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Voyage to the Marvelous: A Traveler’s Guide to The Kingdom of This World

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 December 2019

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Abstract

Following a legacy of four and a half centuries of literature written by foreign travelers landing on Haiti’s shores, Alejo Carpentier’s seminal novel about the Haitian Revolution is predicated upon Carpentier’s voyage to Haiti six years earlier. This article attends to the role of voyage in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World, revealing the ways in which Carpentier’s storytelling and rendering of Haiti in both the novel and its prologue, and his accompanying theory of the marvelous real, adhere to Eurocentric conceptions of time that reinscribe this neocolonial space as anachronistic space. Because Carpentier can only perceive Haiti in the past, he replicates the role of the imperial travel writer in fashioning metropolitan conceptions of colonial spaces and reproduces the imbalance of power between visitor/visited. This perspective reinforces a dominant Euro-American image of Haiti as a strange and magical object of consumption and fails to imagine it as an independent, post-revolution state.

Keywords

Alejo Carpentiermarvelous realnew world baroqueempiretravel literatureHaitian RevolutionCaribbeancolonial discoursesneocolonialismvoyageCaribbean tourism
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 50 - 68
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press, 2019

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References

1 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), xxiiiGoogle Scholar.

2 Copeland Hall, “South to the Spanish Main,” New York Times, January 16, 1938.

3 Hall, “South to the Spanish Main.” With violence breaking out in Europe, the Caribbean was marketed to US tourists as a “fresh” alternative to European travel. The region’s relative proximity to the United States enabled short pleasure trips. This new pleasure conquest invited “jaded” travelers seeking “fresh lands, scenes and pictures” to be “imbued with the pride of ‘discovery.’ ” See Henry Albert Phillips, “Winter Cruises Swing South: Four Hundred Offered in Coming Season, With Latin-American Itineraries Replacing Most Mediterranean Voyages,” New York Times, December 8, 1935.

4 Mintz, Sidney and Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, “The Social History of Haitian Vodou,” in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Cosentino, Donald (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995), 122–47Google Scholar, esp. 142.

5 Mintz and Trouillot, “The Social History of Haitian Vodou.” At the time of the US occupation of Haiti, corvée was a standard feature of colonial regimes worldwide, most notably of the French and British. The global exploitation of compulsory, unpaid labor not only survived the ostensible abolition of slavery and the slave trade, but such practices were internationally sanctioned. The 1926 League of Nations Slavery Convention (to which the United States was not a signatory), whose mission was to “prevent forced labour from developing into conditions analogous to slavery,” permitted forms of compulsory, forced labor if the labor was “exacted for public purposes.” League of Nations, Convention to Suppress the Slave Trade and Slavery (25 September 1926), Article 5(1). Thus, to conserve fiscal expenditures, corvée labor was commonly compelled by colonial governments from local populations for local public works projects. Research reveals that extensive colonial infrastructure, particularly roads and railways, was built by means of this compulsory “labor tax” and other similar forced labor policies. See, for example, Akurang-Parry, Kwabena Opare, “Colonial Forced Labor Policies for Road-Building in Southern Ghana and International Anti-Forced Labor Pressures, 1900–1940,” African Economic History 28 (2000): 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; van Waijenburg, Marlous, “Financing the African Colonial State: The Revenue Imperative and Forced Labor,” The Journal of Economic History 78.1 (2018): 40–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8 Seabrook, The Magic Island, 91. The Magic Island marks a departure from the blatantly anti-Black accounts of Haiti and Vodou by earlier North Atlantic writers, such as the British author Hesketh Prichard’s 1901 travelogue, Where Black Rules White: A Journey Across and About Hayti. Nevertheless, racial stereotypes of Black inferiority and sexualization permeate Seabrook’s text. For instance, writing of his “mysterious” bond with the mamaloi, Maman Célie, Seabrook invokes a Jim Crow “mammy” archetype: “It was as if … I had suckled in infancy at her dark breasts, had wandered far, and was now returning home.” Seabrook, The Magic Island, 28.

9 In 1938, Hurston published Tell My Horse, after receiving a Guggenheim Foundation Creative Arts grant in the category of general nonfiction to visit Jamaica and Haiti for “the gathering of material for books on authentic Negro folk-life, in particular a study of magic practices among Negroes in the West Indies.” John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, “Zorah Neale Hurston.” Accessed September 22, 2019. https://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/zora-neale-hurston/.

10 Hemenway, Robert E., Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980), 246Google Scholar. A decade later, in 1946, Maya Deren received a Guggenheim Foundation Creative Arts grant to travel to Haiti to film Haitian dance. Deren, Maya, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson, 1970), 5Google Scholar. On page 9, in the preface to her 1953 monograph, Divine Horsemen, Deren discusses the tendency of foreigners to objectify the Haitian people and Vodou and details her rejection of a detached, “Occidental” gaze. Despite the footage that she collected over the course of several return trips, she did not complete the film.

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12 Carpentier, Alejo, El reino de este mundo (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2017), 9Google Scholar. Translations are my own except where otherwise noted.

13 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo.

14 Diana Rice, “Notes for the Traveler: Two Holiday Islands, Inland Trips on Puerto Rico and Haitian Mountains,” New York Times, September 29, 1940.

15 These are the stories typically excluded from Euro-American consumption-driven narratives, whereas Haitian authors and intellectuals were well attuned to the need to improve these material conditions. An example is Jacques Roumain, who was active in the resistance movement against US occupation. Roumain’s novel, Masters of the Dew (originally published in French as Gouverneurs de la Rosée and translated into English by Langston Hughes and Mercer Cook in 1944), represents the indigéniste (indigenous) movement in Haitian literature, which sought to elevate the voices of the Haitian peasant majority and provide a vision for improving their material welfare. In Masters of the Dew, rather than focus on history or race relations, or to sensationalize Vodou, Roumain treats Vodou as a routine aspect of everyday life. The narrative, which calls for cooperative community action and the return of the coumbite (communal farming practices), centers on curing the blight that afflicted Haiti’s land and people. See Roumain, Jacques, Masters of the Dew, trans. Hughes, Langston and Cook, Mercer (Coconut Creek: Caribbean Studies Press, 2012)Google Scholar.

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17 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 11.

18 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 9. “Esto se me hizo particularmente evidente durante mi permanencia en Haití, al hallarme en contacto cotidiano con algo que podríamos llamar lo real maravilloso. Pisaba yo una tierra donde millares de hombres ansiosos de libertad creyeron en los poderes licantrópicos de Mackandal, a punto de que esa fe colectiva produjera un milagro el día de su ejecución … Había estado en la Ciudadela La Ferriére, obra sin antecedentes arquitectónicos, únicamente anunciada por las Prisiones Imaginarias del Piranese … A cada paso hallaba lo real maravilloso.”

19 McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather (New York: Routledge, 1995), 40–42Google Scholar.

20 The practice of Vodou was illegal and violently repressed under the US occupation and, thereafter, in successive campaigns against “superstition.” In The Magic Island, Seabrook, writing during the US occupation, describes the legal barriers and secrecy that frustrated his ability to attend a Vodou ceremony. Seabrook attributes this secrecy to persecution by US authorities and not to any intrinsic feature of Vodou. Seabrook, Magic Island, 31, n1. As an American tourist, his presence might have been welcomed for the security and cover that it would have provided to the Haitian worshippers. In 1946, noiriste president Dumarsais Estimé, recognizing the commercial value of Vodou as folklore, loosened rules against Vodou and promoted the displays of “purified versions of Vodou” that were advertised to international tourists. See Mintz and Trouillot, “The Social History of Haitian Vodou,” 142–43.

21 Mintz and Trouillot, “The Social History of Haitian Vodou,” 143.

22 Bear, John, The #1 New York Times Best Seller: Intriguing Facts About the 484 Books That Have Been #1 New York Times Bestsellers Since the First List, 50 Years Ago (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1992), 27Google Scholar. Within a year, Lydia Bailey had been translated into eight European languages. “WorldCat,” OCLC Online Computer Library Center. Accessed September 22, 2019. https://www.worldcat.org/.

23 Examples of these posters can be found in online archives. See, for example, “Lydia Bailey (1952),” The Department of Afro-American Research, Arts, and Culture. August 21, 2017. https://www.daarac.org/2017/08/lydia-bailey-1952.html.

24 Mignolo, Walter D., “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, eds. Moraña, Mabel, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 225–58Google Scholar, esp. 235.

25 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 40.

26 O’Gorman, Edmundo, The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961), 47Google Scholar.

27 Dash, J. Michael, The Other America: Caribbean Literature in a New World Context (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 22Google Scholar.

28 I employ the concepts of “the marvelous real” and “magical realism” interchangeably here, focusing upon the analogous positionality of the author with respect to Europe and America, as well as the author’s correlating assumptions about the nature of reality, that is, what is real and ordinary versus what is magical and extraordinary. As Roberto González Echevarría writes, “[a]ll magic, all marvel supposes an alteration of order, an alterity—assumes the other, the world, looking back at us from the other side.” Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier, 127. For further comparative analysis of “magical realism” and Carpentier’s “marvelous real,” see Warnes, Christopher, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 191Google Scholar.

30 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 5. “Después de sentir el nada mentido sortilegio de las tierras de Haití, de haber hallado advertencias mágicas en los caminos rojos de la Meseta Central, de haber oído los tambores del Petro y del Rada, me vi llevado a acercar la maravillosa realidad vivida a la acotante pretensión de suscitar lo maravilloso que caracterizó ciertas literaturas europeas de estos últimos treinta años.” Here, Carpentier is comparing the marvelous real against surrealism and what German theorist Franz Roh termed “magical realism” (“realismo mágico”) in European art of the twentieth century. See Carpentier, Alejo, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso,” in Ensayo cubano del siglo XX, eds. Hernández, Rafael and Rojas, Rafael (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002), 349–51Google Scholar.

31 We see this as well in Carpentier’s articulation of the baroque, which I discuss infra.

32 Glissant, Édouard, Poetics of Relation, trans. Wing, Betsy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 17.

34 Glissant, Poetics of Relation.

35 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 28–29.

36 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 82. Wynter, Sylvia traces the roots of this ontological problem in “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3.3 (2003): 257–337CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 11.

38 The first edition of El reino de este mundo (1949) was published in Spanish in Mexico City by Edicion y Distribucion Iberoamericana de Publicaciones.

39 In the novel, Ti Noël takes part in the important early revolt led by Makandal that initiated the revolution. When Ti Noël returns to Haiti after going to Cuba with his master, he is an older man under the rule of Henrí Christophe. In Carpentier’s narrative, he also leads the attack on Sans Souci. Aside from these two insurgencies, Ti Noël is absent during most of the revolution, however, his name recalls that of Petit-Noël Prieur, a soldier who fought in the revolution under the rebel leader, Sans-Souci. Prieur was appointed colonel by general Jean-Jacques Dessalines. See Léger, Jacques Nicolas, Haiti, Her History and Her Detractors (New York: Neale, 1907), 139Google Scholar.

40 Referencing Ti Noël’s lifetime, Carpentier specifies in his prologue that his text “narrates a sequence of extraordinary events that transpired on the island of Saint-Domingue over a distinct period that does not span an entire human lifetime” (“narra una sucesión de hechos extraordinarios, ocurridos en la isla de Santo Domingo, en determinada época que no alcanza el lapso de una vida humana”). Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 11. (Note: I prefer the Makandal spelling, which has broader usage, yet, in quotes from the novel, Carpentier spells it Mackandal.)

41 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo.

42 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 11–12.

43 Danticat, Edwidge, “Introduction,” in The Kingdom of This World, trans. de Onís, Harriet (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), xiGoogle Scholar.

44 Danticat, “Introduction,” xi.

45 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 82 (emphasis in original).

46 Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” 234.

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49 Paravisini-Gebert, “The Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows,” 114.

50 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 10–11. In a footnote in his prologue on page 11, Carpentier cites Jacques Roumain’s 1943 ethnographic work centered on the Rada asòtò drum, Le sacrifice du Tambour Assoto(r). For more on Romain’s monograph, see Ramsey, Kate, “Prohibition, Persecution, Performance: Anthropology and the Penalization of Vodou in Mid-20th-Century,” Gradhiva 1 (2005): 165–79. http://journals.openedition.org/gradhiva/352CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Ramsey’s analysis of the performative impact of the legal repression of Vodou also addresses Roumain’s complicated position toward Vodou in Haiti considering his materialist perspective.

51 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 5. “A fines del año 1943 tuve la suerte de poder visitar el reino de Henri Christophe—las ruinas, tan poéticas, de Sans-Souci; la mole, imponentemente intacta a pesar de rayos y terremotos, de la Ciudadela La Ferriére— y de conocer la todavía normanda Ciudad del Cabo —el Cap Françáis de la antigua colonia—, donde una calle de larguísimos balcones conduce al palacio de cantería habitado antaño por Paulina Bonaparte.”

52 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 29.

53 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 99.

54 See Lowe, Lisa, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 12–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also, Lowe’s chapter “Autobiography out of Empire,” which critically analyzes biographical conventions within modern liberal discourses.

55 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 39–43.

56 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 80.

57 Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, trans. Harriet de Onís, 49.

58 Arnold, David, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 142Google Scholar.

59 Dash, The Other America, 26–29.

60 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 78.

61 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 80. “La revelación de la Ciudad del Cabo y de la Llanura del Norte, con su fondo de montañas difuminadas por el vaho de los plantíos de cañas de azúcar, encantó a Paulina, que había leído los amores de Pablo y Virginia y conocía una linda contradanza criolla, de ritmo extraño, publicada en París en la calle del Salmón, bajo el título de La Insular. Sintiéndose algo ave del paraíso, algo pájaro lira, bajo sus faldas de muselina, descubría la finura de helechos nuevos, la parda jugosidad de los nísperos, el tamaño de hojas que podían doblarse como abanicos.” In this response to primitivist discourses in European travel literature, Carpentier describes Pauline as adapting to her new natural surroundings, yet she imagines folding tropical leaves into fans, a reference to the tropical heat as well as to literature rendering the contradictory desires of European travelers to return to nature while retaining the appurtenances of civilization. In this same vein, in Robinson Crusoe, Crusoe creates an umbrella out of animal skins, whereas in Paul and Virginia, Virginia creates a tablecloth out of plantain leaves. This trope employs symbolic materials to demonstrate the imperial travelers’ ambivalence toward escaping civilization and returning to the primitivistic nature associated with distant tropical spaces and peoples.

62 Arnold, The Problem of Nature, 161.

63 Seabrook, The Magic Island, 3–4.

64 Dash, The Other America, 31.

65 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 86.

66 Arnold, The Problem of Nature, 150.

67 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 188.

68 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 188–89. In her discussion of imperial fetishism, McClintock quotes Edward B. Tylor’s 1871 anthropological text: “So strong is the pervading influence, that the European in Africa is apt to catch it from the Negro and himself, as the saying is, ‘become black.’ ”

69 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 86.

70 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 14Google Scholar.

71 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 155.

72 Hulme, Peter, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 211Google Scholar.

73 McClintock, Imperial Leather, 27.

74 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 12.

75 Carpentier, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso,” 333–56, esp. 354.

76 Léger, Natalie M., “Faithless Sight: Haiti in the Kingdom of This World,” Research in African Literatures 45.1 (2014): 85–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 96.

77 Carpentier, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso,” 338.

78 Carpentier, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso,” 336.

79 Carpentier, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso,” 351.

80 Kaup, Monika, “Becoming Baroque: Folding European Forms into the New World Baroque with Alejo Carpentier,” CR: The New Centennial Review 5.2 (2005): 107–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 112.

81 Dating his theory to the Spanish Conquest, Carpentier, with unintentional irony, aligns his perspective of the American marvelous reality with the perceptions of the conquistadors, who “saw very clearly the marvelous real aspects of America” (“los conquistadores vieron muy claramente el aspecto real maravilloso en las cosas de América”). Carpentier, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso,” 351.

82 For more on this, see Zamora, Lois Parkinson, “Exuberance by Design: New World Baroque and the Politics of Postcoloniality,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy/Revue Canadienne de Philosophie Continentale 18.1 (2014): 22–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 33.

83 Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” 234.

84 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 49. “Mackandal agitó su muñón que no habían podido atar … y echando violentamente el torso hacia adelante. Sus ataduras cayeron, y el cuerpo del negro se espigó en el aire, volando por sobre las cabezas, antes de hundirse en las ondas negras de la masa de esclavos. Un solo grito llenó la plaza.—Mackandal sauvé!”

85 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo.

86 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo.

87 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 49–50.

88 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 8; my emphasis.

89 Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 8. For further discussion of this distinction between faith and “disbelief,” which Warnes terms “irreverence,” see Warnes, Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel, 13–16.

90 Césaire, Suzanne, “1943: Surrealism and Us,” in The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945) Suzanne Césaire, ed. Maximin, Daniel, trans. Walker, Keith L. (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2012): 34–38Google Scholar, esp. 35.

91 Trouillot, Silencing the Past, 27.

92 Léger, “Faithless Sight,” 88.

93 Carpentier, “Lo barroco y lo real maravilloso,” 344.