The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.Footnote 1
A 1938 New York Times travel section headline beckons: “Lands of the Buccaneers Call.” On the page, a travel article entices US “vacationists” to the “blue Caribbean,” promising a mixture of leisure, history, and adventure—“gaiety and relaxation beneath tropical skies … where America’s discoverers first trod American soil.”Footnote 2 Tourists could expect to find “many mingled races … strange customs, odd sites and exotic places for those who venture off the beaten track.”Footnote 3 In colonial slavery’s wake, centuries of travel accounts and long-trodden shipping routes lured North Atlantic travelers to these thrilling islands of adventure and fortune. By the 1920s, the US occupation of Haiti opened up a growing tourist industry that by 1940 entertained “boatloads” of tourists with cockfights, “voodoo dancers,” and drums. One of the most popular excursions was an “exciting” trip by horseback to King Henrí Christophe’s famed citadel, where visitors enjoyed a picnic lunch with breathtaking views. Trips to the citadel were made more accessible than ever by new roads designed by US Marines, which were built to transport natural commodities such as cotton, sugar, coffee, mahogany, and landless migrant laborers. Hidden and silent from the popular narratives were the human costs of these tourist and commercial routes. The road projects that facilitated Euro-American tourism and industry relied upon the reimposition of colonial labor practices. For instance, as Sidney Mintz and Michel-Rolph Trouillot describe, the US exacted unpaid corvée labor to build roads during its occupation of Haiti.Footnote 4 Under this policy, US Marines served as overseers to “thousands of peasants tied together by ropes while performing ‘voluntary’ labor on the roads.”Footnote 5
The routes that enabled these neocolonial systems of human labor and resource exploitation in Haiti also permitted the expansion of interior travel, which in turn enabled travel writers from the United States and elsewhere to journey deep into the mountains to study and unveil Haiti’s Vodou mystique for Euro-American audiences. Written accounts commodified Vodou for the popular consumption of these audiences, which further augmented the tourism industry. In his 1929 ethnographic travelogue of Haiti, The Magic Island, William Seabrook reaffirmed and sensationalized Vodou myths with salacious firsthand descriptions of Vodou ceremonies that he witnessed while drunk. As Seabrook writes, “The literary-traditional white stranger who spied from hiding in the forest, had such a one lurked near by, would have seen all the wildest tales of Voodoo fiction justified.”Footnote 6 Hence, anticipating Alejo Carpentier’s theory of the marvelous real, in Seabrook’s account, Haiti’s marvelous was indeed real. Seabrook’s narration proceeds to describe the scene: “leaping, screaming, writhing black bodies, blood-maddened, sex-maddened, god-maddened, drunken, whirled and danced their dark saturnalia, heads thrown weirdly back as if their necks were broken, white teeth and eyeballs gleaming, while couples seizing one another from time to time fled from the circle, as if pursued by furies, into the forest to share and slake their ecstasy.”Footnote 7 Seabrook’s primitivism affectionately paints his Haitian muses as an earlier form of humanity that is difficult for the “civilized mind to understand” because “[t]he Haitian peasants are thus double-natured in reality—sometimes moved by savage, atavistic forces whose dark depths no white psychology can ever plumb—but often, even in their weirdest customs, naive, simple, harmless children.”Footnote 8 When Zora Neale Hurston read The Magic Island, she was inspired to try to correct the record.Footnote 9 In 1936, she applied for a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, writing that “the proper voodoo book ‘has never been done, and it is crying to me to do it.’ ”Footnote 10 By contrast, Alejo Carpentier praised The Magic Island as “one of the most beautiful books written during recent times” and he regarded Seabrook as an “admirable American writer and traveler.”Footnote 11 Carpentier’s admiration for Seabrook and The Magic Island provides insight into his perspective on the leading travel literature concerning Haiti and reveals his uncritical stance toward prevailing Euro-American biases about contemporary Haitian people and culture.
Following a legacy of four and a half centuries of literature written by foreign travelers landing on Haiti’s shores, Carpentier’s seminal novel about the Haitian Revolution is predicated upon a voyage. As he writes in his prologue to the first edition of The Kingdom of This World (El reino de este mundo), Carpentier developed his ideas for the novel out of a visit to Haiti six years earlier. While touring the historic sites of Saint-Domingue—Palais Sans Souci, Citadelle Laferrière, and the colonial streets and architecture of Cap-Haïtien (previously Cap-Français)—Carpentier “had breathed the atmosphere created by Henrí Christophe, monarch of incredible determination” ([h]abía respirado la atmósfera creada por Henri Christophe, monarca de increíbles empeños).Footnote 12 Echoing Seabrook’s (the traveler’s) corroboration of “the wildest tales of Voodoo fiction,” Carpentier (the traveler) confirms that “at each step [he] discovered the marvelous real” ([a] cada paso hallaba lo real maravilloso). Footnote 13
When Alejo Carpentier toured Haiti as a cultural delegate from Cuba in 1943, Haiti was popularly marketed as a land of living history and mystery, where “Cap Haïtien lives with the memories of King Henrí Christophe’s splendid days” (my emphasis) and it was one of the Caribbean’s most popular tourist destinations for Euro-American adventurers.Footnote 14 The image of Haiti promoted by popular travel writing and tourism marketing, however, elided the less-than-marvelous realities. The material improvements that the US occupation brought about for travelers, transnationals, and the elite did not extend to the vast Haitian peasant class, which was experiencing extreme poverty in a neocolonial system marked by economic inequality, institutional colorism, intervention by foreign interests, and ecocide stemming from current and past plantation ecologies and ecological disasters.Footnote 15 As Mimi Sheller argues, “free trade,” like other mobile liberal practices, including tourism, enriches the mobile at the expense of the immobile. The neocolonial features of twentieth-century Haiti support Sheller’s observation that “[e]ven in a world without slavery the mobile capital of ‘free trade’ helped to hold in place and constrain the lives of ‘freed labourers’ long after their emancipation from slavery.”Footnote 16 The irony of “free trade” and emancipation/freed labor is that a century and a half after the Haitian Revolution, “freedom” remained elusive and colonial relationships between visitor and visited persisted.
This reading of The Kingdom of This World highlights the role of voyage in Carpentier’s narrative of the Haitian Revolution, which claims as its source, “a reality strictly followed in every detail” (una realidad estrictamente seguida en todos sus detalles).Footnote 17 Carpentier writes that during his “stay in Haiti” he was “in daily contact with something we could call the marvelous real … I trod upon a land where thousands of men eager for liberty believed in the lycanthropic powers of Mackandal, to the point that their collective faith produced a miracle on the day of his execution … I was in the Citadel La Ferrière, a work without architectonic precedents, foretold only by the Imaginary Prisons of Piranesi … At each step I found the marvelous real.”Footnote 18 Notwithstanding Carpentier’s emphasis on the “real,” in view of his silence about Haiti’s present, Carpentier’s daily treading and stepping on Haitian soil only seems to have reinforced a tourist’s gaze, a characteristic privileging of the past. Consequently, rather than subvert the imperial discourses that normalize the unequal power dynamics of empire, as he purports to do in his theories of the baroque and the marvelous real, discussed infra, Carpentier’s privileged access to mobility and identity as voyager to Haiti replicates the role of the itinerant travel writer and reinscribes them.
Anachronistic Voyages
By the time of The Kingdom of This World’s publication in 1949, Haiti had already captivated the popular Euro-American literary imagination. Yet, just as it had been for centuries before, it remained, to borrow Anne McClintock’s term, “anachronistic space,”Footnote 19 where journeys across empire to colonial spaces are journeys back in time. Tourists came to revel in Haiti’s glorious past—to visit the ruins of the “Black Napoleon” and encounter “primitive” people and their rituals, music, and dwellings. Despite laws prohibiting the practice of Vodou, Vodou and its practitioners became consumer products in a Euro-American market.Footnote 20 As Mintz and Trouillot write, “Vodou became folklore; and folklore could be sold.”Footnote 21 Travel literature, such as ethnographic writings, travel guides, and historical novels set in Haiti, captivated northern consumers. For instance, in 1947, Lydia Bailey, a historical novel set partially in Haiti during the Haitian Revolution, written by US author Kenneth Roberts, held first place on the New York Times fiction best-seller list for fourteen consecutive weeks.Footnote 22 Subsequently, posters for Lydia Bailey’s 20th Century Fox film adaptation promoted “Savage Excitement” and “the Wild Beat-Beat of a Thousand Voodoo Drums!!”Footnote 23 The Euro-American consumption of an anachronistic vision of Haiti, via the complementary mobile industries of tourism and media and print culture, perpetuated colonial attitudes of Haiti as a space of static alterity. Through this imagined chronos, Eurocentric histories satiate the desires and objectives of the visitor/consumer while subordinating and concealing the present-day violences born by the visited/consumed.
Walter Mignolo explains that time (as well as space) is a critical element of colonial power structures: “Since the Renaissance—the early modern period or emergence of the modern/colonial world—time has functioned as a principle of order that increasingly subordinates places, relegating them to before or below from the perspective of the holders (of the doors) of time.”Footnote 24 Mignolo’s observation of the imperial ordering of colonized spaces in time resonates in McClintock’s concept of anachronistic space, which she describes as a static space that is “prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of place in the historical time of modernity.”Footnote 25 In the colonial—and neocolonial—world order, the journey across empire performs the merger of time and space.
European travel writing since Christopher Columbus’s ship logs and letters perfects the merger of time and space performed by the journey and fashions and reinforces the dominant narratives of time and space across empire. Speaking to the power of literary discourse in the shaping of empire, Mexican theorist Edmundo O’Gorman famously (and quite unpopularly at the time) argued that through his writings Columbus “invented” rather than “discovered” America.Footnote 26 Michael Dash similarly argues that “geographical space, landscape, and human communities are inscribed with the rhetoric and images of given discursive practices.”Footnote 27 By underscoring the role of voyage in The Kingdom of This World, this reading also attends to the ways in which Carpentier’s storytelling and rendering of Haiti in both the novel and its prologue, and his accompanying theory of the marvelous real, adhere to Eurocentric conceptions of time that reinscribe this neocolonial space as anachronistic space.
Carpentier as Traveler/Visitor
In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt illustrates the nexus between magical or marvelous realism, the travel writer, and the significance of time that I am attempting to describe here.Footnote 28 In discussing an allegorical passage in Domingo Sarmiento’s 1849 Travels that invokes Robinson Crusoe, Pratt distills the significance of space and time in Sarmiento’s magical realist gesture as follows: “Facing the metropolis, the magic realist flashes back a message from the frontier: your fictions … are my realities … your past is my present; your exotic (world outside of clock time) is my everyday.”Footnote 29 In Pratt’s analysis, the intrinsic messages inherent in the travel writer’s inscriptions of the voyage conceptualize space and time in the Americas in a way analogous to Carpentier’s declarations a century later. Speaking back to Europe critically about European surrealism and fantasy literature, Carpentier writes in his prologue to The Kingdom of This World: “After feeling the very real enchantment of the land of Haiti, of having discovered magical signs in the red roads of the Central Plateau, of having heard the drums of the Petro and the Rada, I was led to closely compare the marvelous reality just lived to the exhausting pretense of evoking the marvelous that has characterized certain European literatures of these past thirty years.”Footnote 30 Like Sarmiento in Pratt’s interpretation, Carpentier proclaims to Europe that enchantment and magic exist outside of the geographic (and temporal) space of Europe, in America. His message to Europe: The marvelous, the enchanting, the magic, are incompatible with normative European space/time; they are all here, not there.Footnote 31 Thus, in considering the significance of voyage in The Kingdom of This World, we can see that Carpentier inscribes America only in its alteriority to Europe and that the messages he sends to the metropolis perpetuate historic Eurocentric discourses concerning space and time in the colonial world. Yet, as voyager, he is also visitor, and we must also consider the messages that his text conveys to the colonial, visited space.
Access to mobility is a critical determinant of who voyages across empire and who writes the narrative. Édouard Glissant, in his examination of errantry and its relationship to power in Poetics of Relation, traces the western voyager identity and writes that Europe’s early modern period of discovery and conquest “achieved a final, almost mystical perfection in the Voyage.”Footnote 32 Glissant emphasizes the significance of a person’s identity as “visitor or visited” within this power relationship.Footnote 33 In a passage that configures well with Pratt’s, Glissant speaks directly to this power relationship. Yet, rather than the transnational Sarmiento/Carpentier speaking back to Europe, Glissant posits the gesture of the conqueror/visitor with respect to her acknowledgment of the “Other”/visited: “ ‘I can think that my strength lies in the Voyage (I am making History) and that your difference is motionless and silent.’ ”Footnote 34 Accordingly, the power differential between the moving travel writer and her subjects attaches to the writer’s access to travel (visitor/visited), the pen (written/oral), progress (civilized/savage), and the colonizing language (European/Other), and determines nothing less than the power to make “history.”
Glissant’s insight into the connection between the voyage, power, and the production of history and the simultaneous silencing of the powerless/conquered/visited anticipates the detailed work of Trouillot on the invisible relationship between power and the writing of history in the Americas. As Trouillot writes of history, “[p]ower is constitutive of the story … It precedes the narrative proper, contributes to its creation and to its interpretation … In history, power begins at the source.”Footnote 35 The visitor’s power reveals itself in travel writing by the very nature of the terminology employed to describe the visited. Trouillot argues that the depth of a relational identity of difference touches at the very core of the definition of human or Man (capital M). Even in a context where the visited/Other arguably attains human status within the imperial ontology, the visited/Other’s access to human status does not necessarily entail access to self-determination. As Trouillot observes, “[t]he lexical opposition Man-versus-Native (or Man-versus-Negro) tinted the European literature on the Americas from 1492 to the Haitian Revolution and beyond.”Footnote 36 If we look closely, we see that these dialectical visited/Others exist in Carpentier’s enunciation of a marvelous reality, particularly in his mining of America for “the virginity of the landscape … the Faustic presence of the Indian and the Black … the fecund racial mixtures” (por la virginidad del paisaje … por la presencia fáustica del indio y del negro … por los fecundos mestizajes).Footnote 37 He conceives of the “marvelous” as fixedly positioned in time and territorialized in the Americas, and a “reality” that is structured by European ontologies and conceptions of order and progress. At best, Carpentier’s messages rearticulate difference, which he locates within this colonial space from a transnational, Eurocentric lens. In his perpetuation of these colonial categories and his privileging of the “reality” of European histories in The Kingdom of This World, he reinscribes these differences and Euro-American notions of the ahistoricity of colonial space.
Narrative Perspectives in the Text
Carpentier published The Kingdom of This World, his historical narrative of the Haitian Revolution, in 1949.Footnote 38 Set in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (modern-day Haiti) at the turn of the nineteenth century, the novel depicts much of the Haitian Revolution from the perspective of Ti Noël, an enslaved stableman.Footnote 39 Carpentier structures his text over the historic period spanning the course of Ti Noël’s life, from his youth under French colonial rule, when he takes part in the popular rebellion led by Makandal and the legendary Vodou ceremony conducted by Dutty Boukman at Bois Caïman, through to his old age during the despotic reign of King Henrí Christophe, when he leads the insurgent raid at the Sans Souci palace, and, thereafter, into the Jean-Pierre Boyer administration.Footnote 40 Carpentier introduces his theory of “the marvelous real” in his prologue to the novel’s first edition. He writes that “the marvelous real” is a narrative style unique to the Americas that permits “the marvelous to flow freely from a reality strictly followed in every detail” (que lo maravilloso fluya libremente de una realidad estrictamente seguida en todos sus detalles).Footnote 41 Guided by this theory, Carpentier purports to present historically accurate details that reveal the colonial American space to be uniquely magical and marvelous, proposing that the place where these “extraordinary acts” (hechos extraordinarios) occurred, “the magic crossroads of the City of the Cap [Cap-Haïtien]” (en la encrucijada mágica de la Ciudad del Cabo), in turn gives rise to a marvelous literature that is unique to the Americas.Footnote 42 In her 2006 introduction to the English translation of The Kingdom of This World, Edwidge Danticat affirms that “the real marvelous, which we have come to know as magical realism, lives and thrives in past and present Haiti, just as it does in this novel.”Footnote 43 In Danticat’s view, Vodou is a part of the “real marvelous” in Haiti, but it is not everything. She writes that “[f]rom Haiti’s fertile communal imagination sprang a fantastic sense of possibility, which certainly contributed to bondmen and -women defeating the most powerful armies of the time.”Footnote 44 Danticat’s argument that a communal “fantastic sense of possibility” was key to bringing about the revolution is supported by Trouillot, who maintains that the prospect of a slave-driven revolution would have been deemed ontologically impossible in its time. Trouillot writes that the Haitian Revolution “challenge[d] the ontological and political assumptions of the most radical writers of the Enlightenment. The events that shook up Saint-Domingue from 1791 to 1804 constituted a sequence for which not even the extreme political left in France or in England had a conceptual frame of reference. They were ‘unthinkable’ facts in the framework of Western thought.”Footnote 45 Danticat’s articulation of Vodou’s place in the Haitian communal imagination emphasizes a shared sense of empowerment and community that is distinct from Carpentier’s marvelous real. Mignolo writes that the “limit of Western philosophy is the border where the colonial difference emerges, making visible the variety of local histories that Western thought, from the Right and the Left, hid and suppressed.”Footnote 46 As opposed to Carpentier’s grounding of the real within the realm of Europe’s framework of possibility, and the marvelous as that which is inconceivable and strange, Danticat’s approach advances a broader framework for what is possible and what is real that is localized in the Haitian imaginary.
The novel ends during the Boyer regime—after Haiti has achieved independence and following the tenures of Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henrí Christophe, and Alexandre Pétion. Ti Noël, saved from execution for his role in the first major rebellion of the revolution, lives in exile in Santiago de Cuba with his master for the revolution’s duration. Consequently, via Ti Noël’s perspective, Carpentier places the preponderant emphasis on Henrí Christophe, who was in power when Ti Noël returned. Apart from a detailed treatment of Christophe and a passing reference to Dessalines, Carpentier notably omits most of the historical details of the prominent leaders of the Haitian Revolution, including the celebrated heroes of nationalist histories, an approach that has been critically challenged. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert argues that Carpentier’s historical omissions are intentional erasures that sensationalize Vodou at the expense of historical accuracy.Footnote 47 She describes Carpentier’s narrative as “a fractured tale whose fissures may be read as subverting the adherence to the facts of Haitian history and its primary sources that the author claims for his text.”Footnote 48 Where Paravisini-Gebert concludes that Carpentier’s omission of the national heroes reveals a “hopelessness concerning the Haitian land and its people,”Footnote 49 we could also say that the historical details that Carpentier either chose to include or silence reflect his relational identity to Haiti as voyager/traveler/visitor. Carpentier was a consumer of Haiti—it’s land, people, and history. As a transnational diasporic figure who divided his life between Cuba, Venezuela, and France, Carpentier was a cultural outsider with respect to Haiti and the African Caribbean. He obtained the materials for writing The Kingdom of This World from his experiences and ethnographic interest in Afro-Caribbean rituals while living in Cuba and Venezuela, which he references in his prologue, from reading Vodou ethnographies and Euro-American travelers’ accounts and histories, and, importantly, as a tourist to Haiti.Footnote 50 Perhaps not coincidentally, Christophe, whose character eclipses the rest of the revolutionaries in the novel, commissioned the building of the grandiose architecture that enthralled Carpentier on his travels to Haiti. Carpentier’s reiteration of tourist clichés of Haiti as an enchanted island and of Euro-American discourses of Haiti as anachronistic space reflects a voyager/traveler/visitor’s perspective that declines to offer a forward-looking image of the nation. By contrast, Carpentier’s perspective differs markedly from the localized philosophies and literatures of the indigéniste, Marxist, and noiriste movements that emerged in Haiti in the 1920s and 1930s.
Carpentier visited Haiti not to see the present, but to see the past. As he discusses in his prologue, he was inspired to write The Kingdom of This World by his encounter with the past in the present in Haiti, which he observed in the remnant architectural structures of Henrí Christophe and Pauline Bonaparte, as well as in the collective mystical (non-European) faith in Vodou reinforced by the sounds of Petro and Rada drums. Accordingly, Carpentier’s perspective of Haiti as voyager/traveler/visitor attended to the material artifacts and details of the Haitian subjects that were visible to the metropolitan traveler at that moment in time. He mentions these in his prologue:
At the end of the year 1943, I was fortunate to be able to visit the kingdom of Henrí Christophe—the ruins, so poetic, of Sans-Souci; the mass of the Citadel La Ferriére, impressively intact despite lightning and earthquakes—and to visit the still-Norman City of the Cap [Cap Haïtien]—the Cap Françáis of the old colony—, where a street lined with very long balconies leads to the stone palace once inhabited by Pauline Bonaparte.Footnote 51
Thus, while the discursive power of Carpentier’s imagined, enchanted, antiquated (“still-Norman”) Haiti concealed the present realities that were before him, at the same time, the materiality of the historical objects and structures that he encountered there held power over the narrative. As Trouillot writes, “History begins with bodies and artifacts … The bigger the material mass, the more easily it entraps us.”Footnote 52 Perhaps in the case of Carpentier, enrapture may be more fitting than entrapment. Nevertheless, Carpentier’s version of Haitian history flowed from these tangible historical artifacts that he encountered there. From this perspective, it is less surprising that Henrí Christophe and Pauline Bonaparte hold leading roles in this short narrative of the Haitian Revolution, which references all of these structures, including the bust of Pauline Bonaparte that visitors can still see on-site at the ruins of Christophe’s Sans Souci palace.Footnote 53
In addition to the significance of these material structures that memorialized Henrí Christophe and Pauline Bonaparte, the legendary drama of Christophe’s suicide and his self-entombment had already captivated numbers of tourists who climbed the summit to the citadel on horseback to hear the tales of his “fantastic” despotism. Thus, Christophe had already proven his merit as fodder for a historical novel intended for non-Haitian audiences. Moreover, the trajectory of Christophe’s life, his rise from slavery to freedom to become Haiti’s civilized king—noted for his conspicuous mimicry of all things French—is a model of the Western liberalist telos of freedom from slavery that reaffirms Eurocentric presumptions of liberal progress.Footnote 54 Hence, Christophe’s emancipation and overcoming of savagery through his Europeanized education, conversion to Christianity, and pompous display of European cultural trappings, while still retaining the exotic Vodou mystique that attracts visitors and readers of travel narratives of Haiti, is a narrative that is highly compatible with the expectations of modern Euro-American readers.
An unlikely leading figure in the text is Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon’s sister, who arrives in Saint-Domingue in Part II, the second quarter of the novel. Carpentier documents Pauline’s arrival with her husband, General Charles LeClerc, and the French military, who were sent to suppress the slave uprisings in the colony. Carpentier’s version of history omits LeClerc’s capture of Touissant Louverture and his plans to reinstate slavery in Saint-Domingue.Footnote 55 Instead, Carpentier depicts LeClerc as fearful of the slave uprisings and of the monarchist planters, and generally “of threats of every kind” (de amenazas de toda índole).Footnote 56 For this period of the novel, Carpentier illumines Pauline’s perspective as imperial traveler, conqueror, and living symbol of the liberal discourses of the Enlightenment and Romanticism in France. Pauline personifies European attitudes toward the colonies and is a stand-in for the Euro-American traveler/visitor whose seeming entanglements in the island space are conveniently transient. Pauline’s visit to the island culminates in scenes of fetishized rituals conducted by her African-born slave, Soliman (who later serves Christophe), who summons African lois (deities) to ward off yellow fever, until which time a ship arrives and takes her out of this colonial space and back to Europe.
Pauline Bonaparte as Itinerant Colonizer
European travelogues traditionally depicted “the tropics” as distant, temperate spaces that are geographically, environmentally, and culturally exotic in relationship to Europe. Carpentier parodies these tropes of “tropicality” with the introduction of Pauline. His narration of her begins on her overseas voyage from France to Saint-Domingue, where she accompanies LeClerc on behalf of the French government. The epigraph to Part II of the novel, which introduces Pauline’s arrival in Saint-Domingue, is an excerpt of a passage from the nonfictional memoir of Madame d’Abrantès (Madame Junot), who in it recounts her speech that convinced Pauline to travel to the French colony. D’Abrantès writes, “I told her that she would be a queen out there … she would go about in a palanquin … a slave would watch over her smallest gesture … she would stroll under orange-trees in bloom … the savages are not to be feared …”Footnote 57 By incorporating the diary into the novel, along with multiple other European Enlightenment and Romantic texts, Carpentier conspicuously engages with the concept of Haiti, and the Caribbean generally, as it existed in the European imaginary—as inscribed predominantly by imperial travel writing. The passage’s mixing of tropes of disparate tropical spaces as a single tropical elsewhere supports a finding that the tropics exist “as a conceptual, and not just physical, space.”Footnote 58 Within these spaces, European discourses of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries portrayed the lives of those who lived in the tropical zones as alternating between a dialectic of wild, violent, and libidinal versus innocent, pure, and free.Footnote 59
Carpentier’s portrayal of Pauline as imperial traveler begins with her arrival to the Cap Français. In Imperial Eyes, Pratt describes the importance of arrival scenes in travel narratives written at the end of the eighteenth century. Ranging from an imperial gaze, to a reciprocal interchange, Pratt writes that arrival scenes “serve as particularly potent sites for framing relations of contact and setting the terms of its representation.”Footnote 60 Carpentier narrates Pauline’s arrival to Saint-Domingue aboard her French military ship by focusing upon her imperial gaze:
The revelation of the City of the Cap and of the Northern Plain, with its backdrop of mountains blurred by the mist rising from the sugarcane plantations, enchanted Pauline, who had read the sentiments of Paul and Virginia, and was familiar with L’Insulair, a pretty Creole quadrille of a strange rhythm, published in Paris … Feeling herself part bird of paradise, part lyrebird, in her muslin skirts, she discovered the fineness of new ferns, the brown juiciness of loquat trees, and huge leaves that could be folded like fans.Footnote 61
In the visual imagery of this passage, the view of the mountains in the background is blurred by the mist rising from the cane fields in the foreground, symbolizing the preeminence of colonial plantations and slavery. Carpentier’s positioning of the natural mountain scenery behind the plantation through the gaze of Pauline is an ironic effort to work against the common trope of the island as a return to Edenic nature, as the plantation was in fact a site of violence. As Arnold writes, this “juxtaposing of brutal slavery with natural splendour was an important and troubling part of outsiders’ views of the tropical world.”Footnote 62 Thus, Pauline’s arrival scene both establishes and problematizes the European gaze. Pauline’s delight at viewing the colonial landscape reminds that literature and art, including travel writing, shaped an imperial reality that naturalized colonial slavery in the metropolitan imagination.
Pauline’s colonial arrival chronologically predates the twentieth-century setting of Seabrook’s arrival scene in The Magic Island. Although Carpentier wrote it two decades after The Magic Island, Pauline’s arrival scene reproduces aspects of Seabrook’s. Seabrook writes:
Our West Indian mail boat lay at anchor in a tropical green gulf. From the palm-fringed shore a great mass of mountains rose, fantastic and mysterious. Dark jungle covered their near slopes, but high beyond the jungle, blue-black, bare ranges piled up, towering … Here in ruins was the palace built for Pauline Bonaparte … On a peak behind the Cape loomed the gigantic fortress which the self-crowned black king Christophe had built … as night fell it faded to vagueness and disappeared. Only the jungle mountains remained, dark, mysterious; and from their slopes came presently far out across the water the steady boom of Voodoo drums.Footnote 63
Seabrook’s arrival scene likewise establishes his imperial/traveler/visitor gaze. He frames Haiti as a fantastic, dark, and mysterious tropical island nation defined by its history. As a travel writer, his description set the scene for Carpentier’s subsequent arrival in Haiti. Carpentier’s prologue to The Kingdom of This World, along with his corresponding emphasis on Christophe and Pauline, evince Seabrook’s influence.
Pauline reifies the European discourses of “hedonistic primitivism” and fetishism that attached to colonial tropical island spaces.Footnote 64 Along her voyage across space and time to the Edenic tropical island space of the colony, Carpentier represents Pauline as superficially shedding the conventions of metropolitan society. Yet, just before Pauline boards her return ship to Europe, Carpentier narrates Pauline’s shift in perspective toward what she once viewed as an island paradise: “Now the tropics had become abominable” (Ahora el trópico se le hacía abominable).Footnote 65 As Arnold notes, “Alongside the awe and intimations of an earthly paradise, there lurked an abiding sense of danger, alienation and repugnance.”Footnote 66 Eurocentric beliefs in technological supremacy corresponded with a repudiation of fetishism. The worship of inanimate objects and believing that they have supernatural forces were anachronistic and antithetical to Enlightenment reason.Footnote 67 Yet, despite these negative connotations, it was typical for European travelers visiting colonial spaces to fetishize exotic things. As McClintock writes, nineteenth-century anthropologists identified a common phenomenon that they called “becoming Black,” wherein European travelers to Africa commonly adopted pagan practices and wore pagan amulets.Footnote 68 Carpentier adapts these sensibilities to the Afro-Caribbean setting when Pauline, who desperately participates in Vodou rituals led by Soliman to ward off yellow fever, embarks her ship and leaves the island penitently wearing scapulars, yet also traveling with an amulet to the loi, Papa Legba, crafted by Soliman, on her voyage back to Europe.Footnote 69
Whereas Carpentier ironizes the European gaze in Pauline’s arrival, he appears to be less attuned to the asymmetry in Pauline’s ability to depart the island without Soliman. This imbalance of power that Carpentier inscribes recalls what Elizabeth DeLoughrey has identified as a common trope of imperial travel writing of island spaces. She writes that “the supremacy of European technology is reiterated by the arrival of a large ship, a ‘floating island’ that transports its human and material resources to the metropole. Since the European has conquered his island, he departs to narrate the tale from the northern metropole, usually abandoning his island slaves, servants, mistress, wife, or children.”Footnote 70 In the case of Pauline, her female gender elevates a female voice against a clearly defined European male canon and ethos. As DeLoughrey’s passage implies, narratives of European conquest and adventure were nearly exclusively written from a male perspective. Pratt writes that male heroes dominated the field, and even when men were accompanied by women in their travels to colonial locales, they “scripted themselves into a wholly male, heroic world.”Footnote 71 Peter Hulme similarly references “the masculinist ethos of European colonialism.”Footnote 72 Likewise, a central theme of McClintock’s Imperial Leather is the “male imperial identity … displaced onto a ‘feminized space.’ ”Footnote 73 Thus, with respect to European travel literature and renderings of the voyage to colonial spaces, Carpentier’s depiction of the novel’s European hero as a woman might represent what could be considered a baroque expansion that challenges longstanding European discursive conventions. Pauline’s mobility, however, merely replicates the historical power differential between the male traveler and the visited. Moreover, in view of the media and print culture of his day, particularly the hugely popular Lydia Bailey, the female heroine in a Caribbean setting had become an established, exportable modern commodity.
Contextualizing the Marvelous Real
Discounting European surrealism and fantasy literature as vain attempts to invoke the marvelous through tricks of the imagination and dream imagery, Carpentier argues in his prologue to The Kingdom of This World that Haiti, and America as a whole, with its particular mixture of peoples and cosmogonies, is the unique source of a marvelous reality, a combination of faith, reality, and magic, the likes of which had never been represented in literature before. What Carpentier describes as his “chronicle of the marvelous-real” (una crónica de lo real-maravilloso)Footnote 74 in the text of The Kingdom of This World is an example of what Carpentier later describes as a “baroque that occurs spontaneously in our [American] literature” (un barroquismo que se produce espontáneamente en nuestra literatura).Footnote 75 The New World baroque theory advanced by Carpentier and his Latin American contemporaries posits a counter-modernity that repurposes European nomenclature to challenge European positivism and Enlightenment reason. Carpentier maintains that this baroque is not an order imposed by Europe, but rather, the irrational, unscripted conditions that arose out of Europe’s colonization of the Americas. Notwithstanding the baroque’s professedly mobile and expansive qualities, there are limits to the application of an “emergent” theory to the context of The Kingdom of This World. Written in a cyclical narrative form, the novel leaves the potential of revolution uncertain. As Natalie M. Léger explains, Carpentier’s narrative time is static rather than emergent: “Static time conditions the narrative’s movement and the novel’s thematic concerns, specifically freedom’s elusiveness, revolution’s enduring significance, and change as repetition with difference.”Footnote 76 Consequently, Carpentier’s mode of repetitive, circular narrativization fashions a world temporally in stasis, challenging his concept of the baroque as “art in motion” (un arte en movimiento).Footnote 77 It is perhaps no accident then, that Carpentier, in untethering the term baroque, which he sees as an everlasting baroque spirit, from the particular seventeenth-century art movement, describes the baroque as a “human constant” (una constante humana).Footnote 78 Similarly, Carpentier defines the marvelous real in America as irrational and static: “Here the unusual is the everyday, and always was the everyday” (Aquí lo insólito es cotidiano, siempre fue cotidiano) (my emphasis).Footnote 79 With respect to movement in time and space, the colonial crisis and relations ultimately remain intact and unchanged.
Carpentier’s theory of the marvelous real intersects with his New World baroque theory and likewise purports to reject traditional colonial hierarchies. Citing subsequent theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Monika Kaup maintains that the New World baroque is distinct from its European predecessor because “it was generated from the European Baroque by a destratifying process that deterritorialized its colonizing hierarchical order.”Footnote 80 Yet, Carpentier’s New World baroque fails as a destratifying mechanism. Whereas Carpentier ironizes and ridicules the illogic and hypocrisy of the discourses of the Enlightenment in Europe that fueled a modernity contingent upon colonial slavery in America, he nonetheless privileges a Eurocentric positionality.Footnote 81 Moreover, even while the narrative critiques hierarchical colonial power relationships, it ultimately perpetuates them in a vision of Haiti as an anachronistic colonial space in which a post-revolutionary independent American nation is inconceivable.
Unlike postcolonial theories that call for a discursive rupture from a colonial past, Carpentier co-opts European terminology for the New World baroque in order to revise European hegemonic discourses.Footnote 82 Mignolo argues, however, that an approach that continues, rather than relocates, European discourses is unable to break free from them. Mignolo suggests that “because of the colonial difference, coloniality of being cannot be a critical continuation of the former (a sort of postmodern displacement), but must be, rather, a relocation of the thinking and a critical awareness of the geopolitics of knowledge.”Footnote 83 Carpentier’s “marvelous reality” illustrates Mignolo’s argument. By not acknowledging the politics underlying the concepts of “reality” and “historical truth,” Carpentier remains moored to a European version of “reality,” while his wonderment with the Haitian “marvelous” amounts to an exoticizing Othering. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this in the text of The Kingdom of This World is when Makandal is burned at the stake. According to the “reality” for the Haitian masses, as Carpentier narrates it, Makandal escapes his execution through his power to transform into a flying insect. Carpentier narrates that the one-armed Makandal, who was tied to a post as the flames were rising, “shook his arm stump that could not be tied down … and violently cast his torso forward. The tethers fell off and the negro’s body shot up in the air, flying overhead, before sinking into the black waves of the crowd of slaves. One single cry filled the plaza.—Makandal is saved! [Mackandal sauvé!]”Footnote 84 In the novel’s reality, however, Carpentier narrates that there was so much crashing and yelling and tumult that followed that “very few saw that Mackandal, held by ten soldiers, had been pushed head-first into the fire, and that a flame lit by his burning hair had drowned out his last cry” (muy pocos vieron que Mackandal, agarrado por diez soldados, era metido de cabeza en el fuego, y que una llama crecida por el pelo encendido ahogaba su último grito).Footnote 85 Carpentier narrates that the enslaved return to their plantations, laughing all the way: “Mackandal had fulfilled his promise, remaining in the kingdom of this world. Once again, the whites were tricked by the Great Powers of the Other Shore” (Mackandal había cumplido su promesa, permaneciendo en el reino de este mundo. Una vez más eran burlados los blancos por los Altos Poderes de la Otra Orilla).Footnote 86 Meanwhile, the White plantation owner, Lenormand de Mezy, aware of the “reality” that Makandal had been murdered, misreads their laughter as “insensitivity to the torture of one of their own” (la insensibilidad de los negros ante el suplicio de un semejante).Footnote 87 In this scene, Carpentier acknowledges the existence of these competing perspectives and juxtaposes the European and Afro-Caribbean discourses beside one another in a gesture acknowledging transculturation within the colonial space. Nonetheless, the positivistic Eurocentric version of history grounded in “reason” prevails as the novel’s “reality.”
Just as his New World baroque is a repurposing or revision of a European hegemonic discourse, in his theory of a marvelous reality, Carpentier’s theory of “reality” calls for “an expansion of the scale and categories” (una ampliación de las escalas y categorías—my emphasis) of the prevailing Eurocentric reality.Footnote 88 At the same time, Carpentier rebukes surrealism, which he sharply criticizes as fabricated and formulaic. Ultimately, Carpentier distinguishes the real marvelous as arising out of “faith” (la sensación de lo maravilloso presupone una fe), from surrealism, which, he argues fashions a “marvelous born out of disbelief” (lo maravilloso invocado en el descreimiento).Footnote 89 Yet, American critics of colonialism and its aftermath embraced surrealism for this “disbelief,” or rejection of Europe’s reality. For instance, in her 1943 essay, “Surrealism and Us,” Suzanne Césaire writes that surrealism “free[s] the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and so-called Western reason.”Footnote 90 Thus, in view of surrealism’s attempts to break free of European modes of thought altogether, it surpasses the marvelous real in its potential to relocate and reconstitute knowledge and discursive power.
Conclusion
The Kingdom of This World is an important text that reminds that the Haitian Revolution, an unprecedented act of counter-conquest in the Americas, can no longer be, as Trouillot argues, silenced “by Western historiography.”Footnote 91 Yet, more than one hundred years after the revolution, Carpentier visited its descendants, who were still living in the shadows of slavery, and chose to write only about the past. As Léger writes of Carpentier, “He perceives Haiti and yet does not see it at all.”Footnote 92 Viewing the text’s striking parallels with travel writing, we see that Carpentier’s relational identity as voyager/visitor to Haiti structures his perception of it and he is unable to avoid reinscribing the conceptual space of Haiti that had been indelibly engraved by the writings of imperial tourism promoters, conquerors, naturalists, adventurers, and ethnographers. From Carpentier’s privileged position of mobility as an itinerant observer, he underscores the stasis of the visited. Like the imperial traveler, he wields the power to engage with and abandon his subject at will. Carpentier’s fascination with the “strange” or “Otherness” of America, his emphasis on repetition and stasis, and his preference for material artifacts over material human conditions, replicate the Enlightenment and Romantic discourses that he ironizes in the novel. Could Carpentier see a workable present or future for the liberated masses in the transculturated America that he celebrates in his writings? Or are we to read the tragic circularity of his narrative as an affirmation of his inability to surpass the space-time of the novel?
In the 1940s, visitors to Haiti, like Carpentier, were beckoned by the allure of its history; they were lured by a fantastic, enchanted past without regard for the present and future of the visited. In The Kingdom of This World, Carpentier attends to the polycentric discourses emerging from the novel’s American setting, as well as to the cycle of violence that flowed from the original violence of colonialism, and then the revolution, yet he stops short of writing a counter-history. Although Carpentier argues that the baroque “is always projecting forward” (siempre está proyectando hacia adelante), The Kingdom of This World does not accomplish this.Footnote 93 On the contrary, Carpentier’s work projects backward, functioning like that of an imperial travel writer—it reinforces a colonialist agenda by encapsulating Haiti in a marvelous past.
