Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History 0739184660, 9780739184660

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Possession, Dispossession, and Self-Possession
I: Dispossessions: Nationhood, Citizenship, Personhood, and Poverty
Chapter One: Hegel and Agamben
Chapter Two: States of Exception
Chapter Three: The Newest Utopia
Chapter Four: Mbembe’s “Unhappiness” and Trouillot’s “Fundamentally New Subjects”
II: Possession Dispossessed: Pathologizing and a “Western” Intellectual History of Possession
Chapter Five: “Unhappiness” as Taboo
Chapter Six: Secularizing Possession andFostering Revolution?
Chapter Seven: Leiris’s “Lived Theater”
Chapter Eight: From Haiti to Brazil, from Herskovits to Métraux
Chapter Nine: Verger’s Image in Bataille’sTears of Eros
Chapter Ten: Possession, a Threshold to a Biopolitical Order
III: Repossessing Possession: After Franco-American Ethnography, after Duvalier—Vodou in Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves
Chapter Eleven: Depestre, the “Autofiction” of the “(Anti)Hero” of “A New World Mediterranean”
Chapter Twelve: The West’s Obsession with Defining Art
Chapter Thirteen: Between Frankétienne and Glissant
IV: Self-Repossession: The Dispossessed and Their “New Subjectivities”—Jean-Claude Fignolé’s and Kettly Mars’s Novels
Chapter Fourteen: On “Un-Becoming” Racial
Chapter Fifteen: Possession as Fluidity: Finding Equilibrium under a Neoliberal Order
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought

Bèlè moi—Martinique 2011 from “Intérieur—Andidan 2011” by Nicolas Nabajoth. Source: Reprinted by permission from Nicolas Nabajoth.

Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought An Intellectual History Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken

LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Parts of “Introduction: Possession, Dispossession, and Self-Possession: From Pathology to Healing, Braiding Intellectual Histories” further develops work published as “Towards an Intellectual History of Possession: Reading ‘la crise’ as a Textual Space in Vodou and André Breton’s Haitian Lectures and Nadja” in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 41.2 (June 2012): 280–305. Portions of part I were originally published in the Journal of Haitian Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, under the title “Questions We Are Asking: Hegel, Agamben, Dayan, Trouillot, Mbembe, and Haitian Studies.” Reprinted with permission. Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom Copyright © 2015 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benedicty-Kokken, Alessandra, 1973Spirit possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou thought : an intellectual history / Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-8465-3 (cloth : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-0-7391-8466-0 (electronic) 1. Vodou--Haiti. 2. Spirit possession--Haiti. I. Title. BL2490.B43 2014 133.4'26097294--dc23 2014031638 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To Alfonsina, Dario, and Raffaele

Contents

Preface: Among Haitian Studies, French Critical Theory, and Postcolonial Theory Acknowledgments Introduction: Possession, Dispossession, and Self-Possession: From Pathology to Healing, Braiding Intellectual Histories I: Dispossessions: Nationhood, Citizenship, Personhood, and Poverty 1

1 11 15

43

Hegel and Agamben: Materializing Philosophy, Philosophizing the Material

47

2

States of Exception: Dayan, Trouillot, and Mbembe

71

3

The Newest Utopia: “Ending Poverty”

83

4

Mbembe’s “Unhappiness” and Trouillot’s “Fundamentally New Subjects”

89

II: Possession Dispossessed: Pathologizing and a “Western” Intellectual History of Possession 5 6 7 8 9

101

“Unhappiness” as Taboo: Anthropology, Psychology, and the Disciplining of “Possession”

107

Secularizing Possession and Fostering Revolution?: Breton’s “Haitian Lectures”

117

Leiris’s “Lived Theater”: Possession as the Autobiography of the Conscious and Unconscious

127

From Haiti to Brazil, from Herskovits to Métraux: Anthropology and Human Rights

143

Verger’s Image in Bataille’s Tears of Eros: Hollier’s Dispossessed Intellectuals and Vodou Thought

155

10 Possession, a Threshold to a Biopolitical Order: de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Athena Athanasiou

vii

185

viii

Contents

III: Repossessing Possession: After Franco-American Ethnography, after Duvalier—Vodou in Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves

201

11 Depestre, the “Autofiction” of the “(Anti)Hero” of “A New World Mediterranean”

205

12 The West’s Obsession with Defining Art: Depestre’s Joust with an Aesthetic-Empirical Order of Things

229

13 Between Frankétienne and Glissant: Hadriana’s Realpolitik

263

IV: Self-Repossession: The Dispossessed and Their “New Subjectivities”—Jean-Claude Fignolé’s and Kettly Mars’s Novels

271

14 On “Un-Becoming” Racial: Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Aube Tranquille

273

15 Possession as Fluidity: Finding Equilibrium under a Neoliberal Order: Kettly Mars’s L’Heure hybride and Aux frontières de la soif

329

Appendix: Timeline Combining General Contexts for Transatlantic and Hemispheric Atlantic Thought— Particularly in France, Haiti, and the United States Bibliography Index About the Author

361 383 399 419

Preface Among Haitian Studies, French Critical Theory, and Postcolonial Theory

Amongst Vodouyizans, there is no one comprehensive word to designate the practices, the philosophical system that in this book I will refer to as “Vodou” 1; similarly the word “possession” is not how Voudouyizans in the past generally have designated the experience of receiving another spirit, 2 another subjectivity into their corporeal bodies. And, similarly in Haitian Kreyòl there is no word to designate “art.” 3 And yet, this entire book is about these three words: “Vodou,” “possession,” and “art.” The caveat then of this book is one of the lessons of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s work: to engage with the “cultural” other, especially using the epistemological frameworks of academic language, is to, without a shadow of a doubt, participate in a racialized, racist, denigrating discourse, one that hurls the “other” into what Trouillot calls “the Savage slot” (see chapter 4). I will not succeed in avoiding this, for this is an academic book, but what my book does, is respond to Trouillot’s invitation to devise a research topic that does not study a geographically circumscribed “other,” an “other” that lives in a certain place, far away, a being that fits neatly into the desire to depict the “other” as monolithically different from the “self.” Rather, Trouillot encourages that we identify research topics that reflect the enmeshing, in Achille Mbembe’s words, the “entanglement” 4 between what is perceived as the “global north” and the “global south.” In the most general of senses, this book responds to three challenges that face Haitian studies and more largely postcolonial studies in the francophone context today: an ongoing effort to destigmatize Vodou from degrading representations; the challenge to locate spaces of agency in a Haitian landscape that is privy to the worst forms of objectification by a geopolitical order that has, it would seem, hopelessly abused it; 5 and a French public sphere that is only very recently, and even then, stubbornly, 6 allowing itself to consider postcolonial discourse as a possibility for thinking through its relationship to its former colonies, its overseas “départements” and “territoires,” and its non-“français de souche” citizens. This book is then as much about Haitian thought as it is about French thought, and how the two have interacted around the notion of “possession” over the past century. 1

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HONORING VODOU’S INTEGRITY IN THE ACADEME The first challenge is what Kate Ramsey qualifies as the “ongoing contemporary stigmatization of the religion,” one that “intensified with the start of the cholera epidemic in October 2010.” 7 That said, in the past half century, strides have been made in producing scholarship that counters “narratives denigrating African-based spirituality.” 8 As of 2012, there is a series of Duke University Press dedicated to the scholarship, not necessarily of Vodou, but of “Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People,” not to mention the important work of KOSANBA, A Scholarly Association for the Study of Haitian Vodou. As of December 2012, thanks to KOSANBA’s efforts, the United States Library of Congress “change[d] its primary subject heading of the religion from ‘Voodooism’ to ‘Vodou,’ an appellation that is far less ‘pejorative’ than ‘Voodoo.’” 9 Kate Ramsey explains that: Practitioners of Haitian Vodou have historically not objectified the religion as such but rather said that they “serve the spirits. . . . Yet if many practitioners, or Vodouyizan, still prefer to describe a practice, outsiders have long insisted on naming an entity. 10

To take account of an intellectual history of possession is to note that “Voodoo,” “Vaudou,” “Vodou” are themselves products not only of languages, but of the epistemologies of the scholarly world, which cannot free itself from the compulsion to name. In a sense, the idea for this project came from a discussion with Yvonne Daniel around words used to describe what in the book I identify as “possession,” the moment that a spirit mounts its human horse. In Haitian Kreyòl, the words used are “monte chwal”—“mounting the horse” 11; in Cuban Regla de Ocha [Santería] the terminology would be “orichas montando/ bajando/ descendiendo/ orichas bailando o subiendo a la cabeza”—“spirits mounting/ coming down onto/ descending onto/ spirits dancing or climbing into the head” 12; and in Candomblé it could also be “orixás manifesting.” 13 The word “possession,” then, it would seem, emerges from a specifically francophone informed scholarship, that is, work done “on” Haitian Vodou by French scholars, and then by scholars writing mostly in English, but informed by the earlier scholarship of writers such as Michel Leiris or Alfred Métraux. 14 In considering an intellectual history of possession, I follow directly on the footsteps of René Depestre’s 1988 novel, Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, which takes account of how scholarship on Vodou, is, in part, the result of an academic exigency to name, and as such is a mirror to the “entanglements” of varying colonial and postcolonial influences: of course, West and Central African, Arawak, Caribe, French, Haitian, U.S.-American, and Vodouyizan, but also many others, including Spanish, Polish, Dutch, and Portuguese.

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More generally, Depestre’s novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, written just about twenty-five years ago, takes account of so many of the topics that occupy present-day scholarship on the Caribbean, and more generally postcolonial studies today. In the three chapters that I dedicate to Depestre’s novel, I argue that in an extremely intricate way, Depestre takes early French and U.S.-American anthropology of Haiti, and more generally of African and African-diasporic cultures to task; he acknowledges the constructive elements of theories of hybridity, but also reminds us that more often than not such hybridity, such creolization is linked into the traumatic experiences of being constantly othered. He offers a commentary on a century of activist-writers who theorized Marxism, communism, socialism, and anticolonialism, but found themselves, for the most part, instead, disillusioned, even decimated by what would seem to be the failure of all of these endeavors, where Nazism, Stalinism, Castroism, Duvalierism, and more generally “technocra[cy],” 15 would turn egalitarian aspirations into authoritarian ones. Published two years after the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier from the Haitian presidency, Depestre’s novel is probably one of the first interventions after Duvalier’s manipulation of Vodou to attempt to force, especially his French and Haitian readers, to deal with Vodou’s history, and to espouse it, as yes, a religion, but also as a form of “African based spirituality,” 16 as a “knowledge” system, 17 a philosophy. 18 When it first came out, Depestre’s novel was mostly discredited as promoting a sort of cheap eroticism around what seemed to be the typified racially driven desiring structures of a Caribbean order (the black macho narrator falls in love with the “embodiment of flawless [French] femininity” 19). I would argue that in fact, it is a novel that obliges its characters, even the ones that are just supposed to sit there and be pretty, and its readers, whether they like it or not, from whatever vantage point they prefer to read the novel, to in Mireille Rosello’s words, “bec[o]me political subjects.” 20 Published seven years after Edouard Glissant first comes out with Le discours antillais, Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves is also a reflection on the intellectual ambiance of the 1990s, which would idealize what it means to be creolized, to be hybrid. While Glissant himself does not paint a romanticized picture of what it means to be engaged in “la Poétique de la Relation” 21—“the Poetics of Relation,” a more general intellectual milieu seizes upon “creolization as cultural creativity”; 22 and while such a public sphere does not necessarily present the process of creolization as a utopia, it doesn’t either fully recognize the traumatisms involved in such creativity. If in Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture (2009), Madelaine Hron shows that there is little that is joyous in the pained experience of otherness, exile, immigration, and dispossession, then Depestre’s novel is one of the first texts to deal both with the attractiveness of hybridity, or of what he calls “métissage,” 23 one that obfus-

4

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cates a much deeper experience of suffering, one so intense, that it really is not palatable for persons who have not experienced it. In putting into play “Gede’s tricksterism,” 24 Depestre seduces the reader into what seems to be a pleasant narrative, one that would receive “Western theoretical approbation,” 25 but in the end, exposes us/them to the uncomfortable narratives of those fractured persons who emerge from a space of what Kaiama L. Glover names “ex-centricity,” 26 those whose voices are “quasi-schizophrenic,” 27 those who must find modes of speaking and “writ[ing] the unspeakable.” 28 Depestre will trick his readers, whatever their received or elected beliefs are—Eurocentrism, Afrocentrism, cosmopolitanism—to reconsider their position, and not only to reassess their position, but to narratively be exposed to what it means to be fragmented, torn apart, traumatized. The reader will also learn that it is not only intellectual knowledge that brings healing, but also embodied knowledge. While the novel is on the surface about zombification, I will argue that it is ultimately about possession, where possession is first and foremost about healing. “SHOCKS AND DISAPPOINTMENTS,” ASPIRING DESPITE . . . The second challenge with which this book engages is what Roberto Strongman identifies as the confusing mélange of disappointment, sadness, and even anger at contemplating a Haiti, in Donald J. Cosentino’s words, which is ever in decay: “in the first decade of this millennium, when everything there seems to have grown only worse and worse.” 29 Strongman writes: Whether as children of the soil or scholars of the country and its wonders, Haiti has marked our lives and we long to go back to that site of affective and intellectual imprinting. If we are being honest with ourselves, we might confess to the shock and even the disappointments of our recent returns. Everything has changed after the earthquake, the hurricanes, the Aristide administrations, and the Duvaliers. 30

Nadège Clitandre vehemently and convincingly argues that the way both the American media and the academe take note of Haitians’ capacity to suffer, its predilection for “resilience” is extremely problematic (see chapter 1). In arguing that “resilience” is itself yet another form of “exceptionalism” attributed to Haitians, such a discourse creates a space where it seems “culturally” “natural” for Haitians to be in pain. 31 While providing a certain impression of “resilience,” of persons and peoples capable of dealing with such suffering, “resilience” also masks much deeper suffering. Sissela Bok in Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science, points to the relationship between resilience and posttraumatic stress disorder:

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A strong measure of resilience is surely necessary for sheer survival. When it is impaired, as in post-traumatic stress disorder, there is no end to the reliving and re-envisioning of the traumatic events. The shock of trauma can disable switching mechanisms in the brain that ordinarily soften painful recollections—as is well known, for instance about our failures to remember accidents, operations, even labor pains. If these brain mechanisms malfunction, individuals suffer from persistent searing memories and anguish. 32

It is in this scope that I study “possession,” possession as one of the privileged spaces through which the victims of trauma, individual traumas, collective traumas, find a way to process suffering, what as we will see throughout this book, is the claim of scholars such as Max Beauvoir, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Kesner Castor, Joan Dayan, Claudine Michel, Leslie G. Desmangles, Michel Leiris, Karen McCarthy Brown, Terry Rey, Karen Richman, and Craig E. Stephenson. The work of Jean-Claude Fignolé’s and Kettly Mars’s oeuvre, as the end of this book will demonstrate, is about always carving out a space of healing, even in the most destitute of landscapes, about creating and recreating not just the “desire” to “live” in Haiti, but making it possible in Nadève Ménard’s words, for a person “who actually has a choice” to stay in Haiti, to “choose to live here.” 33 As we will see further on, Stephenson reminds us that the etymology of possession is the “ability” to “sit,” to be “seated.” 34 Choosing to live somewhere that others perceive as maybe even hopelessly “poor,” hopelessly “dispossessed” is to repossess that place, to make it one’s own, to understand, “perhaps it means that the country is not as barren and hopeless as typically portrayed.” 35 CONFRONTING RACIALIZED LIBERALISM: POSTCOLONIALITY AS PATHOLOGY In the same way that the word for “art” does not exist in Haitian Kreyòl, so too the French Republic has attempted to write “race” out of its official language. 36 Yet, just as art still exists in Haitian culture, so too racism thrives in France. Although not directly related to possession per se, it is important to note that the work of visible public intellectuals such as Pascal Bruckner, whose work on “happiness” I use in chapter 5, or Daniel Lefeuvre, is exemplary of an extremely contradictory, and even stubbornly hypocritical tradition of intellectual “liberal” thought that believes itself to be engaged in discourses that are tolerant, open, cosmopolitan, and not racist. As the first part of this book will explore, and particularly the discussion of Trouillot’s writings in Global Transformations (2003), 37 anthropology, and more generally any academic scholarship concerned with the “cultural” other, is inherently, even if inadvertently, promoting what Trouillot names “the Savage slot.” In the case of French metropoli-

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tan intellectual discussions around colonialism and postcolonialism, and here I base my analysis on Charles Forsdick’s article “Colonial History, Postcolonial Memory: Contemporary Perspectives” (2007), Bruckner is a case in point of such obstinate liberalism (i.e., libertinage), completely unaware of its exclusionary practices. Bruckner’s commentary, as we will see in chapter 5, is one that is capable of astute criticism, and yet, absolutely closed off to new strands of thought, because, these “new” (i.e., nonEuropean) theoretical frameworks exist in a domain, that of postcolonial discourse, which Bruckner doesn’t necessarily ignore, but rather, which he rejects as ultimately, if not illegitimate, at least not very useful. It is of no surprise then that in Forsdick’s analysis of why postcolonial studies has met with such resistance in the French academe, he mentions how Bruckner, in La Tyrannie de la pertinence: essai sur le masochisme occidental—The Tyranny of Pertinence: Essay on Western Masochism (2005) “dismisses any attempt to detect legacies of the ‘colonial’ past in the ‘postcolonial’ present . . . reveal[ing] the blend of historical revisionism and ideological bad faith on which this ‘white blindfold’ thesis depends.” 38 The title of the Bruckner book, on which Forsdick bases his analysis, also harbors back to a certain inability amongst French intellectuals to see that to revolt against the French bourgeois order (as a bourgeois) does little to help advance the cause of entire communities that the French empire and current geopolitical order continue to marginalize (see chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10, notably, this book’s later discussion of Bataille’s Tears of Eros and Depestre’s novel). It might even be possible to read Bruckner as coming out of a tradition of French intellectuals actively involved in repudiating a bourgeois order, while at the same time, edifying this (white) bourgeois order through their discomfort and inability to deal with colonialism and especially postcolonialism, in all of its meanings: postcolonialism as a continuation of a colonial order that continues to politically, environmentally, and economically dispossess peoples across the globe, but also the postcolonial as a process, even a practice of engaging actively with the multiple “others” that are part of, in this case, the “French” and (formerly) francophone landscapes. If French intellectuals see discussions of postcolonial discourse as an imposition of an “orthodoxy,” 39 it is that they do not see that the French Republic itself promotes a “homogenized, modèle républicain” 40 that repels, in Forsdick’s words, the complexity of: postcolonial sites that resonate for both (former) “colonizer” and (former) “colonized,” bearing multiple and often conflicting memories that have been perpetuated, in often refracted forms, in the postcolonial era. 41

As we will see in chapter 5, Bruckner objects to “happiness” as a reflection of the desire for banality, and as such is interested in “sites” that are oppositional to a bourgeois order, for example “bad behavior,” 42 “vul-

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garity,” or “masochism.” Yet, he does not see that these are in a sense acts of big boys acting immaturely, being a bit “melodramatic,” a word Forsdick uses in referring to Daniel Lefeuvre’s resistance to postcolonial theory. 43 Their thinking remains myopic in that it cannot move past thought that dichotomizes: given Bruckner’s invective of the Western desire for happiness, it is ironic, and here I read him through Forsdick, that he would also take Europeans to task for feeling too guilty, for participating in “a widespread self-loathing inherent in current reassessments of the colonial past.” 44 Rosello corroborates; she explains that the French resistance to postcolonial theories comes from the fact that: anti-repentants speak as though there was a colonial and then a postcolonial France, rather than a postcolonial way of analyzing colonialism in the nineteenth century as well as the history of the post-independence era (which includes the memory of past conflicts of decolonization.)

She further explains, “Postcolonial theories . . . are under suspicion and the few French academics who choose to make use of them are likely to be seen as ‘repentants.’” 45 Forsdick suggests that La Tyrannie de la pertinence: essai sur le masochisme occidental is to be read as a “sequel to his earlier Sanglot de l’homme blanc [The Sobs of the White Man (1983)].” 46 It is shameful that Bruckner, at least in 1983 and 2005, when the two books that Forsdick analyzes are written, is so resistant to postcolonial thought; and, it is equally problematic that he cannot imagine that someone besides the “white man” might also shed a tear. Most importantly though, as this book’s fifth chapter on how “possession” has been pathologized shows, it is as if Bruckner, whose work helps me to build my argument on how trauma is rendered abnormal amongst the bourgeois and middle class, desires that which he repudiates. Were he to be more open to the very notion of postcoloniality, he would encounter Achille Mbembe’s deliberations on “unhappiness” (chapter 4), and discover what Forsdick identifies as “sites” that harbor the complexities that foster “possibilities.” 47 The very notion then of “possession,” possession as trope—whether as illness or mental disorder, or quite the opposite, as a means of working through, finding solace or even curing trauma—presents itself, as this book will show, as one of Forsdick’s “postcolonial sites that resonate for both (former) ‘colonizer’ and (former) ‘colonized.’” 48 The danger though in theorizing it as such, is that maybe it is in the end better that such a commonplace be kept on the down-low, where exposing it, rather than raising awareness, will only solicit more misrepresentation, more stigmatization of possession as a disorderly manifestation, belonging to “them” and not “us.” If I started the preface off with a sort of caveat, then I end it with a hope that such a staunch need to misunderstand each other will not come to haunt my book.

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Nota Bene: If translations were available, in most cases, I used the published English translation. Otherwise, all translations are mine. Also, in most cases, and especially for the literary texts, I included the original French as well as the English translation. NOTES 1. Kate Ramsey, “Vodou, History, and New Narratives,” Transition: An International Review 111 (2013): 36. 2. Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble (Bloomington: University of Illinois Press, 2005): 13. 3. Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, “Libérer le double, la beauté sera convulsive . . . A propos d’une collection d’art vodou,” Gradhiva: Haïti et l’anthropologie, online: http:// gradhiva.revues.org/271 (Musée du quai Branly), 2005, put online in 2008: 57–69, online version: 6. The original French is: “Jusqu’à ce jour, la langue créole ne possède aucun vocable pour désigner ce que la civilisation occidentale qualifie d’ ‘art.’” 4. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 14–16. 5. Laurent Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2012), 365. 6. Charles Forsdick, “Colonial History, Postcolonial Memory: Contemporary Perspectives,” Francophone Postcolonial Studies, Autumn-Winter 2007: 101–118. 7. Kate Ramsey, “Vodou, History, and New Narratives,” Transition: An International Review 111 (2013): Table of Contents, 36. 8. Ibid., 41. The work of M. Jacqui Alexander, Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique, LeGrace Benson, Kesner Castor, Carlo Avierl Célius, Donald J. Cosentino, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Vèvè Clark, Yvonne Daniel, Joan Dayan, Leslie G. Desmangles, Laënnec Hurbon, Christine Laurière, Karen McCarthy Brown, Elizabeth McAlister, Claudine Michel, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Jhon Picard-Byron, Kate Ramsey, Terry Rey, Karen Richman, Katherine Smith, Roberto Strongman, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, and Gina Ulysse, just to name a few who have created a corpus or works on Haitian Vodou. 9. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Kate Ramsey, “Media Alerts.” Journal of Haitian Studies 18, no. 2 (2012): 28. 10. Ramsey, “Vodou, History, and New Narratives,” 36. 11. Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom,13. 12. Ibid., 22. 13. Ibid., 43. 14. Conversation with Yvonne Daniel after her conference and performance titled “Corporeal Consequences for Dancing Divinity” (at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education, The City College of New York, September 26, 2011). 15. Raphael Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere: From the Plantation to the Postcolonial (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 146. 16. Ramsey, “Vodou, History, and New Narratives,” 41. 17. Claudine Michel, “Mama Lola’s Triplets, Haiti’s Sacred Ground, and Vodou Quintessential Lesson,” Journal of Haitian Studies 18, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 34. 18. Kesner Castor, Ethique Vaudou: Herméneutique de la maîtrise. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998. 19. Martin Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 127. 20. Mireille Rosello, The Reparative in Narratives: Works of Mourning in Progress (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 146. In writing about Gisèle Halimi, a

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lawyer of Tunisian and Jewish upbringing who writes “autobiographical and legal narratives” about the very trials for which she served as a lawyer, often “defending men and women accused of terrorism,” Rosello explains that Halimi’s “narratives often made her clients ‘political’ in the sense that her interventions successfully reconfigured the borders between who could be heard and dismissed . . . and who could be heard as speaking a rational language.” 21. Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997 [1981]): 419. 22. Quoted from the title and introduction by Robert Baron and Ana C. Cara to the edited volume, Creolization as Cultural Creativity (Jackson: University of Mississippi, 2011). For a critique of how the academe has seized upon writers who appropriate “French-determined theoretical models” and pass them off as “Antillean” (5), of writers who engage in a “hyper-awareness of the importance of Western theoretical approbation” (11), see the “Introduction: The Consequences of Ex-Centricity” in Kaiama L. Glover, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010). 23. René Depestre, Le métier à métisser. Paris: Editions Stock, 1998. 24. Michel, “Mama Lola’s Triplets,” 34. Part III, which is dedicated to Depestre’s work will further explain what the Gede lwas, or spirits, represent. 25. Glover, Haiti Unbound, 11. 26. Ibid., 1. 27. Ibid., 42. 28. Ibid., 180. 29. Donald J. Cosentino, “Baby on a Blender: A Visual History of Catastrophe in Haiti,” Small Axe, no. 36 (November 2011): 134. 30. Roberto Strongman, “Détour d’Haïti: A Prologue.” Journal of Haitian Studies 18, no. 2 (Fall 2012): 4. 31. Nadège Clitandre, “Haitian Exceptionalism in the Caribbean and the Project of Rebuilding Haiti,” The Journal of Haitian Studies, 17.2 (2011): 150. 32. Sissela Bok, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010), 118. 33. Nadève Ménard, “The Myth of the Exiled Writer,” Transition 111 (2013): 58. 34. Craig E. Stephenson, Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche (Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxford: Routledge, 2009), 117. 35. Ménard, “The Myth of the Exiled Writer,” 58. 36. Morris, Harvey. “France Fights Racism by Outlawing ‘Race.’” New York Times’s reposting of an article in International Herald Tribune. May 17, 2013. http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/17/france-fights-racism-by-outlawing-race/?_r=0 (accessed August 26, 2013). Morris writes: In a move aimed at undermining the bogus foundation of racist ideology, France’s National Assembly has decided to drop the word “race” from the country’s laws. . . . From now on, the word “racial”, as well as “race”, will be dropped from relevant articles of the French penal code, or replaced by the word “ethnic.” 37. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 38. Charles Forsdick, “Colonial History, Postcolonial Memory,” 109–110. 39. Ibid., 108. 40. Ibid., 114. 41. Ibid., 117. 42. I refer to the title of a book and cinema festival organized in New York by various European consulates: “Europeans Behaving Badly.” 43. Ibid., 109. Forsdick refers to Daniel Lefeuvre’s Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale (Paris, Flammarion, 2005). 44. Ibid., 109.

10 45. 46. 47. 48.

Preface Rosello, The Reparative in Narratives, 8. Ibid. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 241. Ibid., 117.

Acknowledgments

I suppose books are always long in the making, but especially first academic books, as their origins often are inspired by the breadth and innovativeness of graduate course work; and then thanks to fellowships, the curating of one’s own courses, and participation in working groups, they are vastly transformed into “the book.” There are therefore many persons to whom I am indebted, and despite the many persons I have chosen to thank, each acknowledgment belongs to its specific place and time. Where time passes and memory runs weak, I have made an effort to express my gratitude to persons, who each step of the way, had a crucial impact on my scholarship and professional trajectory. Throughout my graduate career and later in the seven years that I worked for C.E.T. Academic Exchange, The French Embassy, the Québec Government House in New York, the Lycée français of New York, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, I struggled between my enthusiasm for cultural programming and policy making, and my passion for research and pedagogy. I found enormous support in those colleagues who understood the compulsion to remain engaged intellectually while at the same creating more concrete and collaborative initiatives for various “grands publics”: my dissertation advisor Aliko Songolo; Gilles Bousquet, who first hired me to work in academic affairs at the University of Wisconsin Madison; Dean Juan Carlos Mercado and Chair Kathlene McDonald at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York; and my cherished friends and academic colleagues, Kaiama L. Glover, Christian Flaugh, Robert Baron, Jerry W. Carlson, and John Ryan Poynter; and the fabulous bosses under whose aegis I worked throughout the diplomatic agencies representing France and Québec, most notably Chantal Manès-Bonisseau and Fabrice Jaumont, as well as Nicole McKinnon, Fabienne Bilodeau, Estelle Gutman, Jacqueline Bonne-Francil, Hervé Ferrage, Benjamin Teitelbaum, and Michel Robitaille. I have been blessed by Chair Kathlene McDonald’s exceptional leadership and commitment to fairness, treating all issues seemingly small and more obviously large as acts that assure that our institution, the City College of New York, enact the mission it started out with as the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. Professor Songolo and Dean Mercado always have an answer, regardless of what question I ask, their vast life experience across continents bringing a rare cosmopolitanism that offers 11

12

Acknowledgments

otherwise inaccessible insight on politics, society, and the arts. I am especially indebted to Dean Mercado for his enormous support of my teaching and scholarship over the years. The wealth of intellectual sources that inform my book are the result of hours of conversations with colleagues in the cadre of several grants and research forums: the fellowship of the Société des professeurs français et francophones d’Amérique, which enabled me to finish my dissertation in Martinique; the Caribbean Epistemologies Seminar at the Graduate Center—CUNY, founded and brilliantly run by Kelly B. Josephs and Herman Bennett; the Center for the Humanities at the Graduate Center (CUNY) fellowship seminar on “poverty,” funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, notably Jessie Daniels, Gunja SenGupta, Aoibheann Sweeney, Joseph Entin, Marcia Esparza, Wendy Luttrell, and Jeff Maskovsky; and our nurturing and extremely productive Transnational and Transcolonial Caribbean Studies Research Group (www.transcarib.org), whose members I consider to be close friends: Kaiama L. Glover, Maja Horn, Kelly B. Josephs, and Christian Flaugh; “Aesthetic and Cultural Expression of African-Derived Religions,” a lecture series I co-organized with Jerry W. Carlson and Kaiama L. Glover thanks to the City Seeds grant from the president’s office at the City College of New York, and through which I had the great honor of exchanging ideas with Colin Dayan, Yvonne Daniel, Bonita Bonet-Haskins, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert. Through Dean Juan Carlos Mercado’s ongoing book talk lecture series, the Human Rights Forum (www.humanrightsccny.org) as well as the M.A. in the Study of Americas (www.citycollegeamericasma.org), all at the City College of New York, I have had the privilege to teach courses and organize initiatives that conscientiously work transnationally and interdisciplinarily. Here I’d like to particularly thank Vince Boudreau, John Haworth, David Marwell, Dee Dee Mozeleski, Rajan Menon, and Eric D. Weitz. My book also benefits from extremely rigorous editing of my first published work by: Jean Jonassaint, Terry Rey, Karen Richman, Francis Landy, Kelly B. Josephs, Martin Munro, Charles Forsdick, Alec G. Hargreaves, Nicki Hitchcott, David Scott, Claudine Michel, Nadège Clitandre, Toni Pressley-Sanon, Sophie Saint-Just, and Mark Schuller, as well as the anonymous readers of my book manuscript and its superbly delightful and competent editor Lindsey Porambo and her colleagues Elizabeth DeBusk, Marilyn Ehm, and Adam Palumbo. I am indebted to the hours of conversation with J. Michael Dash and Stella Vincenot, whose knowledge of the Caribbean and their sensitivity to the aesthetic in literature constantly kept me on my toes. I thank J. Michael Dash for pioneering Haitian literary studies, and despite his immense knowledge of sociopolitical contexts, always reminding me to stay close to the literary texts; I thank Stella Vincenot for setting an example of what it means to always conduct research with meticulous attention and intention. I thank Craig E. Ste-

Acknowledgments

13

phenson for giving me a solid platform off of which to launch my own book. I thank him, Gina Athena Ulysse, and Jerry W. Carlson for taking the great leap into radical interdisciplinary work to engage in a conversation on March 10, 2014, titled “Posssession and Inspiration: Between the Psyche and the Spirits: A Conversation between Therapy and Vodou.” Finally, I am thankful to the fabulous community that has been cultivated over the years across the many talks and roundtables that Jerry W. Carlson, Kaiama L. Glover, Kelly Baker Josephs, Maja Horn, Christian Flaugh, and I have organized. Many of those in the extremely engaged audience were our own students at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the Center for Worker Education at the City College of New York, without a doubt one of the best educations that any liberal arts or early childhood education student can get today. I descend from a line of strong women, women who for at least four generations have struggled themselves between career and family. I’d like to thank all those women in my life who have excavated the paths for those of my generation to find ourselves welcomed by an array of professional choices. Thanks to their pioneering efforts, with each decade that goes by, the choices I have been able to make have come at fewer and fewer costs. Several of these women went beyond the call of duty: at the University of California Santa Barbara, Cynthia J. Brown, whose example I continue to call upon in my own life as I progress through life; Jee Soo Kim, Elizabeth MacArthur, Catherine Nesci, and Claudine Michel, who without asking, who out of an immense generosity of being, has mentored me, and so many others, in a way that is exemplary of what it means to be conscious of one’s profession as first and foremost a commitment to nothing less than humanity; at UW-Madison, Alessandra Corigliano, Elizabeth Berglund-Hall, Judith Graves Miller, Deborah Jenson, Roberta Tabanelli, Soraya Tlatli, and Natasha Ventsel; at the Sorbonne, Kaiama L. Glover, whose immense wisdom has set an example that I have striven to follow; from my time at the French Embassy, Chantal Manès-Bonisseau, simply the most formidable and creative energy to teach me how it is possible to make changes to a system from within; at the City College of New York, Kathlene McDonald and Andrea Weiss; and in my personal life, Ghislaine Laurens and my grandmothers, Alfonsina and Eleanor. I am acutely aware that I owe these opportunities to those women (notably Amy and Giuliana Benedicty) and men (especially my father Gustavo Benedicty) who have supported equal rights for women in the workplace. I’d also like to thank Carlos Aguasaco, Laura Asok, Eddie Baba, Laura Bartovics, Gilles Bousquet, George Bradley, Ellis Brooks-Rua, Piercarlo Brunino, Jean-Robert Cadély, Florence Cavé-Wasserman, Rajeev Chellapilla, Marlene Clark, Peter Consenstein, Rachel Douglass, David Eastzer, Vicki Garavuso, Matthew Gumpert, Madeleine Gunther, David Lasserre, Mary Lutz, Elizabeth Mathews, Markos Regassa, Kasmore Rhedrick, Su-

14

Acknowledgments

sanna Rosenbaum, Stella Samueldòttir, Erick Tengna Sile, Thomas Spear, Toby Wikström, Justin Williams, Martin Woessner, Solomon Woldesemayat, and my dear friends Nathalie Charles, Jean-Luc, Léo, Rémi, and Romain Costes, Annouchka Engel-Vaillancourt Klug, Katrina Gosek, Christine Hérisson, Ghislane and Dominique Laurens, Sophie SchiavoSchlenker, Ellen Snooks-Crowley, and Daniëlle Van De Ven. Without the constant refrain of Nathalie Charles and Fabrice Jaumont telling me, “quelquefois il faut juste s’imposer,” I’d never had put together such an interdisciplinary project. Without the good humor and the magic of the long-distance friendships of Mark Calaiacovo, Tania Dowling-Helgren, Christian Flaugh, and Maria Alice Lima Jesson, so many difficult moments would have just remained frustrating. Without the enthusiasm of Roxanne Gergis-Cacioppo going to art and independent films and galleries with me, my work would not benefit from an attention to the nonliterary arts. Without Emily Fugate-Brunino’s expertise in the ethnographic practice, I’d have never taken the risk to study anthropology alongside literature. Without the hours of conversation and revisions with John Ryan Poynter on my balcony in “Petit Paradis” at the “Impasse des poètes,” I’d have never finished my book in such a timely manner. Most important to my project however has been the exemplary collegiality of Christian Flaugh and Kaiama L. Glover. Without Christian’s generosity in reading my work and in sharing sources; and without the hours of discussion with Kaiama, her generosity in including me in productive collaborations, and her inspirational example, this project would not have existed. Without Amy and Gustavo Benedicty cultivating a marriage based on responsibility to one’s community and larger society—a sense of what is and what is never negotiable, regardless the risk; without Giuliana Benedicty, Damian Monteiro, Anton and Isabella Benedicty Monteiro taking such good care of me in the past two years; without the hours of writing at Indian Road with Susanna Schaller; without the nonjudgmental wisdom of Lorenzo Benedicty; and without the reserved gusto and immense intelligence of Michiel Kokken, I would never have finished this book.

Introduction: Possession, Dispossession, and Self-Possession From Pathology to Healing, Braiding Intellectual Histories

In its largest scope, this book traces an arc between “being dispossessed” and finding healing, solace, and even sometimes solutions, in “possession,” in “repossessing” the only space that one can ultimately control: the landscape of the body, even if battered, mutilated, disillusioned. If until recently (2013), the American Psychiatric Association (APA) classified possession under diagnosis “300.15, a dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS),” a disorder that squarely locates it in other “cultures,” as “not a normal part of a broadly accepted collective cultural or religious practice” 1 (see chapter 5), then psychoanalyst and scholar Stephenson reclaims possession, not as a disorder, but as quite the opposite, proposing possession as a means to work through, and heal from trauma. That said, despite the changes made in 2013 to its manual, the APA still has a diagnostic for possession: 300.14, in which the “[d]isruption of identity [is] characterized by two or more distinct personality states, which may be described in some cultures as an experience of possession.” In other words, it still appears, as a diagnostic, not necessarily as a pathology. 2 Using Hron’s work on pain in literature by immigrant writers and Mbembe’s iterations of “unhappiness” in postcolonial Africa, I argue that in its own way possession is a “highly deictic form” that brings “immedia[cy]” to a subject’s narration of himself, herself, or itself. 3 I show that when material poverty and physical, mental, and/or emotional alienation converge, possession, as extreme and “theatrical” 4 as it may seem, provides a mode of narration that enables a person to survive what seems to others to be a dismal reality. My book combines work that is at once from the canon of French theory as well as from the more marginal spaces of postcolonial thought, with an emphasis on Vodou philosophy and practice. In tracing the rapprochements between Western and non-Western systems, and by looking specifically at the points of contact between possession in East Africa, France, and Haiti, I consider how the experience of extreme pain might only be communicated through embodied knowledge systems, of which possession is one of the most disseminated avatars. 15

16

Introduction

In its structure, I explore how the concept of “possession” creates a bridge between French and Haitian thought. To focus in on “possession” is to inadvertently shed light on quite an expansive web of connections between people and ideas. The first part of the book initially considers the notion of dispossession, as completely unrelated to the notion of “spirit” possession. The second part then traces the notion of possession within the work of mostly French scholars to show how despite even the best intentions, possession is read first and foremost as a pathology. The third part dedicates three chapters to Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, a novel of René Depestre, Haitian writer, living in France, to show how possession and zombification function in an anglophone, creolophone, francophone, and hispanophone space. Depestre’s novel works towards the notion of possession as a sort of realpolitik both of how things might be, and also of how they really are. Finally, the fourth part considers possession in the context of post-Duvalierian Haiti, through the work of JeanClaude Fignolé and Kettly Mars, Haitian writers, living in Haiti, and who consider what it means to repossess oneself in the most arduous of material realities. I have interlaced more recent studies of possession by Haitian practitioners and scholars throughout the book, choosing to deal with possession in the Haitian context through literature. There is certainly another volume to be done on possession by ethnographers and/or practitioners in Haiti by Haitians, which has partially been accounted for in Carlo Avierl Célius’s edited volume, “Haïti et l’anthropologie,” a special volume of the journal Gradhiva, published by the Musée du quay Branly (2005). I have purposefully organized the beginning of the book into short and shortesque chapters with explicit chapter headings, and have composed the book in such a way that at any point of entry, each chapter should be readable on its own. Yet, I have also composed the book so that each chapter belongs to an overall narrative arc that justifies how French and Haitian texts, both print-online, literary and oral-embodied, ritual texts should and must be read together. In a sense my work has been nothing more than to trace and interlace intellectual histories that are usually studied independently of each other. At the end of the book is a timeline that has helped me to write this book, and that I offer as the tool I so wish I’d had. I provide a short summary of the book. If in the first part of my book, I point to how “dispossession” is itself an extreme form of exile, one that can take place on one’s own land, without one having left it, then the second, third, and fourth parts of this book show how “possession”— what I argue is material dispossession’s counterpart—becomes a means of reclaiming one’s space. Possession is ultimately a path to self-possession, for to relocate and reassert one’s home, one’s sense of home, one’s body, and more generally, one’s sense of being in a world—a world that as Agamben’s, Dayan’s, Mbembe’s, and Trouillot’s work shows (part I)—

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seems to relentlessly reproduce new modalities and augment the intensity with which such dispossession violates the integrity of what it means to be a “person” (see discussion on Dayan in part I). With a focus on Haiti, the book moves across four spaces: “Dispossessions,” “Possession Dispossessed,” “Repossessing Possession,” and “SelfRepossession.” Each part is prefaced by a short summary of the arguments of each section. In so doing, this book suggests that in the twentyfirst century, possession is a concept that “speaks” not only to Haitians, but more generally to many of the world’s most disenfranchised. Part I explores early twenty-first-century dispossessions through theoretical frameworks that are transnational, arguing that theory produced by Haitians and non-Haitians, on and about Haiti, is the locus of some of the most original thinking to date on the predicament of contemporary global society. Unfortunately, despite their best intentions, “theory” and “criticism” still remain grounded in a rather noncomparative practice. Worst to suffer this “silo” effect, is the exchange on the one hand, between theory from the “global north” and the “global south,” and on the other, between theory produced amongst the various sites that exist within the vast landscape designated by the nomenclature: the “global south.” Part II traces an intellectual history of possession in the Euro–North American twentieth century, and the important role that Haiti has played within it. This second part looks at how mostly French intellectuals processed the notion of spirit possession through their twentieth-century studies abroad, notably in East Africa and Haiti; and, at home, in the first half of the seventeenth century. While there exist rituals of possession throughout the world, and Gilbert Rouget in Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession, first published in 1980, 5 provides an exhaustive study of these various expressions worldwide, my book focuses in on the particular relationship between especially Haiti and France, and also to a certain extent the United States of America. However, I chose to limit my discussion of Haiti and France to a very specific relationship—that between Alfred Métraux and Melville Herskovits—because a more expansive discussion of the relationship between Haiti and the United States in the twentieth century leads to a conversation about the zonbi, 6 rather than that of possession. Work on the zonbi and how it traveled to the United States is being carried out by Emily T. Bauman, 7 Kaiama L. Glover, 8 Sarah Juliet Lauro, 9 and Adam McGee. 10 Part III and part IV focus on possession in a “Haitian” context, and offer close readings of the novels addressed; thus, these chapters are longer. Part III deals with René Depestre’s novel and shows how Depestre’s novel operates possession in three ways. Firstly, the novel “writes back,” engaging the intellectuals whose work I cover in part I, confirming where their analyses of Vodou are correct, elegantly revising their work where they are mistaken. Secondly, the novel passes judgment on Vodou, revealing its weaknesses, and how it was so easily coopted by the Duval-

18

Introduction

ierist tyrannical regime. That said, Depestre’s novel also recuperates the aspects of Vodou that enable a person and a community to preserve and also reconstruct itself quietly, in relative safety from oppressive political forces. Thirdly, through the zombification and dezombification of Hadriana, one of the novel’s first-person narrators, the novel allows both Hadriana and the novel’s other first-person narrator, Patrick, to repossess themselves, to again find equilibrium. As such, this is ultimately a novel that looks back on the experience of Vodou from the perspective of exile. Part IV performs close readings of the prose fiction of two writers who have remained in Haiti, leaving only for brief sojourns, but who have elected Haiti as their place of residence. In short, they live with Haiti’s precarious realities day in and day out. I have chosen the works of writers produced after the ousting of the Duvalier dictatorship, for I am interested in how possession articulates itself in a late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century context. For Jean-Claude Fignolé’s protagonists, possession plays itself out as a philosophy; for Mars’s characters, it is primarily a practice of reckoning, healing, and reconciliation. Fignolé puts forth a notion of possession as a means of establishing human dignity where humanity has been denied. If Eric D. Weitz reminds us that the notion of race became solidified with the emergence of the nation-state, 11 and Sibylle Fischer shows how the early Haitian constitutions would grapple to resist the concept of race, 12 then Fignolé’s novels historicize these predicaments while at the same time putting forth Vodou as a thought system that struggles against the traps of any racializing ideology. Possession in his work serves as a reminder of a time past, when race literally did not exist. For Mars, possession articulates itself as the fluidity of being, as per Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s reading of African-derived religious practices, 13 a fluidity that allows a person to preserve her/his integrity in the most degrading of twenty-first-century realities: extreme poverty. In a country that has suffered multiple collective traumatisms—obvious ones such as an extremely violent long-term dictatorship or the 2010 earthquake, and more sustained geopolitical upsets, such as extreme poverty and environmental degradation—Mars’s work offers a space in which the novel’s mostly Haitian protagonists—as well as the novel’s readers— may reckon themselves with troubling experiences, both past and present. After the Duvalier and Cédras dictatorships, as well as the multiple Aristide presidencies, there has never been a formal apparatus set up for transitional justice. Possession then, that is Max Beauvoir’s articulation of possession as the “reorganization of the self to achieve harmony” 14 becomes a forum— albeit fictional, rather private, and metaphysical—through which Haitians may work through an unofficial and intimate sort of a truth commission. So if Deborah Jenson locates the narrative of “un-becoming a slave” in the early decades of the Haitian republic, 15 I suggest that in its

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many moments of instability, Haiti’s need for stories that narrate what it means to “un-become” subjugated have persisted throughout the centuries. Possession, that is, the ability to find equilibrium within the most unstable of situations, thus becomes a philosophy and a practice, an essential way of being in the world. The central connotation that anchors this book’s exploration of “possession” is the Vodou framework, where possession in its most basic definition refers to the “possession” of a human body by a spirit, or lwa. Later, the book looks at possession as related to more general political, social, and aesthetic contexts and as such helps to explain the West’s fascination with Haiti and how Haitian thought might inform Western philosophy on the human experience. My book thinks through possession in varying contexts: as a “cultural” practice, as a narrative mode, and as a metaphor for certain types of marginalization, especially ones that are direct consequences of the violence caused by colonial and postcolonial histories. The concept of possession demands that my book also work through the complexities associated with the binary that posits the West against the non-West. POSSESSION AS TROPE, POSSESSION AS SELF-NARRATION Drawing on the work of anthropologists and religious scholars such as Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Yvonne Daniel, Claudine Michel, Terry Rey, and Karen Richman on embodied knowledge in African-derived religions, my book suggests that possession is the most popularly circulated manifestation of a thought system that uses the body as much as the intellect to understand the world (i.e., to determine truth) and to tell a story of the self. Possession, my book argues, is at once a narrative structure and part of a knowledge structure. Engaging with theories that consider the interface between self-narration and “responsibility” (Paul Rabinow) 16 and/or “accountability” (Judith Butler), 17 this book shows how possession cultivates the experience of the body in negotiating human experience. If both activities—understanding the world so as to determine one or more truths and telling a story about oneself—are intimately linked, then possession enhances the intimacy between them. My book ultimately proposes that possession is a form of self-narration that enables individuals who experience extreme duress to inscribe agency into a life that is constantly being undermined through transformative acts and events such as slavery, servitude, poverty, exile, refugee status, and/or general disenfranchisement. In a sense, I then refocus Stephenson’s recuperation of possession as a therapeutic tool that maybe does not offer a solution or a cure, but as a deictic tool, a means of finding a narrative structure that can contain, and even “tell” extreme suffering. Here my work joins that of Hron, Glover, Rosello, Christian Flaugh, and

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Introduction

Julie Nack-Ngue in arguing that there are forms, aesthetic ones, literary ones, embodied ones, which might seem “freakish” to quote Flaugh, or “ex-centric” to cite Glover, but they nonetheless are forms that narrate realities, and in so doing also offer solace. This book then provides a key to understanding “possession,” not for those unfamiliar with the concept, because following on Erika Bourguignon’s and Dayan’s work, I agree that most persons everywhere are familiar with the notion of possession. Rather this book explores why and how, the “northern” public sphere, especially in France and the United States, cultivates a “discomfort” with the notion of possession, rather than embrace it as a common manifestation, an expression that works through traumatic experiences: displacement, disconnection, persecution, slavery, war, immigration, refugee status. Stephenson reminds us that the etymology of “possession” is to be “able” “to sit,” where: The metaphor in the concept of possession is that a being claims space and sits in a position of capability within or power over the sufferer . . . and Jung finds the metaphor effective because it personifies an entity occupying that seat after a tyrannical overthrow. The goal of psychotherapy is that the patient should become “self-possessed.” 18

Possession, is not only a common concept, but one shared especially by persons and communities that undergo severely damaging changes, which are often first and foremost related to material “dispossessions,” to property being stolen, to lands being occupied, to human bodies being taken as “property,” as “chattel,” concepts that we will further explore in the first part of this book. In considering possession first as a “trope,” I focus in on a specific intellectual history, that is mostly unrecognized, but which discreetly, and powerfully would leave its imprint on French, Haitian, and U.S.-American thought in the humanities and social sciences. I claim that the way that Haitian Vodou possession is perceived, generally speaking, by persons not acculturated to communities in which the notion of possession is familiar, has been conditioned by a very privileged moment that brought French intellectuals into contact with U.S.-American intellectuals around an interest in Haitian Vodou. Grosso modo, I look at three major contexts in which the word “possession” appears: first, ethnographic, philosophical, and/or literary productions mostly French and Haitian in the midtwentieth century that have as their object of study expressions of “spirit possession” taking place in the Americas and East Africa; second, scholarship that references sixteenth-century possessions by the “devil” or other “evil” spirits in France; and third, more current discussions of the global dynamics leading to new or more acute violations of human rights (i.e., disrespect of land and housing rights, environmental degradation caused by human activity, increased migrant populations and/or refu-

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gees). Collectively these human rights abuses are often referred to as “dispossession,” and those who are its most vulnerable victims become identified as “dispossessed peoples.” In paying attention to these trajectories, which employ the words “possession” and/or “dispossession,” I trace an intellectual history that reveals bridges between philosophies of being produced out of European (mostly French) and sub-Saharan African (mostly East African) geographical contexts. In other words, I follow understudied arteries that link “postcolonial studies” to “philosophy” and “critical theory,” 19 the former usually referencing scholars from the “global south,” and the latter, mostly referencing European and North American thinkers. Academic disciplines often study philosophical systems that emanate from postcolonial spaces within the context of the discipline of cultural anthropology. In considering texts from various disciplinary contexts, on the one hand, I draw attention to how the word “possession” holds an important role in contemporary critical theory, and on the other, I show how Haiti plays a seemingly minor, but extremely decisive role in contributing to the prevalence of the term “possession” in contemporary academic scholarship and intellectual thought. As such, the concept of “possession” serves as one node through which to notice the often obfuscated bridges between French, Haitian, and sub-Saharan African thought, what Mbembe refers to as the “enchevêtrement” 20 —“entanglement” that entwines the intellectual histories coming from seemingly “distinct,” “demarcated” geographical spaces, privileged by our tendency to still conduct our research within the boundaries defined by “area studies.” In this way, this book is nothing new, but rather an expansion, a refocusing, an amalgamation of previously articulated work, and in so doing, sheds light on a completely ignored artery of this/these intellectual history/ies. HAITI IN THE MIDDLE: 1930S AND 1940S AS CENTERFOLD Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness aims to “follow . . . around” the word “happiness.” 21 In the context of my work in the second part of this book, the “following around” of the word “possession” as well as the terms “trance” and “crisis” 22 has already been conducted by Rouget in Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession. 23 For his part, Stephenson has also considered possession as a psychoanalytic healing method in Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche (2009). 24 My process is less comprehensive than that of Ahmed in her explorations of “happiness,” or of Rouget’s in his study of spirit possession. That is, I do not seek to look at the term “possession” exhaustively in all of its geographical contexts; and in contrast to Stephenson, whose work is largely focused on psychoanalysis, my work in this book

22

Introduction

combines a study of multiple methods and disciplines: ethnographies, theories of anthropology, literature, literary theory, and religious studies. Although I do “follow” the term “possession” “around,” I do so in concentrating on a specific intellectual history whose itinerary literally included Haiti at a precise historical moment: that of French intellectuals traveling through or sojourning in Haiti at the time of their exile from France during the Vichy government and just after the Second World War. I take the period of 1941 to 1946, and more generally the 1930s and 1940s, as the centerfold of a more complex network of relations that places Haiti as one of the pivots of a more expanded intellectual conversation around “possession.” On the front end, the bookend, which demarcates the period is the “Mission Dakar-Djibouti [that] offered a first imperial venue [for France] for launching France’s newest human science [i.e., ethnology].” 25 Although Michel Leiris is not a major explicit presence in Haiti nor extensively trained in ethnography/anthropology, his writings on possession and the integral and highly visible work that he produced as the secretary and archivist of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition, as well as his reflections on the mission over the next decades, I argue, is absolutely essential to understanding the theoretical underpinnings of many studies and literature on spirit possession in Haiti, from Alfred Métraux to Karen McCarthy Brown. For this reason, I dedicate a chapter to Leiris’s work on zar possession in Ethiopia, the majority of which is based on his visit there during the 1931–1933 expedition. As Alice Conklin argues, the legacy of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition cannot be underestimated: If no future mission sponsored by the Musée de l’Ethnographie/Institut d’Ethnologie operated in quite the same commercial manner or benefited from such generous state funds, the Mission Dakar-Djibouti nevertheless bound ethnologists ever more closely to the empire’s resources by initiating a set of practices that all their subsequent research and collecting missions to the colonies in the 1930s would emulate. 26

More directly related to Haiti, Pierre Mabille’s arrival in Port-au-Prince in July 1941 as a medical doctor, and later as cultural attaché for “la France libre” in Haiti, also marks an important moment in French ethnology’s relationship to Haiti. 27 The back end is marked by 1958, the date of publication of both Michel Leiris’s and Alfred Métraux’s writings on possession in Ethiopia and Haiti, and more generally on Haiti (chapters 7 and 8). Using the period of 1941–1958 as an anchor, as the moment of time when U.S.-American- and French-based intellectuals spent time in Haiti, this chapter will examine a number of other related historical contexts, which are more or less, but nonetheless, all directly related to the role Haiti played in welcoming French public figures during and after the Second World War. If in his book on “post-1946 Haitian Literature” Martin Munro “affirms and inter-

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prets exile as the master trope of Haitian culture,” 28 then my work explores “possession” as a trope that would resonate with French, Haitian, and U.S.-American intellectuals, and would gain significance precisely in the exile not only of those Haitian writers to whom Munro’s work is dedicated, but also in the exile of those French intellectuals who passed through Haiti during their own national disenfranchisement. “POSSESSION”: FAMILIAR BUT UNCOMFORTABLE In her 1976 study of possession, Bourguignon points to the ease with which U.S.-Americans speak about possession. She writes, “The notion of ‘possession,’ or ‘spirit possession,’ appears to be so familiar to Americans that a definition seems hardly necessary.” 29 If possession is the event of losing one’s own consciousness, one’s subjectivity, usually for a given moment of time, one whose duration is more or less long, then as Bourguignon argues, possession is a phenomenon with which most persons are familiar. What is at stake is not whether or not the characteristics of possession 30 exist in a community’s practices, but rather the names that the group gives to the phenomena associated with possession. Bourguignon writes: This disagreement leads to the question of just what we might mean by “abnormal” or “pathological,” a difficult subject on which only limited agreement exists. We might begin by asking: Do the people among whom possession trance occurs consider it “abnormal”? Do they say the person who experiences such a state is “crazy”? Do they say, “Something must be done about this so that he can go back to functioning like a normal person?” . . . The answer must be that in some societies, under some circumstances, it is considered a “bad thing” to go into possession trance and something must be done about it. In other places, going into possession trance is considered a fine and desirable thing. 31

The phenomenon of possession is certainly not new, as studies exist on spirit possession in antiquity. 32 Instead, what is new(er), is that the word “possession” is finding resonance, and usage, outside of contexts of “spirit” possession, and notably in the work of Athena Athanasiou, Judith Butler, and Rob Nixon, as this book will illustrate. Most importantly, in the forty years since the publication of Bourguignon’s work, “possession” is being considered, at least by academics both within and outside of Vodou studies, as a normative appellation, as a legitimate mode of “healthy” behavior, one that belongs as much to the so-called “secular” realm as that of the “religious.” 33 To trace the family tree of the word “possession” is to show that it is not entirely arbitrary, that a critical theorist such as Butler, a scholar who openly acknowledges her work as one in line with the legacy of French

24

Introduction

theorist Michel Foucault, would increasingly use the word “possession” in her work, while a scholar such as Agamben, whose more explicit intellectual heritage is that of Martin Heidegger would use other terms to characterize similar phenomena (chapter 10 is dedicated to the writings on “possession” of Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler). All of the philosophical frameworks that I consider in this Introduction, in parts III and IV refer to spirit possession directly and/or use derivations of the word “possession” to describe a contemporary state of affairs, one increasingly populated by those who are ”dispossessed,” what Angelo Mastrandrea characterizes as a “new age of obscurantism.” 34 Drawing on Trouillot’s suggestion that the spaces of nonnational, nonnormative citizenship might actually produce “fundamentally new subjects,” 35 I claim that individuals who are open to experiences of being possessed engage in a relationship with the world that does not fit neatly into the codifications of the normative (and utopian) 36 nation-state model (see part I). Those who make themselves available to the experience of possession live, function, succeed, and claim space in a world, and as such should not be deemed “abnormal” (chapter 5); “failed” (part I), or “evil” (see discussion of Sylvia Wynter, chapter 4). In short, this book proposes that possession, in varied cultural contexts, especially French and Haitian, is a form of subjectivity that allows an individual and a community to deal with traumatic experiences. The practice of possession is certainly not new, rather it is a form that not only seems to be manifesting itself more and more in so-called contemporary Western societies, but more importantly, it is being named as such. In other words, the notion of giving one’s body up temporarily, but in momentary completeness, to a nonrational force is not uncommon. For some, it is spiritual (in the case of Vodou possession); for others devilish (in the case of the Loudun possessions in France or the Salem witchcraft trials in New England, or more recently the Fin de siècle sensationalist Palladium Affair concocted by Léo Taxil) 37; and still others musical or rhythmic (in the case of mosh pit dancing or krumping), 38 but for most it is of the metaphysical order. And, for many, whether connoted as “good” or “bad,” possession is an expression of embodied knowledge. VECTORS OF SCHOLARSHIP In terms of current research, the most general backdrop for this book is that of recent scholarship that emphasizes an intimate—even if uncomfortable—relationship between European and Caribbean thought systems, a scholarship that offers insight into an instance of transatlantic dialogue that included the Caribbean, and more specifically Haiti. In political philosophy and intellectual history, Susan Buck-Morss, Sibylle

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Fischer, Nick Nesbitt, and David Scott explore the idea that Haiti, while not explicit in G. W. F. Hegel’s work, at least informed his thinking of the master-slave narrative. In anthropology, meanwhile, Terry Rey and Karen Richman note that in the context of Haitian religion, by the time the African slaves had arrived in Saint-Domingue, the “European” element had informed the “African” one, and vice versa; in other words, the worshiping practices of those Central Africans who became slaves destined for the Caribbean had undergone processes of hybridization, noting that “[a]t the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791” 39 most probably their religious practices had already manifested a “Kongolese appropriation of Catholicism—an “Afro-Catholic synthesis.” 40 Similarly, in speaking of the notion of pwen in Vodou, they identify a European etymology: “Pwen is based upon the French word point. Its French provenance is a reminder of the dynamic contribution of European magical knowledge and thought to Haitian religion, a contribution that scholars have generally overlooked in their quest to uncover African ‘survivals.’” 41 I cite the above examples of the points of contact between African, Caribbean, and European epistemologies to underline the interpenetration of thought systems, which serves as a backdrop to this book’s consideration of the various iterations of the notion of possession as they appear in the French and Caribbean discourses of the early to midtwentieth century, for, spirit possession is one of the avatars of Vodou pwen. A second backdrop for this book is that of scholars who examine the intersection between literature, literary theory, and ethnography in the colonial and postcolonial francophone contexts. Maryse Condé’s article on the political role of poetry amongst white French and black francophone scholars; J. Michael Dash’s work on the “Surrealist Ethnographers”; Irene Albers’s scholarship on Michel Leiris’s representations of zar 42 possession in East Africa; and Marcel Hénaff, Clifford Geertz, Boris Wiseman, and Vincent Debaene’s work on the intersections between ethnography and literature inform this book’s discussion on possession. I also consider the work of Dominique Berthet, Denis Hollier, Martin Jay, Martin Munro, and Constantin von Barloewen, which puts the more biographical elements of the lives of intellectuals such as Georges Bataille, André Breton, René Depestre, Michel Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pierre Verger into dialogue with their literary, philosophical, or artistic production. 43 Despite more general scholarship on the intersections between ethnography, literature, and the arts, the attention given to the French Caribbean, as Dash argues in his 2007 article titled “Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean,” is still lacking: While the impact of the Surrealist intellectuals’ exile in the U.S. is well documented, one would be hard put to find, even in French, a thoroughgoing examination of this period of the interaction between a French literary avant-garde and Caribbean writers. . . . When the Sur-

26

Introduction realists’ travel through the Caribbean is mentioned, the tendency is to concentrate exclusively on André Breton and generally ignore the passage of Surrealist dissidents such as Pierre Mabille, Michel Leiris, and Alfred Métraux, who inaugurated a form of writing that Glissant in 1956 calls a welcome combination of literature and ethnography. 44

Dash identifies and resurrects texts about which little has been written, or which have been largely ignored by contemporary scholarship; he reinscribes them in the context of more widely read work, such as Métraux’s ethnography of Vodou. As Dash’s article indicates, there is lack of understanding not only on the relationship between French and Caribbean intellectuals in the early twentieth century, but also on the relationship between ethnography and literature in the Caribbean intellectual context. Condé’s 2001 article on Marxist poetics in the French Caribbean titled “Fous t’en Depestre; Laisse dire Aragon” points not only to the need for scholarship, but also to a certain negligence associated with such lacunae. Condé writes: “The literary episode . . . serves to illustrate the relations between French literature and francophone literature. They are at best, relationships of ignorance, of indifference.” 45 An example of such “indifference” is Martin Jay’s monumental work, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993), for which there is no index entry for Haiti, very little mention of Leiris, and in his discussions of Breton and Bataille, no reference to Haiti. 46 To study the trope of possession, then, in midtwentieth-century literary and scholarly production in French and the Caribbean, is, it seems, following on Dash and Condé’s examples, to contribute directly to the absence of scholarship on the French intellectuals’ presence in the Caribbean. The final and vast framework for the book, addresses the associations between subjectivity and traumatism. In his ruminations in his article titled “Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the Camp,” Richard Ek suggests that as the “camp” 47 as domiciliary reality imposes itself on humanity, replacing that of the “city,” so too “displacement and desubjectification” 48 create notions of identity that are better adapted to the reality of migration, and quasi-perpetual disarticulation. This Introduction feeds directly into part I’s discussion of material dispossession, to suggest that possession offers alternative forms of subjectivity—that is, “alternative,” according to Western standards of supposed normativity. Irrespective of their political leanings, French intellectuals in the early and midtwentieth century would come to privilege research and reflections that aim at understanding the role of the human body in the experience of “being human,” thus constituting a more general break from earlier philosophical approaches that privileged a Cartesian system, one that sought the “real” outside of human experience. As such, the materiality of human experience, that is, the more concrete expressions that figure in the lives of human bodies become primary concerns that domi-

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nate French thought in the early and midtwentieth centuries. Edmund Husserl in Germany and Henri Bergson in France, that is, the older generation that would inform amongst many others Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre, would give human experience a primary role in accounting for knowledge. With “reality” being located more and more in (and being produced by) human experience, the role of the body in philosophical investigation would gain attention. In speaking about the critical notion of pwen in Haitian Vodou, Terry Rey and Karen Richman, write: The concept of pwen can perhaps best be understood as a mode of embodied perception. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception through the body is a fitting approach to understanding pwen, especially in combination with the approach to mimesis influenced by the work of Walter Benjamin (1968). In a provocative book inspired by Benjamin’s commentary on the mimetic faculty, Michael Taussig (1993) states that mimesis is a double process involving imitative action and embodiment, copying and contact, miming and bodily perception. Pwen are corporeal ways, then, to use Benjamin’s . . . terms, to “get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.” A pwen seizes or stops the power inside the other by reproducing it. Mimesis is essential for its production/performance. Furthermore, a pwen only exists as a relation, that is, insofar as someone other than the one who created it can perceive it. 49

Moreover, the death tolls inflicted by mass, industrialized warfare from the two World Wars would also contribute to an interest in the materiality of the human experience, where knowledge is as much a result of proficiencies of the body as it is of mental, spiritual, or psychological ones. The discourse is no longer one that pursues a distinction between the spiritual (religious or metaphysical) and the rational (scientific), nor is it a discourse that treats the “bodily” as simply generative of carnal pleasures (sensual and/or sexual). Instead, the body begins to be looked upon as a text that registers multiple experiences, and most importantly, its theorization strives to liberate itself from a Christian past that denotes as “bad” all that is of the bodily realm. Whether read by the scholars as religious (i.e., Catholic mysticism); as demonic (i.e., studies of the 1632 Loudun possessions in France); as psychoanalytic (i.e., Jean-Martin Charcot’s or Josef Breuer’s experimentations with hypnosis); as philosophical (i.e., the role that Merleau-Ponty or Sartre would place on the body in explaining “reality” and “knowledge”); as avant-garde (i.e., the Surrealists’ experiments with automatism); rhythmic and performative (i.e., Maya Deren’s and Katherine Dunham’s initial interest in Vodou dance); or anthropological (i.e., Leiris’s study of zar possession and Métraux’s research on Vodou possession), the exploration of the body in all its capacities would benefit from new methodologies with which to study human experience.

28

Introduction

Whether it was Bataille’s, Breton’s, Leiris’s, or Sartre’s disdain for the religious, or de Certeau’s work to bridge a mostly Christian-based theology with more “secular” work in the social sciences, the body would become the obsession of an early and mid-twentieth-century intellectual elite that was at once: fascinated by the first decades of psychoanalytic theorizing; vehemently reconsidering and/or rejecting the burden of a Christian past; stunned by the horrors of the First and later Second World Wars; and traveling to the French colonies, and in some cases living amongst communities different than their own. In such a context, it makes sense that the phenomenon of possession, whether in the European (as in de Certeau’s or Foucault’s studies of demonic possession) or the non-European context (as in Leiris’s studies of zar possession or Métraux’s book on Vodou) would garner their attention. Moreover, as is showcased in Breton’s “Haitian Lectures” (chapter 6), the notion of possession troubles the waters of disciplinary research, for it serves as a nexus that combines many of the categories that French intellectuals were trying to extricate and put into isolation: theology, religious studies, the arts, art history, anthropology, sociology, and psychoanalysis, amongst others. It comes of no surprise then that French intellectuals exploring the role of human subjectivity in theories of “being,” would be at once fascinated and troubled by “spirit possession.” On the one hand, subjectivity is the phenomenon of constituting one’s sense of unity of being, one that integrates the body, the psyche, the metaphysical, the spiritual, and/or the scientifically unexplainable. On the other hand, possession is an experience that integrates all of the above, not just for one individual “self,” but as an amalgamate of various “selves,” with separate psyches and even bodies, into one consciousness of being. In a sense, the constitution of human subjectivity and the event of possession operate in similar ways, only subjectivity is reflective of a cosmology that privileges the category of the individual as an analytical category to study “being,” while possession is reflective of an ontological order that, in addition to using the individual as an analytical category, also integrates fragmented subjectivities (as in a human being’s ti-bon-anj being separated from its gwo-bon-anj 50 as well as composite subjectivities (as in a human being’s body being used as a receptacle to host the separate being of a lwa [or spirit] as constitutive elements of “being.”) Given the increased importance ascribed to the bodily experience of subjectivity in French philosophy from the 1890s and into the late twentieth century, and its defining role in the experience of “spirit possession,” it makes sense, then, that French scholars would be attracted to communities that epistemologically include the concept of possession into the range of normative behaviors that codify their societal behaviors. Unfortunately, as especially part II will show, despite the French intellectuals’ fascination with possession in “other” “cultures,” possession would re-

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main relegated to Trouillot’s “Savage slot,” to the realm of ethnographic research that others others. As such, possession would be studied as a religious (and even cultish) manifestation, rather than as a philosophical one. Despite the same intellectuals’ use of the word “possession” in other contexts (part I, chapter 10, and part IV), despite theorizing similar phenomena in so-called Western cultures, possession when evoked in a Vodou or a zar context would and still is mostly considered by French and other Western scholars as a nonsecular phenomenon. That Athanasiou and Butler in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political 51 can dedicate an entire set of dialogues to the etymological, psychoanalytical, political, and social dimension of “dispossession” and “possession” and not note the relationship to “spirit” possession, is to point to how, despite best intentions, the Western academe still functions in such a way as to ignore the existence of its marginalizing processes. So, in addition to spotlighting the intellectual history that brought academic and literary French intellectual circles into contact with their Haitian and/or Vodou counterparts, a history that I argue has everything to do with Athanasiou’s and Butler’s discussions, what this chapter also does, is follow on Bourguignon’s work to identify how possession not only has meaning in so-called Western cultures, but also is finding more and more of a place, even if slowly, as a “normative” behavior. In a mostly francophone context, that is the framework of intellectual production in the French language or that studies spaces in which the French language has or has had an influence, I suggest that there exists an intellectual history around the concept (and trope) of “possession” as one that informs contemporary critical theory. Amongst intellectuals who write mostly in French, three types of intellectual histories on possession converged in the mid-twentieth century around: European, and mostly French iterations of spirit possession (notably the Loudun possessions in the 1600s); African spirit possession (East African zar possession); and Caribbean expressions of spirit possession (especially in Haitian Vodou). I show how possession finds resonance with French thought in the 1940s. Moreover, I argue that to a certain extent it informs contemporary thought, notably in Foucault’s and Butler’s work. As such, my work proposes that it’s much more than a coincidence that Butler’s research on personal responsibility, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) (which considers only the work of European scholars) is sprinkled with the word possession, and that she use the image of spirit possession in the final paragraph of her book on human accountability to designate the small, but existent space, in which the individual still has a possibility to be accountable (introduction, chapter 10, part IV). My proposition is to show how both the vocabulary and the theory that come to be associated with what I will call the “act of possession” engages a reflection that accounts for fragmented notions of identity. I draw on anthropological theories of subjectivity to put the accent on the

30

Introduction

destabilizing experience of the contemporary, globalized human subject. In this context, possession as seen in Vodou as cultural text only reinforces Wiseman’s notion of “ethno-aesthetics” 52 or Dash’s articulation of “Surrealist ethnographers.” Of interest in this regard is João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman’s Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (2007), a compilation of essays on methods for “contemporary anthropological observation.” 53 Although Haitian Vodou does not figure as a subject of their volume, I suggest that their theories exemplify the role that the “crise” of “possession” may have in enabling a body in crisis to speak for itself. In “Return(s) to Subjectivities,” which is Michael M. J. Fischer’s epilogue to the collection, we read that “our high-technology age” and a globalized space that is increasingly “nonstate” calls for a return to subjectivities, in other words a distancing from favoring knowledge systems by which the human state is assumed to be stable, or as Kleinman and Fitz-Henry state: Scholars have frequently invoked this notion of a unified human nature as the rationale for universals of all kinds, and it continues to be used as a justification for Western ethical discourse, which assumes a static, generalized subject that does not vary with changing historical circumstances, cultural contexts, or sociopolitical institutions. 54

In Darren Staloff’s Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding (2005), 55 he includes not only a global context for the American Enlightenment, but also provides a thorough history of the important role that Haiti played in differentiating between the politics of the three statesmen, notably Adams and Jefferson. Staloff also vividly summarizes the attitude in which the Enlightenment discourse regarded the supposed supernatural beliefs of pre-Enlightenment Europe. What strikes me in the following passage is that the vocabulary resonates with general, stereotyped discussions of possession in Haitian Vodou, and as we will see in chapter 6, Breton’s discussions of an aesthetic for the twentieth century (and why Haitian Vodou isn’t a viable aesthetic expression): Historians describe the impact of this worldliness [that of the Enlightenment] as a process of disenchantment. The word has the peculiar virtue of reminding us just how enchanted the worldview of the preceding centuries had been. Comets, earthquakes, volcanoes, and even severe storms were not natural phenomena but portents of divine wrath and judgment. Ghosts walked the earth, and demons possessed the bodies of human victims. Satan was not a symbol of evil but a real, active presence—Martin Luther once reportedly threw an inkwell at him. Miraculous and supernatural cures for a variety of ailments were an accepted part of conventional belief. . . . The central goal of the Enlightenment’s metaphysical disenchantment was to subject such time-worn and traditional beliefs to ridicule as childish superstitions. 56

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Fischer’s epilogue speaks of the necessity in the contemporary age to honor all human expressions, and he emphasizes that the terrains that are considered exotic in European discourse—a bit like Staloff’s invocation of an almost legendary dystopic time before “the Enlightenment”—are no longer to be found in communities different than our own. The need to demarginalize the study of all subjectivities—that is all expressions of the self—whether seemingly objectively rational or seemingly irrational is quintessential to enabling Ek’s “displace[d] and desubjectifi[ed]” bodies 57 to possibly create “a (re)constructed platform for individual, social, and civic selves.” 58 Building on Ek’s phrase, I characterize the “being,” which resembles that about which Ek, Fischer, or Rabinow speak as a desubjectified subject. If Fischer suggests that “the returns to subjectivity might be guarantors of privacy, ethical and social responsibility, and monitoring of integrity (of the body, accountability, civic community),” 59 Rabinow is more skeptical in regards to the possibility that such a desubjectified subject might actually be able to act “responsibly,” at least when “the term ethics appears promiscuously in the most surprising couplings—business ethics, baseball ethics, bioethics”: 60 because we live in a modernity in which the future appears as contingent, the ethical actor cannot know the future chain of consequences of his actions. This situation leads to a dilemma: Either we do not act (but then who takes responsibility for the consequences of inaction?), or we act responsibly, knowing that we cannot know the stochastic [undetermined, from the Greek, “to guess”] results of our actions. Today, we are conscious of accepting risk, and ethics, at least until now, has not been able to provide any criteria for this situation. It has provided only procedures and values. Hence, the cost of a responsibility-based ethics may be its impossibility. 61

In other words, how does a desubjectified subject do anything, much less take responsibility? In a sense Rabinow’s article responds to Stephenson’s advocacy of a psychoanalysis that looks to the social sciences for amelioration of its own practice. That said, Rabinow rejects the infusion of psychoanalysis into anthropology, for as he points out, it has already been attempted, and it serves to “ablate them [anthropologists] from their own cultural prejudices.” 62 Instead, he advocates for an “immediate history,” an “anthropology of the actual,” 63 by which “authors” facilitate to the maximum the voices of those along whose side they study: “To write immediate history well, authors should not speak for those they aim to present but should seek a mode through which interviewees could speak for themselves.” 64 For Rabinow, anthropology thus becomes less about studying “culture” than about “self-formation.” The example that Rabinow examines, and offers up as possibly enacting such “anthropology of the actual,” 65 is

32

Introduction

that of Thucydides’s (460–c. 395 BC) On the Peloponnesian War. 66 Rabinow concludes his article: “we are wise to ponder how a text written twentyfive hundred years ago remains such a keen deictic tool.” 67 Rabinow’s process is one that aims less at achieving a cohesive subject, or subjectivity, but rather strives towards representing the moment. Stephenson provides an etymology of the word “possession,” relating it up to psychology: In English, “to possess” denotes “to hold as property”, “to own”, “to occupy”; like the French posséder, it derives for the Latin possidere, from potis meaning “able” and sedere, “to sit”. The metaphor in the concept of possession is that a being claims space and sits in a position of capability. . . . The goal of psychotherapy is that the patient should become “self-possessed.” 68

Thus if the contemporary age, as Fischer puts forward, “will not require subjectivity to be located only within the body,” 69 Rabinow implies that the anthropological process is less about locating the “subject” (in a certain identifiable “culture”), than in describing the “singularity of events.” 70 For Stephenson, possession is directly related to “selfhood sitting in its own seat and of the suffering inherent when selfhood experiences itself as unseated.” 71 Like Thucydides, who “was no longer an actor in these events; he was in exile but immediately adjacent to things,” it seems that what is at stake for Rabinow is less about location or identity than it is about being “unquestionably reflective while remaining contemporary to the events themselves.” 72 As part III shows, Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves resonates with Rabinow’s work in that it may be read as a consideration of the ethnographic process, which is in turn related to the autobiography (of self) and of the communities to which a person belongs or is associated. In a sense, then, might possession itself be a means by which an individual speaks and/or embodies its dislocation, while the interpretative aspect that accompanies the process of possession, that offered by those close to the individual possessed—whether mambo, houngan, anthropologist, or novelist—be one that enables the community (that of the hounfor, that of the academe) to reflect on the events? In other words, is to be self-possessed less linked to subjectivity and identity than to the process of reflection on events that one undergoes? So while the experience of the desubjectified subject may quite possibly be unable to act responsibly faced with “a contingent but onrushing future,” 73 and if as Rabinow suggests “ethics” and “responsibility” are in crisis, 74 if possibility there is, the only way to take inventory of what might be new paradigms that desubjectified subjects might employ to assure an ethics for the future management of society is quite simply to listen. Rabinow acknowledges that for the anthropologist, as for the historian or the philosopher finding a “form of inquiry . . . appropriate for

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studying practices in their immediacy rather than cultures in their atemporality” 75 is challenging in a time in which authority and objectivity are in crisis. As Kleinman and Fitz-Henry point out, such concepts “still largely fail to account for the enormous complexity of human social experience—war, genocide, structural violence, poverty, and displacement— and the highly nuanced subjective states that those experiences engender.” 76 Rabinow thus encourages anthropologists to “find conceptually deictic forms—forms that would once again make immediate history a tool for bringing particularity and generality into more fruitful, mutually informing relationships, obliging the reader to take up an active and prudential stance toward the issues under deliberation.” 77 In writing on zar possession cults amongst Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, Eliezer Witztum, Nimrod Grisaru, and Danny Budowski identify zar “as a diagnostic category, either as the explanatory model in the Ethiopian community [in Israel] or as a culture-bound syndrome in terms of Western diagnostic systems.” 78 Whether in medicine, literature, or ethnography, the discussion of possession might be a “contemporary one,” in the sense that Clifford Geertz gives to the term: “Contemporaries are persons who share a community of time but not space: they live at (more or less) the same period of history and have, often attenuated, social relationships with one another.” 79 In this way, possession, whether in French theory or in the text of Haitian Vodou ritual, is a contemporary experience that links Haitians to the French, and even Haitians and the French to Israelis and Ethiopians. Bourguignon writes: The argument suggested here is: Possession trance, by offering a decision-making authority in the person of a medium, revealing the presumed will of the spirits, allows persons oppressed by rigid societies some degree of leeway and some elbow room. As such, possession trance may be said to represent a safety valve, of sorts, for societies whose rigid social structures cause certain stresses. 80

In an increasingly transnational and interconnected space, might it be that possession expresses contemporary pressures on the individual? In a time that Ek refers to as “the return of the camp,” 81 dispossession and dislocation are becoming ubiquitous; and we can thus expect that the notion of possession to address problems of dispossession will be more and more important. What interests me is how the notion of possession as it is conceived of in Haitian Vodou and in French twentieth-century thought fits into the above propositions. In the conclusion to their edited volume titled Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel explain that they have chosen essays that provide an “emic perspective, that of the insider”: In this multicultural and multinational world—“worlds,” to be precise—it is enormously important to allow multitudinous voices to re-

34

Introduction veal themselves, particularly if they have been violently silenced down through the centuries. 82

Their propositions reiterate that subjects speak for themselves, and that they speak in the present tense: possession, or “crisis,” is a privileged moment of such speaking. Leslie G. Desmangles explains, furthermore, that “during the period of possession, the serviteur, . . . embodies the cross symbol of the vèvès, the zero-point of contact between the sacred and the profane world” and his or her “body is the vertical line whereby the revitalizing forces of the universe flow to the société.” 83 Thus, possession is a mode by which the desubjectified subject may find a means to express itself in the face of an ever-destabilized global reality. In a sense, then, possession is dispossession revitalized. At the very least, it is a lens through which to explore otherness, a sort of displacement within, which represents the displacement of the insular, the displacement that fragments the body—the human body, the collective body, body as narrative, the body as cultural text. It is a means to explore how the traumatic experience—whether that of migration, of psychosis, or those of geopolitical and historical impediments—might be transcended if only momentarily within Wiseman’s notion of “ethno-aesthet[ic]” representation. While it is true, as Irene Albers points out, that both Breton’s and Leiris’s work reveals exoticist and primitivist representations, she also suggests that studying the modes of Leiris’s exoticism is revelatory of ways in which an individual learns to know both his or her own culture as well as that of another. 84 So while scholars such as Edouard Glissant judge the messages of Surrealism harshly, 85 Dash affirms that writers such as Breton and Leiris also “inaugurated a form of writing that Glissant in 1956 calls a welcome combination of literature and ethnography.” 86 Thus, in the same vein, my intent is not to judge (although I don’t always succeed) the work of the French writers whose work appears in the book, but rather to listen to them in their own words, their own era. POSSESSION, PWEN, AND WRITING I now turn to another lens through which we may conceive of possession: possession as a representational form that helps the individual to negotiate “displacement and desubjectification.” 87 If the body in Vodou spirit possession is the place where human and lwa meet and dislodge the human of its corporeal residency, then the body becomes a location that registers that which passes through it. How, if at all, may we compare the experience of possession to that of writing? Toward answering this question, I turn to Glissant’s considerations of writing as they might relate to his notion of Martinican “dispossession.” 88 When Glissant writes that, “Le créole haïtien est pratiquement sauf du passage. Le signe peint est sa demeure.”—“Haitian Creole is prac-

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35

tically unharmed by the passage. The painted sign is its ancestral residence,” 89 he notes a difference between literary production coming out of Haiti and/or from Haitian writers, and that of Martinique and Martinican writers. The context of Glissant’s statement is to expand upon Haitian writers’ comfort with the written form, noting with dismay that for Martinicans, the “passage” from the oral to the written form has been more difficult than for Haitians. In her book titled African Novels and the Question of Orality, Eileen Julien proposes that scholars of African literature have imposed the false binary of orality/writing. She writes, “For many practitioners of African literature and criticism, continuity has meant most often a search for a heritage from oral traditions to the new literatures written in European and African languages, the ‘passage from orality to writing.’” 90 Glissant’s italicized use of the word “passage” renders ironic the erroneous notion of the relationship between oral and written communication as evolutionary and civilizing, a derogatory connotation, according to which for the European colonizer, “Blacks and other people of color could not write” 91 for “ . . . writing, according to Hume, was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human.” 92 Glissant’s use of the word “passage” in association with writing also invokes the tragedy of “The Middle Passage” or “la Traversée.” In so far as the body (or kò kadav) 93 becomes a place, we may relate possession to Glissant’s poetic endeavor. Although Carine Mardorossian’s article has nothing to do with Vodou, the discourse she invokes when tracing a genealogy between Frantz Fanon and Glissant complements our present discussion of Vodou possession. Mardorossian invokes Michelle Praeger’s description of Glissant’s “creolized aesthetic” as a “poetics of location” in which “‘one finds in Glissant’s work a discourse of geographical continuity meant to compensate for the nonhistory of the Caribbean.’” 94 Further on, Mardorossian writes: One would think that a cultural model that embraces mutability and the coming together of cultures may necessarily be more lukewarm in its critique of the effects of colonialism. Yet, as Fanon’s and Glissant’s interventions both illustrate, insight into cultural heritage as a site of interaction need not compromise on one’s condemnation of the “dépossession” resulting from colonial and neocolonial relations. 95

Mardorossian’s text directly relates a poetics of location to Glissant’s notion of dispossession; in a sense, they act as a call and response to one another, where colonial and postcolonial dispossession call upon the poet to create the Glissantian poétique de la relation, which for Praeger directly relates to locations, “symbolic sites through which the relationality of the modern world is discussed and embodied.” 96 If the phenomenological actors in the poetics of possession are the ti bon anj, the gwo bon anj, and the hundreds of lwa privy to descending upon the human body, then they act in much the same way as do the figures of speech that the poet uses to give

36

Introduction

life to words. In a sense, the body, that is the kò kadav, like the morpheme or the phoneme, is nothing more than a signifier waiting to receive its meaning from a relational experience that depends on location. The emphasis that I have put on the kò kadav as location may initially seem contrary to the concept that the corporeal body in Vodou is like a “horse,” which the lwa “mounts”—the often ambulant mobility with which a horse is associated contradicts the notion of body as domicile, and yet, it is precisely that: the body in Haitian Vodou is a domicile in continual displacement whose denizens are also continually displaced to make way for the spirits. In a sense, it is Jacques Derrida’s flying signifier, constantly on the move, continually the vehicle of meanings that are both complementary and contradictory, a medium for the “mutability and coming together of cultures.” 97 In Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (2005), Luís Madureira 98 advocates the reading of texts that reveal a “latticework of uneven and subtle continuities,” which in turn enable “readings of nonwestern modernisms to be submitted to a thoroughgoing reevaluation.” 99 Breton, Herskovits, Leiris, or Métraux are from the “West,” but as Dash points out, the Caribbean is not necessarily “non-western.” Dash refers to Geertz who speaks to Lévi-Strauss’s dismissal of the Caribbean as a space not pure enough in its exotic distance from European culture, whereas Leiris’s interest is to explore “Haiti and Martinique” as “mirrors in which the everyday provides zones of interaction, a ‘théâtre vécu,’ involving self and other.” 100 It is precisely because it was such a complex mirror of real and unreal, of unpredictable images and displaced originals, that Leiris could sense in this act of self-exploration the interactions of global modernity. The destabilizing and creolizing Caribbean, with its desubjectifying possibilities, becomes an ideal site for Leiris’s self-ethnography.

As such, Dash’s “desubjectifying possibilities” recast Ek’s and Rabinow’s notions of the desubjectified subject in a more hopeful light. In her work, Glover speaks of identifying new centers in considerations of Caribbean discourses. She writes of the role her book Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon plays in literary theory on Haiti: Haiti Unbound fills, then, a rather astonishingly empty place in the assessment of postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics. Affirming the presence of a spiral-based aesthetic in major prose and fiction works . . . , I frame my analyses here in an interrogation of the criteria for inclusion in New World traditions, considering the manner in which new centers and margins have been created in the already peripheralized space(s) of the Americas. 101

Similarly, this book hopes to offer yet another way of centering (or decentering) discourses on the physical and intellectual encounters between

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37

French, U.S.-American, Haitian, and/or Vodouyizan intellectuals, and theories of subjectivities as related specifically to possession. This book’s intention is to convince its reader that in its own way possession is a “highly deictic form” that brings “immedia[cy]” to a subject’s narration of himself, herself, or itself, 102 and more importantly might be a conceptual space that is far more contemporary than it might on first glance seem. NOTES 1. American Psychiatric Association. DSM-IV-TR (4th, revised ed.). Arlington: American Psychiatric Press, 2000 as cited by Ida Sharon, MD, et al. “Dissociative Disorders.” 15 May 2012. E-Medicine. 4 July 2013 http://emedicine.medscape.com/ article/294508-overview. 2. American Psychiatric Association, “Dissociative Disorders” in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition (2013. 19 May 2014 http://dsm. psychiatryonline.org/content.aspx?bookid=556§ionid=41101774&resultclick=1). 3. Rabinow 116. 4. In most of his discussions on possession, Leiris considers and is troubled by the “theatricality” of possession. See chapter 7. 5. Rouget, Music and Trance. 6. I have chosen to italicize the word zonbi and use its Haitian Kreyòl spelling to honor the genealogy of the term as one belonging to a Haitian cultural space. Where I cite others, I preserve their spelling of the word: Theodore Charmant, Haitian CreoleEnglish/ English-Haitian Creole Dictionary (New York: Hippocrene Books, 2001). 7. “Black Atlantic, White Zombie,” by Emily T. Bauman. Perf. Conference talk given at “Currents of the Black Atlantic,” (The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York. 14 March 2014). 8. Glover, Haiti Unbound. 9. Sarah Juliet Lauro and Deborah Christie, Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-human (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011). 10. Adam McGee, “Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture,” (Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 41.2): 231–56. 11. Eric E. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 97. 12. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 239. 13. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 14. Max Beauvoir,”Herbs and Energy: The Holistic Medical System of the Haitian People,” in Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel. Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006): 129. 15. Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). 16. Paul Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation and Self-Formation,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, by João Biehl, Byron Good and Arthur Kleinman, 98–118 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 17. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself, New York: Fordham University Press, 2005; Paul Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation and Self-Formation,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, by João Biehl, Byron Good and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007): 98–118. 18. Stephenson, Possession, 117. 19. I borrow from Judith Butler in Giving an Account of Oneself, in which she refers to considerations of personal responsibility in the works of “philosophers” such as

38

Introduction

Nietzsche and “critical theorists,” such as herself. While she doesn’t explicitly use the two terms interchangeably, she also does not explicitly make a distinction between them. In this book, I will use them as equivalent terms (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). 20. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14–16. 21. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010),14. 22. For more on the distinction, see my discussion of Gilbert Rouget’s work further on in this chapter. Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985 [1980]). 23. Ibid. 24. Stephenson, Possession. 25. Alice L. Conklin, In the Museum of Man: Race, Anthropology, and Empire in France, 1850–1950 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), 211. 26. Ibid., 211. 27. Dominique Berthet, André Breton, l’Eloge de la Rencontre: Antilles, Amérique, Océanie (Paris: HC Editions, 2008), 99. 28. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 5. 29. Erika Bourguignon, Possession (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1991 [1976]), 1. 30. Erika Bourguignon acknowledges symptoms similar to “possession,” but characterizes as “possession” only those groups of people that self-identify with the word: “Nevertheless, if we speak in very general terms about dissociation, fugue states, multiple personalities, fainting, functional epileptic seizures and other behavior of an apparently hysterical type, then the behavior is probably universal and occurs in all societies; however, it should not properly be referred to as ‘possession’ states” (10). For his part, Gilbert Rouget’s comparative analysis of ethnographic work on phenomena similar to possession throughout the world, includes terminology such as “crisis” (6–7, 38), “ecstasy” (4), and “trance” (38). 31. Burguignon, Possession, 8. 32. See discussion further on which distinguishes between Leiris’s and Métraux’s usages of Antiquity, and notably what it meant to label a culture “Dionysian.” 33. For a further discussion of secularity, see the reference to M. Jacqui Alexander’s work in chapter 1, and the entirety of the chapter dedicated to René Depestre’s novel Hadriana, dans tous mes rêves. 34. Angelo Mastrandrea, “Italie: Naples ou le futur de l’Europe,” (April 2013), http:/ /www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2013/04/MASTRANDREA/49008. 35. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 94. 36. Ibid., 36. 37. The Palladium Affair was based on sensationalistic journalist Léo Taxil’s “magnum opus, Le diable au XIXème siècle,” which purported devil worship amongst Free Masons. Taxil proclaimed it a hoax in a press conference in 1897, but through his writings on the subject, first published in 1885, he disseminated the rumor for over ten years. David Allen Harvey, “Lucifer in the City of Light: The Palladium Hoax and ‘Diabolical Causality’ in Fin De Siècle France,” Fin de Siècle France Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1/2, Winter 2006: 177–206. 38. See the documentary Rize, directed by David LaChapelle, performed by Lil’ C, Tommy the Clown, and Miss Prissy (2005). After one of the krumpers loses herself, falls, and is caught by those in the circle around her, one of the onlookers explains to the camera person: “She was struck, that’s what we’ve been waiting for.” 39. Terry Rey and Karen Richman, “The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion,” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 39, no. 3 (September 2010): 384. 40. Ibid., 387. 41. Ibid., 392.

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39

42. There is sufficient literature on lwa and zar that I need not continually define these concepts. I will capitalize the words “Vodou” and its cognates but will not capitalize the words lwa or zar. In the Fon language, spoken in Benin, Vodou means “spirit” or “deity”; in Arabic zar (Z-A-R) means “the visited”; in Amharic, the dominant language in Gondar, zar means “demon” or “genius,” the word that Leiris (through Abba Jérôme Gäbraä Musé’s translation, see section on Leiris) uses to define it: “génie possesseur” in Michel Leiris’s Miroir de l’Afrique, edited by Jean Jamin (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996 [1931–1967]), 1442. 43. For more on the literary and philosophical genealogies amongst André Breton, Aimé Césaire, René Depestre, Michel Leiris, and Pierre Mabille, please see J. Michael Dash, Jean-Claude Michel, Nick Nesbitt, Timothy J. Reiss, Aliko Songolo, and Gary Wilder’s work. For specific works of the authors cited in this paragraph, see bibliography. 44. J. Michael Dash, “Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean,” L’Esprit Créateur 47.1 (Spring 2007), 84. 45. Maryse Condé, “Fous t’en Depestre; Laisse dire Aragon,” The Romantic Review 92.1/2 (Jan-March 2001), 177. Translation mine. 46. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 47. Agamben’s work looks most prominently at the “camp” of the Holocaust in Europe; however, given his discussion of the challenges of humanitarianism, for example in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995, 1998, 133), it is plausible to understand Ek’s reference to the “camp” as both a metaphor and a contemporary reality. Agamben has been criticized for an “‘aestheticization’ of politics in his writing” (De la Durantaye 2009, 12). 48. Richard Ek, “Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the Camp: An Introduction,” Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography (2006), 363. 49. Rey and Richman, “The Somatics of Syncretism,” 392. 50. See discussion of gwo bon anj and ti bon anj in chapter 9. Réginald O. Crosley writes, “In Haiti, the components of man are known as kò kadav, gro [gwo] bon anj, and ti bon anj, which correspond to the body, the semedo, and the selido of the Dahomeans and the body, the moyo, and the mfumu-kutu of the Bantu or Bakongo. In Dagaraland, Burkina Faso, we have the body, a soul or body double called sié, and a third component which is a spirit or a God” (“Shadow-Matter Universes in Haitian and Dagara Ontologies: A Comparative Study,” in Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality, by Patrick Bellegrade-Smith and Claudine Michel [Bloomington/ Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2006], 7). 51. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). 52. Boris Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 23. 53. Paul Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation and Self-Formation,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, by João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 107. 54. Arthur Kleinman and Erin Fritz-Henry, “The Experiential Basis of Subjectivity: How Individuals Change in the Context of Social Transformation,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, by João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 52. 55. Darren Staloff, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politicis of Enlightenment and the American Founding (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005). 56. Ibid., 14. 57. Ek, “Spatialities of the Camp,” 363. 58. Michael M.J. Fischer, “Epilogue: To Live with What Would Otherwise Be Unendurable: Return(s) to Subjectivities,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, by João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 425.

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Introduction

59. Ibid. 60. Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation,” 103. 61. Ibid., 104. 62. Ibid., 99. 63. Ibid., 109. 64. Ibid., 111. 65. Ibid., 109. 66. Ibid., 112. Rabinow refers to the title as On the Peloponnesian War, whereas it is usually referred to as History of the Peloponnesian War. 67. Ibid., 117. 68. Stephenson, Possession, 117. 69. Fischer, “Epilogue,” 425. 70. Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation,” 117. 71. Stephenson, Possession, 3. 72. Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation,” 116. 73. Ibid., 103. 74. Ibid., 104. 75. Ibid., 111. 76. Kleinman and Fitz-Henry, “Experiential Basis,” 53. 77. Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation,” 116. Here, having never engaged in the ethnographic process myself, my interest resides in the discourses that anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, psychologists, religious studies scholars, and writers employ to study culture, identity, possession, subjectivity, and self-possession. 78. Eliezer Witztum, Nimrod Grisaru, and Danny Budowski, “The ‘Zar’ Possession Syndrome among Ethiopian Immigrants to Israel: Cultural and Clinical Aspects,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 69 (1996): 224. 79. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 365. 80. Burguignon, Possession, 31. 81. Ek, “Spatialities of the Camp,” 363. 82. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel, Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 134. 83. Leslie G. Desmangles, “African Interpretations of the Christian Cross in Vodou,” in Invisible Powers: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture, by Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 48. 84. Irene Albers, “Mimesis and Alterity: Michel Leiris’s Ethnography and Poetics of Spirit Possession,” French Studies: A Quarterly Review 62, no. 3 (July 2008): 275–276. 85. Edouard Glissant, Le discours antillais (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997 [1981]), 742. 86. Dash, “Le Je de l’autre,” 84. 87. Ek, “Spatialities of the Camp,” 363. 88. Glissant, Le Discours antillais, 834. 89. Ibid., 460. My translation. 90. Eileen Julien, African Novels and the Question of Orality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 4. 91. Henry Louis Gates, “Writing Race,” in The Post-colonial Studies Reader, 2nd Edition, by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (London: Routledge, 2007 [1995]), 217. 92. Ibid., 218. 93. Crosley, “Shadow-Matter Universes,” 7. 94. Carine Mardorossian, “From Fanon to Glissant: A Martinican Genealogy,” Small Axe 13, no. 3 (October 2009): 23. 95. Ibid., 23. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., 23. 98. Luís Madureira, Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2005), 6.

Possession, Dispossession, and Self-Possession 99. 100. 101. 102.

Ibid., 2. Dash, “Le Je de l’autre,” 91. Glover, Haiti Unbound, xi. Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation,” 116.

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Post-modernité—Guadeloupe 2008 from “Intérieur—Andidan 2011” by Nicolas Nabajoth. Source: Reprinted by permission from Nicolas Nabajoth.

I

Dispossessions: Nationhood, Citizenship, Personhood, and Poverty

This first part works through ways in which scholars are answering the following questions: how have scholars understood the project of “nation,” and its “citizens,” over the past twenty years? More specifically, how does nationhood (the desire for it, the lack of it, its necessarily utopian intentions and resultant disappointing outcomes) relate to an individual and/or a community’s sense of personhood? And finally, how does the discussion of nationhood and its citizenry connect to the everpresent dialogue around “poverty”? My intention is to look at how discussions about Haiti implicate the above interrogations. It is not my aim to make an explicit argument about nationhood or its various incarnations, but rather, I want to consider the complexity of the notion of nationhood and its associated vocabulary—citizenship, state, nation, personhood, and as I will argue at the end of this section, poverty—as deliberated by scholars working in political philosophy and postcolonial studies in African, Caribbean, European, and North American contexts. As such, this first part may also be read as a coordinated extended review of literature, a putting-into-dialogue of thinkers writing across a transatlantic space, all of whom deal with what it means to be dispossessed, to be in Rob Nixon’s words, “in the literal sense, inundated by development.” If development helps some, for most, it turns them into “developmental refugees,” dumping them into “a terrifying, centrifugal narrative of displacement, dispossession, and exodus,” or (and both), turns them into “uninhabitants,” people who live somewhere, who are technically citizens, but who have little if any protections or rights. 1 In honoring Nixon’s work, I consider both the aspirations and the disappointments of what the notion and practice of nationhood can and cannot deliver in a contemporary era, one that is necessarily informed by the complex dynamic between modernity’s enlightenment project and neo/ post/colonialisms’ exploitation of peoples and places. 2 More particularly, I have chosen to read through Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Colin Dayan’s The Law Is

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Part I

a White Dog (2011), Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s introduction to Haiti State Against Nation: The Origin and Legacy of Duvalierism (1990) and his essays in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (2003), Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony (2001), and Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness (2010) because, I argue, they deal similarly with how personhood has been constructed under the weight of the concept and practice of “nationhood.” The writers in question problematize the notion of “successful” nations. For example, the recent work by Harvard and M.I.T. economists Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson titled Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012), written for a general audience, studies the world’s nations through a prism that organizes them according to those that succeed and those that “fail.” Yarimar Bonilla might criticize such scholarship, one which conceives of “nations” as fixed and bordered geographies, with communities attached to them, as scholarship that only reinforces “normative assumptions of our contemporary political world,” “Western political categories” of “nationalism and sovereignty” as “pathologized sites of failed emancipation.” 3 From very different contexts and standpoints, the thinkers who are featured in this first part put into question the very notion of nationhood as an aspirational concept, one that will assure the “success,” and thus provide freedom and justice for a nation’s supposed “citizens.” Particularly, these writers interest me because they integrate concerns of nation building (i.e., types of institutions and the economies that support them; the perils of mismanaged power; and the utopian hopes of the enlightenment project out of which the modern nation emerged) with an attention to personhood; that is, the consideration of how a being is brought into existence for protection, prosecution, and/or neglect under the laws of the nation-state. In the first chapter, I reflect upon the resonance that G. W. F. Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” continues to have in the North American academe. 4 Throughout this first part, in discussing the production of five theorists, whose work, I argue, if considered as related corpuses of thought, is essential to the understanding of how the notion of “nationhood” is inextricably linked to that of “poverty.” I first look at Agamben’s concept of the homo sacer; second, I move on to Dayan’s most recent work, which considers, amongst other topics, how personhood especially in a pan-American Atlantic space has been constructed most often in reference to an African-diasporic past (and present); third, I return to Trouillot’s publication of Haiti State Against Nation: The Origin and Legacy of Duvalierism and his more recent essays in Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World to draw attention to the precariousness of the notion of nation, and most importantly its relationship to enlightenment utopias; fourth, I look to Mbembe’s work to transnationalize Haiti out of its hemispheric localization, answering Nadège Clitandre’s call to “think about Caribbean affiliation [for Haitian studies], but

Dispossessions

45

also African diasporic connections.” 5 I conclude with a reflection on how we might consider the notions of “nation,” “citizenship,” and “happiness” (and here I draw on both Ahmed and Mbembe), as linked to that of “poverty.” This first section thus combines three types of scholarship: one that considers the aspirations of the enlightenment (i.e., freedom, equality, happiness) in African, American (i.e., U.S.), Caribbean (mostly Haitian), and European (northern, eastern, and central) contexts; a second that deliberates the notion of nationhood, “non-national emancipation,” 6 and “nonsovereign futures;” 7 and a third that theorizes contemporary personhood. In juxtaposing the work of intellectuals reflecting on the human condition across transatlantic landscapes, I identify some of the questions that are being asked in disciplines still conditioned by “area studies,” differing iterations of similar questions that are not often put into dialogue with each other. I am not the first to put these ideas together. What I am doing is giving critical attention to those whom we read. My intention is to show that the notion of “dispossession” as Athanasiou, Butler, or Nixon use it to describe a twenty-first-century world order is not new, and has existed for centuries, especially in spaces (i.e., that of the transatlantic slave trade) where persons were seized, sold, transported, deposited, and forced to “live.” As the four parts of this book will show, “spirit” “possession” is first and foremost about finding ways to inhabit and reinhabit. In other words, most “national” conceptions of personhood, understand that a “person” is defined by connections to her/ himself, to community, to kin, and to land. When a person is dispossessed of the latter two, it is the first two that take precedence, that of a person to her/himself, and that of a person to her/his community. From such an intimate relationship of a person with her/himself and her/his immediate community, I argue, is borne, in part, not just a predilection towards, but an inevitable need for “spirit” “possession.” Yet despite the lexical relationship between the words “possession” and “dispossession,” it is maybe too soon to understand how “spirit” possession by a deity might be more intimately (and philologically) related to more material and political forms of dispossession, as iterated by Athanasiou, Butler, and Nixon. 8 This first part of the book is thus meant to bridge three conversations that deal with the notion of “dispossession”: the first, a conversation about nationhood; the second, an attention to personhood; and the third, the (re)newed attempts to think about, and especially “resolve” “poverty.” Thus, I offer up this first part as an orchestrated review of a select number of works that deal with how dispossession is related to notions of “nation,” “citizenship,” and “personhood,” from the perspective of texts that might be labeled as contemporary works of political philosophy: essays that deal with what it means to exist in an ever-fractured space of a world order that holds tightly to the motivating tenets of

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enlightenment philosophy, while all the while acknowledging its gross failures, or what Bonilla names its “disenchantments.” 9 NOTES 1. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), 152. 2. I will only capitalize the word “enlightenment” when referring to the “Radical Enlightenment,” to respect Nick Nesbitt’s usage of the phrase (see further on). 3. Yarimar Bonilla, “Nonsovereign Futures? French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment,” in From: Caribbean Sovereignty, Democracy and Development in an Age of Globalization, ed. Linden Lewis (New York: Routledge, 2012), 213. 4. In his recent reflection on slavery and Hegel’s master-slave narrative, Gerard Aching considers C. L. R. James’s, Gilroy’s, Buck-Morss’s, and Scott’s work: Yet viewing the work of slaves exclusively as an activity through which the master physically subjugates them can account for only part of their struggle to be free. Such an account, in which there are two social antagonists in a system of human bondage that existed in a specific place and time, provides knowledge about crimes against humanity, but it also affords occasions for transforming master and slave into powerful and apparently pure symbols of oppression and resistance. (Gerard Aching, “The Slave’s Work: Reading Slavery through Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic,” PMLA, 127.4 [2012]: 913.) 5. Clitandre, “Haitian Exceptionalism in the Caribbean and the Project of Rebuilding Haiti,” 150. 6. Gary Wilder, “Untimely Vision: Aimé Césaire, Decolonization, Utopia,” Public Culture, 21 (2009): 104. 7. Bonilla, “Nonsovereign Futures?” 208. 8. As we will see at the end of the second part of this book, and also in the conclusion, Butler, as she engages in the conversations with Athanasiou, starts to tune in to the fact that “possession” carries with it a more metaphysical concept, one that is not only related to “possession” as physical property. 9. Bonilla, “Nonsovereign Futures?” 208.

ONE Hegel and Agamben Materializing Philosophy, Philosophizing the Material

Before entering into a discussion of the work of Agamben, Dayan, Mbembe, and Trouillot, it is important to take account of the legacy of G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) on scholarship that deals with “modernity” or the “enlightenment.” 1 What surprises me is that despite the fact that Hegel and his work are constantly criticized, they still occupy a major role in our scholarship. Whether directly or indirectly, Hegel seems to inform and even undergird much of our work, both in questionably constructive and less productive ways. His work always seems to be lurking in the background, a sort of rite of passage, a kind of burden with which we must “faire face.” This may be due, in part, to the fact that in France, Hegel’s work, introduced to French intellectuals by Alexandre Kojève’s lectures in the 1930s at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which included students such as Bataille, Breton, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre, would become associated with radical thought. 2 The pertinence of the Hegelian quandary to present-day scholarship was reiterated in the opening comments to the November 2012 conference organized by graduate students at New York University, titled “Against Recovery? Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive.” 3 One of the co-organizers, Justin Leroy, reminded the audience of the fact that Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, published posthumously in 1837, reserved “no place for Africa.” Many works grapple with the fact that Hegel’s work theorizes freedom, while simultaneously (and with gravely consequential naïveté) forgetting, or rather purposely eradicating any reference to Africa and its diaspora. Within the context of studies of the African diaspora, C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1963), Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982), Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), 47

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and Nick Nesbitt’s Voicing Memory: History, Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (2003) and Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (2008) deal at some level with Hegel’s master-slave narrative. 4 Notably they examine the issue of what it means to be “free,” and whether or not the notion of freedom is inevitably bound to what Hegel’s work arguably suggests is its understood counterpart: bondage and in a more globally historical context, slavery. Works that have and continue to receive enormous attention are studies that look at slavery, revolution, and Haiti within and/or against a backdrop of scholarly traditions that use Hegel to inform their own methodological approaches to their considerations and reconsiderations of historical, cultural, and/or literary texts. The underlying questions of these works are double. First, they seek to determine whether or not the lived experience of slavery conscientiously informed Hegel’s work, in a time that was contemporaneous to the European enlightenment, and within which Hegel’s life and work were inscribed. Second, these works consider Gerard Aching’s argument that Hegel’s “commonly cited today as the ‘master-slave dialectic’” can be useful to scholars seeking to understand what “freedom” has meant to a given person at a given time within the histories of the African diaspora. Aching writes: Whereas the slave’s work has traditionally and accurately been understood as a physical labor externally enforced by the master, less critical attention has been paid to reading the slave’s work ontogenetically, as an internal struggle for the freedom of self-mastery. Such an ontogenetic reading provides valuable insights into ubiquitous but less frequently studied forms of resistance from within slavery. 5

Some scholars make Hegel their primary subject: for example, Susan Buck-Morss argues that Hegel did not forget Haiti; rather, he omitted the Haitian revolutionary struggle: Haiti is ever-present, but seldom iterated. She writes: “There are thus multiple, quite mundane reasons for Hegel’s silence [in regards to Haiti], from fear of political repercussions, to the impact of Napoleon’s victory, to the hazards of moving and personal uprootings. . . . But there is no doubt that Hegel and Haiti belong together.” 6 The attention that scholarship has given to Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic” 7 reflects a preeminent concern with agency, and the agency that must in some way inscribe the experience of survival, which undergirds the life of any human subjected to bondage. Agency, like citizenship, is a term that is used in varied ways by different scholars. It includes at once the official conduits of power by which citizens negotiate, defend, and claim their rights: notably the law, and the institutional structures that establish and enforce these laws. Yet, cultural studies have emphasized the importance of alternative nexuses for the deployment of power, where a person—whether a refugee (i.e., a citizen in exile) or a disenfran-

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chised citizen (i.e., a citizen living in material poverty, and/or a person living under a plutocratic or kleptocratic government)—still can exercise agency, not so much to change the system, but rather to create alternative arrangements of survival for oneself and one’s community. Citing the title of Mimi Sheller’s most recent book, these alternative modes of creating community take the name of “citizenship from below,” a type of citizenship that is as much concerned with revising or resisting an oppressive regime, as it is with creating what Patricia Saunders defines as “a sense of belonging.” 8 Here, the activities that matter are those that are not officially part of the nation—from sexual relationships to grassroots and religious organizing, they are behaviors that enable individuals to set up networks that are independent from the more official (national) institutions that disenfranchise them. Given the present discussion of Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic,” we might consider “citizenship from below” as the relationship formed less between “slaves” with their “masters,” but more the relationship created amongst “slaves” for themselves, and in large part in a realm mostly ignored by their “masters.” Whether “from above,” in the more official recourses provided by the nation-state, or “from below” in the backrooms, interstices, and left-over spaces existing in the margins of the nation-state’s institutions, agency intends a certain degree of decision-making, of control over one’s destiny. This said, the present deliberations around Hegel’s “master-slave dialectic,” as well as the essays of the scholars studied in the first part of this book engage, at least as a departure point, the more traditional notion of citizenship, whereby a citizen should, in theory, be a person who benefits fully from the social contract that undergirds the tenets of most “democratic” nation-states. Within the framework of a more conventional association of agency, citizenship, and nationhood, Jean Casimir’s, Laurent Dubois’s, and David Scott’s recent publications suggest that both at the time of the Haitian revolution and through to the present-day, Haitians had and have had very little possibility of exercising political agency, at least in the more conventional and “official” sense of the term. Scott “develop[s] an argument that modernity was not a choice New World slaves could exercise but was itself one of the fundamental conditions of choice” and suggests that “Toussaint and his colleagues were conscripts—not volunteers—of modernity.” 9 Similarly, Dubois reemphasizes the predicament of non-choice: “Twenty-five years after the overthrow of Duvalier,” Dubois writes, “Haitians are still largely the objects rather than the subjects of the political and economic order under which they live.” 10 Despite our attempts in current theory to avoid binaries, as the above discussions of both the “master-slave dialectic” and the notion of “citizenship from below”—as opposed to its attendant other: “citizenship from above”—demonstrate, it is hard to avoid conversations that don’t orient us around oppositional categories: “slave” and “master”; “below”

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and “above.” Yet, the notion of the political subject in the Haitian context complicates these polarities. Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti and Universal History shows how Haiti’s revolutionary space was composed at once of the circulation of revolutionary ideas, probably promoted through the relationships between Freemason, Yoruban, Dahomean, Kongolese, and Afro-Islamic political and spiritual leaderships. 11 Buck-Morss warns that: to be a Mason is an ontological category empty of defining qualities for which it could be held causally responsible (just as to be Christian does not make one virtuous, to be Marxist does not make one a revolutionary . . . Toussaint became a Mason, but so, allegedly, did Napoleon who destroyed him. 12

In other words, a “new humanism” was produced as a result of the symbiotic relationships amongst varying and intersecting “Atlantic cosmologies,” which amalgamated different thought communities around deliberations of what it meant to be free and to achieve justice. 13 One of these locuses of symbiosis would come to be named Vodou. However, over the decades and centuries, the varying political and spiritual traditions that informed the first attempts of revolution and later nation-building in Haiti would succumb to the troublesome binary of “secular” versus “religious,” where Vodou would no longer be thought of as a system of political thought, but would be considered, by many especially in “the West,” as as a religion, and at that a religious system, of the order of an unofficial “cult” that may actually be “the cause of all of Haiti’s ills,” one of those frustrating stereotypes that so many scholars of Haiti continue to have to deconstruct for our colleagues in other disciplines, and other professions. As M. Jacqui Alexander argues, as soon as the secular order imposed itself as the sine qua non of the democratic nation-state, all political expressions that were not “secular” could only be seen as unofficial and illegitimate expressions of political agency. 14 What I am trying to point out is that Haiti is exemplary of a space that was comprehensively engaging the elements that we later in the academe would tease out as two separate types of citizenship: one more “enlightened,” and thus “secular,” to be studied as political philosophy, the other more spiritual, religious, and above all “culturally” “different,” to be studied in anthropology and sociology. Yet, Aching’s reading of Hegel’s work as one that might provide access to “the freedom of self-mastery,” resonates with Buck-Morss’s work on Hegel and Haiti. 15 Hegel’s dialectic is one that preserves the important relationship between the secular and the spiritual, as one that enables the individual to articulate political agency across all of the relationships in which s/he engages: the relationship to her/himself, to her/his community, and eventually to her/his nation to assure political agency. Furthermore, the “self-mastery” that Aching identifies as one of the key prisms for studying Hegel’s master-slave narrative resonates with schol-

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arship of Vodou practice. For example, for Kesner Castor self-mastery is at the heart of a Vodou ethical system. 16 Max Beauvoir corroborates: Typically, there are two sorts of possession. The first is called bosal (or rough). Here, the person releases all excess energies built up within him or herself, often through violent thrashing of the body and generally disorganized, “wild” behavior, which is nevertheless understood, interpreted, and considered to be of great significance to all. The second, more controlled possession implies a reorganization of the self to achieve harmony within the self and with the various forces of nature in the universe. 17

Another iteration of what might be related to the notion of agency as “self-mastery” is that of “resilience,” best articulated by Jean Casimir’s and Laurent Dubois’s article, which appeared in Martin Munro’s Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture, and the Earthquake of 2010 (2010): If a similarly catastrophic event—resulting in no state infrastructure, no communication, no active security forces, and overwhelming destruction of the built environment—took place in a North American city, the level of social chaos would likely have been, it seems to us, much greater than it has been in Haiti. That probably is in part because of the ways Haitian society is largely independent from, and indeed in some ways in opposition to, the state. 18

Clitandre argues that “resilience” is itself yet another form of “exceptionalism” attributed to Haitians. While it has positive connotations, it nonetheless creates a space where it seems “culturally” “natural” for Haitians to suffer, and at that to suffer in an exemplary manner. 19 Whether laudatory or problematic (or both), the question of agency as it relates to freedom—whether discussed within the complex and related historical and political trajectories of France, Haiti, and the United States as nation-states, or whether it emerges from studies of Vodou or sexuality as types of “citizenship from below”—undergirds all of the above studies. Whether they deal explicitly with the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, or whether they operate within the intersection between political philosophy and cultural anthropology, I suggest that the work of Hegel, Agamben, Dayan, Trouillot, Mbembe, and Ahmed, in one way or another, addresses the difficult relationship between the secular notion (and ideal) of nationhood and the various expressions of citizenship, some secular, some non-secular, some official, some unofficial that emerge from pragmatic on-the-ground circumstances. It seems then that discussions of “freedom” are at once the property of scholars of religion, but also of scholars of political philosophy. Deliberations of freedom in Haiti are mostly, in our studies, relegated to the realm of religious studies and anthropology. Buck-Morss, Dubois, James, Nesbitt, and Kate Ramsey remind us that Haiti (and Vodou) may also be considered within the disciplinary parameters of the (more secular) disciplines of history and politi-

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cal philosophy. The question, then, that resonates with Aching’s consideration of the Hegelian dialectic is one that addresses the relationship between freedom and agency, especially alternative agencies and unexpected definitions of what it means to be “free,” as a bondsman, as a slave, or as any political subject who does not benefit from the sustained stability not only of whiteness, but of a whiteness in a political context in which the state may offer the (“white”) person continued protection. AGAMBEN Despite the fact that Agamben’s work is almost uniquely dedicated to the study of Europe, it interests me because he also deals with the disappointments of the “enlightenment” project: the danger of disciplinary research; the tension between the secular and the spiritual; and a concern with what it means to exist as a “person” who is not a “citizen.” Agamben’s work in a sense follows the itinerary of the obfuscation of the sacred: he pursues it from its location outside of the human body (pagan and pre-Christ), to its location within a select number of humans (i.e., Jesus Christ, saints, emperors, and enlightened monarchs, from ancient Rome to early Christianity), to its fragmentation amongst those reduced to the most dismal of material living conditions, those with the fewest political rights (refugees and the urban poor in contemporary times). My objective in doing a close reading of Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life is to think through the Italian philosopher’s work in the context of Haitian studies. I wonder: why is such a vibrant discipline—one that has its own journal; one that has always been interdisciplinary; one that garners attention and awards for essays and books published in anthropology, history, cultural studies, and philosophy—absent to the intellectual landscape of such sophisticated thinkers such as Agamben? The most obvious reason is that the academe has played at matchmaking, a matchmaking between disciplines and geographic spaces: where “philosophy” has mostly been interested in European spaces, where cultural anthropology, at least in most of the twentieth century, has typically made the object of its study “other,” non-European peoples. 20 Another way to frame my interest in Agamben is to speculate, and here I am grateful to Sibylle Fischer’s article, which I will look at more closely below, titled “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” republished in The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development (2013) 21 : why does Agamben not think more about the postcolonial space, especially when, as we will note later, he locates bare life today within it? 22 Coming off the above discussion of Black Atlantic-studies scholars’ interest in Hegel, it might also just be the simple fact that Africa was absent from Hegel’s history of mankind, which reflects a more broad omission of Haiti in many Euro-

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pean and North American scholars’ work. As Dominique Berthet’s, Valerie Kaussen’s, and Nesbitt’s books show, Hegel might have been present in the work of Caribbean scholars, but why has the reverse not been true, especially in the past decade/s? 23 Only Buck-Morss argues that Hegel was aware of Haiti’s revolutionary struggle, but it nonetheless remains a fact that in explicit evocations, Haiti was totally left out (if not purposely neglected from his work). My intent in dealing with Agamben’s work is to preserve the complexities of his thought, for it is within the larger logic of the development of his critical approach to the contemporary predicament of democracy that it is possible to see both how Agamben’s political philosophy can shed light on Haitian studies, and how Haitian studies might expand and repair some of the “serious concerns” that scholars such as Fischer have had with Agamben’s theory. 24 Before doing so, I take the time to present the terms that construct his theoretical lexicon. For those already familiar with his work, the below may seem overly simplistic, but taking my cue from Fischer’s analysis of his work, it is my intention to consider both how easy it is to integrate the terms that attract readers to Agamben’s work, alongside a more complex reading of where Agamben’s work gets stuck, and how this sticking has everything to do with Haitian studies. In one of his many definitions of the term, Agamben defines homo sacer or “sacred man” as “homo sacer: the unpunishability of his killing and the ban on his sacrifice.” 25 In other words, sacred life is the life that does not belong in the public sphere, 26 but cannot be gotten rid of because it serves some sort of social function. Sacred man is also “a life that may be killed without the commission of homicide;” that is, if the sacred man is killed, or killed through the slow death involved in not protecting his (or her) security, then the perpetrator of the killing goes unpunished. 27 It goes without saying, that since the “sacred man” is supposed to be kept alive, but at the same time is to be banished from the public sphere, he is marginalized: adopting another of Agamben’s terms he is “banned” from participating in public life. 28 Yet another expression common to discussions of Agamben’s work is “state of exception.” Although I will return to the meaning he provides in his 2003 book, State of Exception, for now I will limit the definition to that which he offers a few years earlier in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life: “state of exception” is the “sphere . . . of the sovereign decision, which suspends law in the state of exception and thus implicates bare life within it.” 29 Homo sacer can be read as applying both to the Ancient Roman context from which Agamben draws the phrase and in more contemporary times. In the Roman context, for Agamben, it is not just he who is at the bottom of the political social ladder who succumbs to the social status of he whose life cannot be sacrificed, but it is also the person at the highest level: the sovereign. 30 Agamben points out that it is ultimately the murder of the free man, which is deemed punishable (not that of the sove-

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reign, nor that of those who are not part of political society). He cites the etymology of the word parricide: “whatever etymology one accepts for the term parricidium, it originally indicated the killing of a free man.” 31 In other words, both the sovereign and those marginalized from political society (i.e., peasants, women) are important because they represent entities that cannot be killed, and as such if they are killed they are easily replaced by another sovereign, or by another marginalized person. In such a logic, the individual is unimportant, but what the person represents to society is indispensable. The sacred person is thus a metaphor for something else, and while the actual body of the individual might be done away with, the role which this person plays, that for which s/he stands cannot be gotten rid of. For Agamben, it seems that the material reality of those living as homines sacri has become worse in recent times. As such, “state-of-exception” refers to the political apparatuses that produce homo sacer in the present-day, and these persons, possess what Agamben names “bare life.” “Bare life” is a nomination that exemplifies how the homo sacer of today’s world suffers from a dismal and terrifying material reality, one from which the Roman emperor (as we saw above, also an example of the homo sacer) obviously did not suffer. The definitions of Agamben’s terminology will become clearer; however, to facilitate reading, I thought it important to present the terminology and contexts associated with Agamben’s use of the term homo sacer. I contend that Agamben’s work offers itself up to many usages. Unlike Jacques Derrida’s work, Agamben’s theory provides functional, clear definitions. That said, the larger corpus of his work is less clear, because while related, the definitions for a given word often contradict each other. The discussion of Hegel has underscored the agency inscribed in the slave’s existence, whether the lived experience of that of a slave, or more figuratively, that of the human struggle to attain “freedom” and/or “happiness.” The present discussion of Agamben is concerned with what it means to live in extreme marginalization, with few or no rights to state protection, education, or health care. By combining a scholarship on Haiti that deals with two different interrogations—the question of the agency of the oppressed, and the identification of the dismal quasi-non-citizenship of those living in “the state-of-exception,” my work arrives at a set of questions: first, what does it mean to live in the “state-of-exception” and what does such an existence look like? Second, does a discussion of agency still have a place in such a seemingly dismal landscape? How does Haiti fit into these discussions and should it? The objective is thus not to answer these questions, but rather to show how I have arrived at these questions by examining the archives that scholars—both Haitian and non-Haitian—who spend time reading, thinking, and writing about Haiti and who mostly publish in a “global northern” space—have put together in the past decades, especially concerning questions that deal specifically

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with the notion of the citizen in Haiti and more generally that of the citizen in what Mbembe names the “postcolony.” AGAMBEN’S HOMO SACER AND HAITI? It is in light of this concern with the political instability of the “nation” and its “citizens” that I now turn to Agamben’s work, in primarily one text, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, first published in Italian in 1995 and later in English in 1998, as well as State of Exception, first published in Italian in 2003 and in English in 2005. Agamben’s work has been extremely popular in the last decade in studying a range of issues related to the implication of state control over both citizens and non-citizens at multiple levels of the global order: for example, the predicament of refugees; the philosophical justifications that enabled Holocausts of the twentieth century; domestic policy of countries mostly situated in the “global north” concerning documented and undocumented visitors and immigrants, as well as citizens; and, the foreign policy of these same countries in the name of the safety of the majority of its citizens. Recent scholarship has been interested in whether or not Agamben’s homo sacer might be an appropriate critical category to think through citizenship in Haiti. In the Haitian context, three scholars’ articles have evoked Agamben’s work: Andrew Asibong’s “Mulier Sacra: Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq and the Sexual Metamorphoses of ‘Bare Life’” (2003); Fischer’s “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life” (2007); and Kaiama L. Glover’s “New Narratives of Haiti; or, How to Empathize with a Zombie” (2012). I will first offer up the definitions that Asibong, Fischer, and Glover use in referring to Agamben’s often-cited terminology of “bare life,” “homo sacer” or “sacred man,” and “state of exception.” Then, I will turn to Agamben’s own development of the various uses that he makes of these terms in a mostly European context, in a more general global arena, as well as in his seldom but specific references to the postcolony. In both discussions, that which involves the consideration of Agamben’s work in a Haitian context and that which considers Agamben’s work on its own, I am again interested in identifying the questions that preoccupy the given scholars: more particularly, what is at stake in the popularity of Agamben’s work and its application to a Haitian context? Asibong’s article compares the work of two French-language writers: Haitian Marie Vieux Chauvet and French (born in the Basque region of the Pyrénées-Atlantiques) Marie Darrieussecq. While Asibong finds Agamben’s work useful as regards the identification of the implications of “the modern ‘camp-like’ State” on individual citizens, he criticizes Agamben’s “indiffer[ence] to the question of sex.” 32 Asibong explains the intimacy between homo sacer (that is, sacred man) and bare life in Agamben’s work:

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Chapter 1 The life that homo sacer possesses is “bare life”: life that has been stripped of all its claims to health, to legitimacy, even to human identity. Bare life is the kind of life that is consigned to extermination in the Nazi death camp, the kind of life that, so far as the Law is concerned, simply does not deserve to live. And, for Agamben, bare life and its owner, homo sacer, are neither just eccentric features of ancient Rome nor just the outcome of racial policies of the fascist Third Reich. They are, rather, the disavowed building blocks of the modern State itself. 33

For Asibong, the burning question is: “How could our democracies, dedicated as they are to the preservation, not the annihilation, of human rights and everything that goes with them, purposefully, systematically, allow life to be silently, legally, eradicated?” 34 He suggests that for the two women writers and the female characters they write into narrative, “bare life must be, at least to some degree, negotiable in order to be survivable.” 35 In Asibong’s writing there is a co-dependent relationship between the “ordinary citizen” 36 and the homo sacer: the ordinary citizen keeps itself alive in a symbiotic relationship to the homo sacer, only the ordinary citizen is unaware that it is sucking the life out of the homo sacer. 37 To quasi-anonymously breathe life into others (who are not “sacred”), at one’s own expense, is, Asibong suggests, to be a “sacred” entity. Using Darrieussecq, Asibong argues that the mulier sacer, the female counterpart of the homo sacer, is the one who makes us aware of the bleeding process and in so doing is able to “negotiate” the terms by which the cannibalism occurs: “Mulier sacra exposes the essentially obscene nature of the Law, the fact that the Law itself is, from the very start, thoroughly, perversely, sexualized.” 38 However, Chauvet’s work shows that there’s no exit: There is simply no strategy, no matter how radical, one can employ to escape its [the Law’s] clutches for good: survival of the passage to bare life is only ever either purely provisional or else is itself in some way complicit with the terms of the Law. 39

Asibong does not write on the difference between the countries of origin of the writers’ work. It is hard not to reflect on the fact that the French text (Darrieussecq’s) offers a scenario that is slightly more hopeful than the Haitian text (Chauvet’s). Although his work seeks to organize suffering around womanhood, comparatively, the Haitian case study still comes out as the one that suffers more. The notion of Haiti’s extreme situation especially with regard to its suffering is the topic of Fischer’s article “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life.” The article looks at Bruce Gilden’s “book of photographs entitled Haiti (1996)” 40 against two backdrops: Agamben’s analytical framework of homo sacer and its twentieth and twenty-first century avatar, “bare life;” and, “a number of important studies of the discourse of Haitian Otherness” and its nefarious consequences on how “hegemonic powers in the

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Atlantic world . . . are being served” by a certain “desire,” related to what I have designated in other work (and inspired by J. Michael Dash, Fischer, Marianna Torgovnick, and Gina Ulysse) as a certain “fetishization of poverty.” 41 Like Asibong, Fischer’s article starts off optimistically regarding the usefulness of Agamben’s concepts, but, in applying them to her analysis, like Asibong, she finds that Agamben’s concepts fall short of the extremely violent postcolonial dynamic that is taking place. Not only do they fail to accurately describe what is going on, but the terms themselves also seem to contribute to the “desire” and to the “fetishization” of Haiti’s poverty. She writes: In Agamben’s thought, “bare life”: is certainly not a figure of fantasy. Yet, the dramatic abstractness of the concept, which treats Auschwitz as the truth of Western politics, and its heightened rhetoric of life and death, of state of exception, of sovereign ban, and animalization ultimately create an affective space where identifications and psychical enjoyment go unchecked. 42

Her analysis of Gilden’s photography offers another example of how the global north and its political and economic hegemony, through the structures of its biopolitical order, have produced a psychological disorder, which desires the contemplation of “grotesque Otherness,” 43 and even more pathologically, seeks to locate this projection in a seeming reality of a real place and time: for Gilden, it is Haiti between 1984 and 1995. 44 Fischer’s analysis of Agamben’s theory and of Gilden’s images corroborates Torgovnick’s more general reflections on cultural exoticism: “The real secret of the primitive in this century has often been the same secret as always: the primitive can be—has been, will (?)—whatever EuroAmericans want it to be.” 45 It is this projection of otherness, which fulfills some sort of desire that renders the homo sacer “sacred.” Paired with Fischer’s disappointment in the non-functionality of Agamben’s work, Torgovnick’s investigation suggests that Agamben’s work might itself be fulfilling a certain primitivist “fantasy,” the title used in Fischer’s article. For her part, Glover continues Fischer’s discussion acknowledging that what is so troubling about Haiti’s exceptional narratives is that “Haitian exceptionalism . . . ultimately conflates the super- and the subhuman.” 46 Glover makes a nod toward both Chauvet’s and Gilden’s work when she identifies the paramount importance of the violence of the Duvalier regimes in shaping the literary aesthetics of those writers who remained in Haiti during the dictatorship. Here the fantasy of the sadistic violence that Asibong evokes in his discussion of Chauvet’s work becomes reality. Glover writes: The scenario described by Agamben certainly provides a valid frame within which to understand the parameters of being under François and Jean-Claude Duvalier. The connection to the zombie—a creature

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Chapter 1 reduced to her or his animal essence and utterly stripped of any claim to humanity—is apparent. 47

As Asibong points out, Chauvet was “exiled by the dictator François Duvalier immediately after the publication in 1968 of her breathtakingly incendiary novel, Amour, colère et folie”; 48 for her part, Fischer explains that Gilden’s “photographs cover the last two years of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship.” 49 Albeit in a completely different context, one of extreme significance and to which I will return later, Glover’s work moves beyond the biographic mentions, to consider the relationship between what Michel-Rolph Trouillot identifies as the extreme abuse of both government and civil society that took place under the Duvalier regimes, and the resultant degradation of the human condition as outlined by Agamben. AGAMBEN’S LOGIC: TWO WORDS FOR “LIFE” Agamben’s work revolves around exclusion, and more specifically around who (or what) has the right to life and who does not, and more importantly who has a right to a full life, and who has the non-right to just be “biologically alive,” those who are “situated in a limit zone between life and death.” 50 In what follows, I will argue that Vodou thought, has everything to do with how those whom the geopolitical apparatus has ascribed life in the “limit zone” reclaim the right to a more full definition of life. In her anthropological monograph of Marie Thérèse Alourdes Macena Champagne Lovinski, or Mama Lola, a Haitian Vodou priestess practicing in Brooklyn, Karen McCarthy Brown recounts Mama Lola’s consideration of exclusion: “Sometime I’m in trouble, and I repeat that word, ‘Sim salalam, sa salawu. Pa salam, pa salawu.’ And everything okay! That word mean, ‘You in, you in. You out, you stay out.’” 51 In speaking more generally of African-derived religions in the Caribbean, Yvonne Daniel writes, “There is also a separation between the ‘insiders’ and the ‘outsiders’ in Cuba, in Haiti, but in practice everyone dances and sings [in sacred rituals].” 52 For Agamben, the distinction between “modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy . . . is that modern democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zoē.” 53 The following reflections suggest that Agamben’s theoretical apparatus—which deals with two types of lives, those that have the right to “live” and those others that in Glover’s application of Agamben’s theory are reserved the non-life of the “zombie”—has everything to do with who is “in” and who is “out.” Given my above analyses of the juxtaposition of Agamben’s work to a Haitian aesthetic, literary, and/or socio-political context, I return to Agamben’s text and to a close analysis of his development of homo sacer and its associated lexica as a critical category with which to study the

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predicament of contemporary human society. I will first explain the relevant aspects of Agamben’s argumentation with regard to the varying notions associated with the word “life.” I will then relate his work to Haiti’s foundational existence: using one of Agamben’s terms, Haiti has always been on the “threshold” of Western society, as a state created in the heart of trans-Atlantic capitalism and “conscript[ed],” using David Scott’s word, to participate in modernity’s “enlightenment” project. I hope to show that it is not such a surprising coincidence that Agamben’s prose reiterates Mama Lola’s oral philosophy. Agamben writes: “We must . . . ask why Western politics first constitutes itself through an exclusion (which is simultaneously an inclusion) of bare life. What is the relation between politics and life, if life presents itself as what is included by means of exclusion?” 54 Agamben tells the story of Western democracy through the relationship between two Greek terms that designate “life”: zoē and bios. Zoē is the “simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods).” Grosso modo, zoē is also termed in Agamben’s work as “bare life,” “the living being” 55 or “the natural body.” 56 Bios, on the other hand, is “the form or way of living proper to an individual or group;” it is “a qualified life, a particular way of life,” 57 or “the qualified life of the citizen.” 58 The question for Agamben becomes, over the course of Western history, what role does the zoē take on in the life of the polis? In other words, does the relationship between zoē/ “bare”/ “natural” life and the polis/ “politics”/ “the city” change over time? Agamben explains that in antiquity, the two realms were considered distinct: “reproductive life” and “the subsistence of life” (that is, zoē, “bare life,” “natural life”) took place in “the sphere of the oikos, ‘home’” and the man who participated in the life of the city manifested a “specific difference” that set him apart from other life. 59 Unlike those human lives residing at home (i.e., the peasant man and woman) and taking care of reproduction and subsistence, the political man distinguished himself amongst other humans as participating in the life outside of the home. In so doing, the political being took on the power of life as bios, a status as a living being that set him apart from others. For Agamben, the immense work, first of Hannah Arendt, 60 and later of Michel Foucault, shows how over the centuries in Europe, more and more individuals were included in public, political life. 61 In other words, it is no longer a select few who are living in what antiquity claimed as proper to the bios: “a qualified life, a particular way of life.” 62 If more and more persons have a right to the status afforded by the bios, what then happens when there are too many persons participating in the life of the polis? Do the factors that determine the bios change? For Agamben, the result of such participation is that the distinction between the zoē and the polis has become muddled.

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Fast-forwarding to the present day, such inclusion of the “masses,” the pretense that all citizens should enjoy the life of the bios not only taxes resources but also exhausts the epistemological frameworks upon which the foundation of our sense of democracy is founded. What must happen for Agamben, is that in our thought, in our way-of-being, we must exercise more creativity with regard to what it means to be “alive.” Is it necessary that only those enjoying the life of the bios be afforded the protections of the state? And what happens when the state cannot provide for those who claim a right to the bios? In contemporary times, exclusion takes place at the level of nationhood. There are those who receive the advantages of statehood, and those who don’t. In Roman times, those who did not embody the bios were the zoē and they possessed agency since they rendered services: they took care of the hearth and produced food that nurtured those in the polis. Even when exploited, they were “sacred.” A similar scenario might be argued for the slave, only as Orlando Patterson points out, “slavery was a substitute for death in war.” 63 If the sacredness of those deprived of the bios in Roman times was that of providing “subsistence,” in modernity, 64 sacredness took the resemblance not to death, but to quasi-death: Fischer uses John Locke to show that “the slave is the living dead,” 65 and as such resembles Agamben’s homo sacer. In today’s world, sacred men and women are sequestered off into spaces of extreme poverty, “camps” or the dark corners that exist in all nations; such persons do not preserve any of the respect afforded by the zoē’s work to sustain the bios; instead, their sacredness lies precisely in the degradation required by the notion of “bare life”: it is only as damaged beings that they may be sacred enough to receive “humanitarian” attention. Whether in smaller or larger pockets of the United States, or overwhelmingly present in the world’s poorest nations; whether tragic avatars of historical moments, such as a Holocaust, or permanent denizens of the world’s various postcolonies, those bearers of “bare life,” as seen in Asibong’s and Fischer’s work are sacred in that they fulfill a certain Western “fantasy.” The fact that the enlightenment project has not revised its conceptualization of the notion of what “life” is, has led to drastic humanitarian issues. For Agamben, “refugees . . . represent such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state . . . because by breaking the continuity between man and citizen, nativity and nationality, they put the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis.” 66 Here again, we find ourselves confronted with a similar vocabulary to that of the slave. Patterson defines slavery as: “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.” 67 The “originary fiction” is that, as the Declaration of the United States of America states: “all men are created equal.” 68 Agamben’s work points out the following: the assumption of the “originary fiction” of modern democracy is that most men would belong to governments and thus be citizens. In simplified terms, all men

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are created equal as outlined by the conditions of the charter of the modern nation-state. All men who are citizens of a nation-state should benefit from equal rights. Yet, what happens to those men (and women) who do not belong to nation-states, who reside in nation-states but are not citizens, who reside in nation-states but are deprived of certain or many rights? Such is democracy’s failure. The preceding and also the following may sound like an oversimplified suite of cause-effect circumstances, and such is precisely my goal. Agamben’s work is as Fischer points out seductive because: Agamben is one of the very few thinkers who seems to be able to give words to what evidently is the most urgent issue in contemporary political theory: the dehumanization entailed by the exclusionary transformation of citizens and political subjects into subjects of management and control. 69

In presenting the logic that undergirds Agamben’s analytical apparatus, I hope to show that there is legitimacy to his arguments in that he points us towards new questions that beckon answers. In much more elegant (or seductive, or repulsive) terms, his question, I suggest is quite simply: What now? What do we do now that more and more of us are realizing that the entire enlightenment project is a gross failure? My deliberation of these questions involves the previous considerations concerning the importance the academe places on the notion of agency and those of Asibong’s, Fischer’s, and Glover’s treatments of Agamben’s work. But, before returning to those questions, it is important to identify Agamben’s logic, or at least the reasoning that emerges in my reading of Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. So what happens to those men who are not citizens? Those men who are men (and women, intersex, and transgender), but not citizens become in Agamben’s logic refugees. The refugee’s existence hurls upon the structures that undergird democracy the terrifying reality that “the refugee is truly ‘the man of rights,’ as Arendt suggests, the first and only real appearance of rights outside the fiction of the citizen that always covers them over.” 70 It seems then that democracy is predicated upon an idealized omnipresence of the nation-state, for “all men are created equal” only insofar as they are citizens of (wealthy) nation-states. Yet since there are many persons living outside of 71 the structure of either the nation-state or a semi-functional nation-state, there exist refugees. 72 In the contemporary world, the result is ultimately for Agamben, that the rights of man (and woman, and other sexes) hinge upon the condition of citizenry, and thus do not include “all men.” The problem complicates itself when discussing humanitarianism. Agamben shows how the entanglement between the varying connotations of the word “life” inform the difficulty that humanitarianism has in safeguarding both a man’s right to be protected as a “natural being” (zoē)

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and his right to benefit from the political life (polis) (which in turn, in varying degrees privileges the bios). On humanitarianism, Agamben writes: The separation between humanitarianism and politics that we are experiencing today is the extreme phase of the separation of the rights of man from the rights of the citizen. In the final analysis, however, humanitarian organizations—which today are more and more supported by international commissions—can only grasp human life in the figure of bare or sacred life, and therefore, despite themselves, maintain a secret solidarity with the very powers they ought to fight. It takes only a glance at the recent publicity campaigns to gather funds for refugees from Rwanda to realize that here human life is exclusively considered (and there are certainly good reasons for this) as sacred life—which is to say, as life that can be killed but not sacrificed—and that only as such is it made into the object of aid and protection. 73

Michel Foucault’s work interests Agamben because it demonstrates that the human being (or citizen) who belongs to the state is linked to two aspects of biopolitics: “political techniques . . . [by] which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals . . . ; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power.” 74 Humanitarianism is thus predicated upon the notion of the human as it relates only to the first variable in biopolitical governance: the protection of “natural life,” of the zoē, and at that, the protection is often inconsistent and minimal. Given the elegance with which Agamben writes and honors those thinkers who have come before him, especially Arendt, and, while I agree completely with Fischer’s criticism that the attractiveness of Agamben’s terms risks making light of extreme suffering and horrific historical situations, I think Agamben, at least in his few references to the postcolonial space, succumbs to a tendency of those unfamiliar with it. In an article comparing the notion of “difference” in Martin Heidegger’s and Edouard Glissant’s work, Seanna Sumalee Oakley writes: We could say that the trope of the Third World merely amplifies a point for Heidegger in a “calculating” way. What the Third World represents or might represent in terms of difference is not considered to any degree. For Glissant, the trope of the Third World is one close to home, and it is moreover a distinct case. Martinique would not serve Heidegger’s point, which depends on an undifferentiated Third World, for Martinicans know all too well the “origin of this determination of Being” and willingly traffic with its “anointed violence.” Insofar as Martinicans experience this “violence in retreat,” it is in a “convulsive” and “discontinuous” rather than uniform manner. What Heidegger

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misses by short-circuiting the Third World as a trope are its implications for difference. 75

Given the fact that Agamben studied under Heidegger, 76 and that one of his most preoccupying research topics is the European Holocaust, it is not surprising then that Agamben would not be familiar with postcolonial spaces. I do not excuse Agamben, but just as scholars such as Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, and Agamben define a complex intellectual history that includes Nazi collaborators (Heidegger), exiles from Nazi Germany (Arendt), and reflection on both, so Agamben’s work, which has high currency in the discourses of human rights theory, should, I think, be more responsible towards its engagement of postcolonial studies theory. Furthermore, it seems to me that given its relationship to European and American enlightenment projects, Haitian studies might be a space to reconsider Agamben’s compelling theoretical considerations of what it means to be divested of one’s humanity within the context of the project of the nation-state. LOCATING AGAMBEN’S POLIS: HAITIAN STUDIES AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY How is the above discussion, which distinguishes between the rights of “man” and the rights of the “citizen,” between laws that protect “bare life” and laws that protect a “qualified” conception of “life” (for example, “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”) connected to a discussion of Haiti? In Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (2008), Nick Nesbitt shows how the “declaration of Haitian independence in 1804 can in a certain sense be understood as the political climax of what [Jonathan] Israel has called the ‘radical’ (as opposed to a ‘moderate’) enlightenment,” conceiving “a society without slavery, one of a universal and unqualified human right to freedom,” which Nesbitt argues “stands as Haiti’s unique contribution to humanity.” 77 The italics are proper to Nesbitt’s text: the first of the italicized words resonates strongly with Agamben’s work, which reminds us that all men have “simple natural life,” but that others benefit from “a qualified life, a particular way of life.” Combining Agamben’s and Nesbitt’s theoretical lexica, then zoē is universal, bios is not. If the Radical Enlightenment, or at least as Nesbitt argues Haiti’s Radical Enlightenment, is to be universal, then a contradiction arises. If the proper of the bios is that it be “qualified” (i.e., some people benefit from it and others don’t), then how can the “qualified” at the same time be “unqualified”? In different ways, the contradiction undergirds both Agamben’s work on Western political philosophy and Nesbitt’s work on the relationship between the European enlightenment and the Haitian Revolution. While

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the biopolitical might control entire humanity as far as natural life (zoē) is concerned, only a few benefit from the “qualified” aspect of the bios. 78 All are citizens as far as their “bare,” “natural” lives are concerned, but not all are citizens as far as their access to other types of rights comes into play. The following passage in Nesbitt’s Universal Emancipation echoes the above passage of Agamben’s Homo Sacer: The positive efficacy of this abstraction (“Man”) opened up a gap or interval in that century, a gap inherent in the inadequation between the slaves’ active and ongoing depoliticization and exclusion (through the dehumanization of slavery) and the universal rights of man, a process enacted through their isolation from the normative consensus on slavery of the [French] Assemblée nationale. 79

On the one hand, Agamben examines the relationships between etymologies and definitions of the word “life” to reveal the contradiction between varying concepts of “life.” On the other hand, by foregrounding the Haitian enlightenment, Nesbitt conducts a comparative study of philosophies of transatlantic modernities to demonstrate the ambivalent relationship between official declarations of “rights of man” and their application on a more global scale. After reading Agamben, the phrase in Nesbitt’s text—“the dehumanization of slavery” 80 —reiterates Agamben’s comments on refugee status and humanitarianism. If democracy inaugurates the advent of the human life as both zoē and polis, then those who can’t be part of a democratic system must be “dehumaniz[ed].” If in Antiquity, it was perfectly normal for some humans to occupy themselves with the activities of sustenance and reproduction (zoē), modernity’s institutions in a sense also reproduce the dichotomy between zoē and polis, yet their discourses vehemently deny such an opposition. Quisqueya/Saint-Domingue/Haiti and more generally the Caribbean may corroborate Agamben’s distinction between the two appellations for “life” in another, much more concrete way. When did the polis exist in the Caribbean? A leading question of Agamben’s thought in Homo Sacer is “In what way does bare life dwell in the polis?” 81 Ned Sublette’s book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (2009) inundates in examples of the absence of effective political power in colonial America. Costly wars (the War of the Grand Alliance or King Williams War, Seven Years War or the French and Indian War) 82 and the expense of exploring, taking over, and securing new territories prevented European powers from establishing strong political presences in North America and the Caribbean. Until the United States of America was able to purchase Louisiana, the polis in the Francophone Caribbean did not dictate life in the colonies. Sublette offers an amusing anecdote regarding New Orleans, which illustrates less the tension between the French and

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Spanish, than the disregard on the part of the denizens of New Orleans for the political aegis of either of the European powers. [Antonio de] Ulloa declined to take official possession of Louisiana until the Spanish government backed him up with troops or funds, neither of which were forthcoming. In September 1766 he went to the Balize, at the mouth of the Mississippi, and remained there until March. . . . In the absence of a show of force, the French-speaking Louisianians, several years adrift from any effective colonial government, became bolder in their opposition. Ulloa’s greatest headache was the [French] Superior Council, particularly its attorney general, Chauvin de la Frénière. The council continued to issue decrees, while French soldiers refused to serve under the Spanish flag. There were two governments, neither with authority. 83

The relationship between the governmental representatives of colonial power, the plantation owners, indentured servants, the free men and women of color, the slaves, and indigenous groups was constantly changing, if not tenuous. In The Story of the Haitian Revolution: Avengers of the New World (2004), Dubois describes a sort of competition between the “whites” and the “free-colored” in the recruitment of slaves to serve as “auxiliaries” in the “conflicts between whites and free-colored” in 1791–1792. 84 In Saint-Domingue, both sides had to await official French word as to the status of “free-coloreds”: by May 1792 news had arrived from France about the April 4 decree granting full political rights to free-coloreds. The looming danger of slave revolt and the turnabout in Paris combined to weaken the political will of those whites who still resisted the demands of the freecoloreds. 85

As disparate as the two above examples may seem, I use them to show how almost everyone in the Caribbean, regardless of skin color or social standing, was at best peripheral to anything that could be considered a national polis. Claude Isaac Borel, who was part of the French Colonial Assembly, was no different in this sense than the free-coloreds, as both had to create their own militias to fight each other. Given the more peaceful context of New Orleans, Ulloa just decided to wait for the “troops” and “funds,” just as the “whites” in Saint-Domingue waited for “decree[s]” from France. It could be argued that the planters administered the polis; yet, the above examples show that the political governance in New Orleans and Saint-Domingue was at best slow and at worst fractured. The nomenclature that Dubois accounts for reflects the distinction between groups of people in Saint-Domingue in 1791. My intention is not to ignore the enormous amount of scholarship on race and the development of racial categories, but rather to point out the fact that words to designate allegiance to sovereign nations in the Americas had no choice but to implement the

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names used to designate racial categories. The deficiency of the nominatives used to describe the new citizens of Haiti (and more generally of other countries in the Americas) points to the insufficiency of the political structures that made the laws to deal with the new nation and its citizens. Fischer’s analyses of the first Haitian Constitutions indicate both the challenges of nomenclature in designating the new citizen and the challenges to formulating legal structures that would work. In speaking of the May 20, 1805 constitution signed by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Fischer considers “Dessalines’s act of renaming”: 86 In the process of clarification and political argument that presumably accompanied the drafting of the constitution, a process of redefinition of terms must have taken place which is reflected in a textual structure that has more a narrative than a legal logic. 87

Fischer explains that Dessalines had hoped through the constitution “to rid the country of its inheritance of racial distinctions and hierarchies based on skin color. . . . Eventually these juridical fictions were dropped under the onslaught of a reality that was a far cry from having abandoned racial distinctions.” 88 Haiti was able to shake off the burden of the French polis, but it was doomed even before it won its independence from the French in 1804 to use its racialized lexica. In Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of the American Enlightenment (2005), Darren Staloff explains that “[d]espite the radical implications, Adams did not hesitate . . . on January 16, 1799” to end the embargo on Haiti and engage in trade with Toussaint’s government. In fact, Staloff writes that “the resumption of shipping to Haiti was a welcome tonic for American commerce.” 89 However, three years before Haiti gained its independence in 1804, Jefferson’s ascension to the US presidency in 1801 short-circuited hopes for the recognition of Haiti as a viable political entity. Staloff writes: Adams’s support for Toussaint had been critical. By the end of his term in office Adams was moving rapidly toward full-scale diplomatic engagement with the revolutionary government of Haiti, a process that would be abruptly reversed by his Republican successors. 90

Had Jefferson not revoked Adams’s moves towards a full recognition of Haiti, maybe Haiti would not have been in Fischer’s word “disavowed.” If anything, the Monroe Doctrine and its corollary, using Agamben’s terminology, is the unequivocal establishment of the polis in the Americas. No longer was the law to come in the form of decrees from Europe, for which viceroys and governors waited patiently (and not so patiently) in the Americas; instead, yellow journalism, soft words, and big sticks would exert power over places such as Haiti that in name were states, but in practice were something else. If we use Agamben’s homo sacer and its associated terminologies to read Haiti’s early history, what becomes

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clear, is that the polis, existed elsewhere, and when exerted over Haiti, it took the form of Agamben’s “state of exception.” NOTES 1. As Madeleine Dobie points out, the term “enlightenment” is not particularly useful in discussing eighteenth-century France. (Madeleine Dobie, Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, (2010), 27). 2. Majid Yar, “Kojève, Alexander.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer Reviewed Academic Source (IEP) (at the University of Tennessee at Martin, accessed June 20, 2013. http://www.iep.utm.edu/kojeve/). 3. Justin Leroy, “Opening Remarks: Against Recovery? Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive” (New York University’s American History Workshop, New York, November 30, 2012.) 4. It is important to note that many of these discussions are specifically about Haiti: Sibylle Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Susan Buck-Morss’s Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Nick Nesbitt’s Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (2008), and David Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004). 5. Aching, “The Slave’s Work,” 912. Aching provides a concise explanation of the general ways in which scholars have read the figures of the “lord” and the “bondsman,” now referred to as the “master-slave dialectic” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807). Aching writes: Hegel’s recourse to these metaphors has produced two broad tendencies in the understanding of an approach to the “master” and “slave” in the philosopher’s theory. . . . Deciding to read the master-slave dialectic as either a struggle between two individuals or a struggle between two forms of consciousness within the subject has important theoretical and methodological consequences that I would like to describe and examine, especially as they pertain to the meanings of work in slavery. (912) 6. Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 20. 7. Aching, “The Slave’s Work,” 912. 8. Patricia Saunders, Question and answer discussion on “citizenship” after panel 2B, “Literature and the Build Environment” (Tallahassee, Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University, February 14, 2013). I am indebted to Patricia Saunders, associate professor of English at the University of Miami, for spending so much time with me to help me understand multiple definitions of citizenship. After the talk that preceded this writing, she engaged in a discussion with me, and defined citizenship as “a sense of belonging.” Sheller’s work is published by Duke University Press’s series titled “Perverse Modernities,” which also includes M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (2005) and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (2010), all works that we may also include in the exploration of agency as “citizenship from below,” not to mention Faith Smith’s edited volume Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (2011). Together these four works put into relation three sets of scholarship: one that has mostly been generated out of religious studies, anthropology, and philosophy departments—that is the study of African-derived spiritual traditions; the second, that of a mostly Western theorized queer studies; and the third, a discussion that relates citizenship, nationhood, and narration to the concern, and I would propose obsession, that academic scholarship has with agency.

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9. David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 19. 10. Dubois, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, 365. 11. Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 119–126. 12. Ibid., 141–142. 13. Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, (1992), 7. 14. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005),15, 323, 328. 15. Aching, “The Slave’s Work,” 912. 16. Kesner Castor, Ethique Vaudou: Herméneutique de la maîtrise (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1998), 30. Castor specifies that Vodou “donne plutôt à penser en fin de compte à un système (deep structure) qui réduit les divergences et asseoit une éthique, celle de la maîtrise” (30, Castor’s translation). 17. Beauvoir, “Herbs and Energy,” 129. 18. Jean Casimir and Laurent Dubois, “Reckoning in Haiti: The State and Society since the Revolution,” in Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture, and the Earthquake of 2010, edited by Martin Munro (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2010), 126. 19. Clitandre, “Haitian Exceptionalism in the Caribbean and the Project of Rebuilding Haiti,” 150–151. 20. In Global Transformations, Trouillot argues that anthropology’s purpose resides in part, in its ability to entice more scholars from “the non-West” to study “the West” in Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 23, 136. 21. Sibylle Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 23 (2007): p. 1. An updated version of Fischer’s article appears in Millery Polyné, The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). My citations of the article are all from the original Small Axe version. 22. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998, original in Italian 1995), 133. See full citation further on in this first part. 23. Dominique Berthet, André Breton, l’éloge de la rencontre (Paris: HC Editions, (2008), 59; Valerie Kaussen, Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization and U.S. Imperialism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 154; Nick Nesbitt, Voicing Memory: History, Subjectivity in French Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Viriginia Press, 2003), 42, 213. 24. Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” 1. 25. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 73. 26. Ibid., 89. 27. Ibid., 159. 28. Ibid., 83. 29. Ibid. 30. “What unites the surviving devotee, homo sacer, and the sovereign in one single paradigm is that in each case we find ourselves confronted with a bare life that has been separated from its context and that, so to speak, surviving its death, is for this very reason incompatible with the human world. In every case, sacred life cannot dwell in the city of men” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 92, 100). 31. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 72. 32. Andrew Asibong, “Mulier Sacra: Marie Chauvet, Marie Darrieussecq and the Sexual Metamorphoses of ‘Bare Life,’” French Cultural Studies, 14 (2003):169. 33. Asibong, “Mulier Sacra,” 170. 34. Ibid., 170. 35. Ibid., 177. 36. Ibid., 170. 37. Ibid.

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38. Ibid., 173. 39. Ibid., 174. 40. Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” 9. 41. Alessandra Benedicty, “Aesthetics of ‘Ex-centricity’ and Considerations of ‘Poverty,’” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 39 (2012): 175. 42. Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” 8. 43. Ibid., 3. 44. Ibid., 9–10. 45. Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 9. 46. Kaiama L. Glover, “New Narratives of Haiti; or, How to Empathize with a Zombie,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 39 (2012): 201. 47. Ibid., 202. 48. Asibong, “Mulier sacra,” 171. 49. Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” 11. 50. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 159. 51. Karen McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brookly, with a new foreword by Claudine Michel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 70. 52. Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 39. 53. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9. 54. Ibid., 7. 55. Ibid., 2. 56. Ibid., 125. 57. Ibid., 1. 58. Ibid., 124. 59. Ibid., 2. 60. I’d like to point out the incredible diplomacy with which Agamben writes and considers the scholarship of his predecessors. In addition, it is extremely exciting to see how he lauds Hannah Arendt for being one of the first to point out the dangerous ironies of biopolitics. 61. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9. 62. Ibid. 1. 63. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5. 64. Orlando Patterson’s work looks at slavery in Ancient Rome. A longer iteration of this chapter should have considered how Agamben’s zoē and Patterson’s analysis of Roman slavery contrast. 65. Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” 8. 66. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 131. 67. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 13. 68. “Declaration of Independence of the United States of America,” 4 July 1776, accessed October 28, 2011 The Charters of Freedom. The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration,http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_ transcript.html. 69. Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” 4. 70. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 131. 71. We need only to think of the amount of time it took for the U.S. federal government to react to the aftermaths of the breaking of the levees in New Orleans to note that within even the strongest nation-states, many live outside of the benefits afforded by the “political techniques . . . with which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals” (Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5). 72. The introduction to Valerie Kaussen’s Migrant Revolutions: Haitian Literature, Globalization and U.S. Imperialism offers a poignant and terrifying account of how Haitian citizens repatriated from the United States of America to Haiti are in effect refugees, without a home, a common language, or any means of financial survival.

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73. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 133. 74. Ibid. 5. 75. Seanna Sumalee Oakley, “Commonplaces: Rhetorical Figures of Difference in Heidegger and Glissant,” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 41.1 (2008): 14. 76. Laurent de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1. 77. Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008), 2. 78. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 9. 79. Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation, 176. 80. Ibid. 81. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 8. 82. Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans : From Spanish Silver to Congo Square (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books [Reprint Edition], 2009), 34, 82. 83. Ibid., 90. 84. Dubois, Avengers, 136. 85. Ibid., 137. 86. Sibylle Fischer, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 232. 87. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 234. 88. Ibid., 235. 89. Staloff, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, 214. 90. Ibid., 215.

TWO States of Exception Dayan, Trouillot, and Mbembe

Dayan, Trouillot, and Mbembe’s work responds, both avant la lettre and retroactively, to the lacunae in Agamben’s corpus concerning non-European spaces. Dayan and Trouillot theorize what Agamben’s polis looks like in the space dominated by a U.S. empire, that is, both the United States and the more broad extensions of its dominion. For both scholars, wherever the U.S.-American empire dominates, it brings with it a history of making real human beings into “noncitizens” and “nonhumans.” In other words, a tradition of slavery undergirds a U.S.-American tradition of dominance, and as such, the United States is specialized in making humans into nonhumans. To those of us who are Haitian scholars and who know her groundbreaking work, Haiti, History, and the Gods (1995), it comes as no surprise that Dayan would theorize an Atlantic American space whose foundation is built upon an insecure and imprecise scaffolding of dispossession, of noncitizenship. As such, as we will note, in Dayan’s The Law Is a White Dog, there exists an intimacy between the notions of (spirit) “possession” and (political) “dispossession.” While Trouillot stays away from the context of Vodou and of spirit possession, his work is nevertheless interested in how the concepts of “nation” and “citizen” work only for a privileged population. Mbembe’s work allows us, as Clitandre encourages scholars to do, to revisit affinities between Africa and Haiti, and as I have shown in previous work, it is not coincidental that Mbembe maps aesthetic and political filiations between the Caribbean and Africa. 1 Together then, Dayan, Trouillot, and Mbembe’s writings show how both political structures and the epistemological spaces that articulate them—that put them into law—function to dispossess persons not only of their rights as citizens, but of their very right to actually 71

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“be” a “person.” They become in Glover’s words, “not a specific myth with an originary victim-protagonist,” but zombies, not as fictions, but as “a situational phenomenon that has served metaphorically to illustrate the various forms of institutionalized oppression . . . a fitting metaphor for the postcolonial Haitian in particular and the alienated individual in general.” 2 In other words, using Glover’s analysis of zombification as metaphor for any “alienated individual,” then it is logical, as we will see, that for Dayan, for Trouillot, and for Mbembe, Haiti’s colonial and postcolonial predicament serves as much more than just as a metaphor for general dispossession. As “a situational phenomenon,” Haitian studies represents a critical space where many of the considerations of contemporary global dispossession have already been theorized. DAYAN: BYPASSING THE PERSON, FROM CHATTEL TO CRIMINAL In The Law Is a White Dog, Dayan’s interest is in how “persons” are made and unmade by the law; her story is about the “drama of redefinition” 3 as deliberated in “case law.” 4 Like Agamben, her work invites multiple readings, for her seven essays are true “essais” à la Montaigne, each may be read independently of the others. Of course, they may also be read together, and as such, they consider the evolving relationship in law between three terms: property (“the chattel” as movable property whether slave or animal); the slave (as both human and chattel); and the criminal (as movable property of the state). There is also a fourth term, the dog, which demonstrates the slippery relationship between the first three, where in some legal cases the dog is a form of property 5 and in others, it is the law itself, 6 and most importantly like the slave, but unlike the criminal, is “worthy of being possessed.” 7 This fourth term, “dog,” comes to represent for Dayan a space that may be compared to Agamben’s notion of sacred life, but first, let us understand the way Dayan creates a relationship between legal personhood and criminality in the American hemisphere. The third chapter of The Law Is a White Dog titled “Punishing the Residue” traces how the slave became a “person in law” only once he or she committed a crime: 8 If we turn for a moment to the definition of the slave as a person in law, we realize just how strange legal logic had to be in order to birth this being. For this piece of property became a person only in committing a crime. The crime proved consciousness, mind, and will. No longer disabled in law, the slave could be recognized as a thinking thing. He was treated as a person, capable of committing acts for which he might be punished as a criminal. It is quite possible, if we push this reasoning further, that all definitions of personhood, whether applying to a free citizen or a slave, rest ultimately on the ability to blame oneself. 9

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Dayan’s text may and should be read as a philosophical treatise on prisoners. Her first chapter begins with a lexicon that deals with contemporary issues in political philosophy and prison studies, with an extended discussion of prisons in the United States, as well as the carceral practices in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. As the seven essays that make up her book build upon each other, it becomes clear that slavery not only directly shaped the formation of the “American enlightenment,” but it is also the “specter” that haunts most of the law that in more recent times regiments the American prison system and its treatment of prisoners abroad. Dayan writes: How are prisoners turned into something other than civil persons? In this highly controlled practice of transmutation, both prisons and case law, in constant dialogue, not only turn prisoners into “slaves of the state” but recast them anew as civil nonentities. 10

The book may then also be read inside out, as a treatise on how the institution and concept of slavery constitutes the sine qua non of the American (and modern) prison system in places where the United States exercises its “democracy” through its most forceful means. Regardless of the prism used to read Dayan’s book, what becomes clear is that personhood in the spaces in which the United States operates is defined by an intimate relationship between servitude and criminality. Personhood in the United States of America and in the spaces under its direct, and also, indirect aegis revolves around the notion of servility: Dayan writes, “I suggest that the potent image of a servile body can be perpetually reinvented.” 11 Hegel resonates so well in the space of the hemispheric Atlantic not only because all peoples everywhere exist in master-servant relationships, but because the modern economies of the American Atlantic were built upon the most unmetaphoric avatar of the Hegelian dialectic: mass slavery. If the United States’ legal system articulates personhood according to a logic that imbricates blame, criminality, and servility, then what does this mean for notions of citizenship in a hemisphere largely determined by over two centuries of U.S. domination? Dayan does not much use the words “nation,” “citizenship,” or “agency.” Instead, she reveals the prevalence of a lexicon based on property, theft, slavery, servitude, and criminality. The legal cases she studies are interested less in securing “freedom and justice for all” than in defining, that is, delimiting who is, and most importantly, who is not part of this “all.” For Dayan, American legal codes are less about working towards enforcing the aspirations of an enlightenment philosophy, and much more about finding legal ways to diverge its promises, and to create an American ruling class. As a result, drawing on Dayan’s work, the notion of “citizenship” is nothing more than a person who is legitimated under a nation’s legal codes. Such legitimization, in most cases, does not assure any rights,

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privileges, or protections for the person, but rather determines the modalities of this person’s servitude and/or criminalization. Although Dayan does not concern herself with defining citizenship per se, we might read her work to define two types of citizens: those who break the law (i.e., a slave turned criminal; a criminal) and those who uphold the law (“the pateroller”). 12 But for Dayan, the law is less interested in enforcing the rights of citizens and their evolution towards a state of “freedom” or “justice,” than it is preoccupied with protecting property. Whether human or animal, the law’s primary concern is to determine whether or not a piece of property is “worthy of being possessed.” 13 For if a piece of property is stolen (or steals itself in the case of a runaway slave), the modalities of this theft will determine who the criminal is and how severe his or her punishment will be. So we might consider Dayan’s work to theorize three types of beings: beings that started out as property; beings that steal property and hence commit crimes; and beings that punish those beings that commit crimes. Yet, there is a fourth type of being, one that is outside the law’s grasp: this being is the “specter” of all those beings that have been tortured, marginalized, disenfranchised; they are the persons who are not “person[s] in law,” that have been written out of legal personhood, those who are “dead in law,” 14 for “[a]ll are spirits until they are written into law.” 15 In a sense, as Ramsey’s work shows, Vodou emerged as an alternative system of society, one marginalized and oppressed by the official church and state, one that exists for itself as a means to give and protect the lives of those “dead in law.” Yet, this very system which creates systems of community for those “dead in law” also haunts and terrifies those very persons, those official citizens of a nation-state, who condemn a person to such a noncitizenship, for “law can either make an entity the subject of rights or deprive it of the right to have rights.” 16 As both Dayan 17 and Ramsey point out, it is not arbitrary that the word for spirit for Vodouyizans is lwa, thus sharing a “phonetic affinity” 18 with the French word for law: loi. For those official citizens, those who in an Agambian sense benefit from the protections of the law, or in a Dayanian sense define their own citizenship by those they criminalize, for these more legally “official,” watchdog citizens, an unofficial system of thought that defines beings outside of the law—a system like Vodou—presents itself as a terrifying, uncontrollable domain, populated by specters from a distant past returning to make them accountable for having written them out of existence. Vodou is ultimately a for itself system, one that creates care networks for such noncitizens, but in the eyes of the “official” citizens, Vodou represents a system that is out for revenge. As a result, official citizens perceive these unofficial citizens, these noncitizens as the haunting icons that inhabit the landscapes the American South and the Caribbean:

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But duppies, or the unquiet dead, returned in varying guises. The relics and scraps of bodies bought, bartered, and sold as in cattle, coins, parcels of land, or pieces of furniture returned as ancestor spirits, caught in the evil that had created them. Their metamorphoses record the rudiments of a legal sorcery that converted human animals into things or nonhuman animals. Whether we turn to the English or French Caribbean, or even the American South, these demonic spirits returned, taking vengeance as lougawou or vampires, soucriants or suckers, shapeshifters known to shed skin and suck blood. 19

And, as a result, official citizens live in constant fear of their own hallucinations of how the other, whom they have created through their own practices of hegemony live. As alluded to above, for Dayan, there is a fourth term, “dog,” which comes to represent a space that may be compared to Agamben’s notion of “sacred life.” In her final chapter, Dayan shows how “the dog” constitutes its own category, where “the dog” has gained a sort of personhood, at least with regards to its relationship to “the slave” or “the criminal.” Her book begins with a lexicon that deals with contemporary issues in political philosophy and prison studies. As the essays evolve, it becomes clear that slavery not only directly shaped the formation of the “American enlightenment,” but it is also the “specter” that haunts most of the law that in more recent times regiments the American prison system and its treatment of prisoners abroad. Dayan’s ballsy move is to note that often in American law, dogs are much more coveted possessions than are former slaves, who since emancipation have been reserved the pallid right to exist as actual or potential criminals. Her work on the dog only serves to underscore the fact that many are those beings in the larger American, and now global landscape, who are not worthy of being possessed. In other words, men and women who under a previous order might have been slaves now become prisoners: obliged to be persons under the law, they become the most dispossessed members of society. Dogs, still capable of being property, earn more dignity under the law as possessions than do persons in the law whom official society does not want or need. If Agamben’s homo sacer is the one who cannot be killed because s/he serves a certain social function, for Dayan, the prisoner serves a similar function, but with none of Agamben’s romanticism. Combining Agamben’s and Dayan’s logics, the prisoner has become a citizen, a “free man,” 20 to kill her/him would be to commit parricide. For Dayan, it seems then that prison is the only solution to a society that would rather kill those beings it has only regrettably integrated into its citizenry. Western society and especially U.S. society are ones that regret the inclusive discursive gestures of a philosophy that declares “all men equal.” In a space with such misgivings, it is not surprising then that a form of property such as a dog would garner more respect than an unwanted human citizen, such as a prisoner.

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MICHEL-ROLPH TROUILLOT: SEARCHING FOR THE POLIS Both Agamben’s and Dayan’s most recent work focuses on how the “state of exception” works in a mostly Western context, that is in spaces that are part of, or overtly claimed (say in the case of Guantánamo) by Western countries such as the United States. I now turn to Michel-Rolph Trouillot and later Achille Mbembe to explore how the notion of citizenship and nation play themselves out in a so-called “non-Western” space. In his last book, Trouillot patiently teases out the ambivalences of what “the West” “stands for.” 21 We might conclude from Trouillot’s discussions, that the notion of “the West” falls apart as “the West” realizes more and more acutely that “modernity never was—never could be—what it claims to be.” 22 In turning to Trouillot’s and Mbembe’s work, the intimate but often unaccounted for and complex relationship between “the West” and the “non-West” starts to find theorizations for its various manifestations. What does it mean to be a citizen of a so-called “failed state,” one that does not correspond to what Bonilla, as we saw earlier, designates as “normative assumptions of our contemporary political world” 23 and what Trouillot would claim as the “utopia” of the very idea of “nation”? 24 The above discussions have been highly theoretical, because Agamben’s, Asibong’s, Dayan’s, Dubois’s, Glover’s, Fischer’s, and Nesbitt’s work invites its reader to actively engage in reavowing what has been “disavowed,” using the title to Fischer’s book. For its part, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Haiti—State Against Nation: Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism, offers its reader a concise, clear account of where Duvalierism came from and where Haiti finds itself in 1990, when the book is published. Trouillot’s earlier work interests me because it deals with more concrete concepts of how the government (that is, the state), civil society, and the concept of “nation” interact in Haiti. Trouillot explains that Haiti—State Against Nation was originally conceived as a translation of his French publication, Les racines historiques de l’état duvaliérien, published in 1986 at the moment of the “passing of the Duvalier dynasty,” 25 and which was intended for the Haitian “intellectual elite.” 26 Its methodology is largely that of political science, but imbued with the gift of the anthropologist’s ability to “pay attention” 27 to the most complex of situations in one cultural space and translate them out to another. For as Trouillot explains: State Against Nation was written under the sign of a “cultural transcription” for its audience is “international.” 28 Trouillot traces the history of the dynamics that led to the Duvalier regime through a discussion that looks at how the makeup of Haitian society—which he designates grosso modo as three groups: “the peasantry”/“the rural majority,” 29 “the import-export bourgeoisie,” 30 and those in “the urban scene” 31/“the middle classes” 32/“the ruling class” 33—participated in the two arenas that organize society: “the state” and “civil

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society.” Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s deliberations about the notion of nation, 34 Trouillot is particularly interested in how these two agents of society create what he calls the “lived fiction of a national community.” 35 For Trouillot, what the Duvaliers did was master the ability not only to imagine, but also to impose an imagination of a specific narrative of “nation” on Haiti’s citizens. Trouillot writes: Benedict Anderson . . . comes close to the point when he defines nations as “imagined political communities” (emphasis added). But again, the nation has no “content” and is no more political in nature than any other imagined community. What is political is the projection of this community; or, better said perhaps, the field against which this projection operates. The nation is not a political fiction; it is a fiction in politics. 36

As generally known, the Duvalierist government nurtured certain narratives of Haiti—one associated with its revolution and another related to Vodou as the folk religion that lent “authenticity” to a specifically Haitian national expression. Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti examines the complex relationship among official Haitian juridical law, authorities (religious, governmental, Catholic clergy, and U.S. occupying forces), the “‘nighttime’ legal system” organized amongst the Haitian peasantry and “syete sekrè (secret societies)” 37 and Vodou as an “African-diasporic healing practice.” 38 She suggests that before François and Jean-Claude Duvalier, when activity amongst the slaves and later peasant classes threatened authorities, reaction to Vodou in Haiti resembled that which obeah had been in Jamaica: “colonially constructed as witchcraft”; 39 after the Duvaliers, Vodou became associated with the grotesque tyranny of Duvalierism. Trouillot explains that by 1965, François Duvalier was able to manipulate most of the narratives that composed the building blocks of civil society. In this way, he underwrote his dictatorship with cultural legitimacy. Trouillot writes: It is this seizure of a weakened civil society by the state—which went so far as to subjugate many traditional (regional, religious, and even familial) solidarities—that lets us speak of a qualitative transformation. The Duvalier state aimed to become “total”; its means became totalitarian. 40

The Duvalier dynasty strove not only to totalize the control over its citizens; it took control of how its citizens narrated themselves. Duvalier’s tour de force was that he appropriated the precise narratives that represented resistance to underpin his own legitimacy to rule. Trouillot explains: The nationalist outbursts of these officials, however rare, were not just for the benefit of their foreign audiences. Their claims to leadership involved Haitian culture and history, both of which they saw as intertwined in the lived fiction of a national community. 41

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In other words, if the Hatian revolution represented political resistance to colonial power, and Vodou denoted a cultural expression specific to Haiti, then the Duvaliers took these narratives to justify their own rule. For a Haitian to fight against the Duvaliers was also in a sense to contest his or her own sense of national identity. In her article, Fischer uses other of Trouillot’s work, notably the essay “The Odd and the Ordinary” (1990) to show how Haiti has suffered from a devastating “discourse of deviance.” 42 As seen above, where Fischer locates the origins of this discourse in “the interests of the hegemonic powers in the Atlantic world,” 43 Trouillot in the introduction of State Against Nation narrows the lens to focus on Haiti. The above discussion of Trouillot’s work shows that exceptionalist discourses of Haiti are generated both by the “hegemonic powers,” and also by the less wealthy and the less powerful entities, who find and create disparaging images of exoticism for their own less internationalist purposes. Such is the “entanglement” 44 amongst the former colonizers, the new postcolonizers, and the postcolony. For Trouillot points out that all Haitians, regardless of their social class, lack the power needed to overhaul either or both their government (that is their state) or their civil society: “In Haiti, the weakness of the bourgeoisie, the perception of color and race, as well as the origins of the state itself reinforced the propensity to take a ‘nationalist’ stance.” 45 The bourgeoisie’s weakness paired with the fact that in “Haiti, the state’s long-held monopoly as the sole employer on the urban scene” 46 prohibited the promulgation of a civil society that would have many sources of vibrant nongovernmental actors. As such, it was easy, Trouillot argues, for the Duvalier dynasty to seize control not only of the institutions of government and civil society, but also of its national narratives. Trouillot defines the political arena as one that can reside in government, in civil society, or in both. Here, as in real life, civil and political society can have the same “content.” Political society is the polity (the polis)—that is, the society at large, perceived as an arena where power, the common good, and conflicting interests are always at stake. It is the wider arena wherein the nexus of coercive institutions (the state in the strictest sense) reproduces itself. 47

The economically stronger entities in a global, geopolitical landscape seize the polis for themselves, leaving the weaker players with only a limited version of the polis. As such, the polis in the postcolony functions with restricted means, leading it ultimately, at least in the case of Haiti, to dictatorship. 48

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STATING EXCEPTION: AGAMBEN, DAYAN, TROUILLOT, AND MBEMBE Whether in Agamben’s work on Europe, Trouillot’s analysis of Haiti, Mbembe’s study of the postcolony, or Dayan’s essays on the carceral state, the four scholars designate a space where the philosophical undergirding of the nation falls short of its actual manifestations. In On the Postcolony, Mbembe names the dynamic described by Trouillot in Haiti— State Against Nation as “commandement,” which depended on the “weakness of, and inflation of, the notion of right” and on “three sorts of violence”: “a founding violence,” “it regarded itself as the sole power to judge its laws,” and “the third form of violence was designed to ensure this authority’s maintenance.” 49 More importantly, “commandement was based on a régime d’exception—that is, a regime that departed from the common law.” 50 For his part, in State of Exception, first published in Italian in 2003, with the project of locating the misuses of power amongst the state powers mostly in the global north, Agamben writes: The present study will use the syntagma state of exception as the technical term for the consistent set of legal phenomena that it seeks to define. This term, which is common in German theory (Ausnahmezustand, but also Notstand, “state of necessity”), is foreign to Italian and French theory, which prefers to speak of emergency decrees and state of siege (political or fictitious, état de siège fictif). In Anglo-Saxon theory, the terms martial law and emergency prevail. 51

Even more interesting in Agamben’s study is that he locates the “origin” of “the institution of state of siege” in the same year as the beginning of the Haitian revolution. In other words, Agamben suggests that the burgeoning years the U.S.-American democracy and the volatile years of France’s experimentations with various types of government, also marked the institutionalization, of what for Agamben is one of democracy’s most undemocratic gestures: in the French Constituent Assembly’s decree of July 8, 1791, which distinguished among état de paix . . . ; état de guerre, in which civil authority must act in concert with military authority; and état de siège, in which “all the functions entrusted to the civil authority for maintaining order and internal policing pass to the military commander, who exercises them under his exclusive responsibility.” 52

This state of siege, for which Agamben employs the term state of exception corresponds then to Mbembe’s theorization of the colonial and postcolonial commandement and its “régime d’exception.” Yet another correspondence is that Mbembe locates the functioning of the régime d’exception in the terms of Aching’s analysis of the “master-slave dialectic.” Mbembe writes:

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Chapter 2 This departure from the principle of a single law for all went hand in hand with the delegation of private rights to individuals and companies and the constitution by those individuals and companies of a form of sovereignty drawing some features from royal power itself. For example, the bond between the king or queen (the grantor) and the company (the concessionaire) resembled the feudal bond between vassal and lord. 53

Yet the most telling consequence of such state of exception, of such commandement, is realized in the American Atlantic, where as Dayan demonstrates, the U.S. empire does all it can to negate the personhood of the slave, first by denying it personhood, and then once freed, relegating her/ him immediately to an almost equally personless state of criminality: a double dispossession, or rather, a layered archeology of dispossessions. NOTES 1. Benedicty, “Aesthetics of ‘Ex-centricity’ and Considerations of ‘Poverty,’” 174. 2. Kaiama L. Glover, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010), 59. 3. Colin Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 80. 4. Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog, 65. 5. Ibid., 245. 6. Ibid., 251–252. 7. Ibid., 213. 8. In this third chapter, Dayan rereads (and defends) Locke’s Essay and Second Treatise, while all the while acknowledging how easy it is to fathom how it could have been co-opted by apologists of slavery such as Edward Long (The History of Jamaica, 1774) and Thomas Jefferson (Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog,116–127). 9. Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog, 89. 10. Ibid., 65. 11. Ibid., 41. 12. Ibid., 252. 13. Ibid., 213. 14. Ibid., 139. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Ibid., 246. 17. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998 [1995]), 72. 18. Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 19. 19. Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog,130. 20. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 72. 21. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 9. 22. Ibid., 46. 23. Ibid., 9. 24. Ibid., 25. 25. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Haiti State Against Nation: The Origin and Legacy of Duvalierism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1990). 26. Trouillot, Haiti State Against Nation, 10. 27. Irina Carlota Silber, “Mothers/Fighters/Citizens: Violence and Disillusionment in Post-war El Salvador.” Gender and History 16.3 (2004): 566.

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28. Trouillot, Haiti State Against Nation, 10. 29. Ibid., 16. 30. Ibid., 27. 31. Ibid., 28. 32. Ibid., 29. 33. Ibid., 27. 34. Ibid., 25. 35. Ibid., 30. 36. Ibid., 26. 37. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 17. 38. Ibid., 1. 39. Ibid., 17. 40. Trouillot, Haiti State Against Nation, 17. 41. Ibid., 30. 42. Fischer, “Haiti: Fantasies of Bare Life,” 3. 43. Ibid. 44. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 14–16. 45. Trouillot, Haiti State Against Nation, 29. 46. Ibid., 28. 47. Ibid., 29. 48. A similar dynamic is described by Mbembe in Togo (Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 105). 49. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 25. 50. Ibid., 29. 51. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, original in Italian 2003), 4. 52. Ibid., p. 5. 53. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 29.

THREE The Newest Utopia “Ending Poverty”

In the essays that make up Global Transformations, Trouillot looks at the relationship between “the West,” its “civilization,” and one of the most important characteristics of “the West” as a space that forms what Bonilla labels “normative” nations, whereby a “nation” designates a geographical terrain that contains the institutions that make up and also support a state in such a way as to promote “democracy.” In asking us to “suspend the state-nation homology,” Trouillot opens up a discursive space through which to think through types of governance that are not necessarily “national.” A discursive space that does not automatically include “sovereignty,” and where the “state” does not in all cases correspond to the “nation,” where the “state thus appears as an open field with multiple boundaries and no institutional fixity—which is to say that it needs to be conceptionalized at more than one level.” 1 Yet, Trouillot’s interrogation of the notions of “nation” and “state,” both in his 1998 Haiti: State Against Nation and in his 2003 Global Transformations, is not yet of currency in mainstream considerations of nationhood. For example, in Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty, published in 2012, Acemoglu and Robinson combine economy, sociology, and history to look at why certain nations have done well, why others that weren’t doing so well have propelled themselves forward, and why others continue to do badly. As economists, their explanations focus on policies implemented; yet, my interest in invoking their work, is to focus on how they frame the relevance of their work. Published for a general audience by economists at two leading U.S. universities (Harvard and MIT), the notion of nation as a sovereign entity that circumscribes a specific geographical terrain is posited as an axiom of 83

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their study. Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s study is actually much more subtle than its more overarching claims seem to suggest. For example, in a passage in the chapter titled “Reversing Development: How European Colonialism Impoverished Large Parts of the World,” the authors offer an extremely detailed and interdisciplinary study of how in South Africa, the nineteenth century saw a “reversal” of advances made by “native” farmers. They suggest that the nineteenth century witnessed the making of modern-day racism, or discourses that “culture” is to blame for poverty. 2 What interests me in Acemoglu and Robinson’s title is how the words “nation” and “poverty” are part of the same discussion. The word “poverty” has come in and out of political and academic discourse in the twentieth century and seems to be reemerging in twenty-first-century conversations, especially in the context of global poverty. Whether it is the issue of The Economist whose cover reads “Towards the End of Poverty,” 3 or the revised United Nations Millenium Development Goals, whose logo in June 2013 was “We can end poverty 2015,” or academic think tanks such as the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), founded in 2003, and headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the word “poverty” is positing itself as a term through which to think through inequality. The political leanings of the institutions that implement these recent iterations of the word “poverty” are generally neoliberal and are concerned with international inequalities, between “nations.” They work collaboratively across nations: for example the J-PAL’s mission is to “reduce poverty by ensuring that policy is based on scientific evidence.” 4 Despite the United Nations Development Programme’s renaming, in 2010, of what used to be called the “Human Poverty Index,” changing it to the “Multidimensional Poverty Index” (MPI) (and whose results are “Human Development Reports”), there is still a report for each of the 187 UN member states. For example in 2013, Haiti was classified at 161st. That said, all of Haiti’s Caribbean neighbors fall within the first 100 most “developed” countries in the world. 5 Here, what I am interested in is the fact that the organizational rubric by which to measure poverty remains that of the “nation,” and then, the region that combines multiple nations. As such, the notion of sovereign nation as one contained by a specific geography enables much of the dichotomization to which Trouillot objects. The subtitle of the 2013 report is “The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World.” 6 The paradigm of the nation posits the global north against the global south, creating a hierarchy of nations, those that “succeed” over those that have “failed.” In other words, prosperity belongs to some nations, and poverty to others. In such a system of correspondences, “nation” becomes the veil that hides poverty within one’s own “developed” country, just as it also functions to obfuscate the important prosperity from which an “undeveloped” nation’s elite benefits. Furthermore, in the UNDP reports, studies

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of nations are clustered into “regional reports,” such as “Africa,” “the Arab states,” “Latin America and the Caribbean.” Yet, it only takes looking at Haiti, the only country in the Caribbean classified above the hundredth “least developed” country in the world, with the Dominican Republic, the next most “poor” country at ninety-sixth, to realize that “region” is not a sufficient enough category to assess how and why nations are poor. 7 The other countries that surround Haiti in the index are all, except for Afghanistan, sub-Saharan African countries. What is clear then is that: the primary measurement for poverty is linked up to nationhood; that the indices for determining “poverty” are primarily economic, and “based on scientific evidence”; and that the vocabulary used for studying poverty is, at least in the current context, unavoidably degrading, based on a civilizing mission, dividing nations into those that are “developed” and those that aren’t. Trouillot reminds us in Global Transformations that the “Western” notion of “nation” is nothing more than a “utopia,” without which “the West” could not exist. In this context, “poverty,” as a quality that “undeveloped” nations possess, comes to represent the new civilizing mission: so-called successful nations, it would seem, have a responsibility to help the so-called poorer nations. Writing in 2003, Trouillot identifies “the perception of an ongoing collapse of the Western metanarratives, the vacuum created by the fall of the house of Reason,” 8 and he clearly identifies the collapse of any correlation between “nation” and “state” in what the United Nations would call “undeveloped” nations: The weakening of the peripheral state—most obvious in the identification of subjects—reproduces itself with regards to all the effects highlighted in this chapter. I have already mentioned the increased power of NGOs, of trans- and supranational institutions in producing both the isolation and the legibility of state-effects in peripheral societies. International organizations, private or state-sponsored, now help fashion throughout the periphery an incipient public sphere that expands beyond national confines. 9

Today, as we witness a similar phenomenon in the nations of the “global north,” nations, such as Greece, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, and Portugal, Trouillot’s assessment of the national project as utopian only rings more true. What I am suggesting then, is that as “the West” is slowly coming to realize that the project of the “nation” is an impossible one, it has turned to a discourse of poverty to salvage “the West”/“non-West” binary. More importantly, again drawing on Trouillot’s work on “the Savage slot,” 10 “poverty” and most significantly “ending poverty” becomes a means of perpetuating the need to fill “the Savage slot.” In a discourse that writes certain nations as poor, and others as wealthy, we fall into the same binaries about which Trouillot speaks: “the West” versus its attendant

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other, “the non-West”; successful nations versus failed nations; the wealthy versus the poor. Trouillot troubles these dichotomous structures by positing another interdependent relationship between “the West” and “the Savage slot.” When “the West” labels other nations as failed and poor, as Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s title does, it places the “poor,” maybe inadvertently, maybe willingly, into the “Savage slot.” One might deduce here that all of the examples of poverty discourse that I’ve provided thus far belong mostly to scholars whom we might identify in one way or another as neoliberal, for as Johanna Bockman points out the antecedent of both neoliberalist and socialist economic models has been neoclassical economics. 11 It is plausible then that the essentializing role that “the poor” represent for more neoliberal scholars has also found its expression in earlier, more socialist work. We need only recall Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States (1962), whose multiple editions became one of the most well-read works in left-leaning intellectual circles in the United States. J. Michael Dash acknowledges Harrington’s book in the title for his own work The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context, which for its part, is one of the most well-read works in Caribbean studies: apply[ing] the word America to not just the United States but to the entire hemisphere. Also, his [Glissant’s] conception of otherness is not the dehumanizing process that Harrington analyzed in the economic underworld of U.S. cities but a process of self-definition that has been one of the most powerful catalysts in the Caribbean imagination. 12

Unlike the poverty discourse iterated above, Harrington’s book addresses poverty within the United States, but it still falls into the seemingly unavoidable trap of othering those who are poor. Dash’s work on Glissant’s exploration of the relationship between the “other” and the “same” honors a more complex reading (and meaning) of what it means to be “poor.” For now, I am interested in looking at how “poverty” has acquired meaning in the Manichean discourse designated by and for a Euro-global north. Reading through Erica Sherover’s 1979 article on poverty in Karl Marx’s work, it is obvious that Marx not only idealizes the poor, but also places them directly into Trouillot’s “Savage slot.” Sherover cites Marx’s comparison of the poor in the Rhineland to the “savages of Cuba.” Sherover writes: “It is clear from the text that Marx regards the insight of the Cuban natives and the insight of the poor as superior to the insight of the Spaniards and the Rhinelanders,” 13 since both the “Cuban natives” and the Rhinelander poor do not “fetishize” materialism, that is, they do not add value to the use value of either “gold” in the case of the Cubans and “wood” in the case of the Rhinelanders. “The poor understand that wood is only wood; they do not endow it with a soul,” writes Sherover. 14 Then again, as Sherover’s article points out, in romanticizing the poor, Marx at

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least gives them a place in the human order, whereas for Hegel, to whom Sherover compares Marx, “they lack the requirements for membership in this society; they are not members of any recognized estate.” 15 For Marx, it is the primitivism—the idea that the “poor have a morally superior consciousness” 16 —that makes them essential to, if not a part of society. And, here we find ourselves yet again in the space of the sacred: whether Agamben’s more benign “bare life,” Dayan’s more threatening “duppies, or the unquiet dead,” 17 or Marx’s idealized poor, all serve the function of something more primitive than so-called civilized society, and all fill Trouillot’s “Savage slot.” Regardless of the political leanings, whether or not one is a proponent of neoliberal capitalism or not, the appellation of “poor” is othering, placing certain persons either at the bottom of the ladder of “development,” or it idealizes them as morally superior by virtue of their material inferiority. Thus, in using Trouillot’s work as an analytic to understand the relationship between “nation” and “the Savage slot,” I have argued that the labeling of persons as “poor,” preserves the utopia of a “Western” “civilization,” while realizing that it is no longer superior, but somehow continues to constantly “succeed” over other global spaces. NOTES 1. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 83. 2. Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Business, 2012), 263–266. 3. The Economist, “Towards the End of Poverty,” June 1, 2013 (Print Edition), accessed August 5, 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim. 4. J-PAL website. The directors of the institute taught an online MIT Open Courseware course in Spring 2011, which was again offered in Spring 2013, accessed June 2013, http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/economics/14-73-the-challenge-of-world-povertyspring-2011/index.htm. 5. United Nations Development Programme, “International Human Development Indicators” (2013), accessed in June 2013, http://hdr.undp.org/en/data/profiles/. 6. United Nations Development Programme, “Summary: Human Development Report 2013: The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World” (2013), accessed in June 2013, http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR2013_EN_Summary.pdf. 7. United Nations Development Programme (2013 and 2011), accessed in June 2013, http://hdrstats.undp.org/en/countries/profiles/DOM.html, at 96th in 2013, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Development_Index, at 99th in 2011. 8. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 25. 9. Ibid., 94. 10. Ibid., 19. 11. Johanna Bockman, “The Long Road to 1989: Neoclassical Economics, Alternative Socialisms, and the Advent of Neoliberalism,” Radical History Review 112 (Winter 2012): 10. Bockman writes, “Whether or not neoclassical economists have a political interest in or commitment to socialism, these various socialisms, as well as markets, remain central to the practice of neoclassical economics. Second, since the late nineteenth century, socialist economists have used neoclassical economics not only as a

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way to describe or predict the economy but also as blueprints for future socialist societies. . . . The stylized, dualistic thinking of the Cold War that divided the world into neoliberal, free market capitalism and Soviet state socialism continues to restrict our understanding of professional economics, neoliberalism, and what was truly at stake in 1989.” 12. J. Michael Dash, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), xi. 13. Erica Sherover, “The Virtue of Poverty: Marx’s Transformation of Hegel’s Concept of the Poor,” Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de théorie politique et sociale 3.1 (1979): 58–59. 14. Ibid., 59. 15. Ibid., 56. 16. Ibid., 60. 17. Dayan, The Law Is a White Dog, 130.

FOUR Mbembe’s “Unhappiness” and Trouillot’s “Fundamentally New Subjects”

A book that concerns itself with “possession”; “spirit” possession; possessing others; possessing others’ lands, peoples, bodies; (re)possessing oneself; being self-possessed; and being dispossessed by another, ultimately, is about taking account of how persons make sense of lives that a certain regimenting order deems worthless. There is also a possible distinction between, on the one hand, “taking account” 1 of what it means to live, be, and make meaning out of dispossessed existences; and, on the other hand, fighting against the very circumstances that cause such dismal existences. There is thus a scholarship that “takes account of,” a sort of observation; and another scholarship, or rather activity that is much more practical, that is activist, “engagé.” My work fits into the former; it is interested in understanding how a citizen of a postcolony, a person living under the commandement of the “state of exception,” or the noncitizen, especially the noncitizen inhabiting spaces of extreme poverty, lives and exercises agency. The question is less about whether or not agency exists even in the most urgent of circumstances, for as Mbembe has shown it does, but rather, how do we take account of such nonnormative forms of agency, and, how do we give them more exchange? How do we create scholarship that doesn’t “pathologize,” drawing on Bonilla’s term, for while Agamben’s work is essential and attractive to describing the terrors of the biopolitical order, as Fischer shows, it also plays straight into the codifications of what Trouillot names the “Savage slot,” a label which this chapter will further explain. How do we take account of what it means to live, be, and make meaning out of dispossessed existences, while at the same time fighting against the very circumstances that cause 89

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the dispossessions? While answering these questions certainly does not solve a problem, it also does not risk imposing a certain set of “enlightened” standards on a situation. In other words, while Acemoglu and Robinson might strive to make all nations “successful,” despite best intentions, they “pathologize” those that are “failed,” those that cannot, given the circumstances, dig themselves out of poverty. In so doing, as Bonilla’s, Clitandre’s, and Wilder’s work suggests, experts such as Acemoglu and Robinson are not only imposing a fixed narrative on a situation, but they are also possibly missing out on viable alternative ways to be in the world. As the second and third parts of this book show, “possession” offers itself as one of these workable alternate means for the self, especially the traumatized self, to negotiate itself, to its surroundings, especially aggressive surroundings. That said, before setting out to look more closely at possession, in the final chapter of this section, I’d like to look at current scholarship that already works to take note of newer ways of being in the world, alternative methods by which to acquire and produce knowledge about the world. So in the final chapter which closes the first section of this book, I argue that there is now sufficient scholarship pointing us to three types of scholarship, scholarship that is capable of “paying attention” to new ways of being in the world, rather than imposing, a single mode of existence and aspirations, as an example that all should follow. Of course, as Arjun Appadurai points out the fact that “the space of technology and public policy” actually cares about “the condition of poverty,” “which is largely a product of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” 2 is a good thing. But, as Appadurai also indicates, the danger of such a scientific approach to poverty is that the poor lose their voice. Appadurai writes: Before full acceptance of the liberal presumption of the equality of all human beings before the law, the state, and their fellow citizens, the poor may have lacked in political voice and suffered all manner of political exploitation. But their humanity was not usually in question. 3

The three types of scholarship that I identify here below is scholarship that I argue reminds us to remain attached to the human, the humane, the humanities, to listen to how “groups are striving to maintain the integrity of their communities,” 4 before the experts come in to solve the issues for (with) them. The first type of alternative scholarship is to heed Trouillot’s call. By this, I mean, all scholars, not just postcolonial scholars, must take account of the “ongoing collapse of the Western metanarratives” 5 and what Trouillot names the “déplacement,” the displacement of notions such as “the nation.” But, to do so, we must engage in “the need for detailed ethnographies that document the extent of the déplacement and reveal whether or not it entails the production of fundamentally new subjects

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and fundamental changes in the reach and potency of state power.” 6 Scholars such at Yarimar Bonilla and Gary Wilder, in exploring solutions such as Aimé Césaire’s “nonnational colonial emancipation” 7 or Bonilla’s study of “alternative forms of political organization and political subjectivity” 8 in the Caribbean are already mapping out ways of being that do not correspond to the paradigm set up by nations such as the United States or France and organizations such as the World Bank and the United Nations. Trouillot proposes that one of the most beneficial ways to produce ethnographies that take into account the “production of fundamentally new subjects” is that persons who do not belong to the “West” need to start studying spaces in “the West.” 9 Only in this way does anthropology begin to revise and revisit the space it has allotted to “the Savage slot.” 10 I would argue that all disciplines suffer from the need for “the Savage slot,” only anthropology, because its principal object of study for so many decades was “the West’s” other, has been unable to ignore these practices. As we have seen above, even research in economics, suffers from the trap of “the Savage slot.” The second type of scholarship is one that studies intellectual and embodied forms and sites of knowledge production, works that privilege alternative ways of being in the world, and that intentionally or inadvertently wear down the edifices that sustain false metanarratives of “the West” and its supposed exemplary role in setting the tone for what is an “acceptable” way of existing in the world. These forms of knowledge produce narratives of self and of community that favor the local and the translocal, wherever that locality or those localities might be sited, under the varying forms through which they might present themselves: grassroots organizations, spiritual and healing practices such as Vodou, literature, dance, and/or music. By translocal, I mean expressions of local practices that are disseminated across geographic spaces, that honor the phenomenon of “déplacement” about which Trouillot writes, and usually, without necessarily intending it, function as a sort of counterculture, either deliberately or unintentionally. For example, La Via Campesina: International Peasant Movement exerts a political agenda that intentionally defends the rights of small-scale producers, articulating local practices both for farming and for resisting free trade policies that favor large farmers. Vodou has also become a translocal movement in that it is practiced across the globe by members of the diaspora, and now nondiasporic members. We can only fracture and eventually break “the Savage slot” if we think of ourselves as one of many others, regardless of our positioning along the continuum that posits as its poles “the West” and “the nonWest.” Scholarship can contribute to such thinking by paying attention to alternative narratives, narratives that respond in a sense to Trouillot’s injunction for the future of anthropology, one that he refers to as Glissantian: 11 “There is no Other, but multitudes of others who are all others for

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different reasons, in spite of totalizing narratives, including that of capital.” 12 The final type of scholarship that has the potentiality to break down the binary that posits “the West” against its unique Other, is probably the most difficult from which academic discourse might free itself, and that is one that takes the risk of exploring spaces where “nation,” “prosperity,” and “happiness” are not of currency. Given the above discussions that outline the drastic and dismal state of affairs as regards the citizen and the supposed national structures that are supposed to protect her or him, I argue that the question of agency (and freedom) is not the only question to be asking. Why not? Because the concepts of freedom, citizenship, and agency, connote a paradigm of what is the correct way to live, one based on centuries of democracy building in “the West.” This same “West,” as Trouillot’s work suggests, has engendered a space that has created a grossly fantastical margin, that of “the Savage slot.” Yet, there are other spaces that have also taken place and even come of age in the interstices of both “the West” and what is perceived by those in this “West” as a unidimensional “Savage slot.” These spaces are rewriting our usages of what it means “to live,” “to be free,” “to succeed,” “to fail,” and “to be prosperous.” Some of these interstitial spaces, such as Vodou, have been studied and written about both within the framework of “the Savage slot,” but have also been theorized by scholars and artists, who have known how to recognize the fact that something else is happening, that Vodou, borrowing from Trouillot’s words, has and continues to theorize “fundamentally new subjects.” 13 I would argue, too, that artistic and literary expressions in all of their forms depict subjectivities that are extremely contemporary, which have not yet had the time to be codified by scholars. Exposure in the academe to such “fundamentally new subjects,” 14 might find its first circulation amongst literary scholars, art historians, and performance art scholars, and those scholars working with grassroots organizations, for the texts and contexts such scholars study are spaces that are often those the least mediated by other more hegemonic institutions. Of course, any performance, novel, painting, or grassroots organization is dependent on sponsorship, patronage, or funding in some form. Later, usually in a parallel space, social scientists, take up the study of the “new” given reality in a more logical (and less affective) way, with an itinerary that usually starts in the arts and literature, and passes through the disciplines, from the more “humanistic,” such as history, to those that are more “scientific,” such as economics. An example of such a trajectory is that of “culture” as the cause of a nation or a community’s economic “success” or “failure.” Just as recently as the press around the 2010 Haitian earthquake, the often-cited New York Times columnist David Brooks blamed culture for Haiti’s poverty. 15 However, in 2012 Acemoglu’s and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail dedicates a significant part of their

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second chapter to dispelling the myth that culture has anything to do with poverty. Scholars of art history, performance studies, cultural studies, and anthropology, amongst other disciplines, have been trying to show for decades that culture has nothing to do with poverty, but rather socio-politico-historical contexts limit the choices available to an individual, a community, or a nation that wishes to work its way out of the “poverty trap.” For Trouillot, “culture”—despite Franz Boas’s best intentions 16—serves as a stand-in that enables scholars to not deal with a continued racialized social order: Trouillot writes, “while the culture-concept helped to question the theoretical relevance of race in some learned circles, it has not much affected racism in the public space.” 17 Carlo Avierl Célius, in his article titled “Cheminement anthropologique en Haïti” explains that regardless of the confusing way in which the term “culture” has been defined and implemented as a critical category, it has nonetheless been central to the history of anthropology. 18 Regardless of the discipline in which we operate, the most difficult challenge in opening ourselves to an acknowledgement of “fundamentally new subjects” 19 is the vocabulary we use and how we use it. In what follows, I will work through the notion of happiness, as it relates to the concepts with which I’ve been dealing throughout this first part of the book: citizenship, personhood, and nation. Each of the above texts seeks to identify the problems with the enlightenment project, but also, these texts reflect a certain hesitation in scholars to let go of the lexica associated with the enlightenment, including the word and concept of “happiness.” What Agamben, Trouillot, and Mbembe ask us to do is to take a step into the abyss and engage with epistemologies that might come out of what Mbembe describes as a contemporary era, one that is “a period not only of unhappiness but of possibilities.” 20 In his conclusion, Mbembe writes, “[b]ut as experience shows, the age of unhappiness is also a noisy age of disguise.” 21 If as Trouillot explains “the distinction between state and civil society, [was] inherited from the enlightenment” 22 so too Mbembe reminds us, was the notion of the citizen and the citizen’s quest for “certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” 23 In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed looks at how we are conditioned to fulfilling what she calls the “promise of happiness.” 24 She looks at the ambivalences that surround the term “happiness,” while at the same time acknowledging the extremely important place it has taken as a variable in determining everything from personal choices to the policies of nation-states and world organizations that are meant to make people “happier.” 25 Her justification for abandoning “happiness” as a supposed analytical category through which to determine “which individuals are happier than others, as well as which groups, or nation-states are happier than others” 26 is the vast spectrum of dissonance within studies on happiness. On one end of the spectrum, wealth is supposed to

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make people happier, 27 happiness becomes “recognizable as bourgeois.” 28 Ahmed writes: The face of happiness, at least in its description, looks rather like the face of privilege. Rather than assuming happiness is simply found in “happy persons,” we can consider how claims to happiness make certain forms of personhood valuable. 29

On the other end of happiness studies, scholars have also argued that less wealth makes people happy, 30 an argument that leads back to “the happy savage,” the one invoked by Marx in his discussion of the Rhinelander “poor” and the Cuban “natives.” Ahmed describes her project as one that “proceeds by suspending belief that happiness is a good thing.” 31 Her work focuses on “how feelings make some things and not others good,” 32 regardless of social norms and imposed paradigms, such as those imposed by nations that base themselves on the pursuit of “certain unalienable Rights.” Drawing on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of “the ‘flow’ to describe the relationship between happy persons and happy worlds,” Ahmed explains that unhappy persons might be those who “are not ‘in flow’” and as such “they encounter the world as resistant, as blocking rather than enabling an action.” 33 Like Ahmed, my interest is not in “know[ing] ‘in advance’ what will improve people’s lives,” but rather how people live their lives, how some connect in such a way that produces, in Ahmed’s words, a “good feeling,” a feeling of success. I am not interested in whether or not a Western ideal of happiness, and its associated variables—freedom, prosperity, wealth, and official citizenship and even national sovereignty—make people happy or not. According to Western standards, most nation-states that are “undeveloped” are also unhappy. 34 When Clitandre takes scholars and political pundits to task for romanticizing Haitians’ supposed “exceptional ability to suffer,” 35 she evokes the essentializing problem of “the Savage slot,” for only exceptional (i.e., “non-Western”) persons can suffer “so well.” One need only refer back to Selden Rodman’s Where Art is Joy: Haitian Art: The First Forty Years in which he finds inspiration in Ralph Korngold’s notion of Haitian art as “the idea of art as joyfully bodied . . . The joy of natural beauty! The joy of art!” 36 Rodman explains that Haitian art belongs to the category of the aesthetics of the “African race” which knows “nothing but the moment and its intensity of pleasure and pain—what liberty!” 37 as if the mere repetition of the exclamation point were potent enough to replace the lack of formal artistic analysis. Yet, when we look at novels such as L’heure hybride (2005) or Aux frontières de la soif (2013) by Kettly Mars, or Raoul Peck’s recent documentary Fatal Assistance (2013), suffering is asserted as unacceptable. In these texts, resilience is not iterated as a saving grace. The texts do represent ways of “dwelling,” “living,” and “flowing” as “unhappiness,” but draw-

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ing on Mbembe, these are also spaces “of possibilities.” 38 I am not arguing that scholars at centers such as the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), should not continue to work to fight poverty, but I propose that we might multiply scholarship that allows us to observe rather than interpret, as Paul Rabinow’s work encourages us to do, 39 or in Trouillot’s words, to engage in “ethnographies” that possibly “reveal . . . fundamentally new subjects and fundamental changes in the reach and potency of state power.” 40 What is calling upon us then, is maybe to take a great leap into unknown and terrifying conceptual territories, those of what Sylvia Wynter might deem as an “evil” 41 space, one in which the pursuit is not of happiness, but rather one in which the possibilities lie elsewhere than in the binary distinctions between zoē and bios, one that does not concern itself with whether or not the “bare life” exhibited by today’s homo sacer is exoticist or not, but rather one that accounts for the fact that “[w]hat defines the postcolonized subject is the ability to engage in baroque practices fundamentally ambiguous, fluid, and modifiable even where there are clear, written, and precise rules.” 42 In positing Agamben’s analytical category of homo sacer next to the critical frameworks used to study Haiti; to consider, as Dayan does, personhood as legalized through U.S.-American political hegemony; to examine Trouillot and Mbembe’s analyses of the postcolony, what I hope to have shown is that our questions often lead us to unsatisfying outcomes: anger that certain narratives keep being repeated, frustration with the impossibility to locate agency that can really affect the national structures of state government and civil society. Wynter explains in her interview with David Scott in 2000 that the concept of “evil” is linked to the idea of “life unworthy of life,” and at least in the Atlantic, the concept of “evil” is related to “the Negro-as-slave [who is] projected as the missing link between rational humans and irrational animals.” 43 Take, for example, Myllery Polyné’s or Deborah Jenson’s considerations of Pat Robertson’s infamous comments after the earthquake to corroborate Wynter’s claims. 44 What we want instead—or rather, in addition—to ask is what does this supposed “unhappiness” look like? And, what are its possibilities? How can persons “flow” even in the most dire of material circumstances, and how might this “flowing” point to “fundamentally new subjects”? These I argue are the questions that Haitian studies, and especially Haitian literature, literary, religious, and anthropological studies, have already been asking. We need only look to Dash’s project The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context, or Jean Jonassaint’s, Kaiama L. Glover’s, and Rachel Douglas’s books on the prose of those writers who stayed in Haiti under the Duvalier regime. In L’énigme du retour, 45 Dany Laferrière’s autofictional narrator writes: “Je ne comprends pas que les gens se soient habitués à une telle calamité”—“I don’t understand how people have become used to such misfortune.” 46 What is clear is that

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the more recent Haitian novels are describing this unhappiness, sometimes tragically, and sometimes under other modes, but that the realities that they are depicting are disengaging more and more from an enlightenment project of the pursuit of agency and/or happiness. So where does a discussion of Haitian narratives and Agamben’s considerations of “life” and Dayan’s analysis of “personhood” leave us? As a literary scholar, I cannot trace possible new trajectories for Haiti. The goal of my reflections has been to point out the fact that Haitians, especially those who are not tied into the highest levels of the transnational elite, have been grappling with the arbitrariness of the words “man,” “life,” “humans,” and “rights” since “all” of Haiti’s “beginnings”: the Middle Passage, slavery, the Haitian Revolution, Haitian “independence,” postDuvalierism, Aristide, post-Aristide, postearthquake. They have also, for the past five-going-on-six centuries been keenly tuned into the contradiction that Agamben points out in his late twentieth-century study of the etymologies of the word “life.” For all of this time, all Haitians, including the elite, have known that the polis exists elsewhere. Having lived with such a reality for so long, I argue that Haitians—all Haitians, elite and the pèp-la—have learned to reinscribe the agency that is subsumed by Agamben’s notion of the word bios, into a life that has no (or an extremely limited) polis. 47 The objective of the first part of this book has not been to outline the modalities of what such a bios without polis is. The material is already there. The work done by anthropologists and religious studies scholars on grassroots movements, Catholicism, Protestantism, and Vodou in Haiti, as well as the literary scholarship on Haiti provide keys into what it means to create personal and organizational philosophies that not only imagine but enact “qualified” lives, lives with the power of the bios that maybe don’t escape but at least significantly manipulate the “biopolitical body that is bare life.” The fact that Catholicism, Protestantism, and especially Vodou are connoted mostly as religious systems is related to the fact that disciplines shape how we see artifacts of culture as “secular” or “religious.” Agamben’s last words in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life are to call upon scholars to work across the “threshold[s]” that separate disciplines. It is the constraints of disciplines that often inhibit us from seeing new ways of approaching solutions to new or other modalities of being: “the historical development of these very disciplines has brought them to a limit beyond which they cannot venture without risking an unprecedented biopolitical catastrophe.” 48 For Agamben, for Mbembe, and for Trouillot, as long as the rights of man are defined according to the dichotomy between man as “bare life” and man as “political entity,” nothing will change. I hope to have shown that Haiti is an example. De la Durantaye writes that for Agamben, “[t]he catastrophe in question is that the state of exception risks becoming the rule, that the exceptional abuses of power that our age has known threaten to become

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the norm—and that we accept them as such.” 49 But as Mbembe and Wynter show us, there is possibility within this space, we just have to orient ourselves around the archives, within the thresholds, in such a way so as to ask the questions that will allow us to explore this so-called “unhappy” space. When Fischer takes Gilden’s book of art photography to task in the same discussion as Agamben’s notion of “bare life,” she is hitting the same nerve as that which undergirds the first part of this book: it is possible for lives to be led that don’t include a participation in an officially recognized political apparatus. Drastically and tragically, they will not benefit from the same “political techniques” that take “care of the natural life of individuals” (i.e., police, hospitals). 50 As Fischer points out, such lives, using Agamben’s words, “are concerned with” much more than “the reproduction and subsistence of life,” 51 and they deserve to be looked at in another way. That Edwidge Danticat’s, Dany Laferrière’s, Frankétienne’s, Kettly Mars’s, and Gary Victor’s novels are being translated into multiple languages and winning awards worldwide does not just mean that we have a voracious appetite for the grotesque, but that such novels speak deeply to existential realities that no longer may be contained within exoticisation. Just as the distinction between zoē and bios has become muddled, so too postcolonial scholars are theorizing how the threshold between “Western” and “non-Western” subjectivities as Mbembe argues have been “entangled” for centuries. As we become aware of the varying iterations produced by the multiple histories of globalizing processes, writers and scholars are starting to take account of what Trouillot articulates as “fundamentally new subjects.” Agamben’s political philosophy and scholarship, and philosophy and literature on and from Haiti have in common the entanglement that problematizes Western democratic principles. Agamben writes about it presently; Haitians have been living, philosophizing, and writing about the entanglement since the Middle Passage, and if we consider Terry Rey’s and Karen Richman’s work, from even before. 52 I argue then that we should look to Haiti, not just to enrich our own work as scholars working in, on, or about Haiti, but, more generally, to inform studies of what contemporary subjectivities look like. Although questions about freedom, agency, and happiness must continue to be contemplated, for Ahmed and Mbembe, such questions are less of a central concern than the consideration of what unhappiness looks like, and, what its “possibilities” might be. In Migrant Revolutions, Valerie Kaussen’s introduction places postcolonial theories alongside creolization theories, and traces the difficult realities of Haitians, really in whatever circumstances they live in, and at the end arrives at a “possibility”: the global economics of colonialism and slavery, just like the production of subaltern cultural globality, are ongoing, not vestiges or legacies

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Chapter 4 of a bygone era of French colonialism. Indeed, Haitian boat people, returnees, and viejos reveal the persistence of a racialized colonial economy within globalization, out of which they nonetheless produce cultures of syncretism and resistance. 53

One of these many possibilities, then, is possession: possession as embodied relief from material dispossession; possession as embodied philosophical practice; possession as bridge to repossession, and most importantly self-possession. Whether “happy” or “unhappy,” one can, it would seem, always relocate oneself, at least in one’s own physical body: selfpossession. But, more on that in parts III and IV. NOTES 1. Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. Again here, Butler’s Giving Account of Oneself, is informing my work. Further discussions of her work may be found in the last chapter of the second part of this book. 2. Arjun Appadurai, The Future As Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (London: Verso, 2013), 117 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 116. 5. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 25. 6. Ibid., 94. 7. Wilder, “Untimely,” 104. 8. Bonilla, “Nonsovereign Futures?” 216. 9. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 23, 136. 10. “If we take seriously the perception of an ongoing collapse of the Western metanarratives, the vacuum created by the fall of the house of Reason in the once fertile fields of utopian imagination, and the empirical destruction of the Savage object, then the anthropologist aware of this situation has no target outside of himself (as witness) and his text (as pretext) within the thematic universe he inherits” (Trouillot, Global Transformations, 25). 11. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 8. 12. Ibid., 27. 13. Ibid., 94. 14. Ibid. 15. David Brooks, “The Underlying Tragedy,” op-ed, New York Times, January 15, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2010/01/15/opinion/15brooks.html?pagewanted=print. Millery Polyné summarizes the negative connotations, pointing to the intimate relationship between Vodou and the disparaging portrayals of Haiti: Given the off-color remarks of New York Times columnist David Brooks (who has suggested that Haitians are largely to blame for economic stagnation for embracing cultural traditions that are “progress-resistant”) and the controversial religious broadcaster Pat Robertson (who attributed the success of the Haitian Revolution to a “pact” made “to the devil”), one wonders how political officials, members of the tourist industry, and other architects of Haiti’s “rebirth” will frame Vodou and its practitioners going forward? (Millery Polyné, “To the ‘Sons’ of Dessalines and of Pétion: Radicalism and the Idea of a ‘New’ Haiti,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 36 [2011]: 166). Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti examines the complex relationship amongst official Haitian juridical law, authorities (religious, governmen-

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tal, Catholic clergy, and U.S. occupying forces), the “‘nighttime’ legal system” organized among the Haitian peasantry and “syete sekrè (secret societies)” (SL 17) and Vodou as an “African-diasporic healing practice” (SL 1). She suggests that before François and Jean-Claude Duvalier, when activity amongst the slaves and later peasant classes threatened authorities, Vodou became in Haiti as obeah had in Jamaica: “colonially constructed as witchcraft” (SL 17); after the Duvaliers, Vodou became associated with the grotesque tyranny of Duvalierism. 16. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 103, 109. 17. Ibid., 113. 18. Carlo Avierl Célius, “Cheminement anthropologique en Haïti.” Gradhiva: “Haïti et l’anthropologie,” Musée du quai Branly (2005, online version 2008, http://gradhiva. revues.org/263 online version: 1–12): 3. 19. Truillot, Global Transformations, 94. 20. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 241. 21. Ibid., 238. 22. Trouillot, Haiti State Against Nation, 19. 23. “Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.” 24. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 14. 25. “Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.” 26. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 6. 27. Ibid., 10. 28. Ibid., 12. 29. Ibid., 11. 30. Ibid., 7–8. 31. Ibid., 13. 32. Ibid., 13. 33. Ibid., 11. 34. Ibid., 6, 8. 35. Clitandre, “Haitian Exceptionalism in the Caribbean and the Project of Rebuilding Haiti,” 151. 36. Selden Rodman, Where Art is Joy: Haitian Art: The First Forty Years (London: Ruggles De Latour, 1988), 7. 37. Ibid., 10. 38. Mbembe, On the Postcolony, 241. 39. Paul Rabinow, “Anthropological Observation and Self-Formation,” in Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, edited by João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007): 116. Here, having never engaged in the ethnographic process myself, my interest resides in the discourses that anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, psychologists, religious studies scholars, and writers employ to study culture, identity, possession, subjectivity, and self-possession. 40. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 94. 41. Wynter, “The Re-enchantment,” 182. 42. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 129. 43. Wynter, “The Re-enchantment,” 182. 44. See bibliography for sources. 45. Dany Laferrière, L’énigme du retour (Paris: Grasset, 2009), 181. 46. Ibid. My translation. 47. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 188. 48. Ibid.,188. 49. de la Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction, 12. 50. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 5. 51. Ibid., 2. 52. Terry Rey and Karen Richman note that in the context of Haitian religion, by the time the African slaves had arrived in Saint-Domingue, the “European” element had informed the “African” one; in other words, the worshiping practices of those Central

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Africans who became slaves destined for the Caribbean had undergone processes of hybridization, noting that “at the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791,” most probably their religious practices had already undergone a “Kongolese appropriation of Catholicism”—an “Afro-Catholic synthesis” (Terry Rey and Karen Richman, “The Somatics of Syncretism: Tying Body and Soul in Haitian Religion,” Studies in Religion/ Sciences religieuses 39.3 [August 2010]: 384, 387). 53. Kaussen, Migrant Revolutions, 21.

Andidan nanm a mas—Guadeloupe 2008 from “Intérieur—Andidan 2011” by Nicolas Nabajoth Source: Reprinted by permission from Nicolas Nabajoth.

II

Possession Dispossessed: Pathologizing and a “Western” Intellectual History of Possession

In this second part and the minichapters that compose it, I will examine the word “possession” in varying contexts, and trace both more, and less, direct relationships amongst seemingly independent meanings of the word. The homebase for my exploration is “possession” as “spirit” possession, particularly in its expressions across three contexts: Haitian Vodou where a lwa (or spirit) possesses a person, Gondarian (Gondar in the Amhara region of Ethiopia) possession where a zar 1 (a spirit) possesses a person, and the early seventeenth-century Loudun possessions in France where a devil possesses a person. This second part, looks at the scholarship generated between 1929, which marks the year that William Seabrook published The Magic Island as well as the year that Zora Neale Hurston conducted field work on “hoodoo” in New Orleans, and 1975, the year that Michel Foucault gave his lecture on the Loudun possessions at the Collège de France. I examine work by mostly non-Haitians, mostly Euro-French and Euro–North American white men, some practitioners and others nonpractitioners. In this second part, the purpose of an analysis of “possession” in a mostly Western context is to take note first of how the word possession circulates in a context that is mostly French (and francophone), and second, to account for the important role that “Haiti”—as an idea, 2 as a place—has had in shaping how intellectuals circulating in the academe read “possession.” I argue that inaccurate accounts of Haitian Vodou possession will prevail and as such will shape an overall discourse on possession. At times, to exemplify the affinities between twentieth-century French philosophy and Haitian Vodou, I will draw on more reliable late twentieth and early twenty-first-century scholarship on Vodou religion and philosophy. In combining past studies with more contemporary ones, I reveal how the actual word “possession” and expression “spirit possession” are themselves inflected by the biases of disciplinary re-

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search, and at that, a research that despite its best intentions relegates the study of so-called non-northern societies into a separate, and often degraded, space. If the first part of the book is about global dispossessions in the first decades of the twentieth century, and the important role that Haiti plays in exemplifying what it means to be “exceptionally” dispossessed, the second part of the book points to how the narratives of “Haiti” are intimately linked to a Franco-U.S.-American discursive space, constructed over the course of the twentieth century, a discursive order that has conflated the representation of “Haiti” with an understanding of Vodou primarily as an occult religion, and not as a philosophical system. I argue that it is the Western imperative for empirical evidence and authenticity that causes even the most well-intentioned social scientists to misrepresent possession as illegitimate: as “abnormal,” as “pathological,” as “diabolic.” Ironically, although I do not dedicate any significant attention to it, some of the most progressive writing on Vodou by a non-Haitian comes in Pierre Mabille’s preface to Haitian anthropologist Louis Maximilien’s Le Vaudou haïtien: Rites Radas—Canzo (1945). As noted in the introduction, Mabille, trained as a doctor and serving as the cultural attaché for “la France libre” in Haiti, spent several years in Haiti. 3 A BRIEF OVERALL HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR THE EUROPEAN “DISPOSSESSED” In part II, drawing on Stephenson’s work, the first explorations of subjectivity will summarize how current psychiatry characterizes possession. I will then move on to look at how André Breton accounted for Vodou possession in his observations while he was in Haiti. Next, I will explore more “ethnographic” accounts of possession, notably Alfred Métraux’s work in Haiti, and Michel Leiris’s work in East Africa. I will follow the discussion of Breton’s, Leiris’s, Mabille’s, and Métraux’s direct contact with Haiti, with an analysis of two concurrent intellectual spaces, taking place mostly in the first half of the twentieth century. The first, Statesside, has to do with the burgeoning years of U.S.-American anthropology as one that, due in part to the U.S.-American occupation of Haiti between July 1915 and August 1934, was in active dialogue not only with Haiti as an object of study, but also with an equally expanding activity in the ethnographies of the colonial spaces occupied by France. The second is the vexed evolution of a French intellectual milieu, that over the 1930s and 1940s would first find itself nurtured and excited by an extremely vibrant intellectual dialogue between German philosophy, particularly that of Hegel and Edmund Husserl, and later would find itself perplexed by the rise of German fascism, the Holocaust, and in the later decades the increased hypocrisies of governments and organiza-

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tions with a supposed socialist mission. Here, I will rely on Denis Hollier’s Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War, for which the original French title, is, tellingly Les Dépossédés (The Dispossessed), and looks at the work of Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, André Malraux, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although Haiti does not figure in Hollier’s work, I will show how the questioning of “being” with which Bataille, Leiris, and Sartre grapple in the anxiety-ridden years before, during, and after the Second World War, has everything to do with the notions of dispossession and possession. Some intellectuals such as Aragon, Bataille, and Leiris would stay in France; and others, such as Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Mabille would leave Vichy France for the Americas. It is interesting to note that besides Henri-Louis Bergson (1859–1941), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), most of the intellectuals I mention in this section were born within about a decade of each other: born in 1896, Breton is the oldest, and Lévi-Strauss, born in 1908 is the youngest. De Certeau is of a younger generation, born in 1925. In other words, the decision to stay in France or to leave would largely be personal and/or circumstantial, rather than related to age. For example, Sartre would be taken as a prisoner of war by the German forces, only to be released in 1941, the same year in which Breton leaves from Marseille on the Capitaine Paul Lemerle, the ship that would take Breton, Wilfredo Lam, and Lévi-Strauss, amongst others, from Marseille to Martinique, at which point passengers would separate out, but most would be eventually bound for the United States. 4 The purpose of this chapter is not to pass judgment on Sartre’s actions to fill the place of a departed Jewish professor at the Lycée Condorcet, or that of intellectuals such as Bataille and Leiris to remain in France rather than to leave it after June 22, 1940, when the Nazi Germans officially occupied Paris. Instead, I want to point out that in the 1920s and 1930s many of these intellectuals were in contact with each other and even collaborated on projects. The intimacy between many of the intellectuals discussed in this chapter, notwithstanding intellectual disagreements, would work itself out in such a way that each scholar would not only be aware of each other’s actions (and nonactions), but also would be informed by the intellectual influences in each other’s lives. So while Métraux and Leiris would not be amongst those intellectuals to travel through the Caribbean during the Vichy period, Métraux would lead the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Marbial Valley (Haiti) anthropological survey from 1948 to 1950; Leiris would visit him in 1948; and together they would conduct biweekly meetings in the 1950s to discuss the correspondences between zar and Vodou systems of possession, 5 thus creating, what I suggest in this chapter might be a specifically “French” discourse on possession, one that follows in direct lineage with Breton’s 1945–1946 “Haitian Lectures.”

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The Haitian context aside, more generally speaking, those intellectuals who elected exile would find themselves observing, dialoguing with, and writing about the American continents, creating a transatlantic interchange with those intellectuals that stayed. The period of the 1930s and the early 1940s, that is a period that had not yet witnessed the Holocaust, had already put the question of activism at the forefront of intellectual agendas, regardless of where an artist or scholar found her/himself. The period leading up to the Second World War would be defined by: the heritage of the First World War; the massacres of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s ascension to power; the increased strength of the fascist parties in Germany, Italy, and Spain; a more keen consciousness amongst the youth as regards the oppressive colonial conditions imposed by the “French empire”; and the importance that adherence to, and later questioning of the Communist Party played in the lives of many French intellectuals. The question of political engagement through creative production, “littérature engagée” or “poésie engagée” would fuel many of the legendary disputes and schisms between Breton on one side, and Bataille and Leiris on the other at the end of 1929 and in early 1930; the argument between Breton and Aragon over Victor Serge 1935 6; and later, the debates between Aragon and other literary figures, including Leiris, throughout the decades 7; as well as the later argument between Aimé Césaire and Depestre (1954–1955), and Camus and Sartre (1952), 8 as regards four related issues: one, the ability of poetry and literature to influence a political situation; two, whether or not an activist mission compromises the aesthetic project; three, whether or not the arts, and more specifically the literary arts, should negotiate the aesthetic endeavor with the political one; and finally, the role of violence in achieving democratic advances. NOTES 1. See note at the beginning of the introduction to this book. 2. Polyné, The Idea of Haiti. 3. Dominique Berthet, André Breton, l’Eloge de la Rencontre: Antilles, Amérique, Océanie (HC Editions 2008), 99. For more on Mabille, see J. Michael Dash’s article, “Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean,” L’Esprit Créateur 47, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 84–95. 4. María Clara Bernal, “El encantador de serpientes: sueños de paisajes lejanos,” Revista de Estudios Sociales (August 2008), 42. 5. Jacques Mercier, “‘Présentation’ to La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar précédée de la croyance aux génies zar en Ethiopie du nord,” in Miroir de l’Afrique, by Michel Leiris, edited by Jean Jamin (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996), 903. 6. Charles-André Udry, Review of Victor Serge, 1936–1947: les Carnets de “Minuit dans le siècle” by Victor Serge. http://alencontre.org/societe/livres/victor-serge-19361947-les-carnets-de-minuit-dans-le-siecle.html.

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7. Jean Jamin, “Note n. 22 to L’Afrique fantôme” in Miroir de l’Afrique, by Michel Leiris, edited by Jean Jamin, 87–870. (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996 [Editions Gallimard, 1934]), 361. 8. Camus and Sartre disputed after the publication of Camus’s L’Homme révolté over the role of violence in the revolutionary struggle: Camus was not in full support of it, while Sartre felt it justified. Additionally, for most of his life, Sartre would support, or at least not speak out against Stalinism, whereas Camus would be against totalitarianism under all circumstances, including for a socialist cause. For a brief account, see Jim Holt, “Exit, Pursued by a Lobster—Jean-Paul Sartre: Brilliant philosopher, or totalitarian apologist?” Slate (September 22, 2003) http://www.slate.com/ articles/arts/egghead/2003/09/exit_pursued_by_a_lobster.html.

FIVE “Unhappiness” as Taboo Anthropology, Psychology, and the Disciplining of “Possession”

As Gilbert Rouget’s research in Music and Trance: A Theory of the Relations between Music and Possession (1980) shows, there are multiple practices and avatars of possession, trance, and crisis. Even just within Haitian Vodou, there exist an array of ways that a person or an object may become possessed. I am thus less interested in inventorying the varying manifestations of possession, but rather I want to understand how the word “possession” is deployed within a given context. I am particularly curious about how academic disciplines have possibly conditioned the circumstances through which possession has been articulated, particularly in French and postcolonial francophone contexts. In the sections of this chapter that follow, I will weave in and out of varying contexts. At the end of this chapter, I will draw more direct conclusions about the relationships between them. I will begin with a discussion of the relationship between anthropology and psychology. Until its most recent revision (DSM-V) in 2013, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, classified possession under diagnosis “300.15, a dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS)”: Dissociative trance disorder: single or episodic disturbances in the state of consciousness, identity, or memory that are indigenous to particular locations and cultures. Dissociative trance involves narrowing of awareness of immediate surroundings or stereotyped behaviors or movements that are experienced as being beyond one’s control. Possession trance involves replacement of the customary sense of personal identity by a new identity, attributed to the influence of a spirit, power, 107

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Chapter 5 deity, or other person, and associated with stereotyped “involuntary” movements or amnesia. Examples include amok (Indonesia), bebainan (Indonesia), latab (Malaysia), pibloktoq (Arctic), ataque de nervios (Latin America), and possession (India). The dissociative or trance disorder is not a normal part of a broadly accepted collective cultural or religious practice. 1

The DSM-V (2013) still preserves possession as a diagnostic, but not as a disorder. It is interesting that none of the examples that the DSM-IV-TR provides come from religious traditions, such as Vodou or Regla de Ocha, where being mounted by the spirits, or speaking in tongues in the case of Pentecostal traditions, are a desired, rather than a pathological state of being. The DSM-IV-TR steers away from the discussion that for certain traditions, such as Vodou, being mounted by the spirits is a frequent if not essential part of most religious ceremonies. In his recent transcultural study of possession, Stephenson advocates for the reconsideration of possession, not as a “mental disorder,” but rather as “a potential epistemological break, part of psychiatry’s attempt to culturally contextualize its discourse and treatment models.” 2 Stephenson asks: “Could possession provide an idiom through which psychiatry might reflect upon and rectify its diagnostics?” 3 Stephenson’s efforts to recuperate possession from the status of abnormality that the APA’s DSM-IV-TR ascribes to it (i.e., “not a normal part of a broadly accepted collective cultural or religious practice”) are grounded in his discussion of the evolution of academic disciplines. Stephenson explains the intimacy, followed by the divorce between psychology and anthropology: At the Clark Conference in 1909, Franz Boas carefully maneuvered anthropology away from the essentialist tendencies of psychology and psychoanalysis. A century later, in a similar manner, many Western anthropologists attempt in their writings to describe possession in nonWestern settings without lending it a psychological description, because they find a tendency to pathologize inherent in psychological language. 4

Stephenson’s argument is that in the estranged couple that anthropology and psychology form, psychology would stand to gain from a renewed rapprochement with other social sciences. Acknowledging the extremely exoticising and deprecating language that Carl Jung uses to describe possession, 5 Stephenson reexamines Jung’s work to extract from it Jung’s interest in implementing possession as a methodology in Western psychoanalysis. 6 That said, although Stephenson’s work has as its goal to recuperate a Jungian notion of possession, the role of Jung’s work in his book is rather marginal; rather, it is the concept of possession—accounts of possessions in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe—that take center stage. If at the turn of the twentieth century, for psychologists, the primary site of study for the self’s other was analysis of the intimate

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Figure 5.1. Conference at Clark University with, notably, Franz Boas, Sigmund Freud, and Carl G. Jung. Source: Photo courtesy of Clark University Archives.

psychic space of the human individual, and, for anthropologists “the other” constituted ethnographies of communities mostly outside of EuroCanada, the Euro-United States, or Europe, then Stephenson points to the fact that possession is a form that bridges both conceptions of othering, and at best has constantly troubled the disciplinary divide between psychology and anthropology: I connect Jung’s concept of possession explicitly to its etymology, to the forceful image of selfhood sitting in its own seat and of the suffering inherent when selfhood experiences itself unseated by something “Other.” 7

Thus, the historical context that Stephenson outlines as regards European and North American scholars’ interest in possession emphasizes the fact that “Western” discourse is dually familiar, but also, uncomfortable with the concept of possession. Stephenson advocates looking towards anthropology to better the field of psychoanalysis, but it just takes returning to Trouillot’s criticisms of anthropology to realize that anthropology might not be able to provide much assistance, at least until more anthropologists follow Trouillot’s call

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to revise the discipline. More specifically, Stephenson identifies the language of psychoanalysis (and also psychology, for psychologists also rely on the DSM-IV-TR for their diagnoses) as “pathological.” And, for his part, Trouillot calls anthropology to task for practices that marginalize. It seems unavoidable, then, not to question whether or not the methodologies we are using across the academy, are not themselves to be called into question. Moreover, following on the first part’s exploration of happiness as a U.S.-Constitutional right, and of a more general value system upheld by societies existing in the shadow of enlightenment aspirations, one wonders if academic and scientific discourses are ultimately uncomfortable with anything that is not “happy.” In such a space, extreme unhappiness, that is trauma, would be perceived as pathological. Following a logic that pathologizes expressions of unhappiness would suggest that the entire process of trauma—that is the causes of trauma, the trauma itself, and even the methodologies used to address and heal trauma—would all be seen as neurotic behaviors. For example, until recently, and even now, diseases such as cancer are considered taboo subjects, or at least causes for discretion, and seeing a therapist and taking antidepression medication are still connoted as shameful behaviors. In such a comparative context, even if understood as a healing practice, it makes sense that possession would be looked upon by the medical profession as a “disorder.” In Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy, first published in French in 2000, Pascal Bruckner studies mostly European and North American conceptions of the quest for happiness. As a “European behaving badly,” completely accountable for a certain Eurocentrism, Bruckner analyzes a supposed pleasure taken in life by those who are “vulgar,” that is, not “bourgeois.” 8 What his book points out is that happiness is very much a product of European and American projects of modernity, and as such, yet another one of their false and impossible-to-fulfill promises. For Bruckner, happiness as democratic right has become a moral imperative; to be “unhappy,” especially in a North American space, is almost criminal. Bruckner writes, “Whenever a tragedy occurs, we have to find someone who is responsible for it. We have moved from fatalism to penalism”; 9 and further on: “By deciding that a certain abuse is no longer tolerable, and by translating their [Americans’, i.e., North Americans’] revolt into legal and political terms, these people modify the norm and shift the threshold of intolerance for everyone.” 10 Although Bruckner does not explicitly state that a discourse of human rights makes everyone either a “victim” or a “criminal,” his work provocatively suggests that happiness has become a dogma, and any violation of it thus takes on a felonious quality. The danger of Bruckner’s hypothesis is that crimes against humanity be tolerated as a sort of realpolitik of the everyday. His work also implies the terrifying prospect that no specific indi-

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vidual/s or entity/ies can be ultimately responsible for human atrocities, a discussion to which I will return at the end of this chapter. In a first instance, what I want to hold on to in Bruckner’s work is the idea that happiness belongs to the space circumscribed by Trouillot’s concept of the “Savage slot.” While Bruckner, in Perpetual Euphoria, mostly ignores a non-Western context, he does so consciously, and in his own way, claims that the last vestiges of a bourgeois sense of happiness may be sought amongst the bourgeois’ others. Bruckner writes: If there are desirable milieus today, they may have to be sought on the margins, in the contagious minorities that used to be excluded and that by their culture and music now set the tone for the majority. The middle classes seek elsewhere, sometimes on the fringes of legality, thrills that they no longer find in their own mirrors. The strength of the marginal is exoticism, which makes it both dangerous and attractive: by violating the rules, it escapes the ambient uniformity. 11

In a sense, one might accuse Bruckner of being outrageously racist, but in so behaving, he also forces his mostly Western readers to face their own racisms, for as Trouillot points out, in many cases the word “culture” has become a euphemism to dissimulate more contemporary forms of racism. 12 A case in point of a seemingly benign (i.e., nonracist) discourse on the unquestioned relationship amongst the act of possession, exoticism, and the thrill of “elsewhere” takes place in Le Monde’s January 2013 edition of its Dossiers & Documents publication whose theme is “Besoin d’ailleurs” (“The Need for Elsewhere”). The opening article, specially written for the January 2013 edition (as opposed to taken from the archives of Le Monde publications), is by Michel Le Bris, a longtime friend of Haiti and creator and director of the Etonnants Voyageurs festival. The article, also named “Besoin d’ailleurs” and featured on the front page is meant to give harmony to the issue’s various articles, and also serves to promote the February 2013 Etonnant Voyageurs Festival of Literature and Film, which took place in Brazzaville. 13 The title resonates with Bruckner’s observation that one of the only spaces in which happiness is attainable for a Western middle-class cohort is “elsewhere,” in the “marginal,” which for Bruckner is necessarily constituted by “exoticism.” 14 Even more provocative and à propos to this chapter’s discussion of possession are the title and the opening line of the article titled “A Pont-Aven, Copenhague ou Haïti, les colères de Gauguin,” which was originally published on November 16, 2001 by Le Monde. The opening line reads: Occurences of possession are rather rare these days. For this reason, Jean-Luc Coatalem’s book is all the more strange: this writer and traveler is possessed by Paul Gauguin. A demanding obsession: to satisfy it, necessitated a considerable number of volumes, he had to

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What fascinates me here is that in the body of his article, Phillipe Dagen writes about various places, “Copenhagen,” “Martinique,” “Tahiti,” “Peru,” “Brittany,” “Paris,” and “Arles,” but despite the title’s evocation of Haiti, the writer never comes back to give us more information about Gauguin’s relationship to Haiti. As many know, exoticist tendencies and the fact that “Haiti” is almost an acronym of “Tahiti” will often confound Tahiti, where Gauguin spent significant time, with Haiti. 16 In addition, as Charles Forsdick’s work on Victor Segalen shows, Gauguin himself comes to represent a sort of image of the ultimate explorer of the exotic, following on the footsteps of Rimbaud, 17 but unlike him dying abroad in the Marquesas Islands. From the article, the reader has no idea really if Jean-Luc Coatalem’s book on Gauguin, 18 for which Dagen’s article serves as a review, even deals with Haiti. In fact, given Dagen’s prominence as a journalist and critic of art, art history, and more generally French culture, it would seem that the error of confusing “Haïti” with “Tahiti,” would have been committed by the editor of the issue, and not the author of the article. Regardless of the circumstances that place Haiti into a historical context into which it does not directly belong, what is important is that the notion of “Vodou possession” is the unsaid term that in Dobie’s term “hovers in the air.” 19 While the word Vodou is not mentioned in the article, the evocation of Haiti in the title, which in turn flows into a rather trite use of possession as a metaphor for the passion of research assumes a certain synonymy between “Haiti,” “Vodou” possession, and the pleasures of “elsewhere.” Obviously, how Haiti figures into Gauguin’s life is less important in attracting readers’ attention than is the trope of Vodou possession. In other words, the trope of elsewhere seems to dominate both Gauguin’s life and the study of Gauguin’s life. The reader’s pleasure is to be located in the book’s promise to transport her/him to an exotic elsewhere. As such, the vocabulary of Le Bris’s and Dagen’s articles resonates with Bruckner’s work on what Ahmed names “the promise of happiness.” In other words, happiness can only be achieved within exoticism, so the logic goes like this: a culture that sets up happiness as a moral imperative relies on the marginalization of others to sustain its happiness. As long as the quest for happiness is privileged in “the order of things,” then so, “the Savage slot” will persist as an analytical category that permeates the most vulgar expressions of societal behavior, and its more highbrow activities, including the methodologies employed by medical practitioners, psychologists, psychoanalysts, scholars, and academics. In a second instance, and related to the first, Bruckner’s book on happiness is also meaningful to the present discussion of possession as a

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“mental disorder,” because it suggests that Western culture cannot conceive of unhappiness as a normal state of being. Bruckner criticizes the West’s predilection to make happiness a normative behavior. Drawing on Bruckner’s logic, it is possible to ask: what happens in spaces where unhappiness, and even extreme, sustained, and multiple types of trauma are standard to most people’s lives? If trauma and its various manifestations constitute a normative behavior, then trauma, it would seem, could not be thought of as pathological. Rather, both trauma and the ways of healing it would constitute a way of being in the world. Bruckner’s work proposes that since the Second World War, “the West” has been under the false impression that happiness is possible, and in such circumstances, unhappiness, then becomes unacceptable. Bruckner signals the temporariness of a prosperous “West,” and its repercussions on what is supposed to become an equally prosperous “rest-of-the-world”: The West’s error, in the second half of the twentieth century, was to give people the mad hope that an end would soon be put to all calamities: famines, poverty, disease, and old age were supposed to disappear within a decade or two and a humanity cleansed of its age-old ailments would appear at the gateway to the third millennium. 20

If prosperity and the supposed happiness associated with it is just an exception to a more durable human condition of suffering, then it is not surprising that the historical context that Stephenson outlines as regards European and North American scholars’ interest in possession emphasizes the fact that Western discourse is dually familiar, and uncomfortable, with the concept of possession. To those who are prosperous, and following on the analysis of Dayan’s work in the first part, possession might represent the spectral haunting of sins of the intergenerational past. To others, who haven’t shared in such prosperity, whether in a “culturally exotic” context or a more familiar one, possession might just be a normative behavior of dealing with (and healing from) extremely arduous circumstances. Whether antidepressant medication or the act of possession, both are curative means that are ordered within a discourse of disease. However, possession both suffers from, and in a sense, is also recuperated by its association as an exotic, non-Western behavior. In other words, while exoticism marginalizes, it also connotes the object of its exoticization through an overromanticized practice of othering. In more raw terminology, as much as possession might be misunderstood, misrepresented, and misread, it nonetheless enjoys a certain glamorizing, which the practice of therapy and taking antidepressants doesn’t hold in the public imagination. To juxtapose texts from the French periodical Le Monde, from an intellectual such as Le Bris who is familiar with Haiti, from another such as Bruckner who is not, and to place them in a more general discussion of the intellectual history that birthed the disciplines of

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anthropology and psychology, sets the stage for this chapter’s argument that possession, especially in French and francophone contexts, is a pervasive trope, a trope that lurks behind the scenes of a complex and active twentieth-century intellectual landscape, informing the work of some of the biggest “players” in American and French critical theory. While psychoanalysis, psychology, and anthropology denote professional engagements both from within and outside of the academe, they nonetheless implicate a certain “bourgeois” order. Following on Bruckner’s analysis of the role of happiness in “the West,” it is not surprising then that behaviors related to unhappiness, whether it be the symptom, illness, or cure, inscribe themselves within an epistemology of pathology. And, if we juxtapose Bruckner’s Perpetual Happiness to Bruckner’s earlier works analyzed by Forsdick, and this book’s earlier discussion of a French intellectual milieu’s resistance to postcolonial discourse (see Preface), 21 it is quite easy to see that for writers such as Bruckner and Lefeuvre, postcoloniality is itself a pathological state, a sickness that can easily be healed if the “white man” were to just stop feeling guilty about the whole colonial affair and just “be done with it,” echoing Lefeuvre’s title Pour en finir avec la repentance coloniale—To Be Done with Colonial Repentance (2005). In the chapters that follow, it will become clear, or at least, such is my goal, that the trope of possession is quietly but intimately connected to the very intellectual traditions of which a public intellectual such as Bruckner is born. While the concept of possession in the French context is not uniquely related to “spirit” possession, the work and concepts generated by thinkers such Bataille, Leiris, de Certeau, and Foucault have a certain genealogy, which is inarguably colonial and postcolonial. Bruckner’s and Lefeuvre’s books deal more with Algeria; however, since I have used Bruckner’s work in my own analyses of possession as pathology, I felt it necessary to contextualize Bruckner’s work in the larger context of the legacies of the French colonial empire. NOTES 1. American Psychiatric Association. DSM-IV-TR (4th, revised ed.). Arlington: American Psychiatric Press, 2000 as cited by Ida Sharon, MD, et al. “Dissociative Disorders.” 15 May 2012. E-Medicine. 4 July 2013 http://emedicine.medscape.com/ article/294508-overview. 2. Stephenson, Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche, 3, 73–74. 3. Ibid., 74. 4. Ibid., 66. 5. Ibid., 48. 6. Ibid., 118. 7. Ibid., 3–4. 8. Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy, trans. Steven Rendall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010 [2000]), 149–162. 9. Ibid., 97. 10. Ibid., 201.

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11. Ibid., 167. 12. See discussion of Trouillot’s work in the first part of this book. 13. Michel Le Bris, “Besoin d’ailleurs,” Le Monde: Dossiers & Documents 426 (January 2013), 1. With Le Bris as one of its founders, Etonnants voyageurs: Festival internationale du livre et du film, is headquartered in Saint-Malo, but takes place in other cities in the world, for example in Bamako, Brazzaville, and Port-au-Prince. The last time the festival was in Haiti was during the 2010 earthquake. 14. Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria, 167. 15. My translation of: Philippe Dagen, “A Pont-Aven, Copenhague ou Haïti, les colères de Gauguin,” Le Monde: Dossiers & Documents 426 (January 2013), 6. The original French is: Les cas de possession sont assez rares de nos jours. Le livre de Jean-Luc Coatalem n’en est que plus étrange: cet écrivain et voyageur est possédé par Paul Gauguin. Obsession exigeante: pour la satisfaire, il lui a fallu un nombre considérable de volumes, visiter des musées, se rendre là où le peintre a vécu. 16. Gauguin travelled in 1887 to Martinique. 17. Charles Forsdick, Victor Segalen and the Aesthetics of Diversity: Journeys between Cultures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2–3. 18. Jean-Luc Coatalem, Je suis dans les mers du Sud : Sur les traces de Paul Gauguin (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle, 2001) and published in English as In Search Of Gauguin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd, 2004). 19. Here, I cite Madeleine Dobie in Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2010), 188. For Dobie, “Slavery hovering in the air” may be considered the undergirding image that puts into relation the diverse and rich panoply of texts, eras, and locations, which constitute the scope of her analysis of how French culture was (and was not) shaped by the trope of slavery both in “the Orient” and in the Americas, and was (and was not) transformed economically, socially, and culturally by the fact of slavery in the Western Atlantic. Dobie’s expression, “slavery hovering in the air,” refers directly to her analysis of Chateaubriand’s limited, yet telling allusions to slavery in Voyage to America, written in the early 1800s. Yet, the ethereal grotesqueness of the image also emblematizes what might be considered a paradigmatic shift in thinking about representations of slavery and race in texts of the eighteenth century and the scholarship devoted to the study of the French Enlightenment. If most previous studies of how French texts deal with slavery speak more of silences (9), Dobie´s work shows how slavery is ubiquitous, only “latent[ly]” so (11). It “hover[s],” lurking disturbingly close by, with repercussions for scholars of eighteenth-century France, but also for academic constituencies as varied as specialists of colonial America or pundits of contemporary European thought. 20. Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria, 188–189. 21. The books in which Bruckner repudiates the complexities of postcoloniality are written after the original French publication of Perpetual Euphoria (but before the English translation). That said, the order of publication is not so relevant, because for Bruckner a discussion of colonial issues, it would seem, would have little to do with deliberations about happiness.

SIX Secularizing Possession and Fostering Revolution? Breton’s “Haitian Lectures”

Although most of my attention to Breton will stem from analysis of the first of what were meant to be eleven planned lectures on poetry in Haiti in December 1945 and early 1946, I claim that the first “conférence,” its content and what the “event” of his presence in Haiti meant to Haitian intellectuals and to Breton’s aspirations for Surrealism are extremely significant to an intellectual history of “possession.” My proposition is to show how both the vocabulary and the theory that come to be associated with what I will call the act of possession in Breton’s work engages a reflection that accounts for Ek’s notion of identity, one that is based on movement rather than on origin, one that does not assume permanence, but accounts for frequent instability. To do so, I look at two aspects of his writing: how both before and during his first contact with Haiti, Breton was interested in alternative states of being; and second, how these alternative states related to desubjectification. If a normative, Cartesian notion of subjectivity is conceived of as personhood that is constituted of a “being” based on one subjectivity per human body, a unity that sustains itself throughout the lifetime of the given human body, then desubjectification is the interruption of the coherency of such a single subjectivity. Given the monumental influence, for better or worse, 1 that Breton had in the lives of Aragon, Bataille, Leiris, and Mabille, not to mention Spanishlanguage artists and writers, such as Lam (Cuban) or Eugenio Fernández Granell (Spanish, and living in the Dominican Republic during the Franco dictatorship), or Haitian poets and activists such as Jacques Stephen Alexis, Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude, or Depestre, it is not dispropor117

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tionate that the second part of this book dedicate such significance of its analysis of the history of possession to a single text of Breton. Breton was in a sense ubiquitous, as a cultural icon, but also as a presence in the personal lives of other intellectuals. Depestre writes of the interwar moment in Port-au-Prince: In fact, thanks to the time that Pierre Mabille, Aimé Césaire, 2 André Breton spent in Haiti, Surrealism was to offer up to my generation the horizons of modernity. For us in our twenties, to meet French men of great poetic renown and generosity in Port-au-Prince, constituted nothing less than an opportunity to celebrate. 3

For his part, in his journal entry dated November 14, 1931, while in Sanga, east of Bamako in Mali, amongst Dogons, Leiris writes: “Nouvelle pollution nocturne. Rêvé par ailleurs que je me réconciliais avec André Breton. Au diable la psychanalyse.”—“Another nocturnal source of pollution. For that matter, I dreamt that André Breton and I had resolved our differences. To hell with psychoanalysis.” 4 While Breton does not mention Leiris’s journals on Gondarian zar possession, published eleven years before Breton gives his first Haitian conference, it seems unlikely that he wouldn’t be familiar, if not with the journals, at least with Leiris’s participation in the Dakar-Djibouti expedition and the subsequent cultural manifestations of the expedition, notably the exhibit at the “musée d’Ethnographie” from July through October 1933. 5 In the following considerations of Breton’s work within the context of his visit to Haiti, I propose that the concept of possession as considered by Breton’s Surrealist aesthetics is one that points out not only affinities between French and Haitian thought systems, but also renders problematic the binary that posits the interiority of a body’s psychological space against the exteriority that underlies an individual’s commitment to social action. It is important to emphasize the “event” that Breton’s visit to Haiti represented, for it accompanied, if not catalyzed, the overthrow of President Elie Lescot’s (May 1941–January 1946) presidency, which took place within a month of Breton’s visit. In an interview with Lucienne Serrano, Depestre, as one of the young Haitian poets who was in Breton’s entourage during the visit, explicitly explains how Breton’s visit to Haiti was capital to both Breton and Depestre: Such a creative effort had to engender a popular Surrealism, a phenomenon that surprised Breton, in 1945, at the moment of his time in Haiti. The founder of learned Surrealism, which resembled German Romanticism, discovered with joy that Surrealism was a historical given of the consciousness of all men. One could find it, in its religious forms, with the Haitians, for example. Such a discovery would delight Breton. I was a witness to his rapture: Breton, under our very eyes, learned that Surrealism could be lived on a daily basis by millions of human beings,

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and all the while the same frame of mind had been up until then a movement of European intellectuals. 6

Although in the quotation Depestre does not specify how Surrealism and Vodou relate to each other, he accounts for their similarity, as well as for the momentous occasion that Breton’s visit represented. Breton’s Haitian lectures may be found in the third volume of the French edition of his complete works, published by Gallimard in 1999. Marguerite Bonnet, the editor of the third volume, in collaboration with Etienne-Alain Hubert, Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas, and José Pierre, provide extensive notes on the historical context in which Breton pronounced the lectures in Haiti. I take this much time to point out the contribution of the notes to the reading of the lectures for they put in evidence three factors: first, the enthusiastic welcome and espousal of Breton’s Surrealist poetics by Haitian poet-activists such as Depestre and Magloire Saint-Aude; second, Breton’s reciprocal enthusiasm in responding to the Haitian poets’ political engagement; and third, Breton’s allusions to Vodou. The notes take the form of two short essays, which underscore the exaltation of Breton on the part of Haitian intellectuals and the youth, as well as Breton’s eagerness for the combination of aesthetics and revolutionary spirit that he witnessed amongst the Haitians with whom he came into contact during his trip. 7 Breton arrived in Haiti on December 4, 1945, welcomed by Mabille, who had arrived in Haiti in July 1941 as a medical doctor because Haiti served as an outpost of “la France libre.” Eventually Mabille becomes the cultural attaché to France in Haiti. Following the war, in September 1945, an agreement is signed to establish a French Institute in Port-au-Prince, of which Pierre Mabille will be its first director. Mabille fills out an “‘ordre de mission’ for André and Elisa Breton so that the poet may give a series of lectures both in Haiti and then later in Martinique.” 8 Especially of interest for our purposes is Breton’s arrival speech, “Speech at the Savoy Club of Port-au-Prince,” delivered on December 5, 1945 and published immediately after in a special edition of the Haitian poets’ literary magazine La Ruche (The Beehive), and the first of eleven planned conferences on poetry, of which only seven took place; the junta interrupted the schedule. 9 The first lecture is titled simply “Surréalisme,” and took place on December 20, 1945 as a public reading at the Rex Theatre in front of “avant-garde intellectuals” and “feverish youth.” 10 According to Dominique Berthet, legend has it that Breton did not shake President Lescot’s hand upon leaving the Rex Theater in which he did his first lecture. If true, President Lescot would have taken the gesture as a public affront, and those in attendance would have read it as an act of solidarity to their cause. 11 Regardless of the veracity of Berthet’s anecdote, Bonnet explains that the publication of the speech in La Ruche led to the Haitian government’s seizure of the magazine and the impris-

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onment of certain of its editors, including Depestre, in turn provoking a student demonstration that led to the fall of President Lescot. I paraphrase Bonnet et al.’s notes so as to emphasize a volatile context that informs Breton’s rearticulation of Surrealist ethics and aesthetics before Haitian audiences. Bonnet quite explicitly suggests that Breton’s first two public appearances in Haiti would have actively contributed to the political events. The notes send the reader to an October 1946 article with Jean Duché in which Breton explains that it is first and foremost “the misery, followed by the patience, of the Haitian people [which] were at their height,” that led to the overthrow of the government. 12 They also mention another 1946 interview with Jean Bedel entitled “How without wanting it André Breton started a revolution in Haiti,” which appeared in the literary journal La Minerve (Minerva) on June 7, 1946. 13 After the coup, for most of his trip Breton remained “constrained to prudency, almost never leaving Pétionville”; and, “the tone and content of his talks became more and more didactic.” 14 That said, Bonnet is rather explicit in suggesting that at least at first, Breton might have seen his own interest in the instability of the Haitian social and political situation in 1945: This first talk . . . took place in public, with its goal to restore to the image of Surrealism all of its dimensions, including its revolutionary aspects, as if to provide a relay to the intellectuals of Haiti. 15

Regardless of whether or not Breton saw the precariousness of the Haitian political situation as a means to realize the full political ambitions of his Surrealism, Breton’s first public appearances in Haiti reveal that the French intellectual was delighted by the eager welcome of the young Haitians, and was deliberate in his consideration of Haitian Vodou in relation to Surrealism. Whether or not he performed “rhetorical enthusiasm” to foment revolution is questionable; but the text of his conference on Surrealism reveals what Depestre characterizes as an “enraptured” response to Breton’s exposure to Haitian Vodou. 16 AESTHETICS AND POLITICS: SURREALISM’S UNRESOLVED CHALLENGE Given the contexts described above, Breton’s discussion of the history of Surrealism as one at pains to resolve the disparity between ethics and aesthetics becomes relevant. I intentionally use short fragments of Breton’s December 20, 1945 conference to summarize his ruminations on the evolution of Surrealist thought in the earlier decades of the 1900s. His words reflect a concern between the interiority and exteriority of human experience as it relates to “the right of peoples to do for themselves.” 17 Speaking in Haiti in December 1945, Breton notes retrospectively that until

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1925, Surrealism had still been in its “intuitive stage.” For it to enter its “reasoning phase,” it would need a “particularly emotional traumatism,” which would come in the form of France’s “colonialist war against Morocco,” a war that would underscore the French government’s disrespect of a citizen’s right for political self-determination. 18 It is “dialectical materialism” that becomes the tool by which Surrealism will find its “reasoning phase,” in which the avant-garde art movement will apply the “nonconformism” of experiments in alternative somatic states to a world “outside of itself.” 19 Breton hopes that experiments in the unconscious will find their articulation in Marxist politics. He believes that nonconformity, whether aesthetic or political, might bring together the bourgeois origins of most of the Surrealists with those French citizens of “working class origins,” “thus allowing the artist and the proletariat to unite in their resistance against ‘national egoisms.’” 20 Breton manifestly scoffs at “the almighty power of thought, regarded as capable of emancipating and freeing itself by its own means,” “a belief system” which he finds “very detrimental.” 21 However, he also recognizes that “the plunge of the lost body into the unconscious,” which characterizes one of the principal modalities by which Surrealism as a “poetic then artistic movement” 22 operated, is too intimate, too affective of an experience to be of social, and especially political, import: The years that followed, in fact, the First World War, sanctioned by a treaty, in our eyes, again accentuated the permanent disharmony and reinforced the causes of the conflict, and the Surrealist activity remained confined to its first theoretical givens. 23

He finds contemptible “the almighty power of thought,” which inhibits the movement from finding a better way to bridge the gap between somatic nonconformity—that is alternative explorations of the use of the human body and its psyche—and collective, political nonconformity. Thus, the problematic that Breton puts forth in his lecture on Surrealism in Haiti is that of the disparity between Breton’s fascination with Freud’s methodologies 24 and a Marxist dialectical materialism. 25 It is the conceptual chasm between the body’s psychical capacities and the individual’s responsibility to a larger collective body that troubles Breton. Generally speaking, the recurring theme of Breton’s talk is how the individual—especially the individual who is European or American— can deal personally, socially and politically, with the traumas of modernity, especially the dislocation of urban life and the violence of the World Wars: The passer-by, always in a rush in big American or European cities, is in this way a perpetual dupe. He knows no longer from where he comes, and even less so, where he goes. He has everything to relearn from the Haitian peasant. 26

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In reflecting on the First World War, Breton wonders at how the human subject is left to deal with the disruption and disillusion “where the First World War had left us, and the tabula rasa that it had rendered of the acknowledged values of our youth.” 27 He begins his conference with the conclusion that the Haitian “peasant” has found a spiritual equilibrium of which the European or North American are devoid: If we consider the human condition in Haiti under this angle in relationship to what it is in countries that consider themselves to be the avant-garde of all that is technical progress, I do not hesitate in thinking that it is on the side of the latter that spiritual misery and the most pressing of distresses resides. 28

(Here, we are reminded of a direct intellectual history that leads to Bruckner’s comments half a century later.) Breton’s deduction is based in a discussion of three belief systems to which he has been exposed—Christianity, “indigenous religions,” and Vodou. 29 So in a sense, what Breton does, in the presence of Vodou as cultural system is to reexamine Surrealism, which, at least in Breton’s iteration of it, has lost many of its adherents, notably Aragon, Bataille, and Leiris. One wonders even, if on the advent of Breton’s return to France, after spending the wartime years in the Americas, he is not performing his lecture as much for a French audience as he is a Haitian one? SURREALIST CONVULSION AND VODOU POSSESSION I will now turn to Breton’s treatment of the moment of possession in Vodou ritual as he has observed it, and his comparison of the Vodouyizan moment of possession to the avant-garde practices of 1919 in which he and his friends participated: crises, otherwise known as nervous phenomena created by autosuggestion, which a certain number of my friends presented in rapid succession, by the simple contagious effect that one person, who played the initiatory role, had on several of my friends. These bouts of possession, which I managed to observe with some regularity, night after night over several months, took as their stage my apartment in Paris. 30

Breton is intent on distinguishing his Surrealist experimentation from possession in Vodou: It goes without saying that at least in its genesis, the observed crises differed fundamentally from the Haitian “crises of the lwa.” Devoid of any religious foundation, it took place in a strictly experimental context. 31

Although Jay does not refer to Breton’s “Haitian Lectures” in Downcast Eyes, he does acknowledge Breton’s disdain for non-Surrealist practices:

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“Breton may have denied the resemblance to a spiritualist who is merely a vessel for external voices, but the Surrealist poet nonetheless succumbed to powerful forces beyond his or her conscious control.” 32 Breton’s discourse is at best exoticizing, and at worst condescending, a point that will be discussed later. For the moment, I am interested in how Breton’s comments on Vodou possession fit into a broader intellectual history. Given the fact that Breton deliberately couches his discussion of Surrealism within the context of an explicit skepticism about religion, or rather “cults”—for he calls both Vodou and Christianity “cults” 33 —he is nonetheless at pains to dissimulate his fascination with Vodou possession. The “attitude” of which Breton speaks in the citation below is that which offers up “the plunge of the lost body into the unconscious” as a means of relief from the psychological grief that “a period of extreme intellectual and moral disarray” entailed: 34 I so obstinately clung to this attitude that it provided the conclusion of the book: Nadja, published in 1928. . . . I like to think that Haiti [like a jewel] is set 35 like no other place in the world: “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” Hypnotic sleep also confirmed the idea that mental automatism, far from being a trap, is the ideal means by which we may act upon life through the intermediary of language, that this language be oral or written, graphic language, just as that of song or dance. The Verb, if it has been placed “at the beginning,” must maintain the power to recreate everything. 36

Breton cites the last line of the novel Nadja, written in 1928, well before his sojourn in the Americas. 37 The disseminative power that the last line of Nadja would, one might even argue, have influenced the lexica used by French scholars first working on spirit possession outside of France. Rouget explains the usage of the word “crise,” as a specific type of possession and/or as a transitory moment leading into possession. In other words, “crise” designates the moment in which the subjectivity that usually inhabits a given body is displaced by that of the spirit that mounts the body. Rouget writes: Three words constantly recur in texts describing possession cults: possession (of course), trance, and crisis (crise). But all authors do not use the last two terms in the same way. Some talk mainly of crisis: Michel Leiris (1958) and Andras Zempléni (1966) in particular, in their descriptions of possession in Ethiopia and Senegal respectively. . . . The word crise is used to denote sometimes a convulsive form of trance, sometimes the paroxysmic aspect of trance when it displays periods of variable intensity, sometimes the onset of trance if it is characterized by a moment of more or less distressing agitation, and finally sometimes— and this last is a very different usage—to refer to the troubled period a given individual may undergo, and which will lead him to seek an outlet in possession. 38

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As discussed above, it seems that Breton might intentionally be using the word “crise” to designate the secular act in which he is engaged, and “possession” to denote a more “religious” aspect of Vodou. Regardless, one can read the word “convulsion” in Rouget’s work as in line with both a French ethnographic lexica, and also, Bretonian Surrealism. In his December 1945 lecture, Breton uses the term to refer back to the aesthetic principles of Surrealism and also engages in the ethnographic talk of, for example, Leiris’s first publications on zar possession, which this book will look at further on. For now, I want to emphasize that Breton’s enchantment with both the “crise” in Surrealism and “possession” in Vodou resides in that both provide a physiological processing of trauma. More recently and unrelated to the historical contexts put into play in this chapter, Ellen Corin’s work on trauma explores the “ex-centricity of the subject.” She proposes that “[w]hatever the context, narratives suggest that something rises from within the subject’s experience and destabilizes it, shaking the lived world at its roots.” 39 Drawing on Corin’s more general study of trauma, what Breton observes in both forms of convulsive somatic behavior is an aesthetics that enables the desubjectified subject to represent the trauma of its psychic displacement. Breton writes: That said, I am far from wanting to mark any superiority in favor of that which livened up, in a strongly disorganized way, the small group that we formed. I insist that it is in and of itself significant, if not to say heraldic, that at that time, in our dispositions of spirit and of heart, in the dire state of despair in which the first World War had left us . . . we were able to rediscover the gesture, which for centuries had elevated the Haitian peasant beyond slavery and the overwhelming reason that would have made it seem that all was lost. 40

Although Breton does not directly compare the hopelessness of his group of friends during the First World War to the despair incurred by the slave trade and slavery, his text does recognize that the “gesture” of the young French men’s “crise” has been preserved throughout the generations in Haiti, whereas in France, despite a tradition of possession, over the centuries it had been lost. 41 As noted in this book’s Introduction, Dash traces the writing process of the “Surrealist ethnographers,” paying particular attention to how a sense of instability plays itself out in their works. For example, in the case of Breton’s Martinique charmeuse de serpents, he notes “self-doubt and anxiety in the effort to produce a stable travel narrative.” 42 While Breton’s privileged displacement as member of an elite class (to which he hints both in the above quote and his aforementioned self-identification as a “non-worker”), 43 and the modesty associated with his desire not to convey a sense of “superiority,” may be questionable, there is nonetheless legitimacy to his argument that “crise” and “possession” serve to process a traumatic event. Although his writings on possession are brief, the

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importance of his persona: as a well-known international intellectual in an epoch in which artistic practices were extremely important to the intellectual public sphere, especially that of those espousing a socialist politics, and his visit to Haiti and the events that ensued while he was there, are important to the intellectual history that binds Haiti both to France and United States in the 1930s and 1940s. NOTES 1. Matthew J. Smith writes: “The majority of this group, as Laraque, Depestre, Bloncourt, and Pressoir later admitted, had a narrow and blind view of surrealism and were unfamiliar with the critical writings of Breton’s contemporaries or the limitations of the movement. Notwithstanding, the presence of the revered Breton, whose visit coincided with that of Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam in Port-au-Prince over Christmas 1945, stirred considerable excitement among the members of La Ruche and their peers,” Red and Black in Haiti: Radicalism, Conflict, and Political Change, 1934–1957 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 75–76. 2. In 1944, Pierre Mabille, the cultural attaché for “la France libre” in Haiti, invited Aimé Césaire to conduct a four-month-long seminar in Haiti; in Dominique Berthet, André Breton, l’Eloge de la Rencontre: Antilles, Amérique, Océanie (Paris: HC Editions, 2008), 101. 3. René Depestre,”La France et Haïti: le mythe et la réalité,” Gradhiva: Haïti et l’anthropologie. Prod. Musée du Quai Branly, Paris (2005, put online in 2008, http:// gradhiva.revues.org/249): 3. The original French is: En effet, grâce au séjour en Haïti de Pierre Mabille, Aimé Césaire, André Breton, le surréalisme devait ouvrir à ma génération les horizons de la modernité. Ce fut pour nos vingt ans une fête du savoir et de la poésie de rencontrer à Port-au-Prince des hommes français de vaste connaissance poétique et de générosité. 4. It’s unclear what the second event is. It seems that it’s the return to Sanga (Sangha, Mali) after an expedition to try to obtain “plusieurs statuettes à faire tomber la pluie”—“multiple extraordinary statuettes,” which were “refused” to them, and “quelques masques achetés à Touyogou”—“some masks purchased at Touyogou” in Michel Leiris’s “L’Afrique fantôme,” in Miroir de l’Afrique, by Michel Leiris, edited by Jean Jamin, 87–870 (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996 [Editions Gallimard, 1934]) 266–267. 5. Jean-Sébastien Gallaire, directeur des Éditions les Cahiers. “Michel Leiris: Actualité, Bibliographie, Chronologie, Critique,” http://www.michel-leiris.fr/spip/article. php3?id_article=29 (accessed July 14, 2013). 6. René Depestre, Le métier à métisser (Paris: Editions Stock, 1998), 144–145, translation mine. 7. Marguerite Bonnet, Etienne-Alain Hubert, Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas, and José Pierre. In André Breton: Oeuvres complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1999. IV vols.), 1214–19, 1227–28. All translations of Bonnet and others are mine. 8. Berthet, André Breton, l’Eloge de la Rencontre, 99–100. 9. Bonnet and others, André Breton: Oeuvres complètes, 1217. 10. Ibid., 1214–15, 1217–18, 1227. 11. See timeline for December 20, 1945. Berthet, André Breton, l’Eloge de la Rencontre, 111. 12. Bonnet and others, André Breton: Oeuvres complètes, 592. 13. Ibid., 1217.

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14. Ibid., 1218. 15. Ibid., 1227–1228. 16. It may also be that Breton’s elation in his conference is due to the fact that he speaks in December 1945, after the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied powers, May 8, 1945. 17. André Breton, “‘Le Surréalisme: Conférence inaugurale de conférences sur la littérature,’ prononcée au théâtre Rex à Port-au-Prince le 20 décembre 1945.” In Vol. III, in André Breton: Oeuvre complètes, edited by Marguerite Bonnet and others, 150–167 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1999), 162. Further on, I will cite it as Breton’s “First Haitian Lecture.” All translations of Breton’s Surrealism text are mine. 18. Ibid. For further information, see Vincent Debaene’s “Review of La Rançon du colonialisme. Les surréalistes face aux mythes de la France coloniale (1919–1962), by Sophie Leclercq.” Gradhiva: Carl Einstein et les primitivistes 14 (2011): 261–63. In a letter titled, Lettre ouverte à M. Paul Claudel, ambassadeur de France au Japon, the Surrealists and the French Communist Party support Abd el-Krim (Muḥammad ibn ‘Abd al-Karīm alKhaṭṭāb) a leader of the Ait Khattab group of Berbers in Morocco, who organized for the Republic of Rif, whose goal was independence from Spanish and French colonial rule (Debaene 261). 19. Breton, “First Haitian Lecture,” 162. 20. Ibid., 160. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid., 154. 23. Ibid., 162. 24. Ibid., 156. 25. Ibid., 162. 26. Ibid., 153. 27. Ibid., 159. 28. Ibid., 152. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 158. 31. Ibid., 159. 32. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994 [1993]), 242. 33. Breton, “First Haitian Lecture,” 152. 34. Ibid., 160. 35. Breton uses and italicizes the word “sertie,” which refers to the “setting of a stone or of a jewel.” 36. Breton, “First Haitian Lecture,” 160. 37. The French original text is: “LA BEAUTÉ SERA CONVULSIVE OU NE SERA PAS.” 38. Rouget, Music and Trance, 38. 39. Ellen Corin, “The ‘Other’ of Culture in Psychosis: The Ex-Centricity of the Subject.” In Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, edited by João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, 273–314 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 273. 40. Breton, “First Haitian Lecture,” 159. 41. Breton proposes that the concept of the somatic crisis has been newly rediscovered in Europe by the Surrealists: he explains that the “Jesuits and Jansenists” had already experimented with alternative somatic states (Breton, “First Haitian Lecture,”160). 42. J. Michael Dash, “Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean,” L’Esprit Créateur 47, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 87. 43. Breton, “First Haitian Lecture,” 162.

SEVEN Leiris’s “Lived Theater” Possession as the Autobiography of the Conscious and Unconscious

As seen above, Breton’s comparison of possession in Haitian Vodou with the “crise” in avant-garde experiments of the young Surrealists would be based on limited observations as an itinerant onlooker sojourning in Haiti. Instead, Michel Leiris’s engagement with zar possession in the Gondar region of Ethiopia constitutes a more sustained and reflective relationship between Leiris and the concept of possession. While Leiris’s time in Haiti was limited, and most of his writings on possession are based on reflections on the time spent in Gondar, the import of his work on general scholarship on possession rituals—even and especially in Haiti—cannot be underestimated. When esteemed scholars of Haitian studies, such as J. Michael Dash or Karen McCarthy Brown, or public intellectuals such as Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, or Boris Wiseman refer to the notion of “théâtre vécu”—“lived theater,” they are using a term that Leiris initiated in his writings about zar possession. The term has in fact become so commonplace, that some such as de Certeau and Foucault do not even mention (i.e., credit) Leiris. Yet most importantly perhaps, is the fact that at the time Alfred Métraux published Le Vaudou haïtien (1958) (published one year later in English as Haitian Voodoo), he would have considered Vodou possession in light of his friendship with Leiris. That is, Leiris not only visits Haiti in Métraux’s companionship, but back in Paris, the two would meet for biweekly meetings between 1950 and 1957, whereby they would try to articulate correspondences between the two systems of possession. 1 Despite the many works on Vodou, many by Haitians, Métraux’s 1958 study nonetheless remains a go-to especially amongst non127

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specialists on Haitian Vodou. 2 To thus dedicate a chapter on Leiris’s writings on zar possession in an attempt to trace the Franco-American interest in Haitian Vodou possession, is essential to understanding how studies of extremely varied practices of possession (i.e., seventeenth-century possession in France, Gondarian zar possession, and Haitian Vodou possession) would find a common vocabulary: the common thread—recognized or unacknowledged—would be Leiris’s work. As mentioned in the introduction, the importance of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931–1933) for which Leiris served as the secretary/archivist would bind “ethnologists ever more closely to the empire’s resources by initiating a set of practices that all their subsequent research and collecting missions to the colonies in the 1930s would emulate.” 3 After his trip to Gondar from July 1—December 5, 1932, 4 Leiris would not return to Gondar for any prolonged period of time. 5 That said, the six months that he spent in Gondar would have a profound effect on him; and, over the course of his life, he would think and write about zar possession, as well as about the more general phenomenon of possession. 6 Like Breton, Leiris would also consider possession in a comparative lens, trying to find correspondences between European culture and that of the Gondar possession practices. Where Breton would distinguish between the secular and the religious, Leiris would concentrate on the distinction between authenticity and artifice, that is, between sincerity and performance. Also, similarly to Breton, Leiris shunned religion, but unlike Breton, he would seek out the sources of the sacred not just in the places that he visited, but also in European “secular” spaces. It might be argued that Leiris’s overall corpus is one that actively seeks out vulnerability. Whether his reflections on bullfighting as in Tauromachies (1937) and Miroir de la tauromachie (1938), or compromising bourgeois dignity to engage intimate semiautobiographical portraits of himself as in L’Âge d’homme (mostly written in 1935, and published in 1939) 7 or Aurora (written in 1927, first published in 1932), he is interested in where man is fallible, and he is most compelled by spaces that privilege and tease out such moments of susceptibility rather than try to eradicate or suppress them. 8 Possession, like bull fighting, becomes for Leiris, exemplary of practices that cultivate vulnerability as a state of being, even if more or less temporary. Of course, in very different ways, mastery undergirds both bullfighting and possession; however, both put into play how a person may be rendered defenseless to material and spiritual forces. As such, at times, like Breton, Leiris’s engagements with possession will impose the vestiges of a strict Cartesian impulse to categorize possession as either “authentic” or “inauthentic.” Yet, for the most part, possession in its liminality—in its threshold between the material and the spiritual—will represent a privileged occasion and focused commemoration and/or celebration of a person or group of persons’ vulnerability as masters over the conditions, material and otherwise, that determine their

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lives. The notion of spirit possession would come to represent for Leiris not only a space that “man” is unable to control, but an acknowledgment that not all can be known. For Jacques Mercier, author of the text that presents the 1996 reedition of Leiris’s La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar précédée de “La croyance aux génies zar en Ethiopie du nord,” in Miroir de l’Afrique (Possession and Its Theatrical Aspects, preceded by “The Belief in Zar Spirits in Northern Ethiopia,” in Mirror of Africa, my translation), 9 Leiris’s lifelong intellectual search has to do with “l’intermédiaire et l’ambigu”—“the intermediary and the ambiguous” 10 whether it is possession, the “theatrical,” “poetic inspiration,” “eroticism,” or “addicts, weirdos and crazies”—“les toxicomanes, originaux et fous.” 11 Leiris’s writings on possession throughout his lifetime would be reflective of an intellectual mind constantly open to less rigid theoretical frameworks. His sustained engagement with possession and more generally the ethnographic profession, his lifelong friendships with Abba Jerôme Gabra Moussié and Métraux, his own active participation in psychoanalysis and the visual arts, and his production of fictional and autobiographical prose would, it seems, inform his writings on possession over the decades, and account for the changing narrative modes that he would use to write about it. MAKING SENSE OF LEIRIS’S PUBLICATIONS ON POSSESSION— REFLECTING ON ANTHROPOLOGY’S PRACTICES Leiris’s work on Zar possession constitutes a fascinating corpus because without returning to Gondar, he writes across the decades of the twentieth century, taking into account and contributing, for better or worse, to discussions on anthropological methodology. The texts appear in Jean Jamin’s extraordinary 1996 edited and annotated volume Miroir de l’Afrique. Jamin’s volume is so thorough that the texts and their republications blend into each other. For this reason, for those unfamiliar with Leiris’s work on Zar possession, and given this chapter’s particular interest in an intellectual trajectory of “possession,” I list the texts in the order that Leiris composed them, with the accompanying dates in which they were published and republished. The first, L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa) is composed of the journals that Leiris wrote during the DakarDjibouti expedition (May 19, 1931—February 17, 1933), first published in 1934. Leiris is hired as the “secrétaire-archiviste et enquêteur (pour la sociologie religieuse et l’ethnologie des sociétés secrètes)”—“secretaryarchivist and investigator (for religious sociology and the ethnology of secret societies).” 12 The second text expressly on possession, which Jamin includes in the volume is “La Croyance aux génies zar en Ethiopie du nord,” was first written in 1935, but published in 1938, after Mussolini’s

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invasion of Ethiopia. Jamin points to the importance of the ascending influence of fascist factions in Europe and the colonies in the years leading up to the Second World War. 13 The 1938 text was published in the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique, a reminder of this book’s previous discussion of the “pathological” nature of possession as seen by the official psychoanalytical community. “La Croyance” is published as a revised piece in 1980, with the purpose of serving as the introduction to the republication in 1980 of the 1958 La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar. The text “La Croyance,” then, more than any of the other texts is an amalgamation of Leiris’s narrative voices from 1935 through 1980. The third text is the talk that Leiris gives in Haiti in 1948 when visiting Métraux and is titled “Message de l’Afrique.” According to Jamin, based on a letter that Leiris wrote to his wife, Leiris admits to feeling absolutely unqualified to give a talk on zar possession, much less a talk that is supposed to compare zar spirit possession to Vodou possession. Moreover, he is particularly nervous presenting in front of the expertise of the wife of Haitian anthropologist Milo Rigaud, who is in the audience. 14 Jamin also cites a dream in which Leiris is haunted by the claustrophobic oppressive space of a boat that resembles at once a ship of war and of the slavetrade. 15 Leiris visits Métraux who leads the UNESCO Marbial Valley (Haiti) anthropological survey from 1948 to 1950; more importantly, Métraux has invited Leiris to Haiti in order to “reconnect with this ‘intermediary world’ of the possessed. For the period of one month, in 1948, he would guide Michel Leiris on an ethnographic mission in Haiti, from Vodou ceremony to Vodou ceremony.” 16 The trip and the friendship between Leiris and Métraux would lead to a decade-long friendship based most notably on biweekly meetings between 1950 and 1957 whereby Leiris and Métraux would try to articulate correspondences between the two systems of possession. 17 It is thus not a coincidence that both Leiris and Métraux would publish their best known works on possession in the same year, 1958: Métraux publishes the book Le Vaudou haïtien and Leiris publishes what I designate as the fourth text in this series, that is, the short book/essay La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar. The fifth text is Leiris’s preface to Métraux’s book Le Vaudou haïtien, published by Gallimard in 1958, in which Leiris makes reference to his terminology of “théâtre vécu,” 18 a term that will be central to this chapter’s discussion of Leiris’s influence on contemporary scholarship in anthropology, religious studies, and aesthetic thought. Additionally, Jamin mentions that there are other texts, such as Leiris’s “carnets de route” from his time in Haiti, and other letters, but I limit myself to the four texts published in Miroir de l’Afrique, and the preface to Métraux’s extremely influential book on Vodou. While the chronology of the original composition, revision, and publication circumstances around these five texts is extremely confusing, I

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want to hold on to the fact that throughout his life Leiris will revisit the critical frameworks with which he studied possession. Thus, over the period of 1932 to 1980, Leiris will write about possession, and as Jacques Mercier notes, his perspective on possession will change: for Mercier, in the 1934 journals, Leiris focuses on trauma and healing, whereas in the 1958 text he is interested in possession as an aesthetic mode. 19 For its part, “La Croyance” credits his work on zar possession to his teacher and principal informant: “in accordance with the method taught by Marcel Mauss at the Institute of Ethnology, and I was assisted during this work by the man of letters Abba Jérôme Gabra Moussié, delegate of the Ethiopian government to the Mission to help him [Marcel Griaule] in his research.” 20 Introducing the revised version in 1980, it is notable, given the revisions in ethnographic practices, that Leiris would want to contextualize the methodologies, indicating that he is aware that Mauss’s method has been called into question over the decades. Barbara Tedlock explains: In the French tradition, the emphasis was on team research, using a documentary approach. The British and American traditions emphasized individual research, using an experiential approach that was labeled with the oxymoron “participant observation.” 21

She explains that Mauss “recommended that the ‘professional ethnographer’ adopt the ‘intensive method,’ by which he did not mean long-term individual experiential research, but rather multifaceted documentary team research.” 22 More importantly, given the importance that Leiris’s intimate journals and autobiographical fiction played in cultural circles, it is hard to read Leiris’s ethnographic texts on their own terms, especially when the publication of his ethnographic work that is most circulated today is the 1996 edited volume Miroir de l’Afrique, which includes the journals. Moreover, it is significant that as regards a mission on which Leiris was only a secretary/archivist, it is Leiris and not Griaule whose work is the most read. Also, to note, it is the very notion of the ethnographic enterprise as one of teamwork amongst the ethnographers, a team, which in Mauss’s methodology does not include the so-called indigenous informants. That in 1980, Leiris would immediately follow his accounting for Mauss’s methodology with the identification of his primary research partner, Gabra Moussié, seems to be a pretty direct acknowledgement of more contemporary ethnographic practices. To mention Mauss and Gabra Moussié in the same sentence is to quietly call into question what is derogatorily called “armchair anthropology” of ethnographers such as Mauss, who “although he never undertook fieldwork, taught an annual course” on the methods of fieldwork. 23 Moreover, in Leiris’s preface to Métraux’s Le Vaudou haïtien, Leiris is a bit more forthcoming in his critique of ethnographies that are not based on fieldwork. His introduction has as its purpose

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to legitimize Métraux as an anthropologist, and the quality upon which he bases his laudatory comments of Métraux’s study is precisely his predilection for fieldwork: one of the major attributes of most of his writings is the impression that his writings give that they are ultimately the result of an intimate and personal contact of the author with the material, people, or things that are the topics of his work? A quality, it seems to me, which is pretty rare these days. 24

That said, Leiris’s work on zar possession will be solely based on the few months that he spent in Gondar in 1932. Again, given the importance that Leiris’s and Métraux’s work would have on systematizing discourse on spirit possession across geographical spaces, it is hard not to note that the amount of time they spent discussing spirit possession in a French context greatly outweighed the time they spent in the locations about which they were writing. Given the changing discourses on the ethnographic process over the twentieth century, it is not surprising that in the various texts expressly dedicated to his reflections on zar possession, Leiris would employ various narrative voices: in his journal entries, he shares the most private intimacies of his conscious (i.e., sexual desire aroused by being a participant-observer) and unconscious thought processes (i.e., dreams he has while traveling); his voice in the 1958 text, in a sense, is a mea culpa towards Gabra Moussié, his “old friend”; and his 1980 text engages a narrative tone that is more academically reflective of the practice of anthropology and particularly the privileged relationship between the ethnographer and his “informateurs indigènes”—“indigenous informants.” 25 LEIRIS’S POSSESSION AS “LIVED THEATER” In Leiris’s La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar, written in 1958, after his visit to Haiti and his biweekly meetings with Métraux, Leiris introduces the term “théâtre vécu,” or “lived theater,” a concept that will find resonance in the work of anthropologists working not just on spirit possession, but also on the aesthetic in non-European cultures. The term, “lived theater,” as this section examines, reflects the overarching preoccupation with the “truthful” What this present section will illustrate is how Leiris’s concept of “lived theater” emerges from his interest in “spirit” possession, and fits into an academic discourse, that is weighted down by the imperative to be “scientific.” More specifically, I will contextualize the phrase as used by Leiris in La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar, and look at how “théâtre vécu” has been engaged more recently. I argue that despite our best efforts, it is our obsession to determine what is truthful, or

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not, that pathologizes and/or relegates an object of study to the “Savage slot.” In anthropological discourse dating from the latter part of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, of which Trouillot’s Global Transformations is an example, there has been a preoccupation to redress the ills of an anthropological past that (has) 26 engaged intimately with or in the (post)colonial enterprise. In this context, there emerges a type of scholarship that strives to read material objects of study as objets d’art, and magico-religious-spiritual rituals as artistic performances. Although, as we will see, Leiris’s La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux is obsessed with determining “truth,” and although he engages in anthropological work that wouldn’t be considered methodologically sound in today’s standards, his writing on “lived theater” nonetheless nurtures a space that destabilizes a scientific discourse, which fixes human activity and creative production into “authentic” and “inauthentic” phenomena. Whether it is Leiris’s reading of possession, or the very assertiveness of the act of possession, or both, what Leiris’s text reveals is how possession’s overwhelming imposition of presence upon the body that is possessed (“the horse”) 27 or on the community that looks on (whether Vodouyizan or not, whether involved in the ceremony or not, whether participant observer or not) troubles the waters upon which the “Savage slot” usually safely sails. Although the title La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar indicates that the text is about possession rituals in Gondar, in a sense, the text is as much a comparativist study of phenomena in European culture that resemble possession. Leiris compares possession to Italian commedia dell’arte, 28 but more importantly his text imbricates a lexicon of theater to his ethnographic study of zar possession. It’s not so much about finding equivalencies in Mediterranean European cultures that correspond to Ethiopian zar possession, but about searching for an epistemology that suffices to explain how possession occupies a liminal space between the material and the spiritual, and the rational and the irrational. Leiris chooses theater as the discursive framework with which to explain to audiences, mostly in the social sciences, how possession achieves credibility in the Gondarian context. There exists however another lexicon that inundates Leiris’s text as much as that around theater, and that is a vocabulary that deals not just with “artifice,” but with a much more moralising language that treats possession as a “lie.” Leiris’s stance as regards a language that qualifies possession as prevarication is not overtly clear, but before making more fixed analysis, I’d like now to look more closely at his text. Leiris does not introduce the phrase “théâtre vécu” until the title of the fifth of five chapters, “Théâtre joué et théatre vécu dans le Culte des zar”—“Interpreted [i.e., Play-Acted] Theater and Lived Theater in the Cult of the Zar.” 29 Here the word “joué” refers to acting, playing a role, or in the French “interpreting a role” for theater. The actual phrase in which Leiris

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writes about “théatre vécu” reflects that Leiris has been building up to a discussion that identifies a type of theater that distinguishes itself from a European sensibility of theater as art/ifice. Leiris writes: Putting aside the occurrences in which it would be legitimate to talk of interpreted (i.e., play-acted) theater, where a certain level of prevarication would seem to prevail, there are also cases where the reality of the possession is neither painful for the person of interest (i.e., the possessed) nor for any of her/his assistants. Such theater could comply with what we are qualifying as lived theater, in other words: a type of theater, which is maybe also for its part play-acted, but with a minimum amount of artifice and devoid of any intention to deceive the spectator. Insofar as possession takes on a theatrical form, and as such is susceptible to appealing to the imagination or to seducing the spectator, it raises suspicion, and the questionable character of its spectacular practices, such as those of dance and the gurri [movement of trance] of the possessed, does not escape the attention of the experts, who are not dupes [of such insincerity]. 30

Leiris’s intention then it seems is to anticipate readers whose knee-jerk reaction will be to primitivize zar possession and qualify it as of an inferior cultural order. Earlier in the chapter, Leiris engages the work of Jules Michelet (1798–1894), who in his “grandeur,” it seems, might be held as an authority of the phenomenon of spirit possession in previous scholarship. The first sentence of the last chapter of La Possession reads: “The faculty most especially of believing in their lies,” such is the major contribution, which comes at the end of the great historian of Romanticism Michelet’s study of witchcraft in France in the Middle Ages and under the Ancien Régime. Such is the quality that Michelet believes to be attributable to the witch. And yet, if amongst the various methods that I was able to observe in living within the intimacy of the Baläzar [a person possessed by a zar] group, there exist a number of occurences where sincerity makes a good case for itself. 31

Leiris’s language at the beginning of the chapter is ambivalent: it suggests that he espouses Michelet’s proposition that possession is basically a series of lies, and that zar possession would only be another case of such prevarication. On the other hand, his introduction of the framework of “lived theater” problematizes the notion of insincerity. He calls upon the language of theater to distinguish between effective and ineffective acting. Whether in the European or the Gondarian context, bad acting makes the spectator aware that the performance is just that, a performance. In other words, in order for the suspension of disbelief on the part of the spectator to occur, the acting must be effective. The difference is that for European audiences, the temporal contours of the suspension of disbelief are relegated to the space (the street, theater, amphitheater, or

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black box) and time (there is a beginning and an end of a performance, often divided up by intermissions) of the theatrical performance. Instead, for the practitioners of zar possession, the suspension of disbelief is a more permanent way of being in the world. The last sentence of La possession reads the permanency of the suspension of disbelief as a sort of taboo of the collective unconscious, or at least a communaly shared self-discipline to remain in a space that suspends reality: Moreover, if these manifestations [i.e., possessions] are really of the theatrical order, it’s quite certain then that this is a theater in which it is forbidden for the theatrical to recognize itself. In order for the ritual [of possession] not to lose its meaning, the mythical beings upon which the ritual relies must be intimately integrated into the foundation of denial of the very theatrical essence upon which [possession] is based. 32

Leiris crafts La Possession in such a way as to slowly convince his reader that possession is much more than an exotic example of primitivism. In a general introduction to the case of Gondarian possession, Leiris uses the language of simile (i.e., “équivaudraient”—“are equivalent to”; “comme des”—“such as”) to compare zar possession to phenomena that he deems analogous to European performance culture. 33 He quickly invokes the first theater of “Western civilization” to possession. 34 Leiris compares the “fixity” of the characters of the commedia dell’arte, “in more recent times” to the recognizable spirits that manifest themselves in the bodies of those they mount. Like the commedia dell’arte roles of Pulcinella or Arlecchino, the zars Abbaté Čängär or Šifärra 35 are typeset by certain common activities and accouterments. 36 The preface then uses the “Western” context to offer points of entry to its non-Gondarian readers. As Leiris enters into a more detailed description of how zar possession works in Mälkam Ayyähu’s entourage, he continues to describe the important role that the clothing has in the life of what Leiris refers to as her “parish.” 37 Mälkam Ayyähu is the elder, a woman, in the parish of Bäata, who is revered for her ability to converse—to be possessed by—so many spirits, and by this fact, also esteemed in her community as a healer. Along with Leiris’s translator Abba Jérôme Gabra Moussié, she is his most cherished interlocutor. 38 Leiris then goes from an initial explicit comparison between theater and possession, to a description of zar possession that focuses on contexts that are equivalent to those of the professional theatrical world. As seen above, Mercier notes that Leiris’s 1958 texts would focus on the aesthetic aspects of possession more than on the role that possession plays in healing. 39 On the one hand, one might read Leiris’s discussion of catharsis as a mode of aesthetic healing, yet the emphasis is on the performance aspect of possession. Again, Leiris references Greek antiquity, where it was the role of theater to create the circumstances for catharsis to occur. Leiris writes:

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In Leiris’s reading of possession, the performer is at the same time the protagonist whom s/he performs and also the director, and as such, here, Leiris presents possession as (morally, aesthetically) superior to Greek catharsis. At least he uses a language of “virtue” to positively connote possession’s capacity to integrate the actor and the various levels of spectators: where the zar would be the ultimate actor; its human horse the concrete body that carries the spiritual actor; and the audience which occupies the same space as the person possessed, and thus participates in how a certain “scene” plays out. The aforementioned passage comes almost at the end of La Possession, suggesting that Leiris has waited to pass judgement on his comparison between the grand traditions of European performance culture and that of zar possession. Unlike Breton, it is the non-European case that is cast in a more favorable light. One wonders, in fact, if Leiris is not writing with Breton’s first “Haitian conference” in mind, quietly writing against the man who had once been one of his most intimate acquaintances, and who had haunted him even in his dreams at the beginning of the Dakar-Djibouti expedition. While it may seem accidental that Leiris positively connotes possession, I argue that the overarching rhetorical intention of the text is to produce a nondegrading discourse on possession that counters grotesquely colonialist tendencies to disavow other cultures as “backwards.” Leiris doesn’t make the question of the “authenticity” of possession a precise topic of the essay until the fourth chapter, where for the first time in the text, and in the last paragraph of the entire work, he articulates the assumptions of his reader. Yet, he speaks to his reader’s expectations through the most indirect language possible. Embedded in the below usages of multiple negative syntaxes (“unjust,” “impossibility,” “not”), is Leiris’s acknowledgment of his readers’ skepticism, their conviction that the rite of possession is a big “lie,” both empirically impossible to prove, and also inauthentic: Nonetheless, before burdening those in question of bad faith in the contemporary usage of the expression, it would be unjust not to put into question the fundamental impossibility of creating an exact correspondence between the lived experiences and the common preconceptions resulting from tradition. 41

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Yet, Leiris knows there is something else that makes zar possession legitimate, and the art of ambivalence that he creates through the layers of negative syntactual marks, is his instinct not to cave in to his readers’ expectations. The third section of this book, in its analysis of Depestre’s novel, will respond directly to Leiris’s struggle to identify just what it is that makes possession legitimate. But for now, in the context of Leiris’s essay on possession, we note, that having set up a system of corrrespondences between theater in a Mediterranean context and possession in an Ethiopian one, Leiris must now deal outright with the idea that in Gondarian society, possession does not constitute an artistic space that is separate from the everyday, but rather it is part of the everyday. Leiris’s challenge will then be to cast the everyday as “worthy” of the European traditions which he has evoked throughout his text. Yet, in a sense, in the first chapter, he has already prepped his reader to consider the Gondarians on par with his readers, for the first critics to judge possession as legitimate or not, are the members of Mälkam Ayyähu’s parish, who accuse a woman in the parish of “simulating possession.” 42 In this way, when we get to the last chapter’s discussion of “mensonge”—“prevarication,” 43 “mauvaise foi”—“bad faith,” 44 and “seduction,” 45 and concern about distinguishing the “authentic” from the “inauthentic,” 46 possession as “provoked” as opposed to possession as a “spontaneous” 47 act, we have already learned that it is not only a Western obsession to determine whether or not possession is “real,” but is also of import to those closest to zar possession. Given how Leiris places his introduction of the polemic around possession’s authenticity, it is not implausible that Leiris’s most important rhetorical gesture is to legitimize possession as an act that might not correspond to a scientific empirical thought system, but does correspond to an aesthetic discourse with which the West’s most elite connoisseurs of art and theater would be familiar. Ultimately, then, the development of the theory of “lived theater” becomes a way to rehabilitate degrading representations of the other, using an epistemology of “high culture,” of aesthetics. While Breton uses a comparison of Surrealist aesthetics with Haitian Vodou practice to reaffirm the former, Leiris uses an epistemology of the aesthetics of theater to legitimize zar possession amongst audiences accustomed to thinking of possession as either of the order of the “demonic” and/or of the ”primitive.” When Mercier notes that in his 1958 text, Leiris has forsaken a study of possession as a means of dealing with trauma, for a study that favors the “aesthetic,” he confirms my suggestion that Leiris’s aim is to above all steer away from a type of scholarship on possession that reads possession along the grotesquely exoticist lines of a work such as William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) or works that disregard possession as an inferior social system, one on its way to “becoming civilized.” It is interesting to note that in a 1931 48 issue of Documents, Bataille publishes a

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text by Leiris titled “‘Le caput mortuum’ ou la femme de l’alchimiste,” which is accompanied by images of William Seabrook that deal with “various types of acephali, images of headless—or rather, faceless—bodies.” 49 The particular photo is not of Seabrook’s time in Haiti but rather of a full-head “Leather mask and collar” and is part of Seabrook’s interest in occult practices, although the specific context of the photo is not explained. While Leiris’s text tackles the notion of the “truth” of possession, his work steers clear of any reference to the “demonic.” One wonders if his method for countering such imagery would be to just not engage with it. While the focus of Leiris’s 1950 text might be on theater, he nonetheless acknowledges the primary role that possession plays in rituals of healing. He summarizes the role of the most prominent leaders in the Gondarian community, and in so doing accounts for the healing aspects of possession: The great possessed one is not only a healer, but may be consulted as an augur, a mediator, a moral guide, an advisor. For each of the activities of her/his life—including medical practices—s/he has a particular Zar, presupposed for the given activity. 50

Given Leiris’s interest and own engagement as a patient in psychoanalysis, and especially, his lifelong experimentation with the autobiographical process, it would seem that for Leiris “possession” is itself a sort of autobiographical process that allows a person to: respond, in the most direct and most, if we can name it as such, corporeal way possible, in its capacity for pure production, to this need that no social organization, basically closed off to the possibility of the irrational, could ever satisfy? 51

In other words, possession is a corporeal and intellectual process that accounts for both the conscious and unconscious autobiography of a given being. In fact, for Leiris, anthropology itself should involve the autobiographical process: anthropologists should resist “confusing scientific objectivity” with “an attitude of refusal towards that which has to do with their own personality.” 52 As such, where for Leiris the concept of “lived theater” is a means of explaining Vodou or zar possession, for Dash, it refers to a much more broad attitude towards how Leiris conceives of “being,” in a context that was inclusive of all spaces. Dash refers to Clifford Geertz who speaks to Lévi-Strauss’s dismissal of the Caribbean as a space not pure enough in its exotic distance from European culture, whereas Leiris’s interest is to explore “Haiti and Martinique” as “mirrors in which the everyday provides zones of interaction, a ‘théâtre vécu,’ involving self and other”: 53 It is precisely because it was such a complex mirror of real and unreal, of unpredictable images and displaced originals, that Leiris could sense

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in this act of self-exploration the interactions of global modernity. The destabilizing and creolizing Caribbean, with its desubjectifying possibilities, becomes an ideal site for Leiris’s self-ethnography.

Combining Leiris’s own words with Dash’s analysis, “lived theater” can be read as threefold. First, it is an epistemology that crafts an ethnography of spirit possession in the Gondarian and Haitian contexts. Second, it is an ethnographic process that explains not only the effect of the “participant observer” on the anthropologist’s interlocutors, but one that accounts for the impact that “the informants” have on the anthropologist. Thirdly, and most importantly, “lived theater” describes the vulnerability of “being”; it is a concept that refers to processes that contradict the notion of the human subject as a stable and self-contained entity. To be possessed by a spirit, is in fact to be dispossessed by it, to be humbled by the other, and in such humility to be open to the other. In Athanasiou’s and Butler’s discussion, as we will see at the end of this section, while most “dispossession” is purely exploitative, there exists a mode of dispossession that renders a being exposed, and as such places this being in a more reciprocal relationship to the panoply of others that populate this being’s life. Athanasiou, who sums up Butler’s claims, explains: Being dispossessed by the other’s presence and by our own presence to the other is the only way to be present to one another. So being present to one another takes place at the limits of one’s own self-sufficiency and self-knowability, in the wake of the endless finitude of the human. 54

Vodou or zar possession, Leiris’s “lived theatre,” or Dash’s “destabilizing and creolizing Caribbean” constitute painful, yes, traumatic, spaces that push the limits of “knowability.” NOTES 1. Mercier, “Présentation to ‘La Possession,’” 902–903. 2. For example, Jewell P. Rhodes’s novel on New Orleans’s legendary three generations of Marie Laveau, Voodoo Dreams: A Novel of Marie Laveau, bases its use of Vodou on Métraux’s book (New York: Picador, 1995). 3. Conklin, In the Museum of Man, 211. 4. Michel Leiris, “La Croyance aux génies zar en Ethiopie du nord,” in Miroir de l’Afrique, edited by Jean Jamin, 917–45 (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996 [Fata Morgana, 1989; in the collection “Les Hommes et leurs signes,” 1980]): 923. Further citations of this text will be cited as “Croyance.” 5. I have not been able to verify whether or not Leiris ever returned to Ethiopia. It seems from the various timelines that he did not, but I cannot corroborate this. 6. Gallaire, “Michel Leiris: Actualité, Bibliographie, Chronologie, Critique,” http:// www.michel-leiris.fr/spip/article.php3?id_article=29. 7. In English, see Michel Leiris, Manhood: A Journey from Childhood into the Fierce Order of Virility, with Foreward by Susan Sontag from Against Interpretation (1964, 1966), and also with Leiris’s Afterward: The Autobiographer as Torero, translated by Richard Howard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1984, 1963, in French: Editions

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Gallimard, 1939, 1946]); and Michel Leiris and André Masson, Mirror of Tauromachy (London: Atlas Press, 2007). 8. I use Jean Jamin’s chronology in Miroir de l’Afrique for the dates of publication of Aurora, L’Âge d’homme, Tauromachies, and Miroir de la tauromachie. 9. I will only use my translation into English of Leiris’s texts compiled in Mirror of Africa, edited by Jean Jamin in this first mention of them. Since the words in French are mostly cognates, I prefer to keep the French titles. Brent Edwards is currently translating Mirror of Africa, but to my knowledge, the texts within have not yet been translated into English, so all translations in this book of Leiris’s texts from Mirror of Africa are mine. 10. Jacques Mercier, “‘Présentation’ to La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar précédée de la croyance aux génies zar en Ethiopie du nord.” In Miroir de l’Afrique, by Michel Leiris, edited by Jean Jamin, 891–915 (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996), 901–902. Further citations of this text will be referred to as “Présentation to ‘La Possession.’” 11. Ibid., 902. 12. Jean Jamin, “‘Michel Leiris: Vie et Oeuvre,’ suivi de ‘Note historiographique,’” in Miroir de l’Afrique, by Michel Leiris, edited by Jean Jamin (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996), 1379. 13. Ibid. 14. Jean Jamin, “Présentation to ‘Message de l’Afrique,’” in Miroir de l’Afrique, by Michel Leiris, edited by Jean Jamin, 873–76 (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996) 875. Milo Rigaud’s book Secrets of Voodoo is first published in French in 1953, and again into English by City Lights Books/Arco Publishing, Inc. in 1969. 15. Leiris as quoted in Jamin’s “Présentation to ‘Message de l’Afrique,’” 875: Coucher à 10 heures et demie. L’orage, qui a éclaté pendant que nous étions au bar et a été peu violent, a un peu rafraîchi l’atmosphère . . . [the bracket and suspension marks are in the original] {Rêve de cette nuit : à la suite de je ne sais quel délit commis à l’égard de la marine militaire, nous sommes condamnés, un compagnon de route et moi, à effectuer notre traversée de retour en France enchaînés (aux fers ?) et à fond de la cale.} 16. Mercier, “Présentation to ‘La Possession,’” 902. The original French is: “renouer avec ce ‘monde intermédiaire’ des possédés. Durant un mois, en 1948, il pilota Michel Leiris en mission ethnographique à Haiti, de cérémonie vaudou en cérémonie vaudou.” 17. Ibid., 902–903. 18. Michel Leiris, “Préface,” in Le Vaudou haïtien, by Alfred Métraux, 7–10 (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1958), 9. Future citation of this text will be written as: “Preface to Métraux.” 19. Mercier, “Présentation to ‘La Possession,’” 908. 20. Leiris, “Croyance,” 923. The original French is: “conformément à la méthode enseignée par Marcel Mauss à l’Institut d’ethnologie, et j’ai été assisté durant ce travail par le lettré abyssin Abba Jérôme Gabra Moussié, délégué du gouvernment éthiopien auprès de la Mission pour l’aider [Marcel Griaule] dans ses recherches.” 21. Barbara Tedlock, “From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation.” Journal of Anthropological Research 47, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 69. 22. Ibid., 83. 23. Ibid. 24. Leiris, “Preface to Métraux,” 7. The original French is: “L’une des qualités majeures de la plupart de ses écrits n’est-elle pas l’impression qu’ils donnent de résulter d’un contact intime et personnel de l’auteur avec la matière, gens ou choses, dont il traite ? Qualité, semble-t-il, assez rare aujourd’hui.” 25. Leiris, “Croyance,” 923–924. 26. See Mark Schuller’s Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

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27. According to Leiris, as in Haitian Vodou, the body possessed is referred to as a horse, which is in turn ridden by the possessing spirit in Michel Leiris, “La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar,” in Miroir de l’Afrique, by Michel Leiris, edited by Jean Jamin, 948–1062 (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996 [Le Plon 1958; Fata Morgana, 1989]), 1042. Future citations will be listed as “Possession et ses aspects théâtraux.” 28. Leiris, “Possession et ses aspects théâtraux,” 951. 29. Ibid., 1047. 30. Ibid., 1049. The original French is: A côté des cas pour lesquels il serait légitime de parler de théâtre joué parce que le mensonge y apparaît prépondérant, il y a des cas où la réalité de la possession n’est douleureuse ni pour l’intéressé lui-même ni pour aucun des assistants et qui répondent à ce qu’on pourrait qualifier de théâtre vécu, autrement dit : un théâtre joué peut-être lui aussi, mais avec un minimum d’artifice et en dehors de toute intention d’en imposer au spectateur. C’est dans la mesure surtout, semble-t-il, où la possession revêt une forme théâtrale propore à frapper l’imagination ou à séduire qu’elle éveille une suspicion, et le caractère litigieux de pratiques spectaculaires tel que la danse et le gurri des possédés paraît bien ne pas échapper à certains adeptes. 31. Ibid., 1047. The original French is: “La faculté surtout de croire en tous ses mensonges,” tel est le don principal que le grand historien romantique Michelet, vers la fin de l’étude qu’il a faite de la sorcellerie en France au Moyen Age et sous l’Ancien Régime, pense pouvoir attribuer à la sorcière. Or si, parmi les faits d’ordres divers que j’ai pu observer en vivant dans l’intimité d’un group de baläzar, il est de nombreux faits relatifs à la possession où la sincérité prête fortement à litige. 32. Ibid., 1044. The original French is: Il est certain en outre que si théâtre il y a dans ces manifestations, c’est un théâtre à qui sa base même interdit de jamais s’avouer tel, vu son étroite intégration à un rituel dont le sens se perdrait si l’on pensait que les êtres mythiques auxquels il se réfère n’y sont pas effectivement mis en jeu. 33. Ibid., 951. 34. See discussion on connections between Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Ruth Benedict, Michel Leiris, and Alfred Métraux’s in chapters 7 and 8 of this book. 35. Arlecchino is a sympathetic devilish character, whereas Pulcinella, a “mask” that represents the liminality between male/female and urban/country. For their part, Seyfou Tchenguer (Abbaté Čängäré) (Leiris, “L’Afrique fantôme,” 592) or Šifärra (Ibid., 624) are warrior Zar. Mälkam Ayyähu, Leiris’s chief informant in Gondar, a woman, is principally mounted by the male Zar Abbaté Čängäré, and so her followers, according to Leiris often call her “mon père Čängär” (Leiris, “Possession,” 967, 984). 36. Leiris, “Possession,” 983. 37. Ibid., 958. 38. I use the spelling that Leiris uses in his homage to Abba Jérôme Gabra Moussié written in 1982–1983, just before Gabra Moussié’s passing: Michel Leiris, “Encens pour Berhane,” in Miroir de l’Afrique, edited by Jean Jamin, 1063–1071 (Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1996), 1067. 39. Mercier, “Présentation to ‘La Possession,’” 908. 40. The original French is: D’une manière générale, il est probable enfin que si le théâtre en tant que tel possède une certaine vertu de katharsis ou “purgation” des passions (moins

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41. The original French is: “Toutefois, avant de taxer les intéressés de mauvaise foi au sens courant de l’expression, il serait injuste de ne pas mettre en cause l’impossibilité fondamentale qu’il y a de faire cadrer exactement les expériences vécues avec les idées reçues par tradition” (Leiris, “Possession,” 1045). 42. Leiris, “Possession,” 966. 43. Ibid., 1047–1049. 44. Ibid., 1045, 1054. 45. Ibid., 1049. 46. Ibid., 1054. 47. Ibid., 1048. 48. Denis Hollier, Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War (Les Dépossédés (Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, Sartre) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997 [1993, Les Editions de Minuit]), 111. 49. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 111, 215. William Seabrook. The photo is: “William Seabrook, “Le Caput Mortuum.” Documents no. 8 (1930), 21. Published with the permission of William K. Seabrook; original copyright holder was William B. Seabrook,” as cited by Susan Zieger, “The Case of William Seabrook: Documents, Haiti, and the Working Dead.” Modernism/Modernity 19.4 (November 2012): 738. Also, see Suzanne Rinne and Joëlle Vitiello, Elles écrivent des Antilles: Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1997). 50. The French is: “Le grand possédé n’est pas seulement guérisseur, mais peut être consulté comme devin, arbitre, directeur de conscience, conseiller. Pour chacune des activités de sa vie—y compris les diverses pratiques médicales—il a un zar particulier, préposé à cette activité” (Leiris, “Croyance,” 942). 51. The original French is: “répondre, de la façon la plus directe et la plus corporelle si l’on peut dire, à ce besoin que ne saurait satisfaire aucune organisation sociale axée sur la production pure et, de ce fait, plus ou moins fermée à l’irrationnel?” (Leiris, “Preface to Métraux,” 10). 52. The full sentence in French is: “les chercheurs à peu d’exceptions près confondant objectivité scientifique et attitude de refus envers ce qui tient à leur personnalité propre” (Leiris, “Preface to Métraux,” 7). 53. Dash, “Le Je de l’autre,” 91. 54. Athanasiou in Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, 17.

EIGHT From Haiti to Brazil, from Herskovits to Métraux Anthropology and Human Rights

The first studies of Haitian Vodou by non-Haitians are important to this book’s study of spirit possession, especially their Haitian Vodou iteration because to understand the political agendas behind funding ethnographic research in Haiti is to understand how (spirit) possession would be read across the decades: primarily as a phenomenon taking place in another “culture,” and following on Trouillot in another “race.” Haiti would fulfill the role of satisfying a research agenda that sought to understand African cultural expressions in the Americas, whereas Brazil would play into an agenda focused on race relations. Both countries would be used by anthropological studies (mostly in the north), and the political agendas behind them, and in so doing, the “ideas” 1 of “Haiti” and “Brazil” would exemplify Trouillot’s “Savage slot.” In the context of how the history of anthropology in Europe and North America have evolved, Melville Herskovits and Alfred Métraux unto themselves provide sites where multiple intellectual histories intersect: scholarship on Vodou and other African-derived sacred traditions; scholarship on Haiti; research on the African diaspora; humanitarian aspirations for anthropology; and contact with varying milieus of anthropological practices: U.S.-American, French-based, Brazilian, Haitian, and Mexican. Taking Herskovits and Métraux as central figures, one American, the other Swiss (with a career in France and UNESCO), I will narrate what might initially seem as rather accidental moments in the ethnography of the Afro-Atlantic. The following chronicle is meant to be supported by the timeline that follows this chapter, which includes other 143

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events taking place simultaneously transatlantically. The facts might seem anodyne, but to my knowledge they have not yet been put together in such a comprehensive way. In so doing, what becomes unavoidably obvious, is the prominent role Haiti played in both U.S.-American and French cultural anthropology. My goal in this chapter is to show that one of the most important common grounds, if not, the nexus between French ethnography and the burgeoning years of anthropological work in the United States was Haiti. As such, I argue that Haiti constituted a significant “agent” in a more general history of cultural anthropology. I use the word “agent” because to speak about “Haiti” is to evoke associations that directly affect an intellectual history of anthropology. As seen above, in the imaginary of many non-Haitians, “Haiti,” for better or worse, serves as a sort of trope, a figure of exoticism. “Haiti” also designates an island geographically close to the United States, which has officially and unofficially occupied Haiti. “Haiti” is also a place whose history in Trouillot’s words has been “silenced,” or in Fischer’s words “disavowed.” 2 As regards philosophical discourse, it is the location of Vodouyizan intellectuals such as mambo Odette Mennesson Rigaud and mambo Lorgina Delorge, Métraux’s “informants,” or Cicéron St. Aude, a houngan who traveled to Paris with Katherine Dunham’s dancing company and whom Deren filmed 3 ; and scholars of Haitian “folk culture” such as Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil, Jean Price-Mars, or Milo Rigaud. Charles Forsdick’s article “‘Burst of Thunder, Stage Pitch Black’: The Place of Haiti in U.S. Inter-war Cultural Production” (2011), whose title makes reference to Orson Welles’s all-black casted Voodoo Macbeth, first produced in 1936 by the Federal Theater Project in New York, takes account of a moment, especially in the interwar period, after the U.S.American official occupation of Haiti, especially amongst American intelletuals, in which there was at once a continued “indulging in seemingly obligatory references to an exoticized Vodou, to zombification, and even (especially but not exclusively in earlier texts) to cannibalism,” but at the same time, also, an intention in “remaking and rethinking inspired in part, counterintuitively perhaps, by the increased contact permitted by the [U.S.] occupation [of Haiti], in part by the rapid socio-political shifts triggered by the Depression.” 4 In The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, Kate Ramsey designates this 1930s moment, a “dramatic turn of U.S. anthropological interest toward Haiti,” one that “warrants further study.” 5 Forsdick traces the attention given to Haiti by American white and black intellectuals, such as Langston Hughes’s journey of “self-exploration” to Haiti in 1931, 6 Alan Lomax’s audio recordings of Vodou song taped upon his visit to Haiti in 1936, C. L. R. James’s “Black Jacobins— both the 1936 play and the 1938 history, 7 Jacob Lawrence’s Toussaint Louverture series of 1937–1938, or William Dubois’ drama “Haiti” (1938). 8 While Forsdick’s concentration is on representations of the Haitian Revo-

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lution, just from the title of Welles’s play it is clear that the context of Vodou remains always close at hand. Most importantly, the 1930s and onward into the twentieth century designate the beginning of a period in which “the anthropological,” is first and foremost a gesture—even if often, as we will see, maladroitly orchestrated—to place “new emphasis not on the exotic but [on] the everyday,” 9 on the “cultures” of those of African descent living alongside white Americans within the United States or in proximity to the United States. BOAS, HERSKOVITS, HURSTON, DUNHAM, AND DEREN But before Breton, Lévi-Strauss, Leiris, Mabille, or Métraux enter onto the scene of the (Afro)-American Atlantic, there are first Boas, probably the most important figure in the early history of American anthropology, and Herskovits, one of the most influential, yet provocatively complex figures of anthropology. In this chapter’s account of the prominent figures to study cultures that normalize possession is Boas’s advisee, Zora Neale Hurston, who, in 1929, under Boas’s mentorship, travels to New Orleans to study “hoodoo.” Boas also serves as the doctoral advisor to Herskovits whose first book, Life in a Haitian Valley (1937), would be based on field research that took place in the summer of 1934, in the last months of the United States of America’s official occupation of Haiti. Outside of strict academic scholarship, the Guggenheim Foundation, which since its establishment in 1925 has always played a decisive role in determining intellectual priorities and trends outside of the academe, in the span of an eleven-year period, awards three American-based women Guggenheim fellowships to study in Haiti: in 1935, Dunham receives the award to conduct an ethnographic study of the dance forms of the Caribbean, especially as manifested in Vodou; in 1936, Neale Hurston receives the award to conduct ethnographic work in Haiti and Jamaica, based on which a couple of years later she publishes Tell My Horse: Voodoo Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938); and, in 1946, Deren receives the award for “Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures,” and to finish work on a project titled: “Meditation on Violence.” Although Haiti is not explicit in the titles, Deren takes her first trip to Haiti in 1947, returning there over the course of the next eight years. Both Deren and Dunham would become Vodouyizan practitioners through initiation, and both would go on to publish amongst the most frequently read books on Haitian Vodou: in 1953, with Vanguard Press, Deren publishes Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, and, in 1969, with the University of Chicago Press, and later with Doubleday, Dunham publishes Island Possessed. Writing in 2008, in his extensive review of Jerry Gershenhorn’s biography of Herskovits, Roy Richard Grinker, professor of social anthropology and human rights at the Elliott School of George Washington University

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explains how the profession of anthropologist is always a “public” one, one not only engaged in the analysis of how peoples and their communities organize themselves, but also a profession upon which both the academic and the general professional sector rely. Grinker explains that Gershenhorn’s biography of Herskovits is essential reading to understanding “contemporary anthropological theory,” 10 and more generally, he explains that anthropology, politics, and personal trajectories are inextricably linked. Grinker writes: First, young anthropologists today struggle, under the banner of “public anthropology,” to make the discipline meaningful to contemporary social issues, often believing that activism in anthropology is a wholly original act. They would do well to learn about people like Leslie White and Melville Herskovits. Anthropology, for them, while different in many ways from the current concept of public anthropology, was nonetheless inseparable from politics. Second, the history of anthropology was shaped as much by personal background and political experience as by intellect. Thus, we should pay careful attention to the way our own work today is informed by who we are as individuals. 11

In a more brazen way, Trouillot corroborates Grinker’s claim that anthropology plays a privileged role outside of the academe, most notably as “an institutional arm of the state abroad as it was at home,” one that rather than being an advisee who revises a government’s agenda, plays the consultant who more often than not is coopted by it. 12 To read anthropology as one of the most political of disciplines in the humanities and the social sciences, especially in the twentieth century, is to better understand how ethnographic work about Haiti, and more specifically, the professional itineraries of Herskovits and Métraux relate to each other, tracing a trajectory that over the middle decades of the twentieth century sees the anthropological study of the African diaspora move south along the Atlantic: from the United States and Haiti, to Brazil. Three specific political concerns inform why Haiti occupied such an important role in the 1930s, and also, why focus on Haiti amongst American and French anthropologists, and those organizations that funded their work, diminished in the three decades that followed. The first is security, especially fortifying the areas that reside in geographical proximity to the United States. The second political concern would correspond to a more international humanitarian agenda. Marcos Chor Maio writes: UNESCO had been established following the catastrophic results of World War II. One of its major goals was to understand the international conflict and its most perverse consequence, the Holocaust. The issue of race was also kept in the forefront of public attention by the persistence of racism, especially in the United States and South Africa, the emergence of the cold war, and the disruption of colonialism in Africa

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and Asia. . . . To this end, UNESCO encouraged in the early 1950s a cycle of studies about Brazilian race relations. 13

The third political agenda stems from the second, as regards how the United States would deal with an extremely volatile and polemical public discourse on race in the years of the Civil Rights Movement. HERSKOVITS AND MÉTRAUX To think through Herskovits’s and Métraux’s research, the professional positions they occupied, their funding sources, and the projects that were funded is to simultaneously understand how Haiti fits into the intellectual history of cultural anthropology, especially as regards studies of race, and more specifically of race as related to the American continents’ Atlantic regions. To illustrate how and why Haiti occupied front row and center of anthropological research on the African diaspora, and why it later became less prominent for American and French anthropologists, I will note significant moments first in the life of Herskovits and then in that of Métraux. I will follow with some conclusions that relate the two men’s biographies to the aforementioned political issues that informed the most active parts of their respective careers. In 1923, Herskovits receives his PhD under Boas’s aegis; just four years later, he establishes the Anthropology Department at Northwestern University; in 1928, he travels to Haiti for the first time with his wife Frances; 14 in the summer of 1934, with his wife, he conducts fieldwork in Mirebalais, Haiti; in 1935, Dunham receives funding from the Guggenheim to work with Herskovits; in 1935, Herskovits begins to correspond with Arthur Ramos, a Brazilian psychologist and anthropologist (again the early disciplinary intimacy between psychoanalysis and anthropology), as regards studies in race relations, funded by UNESCO. Herskovits’s and Ramos’s collaborative dialogue would end with Ramos’s death in 1949. 15 In 1937, Herskovits publishes Life in a Haitian Valley, and in the same year, he offers “Métraux a salary of $2,700 to take up a six-month course at Northwestern,” which it seems that Métraux accepts. 16 In 1941, Herskovits publishes The Myth of the Negro Past in which he clearly states his intention to build “scientific knowledge of what has happened to this African cultural heritage in the New World.” 17 In the same year, Métraux and his wife Rhoda travel to Haiti for the first time, with a letter from Herskovits introducing Métraux to Jean Price-Mars. 18 Upon their visit, and in meeting with Jacques Roumain, so appalled by the persecution of Vodou by the church and government, Métraux and Roumain come up with the idea of establishing the Bureau d’ethnologie, which would be housed by the Haitian state. 19 In 1941–1942, Herskovits conducts fieldwork in Brazil, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, 20 on amongst other topics spirit possession in Candomblé. His collaborations

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in Brazil with Ramos would contribute to the creation of the InterAmerican Society for Black Studies. Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães explains the context: They [Herskovits and Ramos] both took part in this project [i.e., research on studies in race relations, funded by UNESCO] along with Fernando Ortiz, Richard Pattee, Jean Price-Mars, and others, and the project led to the creation of the Inter-American Society for Black Studies, whose headquarters were eventually established in Mexico in 1944. From 1945 their letters dealt with subjects relating to the exchange of books, to the publication of the translation of Herskovits’s book Acculturation. 21

In the United States, in 1948, Herskovits, with funding from the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation establishes the first major program in Africana Studies at Northwestern University. Yet, here, just after the Second World War, Herskovits’s reputation as an anthropologist would be called into question over a series of methodological and political interventions. He would become as J. Cameron Karter describes him the “odd man out.” 22 Already with the publication of The Myth of the Negro Past, his work would come under significant criticism from E. Franklin Frazier, “the most famous black sociologist of the time, who had already published The Negro Family in the United States” 23 in 1939. 24 Frazier “rejected most of Herskovits’s evidence for African survivals in the United States,” or at least he would discredit the “scientific” significance of Herskovits’s research, “while conceding that there were African survivals in language and the arts.” 25 Although Herskovits tried to move beyond the “atomizing focus” of Boasians, who concentrated on studies of specific communities, he nonetheless fell into the trap of creating larger units of measurement, such as “African” or “European,” that would prove to be too generalizing to be useful as categories of analysis. And, while the intention to trace similarities amongst African diasporic communities along the Atlantic was not unfounded, 26 his approach, would be perceived as questionable, by anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Geoffrey Gorer. 27 For example, Herskovits focused on those who seemed overtly “African” or of African descent, and ignored a methodology that acknowledged “cultural integration as many of his contemporaries did”: i.e., the case of white Creoles, who despite their possession of economic and political power, would have absorbed many of the so-called Herskovitsian “African” cultural practices, 28 or the ways in which African Americans contributed in a unique way to American society, as their own cultural group, not as a descendant of Africans. 29 Herskovits’s biggest misstep came in the form of the “Statement on Human Rights,” that he drafted for the Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), “submitted [on the part of the AAA]

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to the Commission on Human Rights” on June 26, 1947, 30 and which “aroused tremendous controversy among anthropologists.” 31 In his biography of Herskovits, Gershenhorn cites Herskovits in the “Statement”: The UDHR, he insisted, must guarantee “the right of men to live in terms of their own traditions.” 32 The debate would revolve around the moral implications of “cultural relativism.” Cultural relativism considers a certain societal behavior as a function of that particular society. In other words, what makes sense for one society might not make sense for another; while societies might be unequal as regards power relations, they are all equal “culturally.” Herskovits’s intention then was to assure that more voices be present at the table that was work-shopping a post–World War II, human rights discourse. To justify his aim, he used the discourse of cultural relativism: that when one society holds or has historically held more political and economic power than another, it should not impose its own societal behaviors onto another society. Yet, just coming out of the Second World War, to apply “cultural relativism” to a discourse of human rights was in a sense to morally condone questionable behavior. The most obvious implication of the danger of integrating cultural relativism into a discourse of human rights could, it would seem, justify morally objectionable practices, such as totalitarianism or racism. As previously discussed in part I, in Global Transformations, Trouillot challenges the very notion of culture as one that is by default a racialized concept. In so doing, he questions whether or not it is possible for cultural relativism to play a neutral role in the negotiations between societies. 33 He writes: In its initial context of deployment, culture is first and foremost an anticoncept. It is inherently tied to race, its nemesis. Culture is race repellent—not only what race is not, but what prevents race from occupying the defining place in anthropological discourse that it otherwise occupies in the larger American society. 34

In other words to evoke “culture” is to evoke “race,” and so “cultural relativism” in a sense must be looked upon as “racial relativism.” In hindsight, considering the context of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, Herskovits’s gesture to propose cultural relativism makes even less sense, for to advocate for cultural relativism might also be to understand racism as an acceptable behavior. While Herskovits’s intention was to assure a more fair representation of the world’s communities in determining the new human rights language, he did not sufficiently work out the implications of applying an anthropological methodological approach to a humanitarian agenda. This event, the questioning of his methodology in The Myth of the Negro Past, and his increased heavyhanded possessiveness over the field he had helped to create, would constitute the beginnings of his weakened position both amongst younger anthropologists and the international community in general.

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For Samuel Moyn despite the concerted efforts after the Second World War to harmonize a discourse of human rights and create initiatives to promote them, it would not be until the latter part of the twentieth century that they would have any veritable import; that is, it wasn’t until the 1970s that the language of “human rights” actually made sense as a political discourse for any of the world’s nations and/or peoples. 35 Following Moyn’s logic, regardless of criticism by anthropologists of Herskovits’s and the AAA’s “Statement on Human Rights,” the discussion around them, especially in the United States, 36 would die out very quickly after the Second World War. In a sense, amongst other reasons, Herskovits’s professional role took a downturn in the latter years of his career, because he was working in a postwar U.S.-American space, that was resistant to really making changes in racial relations, and incapable in its liberal policymaking to integrating “social freedom in the state.” 37 If Herskovits’s monograph was the predominant work by a male, U.S.-American anthropologist on Haiti, Métraux’s 1958 work on Haitian Vodou, which would be translated into English and published by Oxford University Press a year later, would complement Hurston’s 1938 Tell My Horse, Deren’s 1953 Divine Horsemen, and Rigaud’s 1953 Secrets of Voodoo. Notably, though, Métraux’s work would be the other monograph about Haiti written by a male ethnographer. While Herskovits would aspire to a more prominent role in the postwar international community, Métraux, well before his publication of Haitian Vodou, would already occupy a position as a public anthropologist. As previously mentioned, his 1948–1950 work in Haiti would be funded by UNESCO, and in 1950, Métraux would become a permanent member of UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences, and director of research for the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. In the same year, with Herskovits and Roger Bastide, a French sociologist and anthropologist who studied Brazilian Candomblé, Métraux joins forces to support Dunham when she is “denied admittance to a hotel because she was Black” in São Paulo. “This episode of racial discrimination opened a series of congressional discussions about an antidiscrimination law, approved in 1951, the socalled Alfonso Arinos law.” 38 And, like Herskovits, but ten years later in 1951, he would conduct research in Brazil. If in 1947, Herskovits creates controversy over the “Statement on Human Rights,” by 1950, Métraux has secured himself a permanent position at UNESCO. While the two would continue to collaborate, Herskovits’s role on the global scene would diminish while Métraux’s would increase. MOVING SOUTH To contrast Herskovits’s professional biography with Métraux’s shines the light on how anthropological work on the African diaspora changed

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over the decades. For the interests of U.S.-American foreign policy, JeanClaude Duvalier’s regime would make Haiti stable, in the sense that his ascendancy to power assured the United States that Haiti would not become a breeding ground for communism. Also, the volatility of the Civil Rights Movement would shift attention from research on the African diaspora to research on race relations. For the first research agenda, one that equated skin color with “cultural” influences, Haiti would provide the most “obvious” avatar of the preservation of “African” cultural behaviors in the Western hemisphere; while the exigencies of the second research agenda would find more resonance in Brazil, where different “races” supposedly 39 cohabited within the same population. It then becomes clear why research funding moves south from Haiti, to Mexico, and then Brazil. Within such a context, Herskovits’s career could only but fall out of favor. To meander out of this book’s direct engagement with spirit possession as a trope and to look at an intellectual history of how Europeans and U.S.-Americans conducted research in the Western hemisphere’s Black Atlantic sheds light on why Haiti occupied such a central role for an important moment in the twentieth century. To add to this history, the overlapping role between on the one hand, the art and literary scenes, and on the other, the ethnographic/anthropological milieus in the Caribbean, France, and the United States puts Haiti at the center of a moment in time when so many “who’s who” of these various intellectual worlds passed through Haiti. While its role on the research agendas of foreign scholars would take a backseat until the fall of the Duvalier dynasty, and the more recent development of “the republic of N.G.O.s,” it might be argued that that these midtwentieth-century studies of Haiti by non-Haitians would have a significant impact on early anthropology, or at least, in how we perceive the “self” and “other” on a geopolitical scale: Haiti always the most “exceptional” of “exceptions” in the Americas, with this “exception,” following on Trouillot, always tied to “culture,” and thus “race.” NOTES 1. Polyné, The Idea of Haiti. 2. See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995) and Fischer, Modernity Disavowed. 3. Rachel Beauvoir Dominique, “Fond documentaire Odette Mennesson Rigaud: Rapport d’inventaire” (Port-au-Prince, 2005, http://www.ht.refer.org/OMR/ Catalogue_OMR.pdf), 1. 4. Charles Forsdick, “‘Burst of Thunder, Stage Pitch Black’: The Place of Haiti in U.S. Interwar Cultural Production,” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 15, no. 1 (2011): 11. 5. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 165, 329. 6. Forsdick, “‘Burst of Thunder, Stage Pitch Black,’” 12. 7. Ibid., 9.

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8. Ibid., 14. 9. Ibid., 13. 10. Roy Richard Grinker, “The Politics of Knowledge: Julian Steward, Leslie White, Melville Herskovits, and Luca Cavalli-Sforza.” Reviews in Anthropology (37: 2008) 37 (2008): 268. 11. Grinker, “The Politics of Knowledge,” 260. 12. Trouillot, Global Transformations,19. 13. Marcos Chor Maio, “UNESCO And The Study Of Race Relations In Brazil: Regional or National Issue?” Latin American Research Review (http://lasa-2.univ.pitt. edu/LARR/prot/search/retrieve/?Vol=36&Num=2&Start=118) 36, no. 2 (2001): 118–136. 14. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 165. 15. Antonio Sérgio Alfredo Guimarães, “Africanism and Racial Democracy: The Correspondence between Herskovits and Arthur Ramos (1935–1949).” E.I.A.L. Facultad de Humanidades Lester y Sally Entin Escuela de Historia Instituto de Historia y Cultura de América Latina 2008–2009 (Volume 19). http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=237&Itemid=164 (accessed November 1, 2012). 16. Here I am not actually sure whether or not Métraux accepts it, but it seems that he does (Guimarães, “Africanism and Racial Democracy,” http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=237&Itemid=164). 17. Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (New York London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1941) http://archive.org/stream/mythofthenegropa033515mbp/ mythofthenegropa033515mbp_djvu.txt (accessed July 31, 2013). 18. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 211. 19. Ibid., 210, 212. 20. Guimarães, “Africanism and Racial Democracy,” http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=237&Itemid=164 ; and Livio Sansone, “Turner, Franklin, and Herskovits in the Gantois House of Candomblé: The Transnational Origin of Afro-Brazilian Studies.” The Black Scholar 41, no. 1 (Spring 2011): 48. 21. Ibid. 22. J. Cameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 131. 23. Sansone, “Turner, Franklin, and Herskovits,” 48. 24. Ibid. Sansone explains that both Frazier and Herskovits conducted their field work at the same “povo de santo (the members, literally, “people of saint”) of the same Candomblé house of worship in Salvador—the prestigious and ‘traditional’ Gantois terreiro, of the Ketu/Yoruba nation.” In 1942–1943, they would engage in a written debate through the “publication in the American Sociological Review of an article by Frazier followed by a response by Herskovits and a counter response by Frazier” (Sansone 48). 25. Jerry Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits: And the Racial Politics of Knowledge (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 113. 26. Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 131. Herskovits would receive praise from W. E. B. Dubois. 27. Mark Allen Peterson writes in Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millenium (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), 47: “The goal of this project was to do for large-scale societies—particularly nations—what many of these same anthropologists had sought to do in smaller-scale societies: generate holistic statements that are in some way applicable to every member of the society being described.” 28. Series Editor, “Introduction,” in Melville J. Herskovits: And the Racial Politics of Knowledge, by Jerry Gershenhorn, xi–xiv (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), xii. 29. Carter, Race: A Theological Account, 131. 30. Gershenhorn, Melville J. Herskovits, 296. 31. Ibid., 21. 32. Ibid.

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33. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 98, 106, 113. 34. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 100. 35. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), 47. 36. Moyn writes: If, in late wartime and shortly thereafter, rights were simply another way to express a brief social democratic consensus, as time passed they afforded new tools to West European conservatives to signal their distinct identity. America, which had helped drive the global inflation of wartime hopes, retreated from the language it had helped introduce, leaving Western Europe alone to cultivate it. Even there—especially there—the real debate in domestic politics was about how to create social freedom in the state. Yet European conservatism captured the language of human rights, while few others learned to speak it. After a few years had passed, the meanings the idea of human rights had accreted were so geographically specific and ideologically partisan—and, most often, linked so inseparably to Christian, Cold War identity—as to make the fact that they could return later in some different guise a deep puzzle. (The Last Utopia, 47) 37. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 47. 38. Jessé Souza and Valter Sinder, Imagining Brazil (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005): 166, 168. 39. The notion of Luso Tropicalism puts into question the myth of the racial openness of Brazil’s society.

NINE Verger’s Image in Bataille’s Tears of Eros Hollier’s Dispossessed Intellectuals and Vodou Thought

The following section is dedicated to the deployment of one image, and all that might have gone into its usage and placement in the highly disseminated book in which it appears. The image in question is Pierre Verger’s “Sacrifice of a Ram. Voodoo Cult” and it appears in Bataille’s Larmes d’Eros—Tears of Eros, first published in French in 1961 and in English in 1989. The photo is identified by the following text: What a voodoo sacrificer experienced was a king of ecstasy. An ecstasy comparable in a way to drunkenness. An ecstasy brought by the killing of birds. I will add nothing to these very beautiful photographs, which we owe to one of today’s most remarkable and renowned photographers . . . the sacred. We can give no justifiable definition of this word. 1

Although Métraux’s study on Vodou is identified in the caption to the photos, Verger’s name is absent. It remains then unclear who the photographer is. It is only thanks to the earlier book, L’Erotisme (Eroticism: Death and Sensuality), published in French in 1957, that it is possible to attribute the photos to Verger, for Bataille thanks Verger for his photos, and identifies Métraux as “my oldest friend.” 2 That said, it was not until I was in contact with the Fundação Pierre Verger that I discovered that the series was taken in Salvador, Brazil, on the terreiro de Pai Cosme, between 1946 and 1953. 3 Also, the photos in Tears of Eros truncate the presence of the other members in the terreiro, offering a close-up of the “sacrificer” drinking from the ram’s head. Having argued that Haiti served as a major presence in early anthropology, and, in a manner of speaking, as “a stepping stone” to further 155

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Figure 9.1. Photo used by Georges Bataille in Larmes d’Eros—Tears of Eros, first published in French in 1961 and in English in 1989. The photo in Bataille’s text is significantly cropped, or it is a different photo in the same series that offers more of a close-up than the above. Although identified as “voodoo,” the photo was taken in Salvador, Brazil, on the terreiro de Pai Cosme, between 1946 and 1953. Source: Reprinted by permission from Pierre Verger Foundation, with special thanks to Alex Baradel.

research on the African diaspora in the Americas, especially in Brazil, it should come as no surprise that Verger too would be part of the group of acquaintances, traveling to Haiti to visit Métraux. Verger would go on to be a major figure of the European expatriate community in Brazil. As a photographer and self-taught ethnographer, he would become a priest in Candomblé and Yoruba Ifa: his Yoruba name is Fátúmbí; and today there exists the Fundação Pierre Verger in Salvador de Bahia.

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Like Breton, Bataille’s interaction with rites of possession and/or Haitian Vodou would be minimal, but his impact on the intellectual and artistic milieu would not be without significance. His assertive imposition of sexuality, or rather “eroticism” on his readers, would garner the approval of multiple generations of French readers wanting to shake the weight of a conservative European Catholic or Protestant heritage. Yet, in so doing, and unlike his ethnographer compatriots, I argue, he would never really fully understand the damage done in using Haitian Vodou as a “part” of larger arguments about mostly French society. His work, and especially the placing of a series of four images—part of the same series—in the conclusion of Tears of Eros, is emblematic, I claim, of many of the meanings evoked in the trope of “possession” in the French, francophone and U.S.-American, anglophone contexts. In this chapter, first I stay close to the previous conversation around ethnography; then, I expand out from a discussion directly related to “spirit” possession and its ethnographies by scholars foreign to it—that is, not “native” or autochtone to its cultural practice—to return to a more general context of philosophical thought before and after the Second World War. As noted in the introduction, despite intellectual disputes and schisms, most of the personalities discussed in this second part came of age before the Holocaust; and, they would think, write, or deploy the images associated with Vodou both before and after the war. The war, the Holocaust, and the concept of possession are not as we shall see such unrelated concepts, and like the image of the matador, they will be “used” to represent the liminality between not just life and death, but between being and nonbeing. To understand both the particularly distorted exoticist placement of Verger’s photo, “Sacrifice of a Ram. Voodoo Cult” in the section “Voodoo Sacrifice” in the “grand finale” conclusion of The Tears of Eros, and the context out of which such a “crime” of montage could be “committed,” is to ultimately understand most of the meanings ascribed to Vodou “possession” by U.S.-American and French intellectuals from 1929, the year of Seabrook’s publication of The Magic Island. I haven’t spent much time on Seabrook because his work and his discipline, occultism, would fall out of favor. Susan Zieger identifies him as “lay anthropologist, sadist, cannibal, paranormal researcher, dabbler in black magic, alcoholic, sensational journalist . . . Seabrook (1884–1945) specialized in violation.” 4 In fact, Seabrook’s trajectory would reflect that of anthropology, where at the turn of the century, anthropology was just a part of a more amorphous set of disciplines from psychoanalysis to occultism, and by the midtwentieth century, would do everything possible to distance itself from its early associations with anything “other.” (Whether or not anthropology has directly dealt with such a questionable past is another story, one that Trouillot’s Global Transformations deals with, as we saw in the first part of this book.) All to say, even if Métraux politely discredits Seabrook’s work in his own 1958 book on Vodou, for better or worse, and obviously,

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mostly for worse, it was Seabrook’s book that would introduce the word “zombie” to an American readership, with a presentation that focused mostly on the occult practices of Vodou. As mentioned in the introduction, excellent work is already being done on the zonbi, so I will not address it here. DESPITE BEST INTENTIONS . . . While Leiris and Métraux would become aware of the damage that the circulation of such exoticising images would have on perceptions of rites of Vodou or zar possession, Bataille, maybe because of the fact that he was not an ethnographer, maybe because he did not travel as extensively as Leiris and Métraux, would continue to use images of other cultures to illustrate philosophical theses that were meant to be “universally” true, and most importantly “cultivated the art of permanent revolt and volteface.” 5 Like Seabrook, Bataille’s profession would be less well defined than Leiris’s or Métraux’s. Dawn Ades and Fiona Bradley in their description of him for their republication of many of the visual works featured in Bataille’s literary magazine Documents describe him as “numismatist, scholar, pornographer, social critic and idiosyncratric philosopher.” 6 My interest is much less in judging each of the persons featured in the second part of this book, but in understanding how they implement the image of possession. My ultimate intention is to see how these past “usages” of the image of possession leave their trace in current scholarship, and how they might be “used” in a healthier way. In other words, if the American Psychiatric Association until very recently discredited possession as unwholesome, as “not a normal part of a broadly accepted collective cultural or religious practice,” it also recognizes it as a “dissociative trance disorder.” 7 In listing it, the APA deems it as an “unhealthy” phenomenon, but in its description it dismisses it as fake, and most importantly as belonging outside of “American” culture. As Bourguignon points out, possession exists in all cultures, but it’s much more than a matter of what name is attributed to it, it’s also about how it is connoted, how it is accepted or vilified. If it is “not broadly accepted,” why then not just ignore it? The challenge it seems is to deal with that fact that possession is threatening, and, as such must be cured. But where did such a negative image of “spirit” possession and particularly Vodou come from? As we saw in the first chapter, Dayan plays with the idea that Vodou as evil comes directly out of an internalized fear amongst those guilty of a heritage of slavery (and all of the cursed fruits of capitalist culture that emerged from a slave economy). For Dayan, the negative portrayal of Vodou constitutes the specters of a slaveholding past returning to haunt those profiting from a slave system that victi-

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mized creole and bossal slaves; and in its new form, it encompasses a complex prison-industrial system and continues not only to disenfranchise, but literally criminalize, their descendants just for “being” present: case in point the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer in July 2013. While the notion of vampires in the U.S.-American South and New Orleansian “hoodoo” predated Seabrook’s The Magic Island, it certainly did not help that such a well-known book concentrated on just one part of the Vodou thought system: although avidly espousing the occult aspect, his book did nothing to counter a political history that benefitted from demonizing Vodou. It is not coincidental then that Métraux, who conducts his fieldwork at the time of one of the many “anti-superstition” campaigns in Haiti, 8 would clearly make one of his objectives, as we saw above, the “normalization” of Vodou, claiming it as “part of our civilization.” 9 And yet, despite the attempt to navigate away from extreme depictions of Vodou as some sort of devilish cult, one year after Métraux publishes his book, Bataille publishes Tears of Eros, and the first lines of the book repeat the word “diabolical” multiple times, defining the “diabolical” as “essentially the coincidence of death and eroticism.” 10 Bataille, as I will argue further on, is at once completely insensitive to concerns of anthropological integrity, and at the same time, gives it a stage, offering it the most vivid and succinct portrayal of the notion of “possession” in a French postwar context. But before finding the silver lining in Bataille’s portrayal of Haitian Vodou, it is important to fully take stock of the confrontational exoticism that Bataille’s placement of this one image constitutes. Not unlike Seabrook, the deployment of the image of Haitian Vodou in Tears of Eros, not to mention of images taken from other parts of the world, pushes the exotic impulse to the extreme: extreme forms of torture in China (whose usages are also called into question, by the photographer of the image himself) 11 are juxtaposed next to the sacrifice of a ram in a Vodou ceremony. The entire conclusion is a part of a book about the relationship between eroticism and not just death, but extremely traumatic forms of death by torture. That said, as problematic as Bataille’s Tears of Eros is, I can’t omit it from this chapter’s current discussion of how notable French scholars wrote about possession. More importantly, to understand the contexts that informed Bataille’s usage and placement of the image is indicative of why the notion of “spirit” possession, even if grossly and destructively misrepresented, was not completely misunderstood. As Bourguignon’s work reveals, a concept analogous to possession shows up in most cultures; what is at stake is how a culture acknowledges or discredits such a concept. To understand Bataille’s usage of Verger’s image offers a window into understanding why possession has become so exoticised, when in fact, it resonates so

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intimately with the lives and work of the midtwentieth-century megafigures of French thought. Even if Bataille’s work has held an ambivalent place amongst academics, 12 it nonetheless circulates amongst scholars, artists, and more general readers. Like Leiris, Bataille produced avant-garde creative prose, as well as scholarly work in the social sciences and philosophy. Whether in fiction or intended “non-fiction,” like Breton, Leiris, or Seabrook, he sought to question the social behaviors of his own culture by exalting the social mores of nonnorthern cultures. Yet, while Leiris and Métraux would start to understand the dangerous implications of using cursory readings of a cultural fact in one cultural context to make a point in and for another culture, I am not sure that Bataille, Breton, and certainly Seabrook, would ever comprehend the damage they were causing. Bataille’s avant-garde exploration of sadistic eroticism might have discredited him amongst some, such as Breton, 13 but his work on economic theory, notably The Accursed Share (1949), is considered by scholars as anticipating Louis Althusser’s “aleatory materialism” or Agamben’s “non-potentiality.” 14 More generally, Bataille would influence the work of other French philosophers. Gary Gutting writes that Foucault was particularly interested in the materiality of Bataille’s work: Foucault was enthralled by French avant-garde literature, especially the writings of Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, where he found the experiential concreteness of existential phenomenology without what he came to see as dubious philosophical assumptions about subjectivity. Of particular interest was this literature’s evocation of “limitexperiences”, which push us to extremes where conventional categories of intelligibility begin to break down. 15

(It is not surprising, given this chapter’s initial discussion of how French philosophy became interested in the materiality of being that we again find the language of possession, as embodied (i.e., physically material), nor that Foucault would be interested in “limit experiences,” where possession would be an embodied manifestation of the threshold between the earthly and the metaphysical.) ANCIENT GREECE: A (DEGRADING) METAPHOR FOR ANTHROPOLOGY The following is based in large part on Denis Hollier’s Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War, whose French title, Les Dépossédés (The Dispossessed), as I will suggest, is integral to understanding the affinities between midtwentieth-century French thought and a Vodou philosophical system. While Bataille did not necessarily enjoy “official favor in his day,” 16 as seen above, he would influence later generations of French thinkers. That said, in his day he would nonetheless be

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extremely active in fostering intellectual activity: Bataille was a founding member with Roger Caillois and Leiris of the Collège de sociologie; and, he played an important role as an editor of the magazines Acéphale, Documents, and Critique, providing platforms for writers and artists. As such, it is not possible to cast away Bataille’s work as easily as Seabrook’s, nor, despite the questionable usage of his deployment of Vodou, should we, for it is in understanding the modalities of Bataille’s provocations, even if in complete ignorance of more responsible ethnographic methodologies, that we further appreciate how possession functions as a trope in French thought in the midtwentieth century. While specific ethnographers would become aware of how easy, and serious, it could be to misportray the people amongst whom they were conducting fieldwork, the larger theoretical apparatus that contributed to early anthropology, and according to Trouillot that still undergirds anthropology, would, if not set the stage, at least largely resemble the theoretical language of The Tears of Eros. In other words, The Tears of Eros might as well be named The Savage Slot. The Tears of Eros is part of Bataille’s work on “eros” and “thanatos,” as oppositional, but imbricated forces. In fact, when Gutting identifies “the experiential concreteness” of Bataille’s work, he suggests that Bataille’s theoretical nomenclatures stood as much for “concepts” as for “impulses”; that is, for Bataille the bodily—in both its psychoanalytical and physical capacities—drives how the human being 17 acquires and processes knowledge. The fact that Bataille borrows from Greek vocabulary to designate modes of behavior is not unrelated to language that Leiris and Métraux employed in their respective 1958 publications. As seen above, Leiris compares zar possession to comparable practices in Greek antiquity: Let us note that in ancient Greece it is a cult based on possession, that of Dionysius, which is related to the advent of theatrical genres such as the dithyramb [hymn to honor Dionysius, but which would later develop into a minitragedy] and the satirical or silenical [from Dionysius’s companion Silenus, older and more boorish than all the other satyrs] drama. 18

That said, in the last chapter of his book, Métraux, while acknowledging similarities, will refute the comparison: There is, however, an important difference between Voodoo and the cults just mentioned [Dionysus or Demeter]. It is too often forgotten that Voodoo, for all of its African heritage, belongs to the modern world and is part of our civilization. . . . For a true picture it is essential to remember that although the religion of the black peasant is still, to a large extent African, the institutions of Haiti, its political ideals, its notion of progress, are those of a Western state. 19

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The labeling of cultures as “Dionysian” or “Apollonian” in all probability comes from American anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Cultures (1934), 20 and its application of Nietzsche’s distinction in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) between more impassioned impulses to life and more rational ones. For Nietzsche, Dionysian and Apollonian behaviors are always in an engaged, but tense relationship with each other. For Benedict, they’d become a way to identify and categorize different cultures as distinct one from the other. I have argued that both Leiris and Métraux are working to at once qualify Vodou as a “civilized” societal expression, and to render it intelligible to nonacademics. Although they invoke Dionysus, they are, in fact, working against the sort of dichotomizing categorization of peoples that Benedict proposes in her work. That said, Métraux falls into the trap of creating a hierarchy of cultures when he qualifies Haiti as “part of our civilization,” that is “Western,” and not “African.” Here, we are reminded of Dash’s analysis of Leiris’s “lived theater,” one in which the ethnographic self and other are constantly exchanging roles, questioning each other, creolizing. 21 The above associations are eclectic in that they mix anthropological, psychological, and philosophical concerns, but what is nondebatable is that the terms being used are closely related, and all based on dichotomies that oversimplify complex systems. To be sardonic, one wonders if just by referring to a context of antiquity and employing words from ancient Greek, one legitimizes one’s work as credible scholarship. To make the above connections reveals how blatantly racialized, if not racist, academic work that includes discussions of other cultures can be. Even Métraux, who tries so hard to normalize Haitian Vodou for his Western audiences, in so doing, repeats the error of humiliating whatever is designated by the adjective “African.” But, again, my point is not to look back with the hindsight of Trouillot’s work on the “Savage slot” to judge Benedict, Leiris, or Métraux, and more recent scholarship including my own, but rather to explain in what context Bataille would use an image of Haitian Vodou to illustrate his claims and aspirations about humanity. If anthropology was using and/or putting into question a theoretical framework that divided the communities of the world into those that were more “passionate” than those that were more “rational,” then in this framework, Bataille’s work presents itself as potentially groundbreaking. First, his categories of analysis completely bypass the “rational,” in that both the impulse to the erotic and the thrust to the deathly are not considered to be “rational” behaviors. Second, he dumps all of human cultures into the same behavioral basket: all humans, regardless of their culture, engage in the tension between life as nothing more than a desperate attempt to avoid death, and as such are all more or less read by Bataille as erotic. For if sex is the instinct to reproduce life, which both animals and humans share, then the erotic is the propulsion to defer death while all the while being acutely aware of it. One of the problems,

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and there are many which will be examined in the paragraphs that follow, is that Bataille’s montage of the images and accompanying narrative that compose The Tears of Eros are based on the argument that more “primitive” cultures were and are more welcoming of the tension between the erotic and deathly. In this way, Bataille compares Paleolithics who 17,000 years ago painted images in caves that belong to modern-day France to modern-day Africans, Chinese, and Haitians. As such, Bataille’s The Tears of Eros serves as a magnifying class to identify and aggrandize the grave problems with the (early) theoretical supports of many of our studies in the humanities and social sciences. Placed in this context, Verger’s image of Vodou possession only nurtures the cultivation of the “Savage slot.” BATAILLE AND THE “DISPOSSESSED” Let us now turn away from anthropology and the examination of “other” “cultures,” and look at Bataille’s work in a mostly European context. It is not insignificant that the original French publication of Hollier’s book Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War, is titled Les Dépossédés (The Dispossessed). Hollier looks at how the thought of Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, and Sartre is obsessed with “knowing” using other means than the Cartesian notion of human subjectivity. If Cartesian knowledge takes place through reason, which is generated by the brain that in turn activates the mind, and that each human body contains a unique brain, so then the body serves primarily as a receptacle for one unique human subjectivity. Additionally, within this body, the mind is the primary human organ, the master of all other organs. For Hollier, one of the primary concerns of figures such as Bataille, Breton, Caillois, and Leiris, would be to call into question all the ubercapacities attributed to the human brain. The onslaught of industrialization and the interpretation of the First World War as a war of new technologies, larger than any human being or community of human beings, would prove humiliating for a Cartesian thought system that extolled the ability of the human brain to cultivate “enlightened” societies. In the age of industrialization, machines loomed larger than life, and in the era of a First World War driven by unprecedented technology to kill, the mind would prove helpless to the vast power of newer tools and methods. The whole regime of thought from Surrealism to existentialism would call into question all of the aspirations that the ages of the Renaissance and the enlightenment had aspired towards. While many a force in the past had ambushed the human body, the mass destruction on European soil of all classes of European society, would directly affect the bourgeois professions of which librarians such as Bataille or archivists such as Leiris were a part.

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With such traumatizing experiences, and in the full exploration of the early dissemination of Freudian psychoanalysis, in the 1920s and 1930s, in an extremely general sense, the young intellectuals would ponder how the brain failed as an organ to explain a human being’s experience, and some, such as Bataille, would strive to find variables, besides the capacity to reason, to continue to distinguish the human being from other animal life. Given the influence of German phenomenology on the French intellectual scene, they would also not only think about how the mind might not be the only faculty with which “to know” the world. It no longer was a question of knowing thyself to know the world, but rather, a question of not knowing thyself to better apprehend the world. In other words, knowing would move outside: outside of one’s own mind, outside of human experience experienced as personal, outside of one’s own culture, outside of the knowable. The idea was that subjectivity was molded by much more than a human’s capacity to think, and in fact, knowability, consciousness of the world, could very well not be human at all. In this sense, drawing Hollier’s original title, the consciousness of the world, the knowing of the world, for figures such as Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, and Sartre, is experienced as a sort of “dispossession,” for it is this generation living during and after the World Wars that experiences the futility of reasoning, that finds itself “dispossessed” of the faculty to understand the world through the mind, and at a loss, embarks upon experiments to determine how else a being acquires consciousness and/or perceives the world. In these earlier years, as Breton’s first Haitian lecture would indicate, the counterinsurgency against the supremacy of reason would be infused with the rebelliousness of youth, the hopefulness contained in the innovations of the avant-garde. Dadaism, Italian Futurism, and early Surrealism were playful, “ludique.” For them, especially the first two, anarchy and violence were sources of creativity that would not only hold the Cartesian system of reason and the societies that extolled them accountable for their hypocrisies, but also would erect new and better systems of society. Hollier traces the work of those scholars who mostly stayed in Paris during the Second World War. He follows the evolution of their thought in the interwar period and during the Second World War, characterizing it as an extremely confusing time, for all those witnessing an ever increasing institutionalizing of fascism in Europe. Hollier recounts an intellectual history of how these literary figures would graft their disavowal of the Cartesian order onto a complex era trying to at first make sense of what was happening first in Italy, Germany, and Spain, and later, in the Soviet Union, 22 and would then respond to the increased urgency to “engage” in such a way so as to change the course of events as they were taking place. Obviously, for all, the regret to have not acted differently, or done more, whether openly articulated or admitted, would be palpable in the

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prominent role that the notion of “littérature engagée” would play in the postwar intellectual scene. PHILOSOPHY AND ACCOUNTABILITY For Hollier, the sprawl of fascism across Europe in the 1930s would not only dispossess Europe, and especially France, of its democratic ideals, but for those already disenchanted by Stalinist communism, and for those such as Bataille, Leiris, and Sartre, who mostly remained in Paris during the Vichy government, the continuation of an earlier, less wrought avant-garde, rebellious, and mostly socialist agenda would find itself particularly “dispossessed.” Here, borrowing from Hollier, I am implementing the word “dispossession” as unrelated to the context of “spirit” possession. Before returning to a more direct discussion of how Hollier’s history of intellectual thought in France “under the threat of war” relates to “spirit” possession, drawing and informed by my readings of Jay’s Downcast Eyes and Eric Matthews’s Twentieth-Century French Philosophy, 23 I look at the work of Bataille and Sartre through the very general notion of possession in many of its philological contexts, but not necessarily as related to Leiris’s or Métraux’s texts on “spirit” possession. In his chapter on Caillois, Hollier writes: Indeed, sexuality functions as a modality of epoch, as a way of bracketing off the self and subjectivity. A way of evacuating oneself, expelling oneself. The best of all possible worlds is thus a world in which what is forbidden also turns out to be impossible. Pleasure has to be the other’s. In fact there is not pleasure but the other’s. One never enjoys in the first person. If I were to give myself over to pleasure, I would lose myself; it would not leave me, Caillois says, “in possession of myself.” Thus pleasure can never be mine. And it is precisely in order to avoid the expropriation of self through pleasure that Caillois’s strong men want only a pleasure that would clearly not be their own. 24

The first part of Hollier’s citation may be read in context of the refusal to exalt the self; it’s as if this generation of intellectuals has tired of putting man at the center of existence, as primary engine of knowledge production. The second part of the citation nods towards a sort of self-flagellating choice to exist in step with the extreme traumatisms of the times. If “possession” represents an “expropriation of self through pleasure,” then for Caillois it is preferable to be dispossessed, even if pleasure and dispossession cannot cohabitate. We are a far cry here from Bruckner’s criticism of American and European bourgeois societies in “the second half of the twentieth century, [when] Europe was characterized by a feverish enthusiasm and inordinate optimism in which even mentioning misfortune was considered old-fashioned, not to say obscene.” 25 Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, and Sartre are part of the generations preceding a postwar

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prosperity, those that had to deal directly with their own insufficient actions or inactions, those who neither belonged to the category of “victim” nor “perpetrator.” If one of Bataille’s books is titled Guilty, it is because all of literature should be literature that “pleads guilty.” 26 Yet, there is a tension between rejecting the wholesomeness of the Cartesian subject, one that is capable of taking responsibility for her/ himself, and the association of guilt with amoral or criminal activity. On the one hand, these intellectuals sought to desperately experiment with new forms of identity formation. On the other hand, most of these same figures objected to the rise of fascism in Europe. It was and still is far from clear how these two projects could not contradict each other, for, to cast away the life of reason, and with it that of the Cartesian mind, is also, in a sense to deny the possibility for accountability, or at least an answerability that associates a person with her/his acts. In a French intellectual space haunted by a Christian and enlightenment cultural history, as well as the more contemporary crimes of a Vichy government complicit with a Nazi agenda, or Stalinist totalitarianism, it would often seem that a philosophical, literary, and/or aesthetic agenda would not be sufficient in countering the violent despotism that exterminated millions of beings. While into the 1930s, it might have seemed plausible to do away with a traditional notion of accountability, after the Second Word War, philosophers such as Arendt, Bataille, Camus, Fanon, and Sartre would grapple with creating correspondences between the philosophies that they’d grown up on, and the urgency of rendering accountable. Until now, I have not yet spoken of either Arendt or Fanon, but I think that to bring them briefly into the conversation about the context that birthed Bataille’s Larmes d’eros, helps to understand the late 1950s and early 1960s as a time in which various discursive spaces began to overlap. As seen above, the decades of the 1950s and 1960s were populated by intellectuals who had spent the time before the Second World War working to probe and revise the “age of reason,” and the bourgeois societies that emerged from it. After the war, these same intellectuals would grapple with their own potential complicity in the horrors of the Holocaust. For example, Hollier brings up the controversy over the Collège de France, in which Carlo Ginzburg in a 1989 article titled “Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil,” accuses the Collège de France and its “vicinity,” and here I quote Hollier quoting Ginzburg, of an “extremely equivocal attitude towards Fascist and Nazi ideologies.” 27 Further on, Hollier writes, “The ambiguities of the College are not a cover for anything. They are real ambiguities. As such, as ambiguities, they are at the heart of what the Collège was about.” 28 Hollier’s entire project is to provide a detailed intellectual history of how the preeminent figures of French thought in the 1930s and 1940s processed, and then, came to realize the unprecedented fantastical sad-

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ism of Nazi fascism and the large-scale hypocrisy of Stalinism, and in the late 1940s and 1950s, wrote about it afterwards. Although Hollier prefaces his book asking, “How to write after Auschwitz?,” his book deals with how “[n]ot all silences are alike.” 29 Hollier suggests that the entire era of the rise of fascism was marked by a space in which “silence has become generalized.” 30 In a sense, Hollier is dealing with the issues that Hannah Arendt confronted in her 1961 articles on the Adolf Eichmann trials, which were later published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). Arendt’s New Yorker articles met with scandal because she not only identified bureaucracy as bearing the hallmark of evil, but also admitted the role of certain leaders of the Jewish community, who reported to Eichmann, as being complicit to the Nazi cause. In combining journalistic reportage with philosophical analysis, Arendt found herself confronted with the same issues that the Dadaists and the early Surrealists were fighting against: the danger of a bourgeois order, informed by “reason.” She is delving into the polemic space between trying to understand how something is, and judging whether or not it could have been avoided: the difference between science and morality, the tension, if we return to Herskovits’s “Statement” to the United Nations, is one between “cultural relativism” and “human rights.” On the one hand, Arendt, Hollier, and even Herskovits are concerned with what it means to be an individual involved in the societal momentum leading up to an event. On the other hand, their critics privilege what it means to judge both the event and the actions of individuals associated with the event. In other words, Arendt, Hollier, and Herskovits interrogate the difference between being swept up in a movement, being a part of, only perceiving parts of a forward motion towards a crime, as opposed to seeing, with hindsight, the more holistic “Event” of the Holocaust. Yet, especially in the case of Arendt and the intellectuals about whom Hollier writes, there is an increased need to understand how they themselves or those close to them might have been complicit. Moreover, their interrogations would force them, maybe not explicitly, to revisit the ideas that they had deemed progressive and even revolutionary before the war. VIOLENCE, ANTICOLONIALISM, AND HUMAN RIGHTS The role of violence in resistance to the sociopolitical order would follow a problematic trajectory from the years preceding the World Wars and into the first decades of anticolonialism. Hollier explains how in keeping with a Marxist agenda, where “criticism as a weapon will never replace criticism by way of weapons,” 31 and as such, violence as culture, would be espoused by fascists and nonfascists alike. 32 More importantly though, as Hollier shows, violence, or at least the solidarity amongst soldiers

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engaged in struggle, would be generative of something greater, “fraternity.” And, most importantly, such communal insurgency, Hollier explains, leads to “transcendental consciousness.” 33 The idea of violence as a phenomenological tool, as one that would allow man to get out of his person, to allow his consciousness to detach from his ego, so that his specific consciousness might join in the more collective consciousness of a fraternity of men, with hindsight seems utopian. Depestre in an address pronounced in the context of a 2005 UNESCO event and published as an essay titled “Sartre in His Fraternity” sheds light not just on the inconsistencies between violence and fraternity, but also traces the complex history that undergirds violence’s relationship to fraternity. Depestre writes: In 1962, when I met Sartre in Moscow, I had just read Les Damnés de la terre. It was tempting to ask the writer of the preface whether it was reasonable to talk about the dual nature of violence in history. A violence that brought about civility in human relations—and which in the end was progressive—and a violence that was just barbarism. In the 2005 context, all possible variants of violence appear one after another on our screens, from the atrocious 9/11 massacre via the day-to-day violence of suicide attacks, to the upsurge of torching of cars and nursery schools by juveniles. What relationship is there between fraternity and the various levels of terrorism? . . . In March 1980, a month before he died, when he was questioned on the same topic by Benny Lévi in Le Nouvel Observateur, he confessed that to tell the truth “he did not clearly see the connection between violence and fraternity.” 34

In the end, Depestre does not ask Sartre to account for whether or not there might be two types of violence; instead, he explains that he has noted that “[i]n the maze of a voluminous bibliography” of Sartre’s work, Depestre: checked the number of times the enlightenment philosopher’s third utopia appears, starting with the title of a study on the thinker or the artist. Not once, from 1945 to 2001. It is as if the sun of fraternity never shone on the Herculean labours of the little man of Paris, who experienced the horrors and marvels of the 20th century till his strength was exhausted, always the legendary hero of culture and freedom. 35

Depestre’s 2005 talk suggests that Sartre had figured it out, he’d realized the ridiculousness of a prewar philosophy that exalted violence, that “the common gulfs that fraternity and terror have continued to deepen pitilessly in the history of cultures and civilizations.” 36 But, for Depestre, it is precisely Sartre’s solidarity to Marxism and to anticolonialism that would force him to refrain from contemplating nonrevolutionary solutions. Depestre joustingly writes, “The business is phenomenally complex,” and follows with a reference to nonviolence as “the Himalayan peak which the honour of the human race will be increasingly required to measure

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itself against.” 37 He is putting into question an entire philosophical tradition, that attempted for decades to match a phenomenological inquiry to a Marxist agenda. Even more astutely, Depestre is suggesting that had Sartre called into question the utility of violence as a revolutionary force, he would have been at risk of speaking against the anticolonial struggles that took place after the Second World War: such in fact was the basis of the schism between Camus and Sartre in 1952. Depestre’s essay underscores the ambivalence surrounding Sartre’s relationship to violence as redemptive and corresponds to Hollier’s accounting of how inextricably linked an adulation of aggression was to the aesthetic and philosophical aspirations of French writers of the 1930s and early 1940s, such as Caillois, Husserl, Malraux, or Sartre. What is clear is that violence in both the political and personal realms would play a primary role as a tool for liberation, whether political or personal. In this way, Arendt, Fanon, and Sartre would have in common that they would try to apply abstract and often ephemeral erudition of philosophy to real political struggles, with real weapons, real killers, and real victims. But, such, in a sense, was the aspiration of phenomenological thought, to take philosophy out of the Cartesian mind and place it not only in the body, but in all that was existent: the “transcendent ego” to be first and foremost a material one. And, yet, the fact would still remain, the Holocaust happened. Read alongside Hollier, Depestre’s seemingly lighthearted analysis of Sartre’s relationship to the concepts of “fraternity” and “violence” reveals that the question for Sartre, in Hollier’s words, wasn’t so much, “How to write after Auschwitz?,” 38 but with Depestre’s insight, the question needs to be expanded: “How to write after Auschwitz, but, during the period of the first anticolonial struggles?” As Depestre shows, Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth and its enormously influential role in the anticolonial struggles the world over, would only further complicate the extremely tainted relationship between fraternity and violence. To question the dangerous complicity between violence and fraternity that led to the Holocaust might have, Depestre suggests, undermined the anticolonial struggle. Read in this light, Camus’s rejection of violence as a useful tool, or Césaire’s decision to departmentalize Martinique, might be seen as post-Holocaust responses to choosing human rights over a Marxist agenda. Both, unlike Sartre, would leave the Communist party: Césaire in 1956, 39 and Camus, perceived as a Trotskyite, was expelled from it in 1937. In his study of the history of human rights, Moyn titles a chapter “Why Anticolonialism Wasn’t a Human Rights Movement,” explaining that for “Vietnamese anticolonialist Ho Chi Minh,” 40 “the utopia that still mattered most was postcolonial, collective liberation from empire, not individual rights canonized in international law.” 41 Moyn writes, “colonial subjects were painfully aware that Western ‘humanism’ had not been kind to them so far.” 42 Moyn’s one-sentence articulation sums up not

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only the centuries of slavery and exploitation from which the entire Western European enlightenment project silently fueled itself; Moyn’s words also, in less playful terms than Depestre’s, whip the rug out from under Western leaders’ pretense to erect better societies, especially in colonial spaces that should no longer be of their concern. Most importantly though, besides the anomaly of Mahatma Ghandi, it was anticolonialism’s espousal of violence, which matched the continuation of a Marxist agenda, that most fervently pitted an anticolonialist agenda against that of an emerging human rights one, one that would draw on a rhetoric of nonviolence. Moyn explains: The general infiltration of Marxism into anticolonialism, which increased after the mid-1960s, did not change the exclusionary equation, and a self-stylized “humanism” tolerant toward violence prevailed. 43

Sartre’s dedication to both Marxism and anticolonialism, but at the same time, his upbringing as a phenomenologist, along with his visibility as a public intellectual, would make of him a figure that lurks in the sidelines of any intellectual history of twentieth century thought, including one on what spirit possession meant for a French public sphere. To mention Sartre, is then, especially in a book dealing with the trope of possession, to deal with Sartre in all of his moments. And, in order to understand the relationship among possession, “spirit” possession, and especially Vodou spirit possession in the context of French critical theory, it has been necessary to integrate what are often considered separate intellectual histories: a purely “français de souche” philosophical context; a discussion of the early decades of anthropology’s gradual divorce from psychoanalysis; the circulation of Hegel’s, Husserl’s, and Heidegger’s work amongst French and francophone intellectuals, and the subsequent “declension” of their work across French intellectual movements and circles; the overwhelming shock of the emerging accounts of the Holocaust’s horrors; the problematic relationship between Marxism, Stalinist “Communism,” and alternative socialist movements; and finally, the emerging context of anticolonial struggles, itself using as one of its manifestos Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, also originating out of a FrancoMarxist-psychoanalytical philosophical context. PHENOMENOLOGY AND POSSESSION Yet, before turning back to Bataille’s deployment of Verger’s “Sacrifice of a Ram. Voodoo Cult,” as it appears in Bataille’s Larmes d’Eros, one last task remains, which is to understand how Bataille’s and Sartre’s work more directly engages the notion of possession. There still remains to be understood, what Hollier means when he titles the 1993 French version of his book Les Dépossédés. Just the fact that Hollier would completely

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change the title from the 1997 English version is indicative not just of the discomfort that an American audience might have in imagining the “silences” of writers such as Bataille, Caillois, or Sartre in regards to the Nazi order, but it is also suggestive that the notions of “possession” and “dispossession” play a particular role in a francophilological context. When Hollier explains that Caillois, and an entire “epoch” sought out sexuality as a “way of evacuating oneself, expelling oneself,” 44 he is referring to a desire to dissociate “consciousness” from the “ego.” 45 But, still in the same gesture by which Hollier analyzes an entire era’s desire to expel itself, he also explains that Caillois wants to remain “in possession” of himself. So what is this phenomenon that wants at once to be in possession of oneself, but also dispossess itself of itself? As introduced above, it is a generation that rejects a Cartesian subjectivity, and is looking to relocate the subject. If subjectivity is how a being takes account of its own beingness, how the being becomes conscious of the world, then Bataille, Caillois, and Sartre want to take account of spaces besides just the ego where consciousness of the world is produced. So to “dispossess” oneself under the tenets of a Cartesian order is only to be better in possession of how knowledge is produced in an alternative, “phenomenological” order. If phenomenology is concerned with the more concrete expressions that take place on and around the life of the human body, and especially ones that allow an individual mind to transcend its own receptacle, to join itself to other life forces, such as “fraternity,” then to be in “possession of oneself” is to transcend oneself so as to exist in the world in an increased “fraternity” to others. In his analysis of Sartre’s adaptation of Heidegger’s work, notably in La Nausée—Nausea, first published in 1934, Hollier explains that Sartre introduces the idea that “there is” consciousness, rather that “I am” consciousness. It is not out of the question that the “there is” sequence in Nausea might be attributed to Sartre’s desire to take up Corbin’s [Henry Corbin, who translated Heidegger into French in 1931] linguistic challenge and force the French language to do the impossible, that is, compel its grammar to produce the equivalent of the German impersonal. Wo ich war, soll es warden. 46

It is easy to see how French intellectuals bathing in such discussions of “purging that eliminates all subjectivity” 47 or “evacuating oneself, expelling oneself” 48 would find the imagery of spirit possession of interest. Even though Sartre himself does not dedicate any work to it, I have chosen to reintroduce a discussion of spirit possession in the Vodou context because a comparison of the Sartrian phenomenology with Vodou ritual enables us to see how the two systems are not so foreign to each other. For scholars acculturated to the supposed secularity of scholarship,

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to the academic practice that the study of Vodou belongs to the disciplines of anthropology or religious studies, such a comparison between Sartre’s evocation of “consciousness” and Vodou’s articulation of the gwo-bon-anj rings as uncomfortable. And yet, if a character such as Anny in Sartre’s novel can be read as illustrative of existential philosophy, so too, can and should Vodou ritual. What spirit possession does is at once “purge” an individual of her/his own subjectivity, and at the same time, it creates a space where others become witness to the person’s possession by a spirit. In other words, witnesses relate and tell the story of the moment of possession, of someone’s lost subjectivity; thus, creating an interdependence between on the one hand, the person purged of her/his subjectivity (i.e., the person possessed); and on the other, the persons who are witnesses of the purging. In the Sartrian occurrence, it seems that the experience of purging the notion of the “I,” of consciousness belonging to a unique person’s subjectivity, is an experience of extreme isolation. 49 For Sartre, then, the purging of subjectivity implies nonrecognition, assumes that all “I”’s live ultimately in an extreme state of alienation. In spirit possession, another’s “I” might be purged, but it requires an entity to recognize that the person possessed is being temporarily liquidated. The fact that others recognize the person is being possessed, in a Sartrian sense, then would deny that purging is really taking place, for as long as a person can emerge from the state of possession to reenter a discursive space of dialoguing individuals, where individuals can situate themselves to fill the roles of pronouns such as “I” and “you,” in the Sartrian sense, there is no real purging going on. Breton might name this difference between Vodou and Sartrian purgings as the difference between the religious and the secular, and maybe he is right. Regardless, the problem of the Sartrian situation is that it writes suffering off as nonsuffering, or absorbs all suffering into the absolutism of the immense suffering of the “deprivatization of existence.” 50 But written in 1932, and with its definitive edition finalized in 1938, Nausea is composed well before Europe understood the gravity of the Nazi experience: it is not the violences of the first war that call the convictions of individual thinkers into question, it is the Second World War. One wonders if in a post-Holocaust and post-Hiroshima world, Sartre could have written about how Anny doesn’t really suffer “in the first person.” What I am trying to get at here, is that maybe, Vodou grasps the philosophical aspiration of Sartrian existentialism, without at the same time, denying the body, and the various subjectivities that enter in and out of it. If Vodou possession comes out of the context of the multiple traumatisms of slavery and neocolonial dispossessions, it has had to engage directly with extreme suffering. In other words, maybe the judgment call on legitimizing a cultural act, whether Sartre’s novel or Vodou ritual, should not be about determining if it is of the philosophical or religious

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order, of the scientific or of the sacred domain, but instead, maybe it should be about how well it truly reflects human experience. In a European bourgeois order that was suffering on a massive scale, it would make sense that something like Vodou possession would resonate, even if uncomfortably, with French thinkers such as Bataille or Leiris. Another title for Hollier’s book could be “never existing in the first person.” In other words, before the Holocaust, Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, and Sartre sought to reduce the importance of the human mind and its ego. In fact, to expel it seemed the most magnanimous, the least selfish of endeavors. If the Renaissance man and his enlightenment descendants were obsessed with their own selves, then a better humanity would take place when men took inventory of the fact that in the Hegelian masterslave dialectic, they too might be “slaves” to something else, and in its Marxist iteration, they might give up their individual egos to something bigger. Hollier’s “dispossessed” were, yes, dispossessed by a confusing era of a rising totalitarianism on both the political left and the political right, but most importantly their philosophical aspiration was to dispossess themselves of a previous ontological order and allow it to be repossessed by other forces. HEADLESS OR “DIVINE HORSEMEN” In this context of the 1930s and early 1940s, the figure of the “acéphale,” from the Greek akephalos, meaning headless, comes to represent the ultimate visual for an intellectual dialogue that was engaged in revising what it meant “to be” not just a person, but a “being,” whose consciousness was constructed by more than just the brain, and engaged with much more than the life of reason. Bataille also edited an art/literary magazine of the same title from 1936–1939, but in the earlier magazine Documents, as seen above, Bataille, in publishing Seabrook’s photos alongside Leiris’s initial writings around what would become L’Âge d’homme (Manhood), already plays with the idea of headlessness: Leiris turns Seabrook’s photos into a set of peculiar stations of the Cross, associating them with a mystical Arabic narrative that culminates in a moment of terror: a dervish who was expecting to see the face of God finds himself confronting “his own face.” . . . The images of headless women are formative of the function of the “I.” These photographs of a head that does not see itself establish the paradoxical matrix of a relation to the self. According to Bataille’s equation, man is what he is lacking: thus it is the absence of a head that broaches autobiography. The subject of autobiography is not the one who stubbornly insists on effacing the other, but the one who loses face, who in the depths of himself encounters the faceless other, recognizes himself in the without-self of the third person. 51

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To look at oneself in the mirror, to write an autobiography, constantly trying to purge itself of the first person, trying to write itself through the varying possibilities of the third person, are forms that point to the acéphale, which for Hollier in speaking of Leiris’s project in Manhood is “A castrating mimesis: the mirror cuts. I recognize myself in the mirror that reduces me to my head,” 52 where the women in Manhood “are made into muses for the elocutionary inspiration for the autobiographical caesura; they allow the first person to detach itself; they allow the subject to expose itself as a self-that-is-dying,” 53 an “effacement of the first person before the third.” 54 Possession in Vodou, that is “the crise de loa—that moment when the god [spirit] inhabits the head of his or her servitor” 55 designates the “mounting” of a person’s body (“the horse”) by a spirit (“the horseman”), and it is the moment in which a terrestrial human person’s mind is occupied by the subjectivity of another being, the spirit or ancestor, for there are hundreds of lwas, some are common figures recognizable to all practitioners of Vodou everywhere (i.e., the lwas Ezili Dantò or Bawòn Samdi) and some are specific to a community (i.e., a specific ancestor). More technically, to better understand how the epistemology of Vodou possession can be conceived as analogous to that of a phenomenological philosophical agenda, let us now look more closely at the modalities of possession as articulated in Vodou. Réginald O. Crosley writes: In Haiti, the components of man are known as kò kadav, gro [gwo] bon anj, and ti bon anj, which correspond to the body, the semedo, and the selido of the Dahomeans and the body, the moyo, and the mfumu-kutu of the Bantu or Bakongo. In Dagaraland, Burkina Faso, we have the body, a soul or body double called sié, and a third component which is a spirit or a God. 56

For a Vodouyizan, both the gwo-bon-anj and the ti-bon-anj are manifestations of a person’s soul; however, the gwo-bon-anj corresponds more closely to a Christian concept of soul and the Freudian concept of psyche, and the ti-bon-anj to personality. Since in Vodou “the energy of matter is common to all living matter,” then we may think of the gwo-bon-anj and the ti-bon-anj as parts of a totality. 57 The gwo-bon-anj is an element of the universal life force, or the supreme God of Vodou, Bondye. Desmangles describes the gwo-bon-anj as follows: The first compartment . . . is the immortal, cosmic spirit of Bondye, which is manifested in the body . . . . It is a life-force, an internal dynamism planted within the body that serves as its shell. It derives its subsistence from, and is an offshoot particle of Bondye; it is sustained and molded by the same “stuff” from which creation flows. 58

And, here, it is important to point out that Bondye is not as personified a figure as “God” in a Christian context; Bondye is a much more amoebic concept, as Desmangles indicates a “life force.” In contrast, the ti-bon-anj

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“is personality, conscience, the moral side of one’s character . . . it is that element in a person which is the physical manifestation of his or her gwobon-anj.” 59 Both Desmangles and Deren explain that one can imagine them as twins in which the gwo-bon-anj is “the metaphysical double of the physical being [or ti-bon-anj].” 60 The ti-bon-anj as “physical being” is the individual personality that performs actions in society. The above description of the tripartite conception of the human in Vodou cosmology not only emphasizes “the non-material components of the person—that is, his or her two souls,” 61 but also draws attention to the cohabitation of various modes of consciousness. To the two souls that reside within the human body, during the moment of possession, a third resident manifests itself, the lwa, which traverses the human body displacing either the gwo-bon-anj or ti-bon-anj that resides within the carnal body, the kò kadav, and the lwas too are part of the larger fabric of “life force” that is Bondye. In a sense, drawing on Leiris’s employment of a theatrical lexicon, but limiting the platform to that of the human body, the kò kadav becomes a proscenium, a canvas, across which varied voices—ti-bon-anj, gwo-bonanj, lwa—leave their imprint. Regardless of whether one is a Vodouyizan or not—whether one believes or not in the spiritual power of the three phenomena—the three manifest themselves as distinct narrative voices that play themselves out on the stage that is the human body. If for Leiris and Karen McCarthy Brown there is a theatrical aspect to possession in which the body acts for observers, I would also propose that this body is itself a stage on which various phenomenological entities perform. By phenomenological actor, I mean an entity—in this context the ti-bon-anj, gwo-bon-anj, or lwa—that speaks in its own right, that represents its own individual subjectivity, or in Hollier’s terms, “consciousness.” In this way, the kò kadav becomes a place: a place that is traversed, a place occupied by various entities, some denizens that are displaced (gwo-bon-anj and ti-bon-anj) and those that invade and dislodge (the lwa). As such, possession in its reenactment serves in a “healing” capacity, a topic to which I will later return in the last chapter. For now, I emphasize that in the midtwentieth century when Western Europe would undergo a fragmenting of its designated nation-state spaces, a displacement of persons, and a death toll unlike any it had seen since the French Revolution, it is not surprising that intellectuals would seek out a philosophical system that might be analogous to Vodou. Only they would not identify it as healing, although Breton comes close to articulating an epistemology of healing when he compares the Surrealist exercises of automatism to Freudian psychoanalysis. Instead, Bataille especially, would deal in a space of “guilt,” where the most to which humanity might aspire would be a nonhypocritical espousal of the “devilish” aspects of being human: the instinct of humanity to be “erotic” because of its even more underlying instinct towards death.

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And, again, I want to emphasize that the only way to see how Vodou is analogous to a phenomenological project is to let go of the primal role academic scholarship places on the binary that posits the religious against the secular, as Breton does in his first “Haitian lecture.” Additionally, the work of showing how “postmodern” Vodou is has already been done by Dayan in Haiti, History and the Gods (1995). My interest here is to specifically focus on how the phenomenon of possession is analogous to the literary and aesthetic aspirations of those thinkers who surrounded Bataille in his work over the decades: how does a Vodou cosmology put into practice, and I intentionally reuse Hollier’s terms, a systematic “evacuation” of the “first person,” so that the “consciousness” of the physical person that in a Cartesian system serves as domicile for this mind-consciousness may engage with “experiences” outside of it, or not just limited to its “mind”? The words Hollier uses to speak of Bataille’s, Caillois’s, Leiris’s, and Sartre’s aesthetic and literary projects, I argue, resonate with a Vodou philosophical system. But, it is only possible to accentuate these similarities if we let go of the imperative to be “scientific,” and most importantly to not be religious. In fact, as Ginzburg’s indictment of the Collège de France suggests, part of his criticism is that the Collège was interested in researching “the sacred,” and as such would find a topic that was comfortably “ambivalent” in a time that required much more clear political engagement. 62 That, said, as mentioned above, given the communal aspect of Vodou; the fact that a figure of wisdom—the mambo or houngan—presides over a ceremony in which one or more possessions usually occur; and, that a Vodou ceremony includes not just possession but both an onlooking community and a moment in which the specific possession is interpreted for the community, it is possible to understand how Vodou creates a space of “accountability,” in that the community takes account of what a given possession means for a community at any given moment in time. Instead, the figure of the acéphale, especially in Bataille’s work, signifies rebellion towards a Cartesian system. In Hollier’s analyses, it is especially Leiris, in his autobiographical endeavors, who works the figure of the acéphale as an analytical space, but again, this work is “auto,” it is Leiris decomposing himself and analyzing his own decomposition. It is maybe Breton’s experiments with automatism which come closest to creating the community that supports the moment leading into and out of the “crise.” THE RISKS OF MONTAGE Holding on to the primacy of “guilt” and solitude in the space that surrounded Bataille’s aesthetic production, and having briefly presented how Vodou places the emphasis on healing and a sense of shared accountability for possession, I am now able to return to Bataille’s deploy-

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ment of the image of the sacrifice of the ram in a Vodou ceremony. The sacrifice of an animal in the context of a Vodou ceremony is done to honor a particular lwa or set of lwas. It is difficult to know exactly to what context the image belongs: neither the photo nor the captions to the photo offer it a context: in fact as seen at the beginning of this chapter, it seems the captions associate the image with Haiti rather than Brazil where the photo was most probably taken. Without this information, it is difficult to understand how Verger’s photo of the sacrifice of the ram functions in its original context. We are then left to understand the image, not in a Vodou framework, but in the microcosm of Bataille’s work. Tears of Eros was composed in 1959, but not finished until 1961, at a time when he is “ill, very tired, and he has trouble finishing his book.” The unidentified author of the entry “Tremblement de Bataille,” on the website Philippe Sollers—Sur et Autour de Sollers, drawing on letters between Bataille and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca, a cofounder of Cahiers du cinéma and specialist and publisher of topics related to eroticism, continues: But he [Bataille] insists on concluding it on a “sequence ‘Vodou sacrifice—Chinese torture—the final illustrations.’” In a letter to Lo Duca dated 22 May 1961, he maintains that this sequence “of horrors, of tortures” should not be interrupted by other photos. “That would interrupt the logic of these illustrations,” he writes, and he staunchly concludes: “I am bothered that I must so clearly demand this, believe me, I do not do this, but as an absolute obligation.” 63

If in Caillois’s case, sexual pleasure is only something received by the other, something that one must constantly deny oneself for the pleasure to even exist, then the end of Bataille’s picture book collage, which exposes images of sacrifice and torture, would suggest that all torture is ultimately for the pleasure of s/he who is not being sacrificed; or rather, pleasure is derived from the other’s suffering. In this context, the image of the sacrifice of the ram gets overwhelmed by the context of the mutilation of the body of the Chinese man. Even here, Bataille it seems is mistaken, for he has confused not just one but two sacrifices of a Chinese man with that depicted in the image: in other words, the story he tells, the name of the person, and the image do not correspond to each other, although it seems that the location of the sacrifice in Beijing would have been the same. 64 As for the image of the person holding the ram’s head, there is no information about either the specific ceremony or the ritual sacrifice. Bataille could have easily quoted from Métraux’s section “Sacrifice” in a chapter title “Ritual.” 65 Métraux explains that by the time the person would be in contact with the decapitated head of the ram, s/he would already have been mounted by the lwa to whom the ram was being offered. 66 And, as for the image of the tortured man in Beijing, there is nothing to suggest an erotic drive amongst those involved in the

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situation. The eroticism as per his letters to Lo Duca is located in Bataille’s subjectivity. Here, all of the images serve as metaphors for how Bataille (and possibly Lo Duca) 67 envision the world. Most significantly, as metaphors, these images serve as means of providing Bataille with “divine ecstasy”; nowhere is it mentioned that on many occasions the sacrificed animal will be placed on the parts of a person’s body “afflicted” or “ill.” 68 While divine ecstasy might be a form of healing, the lexicon of healing is absolutely absent from Bataille’s text. For Bataille, an archivist at the Bibliothèque nationale, who was friends with Leiris, ran in the same circles as Métraux, and procured his photos from Musée de l’Homme, it’s hard to excuse his failure to contextualize the photos, 69 especially when it was first published in 1961, two years after Métraux had published his book, and well after Leiris had first written about zar possession. What matters here is that Vodou is conflated with spirit possession, which is conflated with animal sacrifice and blood drinking, which is conflated with eroticism and the death drive, which Leiris summarizes as “diabolic.” The first lines of Tears of Eros read: The simple sexual act is different from eroticism; the former is found in animal life, whereas human life alone admits of an activity defined perhaps by a “diabolical” aspect, aptly described by the word eroticism. The word “diabolical,” it is true, refers to Christianity. It would appear, however, that even when Christianity was still far off, the most ancient form of humanity knew eroticism. . . . If it is true that “diabolical” means essentially the coincidence of death and eroticism, and if the devil is in the end only our own madness, if we come to tears, if we shudder in sorrow—or if we are seized by fits of laughter—can we fail to perceive, linked to this nascent eroticism, the preoccupation with, the haunting fear of death (of a tragic death, in a sense, even though laughable in spite of everything)? 70

Here, we are reminded of the first chapter’s discussion of “evil” in Wynter’s interview with David Scott where she links the idea of “evil” to the notion of “life unworthy of life,” and at least in the Atlantic, the concept of “evil” as associated with “the Negro-as-slave [who is] projected as the missing link between rational humans and irrational animals.” 71 While Bataille’s overall philosophical agenda might have been to shed light on the hypocrisy of a humanity capable of enormous crimes against itself, while he might cultivate a philosophy of “guilt,” he also—in being completely ignorant of what by 1961 is no longer an unnoticed reality of colonialism’s multiple holocausts on the peoples that the colonial process has conquered and displaced—is committing an act of hypocrisy. Despite Leiris’s and Métraux’s attempt to distance themselves from the occultism à la Seabrook, Bataille continues to bathe in it to the end. In Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone

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World, Richard Watts traces the evolving relationship between the “French metropolitan intellectuals” 72 and the writers coming from what he designates in the title of his book as the “post/colon[ies].” In the chapters in his book in which he looks at “the decolonial period,” 73 he explains that it was one of the primary objectives of the French intellectuals in the period during and after World War II “to respond to the distress signals from the colonies.” 74 Even if for some reason it is possible in 1961 to excuse Bataille for ignoring the work of say Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) or Sartre’s essay “Orphée noire” (1948), which point to the alienation experienced by the Black man oppressed by a white order, to continue to promote the acéphale as a useful image after the Holocaust is problematic. The image of a beheaded ram, of decapitation as in André Masson’s drawing for the first issue of the journal Acéphale, not only decapitates Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, but also serves as a visual illusion to revolution, the guillotining of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Yet, looked upon in a post-Holocaust world, this figure becomes a sick reminder of the decapitation of millions of interns of the Nazi camps, their hair collected and gold extracted from their teeth. The acéphale serves as the most visual cautionary tale to what happens when the figurative is implemented as literal, to how ideas are highly malleable and can be shaped to serve any agenda. As such, a book so visual, with such a widespread dissemination in multiple languages, would eclipse the concept of possession as healing rite in the Vodou context, with the notion of possession in any cultural context as diabolic. To Bataille’s credit, his intention is to cultivate the “diabolical” as a pursuit and mode of being in the world, one that is less insincere. Yet after the Holocaust, well after Leiris has migrated away from extremely exoticist portrayals of non-European peoples, and during the burgeoning years of the first successful twentieth-century anticolonial struggles for national sovereignty, it seems naïve not to see the dangers of using the term “diabolical,” especially in what is essentially a montage of images. Even Breton, in his 1946 lecture, in invoking the last officially recognized instances of possession in the French context, 75 would not associate spirit possession with the devil (even if they were). To arrive at understanding how Bataille might have deployed the image of the ram without the express intention of alienating readers more familiar with a Vodou philosophical system, I have had to dedicate almost an entire chapter. To do so is itself a testament to how Vodou continues to be read as exoticist, and we need only look back to the earlier discussion of Dagen’s article in the 2013 Le Monde dossier on “Besoin d’ailleurs”—“The Need for Elsewhere.” Bataille’s use of the image and popularity of Tears of Eros from its first publication in 1961 and on through its reprints and translations would be the two steps back of the one step forward that Leiris and Métraux had gestured towards in their respective 1959 publications. Regardless of Bataille’s intention and/or naïveté, for most of his

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readers, the images in his book, including that of the Vodou sacrifice of the ram placed next to the image of a man literally being cut to pieces would connote Haitian Vodou, and the rite of possession, as sadistically “diabolical.” NOTES 1. Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, translated by Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989), 200–201. The original French is Larmes d’Eros (Paris: JeanJacques Pauvert, 1961). 2. Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality (First edition in English: Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo; in French, L’Erotisme) L’Erotisme Les Editions de Minuit, (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986 [1962 in English by Walker and Company, and in 1957 in French by Les Editions de Minuit]), 9. What seems to be another photo in the series depicting the sacrifice of the ram also appears on p. 96. 3. Correspondence with Alex Baradel of the Fundação Pierre Verger between May 15–28, 2014. 4. Zieger, “The Case of William Seabrook,” 738. 5. I take the expression from the statement on Jacques Vergès’s death issued by Vergès’s editor, Éditions Pierre-Guillaume de Roux, in the aftermath of his death in August 2013. Vergès was the famous anticolonialist, involved in the Algerian War, who later controversially defended Klaus Barbie, “Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, a.k.a. Carlos the Jackal; and Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge head of state, Khieu Samphan.” See Robert D. McFadden, “Jacques Vergès, Defender of Terrorists and War Criminals, Is Dead at 88.” www.nytimes.com. August 16, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/17/world/ europe/jacques-verges-88–defender-of-war-criminals-and-terrorists.html? pagewanted=all&_r=1&; (accessed August 31, 2013) 6. Dawes Ades and Fiona Bradley, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS (Hayward Gallery, London, Exhibit May 11–July 30, 2006) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 11. 7. American Psychiatric Association. DSM-IV-TR (4th, revised ed.). Arlington: American Psychiatric Press, 2000 as cited by Ida Sharon, MD, et al. “Dissociative Disorders.” 15 May 2012. E-Medicine. 4 July 2013 http://emedicine.medscape.com/ article/294508-overview. 8. See Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti. 9. Alfred Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, translated by Hugo Charteris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 265. 10. Bataille, Tears of Eros, 23. 11. Historian Jérôme Bourgon has written on the images of the “Chinese tortures” in Tears of Eros. 12. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 184 and Jay, Downcast Eyes, 232–233. 13. See previous note. 14. William Lewis, “Louis Althusser,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2009/ entries/althusser/. Lewis writes: “aleatory materialism is marked almost as much by its rejections as it is by the positive claims it contains about the world and about history.” There is resonance with Agamben’s notion of “non-potentiality” in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 15. Gary Gutting, “Michel Foucault,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2013/ entries/foucault/. 16. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 184.

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17. I use the word “human being” because in The Tears of Eros, Bataille asserts that it is “eroticism,” as opposed to “sex,” which distinguishes human from animal (Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 23). 18. The original French is: “Il est permis de relever que dans la Grèce ancienne c’est à un culte à base de possession, celui de Dionysos, qu’est liée l’apparition de genres théâtraux comme le dithyrambe et le drame satyrique ou silénique.” (Leiris, “Possession et ses aspects théâtraux,” 951). 19. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 265. 20. Peterson, Anthropology and Mass Communication, 48. 21. Dash, “Le Je de l’autre,” 91. 22. Hollier writes of Bataille: The about-face that this appeal to the values of discipline and authority represents for Bataille is striking. Five years earlier, in Documents, he was advocating an aesthetics of formlessness whose antiarchitectural inspiration took on all forms of authority as targets. . . . Bataille’s about-face is related to the shifts in the overall political landscape between 1929 and 1936: in Germany, the antiauthoritarian decomposition of Weimar, successor the Reich, has just been disciplined by Nazi terror; and in the USSR, Bolshevik romanticism has yielded to the generalized Soviet work camps. (Hollier, Absent without Leave, 165) 23. Eric Matthews, Twentieth-Century French Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 24. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 38. 25. Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria, 185. 26. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 62. 27. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 77. Hollier quotes the article “Germanic Mythology and Nazism: Thoughts on an Old Book by Georges Dumézil,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, translated by John Tedeschi and Ann C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 143. 28. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 78. 29. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 9, 184. 30. Ibid., 180. 31. Ibid., 159. 32. Ibid., 159. 33. Ibid., 167, 34. René Depestre, “Sartre in His Fraternity.” Diogenes (UNESCO), 216 (2007): 41–42). 35. Ibid., 45. 36. Ibid., 43–44. 37. Ibid., 44. 38. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 9. 39. Aimé Césaire, “Lettre Maurice Thorez.” LesMotsSontImportants.net. October 24, 1956. http://lmsi.net/Lettre-a-Maurice-Thorez (accessed August 4, 2013). 40. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 84. 41. Ibid., 85. 42. Ibid., 87. 43. Ibid., 93. 44. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 38. 45. Ibid.,167. 46. Ibid., 157–158. 47. Ibid.,155. 48. Ibid., 38. 49. Ibid., 157. 50. Ibid., 157. 51. Ibid., 112.

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52. Ibid., 109. 53. Ibid., 108. 54. Ibid., 110. 55. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 19. 56. Réginald O. Crosley, “Shadow-Matter Universes in Haitian and Dagara Ontologies: A Comparative Study,” in Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality, by Patrick Bellegrade-Smith and Claudine Michel, 7–18 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 7. 57. Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, Foreword by Joseph Campbell (Kingston, NY: McPherson, 1983 [1953, by Vanguard Press]), 25. 58. Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992) 66. 59. Ibid., 67. 60. Deren, Divine Horsemen, 26. 61. Crosley, “Shadow-Matter Universes in Haitian and Dagara Ontologies,” 7. 62. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 89. 63. A. Gauvin, Tremblement de Bataille. May 2008. http://www.pileface.com/sollers/ article.php3?id_article=359 (accessed 4 2013, August). The full citation is in French is: Il y revient encore, “obligé,” en 1961. Bataille est alors malade, très fatigué, il a du mal à terminer son livre Les larmes d’Eros. Mais il tient à l’achever sur une “séquence ‘sacrifice vaudou—supplice chinois—illustrations finales’”. Dans une lettre à Lo Duca du 22 mai 1961, il insiste même pour que cette séquence “d’horreurs, de supplices” ne soit pas interrompue par d’autres photos. “Cela interromprait la logique de ces illustrations” écrit-il, pour conclure de manière ferme : “Je suis ennuyé d’avoir à exiger quelque chose aussi nettement, je ne le fais, croyez-moi, qu’obligé, absolument.” Il écrit à JeanJacques Pauvert, l’éditeur, mais, hélas, le livre est déjà sous presse. 64. See fifth footnote on Fu-Zhu-li in Gauvin in “Tremblement de Bataille,” http:// www.pileface.com/sollers/article.php3?id_article=359. Also see, Jérome Bourgon’s May 2004 note on the discrepancies, see particularly his allusion to Louis Carpeaux’s book in Chinese Torture, Supplice Chinois. May 2004, http://turandot. chineselegalculture.org/Essay.php?ID=27 (accessed July 31, 2013). 65. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti,168–176. 66. Ibid., 170–171. 67. Bourgon suggests that it might have been Lo Duca who wrote the captions to the photos, and even might have written most of Tears of Eros (“Bataille et le supplicié chinois: erreurs sur la personne,” http://turandot.chineselegalculture.org/Essay.php? ID=27. 68. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 172. 69. See third footnote in “Tremblement de Bataille,” http://www.pileface.com/ sollers/article.php3?id_article=359. 70. Bataille, The Tears of Eros, 23. 71. Wynter, “The Re-enchantment of Humanism,” 182. 72. Richard Watts, Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacturing of Literary Identity in the Francophone World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 87. 73. Ibid., 72. 74. Ibid., 87. In Watt’s analysis of the changing role of the preface by what he calls “patrons” (“Sartre, Gide, Breton, Mauriac, Cocteau”) “whose endorsement in the form of prefaces attracted significant attention to these texts” (Watts, Packaging Post/Coloniality, 87), Watts shows that as the relationship between France and the colonies changed, so did the role of the preface: “However, it became increasingly evident as 1962 approached that the work of a colonized writer did not—or should not—require the patronage of a Sartre or a Gide” (Watts 88). Watts shows how the last two major prefaces by French patrons, both written in 1961—Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s Les damnés de la terre, “written on the eve of decolonization of Algeria” and Louis Aragon’s

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preface to Mohammad Dib’s “first collection of poetry, L’Ombre gardienne—are manifest of an existential and poetic humility vis-à-vis of Fanon and Dib’s texts: Sartre “finds himself lacking the authority to make a totalizing analysis of Fanon’s text, an authority he had not lacked in ‘Orphée noir’ when he had foreclosed the future of a specifically black literature” (Ibid., 94–95) and in introducing Aragon’s preface to Dib, Watts writes “Sartre is not the only metropolitan writer of his generation to find himself in a situation of irrelevance” (Ibid., 95). 75. Breton, “First Haitian Lecture,” 152.

TEN Possession, a Threshold to a Biopolitical Order de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Athena Athanasiou

It is in the context of the association of the “diabolic” with “possession” that I bridge onto a shorter analysis of the last set of texts amongst French scholars, which directly invokes the notion of possession. This time, the possession is not Haitian, but French, and it is “diabolical,” or at least its pretense is, only these writers, Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault work to understand and communicate to their audiences how and why the word “diabolical” is implemented to stand in as a metaphor and scapegoat for other social problems. There is much more recent scholarship on devil possessions in Europe in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, 1 but I have chosen to work with de Certeau and Foucault because of the important role they have had and continue to have on late twentieth and early twenty-first-century critical theory. Since I am interested in the intellectual history of possession, it is the thinkers whose works circulate, whose work is popular and read both by academics and more general audiences that is the focus of my study. In addition, although the two texts this chapter looks at are not amongst the most circulated of their writings, given the importance of both de Certeau and Foucault’s work amongst scholars in the humanities and the social sciences in the later decades of the twentieth century and early twenty-first, it is important to include them in a conversation on how possession has acquired the meanings associated with it over the decades of the French and francophone twentieth century. More specifically, their work provides a direct link amongst: spirit possession in the French context, or 185

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rather, possession of the human body by one or more malevolent beings; Bataille’s juxtaposition of eros/thanatos; and Foucault’s work on sexuality and more generally on biopolitics. The two texts that I will look at are de Certeau’s La possession de Loudun, first published in 1970, and the lesson “Cours du 26 février 1975,” published in 1999, in a volume titled Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France: 1974–1975. 2 I will discuss both texts together because in his lecture Foucault expressly refers to and supports his claims using de Certeau’s La possession de Loudun. Moreover, both scholars have as their aim to uncover the underlying societal contexts that would give way to and legitimize possessions in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. LIKE BATAILLE, UNLIKE BATAILLE Unlike Bataille, who, in a sense is didactically suggesting an alternative way to living with the dismal reality of a humanity subjugated to its psychophysical impulse towards eroticism and death, de Certeau and Foucault are looking backwards to understand a transitional moment in French history. Bataille’s work is chiefly psychoanalytical, de Certeau’s and Foucault’s is sociohistorical: Bataille experiments with creative montage, unconcerned with historical precision; the other depends on an “archeologically” precise understanding of the past. As a result, Bataille posits the “diabolical” as a way of being in the world; whereas de Certeau and Foucault unveil it as a symptom of more broad tensions of a society transitioning from a Catholic order to a more scientific one. In presenting the methodological approach by which de Certeau intimately weaves the archives related to the 1632 Loudun possessions (letters, trial proceedings, accounts) in regular font with his own narrative in italics, de Certeau writes: The strange is thus rooted in the body of a society. It is attached to it by too many socio-cultural connections for it to be isolated. . . . Maybe it reveals a global mutation, which would consist, yet again, in exorcizing or marginalizing the first symptoms of a crisis as this crisis slowly gives form to a new order. 3

The goal of both de Certeau, and Foucault following on the heels of de Certeau, is to understand the underlying political and sociological forces that allowed for the Loudun possessions to take place and to be officially recognized (and exploited) as such by Richelieu’s government. That said, as seen above, Foucault was mesmerized by Bataille’s work; and, one wonders if his three volume project titled The History of Sexuality, might not have had as its antecedent Bataille’s ruminations on the relationship between eroticism and death. In fact, it seems that one of the reasons that

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Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni, the editors of Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France: 1974–1975 (The Abnormal: Course at the College of France: 1974–1975) had in locating and obtaining permissions to publish the lectures, had to do with Foucault’s dissatisfaction with the process that would have led to their publication as the eventual fourth volume of The History of Sexuality. 4 What interests me here is to see how de Certeau and Foucault deal with the notion of possession, as similar to, and different from Bataille. Like Bataille, all look at possession in the context of the Judeo-Christian context of “evil.” De Certeau’s La possession du Loudun is mostly concerned with how the possessions indicated a symptom of something larger. In distinguishing between his usages of the word “sorcery” and “possession,” Foucault’s lecture is preoccupied with identifying how society sets up systems to control bodies, but also how bodies subvert and act out against these systems. In writing about Pierre Bourdieu, Terry Rey acknowledges Bourdieu’s vehement antireligiosity, that “God, for Bourdieu, is but a socially constructed illusion, and religion is an ultimately unnecessary system of symbolic meaning,” but Rey writes, “It is important to note, though, that Bourdieu . . . does affirm that religion provides people with meaning.” 5 Similarly to Rey’s comment on Bourdieu, and unlike Bataille, both de Certeau and Foucault also honor and acknowledge how religion functions for those who are unaware of how it regiments their lives. In de Certeau’s case it might be his education as a Jesuit, but more generally, I would surmise that both de Certeau (1925–1986) and Foucault (1926–1984), born twenty to thirty years after Bataille, Breton, Leiris, or Sartre, benefitted from the latters’ struggle to create a thinking maybe not less troubled by a Catholic sociological context, but at least not in direct conflict with it. In other words, where Bataille would seek to think through as much as to blatantly instigate against the status quo, de Certeau’s and Foucault’s work on religion corresponds to the rigor of a structuralist methodology, seeking to render the humanities more “scientific,” and as such looking “to state it as it is,” rather than provoke. THE LOUDUN POSSESSIONS: FRENCH SOCIETY AT CROSSROADS The Loudun possessions took place in 1632 in Loudun, France. Father Urbain Grandier is accused of conspiring with Satan to arrange that the nuns of the Ursuline convent be possessed by various demons, including Asmodai, Beelzebub, and Leviathan. De Certeau explains that to become an Ursuline nun in the seventeenth century was itself to be in a sense a feminist avant la lettre. The women are most often than not “young women,” 6 and—as the trials and exorcisms following the possession would “reveal”—engaged in sexual relations with their “sorcerer,” that is the

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priest, such as Father Grandier, who would have made the pact with the Devil. 7 De Certeau explains that geographically Loudun was essential to Cardinal Richelieu’s dominion: Most importantly, Richelieu came to see his fiefdom (less that 20 km from Loudun) expanded and established as a duchy (August 1631), and he had the full intention of solidly occupying it. He was at the height of his power. 8

In addition to threatening Richelieu’s private domain at the height of his power, Loudun also represented a frontier space, between Catholicism and Protestantism. De Certeau points out that the Edict of Nantes, signed in 1598, only precedes the Loudun possessions by thirty-four years. And in 1611, the Treaty of Loudun had negotiated a “fragile agreement [fragile accord]” between the “Huguenot leaders [chefs huguenots]” and the “delegates of Marie de Médicis [délégués de Marie de Médicis].” 9 In this context, for Cardinal Richelieu, Father Grandier’s outspokenness against celibacy, as well as his objections to Richelieu’s attempts to exert more control over cities vulnerable to Protestant influence, set the stage for the possessions. The Loudun community found itself trapped between two forces: on the one hand, their obligation to Cardinal Richelieu, who also served as King Louis XIII’s chief minister, and was actively consolidating the crown’s power over France; and on the other, their loyalty, Father Grandier, the local power, who had recently written against Catholic practice, justifying that priests could indeed marry. 10 Geographically ensconced between the ever-powerful Catholic, royal authority and their wavering allegiance to Father Grandier, whose penchant towards Protestantism grew weaker and weaker as Richelieu gained power, the denizens of Loudun would find themselves in an increasingly compromised position. As such, in the midst of Louis XIII’s and Cardinal Richelieu’s consolidation of the French kingdom and the Catholic church’s aegis over France, de Certeau suggests that possession would come to serve as a sort of way out for a community that only three decades prior had considered a peace between Catholics and Protestants as a viable reality. While Foucault’s lecture is a more general analysis of possession in France by demonic forces, he too, like de Certeau will put the notion of accountability at the center of his discussion, for to understand who is being made accountable is to ultimately understand the societal forces at work. Foucault summarizes the phenomenon of possession by the devil in a culturally Christian context: There will be a three-termed matrix: the devil, of course; the possessed nun, at the other extreme; but, between them, triangulating their relationship will be the confessor. . . . In any case, this central protagonist, that of the director, or the confessor, will multiply itself, double-up on itself, in step with the conflicts that are proper to the ecclesiastical institution. As for the possessed woman, that is, the third term of the

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triangle, she too will double-up on herself, in the sense, that unlike a witch, she will not serve as the devil’s accomplice, his docile servant. It’s a much more complicated affair. Of course, the possessed woman will be under the devil’s power. But this power, as soon as it has anchored down into her, as soon as it has penetrated her body, will encounter resistance. The possessed woman is the one who resists the devil, at the same time that she is his receptacle. 11

Both of the human entities of the triangle are ecclesiastics serving the Catholic church. In applying Foucault’s description to de Certeau’s analysis of the sociohistorical context, then, it is the renegade members of the Catholic clergy, who will serve as scapegoats to deflect the entire Loudun community’s ambivalent role towards the central Parisian authority. As the priest who would have arranged the pact with the devil, Father Grandier would be the one ultimately held accountable: accused of sorcery, he is tortured and burned at the stake. The nuns, who were possessed, by virtue of their victimhood, once exorcised of their demons, would be ultimately excused of their initial complicity with the priestsorcerer. In other words, the possessions of 1632 constitute an event, that becomes a crime, which will be tried (or rather the object of inquisition) from 1633–1640. 12 For while Father Grandier would be executed in August 1633, the possessions and the public exorcisms of the crimes would continue until 1640, when Richelieu is confident that the Loudun community no longer poses a threat. So while Father Grandier is the scapegoat, the duration of the possessions, and their exorcisms, represent much more than only the threat that the community of Loudun, and especially Grandier, represented for the French Catholic crown. De Certeau, Foucault, and Stephenson emphasize that the Loudun possessions represented a long-term event that captured the public’s attention, and as such would come to represent theatrical space where the social tensions of the time could play themselves out. It is notable that one of the writers to pay attention to the possessions would be Alexandre Dumas, père. The same author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers also wrote a novella titled “Urbain Grandier” from the Eight Volume set Celebrated Crimes (1839–1841) 13 also made into a play of the same name (1850). 14 De Certeau explains that “the possession becomes a major public trial: between science and religion, about the certain and the uncertain, on reason, the supernatural, authority,” for it is during “these very years (1632–1640) that reason bursts onto the scene with the publication of Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637).” 15 As Stephenson points out, it is not necessarily a coincidence that Descartes “was born sixty kilometers east of Loudun at La Haye in 1596” and who “by the time of the possessions of Loudun,” found himself obligated to live “in permanent and peripatetic exile in the Netherlands, hoping to evade the hostilities of both Catholic and Calvinist theologians.” 16 Stephenson suggests that Descartes’s work would have been, if not directly influenced by the Lou-

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dun possessions, at least informed by a similar concern in determining which forces were at the origin of knowledge, and thus truth. Stephenson writes: Descartes was charting the same territory that the exorcists were mapping on the bodies of the Ursulines at Loudun and that the physicians and theologians were debating with regard to the natural versus the supernatural. Descartes with his cogito ergo sum was seeking by virtue of an indivisible reasoning mind a universal science that would counter the internecine splitting of the Wars of Religion. That his system achieved this goal by splitting reality into two distinct irreconcilable realms, extensa and cogitans, is its major weakness. 17

Stephenson’s work again reminds us not only of the varying discursive spaces, religious and nonreligious, and the ambivalence between the two, which literally and very physically were vying for power. Father Grandin was more than anything in de Certeau’s words, “l’annonciateur de l’évangile du progrès”—“the forewarning to the gospel of progress” 18 and Stephenson reminds us that Descartes too would be obliged to fit his radical philosophy under the supreme aegis of God, for while not accused of sorcery as Grandin was, Descartes would also be threatened with death as a heretic, hence his exile to Amsterdam. 19 FOUCAULT AND POSSESSION: A THRESHOLD TO A BIOPOLITICAL ORDER Foucault’s lecture will read both the possessions and the enormous attention they garnered in the more broad perspective of French society from the turn of the seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, and more specifically of a society on the threshold of nothing less than a biopolitical order. The lecture in which he discusses possession in the seventeenth century is meant to elucidate the antecedents of a more recent and contemporary “order of things,” by “which the State assumes and integrates the care of the natural life of individuals . . . ; on the other hand, the examination of the technologies of self by which processes of subjectivization bring the individual to bind himself to his own identity and consciousness and, at the same time, to an external power.” 20 Foucault’s 1974–1975 lectures are part of the reflections that would lead to the publication of the three volumes that make up The History of Sexuality. As such Foucault is working through the ideas that would lead to his theorization of the detailed but ancillary disciplining of the body (i.e., the bourgeois structures of marriage, health care, sexual taboos, racism 21), which would allow for a regulation of populations that was no longer direct (i.e., the invasion of village, serfdom, slavery). Foucault looks to the possessions of the early seventeenth century as a sort of “dawn” of a biopolitical order, one that would seek absolute sovereignty over the

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body through less obvious systems of control, such as: “health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality.” 22 In the 1974–1975 lectures, Foucault is concerned with who manages control over the body, particularly in its psychological and/or spiritual dimensions. Given the waning importance of the church and the increased dominance of the state and its public services, Foucault looks at three spaces in which control of the body—both physical and nonphysical (spiritual, mental)—is exercised by the church, the state, and the sociopolitical apparatus that surrounds the two institutions. In the preceding “conférence” of the lecture series, he points to the rising importance of psychology, writing about the finally legitimated role that psychology took on in the midnineteenth century in the healing of “maladies mentales”—“mental illnesses”: I think we cannot underestimate the historical importance of convulsion in the history of mental illnesses, because, remember what I have told you in our past meetings, around 1850 psychiatry finally dis-alienated itself. It ceased to only concern itself with an analysis of errors, of deliriums, of illusions, and became engaged with the analysis of all of the perturbations of the instinct. Psychiatry gives itself to the instinctual, its troubles, all the confusions of the voluntary and of the involuntary, and appropriates them. And so, this convulsion (that is to say this paroxysmal agitation of the nervous system which was, for the medicine of the eighteenth century, the manner by which to recode the old convulsion and all the effects of a concupiscence inherited from Christianity) will now appear as the involuntary liberation of automatisms. 23

What is interesting in Foucault’s discussion is that “la convulsion” becomes the ultimate location of mental illness: “la convulsion va être le prototype même de la folie”—“convulsion will be the actual prototype for madness.” 24 In one go, Foucault summarizes the entire history of the APA’s “disordering” of possession as a mental illness, but ultimately, he also refers to the intellectual past of the discourse on possession in a French and francophone context, one that in one complex web connects Breton’s adulation of “convulsion” to Vodou possession to, in Bataille’s terms, the eroticization of, or in Foucault’s parlance, the sexualization of anyone deemed other, conflating French society’s “les anormaux” (the prostitute, the criminal, the mentally ill) with the ethnographic other (Gondarians, Haitians). But, outside of the larger and well-known context of Foucault’s general work, why is the advent of psychology as a valid medical activity important and what does Foucault bring to the conversation as regards a French preoccupation with possession? For Foucault, the possessions at Loudun in the 1630s mark an important point in the history of the body, and the control exercised over it. Before the age of reason, it was the

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church that dictated human experience, especially in regards to the sins its flesh could commit and the destiny of its soul. As an age of reason took over, the church’s supremacy over the life of the human mind, body, and spirit diminished. Although Foucault does not mention Richelieu in his lecture, it is the Cardinal’s gesture to impose the supremacy of the state over that of the church that corresponds to the first moments of a state that will make its concern that which once belonged to the church. In other words, Richelieu understands that power is based on assuring dominion over lands, but also that in an increasingly bourgeoisified world, where merchants would prove as wealthy, if not more wealthy, than an aristocratic landowning class, it would become important to control the bodies of persons more mobile, such as merchants. Simultaneously, medicine became more reliable than a Christian faith in the healing of the body. The church would find itself removed of its duties to control the more “fleshy” aspects of the body; and simultaneously, the state would understand that increasingly its control would lie in its ability to create and monopolize institutions whose primary activity is the life of the body. If Foucault points to the midnineteenth-century acceptance of psychology as a viable medical activity in the same lecture as he analyzes the early seventeenth-century possessions in France, it is that he wishes to emphasize the process by which the state displaced the church of all of its duties. Where at the beginning of the 1600s, before Richelieu, all aspects of the life of the human body might fall under the aegis of the church, by the midnineteenth century, the church would be incapacitated of virtually all of its responsibilities. For Foucault then, the possessions at Loudun may be read as a testimonial to the struggle between the Catholic church and the ever more centralized French nation-state: This flesh, by which the church assured its control over the body, now risks in effect to succumb to this other mode of analysis and management of the body; it will be confiscated by another power, the secular power of medicine. 25

Foucault’s reading of the Loudun possessions has to do with the state’s desire to dismantle the power of the church; in other words, Richelieu’s role as chief minister to Louis XIII would supersede his role as cardinal. The Loudun possessions for Foucault are then about the struggle between church and state, and Loudun’s denizens are trapped in the middle. The church wants to blame the possessions on an outside entity; Richelieu and his minions, the exorcists that he sends to Loudun to manage the possessions, and judges he engages to man the trials, are unofficially mandated to find blame with the church. If fault is found within the church, then the secularized power will prevail in its commandment over the body. The possessions at Loudun represent this final struggle be-

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tween church and state, where the state, and its modes of power, will prevail. This is why, faced with these phenomena of possession, which spread throughout the Ursuline convent of Loudun, it was necessary at all costs to find the sorcerer. But, it followed that the only person who could play the role of sorcerer had to be someone who belonged to the church, since all of the protagonists implicated at the beginning [of the possessions] were ecclesiastics. In this way, the church would find itself forced to amputate itself of one of its members and to designate a priest as sorcerer. 26

Foucault distinguishes between “sorcellerie”/“sorcery” and “possession,” by which sorcery is the label the state uses to disqualify possession as a farce; whereas possession designates the possibility that the invasion of the body by a diabolic entity is a viable phenomenon. He writes that possession will take place “in the very heart of the Christian institution”—“au coeur même de l’institution chrétienne” and “more so, and it isn’t just any woman in the city, but the nun”—“bien mieux, ce n’est même pas n’importe quelle femme dans la ville, c’est la religieuse.” 27 Drawing on one of Agamben’s terms, the possessions of Aix and Loudun represent “the threshold” moment, whereby both systems of thought, one that “believes” in possession as a possible occurrence and one that is skeptical of its scientific value coexist and struggle for power. As such, the epoch during which the Aix and Loudun possessions take place will be limited to this in-between moment, in which the church is still hanging on to its power over the body. Once the church has been completely defeated by the secularization of control over the physical, mental and social capacities of the human body, then the notion of the body-possessed becomes irrelevant to both the church and state, for who can be possessed by the devil if neither devil nor god exists? As the church loses its use value, the medical field will gradually codify possession as an illness, with the first codifications taking place in the early 1700s. 28 In France, by the 1850s, 29 the full confiscation of power over the body through secularization will be accomplished when psychology has legitimated itself as a valid science. Medicine moves in to fully occupy the authoritative voice on possessions and mental convulsions. The church is thus left with very little to work with, and as a result will turn its attention to “une apparition à distance”—“an apparition in the distance,” something that is “à la fois proche et lointaine, à portée de main en un sens et pourtant inaccessible”—“both close and far, at hand’s reach in a sense and yet inaccessible,” and most importantly “les apparitions du XIXe siècle (celle de la Salette et celle de Lourdes sont caractéristiques) excluent absolument le corps à corps”—“the apparitions of the nineteenth century (that of la Salette and of Lourdes are examples) rule out the body-to-body contact.” 30 Due to the lack of materiality of the “appari-

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tion,” it cannot enter into medicine’s domain of activity, and thus the church is able to hold onto a certain authority, but it will no longer adjudicate over the physical, mental, or psychological activity of the human body: at best, it might retain power over the “spiritual.” HAITI AND GONDAR IN THE BACKGROUND But while a discussion of de Certeau’s and Foucault’s texts on possession might contribute to a general history of possession in the especially French context, what has happened to my earlier claim that Haitian Vodou plays an important role in a more general intellectual and philological history of “possession”? Haiti is not mentioned, nor are Breton, Leiris, or Métraux, but they are “there.” As seen above, Foucault’s discussion of “convulsion” as the ultimate sign of madness alludes to Breton’s now legendary statement, “Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.” “LA BEAUTÉ SERA CONVULSIVE OU NE SERA PAS,” capitalized in Nadja and repeated in lower case in his first “Haitian lecture.” The importance of Breton and his notion of “convulsive beauty” is probably his most well cited phrase, and as such it is difficult not to read Breton into Foucault’s text. Does that mean that Foucault would have read Breton’s “Haitian lecture”? No, but what this chapter argues is that possession as “trope” is just that: it carries with it meanings that are so weighted down with a specific intellectual history that they need not be directly referenced. Whether Foucault is explicitly aware of Breton’s presence in his text on possession, whether Foucault really even knows that Breton spent time in Haiti or wrote about possession in a Vodou context is besides the point; what matters is that the Breton and Haitian Vodou came into contact and that this context inscribes itself into the intellectual fabric on which Foucault stitches his own reflections. If Breton is present in Foucault’s text, Leiris and the notion of “lived theater” is extremely present in both de Certeau’s and Foucault’s texts on possession. De Certeau’s seventh chapter, titled “Le Théâtre des possédés” echoes both in title and content Leiris’s 1958 text, yet while de Certeau cites Claude Lévi-Strauss, he does not cite Leiris. It could be possible that Leiris’s text did not figure into his readings, but like Leiris, de Certeau also deals with the question of authenticity: “Is such a scene hallucinatory or real? Such is the question asked during the entirety of these months [the months of the trial of Father Grandier]: what in all of this is real?” 31 And de Certeau’s answer will be similar to Leiris’s: the “real” will lie in the need for the community to work through the overwhelming changes taking place, not only in their entourage, but in the entire way of thinking of a society moving from “God” to “reason.” In comparing the Loudun possessions to other possessions taking place before and after the Loudun possessions, de Certeau will identify patterns. The possessions, the exor-

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cisms to deliver the victims from their diabolic possessors, and the trials of those who were thought to have invoked the possessing demons, follow a prototype, a sort of mise-en-scène that is predictable. Suggesting that the possessions of Aix (1609–1611) set the “norm” for the proceedings in Loudun, de Certeau writes: “But, undoubtedly, the archetype had served as the norm before serving as proof. . . . It’s that it has its own tradition, and the denizens [of Aix, of Loudun] seem to have attributed to themselves previously defined roles.” 32 As for Leiris, while the zar possessions themselves may not be explainable scientifically, they serve as a literal space through which not only the ”actors,” but also the “spectators” might “process” the changes in their society. The tribunals, that is the “procès” themselves, serve, as Foucault’s work suggests, as a space to announce the dawn of a new era, of a new way of controlling human bodies. Like Leiris and Métraux, de Certeau will compare the roles actors play during possession and the procedures associated with the trials to the commedia dell’arte. 33 Although, de Certeau does not cite either Leiris or Métraux, both, who as we saw earlier, made the comparison, it’s hard not to recognize Leiris’s notion of “lived theater.” It is not so much that neither de Certeau nor Foucault has given it a proper citation, but rather, that “lived theater” has become such a common concept in the French social sciences. In other words, de Certeau may not be aware, nor need to cite those who had written before him. Regardless, in both de Certeau’s and Foucault’s deliberations what obviously gets lost is the context of Gondarian zar and Haitian Vodou possession rituals. In so doing, yet again, the anthropological other serves as a kick-starter to an entire theoretical apparatus, but once up and running, its role as catalyst is forgotten and the multiple iterations of the anthropological other are cast back into the net of Trouillot’s “Savage slot.” Even if scholars such as Elsa Dorlin and Ann Laura Stoler 34 have sought to recuperate Foucault’s (seeming) neglect of the postcolonial and/or racist context, in the specific cases of Gondar and Haiti, both have been, if not forgotten, at least not given credit for contributing to de Certeau’s and Foucault’s 1970s discussions on possession. That said, especially given Foucault’s admiration of Bataille’s work, in leaving Bataille’s, Leiris’s, and Métraux’s reflections on Gondar and/or Haiti out of their discussions, they also do not reproduce or aggrandize the exoticist image of possession as the “diabolic” in the non-European and more “African” spaces of the world. Yet, as Trouillot argues, such is the danger of the “Savage slot,” to not deal with it is no less problematic than promoting it. In this sense, as we will note in the chapters dedicated to Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, Bataille’s juxtaposition of eros/ thanatos in the context of Haitian Vodou is maybe recoverable. But again, the primary objective is not judgment of these French thinkers, but rather to show that just as for Buck-Morss unmentioned Haiti still occupied a primary space in Hegel’s deliberations of the “master-slave dialectic,” so

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too Haitian Vodou has a rightful place in the philological history of “possession.” (DIS)POSSESSIONS: BUTLER AND ATHANASIOU In the discussions that have made up this mostly chronological treatment of a history of possession in the mostly French and francophone context, there is one last pair of works that follows Foucault’s work: Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself (2005) and Butler and Athena Athanasiou’s Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (2013). Butler especially builds out of a tradition that continues to question the notion that one body contains one mind and one subjectivity. Together in their introduction Butler and Athanasiou state: “the idea of the unitary subject serves a form of power that must be challenged and undone.” 35 The authors go on to locate the multiplicity of the human subject in a context of “gender theory, queer activism, and heterodox psychoanalysis.” 36 While Bataille’s and Leiris’s work might have been far from feminist, their engagement with psychoanalytic theory, their interest in the variants, variables, and fragmentations of not just human subjectivity, but subjectivity tout court resonates with Butler’s theoretical interests, which she readily attributes to “Irigaray, Heidegger’s critique of technology, Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, and post-Lacanian psychoanalysis.” 37 While Butler and Athanasiou are not necessarily “French” scholars per se, they work within a shared intellectual tradition. While Bataille, Leiris, and Sartre might not be directly invoked as influences, they too, like Butler and Athanasiou struggled with the tension between the desire to advocate for a fragmented subject, but can’t seem to get around the problem that such a diffuse notion of “being” has for political accountability and action. In other words, as we have seen in our discussion of Hollier’s study of the “dispossessed” French thinkers of the interwar and the post–Second World War, how does a fragmented subject take responsibility for anything, much less gross crimes against humanity? Where Bataille and Sartre will be concerned primarily with industrialized war, the Holocaust, and in Sartre’s case, colonialism, Butler and Athanasiou will be compelled by crimes of a well-established biopolitical order, articulated first as we saw above by Foucault, and later as examined in the first part by Agamben, Dayan, and Mbembe. I only introduce Butler’s and Athanasiou’s work here because it is the logical next discussion in an intellectual history of dispossession, for their entire dialogue in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (which could be a beautiful title for a book on the Loudun possessions) turns around the terms “possession” and “dispossession.” That said, I choose to place it after the discussion of possession in the contexts to Haiti and/ or Haitian Vodou because Butler and Athanasiou’s conversation is one

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that struggles not only to define the terms “possession” and “dispossession,” but uses these terms copiously to try to resolve what it means to take account of oneself metaphysically while at the same time taking account of one’s concrete actions in a world that desperately needs to be repaired. For Butler and Athanasiou, there exists a vast discrepancy between a philosophy that advocates for the dispossession of self, and the material realities of the political dispossession of persons, communities, and peoples. Their dialogue revolves around the following interrogation: And so we take up the question of how to become dispossessed of the sovereign self and enter into forms of collectivity that oppose forms of dispossession that systematically jettison populations from modes of collective belonging and justice. 38

As in the first chapter, I claim that their interrogation would benefit from an understanding of “possession” in the context of a Vodou philosophical system. The best way then to discuss Butler’s and Athanasiou’s recent deliberations is after I have spent more time in a discursive space that “knows” and puts into play a Haitian Vodou philosophical system. For while this second part has argued that Haiti is central to a French and francophone deployment of “possession” as word, concept, and trope, the discussion has been dominated by a Franco-European discursive space. What I mean is that I have shown how mostly white European and U.S.American men read and write about possession; how some of them write about Haitian Vodou possession, and in Leiris’s case Gondarian zar possession. In this sense, while I have argued that Haiti occupies a central role, it does so as an anthropological other. While Deren, Dunham, Hurston, Leiris, and Métraux, in very different ways struggled to honor this anthropological other, they were nonetheless obliged to do so under the aegis of the language of the academe. And although Dunham and Hurston would find ways to subvert the academe’s rigid codifications, they nonetheless had to operate within it. 39 The third part of the book thus purposely looks at writers who identify themselves as Haitians, and reads texts that are novels; that is, their very form, is one that has the liberty to operate outside of the discursive space of the social sciences. NOTES 1. There is much more recent scholarship on devil possessions in Europe in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. See bibliography for full titles of selected works by Sarah Ferber, David Allen Harvey, Andreea Marculescu, and Robert Ziegler. 2. Michel de Certeau, La possession de Loudun (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 2005 [1970]) and Michel Foucault, Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France. 1974–1975. (Paris: Seuil/Gallimard [Hautes Etudes], 1999). 3. The original French:

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4. In their notes of Les Anormaux, Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni indicate that the course informed La Volonté de savoir, in Valerio Marchetti and Antonella Salomoni’s “Résumé du cours” and “Situation du cours” in Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France, 1974–1975, by Michel Foucault, 305–338 (Paris: Gallimard/ Le Seuil (Hautes études), 1999), 322) as well as a manuscript titled La Chair et le Corps, which Foucault destroyed, and which would have informed Les Aveux de la chair, also unedited, which would have constituted the fourth volume of The History of Sexuality (Ibid., 325). 5. Terry Rey, Bourdieu on Religion: Imposing Faith and Legitimacy (London, CT: Equinox Publishing, 2007). 6. “Qui sont donc ces possédées ? De jeunes femmes, comme ce fut souvent le cas des sorcières ou des possédées du XVIIe siècle ” (de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 173). 7. de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 116–117. 8. The original French is: Surtout, Richelieu venait de voir sa seigneurie de Richelieu (à moins de 20 km de Loudun) agrandie et érigée en duché-prairie (août 1631), et il entendait bien en constituer solidement le domaine. Il arrivait au faîte de sa puissance. (de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 133) 9. de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 55. 10. Ibid., 117. 11. The original French in Foucault’s text is: Il y aura une matrice à trois termes : le diable, bien sûr ; la religieuse possédée, à l’autre extrémité ; mais, entre les deux, triangulant le rapport, on va avoir le confesseur. . . . En tout cas, ce personnage central du directeur, ou du confesseur, va se démultiplier, se dédoubler, selon les conflits qui sont propres à l’institution ecclésiastique elle-même. Quant à la possédée, troisième terme du triangle, elle va aussi se dédoubler, en ce sens qu’elle ne sera pas, comme la sorcière, le suppôt du diable, sa servante docile. Ce sera plus compliqué que cela. La possédée sera celle, bien sûr, qui est sous le pouvoir du diable. Mais ce pouvoir, aussitôt qu’il s’ancre, qu’il s’enfonce, qu’il pénètre dans le corps de la possédée, va rencontrer une résistance. La possédée est celle qui résiste au diable, au moment même où elle est le réceptacle du diable. (Foucault, Les Anormaux, 192) 12. de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 18. 13. Alexandre Dumas, “Urbain Grandier,” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2746/ 2746-h/2746-h.htm, David Widger September 22, 2004 [EBook #2746]. 14. “Urbain Grandier: A Play in 5 Acts” by Alexandre Dumas père, 1850. Translated and adapted by Frank J. Morlock http://www.cadytech.com/dumas/stories/urbain_ grandier.php, 2000 15. Read with the original French: “[l]a possession devient un grand procès public: entre la science et la religion, sur le certain et l’incertain, sur la raison, le surnaturel, l’autorité,” for it is during “les années mêmes (1632–1640) qui voient un grand sursaut de la raison avec la parution du Discours de la méthode de Descartes (1637)” (de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 16). 16. Stephenson, Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche, 17–18. 17. Ibid., 19. 18. de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 23. 19. Stephenson, Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche, 17–19.

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20. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1990 [1978]), 147. 21. Although Foucault is often criticized for not writing about race, he does mention it in the first volume of The History of Sexuality: “racism took shape at this point” (149). Ann Laura Stoler in Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995) studies Foucault’s work alongside the archives of a mostly Dutch colonial context to show how his work is not only applicable to the colonial context, but is highly aware of race. 22. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 5. 23. The original French is: Je crois qu’on ne peut pas sous-estimer l’importance historique de cette convulsion dans l’histoire des maladies mentales, parce que, rappelez-vous ce que je vous disais au cours de dernières rencontres, vers 1850 la psychiatrie s’est finalement désaliénisée. Elle a cessé d’être l’analyse de l’erreur, du délire, de l’illusion pour devenir l’analyse de toutes les perturbations de l’instinct. La psychiatrie se donne l’instinct, ses troubles, toute la confusion du volontaire et de l’involontaire, comme son domaine propre. Eh bien, cette convulsion (c’est-à-dire cette agitation paroxystique du système nerveux qui a été, pour la médicine du XVIIIe siècle, la manière de recoder la vieille convulsion et tout l’effet de concupiscence de l’héritage chrétien) va apparaître maintenant comme étant la libération involontaire des automatismes. (Foucault, Les Anormaux, 208) 24. Foucault, Les Anormaux, 208. 25. The original French is: “Cette chair, par laquelle l’Eglise assurait son contrôle sur les corps, risque en effet d’être maintenant, par cet autre mode d’analyse et de gestion du corps, confisquée par un autre pouvoir, qui sera le pouvoir laïque de la médicine.” (Foucault, Les Anormaux, 206) 26. The original French is: C’est pourquoi, devant ces phénomènes de possession qui se répandaient dans le couvent des ursulines de Loudun, il a fallu à tout prix trouver le sorcier. Or, il s’est trouvé que le seul qui pouvait jouer le rôle de sorcier, c’était précisément quelqu’un qui appartenait à l’Eglise, puisque tous les personnages impliquées au départ étaient des personnages ecclésiastiques. De sorte que l’Eglise a été obligée de s’amputer de l’un de ses membres et de désigner comme sorcier quelqu’un qui était un curé (Foucault, Les Anormaux, 201) 27. Foucault, Les Anormaux, 191. 28. Ibid., 206–7. 29. There is a later context about which neither Bataille nor Foucault speak, which is the 1885–1897 “Palladium Affair,” based on sensationalistic journalist Léo Taxil’s “magnum opus, Le diable au XIXème siècle,” in which he reported an international network of devil worship based out of Masonic temples, with its headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. The context of the American South reminds us once again of this book’s first discussions of Dayan’s claims that the notion of the “duppie” or the “zombie,” of the human body possessed by another, would continue to have a role in an American context grappling with the guilt, and especially its fear that the generations of those members of the African diaspora that it has and continues to dispossess will come back to haunt us/them. David Allen Harvey writes, “Lurid, sensationalistic, and nearly two thousand pages long, Le diable au XIXème siècle combined political polemic with pulp fiction adventure and exoticism, a formula that quickly made it a success and ultimately a cause célèbre. Ultimately, however, the Palladium was revealed as a fraud in April 1897 by the man who had done the most to publicize it.” See David Allen Harvey, “Lucifer in the City of Light: The Palladium Hoax and ‘Diabolical Causality,’” Fin de Siècle France Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1/2, Winter 2006: 177–206.

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Also ironic is that the collective name for the two persons who supposedly wrote Taxil’s book was “Bataille.” See David Allen Harvey, “Review of Robert Ziegler’s Satanism, Magic, and Mysticism in Fin-de-siècle France (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).” H-France Review Vol. 13 13, no. 65 (May 2013). 30. Foucault, Les Anormaux, 209. 31. The original French is: “Ce tableau est-il hallucinatoire or réel? C’est précisément la question posée tout au long de ces mois [the months of the trial of Father Grandier]: qu’est-ce qui est réel ?” (de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 181). 32. The original French is: “Mais, sans doute, l’archétype avait servi de norme avant de servir de preuve. . . . C’est qu’il a sa tradition, et les habitants semblent s’être distribués sans difficulté des rôles déjà définis ” (de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 49). 33. de Certeau, La possession de Loudun, 16. 34. For Stoler see aforementioned footnote on Race and the Education of Desire (1995) and see Elsa Dorlin’s La Matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la Nation française (Paris: La Découverte, coll. “Textes à l’appui/Genre et sexualité”, 2006). 35. Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou, Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, ix. 36. Ibid., x. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., xi. 39. In November 2012, my colleagues and I organized a roundtable titled “Early Twentieth Century Ethnographies on Haiti: Interdisciplinary Roundtable.” Kyrah Malika Daniels, Kaiama L. Glover, Adam McGee, Mark Schuller, and Gina Ulysse’s papers and comments revealed the strategies actively pursued by Dunham and Deren to subvert a problematic anthropological discourse. See Glover’s forthcoming article.

Latousen—Guadeloupe 2007 from “Intérieur—Andidan 2011” by Nicolas Nabajoth. Source: Reprinted by permission from Nicolas Nabajoth.

III

Repossessing Possession: After Franco-American Ethnography, after Duvalier—Vodou in Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves

If for Rosello and Forsdick, a French intellectual public sphere is unwilling to acknowledge the usefulness of the concept of postcoloniality, it is because, as we saw in the Preface, they refuse, are not comfortable with, or are not exposed to what Forsdick characterizes as “postcolonial sites that resonate for both (former) ‘colonizer’ and (former) ‘colonized.’” 1 He explains that ultimately such thinkers are unable to think past the simplistic structures of the “reified colonizer/colonized binary.” 2 Hadriana dans tous mes rêves is a novel that gives itself up as a sort of offering to all those victims, culprits, and those somewhere in between, scared or incapable of envisioning the world beyond the simple duality of the us/them dichotomy. Initially, Depestre, the trickster, entices the reader into the simplicity of the binary: Patrick, a black, lower class boy falls in love with Hadriana, a white, rich girl, and both will be chastised for misbehaving, acting against racialized, social norms. Later, his multiple narrators will reveal the complexities not just of Hadriana, nor of Patrick, but they will oblige their readers to deal with convolutions to his readers’ own truths, whether social, racial, and/or sexual. As we shall discover, Hadriana is at once herself and multiple Hadrianas (Nana/Ezili/Altagracia) and she is also in active dialogue with many, many non-Hadrianic beings (Patrick/(Depestre)/Loko/Balthizar/Madame Losange, to name only a few). Culturally, she navigates amongst France, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and the larger Caribbean. Yet, Depestre’s tour de force is to understand that both sides—whether a “français de souche,” such as Bruckner, or a Haitian “noiriste” such as Duvalier—were they to know her complexity would outright reject her, for she is, despite her beauty, or because of it, in Christian Flaugh’s words a “freak”:

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Yet her freakishness is only the product of a larger Caribbean in turmoil, in which Jamaica in the midtwentieth century is perhaps the island to have tried out the most types of political models, for as Kelly Baker Josephs reminds us, on “a larger scale, Caribbean literature repeats the use of mad characters . . . constantly changing intensity and meaning.” 4 Dalleo writes: For other islands [i.e., not Cuba] most dramatically Puerto Rico as well as Trinidad and Tobago, postcoloniality meant full incorporation into North American capitalism, with fiction by Luis Rafael Sanchez, Ana Lydia Vega, or Earl Lovelace borrowing from the contaminated language of the market to create new artistic forms. Jamaica in the 1970s found itself negotiating between Cuba’s total withdrawal and Puerto Rico’s full incorporation. . . . But in 1972, with the victory of the People’s National Party (PNP), led by Michael Manley, official policy changed. Manley, under the slogan “We Are Not for Sale,” pursued a policy of rapprochement with Cuba and resistance against U.S. imperialism. 5

Again, here we are reminded of Bonilla’s and Wilder’s challenge to think through Caribbean political spaces in their own right, without imposing upon them the normative model of the nation-state. However, so as not to scare their readers off too soon, in the hopes that they will not outright reject anything that looks too multifaceted, Depestre’s novel will trick its reader, leading her/him/it into the tidy and orderly world, where the French are posited against the Haitians, the Christian elites against the working class Voudouyizans, the rational against the magical. The novel slowly (and sensually) reveals that each thread unravels into multiple strands that cannot be returned to their original order. Using trusted voices which, at least on the surface, seem to be major proponents of binaric thinking, scholars such as Jean-Price Mars or Claude Lévi-Strauss, Depestre’s novel manipulates its readers into the labyrinth of a Glissantian “Poetics of Relation.” Depestre’s novel subtly, accompanied by Marcel Hénaff’s and Boris Wiseman’s 6 more explicit scholarship will suggest especially in Lévi-Strauss’s case, that even LéviStrauss was unable to stand true to his quest for “pure” dichotomous thinking. Manipulated into a more entangled space, where things are muddled, unkempt, the reader might complain, but once the reader has ventured too far, s/he cannot go back to a time (only a few pages earlier) when things were clearly demarcated. If the readers stay on until the end, they might even find themselves seated, possessed by an order that not

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only provides solace, but is even more pleasurable than the order with which they had started out. Depestre’s novel is succinct, and brilliant. Published in 1988, I hope to show that it was twenty-five years ahead, not so much of its time, but of an intellectual and academic milieu that could digest such an unsystematic narrative. As Glover points out, North American and French academic systems seem unable to integrate postcolonial scholars whose work cannot be manipulated into making them feel good about themselves. Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves does quite the opposite. The novel disorders because it combines highbrow with lowbrow: it invokes both the elitism of a European and an elite Caribbean canon, of which Depestre acknowledges being a part. Dalleo explains that in the 1930s through independence or revolution, writers such as Martí, Carpentier, Césaire, or Depestre were supposed to serve as representatives for the people, as interlocutors “speak[ing] for” the “folk” or the “public and counterpublic,” 7 whereas more recent writing, such as testimonio “unlike the products of the global culture industry or European high modernist literature, should be a popular form but one produced by the people rather than imposed on them.” 8 With the extreme elegance that is proper to Depestre’s persona, his novel embodies what Assotto Saint puts into a language that Depestre would never use, but which I would suggest, he performs: “By using the nom de guerre of Saint, I also wanted to add a sacrilegious twist to my life by grandly sanctifying the loud low-life bitch that I am.” 9 In the end, Depestre’s is a novel that creolizes its reader, forcing her/ him/it to negotiate her/himself/itself to what it means to live amongst not just many, many others, but also many, many other selves. The reader is exposed to the multiplicity of consciousnesses through the novel’s unwillingness to offer up a dominant narrative voice: as will be further deliberated, both Patrick Altamont and Hadriana (“Nana”) Siloé occupy the role—possess the role—of the first-person singular voice, “je”—“I”; and they are both also each dispossessed of it. I will argue that the zombification, which Hadriana undergoes ultimately represents the initial stage of possession, the violent and uncomfortable evacuating of her soul; while her later dezombification represents a sort of possession, a possession of both herself, and possibly of Patrick, for both narrators it would seem, at least narratologically, as I will argue, share the same physical kò kadav: the physical text that stands before the reader’s eyes. In other words, it is never possible to really determine who the ultimate narrator is: Patrick or Hadriana? What is clear is that each undergoes zombification in his or her own way, and both achieve the ultimate goal of a possession: a “reorganization of the self.” 10 Moreover, I propose that the processes of zombification/dezombification (i.e., dispossession/possession) are assimilated to the creative method, which is itself associated with an explicit espousal of art as an embodied endeavor, one that is necessarily erotic.

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NOTES 1. Forsdick, “Colonial History, Postcolonial Memory,” 117. 2. Ibid., 111. 3. Christian Flaugh, Operation Freak: Narrative, Identity, and the Spectrum of Bodily Abilities (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2012), 22. 4. Kelly Baker Josephs, Disturbers of the Peace Representations of Madness in Anglophone Caribbean Literature (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 1. 5. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 187. 6. Marcel Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology, translated by Mary Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998) and Boris Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 7. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 97. 8. Ibid., 182. 9. Assoto Saint, Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems, Fiction, Essay and Plays of Assotto Saint (New York: Masquerade Books, 1996), 9. 10. Beauvoir, “Herbs and Energy,” 129–130.

ELEVEN Depestre, the “Autofiction” of the “(Anti)Hero” of “A New World Mediterranean”

On a basic level, one might read René Depestre’s novel about Hadriana’s death at the moment of her wedding and her subsequent zombification as an extended rewriting of two of the anecdotes that Métraux recounts in Voodoo in Haiti: the first, as (re)related from Zora Neale Hurston about a “society girl” reappearing from the dead; 1 the second, about “a girl from Marbial, engaged to a young man with whom she was very much in love, was unwise enough to reject—rather sharply—the advances of a powerful hungan.” 2 Yet, as Edwidge Danticat reveals, the legend that persists is that of Depestre’s novel: Jacmel’s resident goddess is Hadriana Siloe. One of the most beautiful women in town, Hadriana dies at the altar in the middle of her wedding ceremony. Her body is exposed at the square for the public wake before her funeral. Except she is not dead. It only appears so. Her apparent demise was caused by a man with mystical powers who shows himself as a giant butterfly. Hadriana becomes a zombie. 3

Yet, to fully understand the complexity of Depestre’s 1988 novel Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, and to appreciate how the novel, as a sort of roman-àthèse, contributes to an intellectual history of possession in the mostly French, francophone, and Latin American contexts, it is necessary to contextualize the life and times of a man who has juggled various and often conflicting forms of dissidence, advocating for varying causes: socialism, communism, anticolonialism, human rights, humanism, and even eroticism. Depestre’s explicit and implicit references to Bataille, Breton, Leiris, Métraux, Seabrook, and Yourcenar, as well as his consideration of the anthropological work of Lévi-Strauss and the contexts of magic and mar205

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Figure 11.1. “René Depestre prend la parole lors des grandes grèves contre Elie Lescot—Haïti 1946”/“René Depestre speaks on the part of the demonstrators against Elie Lescot—Haiti 1946.” Depestre is arrested after the demonstrations, which follow Breton’s “First Haitian Conference.” On January 11, 1946, President Elie Lescot is forced out of power; Depestre is forced to flee, and he will continue his studies in France. Source: Courtesy of Pôle francophone, BFM de Limoges, with special thanks to René Depestre and Baptiste Chrétien.

velous realisms, force the reader to consider the novel as a sort of romanà-thèse, in which one of the novel’s narrators, Patrick, muses over the varying “ideas” that have influenced him over his lifetime. The next chapter will deal more closely with the narrators of Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, whereas this chapter will consider the novel as a sort of “autofiction” of Depestre’s own relationship to Haiti. 4 Writers such as Colin Dayan and Lizbeth Paravisini-Gebert have taken Depestre to task for objectifying or completely ignoring “women as agents of reclamation and revolt.” 5 While Dayan’s and Paravisini-Gebert’s claims cannot be refuted, through a comparison of Hadriana dans tous mes rêves with Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien 1958, I argue that Depestre’s dedication in the 1980s and early 1990s to the project of eroticism, engages a more complex conversation with what it means to be a male public figure in a postmodern, transnational space. As Jana Evans Braziel argues, “Haiti’s revolutionary history has been citizened by gwo nèg, or ‘big men,’ whose individual lives, heroic (or dastardly) feats, and triumphant (sometimes notorious) deaths are the fragile ruins and shardlike makings of legend, or of infamy.” 6 Depestre’s youth is characterized

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Figure 11.2. “Depestre et Che Guevara—imprimerie nationale à Cuba—1960”/ “Depestre and Che Guevara—the National Printing House of Cuba—1960.” In 1959, Depestre joins the Cuban Revolution and will remain in Cuba until 1978. Source: Courtesy of Pôle francophone, BFM de Limoges, with special thanks to René Depestre and Baptiste Chrétien.

by a political life aspiring to the “powerful man, one who commands respect, social stature, and, above all, authority”; 7 while the later part of his life, as Patrick Cazal’s documentary René Depestre, chronique d’un animal marin—René Depestre, Chronicle of a Marine Animal (2005) 8 demonstrates is much more about negotiating what it is to live quietly and modestly. In his own way, then I argue, Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, and more generally eroticism as an aesthetic, are Depestre’s way of working through the “patriarchal masculinity” that has characterized both nefarious dictatorships such as that of the Duvaliers, but also the more socialist-minded ones such as Castro’s, of which Depestre was an integral member. In addition then to recuperating Vodou from its misuse by the Duvaliers and explaining its philosophy to its readers, Hadriana also grapples with how the arts, and more specifically the eroticism often associated with artistic inspiration, might themselves constitute an essential part of political/public life. At the very least, eroticism, I will argue, becomes a

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means through which Depestre’s novel works through the failure of the heteromasculinist “gwo nèg” past of both heroes such as Dessalines and antiheroes such as Duvalier. While Depestre’s Hadriana is definitely not a feminist novel, it is neither an antifeminist one. It is a means by which he may work through what it means for a society to struggle with oppressive leadership, and for an individual man—that is Depestre—to transition from being at the center of the political limelight both in Haiti and Cuba, to leading a more quiet life of leisure in southern France. This chapter will show how such varying intertexts work together to build on and out of Leiris’s concern with the legitimacy of possession, and Bataille’s interest in Vodou as a site where life and death interact. Most importantly, Hadriana offers up possession as both an ontological reality, one that exists for itself; and also, as an artifice, an aesthetic process that serves foremost as a metaphor for Haiti under the Duvaliers: for Depestre’s own life trajectory; for the plurality of the Caribbean existence; and for the relationship between life and death. In Chris Bongie’s Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de siècle (1991), he writes: The underlying project of exoticism is to recover the possibility of this total “experience,” this concrete apprehension of others that is (or so the critics of modernity hypothesize) typical of traditional communities but has been, or is being, eliminated from our own world. 9

Depestre’s work recognizes that what is at stake is the feeling of what Bongie identifies as “alienation,” that “the post-revolutionary individual is in his very essence an afterimage, always alienated from experience and tradition.” 10 Depestre understands that deployments of Vodou by (even rogue) intellectuals such as Seabrook is about addressing such deep alienation. Yet, at the same time, Depestre writes with the consciousness of the alienation theorized by Fanon in Peau noire, masques blancs—Black Skin, White Masks (1952), one in which the white man’s search to recuperate the “total experience” for himself completely annihilates, it would seem, the experience of any other man (or woman): “As painful as it is for us to have to say this: there is but one destiny for the black man. And it is white.” 11 So when Depestre taunts his readers with the “erotic,” he is playing with a tradition of European writers behaving badly to provoke their own bourgeois order, but having no clue that they are muffling certain voices, and completely dispossessing others of theirs. If Frankétienne’s novel Dézafi (1975) and its adaptation into French Les Affres d’un défi—The Agony of Defiance (1979) 12 are dominated by the word “enchevêtrement”—“entanglement,” and Maryse Condé’s Traversée de la mangrove—Crossing the Mangrove (1989) 13 is also presided over by the image of intertwined roots and branches, Depestre’s novel is a complex enmeshing 14 of the respective lexicons associated with Greek and Roman mythology and history; a Vodou philosophical system of the sacred, the aesthetic, and healing; and, twentieth-century social science research by

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mostly French and Caribbean artists, folklorists, ethnographers, anthropologists, and philosophers. Unlike Marcel Camus’s fiction film Orfeo negro—Black Orpheus (1959), 15 in which there is a rather clear attempt to match Greco-Roman gods and Candomblé orixás, 16 Depestre’s novel entangles in such a way as to confound all his readers, even those more or less equally familiar with the contexts of Greco-Roman mythology, Vodou, and the social sciences. The three chapters dedicated to Depestre’s novel will try to focus on certain themes, but ultimately, Depestre’s art as a novelist is to intertwine in such an intricate manner that it is impossible to filter out “siloed” readings, for of course, as we will discover, it is not a coincidence that his heroine’s last name, before her transformation into Nana and just Hadriana, is Hadriana Siloé. If in the most loose sense of terms, possession is the intersection of multiple spirits, or energies, in a single body, then possession is by its very nature an intertwining activity, one that cultivates “the fundamental notions of mare and pwen (tying and point)” as Rey’s and Richman’s work shows, 17 and which this book will further discuss in part IV. The three chapters dedicated to Hadriana dans tous mes rêves will suggest that Depestre’s novel looks to make an intervention as a novel of the French language, positing itself next to, for example André Breton’s Nadja, Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma to which he makes a reference, 18 or Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien. One could even read Depestre’s novel as intentionally wanting to place itself as one of the quintessential Haitian novels, for in referencing Yacine’s Nedjma (the canonical postcolonial Algerian novel), he is also referencing what Jonassaint explains is reputed as the “first” Haitian novel, the 1859 novel Stella, 19 by Eméric Bergeaud. Nedjma in Arabic, from the roots (N J M), means “star” in Arabic, as is Stella in Italian. Hadriana is also a novel that may be read to dialogue with Caribbean discourses of identity such as those of Alejo Carpentier, Jacques Stephen Alexis, and even Edouard Glissant. Finally, it is a novel that seeks to “present itself as ‘Haitian,’” drawing on Jonassaint’s description of Alexis’s novels, to both cultivate and bring to non-Haitian, and I would even argue, non-Vodouyizan readers, a sensibility to what Jonassaint names “haïtianité”—“Haitianness.” 20 AN HOLLIERIAN DISPOSSESSION: EROTICISM AND THE DISSIMULATION OF TRAUMA To understand why Depestre weaves such an entangled narrative is to understand his biographical itinerary, and the literary and philosophical informants of this trajectory. René Depestre, born in 1926, so three years before the publication of William Seabrook’s The Magic Island and during the occupation of Haiti by the United States, is known amongst his contemporaries and generations following him, as a poet-activist. As noted

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in the earlier parts of this book and in the timeline, in 1956, after the First International Conference of Black Writers and Artists “organized by [the magazine] Présence africaine,” Depestre would “break with Stalinism,” 21 and later that year, Depestre and Césaire would fall out over their adhesion to the communist party and the political role of poetry. Unlike Césaire, Depestre would remain a member of the official communist party, whereas Césaire would leave it in 1956 22 to dedicate himself to a “négritude combattante”—“a combatant négritude.” 23 As we saw in the introduction to this book, while the debate drew on general arguments in France over how accessible poetry should be to the masses, as Anne Douaire-Banny suggests, it was as much about a younger poet, Depestre, openly, in the pages of Lettres françaises, Présence africaine, and Optique, the three publications in which the debate would take place, 24 disrespecting the older one, Césaire. Douaire-Banny writes, “la position dominante de Césaire qui tient parfaitement son rôle”—“Césaire’s dominant position, perfectly holding on to his seniority.” 25 Furthermore, Césaire’s own ambivalent relationship to anticolonialism as a politician under whose aegis Martinique was departmentalized, would further complicate a clear-cut understanding of the debate, not to mention that prior to their 1956 altercation, in 1950, Depestre had been “expulsed from France” for having “fought for decolonization.” 26 Regardless of the said and unsaid reasons of the debate between the two men, after living in Cuba for close to twenty years (from 1959 to 1978), by 1971, Depestre would have already spoken out against Castro’s regime, and he would eventually leave the international communist cause, taking a position at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. In chapter 9, we already saw the clever way in which Depestre in his talk to a UNESCO audience, and later publication, “Sartre in His Fraternity,” both honors Sartre and questions the very “fraternity” for which he was lauded in articles written about him at the time of his death. 27 Depestre opens his address: I am neither a Sartrian nor a Sartrologue, nor even an amateur weekend dabbler in Sartre. I have none of the qualities required to talk about the philosopher who saw Relevance as “the most French of the virtues.” I simply have the leisure time to go back to the fact that, having read Sartre since my student years in Paris, I felt there was in his fiction and thought a general poetics of fraternity. 28

Innocuously, Depestre explains that he will look to Sartre’s “fiction and thought” to locate where such “fraternity” lies, and yet his talk will almost uniquely cite either conversations that he had with Sartre, or Sartre’s own words in interviews. Indirectly and imprecisely, without iterating the infamous schism between Camus and Sartre, Depestre will show that the concept of “fraternity” in Sartre’s life and work, if not a complete “fiction,” would remain not so much a “mere” “thought,” than a concept

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with which Sartre would grapple his whole life, especially, as chapter 9 argued in regards to the role of “violence” in helping to achieve such a “fraternity,” amongst men of all places, races, and social standings. While “Sartre in His Fraternity” might exemplify the sleight of hand with which Depestre both honors and questions Sartre’s legacy, it is also in an even more subtle way, a reflection on Depestre’s own action, or lack thereof later in his life, what Chris Bongie calls “his ‘postmodern’ renunciation of the revolutionary project to which he once adhered.” 29 When, in the above citation, Depestre writes, “I simply have the leisure time,” he is clearly taking accountability for having stepped out of a politically engaged life. This is no longer the Depestre known for being the revolutionary, the one who directly contributed to the overthrow of President Elie Lescot in 1946 (see chapter 6); who in 1950 was kicked out of France for supporting an anticolonialist agenda; who unlike Sartre eventually broke with Stalinism, and later Castroism; who openly and in print disagreed with Césaire; and who in 1957 refused to serve as François Duvalier’s “Responsable culturel des affaires étrangères.” 30 In the same year that Depestre pronounces “Sartre in His Fraternity,” Patrick Cazal releases his documentary, René Depestre, chronique d’un animal marin—René Depestre, Chronicle of a Marine Animal (2005). 31 The documentary takes us through Depestre’s life, with interviews with Depestre in his home in France, where Depestre explains his move towards writing about the erotic. Depestre has made a decision to be a man of “leisure,” it is a parti pris, a choice to leave the realm of the overtly political. The last entry of Baptiste Chrétien’s timeline of Depestre’s life reads: “1986: He retires in the Aude region of France and two years later publishes Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, a novel recognized by many distinctions, including le Prix Renaudot and le Prix de la Société des gens de lettres.” 32 In opening his talk about Sartre, Depestre is completely aware of the significance of pronouncing the word “leisure” in an intellectual space informed by decades of deliberations as to what it meant to be politically engaged, deliberations that led to broken friendships between poets and writers. As such, Depestre belongs to Hollier’s generation of “dispossessed” writers, who without always admitting it openly or fully articulating it, find themselves disillusioned by a world beyond a violence that any of them could have imagined when starting off their poeticopolitical careers as youths in Paris, Port-au-Prince, or Marburg (where Hannah Arendt studied under Heidegger). 33 The true fraternity to which Depestre speaks in his homage to Sartre, is one that recognizes that in addition to sympathizing with Sartre as to the ambivalent role of violence in a post-Holocaust world, in the establishment of a socialist and/or anticolonialist agenda, Depestre and Sartre would be extremely sensitive to and also thus disappointed by the inability for human rights to align with either or both an official Communist and/or anticolonialist agenda. So when Depestre speaks to a UNESCO

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audience in 2005 about Sartre, what he is really doing is acknowledging that both he and Sartre grappled in real time with Moyn’s claim that “anticolonialism wasn’t a human rights movement.” 34 In fact, to compare the footage of Depestre speaking about socialism on a panel in Cuba in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s classic Cuban film, Memorias del Subdesarrollo— Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) 35 to the interviews with Depestre about eroticism in Cazal’s René Depestre, Chronicle of a Marine Animal (2005), is to note, and I would say, tragically note, how Depestre’s own life is the personification of how socialist, human rights, and anticolonialist agendas would not find much of a common ground. While granted, extremely masculinist, where the machismo at once acknowledges in Dalleo’s words the “breakdown of masculine public space” 36 and “attempt[s] to create a new heroic and masculine public role for the writer in a context where even that identity has been commodified,” 37 it is also the tragic story that “plays out throughout the Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s,” where intellectuals, who participated in revolutionary and/or anticolonial struggles, find themselves not only irrelevant, 38 but even expelled, and violently so, from the public sphere. 39 Dalleo, writing alongside Dash’s and Matthew J. Smith’s work, writes: “This exile from the public sphere meant that the literary intellectuals discussed in the first half of this book [i.e., Jacques Roumain, José Martí] never truly came to power, and were more often victims than perpetrators of the postcolonial violence Dash identifies.” 40 Dalleo is specifically comparing intellectuals such as Depestre and Jacques Stephen Alexis to others such as François Duvalier, who did come to power. 41 The lack of political empowerment associated with a more modest literary engagement, then represents a sort of “impotence.” 42 That said, if the “public sphere” is to be understood as “political” power rather than say contributions to “regional solidarity,” 43 or to the dissemination of new ideas about the relationship of self to community, then writers such as Depestre are not “powerful.” The frustration, yes, might be a certain feeling of ineffectiveness, for Dash’s discussion deals with the “disturbing reality that suggests that in every intellectual and writer there lurks the monster of all Haitian intellectuals, François Duvalier.” 44 Dash’s contemplation of literary engagement as the acte manqué of political power comes in his discussion of Marie Chauvet’s work, but again, going back to Hollier, while a feeling of (masculine) egoism might inform such a feeling of powerlessness, it has much more to do, I’d argue, with the gross disillusion of a dismal Haitian, Caribbean, and more general global state of affairs. These are men, and in the case of Chauvet, also women, who absolutely compromised their personal lives to promote a better world. One could better look at Depestre’s exilic itinerary as one that in particular kept its ego in check, constantly deflecting any impulse towards the type of residential stability necessary to setting up (dictatorial) political shop. So, the need for eroticism, yes, might be a male response (although

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one need only look to Chauvet, or Condé’s narrator notably in I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem 45) to realize that the erotic impulse is a complex response to equally complicated circumstances. If the autobiographical elements of the novel Hadriana, dans tous mes rêves seem to be limited to his youth in the late 1930s in Jacmel, Haiti, and his teaching appointment in the 1980s in Mona, Jamaica, I argue that the novel deals not only with the much more politically complex trajectory of Depestre’s life, but also with a literary and philosophical history that includes the Caribbean, France, and Latin America. Without understanding Depestre’s relationship to a French intellectual history that wrote about or was informed by Haiti, without understanding Depestre’s relationship to Duvalier, and most importantly, without understanding his role as international intellectual “trickster”—a sort of member of the Gede family of cunning lwas, it is difficult to take account of Depestre’s turn towards eroticism in his later works, notably in Hadriana, dans tous mes rêves and Eros dans un train chinois (1990). Munro explains: Eroticism in Depestre’s writing has been critiqued as a narcissistic space, outside time and history, and thus as a kind of refuge from the vagaries of politics. As Dash sees it, Depestre’s recurrent literary quest for erotic escape recalls the earlier writing of Carl Brouard, only for Depestre the context for sexual abandon, or géolibertinage, to use Depestre’s own term, is more global, and sex is the ultimate weapon. 46

Paravisini-Gebert, an important voice in research not only on Caribbean literatures, but also on Vodou, Lukumi, la Regla de Ocha, Santería, Espiritismo, and Rastafarianism writes of Hadriana dans tous mes rêves: The false eroticism of the text, false to the degree that it objectifies female sexuality and is built on male-centered fantasies of erotic dominance, is linked to racially-determined attitudes on sexuality. The text is overly concerned with sexual relations between black men and white women. . . . Depestre’s text ultimately resists meaning, as it seems to strive to empty history of its content by placing the erotic quest above it. But the erotic quest itself is deprived of sense in the text, since it negates the free erotic jouissance of the carnivalesque in the name of the triumph of the grotesque phallic image. It is an erotic quest that places women in the same context as the zombified Haitian people, one lacking a will to revolt, the other lacking the freedom to desire. 47

Paravisini-Gebert is correct on all accounts: Depestre’s narration privileges Hadriana’s whiteness; degrades her as a woman; and creates a metaphor between her and the Haitian people. And yet, all three of these “uses” of Hadriana are in a sense in conflict with each other: how can Hadriana as a French-Haitian elite represent the Haitian people? How else could the story have taken place if Hadriana hadn’t been white, for as Hadriana herself acknowledges, “In those days, blond skin, better than any diplomatic passport, enjoyed the privilege of a visa to the realm of

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divine right.” 48 But not only is Depestre a master of narrating with a trickster’s voice, arriving on the scene like the Gede lwa, Bawòn Samdi, announcing “the spirit of ancestral dead and sexual regeneration,” 49 but his protagonist Hadriana also uses her assets to subvert, resembling the light-skinned Ezuli Freda, “the wife of Danbala, Agwe, and Ogoun. But besides her relationship with these spiritual entities, she claims as well all mortal men, Haitians and non-Haitians. In this regard, she is an independent agent.” 50 The fact that Depestre’s first person narrator forfeits his voice to that of Hadriana in the novel’s “third movement” is a gesture towards a series of “something elses,” which will be explored in this chapter: a spiritual marriage between himself and Hadriana as lwa; a reworking of Bataille’s pairing of eroticism and death; and maybe, even, a sort of dabbling in experimentations with usually phallocentric, but not necessarily heteronormative sexual experiences. Eroticism might be many things, and it certainly gravitates around potency, but it is not an end in itself. It is mostly a symptom of something more tragic. Where Bataille’s compulsion for the erotic will be of the sadistic order, Depestre’s will be of the seemingly lighthearted order of Bruckner’s “vulgar,” where the “vulgar” is the label implemented by a bourgeois perspective to designate what it perceives as the joyousness of the peasant and working classes. 51 Where Bataille’s penchant for the sadistic is an obviously outward manifestation of a pained existence, for Depestre a more “vulgar” (joyous) eroticism as produced by the Vodou context, is also, in its own right, a sign of deep disillusion. Depestre’s 1988 novel is then both an autofictional attempt for Depestre to deal with his own suffering, but it is also an offering to a Haitian people after Duvalierism, one in deep need of the healthier aspects of Vodou, one stripped of the violent exoticism ascribed to it by Bataille, or a Vodou mishandled by the Duvalier regime. In this way, eroticism is only a “way in,” a stepping stone to a more complex Vodou system whose aim is to process, deal with, and ultimately heal trauma. In The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context, in referring to the protagonist Rosario in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, Dash writes: Rosario is both the feminized, native other and the hybrid inscribed in a universal historical encounter. She is grounded in the reality of a racial and cultural encounter of global proportions that typifies for Carpentier the experience of the New World as a marvelous crossroads. To this extent, the Caribbean’s heterogeneity makes it superior to Europe’s relatively tame Mediterranean. 52

Hadriana dans tous mes rêves is about what Haiti was as a relatively selfsustaining Caribbean island coming out of the nineteenth century before the onset and consequences of an aggressive U.S.-American neocolonial-

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ism and a Cold War political order. It describes the dynamism of “a new world Mediterranean.” 53 That said, although the first “movement” of Hadriana refers back to a post-U.S. occupation and the pre–Second World War era in Haiti, it does so in 1988, seven years after Glissant has first published Le Discours antillais (1981)—Caribbean Discourse (1992). 54 In regards to Glissant’s comments about The Lost Steps in L’Intention poétique (1969), Dash writes that Carpentier’s novel is ultimately about the “definitive loss of the past and the need to confront modernity.” 55 Similarly, Depestre’s novel is as much a celebration of Haiti as a “racial and cultural encounter of global proportions” as it is an acknowledgement of the diminution of such a positive creolized space, especially in a Haiti dominated by a tyrannically Duvalierist fetishism for all that is hyperbolically “noiriste.” One of the novel’s first-person narrators Patrick, who shares certain biographical facts with Depestre, the son of a seamstress and Hadriana’s childhood friend and later lover, nods sardonically to what Hron identifies as Duvalier’s coopting of Jean Price-Mars’s “cultural revival [one that included Vodou, and] that took place in Haiti in the early twentieth century” 56: in Patrick’s words, “un Price-Mars, entrepris de précieuses recherches sur le culte national des Haïtiens”—“a Price-Mars, taken by precious research on the Haitian national cult.” Later, Patrick pokes sardonic fun at Price-Mars’s acclaimed 1928 study Ainsi parla l’oncle, 57 for he names a chapter “Ainsi parla mon oncle Féfé,” 58 in which his first-person narrator Patrick, through his uncle’s expertise, relates the workings of Vodou zombification. Gérarde Magloire and Kevin A. Yelvington write, “Price-Mars’s most ambitious aim in Haitian folkloric studies was to investigate the cultural forms that unite Haitian masses and upper classes across great social rifts.” 59 If Price-Mars hoped his work would unite, then Depestre’s novel points to how his work was manipulated to other means, where Hadriana’s zombification may then be read as an annunciatory event of a Haiti that would use Vodou to promote a “noiriste ideology.” 60 Hron explains that the task after Duvalierism would be to “draw attention” away from “the abusive translation” 61 of Vodou as a tool of Duvalier as a “black fascist tyrant.” 62 In this way, Depestre’s novel, published in 1988, two years after the fall of the Duvalier regime, is to restore Vodou’s image. But mostly Hadriana is troubling because she represents too many identities: in her whiteness, she signifies colonialism; in her familial upbringing, she is the product of progressive republican French values of cultural tolerance; 63 in her young late adolescence, she is engaged and married to a member of the Haitian elite; and in her childhood and young adulthood, she is Haitian of a more common order, baptized alongside other Haitian children, including Patrick; 64 and most importantly, she is abducted, possessed, and zombified as a Haitian by a Vodou bokor. For Patrick’s first-person narrative, Hadriana in a sense will represent not so

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much what Haiti is in 1988, nor what it might be after the Duvalier regime, but rather what Haiti was for a moment between the U.S. occupation of Haiti and the arrival of François Duvalier. But Hadriana must not only be read as a metaphor for Haiti, for this is an “autofictional” 65 novel of a writer who knew Haiti intimately until Duvalier expelled him from it in 1957, and who, in the third “movement” of the novel, must rely on a second first-person voice, that of Hadriana, whom as we shall see, serves as his muse, his Achille’s heel, his informant, and through a sort of narrative possession, as his mèt tèt, the Vodou spirit most closely linked to his psychical being. Although she too is expelled from Haiti, and while she is originally French, but living in Haiti and Jamaica, he—that is Patrick as an autofictional Depestre—must rest his narrative upon hers to inform him, for his “imagination . . . spins around a center that is located in another place, Haiti, and another time, the 1930s.” 66 In many senses then, Hadriana is Depestre, for as Munro claims using Depestre’s words in a 2002 letter to him, “Depestre is at the epicenter of ‘many aesthetic influences,’” 67 but also many difficult sociopersonal-political ones, which are all in their own way aesthetic. For in the end, as Jonaissaint points out, it seems that Depestre actually conceives of politics, or at least of the socialist politics of the twentieth century as a sort of aesthetics in their own right. 68 So when Depestre explains that he “simply ha[s] the leisure time,” it is not so simple, nor is it so easy to read Hadriana as the delirious musings of an older man abandoning a politically “engaged writing” for the erotic, even if he himself suggests that such is the case in his interviews in Cazal’s film. Instead, this is a novel that I claim at once supports and expands Bataille’s explorations of the relationship between the human drive for the deathly through the erotic, and also politely takes Bataille to task for not only misrepresenting Vodou, but most importantly for missing an opportunity to better expound his thesis on eros/thanatos. In an uncharacteristically nontrickster, unambivalent moment, in an interview published in 2005, Depestre directly criticizes early anthropology: “I’m not questioning anthropology as a science, but its early fumbling around, the trials, and the errors that were sometimes a bit whimsical, fantastical.” 69 As such, Depestre’s novel is one aware of most of the sociopolitical contexts that burden Haiti and the Caribbean, and in so doing serves as a bridge between pre-Duvalierian Haiti, and the Haiti that has followed it: a Haiti greatly transformed not just by the dictatorship, but by exile and its resultant diasporas, and more recently by a “humanitarian” new global order that drawing on Mark Schuller’s work neocolonizes by “killing with kindness.” 70 In After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (2002), Danticat explains how Depestre’s novel has become legend in his birthplace:

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Hadriana is one of those rare literary cases in which a novel’s character becomes even more real, and more powerful, than actual people. For many Jacmelians, . . . even pondering her existence parallels the question that many agnostics ask themselves about God. Did we create God or did God create us? Did Depestre and Jacmel create Hadriana or did she create Jacmel and Depestre? . . . Depestre’s novel has such influence that pieces of it seem to appear everywhere. The national Haitian tourist guide borrows from the title of the book for the heading of its section about Jacmel. 71

Myriam Chancy explains Danticat’s particular relationship, as a Haitian immigrant returning to Haiti, and her particular relationship to Jacmel: Danticat thus cautions her careful reader to observe her observing, not as an insider but as a diasporic returnee, an outsider, who well understands her displacement from homeground and does not seek to suspend the gulf of time that has created the distance from home and native culture. 72

In other words, Danticat herself is drawn to the legend of Hadriana because like Depestre, she too needs an interlocutor to help her understand a Haiti from where she originated, but of which she is no longer an onthe-ground permanent resident. Were Depestre’s novel not representative of something more than objectifying the white woman, of a cheap exoticism of the “black” Vodou world, then Hadriana/Hadriana—as both a protagonist and a novel—would not have acquired such acclaim in the past quarter century, and come to mean so much to younger generations of Haitian writers. YOURCENAR’S HADRIEN, DEPESTRE’S HADRIANA: SEMIFICTIONAL AUTOBIOGRAPHIES OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL Silvio Torres-Saillant writes that Depestre’s “works have done a great service in affirming the cultural authenticity of the people of the Caribbean,” 73 although feminist scholars will disagree, accusing Depestre of feminizing the Caribbean into an overly eroticized (and exoticized) space. After all, his life trajectory, the omission of women’s voices from most of his early work, the lexica he employs, correspond to what Maja Horn describes as “hegemonic notions of masculinity [that] are often reiterated and reproduced by some of the country’s most important critical and anti-hegemonic voices: Dominican post-dictatorship letrados.” 74 To understand how Depestre’s novel may be read less as an objectification of women, and more as an exploration and apology for eroticism, I compare Hadriana dans tous mes rêves to Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien. If Yourcenar is interested in locating man at humanity’s threshold moment between a pagan era and a Christian one, then Depestre is

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concerned with locating man, and woman, in 1988, at a pivotal moment for Haiti: two years after the Duvalier regime has fallen in Haiti. While Yourcenar benefits from centuries of hindsight, Depestre’s novel, more focused on the twentieth century, is itself reflecting on and amongst the contexts of unprecedented moments in human experience: on a more personal level, 1988 marks the ten-year anniversary of Depestre’s official departure from Castro’s Cuba and the eight-year anniversary of Yourcenar’s induction as the first woman to the Académie française, as well as the eight-year commemoration of Sartre’s death; more generally, 1988 is at an approximate two decade mark from the last African liberations, from the landing on the moon, from the assassination of Martin Luther King and Patrice Lumumba; and, it represents a year before the fall of the Berlin wall. While all of these specific contexts are not directly evoked in Depestre’s novel, they inform the reading of the novel in a broader humanistic historical context. A hint then to better understanding the various layers of the novel might be in the title, which I suggest not only pays homage to Yourcenar’s acclaimed epistolary novel Mémoires d’Hadrien (1958), 75 but also speaks to this book’s earlier discussions of French philosophy’s (and anthropology’s) increased interest in how consciousness and knowledge are informed by “embodied” experiences. Being that Hadriana is not exactly a common French or Haitian name, and given that Depestre chooses the clearly “ancient Roman” version of the name, for he could have used a more current spelling of the name, such as Adrienne or Adriana, I am more than encouraged to entertain the possibility that Yourcenar’s novel is part of Depestre’s complex staging of sources, allusions, and intertexts. Mémoires d’Hadrien is written in the first person, composed as a series of letters to “Mon cher Marc,” 76 that is to Marcus Aurelius, whom Hadrian 77 intended as a successor to the Roman Empire. Yourcenar’s second note in the appendix, “Carnets de notes de Mémoires d’Hadrien”—“Notes to Memories of Hadrian” reads: In the whereabouts of 1927, in a volume of Flaubert’s correspondence, which I’d very much read and commented, may be found the unforgettable phrase: “When the gods were no more, and Christ was yet to be, there existed a unique moment, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, where only man existed.” A major part of my life would be spent trying to define, and then paint, this solitary man, who for this very reason, would be linked to nothing less than everything. 78

Whether it is the “phenomenologists” or the Vodouyizans; whether Nietzsche, Benedict, Leiris, Métraux, or Bataille drawing on Nietzsche; Yourcenar drawing on Hadrian; or Depestre drawing on all of the former, Depestre’s novel is an expansion of what it means to be human at the moment of death, when one is highly aware of the feebleness of the

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mind, powerless to the onslaught of the body’s supremacy over existence. Of most significance in comparing the two novels is that Yourcenar reconstructs what might have been the Emperor Hadrian’s reflections upon his deathbed of his progressive leadership and his advocacy of the arts as an essential part of political/public life. Yet, she also invokes something far more instinctual than the “civilizing” missions of political leadership and the cultivation of high culture; she writes of the Roman Emperor’s infamous obsession for the young Greek man Antinous (“Antinoüs,” in Yourcenar’s text). At first read, Depestre’s novel would seem to only be concerned with the latter: the obsession with the beauty of a young body. Here it is a Haitian Patrick, both as teenage narrator and grown-man narrator fixated on the beauty of a nubile and later ageless Hadriana. Keeping in mind Depestre’s talent for tricking his audiences and readers, his allusion to Yourcenar’s novel invites us to see more than just a cheap eroticism. Drawing on Dalleo’s title, Depestre’s novel is also a history of “the public sphere” in the Caribbean as one highly informed by the arts and literary life, for better—as per La Ruche’s and Breton’s revolutionary poetics; and also for worse—as in the case of the Duvalier’s coopting of Vodou. At the heyday of Christianity, Yourcenar’s novel is a reflection on the art of ruling over a disparate empire expansively stretching throughout and beyond the Mediterranean, of the more personal story of a Roman peasant-turned-emperor coveting the noble elegance of a young Greek aristocrat. For its part, at the end of a Cold War era and a significantly compromised aspiration to socialism and at the dawn of a global mega-capitalist world order, Depestre’s novel is a reflection on the art of “confront[ing and surviving] modernity.” 79 It is also about a Haitian working-class-boy turned international public intellectual longing for the elite elegance of a French boutgeoisie. Both Yourcenar and Depestre relate the intensely personal experiences of desire, and love, to the ethicopolitical responsibilities of men whose lives have been defined by the public sphere. Both novels fictionalize the autobiographical, and in so doing reflect on what it means to dedicate one’s life to the “public sphere.” But both also deal with firstperson narrators at the end of a long career, reflecting upon perceived failures, and the disillusion involved in realizing that one’s aspirations for a revised societal order were mostly of a utopian order. In this context, eroticism may be read as a sort of by-product or symptom of a utopian yearning for a pure order of things, whose youthful expression is of the political order, and whose more mature expression is aesthetic. In other words, Roman emperor and Communist intellectual alike, will first privilege the political in their quest to reorder society, and in the later years of their lives, will favor the aesthetic.

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But the passage from man of politics to esthete will be mediated by a maladroit force: the erotic. The erotic is expressed through an initially destructive desire for the nubile body. Antinous will die to serve the desire of Hadrian, as will, in a certain sense Hadriana, but both, as young martyrs, essentially of love, will become legends, sedimented into the artistic heritage bequeathed by their leader-lovers onto their constituencies. Hadrian will construct cities in Antinous’s name, 80 and Depestre will make Hadriana into “Jacmel’s resident goddess.” 81 The erotic will represent the awkward and humiliating passage from the political to the aesthetic, from youthful, obstinate, and powerful naïve conviction in mass social change, to the more tolerant wisdom conferred by the solitudes of old age. Yourcenar speaks of the many cities constructed, of which “Antinoé” is “la plus chère, née sur l’emplacement du malheur”— “the most dear to him, constructed on the location of unhappiness.” 82 Antinous would have died, it seems drowned in the Nile, possibly sacrificing himself, with the help of a local magician. Yourcenar’s novel recounts the sacrifice of the falcon, Antinous’s gift to Hadrian, where the actual gift is the sacrifice of the falcon to Osiris in Hadrian’s name. 83 This will serve it seems as a foreshadowing of Antinous’s death, of his sacrifice on “une table d’offrandes”—“a sacrificial table” on the anniversary of the death of Osiris. 84 Antinous thus comes to represent the death of a Hellenic youth in the lands of the “barbares”—“barbarians” of which Egypt, according to Hadrian’s narrative, is an example. 85 Like the French Hadriana, the Hellenic Antinous is integrated into the local magical rites to which the Emperor does not subscribe. 86 At the end of his letters to Marc Aurelius, his second successor, Hadrian explains that he must now console the one whom he has chosen to first be his successor, “Antonin,” i.e., Antoninus Pius. In naming his martyred, nubile protagonist Hadriana, Depestre transposes the Mediterranean Antinous/Hadrian/Antonin schemata onto the Caribbean as Hadriana in Haiti/Patrick/Hadriana in Jamaica. Depestre is also in a sense integrating them, bringing the Emperor Hadrian back to life as French-Caribbean woman. What is at stake in Yourcenar’s and Depestre’s novels is to recognize that the consciousness of the world is always linked to “everything”: the truth, prevarication, the authentic, the inauthentic, the rational, and the magical, all before and parallel to a Cartesian order, organically entwined one within the other. What Depestre wants us as readers to do, is realize that in trying to structure knowledge too much, we get, well, really, absolutely nowhere. In chapter 12, I look at how Depestre ultimately passes judgment on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, but Geertz’s commentary on Lévi-Strauss’s work nods to how trying to understand too much just leads to futile repetition. Geertz writes:

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For what Lévi-Strauss has made for himself is an infernal culture machine. It annuls history, reduces sentiment to a shadow of the intellect, and replaces the particular minds of particular savages in particular jungles with the Savage Mind immanent in us all. 87

It is not hard then to understand that Trouillot’s “Savage slot” permeates all academic disciplines and is ultimately essentializing, and just plain racist. Related to the racism inherent to, it would seem, all academic scholarship, is yet another important intertext which, even more subtly than the others, interweaves itself into the fabric of Depestre’s quiet engagement of Mémoires d’Hadrien. Depestre’s text, and if we consider his collection of short stories Eros dans un train chinois, is a sort of racial no-holds-barred, where he refuses to play the politically correct card as regards racial politics. Where he certainly angers certain of his readers for promoting a “white” “French” woman as a heroine, he does so in a discursive field that playfully undermines racialist political agendas. In engaging Yourcenar’s Emperor Hadrian, he also brings Egypt into the mix, for to mention Hadrian is to automatically conjure up the image of his young lover Antinous, who dies in the Nile, near present day Sheikh ‘Ibada in Middle Egypt. In so doing, Depestre’s novel invokes the work of Anténor Firmin, the nineteenth-century Haitian anthropologist, who would base his work on race, in part on Egypt’s central geographic role amongst the peoples of Europe, Mesopotamia, and North and Central Africa, both during antiquity and also modern colonialism. 88 Firmin recounts how race would be mobilized in such a way as to justify what Celucien L. Joseph identifies as the “European ‘civilizing mission’” in Egypt, one that would ultimately allow European powers (all vying for power in Egypt) to lay claim to it. 89 Like Egypt in the 1880s, so too Haiti in the 1930s and 1940s (which corresponds to the era when Hadriana’s zombification takes place), would become the battleground upon which race, in the form of discussions around the role of Vodou, would become a major variable by which the U.S.-American occupation would justify its repression of peasant communities. 90 Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law tells the story of how after the U.S. occupation, the Catholic church and the Haitian state’s “antisuperstition campaigns” would target Vodou as a means to further clamp down its controls on the countryside. 91 Vodou would further be violated under Duvalierism, which, as we saw earlier, would create perverted representations of Vodou, through a sort of reverse racism, where Vodou would come to represent a tyrannical form of Afro-centrism. If a Western world order imposes a racialized discourse over spaces in which persons’ skin colors reflect the dynamism of spaces such as Egypt that are at “important crossroads on the itinerary to the various islands and archipelagos,” 92 then Antinous and Hadriana, although they may be and are read according to their racial or ethnic place in society, choose themselves

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to instead embody the cosmopolitanisms that Egypt and Haiti, at the crossroads of countless cultures, represent, even if choosing cosmopolitanism means death, means that those powers vying for this space will make them victims of the vicious racial battles that help them to justify their political agendas. To examine Hadriana dans tous mes rêves as a sort of autobiographical narrative of a figure involved in Dalleo’s “public sphere” of “Caribbean literature” is thus a sort of enactment of Dash’s invocation of the “New World Mediterranean” (and Nile). To take account of the intertext suggested by the novel’s title is to build on Torres-Saillant’s claim that “Caribbean literature deals more with the cultural and political problems of the region than with the inner conflicts of individual souls.” 93 I would suggest rather that in the case of Depestre’s usage of his indirect referencing of Yourcenar’s novel, the “inner conflicts” are intimately linked up to the “cultural and political,” but this does not make them any less personal. The distinction is maybe more one of how a public intellectual’s private life is inextricably linked to his public life. When later, Torres-Saillant claims that “Depestre’s complete oeuvre can reveal a continuous involvement with the sacred that shows up in different guises,” 94 one is reminded of Hollier’s discussions on the role of the sacred in the French intellectuals’ “ambivalent” “silence” on the various indicators of rising fascism in Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s. To read Torres-Saillant alongside Hollier would suggest that “the sacred” would designate this overlapping of “the political,” “the cultural,” and the “individual.” For Dalleo, “two registers” make up “the public sphere—material reality and imagined ideal” and they: interact as a complex dialectic: the institutions and structures of the public sphere shape writers’ imaginations even as writers imagine alternative arrangements and new ways of thinking that help create new public spaces and identities. 95

The sacred then, would refer to the “complex dialectic” of the “public sphere.” In some cases, such operations of the sacred as Ginzburg suggests (see chapter 9), would work towards a fascist cause, and in others, towards a more democratic one. But, for both Yourcenar and Depestre, involvement in the political will necessarily be one that results in an “immense mass of evils, of failures, of negligence, and of error,” but, “from time to time,” “peace will insert itself between two periods of war.” 96 The sacred will be an ambivalent amalgamation of “social action,” a sort of “liberation theology” 97 and a “supra-sensory realm,” 98 one capable of being more or less destructive, but never completely benign, for ultimately, the political is never fully innocent: parti pris means actions take place, and someone somewhere gets hurt. The question though is ultimately to what extent: the difference between a Nero and a Hadrian, between a Duvalier and a Depestre.

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In a sense then, as we will explore in the following chapters, the question of how the intellectual affects the public sphere is the difference between zombification and possession. In other words, zombification is the stealing of a person’s essence, of her/his soul, of her/his gwo-bon-anj, sealing it in a bottle, entrapping it; while possession is the displacement of a person’s gwo-bon-anj by a lwa’s energetic strength. The former depletes a community, dispossesses it; the second fills it, brings in additional reinforcements. But both involve the violent process of displacing a person’s gwo-bon-anj, of making her/him uncomfortable, or putting the person through the pained process of the body’s “crisis” 99 as it accepts to be evacuated, and in the case of possession also reinhabited by a lwa. In other words, to be involved in the public sphere, as politician or as public intellectual, or as Vodouyizan, is to know that one’s words and one’s actions will, in Dalleo’s words, “shape,” at the very least “identities,” if not also “new public spaces” and institutions. As such, errors will be made, in helping some, others will be neglected, and even damaged, dispossessed. To understand how the notions of possession and dispossession relate to the “public sphere,” is then to consider not just Patrick’s narrational voice, but also the autobiographical elements of Depestre’s life, to understand how Depestre is the (anti)hero of a “New World Mediterranean.” NOTES 1. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 281. 2. Ibid., 284. 3. Edwidge Danticat, After the Dance: A Walk through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002), 65. 4. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 183. 5. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 83. 6. Jana Braziel, Artists, Performers, and Black Masculinity in the Haitian Diaspora (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 1. 7. Ibid. 8. René Depestre: Chronique d’un animal marin. Directed by Patrick Cazals. Produced by Les Films du Horla Culture en Images. 2005. 9. Chris Bongie, Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de Siècle (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 9. 10. Ibid., 13. 11. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]), xiv. 12. The French title may be translated as the Agony of Defiance, and the Creole title Dezafi designates a command, a challenge by one person to another, especially in the context of a cock fight, where “Dezafi” might translate to “game on” or “bring it on.” Glover and Wynnie Lamour have published side-to-side English translations of Frankétienne’s Dezafi and Les Affres d’un défi in Transition: New Narratives of Haiti 111 (2013): 59–74. 13. Maryse Condé, Crossing the Mangrove, translated by Richard Philcox (New York: Doubleday, 1995 [1989]).

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14. Munro’s chapter on Depestre’s work in Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, reads Depestre’s novels using the theoretical framework of “rhizomatic identity” (Munro, 138) and “deterritorialization” from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and specifically as it is applied by Nikos Papastergiadis to consider “the way that national and regional cultures no longer reflect coherent distinct entities” (Munro, 125). 15. Orfeu Negro, directed by Marcel Camus, performed by Breno Mello and Marpessa Dawn, 1959. It wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1959 and the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards in 1960. 16. In Camus’s film the characters bear the names of Greek gods while the costumes and locations correspond to a mixture of Brazilian carnival and Candomblé rituals, where for example, Orpheus might be Xango, Eurydice would be Oxum, Mira might be Iansa, and Hermes could be Eleggua. 17. Rey and Richman, “The Somatics of Syncretism,” 384. 18. Depestre, Hadriana, 36. 19. Jean Jonassaint, Des romans de tradition haïtienne: Sur un récit tragique (Paris: Editions L’Harmattan, 2002), 19, 23. 20. Ibid., 73. 21. Baptiste Chrétien, “René Depestre,” Bibliothèque francophone multimédia de Limoges (BFM: Espace Auteur). http://www.bm-limoges.fr/espace-auteur/depestre/ auteur-biographie.php (accessed August 6, 2013). 22. Césaire, “Lettre à Maurice Thorez,” http://lmsi.net/Lettre-a-Maurice-Thorez. 23. Anne Douaire-Banny, “‘Sans rimes, toute une saison, loin des mares’. Enjeux d’un débat sur la poésie nationale.” http://pierre.campion2.free.fr. May 20, 2011. http:// pierre.campion2.free.fr/douaire_depestre&cesaire.htm#_ftn21 (accessed August 6, 2013). 24. Condé, Fous-t’en Depestre, 178. 25. Anne Douaire-Banny, “Enjeux d’un débat sur la poésie nationale.” 26. Chrétien, see “1946–1950.” 27. Depestre, Sartre in His Fraternity, 41–42. 28. Ibid., 41. 29. Chris Bongie, Friends and Enemies: The Scribal Politics of Post-colonial Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 172. 30. Chrétien, see “1957.” 31. René Depestre: Chronique d’un animal marin. Directed by Patrick Cazals. Produced by Les Films du Horla Culture en Images. 2005. 32. Chrétien, see “1986.” 33. See chapter 9 for discussion of Hollier’s Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War (Les Dépossédés: Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, Sartre). 34. Moyn, The Last Utopia, 84. I cite the title of Moyn’s third chapter. For a further discussion of Moyn see chapter 7. 35. Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, performed by Sergio Corrieri, Daisy Granados, and Eslinda Nunez, 1968. 36. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 210. 37. Ibid., 223. 38. Ibid., 143. 39. Ibid., 150. 40. Ibid., 127. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid., 142. 43. Ibid., xi. 44. Dash, The Other America, 113. 45. Maryse Condé, I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (New York: Ballantine Books, 1994 [1986]). See Kaiama L. Glover’s articles: “Confronting the Communal: Maryse Condé’s Challenge to New World Orders in Moi, Tituba,” French Forum 37, no. 3 (Fall 2012):

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181–199 ; and “‘Black’ Radicalism in Haiti and the Disorderly Feminine: The Case of Marie Vieux Chauvet.” Small Axe 40 (March 2013): 7–21. 46. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Literature, 132. 47. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, “Women Possessed: Eroticism and Exoticism in the Representation of Woman as Zombie,” in Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santería, Obeah, and the Caribbean, by Margaret Fernàndez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 250. 48. Depestre, Hadriana, 207–208. The original French is: “En ce temps-là, la peau blonde, mieux qu’un passeport diplomatique, avait la valeur d’un visa de droit divin.” 49. Gina Athena Ulysse, “VooDooDoll: What if Haiti were a Woman,” Transition 111 (2013): 104. 50. Gerdès Fleurant, Dancing Spirits: Rhythms and Rituals of Haitian Vodun, the Rada Rite (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996), 98. 51. Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria, 149–162. 52. Dash, The Other America, 91. 53. Ibid., title of Dash’s fourth chapter: “A New World Mediterranean: The Novel and Knowledge.” 54. See Edouard Glissant’s Le discours antillais (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1997 [1981]) and Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, edited by J. Michael Dash (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989). 55. Dash, The Other America, 85. 56. Hron, Translating Pain, 157. 57. Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l’oncle: Essais d’ethnographie (Port-au-Prince: Imprimeur II: Bibliothèque Nationale d’Haiti, 1998 [1928]). 58. Depestre, Hadriana, 51, 101. 59. Gérarde Magloire and Kevin A. Yelvington, “Haiti and the Anthropological Imagination: Jean Price-Mars, Melville J. Herskovits, Roger Bastide,” Gradhiva: Haiti et l’anthropologie, http://gradhiva.revues.org/335, 2005, online version 2008: 10. 60. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 82. 61. Hron, Translating Pain, 154. 62. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 82. 63. The narrator Patrick explains Hadriana’s parents’ intention that she spend time with the “black servants.” After her death/zombification, and it seems thanks to her zombification, she would finally be accepted as fully a Vodouyizan Jacmelienne: “Malgré leurs fortes attaches catholiques, André et elle avaient trouvé naturel que l’enfance d’Hadriana fût illuminé par les contes époustouflantes que les servantes noires lui murmuraient . . . A sa mort, les Jacméliens, qui l’aimaient et l’admiraient comme une fée, l’intégrèrent, le soir même, au répertoire des fables du pays, dans une fantastique histoire” (51). 64. Depestre, Hadriana, 164. 65. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 183. 66. Ibid., 124. 67. Ibid., 132. 68. Jonassaint writes: “In an unequivocal manner, Depestre again takes up with more conviction this time this process of socialism (which he calls real) as one that is as much about politics as it is about aesthetics, in his 1998 essays: Le Métier à Métisser and Ainsi parle le fleuve noir.” Jonassaint, Des romans de tradition haïtienne, 79, my translation. The original French is, “De manière non équivoque, Depestre reprend avec plus de conviction encore ce procès du socialisme (qu’il appelle réel) tant comme mode politique qu’esthéthique, dans ses essais de 1998: Le Métier à Métisser and Ainsi parle le fleuve noir.” 69. The original French is: “Je ne mets pas en question l’anthropologie comme science, mais ses tâtonnements du début, les tâtonnements qu’il y a eu dans une anthropologie un peu fantaisiste, fantasmatique parfois . . . “ in René Depestre, “Entretien avec René Depestre, par Jean-Luc Bonniol,” Gradhiva: Haïti et l’anthropologie, online:

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http://gradhiva.revues.org/261 (Musée du quai Branly) (2005, put online in 2008: 31–45, online version: 1–18): 6. 70. Mark Schuller, Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). Also see the chapter “Incursion I: France and Haiti, 1804/2004: Postimperial Melancholy, ‘New Humanist’ Elation” in Chris Bongie’s Friends and Enemies and Valerie Kaussen’s entire book Migrant Revolutions. 71. Danticat, After the Dance, 66. 72. Myriam J.A. Chancy, “Spectatorship and the Body Politic in the Traveling Subjectivities of John Edgar Wideman and Edwidge Danticat,” Small Axe, 36 (November 2011): 33. 73. Silvio Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics: Toward an Aesthetic of West Indian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 212. 74. Maja Horn, Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013), 50. 75. Marguerite Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1974 [1958]). 76. Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien, 11. 77. In English I will use “Hadrian” and in French, “Hadrien.” 78. Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien, 321. The original French is: Retrouvé dans un volume de la correspondance de Flaubert, fort lu et fort souligné par moi vers 1927, la phrase inoubliable: “Les dieux n’étant plus, et le Christ n’étant pas encore, il y a eu, de Cicéron à Marc Aurèle, un moment unique où l’homme seul a été.” Une grande partie de ma vie allait se passer à essayer de définir, puis à peindre, cet homme seul et d’ailleurs relié à tout. 79. Ibid., 85. 80. Yourcenar speaks of the many cities constructed, of which “Antinoé” is “la plus chère, née sur l’emplacement du malheur” (144). Antinous would have died, it seems drowned in the Nile, possibly sacrificing himself. Yourcenar recounts the sacrifice of the falcon, an offering to Osiris (212), and then that of Antinous on the anniversary of the death of Osiris (215). 81. Danticat, After the Dance, 65. 82. Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien, 144. 83. Ibid., 212. 84. Ibid., 215. 85. Ibid., 145. 86. Ibid., 213. 87. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 355. 88. Anténor Firmin’s work preceded that of Boas or Herskovits, and in 1885, he published De l’égalité des races humaines (Anthropologie positive), translated into English in 2000 by Asselin Charles as The Equality of the Human Races, and retranslated by Asselin Charles and Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban in 2002 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002 [2000, 1885]). Celucien L. Joseph explains, “Current studies on Firmin delineate a clear connection between the science of modern anthropology and the modern construction of race, as observed in [Firmin’s] The Equality of the Human Races” (85), noting that Firmin’s work vehemently rejected the “scientific racism” of Arthur de Gobineau’s “central theis of the ontological superiority of the Aryan-White race” (78). I cite: Celucien L. Joseph, From Toussaint to Price-Mars: Rhetoric, Race, and Religion in Haitian Thought (North Charleston: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013). 89. Joseph, From Toussaint to Price-Mars, 108. 90. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 121. See timeline for 1915–1934. 91. Ibid., 184. See timeline for 1935.

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92. Joseph, From Toussaint to Price-Mars, 107. The original in the English translation of Firmin’s text is cited from Firmin’s The Equality of the Human Races, 386. 93. Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics, 275. 94. Ibid., 157. 95. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 2. 96. Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien, 314. The original French is: “l’immense masse des maux, des échecs, de l’incurie et de l’erreur,” “mais de temps en temps,” “[l]a paix s’installera entre deux périodes de guerre.” 97. Torres-Saillant, Caribbean Poetics, 158. 98. Ibid., 159. 99. Rouget, Music and Trance, 38. Rouget writes: The word crise is used to denote sometimes a convulsive form of trance, sometimes the paroxysmic aspect of trance when it displays periods of variable intensity, sometimes the onset of trance if it is characterized by a moment of more or less distressing agitation, and finally sometimes—and this last is a very different usage—to refer to the troubled period a given individual may undergo, and which will lead him to seek an outlet in possession.

TWELVE The West’s Obsession with Defining Art Depestre’s Joust with an Aesthetic-Empirical Order of Things

As a “roman à thèse,” Hadriana dans tous mes rêves is a direct follow-up to an entire intellectual history of possession. Moving beyond the limiting binary with which Leiris and Métraux struggled, one that posits the “authentic” against the “inauthentic,” the “truth” against the “lie,” the “secular” against the “religious,” Hadriana dans tous mes rêves considers the many theories and movements that have meandered in and out of “Haiti”; that is, as we saw in chapter 4, “Haiti” as place, as nation, as culture, as idea. Onto the narrative form of a novel, Depestre grafts his own intervention into the intellectual history of Haiti. Hadriana dans tous mes rêves plays with the generic conventions of a murder mystery novel, encouraging the reader to figure out “who done it?” Who murdered Hadriana, and later who zombified her? Only here, in trying to figure out who killed and/or zombified Hadriana, the novel, as this chapter will explore, forces its reader not only to consider who the perpetrator is and the “why” of their crime, but also asks that the reader consider whether or not zombification is really a criminal act, whether or not in its artifice it constitutes “art” or remains a (“mere”) “cultural artifact.” Ultimately, what Depestre’s novel does is superimpose varying contexts that problematize clear-cut identifications of the characters as either “good” or “bad,” “perpetrators” or “victims.” At once, Hadriana dans tous mes rêves asks that we consider Dayan’s reading of zonbis as the haunting specters of slave pasts and its intergenerational consequences in the present (see chapter 2) alongside a reading of zombification as an integral 229

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part of a Haitian sociojuridical system, and an interpretation of zombification as metaphor for a society’s state of being. 1 Moreover, as readers, we are asked to piece together three seemingly separate instances of a first-person narration, and to consider whether or not René Depestre, Patrick Altamont, and Hadriana (“Nana”) Siloé are indeed separate beings, and even further, whether or not there is just one or multiple Hadriana/s. The narrative structure of Hadriana taunts its reader, asking that s/he try to create correspondences between protagonists’ physical bodies, their narrational voices, and their subjectivities, of which the many possibilities of mixing and matching seem to multiply the more the reader attempts to identify a definitive resolution to the mystery. In such a tangled space, the reader realizes, that figuring “it” out becomes not only futile, but also silly, for as some of my below analyses show, to follow any line of logic for too long only becomes absurd. The ultimate challenge, then, is not so much to figure out who abducted Hadriana, but rather to consider Haiti’s complex relationship to itself, to the Caribbean, and to France: how Haiti has been rendered so (erotically) exoticized; how it became the victim of such a brutal dictatorship; how racism is perpetuated; how one determines what is art, artifice, beauty, and/or real. The novel will drop clues, in the form of references or intertexts, and it will be up to the reader to do something or nothing with them. To the most assiduous of readers, at some point there will be a moment where s/ he must stop trying to figure out what the clues mean, and accept that some mysteries are ultimately unsolvable. What is important is much less whether or not we know, but how we explore, and how such exploration might lead to solace and eventually, possibly healing. Yet, to read Hadriana in light of this book’s attempt to construct an intellectual history of possession is to accept the author/narrator’s joust; once the reader realizes there will be no resolution to this murder mystery, it’s too late. This chapter is then a meandering in and out of possible “leads,” “leads” that force us to consider many of the intellectual contexts previously discussed, but also to go down new roads. Through Hadriana’s mysterious disappearance and reappearance, the reader will be taken through a labyrinth whose markers include terms and proper nouns such as magic realism and marvelous realism, eros, thanatos, Jean Price-Mars, and Claude Lévi-Strauss, passing through varying discursive spaces— Vodou, surrealism, anthropology, eroticism, and I will suggest even a Glissantian creolization. Whether magicosacred or scholarly, or both (or neither), the reader will be challenged, unable to determine what is believable or what is incredible. In the end, Depestre (like Yourcenar for that matter, as regards the death of Hadrian’s young lover Antinous) really does not want the reader to resolve the mystery, for to do so would be to privilege the rational order over the magicosacred, and in following on Yourcernar, to deny humanity of its intricate connection “to nothing

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less than everything.” 2 Whether Vodou practitioner, literary scholar, or social scientist, what will come to matter in the end, is that solace be offered to either or both academic theoretician or Vodou practitioner. The intellectual history of possession explored in the second part of this book coupled with the relationships between Depestre’s “real” life and that of his protagonist Patrick in Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, will inform this chapter’s consideration of Depestre’s work put into fictional form, or rather “performs” what Boris Wiseman names the “ethno-aesthetics” of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s life oeuvre of writings. 3 In the second part of this book, I did not include Lévi-Strauss because although he traveled to the Caribbean, he did not dedicate much scholarship to it, as previously signaled in the seventh chapter’s consideration of Geertz’s and Dash’s work. 4 To show how Depestre’s work engages with LéviStrauss, it will be useful to bring in more detailed elements of the plot and narrational workings of Hadriana; to draw on scholarship around Lévi-Strauss’s work; and to consider how the word “art” circulates in an ethnographic/anthropological discursive space that studies “cultures” such as Vodou, where art supposedly, as we will see further on, does not exist. “LOKO, THE BUTTERFLY OF WISDOM” In Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, the (not so) monstrous being who abducts Hadriana, is Balthizar Granchiré, whose nonhuman manifestation is as a large butterfly. In Vodou cosmology, the butterfly is an embodiment of “Loko the butterfly of wisdom (in the air)” and is “linked to his ‘wife’ Ayizan, earth and keeper of goods and markets.” 5 Loko is “the god of healing and patron of the herb-doctors,” 6 and as such, in his medicinal powers, “he is associated with the beautiful butterfly and no secret is unknown to him.” 7 One might even argue that Hadriana’s French father is of the Loko order, for he is an “amateur botanist,” specializing in the plants of the entire Caribbean. 8 In Loko’s marriage to Ayizan, together they represent an example of the marasa. Toni Pressley-Sanon explains the concept of marasa, the “divine twins,” the “Dosou” and the “Dosa” in Haitian Vodou. Amongst many functions, the marasa fulfill two roles: first, as binaries whose polarities are often at odds with each other, but due to familial relations are obligated to work out their conflicts; and second, as a dichotomy, that invokes the “jamais deux sans trois”—“never two without three” rule, where the third element is similar to the socalled Hegelian dialectic’s synthesis: in other words, the twins would be the “thesis” and “antithesis,” and the third twin (triplet), not quite birthed into full existence, but always present, would represent a sort of Hegelian/Marxist “synthesis.” That said, the third twin exists alongside the other two, a sort of unsaid triplet. Claudine Michel writes, “This child

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born after the twins, a ‘third twin,’ so to speak, is Marasa Twa, a Dosou/ Dosa is regarded as having an equally complex relationship with the invisible world,” where “three is consistently a sacred number.” 9 Pressley-Sanon writes: the marasa illustrate the attendant third element/space/moment of resolution or completeness through creativity, the dosu/dosa, which is also integral to the marasa concept. Although each explores these dichotomous relationships (the marasa), two of the narratives find resolution in the marasa twa, the movement into the third element to completion, the dosu/dosa. 10

Most importantly, the role of the marasa is to work out conflict, conflict between persons, between forces, between a standard order of things and a changing order. The marasa as a cosmological and philosophical concept serves as an arbitrating force in the worlds of persons and communities constantly downtrodden by globalizing forces from slavery to the neocolonially inflicted environmental forces of destruction, what Rob Nixon explains as the “camouflaging” 11 by which “transnational corporations exploit under cover of a free market ideology the lopsided universe of deregulation” thus inflicting “violence both intimate and distant, unfolding over time and space on a variety of scales, from the cellular to the transnational, the corporeal to the global corporate.” 12 Pressley-Sanon explains how Vodou continues to adapt itself to deal with such silent consequences of such mass destruction: As the lwa have adapted and transformed in tandem with their sèvitè’s changing environments and circumstances, from Africa to the diaspora to a new diaspora in the present, so too is this adaptability present today, as circumstances warrant it. The marasa, as it has always done, guides the concomitant tensions that these processes of twinning, opposition, and creation engender, which is exemplified in the dosa/dosu. The marasa reigns over it all. 13

The butterfly is then a force that is at once terrestrial, tied to the earth as a larva, and possessing the broader perspective afforded by a bird’s-eye view. Loko, together with his earthly partner Ayizan, create a harmony between earth and sky, between the close-up and the panoramic. In this sense, it is not without significance that Hadriana is betrothed to Hector, a pilot, nor that in having an affair with Patrick before her wedding, she is throwing the order of things out of balance. While Balthizar Granchiré is a force of evil, trapped into his monstrosity by the bokor Okil Okilon, a Vodou priest who “practices with both hands,” he also assures that balance be restored: essentially, that Hadriana return to her terrestrial role as a sort of Ayizan. Kate Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti examines the complex relationship amongst official Haitian juridical law, authorities (religious, governmental, Catholic clergy, and U.S.-occupying

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forces), the “‘nighttime’ legal system” organized amongst the Haitian peasantry and “syete sekrè (secret societies)” 14 and Vodou as an “Africandiasporic healing practice.” 15 And, as seen above with Loko, “the social facet of Vodou” is highlighted by the role it has in providing “popular medicine” 16 to the communities for which there are “only two doctors per ten thousand people.” 17 Before François and Jean-Claude Duvalier, when activity amongst the slaves and later peasant classes threatened authorities, Vodou became in Haiti “colonially constructed as witchcraft”; 18 and after the Duvaliers, it was associated with the grotesque tyranny of Duvalierism. Especially before it was coopted by the Duvaliers, amongst its many roles in civil society, Vodou, would be, and still is, a sort of juridical system, one that has sought to manage the spaces of slave and later peasant and working class civil society, spaces about which the authorities did not care, or of which they were not (yet) aware. While not a peasant, in a sense, the Vodou community sees Hadriana, with her espousal of a Vodou thought system, with her friendship to amongst others Patrick, as one of their own. Yet, given her whiteness, especially on the eve of Duvalierism, there will be no place for her in Haitian society. The zombification is thus a sort of sociojuridical mode by which to protect her from what would have been a worse fate had she remained in Haiti. Of course, the above is only one interpretation of Hadriana’s abduction. Depestre’s text resists any single reading. But what is clear is that her abduction and zombification are part of a new order of things, where the balance of things will be upset. Not only will Hadriana’s whiteness no longer be tolerated in a Duvalierist perversion of “noirisme,” but so will any creolized version of Caribbeanness, what Dash labels “the reality of a racial and cultural encounter of global proportions,” which “typifies . . . the experience of the New World as a marvelous crossroads.” 19 In so doing, the entire equipoise of things will be destabilized. Here, one might read the eroticism of the first two “movements” of the novel as an expression of this imbalance; whereas, the third “movement,” narrated by Hadriana restores the balance, and it will ultimately be in Mona, Jamaica that the narrative voice of “nous,” of the collective “we,” will close the novel. The final intendant third party of the novel then is the reader, invited to renew a Caribbean and Vodou commitment to an ethos, quoting Pressley-Sanon, of “one plus one equals three.” 20 For in fact, in Haitian Kreyòl the pronoun nou (we) can also designate the pronoun ou (you), and as such Depestre/Patrick, Hadriana, and reader become complicit twin/triplets in a novel that may be read as representing only one (Patrick’s), or also many narrative voices. In its metamorphoses, from larva to butterfly, the butterfly also incarnates hope, but one always reminiscent of the Kafkian troubling process of what it means to undergo unexpected, unwanted (physical) changes. Danticat writes of the Haitian carnival in Jacmel:

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In a way, it is Granchiré’s inordinate sexual appetite as a butterfly, his desire to zombify Hadriana so she may reside in his sole possession, that saves Hadriana in 1938 from a much more murderous destiny had she remained as a member of a progressive, bourgeois, French/Haitian elite in Haiti under the Duvaliers. Danticat explains that the butterfly follows tragedy, but it can also caution against it (i.e., Hadriana is dezombified, but must leave Haiti to wander the Caribbean) or announce its coming (i.e., the twenty year father and son Duvalier dictatorship). The zombification, in the context of Depestre’s novel represents a sort of larva state, and the process to butterfly-ness, that of Hadriana’s dezombification and resultant itinerancy around the Caribbean might be, perceived from afar, as a beautiful, possibly hopeful image, but it will primarily incarnate for the immediate persons involved, a troubled and pained transformative process. In other words, Hadriana is also the metamorphosis of a young woman from what seems the simple “embodiment of flawless (French) femininity” 22 to the more troubling Caribbean femininity of Dash’s description of Carpentier’s Rosario. The reader must not be trumped either by Depestre’s eroticism, nor by, in Paravisini-Gebert’s terms, the “false” pretenses of this eroticism: this is the eroticism of the Gede, announcing in one gesture, eros, healing, and death. In a passage after Hadriana’s death, Patrick attends a Vodou ceremony in which various women are possessed by mostly female lwas. There is one possessed female human body (a “horse”), whom Patrick and his fellow onlookers cannot recognize. Moreover, the lwa possessing her is one that is not of the common repertory. 23 In the crowd is a mysterious woman, it would seem a mambo who effects a rite upon the young woman who will be possessed by Fréda-Toucan-Dahomin, whom most of the onlookers besides Patrick confuse with Ezili. 24 Later, in Hadriana’s recounting of the same event, we will learn that the woman who has become possessed by the rare lwa is “l’inconnue, Noire d’une extrême beauté”—is “the unknown, Black of an extreme beauty” 25 and shares what seems to be the same body, or at the very least they share “nos seins jumeaux”—“our twin breasts.” Hadriana is thus “ressuscitée”—“resuscitated” 26 split, or cloned, into the beautiful Black woman, and a dezombified Hadriana. Yet, her dezombification comes at a price, for she will no longer have a place in her former community and will be forced to roam the Caribbean and then exile herself to Jamaica. At her dezombification ritual, it would seem that she would again be doubled, becoming a lwa in her own right. 27 Whether as poetic muse who places her poet, Patrick, in

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a state of rapture (“ravissement”), 28 as a lwa who possesses him, or as dezombified Franco-Haitian-Jamaican woman, Hadriana exists as a member of many pairs: Haiti/Jamaica; Haiti/Dominican Republic (through the lwa Fréda-Toucan-Dahomin, who it seems originates in the Dominican Republic); 29 Haiti/France; white/black; female/male; veritable/false. Yet, in all of these doubles, she is of the Caribbean, roaming always by sea or by land, never by air. Her partners though will all be of the physically elevated, aviatory, and/or butterflied-Loko order, whether as her betrothed pilot Hector, the human-butterfly Balthizar Granchiré, or the international writer Patrick Altamont, for it is of course, without coincidence that his last name be Altamont, high mountain. UNDERSTANDING HADRIANA’S ZOMBIFICATION As seen above, the primary narrators of the novel, Patrick Altamont, a Haitian, born in Haiti, and Hadriana Siloé, of the same age as Patrick, French, born in France and raised in Haiti, in three separate designated narrative movements, recount the “event” of Hadriana’s death at the altar on the day of her wedding, January 29 and 31, 1938, 30 or more generally speaking, eight years after the “official” United States occupation of Haiti, four years after the Herskovits couple has conducted its field research in Mirebalais, three years before Mabille arrives in Haiti, eight years before Breton’s sojourn, and ten years before Métraux’s field research in the Marbial Valley. Either by the ill will of a few bokors, or by the more general consensus of the Jacmelian community, Hadriana’s death will come to be understood as a murder, and her destiny that of a zonbi. Born in Jacmel, Haiti, as a relatively well-off adolescent whose parents immigrated to Haiti before her birth, Hadriana is engaged to Hector Danoze, a young man of the Haitian elite trained in the United States as an airline pilot. Both Hadriana and Hector’s relationship with the peasant and “working” classes is mostly through their nannies and servants. For his part, Patrick comes from a modest and well-educated milieu; his mother is a seamstress and his father, nonpresent. His interaction with the Vodou community is much more extensive than that of Hector, but not necessarily of Hadriana, whom we learn has grown up in rites and rituals of Vodou. Patrick’s role as interlocutor between the social classes is at once due to his education, but also to the fact that Patrick’s mother is the seamstress of the wealthy classes of Jacmel, exposing him to regular contact with the elite. The most prominent characters of the Vodou community are Scylla Syllabaire, the village barber, and Mambo Losange, a well-respected Vodou priestess. For the denizens of Jacmel—elite, middle-class, peasant, and/or working class, Hadriana represents an untouchable “fée française”—“a French fairy,” a “fille créole

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d’un prince des maths”—“the Creole daughter of a prince of mathematics.” 31 The novel is divided into three “movements”: Patrick narrates the first two movements, and Hadriana the third. In addition, Patrick’s narration has two instances: one as an adolescent in Jacmel, Haiti, his city of birth, and the other, as an adult exiled from Haiti and living throughout the Caribbean and Europe. As a young man, Patrick’s narration initially sets up a binary between Catholic and Vodou cultures, and, as an adult, his narration establishes an opposition between European and Vodou epistemologies. The plot of the novel is centered around Hadriana’s death, an event that shall become emblematic for Patrick’s lifelong attempt to negotiate his Vodou thought system with the Western episteme that his longterm exile away from Haiti imposes upon him. Hadriana’s death and zombification embody the tensions that exist between what seem to be two separate communities and the apparently differing thought systems that correspond to them. Ultimately, playing with the relative notions of veracity and art, terms taken from Wiseman’s and Hénaff’s scholarship on Lévi-Strauss’s corpus, the novel embodies how the distinction between these two systems is far from definitive. As seen in chapter 9, for a Vodouyizan, both the gwo-bon-anj and the ti-bon-anj are manifestations of a person’s soul; however, the gwo-bon-anj corresponds more closely to a Christian concept of soul and the Freudian concept of psyche, and the ti-bon-anj, to personality. Deren explains that “the vagaries of the subjective conscience” are not important in Vodou’s conception of the human being. 32 Although the ti-bon-anj reflects the personality of an individual, it is first and foremost considered a part of a “collective community.” 33 Similarly, the gwo-bon-anj—the soul—is a piece of the “cosmos.” Both the ti-bon-anj and the gwo-bon-anj—that is, both the personality and the soul of an individual—exist in a metonymic relationship to the “collective community” and “cosmos” of which they are components. 34 Furthermore, the gwo-bon-anj is a person’s soul, but the Vodouyizan conceives of her or his soul as a part of a universal soul—that is of God or Bondye’s soul. In the same way, the lwas are also energetic threads of the larger fabric of existence that is Bondye. In a parallel way, the ti-bon-anj is a person’s personality, that which identifies a body as a distinct individual, but the Vodouyizan envisages this personality as a constituent part of a larger, collective community. It is maybe here, where Hadriana’s being is too disjunctive to remain a part of the larger Haitian society: her being and soul might be grafted from the larger Caribbean, and even Vodou cosmos, but both her corporeal body (her kò kadav) 35 and the facets of her individual being that make her recognizable to others (her ti-bon-anj) are also white and French. In the Vodou system described by Depestre’s novel and also Métraux and later Leslie G. Desmangles, the zonbi represents the opposite of the community spirit. Zonbis are beings that have lost “their state of con-

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sciousness and their capacity for moral judgment.” 36 The actions of a zonbi are no longer related to the larger community. Instead, they represent an individualistic desire, one out of touch with the larger cosmological order to which they belong, and one that ultimately destroys community harmony. This does not intend that the community order is always the morally superior one, it just is the one that a community chooses for itself at a given moment and time, and for this reason, Glover in her work on the spiralists, identifies the zonbi as a sort of “de facto antihero.” 37 An apparent reading then will read the zonbi and the zombifying bokor as cheap thrills of legendary myths, which revolve around the selfishness of a bokor, who in controlling a zonbi’s actions uses them to till his fields or sweatshops, or as a sex slave (hence the bokor’s interest in nubile virgins). A sociological reading interprets the zonbi as a sort of a pariah. It is not that the person zombified has necessarily done anything to harm the community, but that the person no longer fits into its more broad social geography. This does not mean of course that the notion of “evil” bokors taking advantage of their power does not exist, it just points to how the zonbi fits into a societal system that must regiment itself in the margins, either or dually ignored and/or persecuted by the official power in command. Vodou, as Ramsey’s The Spirits and the Law shows, is the ultimate “counterpublic,” a word that Dalleo borrows from Michael Warner to characterize much of the Caribbean “public sphere,” where the “counterpublic” is “one that is constantly reminded of their subordinated position.” 38 Métraux identifies two types of zonbi. The first and most common type of zonbi is the result of the capture of a person’s gwo-bon-anj (“soul,” “psyche”). The person still has motor skills and possesses the energy—its ti-bon-anj (“personality”), enabling her/his body to function physically. Dayan writes: the petit bon ange . . . loses its necessary anchor [its gwo-bon-anj, or its soul]: the petit bon ange will be free-floating, attaching itself to anything, or in its dislocation be stolen by a sorcerer and turned into a zombi. 39

A zonbi is usually the result of a false death. It is understood that the bokor gives a person a poison that temporarily makes the individual seem as if s/he were dead. The community usually recognizes the death of the person and buries her/him. The bokor then unearths the body, resuscitates it or waits for the medicine to wear off, stealing its gwo-bon-anj, and submitting the person and its ti-bon-anj to its desires. In other words, the bokor steals the person’s soul and controls the actions of his or her body. The person still possesses full physical control over her/his body; yet, without a soul and under the influence of the poison, the person is virtually incapable of revolting against the bokor. In addition, by virtue of the fact that the person’s community has recognized his or her death as official

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(or at least “official” according to the Vodouyizan community), the person is no longer able to solicit help from the community. Moreover, the fact that the bokor has captured the person’s gwo-bon-anj means that even at death—that is, even when the zonbi’s gwo-bon-anj expires, the zombified person’s soul, or gwo-bon-anj, suffers the subjugation of the bokor that entrapped it. The second type of zonbi is essentially the opposite of the first. It is an itinerant soul, a gwo-bon-anj that has lost its ti-bon-anj, or the control over its bodily functions and no longer is recognizable in its outwardly person to her/his community. Unlike the first type of zonbi that exists as Métraux characterizes it, as a “flesh-and-blood” zonbi, the other type of zonbi, once its body finally expires continues to roam the earth a soul without a skin. 40 Depestre’s novel makes reference to both types of zonbi theorized by Métraux, without clarifying which type of zombification Hadriana undergoes. 41 At the end of the novel, Hadriana explains that the sorcerer Rosalvo Rosanfer had attempted to steal her ti-bon-anj. 42 In this scenario, the zombification attempted corresponds to the second case—that of the virgin, who once the sorcerer has profited from the last moments of her physical being, entraps her physical life force (the ti-bon-anj), and forces her metaphysical being to roam endlessly. Yet, Hadriana has possibly trumped the full effect of the zombification, for she has, it seems, already sexually transgressed before her marriage, not with Hector, but with Patrick. Our trickster author-narrator has returned: it could very well be that the ultimate bokor then, is Patrick? Yet, again, if this is indeed the case, as we will explore in the next chapter, then it is the women of the community who have one up over him, for it is they, notably Madame Losange and her “Black” assistant, the one whose body is a darker model of Hadriana’s, who deliver her from her entrapment to Rosanfer. Here, the reader finds himself confronted with just one of the many examples of how the novel’s murder mystery will never be fully resolved. Given its intricacies, the multiple possibilities of causality, knowing exactly what really happened, and who really “done it” is impossible. It is here that Depestre puts into play the tensions between Leiris’s “performed theater” and “lived theater” (see chapter 7). The reader is aware that zombification is not “real,” and yet Depestre imposes upon the reader the desire to know, but at the same time omits the elements that would allow the reader to determine if the zombification is real, if Hadriana is or was real, or if she functions uniquely as a literary muse. In both implementing and subverting the codes of a mystery novel, Depestre throws the reader into an awareness of her/his own desire to know. To his playfulness with the genre of the crime novel, Depestre superimposes a discussion of Caribbean and French intellectual thought, one focused on the ethnographies of Vodou and literary discussions of the relationship between Caribbean aesthetics and identity. In so doing, the reader becomes entrapped in the “fiction” of the mystery, and the “reality” of

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the humanities, and especially the social sciences. With the double operative in full gear, the reader becomes aware of the process of knowledgemaking: what does the reader want to know, and what does it really mean “to know,” to know empirically, experientially, aesthetically, somatically? IMPOSING DIFFERENCE, ADMITTING INTIMACY: LÉVI-STRAUSS, MARCEL HÉNAFF, AND BORIS WISEMAN’S “EMPIRICAL” AND “EVENT”-BASED TRUTH SYSTEMS Pushing Depestre’s entwinement of, on the one hand, fictional genre, with on the other, academic exigencies for determining what is and isn’t scientifically truthful, brings us to the heart of Hénaff’s study on LéviStrauss’s work. Hadriana dans tous mes rêves uses zombification as an event that pretends to illustrate the differences between Western and Vodou thought systems. The novel makes direct reference to LéviStrauss’s anthropological work on magic. In the novel, Patrick explains that zombification is “magic” because it is a result of the consensus of a community: The effectiveness of magic (I learned from Lévi-Strauss) is a phenomenon resulting from social consensus. Such consensus played against Hadriana Siloé. When an entire village, in step with its traditions, is convinced that a human being can become a living-dead under the double effect of a toxic substance and an act of high sorcery, one cannot expect, in such a situation, that the victim’s entourage come running to save her. That night, in Jacmel, in the depths of every consciousness, everyone’s concern was first-and-foremost to estrange the young brideturned-zonbi, to brutally force her down into her unpreventable destiny, as a danger for the ensemble of the Jacmelian social body. And that’s basically what happened. 43

Hénaff explains that for Lévi-Strauss there are two types of world societies: communities regimented by “science,” and those that privilege “symbolic” thought, or what he also refers to as “mythical or magical thought.” 44 As we will see, both Hénaff and Wiseman identify ambivalent moments in Lévi-Strauss’s work in which the two supposedly separate systems of thought merge or confuse themselves in each other. Depestre’s novel is itself a demonstration of both the human impulse to establish differences, and also the damaging consequence, not to mention futility, of imposing distinctions between peoples, “cultures,” and disciplines (such as “art” and “ethnography”). Here we recall Dash’s article titled “Caraïbe Fantôme: The Play of Difference in the Francophone Caribbean,” a title that pays tribute to Leiris’s L’Afrique fantôme. In the article, Dash considers “the question of the irreducible alterity of other cultures and

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the radical interrogation of narrative discursive positions,” 45 by which he compares in a later article, as we saw earlier Leiris to Lévi-Strauss, where the latter represents someone interested in the extreme differences between societies, not in the “lived theater,” of the Caribbean, a space that for Dash enmeshes thought systems one into the other. 46 In choosing to privilege Lévi-Strauss amongst the French ethnographers, Depestre is nodding to Lévi-Strauss’s stubbornly binaric theorizations. 47 Wiseman’s entire project in Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics will, in fact, be to show how Lévi-Strauss’s thinking implements binaric thinking to ultimately arrive at an opposite conclusion, the two systems are not so different from each other. Wiseman writes, In an aside contained in The Savage Mind Lévi-Strauss speculates about the nature of his interest in “exotic” cultures. His answer is this: “the fascination exercised over us by customs apparently far removed from ours, the contradictory feeling of proximity and strangeness with which they affect us, stem perhaps from the fact that these customs are very much closer to our own than they appear and present us with an enigmatic image which needs deciphering.” 48

That said, in the theorization of two distinct systems of knowledge, of the “ours” as distinguished from the theirs, the strange is the operative system, and its resultant object of study is “the savage mind.” Trouillot’s theorization of “the Savage slot” is, then, a direct reference to LéviStrauss’s contribution to anthropology’s deep structuring of freakishness into the academe’s quests for knowledge. While the us/them opposition is present in Depestre’s work, what interests me is how the novel focuses in on “proximity and strangeness,” as if rather than being contradictory forces, they are actually synonyms, where it is intimacy that breeds strangeness, and strangeness that breeds intimacy. Stephenson’s work with possession as a mode of psychoanalysis, reminds us that anthropology and psychoanalysis were once close disciplinary kin. Depestre’s novel will present Vodou itself as a system that constantly and relentlessly creates intimacy between “different” social beings. Given the novel’s allusions and even invocations to Lévi-Strauss, it becomes clear, then, that one of the gestures of Depestre’s novel is to make an intervention into a history of both the arts and the social sciences, which as we saw in the second part of this book, locates Haiti as one of the major axes of the development of twentieth century French thought, but one completely trampled over and constantly “disavowed,” to use the title of Fischer’s Modernity Disavowed. Furthermore, in the years that Depestre writes and publishes Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, structuralism, deconstruction, and écriture feminine (via Ferdinand de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Lacan, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, Michel Riffaterre, Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigaray, and Hélène Cixous) are at their apogee in university departments in France, Europe,

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and throughout North America. As we will see, Depestre plays with all three of these theoretical frameworks, more or less, but the one that dominates is his jousting with structuralist anthropology and aesthetic theory. More generally, his novel challenges his reader’s desire to absolutely distinguish between cultures, to try to place Hadriana in one culture rather than another. Her multiple manifestations, her supreme ambivalence, make it impossible to classify her as “French,” “Haitian,” or “Jamaican,” as literary muse or real-life being, as woman or as zonbi. My interest in Hénaff’s analyses of Lévi-Strauss’s work will then focus on how, as a concept determined by “cultural” practices and societal norms, “truth” is at best a relative term. Hénaff distinguishes the difference between, on the one hand, a “scientific” system, which privileges “structures” to determine its realities; and on the other hand, a “symbolic” system, which favors “events” to dictate its truths, whereby a structure is the operative variable of empiricism, repeating itself in various contexts. By virtue of repetition, science regards it as a truth. The meaning of the phenomenon remains constant no matter where and when this occurrence takes place. Hénaff writes: This difference is . . . that of structure and event. Science aims at knowledge of structure by distancing that of the event. . . . Mythical or magical thought, to the contrary, groups together and organizes elements of the world by isolating pertinent features here and there: it introduces or discovers a logic and a necessity in what seemed purely accidental. In short, it produces structure using the event. 49

Hénaff explains that where there is structure there is “congruency”; and “congruency is verifiable by comparing sociological data with those regarding technological and economic conditions: climate, botany, zoology, and so on.” 50 The congruent, repetitive, and foreseeable aspect of a structure provides what usually “we [Westerners disciplined by a scientific epistemology] state . . . in terms of objectivity.” 51 Thus, structure is the ability to prove the existence of a phenomenon in varying heterogeneous contexts. In contrast then, an event emphasizes the singularity and unexpectedness of an occurrence. Societies of “symbolic,” “mythical or magical thought” value the particularity of an event. 52 Unlike a structure, an event only has meaning within the symbolic system to which it belongs. In other words, an event in one symbolic system may have a separate meaning in another symbolic system; therefore, “[w]hat is important is not the meaning of the elements, but their position” within a system. 53 The attribution of this “position” takes place through a “performance”: “for the agent of magic action, it is activity with a utilitarian goal.” 54 Hénaff writes that “magic, through its rites, amounts to including human actions themselves in the order of natural phenomena.” 55 The magician’s performance or action is one that strives to “position” an event in such a way

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that his or her community accepts this location as a truth. The event’s meaning will vary according to the location of its occurrence. It is the coincidence, the rarity, the exceptional quality of the event, which determines its truth, not its repetitiveness. That said, as Wiseman indicates, and contemporary studies in the history of science show, “science” is itself a symbolic system, a product of cultural practice. 56 In Hénaff’s reading of Lévi-Strauss, truth within the theatrical experience is based on a suspension of disbelief; that is, a theatergoer takes a break from the accustomed exigency that truth be empirically proven. “Lived theater” then constitutes a more permanent mode of such a suspension of disbelief. Wiseman writes: My aim in the above discussion was to illustrate some of the ways in which anthropology and aesthetics may be interconnected. In particular, I tried to bring to light how, over great distances, the functioning of a shamanistic cure may come to parallel that of a theatrical performance. My point is not to reduce one experience to the other, but to enlarge the context in which we view each, and reintegrate the “aesthetic” phenomenon that is a theatrical performance into a broader network of interconnected experiences, sometimes seemingly far from aesthetics. By the same token, one may view the shamanistic cure as a form of “lived theatre,” to borrow a phrase coined by Michel Leiris to describe Ethiopian ceremonies of Zar possession. The result is what one may think of as “ethno-aesthetics.” 57

In one sweep, then, Wiseman associates possession, Lévi-Strauss’s life work, and Leiris’s (in)direct informing of Lévi-Strauss’s work. Yet again, the notion of possession finds itself as an unseen backdrop, if not an unacknowledged lifeline of cultural anthropology’s “origins.” Even if Geertz and Dash distinguish between Leiris’s espousal of the ambivalence of the Caribbean’s place between the “West” and the non-West, and Lévi-Strauss’s rejection of it, they all—that is all of us in the academe— find ourselves stumbling over how to articulate the “truths” of systems of thought which it would seem base their knowledge on the event, rather than on the repetitiveness of the structures demanded by empiricism. BETWEEN ART AND ETHNOGRAPHY: ZOMBIFICATION AND THE PHILOSOPHICAL “NEED” TO OTHER The case of the zonbi, and the history of research on zombification exemplify how a “scientific” system of thought is troubled, at least discursively confounded, when confronted with a “truth” that is constructed by a “symbolic” order, one which accepts “veracity” as a truth, and seems to completely suspend the need for empirical truths. For Lévi-Strauss, it would seem, the difference between the two systems is such that in the scientific system, material reality determines the authenticity of an occur-

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rence, whereas in a symbolic system, the opinions and beliefs of human beings determine a reality. Hénaff’s study resembles Depestre’s novel in its desire, and here we are reminded also of Leiris’s and Métraux’s work, to accept both belief systems as legitimate. In fact, one might deduct that Hénaff quietly accuses Lévi-Strauss of ethnocentrism: This point of view [that “veracity . . . seems to be lacking in the actions of the officiant of the ritual or the sorcerer”], even when it is not meant to be depreciating, nonetheless remains necessarily exterior and amounts to completely ignoring the manner in which the ritual is understood by those who perform it. 58

Depestre’s novel invites both its Western characters, and its Western readers, into the symbolic world of Jacmel, Haiti, and the novel. It asks that the reader, Hadriana, and her parents understand “the manner in which” zombification “is understood by those who perform it.” The contemporary efforts to understand the medical properties of the poison that zombifies a human being correspond to a “scientific” imperative to understand the phenomenon of the zonbi as a structure. In light of “Harvard” 59 scholar Wade Davis’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, 60 published in 1985, which attempted to account for zombification botanically, Depestre’s 1988 publication of the novel delves into the controversies that emerged after Davis’s book. Critics took him to task for at best, ambivalent, if not, ill-founded “scientific” research. In 2000, Fridolin Saint-Louis explains that even more recent efforts to scientifically explain zombification have ultimately failed. 61 That said, given the fact that researchers such as Davis or Heinz Edgar Lehmann, 62 have received institutional support and widespread attention, it becomes clear that the “Western” exigency to isolate and uphold a “scientific” discursive space is at best sloppy. Despite the problems that other scientists have had with Davis’s work, and in spite of the fact that zombification’s botanical explanations have not been empirically proven, Davis has gone on to achieve great acclaim, maybe not necessarily in the wider university sphere, but in the public sphere, as a “world renowned ethnographer, writer, photographer, filmmaker, National Geographics Explorer-in-Residence, The University of Winnipeg’s Visiting Professor and Senior Fellow in the Masters in Development Practice (MDP) Indigenous Development.” 63 It is interesting to note that in Davis’s extended biography on the National Geographic website, he omits his publication of The Serpent and the Rainbow, and yet next to his biography National Geographic has featured a Canadian Broadcast Corporation George Stroumboulopoulos interview for which the blurb features Davis’s work in Haiti: “WW1, Everest, and what it’s like studying zombies.” 64 In other words, science might show that zombification has no empirical grounding, but it is not only Vodouyizans who are apt to believe in “symbolically” produced truths, but Western audiences, participating in highly visible and highly pedigreed mediatic

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intellectual spaces such at the National Geographic Society or the CBC. The two systems of thought, which Lévi-Strauss strove for most of his life to tease out, as Dash and Geertz suggest, ultimately, for both LéviStrauss, and intellectuals, such as Depestre, Hénaff, or Wiseman, who have spent time with his work, are ultimately inextricably interlinked. The difference in the end is not how persons determine truth—for all cultures, it would seem, would participate in both types of truth structuring—but rather how languages name, or don’t name, those concepts that shape a person’s or a community’s life. In aesthetic theories about non-European spaces, it has been, well yes, an obsession to justify the so-called “naïve,” “primitive” arts as comparable to the high arts of Western European tradition. In Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien, Hadrian’s philhellenism is attributed in part to his less illustrious background as a Roman, and at that a Roman born in Iberia, far from the Empire’s capital. As seen in the previous chapter, Antinous dies in the “magico-barbaric” landscape of the Nile. Depestre’s allusion to Yourcenar’s novel may then be read as a commentary on the ordering of “cultures,” where in the Euro-Mediterranean-Mesopotamian-Nile imaginary of antiquity, Greek culture occupied the most pedigreed place. Similarly, as Depestre depicts it, in a twentieth-century landscape, at least in most of Europe and the Americas, French culture from the time of Louis XIV would take the place of its Italian, Roman, and Hellenic predecessors in dictating the mores of “taste” for a high bourgeois order. THE WEST’S COMPULSION TO HIERARCHIZE ARTIFICE Depestre’s novel illustrates how the concern for truth and/or authenticity is related to the compulsion to categorize an event, an object, or an idea as (high) “art,” or instead, as a common (ethnographic) object or “cultural” expression produced by those beings whom a European order has “civilizationally” (and racially) othered, either by virtue of the “primitivism” of their “cultural” place in a hierarchical organization, or because of the vulgarity of their working class origins, or both. The conundrum of how to deal with nonempirical truths lies somewhere between, on the one hand, The Tears of Eros’s juxtaposition of Paleolithic Europeans with twentieth-century Haitians, and on the other hand, Bruckner’s deliberations on the vulgarity of “lower” classes in Perpetual Euphoria. The riddle of how (not) to classify (or name) “artifice” is summed up in Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique’s article on Marianne Lehmann’s collection of Vodou art. In writing about the history and mission statement the foundation set up to preserve and promote Lehmann’s collection, Beauvoir-Dominique explains that “even today, the Creole language does not possess any word to designate what Western civilization qualifies as ‘art.’” 65 If Beauvoir-Dominique’s comment in her article titled, “Libérer le

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double, la beauté sera convulsive. . . A propos d’une collection d’art vodou” 66—“Liberating the double, beauty will be convulsive. . . On the subject of a Vodou art collection” sounds a bit sardonic, she indirectly pays homage to Breton’s notion of “convulsive beauty,” but also discreetly points to his hypocrisy when in his third Haitian conference, he famously declares: Haiti is lacking in museums, in art collections, and this is an entire human expression of which you are deprived, or at least, which you cannot experience directly. I can’t render enough thanks to the Centre d’art for having filled this grave lacuna. 67

For Breton, Surrealist convulsive automatisms may be considered of the civilizing order, artist manifestations of the higher secular order, but Vodou possession is nothing more than a backward expression of Breton’s disdain for the realm of the religious. For Breton, then, Haitian art is nonexistent because a distinct institutional location, a distinct word for it, does not exist. Beauvoir-Dominique’s diplomatic wordplay considers an entire history that has systematically discredited the concept of Haitian art and/or imposed a structure from the outside, as in the case of Selden Rodman’s Centre d’art. One of the most reputed projects of Le Centre d’Art, founded in 1944 by U.S.-American patronage, are the frescoes in what was until the 2010 earthquake the Trinité Cathedral, 68 painted by Rigaud Benoit, Castera Bazile, Toussaint Auguste, Wilson Bigaud, Gabriel Levêque, and Philomé Obin, or what Rodman calls the “Haitian primitives.” Rodman explains how he and another American professor chose both the medium and the location in which the artists would work. Most importantly, the passage helps to perceive the extent to which the American sponsors, mostly the Centre’s founders, Rodman and Dewitt Peters, controlled the logistics of the Haitian artists’ work. Rodman writes: We decided against fresco at the outset: Mexico had had a long tradition of fresco before Rivera and Orozco attacked their first walls; here no precedent existed for painting a wet surface in quick-drying patches. William Calfee, an old friend in Washington who then headed the painting department at American University, suggested egg tempera. I persuaded him to fly over for three weeks and conduct our training session. He divided the artists into two groups: upstairs the sophisticated; in the basement the self-taught. 69

Thus, Calfee, Peters, and Rodman chose the artists, the medium, the way to work in the medium, and the lieu de travail. At this point, we may ask, what does it mean for Breton to privilege the 1944 opening of Le Centre d’Art as a turning point in Haitian art? Does it mean that for Breton no noteworthy Haitian art existed before this date? Can this art, when orchestrated by three American men, be considered completely Haitian?

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And what to make of those Haitians, including President Estimé, who vehemently disassociated themselves from the Centre’s espousal of such art? 70 Today, Rodman’s words would have to be significantly edited for publication, and yet, his articulations are not so far off-field from LéviStrauss’s work, Breton’s, or even Leiris’s, for whom a concerted effort was made to honor the integrity of the practice of possession. Rodman’s words also underscore Trouillot’s consideration of anthropology’s, and more generally academia’s, more politically correct, but nonetheless egregious systematization of “the Savage slot.” It seems almost that any academic discussion of “art” in the non-European context finds itself trapped in an epistemology weighted down by the techniques of ethnographic othering. In the second part of this book, we noted how French and American discussions of Haiti, and particularly of Vodou, despite best intentions, unavoidably fell into the “Savage slot.” For his part, Dalleo explains that Caribbean literature of the 1940s, by Caribbeans, in a time when literary magazines surfaced throughout the Caribbean, when theories such as Carpentier’s lo real maravilloso and Alexis’s Haitian Marvelous Realism gained currency, also found themselves complicit in composing within and thus participating in a discursive space that posited itself between a mostly European or Euro-colonial literate elite and the “folk” cultures of the “public and counterpublic” it sought to “speak for.” 71 As both deliberators and spokespersons for a Caribbean transitioning from “modern colonialism” to independence, intellectuals such as Alexis, Carpentier, Césaire, Martí, and Roumain, would find themselves, as members of the intellectual elite, not only trying to represent the larger Caribbean public, including “local forms of knowledge,” 72 but also struggling to work through what they “should be” fighting for in a complex matrix of local leaders coming to power in a twentieth century manipulated by the globalized dynamics of Cold War politics. Dalleo writes: This uncertainty—not about one’s commitment to fight, but about what one is fighting for or against—anticipates what we see among writers at the onset of postcoloniality, facing what Martí here identifies as the challenge of North American-dominated modern colonialism. 73

Again, here we find resonance with Hollier’s “dispossessed” French writers “under the threat of war,” where it wasn’t at all about whether or not they were “committed,” but rather about to which cause, and how that cause transformed itself over time. In such a complex sociopolitical space, with the challenged role of the diplomat-writer who serves as interlocutor between the “counterpublic,” the former colonizer who still dominates the world order, and is both in dialogue with and aspires to be part of the new postcolonial local political order, the literary activity of an intellectual such as Depestre (or Cé-

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saire or Duvalier) would be concerned with what Dalleo calls “the ideology of the literary” where “aestheticism” was “something not opposed to but in fact an integral part of the Caribbean project of anticolonial literature,” an “ideology” that “allows the intellectual to speak for both a public and a counterpublic.” 74 If Depestre was a founding and later integral member of such an “ideological literary” project, his work in Hadriana pays homage to a moment not just in the Caribbean, but in the larger intellectual world, in which writers and poets struggled through what the role of literature should or even could be, given the supremacy of the United States and the USSR, in more engaged political projects, from Marxism to anticolonialism. Yet with the wisdom of Depestre’s myriad life experiences, Hadriana also deals with a related, but less clearly political deliberation of aesthetics, what Derrida in Tympan interjects as “a need:” Philosophy has always insisted on this: thinking its other. Its other: that which limits it, and from which it derives its essence, its definition, its production. 75

In worrying about whether or not Caribbean culture merits its place alongside the “high” arts of Europe, or whether or not literate writerpoets can “speak for” the illiterate “folk,” Depestre reminds us that the ultimate “other” has always been the artist. In other words, before the anthropological other existed, before the Emperor Hadrian situated himself hierarchically between a pedigreed Hellenic order and a barbaric Egyptian one, before Bataille compared contemporary Haitian society to Paleolithic European society, the ultimate “other,” the first “savage,” would have been Plato’s artist, banished from the public sphere. Even when (sort of) reintegrated to (the margin of) the public sphere by Kant’s writing on aesthetics, and subsequent analyses of Kant’s work in “Critique of Judgement,” 76 the artist remains in a peripheral relationship to whatever order(s) a society chooses for itself to establish its truths. Wiseman writes: Human societies therefore exclude certain individuals from the symbolic order or rather assign to them a special place. These individuals are placed not exactly outside the symbolic order, which is an impossibility, but on its periphery. This is the space occupied by the shaman, the artist and the “psychopath,” inventors of idolects (or what they present as such) that exist alongside the collectively construed symbolic order and are used to mediate between the symbolic order and that which escapes or exceeds this order, threatening its integrity and stability. 77

In intertwining the concepts of both sensually exotic beauty and Platonic “beauty”; “art” as beauty; art as (anarchical or disruptive) political intervention; art as (popular) “ethnography”; art as erotic, by superimposing varying “cultural” symbolic systems one upon the other, Depestre is call-

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ing attention to the fact that the phenomenon of othering is one that all societies, all types of “symbolic” orders participate in. In all societies there are varying conjugations of marginalization. In writing about Leiris, Mercier writes that Leiris’s lifelong intellectual search had to do with “l’intermédiaire et l’ambigu,” whether possession, the “theatrical,” “poetic inspiration,” “eroticism,” “addicts, weirdos and crazies.” 78 Bruckner’s work (chapter 5) also designates the “vulgar” as a category of the othering process, the group that is situated “below” a community’s perceived place in society and the aristobourgeois order, situated “above”; and then there is the “barbarically” and “primitively” “cultural” other, the one perceived as being from “far away” in place or in time, as in The Tears of Eros. In writing Hadriana as white and “French,” as Hellenic, as Caribbean, and as Vodouyizan, Depestre’s novel underscores the fact that the “need” for a given subjectivity—whether the collective one of a “nation” or a community, or the more specific one of an individual person, or even an individual person’s component part (i.e., her/his ti-bon-anj, gwo-bonanj, psyche, unconscious, etc.)—is to “insist upon” “thinking its other” and as such is proper to all societies and all philosophical systems. In other words, Europeans aren’t the only ones to marginalize, one of the determinant variables is rather, drawing on Sheller’s work in Citizenship from Below, whether or not a community marginalizes from “above” or from “below.” Just because Vodou has been subject to centuries of persecution from colonialism, the church, and state powers does not mean that it itself is not capable of marginalizing techniques. As we saw in the previous chapter, Patrick’s narrative voice points precisely to how a Duvalierian manipulation of Vodou teased out the violently marginalizing capacity of structures in Vodou society. To determine whether or not Vodou arts are really “art” or just ethnographic “objects,” to ponder whether or not zar or Vodou possession, or zombification are expressions of “performed theater” or rather “lived theater,” to wonder if “lived theater” is “high” or “low” art, or even art at all, hurls the social scientist/writer such as Leiris, the scientist/explorer such as Davis, or the writer/essayist/activist such as Depestre into a vortex of unresolvability. HADRIANA AS REALITY, AS ARTIFICE I propose that the end of the novel, notably the third movement, presents Hadriana’s existence as zonbi as both a cultural fact and as an objet d’art. Like Breton’s Nadja/Nadja 79 or Kateb Yacine’s Nedjma/Nedjma to which Depestre’s novel makes a reference, 80 Hadriana/Hadriana serves as metaphor for her cultural milieu, muse, but unlike Breton’s or Yacine’s novels, the eponymous protagonist also occupies a significant portion of the novel’s narrative space, recounting the entire last third of the novel, whereas

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in Breton’s novel it is not really clear whether or not Nadja actually speaks, and in Yacine’s novel, Nadja does speak in her own voice, but in comparison to the other male narrators, she is not allotted as significant space as in Hadriana. As a major narrative voice of the novel, Hadriana confounds the distinctions between reality, veracity (or the element of “belief” in the “suspension of disbelief” necessary for “performed theater” or “lived theater”), artifice, and/or artifice as art. The end of the second movement is important in understanding the context of the third movement. In the second movement, Patrick recounts the circumstances of the text that Hadriana’s third movement represents. Patrick, now a professor at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, finally meets up with Hadriana. He explains how she hands him a short story. 81 For the reader, Hadriana’s letter constitutes the third movement of the novel. At the end of Hadriana’s story, in the sixteenth chapter (that is the third movement of the novel), there is however a second narrative instance, which includes both Hadriana and Patrick, but is recounted from Patrick’s voice: After our two tales, in an epilogue to our intertwined memoires, Hadriana and I, could have herewith recounted the story of the happy couple that we have formed for the past twenty years. But, without believing in it all too much, we’ve preferred to make do with the faith that work and lucky days of love don’t really have a story. 82

Inscribed within the movement designated as Hadriana’s story, it seems that it should be Hadriana who pronounces the pronoun “nous,” yet it is Patrick who enunciates the last paragraph. Is it really Hadriana who pronounces the third movement of the novel, or is it actually Patrick who has imagined an encounter with Hadriana and has dissimulated his own voice to resemble that of Hadriana? Earlier in the second movement, Patrick explains that since his arrival to Jamaica he has found the strength and peace needed to again write literature, to return to “la libre creation”—“free creation”: On one early morning, putting myself at my worktable I realized with amazement that I was able, without the normal feeling of distress, and with the aid of French words, to establish relationships, natural, playful, sensual and magical ones, with the atrocious past of Jacmel. 83

It is not clear if it is the French words, or rather the relationships, in the plural, to the past, that are “natural, playful, sensual, and magical.” Depestre explains that what he writes that morning is a poem; however, could he also have written a short story—that is, the third movement— recounting in an imagined first-person female voice the story of Hadriana’s zombification? Also the fact that in the second-to-last paragraph of the novel, Hadriana identifies herself with the Vodou spirit Simbi-laSource is suspicious. This is significant since Depestre’s work often refers

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to Damballah, and Damballah is one of the Simbi lwas, associated with serpents. Most significantly, Depestre’s “poème-mystère vaudou,” titled Un Arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien (1967) 84 makes reference to Damballah. One of the major symbols of Damballah is the rainbow. Since the circumstances of Patrick’s life closely resemble those of Depestre’s life, we may ponder the possibility that maybe Depestre’s mèt-tèt is Damballah. In addition, the image of St. Patrick, in part because of the snake, is associated “symbiotically,” using Desmangles’ work in The Faces of the Gods with Damballah. The ultimate question that this narrative dilemma poses concerns the veracity of Hadriana’s existence in Jamaica. If Hadriana has really written the third movement, but to which Patrick has added the last paragraph of the novel—whose narrative voice is the collective “nous”—“we” (and in Haitian Kreyòl it also designates “you”)—then the last paragraph is posterior to her text. In this case, it is possible that she is a real, human presence in Patrick’s adult life. If, on the other hand, the last paragraph of the third movement is part of what seems to be Hadriana’s text, then Hadriana is not real; instead, she is pure artifice: a figment of Patrick’s imagination. This final ambivalence brings us back to the tension between Hadriana as cultural fact and Hadriana as artistic invention. If Hadriana is a real person who lives with Patrick in Jamaica, then she represents the cultural phenomenon of a dezombified zonbi. Exiled from Haiti, a pariah and former zonbi, Hadriana, is either a veritable person, and/or depending on which truth system one subscribes to, a metaphor for Haiti’s inability to integrate the (former) colonizer as a member of its contemporary society. On the other hand, if Hadriana’s existence in Jamaica is not real, not true, not veritable in any system of truth making—that is, if she is a figment of Patrick’s imagination—then, she represents a muse around whom Patrick writes a story. As a muse and the source of his creative literary work, she sublimates Patrick’s solitude and his feeling of culpability. Patrick explains that he participated in the banishment of Hadriana from his Jacmel community fifty years before. Finally, in Jamaica, he rids himself of his feeling of guilt. 85 If Hadriana is Patrick’s muse, then she is a judgmental muse, one who in Jamaica, has finally excused Patrick for abandoning her in Jacmel. The result of this forgiveness is Patrick’s ability to write again. Hadriana is thus a metaphor for a cosmopolitan, hybrid society, one that is at once Haitian, French, Kreyòl, Vodou, and even American (in that Hadriana’s husband was trained as a pilot in the United States). Patrick’s guilt is that of a Haitian who left, abandoning Haiti to a violent form of intolerance, Duvalierism. 86 As such, Hadriana is an aesthetic representation of both Patrick Altamont/René Depestre’s remorse, as well as a means of finding pleasure and beauty in what is otherwise the painful and lonely existence not only of his own exile, but of his politically engaged commitment to constantly

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tainted aspirations to socialism, communism, and human rights. In her beauty, she serves as a release from pain, corresponding to Ole HansenLǿve’s explanation of the Kantian notion of the aesthetic experience: Frequently, we state our appreciation in light of the fact that things and beings seem beautiful to us and merit our admiration; we like this or that. We’ll call the aesthetic experience this series of evaluations for which the reference is the beautiful. 87

Even physically, Hadriana represents the unattainable Platonic beauty of a traditional Western notion of art. Hadriana’s own fiancé, Hector, and Patrick himself, during his adolescence, fear ruining the perfection and inaccessibility that she represents (even if in the end it would seem that sensual, physical contact Hadriana and Patrick did have). Hadriana’s narrative voice explains the idealization of her Haitian suitors: “Hector seemed to be scared to dirty the blond skin of the French fairy, a Creole daughter or of a prince of math and of tabacco”—“Hector, lui, avait eu peur de souiller la chair blonde de la fée française, fille créole d’un prince des maths et du tabac . . . .” 88 Patrick too treats Hadriana differently than he would have another woman, a nonwhite woman. Hadriana, aware of her racial power, recounts: it only took just one blond hair for Patrick to go beyond the marveling of this large adolescent hand on my almond and pass to the dive of the member into the ragingly consenting female waters. 89

Patrick, like a Petrach or a Dante, tries to honor Hadriana as a Laura or Beatrice, and Hadriana herself tries to preserve herself as such a European demoiselle, but neither of the two is able to uphold the exigencies of Platonic noncontact. 90 Depestre’s novel, then, has not set Hadriana up to be a Platonic beauty, or at least if she represents a Platonic beauty for Hector, for Patrick, there is nothing to be done, her beauty is a sensualized one. In his analysis of Ralph Werther, whose pseudonym was Earl Lind, Christopher Looby analyzes how Werther’s work extrapolates Kantian aesthetic thought to include the erotic. 91 He proposes that the “aesthetic instinct” has always, even if later repressed, been associated with “erotic attraction.” 92 One could read Patrick’s playful engagement with Kantian aesthetic theory in a similar vein, where for Patrick, sensuality and beauty go hand-in-hand. In forcing Hadriana to undergo zombification, Depestre, it would seem, is forcing her, a white woman, to, if not empathize, at least sympathize, with the black, Haitian experience. Looby analyzes Lind’s behavior as one of the first openly transgender persons in the United States, and in a sense, Depestre’s attempts to manipulate race plays with gender. While this reading may seem misplaced for the machismo associated with Depestre, he continues to use eroticism to remaneuver race and even gender in his collection of short stories, Eros dans un

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train chinois, and especially in the short story “Blues pour une tasse de thé vert,” where again the autofictional narrator has his first homoerotic experience with a U.S.-American Harlem Renaissance dandy. In applying Jacques Rancière’s aesthetic theory to an African American context, Nancy Bentley writes: the black subject has been made to carry the stigma of bad particularly within the universalist schemas of Western aesthetic thought. As a result, the black diasporic artist, it seems, cannot but perform political work—the work of resistance, subversion, ironic signifying—whenever she takes up a pen or paintbrush, a fact that redeems her art from the false front of the aesthetic. 93

In other words, if for Rancière “[s]ensory forms are necessary for making political claims,” then “aesthetics are the ground for politics,” 94 and as such Depestre’s later prose writings would fit squarely into this aestheticpolitical work. Hadriana also refers to, and is recognized in the novel, as the adulated lwa Ezili. As such, in her correspondence to Ezili, she corresponds to art as what Bentley reading Rancière names “democratic truth,” where art would be the reminder that “demos is [always] linked with a perceived inequality in the polity.” In other words, all art, it would seem, is a reminder of what is “wrong,” “a picture of what is not—an absence in the world (a missing equality, a stolen freedom) intelligible only through the virtuality of a discernible form,” that is art. Hadriana, Hadriana as Ezili represents the form, the figure, who and which, in turn points to all that is “wrong,” 95 the figure, the zonbi, who/that is forced to “carry the stigma of bad.” 96 Hadriana is the daughter of French parents, but of a father who smokes a pipe. As we will explore in the next chapter’s discussion of Loko and the Gede lwas, one of the symbols of one of the Gede lwas, Bawon Samdi, is the pipe, and Ezili herself, the light-skinned lwa of coquetterie, is fond of cigarettes. Deren writes of Ezili: “In Erzulie [Ezili], Vodoun salutes woman as the divinity of the dream, the Goddess of Love, the muse of beauty.” 97 It seems that during Madame Losange’s ceremony to save Hadriana from zombification, as we saw above, she has found a young woman whom the village community does not recognize—an “inconnue”—“an unknown”—who is “Noire d’une extrême beauté,” “black of extreme beauty,” but who most importantly has a physique that is the physical, black double of Hadriana’s body. 98 Hadriana explains: “j’ai reconnu mes propres mamelons déguisés en seins de négresse”—“I recognized my own nipples disguised as those of the black woman,” the same breasts that she later characterizes as “nos seins jumeaux”—“our twin breasts.” 99 The woman serves as the body that, it seems, the lwa Ezili mounts, although as explored above it is actually another lwa, a lwa of Dominican origin, who belongs to the greater Quis-

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queya, and who resembles Ezili, who it seems actually becomes Hadriana’s primary, protective spirit—or her mèt-tèt. In these multiple associations and interpretations, the Hadriana who arrives in Jamaica is as representative of the white beauty of Platonic ideals of traditional European art as she is symbolic of the “black of extreme beauty” of the entire Caribbean, as she is also representative of the more hybrid creolizations of the Caribbean. Thus, as zonbi, or at least through the protective ceremony against zombification, even Hadriana’s beauty comes to represent the multiple intermediary spaces, which exist between France and Haiti. She also comes to represent Depestre’s espousal, like that of Rancière, “that art and politics are separate domains in need of being linked together.” 100 If Leiris’s essay on possession is concerned with determining “truth” from “lie,” and legitimizing the lie under the auspices of art; if for LéviStrauss through Hénaff, the concern is understanding how societies determine truth; and for Wiseman, the research demonstrates the proximity between ethnographic and aesthetic discursive spaces, then what Depestre does is to entrap his readers into realizing that Western society has established an entire apparatus for speaking about what is unempirically true. As a result of such an epistemology that has as its primary exigency a will to “science,” for all that which is not of the “scientific” order, it dedicates important discursive space to determining what is mere artifice and what is artifice as art. As a sort of disguised roman-à-thèse, Depestre’s novel suggests that personhood everywhere is shaped by more than empirical reason, but by an exigency for the aesthetic. The question is less if something is authentic or not, nor how empirically truthful something is, but rather, of accepting that all peoples everywhere construct their beingness through experiences that are not empirically provable. Some need to label (“name”) them as “art” and put them in “museums,” dissociate them from any religious context, while others are much more comfortable with concepts that exist without disciplinary distinctions, without the exigency for the secular, without the need to classify truth and nontruths into a hierarchy that follows the pecking order, “science,” “reason,” “aesthetics,” “high art,” “popular art,” “ethnographic fact,” “erotic,” “pornographic,” etc. In noncopulative languages, such as Haitian Kreyòl, where the verb “to be” is virtually nonexistent, beings still exist. Similarly, in a language that does not possess the word for “art,” art too exists. To lack a name does not mean to lack beingness or personhood. The difference is between what contemporary theory, such as the work of Yvonne Daniel, designates as “embodied knowledge”: knowledge found within the body, within the dancing and drumming body—is rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge. In performance, and as my analyses show, Haitian, Cu-

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“Embodied knowledge” passes through meaning systems and epistemologies that are not predominantly linguistic. In the same vein that Beauvoir-Dominique’s article interrogates the very notion of “art,” so too, Depestre’s entire novel puts into play the tension between “naming” and theorizing a concept such as art and/or aesthetics, and more directly “embodying” it. In other words, do Breton and Rodman “discover” Haitian “art,” or do they actually “create” it? Without a “name” to designate it, without an officially recognized institution, such as a “museum,” or a “market” to which to sell, it would seem for Breton and Rodman that art does not exist in Haiti, at least until the Centre d’art is created by U.S.American moneys, and its accompanying cultural diplomatic policy. Indeed, and here Depestre as trickster resurfaces, for we might even read Hadriana’s zombification as a reversal process of the Centre d’art: if art doesn’t exist in Haiti until Rodman imposes it; so too, zombification doesn’t exist in French culture, until Depestre’s novel abducts one of its prized young, French maidens. Paravisini-Gebert might chastise Depestre for choosing a French, blonde, and white protagonist, but ultimately, he has repossessed not only the French language, but also its muses to not only his, but also Jacmel’s (if not Haiti’s) benefit, taking the colonial hostage, and civilizing her to cosmopolitanism. For ultimately, besides references to Vodou and Duvalier, the novel takes place in Jacmel, not in Haiti, in the city known not only for its Carnival but for its historical openness, having hosted Simon Bolívar during his exile, near the border with the Dominican Republic, and a port city. TYING KNOTS: POSSESSION, THE NOVEL, AND HEALING This entire chapter has been, yes, about Depestre’s intervention and response to most all of the contexts about which I wrote in the second part of this book, but most importantly, it has prepared us to note that Hadriana’s zombification is first and foremost a dispossession, followed by her dezombification, a repossession by which both she and those around her, notably Patrick, find both physical and psychological healing. The novel is playful but it is about Patrick’s and Hadriana’s suffering and the healing that follows after they have told their stories, after they have given up trying to figure things out, after they have taken their retreat, essentially from public life, receding not only into “love, that has no story,” but also into the safe bastion of the university world, where utopias may not only be imagined, but in their own way, on a small and maybe insignificant scale, may be enacted. Dalleo drawing on Dash explains that “the Caribbean intellectual is totalitarian and impotent, too powerful and totally

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irrelevant.” 102 Depestre’s novel acknowledges the contradiction of Dalleo’s commentary on the Caribbean public sphere, suggesting that while any pursuit of purely intellectual knowledge and its political application will find itself embodied, embodied as violence, as tyranny, it is also possible to modulate the relationship between the intellectual and the embodied in a pursuit that does not necessarily provide a solution, but at least solace. In referring to the work of Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, and Sartre, Hollier writes: Unlike a tale, a novel conveys an experience that is too solitary, too individual to enter into the narrative or pragmatic patrimony of its public. A novel is the story of an individual who is not integrated into collective experience. 103

Hadriana is most certainly such a novel, for while it may initially seem to be an erotic free-for-all, it is first and foremost about the solitude incurred by disillusion, the story of the good-intentioned pariah, the artist, the zonbi, the revolutionary who selected solitude over power, who chose to acknowledge the relative irrelevance of most of existence over the illusion that power creates meaning. Patrick explains, “In the West Indies (Mona), I saw awaken in me the silos of joy and hope,” 104 where he could finally confront “the painful memories that Jacmel had on my personality of adulthood,” 105 and he names Hadriana’s zombification and exile: “The Pain of Hadriana.” 106 Given the lightheartedness of the novel, such a lexicon of deep-seated, long-duration trauma comes as a surprise, or is even lost in the playfulness of the novel’s recounting of Jacmel’s dynamic social spaces, from the bourgeois European/ized elite to the peasants. In fact, at first, it is quite hard to see how Hadriana as novel resembles Hollier’s above identification of the novel as solitude. It is easy to assess a humanitarian disaster with the panoramic view of hindsight, but when one is an actor in a land invaded by the forms of tyranny rarely manifest on such a large-scale and long-term, such as Nazism or by Duvalierism, it is harder to pass judgment on those individuals who were present on the scene of such humanitarian catastrophes, navigating a world, “knowing that they are powerless.” 107 The only solace will come in the form of possession, possession as Rey’s and Richman’s theorization of the mare, 108 as the tying and entangling, the knotting, the weaving that is proper to the eclecticism permitted by the novel. Just as Hollier shows how Bataille, Leiris, and Sartre will seek to interweave tale, novel, and theater so as to recount their pain, so too Depestre, later in life, will use the novel as the platform on which to interweave the countless beings that have informed his own beings. Possession then as a site where multiple beings may inhabit one body, is the privileged form for those who have lived through too much, who suffer from grave traumatisms, and wish to give up, at least momentarily the

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quest to understand themselves, and invite others to interpret what has happened to them. Whether in the Vodou context or the Loudun one, whether as possession or as zombification, as orders that privilege the “symbolic,” possession, zombification, and even the work of art or literature exist only so long as they are interpreted by a community of others. NOTES 1. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 258. In fact, Métraux’s description of the first type of zonbi, the one that does not inhabit an actual corporeal human body, resonates with Dayan’s incorporation of the concept into her work on personhood and law (see chapter 2). 2. Yourcenar, Mémoires d’Hadrien, 321. See original full citation cited in previous chapter. The original French is: “cet homme seul et d’ailleurs relié à tout.” 3. Boris Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 5–6. 4. Dash, “Le Je de l’autre,” 91. 5. Toni Pressley-Sanon, “One Plus One Equals Three: Marasa Consciousness, the Lwa, and Three Stories,” Research in African Literatures 44.3 (Fall 2013):120. 6. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 108. 7. Gade Nou Leve Society-Watch Us Rise International Vodou Society. “Papa Loko.” 2005–2011. http://www.ezilikonnen.com/the_lwa/papa-loko.html (accessed August 9, 2013). 8. Depestre, Hadriana, 190. 9. Michel, “Mama Lola’s Triplets,” 34. 10. Pressley-Sanon, “One Plus One Equals Three,” 119. 11. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 35. 12. Ibid., 46. 13. Pressley-Sanon, “One Plus One Equals Three,” 134. 14. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 17. 15. Ibid., 1. 16. Beauvoir-Dominique, “Libérer le double,” online version, 3. 17. Schuller, Killing with Kindness, 31. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. Dash, The Other America, 91. 20. Pressley-Sanon, “One Plus One Equals Three,” article’s title. 21. Danticat, After the Dance, 146. 22. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 127. 23. Depestre, Hadriana, 79. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 178. 26. Ibid., 179. Also, Patrick explains that Hadriana’s zombification only lasted from “Saturday the 29th to Monday the 31st of January 1938” (Ibid., 150). 27. Depestre, Hadriana, 172. 28. Ibid., 147. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 139. The original French is: “Elle ouvrit le tiroir d’un secrétaire et me mit dans les mains la chronique de son aventure de zombie comme elle l’avait vécue du samedi 29 au lundi 31 janvier 1938.” 31. Depestre, Hadriana, 156. 32. Deren, Divine Horsemen, 27. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Crosley, “Shadow-Matter Universes in Haitian and Dagara Ontologies,” 7.

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36. Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 195. 37. Glover, Haiti Unbound, 60. 38. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 4. 39. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 31. 40. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 258. The descriptions of zonbis in Métraux’s work very closely match the story of Hadriana. 41. That said, the details Métraux offers as to the varying types of zombification might be specific to the hounfor in which he conducted his field research, and not reflective of varying expressions of Vodou practice. 42. There are two possibilities for the failed zombification. First, the ceremony that the local Vodou priestess has conducted to safeguard Hadriana from zombification has saved her. The fact that the protective drawings that the Vodou priestess traces depict a vagina that also resembles a butterfly enables us to connect Hadriana’s metaphor of her “bon ange joufflu de [s]on sexe” to the drawings of the ceremony. Finally, it may also be that even though Hadriana claims that she was a virgin at the time of her zombification, the sexual experience that she describes with Patrick is nonetheless such that it may have annulled Rosalvo’s power over her body. However, it is also probable that Hadriana’s zombification corresponds to the first case. If Rosalvo has really “confondu”—“confused” the ti-bon-anj with the gros-bon-anj, then he has entrapped the gwo-bon-anj—that is, her soul, and not her physical life force. In this case, Hadriana is a traditional zonbi, one that walks about as a normal human being, yet that does not have soul. Then at the end of the novel, Hadriana has again succeeded in delivering herself from the sorcerer’s spell. After her escape from the tomb, Hadriana drinks the ocean’s salt water (185). Since salt is the traditional antidote for zombification, upon ingesting the salt, Hadriana is no longer a zonbi. Despite her dezombification, Hadriana nonetheless finds herself banished from the Jacmel and larger Haitian community. The Jacmelians (including her own parents) believe her to be a zonbi and thus she may no longer return to Jacmel as a member of its society. In a sense, within the context of Haiti, she remains a zonbi—a person feared and rejected by her fellow citizens. The only possibility for her existence as anything but a zonbi is to leave immediately, before the news of her zombification reaches the ports. With the money that her parents have put into her chastity belt as a dowry, she boards a boat to Jamaica. Luckily the other Haitian passengers have not yet learned of the young, French bride’s zombification. In addition, as I explore in the body of my book, the fact that she is white allows her to pass customs without a passport (190). Transported out of Haiti, Hadriana goes from being a zonbi and a “paria” to a Haitian spirit, or one of the “dieux” of Vodou. In Haiti, she is a zonbi because the society in which she lives has decided to banish her from their community. In contrast, the Jamaican society to which she moves, with no knowledge of her history in Jacmel, accepts her as a member of its community. Thus, ultimately, Hadriana’s zombification, and also her humanity, are a function of her community’s disapproval or approval. 43. Depestre, Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, 123–124. The original French is: L’efficacité de la magie (je l’ai appris de Lévi-Strauss) est un phénomène de consensus social. Celui-ci a joué aux dépens d’Hadriana Siloé. Quand tout un village, conformément à ses traditions, est convaincu qu’un être humain peut devenir un mort-vivant sous le double effet d’une substance toxique et d’un acte de haute sorcellerie, il ne faut pas s’attendre, en pareil cas, que l’entourage de la victime se porte à son secours. Cette nuit-là, au fond de chaque conscience, à Jacmel, le souci de tous était d’éloigner la jeune mariée changée en zombie, de la rabattre brutalement sur son inéluctable destin, comme un danger pour l’ensemble du corps social jacmélien. C’est ce qui s’est passé. 44. Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss, 192.

258 45. 93. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

Chapter 12 Dash, “Caraïbe Fantôme: The Play of Difference in the Francophone Caribbean,” Dash, “Le Je de l’autre,” 91. Ibid. Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 24. Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss, 192. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 148. Ibid., 192. Ibid., 127–28. Ibid., 127, 149. Ibid., 149. Wiseman writes: As is well known, Lévi-Strauss construes any culture as “a combination of symbolic systems headed by language, the matrimonial rules, the economic relations, art, science and religion.” . . . The relationship between these symbolic systems and social reality itself is that of langue to parole (said differently: the symbolic systems in which cultures originate are unconscious). (Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 21).

57. Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 23. 58. Hénaff, Claude Lévi-Strauss, 149. 59. The full title of the book is: The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic. 60. Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic (New York: Touchstone, 1985). 61. Fridolin Saint-Louis, Le Vodou haïtien: Reflet d’une société bloquée (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000), 125. The proper names Saint-Louis cites as working on the science of zombification are “Heinz Leham (Université McGill)” and the “new-yorkais: Nathalie Cline” with the “Docteur Doyon (Port-au-Prince).” 62. Saint-Louis spells Heinz Edgar Lehmann with an alternative spelling. Lehmann passed away in 1999 after a research career studying psychiatry, notably schizophrenia, in Canada. 63. University of Winnipeg. Dr. Wade Davis. http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/index/ media-wade-davis (accessed August 21, 2013). 64. National Geographic. Wade Davis: Anthropologist/Ethnobotanist: Explorer-in-Residence. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/explorers/bios/wade-davis/ (accessed August 21, 2013). 65. Beauvoir-Dominique, “Libérer le double,” online version: 6. The original French is: “Jusqu’à ce jour, la langue créole ne possède aucun vocable pour désigner ce que la civilisation occidentale qualifie d’ « art ».” 66. Ibid., 1. Beauvoir-Dominique spells “vodou” using the Kreyòl. (On an airplane, the passenger next to me [French] and reading over my shoulder, made sure that I add this footnote.) 67. Breton, Le Surréalisme, 239. The original French is: Haïti manque de musées, de collections d’art et c’est tout un côté de l’expression humaine qui vous est dérobé, du moins dont ne pouvez-vous prendre une connaissance directe. Je ne saurais trop rendre hommage aux efforts du Centre d’art pour combler cette grave lacune. 68. The wall paintings are being restored through the Haitian Cultural Recovery Project, funded in part by the Smithsonian. 69. Selden Rodman, The Miracle of Haitian Art (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 50.

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70. Rodman solicited money twice from the Haitian government to fund a mural project, but according to Rodman, President Dumarsais Estimé opted instead to spend “close to a million . . . on painting and sculpture, and all of it went to French and Belgian pompiers, who defaced the walls; for diminutive cement replicas of third-rate Greco-Roman marbles; or for fountains in the grossest taste. Not one cent went to Haitian artists” (Rodman, Miracl, 50). The reason for this disinterest is that “the educated class was busying itself trying to be as un-Haitian, as unlocal, as unnatural as possible” (Ibid., 36). 71. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 97. 72. Ibid., 76. 73. Ibid., 73. 74. Ibid., 97. 75. Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds by Peggy Kamuf (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 149. 76. Kant’s work on aesthetics may be found in Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790). In art, Kant finds beauty, and the purpose of such beauty is to satisfy a subject’s desire for purity. Since the perception of art is subjective, it is a reality contained within the specificity of the individual’s psyche. In opposition, truth is that which is both shared by the individual and also by society. While, according to Kant, it is a universal truth that human beings will search for beauty in objects, it is not a universal truth that together they will consider the same object of art to be beautiful. For Kant, since beauty is essentially subjective, it is a positive presence in society, but it is not an agent in its advancement. Stephen Boos writes: Kant elevates the aesthetics from the realm of the merely agreeable into the realm of subjective reality, but he falls short of the realm of truth. . . . Kant does not regard aesthetic judgments as theoretical judgments, since knowledge proper, according to Kant, is restricted to the phenomenal realm of the Understanding. Aesthetics are noncognitive matters of taste or feeling in spite of their claim to universal validity. (Stephen Boos and Dorota Glowacka, “Rethinking the Aesthetic: Kant, Schiller, and Hegel,” in Between Ethics and Aesthetics, edited by Stephen Boos and Dorota Glowacka (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 17. According to Kant, a work of art, while shared by members of a society, is not capable of affecting the world at large. At most, art, that is beauty, serves as a sort of metaphor for ideal ethical behavior. Rodolphe Gasché explains that for Kant, beauty is that which resembles the beautiful in nature, and thus defines the morally good. Art is both ethical—that is, it defines a way of being, and moral—it prescribes principled action. At most, art may confirm that an individual possesses a “good soul,” “but the interest experienced by the mind when faced with beautiful form in nature is not moral interest itself” (Gasché 66–67). Thus, for Kant, art exists in society, but does not act upon society. 77. Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 21–22. 78. Mercier, “Présentation to ‘La Possession,’” 902. The original French is: “les toxicomanes, originaux et fous.” 79. Alessandra Benedicty, “Towards an Intellectual History of Possession: Reading ‘la crise’ as a Textual Space in Vodou and André Breton’s Haitian Lectures and Nadja,” Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 41, no. 2 (2012): 280–305. 80. Depestre, Hadriana, 36. 81. Ibid., 139. 82. Ibid., 209. The original French is: “Nous aurions pu, Hadriana et moi, après nos deux récits, en epilogue à nos mémoires ici croisés, narrer le conte du couple heureux qu’on forme depuis dix ans. Mais, sans trop y croire, nous avons préféré nous ranger à la croyance que les travaux et les jours fastes de l’amour n’ont pas d’histoire.” 83. Ibid., 136. The original French is: “Un petit matin, en me mettant à ma table de travail je m’aperçus avec éblouissement que j’étais en mesure, sans l’habituel senti-

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ment de détresse, d’établir à l’aide des mots français des rapports naturels, ludiques, sensuels et magiques, avec l’atroce passé jacmélien.” 84. René Depestre, Un Arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1967). 85. Depestre, Hadriana, 134. 86. In Les Affres d’un Défi, Frankétienne expresses the importance that many Haitian intellectuals place on the fact of staying in Haiti and fighting for a better existence for the country: “Or, nous n’avons nulle intention d’aller ailleurs, même si nous bâillons de faim, de peur et d’impatience”—“And, we have no intention of going elsewhere, even if we yawn with hunger, with fear, with impatience” (Frankétienne, Les Affres, 160). 87. Ole Hansen-Lǿve, Profil Formation: Emmanuel Kant, Analytique du Beau (Paris: Hatier, 1983), 23. The original French is: Fréquemment nous énonçons des appréciations relatives au fait que les choses et les êtres nous semblent beaux et dignes de notre admiration ; ceci ou cela nous plaît. On appellera expérience esthétique la série de ces évaluations dont la référence est le beau. 88. Depestre, Hadriana, 156. 89. Ibid., 158. The original French reads: il s’en était fallu d’un cheveu de blonde que Patrick se décidât à passer outre à l’éblouissement de sa grande main d’adolescent sur mon amande pour piquer un plongeon de mâle dans une eau femelle rageusement consentante. 90. A sociological reading of the two men’s apprehension of Hadriana would suggest as Paravisini-Gebert’s reading of the novel does, that the text falls into the trap of “racially determined attitudes toward sexuality.” She is notably referring to the “sexual relations between black men and white women” (Paravisini-Gebert, “Women Possessed,” 50). She explains: Depestre conscientiously “saves” Hadriana from Granchiré’s erotic rampage—the only young woman in the novel that is not “savagely deflowered”—keeping her for the narrator’s ultimate pleasure at the end of the text. (Ibid.) For a feminist reading of Vodou, see Sophia C. Arredondo’s master’s thesis, “Text, Flesh, and Memory: Remembering the Ezili” (2003) and Karen McCarthy Brown’s Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn (1991). 91. Christopher Looby, “Sexuality’s Aesthetic Dimension: Kant and The Autobiography of an Androgyne,” in American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, by Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 161. 92. Ibid., 159. 93. Nancy Bentley, “Warped Conjunctions: Jacques Rancière and African American Twoness,” in American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions, by Christopher Looby and Cindy Weinstein (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 293. 94. Ibid., 292. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 293. 97. Deren, Divine Horsemen, 138. 98. Depestre, Hadriana, 163. 99. Ibid., 163–164. 100. Gabriel Rockhill, “The Politics of Aesthetics: Political History and the Hermeneutics of Art,” in Jacques Rancière: History, Politics, Aesthetics, by Gabriel Rockhill and Philip Watts (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 196. 101. Daniel, Dancing Wisdom, 4–5. 102. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 143.

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103. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 3. 104. Depestre, Hadriana, 145. In the French, Patrick explains, “A West Indies (Mona), je vis se réveiller en moi de silos de joie et d’espoir,” where he could finally confront “les souvenirs douleureux de Jacmel à ma personnalité d’adulte,” and he names what Hadriana went through as, “Le mal d’Hadriana.” 105. Ibid., 146. 106. Ibid., 117. 107. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 143. 108. Rey and Richman, “The Somatics of Syncretism,” 384.

THIRTEEN Between Frankétienne and Glissant Hadriana’s Realpolitik

Hadriana dans tous mes rêves is a novel which responds to creolization: it is about Vodou as creolization, but one which puts the accent on the fact that the “notion of race, used confusingly, is central” 1 to understanding the complex social structures in Haiti and the larger Caribbean. Vodou acknowledges that some will have and others will not, and all will have to work hard to keep what they have, and honor those ancestors, mentors, and friends who made certain opportunities possible. Ezili must keep up her coquetterie, the Gede, constantly revise and refine their art of trickery, and offerings must be made by the flesh-and-blood humans to their spiritual compatriots: the ancestors and the lwas. Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, written thirteen years after Frankétienne’s Dezafi and seven years after Glissant’s Le Discours antillais, but ten years before Depestre’s Le métier à métisser, is coming off the gross disillusionments with socialism and with Duvalierism, and it is a novel, I hope to have shown in the previous chapter, written at a time when its narrators (and its author) needed healing. Depestre’s depiction of Hadriana’s zombification, and more generally of Vodou, is a creolization of multiple persons, subjectivities, and cultural influences, but it also recognizes that the social roles people play, and which society ascribes to them are more often than not, extremely rigid. Vodou then presents itself as a place where people can be creolized outside of the political, or in the alterpolitical. It is a space where in Saunders’s words they may find a sense of “belonging,” where belonging is first and foremost about healing from a geopolitical context that violently excludes and dispossesses them (see part I). In a sense, the reason Vodou failed miserably under Duvalier, is that maybe it is not meant to be a political concept. Maybe it plays itself 263

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out better in the interstices, in the hidden parts of a society, far from the official political order’s sight. Yet, most importantly, at least as Depestre’s novel depicts it, Vodou is not a utopian space, it is a place where the violently passionate Petwò and Gede lwas negotiate a relationship of “reciprocity” 2 with the cooler Rada lwas. Within the ivory walls of the academe, in the theoretical considerations of UNESCO, creolization might seem utopian, but in its daily practice, as Vodou, it is a rich, complex, and messy affair. Yet, most of all, it’s one that allows a person and/ or a community to work through such disarray, and reclaim a sense of “possession,” or in Stephenson’s words a sense of “seatedness,” of “selfpossession.” 3 THE THIRD TWIN, DEPESTRE: BETWEEN FRANKÉTIENNE AND GLISSANT Rachel Douglas, in writing about Frankétienne’s reworkings of his own prose in the mid- to late 1990s, states: “The affect of the accumulation is further intensified by the hyperbole.” 4 Drawing on Douglas’s work on writing, rewriting, and self-translations in the work of Frankétienne, one might consider a sort of aesthetic of the Loko, of the larva turned butterfly, of the multicolored wings of the butterfly, as one of “accumulation” and “hyperbole,” where the extreme may be at once discredited as invalid, and at the same time may be reflected upon as the unsaid wisdom of the third twin, always lurking, never explicit, but omnipresent. The hyperbole is paired with a “multitude of anaphoric sequences” so as to produce a narrative that reflects “the unconsciousness of the zombified nou,” “reinforc[ing] the lack of autonomous thinking.” 5 Although Frankétienne often puts into play a first-person narrator, this narrator, Douglas argues, is completely unaware of its own zombification. In contrast, Depestre’s first person narrators in Hadriana are absolutely conscious that zombification is or has taken place, or at least that they are undergoing something of an abnormal order. If anything, the sociocultural motivation of Hadriana’s zombification is one that is self-aware: Hadriana must be zombified or become a victim of what will become a militant nationalist noiriste state, where there is no place for Hadriana’s physical whiteness nor her psychical Creole hybridity. Munro recounts Duvalier’s and Depestre’s meeting in 1958, when Duvalier would offer Depestre a position in his government. Basing his recounting of the anecdote on Depestre’s short story “La mort coupée sur mésure” (1995), Munro explains that upon his return to Haiti in 1958–1959, Depestre realizes to what extent Duvalier has transformed from “leftist indigenist” to “fascist tyrant,” and elects again, exile, this time in Cuba. 6 Depestre then chooses to write a tale about Haiti at the time of his early adolescence; in leaving out the years of his absence, he can only

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attest and reflect upon why Hadriana is zombified. It seems then, in 1938, that Haitian civil society, with the inclusion of the Vodou communities, is pursuing a Black nationalist project, but it is also clear that the Vodou communities of Jacmel want, as best they can, to protect those who might be harmed by such a project. In pairing Depestre’s own experience with the semifictional ones recounted in Hadriana, it is also clear that Haitians were not looking at their sociopolitical agenda as a tyrannical project. As Paravisini-Gebert suggests, Depestre’s text might point to the zombification of Haiti under Duvalier, but it is much more the texts of writers who stayed in Haiti under Duvalier, writers such as Frankétienne, who put to prose the notion of zombification as a collective mutation of the Haitian people into zonbi-citizens. 7 For Depestre, Hadriana’s zombification is much more a possession, a mode of healing, granted of an extreme order, by which to transport her out of a Duvalierian Haiti actively working against a Glissantian Poetics of Relation. It is significant that both Hadriana and Patrick will find their home in the space of the university, where the ivory tower may theorize the more beautiful, rather than the more difficult and “freakish” aspects of a creolizing process, and aspire to disseminating its more utopian ideals as a possible sociopolitical project. Even here, as Dalleo points out, the less soft aspects of creolization can invade the serenity of the academe. Dalleo explains that in 1968, “historian Walter Rodney . . . returns to Jamaica from a conference abroad only to be refused reentry to the country and relieved of his post at the University of the West Indies.” 8 For her part, Hron suggests that literary and critical theory is particularly apt at promoting the constructive elements borne of the hybridity, a hybridity that is more often than not associated with the painful experiences of otherness. 9 And here, we are reminded of Bok’s analysis of resilience as an extremely advanced form of posttraumatic stress disorder. 10 Glover shows that the spaces of the academe can only really take in and reprocess the more utopian versions of creolization and hybridity theories: 11 Glissant’s work, or at least his theoretical work, and notably how the academe has incorporated his work, is more palatable to the ivory tower; whereas, Frankétienne’s prose in the density of its unedited immensity, in its opaque deployment of images of the scatological and the cannibal, presents itself, for many readers, as an assault, as Glover argues, on readability, and most importantly threatens a postcolonial project trying to distance itself from such exotic images of “primitive” and “uncivilized” behavior. As such, whether intentionally or not, Depestre’s Hadriana posits itself somewhat in between Frankétienne’s unpalatable “ex-centricity” and Glissant’s more malleable theoretical language. While Depestre shares in the “appropriation of French-determined theoretical models,” and in the “hyper-awareness of the importance of Western theoretical approbation,” 12 he does so, with a multifaceted experience, and outside of the

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strictly francophone context, notably in Cuba, but also across the communist nations of the Cold War era. Depestre writes from France, but primarily as an employee of UNESCO, and at that, as first and foremost an internationalist socialist, one who at every step of the way disaligned himself with a totalitarian nationalist agenda. Unlike Glissant, he writes neither from France nor its overseas departments, and unlike Frankétienne, he does not write from Duvalierist Haiti. Most notably though, Depestre writes Hadriana at a point in his life when he has the opportunity to construct narratives from a space of “leisure,” 13 for he has secured an income for a retirement taken in 1986. He is then able to play up his role of writer possessed by the Gede tricksters, and rather than compose in a space seeking approbation, he writes in a provocative dialogue with French, francophone, and Haitian writers, as all three of this book’s chapters on Depestre’s novel have sought to illustrate. If as Dash points out, Carpentier’s protagonist Rosario and her hybrid identity are at once idyllic and threatening, so too Hadriana is held up as a highly problematic incarnation of utopic readings of Glissantian creolization: in her noncorporeal being, in her gwo-bon-anj, Hadriana might be creole, but in her physicality, in her kò kadav 14 and even in her ti-bon-anj, she is white. In other words, to read Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, between Frankétienne, who operated under a sort of insular exile in Haiti under Duvalier; 15 and, Glissant, who wrote, published, and taught within the constructs of the very powers, notably France and the United States, that have “dispossessed” Martinique, is to perceive Hadriana as a sort of third space, the one that reflects the unsaid and often hard-to-deal-with truths represented by the third twin. As both Paravisini-Gebert’s scholarship and Hadriana’s own fictional narrative voice admit, the young Jacmelienne’s whiteness is privileging. On the second to last page of Depestre’s novel, Hadriana as narrator reminds us that without her whiteness, she would never have been able to navigate the Caribbean or seek entry without a visa: “C’est là toute une autre histoire”—“But that is a whole other story.” 16 Depestre’s novel is polemical because it knows that the undeniable processes of creolization, in most of their manifestations, do not correspond to a utopian project. To place Patrick’s and Hadriana’s “couple heureux”—“happy couple” 17 in the context of the university is to be cognizant that beyond the walls of the ivory tower, creolization’s avatars are less idyllic. Hadriana understands that the academe has only retained the more soothing parts of a much more painful Glissantian poetics, the ones encapsulated in the painful “comédie humaine” of his novels about Mathieu and Mycéa. 18 It is not without consequence that ten years after the publication of Hadriana, Depestre would publish his own sort of treatise on the beauties of hybridity, Métier à metisser (1998). He would locate the joys of such hybridity specifically through his present “métier,” in his present career, as retiree, as novelist, and one with “leisure” time. In other words, Depes-

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tre nods to the fact that the Glissantian “Poetics of Relation” are an entangled affair, for in Dash’s words to “confront modernity” 19 is most often than not a complex, if not violent matter. In commenting on the academe’s celebration of hybridity in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hron writes: Clearly, in our global world of mass migration—where one in 32 people is a foreigner (or first-generation immigrant), one in 140 a refugee, and one in 100 displaced by conflict or civil unrest . . . —this assumption [i.e., hybridity as celebration] is tenuous at best. Because of their supposed lack of a “homing desire,” however, these privileged figures are able, reiterating Kristeva, to maintain their precarious, estranged, happiness. 20

Ultimately, a more joyous creolization rides in the wake of a far more destructive ship, that of the violence of a Caribbean colonized over and over again, fueled by a highly racialized, and most egregiously, racist order. But what do Frankétienne’s and Depestre’s mise-en-scène of zombification have to do with Glissantian creolization? In the introduction to this book, I wrote about Glissant’s treatment of Vodou and of the notion of “la dépossession”—“dispossession.” 21 In my final reflections on Depestre, I draw on Glover when she defines the zonbi as a “de facto antihero, the zombie exposes the limits of any rationalist metaphysical order and fully embraces a destabilizing uncertainty.” 22 She explains: Exemplar of the marvelous real (or its underside, as Régis Antoine would have it), the zombie embodies the fluidity of the boundaries between living and dead, material and spiritual, natural and supernatural. 23

As such, Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves serves as a sort of clearing house of fully articulated cultural-aesthetic movements such as Bretonian Surrealism or Jacques Stephen Alexis’s Haitian Marvelous Realism, but it is also a space that works through less specifically deliberated, but nonetheless highly circulated words that suggest a sort of sociopolitical agenda for literary and artistic activities, in the Caribbean, Latin American, and/or the American Atlantic: words such as magic realism, négritude, spiralism, and even creolization. Most importantly though, Depestre’s novel not only weaves these “movements” into each other, but braids into them, what is probably their most revered ancestor, Vodou, Vodou as thought system, Vodou as a socioaesthetic practice, Vodou as philosophical contemplation and active contemplation of what it means to be written out of legal and official personhood. The zonbi as the “underside” to “the marvelous real” is to acknowledge that a genealogy exists between Vodou, Haitian marvelous realism, spiralism, and even creolization.

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It is also in its own maladroit macho way even a gesture towards a sort of machista version of a male author trying his hand at écriture féminine. As we have seen, Braziel, Dayan, Dalleo, and Paravisini-Gebert, all acknowledge the extreme masculinist discourse of midtwentieth-century Caribbean writing, and Dayan squarely locates Depestre within it: Most revolutionary calls to négritude—whether Duvalier’s “totalitarian” appropriation of the vodou believing peasantry or Frantz Fanon’s “The Intellectual before His People,” or Depestre’s “The Responsibilities of a Man of Culture”—ignored women as agents of reclamation or revolt. 24

Depestre’s writing in Hadriana, allowing the eponymous narrator to (almost) have the last word, is not such an insignificant step for a writer associated with a tradition that, it would seem, didn’t think twice about feminism. It is possible to read Depestre’s eroticism like Kettly Mars’s or Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s as first and foremost about the “fluidity” that for Csíkszentmihályi is a more appropriate critical category than “happiness” in determining better ways to live, to become (again) selfpossessed. As seen at the end of the previous chapter, an even more uncomfortable reading, but one that given the acknowledgment of same-sex relations in the short story “Blues pour une tasse de thé vert” in Eros dans un train chinois puts into play what Strongman theorizes as an aesthetics of the “Bolereo,” “a discursive strategy whereby a seemingly straightforward narrative dances alongside the perversion of its own queer meaning.” 25 Depestre’s prose fiction is always slipperily dancing along, saying one thing to mean another: eroticism is exoticism, but nonheteronormatively so, in its own machista way. 26 Thomas Spear explains: “In authors such as Depestre or Confiant, the physical ‘superiority’ of man is glorified. Depestre keeps his reputation as a humorist for those who do not take seriously his stories of géolibertinage,” 27 but Spear does not say that this superior “man” is not necessarily channeling the female or engaging in same-sex eroticism (these are obviously not the same). In his work, John Ryan Poynter points to the same machismo that Dalleo describes, and suggests that the celebratory discourses of creolization, at least in the official public sphere, do not really know what to do with a Western notion of “sexuality not as an identity but as a praxis.” 28 Poynter describes: a kind of sexual regionalism in which the heterosexual romance through which Latin America is evoked becomes freighted with a symbolic charge, associated with the crucial play of difference that both nourishes Latin America’s cultural vitality and distinguishes it from the West. 29

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Depestre’s later work then makes an effort, a gesture, to be inclusive of “identities” that are not part of, at least, midtwentieth-century Caribbean writing that circulates in the spaces described by Dalleo’s work. Translated into multiple languages (but for the moment, not into English), Depestre’s Hadriana dans tous mes rêves is a novel that came, it would seem too soon. À nous, to move it back into Dalleo’s Caribbean, and I would say, transatlantic “public sphere.” Hadriana should and needs to be read alongside writers such as Danticat, Mayra Montero, Julia Alvarez, and Junot Díaz; Kettly Mars and Rita Indiana Hernández; 30 Frankétienne and Glissant; or Leiris, Bataille, Lévi-Strauss, and Yourcenar. NOTES 1. Carlo Avierl Célius, “Cheminement anthropologique,” online version: 4. 2. Dayan emphasizes the Vodou idea of “reciprocity” and its focus on a democratic process. The relations between humans and lwas are constantly being “redefined (or reimagined) by these gods” because the purpose of such a dynamic rapport between the two entities is to establish a “logic . . . that works through and questions what it means to be equal: in equilibrium and in correspondence” (Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 24). 3. Stephenson, Possession, 117. 4. Rachel Douglas, Frankétienne and Rewriting: A Work in Progress (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 59. 5. Ibid., 58. 6. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 82. 7. See Douglas’s Frankétienne and Rewriting (2009), Hron’s Translating Pain (2009), and Glover’s Haiti Unbound (2010). 8. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 150. 9. Hron, Translating Pain, 24, 42. 10. Bok, Exploring Happiness, 118. 11. Glover, Haiti Unbound, 1–30. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. Depestre, Sartre in His Fraternity, 41. 14. Crosley, “Shadow-Matter Universes in Haitian and Dagara Ontologies,” 7. 15. Glover, Haiti Unbound, 26. 16. Depestre, Hadriana, 208. 17. Ibid., 209. 18. See Edouard Glissant, The Fourth Century, translated by Betsy Wing (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2001 [1964]), originally Le Quatrième siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1997 [1964}); The Overseer’s Cabin, translated by Betsy Wing (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2011 [1981]), originally La Case du commandeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1997 [1981]); and La Lézarde. (Paris: Gallimard, 197 [1958]). 19. Dash, The Other America, 85. 20. Hron, Translating Pain, 24. 21. Glissant, Discours antillais, 95. 22. Glover, Haiti Unbound, 60. 23. Ibid., 60. 24. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 83. 25. Roberto Strongman, “The Latin American Queer Aesthetics of El Bolereo,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 32, no. 64 (2007): 40. 26. For more on “same-sex desiring and gender-transgressing” scholarship on the Caribbean, see Vanessa Agard-Jones, “What the Sands Remember,” GLQ: A Journal of

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Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2012): 325–392; Christian Flaugh, “Crossings and Complexities of Gender in Guadeloupe and Martinique: Reflections on French Caribbean Expressions,” L’Esprit Créateur 53 (Spring 2013): 45–59; John Ryan Poynter, Eroticism in Twentieth Century Francophone Caribbean Literatures PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2006; and the work of Faith Smith, Roberto Strongman, and Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley cited elsewhere in this book. 27. Thomas Spear, “Carnivalesque Jouissance: Representations of Sexuality in the Francophone West Indian Novel,” translated by Richard D. Reitsma, 1998. http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v2i1/SPEAR.HTM (accessed August 20, 2013): Paragraph 8. 28. Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, 7. 29. Poynter, Eroticism, 77. 30. Rita Indiana Hernández is a Dominican musician and writer, author of the novel Papi (2005). See Maja Horn, Masculinity after Trujillo: The Politics of Gender in Dominican Literature (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2013).

Malanga, The Source—Guadeloupe 2008 from “Intérieur—Andidan 2011” by Nicolas Nabajoth. Source: Reprinted by permission from Nicolas Nabajoth.

IV

Self-Repossession: The Dispossessed and Their “New Subjectivities”—JeanClaude Fignolé’s and Kettly Mars’s Novels

Part IV has as its intention to offer up various ways of reading Haitian texts, that may be applied to other Haitian writers, living outside of Haiti; living in between a non-Haitian landscape and Haiti; and living permanently in Haiti. In this last part, I have chosen to look at the novels of writers who have chosen as their primary residence Haiti because their work resoundingly exemplifies the multiple modes of possession that this book has sought to illustrate. This last part is thus dedicated to two Haitian writers living and writing about Haiti in Haiti, and who have not left Haiti, but for brief sojourns. In the chapter “On ‘Un-Becoming’ Racial: Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Aube Tranquille,” I invoke Deborah Jenson’s proposal that in the early and tumultuous years of the Haitian Republic, the stories produced were not a “slave narrative,” but rather “tell the story of un-becoming a slave,” 1 about what it means to “become,” rather than to be free. I look at two of Fignolé’s novels, which share the same protagonists, Aube tranquille (1990), and to a lesser extent Les possédés de la pleine lune (1987). I argue that the two novels use the era designated by Jenson in her study as a decoy for discussing a comparable predicament of the precariousness of being at the moment of transition out of Duvalierism into the unknown next moment of Haitian history. If as Jenson argues Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines would be concerned with recording what it meant to no longer be a slave, then Fignolé’s novels offer an historically fictive rendition of Jenson’s claim, while at the same time translating the insecurity of what it is to live in Haiti after decades of dictatorship. In a different way, but nonetheless in step with Jenson’s claim that there exists “a literary tradition,” and thus legacy, “that sprang directly from the Haitian Revolution, by Haitians,” 2 Kettly Mars’s work also puts forth narratives of protagonists living through the nefarious conse-

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quences of decades-long mistreatment by the geo-political community: both by the elite at home, and the international community abroad. While Haitians may now be free (i.e., not slaves), they live under another sort of regime of precariousness: as the earthquake of 2010 tragically emphasized. With such quotidian insecurity, using Stephenson’s concept, one of the tools with which to “re-seat oneself” is that of possession. Both Fignolé’s and Mars’s work operate the concept of possession in ways that remain true to the theories and ethnographic accounts of possession in Vodou ritual, but also articulate how the notion of possession is one that in some ways has become secularized, and which nonetheless has as its ultimate goal to provide healing. NOTES 1. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 4. 2. Ibid., 1.

FOURTEEN On “Un-Becoming” Racial Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Aube Tranquille

Revenge, as Raymond Verdier defines it, is the only form of human dignity available to those who find themselves in a situation such as slavery—that is, a traumatic predicament, which deprives an individual of his or her humanity. Verdier defines revenge: From its beginnings, we must take into account the scope of this defensive force, of this reactive power of such an energy that is put into movement when blood is spilled, pride is wounded, and one’s entire being humiliated; and, which together produce a wrong that has no reason, a suffering of injustice, that in turn put into question a man’s very existence, physical or spiritual. 1

Jean-Claude Fignolé’s novel Aube tranquille—Tranquil Dawn (1990) ends with a Vodou ceremony in honor of the hot-tempered Vodou spirits, or the Petwò. In her study of Vodou, Maya Deren writes, “Petro was born out of . . . rage. It is not evil; it is the rage against the evil fate which the African suffered, the brutality of his displacement and his enslavement.” 2 This chapter will show how the novel Aube tranquille presents Vodou, and more precisely possession—that is, the act of accepting the lwas and the ancestors into one’s own corporeal body—as first and foremost an expression of human dignity. Aube tranquille depicts Vodou as a system of thought at whose origin and core is the ontological question: “What is a human being?” In the first part of this chapter, I will study the ways in which the European slave trade of Africans and Caribbean slavery established a system of society based on an ontology that denied humanity to Africans. My reading of Aube tranquille suggests that within this system, Vodou created a new system of society that contested the Europeans’ 273

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denial of the African as human. This chapter will look at the ways in which this new system was an inevitable social phenomenon that imposed itself on slave and master alike. Yes, Vodou is often associated with violence, yet as this chapter shows, such violence is only an overt manifestation. Instead, the violence that is perceived by the observer who is unfamiliar with a Vodou Weltanschauung, is in fact, a complex system of justice, one that I argue through Fignolé’s work, is not racially motivated, but rather determined by a human rights discourse that is humanist. Where René Depestre’s Hadriana is more magical realist, in that it depicts extreme violence in an attenuated tone, 3 Fignolé’s Aube tranquille, is in Kaiama L. Glover’s words, spiralist in its intention to offer “the reader a mirror of the troubled relationship between identity, place, and the past in the postcolonial Caribbean.” 4 Aube tranquille thus puts the notion of vengeance into play: ultimately asking that its protagonists and its readers, question: “Is revenge a viable form of justice-making?” It is ultimately the intervention of the lwa and their ability to possess those beings that still occupy a flesh-and-blood kò kadav, which proffers the answer. As noted in earlier chapters, the wisdom conferred by possession comes only after the corporeal body undergoes the painful entrée of the spirits into her/his body. Similarly, Aube tranquille does not offer easy access to the wisdom it confers, and in a sense, the novel operates formally as a possession, where narrative voices lay into other narrative voices, in a chaotic literary formalization of what Glover recognizes as “the notion that one’s identity is as dense as one’s past is long.” 5 I first will situate Aube tranquille in contemporary scholarship; then, I will study the ways in which the novel describes both a European and a Vodou conception of the human being. This chapter will go on to show how the novel foregrounds how the notions of blackness and whiteness are in a sense counterintuitive to a Vodou body politic that is far more nuanced, and will examine how the novel actively engages Martinican Frantz Fanon’s psycho-social, analytical study Peau noire, masques blancs—Black Skin, White Masks (1952). Ultimately, in deploying and subverting the seeming immutable variable of skin color, Aube tranquille illustrates how Vodou possession is a means of vindicating humanity within the repressive master-slave relationship. I claim that the novel’s treatment of revenge and forgiveness exemplify Dayan’s proposal that whether human or metaphysical, reciprocity dictates most relationships in Vodou religion and culture. 6 Finally, I propose that the intricate use of narration, dialogue, and free-indirect discourse puts into play three different modes through which Fignolé’s representation of Vodou plays with the reductive categories of black and white.

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THE PRECARIOUSNESS OF BEING: FIGNOLÉ’S OEUVRE AND A NARRATOLOGY OF POSSESSION This chapter argues that the aesthetic of spiralisme—spiralism, with which writers Jean-Claude Fignolé, Frankétienne, and René Philoctete are associated—as manifested in Aube tranquille may be read as a narratological avatar of possession. I invoke narratology because unlike any of the other texts that I have thus far discussed in this book, none, I contend, so intentionally think through possession as an aesthetic as does Fignolé in Aube tranquille. Many are the definitions, discussions, and polemics around the notion of aesthetics, and for this reason, in this book, I have used the word parsimoniously, wanting to employ it in a context in which it directly applies. In other words, if Bataille, Breton, and Leiris incorporate the notion of possession into their writing, they come to possession more as accidental tourists, where as writers and/or ethnographers engaging with East Africa or the Caribbean, their intellectual thought is informed by, but not consciously engaged with possession. For his part, Depestre deals more with the concept of possession (and its specific avatar in zombification) most prominently as a socio-philosophical prism with which to better understand not just Haiti or the Caribbean, but human nature at large. His novel as I argued earlier is ultimately a roman-à-thèse, using fiction to better explain how a society deals not only with change, but deeply traumatizing change. Fignolé’s prose fiction, I propose, especially in Aube tranquille, is purposeful in its deployment of possession as a formal technique. Aube tranquille, of which this chapter does an extended close reading, actively engages, and even cultivates, an aesthetic of possession. By aesthetic, I mean the act of formally playing with the ideas of “beauty” and its counterpart “ugliness,” by which this act has as its purpose to service a higher “ethical” endeavor. In other words, to participate in aesthetics, from the standpoint of creative practices or a theoretical analysis of these practices, is to intentionally think through how forms and structures interact—that is, combine, cause friction, or outrightly clash—in such a way as to effect a change on the human person, and more generally on society. As Western theory has debated aesthetics, such a change can have more (i.e., Adorno) or less (i.e., Plato) of a direct relationship to society. That is, aesthetics, it would (polemically) seem engages an indirect relationship to society’s more touted essential functions: governance, economics, technology, security, and the politics that orchestrate them. For Fignolé, there is both a creative practice and a theoretical reflection on the creative practice, which more generally has been identified by Fignolé himself, fellow writers such as Frankétienne, and literary critics such as Victoria Famin, Kaiama L. Glover, and Kathleen Gyssels as spiralism. In his comments about writing his second novel Aube tranquille, Fignolé explains that it is “[his] favorite novel”: “For an entire month I lived

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on the spasms of rhythm, literally possessed by my work.” 7 While obviously the notion of being “possessed by,” in both French and English are just mere expressions to designate an activity executed with extreme passion, which involves both body and mind, the notion of possession as circumscribed by both the Haitian tradition of serving the lwas, and the surrounding conversations around Haitian Vodou possession is one with which Fignolé actively engages. Aube tranquille is imbued with the historical antecedents that are at the foundation of Vodou’s philosophical, societal, and religious practices. More than any of the works discussed in this book, Fignolé’s second novel deals with Vodou’s foundings, its very raison d’être, which is not just slavery, but slavery in the time of the European enlightenment. As Buck-Morss indicates in her book Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, the Haitian Revolution was a result of the confluence of multiple philosophical systems: African (especially Islamic West African thought) 8 and European enlightenment philosophy. For BuckMorss, Freemasonry in Europe and North America, and meetings amongst Africans in the Caribbean, served the same role in the Americas: as the intellectuals of their communities, whether Vodou high priest, gens de couleur, soldier, mason, or new citizens, both forums were places to exchange and transmit knowledge that came from hybrid sources: Africa, Europe, and the Americas. 9 (To note: King Salomon, thanks to his legendary temple in Jerusalem, is the veneered ancestor of Freemasons . . . and of course one of the main protagonists of Fignolé’s novel is named Salomon.) More interestingly, in Haiti, Buck-Morss identifies two locations as constituting the forums where ideas were exchanged and evolved: the slave-master’s home where masters and house slaves interacted, and Masonic temples, lodges, or meeting places, which were more informal in the Caribbean and South America, but still existed. 10 While Fignolé’s novel does not deal with Freemasonry, it does foreground the important interaction between master and slave in the intimate spaces of the master’s plantation as a central node to the fueling of the Haitian Revolution. Fignolé’s novel thus belongs to an intention to write down and fill in the grand lacunae of Haitian history. He writes: History, you see, is my “thing,” despite the fact that I’m not trained as a historian. I enjoy, through the novel, rereading the History of my country, which—thanks to our historians—is essentially a process of hagiography. . . . The indignity of the present that we’re living is a direct consequence of the turpitudes of our History, since the very beginning. 11

Aube tranquille is the first gesture in Fignolé’s corpus to deal with characters that resemble historical figures, where Salomon, a well-educated slave, is reminiscent of the legends around Toussaint Louverture: “Toussaint was born a slave on the outskirts of Le Cap on the Bréda plantation, where, instead of being in the fields, he worked with livestock before

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becoming coachman to the manager, Bayon de Libertat. The blend of the factual and the legendary is at work even in oft-cited archival sources,” writes John Patrick Walsh, 12 whose description could very well be applied to summarize Salomon’s relationship to his master. Fignolé’s later novels will deal more explicitly with historical figures: for example, Moi, Toussaint Louverture (2004) and Une heure pour l’éternité (2008), which depicts the conflicted French General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, who is charged with reestablishing slavery under Napoleon’s orders, at the same time that Louverture is imprisoned in France at the Joux Fortress. The novel historicizes Leclerc’s interactions, with for example, Alexandre Pétion, Haitian soldier and first president of the Republic of Haiti. Aube tranquille stands between its prequel Les Possédés de la pleine lune (1987) and these more historical novels as a bridge between what might be deemed magical realism and history. In Fignolé’s novel then, possession—that is, the seizure of the human corporeal body, by metaphysical bodies—ancestors and spirits—also facilitates a connection of the past to the present. Most importantly, possession’s ability to render the past present, serves as a powerful metaphysical weapon in the struggle for basic human rights in Saint-Domingue in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as well as in 1980s France and Haiti, which are the two moments depicted by Aube tranquille. Without a great leap of the imagination, and as I will discuss further, the novel published in 1990 also stands as a metaphor for what it means to live in a Haiti that has only been liberated four years prior (i.e., 1986) from the decades-long Duvalier dictatorship. Possession then is employed as a means by which protagonists may negotiate themselves to volatile, but hopeful political moments, moments in which what is at stake is nothing less than a nation’s entire collective humanity. My interest in Fignolé’s work is in how the phenomenon of possession undergirds his literary aesthetic. Most importantly, I argue that in Fignolé’s novels, there is a relationship between history and changing history, and the act of possession. My chapter will concentrate on Aube tranquille, a novel of historical fiction that depicts the decade leading up to the Haitian Revolution through the prism of the novel’s present, a present which is contemporary to the novel’s writing and publication (late 1980s, with publication in 1990). Using Jenson’s work in Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (2011), it is no coincidence, I posit, that Fignolé’s novels, which ground themselves in the transitory epoch between slavery and emancipation, would deploy possession—the moment in which one living body is inhabited by an ancestor’s or lwa’s spirit. Possession ultimately allows a subject to tangibly, that is corporeally, imagine itself out of a personhoodof-slave and into a personhood-of-freeperson. In speaking of colonial narratives about the African diaspora in the Americas, especially in the North American context, Jenson argues that

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while the slave narrative is central, there is nonetheless an “overdetermination of slavery as a defining category of identity and generic form in Afro-diasporic literature.” 13 She proposes that the hero-politicians Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, were, yes, former slaves, but more importantly men struggling to “tell the story of un-becoming a slave,” 14 and as such “sometimes nothing less than desperate to leave written testimony of the reality they had experienced.” 15 Granted Jenson’s book deals with autobiographical or biographical texts and Fignolé’s work belongs to the fictional genre, Fignolé’s novel nonetheless deals with slaves-who-are-becoming-freemen. Aube tranquille depicts Salomon, a slave who much like Toussaint is taken under the wing of a benevolent plantation owner and becomes literate, working through difficult allegiances to the respect he has to his master, his desire to apply the enlightenment principles taught to him by his tutor and master, and his social responsibility to his racial-and-social class. Une heure pour l’éternité directly depicts the historical figures of Toussaint and Pétion, who albeit minor protagonists in Fignolé’s later novel nonetheless figure into the fictionalization and reconstruction of Leclerc as both the upholder of the revolutionary principles that he grew up on, and also the good soldier to the new regime under which he serves, that of the Emperor Napoleon. Jenson further focuses her study on what initially seems a paradox to a post-enlightenment sensibility: how could persons who were mostly illiterate, such as Dessalines or Christophe, be considered authors in their own right? Jenson writes: Yet a quick mental survey of the world history of political cultures within and outside of alphabetic literacy will confirm that lack of formal schooling in the art of writing cannot inherently disqualify Haitian revolutionary leaders as political thinkers and authorial political texts were typically collaboratively produced between leaders and secretaries, with processes including dictation, discussion, and editing and refinement of the product. 16

In her article on Fignolé’s operating of a spiralist aesthetic, in his novels Aube tranquille and Une heure pour l’éternité, Famin identifies spiralism as an aesthetic that finds one of its most pronounced avatars narratologically, as marked by a lack of any sort of narrator at all. Instead, the text is constructed by a fluid, even if confusing and imprecise continuity of dialogues, of narrative voices, rather than a single narrator. 17 To pair Jenson’s emphasis on collaborative authorship with Famin’s analysis of the changeability of narrative voices in Fignolé’s work, we realize that Fignolé’s historical novels perform what Jenson analyzes: that authorship, and more precisely the composition of Haiti’s revolutionary history, would be a collaborative one, and one fraught with the need to un-write one’s slavery, as well as disseminate and preserve the struggle of “un-

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becoming a slave.” The precariousness of abolition’s success, of the new Haitian state, and of the status of a non-white man in the transatlantic world would, according to Jenson, permeate the texts of those persons who had recently achieved emancipation, whether man-of-politics or female courtesan. As such, if Fignolé’s two novels Aube tranquille and Une heure pour l’éternité portray the same historical moment, and similar historical figures as the archives that Jenson studies, then it becomes clear that Fignolé’s novels successfully not only rewrite, but keep in step with what Jenson proposes as “a literary tradition that sprang directly from the Haitian Revolution, by Haitians.” 18 Fignolé’s aesthetic is therefore grounded in grasping what it means to come to freedom, and the desperation associated with possibly losing it. In regards to what it means to recently achieve freedom, the revolutionary and early post-independence moments that Fignolé depicts in his novels are not far afield from the post-Duvalierist Haiti in which he writes. Both are moments in Jenson’s words of “un-becoming” oppressed, and entail both the vigor of such emancipation and the fear of its precariousness. An aesthetic of such instability, then, may be compared to possession, where multiple voices traverse one body: whether human kò kadav (see chapter 1), political text produced by multiple voices (Jenson’s argument), or the literary text depicting such predicaments (Famin). 19 In her study of Frankétienne, Glover characterizes his writing as a sort of “stylistics of possession,” by which “[s]chizophonia, in other words, is an offering of the unmediated representation of a reality too absurd or too traumatic to narrate—a reality to which existing formulations of the word are insufficient.” 20 That said, the way she uses the notion of “schizophonia,” intends an opacity, which while present in Fignolé’s novel (and Glover dedicates a major part of her book to the operating of opacity in Fignolé’s work) is nonetheless ultimately decipherable, as this chapter’s close readings of the text will show. As such, like the role of possession in a ritualistic setting, Fignolé’s “schizophonia,” constitutes a temporally circumscribed opacity, a sort of passage out of which both the protagonists and the reader emerge towards a greater clarity . . . even if this clarity is just to take full account of the instability with which they live. SAINT-DOMINGUE AND “INTERMEDIARY SPACE” French philosopher Michel Foucault’s notion of discourse and Congolese philosopher V. Y. Mudimbe’s notion of episteme are useful to understanding the various systems of society that converge within Aube tranquille’s creole world of colonial Saint-Domingue and contemporary Haiti. Foucault’s and Mudimbe’s work examine the role of power in the construction of social phenomena. While Foucault focuses primarily on French

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and European society, Mudimbe looks more specifically at the power relationships between European and African societies. More specifically, the two philosophers’ discussions correspond to Aube tranquille’s depictions of a well-established French ideology and an emergent Vodou system of thought. I will explore the novel’s frequent use of the word system, the descriptive depiction of a French ideological system, the vague reference to an African system of society, and the progressive introduction of the word Vodou to characterize the development of a nascent creole society. Foucault’s research provides a vocabulary with which to discuss the relationship between power and society. He envisions society through the lens of language, or philology; that is, meaning in society, like meaning in language, is the result of a differential relationship between two or more elements, 21 and as such, the difference in language puts into play an unequal distribution of power. 22 For its part, a discourse engages one or more speakers; and speech is one of the variables (along with for example the gaze, not to mention much less subtle forms of power differentials: slavery, imprisonment, rape), upon which the difference in power expresses itself. At the same time as speech transfers from person to person, so power shifts between interlocutors. The person who controls speech detains the power over the conversation. This chapter will explore the procedures by which Haiti initially became a center of Caribbean colonization and by which Vodou subsequently emerged from the margin to question this power. As Fignolé’s novel performs it, Vodou, as a discursive system, breaks down the “caractère intransitif”—”intransitive character” of European discourses and permeates the distinction between the seemingly all-powerful center of colonization and its supposed margin/s. 23 Mudimbe’s work is also of interest for his research uses similar theoretical prisms to study discourses of power in colonial and postcolonial contexts. For Mudimbe, specific discourses prescribe not only the power relations between individuals, but they also distinguish epistemes—that is, intellectual and psychological thought processes that are proper to a given system of discourse. Mudimbe illustrates the notion of episteme in the context of the academic setting of the Western human sciences and more specifically anthropology. In The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988), Mudimbe identifies the cultural specificity, or what he names the “epistemological ethnocentrism” of the Western humanities and social sciences. 24 He explains that a troubling situation arises when an African anthropologist studies an African society. Since anthropology is inextricably linked to a European “episteme, that is, an intellectual atmosphere which gives to anthropology its status as discourse, its significance as a discipline, and its credibility as a science in the field of human experience,” the anthropological study of African cultures is in part limited by the power dynamics of European dis-

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courses. 25 He writes: “In simpler words, I mean that anthropology and philology and all social sciences can be readily understood only in the context of their epistemological region of possibility.” 26 The unavoidable epistemological specificity thus is Europe, for when an African anthropologist studies African cultures, he or she does so through a European lens. He suggests that European discourses “invented,” and thus conflated many African systems of thought into one, thus misrepresenting a multiplicity as a singleton. Moreover, in creating a binary then between the European and the African, the global north relegated Africa to the inferior role within the already false duality. In the same way that reason occupies the privileged spot in the binary reason/mental illness, so the terms Europe and white affirm their authority over the terms Africa and black. And as such, the African became inevitably and immutably frozen in a role, that of supporting a European desire for superiority. That said, even if colonialism’s discursive imposition would be to assure the prevalence of the European term, Mudimbe suggests that the eradication of the African term is only partially successful. He describes the resultant predicament of the incomplete cultural supremacy of the West as “an intermediary space”: At any rate, this intermediary space could be viewed as the major signifier of underdevelopment. It reveals the strong tension between a modernity that often is an illusion of development, and a tradition that sometimes reflects a poor image of a mythical past. 27

Mudimbe’s depiction of the intermediary space created between the application of a European episteme to an African context describes a muddled space in which “modernity,” or a product of European discourse and tradition, or the fantasy of a once pure, African episteme are not as well-defined as the European “dichotomizing system” would want or believe them to be. Since other non-European “intellectual atmosphere[s]” exist in Africa, it is impossible that a European system of thought absolutely indoctrinate itself onto a region inhabited by multiple, already well-developed systems of thought. Mudimbe’s argument is essential to Aube tranquille’s depiction of systems of thought in Saint-Domingue/Haiti. 28 While conflated into a European and North American conception of “Africa,” Haiti’s history obviously is exemplary of what it means to be intermediary, and one need only think of the many Caribbean poetico-theorical frames that have emerged since the 1970s that theorize such hybridity: the work of Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Edouard Glissant, or the Creolists (Jean Bernabé, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphaël Confiant), to name just a few. My reading of Aube tranquille proposes that the elements composing Creole society in the Saint-Domingue/Haitian context inevitably created a new episteme. In other words, the interaction between slaves, the few living descendants of the Taïno indigenous society, and the colonizing powers in Saint-Do-

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mingue was such that the codes prescribing the power relations in an African, European, and tragically annihilated Taïno indigenous system of society were no longer functional. All of the characters of Aube tranquille’s revolutionary moment, even the slave-owners, are not absolute members of the French social order described by Foucault’s theory. Rather, due to both the unstable historical moment to which they belong (one that precedes Foucault’s area of research) and their peripheral relationship to either Africa or France, they enter into contact with the geographic space with which their identity is stereotypically associated as marginal objects of its discourses. In other words, from the French perspective, if France represents the same, then Saint-Domingue/Haiti represent the other; and all in Saint-Domingue are othered, obviously some more violently than those with whom they share the island: white slaveowners, their white wives, and white mistresses; “gens de couleur, a category often used to separate out mixed-race subjects in Haiti,” 29 some of whom had achieved freedom; and black slaves: house, plantation managers, and field slaves. Thus the world Fignolé depicts at the end of eighteenth-century Saint-Domingue is that of the what Doris Garraway names the “libertine colony,” 30 a place where categories were at once rigid and fluid, where relationships were unclear, and where the supremacy of the European episteme was definitely not absolute. AUBE TRANQUILLE’S PLOT/S Two principal plots told by various narrative agents confusingly intertwine. Warning: here I reduce Fignolé’s narrative finesse, by offering the crudely simplified storylines. Yet, the novel does not offer them up easily, and those who have already read the novel might not agree with the storylines that I identify. However, to permit the analysis of the novel that this chapter offers, a basic understanding of the plots is necessary. In the contemporary plot, a nun named Sister Thérèse travels on a plane from Paris to Port-au-Prince. On the plane, she listens to a tape recording of her mother’s voice. Her mother recounts the secret history of their Brittany and Swiss-based family, through which Sister Thérèse discovers the grim details of her ancestors’ history as plantation and slave owners in southern Saint-Domingue. The second, main storyline tells the story of the plantation and its residents—both plantation owners and slaves. In addition, the love affairs of the various characters as well as the legends of Sister Thérèse’s well-established family and the slaves’ “magie” or “voudou” provide other mini-plots. The interweaving of these various stories and of the multiple characters that these stories introduce creates a dense and confusing narrative. Moreover, the depictions of European history and legend from the Middle Ages to the modern-day and of

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Haitian history from the mid-eighteenth century to the contemporary period are fragmented and rarely precise. As Famin indicates, Aube tranquille does not have a solitary narrator, or any narrator at all. Were there to be only one narrator, this narrator’s voice would represent the convergence of at least three other narrative voices. It is plausible that Sister Thérèse recounts a rendition of her mother’s story. Her mother in turn relates the story of their ancestor Wolf de Schpeerbach, the wealthy Swiss baron whose family owned a plantation in Saint-Domingue, and who supposedly kept a sort of diary of his life. Additionally, the intricacy of the novel’s system of nomenclature further disorients the reader. Almost all of the female characters have two names of which one is Sonja. The most prominent Sonja is the authoritarian and unforgiving mistress of Wolf’s plantation: Sonja Biemme de Valembrun Lebrun. I shall call her Sonja Biemme. Sonja Schpeerbach Biemme de Valembrun Lebrun is the nun living in the late twentieth century and I shall refer to her as Sister Thérèse. Often the text confounds the identities of both women. In such a narrative instance, I shall refer to them as the Sonjas. Sister Thérese’s love interests—that is, Sister Hyacinthe, Sister Carmenta, and the flight attendant of the Paris/Port-au-Prince flight— also have the first name “Sonja.” Additionally, the use of the prequel to Aube tranquille, Les Possédés de la pleine lune helps to identify the confusing presentation of Saintmilia—the plantation’s healer and priestess, as well as her son Salomon. My final comment before commencing the analysis of the novel regards my use of the descriptors black, white, African, and European. I italicize the words for the novel first affirms the use of these terms to describe the characters’ identities; however, by its end, these terms become completely meaningless. My italicization of the terms reflects the novel’s final representation in the novel. SLAVERY AND SAINT-DOMINGUE/HAITI Aube tranquille refers back to two traditional and stereotypically conceived systems of thought, that of Africa and that of Europe; however, the contemporary space that the novel describes is that of an emerging, new creole world. Regardless of whether or not the old societal system was African or European, a new system emerges from a disjunction with the previous system. This new mode of thought describes a new episteme; in other words, slavery and the plantation are new systems of society that define modern relations of power. As presented by the novel, this “new” discursive space materializes from both the intimate and quotidian contact that takes place between house slaves and slave-owners as well as by the colonies’ relationship to France. Wolf de Schpeerbach is a plantation owner, a wealthy Swiss bar-

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on who grew up in Saint-Domingue on his family’s plantation. Raised by Saintmilia, the slave community’s healer, Wolf is also the best friend to Saintmilia’s son Salomon. Wolf thus adopts the libertarian ideas of the eighteenth-century enlightenment and becomes a partisan of the revolutionary ideas of the nineteenth century, and considers himself to be a benevolent slave-owner. According to the other plantation owners, the recent slave revolts are a result of Wolf’s insufficient surveillance. In the case of proprietors who taught their slaves to read and write, or who did not reprimand slaves for marooning, the slaves organized revolts. In retort to these reprimands, Wolf accuses the neighbor slave-owner of being nothing less despicable than a trafficker of slaves. 31 Although the system that Wolf designates is not specifically identified, it is clear that he situates the slave trader as an appendage of this “système.” The slave trader, the colonizer, the slave, and the plantation owner are not integral to the system identified by Wolf; rather, they are marginal entities from which the system benefits. The colonies represented an intellectual, moral, and legal space that was in no way European; at best, they were only economically European, and while absolutely invaluable to the French economy, still they were not French, even if they belonged to France. Philosophically, as Louis Sala-Molins points out in his historical analysis of Le Code Noir—The Black Code the document that codified and justified slavery—the fact that the colonies existed in the periphery of France, enabled France to rationalize the existence of slavery without having to face the brutal and inhuman conditions of its reality. In Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan—The Black Code or the Ordeal of Canaan , Sala-Molins writes: The silence of the big French philosophers interests me. They know it and they make light of it. The silence of the Enlightenment thinkers interests me. . . . The Black Code of itself, in the intolerable obscenity of all and each of its articles; its aberrant and perfectly logical existence; the consistency of the conceptual potpourri that allowed for its coming into being; the way in which this potpourri can tranquilly let itself simmer, ferment, and fatten the thought of one century, the eighteenth century, in which reason is the modus operandi; the way that the Black Code is accepted, rejected, occulted by the noble minds of the century, the eighteenth century, which gargles with “virtue”: all of that is of interest to me. 32

In a sense, Aube tranquille’s reference to the texts and discussions of the enlightenment is a literary consideration of the “silence” that Sala-Molins identifies. In contrast, the novel’s frequent consideration of slavery in the context of the enlightenment’s libertarian ideas demonstrates how for the novel’s creole subjects, slavery and its ethical considerations, as Jenson’s aforementioned work reveals, were of the utmost importance. 33

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The Black Code was not merely a document intended to regiment the treatment of slaves; instead, it provided Europe with a moral rationalization of slavery. It identified the African slaves as human beings. Such a definition enabled an ideological justification of slavery as an institution able to Christianize and thus to “civilize” what French discourse considered to be an inferior human being. Wolf’s discussions with his mistress and confidante, Cécile Lavlanette (the play on words is amusing: “lave-la nette,” which translates to “clean it up real good,” or more figuratively, “give it to someone straight”), regarding the humanity of the slaves demonstrate the hypocrisy of The Black Code—in other words, for slavery to work, it necessarily had to function on the hypothesis that the African was not a human being, or at least that s/he was an extremely inferior human being to the European. Cécile explains to Wolf that it is his libertarianism that makes him an unsuccessful plantation baron. Unlike Wolf, the most respected slave-owners discredit the humanity ascribed to the slaves by The Black Code. 34 From a distance, with the Catholic church’s mission of educating the slaves into a so-called better humanity, France could justify an idea of benevolent slavery. However, in the end, Wolf’s incapacity to reconcile his democratic ideals with the management of his slave plantation demonstrates that a tolerant slavery is impossible. In fact, returning to Agamben’s notion of homo sacer, one might even read The Black Code as the document par excellence, which put into writing the notion of a humanity as one limited to the corporeal functions. The Black Code’s hypocrisy is the same as that which Agamben identifies in present-day humanitarianism: to think that saving a corporeal life is also to invest it with more complex notions of humanity (emotional, intellectual, psychological) is false, and utterly pretentious. 35 As presented by Aube tranquille, all of the actors living in Saint-Domingue—whether slave-owner or slave—find themselves within its new discursive space. Both the slave and the slave-owner’s impotence regarding their role in slavery—although in drastically different ways—determine their estrangement from the French system. Wolf, the slave-owner whose psychological portrait is an important aspect of Aube Tranquille, identifies the marginality of the slave-trader’s existence vis-à-vis France. In a later discussion with Cécile, Wolf reveals his troubled role as libertarian-minded plantation master. As regards the protection of his economic interests, in talking to Cécile, he states: “nulle part nous ne serons à l’abri si nous ne changeons le système”—“nowhere will we be protected if we don’t change the system.” 36 In this case, the system to which he refers is the French discourse of power—that which regiments Wolf’s economic existence. His optimistic naïveté, or what Cécile labels his hypocrisy, impedes him from seeing that he is unimportant to this system; in no way does he exert any authority over the system, or its alteration. 37 Although not in the same way, but as one operating within the same discursive space, he is as other to the system that created slavery as is a slave. More-

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over, from the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution, his way-of-life is, in fact, not necessarily more precarious than that of the (former) slave, but at least more compromised than that of a former slave: in other words, the slaves will gain freedom, the plantation owners will be forced to leave their plantations, and if not killed, will be forced to flee the island and their lifestyles. In Wolf’s last moment as surrogate narrator, he articulates the existence of the specific world to which both the plantation owners and the slaves belong. In reference to Saintmilia, Wolf states, “elle partit, éthérée, emportant ce qui fut notre univers à tous”—“she left, ethereal, taking with her what was once a universe to all of us.” 38 THE “WINDOW SCENE”: AUBE TRANQUILLLE’S “INTERMEDIARY SPACE” The first scene of the novel, which I shall name the “window scene,” is one that is repeated in varied versions throughout the novel. The changing relationships between the narrator of the scene and the protagonist whom it describes, parallel the novel’s evolution from a more European episteme towards the new creole system of thought of Saint-Domingue/ Haiti. That the reader may interpret the scene as belonging both to Sonja Biemme’s colonial existence and Sister Thérèse’s modern-day life demonstrates the novel’s depiction of both colonial Saint-Domingue and modern-day Haiti as “intermediary spaces” that are neither African nor European. From the first sentence of the novel, the first-person voice produces an opposition between itself and the pronoun elle; in so doing, the voice inscribes the text within the “dichotomizing system.” This first scene presents the reader with a struggle between two female persons 39 : the je and the elle. From the outset, the first-person’s narration defines itself in opposition to the pronoun she: in the morning, when I open the window, she enters into my day with her faded madras, her air of little old lady whose menacing eyes misread the suffering. . . . She extends her hand as a sign of friendship, I’m not a dupe of her foolishness. 40

The I occupies a center and looks out from the window upon the she, and the she is immediately identified as negatively other: she is ugly, dirty, and calculating. The second scene of the novel repeats the first-person narrator’s condemnation of the she, only this time it associates the word “Afrique” to the demeaning vocabulary that it uses. The I scoffs at the she for being a mentally-ill liar claiming to be from lands “plus lointains que cette Afrique qui n’ose plus être son paradis”—“further away from this Africa that dares to no longer be her paradise.” 41 Arbitrarily, the firstperson narrator inserts the term Africa into the list of negative depictions

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of personality flaws and the shunned societal image of mental illness. As such, the novel’s first pages set up an oppositional relationship between a non-African person and an African person, and they seem then to reproduce Mudimbe’s criticism of the European “dichotomizing system,” for the narration disadvantages the African element in a binary opposition between an apparently powerful I and a negative depiction of a seemingly oppressed she. Over the course of the novel, the identities of the two pronouns become clearer. Each pronoun stands for two characters. The I refers to a European woman named Sonja whose identity is multiple. This firstperson narrative voice I represents both the 1790s portrayal of Sonja Biemme and it also corresponds to the subjectivity of Sonja Biemme’s descendant, Sister Thérèse. For its part, the she represents both the houseslave Saintmilia and the nun named Sister Hyacinthe whose non-religious name is also Sonja. 42 More specifically, the I designates whiteness and Europe while the she, blackness and Africa. It seems that both of the Sonjas are white, or at least, not black, maybe mixed-race, and not African. In contrast, the text rather clearly identifies the blackness and Africanness of the she character. Saintmilia has given herself a second name that according to her is African: Ti Mémé N’Kedi. Although it is never clear if Saintmilia is an esclave bossale, a slave born in Africa, or an esclave creole, a slave born in the Caribbean, Saintmilia herself and the Sonjas identify her as African. Similarly, it is clear that Sister Hyacinthe is dark-skinned; however, the novel never identifies the origin of this blackness. Nonetheless, Sister Thérèse associates her with Africa for she constantly compares Sister Hyacinthe to Sister Carmenta, a dark-skinned nun who has spent much time in North Africa. Hence, Saintmilia, Sister Hyacinthe, and Sister Carmenta are associated with Africa, yet it is not clear whether or not they were born in Africa. Based on the “dichotomizing” system through which the novel sets itself up, the reader assumes that the Sonjas are white. Yet, the end of the novel puts into question the reader’s assumption. Nevertheless, it is indisputable that from the beginning of the novel, neither of the Sonjas wants her identity to be associated with blackness or Africanness. As the novel progresses, closely examined, the dialectic between the I and the she, while preserving many of the indicators of the “dichotomizing system” also subverts it. This subversion is the beginning of the establishment of what Mudimbe would call an “intermediary space.” In a sense, the beginning of the novel preserves a defunct model of the European “dichotomizing system”—that is to say, the first-person narrator’s speech demonstrates that the machinery of its discursive system no longer works as it was intended to. In short, the first-person voice is European, yet not absolutely powerful: the I is not the sole narrative voice to wield power over its environment. For were the “dichotomizing system” functional, then it would produce the discourses of power envisaged by a

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European episteme. In other words, the she—that is the African—would not threaten the I. The scene occurs in medias res; therefore, at the level of narration it represents the evolved relationship between the narrative voice (I) and its discursive subject (she); and at the socio-political level, the rapport between the colonizer and the colonized. The strong trace of the binary system reflects the narrative voice’s nostalgia for such a polarizing system. Quite obviously as well, the I is not a male voice, but rather a female one. As becomes more clear later in the novel, as well as in Une heure pour l’éternité, most of the central male protagonists (i.e., Wolf and Salomon in Aube tranquille and General Leclerc in Une heure pour l’éternité) are those who are most perplexed by their role in both a rapidly French and also Haitian political system. As for the women, those women who have more exposure to the polis, notably the libertine women (i.e., Cécile in Aube tranquille and Pauline in Une heure pour l’éternité), who frequent the beds of plantation owners, French military men, and Haitian revolutionaries, are also spokespersons for this new system-of-being. Thus Aube tranquille’s first scene exposes the reader to the three discursive spaces with which the novel deals. Firstly, as we have seen, the individualism of the pronoun I over the objectified she represents the European “dichotomizing system,” whose goal is to establish absolute authority over the African other. Secondly, the pronoun she designates both the supposedly inferior African element, but also the power that the subjugated term exerts despite its seeming impotence. Thirdly, the nous embodies the resultant common space that an inevitable sharing of power prescribes. Besides the bitterness and anger that the first-person narrator harbors towards the she, the instability of the I’s discourse manifests itself within the syntax of its speech, alternating between Sonja’s I and Saintmilia’s she, yet unavoidably culminating in a collective, more neutral we: “ . . . because since the time that she spies on me, we have already devoured our reserves of patience and indulgence, bitternesses, provocations, insinuations.” 43 The I’s destiny is inextricably linked to that of the woman she disdains and together they form a separate narrative voice, “nous.” Foucault explains that for discourse to be powerful it must possess an “identité qui a la forme de l’individualité et du moi”—an “identity that has the form of individuality and of the self.” 44 Were the firstperson narrator really to represent the same—the European—and the pronoun she to truly represent the other—the African—then a dual voice such as the pronoun nous, which integrates the same and the other would not be possible. Thus, despite the fact that the first pages offer only clues by which to understand the specificities of the extremely contorted plot, it is clear that a struggle that destabilizes the authority of the narrative voice will be integral to the novel’s thematic and formal development. The repeated scene of the Sonjas looking out onto the she—that is, the “mad” and defiant character of Saintmilia or Sister Hyacinthe—incarnates the ambiguity of a world in which power relationships are con-

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fused. In each case, the Sonja character sits inside; the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character is outside. However, unlike the surveillance mechanism described by Foucault, this interior space does not prescribe an “intransitive” relationship. Unlike Foucault’s descriptions of prisons and mental hospitals, the Sonjas do not dominate their surroundings; their line of sight is not one-directional. Instead, the she (Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character) stares back threatening the authority of the centralized I (the Sonjas). In a sense, the fact that the window frames Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe, puts the objectified she at the center of its own frame. One may ask whether this centering is exotic; that is, does the I objectify the she so as to contemplate her or, on the contrary, so as to force her into a spot that enables the Sonjas to better control her? While the frame may be one chosen by the Sonjas’s positioning of themselves within their respective bedrooms, what occurs within this frame is not within their control. In other words, the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character also chooses to appear in this frame, to allow herself to be seen by the Sonjas. The evolution of the scene throughout the novel confirms the fact that the Sonja character is increasingly de-centered by the augmented assertiveness of the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character. In each repetition of the scene, the description of Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe’s menacing arm gesture changes. In the first narrative instance, the I only suspects the she’s contempt: “she extends her hand as a sign of friendship, I’m not a dupe of her foolishness.” 45 In the second description, the she’s gesture completely destabilizes the narrator: she raises her hand long enough to smile. . . . She points her finger to this part of my life that leans over the edge of the window, lifting up frustrations more painful than my birth, offering up the obscurity of my body . . . , my God! to no longer think about this mad woman. 46

The hand becomes an accusing finger that judges Sister Thérèse of the crimes of her ancestors. 47 The third performance of the scene takes place within the only moment of semi-conventional third-person narrative of the entire novel: she extended her fist towards a silhouette bent over the window . . . as every morning, . . . reenacting the gesture of hope without knowing that her skinny arm bears the despair of her life . . . called to another existence, which I know of through my mother’s sobs recounting again and again a mutilated and tortured story. 48

In this third instance, the narrative voice is that of Sister Thérèse. She describes a scene between Sonja Biemme and Saintmilia, and coincidentally, it is only at this point in the novel, and for the first time since the very beginning of the text, that there is an explanation of the relationship between the narrative voice and Sister Thérèse. Sister Thérèse’s narrative voice reenacts the information related to her by her mother’s voice on the

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tape. It is on the plane between Paris and Port-au-Prince that Sister Thérèse learns the details of her family’s involvement in the colony of Saint-Domingue. However, up until this point the reader has understood that the narrative voice is enacting its own story, not re-performing the stories of others. 49 The clarification of the narrational circumstances of the novel is significant because it allows the narrative instance both to preserve her authority over the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character, and, paradoxically to democratize the representation of both Sonja Biemme and Saintmilia. In other words, as long as the Sonja character represents herself using the first person singular pronoun I, she detains authority over the discursive space. However, this multifaceted female non-narrator uses the thirdperson to represent both Sonja Biemme (“une silhouette”—“a silhouette”) and Saintmilia (“la,” “sa”—“her”). This time both women remain subjected to the I’s discourse, yet in this objectification—that is, they are both now described in the third person—they, in a sense, become equals. Thus, in this third repetition of the scene, the narrative voice represents the Sonja character and the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character on equal syntactical levels: both women are she’s. Moreover, the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe protagonist continues to seek equal ground with her opponent. The fact that the gesture of the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character is no longer that of her hand or finger, but that of her fist, epitomizes the increased force that the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character has acquired throughout the novel. In this way, she intensifies the strength of her refusal to allow the Sonjas’s authoritarian discourse to subjugate her. The fourth and final occurrence of the “window scene” establishes a more reciprocal discursive space in which the Sonjas no longer seek to control the Saintimilia/Sister Hyacinthe character: this morning I opened the window, and once again you entered into my day with your eternally faded madras. . . . There remain the tears that the women of your land have shed for centuries upon love, upon our communal misfortunes. 50

For the first time, the Sonjas’s use of the first-person, plural possessive “nos”—“our” recognizes both the pain but also the solidarity that is a result of this shared suffering. Most importantly, the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character figures as the Sonjas’s interlocutor. The she’s defiance has finally prevailed: no longer is the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe narrative instance an object of the Sonjas’s discourse; rather, she is a speaker participating in a discourse which belongs to both women—the wife-of-the plantation owner and the house slave/the light-skinned nun and her darker-skinned colleague. The progressive changes in the various performances of the “window scene” demonstrate how the supremacy of the I over the she is precarious. As we have seen, the final description of the window scene does not

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depict space as a phenomenon dominated by the je, but rather, as one in which the je and the elle/tu admit the dual identity of the nous. Through the tu/you, they call upon each other, speak to each other. Hence, the “window scene” no longer represents a “dichotomizing system” in which forces oppose each other, but rather a tandem system, in which forces relate to each other, in which they share a discourse, and even an identity: “notre vérité”, “notre lot”, “notre lit”—“our truth,” “our fate,” “our bed.” LOCATIONS OF AN “INTERMEDIARY SPACE” The window scene is a prototype for Aube tranquille’s nascent creole system of thought. The room and its window designate Sonja’s quarters on the plantation; they also refer to Sister Thérèse’s room at the convent: as such, both locations represent isolated domains in which each woman believes herself to be protected from a threatening outside world. Sonja Biemme constructs a separate residence from that of her husband whom she loathes. The reasons for such hate are never explicitly stated, although it could be that she objects to his libertarian views, his sexual affairs with the house slaves, and his friendship with Saintmilia and her son Salomon. Two centuries later, Sister Thérèse’s mother forces her daughter into the convent so as to protect her from the horrible family curse. Later in the chapter, we will study the malediction that affects both Sonjas; however, for the moment, what is important is that no insulation shelters the women from their fear of what resides beyond their private abodes. Similarly, the other locations in the novel describe spaces that force various identities (masters and slaves, Europeans and Africans, Europeans and Haitians) into uncomfortable contact: the plantation mansion; the forest; the convent; and the airplane. The plantation master’s home, the once thick forestry of the Saint-Domingue landscape, the modern-day French convent, and the airplane from Paris to Port-au-Prince are locations in which individuals who perceive themselves as representing varying racio-social categories come into an uninvited intimate contact with each other. The plantation master’s home, with its domestic slaves, is one of the few places on the plantation in which the masters and the slaves have frequent contact and in which they might be privy to each others’ intimacies, or at least the slaves are exposed to the masters’ private lives. Similarly, the brush of Saint-Domingue’s forests forces Wolf to flee the slaves’ revolt in the company of his house-slaves, who unlike Wolf, are familiar with the forest’s terrain: not only is he obligated to be in his slaves’ perpetual company, but he must depend on them to navigate him to what he hopes will be safety. Two centuries later, the convent is a place that takes in distressed women seeking refuge, such as Sister Hyacinthe;

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and the airplane flight between the two capital cities puts Sister Thérèse face-to-face with the dark-skinned-French flight attendant who mesmerizes her, and eventually with whom she becomes obsessed. Ultimately, for the so-called category of the Europeans, or rather the plantation-owning class of mostly white creoles, the spaces described by Aube tranquille generate a threatening intimacy. What is produced of these encounters is a “new” system of thought, new at least to those who have enjoyed a relatively unquestioned power over the other. Regardless of the debilitative avatars of such traumatizing intimacy, the new system is one in which human beings are acutely attuned to each other’s differences. Despite efforts to shut the other out, they must confront the alterity that the other imposes upon their existence. Most importantly, in the unstable years of the Revolution and its aftermath, both the European and the African are othered. In other words, neither category occupying the simplistic duality of European against African, and vice versa, is privileged. Both are vulnerable to each other’s exertion of power. As such, unable to avoid confrontation, the characters of the novel, whether in colonial times or in the late 1980s, must negotiate their initial identity to an evolved one in which the other and the same have been confounded. What emerges is a “new” system of thought, which questions the power dialectics established by the Western episteme. In order to understand this “new” society, and why this system emerges, it is beneficial to look at the conception of the human being in the European ideological system. More specifically, which elements of the Western episteme enable France to set up, finance, profit from, and justify slavery? Aube tranquille is ultimately a study of the friction amongst: an emergent European modernity; the validation of slavery, even if as Sala-Molins point-out this justification is basically a grand “silence”; and multiple African-based thought systems. As such Aube tranquille, is an historical novel, yes, about the Haitian revolution, but also about why the materialization of a specifically Vodou system was inexorable. DEFINING “THE HUMAN”: RESISTING MODERNITY’S IMPOSITION OF RACE The role that the European system assigned to the black subject was such that for the existential survival of the slave, a new structure was essential. 51 Indeed, the European episteme incorporated slaves into its system; however, this inclusion was not one that assimilated the slaves as human beings, but as inferior non-humans. In a sense, slavery in the European enlightenment centuries, like Foucault’s study of mental illness and prostitution in the nineteenth century, is a social crystallization of the polarizing system favored by a European episteme. However, unlike the fou (the mad person), the freak, or the prostitute, the European ideology, and

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more specifically a French system through The Black Code, literally inscribed this status of non-humanity into its legal corpus. With The Black Code , Louis XIV’s monarchy gave itself the authority to pronounce judgment on the human status of a group of individuals. In a sense, to authorize another person’s humanity is simultaneously to consider the potential non-humanness of that person. The Black Code pretends to detain authority over who is and who is not human. The text’s discourse of power is one that sets up a binary between human and inhuman, and the guardianship of power resides within the term human. Despite the humanity that The Black Code concedes to the African slave, the document establishes the presumed supremacy of the European over the African, a primacy that persists, as represented in Fignolé’s novel, in the thought processes of the 1980s character of Sister Thérèse. The unwritten, yet readily understood implication of the 1685 French document is the establishment of the non-humanness of a human being as societal truth. In other words, The Black Code inculcates the idea of a slave as an inferior human into the ideology of the French system of thought. Given the novel’s association of The Black Code with the question of humanness, the question posed by this part of the chapter is ontological: “What happens to a human being when the society that governs his or her material existence no longer considers him or her as a human being?” In essence, either s/he accepts the imposed system of thought and ceases to become a human being, or, much more plausibly, s/he rejects the system. The characters in Aube tranquille alter the system so as to re-inscribe themselves into a “new” system that vindicates their humanity. What emerges is a definition of the human being—one that does not consider continental heritage or skin tone as its motivating principles; and going back to this chapter’s introduction, one possibly undergirded by an ethic of vengeance. Nevertheless, in order to understand the ways in which the new system of thought dispenses, or at least arduously struggles against the troubling and not-so-anchored category of race as a primary ordering principle, it is important to look at Sibylle Fischer’s research on the usage of the words white (blanc) and black (noir) in the Haitian Republic’s December 27, 1806 constitution and Henri Cristophe’s monarchical 1807 constitution. I quote Fischer’s analysis at length: If we take Dessalines’s attempt to resignify racial terminology seriously, as I think we should, it is only logical that he would not want to identify those who could take up such a right of residence in racial terms. Article I of Christophe’s 1807 constitution (“Every person who resides in the territory of Haiti is free by law,” as distinct from Article 2, “Slavery is abolished forever in Haiti”) could be interpreted in the same light. Although, logically speaking, “All Haitians are black” cannot be inverted to read “All blacks are Haitians,” the determinate vagueness about citizenship requirements for nonwhites suggests that

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Duvalier’s sin in espousing indigénisme, as suggested in both Depestre and Fignolé’s novels is to racialize Haitian identity, where Haitian Vodou’s ultimate justice system, while springing from the false but nefarious consequences of race, will struggle always for justice first, over racial proclivities. Moreover, if Weitz argues that one of the defining factors of the modern nation-state is the imposition of “inheritable and sometimes immutable” 53 variables for citizenship to a nation-state, then Haitian Vodou’s Weltanschauung is based in part on resisting such immutability. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel explain that Vodou’s struggle is against “the twin scourges of colonialism and racism.” 54 In other words, Weitz explains that: older environmental and cultural understandings of difference—the kind of understanding that ancient Greeks and Hebrews had articulated—were overthrown with the newer conception that difference was rooted in the body itself and constituted a definable essence, for good or bad. 55

And later on, “in the modern world, then, the ‘social death’ of slavery, the complete dehumanization of slaves, became, for the first time, congruent with a population seen to possess a particular skin color.” 56 Weitz explains that under the Roman or Ottoman Empires, loyalty to the regime could be confirmed by mutating one’s identity: for example, a Jew could become Christian, or a Christian could become a Muslim, or a person could fight on behalf of the empire. However, the prerequisite of race as a determinant in citizenship creates a variable that no single person (except maybe one “passing”) or community can control. If Weitz refers to modernity as the key moment in which the concepts of “race” and the “nation-state” were developed and took hold, then it is not surprising that in the 1790s and the first decade of the 1800s, Haiti’s constitutions would struggle against the “immutability” of the category of race. As such, the “newness” of Vodou is its constant struggle against race as a viable category. And Fignolé’s novel may be read at a second degree as an invective of Duvalier’s operating of Vodou: even if Duvalier would “accept” Vodou as a folkloric emblem of a darker-skinned Haitian identity, ultimate-

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ly his implementation of Vodou would counter the actual Weltanschauung of Vodou’s political and philosophical undergirdings. From the outset of the novel, the narrator associates skin color with the image of a mask. The difference between white and black is first introduced in Sister Thérèse’s description of her flight attendant: “sourire blanc sur masque noir” and “le visage absorbe le soleil blond du nord, le plaque sur le masque noir, effet saisissant”—“a white smile on a black mask” and “the face absorbs the blond sun of the north, pressing it onto the black mask, an impressive effect.” 57 She identifies her flight as one in which age-old tensions between people of varying skin colors will resolve themselves. 58 The flight to which Sonja refers is not that between Paris and Port-au-Prince; rather, it is that between Paris and Tunis, the flight on which she meets Carmenta, a Tunisian nun whose face uncannily resembles that of Sister Hyacinthe, the woman whom Sister Thérèse meets years later as the “crazy” woman at the convent. Sister Thérèse’s “African” flight forces her to begin an examination of her relationship to both skin tone and her family’s past. As we will examine further on, at the same time as Sister Thérèse comes to resolve her relationship to blackness and to Africanness, she also learns to put an end to the evil malediction that haunts her family. The anathema takes the form of an evil mask, which all members of the Biemme family, a Britanny-based, feudal family, have had to bear since the end of the fifteenth century when Erwan de Biemme resisted the monarchical rule, imposed upon him by Charles VIII’s marriage to Anne de Bretagne (late fifteenth century). 59 BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS, WHITE SKIN, BLACK MASKS What is most striking about the juxtaposition of the above citations regarding color is that they open up a plausible intertextuality with Frantz Fanon’s study Black Skin, White Masks. ther passages within the novel suggest the image of masks of skin color stratified one upon another. In the below conversation, Sister Thérèse identifies the darker skin color, which according to her constitutes a resemblance between Sister Hyacinthe and Sister Carmenta. The specific dialogue cited below belongs to Sister Hyacinthe, who in speaking with Sister Thérèse uses the image of the mask to identify the prejudice that she and Sister Carmenta suffered while in France: —the discriminations of which I was a victim . . . keep me from ever recognizing myself as a white face —you say that she is a brunette? [technically it translates as brunette, but here the reference to skin color is obvious] —I take that back, on a White face. 60

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Sister Hyacinthe’s experience reiterates Fanon’s own personal anecdote recounted in Black Skin, White Masks: In the twentieth century the black man on his home territory is oblivious of the moment when his inferiority is determined by the Other. . . . And then we were given the occasion to confront the white gaze. . . . In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaborating his body schema. 61

Both Sister Hyacinthe and Fanon relate their discovery of blackness as a negative experience by which they understand their blackness as a minuscule piece in the puzzle of an overwhelming white world. The fact of being black absorbs and thus nullifies the specific physical distinctions of the individual. The French world that both Fanon and Sister Hyacinthe describe is one in which a white discourse prevails over a black one. To arrive in France for Fanon or for Sister Hyacinthe is to realize that for the white European, the black individual represents nothing more to “the white gaze” than his or her black skin. The only way to achieve any recognition of individuality within the white world is to attempt assimilation—that is, to assimilate one’s behavior to that of someone who is white, and thus at best one might aspire to sport a white mask. In his article “The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon’s Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis,” Lewis R. Gordon demonstrates how such dissimulation is virtually impossible: We can summarize his [Fanon’s] argument thus: blacks have attempted to escape the historic reality of blackness through the resources of language, which offer semiotic resources of self-deluding performances of emancipation. If the black can speak the European language well enough, perhaps there is the opportunity of “being” a “European.” 62

Gordon explains that the black person believes that he or she through language—that is, symbolically 63 —may escape the oppressive discourse, which relegates the black person to a disadvantaged position. In order to exist symbolically, a person’s language must be recognized—that is, once in France should no one engage her or him in conversation, should no one conceive of her or him as anything but a black body, then this person perceived only as a black body has no interlocutor to affirm her or his existence as an intellectual being. Gordon summarizes Fanon’s analysis of the black person in a white world: “What this means is that the black body does not live on the symbolic level of the white in an anti-black world. It is locked in the serious, material values of the real.” 64 In short, within such a restrictive discourse, the black person does not exist except as a material, physical entity. For the white person, even in a 1980s French world to which Sister Hyacinthe refers, the black person exists as a “peau noire”—“black skin.” At best, as both Fanon’s essay and Sister Thérèse’s

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attraction to black women suggest, the black person figures into the modern, white discourse as a purely material body, a source of physical fascination. Gordon’s reference to psychoanalysis as well as the novel’s important allusions to psychoanalysis, invite the reader to consider a psychoanalytic reading of the novel. The novel’s references to psychoanalysis are few, yet significant. First, in Les Possédés de la pleine lune, the prequel to Aube tranquille, on one of the last pages of the novel, the reader learns that the entire novel is possibly the delirious modern-day speech of a schizophrenic patient named Louiortesse who believes to have lived in the village depicted in the novel. 65 Given that the stories Sister Thérèse’s mother recounts on the tape are in part based on Wolf’s journals, there is also the resemblance to Freud’s patient, “the Wolf Man,” Sergei Konstantinovitch Pankejeff, about whom Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari write in Mille Plateaux—A Thousand Plateaus (1980), 66 part of the collaborative project Capitalisme et schizophrénie—Capitalism and Schizophrenia. They read Freud’s patient as showing how an individual’s consciousness is multiple. For her part, in her study of the spiralists, Glover characterizes their writing as a sort of “schizophonia”; 67 and in Aube tranquille, it seems that Sister Thérèse is a nun who suffers not necessarily mental illness, but is privy to moments of assimilating events belonging to her ancestors into her own lived experience. Additionally, that the novel may be a product of Sister Thérèse’s hallucinatory and drunken state may explain the unlikely fact that the majority of the female characters in the novel have the first name “Sonja.” Like Louiortesse, Sister Thérèse’s mental state may have invented the story for which we are readers. Ultimately, I have chosen not to do a psychoanalytic reading of Aube tranquille because I believe that the novel’s valorization of madness does not correspond to psychoanalysis’s conception of madness as mental illness. Indeed, Vodou scholars such as Desmangles, Deren, and Casnor have compared Vodou to European psychoanalysis. More specifically, they have proposed that Vodou’s conception of the body and of the soul are analogous to psychoanalysis’ notion of the conscious and the subconscious. 68 Although Fignolé’s text makes reference to psychoanalysis and even invites comparison between Vodou and European psychoanalysis, his novels present the “folie”—“madness” of both characters as necessary and healthy. The result of both Louiortesse’s and Sister Thérèse’s “madness” is actually an obsessive desire for revenge. Yet, the novel’s denouement suggests that such vengeance while justified is more detrimental to the community than beneficial. And yet, as Fignolé’s novel presents it, this society is also one that should be questioned and changed, where vengeance serves as a necessary stage towards reestablishing human rights. Vodou’s perceived violence is nothing less than a sort of tribunal for the rights of man, for those who are oppressed within a society that does not protect their rights. Fignolé’s novels do not present Louior-

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tesse’s and Sonja’s madness as mental illness, but rather the novels offer up madness as a productive impetus for change. While the characters’ psychosis may threaten society, such menace is valorized rather than disparaged. If the characters’ madness enables them to impose themselves upon those who oppress them as well as to better their situation as human subjects, then such insanity is useful and even healthy. As Castor’s study of Vodou as healing rite reveals, healthiness in Vodou is that which provides self-mastery physically, psychologically, and communally. Like possession, the madness of Louiortesse and Sonja reveals truths that enable the community to act so as to better the situation of its members. The loss of mental faculties in both possession and the madness depicted in Fignolé’s texts resembles Foucault’s description of Medieval European society’s valorization of the crazy person. 69 According to Foucault, the conventional person knows only pieces of the truth while the “mad” person knows it in its entirety. 70 Although the circumstances of possession are different, the momentary loss of the possessed individual’s intellectual capacities corresponds to the essential and most veneered moment of Vodou ritual—the moment in which the ultimate purveyors of truth, the ancestors and the lwa, come to visit the community through their human conduits. I propose that the Fanonian model if consciously present in Aube tranquille serves contrapuntally to the novel’s presentation of an alternative world in which a black person may partake in the definition of her or his own humanity, and may ultimately exist symbolically: wear, bear, and shed masks, as is the privilege of white persons in a European discursive system. In Fignolé’s novel, the black characters, Saintmilia, Salomon, Toukouma (a woman who leads the slave revolt against Wolf’s plantation), Maïté (an adolescent slave whom Wolf essentially rapes and whom his wife subsequently assassinates), Sister Hyacinthe, and the flight attendant assert themselves within the discursive space that the supposed white characters—Wolf, Sister Thérèse, and Sonja Biemme—mistakenly believe to master. Furthermore, Fignolé’s literary representation of Fanon’s metaphor of the mask is one that suggests that Haitian space functions according to a system of power relationships that are completely different from those of modern Western discourse. In Sister Thérèse’s descriptions of the flight attendant, the masks are not the “masques blancs” of Fanon’s title; rather, they are “masque[s] noir[s]”; and the whiteness is that which comes from the smile and the teeth. However, the novel’s use of the Fanonian imagery is not a reversal of his terms; in other words, this whiteness is not a “white skin”; it remains a mask. In each of the aforementioned citations, the whiteness is something that covers a blackness: the white smile is “sur”—“on” the black mask; the white gloves are on the black hands; and the sun’s blondness is a coat that laminates the darkness of the impenetrable hydrogen/helium-mass below it. Thus,

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visually, both whiteness and blackness in Fignolé’s oeuvre come to represent masks in their own rite. Unlike the white world described by Fanon, in Fignolé’s Saint-Domingue/Haiti, both blacks and whites wear masks; that is, both whites and blacks participate in each other’s symbolic worlds, in the construction of each others’ discourses of power. When the flight attendant in the 1980s or Salomon or Maïté in the 1790s resist the eroticization of the black protagonists, even at the price of death, they force their white solicitors to consider them as more than mere physical bodies. Consequently, not only do they participate in the construction of an ontology that contests the European negation of African or black as human, but they also work towards a definition of humanity, as Fischer’s and Nesbitt’s work demonstrate, which insists on universal rights of man. SAME PROTAGONISTS, ANOTHER WORLD: AUBE TRANQUILLE’S PREQUEL, LES POSSÉDÉS DE LA PLEIN LUNE A study of the use of language (dialogue, free-indirect discourse) in Aube tranquille illustrates the ways in which skin color is or is not a determining factor in the varying definitions of humanity. Each of the prescribed societies depicted in the novel (African/black; European/white) offers a varying definition of what does and what does not constitute a human being. First, we will look at the black characters (Saintmilia, Salomon, Toukouma, Maïté, the flight attendant, and Sister Hyacinthe), then at the white protagonists (Sonja Biemme, Cécile, and the slave owners), and finally, at the characters who are, as the narrative coyly reveals, and we may only ultimately surmise, in one way or another, mixed (Wolf, Klaus, Sister Thérèse). This chapter’s analysis of the various characters’ uses of language illustrates how European discourse excludes blacks from full participation in the codes of society; how the black subject re-inscribes herself or himself into these codes; and how the subsequent re-inscription of the black subject is determinant of a new system of society. To substantiate the importance of Aube tranquille’s treatment of the socalled black characters, it is informative to compare the novel to its prequel Les Possédés de la pleine lune. Les Possédés tells the story of Saintmilia and the slave community to which she belongs and recounts the story of Saintmilia’s marriage to the freed, yet angst-ridden Agénor, of her infertility, and of the miraculous way in which God impregnates her in order to provide her with a son, Salomon. All of the characters are slaves, or former slaves. 71 In Aube tranquille, we learn that Wolf’s mother died during the delivery of her son at which time Saintmilia moved to the master’s house with her infant son, Salomon, so that Saintmilia could be Wolf’s wet-nurse; 72 she would become the master’s principal source of medical advice; and, Salomon, who would benefit from a European edu-

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cation, would become Wolf’s childhood best friend and, in adulthood, Wolf’s second-hand man on the plantation. That said, despite the friendship, Wolf prohibits Salomon’s entry into his home. These elements of the plot are important for they explain how Saintmilia and Salomon are protagonists who intimately know the world of the slaves as well as that of their masters. As such, Saintmilia represents a voice of resistance in both of her communities: where Possédés de la pleine lune relates Saintmilia’s struggle for recognition to the masculinist world of the slave community, 73 Aube tranquille narrates her resistance—in the company of her son and the other slaves—to the white world of which she has become an integral, but still marginalized member. An understanding of the discursive space of Les Possédés de la pleine lune informs the argument of this chapter: chiefly, that multiple discourses, or as Mudimbe refers to them, epistemes, co-exist in the Caribbean space depicted in the novel; and, that the descriptor “creole,” but much more specifically, “Vodou,” will come to describe the coalescence of these various worlds. If “creole” in its most general sense designates a notion of hybridity, then an emergent identity, which the novel names “vodou,” is the intentional deployment of creoleness as an existential practice, one that recuperates in the late twentieth century the integrity of the Fanonian non-subject. Of course, here I write informed by the many theoretical considerations of intellectual thought in the late twentieth century, which operates the notions of creolité, creoleness, mestizaje, and repetition to at once celebrate the non-purity of the Caribbean, and also show its postmodern revolutionary potential. Fignolé thus deploys the zeitgeist of the intellectual public sphere of the Caribbean, within a specifically Haitian context: that of a Duvalierist Haiti that was anything but representative of the hybridity described by critical theorists such as Glissant or Benítez-Rojo, whose theoretical work began to gain widespread attention in the 1980s. If anything, the aesthetic of spiralism, which Famin and Glover theorize, is one that aspires to hybridity, but finds itself regretfully limited by the myopic atavism of an indigénisme taken to its extreme, extolling and exploiting a reductive notion of blackness at the service of a perverted oligarchy. In fact, Fignolé’s use of the word “vodou,” is a cautious one. 74 After Duvalierism’s exploitation of the practice so as to bolster the image of the dictatorship’s dedication to a global African identity, Vodou presents itself as a double-edged sword: on the one hand, the word evokes a discourse manipulated by both Papa and Baby Docs, and on the other, it describes a uniquely Haitian aesthetic to which Jenson refers, one anchored in the specific predicament of humans newly-freed from extremely terrorizing subjugation, and wondering just how long such emancipation might last. The most striking element of the prequel is that it describes a completely alternative world than that of the sequel. Unlike Aube tranquille, Les Possédés de la pleine lune never uses the words black and white to dis-

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cuss skin color; in fact, neither race nor slavery is an explicit issue. Similarly, the novel never uses the word vodou to qualify the metaphysical world with which the protagonists engage. Instead, it is only in the sequel that we learn that Agénor, Saintmilia’s husband, was a freed slave. 75 With the subsequent knowledge provided by the sequel, it is possible to infer the slave status of the denizens of the village of “Les Abricots,” and the freed-slave status of Louiortesse. 76 It is Aube tranquille’s depiction of the slave masters and their inheritors that introduces the reader to the lexical field surrounding skin color, the use of the word vodou, as well as an explicit identification of various Vodou spirits. As noted in the introduction, even today, the word Vodou is not used in practice, but rather as a sort of third-person mode of describing the religion by those who are not within it. The stylistic differences between Les Possédés de la pleine lune and Aube tranquille underline the fact that the discursive spaces that each text tries to depict are completely different. Correspondingly, the narratological devices used to recount each novel couldn’t be more dissimilar: Les Possédés draws on what readers of Caribbean and Latin American literatures (not necessarily Fignolé himself) have labeled magical or marvelous realisms, 77 while Aube tranquille resembles more of a nouveau-roman experiment, which Jonaissiant recognizes was one of spiralism’s influences. 78 While the writing in both novels is opaque, 79 Les Possédés de la pleine lune’s complexity is similar to the marvelous realism of Jacques Stephen Alexis’s Les Arbres musiciens for it describes a community whose reality is significantly marked by metaphysical fluidity between the unexplainable and the empiric—in other words, by local religious and superstitious beliefs. On the other hand, Aube tranquille resembles a nouveau roman in so far as it plays with narrative structures that aim at a mimetic representation of reality that is objective, so objective that the text eradicates the unity provided by the conventional subjectivity of a unique narrator or a well-identified set of narrators. The formal and stylistic differences between the two novels strikingly reveal how two worlds, two sets of discourses, two epistemes, coexist within the same space. In both novels, the location—or in the case of Sister Thérèse’s séjour, the destination—is “Les Abricots” in Saint-Domingue/ Haiti. Les Possédés depicts Les Abricots as a village; in contrast, Aube tranquille describes it as a slave plantation. The first novel represents a poor community of people that has no specific nationality or skin color. Most importantly, the characters suffer extreme hardship; however, it is never clear that one of the causes of such destitution may be slavery. 80 In contrast, the second novel presents this same community as one locked into a discourse that pits whites against blacks, and vice versa. In the first novel, the text articulates Salomon’s, Agénor’s, and Saintmilia’s existence as difficult, yet joyous. 81 Comedy, carefree love scenes, and fantasy are an integral part of the novel’s tone; the female, modern-day narrative

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voice rejoices in her ancestors’ strength. In contrast, the second novel is entirely serious and pain-stricken. Love scenes are intense, and erotic relationships enact brutal power dynamics. Thus, each novel describes the same community, yet each also privileges a unique discourse by which to represent this community. In Les Possédés, where the European episteme is absent, the question of who is or who is not a human is not an issue. Rather, it is Aube tranquille’s introduction of the rigid, Manichean, “Western” discourse that brings up the question of humanity and its definitions. The result is that the same group of people, which seemed relatively free in the first novel, in the second novel, is depicted as completely repressed both historically (by the slave-owners) and as we will explore, formally (the disposition of discourse in relation to the characters’ skin color). ACCESSING FREE-INDIRECT DISCOURSE: THREE TYPES OF DIALOGUE The use of formal structures, and more specifically of the modes of narration in Aube tranquille parallels the role that each character plays in the rapidly changing and precarious revolutionary society that the novel portrays. The most unusual feature of the narration in Aube tranquille is that within a text saturated with free-indirect discourse, the novel rarely (if ever) uses free-indirect discourse to express the subjectivity of the black characters. In other words, almost all of the black characters express themselves through direct discourse. 82 When Saintmilia, Salomon, and Sister Hyacinthe speak, they always appear in the context of a conversation. In contrast, the narration provides all of the other white and mixed characters—both those of the past and of the present—with two narrative modes by which to express themselves: the direct discourse of conversation and the free-indirect discourse of “inner thought.” Thus, in Aube tranquille, only the characters that are not black have the right to freeindirect discourse. (The terminology of “free”—“libre” is preserved in the French as well: discours indirect libre.) How then is it that the reader comes to understand the inner world of the black characters? In other words, how is it that at the end of the novel, I, as a reader, find it completely plausible that Toukouma, the unforgiving Vodou priestess and revolutionary, should spare Wolf’s life; that Salomon, the astute childhood friend, adult house slave of Wolf, and now revolutionary, should allow himself to die at Sonja Biemme’s hand; that Saintmilia, widow without any living family member, should forgive Sonja Biemme for assassinating her only child? In order to answer these questions, this section will first look at the discursive spaces through which the black characters communicate, and then will show how these

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discursive spaces actually trace the space that the novel designates as vodou. In order to understand what I will eventually label the discursive space of Vodou, I will explore the ways in which the text reveals the black characters to the reader. The reader only witnesses the voices of the black characters within the dialogues that take place between a black character and a white character. 83 Although the dialogue seems haphazardly embedded within the text as a series of unpunctuated sentences, the dashes (“—”) introduce each new speaker and clearly designate a moment of dialogue. Also confusing is the fact that in all of the conversations in the novel, the narrator never specifies the identity of the person speaking. Nonetheless, the context usually enables the reader to decipher the voice of the character speaking. I use here the term non-narrator in following on Famin’s analysis of how Fignolé’s spiralist aesthetic obliterates the authoritative voice of a narrator, and as such performs Jenson’s analysis of the revolutionary period and the early Haitian state(s) as moments of “un-becoming a slave,” where all involved have little or no authority on their own to confidently tell the story of what was happening at the time. In order to explain how the black voices progressively emerge from a position of repression to a position of empowerment, it is useful to first describe the three types of dialogue that take place in the novel. For the first half of the novel, the dialogues are traditional in form; that is, they relate a conversation between two individuals and they take place in one time and one place. For example, if Sister Thérèse and Sister Hyacinthe converse, then every other line corresponds to the voice of each woman. The fact that the dialogues in the first part of the novel occur between two people creates a structure that easily lends itself to the European “dichotomizing system” described by Mudimbe. Within this binary structure either one or both of two messages is conveyed to the reader. The black character ventures forth an anecdote or an experience regarding her or his suffering, and, most of the time, at the end of the conversation, the white character abuses the confidence just ventured by the black character by either ignoring or silencing the black character. We have already seen how Sister Thérèse forces Sister Hyacinthe to adopt Sister Thérèse’s limiting interpretation of the role of blacks in her white society; and when Sister Hyacinthe explains how in Europe her skin color causes her psychological suffering, Sister Thérèse disregards Sister Hyacinthe’s testimony of her personal experience of blackness in France. Instead, Sister Thérèse makes Sister Hyacinthe “rectify” her analysis of blackness and forces her lover to accept her own objectifying, self-serving interpretation of blackness as sexual fetish. 84 Thus, in most of her conversations, Sister Thérèse, like Sonja, must always have the last word, and reestablish her Western authority. The second type of dialogue that takes place is in fact one in which two dialogues are embedded one within the other. In other words, there

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is a master dialogue and a minor one. The master dialogue represents one moment in time and the subsidiary exchange communicates a previous moment. To put it simply, the minor dialogue serves as a flashback for a story recounted by one of the speakers. Alonzo is one of Wolf’s slaves, part of the plantation’s managerial staff. In the storyline, certain dialogues take place before Alonzo has turned against his master; however, using Mieke Bal’s term, in the fabula—that is, in the narratological presentation of the events—the reader has already learned that Alonzo will turn against Wolf. After Toukouma and Alonzo’s ambush of Wolf and Salomon, Wolf meets with Cécile and reports the experience. 85 Rather than having Wolf narrate the story of the ambush, Wolf integrates the dialogue that takes place at the time of the entrapment—that between himself and Alonzo—into the dialogue with Cécile. The structure is complex, yet the reader is still able to decipher the identity of the speakers. Although the reader is ultimately able to understand the relationship between the various instances of dialogue, the passage is nonetheless labyrinthine, and reflective of how in other similar moments of speech in the novel, the master dialogue does not return to reframe the context. In other words, it seems as if the dialogue between Wolf and Cécile mutates into that between Wolf and Alonzo. Most importantly, it shows how the slave’s voice (Alonzo) comes to influence more and more that of the master (Wolf), for Alonzo’s motivations are at once confused and dissimulated: eventually, he will catch up to the mutinied slaves, not “to catch” them, but to join them. The third type of dialogue that the novel stages is one in which many individuals speak to each other in a conversation that could never take place in any sort of realistic setting. For example, Sister Hyacinthe, Sister Thérèse, Saintmilia, and Sonja across generations become each other’s interlocutors. 86 A short example of the discursive potpourri is a dialogue amongst Saintmilia, Wolf, and Cécile. Saintmilia and Cécile have never met, nor do they, yet the dialogue allows them to appear on the page as interlocutors. 87 In the brief exchange, the syntax and the vocabulary follow a logical order. In the first line, Saintmilia summons Wolf’s help; in the second line, Wolf, unaware of the danger in which his wife has put Salomon, questions Saintmilia’s request. However, by addressing Cécile and not Saintmilia, he replaces Salomon with himself, taking the role of Saintmilia’s son. This substitution is in fact not preposterous for the text constantly suggests that Saintmilia is Wolf’s surrogate mother. 88 Similarly, Cécile takes on the speech, and thus role, of Saintmilia. Again, the scenario becomes more and more plausible for throughout the text Cécile and Saintmilia not only provide the same advice to Wolf, but they also have matching analyses of the rapidly changing power dynamics that exist on the slave plantation.

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THREE MOVEMENTS AND THREE SPEECH ACTS In a sense, the novel has three movements that correspond to the three types of dialogue. In the first movement, the use of the words “noir” and “blanc” is omnipresent. As we noted, the most straightforward dialogue sets up a binary relationship in which the white character attempts to repress the black character. In the conversations in which Sonja Biemme and Sister Thérèse are speakers, the white character detains the authority over the speech act. However, as the novel progresses, there are more and more conversations between Wolf and his companions. In contrast to Sonja and Sister Thérèse’s conversations, Wolf’s conversations with all of his interlocutors seem to be reversed: the black characters establish their discursive supremacy over him. 89 In the second movement, a blurring of the two distinct Manichean worlds established in the first movement occurs. This second movement commences towards the middle of the novel for it is here that we find the second type of dialogue (a previous event embeds itself within a dialogue that represents a more recent moment in time). However, a closer look reveals that the inscription of one dialogue within another only takes place when Wolf is a speaker. Moreover, the intaglio of dialogue always corresponds to one of Wolf’s memories. In other words, Wolf controls the other dialogue, or rather allows it to take place. In a sense, Wolf is the master of the discourse (or his journals guide Sister Thérèse’s mother’s taped voice). He has the power to confer a voice upon the characters that the non-narrator has silenced. The non-narrator is of course the lack of strong narrative voice; however, there is without a doubt, a voice behind it all, which stages Sister Thérèse’s flight and which adapts what most probably was a fairly linear narrative recounted by her mother. By allowing the Sonjas—that is, Sonja Biemme and Sister Thérèse—and Wolf to express themselves using free-indirect discourse, the narrator (probably Sister Thérèse’s mother’s voice) has privileged the voices of the white characters. Not only does the narrator deprive Saintmilia, Salomon, Sister Hyacinthe, and the flight attendant of the possibility to narrate themselves using free-indirect discourse, but the Sonjas’s authoritarian means of conducting a dialogue represses the black characters when they do try to speak. In contrast, Wolf as narrator subverts this system by letting the silenced characters talk. In a sense then, Wolf is not the hypocrite of Cécile’s judgment for he actually enables, at least discursively to a certain extent, a subversion of the slave system that he both sustains and disdains. And if we are to espouse the notion that Wolf might be a literary allusion to Freud’s patient—and especially Deleuze’s and Guattari’s analysis of Freud’s patient—which was published a decade prior to Aube tranquille, then it is plausible that Wolf’s journals would be in Glover’s words “schizophonic,” attempting to give more voice to those who were closest to him: Cécile, Saintmilia, and Salomon.

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Also, parallel to the emergence of this second type of dialogue is a decrease in the use of the words black and white to describe the characters. Although there is still a distinction between slaves and slave-owners, skin color is no longer the sole means of representing the distinction. The mitigated usage of the black/white binary is mostly due to the fact that the Sonjas’s dialogue no longer dominates the text as it had at the beginning of the novel. Thus, the second movement provides a transition from a discourse based on the rigid, binary structures of the European episteme to a more plural and open Vodou discursive system. The dichotomous discourse that the first movement sets up also structures the second movement, but the voice controlling this discourse belongs to Wolf, a character who associates himself with the European system, yet also wants to change it. Wolf preserves the dual structure of the dialogue, but he also weakens it by lessening the use of color-conscious vocabulary and by incorporating dialogue that provides the reader access to the voices of the other system, that of the slaves. Finally, the third movement ascribes an important role to the voices of the black characters. Although the Sonjas’s and Wolf’s speech moments persist, the voices of Salomon and Saintmilia not only become dominant, but they also achieve an almost deific role. After Salomon’s assassination, he returns to the dialogue as the voice, I will propose, of a sort of Vodou spirit (see further analysis below). Textually, the reader is witness to the increased value that the text assigns to the voices of Saintmilia and Salomon; and, complex dialogues amongst the various voices saturate the end of the novel: these are the longest dialogues of the novel. As previously noted, the text only conveys the voices of the black characters through the use of direct discourse. Just as the revolted slaves take over the plantation, so the dialogue invades what until the final rebellion has been a textual space dominated by the free-indirect discourse of the white characters. Where the reader is privy to the individual thoughts and subconscious meanderings of the white characters, the emotional landscape of the black characters is represented by the voices of ancestors such as Salomon’s spiritual return to the final scenes to dialogue with his mother. Additionally, the third movement introduces the reader to another discursive system, that is not sensitive to skin color, but rather privileges non-racially motivated justice: a dialogue that is not limited to a binary structure between a powerful voice and its impotent interlocutor, but is inclusive, allowing a multiplicity of voices into its structure. Despite the fact that there is no closure to the plot, the medley of voices that takes place in the final dialogues provides a thematic closure. 90 In other words, at the end, at all levels, justice is reestablished—justice amongst the slaves, former slaves, and the slave-owners; justice between antagonistic lovers; and justice amongst kin. The events and dialogues of the final moments reinstate integrity into the lives of all of the characters. The moment of reckoning both questions the European discourse established

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at the beginning of the novel (and its intendant other, a supposed undifferentiated African episteme) and inaugurates a nascent, more complex Vodou discourse. MASKS OF MALEDICTION In order to understand more specifically how the dialogues of the third movement enable the emergence of the “new” Vodou thought system within the social system described by the novel, an analysis of the imagery of the mask as it relates to each of the speakers of the final dialogues reconnects the narratological workings of the novel to the theoretical allusions to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. Within the mélange of voices of the final dialogues, there appears a vocabulary that is specific to Vodou, and more interestingly, embedded within this vocabulary, the nonnarrator incorporates the imagery of the mask. To understand how the mask serves as a narrative agent to both the plot and the philosophical project of the novel, let us compare three moments in the text that describe the mask. The mask to which the first notable iteration of the mask trope appears refers to a family curse, one that has plagued the family of Sister Thérèse and her ancestors for centuries. 91 During Erwan’s ransacking of the village in the Middle Ages, the male inhabitants remain inert bystanders to the pillaging and obvious abuse of their women. Of Erwan’s plundered acquisitions, a brass mask depicting an old woman most enraptures him. Upon his return home, he immediately tries the mask on; only, the mask takes on a life of its own and starts to strangle him, finally killing him. It is as if the community knows that the mask has magical powers by which to avenge the injustice of the attack on their village. It also is important to note that the mask is in “laiton,” or brass, an alloy—a mix of copper and zinc—and that the mask represents an old woman. Later on in the novel, the reader discovers that the connection between the mask and Saintmilia is plausible. The plot suggests that Saintmilia might be the spirit that has possessed the mask, which in turn had killed Erwan centuries before. The final moments of dialogue of the novel reveal Saintmilia to be as vengeful and as violent as Sonja Biemme. They also suggest Vodou as a framework for absolute justice, in the spirit of Nick Nesbitt’s work on the “Radical Enlightement” in Haiti (see part I of this book). For the first time in the text, Saintmilia and Sonja Biemme speak to each other. Saintmilia accuses Sonja Biemme and punishes her with death. However, her conversation becomes relevant to the 1980s plot for Saintmilia speaks to a voice that represents the conflated voice of both Sister Thérèse and Sonja Biemme. Thus, the accusation’s repercussion is not limited to the past, but it also applies to the present. The indictment is one whose context is both that of Sonja Biemme’s specific crimes against her slaves, as well as

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the larger social environment of Sister Thérèse’s late twentieth-century, racial prejudice. 92 Saintmilia as healer casts Sonja Biemme as “sorceress.” More specifically, Saintmilia’s words condemn the Sonjas to death. Since Wolf’s journals refer to the death of his wife as well as his return to Europe without his wife, it is safe to assume that Sonja Biemme dies as a sorceress at the hand of Saintmilia and the other former slaves. Hence, Sonja’s murder provides retribution for the death of Salomon, Saintmilia’s son. And, already we have seen how the last “window scene” attests to the more equal status that Saintmilia achieves within the Sonjas’s discursive world. As studied in the beginning of the chapter, in the last window scene the Sonjas finally address the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character using the second person and not the third person. It seems that somehow, in the reenactment of death, the Sonjas recognize the humanity of the persons whom they have so violently objectified. In so doing, their former object becomes a companion in dialogue, a person with whom they share the same space—whether that of the window, of solitude, or of fear. Despite the Sonjas’ death (Sonja Biemme’s death is literal and Sister Thérèse’s is figurative) and the shift in the pronoun used to refer to the persons who have threatened them, complete equality between the Sonjas and the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character does not yet exist. Each is, in Jenson’s words, a woman who is, after the revolution, in 1980s France or North Africa, still “un-becoming a slave.” 93 The Sonjas still control the narrative space, for the “I” continues to be that of the free-indirect discourse of the Sonjas’s narrative voice. Moreover, although the Sonjas address the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character directly, she cannot respond for her narrative instance is contained within the insular space of the white characters’ free-indirect discourse. It will take another dialogue to open up the discursive space so as to enable the sorority that finally concludes the novel, a companionship which the narrator describes as both laugh and cry: “sur le rire une double plainte d’agonie, deux âmes se sont rencontrées qui cherchaient la paix”—“upon the surface of a laugh a double agonizing lamentation, two souls that were looking for peace came upon each other.” 94 The final dialogue, which evokes the Biemme family mask of malediction surprisingly (at least at first) condemns Saintmilia for Sonja’s murder. Given the totalizing tragic fiasco of indigénisme’s political articulation into Duvalierism, it is plausible that Saintmilia’s need for revenge, her resistance to a more hybrid Vodou system, compounded by her desire to return to the supposed authenticity of Africa as suggested in Les Possédés de la pleine lune’s magic realistic aesthetic, loosely represents a condemnation of the intellectual history by which Duvalierism justified itself. After all, Fignolé, unlike Depestre, writes from within Haiti, and Aube tranquille’s writing belongs to the immediate aftermath of Baby Doc’s regime. In other words, he writes without the safety of Depestre’s exile.

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The last major excerpt to invoke the mask associates the “lait”— “milk” with “laiton”—“brass,” where in French, both signifiers incorporate the word “lait”—“milk,” and as such, break down the impenetrability of a Fanonian mask of white supremacy, that may only be countered, in Fanon’s later work, with the absolute revolt of the “wretched of the earth,” 95 intended as the “native” 96 and thus mostly darker-skinned bodies worldwide. In referring to Saintmilia as “Nanie,” a seemingly new character, Saül, makes a brief appearance to reestablish justice, and even peace, between the two women, at which moment Saintmilia realizes that her quest for “revenge” is not necessarily at the service of “justice.” Most importantly, how can revenge be truly exacted upon those whom one has borne and/or sustained into life? Saül reminds Saintmilia that she not only is mother to Salomon, but also served as Wolf’s wet-nurse. 97 Given the context of the Vodou ceremony and the resemblance of the name of Saül to Salomon, a plausible representation of Saül is as a product of “vodou.” 98 The reading of Saül as Salomon’s spirit is questionable in the sense that usually a deceased member of a Vodouyizan community must wait a year and day after his death in order to be consecrated as a lwa. That Salomon is dead and that the temporal markers of the novel are so vague suggest that even if Saül is not a consecrated ancestral lwa, the voice that comes to speak to Saintmilia at the end of the novel is definitely one that does not represent a human entity, but rather a metaphysical manifestation. Moreover, in the Bible, Saül and Salomon are distinct biblical characters. Saul was the first king of a united Israel while Salomon was the last—after which Israel split into two kingdoms—the southern kingdom of “Judah,” with the capital remaining at Jerusalem, and the northern kingdom of “Israel,” with the capital at Samaria. In a sense, the fact that biblically Saül represents unification also helps to read Saül’s message to Saintmilia as one of peace. That Salomon represents the last unified moment in the Holy Land also might serve as an analogy for the division of Haiti between Pétion and King Christophe, and even later tragic Haitian schisms, most notably between Marxists and Duvalierists. The fact that at Sonja Biemme’s death, the lwa are invoked, makes it possible that Salomon himself—now a soul without a body—has himself become a lwa, who descends upon his earthly descendants to confer his knowledge and act in favor of community justice. 99 Just as Saintmilia denounces Sonja for Salomon’s death, so Salomon-as-Vodou-spirit, asks that Saintmilia allow Sonja Biemme’s spirit to rest in peace. Since Saintmilia is a Vodou priestess, she in theory has the capacity to capture Sonja’s soul, or gwo-bon-anj, and condemn it to eternal wandering as a zonbi. In a sense, by asking his mother to let Sonja rest in peace, he chastises her for her vengeance. Saintmilia’s response to Saül’s words evokes the fact that some sort of supernatural force has intervened to put an end to the mask’s role as avenger.

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To fully understand Saül’s intervention and condemnation of Saintmilia, a further analysis of the mask is useful. For Sister Thérèse, the mask represents her family’s malediction. Until her flight to Haiti, at which time she learns more about the Biemme history, the family’s curse is inextricably linked to darkness, and then later darkness as explicit racism. 100 Sonja’s religious mission is in no way philanthropic; rather, the purpose of her trip is to put an end to what she perceives as the victimization that her family must suffer for having participated in the slave trade. She associates the origin of the malediction to the fact that in the late 1600s, Yann Biemme de Valembrun Lebrun had illegally purchased slaves to toil the fields of his Britanny property. As punishment, the king cuts off his hands and he becomes known as “Biemme le Nègre”— “Biemme the Dark,” a title that for her signifies the pinnacle of shame. 101 It is obvious that his name too is a sardonically playful word game: “Valembrun Lebrun,” where a masculinization of the adjective “brun”— “brown” is repeated twice. The additional knowledge of Sonja Biemme’s history as a “grand planteur à Saint Domingue”—an “important plantation owner in Saint-Domingue” encourages Sister Thérèse to abhor any black person for an inadvertent defilement of her family’s once and longgone grandiose past. 102 It is not until Sister Thérèse listens to her mother’s tape that she learns the true origin of the mask, and of her family’s malcontent: a long tradition of exploitation of others in favor of the family’s economic prosperity. As aforementioned, the initial event took place at the end of the fifteenth century, when the feudal lord Erwan de Biemme resisted Charles VIII’s monarchical rule and pillaged a town. As a result, the brass mask that he steals transforms into the face of an old woman. Thus, legend would have it, that a first act of violence on a helpless and silenced village in Brittany determines five centuries of the plagued existence of the Biemme family. As it were, the Biemme’s original sin was an unmitigated desire for authority. 103 MASKS OF VENGEANCE Vengeance is a mode that both the Sonjas and the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe character appropriate to confront their loneliness. Sonja’s hatred is three-fold. First, she abhors slaves because she recognizes in them the humiliation to which the king subjugated her ancestor, and thus, she associates them with the long history of her family’s malediction. Due to her disfavor vis-à-vis the king, she is limited in her marriage options, and thus must accept a husband who will force her to leave Europe and bring her to a plantation colony. Finally, her loneliness becomes a jealous solitude by which she comes to envy her husband for his friendships with Salomon and Saintmilia and for his love affairs with the slave Maïté and

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the libertine Cécile. She also comes to despise Salomon: the end of the novel makes it clearer that Sonja has desired Salomon, and that even if they may have consummated a sort of affair, he ultimately denies her a love affair to which she may have been open. Sonja, like the past leaders of the Biemme family, defines her existence in a solitude that translates itself as authoritarianism. For Sonja Biemme, revenge is thus a mode by which to preserve independence, even at the cost of companionship. Such individualism while insular assures the despotic independence required to preserve the family’s supremacy. 104 Ultimately then, for Sonja, reciprocal intimacy is a threat to her power, and she responds to any possibilities of camaraderie with a vengeance that is unjust, calculated, and often fatal: she ignores both her husband and son, and suspects any slave who is kind to her of dissidence, using torture and death as punishment. The ultimate menace to her authority is her sentimental attachment to Salomon; and her grand crime, her assassination of him. 105 For her part, in the modern day, Sister Thérèse seems to reenact her female ancestor’s lonely hate through her abusive relationship of Sister Hyacinthe. Les Possédés de la pleine lune provides both a better understanding of the significance of the mask as well as the role of Saintmilia’s character in Fignolé’s work. In the first novel, the mask belongs to Louiortesse, a rival of Saintmilia’s lover, Agénor. The mask that Louiortesse wears is one that steals away the soul and psyche of those victims whom he pursues: “l’usurpateur des âmes, masque au visage de Louiortesse, s’est approprié les consciences avec férocité, confondant les esprits, torturant les corps”—“the usurper of souls, the mask with Louirtesse’s face, has taken over consciousness with ferocity, confounding the spirits, torturing bodies.” 106 The narrator describes the troubled man as duplicitous: “double visage de Louiortesse, effigie monstrueuse”—“Louiortesse’s double face, monstrous effigy,” a person whose interior monologue explains that the violent terrorization of the people around him helps him to combat his loneliness: “je peuple ma solitude du silence des animaux torréfiés”—“I populate my loneliness with the silence of roasted animals.” 107 The narrator of Les Possédés thus personifies the mask as an entity that espouses and cultivates a violent solitude, driven to “cruelty” both as a cause of, and also to sustain such seclusion: [Louiortesse’s] effigy smirked. More than ever, it was alone with itself. A mask of cruelty. The mirror burst into shards, dispersing across the ground a thousand tarnished and gaping grins. 108

The mask that is a visual representation of both Louirtesse’s solitude and his viciousness, is also an annihilating force, which has a devastating impact on that which comes upon it: in the above citation, the mirror that crosses the mask’s gaze meets a deadly end, petrified and smashed into infinite pieces. 109

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It is not until the end of Aube tranquille that the reader understands that the same mask of malediction that plagues the Sonjas also haunts Saintmilia. Like the Sonjas, Saintmilia’s character also seeks revenge. However, it seems that it is the European mode of thought introduced by Aube tranquille, which has infused such hate, for in Les Possédés, Saintmilia manifests no need for retribution against her husband nor his other lovers. In contrast, in the second novel, she seeks justice, and it is her son, in the form of a spirit, who must intervene to destroy the mask—that is, to restrain the consequences of her anger. Thus, the image of the mask sutures two worlds—that of the slaves with that of the slave-owners. To both the European and Haitian reader, Fignolé offers two plausible (and obviously stereotypical) contexts for magic: the late Middle Ages in Europe and “Vodou” in Haiti. The parallels between the origin of the Biemme family mask of malediction and the mask that Saintmilia admits having fashioned are uncanny: both are masks of “laiton”—copper, both depict an “old woman,” and both receive their curse during the exploitation of a group of villagers. Whether or not it is just coincidence that the Biemme family mask of malediction resembles Saintmilia’s is less important than the fact that in the Haitian context Saül intervenes to destroy the mask. He puts an end to the vengeance between the two women; and, in a sense, he also puts an end to the Sonjas’s family curse. Through my analysis in this chapter, the mask thus provides a sort of obfuscated denouement to the confusing plot that combines the histories of a European aristocratic family with that of a Haitian slave family. However, the dissolution of the mask also offers resolution to the racial tension that exists between the supposed black and the white characters. Let us again look at Saintmilia’s final words regarding the mask: Saintmilia’s pleasure at the charred smell of Sonja’s flesh becomes disgust when the smell begins to resemble that of her own blood. In a symbolic sense, the smell of her proper flesh and blood suggests that Sonja Biemme is in fact, at least symbolically, Saintmilia’s daughter-in-law. First, since Wolf considers Saintmilia to be his surrogate mother, Sonja Lebrun becomes her surrogate daughter-in-law. The text’s representation of Wolf’s family line corroborates this reading. It is interesting to note that unlike Sonja, the text never evokes Wolf’s European family line. The only history given to Wolf is that of Saintmilia’s surrogate motherhood and his quasi-brotherhood with Salomon. Whenever he refers to either of these facts, Wolf uses expressions that evoke the fact that he drank of Saintmilia’s breast milk. 110 Less clear though plausible, the reader could also consider Sonja Biemme to be Saintmilia’s daughter-in-law via her relationship to Saintmilia’s son Salomon. Despite the fact that at the end of the text it is quite certain that Sonja Biemme loved Salomon, it remains ambiguous whether or not Salomon reciprocated this sentiment. Should the sentiment have been mutual, for which there are many indicators in

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the novel, then in a sense, Sonja Biemme would also have been Saintmilia’s unofficial daughter-in-law. 111 Thus, when Saintmilia condemns Sonja Biemme to death, she is in fact, at least symbolically, killing a member of her own family. In either or both cases, Saintmilia denies any sort of maternal sentiment to Sonja Biemme. At the time that Wolf supplicates Saintmilia to save his wife, Saintmilia refutes this familial relationship, at which moment Wolf interrupts her, again imploring her to save his wife. 112 However, that before Sonja’s death, Wolf asks Saintmilia to save his wife’s life, and that after Sonja’s death, Saül—that is, Salomon’s spirit—asks his mother to spare her soul suggests that Saintmilia has a responsibility to Sonja. More specifically, Saintmilia’s capacities as healer and Vodou priestess make her liable for her community’s wellbeing. Her sentiment of revenge is personal; it is that of a mother’s love for her son, and her hatred of the person who ended his life. By prohibiting Sonja’s soul from resting in peace, Saintmilia has the capacity to continue the cycle of revenge represented by the mask. Thus, Saül’s intervention is one that asks her to terminate once and for all, the unproductive cycle of revenge that the mask represents. Thus, only a few pages before the end the novel, familial relationships that seemed rather clear, suddenly become confusing. The concluding pages of the text underline information that was always an undercurrent and which forces all of the characters and the reader to reassess their assumptions. Wolf is definitely Saintmilia’s surrogate son, but could Salomon also be Wolf’s half-brother? Like Maïté and Toukouma, could the master—Wolf’s father—have raped Saintmilia? In this case, could Wolf really be Saintmilia’s son, or could Salomon really be the illegitimate child of the former slave owner? After all, both Sister Hyacinthe and Sister Thérèse share the past of a great grandfather whose reputation was lascivious. 113 Moreover, is it possible that Klaus—that is, Sonja’s and Wolf’s mysteriously absent son—who returns to Haiti after the revolution, after his father’s departure and his mother’s death, might actually be Sonja’s and Salomon’s son? The answers to these questions of lineage are never explicated; whatever the case, Klaus and all of the Biemme-Valembrun’s kin that followed Sonja’s marriage to Wolf definitely share a lineage to Saintmilia, for what is certain is that Wolf’s surrogate mother was Saintmilia. Hence, since the end of the eighteenth century, the Biemme-Valembrun family blood and “milk” lines have been mixed. The difference between black and white and the absoluteness of either black skin or white skin is not only undeterminable, but it is also a preposterous obsession. In fact, the modern-day Sister Thérèse is as much “biemme”—that is, “blême,” “d’une blancheur maladive”—“pallid,” “of a sickly whiteness” as she is “brun”—“dark” for she is “Sonja Biemme de Valembrun Lebrun.” Like the mask of “laiton,” she is both the color of brass, an impure alloyed mixture, and the color of

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“lait”—“milk.” She has inherited the skin descended from her ancestor, Sonja Biemme, the skin within whose burnt smell Saintmilia recognizes the odor of her own milk, that which sustained a sickly Wolf into life. 114 REVENGE OR JUSTICE? When Saül descends upon the turmoil of the rebellious Vodou ceremony he does so to curb Saintmilia’s long-repressed anger. As we have noted in the previous chapters, Vodou’s main ethic is to provide its community with healing. Such justice occurs first at a community level. At the end of the novel, the slaves, with the aid of the Petwò rite of Vodou spirits, successfully rise up to overthrow their masters. 115 However, justice also takes place at the individual level when the spirit Saül dissolves the mask and reprimands Saintmilia for her behavior. The two moments of justice ultimately establish an important difference between revenge and justice. The conclusion of Aube tranquille is reminiscent of the legendary Vodou ceremony that inaugurated the beginning of the Haitian revolution. The novel describes how Toukouma and Saintmilia are the main actors of the rebellious ceremony. The female presence corresponds to the historical legend that a woman priestess, a mambo, rallied her community to follow Boukman and the other revolted slaves. 116 Just as Maya Deren specifically indicates Boukman’s name in her rendition of the legendary ceremony, so Fignolé’s text describes the relation between Toukouma’s and Saintmilia’s ceremony and Boukman’s presence. 117 Fignolé’s reenactment of the famous ceremony of August 14, 1791 places the emphasis on the role played by the women during the rebellion. Deren indicates that the legendary ceremony was one in which the mambo sacrificed a pig for the Petwò nation of Vodou spirits. 118 The spirit, or lwa, that most frequently demands the sacrifice of a pig is Ezili Dantò, also known as Ezili Je-Rouge. 119 Read in this context, it is understandable that in Aube tranquille, Wolf’s only description of anything specifically Vodou is his description of “la terrible Erzulie Dantor.” 120 Later on in the text, Wolf recounts his first encounter with his wife using the colors blue and gold, which are the majority colors in the icon of the Black Madonna of Częstochowa, which is often used to honor Ezili Dantò. 121 It is possible to venture the proposal that the entire novel, like the legendary ceremony of emancipation, occurs under the sign of the Vodou spirit Ezili. Wolf’s descriptions of Ezili may be read as a means of interpreting the various characters named “Sonja.” In Vodou, each spirit, especially those that belong to one of the two main “nations,” or rites, of the Vodou pantheon—the even-tempered Rada rite and the hot-tempered Petwò rite—usually have multiple manifestations. For example, Ezili Freda of the Rada rite of spirits evokes seduction, femininity, wealth, and

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fertility. Ezili Je-Rouge, of the more irascible Petwò rite of lwas, embodies what Deren calls a “cosmic tantrum”: “There are times when this sense of all things gone wrong is projected in that combined rage and despair which is Erzulie Ge-Rouge.” 122 In the same vein as the Vodou nomenclature for its most important spirits, Aube tranquille also displays multiple characters that take on the same name “Sonja.” Sister Thérèse, Sister Hyacinthe, the flight attendant, and Sonja Biemme are each separate characters, yet they share the same first name. The benefit of a rapprochement between the Sonjas and Ezili Dantò is that as readers we may directly read Vodou into the novel’s discursive structure. The “window scene” sets up a binary opposition between two a-historical characters: on the one side of the polarization, there are the seemingly white Sonjas—that is, Sonja Biemme and Sister Thérèse; and on the other side of the polarity, there is the explicitly black character, the Saintmilia/Sister Hyacinthe personage. However, when the reader discovers that Sister Hyacinthe’s real name is “Sonja” the binary implodes— that is, if Sister Hyacinthe is a Sonja, then there now exists a polarity that sets a Sonja against a Sonja. The final dialogues, in which voices constantly exchange discursive places, also jumbles the identities, so that all of the characters, including Saintmilia and Cécilia, become interchangeable with the other Sonjas. Moreover, to consider Wolf’s initial associations of his wife Sonja with the Vodou lwa Ezili, is to find that the Sonjas, who for most of the novel have represented the white characters, are just as privy to “the Vodou” of the Haitian characters as are the slaves to the sorcery of the so-called European characters. 123 One of the most important roles of the lwas is to intervene when a situation or a person threatens the health of the community. Unlike Salomon—a human restricted by the severe social oppression of a human society’s slave society—Saül, a lwa, has the freedom afforded to him by the metaphysical world to intervene to force Saintmilia to put an end to the cycle of revenge. Vodou, and more specifically, the Petwò rite of spirits has as its responsibility to secure justice. In Ethique Vaudou, Castor writes: In summary, the Petwò lwas, we hope to have sufficiently demonstrated, announce or denounce situations of disequilibrium, of separation, and injustice. To reestablish balance, these situations necessitate that there be a call to exterior forces, ones so extreme that only they can subjugate the inequity. And it is without a doubt, this extremism, the radicalism of these applied measures that has allowed these mistè to earn the epithets “hard” and “evil.” 124

Saül’s vague intervention is what in Vodou is called a “chanté pwen, ces chants caractérisés par leurs propos ambigus que seul le contexte et surtout un ‘savoir local’ permet vraiment de saisir”—“chanté pwen, these incantations characterized by their ambiguous proposals, understood only

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by the context and more importantly an extremely ‘local knowledge.’” 125 In the specific context of death and Vodou, Saül’s imploration that Sonja’s soul be left to “repose in peace” is a means of asking Saintmilia to consecrate Sonja’s soul to the Vodou afterworld. 126 In the more general context of a Vodou ethic of justice, Saül’s gesture is one that forces Saintmilia to reflect upon her actions and, ultimately, to question the utility of her “vengeance.” To be possessed then in this context is to reestablish justice, even if those invoking the lwa are not in agreement with the lwas’ lessons; and the lwas are notorious for providing—and imposing—unanticipated wisdom. A TERTIARY SPACE: CREOLE OR VODOU? Whether or not we, as readers, accept that the various characters named “Sonja” are affiliated with the Ezuli 127 group of Vodou spirits, or that Saül really is the spiritual manifestation of Salomon is inconsequential. What is clear is that the word “vodou” in Fignolé’s novel comes to represent an alternative space of the Caribbean. This space is one in which the distinctions between the same and the other are not possible. Voices of characters, identities of characters, family lines, and skin colors find themselves so blended and jumbled that the “dichotomizing system” that Mudimbe labels as proper to a Western discourse is no longer a useful means of organizing society. In his study of Vodou titled The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti, Desmangles describes one of the goals of his study: The . . . aim of this study is to describe Vodou as a tertium quid, part of which is a “creole” phenomenon that owes little to Africa or Europe . . . but is indigenous to Haiti, born out of the difficult and oppressive conditions of slavery and the necessary adaptation to a new environment. 128

Fignolé’s contribution to Desmangles’s theory of Vodou as a native and completely separate system of society is two-fold. First, Aube tranquille’s author emphasizes the Vodounness of all of the historical figures—slaves and slave-owners, descendants of slaves and descendants of slave-owners. Second, by imbricating the past in the present, he compares the contemporary state of the world to that which Haiti has endured for centuries. And more specifically, his move, like that of Depestre is one that suggests that the Duvalierist indigénisme, rather than being a celebration of black, folk culture, is a forced category, one which can only be sustained by the use of brutal force. Desmangles’s notion of “Vodou as a tertium quid” and his use of the word “creole” designates a discursive space that is neither African, nor European, but also both at once. 129 However, the two terms—Vodou and

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creole—are not interchangeable. In Fignolé’s text, Vodou has several definitions. First, Fignolé’s novels present Vodou as a term that belongs to a European discourse. As we have seen, despite the fact that the entire repertoire of Vodou imagery is omnipresent in the first novel Les possédés de la plein lune, the word itself never appears in the novel. It is not until the second novel, and always uttered by the voices of the slave-owning class, that Fignolé’s text puts the word into play. As such, Fignolé’s texts embrace the word as a means of inscribing into the European vocabulary a word that designates the alternative and unique existence of Haiti, Haitians, and those whose existence is directly affected by a Haitian Weltanschauung. As noted in the preface of this book, Vodouyizans do not designate themselves as such, rather they identify themselves through their service to the lwa, and “to be possessed,” also mostly a European terminology, is to be mounted by the spirits, and constitutes one of the most mature relationships that a devotee may have to the spirits. Although there are many facets by which to explore the distinctions between creole and Vodou, Fignolé’s novel reveals three. First, Vodou’s origin is the vindication of a slave’s humanity, or rather, the preservation and protection of the freedom of her/his soul as separate from the oppression of her/his body. To be mounted by the lwa—that is, to be temporarily released of one’s earthly soul, of one’s worldly knowledge of one’s dayto-day burden, oppressions, and subjugations—is the ultimate release from the chains of servitude to an oppressive system. Second, Vodou persists today as a means of preserving the justice and freedom of any member of a Vodouyizan community. The case of Aube tranquille in which even a white slave-owner has the right to her humanity, emphasizes Vodou’s preoccupation with justice for any human being. Finally, Vodou assures the healing of both the community and the individual. It provides a means of negotiation amongst members of a community. The window scene’s altered repetition illustrates the evolution of the relationship between the two women. From a situation of vehement antagonism to a final scene of quiet acceptance of each others’ differences, the window scene shows how Saintmilia successfully asserts herself into the discursive space that Sonja had dominated from the beginning of the text. The result is the portrait of a creole space, a place in which differences struggle to locate a common ground—even if temporary—through communication (even if forced) and mutual recognition (even if unwanted). If the many theories of creolization have tended to be taken up by theorists of hybridity as prisms with which to celebrate the Caribbean, Fignolé’s novels, and especially Aube tranquille, remind us that creolization is most often than not an uncomfortable, tough discursive terrain, one that encapsulates the uncertainty and fear embedded in what it means in Jenson’s words to “un-becom[e] a slave.” The title of the novel makes reference to the drama that takes place within the window scene. At the end of the novel, Sonja opens her win-

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dow to talk to Saintmilia whose suffering she now recognizes. Her internal monologue articulates a new rhythm to the alternation between day and night, 130 and in the final lines of the novel, both women awake to a sun that rises to recognize each other’s histories, and to acknowledge that in the Western Hemispheric Atlantic, all sunshine, all “tranquil dawns,” may only be recognized when one acknowledges that “at the beginning was Africa.” 131 As such, the window represents the moment of both women’s mutual recognition of each other’s histories. The sun that rises from the Atlantic, a sun whose origin for the Caribbean is not Europe but Africa, shines across a Haitian landscape shared by both women. Each woman must accept that each other’s history is inextricably linked to her own. For Sonja, Europe and whiteness is ideally a world in which there is neither African nor black. For Saintmilia, Africa represents a time before European colonization and slavery. Thus, the last sentence of the novel— “at the beginning was Africa”—articulates each woman’s recognition of the appropriate place for the idea of Africa within their shared—even if differentiated—creole existences. For Sonja Biemme to accept Africa is to acknowledge that despite her desires to negate the humanness of blackness, her relations with Saintmilia and Salomon prove otherwise. To accept Africa is to recognize her own culpable role within the exploitation of her slaves. Similarly, for Sister Thérèse, to accept Africa is to open herself up to a relationship with Sister Hyacinthe, a relationship in which Sister Hyacinthe represents more than an object of her mostly repressed sexual desire. Although in a different way from the two Biemme women, Saintmilia also must compromise her perception of Africa. She must relinquish a return to Africa; rather, she learns to understand Africa as an important element of the past that informs the present, but to which there is no absolute return. Africa is a “commencement,” but not an “end.” In other words, Saintmilia, as a liberated former slave, must acknowledge the reality of her Caribbean existence, of the unavoidable reality of colonization and of its repercussions on her existence. Correspondingly, in the modern context, Sister Hyacinthe learns to negotiate the reality of her skin color and both the European and African origins of her light-skinned blackness. In short, for Sonja, Sister Thérèse, Saintmilia, and Sister Hyacinthe, both Africa and Europe inform the why and how of their daily existence. Unlike the European context, the Vodou context does not repress the existence of Africa; rather, it forces any individual living in the Vodou context to deal with both the presence of Europe and whiteness, and with that of Africa and blackness. The fact that neither novel ever uses the word creole clues us in on the specificity that Fignolé’s text ascribes to the term Vodou. The novel’s intertextuality with Martinican psychologist Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and the novel’s references to psychoanalysis provide a first distinction between Vodou and creole. Both psychoanalysis and Vodou propose

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psychological understanding and healing. 132 However, psychoanalysis— even criticized and adapted as Fanon does for his creole, Martinican context—does not correspond to the creole context of Haiti. Since Fanon’s essay is psychoanalytical, it must employ the vocabulary and discourse of the discipline; and because psychoanalysis is a Western discipline, Fanon’s notions of humanity remain constrained to both the “dichotomizing system” and the color-consciousness of this European discourse. Although the content of Fanon’s essay attempts to collapse the binary between black and white, formally the title, Peau noire, masques blancs, demonstrates the color consciousness. The oppositions of the last lines also make quite obvious the dichotomous structure: Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other? Was my freedom not given me to build the world of you, man? At the end of this book we would like the reader to feel with us the open dimension of every consciousness. My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who questions! 133

In a sense, within the context of the novel, Vodou is an answer to this prayer. Where Fanon asks that the reader enable him to live fully in his black skin without his mask, Fignolé demonstrates that no skin is purely black, no skin is purely white. To invoke Vodou discreetly, or rather more organically to a Haitian practice, rather than as a performative object of the romanticizing study of the “folk,” as European and U.S.-American anthropologists or the Duvalier dictatorship has done, is like Depestre, to return to the important role that the practice and way-of-thinking of serving the lwa plays in the life of persons negotiating extremely arduous lives—both physically and psychologically. In conclusion to this chapter, it’s important to emphasize that Aube tranquille is a novel; it is fiction; and, thus in a sense, the tranquility of its last scene is an expression of hope, rather than the assertion of a reality. It is that in-between space of the precariousness of recently achieved freedoms, imbued with the memories of past oppressions, and the fear of future ones, not to mention the traumatizing presence of the past in the present. That neither Sonja Biemme nor Sister Thérèse ever explicitly admits to wrongdoing as does Saintmilia, and the fact that the lineage of the Biemme-Valembrum-Schpeerbach family ends with Sister Thérèse, demonstrates the pragmatism that Fignolé quietly inscribes into his portrayal of Vodou. Vodou remains the religion that reflects what Desmangles labels “the difficult and oppressive conditions of slavery,” 134 and its repercussions into the present day. Thus, in a sense, the “tranquil dawn” that the novel announces in its last lines is just as much a Fanonian “final

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prayer” for the recognition of a person’s humanity, as is the last line of Fanon’s essay, a call for the recognition of the humanity of a black person. In returning to Dayan’s notion of the “reciprocity” inherent to Vodou, and keeping present how incredibly arduous the establishment and preservation of such reciprocity is, we understand that ultimately a day may start with tranquility, but prior to the sunrise, the day and night have borne witness to the arduous processes that allow for such a shaky serenity. Dayan explains that the relations between humans and gods are constantly being “redefined (or reimagined) by these gods” because the purpose of such a dynamic rapport between the two entities is to establish a “logic . . . that works through and questions what it means to be equal: in equilibrium and in correspondence.” 135 While scholars such as Karen McCarthy Brown and Castor would agree with Dayan’s statement that Vodou interrogates notions of equality, they emphasize that relationships amongst humans, Vodou priests and priestesses, and Vodou spirits are “in equilibrium and correspondence,” but not necessarily easily or peacefully so. For McCarthy Brown, “these [s]pirits, who preside over particular life domains, serve admirably to give order and definition to the different levels” of a Vodouyizan’s life. 136 Castor points out that the expression most often used by Vodouyizans to identify themselves as practitioners of Vodou is “m’ sevi lè zesprits”—or “I am in the service of the spirits,” and is predicated upon a total dependence of the human subject on the spirits. 137 In some cases, the practitioner endures severe punishment inflicted upon her or him by the spirit. Thus, Vodou is as much about power relations as it is about equality, or it is about reestablishing equality in the face of gross inequities of power. To be ready to accept the spirits into one’s body, to be possessed, as indicated in the introduction, takes a certain maturity within the practice, and as accustomed as a kò kadav might be in welcoming the spirits, such possession, at least in its first moments, is nonetheless uncomfortable and even physically dangerous. This then is what the Vodou episteme proffers: an incredibly pragmatic means of working through the realities of a deeply and repeatedly oppressed society, while all the while holding true to an aspiration that justice be established, a justice based on humanity, and not on race. As such, Fignolé squarely situates Vodou in a time in which as Fischer’s and Weitz’s historical analyses show, the concept of “race” had not yet set up a permanent discursive anchor; writing in the 1980s, he shows that an aspiration for such an unprejudiced Weltanschauung still resides at the foundation of Vodou’s philosophical base. NOTES 1. Raymond Verdier, Vengeance : le face-à-face victime-agresseur (Paris: Editions Autrement—Collection Mutations 228, 2004), 5. The original French is:

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On doit prendre dès le départ la mesure de la force défensive, de la puissance réactive de cette énergie qui se met en mouvement, quand le sang versé, l’honneur blessé, l’être humilié produisent un mal sans raison, une souffrance injuste qui mettent en cause l’existence même, physique ou spirituelle, de l’homme. 2. Deren, Divine Horsemen, 62. 3. Seymour Menton, “The Last of the Just: Between Borges and García Márquez.” World Literature Today 59, no. 4 (1985): 518. 4. Glover, Haiti Unbound, xx. 5. Ibid., 135. 6. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 24. See conclusion of this chapter for a more in depth explanation of her notion of “reciprocity.” 7. Jean-Claude Fignolé, “One Hour for Eternity: A Conversation with Jean-Claude Fignolé, interview with Kathleen Gyssels, translated by Kaiama L. Glover,” Journal of Haitian Studies 16, no. 1 (2010 (interview 2007)): 9. 8. Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History,141–142. 9. Ibid., 63–65. 10. Ibid., 63, 65, 142. 11. Fignolé, “One Hour for Eternity,” 9. 12. John Patrick Walsh, Free and French in the Caribbean: Toussaint Louverture, Aimé Césaire and Narratives of Loyal Opposition (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2013), 27. 13. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 25. 14. Ibid., 4. 15. Ibid., 38. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. Victoria Famin, “Plus qu’une simple polyphonie: Voix spiralistes dans Aube tranquille et Une heure pour l’éternité de Jean-Claude Fignolé,” Journal of Haitian Studies 16.1, 140–141. 18. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 1. 19. In her study of Frankétienne, Glover characterizes his writing as a sort of “stylistics of possession,” by which “schizophonia, in other words, is an offering of the unmediated representation of a reality too absurd or too traumatic to narrate—a reality to which existing formulations of the word are insufficient” (Glover, Haiti Unbound, 183). That said, the way she uses the notion of “schizophonia,” intends an opacity, which while present in Fignolé is nonetheless decipherable. As such, like the role of possession in a ritualistic setting, Fignolé’s “schizophonia,” constitutes a temporary opacity, a sort of passage out of which both the protagonists and the reader emerge towards a great clarity. 20. Glover, Haiti Unbound, 183. 21. Ferdinand de Saussure explains that a phonetic or written “signe”’s “valeur” comes from the relationship between the signifier and the signified. The actual “signification” of the sign comes from the relationship that it has with other signs in the language. Thus, “signification” is the result of “le rapport” with other signs in the language (Saussure 159). 22. Foucault’s use of the word discourse to describe the distribution of power in society refers to the organization of speech into codes that enable certain entities to regulate the transit of power. At a macro-level, this “ordre du discours” defines the power dynamics of an entire society and of the individuals within this society. Those persons or institutions that master the “principes de contrôle et de la production du discours”—“the principles of control and the production of discourse”—detain the power within a society. Foucault’s view of French and European society from the end of the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth century provides a theoretical framework with which to study the depiction of European society in Aube tranquille, but it isn’t entirely reliable as a theoretical prism, for Aube tranquille and its prequel Les possédés de la pleine lune deal with the transitional moments in European societies,

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when such binaric structures were taking form as organizational forces of society. Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (1975, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison), a study of the penal system in France, demonstrates how the centralization of discourse’s production of meaning assures an omnipresence of power. He offers a spatial configuration of power in which a central watchtower entity has a line of vision that encompasses its entire surroundings. Thus, an all-powerful center reigns over its subjugated periphery. Foucault’s study suggests that since the end of the eighteenth century, oppositional constructions that posit a central, privileged term, or the same, against a marginalized, disadvantaged term, or the other, have organized French discourses of power. L’ordre du discours delineates three main dualities that define the order of power in French society: politics and sexuality, reason and mental illness, and truth and falsehood. In each case, the European discourse has advantaged the first term over the second. As a result the second, underprivileged term suffers the repression of the first. In other words, politics, reason, and truth respectively relegate sexuality, mental illness, and falsehood to the margin. In this way, discourses channel power through the production of meanings. In other words, a discourse is a machine whose components are the codes and structures that create signification. The way in which a society configures these codes creates a discourse that confers or withdraws power from certain persons or institutions. 23. Michel Foucault, L’ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 41. 24. V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 19. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 18. 27. Ibid., 5. 28. The island that incorporates today Haiti and the Dominican Republic has had multiple names: Quisqueya, Hispañola, and Saint-Domingue. Depending on the historical moment of the plot, the text uses one of the latter two terms. So as to emphasize the way in which the distinction between the modern-day plot is confusingly and inextricably linked to the storytelling that recounts the past, I will use the term “SaintDomingue/Haiti.” 29. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 27. 30. Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 31. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 94. 32. Louis Sala-Molins. Le Code Noir ou le calvaire de Canaan (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998), 10. The original French is: Le silence des très grands philosophes français m’intéresse. Ils savent et ils s’en moquent. Les silences des Lumières m’intéressent. . . . Le Code Noir en soi, dans l’intolérable obscénité de tous et chacun de ses articles ; son existence aberrante et parfaitement logique; la consistance du bouillon conceptuel qui rend possible son avènement; la façon dont ce bouillon peut tranquillement se grumeler, fermenter et engraisser la pensée en un siècle, le XVIIIè, dont la raison est le maître mot; la façon dont le Code Noir est accepté, rejeté, occulté par les nobles esprits du siècle, le XVIIIè, qui se gargarise de “vertu” : tout cela m’intéresse. 33. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 91, 127, 146. 34. Ibid., 62. 35. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 133. 36. Ibid., 138. 37. Ibid., 146. 38. Ibid., 213. 39. The verb “m’a conduite” in the text allows us to label the voice, presumably, on the tape as feminine. 40. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 7. The original French is:

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le matin, quand j’ouvre la fenêtre, elle entre dans ma journée avec son madras délavé, son air de petite vieille dont les yeux torves lisent de travers la souffrance . . . elle tend la main en signe d’amitié, je ne suis pas dupe de ses simagrées. 41. Ibid., 9. 42. Ibid., 69, 102. 43. Ibid., 7. The original French is: “car nous avons déjà dévoré, depuis le temps qu’elle me guette, nos réserves de patience et d’indulgence, rancoeurs, provocations, insinuations.” 44. Foucault, L’ordre du discours, 31. 45. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 7. The original French is: le matin, quand j’ouvre la fenêtre, elle entre dans ma journée avec son madras délavé, son air de petite vieille dont les yeux torves lisent de travers la souffrance . . . elle tend la main en signe d’amitié, je ne suis pas dupe de ses simagrées. 46. Ibid., 9. The original French is: elle lève la main le temps d’un sourire, . . . elle pointe son doigt sur cette part de ma vie penchée aux bords de la fenêtre, relevant de frustrations plus douleureuses que ma naissance, offrant l’obscurité de mon corps . . . , mon Dieu! ne plus penser à cette folle. 47. Ibid., 9. 48. Ibid., 102. The original French is: elle a tendu le poing vers une silhouette penchée à la fenêtre . . . comme chaque matin . . . refaisant le geste de l’espoir sans savoir que son bras maigrichon porte le désespoir de sa vie . . . appelée à une existence autre que je connais à travers les sanglots de ma mère reprenant un récit haché, torturé. 49. Sister Thérèse is a passenger on a flight. The flight is Air France’s thousandth voyage back and forth across the Atlantic and thus the flight attendants serve champagne. Stunned by her family’s history, Sister Thérèse becomes inebriated and slips into and out of sleep. The confusing relationships between the various characters is probably a result of her narrative’s incorporation of dream and reality for it seems that through dream and the alcohol’s effects, she becomes the characters of her mother’s story. 50. Ibid., 213–214. The original French is: ce matin, quand j’ai ouvert la fenêtre, encore une fois tu es entrée dans ma journée avec ton éternel madras délavé, ton air de petite vieille tassée par la souffrance . . . reste des larmes que les femmes de ton pays versent depuis des siècles sur l’amour, nos malheurs communs. 51. As explained throughout this book, Vodou provides for emotional as well as physical healing. In the novel, it is interesting to note that the only medicine that proves effective is that of Saintmilia, the healer of the plantation (Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 97, 125). The masters often called upon the plantation’s slave-healer for medical help. 52. Fischer, Modernity Disavowed, 239. 53. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 97. He writes that the “overwhelming reality remains that the universalist teaching of the Church prevented a racialist understanding of the Jews. Race thinking in general and anti-Semitism in particular became possible only with the advance of secular society and Enlightenment thought,” 47–48.

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54. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel, “Danbala/Ayida as Cosmic Prism: The Lwa as Trope for Understanding Metaphysics in Haitian Vodou and Beyond,” Journal of Africana Religions 1.4 (2013): 477. 55. Ibid., 24. 56. Ibid., 25. 57. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 12. 58. Ibid., 51. 59. Ibid., 73. As further analysis of the mask will show, until the end of the novel, skin color, race relations, and Sister Thérèse’s condemned family history are all mysteriously and inextricably linked. 60. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 50. The original French is: —les discriminations dont j’ai été victime . . . m’interdisent à jamais de me reconnaître sur un visage blanc —tu as dit qu’elle était brune? —je rectifie, sur un visage Blanc. 61. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008 [1952]), 90. The original French is: Le Noir chez lui, au XXè siècle, ignore le moment où son infériorité passe par l’autre . . . Et puis il nous fut donné d’affronter le regard blanc. . . . Dans le monde blanc, l’homme de couleur rencontre ces difficultés dans l’élaboration de son schéma corporel. (Fanon, Frantz. Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), 89) 62. Lewis R. Gordon, “The Black and the Body Politic: Fanon’s Existential Phenomenological Critique of Psychoanalysis” in Fanon: A Critical Reader, by Lewis R. Gordon, Denean Sharpley-Whiting, and Renée T. White (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996): 77. 63. For Gordon, the symbolic refers to the exterior world and its linguistic and sociocultural codes. The final pages of this chapter will discuss the various characters’ use of language as related to their negotiation to their changing society. 64. Gordon, “The Black and the Body Politic,” 79. 65. Fignolé, Les Possédés, 210. 66. Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, Mille Plateaux (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1980). The entire second chapter, titled “1914—Un seul ou plusieurs loups” is dedicated to rereading Freud’s analysis of the “Wolf man,” not necessarily as victim of sexual abuse, but of an individual’s consciousness as multiple. 67. Glover, Haiti Unbound, 183. 68. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods, 66. 69. Michel Foucault, Folie et déraison : histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1961), 18–19. 70. Ibid., 11, 29. 71. Fignolé, Les Possédés, 189, 213. Aube tranquille, which takes place a couple of decades later, makes allusions to Saintmilia’s painful history, one associated with complex lovers and nostalgia for an Africa that she probably never has known firsthand (126). 72. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 125. 73. Although the chief narrative voice of the novel is undeterminable, it is probable that the narrator of Les Possédés de la pleine lune is a woman. This woman is a modernday descendant of Agénor’s other lover, Violetta, a magical fish-woman who seduced Agénor away from Saintmilia. The compassionate female voice recounts her own grandmother’s childhood memory of Saintmilia’s strength as Agénor’s abandoned

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wife: “La force de la femme n’est-elle pas dans son apparente faiblesse ?” (Fignolé, Les possédés, 160). The last lines of the novel, pronounced by this feminine narrative voice, specifically attribute the power of the female community to Saintmilia: “Saintmilia ! Saintmilia ! Tu as assumé malgré nous ton destin d’amour et d’innocence. Jusqu’au bout. A travers toi, sans que tu le saches, toutes nos histoires de femmes blessées par l’amour, blessées dans l’amour, continuent. Dans la solitude et dans la folie. Continuent” (Fignolé, Les possédés, 215). 74. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 212. 75. Ibid., 125. 76. Ibid.,126. 77. A discussion of marvelous realism and the comparison of the two novels helps to better illustrate the stylistic differences between the two novels. In general, marvelous realism creates various “distancing devices,” making the “readers question the possibility of ascertaining historical reality” (Menton, 518). The specific modes by which such distancing takes place distinguish marvelous realism from other twentieth-century narrative styles. Literary critics Mercedez Lopez Baralt and Seymour Menton offer specific formal structures through which marvelous realism at once brings the reader in, but also keeps her/him at a distance. 1. “The matter-of-fact tone in which . . . horror” is narrated (Menton, 518). 2. The representation of a community in “magic, utopian isolation from the rest of the world” (Menton, 518). 3. The “absence of a bird’s-eye view” in which time and space are inaccurately represented (Menton, 519). 4. The plot of a marvelous realist text “aparece inmotivada, libre del sentido de la causalidad” (Lopez Baralt, 51). 5. The characters are not psychologically profound: “en general, nuestros escritores crean atmósferas, no caracteres” (Lopez Baralt, 52). 6. The temporal structure is usually chronological, but the spatial structure is circular (Lopez Baralt, 56). In order to show how the style and formal structures of the two novels are different, I use the above elements to compare the novels: 1. In Aube tranquille, Salomon’s death is tragic for both the characters and the reader, whereas, in Les Possédés de la pleine lune, the rendition of death and violence is either comic or matter-of-fact (Fignolé, Les Possédés, 59, 117). 2. In Aube tranquille, each location is specified within the context of colonial SaintDomingue or modern-day Haiti. Instead, in the prequel, the village of “Les Abricots” exists unto itself. Its narration does not reference either slavery, Saint-Domingue, or Haiti. 3. Both novels have a complex and difficult plot. In Les Possédés, quotidian, fantastic, and even psychological realities intertwine making any definitive comprehension of the plot impossible. Similarly, in Aube tranquille , the various narrative voices that represent the past and the present combine into a narrative structure for which one interpretation is unattainable. 4. In the Les Possédés de la pleine lune, Agénor’s and Saintmilia’s solitude remains incomprehensible. Saintmilia’s unrequited love for Agénor, her forced relationship with Louiortesse, and her lack of a child are possible reasons for her solitude. However, even these facts are indeterminable; that is, of the three facts listed above, the text only specifically identifies her childless situation. We must infer her state-of-mind from other events in the novel. In contrast, from the outset of Aube tranquille, the sources of suffering are clear: in short, all of the characters’ solitude comes from unequal power relations between blacks and whites. 5. This point is particularly relevant to our discussion of the novel, for as we will see, in Aube tranquille, only the white characters narrate their troubles using a narrative voice in the first person singular—a voice that reveals to the reader

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All of the stylistic features describing marvelous realism appear in Les Possédés de la pleine lune; conversely, in Aube tranquille , all but the third element are absent. 78. Jean Jonassaint, “Beyond Painting or Writing: Franketienne’s Poetic Quest,” Research in African Literatures, Summer 2004: 141. 79. For more on opacity as related to spiralism, see Glover’s Haiti Unbound. 80. At the very end of the novel, there are references to slavery as a cause of the characters’ suffering (189). Interestingly, it is the only moment in which the text confers the character of Salomon with the use of free-indirect discourse. 81. Unlike in Aube tranquille, moments of happiness exist in the prequel; however, those who feel joy must conceal the emotion: Le jour de notre mariage, il souffla ses vapeurs, sa brume, ses orages et s’en vint rire, rire, rire de la folie de ceux qui, mésestimant sa rancune, nous avaient accompagnés à l’église pour nous aider à supporter le poids du bonheur, notre solitude à deux. (196) Le bonheur se vit en silence et presque en cachette. Exprimé ou trop voyant, il est une invitation au malheur. (147) 82. Toukouma is the only black character who does not speak. When the text’s narration relates Toukouma’s organization of the slave revolt, it does so using the third person. 83. In contrast, conversations between two white characters take place often (Cécile and Wolf, Sonja and Wolf). 84. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 68. 85. Ibid., 111–13. 86. Ibid., 192–93. 87. Ibid., 196. 88. Ibid., 114, 188, 213. 89. For examples of such dialogues in which Wolf finds himself in a conversation controlled by his interlocutor, see Wolf’s conversations with Salomon (117, 119), with Maïté (42–43), with Saintmilia (212–213), and with Cécile (47, 56, 80). 90. The plot itself does not achieve closure. The reader may assume, but not confirm the following events: Salomon resists Sonja Lebrun’s love for him; Sonja Lebrun dies at the hand of Toukouma and the rebels who rally around Saintmilia; Wolf is wounded by a slave owner in what seems to be a feeble attempt to save Salomon; and once landed in Haiti, Sister Thérèse has an affair with the air hostess. 91. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 71. 92. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 211–12. 93. Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 4. 94. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 217. 95. Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre (La Découverte, 2007 (1961)). 96. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004 (1961). 97. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 216. 98. Ibid., 212.

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Ibid. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 80–81. Ibid., 82. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 160. Ibid., 165, 169. Fignolé, Les possédés,192–93. Ibid. Ibid., 196–97. The original French is: Son [celle de Louiortesse] effigie grimaça. Plus que jamais, elle était seule avec elle-même. Masque de cruauté. Le miroir vola en éclats, dispersant sur le sol mille rictus dépolis.

109. The citations from Les Possédés de la pleine lune’s association of the words “mask” and “effigy” are of significance because both the definition of the word “effigy” and the presence of the effigy of Sonja Biemme in Aube tranquille (212) inform our understanding of the mask in Fignolé’s novels. The most common definition of the word effigy refers to the representation of a person on a medal or coin. In French, to condemn a person “by effigy” is to trap a representation of the person—such as a painting, statue, or doll. It does not matter whether or not Sonja Biemme does or does not die at Saintmilia’s hand, what is clear is that Salomon intervenes to put an end to the cycle of vengeance. 110. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 114, 194, 203, 214. 111. Sonja Lebrun and Salomon spend all of their time together. It seems that Salomon resists Sonja’s advances not for lack of sentiment, but for principle (Ibid., 175). However, there may have been one intimate encounter between Salomon and Sonja. Sonja accuses Salomon of raping her for which she condemns him to death. Either she makes an advance on him and he resists, or, after their encounter, Sonja’s regret and disgust with her own attraction to him encourages her to accuse him (Ibid., 197, 131). 112. Ibid., 216. 113. Ibid., 51. 114. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 216. 115. The Petwò family of spirits or lwas are the so called, “hot-blooded” spirits. They are called upon in times of intense trouble, when a decision or an intervention must be made quickly. 116. Deren, Divine Horsemen, 63. 117. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 212. 118. Deren, Divine Horsemen, 63. 119. Ibid., 309. 120. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 36. Wolf explains that Cécile’s husband attends his slaves’ ceremonies once a week. He believes that by honoring the feared spirit of Ezili Dantò, she will protect him and his plantation. Thanks to his absence, Wolf may have his affair with Cécile. 121. Ibid., 92. 122. Deren, Divine Horsemen, 143. 123. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 216. 124. Castor, Ethique vaudou, 146. The original French is: En résumé, les loa pétro [the Petwò lwas], nous croyons l’avoir suffisamment démontré, annoncent ou dénoncent des situations de déséquilibre, d’écart et d’injustice. Des situations qui nécessitent, pour leur rétablissement, l’appel à une force extérieure, extrême même, seule capable de les subjuguer. Et c’est sans doute l’extrémisme, le radicalisme des mesures appliquées qui a valu à ces mistè [lwa] les épithètes “dur” et “méchant.” 125. Ibid.,152.

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126. Without the ceremony of the consecration of the soul, Sonja’s soul becomes vulnerable to drifting and ultimate kidnapping by a bokor, or malicious Vodou priest, for condemnation to the state of zombification. 127. Although the citations use “Erzuli/e,” I use “Ezuli.” 128. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods, 15. 129. It may seem that Aube tranquille’s identification of “vaudou” as a separate system of society—neither European, nor African—is nothing more than a literary rendition of Desmangles’s sociological proposal. However, Aube tranquille precedes The Faces of the Gods by two years. Moreover, at the time of its publication, Desmangles’s proposal that Vodou is not a syncretism of African and European religious traditions, but rather is an original societal and religious expression, was considered innovative to the study of Vodou. In a sense, we may say that Aube tranquille introduced the idea of Vodou as “tertium quid” to the academic scene, or rather that, discussions amongst Haitian intellectuals refuted that of Western intellectuals on the concept of syncretism. For an excellent discussion of the debate around syncretism, see Miguel A. De La Torre’s Santería: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (2004). 130. Fignolé, Aube tranquille, 214. 131. Ibid., 217. The original French is: “aubes tranquilles” and “au commencement c’était l’Afrique.” 132. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods, 66. 133. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 206. The original French is: Supériorité ? Infériorité ? Pourquoi tout simplement ne pas essayer de toucher l’autre, de sentir l’autre, de me révéler l’autre ? Ma liberté ne m’est-elle donc pas donnée pour édifier le monde du Toi ? A la fin de cet ouvrage, nous aimerions que l’on sente comme nous la dimension ouverte de toute conscience. Mon ultime prière: O mon corps, fais de moi toujours un homme qui interroge ! (Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs, 188) 134. 135. 136. 137.

Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods, 15. Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods, 24. McCarthy Brown, Mama Lola, 15. Castor, Ethique vaudou, 29.

FIFTEEN Possession as Fluidity: Finding Equilibrium under a Neoliberal Order Kettly Mars’s L’Heure hybride and Aux frontières de la soif

In this last part, my book claims that the depiction of Haiti and its spaces are in the midst of a crossroads that is heavily informed by what Mark Schuller identifies as an acceleration, since the early 1990s, of the mostly nefarious consequences of a neoliberal agenda. I propose that two novels by Kettly Mars actively seek to understand the complex spaces created by “Haiti’s poor majority,” by those who are “meant to benefit” from international aid, but who “escap[e] attention.” 1 The novels are Kettly Mars’s L’Heure hybride—Hybrid Hour (2005) and Aux frontières de la soif—At the Borders of Thirst (2013). I argue that Mars’s depiction of urban space predates, but does not preclude the immediate consequences of the 2010 earthquake on Haiti’s urban landscape. I situate my discussion of the novels against two backgrounds. The first engages a general discussion of space and identity. I use Munro’s, Glover’s, and Ménard’s recent work on twentieth-century and early twenty-first century Haitian novels, as well as critical theory’s preoccupation with what it means to “dwell” (Heidegger, Lefebvre, Appadurai) and “aspire” (Appadurai) to better futures in places overrun by material poverty. An undergirding theme to the analysis of “poverty” in this chapter will be the trickiness of speaking about “poverty.” For an audience in the “global north” acclimated to what is supposed to be a generalized sharing of materials and services for what is assumed to be a rather large and mainstream middle-class, the material realities of Haiti are unacceptable. To consider them as anything but unacceptable is to risk en329

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gaging in a discourse that makes light of the dire realities of the “slow violence” (Nixon) imposed upon peoples living in poverty. At the same time, as noted in the first part of this book’s discussion of Agamben and more general poverty theory, there is the problem of putting into play a discourse that posits the “global north” against the “global south,” and implicitly, involves racialized notions of “culture,” as Trouillot’s Global Transformations suggests. “Poverty” then, as a critical category, as I have argued in chapter 4, is a tricky discursive space, a catch-22 that traps most theorizing models in a viciously redundant interplay between what it means to “have” and to “have-not.” This last part turns to the work of Kettly Mars, where “poverty” in her novel L’Heure hybride, when pronounced as a word, is designated as a space to be avoided. In the two novels by Mars that I consider, “poverty” as my analyses propose, is present; yet, despite the statistics, the presence of humanitarian aid workers, and NGO projects, in a more up-close and personal dealing with the lives of individual human beings, “poverty” turns out to be a relative, and even, at times, utterly useless term. It is not that trying to resolve material poverty is not important: for a protagonist such as Fito in Aux frontières de la soif, it constitutes the raison d’être of his professional choices. What is as at stake in the everyday lives of individuals is managing to find the Mbembian “potentialities” in the “unhappiness” imbricated in such poverty. And such management of self, of one’s own states of consciousness, of the way in which the self and its subjectivities deal with the bodies, selves, and subjectivities of other persons who make up a person’s entourage, whether chosen or imposed by a globalizing geopolitics of humanitarian aid, is tied in with possession: possession as the process by which persons again find their grounding, by which they re-“seat” (Stephenson) themselves, repossess themselves. In the earlier parts of this book, I have suggested that “possession” is much less about pathology, than it is about healing. If there exists a pathology, it is determined by the geopolitical structures that put individuals and peoples into situations that seem unbearable to those who “have.” In fact, if the simplistic binary for much of the twentieth century posited “the West” against the “non-West,” today as we have seen in chapter 3, the binary is much more about “the poor” and “the rich,” an antithetical structure, which is sloppily grafted onto yet another dichotomy, one that opposes “the global south” to the “global north.” Nixon’s or Schuller’s scholarship reveals and gives more depth to the gross inequities that seem to be accentuated in a twenty-first century world order, and they argue rightly so, that such inequities are not excusable, that we must continue to work towards their solutions. Yet, political pundits, humanitarian experts, the media at large, and even scholars often make the jump from the “not excusable” to the “unfathomable.” In other words, scholars such as Clitandre, Fischer, Flaugh,

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Glover, and Ménard, as we have seen earlier in this book, explain that depicting a geopolitical situation or material conditions as “unimaginable” is dangerous because such representations imply that a person or a community living in the space that is conceived of by “the West” as a “have-not” is to inadvertently render them “freakish” (Flaugh), to “exceptionalize” them (Clitandre). As chapter 14’s consideration of Mars’s work illustrates, to live in difficult material conditions does not mean that a community or a person does not: “have”; that they don’t live, “dwell” (Heidegger); “aspire” (Alexander, Appadurai, Sheller); exist beyond Agamben’s “bare life” (Fischer, Glover); “suffer” (Bok, Clitandre, Hron); “belong” (Saunders); or “have choices” (Ménard). 2 In other words, to be resilient is to suffer, to have “only two doctors per ten thousand people” 3 is unacceptable, but it is also to find alternative ways to heal. This book’s Introduction suggested that extreme suffering is not the sole (non)commodity of those living in the global south; part I of this book considered recent theories of dispossession, that is dispossession read as “enforced deprivation of land, rights, livelihood, desire, or modes of belonging,” 4 and its particular relationship to Haitian studies; part II of the book traced how the notion of “spirit” possession, that is, the fact of being overtaken by another, whether the favorable manifestation of a lwa or the unwelcome visit of a demon, has an obfuscated, but traceable lineage in French thought; part III reads Hadriana dans tous mes rêves as a text that that reveals that French and Vodou thought systems are far more imbricated one in the other than Western discourse would care to admit, suggesting that both zombification and possession are primarily modes of, if not healing, of “working through”; and part IV shows how possession is a method with which to work through precariousness and ensure justice. The last part of this book looks at texts that don’t need to articulate, explain, justify, or even name their healing processes, they just put such practices into play. If Vodouyizans don’t have the habit of naming their own care-work and care-networks 5 as “Vodou,” but rather are concerned with serving the spirits 6 and cultivating a practice of mastery over the human body, psyche, and the physical and spiritual communities to which they belong, then the novels of Mars belong to a Vodouyizan way of being. They might garner international attention in the form of awards and contracts for translations into other languages, but her novels, unlike Depestre’s prose fiction, do not translate or explicitly name their own deployment of a Vodou aesthetic/ethical order; they don’t even perform them in some sort of “lived theater”; they just do it. In other words, they aren’t concerned with the distance between “authenticity” and “fiction,” between “performed theater” and “lived theater,” between “poverty” and “extreme poverty”: Mars’s novels take all of their protagonists’ sufferings seriously, and don’t try to hierarchize or classify these traumatisms. They all suffer, and they all must seek healing.

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Mars’s work, as this chapter will suggest, is exemplary of how possession functions, in Stephenson’s words, to enable a person to again “become ‘self-possessed,’” after one has been “unseated.” 7 The entire history of any Caribbean peoples, and if we follow Hron, any immigrant, refugee, and/or exile, is to be dispossessed. To locate modes of expression, of narration, at once embodied and literary is not just a metaphor, it is as we saw in Glissant’s discussion of Haitian art, one of the, if not the, means of healing. If French philosophers and their descendants, such as Butler and Nixon, use the image and word “possession” so easily, it is that “possession” is an extremely useful concept. As such, it is far, far from a pathology, instead, as Stephenson’s work on Jung shows, and Hron’s work on trauma demonstrates, possession is probably one of the most useful means of achieving healing. In the most basic of senses, if a person is displaced, cut off from her/his place of origin, physically violated by the slave trade, slavery, dictatorship, neo/colonialisms, and poverty, then the home, the only place a person can rely upon, is her/his body. In this way, the body, both the physical body, and especially the psychic body must be taken care of. Vodou then is a philosophy of taking meticulous care, especially of the psychic body, and possession for its part is a practice, one of the most expressive manifestations of this healing, for as seen earlier, Beauvoir, Castor, and Daniel’s work suggests other modes of healing practices in Vodou. If Joseph Breuer’s patient Anna O. (Bertha Pappenheim) coined the terms “chimney sweeping” and the “talking cure,” and Breuer would refer to the articulation of pain into the “cathartic method,” then possession is the articulation of pain through both words and bodily expressions. As we saw in the introduction and in Hadriana’s narrator’s analysis of the young woman’s possession in the ritual that followed Hadriana’s death, possession offers itself up as a text to be read and interpreted not just by the mambo or houngan, but by the entire community. Where psychiatric therapy for the most part pathologizes bodily expressions, privileges verbal over physical communication, and ascribes the role of “reading” a diagnosis to one or two therapists or physicians, possession does all of the above but in a communal setting. Possession is as Daniel’s definition of “embodied knowledge” shows (see chapter 12) inclusive, 8 integrating the verbal with the physical, the specialist (i.e., houngan or mambo) with the larger community of those who both participate and observe a ritual. In this way, Mars’s novels are written to allow all readers to bear witness; they present themselves as literary rituals in which all are called on not necessarily to serve the lwa, although they may be read as devotionals to the spirits, but to look upon a geopolitical situation in ways not usually presented by scholars, diplomats, or political pundits. The two novels of Kettly Mars’s about which I write deal with sexuality, sexual identity, gender, and poverty; and they also engage urban space, in such a way as to suggest that “citizenship” as belonging

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(Saunders, Smith) or citizenship “from below” (Sheller) exist both in contact with, but mostly largely ignored by more official power structures. The individuals in Mars’s novels do find vectors for exercising agency within the interstices of a geopolitical order. While Trouillot’s “new subjectivities” are certainly emerging from “new world orders,” so too have parallel ones always existed. If in Depestre’s work, Vodou philosophy is presented as a subjectivity, a way-of-being that has existed for centuries next to a more European bourgeois order, then Mars’s novels show how this Voudouyizan Haitian “global vision of the world” 9 is itself everchanging, and particularly changing under the pressures of a post-Duvalierian (post-Cold War) era in Haiti. Mars’s novels do not call attention to Vodou: while for a reader familiar with the devotional rites to the lwas, the context is clear, the novels may also be read outside of any reference to Vodou. What matters is the role that the body plays negotiating an individual’s relationship with a drastically changing and gravely deteriorated urban public space in Haiti. Mars’s novels, I suggest, showcase how the unclear and messy relationships between class status and economic capacity reshape representations of what it means for a space to be “habitable.” DEPICTING HAITI’S “SLOW VIOLENCE” While the 2010 earthquake and its aftermaths are a context for Mars’s Aux frontières de la soif, I will speak of the earthquake not as a mega-event that marks a change, but rather as the most mediatized of countless events in the cause-effect sequence of what Nixon 10 calls “slow violence,” that trajectory of violences—seemingly celebratory (the departure of U.S. troops from Iraq) or largely invisible (as in the effects of pollution on drinking water)—which accumulate into “the domino effects of exponential environmental risk, not least the intergenerational risk of food security.” 11 Drawing on Schuller’s anthropological research in Killing with Kindness, I suggest that Mars’s novels point to an acceleration of the debilitating effects of neoliberal policy that took place after the first part of the first presidential term of Jean-Bertrand Aristide at the beginning of the 1990s. As Schuller tells it, by the time of Aristide’s re-election and return to the presidency in 2001, Haiti had become a true “republic of NGOs,” whereby the administration of health services, education, and other social policy by NGO’s had become the modus operandi. 12 By the mid-2000s, the resistance to the neoliberal order that Aristide had attempted at the beginning of his first term would no longer be imaginable, for North American efforts to control Haiti would only seem to have changed tactics since its involvement in Duvalierism. Thus, as Schuller narrates it, the recent political history of Haiti is one intimately, and almost uniquely linked to the “kindness” associated with neoliberal policy-making: that of

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humanitarianism, and more specifically to how donor funding is managed and accounted for. The gross disappointment of the Haitian people in the democratic process after Aristide’s first and second rehabilitations to the presidency of Haiti, resulted in a sort of realization of just how overbearing the neoliberal humanitarian order had become. For after all, when the price of a tap-tap ride increases to as much as five times what its price had been two years prior, 13 the average person has no choice but to accept to work with and within the neoliberally driven NGO-structure imposed upon the nation. 14 In Haiti, Schuller identifies the same “slow violence” that Nixon articulates in a transnational setting afflicting the “global south”: “Unlike in Iraq or Afghanistan, where we kill with drones, ‘smart’ bombs, and troop surges, too many people in Haiti are nonetheless dying from the consequences of our aid.” 15 One of the problems, Nixon points out, is that “slow violence” is at a representational disadvantage; how to “render slow violence visible”? 16 “To confront slow violence requires, then, that we plot and give figurative shape to formless threats whose fatal repercussions are dispersed across space and time.” 17 And when, these representations are profiled, especially in the case of Haiti, as we have seen in the second part of this book and as many Haitianist scholars have pointed out over the past decades, they suffer from a grotesque and debilitating exceptionalism. 18 What Mars’s work does, I argue, is to respond to an urgency: that of offering its readers representations of what it means to live in Haiti since the seemingly permanent on-set of “the republic of NGOs.” Although I do not have the space to go into it in this chapter, it becomes obvious that together with Dany Laferrière’s Heading South (2009) and L’énigme d’un retour (2009), Mars’s L’Heure hybride (2005) and Aux frontières de la soif (2013) shift from an insistence on the debilitating consequences of political dictatorship to a concern with the extreme economic poverty that “trickle[s]-down” 19 from the invasive policies of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, or Interim Haiti Recovery Commission, while it was still operational in 2010–2011. 20 In depicting Haiti today, Aux frontières de la soif resists the exoticization implicit in the “fiery spectacle” 21 of an event such as the 2010 earthquake. Such an assertion might seem outlandish, given the extremely ubiquitous deployment of not just sexuality, but of problematic sexual spaces, such as incest and child prostitution. Through taboo issues, Mars’s narratives nonetheless find a way to compellingly and ungratuitously narrate the less globally spectacular consequences of an ever-intrusive transnational, neocolonial order.

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CONSTRUCTING SPACE AND THE HAITIAN NOVEL In his analysis of Haitian twentieth and early twenty-first century literature since 1946, Martin Munro “affirms and interprets exile as the master trope of Haitian culture.” 22 Munro explains that the year 1946 marks the moment of “bitter disappointment for the La Ruche group,” the literary/ activist group that saw the future of Haiti within a more cosmopolitan space than that presented by the noiriste ascension to power under President Dumarsais Estimé, and later and infamously under François Duvalier. 23 As such, 1946 becomes the year that demarcates the beginning of what is widely recognized today as a sort of “brain drain” of Haiti, the expulsion and exodus of many of Haiti’s intellectuals. The departure of Haitians abroad, especially during and after the African independences and the Québec struggle for sovereignty would also be due in part to the high level of education of many Haitians, who would accept jobs abroad in newly independent countries in Africa, as well as a sovereign-seeking Québec. Within this trope of exile, Munro reads the novels of Jacques Stephen Alexis, René Depestre, Emile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, Edwidge Danticat, and also the poetry of writer/politicians such as François Duvalier himself, in dialogue with the notion of “home.” “Home” and its related term “exile” become categories of critical analysis through which to read depictions of Haiti. As a point of orientation for his exploration of exile, Munro engages a human rights discourse, 24 the desire for home and/or homeland: “[o]ne of the most important of these neglected, unattained freedoms is the freedom to inhabit, to occupy space, to establish a home.” 25 At the end of an in-depth deliberation of what it means to be “home” and to “dwell,” 26 Munro questions: “have the Haitian people ever attained the status of the dweller, or the abitan in the Haitian language?” 27 His considerations reveal home as exile: “one is tempted to say that the only place that the people have ever inhabited is that of exile, that the Haitian people are rooted in uprootedness, and that to be Haitian is to be in exile.” 28 Corroborating Munro’s general analysis of Haitian literature and more specifically of Laferrière’s earlier novel Pays sans chapeau (1996), which in an interview Laferrière characterizes as the “‘the book of return,’” 29 Laferrière’s narrator thirteen years later in L’énigme du retour confirms: “On ne peut être haïtien qu’hors d’Haïti”—“One cannot be Haitian but outside of Haiti.” 30 Ménard, for her part, as noted in the Preface, insists that Haiti is livable, and that individuals choose, and have always chosen, to leave, and also to stay. When in his 1979 novel, under Duvalierism, Frankétienne’s narrator writes, “Or, nous n’avons nulle intention d’aller ailleurs, même si nous bâillons de faim, de peur et d’impatience.”—“And, we have no intention of going anywhere else, even if we are gaping out hunger, fear, and impatience,” 31 it is clear that there exists a tension between “staying” and “leaving.” That said, the

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notion of “exile” remains one that I argue is pertinent to this book’s discussion of “possession.” To re-“seat” oneself, to again (and again) become re-self-possessed in contexts that are unarguably challenging is to constantly enter into exile into oneself, to retreat into one’s own microcommunities, into one’s own body. In the aftermath of the earthquake, rumors circulated that even the lwas had abandoned Haiti, a theme that comes up in Mars’s Aux frontières de la soif. Others explained that it was the lwas that allowed them to carry on, to be “resilient,” that is, to begin to work through the overwhelming trauma. 32 Mars’s novels, if read through a Vodou philosophical lens, deal with both the questioning of the lwas unflinching loyalty to those devoted to them, and also with those, who did doubt their continued support. Regardless, in both novels, outside circumstances taking place within the country (material poverty, the earthquake, the conditions of the Internally Displaced Persons [IDP] camps) force the individual characters to be acutely aware of the tenuous nature of their much-cherished living circumstances (Rico in L’Heure hybride); in some cases, they must leave their homes (victims of the earthquake in Aux frontières de la soif); for other protagonists, their materially safe homes becomes infernal sites of existential angst, to be avoided at all costs (Fito in Aux frontières de la soif); and for still others, there is comfort in their abode (Jean-Claude in Aux frontières de la soif). Munro’s work, and more particularly the novels that he has chosen to guide his study of Haitian literature trace a representation of Haitian space in which Haiti is “an uninhabitable place of transit and ongoing exile.” 33 Yet, Douglas’s Frankétienne and Rewriting, Glover’s Haiti Unbound, and Jonassaint’s Typo/ Topo/ Poéthique: sur Frankétienne (see chapter 13) on twentieth-century literature produced within Haiti in much of the same period dealt with by Munro, points not necessarily to another reading of Haitian space, but at least to another iteration of what it means for Haiti to be inhabitable, but difficultly so. Haiti Unbound published three years after Munro’s, focuses on three writers who stayed in Haiti under Duvalierism: Frankétienne, Jean-Claude Fignolé, and René Philoctète. Where “home” and “exile” become the tropes through which Munro explores the literature of those Haitian writers who identify as Haitians, but live and write outside of Haiti-as-geographic-space, Douglas and Glover identify and think through the tropes of the spiral and of the zonbi, as at once metaphors and veritable lived experiences (see chapter 12), both suggestive of the complex ways through which Haitians in Haiti have lived, revolted, challenged, shown “resilience,” “survived,” and passed on. Whether from a position of exile or from denizen-ship, the collective scholarship of recent Haitian literary scholarship contextualizes the novels within the spaces formed by the eras that led up to and included what would become the two brutal regimes of Duvalier father and son. These works trace other paths that intersect with, but are not limited to the

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context of the dictatorship, trajectories such as Marxism, black radicalism, pan-Africanism, Surrealism, postcolonial critical theory, and other aesthetic forms, including poetry and painting. Literary craft serves at once as a mirror to, an outlet from, and a solution to such macabre existences. Yet, all the while operating within a space of literary aesthetics, Glover and Munro push beyond the stereotypical (but seemingly unavoidable) caveat that “an endlessly creative culture” 34 must be bred out what Cosentino, as seen earlier, in citing Kamau Brathwaite, describes as: “a cultural imperative . . . ‘art must come out of catastrophe.’” 35 For his part, Munro reveals the novel as the Haitian home-away-from home, a space that is making singular interventions into what it means to write “autobiography,” “autofiction,” “national,” or “grand” narratives, and more generally, is engaging in a creative “contamination of one genre by the other.” 36 Frankétienne’s ample use in Les Affres d’un défi of the word, “enchevêtrement”—“entwining,” articulates the density of opacity, and also at times, the ghoulish right to suffer (both causing suffering and enduring it). The aesthetic of opacity is to cultivate denseness, as extreme beauty or as overwhelming repugnance, and Glover calls upon us, as readers unfamiliar with it, not to run from it, nor to resist our troublesome fascination with it, but to welcome the invitation to enter into its seemingly uninviting, immoral, and/or aggressive chaos. From the juxtaposition of Munro’s work on exiled writers and Douglas’s, Glover’s, and Jonassaint’s books on writers-who-stayed under the Duvalier regimes, published in the last six years, the question that emerges, is not so much, is “Haiti” “inhabitable,” but rather how is “Haiti” inhabitable? As considered earlier in this book (chapters 4 and 5), “Haiti” is itself a complex word. Yet, in Mars’s work, it is an easily defined word: it is a nation-state in the Caribbean that shares a border with the Dominican Republic. In a public discussion with Dany Laferrière, 37 Mars expressed her own surprise that Laferrière’s narrator in L’énigme du retour should problematize the relationship between “Haiti,” “Haitian,” and “Haitianness.” 38 It is clear that for Mars, and reiterating Ménard, despite the problems challenging it, “Haiti” is much more than an idea, much more than a space negatively connoted by the many stereotypes that have weighed it down. No, for Mars, it is a nation-state, with a strong sense of identity and self-worth. If “Haiti” exists as an idea in many, mostly white persons’ minds, and in the context of Haiti, many blan’s minds (that is, foreigners) then in Mars’s novels Haiti is very much a reality, anchored in a geographical place. Ménard’s and Mars’s strong sense of Haiti as a place to “choose” to live in, as a “nation” in all of the senses that Benedict Anderson and Michel-Rolph Trouillot ascribe to it, is an invitation to explore the question, “how is ‘Haiti’” inhabitable?’ What is at stake now in critical discussions of Haiti’s extreme poverty is not whether Haiti is poor 39 or so exceptionally poor that it represents itself as “uninhabitable,” but rather,

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what does “habitation” look like for those who for whatever reason have “remained” in Haiti. Even more importantly, how do Haitian citizens, who despite full consciousness of the debilitative state-of-affairs and who might actually have a choice to leave, represent Haiti? This chapter is interested in adding a third articulation to Munro’s and Glover’s work, one that has only just recently started to be deliberated in the novels of Kettly Mars and Dany Laferrière: how is residence in Haiti manifesting itself and what does such dwelling signify? How are definitions of “home” being rearticulated and redefined by those who live within and/ or amongst the deepest (and often unintentional) underbelies of neoliberalism’s disastrous policies? SENSUALIZING SPACE IN KETTLY MARS’S L’HEURE HYBRIDE In Mars’s L’Heure hybride, the first-person narrator Jean François Eric L’Hermite (i.e., Rico), 40 who recounts the novel’s storyline, explains: Upon sight of this enormous winged cylinder, that looks like a flying coffin, I feel a panicked fear. But few people know that. One of my biggest secrets. I wonder if I’ll ever leave. The idea has often crossed my mind, but the desire has never been strong enough for me to actually decide to create a new identity for myself in a new land. Visa, I can easily get one thanks to my relationships. . . . Don’t they say that the debts of the bedroom are eternal? . . . But no, such an adventure has never enticed me. I’m too lazy to put in hours in a factory for the White man, too underqualified to work as a bureaucrat, and too handsome to go sell myself for sale prices in these megapoles that cultivate a systematized competition. 41

The passage, while long, lays out the ambivalent space in which choice and non-choice confound themselves in a non-binary: yes, Rico, can leave; yes, he can get himself a visa, but he is, as he realizes in telling his story, not only terrified of flying, but completely disinterested in “succeeding” North American or Euro style. Rico is ultimately terrified of finding himself alone. 42 Here, any reader who is familiar with L’Heure hybride might accuse me of missing the point: Rico is scared of his own possibly repressed and/or burgeoning homosexuality, but the narrative arc of the story is about much more than same-sex sexuality. Instead, I suggest it is one that traces Rico’s fears, from overcoming poverty to surmounting the social alienation associated with engagement in same-sex encounters. Munro’s work on “dwelling” paired with Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s work on embodied sensual and/or sexual experience in the Caribbean context, 43 as well as Mars’s own text, forces the reader to look beyond a reductive (and Euro-centric) reading of what it means to engage in same-sex desire. Rico admits fear of social alienation, yet, he does not shy away from solitude; in fact, he

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cultivates it: “Solitude is bigger than me, sometimes it submerges me but I don’t push it away. Sometimes I’m even looking for it, to brave it, to draw force from it.” 44 By nurturing the fear of solitude, by taking it on, it becomes non-fear. What Rico’s narrative voice privileges is not a space of economic or social success. He is not concerned so much with leaving or staying in Haiti, nor does he obsess over how to avoid loneliness. In a same vein, he is not interested in living a socially open homosexuality. Rather, his aspiration, it seems, is to continue to foster—regardless of his age, social or economic class, or his lovers—a space of continual engagement with all that provides sensuality: sustaining the memory of his mother; a quality of light; a repertoire of smells and noises, carefully articulated into the rhythm of his day and into the spaces that he inhabits, observes, and traverses—the crevices of his room; the intimacy of the roads, markets, cars, clubs, or homes he frequents; or the sedating effects of his alcohol consumption. His fear, then, is a more general one, the facts with which he comes to terms at different phases of his life (his fear of poverty, his fear of appearing too young, his fear of getting old, his desire for other men). Yet, it is the nature of his fear, one that he never fully articulates for his reader, which is the most compelling to a discussion of dwelling. His biggest apprehension, I claim, is to lose the capacity to cultivate the sensuality that encloses him, a swaddling that is for him the ultimate means to confront an under-theorized trio: poverty; the solitude that accompanies poverty; and the anxiety that surrounds the fear of solitude. In recounting both his first fears as an adult, and the memories of the trepidations of his mother, Rico explains: Because the main objective is to avoid poverty at any cost. Not to deny it, poverty, but to avoid it, to mystify it, otherwise she’ll eat you raw like a carnivorous plant. 45

Sensuality becomes his way of avoiding and tricking himself out of material poverty. He does not leave his home until 8:30 p.m., 46 when “subtilement, la topographie de la rue a changé”—“when subtly, the topography of the street has changed,” 47 when the street becomes mother: “Voilà, I’ve entered the street and the earth has welcomed me, she has bent her knees to take me in as one bends over to lift up a child.” 48 Kaussen explains that the “airplane signifies a world condensed through technology, mapped by ‘blancs’ [whites; foreigners] who have reduced Haiti to a tiny speck on their world map, the better to contain it.” 49 Rico stays in Haiti because the spaces he imagines outside of the patterns of his life, whether the sterility of the airplane, the rigidity of the “megapole,” or the aspiration towards North American success, cut him off from the sensuality that assures his ability to, day-in and day-out, gain strength from acknowledging, identifying, and confronting that which scares him.

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In the end, it isn’t that he’s scared of flying, nor is it that he is fearful of leaving, it’s that he is quite certain, that no place will coddle him within the intimate “humanization” 50 of the life he has constructed for himself. Using the circumstances available to him between Port-au-Prince and Pétionville: his room in his boarding house, the streets, cars, clubs, and his lovers’ beds, Rico invests his life with a struggle to renegotiate what Tinsley characterizes as colonized spaces and the bodies that inhabit them: “Like the African bodies claimed and altered by colonialism, the region’s waterways, flora, and earth constitute concrete, contested sites whose manipulated materiality matters complexly.” 51 Only, Rico’s sites of contestation are the urban landscapes and the poor who inhabit them. His space is composed quite literally of those who are poorer than he. Along his walk to his nightly adventure, he notes: “J’aime les petites gens, leur amitié me rassure. De savoir que la vie m’a de justesse épargné le même sort qu’eux me les rend sympathiques”—“I like the more humble, their friendship comforts me. To know that life only just barely preserved me from their same fate makes them even more likable.” 52 It is precisely his fluid relationship to the street and its denizens, with whom he also has sexual relations, 53 which enables him to survive, thrive, and enjoy inhabiting Haiti. As seen in chapter 4, Trouillot reminds us that “[w]hat defines the postcolonized subject is the ability to engage in baroque practices fundamentally ambiguous, fluid, and modifiable even where there are clear, written, and precise rules.” 54 If the rule of neoliberalism is “to end poverty,” Rico accepts that the solution to such an extremely complex problem is not close-at-hand: in the meantime, he’ll survive by creating a fluid relationship to the realities that he must live day in and day out. In describing the lexicon of fastness that has been implemented by activists to make more vivid the threats of environmental damage on the world’s poor, Nixon writes, “So to render slow violence visible entails, among other things, redefining speed.” 55 What Mars’s narrator does is quite the opposite: he engages the slowness of sensuality to better deal with what it means, in a larger world order, to be a citizen that doesn’t count: I don’t count, I’m an ant, a citizen of the shadows, I don’t pay taxes but believe in the longevity of institutions. I tell myself it can always be worse. Poverty, I know it, I was able to get myself out of it. 56

Rico is clear about what he lives on and how he lives: while not dying of hunger, and completely eclipsing from his narrative any concern of sexually transmitted diseases, as one who lives from sexual activity (one of “les opportunistes de tout poil”—“an opportunist of all kinds [literally of ‘all skins’]” 57 he is certainly not a Haitian who has access to much official infrastructure, nor is he well-educated or motivated enough to assure bureaucratic success in a North American metropolis. He figures in, then,

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as regards the UNDP index on “wellness” as one of Haiti’s poor. 58 And yet, he sees himself, his lived experience as one of a person who has escaped poverty. Even as Cosentino acknowledges the ever-debilitated state-of-affairs in Haiti, 59 Rico describes a life in which he has created a dwelling, the space of a “hermit” maybe (after all his last name is L’Hermite), but a space that is inhabitable and even “Rico,” “rich.” What I am getting at is that there is a Haiti constructed out of poverty theory, and a Haiti depicted through representations of the lived experience of Haitians, one that Schuller pays attention to through anthropological engagement, 60 or one that Mars’s novels bring to life on the literary page. To study Rico using poverty theory labels him squarely as “poor” or lacking in “wellness,” whereas to read him through his own self-narration is to see him as engaging in an alternative existence, one that he labels as not-poor. The danger here of course is to make light of the horrid consequences of what Schuller coins “trickle-down imperialism,” which “operates within the system, wherein intermediaries impose defensive interpretations onto subordinates, turning otherwise wellmeaning policy into disastrous implementation.” 61 But, in the same vein, to see lived experiences only through the materiality of poverty theory and its accompanying statistics is to reduce humans to non-beings. RE-OPERATING (UN)INHABITABILITY IN MARS’S AUX FRONTIÈRES DE LA SOIF I draw the term “operating” from Flaugh’s work on what are perceived as “freakish” situations, for example Jacques Godbout’s depiction of conjoined twins in Les têtes à Papineau (1981), or Tahar Ben Jelloun’s transgendered protagonist in L’enfant du sable (1987). Flaugh reoperates narratives that depict physical abnormalities, not to recast them as normal, but to shed light on how the inoperative for the status quo is re-manipulated by those in the margin to redefine new terms of being and personhood. 62 Following on Flaugh, I argue that Mars’s novels re-operate what are social issues that are connoted as negative: for example, poverty, catastrophic disaster to the built environment, and child prostitution. Her narratives do not make excuses for these issues; they do not condone them; but they do show how a person deals with, and finds the Mbembian “possibilities” amongst the multiple traumas of such severely destabilizing predicaments. Aux frontières de la soif, published in 2013, intertwines the lives of a middle-class male Haitian, the denizens of Camp Canaan (or Camp Kanaran in Kreyòl), one of the most notoriously “anarchic” post-2010 earthquake IDP camps, and a female Japanese literary scholar and journalist. Unlike L’Heure hybride, in the place of a unique first-person narrative voice, Aux frontières de la soif presents various narrative agents: the first-

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person narrative voices of young girls and women living in Camp Canaan and a third-person narrative voice that alternatively privileges the points-of-view of Fito, Tatsumi, and one of the male inhabitants of Camp Canaan. Although engaged in a different sort of narrative contract with its reader, Aux frontières de la soif offers, like L’Heure hybride, the portrait of one man. The other voices serve as sub-portraits that frame, reframe, and recast the principal male character. Fito is identified by the third-person narrator at the beginning of the novel as a novelist, and yet he is completely unable to connect to any type of creative activity. Although hinted to in the beginning of Aux frontières, it is not until the end of the novel that the narration confirms Fito’s primary profession as that of an engineer. 63 Whether in his writing, his profession, or his relationships to women (his two ex-wives, his longterm girlfriend, or Tatsumi, whom he is accompanying in her sojourn to Haiti from Japan), Fito is completely unable to perform, produce, or much less create. The various forms of the word “décevoir”—“deceive/ disappoint” 64 and the formulation of the phrase “ne servir à rien”—“to serve no purpose” or the word “inutile”—“useless” 65 inundate the novel as regards Fito’s relationship to himself, his profession, his service to his country, or to the adult women in his life. The only persons upon whom he has an effect, and a questionable one, are the young girls in Camp Canaan. Set side-by-side, L’Heure hybride and Aux frontières de la soif appear as part of a similar narrative project: again, drawing on Munro’s invitation to consider Haitian narrative through the notion of “inhabitability” as a critical category, the two novels use one narrative figure—a male, who has chosen to remain in Haiti—to depict the representation of urban space in a contemporary, and as I’ve argued above, post-Aristidian, neoliberal Haiti. I emphasize my situating Haiti in a post-1990s moment, because the two novels, one written before the earthquake, and the other written after the earthquake, share a character’s dedication to finding a comfort zone within Haiti’s topography, as opposed to one that imagines Haiti from afar, whether through exile (as in the texts analyzed by Munro) or through Spiralist opacity (as in the novels examined by Douglas, Glover, and the contributors to Jonassaint’s edited volume). While Camp Canaan is a direct consequence of the 2010 earthquake, it is also a result of neoliberal, humanitarian policies. The rapprochements between Mars’s two novels show that what is primarily at play is not the mediatic mega-event of the earthquake, but rather the accumulation of ubiquitous, yet less spectacular events of neoliberal “slow violence.” Despite the similarity of the two novels, the second novel presents a major aberration: this is a novel quasi-devoid of the rehabilitative effects of “culture.” If the above discussion drawing on Brathwaite, Munro, and Cosentino pointed to the struggle to move beyond the stereotypical role that “an endlessly creative culture” 66 plays in assuaging Haiti’s material

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poverty, if the narrator of L’Heure hybride reorients his poverty around sensuality (that is, a sort of aesthetic of the quotidian), the narrative voices put into play in Mars’s 2013 novel, try as they will, are completely unable to connect to the restorative engagement with aesthetic, sensual, and/or most sexual activity. Both Rico and Fito determine their respective personal itineraries in relationship to the built environment and urban space in which each circulates. The major difference is that Rico saves himself through a sensual relationship to his habitations, while Fito compromises not only his own existence, but that of many lives in the process. Aux frontières de la soif starts off where L’Heure hybride ended, in a car, on the way to a socially unacceptable sexual experience. For Rico, it is an exciting and joyous discovery that his community will only be expanded now that he has begun to explore same-sex relations; for Fito, it is the uncontrollable need to lie with young girls under the oppressive heat generated by the tarps of the IDP camps and the daytime sunlight that pounds down upon them. The first page of the novel compares the space of Fito’s car with the location of the IDP tryst chamber: Fito was a bit cold but he decided not to lower the air conditioning. He let his blood get colder. In a moment, he would sweat all the water out of his body under a haphazard shelter. 67

Further on, in describing his first time with a young girl, the narrator describes the ambiance of the camp: There were noises of people walking outside, in the corridor, voices spoke to each other, snippets of music floated in the air, a puppy let out squeaking barks, but everything took place in another dimension. 68

Although not a primary objective of this chapter, Mars’s tour-de-force in both novels is to describe both Rico’s and Fito’s socially unacceptable, supposedly immoral, and even illegal sexual behaviors in such a way as to contextualize the activity within the space of the unknown consequences of what it means to be obliged to live in or next to extreme poverty. I don’t mean to compare same-sex relationships with prostitution with pre-pubescent girls, but to propose that Mars’s narratives force the reader to accompany the characters in their trajectories, without judging them: unlike Rico, Fito’s primary impulse in his relationship to the Haitian landscape is not personally hedonistic; rather, it is a deep sense of community and duty to his country. The narrator presents Fito in the same way that Munro interlaces his analyses of the Haitian novels that he studies with the biographies of their writers: Fito is extremely intelligent, promising, a cherished member of the intellectual and social communities in which he circulates. Mars’s narration honors its principal male protagonist and seeks not to accuse, but to understand him. At first read, the most obvious interpretation of Fito’s paying for sexual encounters

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with pre-teen girls is one of unintended misfortune: in a drastic paradoxical turn towards the macabre, in an Oedipal mega-tragedy, it is the commitment to staying, an unflinching dedication to his nation that engages him in a sickly, quasi-incestual relationship to the young girls whom his humanitarian work as an engineer working in the IDP Camps of Corail and Canaan is “meant to benefit.” 69 A more extensive reading of Fito’s commitment to Haiti reveals that Fito’s desire is less (if not at all) for young girls than for a connection to his own country and the people who are its majority inhabitants, those whom Schuller refers to as pèp la, or those that Rico designates as “petites gens”—“humble persons.” 70 Fito, who unlike Rico is not materially poor, suffers from an inability to connect to the land and new urban spaces that populate his nation. What the above citations hint to, what overwhelms Fito, might initially be the innocence and purity of the young girls, but it is also the noises, voices, and music that inhabit Camp Canaan, the need to literally “sweat” with his compatriots. It is the desire for a more intimate relationship to social classes to which he does not belong—those of the majority population of his country, those who through the earthquake are no longer kept out of sight in the shantytowns—which calls him back to the camp. His exhaustion, his disenchantment with Haiti, his inability to connect with those in his social class—whether female or male—make him “thirst” for “purity,” 71 yet what he really desires, I argue, and the novel suggests, is what Saunders describes as citizenship; that is, as “a sense of belonging” to a space. 72 The relationship of Fito’s car to the terrain points to two types of seemingly unbridled landscapes: that of Haiti’s tropical, wild, and magical vegetation, and that produced by the slow-violence of deforestation. On the first page of the novel, Fito’s car, in approaching Camp Canaan traverses a new terrain: “La végétation diminuait au fur et à mesure de sa progression. . . . Il laissa l’asphalte, engagea le tout-terrain . . . ”—“The vegetation diminished as he made his way. . . . He left the asphalt, put the four-by-four into gear.” 73 Towards the end of the novel, with Tatsumi, on his trip to Abricots in northern Haiti, Fito’s car must also engage in offroading: A goat’s road. The car grasped the rocky shards, and the roots that ran like reptiles under his tires. The dense vegetation seemed to open itself to let them through. It wasn’t much further now to Abricots village, the secret one. 74

This second vegetation points not so much to a new relationship to the representation of land in Haiti, but extends on one with which Dany Laferrière jousts both in La chair du maître—The Master’s Flesh (1997) and Vers le sud (2006), translated into English as Heading South (2009): that of the restorative, “magical” nature of Haiti’s landscape.

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In Heading South, Laferrière republishes in a new context and with new short stories/filmic scenarios a selection of the short stories that make up La chair du maître. 75 Amongst these stories are those that depict a European woman’s uncontrollable attraction to Haiti’s countryside: for example, London mother-of-three leaves her husband to live in a “little house” 76 with a Haitian mountain farmer whom she meets at a crossroads with his horse; 77 Laura Ingraham, a “New York Jewish intellectual,” 78 who obsessed with a “small painting (a landscape)” hanging in her room traces its origin to Haiti, where she eventually sets up permanent residence with “Solé, a farmer from Artibonite”; 79 or the French female journalist, who against her will and without her knowledge is spiritually wed to the lwa Legba 80 in the region of Croix-des-Bouquets; 81 not to mention, Brenda’s, Ellen’s, and Sue’s engagement in sexual relationships with young Haitian men at the Hibiscus Hotel “nestled in the land’s luxurious vegetation.” 82 Similarly to Laferrière, Mars’s narrator in Aux frontières de la soif taunts the enchanting power of Haiti’s natural surroundings, depicting it as a vegetation in extinction, exoticized by foreigners, and accessible only to those who can afford it: foreigners and some of Haiti’s elite. In describing Fito’s and Tatsumi’s arrival at the coastal village of Abricots, the narrator recounts Tatsumi’s excitement in meeting their host, the writer “JeanClaude”: Tatsumi was speechless when she discovered that her host was the writer whose work she’d read, and that she found herself in the very village where his first novel was born. 83

As noted in the previous chapter, Jean-Claude Fignolé’s first novel Possédés de la pleine lune—Possessed by the Full Moon (1987) takes place within the magical vegetation of a pre-revolutionary Abricots community. Fito’s discomfort, even repugnance at finding himself in Abricots, his thirst to be back in the meandering pathways of Camp Canaan, the fact that it is Tatsumi, and not he, who is excited about the beachside vegetation, is Mars’s way of putting into question the saving graces of Haiti’s countryside. Such nature saves tourists, it would seem, not Haiti’s own. Tinsley writes: fluidity comes into view as both a conceptual principal and a site of concrete, painful, and liberatory experience—as a trope that reflects the materiality of women of color’s embodied experience while refusing its transparency. 84

As we will further explore, there will be healing in these spaces, but it will be a healing related to fluidity, “a wateriness that complicates as much as it liberates,” 85 one that transforms Fito’s desperation to sweat under the IDP camps into the ability to finally enter the waters at Abricots and swim. It is the fluidity theorized by Tinsley in her analyses of the

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relationship between African diasporic magico-sacred philosophical systems and eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century textual production by women. It is also the fluidity of Ahmed’s notion that healthy existences lie not in being “happy,” but in not “encounter[ing] the world as resistant,” in Csíkszentmihályi’s notion of “flow,” rather than “blockage.” 86 In other words, pain, if it flows, offers healing, and what is put forward as a pivot of an African diasporic philosophical system is healing, where healing is about a sort of existence of osmosis, an elegance of movement through whatever the present scenario is; it is not first and foremost about happiness, or as argued above, about achieving a North American or European standard of “success.” The change of terrain that Fito’s car experiences on its road to Camp Canaan is one uncelebrated and mostly untreated in the Haitian novel: if the aforementioned novels by Laferrière and Fignolé deal with lush vegetation, Mars’s Aux frontières de la soif allows such tropical vegetation to share the stage with the more dusty, hot, treeless landscape, devoid of any shade. Online photo essays and captions of Camps Corail and Canaan call it a “desert.” 87 In the same way that Fito only has provisional access to the lush tropicality of Abricots, he also has even more limited contact with Haiti’s IDP camps. At least at Abricots, he is welcomed by his editor Jean-Claude; whereas, at Camp Canaan, his only invitation to human connection comes from a pimp, “l’oncle”—“uncle” whose “vrai nom”—“real name” is “Golème Gédéon.” 88 In the novels Dézafi (1975) and in Les affres d’un défi (1979), Frankétienne’s character Gédéon presides over the worrying terrain of a Haiti in profound trouble. If in Frankétienne’s novels, the “enchevêtrement”—“entanglement” is that of the courtyard of a malevolent Vodou bokor, a space devoid of human presence, 89 the entanglement of Haiti under a neoliberal order is that of an overly populated IDP camp, with up to 80,000 inhabitants in Camp Canaan. 90 The recent report “Des bidonvilles aux camps: conditions de vie à Canaan, à Corail Cesse-Lesse, et à la piste de l’ancienne aviation de Portau-Prince: Rapport de recherche”—“From Shantytowns to Camps: Conditions of Life in Canaan, Corail Cesse-Lesse, and the Former Landing Strip of Port-au-Prince: Report on Research” (2013) puts the number just in Canaan at more than 30,000 persons. 91 What Fito desires more than anything is to feel that his service to his country be a useful one, and frustrated with the bureaucracy and lack of infrastructure that makes any of his work as an engineer possible, his second-tier desire is to feel a sense of belonging alongside the masses of his co-citizens who exist in “un autre monde . . . un pays perdu aux frontières de la soif”—“another world . . . a country lost at the borders of thirst”; 92 and the only way he knows how to achieve such knowledge, the most expedient way, is through “closeness’ with the camp’s most vulnerable denizens: its little girls. While it may seem trite to frame Fito’s construction of Haitian space around that of the “off-road’ experiences of his car, a car which is never

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described as anything more than that, his “voiture,” the car in his life becomes not just a means of transporting himself between home (where the roads are more-or-less paved), but constitutes a space where intimacies are played out: his own anxieties, his dialogues with Tatsumi. What the car is for many of those Haitians who can afford one, is a space that protects a person from engaging too closely with the poverty-stricken shantytowns that one encounters in transit from one bourgeois place to another. Yet, in Fito’s case, the car is a vehicle that transports him to two spaces, which as we’ve seen above, seem out of his reach: both the lush beachside tropicality of a place such as Abricots, as well as the dusty IDP camp where he engages in prostitution with under-age girls. They both represent exoticized spaces of fantasy to which he does not belong. It will be his dialogues with Tatsumi, in the car, and later at JeanClaude’s Abricots beach-house, which will recast both of these spaces. These conversations are the crossroads that allow him to once again swim in the sea. Thanks to his interactions with Jean-Claude and Tatsumi, he finally transforms all of the spaces he inhabits into ones that he can be a part of, rather than a selfish pervert, where he can again spend time in his own urban apartment, at his desk and write, where he may articulate into the writing of his second novel the traumas of living and dedicating oneself to staying in Haiti. For in the end, Mars’s narrator in Aux frontières de la soif, it can be argued, might be Fito writing about himself? Through Tatsumi, Aux frontières de la soif becomes thus a sort of Haitian literary iteration of the film Hiroshima, mon amour (1959); that is, a set of dialogues that will not only point him in the direction of rehabilitation, but also enable him to accept the immense tragedy that is the “slow violence” (in Nixon’s terms) done to his country by histories of neglect, the most recent, that of the “trickle-down imperialism” (in Schuller’s terms) of neoliberal policy. Tatsumi is at once an embodiment of both a metaphoric Ariadne and of the Vodou lwa Lasiren, the mermaid, also known as “Ezili of the Waters.” 93 Tatsumi, even as a tourist, or because she is a foreigner, is the one who leads Fito through his rediscovery of Haiti. She is also reminiscent of Laferrière’s “Japanese writer,” 94 one who resists interpretation by others, and who herself refrains from making judgment on others. Furthermore, Tatsumi herself bears as her first name the last name of Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a comic/manga book artist who wrote about Japan after World War II, and its first-ever experience of foreign occupation (the United States and United Kingdom occupied Japan from the end of the war through to April 28, 1952). As in Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’s film, the male character (an architect) like Fito (an engineer) must stay on, must learn to inhabit the uninhabitable, not just for himself, but as a professional whose engagement is to create urban spaces that his co-citizens will live in. And, he must learn how not through his own trauma to exploit those very citizens he is mandated to serve. The literary endeavor, whether it is Fito’s own writing, his conver-

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sations with writer Jean-Claude, or professor of literature Tatsumi, is depicted as an essential tool for making it through, for staying the course, or in Assotto Saint’s words, “riding, riding we kept riding.” 95 In a sense, Mars’s work in the diplomatic sector (she worked at the Japanese consulate in Port-au-Prince), opens a new chapter to Dalleo’s Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere. If Jean-Claude Fignolé is both a writer and politician, if Fito is (fictionally) a writer and an engineer, if Rico is at once aesthete and male prostitute, then to engage in the aesthetic in contemporary Haiti is to process, and clear out enough space from the daily onslaught of traumatisms, to be able to move on, and even heal. AN ASPIRATIONAL BUILT ENVIRONMENT Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space, first published in French in 1974 and again in a revised edition in 1984, and translated into English in 1991, has since become essential reading in urban planning theory. Lefebvre questions the relationship between the materiality of the built environment (and “nature”) and the representation of the spaces of such a built environment. He writes: “does language—logically, epistemologically or genetically speaking—precede, accompany or follow social space?”; 96 “To what extent may a space be read or decoded?” 97 Wilder rearticulates Lefebvre’s claims that material spaces are indeed made up of words and images as much as they are of building materials: “Lefebvre treats such varieties of space as concrete abstractions, which he defines as concepts that make social relations possible, forms that have a social existence, abstractions with political power.” 98 Lefebvre rejects a dichotomous dialectical system—for a Hegelian system is too abstract, and the Marxist one is too materially oriented, and opts instead for a “triad: that is, three elements and not two.” 99 He suggests that the third element creates a “system” that is capable of taking account of “materiality” and the “loose ends” that are less tangibly identifiable. 100 He explains that his theorization of three types of space is the result of a society that is deeply seated in “capitalism or neocapitalism.” 101 One of these, 102 “representational space” is: space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users”, but also of some artists and perhaps of those, such as a few writers and philosophers, who describe and aspire to do no more than describe. 103

Laferrière and Mars depict the lived experience of space. For his part, Laferrière shows that Haiti’s “magical” nature only functions in the imagination, in the description of outdated aspirations contained within “naïve” painting or novels such as Jacques Stephen Alexis’s Les Arbres musiciens (1957), Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Possédés de la pleine lune (1987), or

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Laferrière’s own L’Odeur du café (1991). For her part, Mars points to the falseness of the idea that Haiti’s tropical landscapes (or at least what is left of them) would allow someone, such as Fito or Tatsumi to retire to the seaside house and find repose, because even if they intend to achieve such tranquility, 104 their experience of it proves otherwise. Where L’Heure hybride’s Rico is able to re-operate the symbolic power of Haiti’s tropical sensuality into his quotidian patterns, Fito and Tatsumi are incapable of it. What they do achieve is a discursive space and even an epistemology with which to begin to articulate how Haitian contemporary space is lived. Recasting Fito’s tragedy through Lefebvre’s theoretical framework provides other possible reasons for how and why Mars’s portrait of Rico is different than that of Fito. Is Fito unable to connect to Haiti’s sumptuous imagery as Rico does because Fito’s spatial practice is one dominated entirely by the most advanced of capitalist practice to date? Whereas Rico—through transactional sex, in living at night, in renting a room in a pension, in not owning property, not possessing a car, not paying taxes 105—engages in what Jeff Maskovsky terms: an “ambivalent relationship to capitalism.” 106 In so doing, Rico reduces the distance between himself and the space he frequents. Lefebvre explains the estrangement of spatial practice for most of modernity’s citizens: What is spatial practice under neocapitalism? It embodies a close association, within perceived space, between daily reality (daily routine) and urban reality (the routes and networks which link up the places set aside for work, “private” life and leisure). This association is a paradoxical one, because it includes the most extreme separation between the places it links together. 107

On the one hand, Fito transits between spaces, he connects them, but they exist for him through “the most extreme separation.” On the other hand, Rico spends his life creating intimacies between them. The topography that Rico covers is much more limited; Fito’s challenge is larger, mammoth even, and Fito’s life story will be to try to reduce the level of “extreme separation” between the space in which he lives (the bourgeois Pétionville and his car in which he spends so much time) and that of those whom he is supposed to serve in his professions. As an engineer, Fito engages professionally in “representations of space: conceptualized space, the space of scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers and social engineers, as of a certain type of artist with a scientific bent—all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived.” 108 And yet, his professional practice will be a constantly frustrated space for as Harley F. Etienne in “Urban Planning and the Rebuilding of Port-au-Prince” demonstrates, urban planning is quasinon-existent in Haiti. 109 Ultimately, Fito is an engineer who works without a plan, and thus he must operate within a “representational space”

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that is largely unstructured. Fito, in a sense, through Tatsumi’s coaching, becomes Lefebvre’s ideal urban planner: one who considers how a space is already lived. As a novelist, he responds to Lefebvre’s observation that representations do build material reality, and vice versa. Lefebvre’s work is important because it imposes language, plots, stories, and fictions as part of the process that results in tangible material realities: spaces are at once a built environment and also the connotations and memories we ascribe to them; but, drawing on Appadurai, in The Future As Cultural Fact: Essays on the Global Condition (2013), the built environment, from its small spaces to its vast and heavily populated sprawls of shantytowns or IDP camps, is also made up of the “hope” and “aspiration” that people ascribe to the spaces that they inhabit. Where Lefebvre, like Schuller, sees capitalism as categorically imperialistic and as such oppressive, Appadurai, while not disagreeing with the degradation imposed by a neoliberal order, nonetheless identifies silver linings. In a chapter titled “Housing and Hope,” he writes: social groups are striving to maintain the integrity of their communities, which is often embodied and embedded in housing forms. . . . Wherever human beings find forms in which to build shelters for primary groups . . . they are also marking the very meanings of their humanity in the materials with which they build their homes. 110

Mars’s novels delve into all three of Lefebvre’s spaces; Mars lives and writes in Haiti, and Mars takes the risk to write about Haitians of all social classes. As such, she enters into a territory of writer-activism: while maybe not as active as Ken Saro-Wiwa or Wangari Maathai about whom Nixon dedicates important parts of his book, she nonetheless engages in rendering more compelling the “slow violence” that confounds both “colonial dispossession” and “environmentally embedded violence.” 111 At the very least, I argue, and as any reading of these two short novels makes obvious, her work must be read by anyone who is interested in what urban space in Haiti looks like today, for her novels are as much fictions as they are veritable ethnographies of twenty-first century urban space. FLUIDITY AND DWELLING: NEW WAYS TO SERVE THE SPIRITS As in L’Heure hybride, the danger of my analysis of the novels is that I make light of the lives lived by and through what in the global north we’d label “prostitution,” “transactional sex,” and in the case of Mars’s 2013 novel, “child prostitution.” While the first word, “whore” (“putain”) comes up in L’Heure hybride, 112 none of these words are iterated in Aux frontières de la soif. Fito’s little girl victims, as we will see below, find ways, not out of their situations, but desperately carve out spaces of at least

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provisional healing, and one even aspires to setting up her own business, a small-scale and seemingly realistic endeavor. 113 Mars’s narrator does not excuse Fito’s behavior, but it does not chastise him either. Similarly, in both novels, Mars’s primary objective as a writer, I claim, is not to pardon or explain what is socially perceived as deviant sexual behavior. Instead, in step with Munro’s and Glover’s analyses of Haitian literature, her work seeks first and foremost to explore how Haiti is (un)inhabitable. What is clear is that things have gotten much worse, for where Cosentino pairs this worsening of extreme poverty with an amelioration of the art, Mars’s last novel shows that accessing creativity is virtually impossible. While both Rico and Fito find it harder and harder to connect with Legba, 114 to locate a crossroads that will provide release, even if violently so, this new treeless, desert-like terrain makes it much harder to pay devotions to, and welcome the lwa of the crossroads, to stand at the opening of the gates, those which lead to creativity. 115 Yet maybe this new terrain is also revolutionizing Vodou practice and/or our scholarly approaches to Vodou, where the female lwas are capable of manifesting even without the usual rites that first honor Legba. If fluidity is not necessarily an entirely serene concept, “a wateriness that complicates as much as it liberates,” 116 the lwa Lasiren exemplifies how the sea is at once a saving grace and a location of death. In her analysis of fluidity in Mayotte Capécia’s I Am a Martinican Woman (1948), Tinsley speaks of manman dlo (mother of the waters, francophonic version), Mami Wata (mother of the waters, anglophonic version), and Yemayá (“the great universal mother” in Orisha devotion), 117 the water goddesses residing between Africa and the Western Hemisphere’s Atlantic coastlines. 118 There is also Lasiren, as described above, whom Tinsley does not mention, and is a Haitian lwa of the waters. Tinsley explains that maman dlo “snatches men who disrespect her to discipline them,” and “spirits women and girls underwater for days at a time to keep her company and share her knowledge,” times during which erotic initiations and healing rituals, it would seem, also take place. 119 In L’Heure hybride, Rico’s room and the crepuscular obfuscated light in which he nurtures the serenity of his marginalized existence may be read as a recasting, a reoperating of the sea, of Lasiren’s empire onto his own modest, urban dwelling. If at times his sexual encounters are sensual, and at others aggressive, they are part of “an embodied, erotic practice,” 120 that corresponds to the cultivation of fluidity as integral to defining personhood in Caribbean social spaces heavily informed by African-derived religious and philosophical healing systems. In other words, one might not be a Vodouyizan or a believer in the Regla de Ocha, but African-derived religions constitute a social context, where its symbols and lexica circulate and are deployed in varying often “secular” contexts. Without needing to be defined, as I have done persistently throughout this book, in most Caribbean spaces, even the most elite enclaves share a common vocabulary

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around concepts such as “the trickster” or “Mami Wata.” Just as one would be hard-pressed to find really anyone in the world who doesn’t have a sense of whom and what “Jesus” represents, so too in a Haitian space, a figure such as Ezili is understood by most. In this way, even if Mars’s two novels are much less explicitly about Vodou than is Depestre’s Hadriana, the valuation of fluidity as an objective, is yes, of a Vodou Weltanschauung, but it’s also more generally applicable to a “secular” framework. Most importantly though, if for Tinsley fluidity is primarily expressed through the erotic, and the erotic enables “self-making,” 121 allowing a more fluid relationship between the self and the world exterior to the self, then while such a movement is true for Rico, for Fito the opposite takes place. Fito has an extensive intimate past, he has been married, fathered a daughter, he is in the process of separating from a female partner roughly his age, and from his initial interactions it would seem that he is looking forward to romancing Tatsumi when she visits. And, yet, during her visit, despite their time alone at the beach house in Abricots, close to nothing sexual per se takes place. Instead, both Tatsumi and Fito will have the opportunity to read each others’ bodies: Fito when he undresses Tatsumi after she has drunk too much; 122 and Tatsumi when Fito falls suddenly into a deep sleep. 123 These are the most un-erotic of physical encounters, the complete opposite of Rico’s engagements in L’Heure hybride. What is happening, instead, is in a sense a possession, where one person’s psyche is no longer present, and the body, maybe not repossessed by another, is lain out before the other person, to be read, interpreted, taken in. Douglas in the introduction to her book about Frankétienne writes, “The rewriting process, I argue, leads to intensified introspection and reflections on the writing process . . . ”; in other words, rewriting oneself is about the intimate process of realigning the self to be harmonious with its surroundings. 124 Butler explains: it seems, this relation of a self to itself is described as “self-presence” and is itself implicated in the metaphysics of presence. I wonder whether presence can be distinguished from self-identity and even selfsufficiency. If we are, for instance, “present” to one another, we may be dispossessed by that very presence. Is this at least a possibility for you? It seems to me that there is a presence implied by the idea of bodily exposure, which can become the occasion of subjugation or acknowledgment. 125

It is in the body’s passivity that the other person finds, amongst the noise and visual overcharge of post-earthquake landscapes, the silence necessary to connect, to take another person in, to be in Butler’s words, “selfpresent” and “‘present’ to one another.” I have not yet dealt directly with Heidegger’s essay on “dwelling,” because despite the popularity he has in contemporary theory, despite

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the beauty, the “flowing” quality of his prose, the language of his work does not resonate with the depictions of dwelling in the two novels of Mars’s that I have looked at in this book. That said, those who have read varying versions of this chapter have encouraged me to include a discussion of his essay, “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” (1951). 126 Heidegger writes: I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on earth, is Buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on earth as a mortal. . . . Dwelling is never thought of as the basic character of a human being. 127

Basing his analysis in the German language, “that language in a way retracts the real meaning of the word bauen, which is dwelling, is evidence of the primal nature of these meanings,” 128 and in the non-maritime landlocked Black Forest, where Heidegger spent time at his vacation home, resides, maybe, the not so subtle subtlety. For Heidegger, dwelling is first and foremost about being “on earth as a mortal,” whereas for a person living near a sea or an ocean, it is as much about being near or “in the water.” And, being near a body of water that witnessed the Holocaust of the slave trade, in whose depths reside the skeletons of countless slaves thrown off board, the “basic character” of being “human” is as much about being “mortal” as it is about connecting to the spirits of ancestors and communities that exist beneath the Atlantic. That said, Heidegger’s work does get at the same notion of fluidity that Tinsley’s exposes: his famous discussion of the Black Forest farmhouse, where there exists: “the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house.” 129 A dissonance still remains: it is the desire of oneness, of the notion that fluidity exists primarily for the peasant, in nature, in a space that is not heavily populated. Tinsley’s and Mars’s engagement with fluidity is as a means of negotiating a relationship, anytime, anyplace, with any reality, one of smooth “oneness” and also ones of “la crise— crisis,” of “convulsion,” of the “horrible ecstasy,” “the spectacular and asynchronic aspects of violence” 130 of being repeatedly dispossessed, repossessed, and self-possessed. One builds a house in the security of a “wind-sheltered mountain slope,” the other builds it wherever it can, and for however long it lasts. It seats and unseats itself (drawing on the attention that Stephenson gives to the etymology of “possession”) often, but it finds a way, somehow to enter into the movement, at first maladroitly, convulsively, and then with elegance. If “Westerners,” if persons who don’t have the slave trade as part of their heritage, judge and admire Haitians as supposedly being more “resistant” to “suffering” than others, as Clitandre and Hron argue, the West’s assumptions are wrong. Instead, what is not being acknowledged is that a Vodou philosophy cultivates a practice of being that deals with

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Bok’s argument that resilience is first and foremost a manifestation of post-traumatic stress disorder. 131 In encouraging fluidity with the world, one in which a person is encouraged to connect to her/his sufferings, Tinsley’s Caribbean “wateriness” is about healing from extreme and compounded traumatism. It’s about staying, not leaving, or leaving only to return, to come back, to repossess oneself. If possession, as trope, whether in the French context (part II) or in the Haitian context (parts III and IV) is anything, it is quite simply, the notion that the ultimate dwelling space is one’s own body, and to repossess one’s own body, one’s own psyche, is first to enter into a fluid relationship with oneself, and then one’s surroundings. Tinsley writes of the Caribbean body: it is “a site-inmotion.” 132 To be uprooted from one continent to another, to be occupied by foreign powers, to be manipulated by dictatorships, and to be overrun by NGOs, is to manifest what Trouillot suggests might be “new subjectivities,” or rather not so new subjectivities, but are labeled so by scholars who write in the presence of the multiple subjectivities, already theorized in the academy, in the process of being theorized, and potentially theorized. To understand that one’s home is ultimately one’s body, and that one’s body may only preserve its integrity if in a fluid relationship with the outside world, however violent, poor, or morally destitute such a world appears, seems to me, as argued in my introduction, and put forth by Stephenson’s work, a practice that should not be pathologized, but held up as a model of dealing with an ever-upsetting and disenfranchised global order. As Michel suggests: “Could Vodou offer healing modalities for an ailing society? For a world no longer in equilibrium?” 133 NOTES 1. Schuller, Killing with Kindness, 7. 2. The end of this chapter will look at Appadurai’s and Heidegger’s work. The other scholars’ theoretical frameworks have been discussed earlier on. 3. Schuller, Killing with Kindness, 31. 4. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 5. 5. See Wendy Luttrell’s work on “careworlds,” in “Making Boys’ Careworlds Visible.” Thymos: Journal of Boyhood Studies 6, no. 2 (September 2012): 186–202. 6. See discussion of Daniel and Ramsey in Preface. 7. Stephenson, Possession, 117. 8. Daniel, Dancing Wisdom, 4–5. 9. Carrol F. Coates, “Vodou in Haitian Literature,” in Invisible Powers: Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture, by Claudine Michel and Patrick Bellegarde-Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 182. 10. Nixon brings postcolonial and environmental studies together: postcolonial studies at its most incisive remains, it seems to me, an invaluable critical presence in an era of resurgent imperialism, an era in which— sometimes through outright, unregulated plunder, sometimes under camouflage of developmental agendas—a neoliberal order has widened, with ruinous environmental repercussions, the gulf between the expanding

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classes of the super-rich and our planet’s 3 billion ultrapoor. (Nixon, Slow Violence, 37) 11. Nixon, Slow Violence, 145. 12. Schuller, Killing with Kindness, 30. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 30. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Nixon, Slow Violence, 13. 17. Ibid., 10. 18. See Sibylle Fischer and Glover’s 2012 article. 19. Schuller, Killing with Kindness, 12. 20. Due to controversy over the mishandling of donations and representation of Haitians in the governance of the IHRC, the IHRC was not renewed, but has been reformed into the Cadre de Coopération de l’Aide Externe au Développement (CAED), and has been “nationalized” by the Haitian government in the form of “a new framework for the coordination of external assistance in support of Haiti’s development.” Source: Haiti Reconstruction Fund. News—A New Framework for the Coordination of External Assistance in Support of Haiti’s Development. November 26, 2012. http:// www.haitireconstructionfund.org/news_en (accessed June 11, 2014). 21. Nixon, Slow Violence, 11. 22. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 46. 23. Ibid., 45. 24. Writing in 2013, Arjun Appadurai refers to human rights housing discourse: the state of inadequate, insecure, temporary, dangerous, or unhealthy housing (or no housing at all) is a problem that goes far beyond the scope of urban planning, architecture, or municipal authority. It is a product of today’s unholy mix of warfare, real estate markets, poorly enforced housing laws, runaway technological disruptions, and, above all, a wholesale failure in the implementation of human rights laws and norms when it comes to the insecurity of housing for millions of human beings (120). 25. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 2–3. 26. Appadurai writes as regards Martin Heidegger’s and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of “dwelling”: “I have argued that the local is not merely an inert canvas upon which the moving space of globalization is painted, but the local itself is a constant and laborious work in progress, so that the production of locality is a fundamental and never-completed site of human action” (116). 27. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 4. 28. Ibid., 5. 29. Ibid., 180. 30. Laferrière, L’énigme 193. 31. Frankétienne, Les Affres, 160. 32. Thierry Oberlé, “En Haïti, le vaudou est toujours debout,” LeFigaro.fr . February 4, 2010. http://www.lefigaro.fr/international/2010/02/04/01003-20100204ARTFIG00002en-haiti-le-vaudou-est-toujours-debout-.php (accessed September 4, 2013). 33. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 6. 34. Ibid., 1. 35. Cosentino, “Baby on a Blender,” 134. 36. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 187. 37. Kettly Mars and Dany Laferrière were the honored writers at the WinthropKing Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, Tallahassee, Florida, February 14–16, 2013. 38. Laferrière, L’énigme, 193. 39. Here, I limit my discussion of poverty to the criteria used by the United Nations Development Programme, which determines “well-being” through “a composite measure of three basic dimensions of human development: health, education and

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income.” In 2013, Haiti was ranked 161st amongst 186 countries. For comparison, the other “greater” Antilles rate decidedly better: Cuba at 59th; Trinidad and Tobago at 67th; Jamaica at 85th, and the Dominican Republic at 96th. (“The Human Development Index – Going beyond Income,” United Nations Development Programme. Accessed April 1, 2013, http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/) 40. Kettly Mars, L’Heure hybride (La Roque-d’Anthéron: Vents d’ailleurs/ Ici et ailleurs, 2005), 21. 41. Ibid., 29. The original French is: J’éprouve une peur panique devant cet énorme cylindre ailé pareil à un cercueil volant. Mais très peu de gens le savent. Un de mes grands secrets. Je me demande si je partirai jamais un jour. L’idée m’a plus d’une fois traversé l’esprit mais l’envie n’a jamais été assez forte pour me décider à me forger une nouvelle identité en terre étrangère. Des visas, je pourrais facilement en trouver grâce à mes relations. . . . Ne dit-on pas que les dettes de lit son éternelles? . . . Mais non, l’aventure ne m’a jamais tenté. Je suis trop paresseux pour bosser en usine chez le Blanc, trop peu qualifié pour travailler comme fonctionnaire et trop beau pour aller me vendre au rabais dans ces mégapoles à compétition systématique. 42. Ibid., 110, 120. 43. In Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature (2010), Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley explores: “What vocabulary works for African diaspora grammars of gender and sexuality in the English-, French- and Dutch-based creoles that spread rhizomatically through the Americas’ (former) slave societies?” (6). 44. Mars, L’Heure hybride, 54. The original French is: “La solitude me dépasse, me submerge parfois mais je ne la repousse pas. Je la recherche même souvent, pour la braver et y priser de la force.” 45. Mars, L’Heure hybride, 22. The original French is “Car l’objectif essentiel est de fuir la pauvreté par tous les moyens. Ne pas la renier, la pauvreté, mais l’éviter, la mystifier, sinon elle vous bouffe tout cru comme une plante carnivore.” 46. Mars, L’Heure hybride, 145. 47. Ibid., 130. 48. Ibid., 145. The original French is: “Voilà, j’ai mis le pied dans la rue et la terre m’a accueilli, elle a fléchi les genoux pour me prendre comme on se penche pour soulever un enfant.” 49. Kaussen, Migrant Revolutions, 35. 50. Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, 14. 51. Ibid., 15. 52. Mars, L’Heure hybride, 145–146. 53. Ibid., 116. 54. Trouillot, Global Transformations, 129. 55. Nixon, Slow Violence, 13. 56. Mars, L’Heure hybride, 99. The original French is: Moi je ne compte pas, je suis une fourmi, un citoyen de l’ombre, je ne paie pas d’impôts mais je crois en la pérennité des institutions. Je me dis que cela peut toujours être pire. La pauvreté, je connais, je suis arrivé à m’en sortir. 57. Ibid., 107. 58. See previous footnote on UNDP, and extended discussion in chapter 3. 59. Cosentino, “Baby on a Blender,” 134. 60. Schuller, Killing with Kindness, 7. 61. Ibid., 11. 62. I draw on Christian Flaugh’s notion in Operation Freak: Narrative, Identity, and the Spectrum of Bodily Abilities (2012) of narrative as a means to refigure capacity into what in a global north order presents itself as the paralyzed or maimed human body of so

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many postcolonial contexts, a veritable “operation” that rehabilitates the human body and makes it functional (again). 63. Kettly Mars, Aux frontières de la soif (Paris: Mercure de France, 2013), 145. 64. Ibid., 101, 111. 65. Ibid., 64, 65, 72, 131. 66. Ibid., 1. 67. Mars, Aux frontières, 13. The original French is “Fito avait un peu froid mais il ne régla pas le climatisateur. Il laissait son sang se refroidir. Dans un moment, il allait suer toute l’eau de son corps sous un abri de bricoles.” 68. Ibid., 113. The original French is “Il y avait des bruits de pas de dehors, dans le corridor, des voix se parlaient, des bribes de musique flottaient dans l’air, un petit chien lâchait des aboiements grinçants, mais tout ça se passait dans une autre dimension.” 69. Schuller, Killing with Kindness, 7. 70. Mars, L’Heure hybride, 145. 71. Mars, Aux frontières, 94–95, 111, 115, 123, 130, 136, 140, 149, 158, 161. 72. I am indebted to Patricia Saunders, Associate Professor of English at the University of Miami, for spending so much time with me to help me understand multiple definitions for citizenship. After the talk that preceded this writing, she engaged in a discussion with me, and defined citizenship as “a sense of belonging.” See discussion in chapter 1. 73. Mars, Aux frontières, 13. 74. Ibid., 106. The original French is: “Une route de cabri. La voiture s’accrochait aux éclats pierreux, aux racines qui couraient comme des reptiles sous les pneus. La végétation dense semblait s’ouvrir pour leur livrer passage. Abricot, la secrète, n’était plus bien loin.” 75. Laferrière’s novel Vers le sud, published a year after Laurent Cantet’s film Vers le sud (2005), and in English as Heading South (2009) is a sort of discreet, but extremely confrontational response to the film, which is itself inspired by Laferrière’s collection of short stories titled La chair du maître (1997). 76. Dany Laferrière, Heading South. Translated by Wayne Grady (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2009), 88. 77. Ibid., 79. 78. Ibid., 70. 79. Ibid., 74. 80. Ibid., 111. 81. Ibid., 100. 82. Ibid., 111. It is not clear until the chapter titled “Traffic” that the Hibiscus Hotel (Heading South 199–200), in the earlier chapter “Magic Boys” is the same hotel where the three women have relationships with the Haitian young men: Legba and Neptune. 83. Mars, Aux frontières, 108. The original French is “Tatsumi resta sans voix quand elle découvrit que son hôte était l’écrivain qu’elle avait lu et qu’elle se trouvait dans le village même où était né son premier roman.” 84. Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, 147. 85. Ibid., 139. 86. Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 11. 87. “Photo-Essay: Haiti After the Earthquake, Part 2: Camp Canaan, and Part 3: Camp Corail” by Mac McKinney; and photo by Melindayiti: http://www.flickr.com/ photos/melindayiti/5058222891/ 88. Mars, Aux frontières, 88. 89. Frankétienne, Les affres d’un défi. 7. “Enchevêtrement des branches d’arbre au fond d’une vieille cour fréquentée rarement par les êtres humains.” 90. Mars, Aux frontières, 15. 91. Ilionor Louis, Des bidonvilles aux camps: conditions de vie à Canaan, à Corail CesseLesse, et à la piste de l’ancienne aviation de Port-au-Prince: Rapport de recherche. Cette

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recherche a été réalisée grâce á un financement de la Fondation connaissance et liberté (FOKAL) (2013), 24. 92. Mars, Aux frontières, 157. 93. Margarite Fernández-Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo: Second Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 127. 94. Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, 178. 95. Saint, Spells of a Voodoo Doll, 45. 96. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2009 [1974, 1984]), 16. 97. Ibid., 17. 98. Gary Wilder, The French Imperial Nation-State: Negritude and Colonial Humanism between Two World Wars (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 38. 99. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 39. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid., 38–39. 103. Ibid., 39. 104. Mars, Aux frontières, 99. 105. Ibid., 104. 106. Jeff Maskovsky is associate professor of urban studies at Queens College and of anthropology and environmental psychology at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Through the Mellon Seminar on Poverty (2012–2013) sponsored by the Center of the Humanities at CUNY, he and the other Mellon fellows have been invaluable to my burgeoning understanding of neoliberalism. I cite one of my discussions with Maskovsky. 107. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 38. 108. Ibid., 38. 109. Harley F. Etienne, “Urban Planning and the Rebuilding of Port-au-Prince,” in The Idea of Haiti: Rethinking Crisis and Development, by Millery Polyné, 165–180 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 175. 110. Appadurai, The Future As Cultural Fact, 116. 111. Nixon, Slow Violence, 7. 112. Mars, L’Heure hybride, 107, 151. 113. Ibid., 153. 114. Mars, L’Heure hybride 145, 150, 151; Mars, Aux frontières de la soif, 164. 115. No Haitian Vodou ceremony can commence without offerings to Legba, lwa of the crossroads, lwa of death, but also of survival, trickery, creativity, and male sexuality. 116. Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, 139. 117. Fernández-Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions, 52. 118. Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, 156–157. 119. Ibid., 157. 120. Ibid., 146. 121. Ibid., 78. 122. Mars, Aux frontières, 56. 123. Ibid., 125. 124. Douglas, Frankétienne and Rewriting, 1. 125. Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession, 13. 126. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking, from Poetry, Language, Thought,” translated by Albert Hofstadter (New York, Harper Colophon Books, 1971 (“Bauen Wohnen Denken” 1951)),” www.Pratt.edu. http://mysite.pratt.edu/~arch543p/ readings/Heidegger.html (accessed May 5, 2013). 127. Heidegger, “Building,” 2. 128. Ibid. 129. Ibid., 8.

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130. Erica Moiah James, “Speaking in Tongues: Metapictures and the Discourse of Violence in Caribbean Art,” Small Axe 37 (March 2012): 119. 131. Bok, Exploring Happiness, 118. 132. Tinsley, Thiefing Sugar, 51. 133. Michel, Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn, with a new foreword by Claudine Michel, 2010.

Appendix Timeline Combining General Contexts for Transatlantic and Hemispheric Atlantic Thought—Particularly in France, Haiti, and the United States

1609–1611

Possessions in Aix-en-Provence.

1632–1640

First Loudun possessions, with trials lasting from 1633–1640.

1637

Descartes writes Discours de la méthode—Discourse on the Method, and although his birthplace is close to Loudun, he is in exile in Amsterdam during the Loudun possessions.

1692

Salem witchcraft trials.

1807

G. W. F. Hegel publishes Phenomenology of the Spirit [Mind].

1830

“Camille Pissarro was born [on Saint Thomas], when it was still a Danish colony.” 1

1839–1841, 1850

Alexandre Dumas, père (in part of Haitian origin), the same author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers also wrote a novella about the Loudun possessions, titled “Urbain Grandier” from the Eight Volume set Celebrated Crimes (1839–1841), 2 and also made into a play of the same name (1850). 3

1853

Arthur de Gobineau publishes Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races).

1885

Anténor Firmin publishes De l’égalité des races humaines (Anthropologie positive), translated into English in 2000 as The Equality of the Human Races.

1885–1897

“The Palladium Affair,” based on sensationalistic journalist Léo Taxil’s “magnum opus, Le diable au XIXème siècle” reported an international network of devil worship based in Free Masonry temples, with 361

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its headquarters in Charleston, South Carolina. David Allen Harvey writes, “Lurid, sensationalistic, and nearly two thousand pages long, Le diable au XIXème siècle combined political polemic with pulp fiction adventure and exoticism, a formula that quickly made it a success and ultimately a cause célèbre. . . . however, the Palladium was revealed as a fraud in April 1897 by the man who had done the most to publicize it.” 4 1887 (1959, 1970, 1987, 2013)

In 1887, Fyodor Dostoyevsky publishes The Possessed [alternatively translated as The Devils, published in French as Les Démons], upon which Camus would adapt his 1959 play, but use the title Les Possédés. Dostoyevsky’s novel deals with the dissonance between the thought systems of both the ideas of the emerging leftist thinkers and also the more seated tenets of the ever weakened landed classes, criticizing the competency of both to deal with societal governance. In 1970, Michel de Certeau publishes La possession de Loudun. In 1993, Denis Hollier publishes his study of Bataille, Caillois, Leiris, Malraux, and Sartre with the title Les dépossédés with Les Editions de Minuit, and in 1997, its translation into English as Absent without Leave: French Literature under the Threat of War with Harvard University Press. In 2013, Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou publish a series of dialogues under the title, Dispossession: the Performative in the Political, in which they consider the connotations of “possession” as opposed to “dispossessions.” Despite the varying titles, not one of these books deals with spirit possession, only the differing translations [The Demons or The Possessed] suggest a relationship to spirit possession.

1907

Sigmund Freud publishes Delusion and Dream in W. Jensen’s Gradiva, which analyzes the central protagonist of the novel published in 1902 by Wilhelm Jensen, in which a man idealizes woman through the association with the ancient Roman basrelief of Gradiva (in the Vatican Museum). Henry Rousseau paints La Charmeuse de serpents— The Snake Charmer, based on his visits to the botanical

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gardens in Paris. In 1925, it would go to the Louvre, and is currently housed at the Musée d’Orsay. 5 1909

Schism between anthropology and psychoanalysis: Craig E. Stephenson explains the intimacy, followed by the divorce between psychology and anthropology: “At the Clark Conference in 1909, Franz Boas carefully manoeuvred anthropology away from the essentialist tendencies of psychology and psychoanalysis. A century later, in a similar manner, many Western anthropologists attempt in their writings to describe possession in non-Western settings without lending it a psychological description, because they find a tendency to pathologize inherent in psychological language.” 6

July 28, 1915 (Woodrow Wilson)

Beginning of U.S. occupation of Haiti.

1915–1934

The United States officially occupies Haiti, and enforces a series of laws (“articles 405–407 of the Code Pénal”) to prohibit “sortilèges,” that is sorcery, but interprets it as laws against all Vodou practices, thus enforcing a generalized “anti-superstition” campaign against Vodou. 7

1917–1918

“The U.S. military impos[es] the kòve (French corvée, or forced-labor crew) for road construction across central and northern Haiti” 8 and the “U.S.sponsored Haitian Constitution” lifts “the interdiction of alien landholding that had been in place since Haitian independence.” 9

1918–1920

Caco “uprising” against American occupation, emphasized by Sidney W. Mintz’s 2007 introduction to Melville Herskovits’s Life in a Haitian Valley.

1919

Louis Aragon, André Breton, and Philippe Soupault found the magazine Littérature.

1923

Herskovits receives his PhD in Anthropology at Columbia University under the direction of Boas; his first research is about cattle complexes in East Africa.

1924

Surrealism is “founded” with the publication of Manifeste du surréalisme, the establishment of the Centrale Surréaliste, and the magazine La révolution surréaliste (1924—1929). 10

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1925

In a letter titled, Lettre ouverte à M. Paul Claudel, ambassadeur de France au Japon, the Surrealists and the French Communist Party support Abd el-Krim (Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Khaṭṭāb) a leader of the Ait Khattab group of Berbers in Morocco, who organized towards the Republic of Rif, whose goal was independence from Spanish and French colonial rule. 11

1927

Herskovits establishes the Anthropology Department at Northwestern University. Bataille writes The Story of the Eye [Histoire de l’oeil] and the prose essay/poem “The Solar Anus” [“L’Anus solaire”]. 12

1928

Jean Price-Mars publishes a series of lectures as “Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle), his classic study of Haitian popular culture.” 13 Melville and Frances Herskovits travel to Haiti for the first time. 14

1929

William Seabrook publishes The Magic Island, about Vodou in Haiti. Zora Neale Hurston studies with Boas, researching hoodoo in New Orleans.

1929–1930

Breton publishes the second Surrealist Manifesto (Deuxième manifeste du surréalisme), first published in the December 15, 1929 edition of La révolution surréaliste, 15 whose consequence would be to divide the original adherents to the movement according to those committed to radical aesthetics and collective action (Breton’s Surrealists), and those who were not comfortable with the exigency that all artistic activity should be committed to political action. Notably, Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, and Michel Leiris would split from the group. That said, the ambivalence around what collective action meant would also include negotiations to artists’ relationship to the Communist party. For example, Aragon would favor working with the Communist party, and in 1933 Breton would be expelled from it. 16 They would publish a pamphlet against Breton titled Un Cadavre on January 15, 1930, which alluded to a pamphlet of the same name published by Breton

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to attack Anatole France (just after his death) in 1924. Bataille would also go on to edit his own magazine Documents, “which ran for 15 issues through 1929 and 1930.” 17 Hollier writes that in “retrospect, DOCUMENTS appears like a bridge . . . between Surrealism and ethnography.” 18 1931

Bataille publishes a text by Leiris in Documents titled “‘Le caput mortuum’ ou la femme de l’alchimiste,” which is accompanied by images of William Seabrook, that deal with “various types of acephali, images of headless—or rather, faceless—bodies.” 19 Although the images of Seabrook are not of Haiti, they preview what will be later meditations on headlessness and facelessness in Bataille’s magazine Acéphale, supposedly inspired a viewing of André Masson’s paintings in which Masson played Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and, the idea that the “acéphale” is a “surpassing of Don Juan by Nietzsche.” According to Hollier, Don Juan, unlike Nietzsche, manifests a “rationalism which refuses to lose its head.” 20 Langston Hughes takes a journey of “selfexploration” to Haiti in 1931, with a letter of presentation, written by William Seabrook. 21

1931–1933

The Dakar-Djibouti Expedition (May 19, 1931— February 17, 1933), led by Marcel Griaule, and with advising from “the man of letters Abba Jérôme Gabra Moussié, delegate of the Ethiopian government to the Mission to help him [Marcel Griaule] in his research.” 22 The Gondar portion of the trip, where Leiris would observe zar possession rituals, took place from July 1–December 5, 1932. 23

1932

Establishment of the journal Légitime Défense started by René Ménil and Jules Monnerot. 24 Exposition coloniale internationale in Paris. 25 Breton speaks out against “la poésie à sujet” in “Misère de la poésie.” 26

1932

Reconciliation between Bataille and Breton; Aragon leaves the Surrealists.

1933

Breton is expulsed from the Communist Party. 27

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L’Afrique fantôme (Phantom Africa) is published by Editions Gallimard, composed of the journals that Leiris wrote during the Dakar-Djibouti Expedition. Its 1996 version in Miroir de l’Afrique is its 6th edition, which Jean Jamin characterizes as “le caractère ‘inclassable’ de l’ouvrage” or “[l]ivre en quelque sorte origine de l’œuvre ethnographique et de l’œuvre autobiographique.” 28 Herskovits and his wife Frances conduct twelve weeks of summer fieldwork in Haiti. Due to the antisuperstition campaign in Haiti, Herskovits must solicit permission from the local authorities to allow a Vodou ceremony to take place so that he may observe it. 29

1933–1939

Alexander Kojève gives lectures on Hegel at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, which included students such as Bataille, Breton, Lacan, MerleauPonty, and Sartre. 30 By the early 1930s, Victor Serge, a Russian communist, who grew up in Belgium, was feared by Stalin as conspiring with Trotsky against his leadership, and imprisoned several times in the early 1930s. Although in 1935, Serge was not under strict imprisonment, he was sidelined such that he could not find steady employment. His case became a cause célèbre for French intellectuals grappling with Stalinism. Although Serge’s chief correspondence was with André Gide, Breton would take up his cause, wanting to use the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1935 in Paris as a platform to plead Serge’s case. Aragon would disagree. See Victor Serge’s “Open Letter to André Gide.” 31

August 15, 1934 (Franklin D. Roosevelt)

End of official U.S. occupation of Haiti.

1935

The Haitian government under Sténio Vincent redefines what it considers as unacceptable practices associated with Vodou, expanding the definition from just “sortilèges,” or sorcery, to most “pratiques supersticieuses”—”superstitious practices,” which

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included most everything: “ceremonies, rites, dances, and meetings.” 32 Katherine Dunham is awarded travel fellowships from the Julius Rosenwald and Guggenheim foundations to conduct ethnographic study of the dance forms of the Caribbean, especially as manifested in Vodou. She also receives a grant to work with Melville Herskovits. Métraux and Leiris meet. 33 “A cautious rapprochement occurred [between Breton and Bataille]” in 1935 with their joint membership in a political group called Counterrattack. 34 1935–1941

Brazilian anthropologist Arthur Ramos and Herskovits correspond as regards projects on studies in race relations, funded by UNESCO. 35

1936–1939

The Spanish Civil War takes place from July 17, 1936 to April 1, 1939 between the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco and those fighting for the existing Second Spanish Republic. General Franco’s forces won and remained in power until his death in November 1975.

1936

C. L. R. James’s play The Black Jacobins is performed in London’s West End, with Paul Robeson as a leading actor. Neale Hurston receives a Guggenheim Fellowship, and travels to Haiti for the first time. Alan Lomax’s audio recordings of Vodou song are taped upon his visit to Haiti in 1936. 36 Orson Welles’ all-black casted Voodoo Macbeth, is first produced in 1936 by the Federal Theater Project in New York City. 37 Sartre publishes Transcendence of the Ego [Transcendance de l’ego: Esquisse d’une description phénomenologique] written in 1934, breaking with Husserl’s phenomenology. For Sartre, consciousness and phenomenology belonged together. In other words, objects were both objects (including human as object) of consciousness (intended objects), and

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also objects that exercised consciousness. To think is not the same as realizing the fact that one thinks. 1937

Bataille, Caillois, and Leiris found the Collège de sociologie. Herskovits’s Life in a Haitian Valley, his first book, is published by Alfred A. Knopf. “Herskovits offered Alfred Métraux a salary of $2,700 to take up a sixmonth course at Northwestern.” 38 Malraux publishes Days of Hope, which “makes revolution the promise of a victory,” and depicts the Spanish Civil War: its main protagonist is Manuel, the same name of the main protagonist in Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée—Masters of the Dew. The Gradiva Gallery opens, 31, rue de Seine. Breton is its first director. Marcel Duchamp designed the double-cast shadow door. 39

1938

C.L.R. James publishes The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. William Dubois’ drama Haiti is produced in Harlem by the Federal Theater Project. Dunham submits her MA thesis titled “The Dances of Haiti: A Study of Their Material Aspect, Organization, Form, and Function,” to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago in partial fulfillment of the degree, which she never completed. Neale Hurston publishes Tell My Horse: Voodoo Life in Haiti and Jamaica (J.B. Lippincott, Inc.) Sartre publishes La Nausée—Nausea, establishing the importance of action (and experience) to the development of thought.

1937–1938

Jacob Lawrence produces the series of paintings titled Toussaint Louverture.

September 29–30, The Munich Agreement is signed by France, Italy, 1938 Germany, and the United Kingdom, without the participation of Czechoslovakia, to allow Germany to annex the German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland). According to Hollier, the agreement would be taken as a great

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disillusion to French intellectuals, who had hoped that their work would influence democratic leanings. 40 1936–1939

Bataille works on the magazine Acéphale, which would publish antecedents to Leiris’s Manhood (first published in 1939, and again 1946). 41 See the year 1931 for more on the figure of “acéphale.”

1940

Louis Aragon joins the French Resistance. Claude Lévi-Strauss is stripped of his French citizenship by the Vichy government because of his Jewish ancestry.

October 1940

“Peggy Guggenheim, Max Ernst, Oscar Dominguez, Benjamin Péret, André Masson, Marcel Duchamp, Wilfredo Lam, Victor Brauner, René Char, Jacques Hérold, Hans Bellmer, Tristan Tzara, René Daumal spend time in Marseille at the villa Air-Bel,” and of course, André Breton and his family. 42

1941

Publication of Herskovits’s The Myth of the Negro Past. From 1941 to 1942, Herskovits conducts fieldwork in Brazil, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation. American sociologist E. Franklin Frazier receives a Guggenheim Fellowship to study family life in Brazil. Métraux’s “first encounter with Voodoo.” 43 Founding of the Bureau d’Ethnologie de la République d’Haïti with Jacques Roumain as its director. 44 “Mabille’s stay in Haiti coincided with the early visits of Alfred Métraux who first came to Haiti on a private visit in 1941 when he met Jacques Roumain and the idea of a Haitian Bureau d’Ethnologie was born.” 45 Founding of the journal Tropiques by amongst others Suzanne and Aimé Césaire, which ceased publication in 1945.

1940–1942

The Catholic Church in Haiti uses the décret-loi passed under President Vincent in 1935 to expand prohibitions on Vodou practice to launch its own anti-superstition campaign against what it would call “le mélange,” 46 the sacrilegious practice of

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mixing Vodou with Catholicism, quite difficult to define, since African diasporic religious practices themselves, as scholars such as Leslie G. Desmangles, Miguel A. De La Torre, and Margarite Fernández-Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert show have been formed in constant dialogue, in what Desmangles identifies as “symbiosis” to Catholic practices. 47 President Elie Lescot will reinforce the Church’s anti-superstition campaign with “civil and military support” in 1941. 48 March 24, 1941–April 24, 1941

André, Jacqueline, and Aube Breton leave from Marseille on the Capitaine-Paul-Lemerle for Martinique, on their way to the United States. They arrive in Fort-de-France, Martinique on April 24, 1941. Wilfredo Lam, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Victor Serge were also amongst the passengers. 49 Breton sojourns in Martinique, which becomes the impetus for his writing of Martinique charmeuse de serpents— Martinique, Snake Charmer, published in 1948.

April 25, 1941

Clément Magloire-Saint-Aude “indicates his sympathy for Surrealism in Haïti-Journal (April 25, 1941), followed by other articles supportive of the movement between 1942 and 1945.” 50

May 16, 1941, for “Breton, Jacqueline and Aube leave [Martinique] on just over two the Presidente Trujillo on their way to the Dominican weeks Republic via Dominica, Guadeloupe, Barbados, Saint Croix, and Saint Thomas.” 51 Breton meets Eugenio Fernandez Granell, “a Spanish painter and Surrealist writer who would have an important role in disseminating Surrealism in the Caribbean and Latin America” and who sought refuge from the Spanish dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, before Trujillo would manifest himself as one himself. 52 Granelle and Breton met daily while Breton was in the Dominican Republic. André Masson arrives in Martinique six days after Breton. 53 July 1941

Breton and his family arrive in New York and are welcomed by Yves Tanguy and his companion Kay Sage. 54 Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and David Hare co-found the magazine VVV. Pierre Mabille arrives in Port-au-Prince in July 1941 as a

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medical doctor because Haiti is an outpost of “la France libre.” He becomes the cultural attaché for “la France libre” in Haiti. 55 Autumn/Winter 1942

In the United States, Jacqueline leaves Breton for David Hare, and takes their daughter Aube. Breton suffers a profound depression. 56 October 14, 1942: The exhibit, organized by Breton and Duchamp, “First Papers of Surrealism” opens. 57 October 20, 1942: The Peggy Guggenheim Gallery opens the exhibit “Art of this Century,” on which Breton, Duchamp and Max Ernst are consultants for the exhibit. 58 René Ménil notes in “Sur la preface de Breton au Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” in Tracées, identité, négritude, esthéthique aux Antilles that thanks to Césaire, it seems that Breton’s positioning on “la poésie à sujet” has changed, and he is more open to it. 59 Boas passes away, supposedly in Lévi-Strauss’s arms at Columbia University.

1943

While in the United States, Breton writes “Un grand poète noir” about Césaire.

January 1943

Breton, Lévi-Strauss, and Max Ernst visit a store on Third Avenue in New York City, which specializes in “primitive objects.” 60 Together, along with Robert Lebel, they had been commissioned by the Galerie Jeanne Bucher to publish a book titled Les grands arts primitifs d’Amérique du nord, but this work “never saw the light of day.” 61

1944

Jacques Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée—Masters of the Dew is published posthumously in Haiti. 62 Maya Deren participates in an intellectual circle in New York City, which includes, amongst others, Breton. Métraux returns to Haiti. Pierre Mabille invites Aimé Césaire to conduct a four-month-long seminar in Haiti. 63 André and Elsa Breton spend two months in the Gaspésie and the Laurentides in Québec, where he

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“enters into contact with indigenous communities.” 64 Breton’s “Un grand poète noir” is published in Tropiques in May 1944. “They [Melville Herskovits and Arthur Ramos] both took part in this project [i.e., research on studies in race relations, funded by UNESCO] along with Fernando Ortiz, Richard Pattee, Jean Price-Mars, and others, and the project led to the creation of the InterAmerican Society for Black Studies, whose headquarters were eventually established in Mexico in 1944. From 1945 their letters dealt with subjects relating to the exchange of books, to the publication of the translation of Herskovits’s book Acculturation.” 65 June 1945

Breton and Elisa Claro visit Reno, Nevada: they must reside in Reno for at least six weeks to be able to marry. During this time they visit the “Navajo, Zuñi, Apachi and Hopi reservations.” 66

September 1945

An agreement is signed to establish a French Institute in Port-au-Prince. Pierre Mabille will be its first director. Mabille fills out an “‘ordre de mission’ for André and Elisa Breton so that the poet may give a series of lectures both in Haiti and then later in Martinique.” 67

December 4, 1945 André and Elsa Breton arrive in Port-au-Prince by plane. They are “welcomed by Pierre Mabille and Wilfredo Lam (who is there for an exhibit of his work at the French Institute), by Haitian intellectuals René Bélancé, Paul Laraque, and René Depestre, who at the time was nineteen years old, and who had met with great success for a collection of poems [titled Etincelles], and finally by the French ambassador.” That evening they go to the caférestaurant The Savoy. 68 December 7, 1945 The first issue of La Ruche is published, and is named “Organ of the youth,” and this first issue puts as its headline, “Bienvenue au grand Surréaliste André Breton.” In this issue, Jacques Stephen Alexis signed under the “pseudonym of Jacques la Colère.” 69 December 13, 1945

René Bélancé’s interview with Breton for Haïti Journal is published.

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December 20, 1945

“Breton gives his first scheduled literary conference at the Rex Theater in Port-au-Prince, in the presence of President Lescot, his ministers, the senators and deputies, some military dignitaries, business persons—people who knew little about Breton and Surrealism—as well as six hundred students and intellectuals.” 70 Berthet recounts rumors of the end of the evening in which Breton left the theater without taking leave of the head of State, a tradition in Haiti. This faux-pas was taken by the revolutionary youth as a public affront to the government, which only reinforced the prestige of the poet. 71

1945

Seabrook commits suicide in Rhinebeck, New York.

December 1945–January 1946

A presidential decree is imposed by President Lescot to order the cessation of the printing of La Ruche. Depestre and Théodore Baker are arrested. From January 7 to 11, 1946 the youth demonstrates to have their two compatriots released from jail. 72

December 1945–January 1946

Depestre is arrested, after the demonstrations, which follow Breton’s “First Haitian Conference.” He is released and sent to France on an augmented scholarship, whose goal is to “get rid of him.” He will become the “protégé of Marxist intellectuals (Aragon, Pablo Neruda).” 73 On January 11, 1946, President Elie Lescot in Haiti is forced out of power; Depestre is forced to flee, and he will continue his studies in France. Claude Lévi-Strauss is appointed director of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York.

1946

Pierre Verger’s first visit to Brazil.

1946–1947

Deren is awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for “Creative Work in the Field of Motion Pictures,” and to finish work on a project titled: “Meditation on Violence.” In 1947, Deren travels to Haiti for the first time, with subsequent trips to Haiti from 1947–1954.

1946–1954

Max Ernst lives in Sedona from 1946–1954, “in close proximity to the Indian reservations of the Hopi and the Zuñi whose culture and its products he also admired.” 74

1947

Translated by Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook, Masters of the Dew is published in English. 75

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1947

The literary magazine Présence Africaine is founded. Breton’s “Un grand poète noir” serves as a preface to the 1947 edition of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal— Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.

1948

Herskovits, with funding from the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation establishes the first major program in Africana Studies at Northwestern University. Métraux leads the UNESCO Marbial Valley (Haiti) anthropological survey from 1948 to 1950. Césaire invites Leiris to visit the French Caribbean Departments “in order to mark the hundredth anniversary of the abolition of slavery” in territories under French jurisdiction. Leiris spends time with Alfred Métraux in Haiti. At the end of his stay, he gave a talk entitled “Antilles et poésie des carrefours,” which was broadcast at the time. In this lecture of enormous importance to Caribbean Studies, Leiris uses his French Caribbean experiences as fieldwork for an “auto-ethnography.” 76 Breton publishes Martinique Charmeuse de serpents. 77 Sartre writes the preface to Anthologie de la littérature nègre et malgache, edited by Léopold Sédar Senghor. Publication of the first Kinsey Report: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.

1949

In 1949, Verger visits Haiti. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la littérature? is first published. At the time of its publication, Bataille and Blanchot objected to Sartre’s idea of “protecting art against the world,” instead, it should be “a question of exposing art to a world in which it would no longer have any protectors.” 78 With hindsight, Hollier explains that the innovation of Qu’est-ce que la littérature was that Sartre does not ask that writers: “choose between a literature that is committed and one that is not. He shows that, whether they like it or not, whether they know it or not, commitment is a constitutive dimension of literature.” 79 In a sense, Sartre’s reflections attempt to resolve the schisms between Breton, on the one hand, and, on the other, Louis Aragon, Georges Bataille, Robert Desnos and

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Michel Leris (1929–1930), which is also related to the later debate between Césaire and Depestre (1954–1955). Bataille publishes La part maudite (The Accursed Share) with Editions de minuit, written at the end of the Second World War. 1950

May 10, 1950: Overthrow of Dumarsais Estimé who had been the Haitian President since August 16, 1946. Dunham is friends with Estimé and supports him.

1951

Dunham is “denied admittance to a hotel because she was Black” in São Paulo. “This episode of racial discrimination opened a series of congressional discussions about an antidiscrimination law, approved in 1951, the so-called Alfonso Arinos law.” Correspondence between Herskovits, Métraux, and Roger Bastide surrounded this incident. 80

1950s

“UNESCO had been established following the catastrophic results of World War II. One of its major goals was to understand the international conflict and its most perverse consequence, the Holocaust. The issue of race was also kept in the forefront of public attention by the persistence of racism, especially in the United States and South Africa, the emergence of the cold war, and the disruption of colonialism in Africa and Asia. . . . To this end, UNESCO encouraged in the early 1950s a cycle of studies about Brazilian race relations.” 81 1950–1957: Bi-weekly meetings in Paris between Leiris and Métraux discussing correspondences and differences between Ethiopian zar possession and Haitian Vodou possession.

1950

Métraux becomes a permanent member of UNESCO’s Department of Social Sciences. Depestre is kicked out of France for supporting an anticolonialist agenda, and will live itinerantly in Czechoslovakia, Cuba, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil.

1951

Maya Deren writes Divine Horsemen. 82

1953

Deren publishes Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (Vanguard Press).

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Publication of second Kinsey Report: Behavior in the Human Female. 1954

Aragon founds Journal de la Poésie Nationale.

1955

Métraux and Bastide work on what Bastide and Florestan Fernandes published as As relações raciais entre negros a brancos em São Paulo—Racial Relationships between Blacks and Whites in São Paulo. Condé explains the context that would fuel the argument between Césaire and Depestre: “On the first page of ‘Lettres Françaises’ there appears the letter of a certain René Depestre, a Haitian poet living in exile in Brazil, commented on by Charles Dobzinski. ‘I am trying to resolve,’ the letter reads, ‘thanks to Aragon the conflict in which I’ve struggled with formal individualism . . . I have theoretically rallied myself to the decisive teachings of Aragon.’ It has been impossible for me [Condé] to know what Aragon himself felt about Depestre’s allegiance. He makes no reference to it in ‘Lettres Françaises.’ That said, the entire francophone world is up in arms about it.” 83

1955

Césaire publishes the poem titled, “Le verbe marronner, Réponse à René Depestre, poète haïtien (elements d’un art poétique)”—“The Verb ‘To Maroon,’ Response to René Depestre, Haitian Poet (Elements of a Poetic Art).” 84

1956

In 1956, after the First International Conference of Black Writers and Artists “organized by [the magazine] Présence africaine,” Depestre would “break with Stalinism,” and Depestre would continue his published argument with Césaire about the relationship between poetics, communism, and anticolonialism. 85

March 1956

Césaire responds to Depestre for the last time by an article titled “Sur la Poésie nationale” in the magazine Optique. 86

1957

François Duvalier is elected president of Haiti on April 21, 1957. Bataille publishes L’Erotisme, with an image of Vodou by Pierre Verger (see chapter 9).

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377

Leiris publishes La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar—Possession and Its Theatrical Elements, the Ethiopians of Gondar, written in 1958, just after his 1950–1957 bi-weekly meetings with Métraux (see chapter 7). Métraux publishes Le Vaudou haïtien—Voodoo in Haiti with Editions Gallimard, with a preface by Leiris.

1958–1959

Depestre returns to Haiti; Duvalier offers him the position of “Responsable culturel des affaires étrangères,” 87 which he rejects.

1959

Camus publishes Les possédés: pièce en trois parties adaptée du roman de Dostoïevski—The Possessed: A Play in Three Acts. Métraux’s work Voodoo in Haiti is translated into English and published by Oxford University Press.

1959

Depestre joins the Cuban Revolution and will remain in Cuba until 1978. Orfeu Negro, directed by Marcel Camus is released. It wins the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1959 and the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards in 1960.

1960

Neale Hurston passes away.

1961

Deren dies at age forty-four. Bataille publishes Les Larmes d’Eros—The Tears of Eros, with an image of Vodou by Verger. C. L. R. James is forced to leave Trinidad and Tobago, expelled from the People’s National Movement. 88

1962

Bataille passes away.

1963

Herskovits passes away.

1964

François Duvalier declares himself “President for Life.”

1969

Dunham publishes Island Possessed.

1970

De Certeau publishes La possession de Loudun—The Possession at Loudun.

1971

François Duvalier dies on April 21, 1971, passing the power to his son, Jean-Claude.

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Frankétienne publishes Dezafi, the first novel in Haitian Kreyòl. Foucault gives his lecture on possession, titled “Cours du 26 février 1975,” published in 1999, in a volume titled Les Anormaux: Cours au Collège de France: 1974–1975—The Abnormal: Course at the Collège de France: 1974–1975.

1977

Louis Mars publishes The Crisis of Possession in Voudou, translated from the original French of 1946.

1978

Depestre leaves Cuba after several falling outs with Castro’s government, and takes a position at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris.

1979–1980

Leiris writes La Croyance aux génies zar en Ethiopie du nord written in 1979/1980 [see above], published in 1989.

1980

Marguerite Yourcenar is named on March 6, 1980 the first woman to the Académie française. Sartre dies on April 15, 1980.

1981

Edouard Glissant publishes Le discours antillais.

1985

Wade Davis publishes The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist’s Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic. Dany Laferrière publishes Comment faire l’amour avec un nègre sans se fatigue—How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired.

February 7, 1986

Jean-Claude Duvalier falls from power in Haiti, having ruled since April 22, 1971. Depestre retires from UNESCO and moves to the Aude region of France.

1987

Jean-Claude Fignolé publishes Les possédés de la pleine lune—Possessed by the Full Moon.

1988

René Depestre publishes Hadriana dans tous mes rêves—Hadriana in All My Dreams.

1989

Carlo Ginzburg publishes an article suggesting that the College de France and its “vicinity” showed, and this is Hollier quoting Ginzburg, an “‘extremely equivocal attitude towards Fascist and Nazi ideologies’” in the years preceding and during the Second World War. 89 Hollier takes Ginzburg to task,

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contextualizing the philosophical considerations of those intellectuals associated with the Collège de France, which included Bataille, Leiris, and Caillois. 90 1990

Depestre publishes Eros dans un train chinois—Eros in a Chinese Train, and Fignolé publishes Aube tranquille—Tranquil Dawn. Leiris passes away.

1991

Aristide is elected president of Haiti.

1994–1996

Aristide returns to Haiti as President.

1996

Verger passes away.

2001

Maryse Condé publishes the article “Fous t’en Depestre; Laisse dire Aragon” in The Romantic Review.

2001–2004

Aristide’s second term as Haiti’s President.

2005

Kettly Mars publishes L’Heure hybride—Hybrid Hour. The Musée du quay Branly publishes “Haïti et l’anthropologie,” a special volume of the journal Gradhiva, edited by Carlo Avierl Célius.

2006

Dunham passes away.

2007

J. Michael Dash publishes the article “Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist Ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean” in L’Esprit créateur.

2012

As of December 2012, thanks to KOSANBA’s efforts, the United States Library of Congress “change[d] its primary subject heading from ‘Voodooism’ to ‘Vodou,’ an appellation that is far less ‘pejorative’ than ‘Voodoo.’” 91 Duke University Press launches the series titled, “Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People.”

2013

Mars publishes Aux frontières de la soif—At the Borders of Thirst. NOTES

1. Berthet, André Breton, l’Eloge de la Rencontre, 86. 2. Alexandre Dumas, “Urban Grandier,” http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2746/ 2746-h/2746-h.htm, David Widger, September 22, 2004 [ebook #2746].

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3. Alexandre Dumas, père, Urbain Grandier: A Play in 5 Acts, 1850, translated and adapted by Frank J. Morlock http://www.cadytech.com/dumas/stories/urbain_ grandier.php 2000. 4. David Allen Harvey, “Lucifer in the City of Light: The Palladium Hoax and ‘Diabolical Causality,’” Fin de Siècle France Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft 1/2, Winter 2006: 177–206. 5. María Clara Bernal, “El encantador de serpientes: suenos de paisajes lejanos,” Revista de Estudios Sociales, 2008 (August): 40. 6. Stephenson, Possession, 66. 7. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 121. 8. Ibid., 120. 9. Ibid., 119. 10. Sophie Behar, Centre de recherches sur le surréalisme. “Melusine: Université de la Sorbonne nouvelle, Paris III - Centre de recherches sur le surréalisme.” La Révolution surréaliste. 2009. http://melusine.univ-paris3.fr/Revolution_surrealiste/Revol_surr_ index.htm (accessed June 19, 2013). 11. Vincent Debaene, “Review of La Rançon du colonialisme. Les surréalistes face aux mythes de la France coloniale (1919–1962), by Bibliographical reference Sophie Leclercq.” Gradhiva: Carl Einstein et les primitivistes 14 (2011): 261. 12. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 65. 13. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 179. 14. Ibid., 165. 15. Behar, La Révolution surréaliste, http://melusine.univ-paris3.fr/Revolution_ surrealiste/Revol_surr_index.htm 16. Frank Brenner and David Walsh, “André Breton and problems of twentiethcentury culture (Part II).” World Socialist Website. June 16, 1997. http://www.wsws.org/ en/articles/1997/06/bre2-j16.html#40 (accessed September 2, 2013). 17. Ades and Bradley, Undercover Surrealism, 11. 18. Denis Hollier, “Ethiopia,” in Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS, by Dawes Ades and Fiona Bradley (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 140. 19. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 111, 215. 20. Ibid., 53. 21. Forsdick, “Haiti in U.S. Inter-war Cultural Production,” 7–18. 22. Leiris, “Croyance,” 923. The original French is: “conformément à la méthode enseignée par Marcel Mauss à l’Institut d’ethnologie, et j’ai été assisté durant ce travail par le lettré abyssin Abba Jérôme Gabra Moussié, délégué du gouvernment éthiopien auprès de la Mission pour l’aider [Marcel Griaule] dans ses recherches.” 23. Ibid. 24. Dash, “Le Je de l’autre,” 84. 25. Berthet, André Breton, l’Eloge de la Rencontre, 55. 26. Ibid., 61. 27. Brenner and Walsh, “André Breton and Problems of Twentieth-Century Culture,” http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1997/06/bre2-j16.html#40 28. Jean Jamin, Notes to Miroir de l’Afrique, by Michel Leiris, edited by Jean Jamin (Paris: Editions Gallimard [Quarto], 1996), 66. 29. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 191. 30. Majid Yar, “Kojève, Alexander,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer Reviewed Academic Source (IEP) at the University of Tennessee at Martin, http:// www.iep.utm.edu/kojeve, (2013). Accessed on June 20, 2013 31. Victor Serge, 16 Fusillés, translated by Mitch Abidor 2004 (Paris, J. Lefeuvre, 1936), http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1936/xx/letter-gide.htm. 32. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 184. 33. Mercier, “Présentation to ‘La Possession,’” 903. 34. Jay, Downcast Eyes, 232.

Timeline Combining General Contexts

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35. Guimarães, “Africanism and Racial Democracy,” http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=237&Itemid=164 36. Forsdick, “Haiti in U.S. Inter-war Cultural Production,” 7–18. 37. Ibid. 38. Guimarães, “Africanism and Racial Democracy,” http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=237&Itemid=164 39. Berthet, André Breton, 37. 40. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 80–81. 41. Ibid., 101, 111. 42. Berthet, André Breton, 49. 43. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 17 44. Métraux, Voodoo in Haiti, 17 and Rachelle Charlier-Doucet, “Anthropologie, politique et engagement social L’expérience du Bureau d’ethnologie d’Haïti,” 2005. Online version, http://gradhiva.revues.org/313: 2008: 1–19. 45. Dash, “Le Je de l’autre” 90; also see Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 211. 46. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 193, and Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 211. 47. See: Leslie G. Desmangles, The Faces of the Gods: Vodou and Roman Catholicism in Haiti (Chapel Hill: niversity of North Carolina Press, 1992); Miguel A. De La Torre, Santería: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004); and Margarite Fernández-Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo: Second Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 48. Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law, 193. 49. Charles-André Udry, Review of Victor Serge, 1936–1947: les Carnets de “Minuit dans le siècle,” by Victor Serge. http://alencontre.org/societe/livres/victor-serge-19361947-les-carnets-de-minuit-dans-le-siecle.html. 50. Berthet, André Breton, 102. 51. Ibid., 85. 52. Ibid., 86. 53. Ibid., 57. 54. Ibid., 87. 55. Ibid., 99. 56. Ibid., 88. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 61. 60. Ibid., 89. 61. Ibid., 97. 62. Léon-François Hoffmann, “Présentation de Gouverneurs de la Rosée,” Ile en ile. July 21, 2003. http://www.lehman.cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/roumain_gouverneurs. html (accessed September 2, 2013). 63. Berthet, André Breton, 101. 64. Ibid., 91. 65. Guimarães, “Africanism and Racial Democracy, “ http://www1.tau.ac.il/eial/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=237&Itemid=164 66. Berthet, André Breton, 91. 67. Ibid., 100. 68. Ibid., 102. 69. Ibid., 107. 70. Ibid., 108. The translation of Berthet’s text is mine. 71. Ibid., 111. 72. Ibid., 112. 73. Condé, Fous-T’en Depestre, 179, my translation. 74. Berthet, André Breton, 97.

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75. Hoffmann, “Présentation de Gouverneurs de la Rosée,” http://www.lehman. cuny.edu/ile.en.ile/paroles/roumain_gouverneurs.html (accessed September 2, 2013). 76. Dash, “Le Je de l’autre,” 91. 77. Berthet, André Breton, 85. 78. Hollier, Absent without Leave, 7. 79. Ibid., 7. 80. Jessé Souza and Sinder Valter, Imagining Brazil (Plymouth (UK): Lexington Books, 2005), 166. 81. Marcos Chor Maio, “UNESCO and the Study of Race Relations in Brazil: Regional or National Issue?” Latin American Research Review 36, no. 2 (2001): 118–136. Available online at http://lasa-2.univ.pitt.edu/LARR/prot/search/retrieve/?Vol=36& Num=2&Start=118. 82. Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 101. 83. Condé, Fous-T’en Depestre, 177. 84. Anne Douaire-Banny, “‘Sans rimes, toute une saison, loin des mares’. Enjeux d’un débat sur la poésie nationale.” May 20, 2011. http://pierre.campion2.free.fr/ douaire_depestre&cesaire.htm#_ftn21 (accessed August 6, 2013). 85. Baptiste Chrétien, “René Depestre.” Bibliothèque francophone multimédia de Limoges (BFM: Espace Auteur). http://www.bm-limoges.fr/espace-auteur/depestre/ auteur-biographie.php (accessed August 6, 2013) 86. Condé, “Fous-T’en Depestre,” 178. 87. Chrétien, see “1957.” 88. Dalleo, Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere, 145. 89. Hollier, Absent Without Leave, 77, 207. 90. Ibid., 96. 91. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Kate Ramsey, “Media Alerts.” Journal of Haitian Studies 18, no. 2 (2012): 28.

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Index

academe. See French intellectuals, scholars, and academe accountability, 165–167, 188–189, 198n11 Acemoglu, Darren, 83–84, 90 acéphale. See headless, headlessness, or divine horsemen Aching, Gerard, 48, 50–51, 67n4 activism, artistic or intellectual, 104, 209–210 aesthetics or beauty, 216, 225n68; definition and nature of, 250–251, 259n76; eroticism in, 220–221, 251–252; of Fignolé’s, 278–279; in Hadriana, 250–252, 252–253, 260n89; of “Loko”, 264; of opacity, 337; “poetics of location” in Creole, 35; of possession, 118, 275, 277–278; race and, 251–252; of spiralism, 278–279, 300; Surrealist, 118–119, 120–125; Vodou and cultural, 267–268; zar possession compared to theater’s, 137–138 Africa and African diaspora, 71; binary of identity for Europeans and, 286–288; colonization and hybridization of, 281–282, 318; cultural anthropology on, 144–145, 147–150, 197; freedom and, 47–48; personhood from, 286–287; religion and religious culture, 2–3, 24–25, 99n52; slave identity in literature of, 277–278, 299–302. See also race and racism Agamben, Giorgio, 26, 39n47, 69n60; on entanglement on Western and non-Western thought or space, 97; Haitian studies, political philosophy, and, 52, 53, 63–67; homo sacer of, 55–58, 68n30; on

humanitarianism, 62; on interdisciplinary scholarship, 96; life rights and exclusion in work of, 58–63; on nation and exception space, 79; polis for, 63–67; postcolonial studies and familiarity of, 63; on state control of citizens, 55. See also “bare life,” “sacred life,” or natural life; “sacred man” or homo sacer agency: citizenship, nationhood, and, 49, 55, 67n8; definition and nature of, 48–49; of disenfranchised or marginalized, 48–49, 54–55; in dispossessed spaces, 89–90; freedom and relation to, 51–52; Haitian landscape and spaces of, 1; “master-slave dialectic” and relation to, 48–49, 54; as selfmastery, 50–51; self-narration for, 19–20 Ahmed, Sara, 21, 93–94 alienation, 208 alternative states of being, 117–118 American Psychiatric Association (APA), 15, 158 Americans, 23, 121–122 animal sacrifice, 176–177 anthropology: of “actual” or immediacy, 31, 32–33; African diaspora in cultural, 144–145, 147–150, 197; ancient Greece as metaphor for, 160–163; autobiographical process in, 138, 142n52; contributors in Caribbean, 145–147; cultural other in, 157–158, 162–163, 197; Depestre on, 216, 225n69, 240–241; intellectual history of, 147; on magic, 239, 257n43; politics of, 146–147; possession and, 399

400

Index

129–132, 138, 242; psychology and relation to, 107–110; public nature of, 145–146, 150; race in cultural, 147–148, 151; self-formation in, 31 anticolonialism, 167–170, 211–213 APA. See American Psychiatric Association Appadurai, Arjun, 90, 350, 355n24, 355n26 Arendt, Hannah, 166–167 Aristide, Jean-Bertrand, 333–334 art, artist, or artifice: cultural otherness applied to, 246–247, 247–248; definition and nature of, 1, 259n76; embodied knowledge of, 254; Hadriana as reality compared to, 248–254, 260n86; Haiti as nexus of, 151, 240–241; political activism in, 104, 209–210; Vodou, 244–248, 258n67, 258n68; Western thought in hierarchy of, 244–248, 253, 254; “wrong” in, 252–253; zombification as, 229 Asibong, Andrew, 55–56, 58 aspirational built environment, 348–350, 357n67, 357n68 Athanasiou, Athena, 139, 196–197 Aube tranquille- Tranquil Dawn (Fignolé), 327n111; binary of European and African identity in, 286–288; Creole compared to Vodou space in, 316–320, 328n129; Creole or Vodou thought system in, 273–274, 276, 283–284, 286, 291–292, 293–294, 307; dialogue in, 303–304, 305–307, 326n83; discursive or intermediary space in, 287–292, 298–299, 301, 302–303, 315, 316–320, 323n50; family hybridity in, 312–314; free-indirect discourse in, 302–304, 326n80, 326n82; history and historical figures in, 276–277, 279, 316, 317–318, 324n71; hybridization of thought systems in, 283–284; justice in, 314–316, 317, 327n120; masks in, 307–314; movements and speech acts in, 305–307; narration in, 283, 286–291, 295, 302–304, 305–306, 307–308,

322n39, 322n40, 323n43, 323n45, 323n46, 323n48, 323n49, 324n73; personhood of slave in, 285; plots of, 282–283, 305, 326n89, 326n90; Les Possédés’s compared to, 299–302, 325n77; on possession, 273–274, 275–276, 277–278; power and social systems in, 279–282, 288–289, 290–291, 321n22; psychoanalysis and mental illness in, 297–298, 305; racial identity in, 294–295, 295–299, 299–302, 303, 305–307, 313–314, 324n60, 326n83; revenge or vengeance in, 274, 308–309, 310–316; slavery and Saint-Domingue or Haiti in, 283–286; “window scene” in, 286–291, 317–318 authenticity or truth: for event categorization, 244; in “lived theatre”, 132–133, 136–138, 194–195, 242; through mental illness, 298; of possession, 136–138, 142n41, 194–195, 200n33, 200n34, 298; as relative, 241; “Savage slot” determined by, 132–133; scientific system and symbolic, 242–244; in theater, 242; Western society and, 244, 253 autobiography and autobiographical process, 138, 142n51, 142n52, 174, 213, 216, 217–223 Aux frontières de la soif- At the Borders of Thirst (Mars): culture and healing in, 342–343; failure in, 342; habitability in, 341–348; Haitian spaces in, 329, 343–347; L’Heure hybride compared to, 342–343; narration in, 341–342 Ayyähu, Mälkam, 135, 137, 141n35 “bare life,” “sacred life,” or natural life, 55, 59, 61; of contemporary “sacred man”, 54, 55–56; “dog” in relation to, 75; in politics, 59, 64–65; as slavery, 60; suffering in Haiti’s, 56–57; for women or “sacred woman”, 56. See also “sacred man” or homo sacer

Index Bataille, Georges: on death through eroticism, 186, 186–187, 214, 216; de Certeau and Foucault’s work compared to, 186–187; Haitian Vodou impacted by, 157, 158, 159–160, 177–179, 216; headlessness for, 173; healing missing from work of, 177–178; Hollier on, 181n22; human life as erotic for, 162–163, 175; phenomenology and possession for, 170–173; on possession or Vodou as diabolical, 178, 179, 186; postcolonialism and response of, 178–179; scholarship of, 160, 160–161; Tears of Eros from, 155–163, 176–179, 182n67; on torture for pleasure, 177–178; Verger’s Vodou sacrifice photo and work of, 177, 182n63 beauty. See aesthetics or beauty Beauvoir-Dominique, Rachel, 244–245, 245 Bellegarde-Smith, Patrick, 33–34 Benedict, Ruth, 162 Bentley, Nancy, 252 “big men” or gwo nèg, 206–207 binary or binaries: of citizens and refugees, 61; Hadriana and treatment of, 202–203, 234–235, 236, 239–240; of identities, 234–235, 286–288, 291–292, 303; in “master-slave dialectic”, 49–50; of national success and failure, 43–44, 84–85, 85–86, 90; racial, 201, 286–288, 291–292, 292–293, 295, 295–299, 305–307, 312–313, 318, 319, 324n60; of religious and secular, 50, 96, 124, 173, 176, 190, 191–194, 199n25, 199n26, 200n30; of scientific and symbolic systems, 239, 241–242, 258n56; in society, 239–240; of Vodou and Western thought, 236, 239–240, 331 biopolitical order, 190–194 bios, 59–60, 61–62, 63, 96 The Black Code, 284–285, 293, 322n32, 322n34 Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), 295–299, 307, 318–319, 324n61,

401

328n133 Boas, Franz, 145–147 Bockman, Johanna, 87n11 body, 133, 141n27; biopolitical order over, 190–191, 191–192; colonized spaces negotiated by, 340; as dwelling space, 354; embodied experience and, 15, 91, 218, 253–254, 254–255; eroticism as desire for, 219, 220–221; in Haitian Vodou, 36; human experience through, 26–29, 163–164; knowledge processed through, 161; as location or place, 35, 35–36, 175; physical abnormality in, 341, 356n56; possession of, 19, 34, 174, 177; secular control of, 193–194; subjectivity and, 196; Vodou’s philosophy in care of, 332 Bok, Sissela, 4–5 bokor, 237–238 “Bolereo”, 268 Bondye, 174–175, 236 Bongie, Chris, 208, 211 bourgeois and bourgeois order, 111, 114, 167. See also Western thought or space Bourguignon, Erika, 23, 33, 38n30 brain, 163–164, 164 Brazil, 143, 150, 153n39 Breton, André, 125n4, 126n16, 128, 248–249; alternative states of being and desubjectification for, 117–118; on emancipation through power of thought, 121; Foucault influenced by, 194; Haitian lectures of, 117–120; intellectual and political influence of, 117–118, 119–120, 125n1; Leiris and zar possession for, 118, 124; on location for Vodou art, 244–245, 245–246, 258n67; on modern trauma and personhood, 121–122; possession and Surrealist aesthetics of, 118–119; on Surrealist convulsion and Vodou possession, 122–125 Le Bris, Michel, 111, 112, 113, 115n13 Brooks, David, 98n15 Bruckner, Pascal, 5–6, 6, 7, 110–111, 112–113, 114, 115n21

402

Index

Buck-Morss, Susan, 276 Butler, Judith, 37n19, 46, 196–197, 352 butterfly, 231–235 Caillois, Roger, 170–171 Camus, Albert, 105, 224n16 capitalism, 349 car, Haitian space and, 346–347 Caribbean and Caribbean discourses or writing, 302; anthropological contributors on, 145–147; aspirational built environment in, 348–350, 357n67, 357n68; eroticism or sexuality in, 217–218, 268, 338–339, 350–351, 356n43; fluidity of body of, 354; in Hadriana, 3, 201–202, 214–215; life terms in, 64–65; polis in, 64–67; race and racial identity in, 263, 275; thought system relationship of Europe and, 24–34; Western thought and desubjectification from, 36–37. See also Haitian or Caribbean writers and intellectuals Carpentier, Alejo, 214, 215 Cartesian knowledge, 163, 166, 171, 176 catharsis. See healing or catharsis Chancy, Myriam, 217 Chauvet, Marie Vieux, 55, 56, 57, 58 cholera epidemic, 2010, 2 Christianity, 188–189 church. See religion and religious citizen or citizenship: agency, nationhood, and, 49, 55, 67n8; agency of disenfranchised or marginalized, 48–49, 54–55; binary of refugee and, 61; cultural other and fear from, 75; definition and nature of, 67n8, 357n72; Duvalierism in defining Haitian identity or, 77–78, 294, 294–295; “from below”, 49, 49–50; happiness and, 93; homo sacer and, 55, 56; under law, 73–74; in non-Western space, 76; power structures and, 332–333; race and, 65–66; rights of, 61, 120–121; state control of, 55 Civil Rights Movement, 151 Clitandre, Nadège, 4, 94

colonization: African diaspora and, 281–282, 318; body negotiating spaces of, 340; hybridization through, 24–25, 99n52, 201–202, 214, 281–282, 283–284, 318 Communism, 211–212 community, 236, 236–237, 237–238, 255–256, 314, 315–316, 317, 327n124 Conklin, Alice, 22 consciousness, 167–170, 171, 173, 218, 221. See also life or existence contemporary. See modern, modernity, or contemporary convulsion, 191, 199n23, 227n99 Cosentino, Donald J., 4 “Cours du 26 février 1975” (de Certeau), 186 Creole and creolization: Glissantian, 266–267, 300; in Hadriana, 3, 201–202, 203–204, 215, 215–216, 230–231, 250–251, 263–264, 264–265, 266–267; hybridity of, 300, 316–317; “poetics of location” in aesthetic of, 35; scholarship and, 265–266; thought system, 283–284, 286, 291–292, 293–294; Vodou and, 263–264, 316–320, 328n129; zombification and, 267 “creolization as cultural creativity”, 3 criminal and criminality, 72–73, 73–74, 75 crises or crise, 122, 123–124, 124–125, 227n99 critical theory, 21, 29 Crosley, Réginald O., 174 cultural other or otherness: in anthropology, 157–158, 162–163, 197; art or literature subjected to or applying, 246–247, 247–248; body for exploring, 34; citizen and fear of, 75; enlightenment’s disenchantment and, 31; fetishization of poverty of, 57; Haiti as, 144–145, 197; happiness in, 111–112; “lived theater” of self and, 138; philosophy’s need for, 247; of poor, 86, 87; possession as part of, 15, 28–29, 109, 113–114; racial, 296; of Saint-Domingue, 282; in “Savage slot”, 1, 5, 246; of spirit possession,

Index 159; symbolic systems applying, 247–248; of Verger’s photo, 157, 159 cultural relativism, 149 culture: exile in Haitian, 335–336; Haiti in U.S., 144–145; healing linked to, 342–343; individual and political conflicts linked to, 222; poverty and, 92–93; race and racism tied to, 93, 111, 149; slavery shaping French, 115n19; Vodou and aesthetic movements of, 267–268; Western thought and hierarchy of, 244. See also anthropology; religion and religious culture Dagen, Philippe, 111–112, 115n15 Dakar-Djibouti expedition, 22 Dalleo, Raphael, 212, 212–213, 222, 246 Danticat, Edwidge, 205, 217 Darrieussecq, Marie, 55, 56 Dash, J. Michael, 25–26, 36, 86, 138 Davis, Wade, 243 Dayan, Colin, 43, 71, 72–75, 237, 269n2, 320 Dayan, Joan. See Dayan, Colin DDNOS. See dissociative disorder not otherwise specified “dead in law”, 74 death, 186, 186–187, 214, 216, 218–219, 237–238, 316, 328n126 Decartes, René, 189–190 de Certeau, Michel, 185–187, 187–188, 188, 189, 194–196, 198n8 democracy, 59, 60–61, 79 Depestre, René, 2–3, 16, 17–18, 118–119; on anthropology, 216, 225n69, 240–241; on anticolonialism, human rights, and violence, 168, 168–170, 211–213; on art subjected to cultural otherness, 247, 247–248; eroticism, gender, and race for, 251–252, 268; between Frankétienne and Glissant, 264–269; on fraternity, 168, 168–170, 210–212; on hybridity, 266–267; political activism or dissidence from, 205–207, 206, 207, 209–210, 211, 266; political power of, 212–213, 246–247. See also Hadriana dans tous mes rêves

403

déplacement, 90 Deren, Maya, 145–147 Derrida, Jacques, 247 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 321n21 Descartes, René, 189–190 Desmangles, Leslie G., 34, 316–317 desubjectification or desubjectified subject: alternative states of being related to, 117–118; definition and nature of, 117; instability and possession for equilibrium of, 34; modern, 31; representational possession negotiating, 34; selfpossession of, 31–33; trauma in, 124; Western thought and Caribbean, 36–37 Dezafi (Frankétienne), 263 diabolical or evil: possession or Vodou depicted as, 158–159, 178, 179, 185–186, 186, 187, 188–189, 193, 197n1; slave as, 178; sociohistorical view of, 186–187 dialogue, in Aube tranquille, 303–304, 305–307, 326n83 disappointment, at Haitian decay, 4 Le discours antillais, 3 discourse. See Caribbean and Caribbean discourses or writing; Europe, Europeans, and European discourses; free-indirect discourse; postcolonial studies or discourse disenchantment, 30 disenfranchised or marginalized, 17, 48–49, 54–55 disillusion, 255 dislocation, 33 displacement, 34, 43, 90–91 dispossession: agency in spaces of, 89–90; definition and nature of, 331; from development, 43; as extreme exile form, 16; fascism and European, 165–167, 173; in French context, 170–173; history of, 45–46, 102–104, 165–167, 173; “poetics of location” and, 35; political, 71–72, 197; possession for healing or solace from, 15, 34, 46; scholarship on, 165–167, 196–197; through sexuality, 171; spirit possession and

404

Index

European, 165; world and, 33, 164; writing and, 34–35, 35 dissidence, 205–207, 206, 207 dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS), 15, 107–108 divine horseman. See headless, headlessness, or divine horsemen Dobie, Madeleine, 115n19 “dog”, 75 Douglas, Rachel, 264 Dubois, Laurent, 65, 65–66 Dumas, Alexandre, 189 Dunham, Katherine, 145–147, 150 Duvalier, François, 58, 212, 215–216 Duvalierism and Duvalier regime, 308; exile and Haitian space impacted by, 336–337; Haitian citizenship or identity defined by, 77–78, 294, 294–295; Haitian society and, 76–78; Haitian Vodou under, 77, 221, 233, 316; for U.S. foreign policy, 150–151 dwell and dwelling, 335, 350–354, 355n26 earthquake, 2010, 333, 336. See also L’Heure hybride- Hybrid Hour Egypt, 221 Ek, Richard, 26, 31, 33, 39n47 emancipation, 121, 277–278, 279 embodied experience, knowledge systems, or sites, 15, 91, 218, 253–254, 254–255 enlightenment, 66, 67n1; in Aube tranquille, 283–284, 284; cultural other and disenchantment of, 31; disenchantment as feature of, 30; happiness and, 93; industrialization and warfare impacting, 163; modernity and, 47–48 entanglement, 97, 208–209, 221, 223n2 environmental studies, 354n10 episteme, 279–280, 280–282, 300. See also society and social systems; thought and thought systems eroticism, sexuality, or sensuality: aesthetics including, 220–221, 251–252; body desired in, 219, 220–221; in Caribbean writing or discourses, 217–218, 268, 338–339,

350–351, 356n43; death explored through, 186, 186–187, 214, 216; dispossession through, 171; fluidity and self through, 352; gender, race, and, 213–214, 217–218, 225n48, 251–252, 260n90, 268; in Haitian Vodou, 157, 177–178, 214; of human life, 162–163, 175, 180n15; material poverty impacted by, 339, 340–341, 356n48; poverty and, 343–344, 350–351; in public and political life, 207–208, 219–221; space subjected to, 338–341; trauma’s dissimulation and, 209–217; vulgarity of, 214 ethnography and ethnographic process, 25–26, 131, 131–132, 143 ethnology, 22–23 Europe, Europeans, and European discourses, 302; binary of identity for Africans and, 286–288; dispossession and history in, 45–46, 102–104, 165–167, 173; modern trauma and personhood for, 121–122; possession and similar rituals in, 133; possession compared to theater in, 133–136; power and social systems in, 279–282; spirit possession and dispossession of, 165; thought system relationships of Caribbean and, 24–34 event or events, 241–242, 244 evil. See diabolical or evil exclusion, 58–63 exile, 16, 335–337 existence. See life or existence exotic and exoticism. See cultural other or otherness Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science, 4–5 failure, 43–44, 84–85, 85–86, 90, 342 family, 312–314 Famin, Victoria, 278–279 Fanon, Frantz, 166–167, 169, 295–299, 307, 319, 319–320, 324n61, 328n133 fascism, 165–167, 173 fear, 338–339, 356n45 feminism. See gender fetishization, of poverty, 57

Index Fignolé, Jean-Claude, 16, 345–346; aesthetic of, 278–279; as Haitian writer living in Haiti, 271; masks in work of, 307–314; slavery in work of, 271, 277–278, 278–279, 307–308, 326n92; Vodou in text of, 317. See also Aube tranquille- Tranquil Dawn; Les Possédés de la pleine lune Fignolé, Jean-Jacques, 18 Firmin, Anténor, 221, 226n88 Fischer, Michael M. J., 31, 32 Fischer, Sibylle, 56–57, 61, 66, 78, 97, 293–294 Flaugh, Christian, 341, 356n62 fluidity, 345–346, 350–354, 355n26 Forsdick, Charles, 6, 144–145, 201 Foucault, Michel, 62, 186; Bataille’s work compared to, 186–187; on biopolitical order and possession, 190–194; Breton influence on, 194; on discourse and power in social systems, 279–280, 288–289, 321n21, 321n22; Haitian Vodou, zar possession, and, 195–196; Leiris’s influence upon, 194–195; on Loudun possessions, 188–189; on possession as diabolical, 185–186; on truth through mental illness, 298 France: Loudun possessions in, 101, 187–190; possession in context of, 16, 20, 28–29, 33, 101, 103, 161, 170–173, 185–186, 186–190, 190–194; racism in, 5; slavery shaping culture of, 115n19. See also French intellectuals, scholars, and academe Frankétienne, 99n19, 263–269, 279 fraternity, 167–170, 210–212 Frazier, E. Franklin, 148, 152n24 freedom, 47–48, 50–51, 51–52 free-indirect discourse, 302–304, 326n80, 326n82 French: ethnography, 144; ethnology, 22–23; Republic and society, 1, 5, 6, 9n36 French intellectuals, scholars, and academe: body in human experience for, 26–27, 27–29; Caribbean or Haitian writers and, 265–266; European dispossession

405

for, 102–104, 165–167, 173; on Haitian suffering and resilience, 4; Haitian Vodou, zar possession, and, 195–196; Haiti as nexus for, 240–241; headlessness for, 173–176; possession or spirit possession for, 28–29, 103, 170–173, 185–186, 186–187, 331; postcolonial studies and response of, 5–6, 6–7, 114, 115n21, 178–179, 182n74, 201; on religion, 187; subjectivity and impact of spirit possession for, 28–29; Vodou’s integrity honored in, 2–3. See also specific French intellectuals Freud, Sigmund, 297, 324n66 “fundamentally new subjects”, 89–96 Gasché, Rodolphe, 259n76 Gauguin, Paul, 111–112, 115n15, 115n16 Geertz, Clifford, 221 gender: eroticism, race, and, 213–214, 217–218, 225n48, 251–252, 260n90, 268; in narration, 286–287, 322n39, 322n40 Gilden, Bruce, 56–57, 57, 58, 97 Glissant, Edouard, 3, 34–35, 35, 62–63, 264–269, 300 Global Transformations (Trouillot), 83 Glover, Kaiama L., 36, 57–58, 71–72, 279, 321n19, 337 Gordon, Lewis R., 296–297, 324n63 governance, 83, 232–233 Grandier, Urbain, 187–188, 188, 189, 190 Greece, ancient, 160–163, 181n18 Grinker, Roy Richard, 145–146 gwo bon anj or gwo-bon-anj, 39n50, 174–175, 236, 237–238 gwo nèg. See “big men” or gwo nèg habitation. See home or housing Hadriana dans tous mes rêves (Depestre), 269; aesthetics or beauty in, 250–252, 252–253, 260n89; as artifice compared to reality, 248–254, 260n86; autobiographical elements of, 213, 216, 217–223; balancing of

406

Index

new order in, 232–233; binaries and treatment in, 202–203, 234–235, 236, 239–240; Caribbean or postcolonial studies in, 3, 201–202, 214–215; entanglement of Western and nonWestern thought or space in, 208–209; eroticism and dissimulation of trauma in, 209–217; on eroticism in public and political life, 207–208, 219–221; Haitian intellectual history in, 229, 230–231; Haitian society and impact of, 217; hybridity or creolization in, 3, 201–202, 203–204, 215, 215–216, 230–231, 250–251, 263–264, 264–265, 266–267; identity and, 209, 215–216, 224n14, 240–241; initial reception to, 3; intellectual ambiance in, 3; intimacy in relation to strangeness in, 240; “Loko, butterfly of wisdom” in, 231–235; lwa possession in, 234–235, 252–253; Mémoires d’ Hadrien compared to, 217–223, 226n78, 226n80; narration of, 235–236, 248–251, 259n82, 259n83, 264; novel as solitude in, 255–256, 261n104; performed compared to “lived theater” in, 238–239; political and individual conflicts linked in, 222; on possession, 16, 17–18, 205–206, 208, 209; racial politics in, 221; on scholarship on Vodou, 2; on Vodou, 17–18, 236–237, 263–264, 267–268; zombification in, 205, 215, 223, 225n63, 229–230, 233, 233–239, 239, 243, 250, 254, 256n26, 256n30, 257n42, 257n43, 264 Haiti, 322n28; academe and media on suffering and resilience in, 4; as art and scholarship nexus, 151, 240–241; Breton’s lectures in, 117–120; in cultural anthropology, 144–145, 147–150, 197; as cultural other, 144–145, 197; definition and nature of, 337; deviance discourse in, 78; disappointment, sadness, or anger at decay in, 4; French ethnology in relation to 1930s and 1940s, 22–23; governance and law

in, 232–233; habitation impacted by poverty in, 337–338; Haitian writers living in, 271; for Hegel, 48, 52–53; history of, 229, 230–231, 276; homo sacer and, 55–58; intellectual history of, 229, 230–231; life rights and, 63, 64; possession in context of, 16, 17–18, 22, 33, 101; race and racial identity in, 263, 275; slavery and, 283–286; “slow violence” in, 333–334, 347; spaces in, 1, 50, 50–51, 102, 246–247, 329, 334–338, 336–337, 341–348, 348–350; spirit possession in 1930s and 1940s, 22; suffering in “bare life” of, 56–57; in U.S. culture, 144–145; U.S. politics and, 30, 66–67, 214–215 Haitian: exceptionalism, 57–58, 330–331; landscape, 1, 344–346, 357n74, 357n82; narratives, 102, 246–247; politics, 50, 50–51, 65–66, 119–120, 206–207; Revolution, 206–207, 276; society, 76–78, 217, 246–247, 276; studies, 1, 52, 53, 63–67, 95–96 Haitian or Caribbean writers and intellectuals: academe and, 265–266; Breton influence on, 117–118, 119–120, 125n1; exile and Haitian space for, 336; Haiti as domicile of, 271; as interlocutors of Western and Haitian society, 246–247; on lived experience of space, 348–349; possession in work of, 16, 18, 205–206, 208, 271, 273–274, 275–276, 277–278; power of, 212–213, 246–247, 254–255; on social hybridity and zombification, 264; on unhappiness, 95–96. See also Depestre, René; Fignolé, JeanJacques; Mars, Kettly Haitians, 4–5, 51, 94–95, 122, 353–354 Haitian Vodou: ancient Greek practices compared to, 161–163, 181n18; Bataille’s impact on, 157, 158, 159–160, 177–179, 216; body in, 36; under Duvalierism, 77, 221, 233, 316; eroticism or sexuality in, 157, 177–178, 214; French intellectuals

Index and, 195–196; governance and law from, 233; in Haitian identity, 77, 294, 294–295, 317; as healing practice, 232–233; lwa possession in, 101, 177, 351, 358n115; marasa in, 231–232; Métraux on, 150, 161, 177, 256n1, 257n40; politics in ethnographic research on, 143; pwen in, 27; racial politics and, 221; World War II and, 157 Haiti—State Against Nation: Origins and Legacy of Duvalierism (Trouillot), 76 Halimi, Gisèle, 8n20 Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding (Staloff), 30, 66 Hansen-Løve, Ole, 250–251, 260n87 happiness, 92; of bourgeois, 111; for Bruckner, 6, 110–111, 112–113, 114; citizen and, 93; in cultural other, 111–112; enlightenment and, 93; as normative behavior, 112–113; personhood and, 93–94; in Les Possédés, 326n81; in poverty, 94; in Western thought, 110–113 Harrington, Michael, 86 headless, headlessness, or divine horsemen: in autobiography, 174; for Bataille, 173; existence defined by, 173; in French intellectualism and Vodou possession, 173–176; in Vodou possession, 174–175, 176 healing or catharsis: Bataille’s work missing, 177–178; culture and link to, 342–343; in Haitian landscape, 344–346, 357n74, 357n82; mental illness through psychology, 191, 192; through possession, 5, 15, 34, 46, 135–136, 138, 142n50, 254–256, 315–316, 327n124, 330, 332; suffering and, 331, 345–346; Vodou as practice of, 232–233, 298, 314, 317, 323n51 Hegel, G. W. F., 44, 46, 47–50, 50–51, 52–53, 67n5 Heidegger, Martin, 62–63, 352–353, 355n26, 358n126 Hénaff, Marcel, 239–242, 243

407

Herskovits, Melville, 143–144, 145–150, 151, 152n24, 152n27, 167 L’Heure hybride- Hybrid Hour (Mars): Aux frontières compared to, 342–343; body negotiating colonized space in, 340; dwelling and fluidity in, 351–352; fear, poverty, and solitude in, 339; Haitian spaces in, 329; narration of, 338–339, 342, 356n41; poverty in, 330, 339, 340–341; space sensualized in, 338–341 Hiroshima, mon amour, 347–348 history: in Aube tranquille, 276–277, 279, 316, 317–318, 324n71; “big men” in Haitian revolutionary, 206–207; of dispossession, 45–46, 102–104, 165–167, 173; of Haiti, 229, 230–231, 276; intellectual, 143–144, 147, 229, 230–231; possession in social, 186–187, 187–190, 190–194, 197n3, 198n8; UNESCO, 146 The History of Sexuality (Foucault), 186–187, 190 Hollier, Denis, 160, 163, 164, 209–217; on anticolonialism, human rights, and violence, 167–168, 169; on Bataille, 181n22; on embodied knowledge and intellectual, 254–255; on fascism in European dispossession, 165–167; on headlessness, 174, 176; on phenomenology and possession, 170–171, 173 Holocaust and Holocaust camp, 39n47, 166–167, 169, 179 home or housing: as body, 354; exile and, 335–336; of Haitian space, 341–348; human rights to, 355n24; poverty impacting, 337–338, 355n39 homo sacer. See “sacred man” or homo sacer Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Agamben), 55, 61 homosexuality, 338–339, 356n44 hope, 233–234 Hron, Madelaine, 3, 267 human and human experience: through body, 26–29, 163–164; brain and, 163–164, 164; at death, 218–219;

408

Index

Haitian exceptionalism and conflating super- and sub-, 57–58; identity, 273, 273–274, 274, 286–288, 291–292, 292–295, 295–299, 299–302, 303, 305–307, 307–309, 313–314, 317, 324n60, 326n83; justice, 317; in Vodou possession, 174–175. See also life or existence; person, personhood, or individual; rights humanitarianism, 61–62, 334 Hurston, Zora Neale, 145–147 hybridity and hybridization: colonization causing, 24–25, 99n52, 201–202, 214, 281–282, 283–284, 318; of Creole or creolization, 300, 316–317; Depestre on, 266–267; of family, 312–314; in Hadriana, 3, 201–202, 203–204, 215, 215–216, 230–231, 250–251, 263–264, 264–265, 266–267; racial, 283, 295–299, 319, 319–320, 324n61, 328n133; of thought systems, 283–284; zombification and social, 264 identity: Afro-diasporic literature and slave, 277–278, 299–302, 307–309, 313–314, 326n92; binary of, 234–235, 286–288, 291–292, 303; Hadriana and, 209, 215–216, 224n14, 240–241; Haitian Vodou in Haitian, 77, 294, 294–295, 317; human, 273, 273–274, 274, 286–288, 291–292, 292–295, 295–299, 299–302, 303, 305–307, 307–309, 313–314, 317, 324n60, 326n83; possession’s act, subjectivity, and, 29–32; racial, 273, 274, 291–292, 292–295, 295–299, 299–302, 303, 305–307, 307–309, 313–314, 317, 324n60, 326n83; space and, 329–330 immediacy, anthropology of, 31, 32–33 individual. See person, personhood, or individual industrialization, 163 inequality, poverty as, 84 instability, 19, 34 intellectual history: of cultural anthropology, 147; Haitian, 229, 230–231; of possession, 230–231; in

work of Herskovits and Métraux, 143–144, 147 intellectual knowledge production sites, 91 intellectuals. See scholarship, scholars, and intellectuals international aid, 329 intimacy or proximity, 240, 291–292 Jamin, Jean, 129–130 Jenson, Deborah, 271, 277–279 Jung, Carl, 108–109 justice: human, 317; revenge compared to, 314–316; Vodou, 307–308, 314–316, 317, 327n120, 331 Kant, Immanuel, 250–251, 251, 259n76, 260n87 Kaussen, Valerie, 97–98 knowledge: body for processing, 161; embodied experiences informing, 218; entanglement of consciousness and, 221; subjectivity and Cartesian, 163, 171, 176; of world as dispossession, 164. See also embodied experience, knowledge systems, or sites kò kadav, 35, 35–36, 175 Laferrière, Dany, 335, 344–345, 346, 348–349, 357n75 language, 2 law: citizenship under, 73–74; criminal and criminality in, 72–73, 75; “dead” in, 74; Haitian governance and, 232–233; personhood defined in, 72–75; slave and slavery in, 72–73, 75; spirit in relation to, 74 The Law is a White Dog, 72–75 Lefebvre, Henri, 348, 349–350 legitimacy. See authenticity or truth Lehmann, Marianne, 244–245 Leiris, Michel, 37n4, 125n4, 139n4, 140n9, 140n15, 173; on anthropology and possession, 129–132; de Certeau and Foucault influenced by, 194–195; ethnographic work of, 131; in Haitian spirit possession scholarship, 22; “lived theatre” in

Index possession for, 132–139; on performance compared to possession, 128, 133–136, 137–138, 141n40; vulnerability in corpus of, 128–129; on zar possession, 118, 124, 127–129, 129–131, 132, 161 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 221; anthropology on magic in work of, 239; on binaries in society, 239–240; Hénaff and Wiseman on work of, 239–242, 243, 258n56; on proximity and strangeness, 240; on science and symbolic truth, 244 Lewis, William, 180n14 liberation, 169 life or existence: bios and zoē, 59–60, 61–62, 62, 63, 64; in Caribbean, 64–65; democracy defined through, 59; eroticism or sexuality of, 162–163, 175, 180n15; exclusion and right to, 58–63; Haiti and rights of, 63, 64; headless defining, 173; outside traditional political system, 97; Vodou on right to, 58. See also “bare life,” “sacred life,” or natural life; polis or political life; public sphere or life literary theory, 25–26 literature: cultural other applied to Haitian, 246–247; discursive or intermediary space in AfroCaribbean, 287–292, 298–299, 300, 301–302, 302–303, 306–307, 315, 316–320, 323n50; exile and home in Haitian, 335–336; exile and space in Haitian, 336; exile as Haitian cultural trope in, 335–336; political role of postcolonial, 246–247; postcolonial francophone literary theory, ethnography, and, 25–26; slave identity in Afro-diasporic, 277–278, 299–302, 307–309, 313–314, 326n92. See also Aube tranquilleTranquil Dawn; Caribbean and Caribbean discourses or writing; Hadriana dans tous mes rêves; Les Possédés de la pleine lune lived experience, 348–349

409

“lived theater” or “théâtre vécu”, 127; aesthetics of, 137–138; authentic or truthful in, 132–133, 136–138, 194–195, 242; definition and nature of, 132; performance compared to sincerity or, 128, 133–135, 141n30, 141n31, 141n32, 238–239; in possession, 132–139, 194–195, 200n31, 200n32; of self and other, 138; summary of, 139 location or place: body as, 35, 35–36, 175; in Haitian society for idea exchange, 276; of intermediary space, 291–292, 301–302; “poetics of”, 35; “sacred man” and political, 53–54; of Vodou art, 244–246, 258n67, 258n68 Lo Duca, Joseph-Marie, 177, 182n63, 182n67 “Loko, butterfly of wisdom”, 231–235, 264 Loudun possessions, 186, 194–195; accountability in, 188–189, 198n11; Descartes and, 189–190; in France, 101, 187–190; public theater of, 189–190, 198n15; from sociohistorical context, 187–190, 191–193, 197n3 lwa possession, 35–36, 39n42; animal sacrifice to honor, 176; community health and, 315–316, 327n124; crises of, 122; definition and nature of, 74, 315, 327n115; in Hadriana, 234–235, 252–253; in Haitian Vodou, 101, 177, 351, 358n115; in Mars’ work, 336 Mabille, Pierre, 22–23, 119 Madureira, Luís, 36 magic, 239, 257n43, 344–346, 357n74, 357n82 Maio, Marcos Chor, 146 malediction, masks of, 307–310 marasa, 231–232 Mardorossian, Carine, 35 marginalized. See disenfranchised or marginalized Mars, Kettly, 16, 18; aspirational built environment in work of, 348–350, 357n67, 357n68; citizenship and

410

Index

power relations in, 332–333; on dwelling and fluidity, 353; on exile and home, 336; on Haitian landscape’s healing or magic properties, 344–346, 357n74; on Haitian space and neoliberal agenda, 334; on healing and suffering, 331, 345–346; identity and space in work of, 329–330; lwa possession in work of, 336; political mistreatment in work of, 271; on possession for self-possession, 332; possession in work of, 18; on poverty and sexuality, 343–344, 350–351; poverty and space in work of, 330. See also Aux frontières de la soif- At the Borders of Thirst; L’Heure hybride- Hybrid Hour Martinique and Martinicans, 34–35 marvelous realism, 301, 325n77 Marx, Karl, 86–87 Marxism, 168–170 masculine discourse, 268 Maskovsky, Jeff, 358n106 masks: in Fignolé’s work, 307–314; of malediction, 307–310; in narration, 307; racial, 309, 310, 312–313, 319, 324n59; of revenge or vengeance, 310–314, 327n108, 327n109; of solitude and viciousness, 311 “master-slave dialectic”: agency and relation to, 48–49, 54; binary in, 49–50; freedom’s meaning informed by, 48; for North American scholars, 44, 46, 47–50, 67n5 Mauss, Marcel, 131 Mbembe, Achille, 43, 71, 76, 79–80, 93 Mémoires d’Hadrien (Yourcenar), 217–223, 226n78, 226n80 mental illness: in Aube tranquille, 297–298, 305; convulsion in, 191, 199n23; psychology in healing, 191, 192; truth through, 298 Métraux, Alfred, 127–128, 131–132; on Haitian Vodou, 150, 161, 177, 256n1, 257n40; Herskovits and, 147–150; intellectual histories in work of, 143–144, 147; in UNESCO, 103, 130, 150; on zonbi types, 237, 256n1,

257n40, 257n41 Michel, Claudine, 33–34 Michelet, Jules, 134 Mission Dakar-Djibouti, 128 modern, modernity, or contemporary: desubjectified subject, 31; dispossession and dislocation in, 33; human identity imposed by, 292–295; personhood and trauma from, 121–122; scholarship on, 47–48 montage, risk of, 176–179 Moyn, Samuel, 150, 153n36, 169–170 Mudimbe, V. Y., 279–280, 280–281, 286–288, 300 mulier sacer. See “sacred woman” or mulier sacer Munro, Martin, 213, 335, 336, 337 Nabajoth, Nicolas, PS-1, PS-3, PS-5, PS7 Nadja (Breton), 248–249 narration: in Aube tranquille, 283, 286–291, 295, 302–304, 305–306, 307–308, 322n39, 322n40, 323n43, 323n45, 323n46, 323n48, 323n49, 324n73; in Aux frontières, 341–342; gender in, 286–287, 322n39, 322n40; of Hadriana, 235–236, 248–251, 259n82, 259n83, 264; of L’Heure hybride, 338–339, 342, 356n41; masks in, 307; self-, 19–21 nation, nationhood, or state: agency, citizenship, and, 49, 55, 67n8; binary of religion and, 191–194, 199n25, 199n26; binary of success and failure in, 43–44, 84–85, 85–86, 90; in Haitian society, 77; in individual’s care, 190; neoliberal agenda causing NGO, 333–334, 355n14, 355n20; in non-Western space, 76; in person’s care, 190; poverty and, 43–46, 84–85; refugees undermining, 60–61; spaces lacking, 92; state of exception to, 79–80; in Western thought, 85. See also biopolitical order natural life. See “bare life,” “sacred life,” or natural life Nedjma (Yacine), 248–249

Index neoclassical economics, 87n11 neoliberal agenda or order, 329, 333–334, 346, 347, 355n14, 355n20 neoliberal humanitarianism, 334 Nesbitt, Nick, 63–64 new order, balancing of, 232–233 NGO. See non-governmental organization Nietzsche, Friedrich, 162 Nixon, Rob, 43, 354n10 non-governmental organization (NGO), 333–334, 355n14, 355n20 non-Western thought or space, 97, 208–209, 223n2 normative behavior, happiness as, 112–113 novel, 254–256, 261n104, 335–338 Oakley, Seanna Sumalee, 62–63 opacity, aesthetic of, 337 oral tradition, 34–35 Orfeu Negro, 224n15 other. See cultural other or otherness pain, extreme, 15 “The Palladium Affair”, 38n37, 199n26 Paravisini-Begert, Lizabeth, 213–214 pathology, 5–7, 330 Patterson, Orlando, 69n64 performance or theater: Loudun possessions as public, 189–190, 198n15; possession compared to, 128, 133–136, 137–138, 141n40, 175; sincerity or “lived theater” compared to, 128, 133–135, 141n30, 141n31, 141n32, 238–239; truth in, 242. See also “lived theater” or “théâtre vécu” person, personhood, or individual: from Africa, 286–287; alienation of post-revolutionary, 208; cultural and political conflicts linked to, 222; definition and nature of, 45–46; happiness and, 93–94; law in defining, 72–75; modernity and trauma of, 121–122; nationhood, poverty, and, 43–46; physical abnormalities in, 341, 356n56; political dispossession of, 71–72;

411

race and, 295–299; of slave, 80, 285, 292–293; state in care of, 190; in U.S., 73–74, 121–122; Vodou on connection of community and, 236 phenomenology, 170–173 philosophy: accountability and, 165–167; body’s care as Vodou’s, 332; cultural other needed in, 247; postcolonial studies in relation to, 21 physical abnormality, 341, 356n56 place. See location or place pleasure, torture for, 177–178 “poetics of location”, 35 “Poetics of Relation”, 3, 267 polis or political life, 59–60; for Agamben, 63–67; bios without, 96; in Caribbean, 64–67; eroticism in, 207–208, 219–221; power over, 78; slavery in, 71; in U.S. dominion, 71 politics and political, 216, 225n68; Agamben, Haitian studies, and philosophy of, 63–67; of anthropology, 146–147; artistic or intellectual activism and, 104, 209–210; “bare life” in, 59, 64–65; bios and zoē in, 59–60; Breton’s influence on, 119–120; Depestre’s dissident activism or, 205–207, 209–210, 211, 266; dispossession, 71–72, 197; in ethnographic research, 143; Haitian, 50, 50–51, 65–66, 119–120, 206–207; Haiti and U.S., 30, 66–67, 214–215; Haitian writers’ power in, 212–213; humanitarianism and, 61–62; human rights as discourse in, 150, 153n36; individual and cultural conflicts linked to, 222; life outside traditional system of, 97; mistreatment in Mar’s work, 271; possession and order of bio-, 190–194; racial, 221; role of postcolonial literature, 246–247; “sacred man” in, 53–54; society, 78; subjects, 61; Surrealist aesthetics and, 120–122; techniques, 62, 69n71 Polyné, Millery, 98n15

412

Index

Les Possédés de la pleine lune (Fignolé): Aube tranquille compared to, 299–302, 325n77; Creole as hybridity in, 300; discursive space in, 300, 301; happiness in, 326n81; mask of revenge or vengeance in, 311, 327n108, 327n109; plot of, 299–300; racial identity in, 299–302 possession: aesthetic of, 118, 275, 277–278; for Americans, 23; anthropology and, 129–132, 138, 242; authenticity or truth of, 136–138, 142n41, 194–195, 200n33, 200n34, 298; as autobiographical process, 138, 142n51; in binary of religion and state, 193; biopolitical order and, 190–194; of body, 19, 34, 174, 177; as culturally other, 15, 28–29, 109, 113–114; definition and nature of, 1, 2, 15, 18–19, 23, 32, 38n30, 46, 107–108, 158–159, 174–175, 209, 255–256; desubjectification and displacement negotiated by, 34; as diabolical or evil, 158–159, 178, 179, 185–186, 186, 187, 188–189, 193, 197n1; for disenfranchised, 17; emancipation through, 277–278, 279; etymology of, 5, 20, 32; European rituals resembling, 133; as familiar but uncomfortable, 23–24; in French context, 16, 20, 28–29, 33, 101, 103, 161, 170–173, 185–186, 186–190, 190–194; in Haitian context, 16, 17–18, 22, 33, 101; in Haitian writers’ work,, 11.3 16, 18, 205–206, 208, 271, 273–274, 275–276, 277–278; healing or catharsis through, 5, 15, 34, 46, 135–136, 138, 142n50, 254–256, 315–316, 327n124, 330, 332; identity, subjectivity, and act of, 29–32; instability and equilibrium through, 19, 34; intellectual history of, 230–231; in language, 2; “lived theatre” in, 132–139, 194–195, 200n31, 200n32; Loudun, 101, 186, 187–190, 194–195, 198n11, 198n15; multiple means of, 107; as pathology, 330; performance or

theater compared to, 128, 133–136, 137–138, 141n40, 175; phenomenology and, 170–173; psychology on, 107–108; pwen, writing, and, 34–36; scholarship and scholars on, 2, 20–21, 23–24, 28, 28–29, 103, 107, 113, 170–173, 185–186, 186–187; as self-narration, 19–21; for self-possession, 16–17, 32, 98, 330, 332, 335–336; from sociohistorical context, 186–187, 187–190, 190–194, 197n3, 198n8; sorcery compared to, 193; space reclaimed through, 16; spiralism and, 275; as spirit possession, 101; trauma processed through, 5, 20, 24, 33, 34, 90, 124–125; as trope, 7, 19–21, 194; in twentieth century, 17; within Vodou framework, 19; vulnerability in, 128–129; in Western thought, 20, 23–24, 101–104, 109, 113–114, 161; zombification compared to, 223. See also dispossession; lwa possession; spirit possession; Vodou possession; zar possession La possession de Loudun (de Certeau), 186 La Possession et ses aspects théâtraux chez les Ethiopiens de Gondar (Lieris), 132–139 postcolonialism or postcoloniality, 5–7, 114, 115n21, 178–179, 182n74, 201 postcolonial studies or discourse: Agamben and familiarity with, 63; critical theory and philosophy in relation to, 21; environmental and, 354n10; ethnography, literature, literary theory, and francophone, 25–26; French intellectuals’ and response to, 5–6, 6–7, 114, 115n21, 178–179, 182n74, 201; French society resisting, 1, 6; Hadriana on, 3, 201–202, 214–215; after Holocaust, 179; Vodou destigmatized in, 1; in Western scholarship, 203 posttraumatic stress disorder, 4–5, 353–354

Index poverty and poor, 83; culture and, 92–93; as discursive space, 330; fear, solitude, and, 339, 356n45; fetishization of, 57; habitation impacted by, 337–338, 355n39; happiness in, 94; in L’Heure hybride, 330, 339, 340–341; as inequality, 84; for Marx, 86–87; measuring, 84–85; nation and, 43–46, 84–85; otherness of, 86, 87; “Savage slot” and, 85–86, 86–87; scientific approach to, 90; sensuality impacting material, 339, 340–341, 356n48; sexuality and, 343–344, 350–351; U.S., 86; Western thought on Haitian, 329–330, 330–331 power and power relations, 83–84; of Caribbean or Haitian writers and intellectuals, 212–213, 246–247, 254–255; citizenship and, 332–333; emancipation through thought’s, 121; over polis, 78; social systems and role of, 279–282, 285–286, 288–291, 294–295, 321n21, 321n22; in Vodou, 320 Poynter, John Ryan, 268 Praeger, Michelle, 35 Pressley-Sanon, Toni, 232 primitive and primitivism, 135, 137–138, 162–163 prison and prisoners, 73, 75 The Production of Space (Lefebvre), 348 The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed), 93 proximity. See intimacy or proximity psychology, psychiatry, or psychoanalysis, 109; anthropology and relation to, 107–110; in Aube tranquille, 297–298, 305; in healing mental illness, 191, 192; on possession, 107–108; Vodou compared to, 297–298, 318–319 public sphere or life: anthropology in, 145–146, 150; eroticism in, 207–208, 219–221; intellectual’s influence over, 223; Loudun possessions as theater in, 189–190, 198n15; sacred in, 222; “sacred man” and, 53; semifictional autobiography and intellectual in, 217–223

413

pwen, 25, 27, 34–36 Rabinow, Paul, 31, 32–33 race and racism: aesthetics and, 251–252; binaries of, 201, 286–288, 291–292, 292–293, 295, 295–299, 305–307, 312–313, 318, 319, 324n60; in Brazil, 150, 153n39; in Caribbean and Haiti, 263, 275; citizenship and, 65–66; in cultural anthropology, 147–148, 151; cultural other in, 296; culture tied to, 93, 111, 149; eroticism, gender, and, 213–214, 217–218, 225n48, 251–252, 260n90, 268; in France, 5; free-indirect discourse and subjectivity of, 302; French Republic and treatment of, 5, 9n36; in human identity, 273, 274, 291–292, 292–295, 295–299, 299–302, 303, 305–307, 307–309, 313–314, 317, 324n60, 326n83; hybridization of, 283, 295–299, 319, 319–320, 324n61, 328n133; masks of, 309, 310, 312–313, 319, 324n59; personhood or individuality and, 295–299; politics of, 221; in “Savage slot”, 221; in scholarship, 162–163, 199n21, 221; symbolic systems for, 296–297, 298–299, 324n63; in thought systems, 293–294. See also postcolonial studies or discourse racialized liberalism, 5–7 Ramos, Arthur, 147–148 Ramsey, Kate, 2 Rancière, Jacques, 252 reality, artifice compared to, 248–254, 260n86 reciprocity, of Vodou, 320 refugees, 60–61, 61, 69n72 régime d’exception. See state of exception religion and religious culture: African, 2–3, 24–25, 99n52; binary of secular and, 50, 96, 124, 173, 176, 190, 191–194, 199n25, 199n26, 200n30; French intellectuals on, 187 resilience: academe and media on, 4; posttraumatic stress disorder and relation to, 4–5, 353–354; suffering and, 4–5, 51, 94–95, 331, 353–354

414

Index

revenge or vengeance: justice compared to, 314–316; masks of, 310–314, 327n108, 327n109; slavery and, 273, 308–309, 310–314, 320n1 Richelieu, Cardinal, 188, 188–189, 192 rights, 148; anticolonialism, violence, and human, 167–170, 211–213; of citizenship, 61, 120–121; Communism and alignment with human, 211–212; cultural relativism in human, 149; exclusion and life, 58–63; Haiti and life, 63, 64; housing and human, 355n24; political discourse of human, 150, 153n36 Robinson, James, 83–84, 90 Rodman, Selden, 245–246, 259n70 Rosello, Mireille, 6–7, 8n20 sacred, in public sphere, 222 “sacred life”. See “bare life,” “sacred life,” or natural life “sacred man” or homo sacer: of Agamben, 55–58, 68n30; “bare life” of contemporary, 54, 55–56; citizen and, 55, 56; in contemporary society, 58–59; definition and nature of, 53; Haiti and, 55–58; political place or status of, 53–54; public sphere and, 53 “sacred woman” or mulier sacer, 56 sadness, at Haitian decay, 4 Saint-Domingue, 279–282, 283–286, 322n28 Sala-Molins, Louis, 284 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 105; anticolonialism and violence for, 168, 168–170, 211–212; fraternity from, 168, 168–170, 210–212; phenomenology and possession for, 170–173; on suffering, 173 Saunders, Patricia, 67n8, 357n72 “Savage slot”, 240; cultural other in, 1, 5, 246; poverty, poor, and, 85–86, 86–87; racism inherent in, 221; truthful in determining, 132–133 scholarship, scholars, and intellectuals: accountability and philosophy in, 166–167; on African religions and religious cultures, 2–3; Agamben on

interdisciplinary, 96; on agency, citizenship, and nationhood, 49; of Bataille, 160, 160–161; on binary of religious and secular, 176; on brain and human experience, 163–164, 164; Breton influence on, 117–118, 119–120, 125n1; creolization and, 265–266; cultural other in “Savage slot” in, 5; on dispossession, 165–167, 196–197; embodied or intellectual knowledge and, 91, 254–255; on enlightenment, 47–48, 93; ethnographic practices in, 131, 131–132; on European and Caribbean thought system relationships, 24–34; “fundamentally new subjects” of, 90–96; on Haitian spirit possession, 22; Haiti as nexus of, 151, 240–241; industrialization and warfare impacting, 163, 166–167; “masterslave dialectic” for North American, 44, 46, 47–50, 67n5; on nationhood, personhood, and poverty, 43–46; politics and activism of, 104; on possession, 2, 20–21, 23–24, 28, 28–29, 103, 107, 113, 170–173, 185–186, 186–187; postcolonial studies in Western, 203; public sphere and influence of, 223; race and racism in, 162–163, 199n21, 221; self-mastery in Vodou, 50–51; semifictional autobiography and public, 217–223; on spaces lacking nation, prosperity, or happiness, 92; on unhappiness or trauma, 94–96, 110; on Western thought’s displacement, 90–91. See also French intellectuals, scholars, and academe; Haitian or Caribbean writers and intellectuals; postcolonial studies or discourse; specific sciences Schuller, Mark, 333–334 science and scientific approach or system: binary of symbolic and, 239, 241–242, 258n56; to poverty, 90; symbolic truth and, 242–244; to trauma and unhappiness, 110; UNESCO, 103, 130, 146, 150; on

Index zombification, 242–244 Seabrook, William, 137–138, 157–158, 173 secular and secularism: binary of religious and, 50, 96, 124, 173, 176, 190, 191–194, 199n25, 199n26; body controlled in, 193–194; Vodou possession as non-, 28–29, 123, 124 self, 71–72, 138, 197, 352. See also person, personhood, or individual self-determination, 120–121 self-formation, 31 self-mastery, 50–51 self-narration, 19–21 self-possession, 16–17, 31–33, 98, 330, 332, 335–336 self-reflection, 32–33 sensuality. See eroticism, sexuality, or sensuality sexuality. See eroticism, sexuality, or sensuality Sherover, Erica, 86–87 sincerity, 128, 133–135, 141n30, 141n31, 141n32, 238–239 singularity, in event, 241–242 slave and slavery, 69n64; Afrodiasporic literature and identity of, 277–278, 299–302, 307–309, 313–314, 326n92; “bare life” as, 60; The Black Code rationalizing, 284–285, 293, 322n32, 322n34; definition and nature of, 60; as diabolical or evil, 178; in Fignolé’s work, 271, 277–278, 278–279, 307–308, 326n92; French culture shaped by, 115n19; Haiti or Saint-Domingue and, 283–286; in law, 72–73, 75; personhood of, 80, 285, 292–293; polis with, 71; power’s role in social system of, 285–286, 294–295; revenge or vengeance and, 273, 308–309, 310–314, 320n1; suffering from, 326n80, 353–354; in U.S. prison system, 73, 75. See also “master-slave dialectic” “slow violence”, 333–334, 340, 347, 356n56 socialism, 87n11 society and social systems: binaries in, 239–240; cultural relativism in, 149;

415

French Republic and, 1, 5, 6, 9n36; Haitian, 76–78, 217, 246–247, 276; homo sacer in study of contemporary, 58–59; political, 78; possession defined by, 23; possession in history of, 186–187, 187–190, 190–194, 197n3, 198n8; power’s role in, 279–282, 285–286, 288–291, 294–295, 321n21, 321n22; truth in Western, 244, 253; zombification and hybrid, 264 solace or solitude: from disillusion, 255; fear, poverty, and, 339, 356n45; from homosexuality, 338–339, 356n44; masks of, 311; novel as, 255–256, 261n104; through possession, 15, 46 solitude. See solace or solitude sorcery, 193 space or spaces: Afro-Caribbean literature and intermediary or discursive, 287–292, 298–299, 300, 301–302, 302–303, 306–307, 315, 316–320, 323n50; agency in dispossessed, 89–90; of agency in Haitian landscape, 1; aspirational built environment, 348–350, 357n67, 357n68; body as dwelling, 354; body negotiating colonized, 340; capitalism and practice of, 349; car and Haitian, 346–347; citizenship and power structure in urban, 332–333; Creole compared to Vodou, 316–320, 328n129; exile in Haitian, 336–337; governance in discursive, 83; Haitian, 1, 50, 102, 246–247, 329, 334–338, 343–348, 348–350; Haitian novel constructed with, 335–338; Haitian politics and revolutionary, 50, 50–51; identity and, 329–330; inhabitability of Haitian, 341–348; lacking nation, prosperity, or happiness, 92; lived experience of, 348–349; location of intermediary, 291–292, 301–302; possession for reclaiming, 16; poverty as discursive, 330; representations of, 349; SaintDomingue and intermediary,

416

Index

279–282; sensualized, 338–341; urban planning in, 349–350. See also Western thought or space speed, 340, 356n56 spiralism or spiralisme, 275, 278–279, 300 spirit or spirits, 74, 314–315. See also headless, headlessness, or divine horsemen; lwa possession spirit possession: for Americans, 23; crises or crise in, 123–124, 124; cultural other of, 159; European dispossession and, 165; in French thought, 28–29, 103, 170–173, 185–186, 186–187, 331; Haiti in 1930s, 1940s, and, 22; possession as, 101; subjectivity impacted by, 28–29, 171–173; Vodou conflated with, 178. See also Vodou possession Staloff, Darren, 30, 66 state. See nation, nationhood, or state state control, of citizens, 55 “Statement on Human Rights” (Herskovits), 148–149 State of Exception (Agamben), 55 “state of exception”, 55, 79–80 “state of siege”, 79 Stephenson, Craig E., 20, 21, 32, 108–110, 189–190 strange and strangeness, 240 structure, 241–242, 243–244 subjects, subjectivity, and subjectivization: body and, 196; Cartesian knowledge and, 163, 171, 176; in consciousness, 171, 173; fragmented, 196; free-indirect discourse and racial, 302; “fundamentally new”, 89–96; identity, possession’s act, and, 29–32; political, 61; spirit possession and impact on, 28–29, 171–173; technologies of self in, 190; traumatism and relation to, 24, 34. See also desubjectification or desubjectified subject Sublette, Ned, 64–65 success, binary of failure or, 43–44, 84–85, 85–86, 90

suffering: academe and media on Haitian, 4; of Haiti’s “bare life”, 56–57; healing and, 331, 345–346; resilience and, 4–5, 51, 94–95, 331, 353–354; Sartre on, 173; selfnarration of, 19–20; from slavery, 326n80, 353–354; Vodou possession’s engagement with, 173 Surrealist aesthetics, 118–119, 120–125 symbols and symbolic system: binary of scientific and, 239, 241–242, 258n56; cultural otherness applied by, 247–248; for race, 296–297, 298–299, 324n63; scientific system and truth in, 242–244 Tears of Eros (Bataille), 155–163, 176–179, 182n67 “technologies of self”, 62, 190 Tedlock, Barbara, 131 theater. See “lived theater” or “théâtre vécu”; performance or theater “théâtre vécu”. See “lived theater” or “théâtre vécu” thought and thought systems: colonization and hybrid, 283–284; Creole, 283–284, 286, 291–292, 293–294; emancipation through power of, 121; industrialization and warfare impacting, 163; possession as bridge for French and Haitian, 16, 33; race in, 293–294; scholarship on relationship of European and Caribbean, 24–34. See also French intellectuals, scholars, and academe; Vodou thought; Western thought or space ti bon anj or ti-bon-anj, 39n50, 174, 174–175, 236, 237–238 Tinsley, Natasha, 338–339, 340, 345–346, 351–352, 353–354, 356n43 Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 222 torture, for pleasure, 177–178 Translating Pain: Immigrant Suffering in Literature and Culture (Hron), 3 translations, 8 trauma and traumatism: in desubjectification, 124; eroticism and dissimulation of, 209–217; of

Index modernity for person, 121–122; possession to process, 5, 20, 24, 33, 34, 90, 124–125; scholarly and scientific approach to, 110; subject or subjectivity and relation to, 24, 34 tropes, 7, 19–21, 194, 335–336 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 1, 5, 43, 98n10, 109–110; on alternative scholarship, 90–92; on anthropology and public sphere, 146; on citizenship or nation in non-Western space, 76; on culture and poverty, 93; on governance in discursive space, 83; on Haitian society and Duvalier regime, 76–78; on nation and poverty, 85; on polis under U.S. dominion, 71; on political society, 78; on poverty and “Savage slot”, 85–86, 87 truth or truthful. See authenticity or truth twentieth century, possession in, 17 Une heure pour l’éternité (Fignolé), 278–279 UNESCO. See United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization unhappiness: Mbembe on age of, 93; as non-normative behavior, 112–113; scholarship on, 94–96, 110 United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 103, 130, 146, 150 United States (U.S.): citizenship under law of, 73–74; Duvalier regime for foreign policy of, 150–151; Haiti and politics of, 30, 66–67, 214–215; Haiti in culture of, 144–145; personhood in, 73–74, 121–122; polis in dominion of, 71; possession and discomfort in, 20; poverty in, 86; prison and prisoners in, 73, 75 urban planning, 349–350 U.S. See United States vengeance. See revenge or vengeance Verdier, Raymond, 273, 320n1 Verger, Pierre: background of, 155–157; cultural other in photo of, 157, 159;

417

Vodou sacrifice in photo by, 155, 156, 176–179, 182n63 Vergès, Jacques, 180n5 viciousness, masks of, 311 violence: anticolonialism, human rights, and, 167–170, 211–213; fraternity or collective consciousness through, 167–170; liberation through, 169; “slow”, 333–334, 340, 347, 356n56; Vodou associated with, 274, 297–298 Vodou: academe and honoring integrity of, 2–3; animal sacrifice in ceremony of, 176–177; art, 1, 244–246, 244–248, 258n67, 258n68; in binary of religious and secular, 50; body’s care as philosophy of, 332; cholera epidemic of 2010 impacting, 2; cosmology, 231–232; creolization and, 263–264, 316–320, 328n129; cultural-aesthetic movements and, 267–268; for “dead in law”, 74; death and, 316, 328n126; definition and nature of, 1, 2, 39n42, 74, 236–237, 314–315, 316–317; as diabolical or evil, 158–159, 178, 179, 186; dwelling and fluidity in, 351–352; Hadriana on, 17–18, 236–237, 263–264, 267–268; Haitian studies, postcolonial studies, and destigmatized, 1; healing in, 232–233, 298, 314, 317, 323n51; individual and community connection in, 236; justice, 307–308, 314–316, 317, 327n120, 331; in language, 2; possession within framework of, 19; power and power relations in, 320; psychoanalysis compared to, 297–298, 318–319; reciprocity of, 320; self-mastery in scholarship on, 50–51; spirit possession conflated with, 178; spirits in, 314–315; Verger’s photo of sacrifice in, 155, 156, 176–179; violence associated with, 274, 297–298; in Western thought or space, 98n15, 102. See also Haitian Vodou

418

Index

Vodou possession: convulsion in, 191; headlessness in, 174–175, 176; human in, 174–175; as nonsecular, 28–29, 123, 124; suffering engaged in, 173; Surrealist convulsion and, 122–125; zar possession compared to, 130 Vodou thought: Aube tranquille and Creole or, 273–274, 276, 283–284, 286, 291–292, 293–294, 307; binary of Western and, 236, 239–240, 331; human identity in, 273–274, 274; on right to life, 58 Vodouyizans, 1 vulgar and vulgarity, of eroticism, 214 vulnerability, in possession, 128–129 warfare, 27, 163–164, 166–167 Watts, Richard, 178–179, 182n74 Weitz, Eric E., 294, 323n53 Western thought or space: art or artifice determined or hierarchized by, 244–248, 253, 254; authenticity or truth in, 244, 253; binary of Vodou thought and, 236, 239–240, 331; Caribbean desubjectification and, 36–37; citizenship or nation in non-, 76; cultural hierarchy in, 244; entanglement of non-Western and, 97, 208–209, 223n2; Haitian narratives in discursive, 102, 246–247; on Haitian poverty, 329–330, 330–331; Haitian writers as interlocutors of Haitian and, 246–247; happiness in, 110–113; nation in, 85; possession in, 20, 23–24, 101–104, 109, 113–114, 161; postcolonial studies in scholarship of, 203; scholarship on displacement of, 90–91; Vodou in, 98n15, 102. See also scholarship, scholars, and intellectuals Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (Acemoglu and Robinson), 83–84 Wilder, Gary, 348 “window scene,” in Aube tranquille, 286–291, 317–318 Wiseman, Boris, 239–242, 247, 258n56

women: “bare life” for, 56; eroticism of Caribbean and, 217–218 world: bodily possession for understanding, 19; dispossession and, 33, 164; human rights as political discourse in, 150 World War II, 150, 157 writing and written form: dispossession and, 34–35, 35; oral to, 34–35; possession, pwen, and, 34–36. See also Caribbean and Caribbean discourses or writing “wrong,” in art, 252–253 Wynter, Sylvia, 95 Yacine, Kateb, 248–249 Yourcenar, Marguerite, 217–223 zar possession: ancient Greek practices compared to, 161; authenticity or truth in, 136–138; definition and nature of, 33, 39n42; French intellectuals and, 195–196; in Gondarian possession, 101; healing or catharsis through, 138; Leiris on, 118, 124, 127–129, 129–131, 132, 161; “lived theater” in, 133–139; performance compared to sincerity in, 133–135; performance or theater compared to, 133, 134–136, 137–138; Vodou possession compared to, 130 zoē, 59, 59–60, 61–62, 62, 63, 64. See also “bare life,” “sacred life,” or natural life zombie, zombification, or zonbi, 17, 37n6, 158; as art, 229; community in relation to, 236–237, 237–238; creolization and, 267; definition and nature of, 229–230, 236–238; false death resulting in, 237–238; gwobon-anj and ti-bon-anj in, 237–238; in Hadriana, 205, 215, 223, 225n63, 229–230, 233, 233–239, 239, 243, 250, 254, 256n26, 256n30, 257n42, 257n43, 264; possession compared to, 223; scientific system and symbolic truth in, 242–244; social hybridity and, 264; as structure, 243–244; types of, 237, 238, 256n1, 257n40, 257n41

About the Author

Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken is assistant professor of Caribbean and postcolonial literatures in French at the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at the City College of New York. Benedicty has published in Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, The Journal of Haitian Studies, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies. For academic years 2012–2013 and 2013–2014, BenedictyKokken served as director of the master of arts in the study of the Americas. For 2013–2014, as co-advisor, she helped to launch the Human Rights Forum at the City College of New York. Previously, she worked at the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York as director of development (2007–2009) and at the Québec Government Office in New York as attachée for intergovernmental and academic affairs (2004–2007).

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