Pierre Toussaint

An interesting talk with a historian on the life and times of Pierre Toussaint.

Isalina, ou une scène créole

Ignace Nau's Isalina, ou Une scène creole is a frustrating story. Written in the 1830s, it's a literary precursor for Innocent's Mimola or the roman paysan of 20th century Haitian indigénisme. Like his brother, Emile, Nau's Romanticism sought local inspiration and a distinctly Haitian literary expression. Naturally, it is not altogether shocking that Nau incorporated Haitian Creole proverbs and references peasant belief, Vodou, and dance. However, the actual narrative structure of the nouvelle was less convincing. Jean-Julien, the rival of Paul for the affection of Isalina, supposedly used Marie Robin to bewitch Isalina. However, Marie Robin does not appear in the novel and it's not clearly established how the sorcery worked. For instance, we know Isalina suffered hallucinations, and her condition is the gossip of the community around Digneron.  But in the case of Mimola, her malady is described in greater detail by Innocent. Innocent's narrative, perhaps because of its longer length, almost made it more plausible.

Nau makes up for this by highlighting Galba, the caplata or papa-loi who helps Paul restore Isalina. In vivid detail, Galba's consultation is described, as well as the importance of a serpent who is like a guardian angel or deity to him (is this a reference to Damballah?). Later, after Isalina recovers, a dance is held on a Sunday, with clear references to Vodou "sects" (Congo, Poulard, l'Arada) and instruments. The tale ends with Isalina and Paul planning to form a plaçage union, which was common at the time among peasants. Furthermore, Paul plans to have Isalina assist him on his own plot of land, instead of working on the Digneron moulin. As a writer from the Haitian upper class, it is interesting to note the lack of any implied judgment for these customs, although at times the narrator adopts a negative outlook with regard to sorcery and ritual beliefs.

One cannot help but wonder what was the larger ideological motivation for this story. Surely, for a Romantic writer to develop a greater interest in the folkloric and popular beliefs, as well as extolling the beauty of the Cul-de-Sac plain, Isalina's significance in the Haitian and Caribbean literary canon can be understood. However, the Naus were also landowners with extensive interests in the Cul-de-Sac plain, sugar, and, one would think, restoring plantation agriculture. The first section of the story dwells intimately on the functioning of the roulaison, the ateliers of workers, their conductors, and the samba singer. There is, despite the mechanized nature of sugar production and the mills, an almost romanticized communal nature of the labor that perhaps met the interests of Nau and his class rather than the workers and peasants of Digneron. Moreover, despite its extensive use of Vodou and rural beliefs and practice, the narrator also refers to the rural police's attempts to suppress Vodou, since Galba has to avoid their surveillance. Undoubtedly, this is a reference to Boyer's anti-sorcery laws and attempts to criminalize Vodou, yet the author seems to possess a kind of ambivalence. Perhaps his Romanticism sought a middleground between the burgeoning Haitian peasantry and the planter class.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is one of the popular mystery novels recommended to me by a number of people. However, with in the last month, two people suggested I read it. So, I finally got around to it this week. One of the recent recommendations from a leftist suggested the novel is loaded with social commentary on the shortcomings of the Scandinavian social democratic model. In light of the author's politics, such a perspective is actually not far-fetched. Throughout the novel, there is a constant reminder of common sexual violence, misogyny, exploitation of immigrants, corruption in finance and corporate Sweden, dehumanizing social welfare bureaucracies, and, in the case of the Vanger family, strong ties with fascist politics and profiting from deals with Nazi Germany. In this fast-paced and suspenseful thriller, these less flattering aspects of Swedish society are a constant background to Blomkvist's task of investigating Harriet's disappearance and getting back at criminal financier Wennerström. If Blomkvist represents the author himself, but perhaps less ideological in his politics, there is nonetheless a plethora of material to decode here. For instance, the handling of post-Soviet Europe's economic exploitation by Sweden and Western Europe, undoubtedly shapes the corruption of high finance, the state, and violence against immigrants. Truth be told, one could do quite a bit of work with this entertaining novel. 

Pedreira and Price-Mars Ramblings

Antonio Pedreira's Insularismo is one of the more interesting essential texts in Puerto Rican arts and letters. Focusing on insular identity, Pedreira's work builds upon arielismo and Ortega y Gassett for a cultural critique of Puerto Rican identity a few decades after US rule. Undoubtedly, Juan Flores has written probably one of the best essays on Insularismo and the bourgeois ideology guiding Pedreira, but I am interested in Pedreira's commonalities with other Latin American or Caribbean writers of the interwar years. Indeed, I am thinking specifically of Jean Price-Mars and Haiti. Although Pedreira embraces the dominant discourses of scientific racism of his day, and laments the racial mixture which typifies the people of Puerto Rico, he shares with Price-Mars and the indigénistes of Haiti an interest in the peasantry and renewing national identity and culture. 

Of course, Pedreira's racism and Hispanophilia make him quite distinct from Haiti. However, during the US Occupation of Haiti, a similar response of Francophilia to US imperialism (and perceived materialist civilization, lacking culture) could be seen. Furthermore, Haitian intellectuals, like their Spanish-speaking peers in Puerto Rico and Latin America, had long associated the US with coarse capitalism, lacking in the refined culture and aesthetics of so-called "Latin" civilization (Auguste Magloire's writings in Le Matin exemplify the trend). Pedreira, however, added to this legacy of Arielismo The Revolt of the Masses, thereby incorporating new European critiques of mass culture. I have yet to come across obvious references or allusions to Ortega y Gassett in Haiti, but similar viewpoints from Western writers undoubtedly reached Haiti during the 1920s and 1930s through Spengler, Maurras, and others. 

However, Pedreira's true similarity with Price-Mars emerges in his call for cultivating Creolisms in Puerto Rican high culture. Like indigénistes of Haiti, Pedreira and Price-Mars were calling for bourgeois cultural projects of renewal, looking to the local for "high art" purposes in literature, music, and art. However, for Pedreira, the Creolisms of the jibaro or peasant masses, are whitened through a mythologized white peasantry that represents the national soul. Obviously, Price-Mars and like-minded compatriots could not accomplish a similar feat, so the black peasantry and their African antecedence becomes the cherished soul of Haitian identity, and the basis of literature, arts, and music. These parallels reveal how like-minded Caribbean intellectuals of the interwar years responded to the Depression and rise of fascism with similar proposals, despite Pedreira seeking to isolate Puerto Rico from the Caribbean.

Michel Hector

A few years ago, my interest in the history and development of Haitian labor movements and radicalism led me to a renewed interest in the works of Michel Hector. From his various works written under the pseudonym Jean-Jacques Doubout to his later writings on the Haitian Revolution and the genesis of the state, Hector illustrates the utility of Marxist and materialist theory for understanding Haitian historical development. Furthermore, as a militant involved in the labor and socialist movements, Hector's objective analysis offers key insights into different moments and conflicts over strategy, ideology, tactics, and goals of the various left-wing political parties and labor federations. Furthermore, without Hector and his legacy rooted in the long history of Haitian Marxist critique, contemporary scholarship on the Haitian Left would be impoverished and sorely lacking the testimony and analysis of a participant of its struggles.

His work, in both Spanish and French essays and monographs, also provides key sources and an interpretative framework for understanding Haiti's position in the larger political economy of the last two centuries. The earlier work written under the name of Doubout explores the Marxist framework for analyzing the development of social classes and the "semi-feudal" nature of the economy for most of the 19th century. Doubout explains this in Feodalisme ou capitalisme by arguing that the Haitian Revoluton was neither anti-capitalist, nor anti-feudal. One can debate the utility of using terms like feudal, but if understood as "feudal-like," the dichotomy is warranted. Then, the rupture beginning in 1915 with the US Occupation and a rapid increase in the size and number of large-scale agro-industrial firms and proletarianization proceeds. Hector's work follows this development to the early labor movement of the 1920s and 1930s (through figures such as Joseph Jolibois, Jacques Roumain, and Christian Beaulieu), paving the way for the "explosion" of 1946 and independent labor's influence on politics.

Hector, however, also outlines the importance of changes in political economy during the second half of the 19th century with a limited opening of Haiti to foreign capital and enterprise, particularly after 1860. Hector is one of the few historians I have come across whose work encompasses that period in class formation and the extent to which the US Occupation merely accelerated a process that had begun in the later decades of the 19th century. His works include useful chronologies and timelines on the development of capitalist industries in the country, pivotal dates for strikes, and the formations of unions and political parties. Hector's also one of the few sources who wrote about artisans and wage-workers in that period, 1860-1915, including the incipient proto-proletariat into what may be early formations of class consciousness. 

While some may take issue with his Marxist-inspired critiques of the MOP's Fignolé or the UIH's lack of a clear political program or almost anarchist-inspired politics (essentially, playing with fire just as the Duvalier dictatorship was increasingly tyrannical), Hector's oeuvre is foundational for any kind of clear comprehension of the history of modern Haiti. His later work, which, unfortunately, I have not completely read, encompasses social movements and political crisis, such as the piquets of the 1840s and the 1946 revolution. A return to studying early Haiti also manifests, requiring close reading for analysis of the colonial period. In short, Hector's long list of published writings assist in elucidating the entirety of our past, as well as the applicability of Marxist framework for the Caribbean. Rest in peace, Michel Hector Auguste.

Rambling Thoughts on Blyden, Christianity, and Islam

Source 

This intellectual and pan-Africanist is perhaps more responsible than anyone else for the fascination with Islam among African-Americans. West Indian-born Blyden, who chose Liberia and West Africa as his ultimate homeland, praised Islam in West Africa for encouraging education, discipline, abstinence from alcohol, and for not degrading Africans into servile conditions like Christianity. Blyden saw Christianity's spread in Africa by European missionaries as instilling a servile nature in converts whereas Islam, with its longer history in Africa, had promoted learning, trade, and, according to Blyden, was a step above 'fetishism' of African traditional religion. Blyden was so taken with Islam that he also traveled to Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, studying the Arabic language and the Koran.

Blyden had also promoted the study of Arabic in Sierra Leone and Liberia, at one point envisioning a partnership between Christian Americo-Liberians and the Muslim states of the West African interior. Of course, Blyden saw Islam as a preparatory step to the 'true' religion of Christianity, but was unique among Western writers for acknowledging many positive elements of the faith. It also becomes clear that he romanticized Islam in Africa, largely ignoring the slave trade, and his praise of Islam over Christianity was clearly tied to the masculinist impulse of black nationalism as a political project. Unlike Christianity, which allegedly connoted servility (and therefore, femininity), for black men, Islamic African societies were masculine, strong, independent, and assertive.

I contend that Blyden, though writing for European and West African readers rather than African-Americans, influenced the way US blacks perceived Islam in relation to their own history and struggles. Islam and the black nationalist imagination of Blyden influenced African-Americans. Without Blyden, would there have been a Malcolm X?

Biographie de Jean Price-Mars

A broadcast on the life and work of Jean Price-Mars. Enjoy. 

Mujer

Although salsa is not my preferred genre of music, it's one I return to somewhat regularly. Enjoy.