As a
movement that always declared the validity of subjective, internal realities,
Surrealism is easily associated with ancient and new
magical
rituals, which aim to write those internal realities large upon the external world.
Spells,
possessions,
séances,
potions,
incantations,
rain-dances, and the like, deny the obvious divide between futile will and obstinate reality. In this way,
André Breton’s “
Letter to Seers” praises the power of even the most petty
psychics as agents of
delusion, for their role in causing people to confuse “the accomplishable fact and the accomplished fact” (201). This rebellion against
rationality makes sense within the context of the
Enlightenment, which in the early
twentieth century still imposed the heavy-handed obligations of science, objectivity and truth on
academic painters and
humanist poets. The Surrealist groups in Europe sought a return to primitivism, to the irrationality,
wonder, and creativity of
Giorgio de Chirico’s pre-logical “
original man” (14). And they gravitated towards the magical, exotic atmosphere described by André Breton and
André Masson in the essay “
Creole Dialogue”.
But Black Surrealists such as
Wifredo Lam from
Cuba, or the
American
Will Alexander adopting the voice of
Les Morts from
Haiti, have naturally a more complex relationship with their own supposed
primitivism, and its traditional expression through magical
religions such as
Santería and
Voodoo. Magical practices and, more importantly, the images derived from them, appeal less to artists in the
Caribbean that to artists in
Europe, because they are not foreign or
exotic to them. And simultaneously, these
images have more appeal because they have been
historically denigrated, ridiculed, and oppressed by the imperialist or occupying Europeans and
Americans. Wifredo Lam drew on the iconography of
religious objects, objects that were used on the continent from which he partially originated but which he nevertheless did not encounter until he came to
Spain, as a springboard for his own
plastic genesis. By situating the
fetish of
Africa within the jungle of Haiti he brought the latter to harsh and startling life. And Will Alexander used Voodoo as an imaginative weapon, and a defining tool.
The
faddish popularity of
African art among the
avant-garde in
Paris during the 1920s and 30s presented painters and sculptures looking for a way out of reality with art that, while anonymous, was constructed in a “new”
style that was much admired. African artists had been sculpting masks as early as
Paleolithic times, continuing to do so through the kingdoms of the
Dogon, the
Baul, and the
Basongye (Sims 19); the masks were typically used as stand-ins for
gods or the
spirits of ancestors. These artists sculpted in a schematic style whereby the components of a face or body were reduced to bold and simple shapes, a creative imagining in that appealed to the Spanish
Pablo Picasso because it was simultaneously conceptual in its execution, yet magical in its function (Klawans 80). His imitation and broadening of this style has been termed
Cubism.
By the 1920s, ancient African art was popular in Paris, and was more or less a universal heritage to be drawn on by anybody in the
avant-garde. Wifredo Lam initially absorbed this style from the works of Picasso, and not directly from his own heritage. While his priestess godmother
Mantonica Wilson had trained Lam in the practice of
Santería, a religion strongly derived from African
animism, he did not actually view African religious objects, or Picasso’s extension of their style, until he arrived in Europe. Both were crucial influences to his painting, which until the mid 1930s had displayed a “sturdy
realistic style” (Sims 18), in the context of sympathetic portraits of
peasants, or
countryside views. But Picasso’s cubism is analytical, sometimes even
mathematical, painfully deconstructing a view into its every identifying
plane and
angle. In contrast, Lam painted people who resembled masks in order to eliminate “all traces of whatever would dissolve the
humanity of a face in the fortuitous expression of
individuality” (Leenhardt 13). Lam’s figures wear, or are themselves,
masks, sometimes inscrutable and sometimes even featureless, as in 1939’s “
Mother and Son” (Fouchet 41). And even when their faces are visibly angry or disturbed, they still resemble the fragmented figure of an
exquisite corpse, assembled of
stock parts, an eye tacked on here and a tongue there, as in “
The Disaster” of the same year (42). In this way, as universal representations, the figures are
icons. Alternatively, horse-headed, studded with feathers or holding fierce skulls, they are
idols.
Returning from Europe in the 1940s, with the
technique of Cubism at his command, Lam was angered by the
tourist friendly dilution of Cuban
culture that he observed. He responded by painting “
hallucinating figures” whose power to surprise was grounded in local myth and
totemism (Richards 91-92). In his 1944 painting “
The Jungle” (Fouchet 51), Lam portrays at least four figures resembling the bamboo stalks they stand between. They are architectural
columns, they are trees, rooted and straight, but narrow, so that any hostile notion could knock them all over. They could be gods, their faint smiles inscrutable and all knowing. But at the same time, their hanging round buttocks, breasts, and testicle chins reveal a
sensual humanity, if not an actual humanness. This is no
ceremony staged for curious and clueless tourists, it is Lam’s personal
reverie and vision, the moment when the spirits inherent in his physical environment step forward for an instant to taunt or comfort or observe him. Not one is an individual, indeed in some places it is hard to tell where one begins and another ends. Rather the entire group is a collective
phenomenon, their appearance a sort of
miracle, and that is what the painter documents.
The ancient African faces that peer out of the Cuban jungle in Lam’s painting are universal and old, they express a
negritude whereby historical
suffering has fashioned a bond between Africans worldwide, and whereby ancient African gods live secretly in an island far away from Africa. As animated masks they are magical, and they intend no obvious hostility. However, in the decade following the painting of “The Jungle”, the dual rhetoric of magic and negritude was used by the Haitian
dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvaliér with grossly malicious intent, to consolidate his own power and wealth and to plunder his country and murder his subjects.
In the period preceding and coinciding Papa Doc’s reign, the interaction between Voodoo and
Christianity in Haiti was based primarily on
nationalist conceptions of local heritage vs. foreign
Blanc intrusion. In the two decades before he rose to power, U.S. occupation was associated with harsh “
anti-superstition campaigns” (Ferguson 31); persecution of Voodoo practitioners was carried out vehemently throughout Haiti’s colonial occupation as well (Diederich & Burt 361). A major influence on Duvaliér was one of his
lycée teachers, the
ethnologist Jean Price-Mars (Ferguson 33), who was eventually awarded a pension for life by the
president for life (Shannon xv). Price-Mars argued in his book
So Spoke the Uncle that Voodoo is a
religion, not a simple
fetishism, and that as a
synthesis of animism and
Catholicism it is a valid achievement and integral to Haitian culture. This valuation of Voodoo rested less on its component magic than on its
identity politics and its status as a point of pride: “Tales and Legends! Does there exist a people who have yielded a richer harvest than ours?” (Price-Mars 14).
Papa Doc fostered Voodoo during his reign as a response to that religion’s long
repression, as an expression of a negritude in line with his earliest writings. The journal
Les Griots, which he had founded with
Louis Diaquoi and
Lorimer Denis, espoused a return to African cultural roots (Shannon xiv). It was in accord with that aim that in 1944 Duvaliér co-authored a book-length study entitled
The Gradual Evolution of Voudou, establishing his reputation for expertise in the subject (Diederich & Burt 355). Once in power, Papa Doc relied on Voodoo
houngans (priests) as
informants (Ferguson 52), and hired a
bokor (sorcerer) to head the national
militia. But this preference was one of
nationalism and more than of faith, and Papa Doc ultimately tolerated
Catholicism, when he could use it to serve his ends. In 1966, years after expelling all Catholic priests from the country, Papa Doc negotiated with the
Vatican and obtained the crucial concession that forthwith, all the Catholic
clergy in Haiti would be
indigenous. That is, in religious matters what was important was that Haitians be led by Haitians, or rather, Haitians be led by Haitians hand picked by Duvaliér or his administration.
More conspicuously, in office, Papa Doc publicly proclaimed his own adherence to Voodoo (Diederich & Burt 358) and practiced rituals such as studying goat entrails (355) and conferring with the preserved head of the murdered rival
Blucher Philogènes (357). While these activities in themselves might have been typical for a Voodoo practitioner, Papa Doc went qualitatively further, using the
imagery of that religion in conjunction with the
paternalism classically inherent in his office to cultivate an air of “supernatural
messianism” around himself (Ferguson 49).
Propaganda in the form of public stenciling also proclaimed his god-hood (358), and the
Catéchisme de la Révolution taught that the national heroes
Dessalines,
L'Overture,
Christophe,
Pétion, and
Estimé were unified into the person of François Duvaliér (Ferguson 49). When Papa Doc died, his eulogy concluded, “This man was the
Messiah!” (57).
In particular, Papa Doc associated himself with the
loa (god)
Baron Samedi, the spirit of death who also holds the power to save.
…he is able to enswathe himself in an air of virtual preternaturalism. Dressed in his favorite color, black, his smooth, round face assumes a special sheen. He moves hyperslowy, speaks in a whisper. His eye lids droop. Wearing a slightly bemused, unshakable half-smile, he does nothing for disconcertingly long periods of time… The man appears as calm as death. (Diederich & Burt 354)
This visual technique was useful for influencing Haiti’s largely illiterate population.
Published a decade after the ouster of the last Duvaliér,
Jean-Claude “Baby Doc”,
Will Alexander’s long poem “Haiti”, serves the immediate purpose of “simple
revenge” against the murderous Papa Doc and his first lady (Alexander 105). It recounts the resurrection of François and
Simone Duvaliér, whose
souls are held captive in a
govi (clay jar; 121), and are tortured by being forced to unceasingly
copulate in filth and disease (75). But Alexander achieves an equally important aim by
empowering his poem’s speakers, Les Morts, the faceless
victims of Duvaliér’s oppression, and now his accusers, to make
him the alien, and affirm their own right to Africa and to Voodoo. While the dictator and his wife are the “gargoyle couple” (77), a phrase recalling the cold
cathedrals of foreign
colonialist France, Les Morts are “the Africa of
Songhai and
Mali” (72). They also reject Duvaliér’s historical claims to have embodied Haiti’s supposedly ethnically superior Black majority. They go so far as to deny the entire Black/
Mulatto duality- ridiculous in any case, considering that a Mulatto is someone who has Black ancestors- to unify the prototypical Haitian into the proud joint person of
one mulatto…
our brother
who was hanged in the streets
despite the depth of his marvelous Nubian rigour (82)
The obvious necessity for this redefinition and widening of negritude is made painfully clear by the fact that historical Duvaliérism was no noble world of unified Black pride, but a petty and tragic scheme of “
starvation under gemstone” (73).
Les Morts insist that Duvaliér plundered an unsuspecting, “motionless” (Alexander 96) and “windless” (114) Voodoo, so as to appropriate its
imagery. They now retrieve Voodoo from him and renew their own claim to it; they even take back Baron Samedi (102), whose sinister demeanor Papa Doc had consciously impersonated (Ferguson 52). This guardian of the
underworld ironically cooperates with the
grave robbing Morts, as they resurrect the Duvaliérs in order to punish them. Les Morts deliberately include both “old
Dahomean breeding/ with cosmic
Petro scowling” (Alexander 131) in their new Voodoo lexicon. Papa Doc had seized on Voodoo simply because it was African, or at least because it was emphatically not European. But now from beyond death his former subjects recognize in their original religion something more, the genuine startling fragility and fierceness of the
dauntless alabaster motives
ringing
in the beauty of Dahomean translucence
as Haitian lunar suns transpire
in lingering visual ignatics (128)
Ultimately, by stripping Papa Doc of the hifalutin causes whose
rhetoric and
symbolism he hid behind, Les Morts can overcome their initial paradoxical relationship with the gargoyle couple. The witnesses, previously victims, begin the poem in the heady and powerful position of accusers, even
carrion vultures (78). And because all of the parties involved are dead anyway their assaults initially resemble those of “
leech against leech” (88). But re-appropriating their own history allows the accusers enough self-definition to accuse Duvaliér from outside of his own paradigm. The poem serves as a “
symbolic verbal act”, in which Les Morts perform “
corrective magic and therapeutic ritual” on themselves (Mullen 418). In this way they can leave François and Simone to their eternal, painful coupling (131), and, as is implied by their ultimate silence and the poem’s end, achieve at least a corpse’s
rest.
In his brief essay “
Calling the Magicians”, Aimé Césaire, the founder of negritude, addresses the potential for greatness in the
Caribbean, and concludes that it lies in a complete acceptance of local myths as the instruments of wonder and artistic achievement. Because poetry “is a devotion to abandoned or exiled or obliterated
myth” (120), residents of the Caribbean are in a unique poetic position, having undergone
exile from the continent and population base that formed the wellspring of their mythology. He calls upon the few remaining
magicians to “give us back our power of
wonderment”. The very notion that wonderment could be power is a foreign one to any enlightened search for accuracy, whereby factual
knowledge is power, and wonderment, akin to fear, is disempowering. But the “new
barbarism” (121) in which such a wonderment would be nurtured doesn’t need to be bogged down in reality. It has regained access to “the meaning of the symbol” and a liberating “attitude towards the object”, in order to bridge the distance between sad modernity and “the
sun temple…the mask… the African man.” Césaire doesn’t speak of these magical symbols as nationalist, or as the exclusive
intellectual property of the civilizations in which they originated. Rather they are tools that any successful
civilization must use to achieve a new
creativity and
rage.
Works cited:
- Alexander, Will. Asia & Haiti. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995.
- Breton, André. Manifestoes of Surrealism. Trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1972.
- Césaire, Aimé. “Calling the Magician: A Few Words for a Caribbean Civilization.” Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. Trans. Michael Richardson and Krsysztof Fijalkowski. London: Verso, 1996.
- de Chirico, Giorgio. “Mystery and Creation.” London Bulletin. No. 6 (Oct 1938), p. 14
- Diederich, Bernard and Al Burt. Papa Doc: Haiti and its Dictator. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1969
- Ferguson, James. Papa Doc, Baby Doc. New York: Basil Blackwell Inc., 1987.
- Fouchet, Max-Pol. Wifredo Lam. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1976.
- Klawans, Stuart. “'I Was a Weird Example of Art’: My Amputations as Cubist Confession.” African American Review. No. 28 (Winter 1994), pp. 77-87.
- Leenhardt, Jacques. “Introduction.” Wifredo Lam and his Contemporaries, 1938-1952. Ed. Maria R. Balderrama. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1993.
- Mullen, Harryette. “A Collective Force of Burning Ink’: Will Alexander’s Asia & Haiti.” Callaloo. Vol. 22 No. 2 (1999), pp. 417-426.
- Price-Mars, Jean. So Spoke the Uncle. Trans. Shannon W. Magdaline. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1983.
- Richards, Paulette. “Wifredo Lam: A Sketch.” Callaloo. Vol. 34 No. 1 (1988), pp. 90-92.
- Shannon, Magdaline W. “Jean Price-Mars.” So Spoke the Uncle. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1983.
- Sims, Lowery Stokes. “Wifredo Lam: From Spain Back to Cuba.” Wifredo Lam and his Contemporaries, 1938-1952. Ed. Maria R. Balderrama. New York: The Studio Museum in Harlem, 1993.