Haiti Turned Upside Down

...Finally, the work is not a novel at all, it is a documentary in three parts...

...They celebrate their pact at the Grand Hotel Olof (consistently called "Olofsson" by the author)—then, and until recently, the home-away-from-home of Graham Greene and other novelists fattening on Haiti's miseries...

...Subtitled "The Cayman's Nine Lives," it begins with an epigraph from Heinrich von Kleist's The Betrothal in San Domingo: "At Port-au-Prince, there lived at the beginning of this century, when blacks were murdering whites...

...Back in Haiti after home leave, the arrogant Count Schwerin addresses the German colonists as follows: "The immigration of Germans into Haiti is destined to transform this backward country and open up new paths of civilization...

...Hanneken, not Major Beach...

...Book III, "Pastimes of German Immigrants"—introduced with a mistranslation of a sentimental poem by Heine —shifts the focus to the author's family...

...Guided by the God-inspired leadership of our emperor and king, the German colony will disseminate ideas of progress and discipline, which have not up until now taken root in Haiti...

...Returning to Portau-Prince aboard the Lusitania, Pauline dreams of giving premature birth to a monster—part goat, part cayman...

...None of this is true...

...Be assured, though, that there are better ways of finding out what happened to Adolf Hitler and Werner von Braun, Ernst Toller and Ernst Udet, Papa Doc and Madame Max Adolphe...

...If it was the author's intention to make Germans and Haitians alike appear stupid and ludicrous, he has certainly succeeded...

...The Negro race cannot become fully civilized without the white man's help, because Negroes are not capable of developing on their own initiative, as is amply shown by the example of our protectorates in West and East Africa where German effort has created flourishing communities where previously there was nothing but chaos and anarchy...

...The moment she lands in Haiti she smells "the pestilential breath of the mangrove swamps, a nauseating mixture of land and sea, the dark depths of which swarmed with alligators that churned up the fetid bottom with their jagged tails, an obscene thought that aroused her in spite of herself...

...In the author's words, "reality beats fantasy by several plane lengths...

...The scene reproduced on the cover in color—by the late Philomé Obin, the world-famous Haitian artist—is not a wedding, and the site is Cap Haïtien, not Port-auPrince...

...But to put words in the mouths of famous people that turn them into the opposite of what they were, and to do the same in the concluding parts of the book with individuals referred to by their real names who lived in Haiti during this reviewer's lifetime—all the while maintaining that what is being related is "an imaginary story: any resemblance to real persons past or present is fortuitous"—is thoroughly dishonest...

...Vincent happened to be the one French officer who befriended and consistently admired the great black commander, coming close in fact to persuading Bonaparte that the invasion of free Haiti and the kidnapping of the conciliatory Toussaint would be—as the Emperor was later to admit—"the greatest mistake of my career," ranking even ahead of his invasions of Spain and Russia...

...The other misrepresentations—which are legion—must be laid to the author, Hans Christoph Buch...

...To effect Pauline's cure, he takes her (and a cayman, too, of course) to Germany for Christmas...

...The U. S. Marines took no prisoners...

...As for Péralte's body, it was tied (not nailed) to a door for a day or two to convince his followers that he was indeed dead, and was not subsequently dropped from the deck of U.S.S...

...But grandfather Buch has placed a small cayman in her swimming pool that doesn't help, and soon adds many more he has trapped in the Etang Saumatre for sale to German zoos...

...When, just before the landing, a storm whose thunderclaps have the explosive sound of atorpedo snap theLusitania's smokestacks "like matchsticks" (get the premonitory symbolism...

...If the Negro or colored Haitians nevertheless fear German superiority and try to keep the Germans out of their island by means of restrictions unknown in civilized countries, they will thereby be pronouncing their own death sentence...

...The worst injustice Buch commits in Book I, though, is to have General Vincent, of all people, arrest Toussaint...

...The Major kills him in a suburb of Portau-Prince, has his body "nailed to a door," and orders his troops open fire "with grenade throwers, tracer bullets, and machine-gun fire...

...Grandfather Buch's wife Pauline, meanwhile, has been suffering from neurotic symptoms brought on by "the bitter experience of her first marriage...

...Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "Haiti: The Black Republic," "Where Art Is Joy: Forty Years of Haitian Popular Art" (forthcoming) The fact that everything conveyed on the jacket of this book is untrue may, charitably, be ascribed to the publisher...

...Telegrams from Solon Ménos (President Simon Sam's foreign minister), Louis Borno (later President of Haiti) and Georges Sylvain are also quoted at length...

...It recounts the notorious Lüders Affair through letters written by the Imperial German Resident Minister Count Schwerin, and by Emil Lüders himself, as well as through the minutes of the Civil Court of Port-au-Prince on October 14, 1897...

...Herr Stecher informs grandfather Buch that they are being bankrolled from abroad by Emil Lüders, "who hopes that you will sell the natives large quantities of poison so as to cut do wn the indigenous population and make room for German immigration...

...His killer was Captain H.H...

...If Kleist got his inspiration from the "ghost of Toussaint L'Ouverture," as Buch claims, he would have begun his novella "when whites were murdering blacks— and vice versa," and made some effort to tell the truth about how the French sought to subvert and pervert the black revolution in Haiti...

...Louis Buch, Hans Christoph's grandfather, emigrates from Germany to set up a pharmaceutical firm in partnership with "a certain Herr Stecher" (grandfather of Clive Stecher, the leading stationer and bookseller in Haiti today...

...Any diligent reader who has gotten that far in this "novel" will want the pleasure of discovering for himself what is wrong with the conclusion...

...Only the ministrations of a priestess of vaudou brings her any comfort...

...The culturally inferior Negro can only benefit from being subjected to German discipline and German ideas...

...For openers, Book I is an unmitigated disaster...

...No wedding takes place, in Port-auPrince or anywhere else...

...As for the rest of Book III—but enough is enough...

...she expires...

...Those almost-extinct caymans again...

...the first purports to recount the slave insurrection against the French (1791), and Napoleon's unsuccessful attempt to reimpose slavery, by duplicity and atrocity, after the black selfemancipation of 1801...

...The misinformed zealot who reviewed the book for the New York Times went further, charging the Marines with "beatings and lynchings" plus "thebrutalmurder of Péralte," and thus with "paving the way for black nationalism and eventually Duvalier...

...The painting is nowhere acknowledged in the book, leading one to suspect it was used without the permission of either its owner or the artist...

...The account given by Buch himself, overlaid with phony fantasies about caymans who first guard and then swallow "Toussaint's treasure" (there was no treasure, Toussaint having used his entire resources to arm his guerrillas with the British and American weapons that eventually forced Rochambeau to evacuate Haiti), makes a mockery of a great tragedy...

...Susquehanna in a block of concrete, as Buch further alleges...

...Marine occupation, into the hands of Major Edward Beach...

...The arrest was actually made by General Brunêt...

...No one questions a novelist's right to historically situate a fiction...

...Book II, "The Wages of Underdevelopment," dispenses with any pretense to fiction...

...One must assume these documents are transcribed from the archives in Germany or Haiti...

...The last two deal with the outrageous behavior of the small German colony in Haiti that was supported by the imperial fleet (18971941...

...Mostofthe300Cacos netted in the subsequent sweep were released on promise of good behavior—a consistent Marine policy that drew criticism from armchair belligerents in Congress...

...Péralte was slain in ambush, not in Port-au-Prince but in the heart of Caco country near Grande Rivière, after having been betrayed by his own followers...

...Typically, author Buch is not in the slightest reluctant to give his grandfather credit for betraying Charlemagne Péralte, the leader of the Cacos' rebellion against theU.S...