Haiti, History, and the Gods by Joan Dayan
Hogan, John P
STRANGER THAN FICTION Haiti, History, and the Gods Joan Dayan University of California Press, $35,339 pp. John P. Hogan Ho know Haiti is to be obsessed by the place. Joan Dayan, a...
...Referring to the mutilation of Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines's corpse in 1806, she evokes a deeply felt mood of Haiti's past and present...
...From the earliest days of the republic, voodoo, race, gender, and nation have been intertwined...
...It is almost as if she had diagnosed Haiti's (and everyone's...
...One can only hope a new dispensation has begun...
...True to her word, Dayan does not draw conclusions...
...Nonetheless, Haitians, like all of us, are immigrants from the past...
...Such a hankering after resurrection, repeated and theatrical, still plagues Haiti, with each new hero, with each new government, with every dispensation...
...Indeed, la politique de la doublure frames the working out of personal and national identity from Toussaint, Chris-tophe, and Petion to the Duvaliers...
...Many of the burning issues from Saint-Domingue still smolder today...
...policy can be traced from the Jefferson administration to the current flap over apparent U.S...
...Superficial efforts at Catholic religious education provided the opportunity for the Saint-Domingue black population to revitalize the religion of "Rada, Congo, Ibo, or Naga spirits" brought over on the slave ships...
...But the light Dayan shines on race, gender, and religion illumines the path from the slave trade to the drug trade to the boat people...
...In rural areas, Catholic rituals and songs, the lives of Christ and the saints, as well as sacraments and sacramentals were "eagerly adopted by those forbidden the opportunity to become familiar with Christian doctrine...
...Dayan points out that in the colonial period, blacks, whether slaves or emancipated, were more religious than most whites...
...support of Emmanuel Constant's fraph...
...The exploitation of women, whether small farmers or those who stitch baseballs, continues at a galloping pace...
...She sets out to chart the "cultural imagination" of the first black republic and to a great extent succeeds in her creative anthropological examination of race, religion, and gender in colonial Haiti...
...She concentrates on the novels of Marie Chauvet, "perhaps the greatest writer of Haitian fiction...
...That voodoo and Catholicism are interwoven in Haiti is apparent...
...Suspicion of U.S...
...Dayan uses a multifaceted methodology, including careful historical, anthropological, and literary analysis...
...This work is not for those unfamiliar with Haitian history and culture...
...Dayan is at her best in part 2, "Fictions of Haiti...
...She paints a frightening portrait of colonial Haiti from legal and religious texts, memoirs, letters, and literary fiction...
...Zombis, the "epistemology of whiteness," the "onomastics of color," and the history of bizarre mathematical tabulations to measure racial composition will appear arcane to many readers...
...Against a backdrop of Seng-hor, Cesaire, Fanon, and Zora Neale Hurston, she examines Haiti's tales of "land, women, and gods...
...We should pray for a resurrection, but this time round, without a mutilation...
...The church remained a foreign institution tolerant of slavery and thereby earned the contempt of the masses...
...Outside forces still manipulate Haitian events...
...The "logic of voodoo" has provided a soothing ointment against the racism and sexism of Haiti's blood-soaked history...
...How the Iwa meet Jesus or how the Virgin Mary meets Ezili Freda is still the topic of much debate...
...Saint-Domingue, the French colonial name for Haiti, was the richest and most productive of France's colonies, and provided the impetus for many cultural innovations that shaped republican France, from race and religion to dress, jewelry, and food...
...Dayan claims that voodoo practices "must be viewed as ritual reenactments of Haiti's colonial past," rather than simply holdovers from African religious practices...
...This homegrown reconstruction provided, and for many still provides, something of an intelligibility structure in the face of suffering and oppression...
...Voodoo is the hermeneutical thread throughout the quilt, Catholicism the blunt and destructive needle...
...However, for the uneducated the lives of the saints, sacraments, and rituals became purveyors of other beliefs-and other gods...
...The complex amalgamation of voodoo and Catholicism, complicated further by the split between the Ti Legliz and the hierarchy, remains a volatile issue...
...Dayan does hint at a kind of conclusion...
...The gory butchering of the emperor's dead body not only recorded a collective frenzy, she notes, but also registered the potential for transfiguration-a resurrection...
...Their syncretistic religion generated "a belief system of unprecedented resilience...
...Rather, she tells the same story three ways: using ritual, fiction, and history...
...However, for readers with some exposure to the country, it is an intriguing way to wander through Haiti's "cultural imagination...
...Land for sex is a consistent theme...
...the resilience is not...
...However, it is difficult to get clear insights into an amalgamation that defies explanation...
...The author quotes from Jacques-Stephen Alexis's Les Arbres Musiciens: "The Iwa (voodoo spirits) were amalgamated to the body of the nation, they fertilized the land like the male fertilizes the female...
...This methodological tool of "doubling" is pieced together from major Haitian writers...
...original sins and then reconstructed a genesis story to explain their painful contemporary presence...
...The author was right to warn the reader from the beginning not to expect "a unified point of view...
...The modern economy is as exploitative as the colonial plantation economy...
...Authors as diverse as Francois Duvalier and Jacques Rou-main, and virtually all of Haiti's women, writers, as well as Dayan herself, present voodoo as a way of rationalizing, and maybe as a way out of, life's daily miseries...
...The author also describes what happened when the impetus came the other way, "most notably, when Napoleon Bonaparte, wanting to re-institute slavery in his possessions, sent his best troops to Saint-Domingue in order to bring down Toussaint L'Ouverture and make sure no epaulette remained on any black shoulder...
...Sensuality, romance, bondage, and despotism are woven through a quilt made up of pairs: black and white, slave and master, voodoo and Catholicism, virgin and prostitute...
...Male jealousy in the face of the grueling labor of women subsistence farmers and small land owners is crudely sexualized by Rene Depestre: "Every woman has a karo (3.3 acres) of land between her legs...
...After so many stories and so much detail, such reticence is somewhat frustrating for the reader...
...But indeed, she doesn't need to create a myth, she simply recounts the often gruesome historyHer examination, while offering no conclusions, allows for "conflict and collision" and seeks "to dramatize a complex and perplexing social history too often lost in exposition...
...Fear and suspicion of racial politics-whether French or American-run deep...
...Joan Dayan, a Haitian-American professor of English at the University of Arizona, clearly admits to her obsession...
Vol. 123 • October 1996 • No. 18
