ART OF ZIN (Haiti)

 

1.  Heart of Darkness

At one point, as Marlow pauses in his story, lost for words in the dark,

the frame-narrator tells us he listened 

     "for the sentence, the word,

      that would give me the clue to

      the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative,

and the clue evades him,

just as it evaded, and is still evading, Marlow.

     "We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness",

      the ends of the great River Congo "lost in the depths of the land",

      our "battered, twisted, ruined tin-pot steamboat" straining upstream,

      between "the riverbanks' wall of matted vegetation".

      "I felt how big, how confoundingly big

      was that thing that could not talk

      and perhaps was deaf as well.

      What was in there?"

The quest for Kurtz is similarly confounding:

     "a flat piece of board with some faded pencil-writing on it..

      'WOOD FOR YOU. HURRY UP. APPROACH WITH CARE.'

      Something was wrong above.

      But what ― and how much?

      That was the question..

      The bush around us said nothing,

      and would not let us look very far, either."

Meeting Kurtz's ragged factotum adds little:

     "His very existence was improbable, inexplicable,

      and altogether bewildering.

      He was an insoluble problem.

      It was inconceivable how he had existed."

A bizarre patchwork of destitution and unlikely survival

with his absurdist claims that

     "Glamour urged him on, glamour kept him unscathed."

The eventually found, but by now dying, Kurtz is equally enigmatic:

     "Close the shutter",

      he says suddenly one day,

     "I cannot bare to look".

(Appended to Kurtz's pamphlet for the

 INTERNATIONAL SOCIETY FOR THE SUPPRESSION OF SAVAGE CUSTOMS

 is the footnote "Exterminate all the brutes!")

His last words, "The Horror! The Horror!"

     "The memory of that time lingers around me, impalpable,

      like a dying vibration of one immense jabber,

      silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean,

      without any kind of sense.

      Nowhere did we stop long enough to get a particularised impression

      ..only a general sense of vague and oppressive wonder

      ..like a weary pilgrimage among hints for nightmares

      What were we who had strayed in here?" 

2.  Out of Africa

DESSALINES  (1804)

'Finally the hour of vengeance has struck

 and the implacable enemies of the rights of man

 have received the punishment their crimes deserved.

 I raised over their guilty heads my arm

 that for too long had been restrained

 becoming, like your natural enemies, cruel and pitiless.

'Yes, we have rendered unto these true criminals

 war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage.

 Yes, I have saved my country;

 I have avenged America.

 Tremble tyrants, usurpers, scourges of the New World.

 Our daggers are sharpened, ready for your torture.

'As long as there is a breath in my body,

 I will keep this oath:

     "Never will any colonist or European set foot on this land

      as a master or proprietor.

      This resolution will henceforth be the foundation of our constitution."

[The phrase 'whites of whatever nation' replaced 'Europeans' in 1805].'

DUVALIER  (1957, 1961)

     'The peasants love their doc.

     'As President I have no enemies and can have none.

      There are only the enemies of the nation.

      And these the nation must judge.

      No one is untouchable and nothing is sacred.

     'Revolutions must be total, radical, inflexible.

      I have conquered the country.

      I have conquered power.

      I am the new Haiti.

      To wish to destroy me is to wish to destroy Haiti itself.

      It is thanks to me that it breathes,

      thanks to me that it even exists.

     'I am the personification of Haiti.

      Those who seek to destroy Duvalier seek to destroy our fatherland.

      God and the people are the source of all power.

      I have twice been given the power.

      I have taken it and, damn it, I will keep it forever. 

      Is Dessalines for life?

      Yes, Dessalines is for life in Francois Duvalier.

     'I am even now an immaterial being.'

3.  The Art of 'zin'

     'The guard opened the door for him and he blinked in surprise.

      The room he entered was pitch dark,

      draped by black curtains..

      As soon as his eyes adjusted he moved forward

      and saw Duvalier staring at him..

      Duvalier in a black woolen suit,

      sat surrounded by tonton macoutes,

      their dark glasses even more sinister in the pitch-black room.

      On a long trestle table in front of Duvalier

      dozens of black candles burned.'

     'Papa Doc was dressed as Baron Samedi.

      keeper of the dead and cemeteries,

      who controls the border between life and death,

      and appears in top hat, black coat tails, and sunglasses.

      The meaning of the strange garb was never explicated,

      and it did not need to be.

      Duvalier was one with,

      was possessed by,

      was Baron Samedi,

      Voudou master of the zone where spirits moved between worlds.'

Haiti state functioned on two levels;

           public for foreign observers,

           secret for local people.

Secrets were deliberately circulated by Duvalier in Voudou-code,

which translated easily to Haitians,

but remained obscure to outsiders.

In Creole, zin means 'gossip'.

Even killing was zin,

spectacular and staged,

to generate stories.

The mysterious theft of opponent's bodies

spread the repute of Papa Doc's priestly powers.

In 1959 tonton macoutes stopped a hearse 

bearing former rival Clement Jumelle's corpse to burial,

pulled the casket into their vehicle,

and sped away from stunned mourners.

Officially, this was to prevent unrest gathering at the graveside.

Less publicly, rumour was started 

that Jumelle's heart would be used as wanga,

to fortify Duvalier's office.

4.  The Comedians

'Poor Haiti itself

 and the character of Doctor Duvalier's rule

 are not invented,

 the latter not even blackened for dramatic effect.

 Impossible to deepen that night.'

     "Above his head hung

      the portrait of Papa Doc, 

      the portrait of Baron Samedi.

      Clothed in the heavy black suit of the graveyards,

      he peered out at us

      through the thick lenses of his spectacles

      with myopic and expressionless eyes.

      He was rumoured sometimes

      to watch personally

      the slow death of a Tonton victim.

      The eyes would not change.

      Presumably his interest in the death was medical."

     The funeral of Dr Philipot had already passed the first roadblock.

     A second roadblock refused to let the hearse carrying the body to pass.

     The hearse turned around and attempted to go back the way it had come.

     But now the first roadblock would no longer let the hearse through.

     "We have been to the lower roadblock, Madame Philipot.

      They say we can no longer return with the coffin.

      Not without the authorisation of the authorities."

     "What authorities?" I ask.

     "The Secretary for Social Welfare."

     We all with one accord looked at the handsome coffin

     with its gleaming brass handles.

     "There is the Secretary of Social Welfare", I said.

'A reign of terror has often about it the atmosphere of farce.

 The banana skin is a deadly one, but it remains a banana skin.'

In this nightmare republic,

this shabby land of terror,

who are Les Comediens?

Le Narrateur Brown:

     "Smith, Jones, and Brown ― the situation was improbable.

      Again I was aware of the three names,

      interchangeable like comic masks in a farce..

      The corpse in the pool seemed to turn our preoccupations into comedy.

      The corpse of Doctor Philipot belonged to a more tragic theme;

      we were only a sub-plot affording a little light relief..

      Life was ... not the tragedy for which I had been prepared

      and it seemed to me that we were all driven 

      by an authoritative practical joker

      towards the extreme point of poverty."

L'Ambassadeur Pineda:

     "Come on, cheer up,

      let us all be comedians together.

      Take one of my cigars.

      Help yourself at the bar.

      My scotch is good.

      Perhaps even Papa Doc is a comedian..

      We mustn't complain too much of being comedians ―

      it's an honourable profession.

      We have failed ― that's all.

      We are bad comedians, we aren't bad men."

Or Petit Pierre who was 'always gay':

      "It was though he had tossed a coin 

       to decide the only two possible attitudes in Port au Prince;

       the rational and the irrational, misery or gaiety..

       Papa Doc's head had fallen earthwards

       and Petit had plumped for

       the gaiety of despair..

       There were occasional passages in his gossip-column

       that showed an odd satirical courage ―

       perhaps he depended on the police 

       not to read between the lines."

Ce n'est pas les blancs.

C'est les negres.

'Graham Greene was right.

We are comediens ― actors!'

We Haitians are all comedians.

                                                                                                                                                      

1.   Joseph Conrad, 1899, Heart of Darkness

      Valentine Cunningham, 1994, In the Reading Gaol: Postmodernity, Texts, and History, 227-258

2.   David Geggus, 2014, The Haitian Revolution: A Documentary History, 180-2

      Laurent Dubois, 2012, Haiti: The Aftershocks of Victory, 311-359

3.   Paul Johnson, 2006, 'Secretism and the Apotheosis of Duvalier',

                                        Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 420-445

      Mats Lundahl, 2008, 'Papa Doc: Innovator in the Predatory State',

                                         www.scandia.hist.lu.se, 39-78

4.   Graham Greene, 1965, The Comedians

      Bernhard Diederich, 1985, Seeds of Fiction: Graham Greene's Adventures in Haiti and Central      

                                                  America 1954-1983, 255-265