# Haiti

## Landscape and Morale

Estimé

On May 10, a dispatch from Port-au-Prince reported that Haiti's President, Dumarsais Estimé, had resigned after several days of demonstrations precipitated by the President's attempt to put through a constitutional amendment which would have allowed him to succeed himself. After Estimé's resignation the government was taken over by a junta led by Brigadier General Frank Lavaud, Colonel Paul Magloire, and Major Antoine Levelt.

Mr. Wilson's three articles on Haiti were, of course, written some time before these events, but in the May 9 issue of *The Reporter* he described the background of political tension which preceded the present crisis. In the course of this article Mr. Wilson said, "... Estimé has recently shown evidence of yielding to the same compulsion, apparently irresistible in Haiti, which has brought so many of his predecessors to violent or ignominious ends."—THE EDITORS

Port-au-Prince is a lovely little harbor that may recall southern Italy, but only to make you feel essential differences. Italy is always solid, the color is likely to be laid on thick; but Port-au-Prince is insubstantial, with no sharp brightness or sudden contrasts.

As I look out, in mid-afternoon,

above the white wooden lace of the hotel veranda, down over the shadowed green treetops sown with roofs of the loose-knit town, and beyond the few white spires and domes and low bulks of public buildings picked out among the greenery by vivid sun, where the warm red-and-blue of the Haitian flag flies from a wireless spindle above the Exposition, I see the blue of the water in varied shades of *taffetas changeant* pulled taut under the close-hanging clouds, not too heavily saturated with rain, that stretch along the bare coastal hills: to the south, greenish shallows; to the north, a blue surface so tender that, set off by a little white sail or two, it seems nothing so dense as water, but some element sheerly aesthetic, the discovery of a delicate water-colorist. Then, even during the short time I watch it, the dim blue of the mountains, darkening, begins to show faintly purple, the shallows on the left deepen to gradations of color that are never abrupt, and the pure hue of that sensitive lap of the inmost part of the bay takes on a violet tinge.

An hour and a half later, as I sat at the Savoy Café with a lime-flavored lemonade, I gazed out again on the clouds, which were now a soft diluted

gray canopying a sunset sky of a dull but soft diluted orange—all of this less like natural phenomena than light tints laid on by brush. To the south, above the nearer mountains, the rain clouds, still hardly inclement, were full of enchanting effects—these, too, the work of some master—of a fastidiously-diluted inkiness. Sometimes these clouds were yellow—a pale yellow that was firmer than vapor but for which even the fluff of spun sugar or some orange-flavored whipped-up dessert would provide too material a simile.

The charming gentleness of this landscape seems to be felt in the habits of the people. Combined with the influence of French manners, it has made them restrained and quiet. In all matters of social relations, the taste of the Haitians is perfect. They criticize Negeurs from the United States on the grounds that they are loud, that they are flashy, and that they like to play the clown. The Haitians rarely raise their voices and are usually soberly dressed and decorously behaved.

It is odd to see an altercation between a taxi driver and his passenger. If you want to be driven somewhere in Port-au-Prince, you simply stand on the side of the street, and somebody will pick you up, either a taxi or a private car which offers to do duty as

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a taxi. In the taxi you may find other fares, with whom you exchange polite greetings and to whom you say *au revoir* when you or they get out. On one occasion a wispy mulatto who stammered, with whom I had shared a cab, refused to give the driver the two gourdes he asked, and when the man insisted, went through the motions of getting back into the car and having himself driven to the police station to settle it with the authorities. The driver let him go for one gourde, but was extremely bitter about it. Yet the argument had all been conducted in tones that would never have conveyed anything but amiability to one who had not understood what was being said. On another occasion, a girl got out and walked away without having paid her fare. "Vous n'avez pas payé, Mademoiselle," the driver reminded her. The passenger expressed contribution. "Ça arrive à tout le monde," the driver reassured her.

The sea and the sky and the mountains are full of nuances at Port-au-Prince, but the harbor is self-contained, a little too much shut in on itself. It hardly seems to open on larger seas, and the great lozenge of the Île de la Gonave figures as a kind of stopper. No city I have ever visited has seemed to me so much a complete little world;

and this evidently has its inconveniences if you have to live in Port-au-Prince. It is too hard to get away from home. Everyone knows everyone else. When you are going to see one of the élite, you do not need to know his address: You simply tell the taxi driver his name. And everybody knows everybody else's business, as they do in all little old cities, where the families are mostly related. If the gossip is not interesting, they fabricate fantastic scandals.

Yet for a stranger from the United States, after the vast uniformity of Miami or New York, a capital like Port-au-Prince exercises a strong attraction. Just as, swimming face down with a glass mask among the coral forests of the shallows, there is revealed to one the heightened mauves of sea fans and the elaborate branching of madrepores, the blue-and-yellow and silverblack fishes slipping by under one's very nose, that were invisible from the surface in apparently limpid depths, so, too, in the town of Port-au-Prince, which may at first sight seem meager and drab, the scrutiny of closer acquaintance shows a society that, though small, is rich in interest because it is made up of individuals. As in an eighteenth-century town like Dublin, everybody has an audience—for everybody is a “character,” and the characters

must put on a drama. Though anyone who is used to the freedom of the anonymous American cities might in the long run find Port-au-Prince cramping, it seems much more satisfactory humanly to anyone who has a memory of the older kind of American community, where everybody was something or somebody.

Not that Haiti is much like America, though it has something in common with Louisiana; nor is it very much like western Europe. The country that it reminds me of most is Greece. Haiti and Greece are both special cases; but besides this peculiarity, they have several things in common. You find in Haiti, as you do in Greece, a history of heroic freedom alternating with foreign oppression, a tradition of a kind of democracy that is dependent on an inferior class and of a kind of individualism that has produced the insatiable tyrant as well as the tyrannicide; you find, derived from all this, an intense and jealous nationalism in a country too small in the modern world not be preyed upon and to have to be protected by larger powers. You find also similar problems of reviving a deteriorated soil, rendered arid by deforestation; of an educated, if not modernized, minority confronted by an unschooled peasantry resigned to conditions of living perhaps hundreds of centuries old; and of a literary language—in Haiti French, in Greece the so-called *katharevoussa* based on classical Greek—competing with a popular dialect: Creole, *demotiké*. Haiti itself, of course, has no such background as the ancient Greek civilization; but the

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civilization of France has given it something not unlike this.

The contrast between the classical and the popular culture was illustrated in a striking way by two theatrical entertainments at which I "assisted." One of these was an excellent performance at the Rex of Jean Anouilh's *Antigone*. The manager and principal actor, M. Charles de Catalognue, has had professional training in Paris, and was impressively brassy as Creon. A young amateur, Mlle. Adrienne Déjoie, was both statuesque and passionate as Antigone. This modernized classic of the 1940's, though full of contemporary allusions and written not in Alexandrines but in prose, runs to tirades that recall the Comédie Française, and these two actors sustained their declamatory scenes, and, reliably supported by the other characters, the whole long single act of the play, with a dignity and a vigor that held from beginning to end an audience that had not hesitated to manifest extreme dissatisfaction when the curtain did not go up on time.

The other was a brilliant evening of musical entertainment at the open-air theater at the Exposition. The producer and chief dancer, M. Jean-Léon Destiné, has been working with Katherine Dunham in New York, and has brought back one of her women dancers, Mlle. Jeanne Raymond. He has selected with much taste and intelligence first-rate specimens of all the popular musical forms, and produced these with imagination. You have Mlle. Lumaine Casimir, the Creole Yvette

Guilbert; Ti Ro-Ro, the top Haitian drummer; gay-costumed colonial folk dances that queerly combine Negro incantation with eighteenth-century minuets; voodoo ceremonies that, even thus theatricalized, manage to be enthralling, with their stooping evolutions of white-gowned figures, their writhings along the ground, and their crises of possession and sacrifice; and a whole suite of current *méringues*, a kind of dance music that is a specialty of Haiti, for which the bare orchestra of drums is backed by a row of horns.

These drums are omnipresent in Port-au-Prince. They look primitive and are played with the hands, but the drummers have acquired great skill and are capable of complex rhythms. One of the most curious numbers was a "conversation" between drums, performed by Ti Ro-Ro and another drummer. The people in the hills, it seems, communicate with one another by an established drumming code. The audience laughed delightedly at some of the drummed responses, but whether because they could interpret something definite that was being said or simply as one is amused by the interchanges of Samuel Goldenberg and Schmylew in Mussorgsky's "Pictures from an Exhibition," I was not able to tell. From the opening of the Exposition the drumming in Port-au-Prince was all-pervasive and inescapable. One could hear it going on all night in cabarets and bars and probably in voodoo rituels, sometimes so far away that one could hardly catch the rhythm, but vibrating like a taut thread of wire

that ran through the barking of vagrant dogs, the nocturnal crowing of fighting cocks, and the deep, somber booming of bells that summoned to four-o'clock Mass. One day I met a bootblack who was beating out a rhythm on the shoeshining box he carried.

Between the open-air theater and the Rex, there is a conspicuous discrepancy of taste in everything except the acting art. At the former, the décor and the costuming—pinks and yellows and blues against tropical green—had the freshness of West Indian nature. At the latter, the lighting of *Antigone* was so very clumsily handled that the actors cast shadows on each other's faces; and at a benefit performance I attended, where *jeunes filles* played *morceaux* by Chopin and young men recited speeches from *Chantecler*, the backdrop was punctured and gashed, and the setting for a little play of Géraldy consisted of squiggly brown curtains, painted-on yellow doorways, department-store furniture of wicker and wood, and a small picture which, though it figured in the action, was hung so high above the characters' heads that it was impossible for any of them to look at it. The theater itself is a barn, in which, during intermissions, a metallic and hoarse loudspeaker is remorselessly made to cough out over and over again what must once have been a female voice singing a Strauss waltz.

The houses and dress of the bourgeoisie, even when the people are rich, are, so far as I could see, in general no more decorative than the Rex. Amid

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E. ISHU

the purples and scarlets and greens of the flowers and foliage of Haiti, the costuming and setting of human life have been allowed to remain strangely dreary. The only humanly prepared treats for the visual sense that I remember to have encountered in Port-au-Prince were the show at the Bicentennial Exposition and some of the primitive painting.

The women are another matter. You see them at their best at the Rex or at the night club at the Exposition. The Haitian women are exceptionally beautiful, and they present the peculiarity of belonging to a variety of types.

There is the merry-eyed and lively black Negro girl, who has evidently been picked out for her prettiness to sell programs and raise money for future productions; the trim little slender mulatto, of a pale olive that verges

on lemon, who blends with her French refinement something of Negro warmth; the French matron, charmingly coffee-stained, with straight nose and oval face, who sits sedate by her husband or children; and the woman with bronze-tinged hair and mat white skin, rose-flushed with a faintly toasted nuance, as to whose histrionic brown eyes and plump gesticulatory hands it would be hard to tell whether they were Negro or simply meridional. I sat, at one Rex performance, behind a group of good-looking young girls, all evidently well-to-do and on an equal social footing, whose complexions ranged from white to almost black, and who presented me with a row of coiffures that included straight brown hair worn in the white woman's way, hair that was reddish but crinkly, and abundant black hair that was straight. Another girl sitting near me had a pro-

digious dense head of black crepy hair; and there were an old lady, quite brown of complexion but with white hair that was not that of a Negro, and a man who was even darker but had black glossy hair slicked back.

In no such cosmopolitan gathering as one might find in New York or Paris could differences in nationality, differences in social origin, be read on the flesh so plainly, but here the mixtures of blood appear literally in black and white, in hair that is knotted or loose. Yet these textures and shades that declare the race make also a reduction to absurdity, since the people, so variously tinted, are inextricably bound together by the ties of common blood. The absurdity is all the greater because, of two sisters or brothers, one may be almost completely negroid, the other almost completely white. This upper-class society of Port-au-Prince is, as I have already said, a complicated web of distinctions; but the snobbery of the Haitian élite is similarly a reductio ad absurdum of the theory and practice of snobbery. For in Haiti not only color but family is terribly important, very much as it is in our Southern states. You find not only mulattoes who, if one of Emil Roumer's satiric poems is based, as I suppose, on fact, insist that they have no Negro blood and ascribe their ineffaceable tan to the aboriginal Santo Domingan Indians whom the Spaniards exterminated (but who did, as a matter of fact, leave a certain admixture of genes to the peoples who superseded them). You find also, in the hyphenated names that are adopted by many Haitians—as you do in the family middle names that are common in the United States—an eagerness to claim the prestige of a distinguished maternal line. I know one able and cultivated Haitian, who has studied in several countries and works for an international organization but who, though he does not need this recommendation anywhere else except in Haiti, has attached to his father's name the name of his mother's family, because it was originally borne by a Negro who escaped from his captors as soon as he reached Santo Domingo, and, surviving in the mountains, in hiding along with other fugitives, left one of the only Negro names in Haiti which have never had to pass through slavery.

Yet the conflict between cultures at

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different levels, the oscillations between impulses in different directions, the confusion of passions and aims, are involved in all relationships for Haitians. It is this that makes Haiti interesting—and important out of proportion to its size—this and its unique situation of finding itself in a position to work out these black-and-white problems independently of the cramping and crippling inflicted by a white man's government. So jealous of their freedom are the Haitians—and the spirit that dislodged our occupation was the same as that which vanquished the French—that they do not even care to know much of the affairs of the other West Indies, where the Negro is still kept in an inferior position. The stranger is surprised to find that, except recently, for pleasure expeditions to Cuba, the Haitians do not visit their neighbors and, though they usually know their own history well, may even be rather ignorant about events in the other islands during the colonial period.

On our side, for a white native of the United States, a trip to Haiti is immensely instructive. If he has been discouraged or depressed by the Negro life of Harlem as well as the South, he may be surprised to find Haiti stimulating. He will note that, though the French were bad masters, they left the Haitians a sounder kind of education than the black Americans got (though the Haitian Justin Lhérisson, in his satirical novelette *La Famille des Pitite-Caille*, gives an example of a Negro oration which, for polysyllabic nonsense, sounds exactly like Father Divine). He will try to take account of the theory that the stock of the African tribes from which the Haitians come was superior to that of our Negroes. He may wonder whether the nuisance of segregation may not have kept him from knowing the best of the American Negroes. He may decide that, however all this may be, our Negroes were particularly unfortunate in having had to share the defeat of the South, in the sense that they were fatally involved in its decadence and humiliation. In the Haitian revolution, the men of color won; in our Civil War, they were freed but remained among the beaten.

And in Haiti, for all their fiascoes, they have made something out of their mixture. It is something which is not

provincial French, which is still less a reversion to Africa; it is a spirit and a point of view that are not likely to be easily malleable to either the South or the North American mold. The Haitian —between the Americas, between the New World and Europe—is in a peculiarly advantageous situation to have an international sense of history; but he is not merely international, he is also interracial. In an epoch absolutely demented with trumped-up nationalisms and racisms, it is possible for him to see the world in purely human terms.

In Haiti there is an irreducible firstateness, to which all these conditions contribute. One feels it not only in the novels of Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and Pierre Marcelin, with their clear

intellect and their unashamed humanity; one feels it also in such a monograph as Dorsainville's inquiry into voodoo, with its historical and psychological learning, and its assurance in tackling directly and coming to its own conclusions about the outlawed native material that scientists abroad had not treated; you feel it even in the

more academic work of a writer like Dantès Bellegarde, which in its French conventionalizing of history still manages to be true to Haiti. You feel it most of all in those young men and women, bored with the bourgeois amenities and disgusted with the infantile politics, in touch with the great movements of contemporary thought and at home in the outside world, who, as teachers, as physicians, as engineers, as agricultural experts, are studying the needs of their country and trying to teach and construct. Such people are comparable, it seems to me, to the best of their kind in the world.

There is a weakness of the Haitian intelligentsia of which one is sometimes told. The varied elements in their personalities make it hard for them to take a consistent stand, to see a project through. It is said that they tend to agree sincerely with anyone who tries to convince them, and then to be convinced sincerely by the opposite point of view. Certainly one is sometimes astonished to find that some champion of a cause, whom one knows to be high-minded and intelligent, has been lately on the other side. But there are also strong individuals who have concentrated their disparate instincts and who have known how to speak and to act with force. To be a first-rate Haitian, perhaps, one must prove oneself twice a man—or rather, one must prove oneself a man, and not merely a nationalist or the member of a particular race or class.

There is a discord at the roots of the Haitian people which is harsher even than that of race. Jacques Roumain has put it with bitterness in his novel *Les Fantoches*: "The Haitian aristocrat does indeed hold by deep fibers to France. He has not forgotten that the cradle of his birth was some dark hall of a colonial house, the night when a white man, excited with drink, threw down the Negro slave who was his grandmother." Is this an unhappy fate? Is it a handicap? It is a challenge, much plainer for the Haitian than for the products of a more comfortable breeding, to derive from the outrage, the brutishness, that lie at the roots of all life some assertion of the dignity of humankind. And this challenge, even when the worst has been said, the Haitians have somehow met.

—EDMUND WILSON

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Views & Reviews

The Negro in Paris

In Paris nowadays it is rather more difficult for an American Negro to become a really successful entertainer than it is rumored to have been some thirty years ago. For one thing, champagne has ceased to be drunk out of slippers, and the frivolously colored thousand-franc note is neither as elastic nor as freely spent as it was in the 1920's. The musicians and singers who are here now must work very hard indeed to acquire the polish and style which will land them in the big time. Bearing witness to this eternally tantalizing possibility, performers whose eminence is unchallenged, like Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong, occasionally pass through. Some of their

ambitious followers are in or near the big time already; others are gaining reputations which have yet to be tested in the States. Josephine Premice, who was just beginning to be known when I left New York, is here now singing in one of the Right Bank's more elegant establishments; Gordon Heath, who will be remembered for his performances as the embattled soldier in Broadway's *Deep Are the Roots* some seasons back, sings ballads nightly in his own night club on the Rue L'Abbaye; and everyone who comes to Paris these days sooner or later discovers Chez Inez, a night club in the Latin Quarter run by a singer named Inez Cavanaugh, which specializes in fried chicken and

jazz. It is at Chez Inez that many an unknown first performs in public, going on thereafter, if not always to greater triumphs, at least to other night clubs, and possibly landing a contract to tour the Riviera during the spring and summer.

In general, only the Negro entertainers are able to maintain a useful and unquestioning comradeship with other Negroes. Their nonperforming, colored countrymen are, nearly to a man, incomparably more isolated, and it must be conceded that this isolation is deliberate. It is estimated that there are five hundred American Negroes now living in this city, the vast majority of them veterans studying on the G.I. Bill. They are studying everything from the Sorbonne's standard *Cour de Civilization Française* to abnormal psychology, brain surgery, music, fine arts, and literature. Their isolation from each other is not difficult to understand if one bears in mind the axiom, unquestioned by American landlords, that Negroes are happy only when they are kept together. Those driven to break this pattern by leaving the U. S. ghetos have effected not merely a social and physical leave-taking but have also been precipitated into cruel psychological warfare. It is altogether inevitable that past humiliations should become associated not only with one's traditional oppressors but also with one's traditional kinfolk.

Thus the sight of a face from home is not invariably a source of joy, but can also quite easily become a source of embarrassment or rage. The American Negro in Paris is forced at last to exercise an undemocratic discrimination rarely practiced by Americans, that of judging his people, duck by duck, and distinguishing them one from another. Through this deliberate isolation, through lack of numbers, and above all through his own overwhelming need

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