Bicentennial blues

I caught up with Marilyn Houlberg last November in Port-au-Prince. We had co-curated "The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou" exhibition for the Fowler Museum in 1995 and subsequently stayed au courant of Vodou's ever-evolving scene. Now I was curating a couple of exhibitions at the Fowler in honor of the bicentennial of Haitian independence on January 1, 2004. I needed to appraise bicentennial plans and get some pulse on the disastrous turn of events in the Black Republic. I also needed to go shopping for drapo (Vodou flags), and no one keeps a keener eye on that market than Marilyn.

Marilyn and I also shared some serious religious obligations. We were in Haiti during the Days of the Dead (October 31-November 2), sacred to Papa Gede, lwa (Vodou divinity) of death and sexuality (also larceny, mayhem, lewd jokes, lascivious dancing, public drunkenness, and a host of other god-gone-wild activities). He is "Master of Our Heads" (as Vodouists call their divine patrons), since both our fathers were born on Gede's birthday, Halloween. Over years of observing him give the finger to fate, we know Gede most nearly embodies the spirit of the Pep Ayisan (Haitian people) and best expresses their art and philosophy. Besides, Gede is a hell of a lot of fun.

Marilyn was staying at the decidedly downscale Park Hotel, across from the similarly down-scale Champs Mars, Port-au-Prince's town square. There was no doubt which room was hers. Cardboard gods with doll heads and sequined bodies were clustered around her doorway, twisted in unspeakable agonies. No, these were not cut-out posters for Mel Gibson's Passion. They were lwa, fabricated in the style of Pierrot Barra, late master of market detritus, whom both of us had patronized--though come to think of it, Pierrot would have found lots to appropriate from Gibson's flagellated god. Barra returned to the "Isle Beneath the Sea" (as Vodou calls its heaven) hl 1999, but the Iron Market is jammed with his wannabees, pasting sequins on mutilated Barbie dolls in hopes of capturing a few of his bereft customers. Most of their work is execrable, though the stuff around Marilyn's doorway was pretty good.

One sculpture in particular stood out: a black-haired woman with arms and eyeballs raised to heaven, her torso engulfed in vibrant cardboard flames. For aficionados of pre-Vatican II Catholic kitsch she is Anima Sola: the only soul who will always remain in Purgatory because she mocked Christ on his way to Calvary (how that legend escaped Gibson's appropriation we'll never know). In Vodou, her image is recognized as "Mayanet," hottest sister of the already hot earth-mother lwa Ezili Danto. Mayanet's manifestation in a Vodou ceremony is fairly rare but always remarkable for her spastic writhing. I quickly discerned from the statue, as well as the iconography embroidered on drapo piled nearby that market runners were feeding Marilyn's new passion: collecting Mayanets.

From her doorway one also observed three or four middle-aged guys oiling their hairy chests around the micro-pool. They resembled that hapless Kazakh played by HBO comedian Ali G: mustachioed geeks sent on ambiguous foreign missions by some ministry too broke to pay for a genuine tourist hotel. Who knows why these guys were staying at the Park, or what they were trying to buy or sell? It was all so Graham Greene-ish, which is precisely my point. Greene's novel The Comedians, published during Papa Doc Duvalier's reign of terror, gave Haiti a kind of existential chic it's never lost. As a hotel friend (and white Vodou initiate) opined on the balcony of the Oloffson, Greene's favorite hotel, "Haiti used to be a cabinet of curiosities, then a political and religious theater, and now, a drugstore." The last reference is to "White Lady" (a.k.a. crack cocaine), as ubiquitous as street candy.

Tourism, of course, has long since died. Pick up any standard Caribbean tour guide, and Haiti isn't even indexed. It seems to exist solely in digital images of riot and mayhem run on CNN or in the Times. Even the best popular art in the world, or the most extravagant religious ceremonies, can't trump those images, the reality of Haiti's intense poverty; or the bum rap it gets for AIDS. That being so, I was surprised to find tourists there and to discover that many more were expected by year's end. They would be lured down by scheduled plans for the bicentennial party on New Year's Eve.

There really is no need to hype the bicentennial of Haitian independence. It celebrates a genuinely stupendous moment in Black Atlantic--no--world history. The first and only successful national slave revolt. Toussaint Louverture, the former Ewe slave, outfoxing Napoleon. Jean-Jacques Dessalines ripping the white from the tricouleur to create a new flag for Freedom. This is the stuff of epic, of opera, and there were big plans to make it so. A cobbler from Cap Haitien had sewn a huge macoute (shoulder bag) to contain the billions of Euros demanded from France in reparation for the money it had extorted from Haiti after the Revolution as compensation for its lost chattel (i.e., the self-emancipated Haitian people). The macoute stood empty on the steps of some abandoned ministry.