Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada

 

The devil's country home. That's what the South is. It's where the devil goes to rest after he's been about the world wearying the hunted and the haunted. This is the land of the hunted and haunted. This is where he comes. The devil sits on the porch of his plantation; He's dressed up like a gentleman and sitting on a white porch between some white columns.

Flight to Canada is the most difficult Ishmael Reed novel I have read. It's a satire of 19th century America, slavery, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Civil War, and the planter elites of the antebellum South. The novel also pokes fun at the assumptions of many that slaves who escaped the South for the North or Canada suddenly lived in paradise. As Raven Quickskill, the black poet and protagonist of the novel finds out, Canada ain't all it's cracked up to be. He finds racism everywhere, North, South and Canada. Thus, the slave narrative never ends with escaping Southern slavery, but continues in lives of turmoil and struggle against white racism around the 19th century world. Canada is far from a noble, safe haven for black runaways. Now, this novel also shares many similarities to other Reed novels, such as Yellow Back Radio Broke Down in that technology from the 20th century is present in 1860s United States, such as television, film, helicopters, yachts, and other wonders of 20th century technology. So the novel has a lot of anachronisms as well as several literary, historical, and political references pertaining to abolitionism, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederate states, Captain Kidd, the usurpation of Native American lands, and William Wells Brown, a famous black abolitionist and writer. So this novel is very dense, and for those unfamiliar with the history and literary allusions, it may be too avant-garde for some.

A large part of the novel is dedicated to satirical looks at Southern planter aristocracy through the white planter, Arthur Swille, and the ineptness and desire to recreate feudal Europe with black slaves/serfs and romanticized gallantries. Reed also pokes fun at Abraham Lincoln and his reasons for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation and his own extreme racism towards blacks. Of course Harriet Beecher Stowe and the suffragettes, who were quite racist and exploitative of black slavery, are also attacked. Swille's wife is a lazy, Southern belle suffragette who lives off her husband's slaves. Stowe, who got the idea for Uncle Tom's Cabin from black writer Josiah Henson's autobiography, only wrote the novel to purchase a nice home and silk, refusing to share some of her profits with the blacks who gave her the material necessary for her writings. So once again, whites, even abolitionist alllies, perpetuate racism and the dehumanization of African-Americans. Thus, in many ways this novel is a tribute to those forgotten black voices of abolition such as Josiah Henson and William Wells Brown, who wrote the first novel ever penned by an African-American.

Flight to Canada's portrayal of Native Americans is also worth mentioning. Quaw Quaw, educated at Columbia University paid for by her pirate husband, who killed her father and brother, represents the Native American  whitewashed by Anglo-American values and civilization despite losing her own identity and family as a result. Reed also uses the stereotype of an Uncle Tom for Uncle Robin, who actually takes advantage of his privileged position to gradually poison Arthur Swille and change his will, leaving himself the Swille Castle and plantation after the Civil War. Indeed, as Uncle Robin himself notes near the novel's conclusion, he ultimately wins against Swille without direct confrontation whereas Nat Turner is dead and gone for his valiant effort. So the trickster motif in African-American literature is self-evident in Uncle Robin, who 'toms' for white folks but is the one ultimately playing a trick on them despite appearing servile. 

I suppose the most meaningful messages from Flight to Canada is to not distort American history into portraying whites as saviors of black slaves, to recognize the agency of blacks in dismantling slavery as a social, political and economic system, and that freedom is ultimately a state of mind, not a geographic locale. It's a short novel whose multifaceted allusions sometimes escape me, but a worthwhile read nonetheless. Three stars out of five.

Great Book to Read: Antenor Firmin's The Equality of the Races

19th century Haitian intellectual, lawyer, diplomat and anthropologist's The Equality of the Races, published in 1885, is a powerful rebuttal to Gobineau's scientific racism the dominant views on black racial inferiority which still influence the 21st century. Firmin treatise on racial equality includes an analysis of world history which gives numerous examples of contributions to human development and civilization by those designated as black, focusing on Egypt. Thus, his work is interesting for demonstrating once again the long history of blacks in the United States and Haiti correctly identifying Egypt as a product of African cultures of blacks. He also backs up his statements with evidence from Egypt, quotations from classical sources such as Herodotus, and French Egyptologists of the century who actually concurred on the black origins of Kemet. 

Although published in 1885, it may sound like quite a few contemporary Afrocentric tracts and surprisingly, at times like Martin Bernal's Black Athena. So the so-called lies and therapeutic history of modern Afrocentrists has a long history going back centuries. One of these days I'll have to get my hands on this book instead of just reading reviews and the google book preview.

Thoughts on Patrick Chamoiseau's Solibo Magnificent

“…despite his long stay in the land of Descartes, since he had been raised in this country like the rest of us with the same knowledge of zombies and various evil soucougnans, the Inspector’s scientific efforts and cold logic often skidded.”

            Patrick Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent translated from the French and Creole by Rose-Myriam Rejouis and Val Vinokurov, the same duo that translated Chamoiseau’s Texaco, is a wonderful novel of short length on the battle between French and Creole in Martinican sociolinguistics. A meta-text in the form of a mystery, Chamoiseau inserts himself into his often humorous critique of Martinique turning its back on its Creole oral literature in favor of French. The oral tradition, represented by the titular character, Solibo Magnificent, is killed, “throat snickt by the word” in the middle of a story told to an audience in the evening during Carnival time in Fort-de-France. Solibo’s death becomes a police investigation to determine the cause of his death, or the death of Creole oral tradition as Martinique “modernizes” and adopts more of the French language and written literary tradition. Now, Chamoiseau, a pupil of Edouard Glissant and part of the reolite literary movement, sees Creole as the authentic language for Martinican (and other Caribbean writers of the French Caribbean) as best suited to represent Martinican reality and culture in the written literary forms because the language itself is a reflection of the totality of peoples and experiences of the Caribbean. A response to the weaknesses of the monolithic blackness assumed by the negritude movement, famously espoused by Aime Cesaire, creolite celebrates and embraces European, African, indigenous and Asian peoples and cultures that form the basis of the Caribbean sociolingustic reality. 

Chamoiseau, who inserts himself into the text as the author-narrator endeavoring to capture the oral Creole spoken by Solibo, experiments with fusions of French and Creole, oral and written literary traditions, and the inevitable loss of meaning and distortion that occurs through endeavoring to represent oral traditions in the written form. Thus, Chamoiseau’s character in the novel admits his own failure to fully capture the strength of oral traditions, but endeavors to embrace both the written and spoken word, a synthesis rooted in the creolite movement to embrace all cultures within Martinique. Indeed, that is most likely why the text is not entirely Creole either, since French, though part of the colonial heritage and legacy of racism and slavery, reinforced by the corrupt police department and its repression of lower-class residents of Fort-de-France, remains at the core of Martinique as the island remains an overseas department of France with whites in possession of most economic and political power. Chamoiseau’s character in the novel also represents his experimentation with the traditional novel form as known in the West. Here, the author’s character becomes a participant in the plot, allowing it to be read on many levels and include the reader, who must decipher the clever wordplay and multiple forms used in the text. Chamoiseau also divides the novel into 3 parts: an incident report, as typed by the police in the investigation, the “body” or chapters of the text written by Chamoiseau himself, with frequent changes in narration, the use of footnotes to explain and translate Creole phrases, Martinican cultural references, and lack of traditional grammatical structures, and finally, an “After the Word” that attempts to represent Solibo’s last words before his death. Chamoiseau’s text, a nuanced, multi-layered endeavor to embody Martinique’s contradictory and essentially Creole identity, also shows off the author’s writing ability because few could successfully write about the battle between French and Creole language and identity in a way that successfully fuses both irrevocably, with shortcomings and losses to both. Referring to himself as the “word scratcher,” as he later does in Texaco, Chamoiseau tries to represent the craft of writing as an alternative form of ‘drawing’ the world that must also incorporate Creole, oral, and lived experience in its depiction of the world to describe Caribbean societies, since the “oraliture” of Creole is the key component of Caribbean societies. 

In addition, Solibo Magnificent challenges the hegemony of French rationalism and European perception of the world. Like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Chamoiseau criticizes French (European) worship of reason, which leads to overlooking the personal, lived experiences and requires an often unnecessary division or measurement of the world, leading to dehumanization or oppressive unequal conditions through binary oppositional thinking. For Chamoiseau, both the real-life writer and the narrator of the text, embracing both the spoken and written word is a rejection of binary oppositional thinking, which is a perpetual result of western European worship of reason. Inspector Evariste Pilon, a Francophile black Martinican, perpetuates the hegemony of rationalist binary thinking throughout his investigation, which leads to false assumptions on who murdered Solibo because his rationalism (inherited from time spent in the land of Descartes, the French language which is always used by Pilon) cannot accept the fact that Solibo dies because of “internal strangulation” caused when speaking before the witnesses under the tamarind tree in La Savane of Fort-de-France. His investigation, which relies on police brutality and torture of the suspected witnesses, causes the death of two men because he cannot accept the scientifically impossible death, which also demonstrates magic realism, another writing technique Chamoiseau utilizes to illustrate the fantasy of the lived world and oral tradition. Indeed, Solibo’s death is not only impossible from a rational standpoint, but his body miraculously gains weight and becomes as light as a feather when the police remove the corpse, and shows no signs of poison or illness. Pilon’s rational epistemology, ignoring the highly personal and Creole realities of the witnesses, cannot accept what fourteen human beings saw with their own eyes because of his narrowly prescribed perceptions of the world. Moreover, Pilon’s interrogation of the witnesses ignores the multiple layers of meaning attached to time, occupation, age, and other qualifiers of human life that are measured or defined by measurements of time in hours, minutes and seconds. Indeed, when asking the witnesses their age, occupation, and address, the sadistic Chief Sergeant translates the questions into Creole as, “The Inspector asks you what hurricane you were born after, what do you do for the beke, and what side of town do you sleep at night?” Pilon’s French, rationalist outlook does not allow him to accept the nuances of time, occupation, and alternative approaches to understanding one’s life. For the witnesses, speakers of Creole, their lived experience determines the meaning of Pilon’s questions in personal ways based on local culture, geography, and economics, which means natural disasters play a strong role in how one records time, Martinican whites control the distribution of jobs, and transitory lives are common for lower-class Martinicans of the shantytowns of Fort-de-France. French rationalism, an inherent component of French (and European colonialism in general) power in the Caribbean therefore supports the persistence of white rule in Martinique. Due to language’s ties to power, the imposition of French and denigration of Creole by elites maintains the colonial social order in economic, linguistic, political arenas. 

Another avenue through which Chamoiseau proclaims creolite is the text’s numerous references to Martinican music, Creole, history, politics, the description of the urban shantytowns, and the plethora of footnotes and sectors of the Martinican population represented by the witnesses to Solibo’s death. The witnesses themselves represent light-skinned blacks, shantytown dwellers, street vendors, unemployed musicians, a writer (Chamoiseau himself), a “Syrian” bastard, an ancient former agricultural worker insultingly referred to as Congo for his way of speaking Creole and his very recent black African ancestry, coolies, a drummer who accompanies Solibo’s storytelling, and the radical nationalist desiring independence. This diverse array of the people of Martinique, separated by varying degrees of class, ethnicity, politics, and individual expression, all comprise the already heterogeneous social reality of the island. And these aforementioned individuals all share a Creole identity originating from their shared experiences of slavery, colonialism, economic exploitation, and an appreciation for the oral traditions of Creole, though by the time of Solibo’s death, fewer people were listening to his stories and he fulfilled his griot role less as the younger generation turned its back on its cultural origins. Chamoiseau’s espousal of creolite as the basis of Caribbean identity also manifests in the world he creates in the novel, a world filled with magic realism, musical and cultural practices of the island, the Carnival celebrations that storm through the capital, and the insertion of Creole expressions and using the written form to represent orally in the novel form. The novel’s constant allusions to politics and contemporary issues tearing Martinican society apart, such as the Martinican Progressive Party’s support for autonomy or independence from France, the continued police repression and corruption abusing the poor and black, and the cuisine, zouk and Haitian music (Nemours Jean-Baptiste) constitute a microcosm of the Caribbean, and by extension, the entire world. Martinique’s internal heterogeneity symbolizes the Creole reality of the entire Caribbean, which also marks its essential role in world history as one of the birthplaces of modernity. Creolite is the hallmark of real modern culture, if one defines modernity as something universal or capable of incorporation disparate traditions while embracing the contradictions. As a result, Martinique’s creolite designates the island as an important example of human progress by its capacity to include so many seemingly combative cultural forces, such as the African, indigenous, European and Asian influences developed into the wholly unique island Chamoiseau honors.

Solibo Magnificent unfortunately may not be for all. The novel loses a lot in translation since the reader no longer has the mixed Creole-French language of Chamoiseau-ese. Of course the novel’s focus on language and Martinican culture will be totally alien to most English readers, despite the aid of the translators’ footnotes and glossary of Creole terms that appear in the novel. The plot and the format of the novel that fuses oral and written word may initially confuse others or appear meaningless to those unfamiliar with Chamoiseau’s creolite. For those interested in learning about other cultures and willing to expand their knowledge of an important area in the world should read this novel, which is all about multiculturalism and the necessity to respect all cultural traditions of different races or ethnicities, a value that still remains underutilized by much of the world. In order to support his celebration of human totality and universality, Chamoiseau demonstrates the weaknesses of the fetishization of rationalism that reinforces French colonialism, racism, and the power of the French language over Creole. Chamoiseau also critiques complete rejection of the aforementioned characteristics of the French colonial legacy, since complete denial of reason and French will isolate Martinique from a much larger world and will not change the conditions of illiteracy, poverty, and technological advancements that made some of the novel’s characters, such as Solibo and Congo, almost obsolete in society. Hence, the death of Solibo while speaking to his audience while speaking the word, as a consequence of his rejection of the written word, symbolizes the death of oral tradition that remains opposed to the written tradition. Solibo’s total rejection of French and written traditions repeats French rejection of alternative expressions of language, literature, and philosophy, which contributes to Solibo’s increasingly less relevant words of wisdom to the people of Fort-de-France. Overall, this is a fascinating experimental novel on the power of language and its relation to cultural practices and identity. Lacking the historical depth and detail of Texaco, which explores the history and culture of Martinique through the family of Marie-Sophie Laborieux, Solibo Magnificent is a shorter novel and fast read.  

Billie Holiday - Body And Soul (Live @ The L.A. Philharmonic Auditorium)...

My jam

Maryse Conde's Segu

West African Trading Posts: The Advent of European Colonialism

West African trading posts along the coast were cosmopolitan in nature. These communities gradually evolved over centuries of slave trading with Europeans and included heterogeneous populations. In Maryse Condé’s novel, Segu, portrayals of Ouidah, Gorée, and the Cape Coast of modern Ghana illustrated their cosmopolitan nature through architecture, trade, interracial marriages and relationships, the presence of Christianity, and the increasing importance of the slave trade. Therefore, the above characteristics of coastal communities allowed them to facilitate imperialism since they provided initial zones of missionary activity and early colonial conquests by European powers in the 19^th century.

            Miscegenation, perhaps the most ostensible change reflected by these communities, was quite common. The mulatto offspring of interracial unions tended to adopt European racial theories to elevate themselves above darker-skinned Africans. For example, some biracial Africans, such as the half-French and half-Wolof Anne Pépin, owned land and slaves.^[1] Anne, who owned Naba, saw no problem with owning slaves and looked to her father’s French origin for her identity instead of her Wolof mother. For example, she dressed in a European style, with skirts, tunics, scarves, and a shawl.^[2] The mulatto class also resided in tall stone houses or flat-roofed wooden homes and lived from trade.^[3] As a mulatto landowner and slaveholder, Anne was more tied to the land than the French who only came to trade in slaves. Since her world revolved around the slave trade, she refused to recognize the possibility of abolition in the future, despite the growing antislavery movement in Britain and the Haitian Revolution.^[4] When her French lover Isidore informed her of the upcoming abolition of the slave trade by the British and the importance of establishing agricultural colonies in Cape Verde, she could not imagine the very idea of ending the slave trade.^[5] Instead Naba’s labor was used to beautify her home as a gardener and the slaves are not used for profit-making plantation agriculture within the French trading post. However, Anne would be willing to revive connections with her mother’s family in order to purchase land.^[6] Although she is no longer in contact with them, Anne and other biracial coastal people were able to take advantage of their family ties to Africans to access land and wealth. And through connections like hers, Europeans could move further inland.

Besides selling slaves to European and New World traders, African slaves were not being utilized for export agriculture by the French and mulatto landholders. In addition to Anne, biracial people in Ouidah, Lagos, and other coastal cities thought of themselves as better than black Africans since they occupied an intermediate position in European racial schema that dehumanized blacks. The biracial daughter of a Portuguese trader, Eugenia de Carvalho, and her brother shared this belief in color prejudice. Her brother even called Eucaristus a “Dirty nigger, cannibal…”^[7] Thus, they adopted European racial theories and distinguish themselves from Africans while at the same time they’re inextricably linked to Africa through blood and their dependence on slavery and the slave trade. Due to their acceptance of European racist discourse, they sided with Christian missionaries and colonial powers since they perceived themselves as racially distinct from black Africans.

Likewise, Creoles in Sierra Leone and other coastal cities believed that they would inherit positions of authority in the administration of the colonies and thought of themselves as civilizers.^[8] Their communities reflected the gradually increasing missionary zeal of European and African Christians. Creoles in Sierra Leone consisted of an assortment of recaptured slaves from all over West and West-Central Africa, the Caribbean and the United States. Obviously those from the Caribbean and the United States or Christianized recaptured slaves often promoted Western culture and Christianity.^[9] Unlike the mulattoes off the coast of Senegal, they were actively promoting European culture and Christianity in the interior and embraced the Society for the Civilization of Africa and similar groups. Although Naba was baptized and given a Christian name, neither Naba nor neighboring Africans were targets for missionary activity and Anne never endeavored to test the veracity of his conversion. In areas populated by Creoles, missionaries made more meaningful attempts to convert Africans. Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba recaptive, converted to Anglicanism and became the first bishop of the Anglican Church, established an all-African Christian settlement on the Niger River, translated the Bible into Yoruba, and made an English-Yoruba dictionary. These aforementioned accomplishments obviously made missionary activity easier since whites were less inclined to live in the Nigerian interior because of diseases such as malaria. Creoles also accepted European culture and admired the technological superiority of Europe. For instance, Dr. J. Africanus B. Horton, son of an Ibo recaptive and intellectual who published on African affairs believed in the superiority of European civilization. Creoles were thoroughly prepared at Fourah Bay College in Freetown to become clergymen and Africans took advantage of the opportunities offered by Western education. In fact, a higher proportion of children went to school in Sierra Leone than England at the time since education was publicly funded.^[10] Other Creoles saw themselves as harbingers of civilization and Christianity, and believed they would gradually take leadership positions in their communities instead of whites from Europe.^[11] For example, Crowther believed in a form of European colonialism that deposed African kings and governments in order to spread Christianity.^[12] However, Creoles never envisioned the future form of colonialism that disempowered them. Like the mulattoes of Gorée, Creoles aided European colonialism. As cultural brokers and intermediaries between Western missionaries and Africans in the interior, they actively proselytized and spread aspects of Western civilization, which encouraged European imperialism in the region since the Creoles and other coastal peoples welcomed Europeans as traders. In spite of the general appreciation for the opportunities of European education and technology, some Creoles, such as Emma, the wife of Eucaristus and descendant of Jamaican Maroons, opposed the cultural and political imperialism of Britain.^[13] Some Creoles clearly disagreed with the total abandonment of non-Western traditions and religions, but they could not stop other Creoles from encouraging colonialism and opening up new areas for missions in the interior.

            Moreover, coastal communities reflected the growing importance of the Atlantic slave trade and African dependence on European manufactured goods. Conde demonstrates this dependence in the kingdoms of Dahomey and the Asante Empire. The increasing presence of European goods undermined local industries and gradually developed into dependence on Europeans for the types of goods Africans had produced before or received from trade within Africa. In Dahomey, white traders in Ouidah were also influential and European demand for palm oil led to Dahomean palm oil plantation labor. Indeed, the labor of enslaved peoples in Dahomey resembled New World slavery, and Europeans overlooked the use of slave labor to provide this “legitimate commerce.”^[14] This type of trade in which external demand induced Dahomean leaders to supply raw products for machine lubricants and soap in Europe shows the imbalance in trade and power and it gave European merchants and their respective nations too much power in the kingdom. Francisco da Souza, the slave trader in Ouidah provides evidence of this since he is respected and given a position of authority by the king of Dahomey, who also granted a Malobali the right to engage in palm oil cultivation. Furthermore, the only people who benefitted from legitimate commerce were the kings and slave traders who established plantations and relied on slave labor to supply the growing European demand.^[15] The Agoudas, or descendants of Catholic ex-slaves from Brazil also impacted Ouidah since they often identified with Christianity and served missionary interests. Romana exemplified this attitude since she was known as a devout Catholic who treated worked with missionaries. Unlike Dahomey, the Asante had a larger empire with trade connections to the north but its attempts to control the coast were challenged by Europeans, such as the English governor of the Cape Coast fortress. Indeed, the white governor actually desired British political control of the entire region to ensure uninterrupted trade.^[16] So while Malobali did not understand why the Asantehene refused to drive whites away from the coast, it’s apparent that the kingdom would not wish to go to war with the people who supplied their rivals with guns. Once again, coastal West Africa exposed and prepared the way for colonialism by allowing Europeans to directly govern forts and towns with more and more freedom from direct African supervision.

Clearly, trading posts along the West African coast facilitated European colonial expansion. Christianity, the increasing dependency of African kingdoms on Europe for guns and manufactured goods, and interracial peoples and Creole cultures became very common on the coast. These factors then impacted inland states more and more and aided European imperialism because coastal trading towns were the precursor to European rule. The coastal cities provided a launching pad for European militaries and alliances with groups like the Creoles or coastal Africans. Like the Fante and the British against the Asante kingdom, coastal regions provided knowledge of the interior, soldiers, and Westernized intellectuals and Christians who often identified with European powers and eventually served their interests as colonial outposts. Therefore, the coastal trading posts reflect the tensions between two vastly different worlds and the connections that arose to places as far away as Europe and the Americas.

---

1.  Maryse Condé, Segu, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Group, 1996) 96.

2.  Ibid.

3.  Ibid. , 99.

4.  Ibid. , 107.

5.  Ibid. , 101.

6.  Ibid. , 103.

7.  Ibid. , 390.

7.  Neil Kodesh, “Abolition and Legitimate Trade,” 11/10/2010.

8.  Ibid.

9.  Ibid.

10.  Ibid.

11.  Ibid.

12. Maryse Condé, Segu, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Group, 1996) 397.

13. Maryse Condé, Segu, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Group, 1996) 404.

14. Neil Kodesh, “Abolition and Legitimate Trade,” 11/10/2010

15.  Ibid.

16. Maryse Condé, Segu, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: Penguin Group, 1996) 235.

Thoughts on Jacques Roumain's Masters of the Dew

“Nevertheless, the fete went on. The peasants forgot their troubles. Dancing and drinking anesthetized them-- swept away their shipwrecked souls to drown in those regions of unreality and danger where the fierce forces of the African gods lay in wait.”

            Jacques Roumain’s Masters of the Dew, translated into English by Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook, remains one of the most important works in Haitian and Caribbean literature. Roumain, member of Haiti’s elite (his grandfather, Tancrede Auguste, was president of Haiti), also founded the Communist party, which explains the strong Marxist tones of the novel. Roumain studied abroad in Europe and traveled, thus the international context of Masters centers on a character that was part of the Haitian immigrant braceros communities, who labored on often American-owned plantations in Cuba.  An understanding of Cuban and Haitian history is required to fully comprehend the background of Manuel, the protagonist. In the first few decades of the 20^th century, American investors and landholders, alongside their white Cuban allies, imported thousands of black workers from Haiti and the British West Indies for cheap labor, and because of the poor economic conditions of these other Caribbean islands, hundreds of thousands came. Manuel spends several years cutting cane in Cuba, where he and his other braceros gain a worker, or proletariat consciousness and use it or for a huelga, or strike. Unlike the peasants of Haiti, who continued to face extreme exploitation, political exclusion and few opportunities for wage labor, the Haitian and other black workers in Cuba used their labor power collectively to demand higher wages and rights. The novel focuses on Manuel endeavoring to bring this revolutionary, Marxist-influenced notion of worker/peasant consciousness to the people of his village of Fonds Rouge in Haiti. Along the way, he encounters resistance from the religious traditions and a feud between two main families, and he must end the drought that has driven the village to starvation and deeper poverty. Roumain, though obviously not from Haiti’s peasant society, nonetheless uses peasant cultural and religious practices in the novel, such as the coumbite tradition of collective labor among villagers to work on agricultural projects for the entire village. For Manuel, the only way to save agriculture in the village and end poverty is to overcome the feud and form a permanent coumbite that will gradually incorporate more peasants to take back political power.

            Now, I enjoyed reading this novel, but the obvious Communist features limited the character development by reducing some to allegories, such as the rural policeman Hilarion. Hilarion, Florentine the storeowner, the police lieutenant, and the magistrate represent the predatory Haitian state that sells goods to Haitian peasants at high prices, loans money and supplies at usurious rates, and attempts to limit peasant political activity to ultimately expropriate their lands. This portrayal of the Haitian state is largely true, but Hilarion and the other ‘villains’ have very little characterization. I believe this is partly due to the tendency in Marxist literature to reduce human beings to allegories, thereby ignoring the real complexities one finds among all humans. Furthermore, Roumain’s portrayal of Catholicism and Haitian Vodou is problematic for many reasons. One must agree that, as Manuel tells the peasants of Fonds Rouge, the people cannot resign their fates and sacrifice animals to the loas or Christ and put their faith in prayer, but must work collectively in the material world to better their condition. Manuel, though still a believer in Vodou and its cultural and religious relevance to the peasant community, represents a thoroughly secular political movement among villagers, which is problematic for multiple reasons. First, it ignores the potential power of Vodou to actually improve lives, especially through medicine and its importance for building ties between families and villages across Haiti. Second, Roumain sees Vodou (and Catholicism for that matter) as distractions that, though relevant for cultural reasons, essentially divide people from focusing on the present world around them and leads to putting one’s faith in God(s) instead of taking agency. If one has a better understanding of Vodou, one would realize that the belief system is based on the present existence and lived history of the people, and fundamentally fosters communal relations by encouraging collective responses to the vicissitudes of modern life. Vodou, a religion of collective goodwill, is essential for building worker consciousness among peasants because it’s a hybrid fusion of various religious and cultural traditions that brings people together. In Roumain’s defense, however, his critique of religion is not as strong as I describe it, it merely subordinates Vodou to class and economics, instead of focusing on how all the aforementioned conditions are challenged by Vodou. Vodou, however, can and has been abused in Haiti, as the case of the houngan Dormeus who overcharges the peasants for his services. The ultimate strength of Vodou lies in its cultural hybridity, which avoids the hegemony of instrumental reason by emphasizing human collective goodwill rather than categorizing and ranking individuals that occurs consequentially in the super rationalist Western epistemological and Marxist traditions that perpetuate binary thinking. Any social theory that ignores the unique and organic conditions of resistance of the people is bound to fail, and only reproduces Western domination. In the novel, however, Manuel ultimately succeeds by not working against the local religious and cultural beliefs of his community. Though he brings in outside ideas, how the coumbite forms to irrigate the farmlands of the entire village is essentially Vodou, or even the best form of Christianity. Personal sacrifice, as the cost of human life, forces the village to recognize the futility of the feud, work together. Thus, religions play a vital role in the process of resisting the oppressive state by encouraging a compromise between personal avarice and the society’s well being. I must restate that Roumain does not overtly attempt to negate this point, but does tend to overlook it.

            The novel interestingly follows the peasant novel tradition of Haitian literature, which is dominated by mulatto writers since most Haitian peasants were illiterate in the 1930s and 1940s. Due to the overwhelming numbers of non-peasant, non-black writers attempting to portray Haitian rural life, one must wonder how accurate or realistic these novels are. Roumain, an ethnologist, Communist, and nationalist influenced by Jean Price-Mars, provides an accurate depiction of peasant life because of the addition of Creole expressions and the communal practices of the people, such as the coumbite. Unfortunately, Roumain overemphasizes his Communist ideology as the tool for Haitian liberation and economic growth, and some of his characters lacked depth, such as the police officer Hilarion and the peasant resistant to Manuel’s plans of change, Gervilen. Moreover, I find aspects of the novel’s conclusion very clichéd and predictable, especially Manuel’s grieving lover being pregnant as the peasants succeeded in irrigating their fields. In spite of these previously mentioned flaws, Masters does provide a powerful counter to the status quo of Haitian society and espouses a different Marxism, focusing on agricultural labor rather than Marx’s industrial economy. Roumain, as part of the international black literary and political world, had contacts with important figures like Langston Hughes and others of African descent. Indeed, Frantz Fanon’s Les Damnes de la Terre derives its title from a work by Roumain, thereby illustrating his importance in Pan-Africanist, anti-colonial and socialist movements. Manuel also demonstrates the transnational radical consciousness of the Black Atlantic during this period, since his experiences in Cuba with Haitian braceros and other Caribbean laborers including forming multi-ethnic and multi-national collectives to battle white capitalist control of the sugar plantation industry for higher wages. Historically, the fall of the sugar industry led to massive deportations of Caribbean laborers, and racialized notions of civilization led to many Cubans demanding the deportation in order to save jobs for Cubans, even though few Cubans, white or black, desired to work on exploitative plantations. Regardless, nationalities of the Black Atlantic are always crossing porous borders and forming a counterculture of modernity, to use Paul Gilroy’s terminology. This novel provides additional evidence of that, and transcends its literary limits as a Marxist novel.  

Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse

"They say that the white man is coming to rule Haiti again. The black man is so cruel to his own, let the white man come!"

 Zora Neale Hurston's Tell My Horse is an interesting anthropological and religious study of Jamaican and Haitian cultures. Traveling in Jamaica and Haiti during the 1930s, Hurston's personal account reads like a travelogue and fascinating portrait of peasant cultures, religious traditions, and political conditions. Interesting sidenote, Alan Lomax was in Haiti making field recordings of Haitian music and actually recorded Zora Neale Hurston singing folk songs. Anywho, most of the book is centered on her descriptions of life, politics and religion in Haiti rather than Jamaica. Her time in Jamaica, however, does provide insight on race relations (black and mulatto divide in Jamaica exists just like in Haiti), belief in duppies in Jamaican culture, and traditions of Maroons in Accompong, including a dangerous hunt of a giant boar and the feasting that ensued. She also describes with numerous examples the color barrier between blacks and mulattoes in Jamaica, who form an elite separate from the black population because of access to knowledge, white contacts, and political power. Jamaica, like Haiti and other Caribbean islands, has a long history of political rule by mulattoes who usually carry on anti-black prejudice and rarely intermarry  with lower-class blacks. 

One of the great surprises one encounters reading the book is Hurston's ambivalence on the recently terminated American occupation of Haiti. As an African-American woman associated with the Harlem Renaissance one would expect her, like the NAACP and other black organizations, to unequivocally opposed to US imperialism in Haiti. A close reading of Hurston's text and her analysis of Haitian politics, however, reveals the deep political and economic troubles caused in Haiti by black and mulatto elites that created the conditions where American invasion was seen as preferable to the status quo. As Hurston traces the problems of Haiti back to the colonial period and the century and a half of misrule by black and mulatto elites, one must agree that a fundamental problem of Haitian politics is the use of lies and deception to justify the current status of Haiti. While talking to a Haitian intellectual, one sees it as he lies about Haitian history and overlooks Haiti's enormous structural problems that facilitated the American occupation. To this particular Haitian, lying about the actual events and problems of Haiti becomes truth as he lies to himself and to Zora Neale Hurston. 

Besides her ambivalence on the American occupation, Hurston's account focuses on Voodoo, its rituals, and the overwhelming majority of Haitians who practice the faith. Indeed, even light-skinned elites sometimes practice Voodoo, despite publicly distancing themselves from the "superstitions" of the blacks. Hurston's account of Voodoo actually accepts some of the 'supernatural' or unbelievable things associated with Voodoo, such as zombies. She even took a picture of a Zombie while in Haiti, a woman whose eyes appear dead. Thus, Hurston is not as skeptical of Voodoo and its power, so she succeeds in providing a relatively unbiased account of Voodoo rituals, beliefs, and practices. While discussing the practice of bokors who do specialize in turning victims into zombies with a Haitian doctor, they both concur that its probably caused by some drug crafted by African ancestors. Indeed, these secrets in composing drugs, remedies, and other poisons is part of secret societies, which are not 'real' Voodoo but a small sector of the Haitian populace who practice evil rites to turn their victims into human slaves (zombies), poison them, or even practice cannibalism. Hurston also describes the process of invoking the loas, the dances and music associated with calling the loas, and the 'mounting,' or act of possession by a loa. In addition, Hurston shares short descriptions of the most popular loas of the Petro and Rada rites of Vodou, the former belong to the Kongo tradition (central Africa) and the latter coming from Dahomey (West Africa). 

Overall, Hurston's Tell My Horse is a satisfactory account of Voodoo in Haiti. She dispels racist myths of Haitian voodoo as evil superstition, describing the real practices, origins, and theology of it. For Hurston, it is no better nor worse than any other religion. Her description of some of the flaws of Haiti and Jamaica regarding race and gender are also pertinent for understanding current social conditions of both islands and the Caribbean as a region. She does witness some amazing feats while in Jamaica or Haiti, or hears multiple accounts testifying to their validity, so it's hard to not believe that zombies, possession by loas, and the Ba Mouin rite are not 'real.' This text, loved and praised by Ishmael Reed, does live up to the hype as an important look on Vodou and African-derived religious systems, and highlights the already international black consciousness present in African-Americans during the Harlem Renaissance. Her experiences with Vodou/Voodoo testify to that fact, and illustrate the importance of Voodoo as a syncretistic way of life with potential healing through medicine and rituals.