Lilas Desquiron's Reflections of Loko Miwa

“Alexandre’s messenger told me the makout were searching for a communist leader, an exile from Cuba, hidden by the fishermen. They swooped down on Les Irois like birds of prey and soon found the rebel. They recognized him right away. People say he was a famous writer, very tall, very black, but also with that distinguished air of a leader (113).” 

Lilas Desquiron’s Reflections of Loko Miwa, translated from the French by Robin Orr Bodkin, is a fascinating novel that reminds the reader of Depestre’s The Festival of the Greasy Pole. Like Festival, aspects of marvelous realism surface everywhere in the novel, especially regarding zombification, Vodou, and the supernatural phenomena associated with Vodou and magic. Though the novel is a simple love story of forbidden romance, the context of Papa Doc’s iron fist, Jeremie’s mulatto aristocracy, the futile attempt at armed insurrection against Papa Doc’s rule, and the world of Vodou allow the novel to transcend the narrow confines of the love story genre. Indeed, the novel also has some autobiographical aspects as well, since the protagonist, Violaine Delavigne, is a light-skinned child of Jeremie’s mulatto elite like the author Desquiron. Moreover, like Violaine, the author also identifies with her Afro-Haitian, Vodou roots more than her mostly French-inherited European traits. Thus, the novel offers a powerful critique of negritude or noirism as used by Papa Doc, which ostracized mulattoes and light-skinned folks for lacking dark pigmentation, though several of them do identify more strongly with their African/Haitian heritage, despite the distance separating them from it. 

The novel is also clever in that each chapter features a different character recalling their own memories in a chapter named after them to advance the plot of the relatively short novel. This also allows the two ritually made twins, Cocotte, a dark-skinned peasant girl, and Violaine, the beautiful, golden-hued mulatto to become marasa, or sisters. Despite their vastly different class and racial status in Jeremie’s nearly apartheid state of relations, Violaine’s honey-colored mother insists on a Vodou ritual ceremony ‘twinning’ her daughter with Cocotte. The two do become sisters, two halves of the same body metaphorically, and their conclusion has an emotional, successful ending of reunion. Unlike Cocotte and Violaine, Violaine’s black lover, Alexandre, doubts the power of the lwa and ends up languishing in a Port-au-Prince prison for political prisoners due to his aid of Jacques-Stephen Alexis and the other small band of rebels coming from Cuba. In fact, the very tall, very black man referenced in the above quotation from the text is a thinly-veiled reference to Jacques Stephen Alexis, a Haitian Marxist and novelist, best known for Compere General Soleil, a novel featuring lower-class, Haitian peasants and urban proletariat, also advocates the ‘marvelous realism’ one finds in Reflections of Loko Miwa and The Festival of the Greasy Pole. Like Festival, a zonbi is brought back to life, which includes sexual activity to truly become alive again, and the lwa are omnipresent in the lives of the people. 

Moreover, this novel’s utilization of Vodou demonstrates, as Marie Vieux-Chauvet does in her Amour, that lighter-skinned Haitians are not above using and practicing the Vodou of their distant African ancestors. Violaine’s mothers, and her aunts, resort to consulting a oungan or gangan in order to kill Violaine, then turn her into a zonbi. In Chauvet’s Amour, Claire’s father, light-skinned enough to pass for a white man, continues to pay tribute to the lwa of his black grandmother in order to keep his lands productive and maintain his family’s fortune. In Reflections, Violaine and her mother continue to practice dedication to the lwa of their black ancestors, such as Chemin, Violaine’s black-skinned great-grandmother, but mulattoes like Madame Delavigne never practice Vodou publicly, socialize with darker blacks, and worship publicly only in Catholic Churches, wearing their finest clothes.  Violaine, on the other hand, worships the lwa openly, receives an intiation from Man Chavannes, a black manbo, and incorporates Vodou, African-derived dances and walking into her sexually charged gait. She transcends the class barriers that separate wealthy mulattoes from the poor black majority, which means she publicly embraces her black lover outside of the Catholic Church, something her great-grandfather could never do with his beloved black parter, Chemin. This is particular relevant to Desquiron’s critique of biological essentialism in negritude that would preclude people like her or Violaine, since Violaine is not like those who are:‎

”the mulatto merchants of Jeremie are all descendants of pirates. They are all vendors of pakoti and exporters of coffee, cocoa, or campeachy wood, and they are all as proud as can be of their pale skin. They protect it from the fierce Caribbean sun with an almost maniacal care, as if they could hide the original sin of their negritude beneath a pale epidermis."

She embraces her distant black ancestors, regardless of her parents’ refusal to acknowledge their black ancestors, which unites them with the rest of Haiti’s population. In addition, Desquiron’s critique of negritude applies to her critique of Duvalier’s noiriste regime, which targeted mulatto elites as un-Haitian because of their light complexion and distance from the black majority. This culminated in a massacre of some of Jeremie’s mulatto aristocracy in the 1960s, which is alluded to in the novel with the failed attempted rebel band led by Jacques Stephen Alexis. Desquiron’s novel also demonstrates how everyone suffers due to the noirist policy. The farmers who provided shelter and hide the rebels are massacred, and the protest through the streets of Port-au-Prince that preceded the doomed rebels, was brutally quelled by the makout. 

            To most lucid minds, the obvious problems of Duvalier’s rule do not require literature to see how the dictator manipulated race, religion, class, and fear to control a nation. However, literature does provide a human face(s) to see how it affected human lives. This feminist novel, demonstrates the power of Vodou in the lives of the people, its potential to be used and abused by individuals, and the fundamental unity of Haitians through the shared experience of slavery and liberation by their own hands. The following quote from Violaine’s reflection on her family’s dedication to the lwa despite their Catholic, upper-class background is interesting:

My father willingly carried out all of this because he understood that the rigorous observance of the “rules” was the essential condition for maintaining prosperity in our family. In order to preserve his status, fortune, and even his health, he had to fulfill his responsibilities with respect to the lwa rasin. How many prosperous, proud families had fallen on the worst of times because they had forgot this, because they had actually believed they had become white families?

Throughout the novel, she compares the denied African blood of Violaine’s family to an original sin, a mark of Cain that they will never be able to eradicate despite all their attempts to do so. Indeed, the fact that they continue to practice Vodou like the black peasants and lower-classes they despise illustrates how similar they are to those they separate themselves from. Ironically, perhaps the basis of unity between these two peoples lies in their mutual religious practices, which posits a similarly marvelous realism seen through the lens of Vodou. Furthermore, as a feminist novel, its conclusion of women finding solace in the company of each other, supporting each other with or without any man, becomes clear with the sisters, Cocotte and Violaine, who join the food vendor women of Ben Antre in Port-au-Prince. Indeed, the vendors say, “No! Cocotte, don’t say that! No, you two are not all alone. We’re all here for you, and don’t forget it!"