Derek Walcott's Laventille

 It huddled there

steel tinkling its blue painted metal air,

tempered in violence, like Rio's favelas,

with snaking, perilous streets whose edges fell as

its Episcopal turkey-buzzards fall

from its miraculous hilltop

shrine,

down the impossible drop

to Belmont, Woodbrook, Maraval, St. Clair

that shine

like peddlers' tin trinkets in the sun.

From a harsh

shower, its gutters growled and gargled wash 

past the Youth Centre, past the water catchment,

a rigid children's carousel of cement;

we climbed where lank electric

lines and tension cables linked its raw brick

hovels like a complex feud,

where the inheritors of the middle passage stewed,

five to a room, still clamped below their hatch,

breeding like felonies,

whose lives revolve round prison, graveyars, church.

Below bent breadfruit trees

in the flat, coloured city, class

escalated into structures still,

merchant, middleman, magistrate, knight. To go downhill

from here was to ascend.

The middle passage never guessed its end.

This is the height of poverty

for the desperate and black;

climbing, we could look back

with widening memory

on the hot, corrugated-iron sea

whose horrors we all

shared. The salt blood knew it well,

you, me, Samuel's daughter, Samuel,

and those ancestors clamped below its grate.

And climbing steeply past the wild

gutters, it shrilled

in the blood, for those who suffered, who were killed, 

and who survive.

What other gift was there to give

as the godparents of his unnamed child?

Yet outside the brown annex of the church, the

stifling odour of bay rum and talc, the particular,

neat sweetness of the crowd distressed

that sense. The black, fawning verger, 

his bow tie akimbo, grinning, the clown-gloved

fashionable wear of those I deeply loved

once, made me look on with hopelessness and rage

at their new, apish habits, their excess

and fear, the possessed, the self-possessed;

their perfume shrivelled to a childhood fear

of Sabbath graveyards, christenings, marriages,

that muggy, steaming, self-assuring air

of tropical Sabbath afternoons. And in

the church, eyes prickling with rage,

the children rescued from original sin

by their Godfather since the middle passage,

the supercilious brown curate, who intones,

healing the guilt in these rachitic bones,

twisting my love within me like a knife:

"across the troubled waters of this life..."

Which of us cares to walk 

even if God wished

those retching waters where our souls were fished

for this new world? Afterwards, we talk

in whispers, close to death

among these stones planted on alien earth.

Afterwards,

the ceremony, the careful photograph

moved out of range before the patient tombs,

we dare a laugh, 

ritual, desperate words,

born like these children from habitual wombs,

from lives fixed in the unalterable groove

of grinding poverty. I stand out on a balcony

and watch the sun pave its flat, golden path

across the roofs, the aerials, cranes, the tops

of fruit trees crawling downward to the city.

Something inside is laid wide like a wound,

some open passage that has cleft the brain,

some deep, amnesiac blow. We left

somewhere a life we never found,

customs and gods that are not born again,

some crib, some grille of light

clanged shut on us in bondage, and withheld

us from that world below us and beyond,

and in its swaddling cerements we're still bound.

The Haitian Earth

"But you and I, we is Haiti, Yette."

Of Walcott's Haitian Trilogy, The Haitian Earth is my favorite. While Henri Christophe was the strongest and Drums and Colour the weakest, The Haitian Earth features characters who are not from the revolutionary leaders. This play, first performed in Saint Lucia, emphasizes the peasantry and lower-classes of the Haitian Revolution. The play also incorporates numerous instances of Creole as dialogue, abounds in references to the earth as the heart of the nation, symbolizing the role of the peasantry as the true inheritors of Haiti, and uses a peasant woman as the Chorus. 

References to Haiti's cracked earth, dry earth, and tyrannical rule from Dessalines and Christophe  (who uproot the soil, crush the peasantry) make Pompey and Yette the protagonists of the story, representing the union of black and mulatto (Dessalines is depicted as anti-white and anti-mulatto, similar to the previous plays in the trilogy). Pompey, an ex-slave, works the earth, nurtures it like the Haitian peasantry, while Yette, a mulatto women and former mistress and prostitute in Le Cap, grows to love the Haitian earth and embrace her life with Pompey. Later, she plays an even more important role as the victim of rape by Dessalines and murdered by Christophe for practicing her chienbois spell (something akin to a 'voodoo doll' in this instance), which speaks to a subtle feminist ethos considering how the earth is feminized in the text. 

Nevertheless, despite praising the peasantry (perhaps as homage to Saint Lucia's peasantry), the text does fall in the trap of condemning Haiti to an endless night of political oppression after Toussaint. Much like the other plays in the trilogy, Dessalines (compared to a boar) and Christophe are presented as nothing more than tyrants, Haiti subjected to exploitation and greed, but the plays also fail to explore how European greed and colonialism continued to shape Haiti after 1804. 

It seems as if Haiti, after subjected to a racial 'bloodbath' wherein mulattoes and whites are killed, is trapped in a cycle. Of course, as a work of literature, the play is not about historical accuracy, but the play does read as excessively unfair to Dessalines and Christophe while expressing Haiti's Revolution as tragedy rather than triumph. In some ways, it is quite similar to Carpentier's approach to the Haitian Revolution, yet written to celebrate the rural underclass in a distinctly Afro-Caribbean style, full of the language, music, beliefs and egalitarianism. 

Quotes

Toussaint: The soil itself

Is bleeding, and I can't stop it.

Toussaint: I am remembering civilisation. All those glorious white marbles in your museums, all your Gothic arches, your embroidered books. What do they mean to a slave whose back is flayed so raw that, like a book, you can read the spine?

Pompey: Fold up your hopes to show them to your children. 

Because after him, now come

The angry kings.

God help us men.

Drums and Colours: An Epic Drama

Caribbean poet and playwright's Drums and Colours is an epic encompassing the history of the Caribbean from the days of Columbus to the promises of emancipation and union. Penned for the ephemeral West Indies Federation in 1958, the play emphasizes interracial harmony, anti-colonialism, and peace rather than vengeance. Read in this light, one can understand why some scholars treat Drums and Colours as one of a "conservative" response to the Haitian Revolution, which is one of the more important aspects of the play's plot. 

The Haitian Revolution, like other aspects of Caribbean history, is portrayed as a response to European greed and violence, but is portrayed as excessive or racially exclusive by other West Indians in a later segment of the play, set in Jamaica. Thus, the Haitian Revolution, for bringing about the abolition of slavery, is central to the history of the Caribbean as seen by Walcott, but not inclusive of the multicultural peoples of the region. Furthermore, post-1804 Haiti is represented, as in Walcott's Henri Christophe, as corrupted by greed and violence as Dessalines and Christophe sell Toussaint to Leclerc to seize power for themselves.

In this light, some of the problems of Haiti are seen as part of a pattern in Caribbean history where colonial violence, genocide, and greed work against interracial unity (symbolized by the multiracial Maroon band in Jamaica, the lofty words of George William Gordon, and a multiracial Carnival group in Trinidad) from the earliest days of European conquest, imperial rivalries, and slave resistance. Instances of cross-racial solidarity appear throughout the play, such as the case of a Jew and a slave en route to Hispaniola, and this clearly appeals to a political goal of the West Indies Federation, as well as consolidating the nation. 

Of course, this play also transcends the purposes of political 'propaganda' for its universal contemplation of the meaning of power. Is power only wrought by military means or violence? Is it possible to attain peace? What are the dangers of 'democratic despotism' that Leclerc warns us of during the Haitian Revolution scene? Is a nation better off with a 'strong man' dictator, or with the Enlightenment principles of liberalism? Furthermore, the role of religion in upholding or resisting oppression is a consistent theme given how religion was used to exploit and combat colonial repression, depending on the time and place. These important questions were just as pertinent to the West Indies as anywhere else in the world. 

Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes

"The cycle will never end. Blood grows where blood is uprooted..."

Derek Walcott's Henri Christophe: A Chronicle in Seven Scenes is an enjoyable tragedy that tells the fall of Henri Christophe's kingdom in northern Haiti. While not historically accurate (Boyer does not appear at all, and the author places most of the blame for the assassination of Dessalines on Christophe), the play uses verse and Shakespearean tragedy to explain the 'ruin' of Haiti at the beginning of independence. 

Greed, ambition, love of self, or whatever else you may call it, brings upon the inevitable end of Dessalines and Christophe as both declare themselves king and place themselves above their subjects. Vastey also appears in the text as a scheming figure who plots for Christophe, and the massacres of the remaining whites in Haiti by Dessalines is also presented as a horrible bloodbath of excessive vengeance. Indeed, Walcott subtly critiques the notion of racial divisions in the multicultural Caribbean, yet the characters in the play are never able to transcend color divisions, even in the grave (a particularly powerful scene near the play's conclusion includes a discussion of this between Vastey and Christophe). 

Thus, greed, ambition, and the conflict for suzerainty over the nation, and the failure to reverse the decay wrought by 13 years of war after the fall of the 'noble' Toussaint Louverture trap Haiti in a cycle of political conflict as generals plot intrigue. In truth, the author romanticizes Louverture as someone who would never declare himself king, and dies gracefully in the Jura Mountains, thereby leaving Haiti bereft of a leader who would allegedly espouse democratic principles and interracial harmony (again, Walcott uses history to suit the ethos of his time, Caribbean decolonisation in the 20th century). Furthermore, religion is presented in an interesting way in this text, as Christophe rejects Christianity and Vodou while Brelle, his archbishop, dies by Christophe's hand. 

Favorite Quotes

"Christophe loves Haiti, like himself, cruelly.

But like a well-intentioned physician, he bleeds

It too much."

"In death, Henri, the bone is anonymous;

Complexions only grin above the skeleton;

Under the grass the dust is an anthology of creeds and skins."