[Reviving an older series from a year ago for this Halloween season, I provide another selection from Modern Death in Irish and Latin American Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), available for order here or here, or as a free pdf here or here. As with our previous four excerpts, we share this chapter as yet another reminder of what can happen when we allow an LDS perspective to seep into our scholarship and thinking, whether we are conscious of it or not.
Indeed, when this chapter analyzes how the Vodou-influenced protagonists of both The Kingdom of This World and No Other Life are awaiting the future return of a Messianic figure to liberate the captives, overthrow the oppressors, and make this wicked world humane again, well, are we not as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints awaiting the exact same fulfilment? Why else should Russel M. Nelson make such a fanatically big deal about the “true name of the Church”? Whosoever hath ears to hear, let them hear.]
Under My Vodou
Vodou is commonly classified as a syncretic religion—though that itself can be a rather misleading, even colonizing term, as though one couldn’t argue that every religion is at some level syncretic (e.g. Islam can be read as a syncretism of Christianity and Judaism—Christianity as an outgrowth of Judaism with Greco-Roman infusions—Judaism as a mix of Egyptian and Persian influences, and etc.). Although doubtless intended as a neutral descriptor, the term “syncretic” can do the faith a disservice, as it implies that it is strictly some sort of make-shift or improvised religion, which belies its rather ingenious strategies for resistance, as I shall be detailing shortly. But that is not to say that Vodou’s origins cannot be positively traced, inasmuch as the religion definitively arose in Haiti as a combination of various west and central African religions—largely the Vodon practiced by the Fon peoples of Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Nigeria—intermixing with French Catholicism among the local slave population. Like Halloween and Day of the Dead, the Vodou faith can be read as an impressive example of the persistence and survival of indigenous cultural patterns despite ruthless attempts by European colonialism to erase and eradicate them entirely.
There is of course no single, unified practice of Vodou; due to the numerous attempts to suppress the faith throughout its history (most recently after the 2010 Haitian earthquake), the faith has frequently been forced underground, into the wilderness, and into exile, the result of which is that there are as many local variations of Vodou as there are places it is practiced. Nevertheless, what all the many variations of Haitian Vodou appear to share in common is a belief in Loa, or divine spirits, that are invited to take possession of participating individuals via ecstatic rituals. As Melville J. Herskovitz (commonly cited as the first academically respectable white scholar to take seriously the cultural achievements of African Americans) wrote clear back in 1939’s Life in a Haitian Valley, “Outstanding here is the word Vodou itself, already indicated as Dahomean, where it is a general term for ‘deity’” (268). Herskovitz’s emphasis upon Vodou’s communion with the divine was for him an important rejoinder against the many salacious accounts of Vodou then circulating throughout the United States. As he repeatedly has to emphasize throughout his study, “this form of worship of the loa is neither unrestrained hysteria nor drunken orgiastic satisfaction of the sex drive…it is merely the expression of a different tradition” (178). Though certainly considered a dated artifact by now, Herskovitz’s study was (alongside C.L.R. James’s landmark 1938 history of the Haitian revolution The Black Jacobins) a much needed corrective to the common U.S. perceptions of Vodou specifically, and Haiti generally, at the end of the 1930s. U.S. interest in Haiti at the time was at an all-time high, especially following the U.S. Marines’ occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, following the assassination of the pro-American dictator Vilbrun Guillaume Sam by outraged rebels. The invasion was performed under the pretense of preventing an intervention by Imperial Germany, all while strengthening American business interests in the region (a foreign policy that the U.S. would later deploy in support of quite a number of dictatorships across Latin America and the Middle-east later in the century). During the occupation, “Voodoo” (as it became Anglicized) was considered by many Americans as a symbol of the primitive devilishness of a backwards and benighted people, ones in dire need of the civilizing influence of a disciplined Anglo-American hand, lest they spread their black magic to the mainland (as they feared had already happened after its first appearance in New Orleans). The literature of the time sought to establish that retrograde assertion as fact; as Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert summarizes it,
‘William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) […] was one of the many such texts written during the American occupation of Haiti (1915–34)—John Huston Craige’s Black Bagdad (1933) and Cannibal Cousins (1934) and Richard Loederer’s Voodoo Fire in Haiti (1935), among them—whose unstated aim was that of justifying the presence of the American Marines in a savage land in need of a firm civilizing hand. [Seabrook’s] book was a controversial one—“anathema to my countrymen,” according to Philippe Thoby-Marcelin (xv)—because of its lurid tales of necromancy, blood sucking by soucouyants, and zombification. Price-Mars himself had dismissed Seabrook’s account, expressing doubt that the American had indeed “witnessed much of what he wrote about” and claiming he had “embellished what he did witness with false piquant details” (qtd. in Murphy). It was, in the words of later researchers, a work of “mythomania.”’ (117)
The fact that so much of this literature on Haiti and Vodou was a bald-faced fabrication did not matter in the end, the damage was done. To this day, so much of our contemporary pop-cultural conceptions of Vodou in North America—the necromancy, the zombies, the black magic and macabre, carnivalesque imagery—is filtered through the sensational literature produced during the U.S. occupation of Haiti.
Rise of the Zombies
Though the ecstatic loa ceremonies were what initially caught the attention of the U.S. mainland, the Vodou rites of the dead are what have had the longest afterlife in the popular imagination. As Herskovitz describes them:
“Fundamentally, these [rites of the dead] derive from the power which the dead wield in the world of the living—power that is held to come directly from God, who has not only given the dead all the rights of the living, but also the right to return to earth as ghosts. There are several types of ead, two of these being the vien-viens and the zombie. The vien-viens are ordinary ghosts; the latter…are those whose souls have been ‘sold’ by sorcerers and are therefore doomed to wander the earth until their destined time arrives to return to God.” (215)
Like so many of the other works we have examined so far in this project, the dead in this Vodou model are not silenced, not inert, but beings of great power capable of intervening in the world of the living with divine power from God himself. Of particular note in the preceding passage is of course the west African word zombie; it receives minor emphasis in Herskovitz, but is nevertheless what goes on to dominate U.S. pop-culture throughout the rest of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Night of the Living Dead to The Walking Dead and World War Z and all of their manifold imitators, homages, and parodies.
For despite the sensationalistic luridness and racially-tinged Satanic panic, by the 1970s “Voodoo” had largely become a pop-cultural punchline—at least in the Anglosphere. In the 1973 James Bond film “Live and Let Die,” for example, the voodoo assassin Samedi (clearly modeled on the Haitian Lao of the Dead of the same name—complete with his signature black top hat), is merely another henchman Bond must dispatch on his way to defeating the enigmatic Dr. Kananga. In the film’s finale just before the fade to credits, Samedi is revealed to still be alive and laughing maniacally upon the train engine pulling Bond’s carriage; the scene is of course played less as ominous than sheer camp. Vodou had already been appropriated into U.S. Halloween imagery as early as the 1950s, when Screamin’ Jay Hawkins consented (much to his chagrin, as he was a classically trained vocalist) to dress in very loosely Voodooo-“inspired” outfits to perform his runaway hit “I Put a Spell On You”—now an October radio mainstay, as harmless as Bobby Pickett’s “Monster Mash” or Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”. When southern California ska-punk band Sublime recorded “Under My Voodoo” in 1996, it was clearly within the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins pedigree, with little to no further thought given to Vodou’s cultural history or genealogy. For most North Americans, Vodou is not a lived religion with faithful adherents seeking spiritual solace as they struggle to survive and thrive amidst the vicissitudes of the Third World, but either some devilish black magic (as it is represented by the scaremongering Evangelical Right), or as simply another set of camp signifiers come Halloween.
Although Vodou has come to be treated tolerantly, even playfully (if still problematically and patronizingly) throughout North America, zombies by contrast are uniformly treated with horror across the U.S. pop-cultural landscape. Typically, they are portrayed as arising from some catastrophic disease, and are thus by extension little more than an infection themselves, ones in need of violent extermination. We should perhaps not be surprised that “zombie” is now synonymous with hostile hordes of the dehumanized in the United States; it can’t help but feel symbolic for how white Americans have long treated Haitians—along with all other third-world postcolonial peoples of color. As Sarah Jullet Lauro and Karen Embry claim in A Zombi/e Manifesto, “The zombie is currently understood as simultaneously powerless and powerful, slave and slave rebellion” (98), and in either case frightening (especially to a nation like ours that has historically been terrified of the sorts of slave revolts that Haiti successfully had). As always, the dead are implicitly grouped together with the “expendable” impoverished populations of the earth, as a pestilence and threat to human civilization that needs to be controlled and finally eradicated. Even today, the language of contagion is inevitably invoked to dehumanize and villainize immigrants and refugees from across the devastated developing world—from not only Haiti, but also across Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, the Middle-East and Africa itself. Indeed, this implicit revulsion against the Third World was made explicit in 2015, when candidate Trump declared in a statement, “Tremendous infectious disease is pouring across the border […] The United States has become a dumping ground for Mexico and, in fact, for many other parts of the world” (Jacobson). Politifact blandly marked this claim as “unlikely”—although it is also far more probable that he was referring not to any actual diseases, but to the immigrants themselves, as the contagion (as is also betrayed by his disgraceful “shithole countries […] like Haiti” comments before the Black Congressional Caucus in January 2018).
Yet though the zombie’s capacity to horrifically rise from the dead is what has since most pervaded the North American pop-cultural consciousness, what most interested Herskovitz in 1939—and this point often gets lost in the shuffle of zombie theory—was their transformative abilities; he quotes a certain Dr. Parsons, who notes that: “A ganga [or sorcerer] who keeps a zombi may transform him into a stone, perhaps in front of his house, or into any kind of animal. Transforming him into a pig or sheep or cow…” (246). That is, the zombie is not merely a re-animated corpse, but one capable of acts of corporeal transformation and metamorphosis.
This is also the zombie ability that has come to most interest other postcolonial writers. For even Herskovitz and Parson still primarily viewed zombie transformation in a negative light, focusing for example on how the ganga transforms the zombie into an animal only so that it may be sold to the butcher shop (according to Herskovitz, such is what gave rise to the persistent and pernicious myth that cannibalism was practiced among Haitian Vodous). Zombie scholarship to this day still focuses overwhelmingly upon the negative, brain-dead, corpse-like nature of zombies, as yet another weary symbol of how late-period capitalism renders us all walking-corpses and mindless consumers. The zombie in Herskovitz’s description was still a slave after all; when its reanimated corpse wasn’t being sold as a literal commodity, it was being put to work in the fields themselves, according to legend. But what would happen if that same transformative ability was used to escape slavery, to resist colonization? Can the unwillingly-zombified free themselves and reclaim their humanity? What would that look like, for a zombie to become human again?
It may be worth examining, then, how nations with a far more direct and complex relationship with colonialism than the U.S. might approach the transformative possibilities proffered by the zombie. Cuba and Ireland provide us two such intriguing examples in Alejo Carpentier and Brian Moore, who explore the politically resistant possibilities of zombie transformation in their respective Haitian novels The Kingdom of This World (1949) and No Other Life (1993). Both are well positioned to engage with Haiti sympathetically—quite literally in the case of Carpentier’s Cuba, which lies directly west of Haiti and shares with it both the Caribbean sea and a long history of plantation slavery. As for the Northern-Irishman Brian Moore, Terry Eagelton deftly notes that he “has the sympathy of a small, inconsiderable nation for small, inconsiderable people” (Eagelton). As such, both authors take the transformative potential of zombies far more seriously than North Americans.
In this chapter, I will first discuss how Vodou is deployed by The Kingdom of This World to not only resist French colonialism, but to reject the Cartesian modes of thought that allowed Enlightenment-era Europe to rationalize and justify its colonization of the Caribbean specifically and of the Americas generally. I will then analyze the novel’s two biggest scenes of zombie transformation, survey the central character of Ti Noël, discuss the critical accusations of exoticization and appropriation leveled against Carpentier, and then explore how Carpentier’s various supernatural metamorphoses fashion an aesthetics of escape. I will then examine a similar scene of miraculous transformation in No Other Life, note its similarities and indebtedness to Kingdom, and discuss how Carpentier’s novel clarifies Moore’s, even as Moore’s re-enacts Carpentier’s. I will also examine the character of the first-person narrator Father Paul Michaels, and conclude with a discussion of how both novels deploy zombie metamorphosis not only for an aesthetics of escape, but also an aesthetics of transformation—of not only the characters themselves, but of the world around them. As their respective titles suggest, it is the kingdom of this world—and no other life than this one—that these authors seek to transform.
An Anti-Cartesian Vodou
The narrative of The Kingdom of This World spans the history of Haiti from Mackandal’s unsuccessful rebellion of 1759, through the 1791 Revolution, and concludes just after the end of the Henri Christophe dictatorship in 1820—mostly as seen through the eyes of a fictionalized slave named Ti Noël. The novel established the career of Alejo Carpentier, who became considered one of the most important writers to come out of 20th-century Cuba; its prologue’s discussion of “the marvelous real”[1] is often cited (albeit problematically) as an important influence upon “magical realism” and the Latin American Boom of the 1960s. In the expanded version of the prologue that appeared in the 1967 edition of his essay collection Tientos y diferencias, Carpentier writes of his novel that “I have left a mythology, accompanied by magic hymns, preserved for a people that still sing the ceremonies of Vodou” [2] (99). Carpentier had both visited Haiti and been introduced to the practice of Vodou by the time of its composition, which features prominently throughout the novel. Early in the text for example we are introduced to the legendary François Mackandal, who is often described popularly as a Vodou priest or hougan. After his arm is maimed in a machine accident, the once and future rebel leader escapes to the mountains, where he is trained in the transformative powers of Vodou in the house of an old witch, where “At times the talk was of […] men whom certain spells turned into animals” (25)[3]. This same Mackandal later becomes “a houngan of the Rada rite, invested with superhuman powers as the result of his possession by the major gods on several occasions” (36)[4]. Shortly thereafter, Mackandal uses these transformative powers to foment rebellion among his fellow slaves against their French masters.
Not to mention revolts against French Enlightenment thought itself; as Paravisini-Gebert notes, “Carpentier was quick to understand the connection between the Haitian Revolution and Vodou practices that were the very opposite of Cartesian thought” (115), the latter being an ultra-rationalistic conception of the universe long used by western Europe in general—and the French in particular—to justify their foreign imperialism as a mode to stamp out indigenous superstition and so-called primitivism. It is not irrelevant to recall that, in addition to a mathematician and a philosopher, Descartes was an avid vivisectionist, who cut open living animals in his attempts to prove that they had no souls. I do not need here rehearse the long, sordid history of European autocrats also denying souls to the indigenous and the enslaved, so as to vivisect and abuse their bodies with the utmost callousness as well. As Annaliese Hoehling also argues:
‘For many, Haiti’s “birth” during the age of Enlightenment and revolutions marks the birth of modernity in the Caribbean; however, a body of theoretical and historiographical work has exposed the more fundamental relationship of western modernity and coloniality. For example, Walter Mignolo’s (2005) The Idea of Latin America contends that “the West was born” (xiii) when Europeans established a “discovery” framework for appropriation of land and resources in the western hemisphere, and when a “colonial matrix of power” was required to maintain European control of land, resources and peoples” […] in short, Mignolo argues that modernity and coloniality are constitutive of each other.”’ (254)
Modernity itself is constitutive of coloniality in this model; the Enlightenment did not merely co-appear alongside colonialism, but informed and rationalized it. Nor did coloniality end with Haiti’s independence; neocolonialism exerted itself in dramatic form early in Haiti’s history, when France refused to official recognize Haiti’s sovereignty clear until 1825. The French Empire only at last condescended to grant such recognition if Haiti agreed to pay an “indemnity” to France of 150 million franks (U.S. $47.5 billion, as adjusted for inflation in 2020), to “compensate” for all of the property they lost during the revolution—which, insidiously, included the former-slaves themselves. Since no other western government was willing to officially recognize Haiti until France did, Haiti at last was forced to concede. It was an act of massive economic extortion from which the nation has never recovered, which goes a long way towards explaining why Haiti remains today one of the poorest—and most economically exploited—countries in the Western Hemisphere. Simply put, the other colonial powers never forgave Haiti for staging the only successful slave rebellion in western history, and so forcibly re-colonized them by other means.
Since modern rationality has its roots in the Enlightenment-era logic that was regularly weaponized to justify colonization—especially in the Caribbean—it is Enlightenment thought itself that Carpentier determines must be challenged, superseded, and at last elided altogether. (An interesting image of the same comes late in the novel, when Ti Noël , after looting the palace of Christophe, “also carried off […] three volumes of the Grande Encyclopédie on which he was in the habit of sitting to eat sugar cane” (170)[5]—the encyclopedias that were so often a symbol of Enlightenment triumphalism here gets relegated to a dinner seat in the ruins of European-inflected dictatorship). As Hoehling further argues, Carpentier’s interest in Vodou was part of this larger project of challenging the Enlightenment’s hegemony, which was itself symptomatic of a 20th century “return to the Baroque,” a movement defined by not only a certain artistic style but a pre-Cartesian mode of thought:
The 20th-century “return” to the Baroque, as Monika Kaup has argued, can be seen across a diverse group of philosophers, artists and writers – from T.S. Eliot to William Faulkner, Michel Foucault and Édouard Glissant, as well as Alejo Carpentier and Gilles Deleuze. Kaup suggests this return is driven by a “twentieth-century crisis of Enlightenment rationality [which] opens the way for the rediscovery of an earlier, alternate rationality and mode of thought (Baroque reason) that had been repressed and vilified.” (256)
In Hoeling’s reading, Carpentier is part of a larger, global trend within Modernist literature towards exploring alternative modes of thought excluded from Cartesian rationality, one’s that opened up and allowed for the possibility of the non-rationale, the magical, and more importantly, the transformative. This latter point is especially relevant, because The Kingdom of This World explores the liberatory possibilities of pre-modern modes of thought through acts of zombific transformations: not to enslave others, but to liberate themselves.
A Tale of Two Metamorphoses
The Kingdom of This World is bookended by two such miraculous acts of metamorphosis: that of Mackandal at the end of Part 1, and that of Ti Noël at the conclusion of Part 4. In the former, Mackandal uses his Vodou training and herbal knowledge to poison many members of the plantocracy, while also organizing a mass uprising among slaves in the surrounding plantations. The legend of Mackandal grows till he becomes a sort of expectant Messiah figure amongst the slaves, who attribute to him great powers of Vodou transformation:
They all knew that the green lizard, the night moth, the strange dog, the incredible gannet, were nothing but disguises. As he had the power to take the shape of hooded animal, bird, fish, or insect, Mackandal continually visited the plantation of the Plaine to watch over his faithful and find out if they still had faith in his return. In one metamorphosis or another, the one-armed was everywhere. (41-42)[6]
Although Mackandal is never seen, everywhere his power is felt. Yet despite the great faith of the slaves in Mackandal’s omnipresent powers, when he does finally re-appear after a four-year absence, he is swiftly—and rather easily—caught by colonial authorities, who promptly sentence him to death. He is escorted under armed guard to the town’s central plaza in order to be publicly burned alive at the stake, as an example to the slaves.
But the public spectacle backfires: just as the flames begin to lick his body, Mackandal contorts his body, wiggles his stumped-arm they had been unable to bind, utters unknown spells, and then magically breaks free from his bonds. Miraculously, he flies overhead, and lands in the midst of the slaves: “The bonds fell off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead, until it plunged into the black waves of the sea of slaves. A single cry filled the square: ‘Mackandal saved!’” (51-52)[7]. Pandemonium breaks out as the slaves celebrate the miracle. Although Mackandal is then immediately recaptured by ten soldiers who promptly complete the process of burning him alive, the slaves do not notice amidst all the commotion, and hence remain convinced that Mackandal really has escaped once and for all: “That afternoon the slaves returned to their plantations laughing all the way. Mackandal had kept his word, remaining in the Kingdom of This World” (52)[8]. Mackandal’s brief flight through the air becomes a faith-affirming moment for the enslaved of Saint-Domingue. He again becomes an expectant Messiah figure: “he would return to this land when he was least expected” (63)[9] is how he is still described 20 years after his execution. By implication, Mackandal does indeed return again (in spirit, at least) in the form of the 1791 Revolution, to complete his task of rousing the slaves to rise up en masse and slaughter their oppressors, and transform Saint-Domingue into liberated Haiti, just as he had already utilized zombie transformation to liberate himself. Implicitly, Mackandal can even be read as one of the divine loa that possesses the Haitian people in ecstatic Vodou ritual.
However, there are, at least for some critics, several problematic elements concerning Carpentier’s portrayal of Mackandal’s execution. As Frederick A. de Armas notes, “Although Mackandal does ‘fly’ from the fire after pronouncing magical utterances, we are told that it was not an actual transvection through metamorphosis since his body was recaptured by the soldiers and burnt while the commotion in the plaza did not allow the natives to witness this” (311). Mackandal, after all, is still burned alive, and that while still very much in human form—in fact, we never once witness him transforming into anything. His supposedly Vodou-infused powers never receive a definite demonstration; it is all only hearsay and legend, while his purportedly-miraculous flight to freedom is a palpable failure, and a weak one at that. Even more scathingly, Paravisini-Gebert claims of the Mackandal episode that:
“It is a fantasy of barbaric otherness worthy of Seabrook’s Magic Island that sabotages Carpentier’s intended privileging of the connection between history and faith in his account of the Haitian Revolution…[Although it] is intended to signal the extraordinary power of the slaves to maintain their faith in Makandal’s survival despite the reality before them, Carpentier still inscribed the scene with their otherness. After all, the slaves may be deluded by faith into believing Makandal has survived. The planters and soldiers of the text—and most importantly, Carpentier and his readers—know he has not.” (126)
For Paravisini-Gebert, Carpentier’s celebration of the slaves is really just a patronizing smile for the superstitious naiveite of the Haitians, who draw upon a faith that, while impressively resilient, even proto-revolutionary, is nevertheless still rooted in an obvious lie—or at least a delusional misreading of the situation. At best, one might charitably read this episode as an example of how faith can be more transformative than reality—while at worse, as Paravisini-Gebert argues, it is “a fantasy of barbaric otherness” that demeans the very people it was intended to celebrate and empower.
Such readings are complicated, however, by the fact that Ti Noël’s own metamorphoses towards the end of the novel are played far more straight-faced, leaving little room to doubt just how literally the novel wants the reader to interpret them.
Although it does take him awhile to get there. Throughout the entire middle portion of the novel, Ti Noël is largely presented as someone who is more swept away by events than instigating them. After Mackandal’s execution and yet another attempted slave uprising under the Jamaican rebel leader Dutty Boukman, Ti Noël is sent by Lenormand de Mezy to Carpentier’s own native Cuba. There, de Mézy loses Ti Noël in a card game; the latter then goes on to save up his money so he can buy his own freedom and then return to Haiti to behold the success of the revolution for himself—only to find that the dictator Henri Christophe (whom he had previously known as a chef on the de Mézy estate) has already co-opted the revolution, and that the people of Haiti now groan under his brutal dictatorship even more severely than they had under the French. Ti Noël, an increasingly infirm old man himself by this point, is forced into hard labor to help build Christophe’s infamous Sans-Souci palace. The liberatory possibilities of zombie transformation initially proffered by Mackandal appear to have come to naught. As Lauro and Embry note:
“…the zombie narrative is, in some ways, a reprisal of the Haitian Revolution and a story of slave rebellion. The Haitian slave literally threw off the yoke of colonial servitude, but the country has had an unhappy national history, plagued by foreign occupation, civil unrest, and disease. Similarly, the zombi/e seems to embody this kind of disappointment: it only symbolically defies mortality, and woefully at that: even the zombie’s survival of death is anticelebratory, for it remains trapped in a corpse body.” (96-97)
In Lauro and Embrys’ reading, the zombie narrative is but an allegory for the sad history of Haiti itself, whose revolution was swiftly reduced to a mere walking corpse of its initial promise. Kingdom, however, resists such a bleak and hopeless reading; for towards the end of Part III, King Christophe becomes tormented by the ghosts of subjects he had tortured to death, and eventually his Palace is overrun by Vodou priests, who finally drive him to suicide. That is, Vodou and revenants are presented as actively resistingrepression and instigating rebellion in this novel, not just passively representing them.
Indeed, Vodou is a central feature of all of the text’s slave rebellions: on the eve of the 1791 Revolution, the Saint-Domingue governor explicitly cites “Voodoo” as a driving force of the slave revolts, prompting de Mézy to grow paranoid that, “Possibly they had been carrying on the rites of this religion under his very nose for years and years, talking with one another on the festival drums without his suspecting a thing” (79)[10]. Ti Noël for his part does not disprove him; he joins Dutty Boukman in his apocryphal 1791 Vodou ceremony at the Bois Caïman, wherein a “machete suddenly buried itself in the belly of a black pig”[11] and “the delegates came forward one by one to smear their lips with the foaming blood of the pig”[12] and thusly swear “always to obey Boukman” (68)[13]—which, according to legend, inaugurated the Haitian Revolution. Post-revolution, the dictator Henri Christophe, who “had attempted to ignore Voodoo, molding with whiplash a caste of Catholic gentlemen” (148)[14], nevertheless begins to suspect in his final years that “there was probably an image of him stuck full of pins or hung head down with a knife plunged in the region of his heart” (136)[15]—the classic description of the Vodou doll. Later, after Christophe’s overthrow, “At a festival of drums, Ti Noël had been possessed by the spirit of the King of Angola” (171)[16], in a celebratory Vodou ritual. The loa rites, ceremonies and possessions, the divine endowments of power and animal transformations, as Carpentier understood them according to the then-most recent scholarship, are all omnipresent throughout the text of The Kingdom of This World, and are repeatedly presented and empowering revolts against repressive authoritarian regimes.
But the most interesting manifestations of Vodou resistance come after Christophe’s death, as Ti Noël hides away in the woods near his old plantation, in order to consider other strategies for avoiding further re-enslavement. The land was now being cordoned off by Surveyors, representatives of the new mulatto elites who sought to make farm work “obligatory” (176)[17], and thus revive slavery yet again in the immediate aftermath of the Christophe regime. In the grand tradition of Descartes the vivisector, the Surveyors carve up the geography of the land on a Cartesian plane, in order to yet again reimpose the Cartesian rationality of the colonizers. Robbed of his last refuge in wilderness, Ti Noël quite matter-of-factly decides one day to escape them once and for all by metamorphosizing—and unlike the Mackandal episode, these transformations cannot be read with a wink or a smile:
Try as he would, Ti Noël could think of no way to help his subjects bowed once again beneath the whiplash. The old man began to lose heart at this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of revolt. Ti Noël was afraid that he, too, would be ordered to the furrow in spite of his age…Inasmuch as human guise brought with it so many calamities, it would be better to lay it aside for a time, and observe events on the Plaine in some less conspicuous form. Once he had come to this decisions, Ti Noël was astonished at how easy it is to turn into an animal when one has the necessary powers. In proof of this he climbed a tree, willed himself to become a bird, and instantly became a bird. He watched the Surveyors from the top of a branch, digging his beak into the violated flesh of a medlar. The next day he willed himself to a stallion, and he was a stallion, but he had to run off as fast as he could from a mulatto who tried to lasso him and geld him with a kitchen knife. He turned himself into a wasp, but he soon tired of the monotonous geometry of wax constructions. He made the mistake of becoming an ant, only to find himself carrying heavy loads over interminable paths under the vigilance of big-headed ants who reminded him unpleasantly of Lenormand de Mézy’s overseers, Henry Christophe’s guards, and the mulattoes of today. (177-179)[18]
To be clear, Ti Noël’s attempts to escape re-enslavement via transformation are not hiccup-free, and as liable to false-starts as were Mackandal’s: Ti Noël is almost lassoed and castrated whilst a stallion; he quickly tires of being a wasp—their “monotonous geometry of wax constructions” perhaps remind him too much of the Cartesian-plains of the Surveyors; he re-encounters classicism and racism among the geese; and his time as an ant almost repeats his experience as a slave under both de Mézy and Christrophe. Yet even as he struggles to fine-tune his metamorphosis approach, what is most notable about this passage is just how easily and explicitly he begins transforming, once he sets his mind to it. The ambiguity surrounding Mackandal’s transformation is replaced with the absolute nature of Ti Noël’s.
After his various experiments in metamorphosis, Ti Noël finally effects a mysterious disappearance like unto Mackandal: the novel’s final line begins with, “From that moment Ti Noël was never seen again…” (186)[19]. As Steven M. Bell argues, “The novel’s penultimate scene, in which Ti Noël effects various metamorphic transformations, at once parallels and stands in contrast to the earlier scene of Mackandal’s metamorphoses. These two scenes function as contrasting poles in the novel’s cyclic structure, and in the development of the novel’s central character” (Bell 38). Not only does Ti Noël vanish from the narrative, but implicitly Ti Noël will return as assuredly as Mackandal did—and this time, there will be no ambiguity about what sort of transformation he will bring with him. He has become a ganga, only instead of transforming others against their will, he now transforms himself freely; he becomes the model for the enslaved zombie that reclaims his humanity by eschewing it altogether. This last point is crucial to emphasize, because a number of important critics have disputed whether Ti Noël even has a character arc, or is a character worth following at all.
Ti Noël’s Character
J. Bradfort Anderson for example can’t help but claim that “…there is a sense that Ti Noël is an unfit protagonist” (Anderson 14). De Armas expands upon that point, explaining that the character feels too passive to be worth following around, especially when there are far more interesting and important historical figures inhabiting this history:
“The history that he narrates is verifiable, documented, one could even say that it is merely repeated in his text…The unity of Kingdom of This World has preoccupied critics who have wondered if the story is nothing but a series of extraordinary scenes collected somewhat chaotically, without a unifying plot.” (de Armas 135).
The complaint of de Armas is that Kingdom merely restates the basic facts of the Haitian Revolution, without adding anything to our understanding or appreciation for that seminal event—or at least, not in any way that Ti Noël can contribute towards. As Paravisini-Gebert also notes, General Toussaint L’ouverture is glaringly absent from the text—she even uses the loaded word “erased”. She further argues of Ti Noël that:
“He remains in the periphery of history—a witness whose most relevant pro-active deed is that of raping his master’s wife when the 1791 rebellion breaks out. Some would say that the name of Ti Noël has been misappropriated in this instance, that his lack of agency only underscores Carpentier’s insistence on imposing a structure of hopelessness on the narrative of a Revolution whose meaning should not have been thus circumscribed.” (120)
These accusations—that Ti Noël is merely “peripheral,” that he imposes a “structure of hopelessness on the narrative of [the] Revolution” that was frankly not his place to impose in the first place—are a little at odds with the text itself however, where Ti Noël is frequently presented as not a mere spectator, but an active participant in the historical action of the text: Ti Noël is implicitly who begins the process of the mass poisonings on behalf of Mackandal, beginning with a pair of cows; Ti Noël also actively proselytes on behalf of Mackandal and his Vodou powers, openly preaching that “One day he would give the sign for the great uprising […] In that great hour—said Ti Noël—the blood of the whites would run into the brooks, and the Laos, drunk with joy, would bury their faces in it and drink until their lungs were full” (42)[20]; he participates in the Boukman revolt at the outset of the Revolution, and is provocatively described as “put[ting] his mouth to the bung of a barrel of Spanish wine and his Adams apple rose and fell for a long time” (74)[21] as a much-needed refreshment after violently slitting the throats of some plantation owners. Even as an old man during the revolt against Christophe, “Ti Noël had been among the ringleaders in the sack of the Palace of Sans Souci” (169)[22]. One may still plausibly claim that Ti Noël’s metamorphoses are ultimately a form of cowardice and withdrawal from his former activism—but then, the text explicitly agrees: “Ti Noël vaguely understood that his rejection by the geese was a punishment for his cowardice. Mackandal had disguised himself as an animal for years to serve men, not to abjure the world of men” (184)[23]. Only one page later, Ti Noël repents, and in his advanced age once more recommits himself to resistance: “The old man hurled his declaration of war against the new masters, ordering his subjects to march in battle array” (185)[24]. The story of Ti Noël is not one of a passive observer, but a man of willful action.
Yet as Anderson and de Armas might justly respond, Ti Noël’s various efforts have been largely futile. These accusations may be merited, but only insofar as we presuppose that the goal of either Ti Noël or the novel itself is to describe a past and completed revolution. Rather, I would suggest that just as Mackandal’s ambiguous transformations presaged an ambiguous revolution, so Ti Noël’s unambiguous transformations similarly presages an unambiguous revolution—one that still awaits future fulfillment. As Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria has argued, “it is evident that Carpentier presents history as a series of cyclical repetitions” (144), and thus implicitly, Ti Noël will cyclically return as assuredly as Mackandal did.
But Ti Noël cannot consummate it just yet, so for now all he can do is escape—which to be fair, is all that the vast majority of us are able to do too, at least until a more opportune moment comes along. Let us not be too hard on Ti Noël: he is not ineffective at influencing history because he is a passively drawn character, but simply because he is human. (Indeed, who among us has not at-times felt that, despite our best efforts, we still operated only on the peripheries of history.) He lacks means, not motive. Like messianic Mackandal, he learns to await a more opportune time to return and effect direct action. In the meantime, like Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, all Ti Noël can do—all most any of us can do, quite frankly—is hibernate. And to hibernate one must first withdraw: that is, one must first escape. This search for escape informs the overall aesthetics of The Kingdom of This World.
An Aesthetics of Escape
As Hoehling has written of the function of the “Marvelous Real” in the novel: “For Carpentier, lo real maravilloso both reveals and moves beyond European narrative structures. Or, perhaps more accurately, the aesthetic facilitates the possibility of escape. ‘Revolution’ becomes the promise of the aesthetic: what has yet to be narrativized; what is, by definition, always in the process of becoming” (255; emphasis added). Ti Noël embraces the possibilities of the magical not for mere personal delight, but as a form of escape—specifically, an escape that anticipates “what has yet to be narrativized”. The aesthetics of the novel are not apolitical, appropriating the Haitian revolution for art’s sake, but quite the inverse: the novel deploys its aesthetic in order to create a possibility of politicized escape. This point is important to stress, because there have in fact been a fair number of critics who accuse the novel of engaging in the just the sort of Orientalist Othering that it is purportedly resisting; as Hoeling writes:
Critics have raised important concerns about The Kingdom of This World: that Carpentier’s novel appropriates and universalizes Haiti, or neglects and others it (see Paravisini-Gebert 2004; Léger 2014). Broadly speaking, the novel has been criticized for anesthetizing and evacuating the historical specificity and significance of the Haitian Revolution. I would like to offer another perspective on Carpentier’s aesthetic, one that suggests productivity (rather than stasis) and agency (rather than erasure). In appropriating aesthetic principles of the Baroque and surrealism to re-narrativize the Haitian Revolution from the perspectives of minor figures, Carpentier challenges the reader to recognize not only the limits of epistemological perspective to organize reality, but the capacity to escape those limits. (255)
For Hoehling, Carpentier’s supposed surrealist aesthetics (a movement he had largely rejected by the time of the novel’s composition, despite being an early proponent of it), far from appropriating the Haitian revolution towards its own aesthetic ends, is instead an attempt to productively re-narrativize it. The novel’s more fantastical elements are an attempt to help readers identify the limits of their reality, and thereby find a place to escape beyond those limits, where rationality cannot touch one. To quote another Irishman, history is a nightmare from which Ti Noël is trying to wake up; yet like so many of us, history cannot be awakened from so easily, if at all—with the implication that, far from inhabiting the rational universe, history in fact occupies its own dream world.
Ti Noël’s solution then is to embrace the dream logic of history, and thereby hide away and disappear into history’s own illogic, where the impositions of the more “rationale” cannot even imagine finding him. Implicitly, Ti Noël is waiting for us to find him and join him there. As Bell argues, “The reader, as the novel develops, is less frequently presented with both worldviews in simple juxtaposition: Henri Christophe’s ground rules are contradicted, and Ti Noël’s voodoo world appears affirmed in the end. The reader’s experience, or at least sympathy, is expected to parallel Ti Noël” (38-39). Ti Noël’s Vodou realm is where the dead do not disappear, but escape, hide, and wait for the opportune time to effect a liberatory zombie transformation of us all.
A Christmas Carnival
I also cannot help but note that the Carnivalesque (as I discussed in Chapters 2) is also present in much of the major criticism surrounding The Kingdom of This World. “Nevertheless, the slaves displayed a defiant good humor” (41)[25] reads the text early on, and that same defiant good humor informs so much of their subsequent revolts. Gonzalez Echeverraría has argued that, “in The Kingdom of This World the Carnival is at the center of the text” (185). From the singing and dancing of the slaves celebrating the apparent escape of Mackandal at the end of Part One onward, the revolutionary possibilities of Carnival are always foregrounded in this novel. Moreover, it is not the temporary safety valve as described in Bakhtin’s model, but an apocalypse that seeks to dissolve the hierarchies for good. I noted in Chapter 6 the carnivalesque elements of Christmas, and Ti Noël’s surname of course means Christmas in French. Such is not a coincidence; as Gonzalez Echeverraría also notes: “The name Ti Noël suggests that the slave was born on Christmas Day […] Mackandal appears on Christmas Day […] All of the repetitions and Christian rituals are an attempt to make the action fit into a cycle like that of the liturgical year—an attempt, in other words, to fuse the dynamics of the cosmos and writing” (144). Indeed, Mackandal initially makes his Messianic return during Christmas holiday celebrations, whilst “Ti Noël and the other slaves of the household staff watched the progress of the Nativity” (45-46)[26]. The various Christmas allusions scattered throughout Kingdom are not only an allusion to the carnivalesque’s habit of upending hierarchy, but an assurance that the coming, Carnivalesque-reversal of hierarchies is as inevitable as the revolution of the liturgical calendar. Gonzalez Echeverraría for his own part argues that, “Carnival and Apocalypse were the two poles of the pendular movement in The Kingdom of This World” (270). For the carnivalesque within Kingdom looks forward not to some temporary upending of hierarchy, but an ultimate, apocalyptic, and everlasting one.
But here I am still evading a central issue in the novel: just how are Ti Noël’s transformations to be read, anyways—literally, symbolically, allegorically? As Bell notes,
“Volek denies the fantastic elements a direct role in the development of the novel’s central theme, interpreting them symbolically, if not allegorically. Rodriguez Monegal, in his article, interprets the novel on a more literal, less universal, level of meaning. For Rodriguez Monegal, the juxtaposition and mixture of ‘la realidad haitiana, o la vision de los personajes haitianos, con elementos centrales de la cultura europea que contienen, quiza olvidados, la capacidad de conjurar una magia’ [The Haitian reality, or the version of Haitian people, with central elements of European culture that contain, though perhaps forgotten, the capacity to conjure magic] is central to the novel.” (41)
For some critics, the fantastic elements of Kingdom are strictly symbolic; for others, the fantastic elements are representative of the central tensions between Haitian and French/Cartesian epistemologies. However, needless to say, even the most sympathetic contemporary readers of The Kingdom of This World would be hard-pressed to consider Ti Noël’s Vodou transformations as anything other than symbol or allegory; the text may be supernatural, but not the lived history that informs it.
But perhaps a better approach to this question is not to inquire as to whether the fantastic is literally real, but what new possibilities can be generated when we allow the fantastic to exist beyond strict allegory. Such an inquiry, in fact, may be the perfect segue into discussing Brian Moore’s No Other Life, a novel that appears to at least implicitly engage with and reenact Carpentier’s text, and to explore the radical possibilities of faith in a much more contemporary, neo-colonial context.
No Other Life
Brian Moore, a Northern Irish-Canadian born in Belfast, was a popular and critically-acclaimed novelist and screen-writer in his lifetime (Graham Greene once deemed him his favorite living author), whose career spanned decades, from the 1950s through the 1990s. His star, however, has dimmed slightly since his death in 1999, and (at least to some critics) had never shined quite as brightly as it should have in the first place. As such, there is unfortunately nowhere near the same critical corpus surrounding his 19th novel No Other Life as there is for The Kingdom of This World, beyond a few book reviews—though two of those contemporaneous reviews were written by no less than Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Terry Eagleton, both of whom I will cite shortly.
The real difference between the two novelists in the context of this study, however, is in when and how they choose to represent Haiti: The Kingdom of This World centers upon the late-18th and early-19th centuries, and infuses the fantastic onto an ostensibly historical Haiti; No Other Life by contrast focuses upon late-20th century Haiti, and does so through the prism of an imaginary French-Caribbean island called Ganae. Where Carpentier roots his “marvelous real” within concrete historical details, Moore embeds an apparently far more “realist” narrative within the transposed mirror of a fictionalized history. Specifically, Moore’s novel is a retelling of the rise and fall of Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the popular Catholic priest and first democratically-elected president of Haiti from 1990-1991, when he was ousted in a military coup—and again from 1994-1996, and then again from 2000-2004. Although his second and third administrations are outside the historical awareness of the 1993 novel, certain critics have argued that the novel nevertheless anticipates them. Stephen Smith for example, in a 2009 retrospective on No Other Life, couched his call for a critical reappraisal of the late Brian Moore in terms of the novel’s prescience concerning the later career trajectory of Astride:
“The book was published in 1993. Aristide finally left Haiti in 2004, in circumstances that remain opaque. He insisted from exile that he was the legitimate president and that US forces had kidnapped him. Moore’s literary prescience, comparable to Greene’s prefiguring the Cuban missile crisis in Our Man in Havana, has to the best of my knowledge never been remarked on.” (Smith)
Moore, like Carpentier, intuitively perceived disappearance to be less an act of erasure than of strategic withdrawal—the retreat before the inevitable return; and the fact that he apparently saw the return of Astride coming before it actually happened merits at least some of our attention.
The novel itself is narrated through the character of Father Paul Michael, a French-Canadian missionary to Ganae who serves as the last white principal of an elite prep school in Ganae called the College of St. Jean. Despite the fact that the College typically caters exclusively to the island’s tiny mulatto elite, Father Paul chooses to accept into the school a poor, underprivileged, yet also brilliant and charismatic black orphan named Jean-Pierre Cantave. Jeannot, as Father Paul nicknames the boy, becomes a star pupil, and so he eventually supports the boy’s request to be trained and ordained for the Priesthood abroad in Paris. Years later, Jeannot returns to Ganae to lead the life of a simple parish priest in a slum called La Rotunde. His modest ambitions are shattered, however, when Ganae’s resident dictator, a local strongman named Jean-Marie Doumergue (obviously based on Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier), stages a massacre at Jeannot’s ramshackle church. The assault was apparently provoked in retaliation against Jeannot’s preaching under the banner of Liberation Theory—the controversial synthesis of Christian theology and purportedly-Marxist principles that emerged in Latin America in the 1950s, which was broadly conceptualized under the general (and deceptively bland) heading of “preferential option for the poor.” (Such was its massive popularity throughout the Americas that the Vatican’s Congregation of the Doctrine of Faith attempted to at least partially disavow it through official pronouncements in 1984 and 1986.)
Doumergue’s massacre backfires, however, as Jeannot emerges from the fiasco as a sympathetic figure and symbol of resistance among the island’s poor, black majority. Although Jeannot’s preaching of Liberation Theology also results in his expulsion from his order, his parish nonetheless rapidly expands to include all of Ganae—such that he emerges as the overwhelmingly popular choice for president after the death of Doumergue, which he wins handily. Yet though widely beloved, Jeannot initially appears to start following Doumergue’s own example into tyranny: e.g. surrounding himself with a cadre of close followers; refusing to share power with the opposition; staging show trials of symbolic “oppressors”; and dramatizing his mandate by fomenting continual demonstrations on the government’s behalf. The initial trajectory of the novel appears to be that of a one-time revolutionary who is seduced and finally corrupted by the promises of absolute power that he had once dedicated his life to overthrowing—all of which leaves Jeannot’s old mentor Father Paul doubtful about his true loyalties.
Nevertheless, when the Ganae military stages a reactionary coup in cooperation with the island’s mulatto elites, Father Paul chooses to stand with Jeannot. The two flee into the countryside, hide among sympathizers, and strive desperately to stay one step ahead of the army, all while broadcasting Jeannot’s trademark speeches via guerilla radio in order to foment revolt among the peasantry. Like Mackandal, though he is not seen, his influence is everywhere felt. Nevertheless, despite their best efforts, Jeannot and Father Paul are at last cornered, and the military offers him two choices: either consent to be reduced to a figure-head role by announcing his support for a power-sharing initiative with the mulatto-dominated senate, or to be “disappeared” himself; as the commander mockingly notes, although the First World may initially express outrage on his behalf, their characteristically short attention spans will nevertheless swiftly forget about him. After some hard thought, Jeannot appears to reluctantly acquiesce to their demands.
However, when Jeannot soon appears before a crowd of supporters back at the capital—on national TV and under the watchful glare of the military, various dignitaries, Church representatives, and the local elites—something very interesting happens, an event which cannot help but put us in mind of the miraculous metamorphoses in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. For like Mackandal, Jeannot at first glance appears to be surrounded and thwarted by colonial authorities, who have subjected him to a forced public spectacle. He is being led, if not to his execution, then at least to the death of his political power. But then Jeannot approaches the microphones, and begins his final speech:
Brothers and Sisters,
My hour is past.
My day is done.
When you can no longer see me,
When you can no longer find me,
I will be with you.
I will be with you
As will those who have died from soldiers’ bullets,
Who lie in ditches,
Their bodies rotting,
Their minds stilled.
They are not dead.
They live on in you.
They wait
As I wait
For you to change our lives.
But, you ask me
Who will be our leader?
The dead are our leaders.
You and only you
With the held of God
And the memory of the dead
Can bring about our freedom.
It will not happen in a day
Or in a year.
It will not happen in a riot
Or in a parliament of fools.
It will happen when you
No longer ask
For a Messiah.
You are the Messiah.
As for me
I am nothing
I came from nothing.
Today I go back
To those from whom I came,
The poor, the silent, the unknown.
For today on
We wait for you.
As the dead wait for you.
To bring us freedom.
Brothers and Sisters,
You are the anointed ones.
With God’s help
You will not fail. (209)
At this, Jeannot “abruptly leav[es] the podium,” and walks “down the steps and went towards the great multitude, his arms outstretched as if to embrace them,” when “Suddenly, sticks beat on sticks, drums pounded, tin cans rattled, voices chorused, ‘Jeannot! Jeannot!’” in an apparent ecstatic Vodou ceremony. The people crowd around him, and in less than a minute, he disappears into the mass of bodies completely. The general’s thugs begin desperately plunging into the crowd in search of him, but to no avail: “the mass of people, like a great wave, pushed them aside”; and while the elites hastily retreat to their limousines, “The young nuns and priests rushed down into the square, joining the celebration” (Moore 209-211).
At the signal moment, Jeannot, like Carpentier’s Mackandal, appears to perform some sort of miraculous transformation and escape, as he disappears into the ecstatic crowds themselves, to the consternation of the governing elites who suddenly find themselves dumbfounded in their attempts to set an example before the celebrating populace. Even more explicitly than Mackandal or Ti Noël in Kingdom, Jeannot here has transformed into a loa who has possessed the people through the power of the divine.As with other carnivals described throughout this project, the whole spectacle becomes a joyous and ecstatic inversion of this otherwise-solemn ceremony that had initially been intended to affirm the geo-political status quo, but has now (at least temporarily) inverted the order of things. Moreover, the presence of a certain General Mackandal overseeing the proceedings also can’t help but feel like a wink at Mackandal’s execution scene in Kingdom—save that this time it is not the slaves who appear to misinterpret the scene, but emphatically the elites this time, who fail to grasp the nature of Jeannot’s miraculous escape until he is already beyond their grasp.
More emphatically, Jeannot appears to join the dead on his own terms; his is both an escape and a hibernation, like Ti Noël’s. As with other chapters in this book, the dead in Jeannot’s speech are not silenced, not passive, but active participants in the carnival that ensues. For according to Jeannot’s description, the dead are “living,” they are “leaders,” they are “inside us,” they are waiting for you “to bring us freedom”; as Herskovitz had also described clear back in 1939, the dead in Vodou are not silenced, not inert, but beings of great power capable of intervening in the world of the living with divine power from God himself. What’s more, there is the implicit promise that Astride, along with all the dead, will one day return. Indeed, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. in his 1993 New York Times review of the book, saw the novel as prophetic of Astride’s own return to power after the coup: “Now, in No Other Life, Brian Moore has drawn on Father Aristide’s curious drama to give us—just seven weeks before his scheduled return to power—the first fictionalized account of this messianic 40-year-old Catholic priest’s rise and fall from power” (Gates). The narrative itself also affirms the possibility of Jeannot’s return; in the aftermath of his disappearance, Father Paul speaks with an anti-liberation theology Cardinal, who at first insists that: “The ideas of social revolt promulgated by Father Cantave have been repudiated by the poor. They have had enough of the rioting and killings that his teachings inspired. In addition, his followers among the clergy, those priests and nuns who advocated radical social change, have been left without leadership.” Father Paul, however, cannot help but respectfully disagree, and argues: “Your Eminence, the truth of the matter seems to be that Father Contave’s ideas have not been repudiated but, indeed, have in some way been strengthened by his mysterious absence. The poor, more than ever, consider him a sort of Messiah and await his eventual return” (215). The fundamental discrepancy appears to be between the Curates who wish (even hope) that Jeannot’s disappearance equates to his death, and thus his irrelevancy, and that of the Vodou-influenced population, who also equate his disappearance to his death, yet which in their model signifies his increased power and divine influence among the living. As Gates also adds, the nigh-Messianic anticipation of Jeannot’s return is in direct parallel to Astride’s:
‘For the Haitian taxi drivers who queue each day at Harvard Square, one sentence repeats like the Kyrie, regardless of the time of day: “Papa is returning….Papa is returning.” Despite its ironic echoes of the elder Duvalier, “Papa” in Haitian Creole connotes the Father, the Messiah, Jesus. And Papa is how his followers refer to Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Haiti’s first democratically elected President.’ (Gates)
Of course, the key difference here between the fictional Jeannot and the real-life Astride is the nature of their disappearance. As Gates further notes, “Like Father Aristide […] Jeannot is forced into exile. But, unlike Father Aristide’s, his exile is not to a foreign country. He simply vanishes” (Gates). Whether his vanishing act by means of a complicit crowd was an artful act of planning, or a genuine supernatural occurrence, is never resolved for the reader; quite simply, it must be accepted as an act of faith. As Carpentier writes in his intro to Kingdom,“the sensation of the marvelous presupposes faith” (11), a belief in a world excluded from our own—and therefore one that paradoxically remains outside the jurisdiction of the powerful and the “rationale”. This leap of faith is extraordinary, because 1) Moore himself was an avowed non-believer, and 2) Father Paul had been struggling mightily with his own religious faith right up until that moment.
Father Paul’s Character
The title of No Other Life is derived from a scene that occurs roughly mid-way through the novel, wherein Father Paul returns to Quebec to visit his dying mother, the very woman who had encouraged him to enter the priesthood as a young man in the first place. However, when he arrives, Father Paul finds that she has on her death-bed abandoned her life-long faith, and emphatically declares to her son that there is no God, no heaven, no hell, that there is in fact “no other life” beyond this one. Gates informs us that this conversation may have been autobiographical:
Mr. Moore also drew on his religious upbringing. The memorable scene reflected in the book’s title—when the narrator’s dying mother tells him there is “no other life”—was drawn from the author’s conversations with his own mother on her deathbed. “She’d spent her whole life going to mass,” he recalled. “It stunned me that people could waver in their faith at that point. I think everyone must have doubts about the hereafter.” (Gates)
The meeting understandably shakes Father Paul both in mind and spirit; and though he never brings himself to formally repudiate his Catholicism, nevertheless when he returns to Ganae, he is a little more willing to support Jeannot in his own political activism—to at least be more concerned with this life, even as he struggles with his faith in the next. Ironically, it is his own pupil Jeannot who revives his religious faith: though not by restoring it to where it was before, but by transforming it into something new. Much like how French-Catholicism’s contacts with West African Vodun produced Haitian Vodou, so too does Father Paul’s contacts with Jeannot results in a new type of faith that is a syncretism of them both. A zombie has transformed him.
Critical opinion (such as there is extant) is divided on the character of Father Paul. Terry Eagelton for his part found the character of Father Paul to be lacking, a clichéd trope at best:
“The blurb presents Cantave as some tantalizing enigma, but that is the last thing he is: he is just a stock type of the priest turned guerrilla fighter, who adds little imaginative enrichment to that now familiar figure. The narrator is one of a long line of agonized Moore liberals, as attracted to Cantave as he is alarmed by him; and though some psychologically complex subtext is struggling to break out of this ambivalent cleric, it comes to as little as the casual loss of faith which has taken place at some elusive point in the narrative.” (Eagelton)
For Eagelton, Jeannot is a stock-figure, and Father Paul a rather rote-symbol of an “agonized liberal” suffering from a “casual loss of faith” who adds little to narrative—or to the real-world cause of social justice, for that matter. But Gates by contrast considered him to be richly symbolic and well-utilized:
“The relationship between Jeannot and Father Paul suggests a further danger Mr. Moore has deftly avoided, that of writing yet another neocolonial travelogue in which a European rediscovers himself in the mirror of the other. In fact, it is the subtle interdependency between colonial and postcolonial, teacher and pupil, white and black—and especially between the wavering agnosticism of the increasingly wary Father Paul and the single-minded belief of the man whose political career he has fostered—that makes “No Other Life” so much more than that oxymoron, the “contemporary historical novel.” Mr. Moore’s book can be read as an allegory of the relationship of the first world to the third and, ultimately, a study of the interpenetration of the spiritual and the political.” (Gates)
For Gates, the relationship between Jeannot and Father Paul avoids becoming yet another redemption story about a European finding himself in “the mirror of the other,” by instead meditating upon “the subtle interdependency between colonial and postcolonial, teacher and pupil, white and black,” to ultimately become “an allegory” on “the relationship of the first world to the third and, ultimately, a study of the interpenetration of the spiritual and the political.” But No Other Life doesn’t just study or allegorize these relationships: it seeks to transform them, into something fundamentally different than they were before—or at least, gesture towards a potential a world where such a transformation is possible.
Again, to be clear: Brian Moore was most emphatically a non-believer and an anti-cleric, so he most assuredly did not intend No Other Life to somehow be faith-affirming. But nor is the novel exactly faith-destructive, either; if anything, it leaves open a space, not necessarily for the supernatural, but for alternate worlds, other possibilities, differing ways of living and organizing ourselves—not in the next life, but here in this one, and no other.
An Aesthetics of Transformation
Terry Eagelton cynically notes the double-signification of the title to Moore’s novel: “The title means both ‘no life after death’ and ‘no possibility of change on earth’” (Eagelton). Both are reasonable interpretations for the title—at least if the novel is taken in isolation. However, I maintain that there are enough similarities between the transformative escapes of Moore’s Jeannot and Carpentier’s Mackandal to indicate that Moore intends us to at least have the The Kingdom of This World in mind when we read No Other Life. This in turn suggests an additional interpretation: that there is no other life besides this one that should be our priority, and that no other life than this one can or should be transformed. The title, then, is not descriptive but prescriptive: a call for the religious to care most for the salvation of this world, not the next one. Indeed, a very similar conclusion is drawn at the end of The Kingdom of This World:
“Ti Noël […] understood that a man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know, and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him. But man’s greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of This World.” (184-185)[27]
When Carpentier writes that “In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy,” that certainly implies that there is not an established hierarchy in this one—that here, in our life, it is mutable, changeable, susceptible to revolution. When he further writes, “But man’s greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is,” that likewise indicates that our capacity for amelioration is present here—that is, in contrast to Eagelton’s resigned reading, this world can be changed for the better. This is religion not as Marx’s purported “opiate of the masses,” but as interceding directly in the physical world we currently inhabit. The zombies not only have the ability to transform and liberate themselves, but the world entire.
These two novels explore how Vodou zombis can change and liberate not only themselves, but also transform and liberate the literal, physical world around them. It is a fundamentally different conception of what zombies can represent; for it is only in the industrialized neo-colonial First World that zombies are treated as a disease, as harbingers of an apocalypse, as the collapse of civilization—although it would be the end of their civilization. But in the post-colonial realm, in places like Haiti, Cuba, and Ireland, the zombie apocalypse would instead signify the return of the human, as the enslaved and exploited reclaim their right to be human in a fundamentally inhumane world. More than that: the zombie apocalypse, if it were ever to happen, holds the promise to not only make one human again, but to make the whole world humane again. As in the original Greek meaning of the word apocalypse, it would not only be a destruction, but a revelation.
Bibliography
Anderson, J. Bradford. “The Clash of Civilizations and All That Jazz: The Humanism of Alejo Carpentier’s ‘El reino de este mundo.’” Latin American Review. 35(69) 2007: pp. 5-28
de Armas, Frederick A. “Metamorphosis as Revolt: Cervantes’ Persiles y Sigismunda and Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo.” Hispanic Review. 49(3) (Summer 1981), pp. 297- 316.
Beckett, Samuel. Malone Dies. The Grove Centenary Edition, Volume II: Novels. Grove Press, 2006.
Bell, Steven M. “Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo in a New Light: Toward a Theory of the Fantastic.” Journal of Spanish Studies: Twentieth Century. Vol. 8 ½ Spring-Fall 1980, pp. 29-43.
Carpentier, Alejo. El reino de este mundo. Universidad de Puerto Rico: 1994.
—- The Kingdom of This World. Trans. Harriet de Onís. Alfred A. Knopf: 1957.
—- Tientos y diferencias. Arca: 1967.
Eagleton, Terry. “Lapsing?” London Review of Books. 15(7) 8 April 1993. Pg. 15.
Eagleton, Terry. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. University of Texas Press: 1991.
Gates, Jr. Henry Louis. “The Sword and the Savior.” New York Times. September 12, 1993, Sunday Late Edition.
Gonzalez Echevarría, Robert. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. University of Texas Press, 1991.
Herskovitz, Melville J. Life in a Haitian Valley. Alfred A. Knopf, 1937.
Hoehling, Annaliese. “Minoritarian “Marvelous Real”: Enfolding revolution in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World”. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 54:2, 2018. pp. 254-267.
Jacobson, Louis. “Are illegal immigrants bringing ‘tremendous’ disease across the border, Trump says? Unlikely.” Politifact.com. 23 July 2015.
Lauro, Sarah Jullet and Karen Embry. “A Zombie Manifesto: The Nonhuman Condition in the Era of Advanced Capitalism”. boundary 2: an international journal of literature and culture. (2008) 35 (1): 85-108.
Moore, Brian. No Other Life. Nan A. Talese: 1993.
Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. “The Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows: A Re- Reading of Alejo Carpentier’s ‘The Kingdom of This World.’” Research in African Literatures. 35(2) Summer, 2004: pp. 114-127.
Smith, Stephen. “Book of a Lifetime: No Other Life, By Brian Moore.” Independent. 15 May 2009.
[1] “lo real maravilloso”
[2] “he quedado toda una mitología, acompañada de himnos mágicos, conservados por todo un pueblo, que aún se cantan en las ceremonias de Vodou”. Translation my own.
[3] “A veces, se hablaba de […] hombres que ciertos ensalmos dotaban de poderes licantrópicos” (20).
[4] “un houngán del rito Radá, investido de poderes extraordinarios por varias caídas en posesión de dioeses mayors” (29).
[5] “También se había llevado […] tres tomos de la Gran Enciclopedia, sobre los cuales solía sentarse para comer cañas de azúcar” (125).
[6] “Todos sabían que la iguana verde, la mariposa nocturna, el perro desconocido, el Alcatraz inverosímil, no eran sino simples disfraces. Dotado del poder de transformarse en animal de pezuña, no eran sino simples disfraces. Dotado del poder de transformarse en animal de pezuña, e nave, pez o insecto, Mackandal visitaba contínuamente las haciendas de la Llanura para vigilar a sus fieles y saber si todavía confiaban en su regreso. De metamorfosis en metamorfosis, el manco estaba en todas las partes” (32).
[7] “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!” (40)
[8] “Aquella tarde los esclavos regresaron a sus haciendas riendo por todo el camino. Mackandal había cumplido su promesa, permaneciendo en el reino de este mundo” (41)
[9] “regresaría a ellas el día menos pensado” (18).
[10] “A lo mejor, durante años y anños, habían observado las practices de esa religion en sus mismas narices, hablándose con los tambores de calendas, sin que él lo sospechara” (63).
[11] “machete se hundió súbitamente en el vientre de un cerdo negro”
[12] “los delegados desfilaron de uno en uno para untarse los labios con la sangre espumosa del cerdo”
[13] “que obedecería siempre a Bouckman” (50-51)
[14] “había querido ignorar el vodú, formando, a fustazos, una casta de señores católicos” (111)
[15] “habría una imagen suya hincada con alfileres o colgada de mala manera con un cuchillo encajado en el corazón” (103)
[16] “Llevado a un toque de tambores, Ti Noël había caído en posesión del rey de Angola” (126)
[17] “obligatorias” (130)
[18] “Por más que pensara, Ti Noël no veía la manera de ayudar a sus súbidos nuevamente encorvados bajo la tralla de alguien. El anciano comenzaba a desesperarse ante ese anacabable retoñar de cadenas, ese renacer de grillos, esa proliferación de miserias, que los más resignados acababan por aceptar como prueba de la inutilidad de toda rebeldía. Ti Noël temió que le hicieran trabajar sobre los surcos, a pesar de su edad. Por ello, el recuerdo de Mackandal volvió a imponerse a su memoria. Ya que la vestidura de hobre solía traer tantas calamidades, más valía despojarse de ella por un tiempo, siguiendo los acontecimientos de la Llanura bajo aspectos menos llamativos. Tomada esa decision, Ti Noël se sorprendió de los fácil que es transformarse en animal cuando se tienen poderes para ello. Como prueba se trepó a un árbol, quiso ser ave, y al punto fue ave. Miró a los Agrimensores desde lo alto de una rama, metiendo el pico en la pulpa violada de un caimito. Al día siguiente quiso ser garañón y fue garañón; mas tuvo que huir prestamente de un mulato que le arrojaba lazos para castrarlo con un cuchillo de cocina. Hecho avispa, se hastió pronto de la monótona geometría de las edificaciones de cera. Transformado en hormiga por mala idead suya, fue obligado a llevar cargas enormes, en interminables caminos, bajo la vigilencia de unos cabezotas que demasiado le recordaban los mayorales de Lenormand de Mezy, los guardias de Christophe, los mulatos de ahora.” (130-131)
[19] “Y de aquella hora nadie supo más de Ti Noël…” (136)
[20] “Un día daría la señal del gran levantamiento […] En esa gran hora—decía Ti Noël—la sangre de los blancos correría hasta los arroyos, donde los Loas, ebrios de júbilo, la beberían de bruces, hasta llenarse los pulmones” (33)
[21] “peg[ando] la boca, largamente, con muchas bajadas de la nuez, a la canilla de un barril de vino español” (54).
[22] “Ti Noël era de los que habían iniciado el saqueo del Palacio de Sans-Souci” (125)
[23] “Ti Noël comprendió oscuramente que aquel repudio de los gansos era un castigo a su cobardía. Mackandal se había disfrazado de animal, durante años, para server a los hombres, nopara deserter del terreno de los hombres” (134)
[24] “El anciano lanzó su declaración de guerra a los nuevos amos, dando orden a sus súbditos de partir” (135)
[25] “Sin embargo, los esclavos se mostraban de un desafiante buen humor” (22)
[26] “Ti Noël y los demás esclavos de la dotación asistían a los progresos del Nacimiento” (35)
[27] “Ti Noël […] comprendía, ahora, que el hombre nunca sabe para quién padece y espera. Padece y espera y trabaja para gentes que nunca conocerá, y que a su vez padecerán y esperarán y trabajarán para otros que tampoco serán felices, pues el hombre ansía siempre una felicidad situada más allá de la porción que le es otorgada. Pero la grandeza del hombre está precisamente en querer mejorar lo que es. En imponerse Tareas. En el Reino de los Cielos no hay grandeza que conquistar, puesto que allá todo es jerarquía establecida, incognita despejada, existir sin término, imposibilidad de sacrificio, reposo y deleite. Por ello, agobiado de penas y de Tareas, hermoso dentro de su miseria, capaz de amar en medio de las plagas, el hombre solo puede hallar su grandeza, su máxima medida en El reino de este mundo.” (134-135)