Les trois lions

Tracking down examples and detailed information on Haitian art before 1930 can be difficult. With the exception of a hard to find key text by Lerebours or Alexis, there is only an issue of Conjonction which touches upon the subject. That is what led me to Edouard Goldman, a Haitian painter and actor whose work, mostly based on past photographs or sketches (such as this), brought a lively color to the Haitian past while glorifying strong or important leaders and intellectuals. Unfortunately, the text is hard to decipher in many of his works, and the book of the exposition at the Grand Palais, which featured several of Goldman's portraits, does not feature the best reproductions. 

Anyway, Goldman was trained by his father, and is one of more than a few painters whose work depicted politicians, prominent members of society, or historical figures. As a painter, his medium gave him the ability to bring color to the depiction of Haitian reality, as well as integrate text to tell a story of those depicted. For example, the above painting on the left of Toussaint Louverture quotes Lamartine, saying that Toussaint made the nation. Goldman's early 20th century portraits make the case for taking Haitian art before 1930 seriously, particularly since it represents certain themes which loom larger in later work, especially portraits of Haitian founding fathers. The quiet dignity with which Goldman imbues these portraits are a powerful assertion of national pride.

The Masses Are Asses

Pedro Pietri's The Masses Are Asses is both disturbing and hilarious. A couple living in a slum building (ex-hallway toilet) in the South Bronx are pretending to be on vacation in Europe, dining at a fine restaurant (La Plume de Ma Tante). During the short play, the man and woman argue, emulate the rich and poor (including speech patterns, slang, vacuous conservation, and ersatz ostentatious display of wealth), and do nothing as a series of crimes and a fire seemingly threatens to engulf their building. It's somewhat difficult to truly describe this bizarre play and its bitter satire, but it certainly does suggest that the masses are indeed asses. The main couple, whose voices are described as being the same as the various residents, criminals, and delinquents in the building, suggests that the main characters are part of an entire problematic worldview of the lumpenproletariat. 

Not only are they pretending to be rich, but there is a breakdown of social solidarity as they do nothing to assist victims of violent robberies, rape, and disasters. They have internalized the dominant ideology's view of the urban underclass that there is really no escape from the South Bronx. Perhaps Pietri wrote this as a response to the failure of the militancy of the Young Lords, Black Panthers, and other revolutionary groups to enact change. Of course, the cultural conservatism and consumerism of the 1980s, with the urban poor embracing much of neoliberalization openly or indirectly, perhaps also explains why Pietri's play suggests such a rather low opinion of the masses, both rich and poor. The righteous anger of Puerto Rican Obituary remains palpable in this play, but it's subtle and hidden beneath a rather dismal view of the masses, or mass. Cynicism appears to have infiltrated Pietri's work by the 1980s.

As a wild tangent, reading this brings to mind Ortega y Gassett's influence on Pedreira's classic study of Puerto Rican character. Although it would be difficult to argue for such an influence on The Masses Are Asses, perhaps it indirectly shapes the work as the revolt of the masses (through the lower classes and the pseudo-aristocracy) has succeeded in creating stagnant slums where the masses languish under the almighty dollar. Perhaps there is still lingering hope, as the "terrorists" described in the play continue their activities, disrupting the routine of the masses, but it seems unlikely. Regardless, one finds it hard to believe Pietri would ever go as far as Pedreira's classist views, but it would be interesting to explore this theme through his other works.

Con el Sentimiento Herido

Boleros are usually not my cup of tea, but this woman's voice is too powerful. 

Faltaste a la cita

Irresistible merengue music from the 1980s...a great decade for the genre, although perhaps very dated to our ears in the 2010s. 

Ibrahim Njoya's Innovative Work

Battle of Manga

While reading about African writing systems, the kingdom of Bamum crossed my radar. Their visionary king, also called Ibrahim Njoya, formed an alliance with Fulbe Muslims to secure his throne and initiated a series of progressive reforms. One of them being a writing system, but also support for the arts, particularly the works of his relative, Ibrahim Njoya. Naturally, this led to Dan Mazur's detailed article on Njoya's life and work. It's clear that his work represents an indigenous development of a comic book, with the text written in the local Bamum script devised by his king to accompany his own incredibly detailed and unique style, depicting the kingdom's history, its traditions, etc. He worked across multiple mediums and, if French colonial policies had been less intrusive, perhaps Ibrahim Njoya could have established in the 1920s and 1930s an African tradition of comics unlike what could be found in colonial newspapers across much of the continent. For more examples of Njoya's work, as well as that of other artists of Bamum, Les dessins bamum contains a plethora of additional sources. The photographs delineate the various styles and influences apparent in Njoya's oeuvre. 

Conte de la rate et ses quatre ratons

Cleopatra's Dream

I have forgotten how swinging some of Bud Powell's original compositions can be! This classical-sounding piece inventively swings while showing the capacity of the piano to improvise flawlessly in the bebop idiom. This is hardly the first time Powell alluded to the Western classical tradition in his music, as tunes like "Bud on Bach" indicate, but this is one of my favorites of his canon, especially when one considers the decline of his later years. 

La montagne ensorcelée

Jacques Roumain's first peasant novel, La montagne ensorcelée, was published in 1931. Several years separate this from his most famous work, translated in English as Masters of the Dew. While this is certainly not as successful of a literary work or as entertaining (possibly due to the very stark and desperate conditions of life for this peasant community in the Nord or Plateau Central region of the country), it provides a fascinating example of the evolution of the peasant novel in the Haitian literary corpus. It also features an interesting example of the "Francocreolophone" nature of Haitian literary works as it combines French narration with character dialogues in French and Creole, sometimes leaving untranslated the Creole dialogue. For example, t'en prie, or tanpri in standardized Haitian Creole, means please, but Roumain leaves untranslated some Creole words, presumably due to this novel originally being published in serial forms in a Haitian newspaper. Consequently, most of his readers were Haitians who knew Creole.

However, despite crafting a hauntingly real peasant community during the US Occupation, the tragic love story of Aurel and Grace is less successful because the reader does not receive enough information about Placinette and her daughter. Perhaps if those characters were developed a little more, at least Grace, one could see the utter depravity of the chef de section's actions as more tragic. Grace, described as beautiful and clearly in love with Aurel, meets him for nightly trysts and they plan to marry, with Aurel even giving her a proposal letter his uncle and godfather wrote for him. It's endearing and Roumain has a poetic way with words to describe their love, but I couldn't help but wonder about the relationship between Placinette and her daughter. Surely, Grace was less isolated from the community than her mother, and would have heard the rumors of sorcery against her family.

And Baptiste, the grand don who represents greed, or Balletroy, the chef de section who abuses his authority, they provide the bases for a critique of social inequality in the novel, but mostly remain character sketches. There is undeniably a hint of Roumain's nascent Marxism, but here the social bonds are torn apart by superstition and misery without a hint of class struggle or solidarity. Dorneval, driven by a lust for vengeance, as is Dorilas, lose themselves in the mob while Desilus, an elder, ends up ginning bloodlust by feeding the magico-religious worldview of the community. Through these character sketches we see the breakdown of the family, social trust, and concerted efforts to escape their shared destruction. There is no konbit here to bring together the village, nor does Vodou seem capable of acting as a unifying force. 

Yet, within the Haitian novel tradition, one can easily see the innovative prose and descriptive language of La montagne ensorcelée. Reading this after Antoine Innocent's Mimola demonstrates a sympathetic yet critical approach to the religion of Vodou, although Innocent's novel is far more detailed of the actual process of Vodou spirit possession and beliefs. In the case of Roumain, this early novel seems to suggest both Vodou and Catholicism are part of the superstitious worldview of the peasant masses, which cause them to leap to mystical conclusions about the decaying rural world around them and its natural calamities of droughts, storms, sickness, and death. However, if Albert in Mimola represents the thoughts of Innocent, one can see a trajectory in Haitian social thought on the religion as being part of Haitian culture and identity but not necessarily something that is permanent or necessary in the future. The nonfiction of Roumain seems to encapsulate that perspective by calling for an anti-misery campaign instead of anti-superstitious campaigns during the 1940s. Regardless of the influence of Mimola on this particular novel, Roumain subsequently developed a more complex approach to the question of superstition and religious fatalism versus human agency.