes our personalityor thinking matterand the lwa, penetrating the ti bon anj during possession, depends on its force for support. Without the lwa, the ti bon anj in turn loses its necessary anchor: the ti bon anj will be free-floating, attaching itself to anything, or in its dislocation may be stolen by a sorcerer and turned into a zombi. Once the lwa is not supported by the ti bon anj, and no longer possesses (or manifests itself to) its chosen identity, the lwa is lost. And dispossessed, it roams the countryside, bereft and rapacious.
The intimate, constant, and sometimes combative relation between god and servant is perhaps difficult to describe because of the use of the word possession, and the stunning of self into spirit.143 Not everyone can be possessed. This temporary experience, also called by French ethnographers the crise de loa (crisis of spirit), overshadows the constancy of relation, the gradual discipline of mind necessary for the momentary phenomenon to take place. As I have said, "possession" is not the term used by practitioners. Instead, they describe the experience in active terms and, most important, as an interaction: "the lwa descends"; "the lwa mounts the horse" (monte chwal ); "the lwa dances in the head." Although it has been said that the self must leave for the lwa to enter, the self is not erased. The experience of alternating attenuation and expansion prods us to envision a configuration of wills, recognizing each other through their relation.
Though the human vessel is filled with spirit to the point of manifesting altered physical movements, changed expressions, and a new identity, the self is also liberated from normal conventions and societal or economic constraints. The god is insatiable, but the unrelenting desire for food, sex, or drink works with and evolves through the human's desire for expression. In this two-way process, postures or masks of servitude act as the medium for renaming and redefinition. Let me begin with Derek Walcott's analysis of conversion and consumption in his essay The Muse of History :
What seemed to be surrender was redemption. What seemed the loss of tradition was its renewal. What seemed the death of faith was its rebirth. . . .
Manbo La Merci Benjamin goes into trance,
supported by ounsi. Bel-Air Haiti, 1970.
Good, the missionary and merchant must have thought, once we've got them swinging and clapping, all will be peace, but their own God was being taken away from merchant and missionary by a submerged force that rose at ritual gatherings, where the subconscious rhythm rose and took possession and where in fact the Hebraic-European God was changing color, for the names of the sub-deities did not matter, Saint Ursula or Saint Ursulie; the Catholic pantheon adapted easily to African pantheism. Catholic mystery adapted easily to African magic. Not all accepted the white man's God. As prologue to the Haitian Revolution, Boukman was invoking Damballa in the Bois Cayman. Blood sacrifices, warrior initiations, tortures, escapes, revolts, even the despair of slaves who went mad and ate dirt, these are the historical evidence, but what is finally important is that the race or the tribes were converted, they became Christian. But no race is converted against its will. The slave-master now encountered a massive pliability. The stave converted himself, he changed weapons, spiritual weapons, and as he adapted his master's religion, he also adapted his language, and it is here that what we can look at as our poetic tradition begins. Now began the new naming of things.144
I have quoted Walcott at length, because his is a provocative if somewhat general interpretation of how a covert history of mastery and appropriation was being created, even as the historians of empire wrote their narratives of conquest. But mastery in this transformative process did not mean the same thing as it did to the Europeans, nor was usurpation effected for the same ends.
"Master of the head" (mht tht ). "I serve the gods" (M shi lwa ). "Ceremony" (shvis ). Let us consider how the terminology of vodou repeats or reenacts the experience of slavery but allows the speakers to hold on to a freedom that goes beyond such intentional signification. Here, I am aware that contemporary practice cannot be adduced as proof of what happened in the slave cults of colonial Saint-Domingue. Even the best of colonial reporters did not agree on what vodou was. Furthermore, it is presumptuous to think that one can say precisely what it meant to serve the gods in the eighteenth century. As Gabriel Debien warns in Les Esclaves aux Antilles frangaises, referring to the written documents: "To describe the lives of slaves after these sources is a paradox. They are never the ones who speak, who bear witness, but the overseers or masters."145
I want, however, to argue that most of the written evidence of domination or blind submission (Moreau de Saint-Miry, for example, observing a Rada rite in the late 1770s, described it as "monstrous absurdity") oversimplifies the complex rethinking of a brutal institution. Those who had no recourse to written texts or maxims, who could not respond to the Code Noir of Louis XIV (which ordained "the Disci-
pline and Commerce of Negro Slaves in the French Islands of America"), responded with prescripts of their own. Slaves, separated from their kith and kin, enduring the Middle Passage to the New World, were introduced to another kind of daily relationship, a perverted family life on the plantation. Because they were things or "chattel" in the words of the Black Code, they were tyrannized by the master, but, as Orlando Patterson argues in his insightful Slavery and Social Death, they never became utterly degraded:
Slavery, for the slave, was truly a "trial by death," as Hegel called it. Out of this trial the slave emerged, if he survived at all, as a person afire with the knowledge of and the need for dignity and honor. We now understand how very superficial are assertions that the slave internalized the degraded conception of him held by the master; or that his person was necessarily degraded by his degraded condition. Quite the opposite was the case, Hegel speculated, and what evidence there is fully supports him.146
Repeating the terminology of constraint became a way to provoke an alternative epistemology that was not necessarily conveyed in language.
Herein lies a key to the ambiguous nature of ritual practice. Let me pursue this hypothetical reconstruction. Slaves learned snippets of Catholicism, including the names of saints. Indeed, they were named after saintsas well as after heroes, Greek and Roman gods, places of origin, days of the week, or physical characteristicsonce their old names were taken away: Clare, Patrick, Paul, Priam, Hector, Jupiter, Cupid, Mina, Senegal, Long-Arms, High-Buttocks.147 As they absorbed these new names and new terms, they transferred them to the experience (or heritage) that had never left them, the memories of spirits and ancestors that would now have to fill new vessels (much as the lwa would always choose new and different bodies for their manifestations). If newly baptized slaves could be renamed as saints, why couldn't their African spirits be identified with, or imbue, a saint? The old gods were called by new names. In this disguise, slaves could still serve their gods.
The Jesuits tried hard to convert the slaves. According to most accounts, the Jesuits distinguished themselves among the denominations operating in Saint-Domingue by caring more for the souls of slaves than for material gain. Instead of calling the transplanted Africans "slaves" or "negroes," the Jesuits used the term serviteurs, a thoughtfulness that, along with their dedicated teaching, resulted in their expulsion in 1763.148 Those who serve the lwa today call themselves shvith (servants). Thus, we find the same wordsmaster, servant,
service, and the names of saintsbut the meanings are different. Note also a curious detail mentioned by Moreau de Saint-Mirry in his discussion of African slaves: "the Africans that one shouts at, calling them Horses, are eager to get themselves baptized."149 Could chwal (horse), the word used by practitioners for one who is possessed by the spirits, have originated with the name whites used to identify slaves who wanted to be baptized? The old meanings are questioned, replayed, kicked around, and, finally, dismissed. In place of the "master," you get the new law embodied in the lwa, the master of your head that debunks the other mastery, while substituting its own discipline of thought, its own ritual of knowing. In Creole the term for law is lwa or lalwa . When pronounced in Creole, lwa sounds like loi in French. It would be interesting to know what those possessed by the loi d'itat (laws of state) thought that slaves were doing when they prayed to and served their lwa.
In Haiti in 1970 Manbo La Merci Benjamin explained how the lwa might seem to oppress their followers but advised me to remember that these spirits did not have bullwhips. She was trying to help me understand that submission to these spirits was not another form of slavery. As she put it, "instead of being turned into a thing, you become a god." Whereas the zombi is the husk of the human emptied of substancenothing more than a thingthe human "possessed" can satisfy needs and impulses, can open up to a plenitude possible only because of the ultimate nonidentity of the spirit and the spirit-possessed.
To conceive the image of the god in oneself is to be possessed. It is a deed of the most serious conception. Thought realizes itself in the imaging of the gods. A recurrent formation of consciousness and a conception realized within the limits of religious study, the experience of possession localizes and materializes what, for the uninitiated, might remain abstract or vague. This discipline of mind and task of imagination are too often ignored in Western accounts of vodou.
To be ridden by the mit tit, to be seized by the god, is thus to destroy the cunning imperial dichotomy of master and slave, or colonizer and colonized. Submission to the god thrives on the enhancement of ambiguity, which could be described as follows: you let yourself be taken over by something outside of you, a force you want and don't want, control and don't control, and you get a sense of yourself that you did not have before. And spirits unfold their potential in the lineaments of the human, getting what they did not have before, the material envelope through which they experience life on earth. In this
Oungan Andri Pierre. Croix-des-Missions, Haiti, 1986.
exchange of spirit and matter, sacred and profane, the alleged disjunction is suspended. Finally, the forms of this experience of letting go and opening out do not depend on ownership. The lwa "rides" or "dances" or "descends," but does not coerce his/her partner into "possession."
"I do not mean domination. . . . The spirit is dancing in the head of his horse." So explained Andri Pierre, the painter and oungan, when I visited him in Croix-des-Missions in 1986. For the "possessed," that dance is not a loss of identity but rather the surest way back to the self, to an identity lost, submerged, and denigrated. In the horrors of the New World, the ability to know the god in oneself meant survival, which is nothing other than the ability to keep expressing the self, and acceding, if only temporarily, to a form of power that defies compromise.
Continues...
Excerpted from Haiti, History, and the Godsby Joan Dayan Copyright © 1998 by Joan Dayan. Excerpted by permission.
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