Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Haiti is often represented in literature as a strange, alien place. Some of this representation takes the form of crude, stereotypical exploitation that most revels in this strangeness to make it look like as alien a place as possible. So, this would include most literary/cinematic depictions of voodoo or of local Haitian rites and traditions surrounding the dead. But this isn’t all just Orientalist (..or Caribbeanist) exoticism. Haiti really is a strange place. The modern nation was founded in the wake of the world’s only successful slave revolt, during which hundreds of thousands died in nearly orgiastic violence perpetrated by all sides. The conflict featured native and slave born black Haitians constantly switching their allegiances between the French Republic, the shite planters, the African born slaves and the dozens of factions that existed in each individual group. The revolution started almost spontaneously, after a rite where a group of slaves ceremonially slaughtered a pig and then rose up and brutally killed their masters. The leader of the initial revolt, Boukman, was executed by the French, but Haitans believed at the time — and still to this day — that he transformed into a bird or a fly and escaped. He was also believed to be able to communicate with animals.  After the Haitians successfully drove out the French, they quickly turned on each other and had to suffer the horrifying, macabre and authoritarian rule of Henri Christophe, who styled himself as European monarch and maintained the plantation economy that was the impetus of the initial revolt.

Since the revolt, the country was isolated by the rest of world, saw its natural environment destroyed as it tried to exploit less and less fertile land that had already been exhausted by sugar growing and has been poor and violent to this day. It’s a place that, by many accounts, where the past is still very much alive and haunts the present. That the local religion is very much concerned with the dead and their active roles in the lives of the living, only heightens the strange ahistoric nature of the island.

All of this talk of Haiti is just some throat clearing to discuss Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. Carpentier, himself a Cuban writer, was fascinated by the “marvelous real” in Haiti. By this, he meant how occurrences which many would describe as fantastic or magical were commonplace in Haiti and very much part of the fabric of life. His work is something of a precursor to Magical Realism, but is different in that Carpentier insists that there’s no magic or superstition involved, instead, his representation of Haiti is just a record of how Haiti really is.

The story, which roughly follows the experiences of a slave from before the initial rebellion in 1791 through Henri Christophe’s rule. There are excursions to Cuba, Europe, including some truely fantastic scenes featuring Josephine Bonaparte.

The book, which Andrew Seal expertly evokes in his short review/reflection, is simply stunning. A lesser author would get lost trying to actually explain the utter strangeness of Revolutionary post-Revolution Haiti or he would retreat into the consciousness of his relatively insignificant narrator and not every try to capture “the sense of a society seething with arcane energies, weird forces which can only be expressed in strange idioms.” But Carpentier can do just that, and his book contains so many blasts of “biblical thunder of the prose” that the reader not only doesn’t care that there’s little attempt at characterization,  exploration of anyone’s consciousness or plotting that makes much dramatic or literary sense. Instead, the book is almost journalistic in just how vivid and evocative it is.

Also, if we’re looking at books the same way Pierre Bayard does, then it’s a great chance to read some Magical Realist literature that all your Marquez-worshipping friends who cart around One Hundred Years of Solitude like a letter of introduction have probably never even heard of.