The Duel of Faiths in Alejo Carpentier's El Reino De Este

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chapter 6 Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo- Baroque Novel: The Duel of Faiths in Alejo Carpentier’s El reino de este mundo and Ludic Voodoo in Alfonso Quijada Urías’s Lujuria tropical

Hugh Hazelton

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Afro-Caribbean belief systems in understanding the Caribbean world and mind-set. Following the virtual annihilation of the indigenous peoples of the islands, the Spanish, French, British, Dutch, and Danes repopulated the area with slaves imported from many regions of the African coast, from Senegal to Angola. A large number of these slaves came from the already densely populated areas of what are now Benin (formerly Dahomey), Togo, and the Niger Delta, which were highly devel- oped and had a long history of city-states, nation-building and local empires. Moreover, though the slave trade took place on the coast, many of the slaves were actually from the interior, having been captured during raids launched by coastal states that became specialized intermediaries in the trade. The cap- tives were transported to the Americas and sold as chattel, mixed together with Africans of other ethnic and linguistic groups of which they knew nothing, and forced to struggle for survival in a completely alien and hostile environment. There was only one common recourse to which they could turn: their religious beliefs. Moreover, since slaves represented such a heterogeneous mixture of African cultures, even though they often worshipped similar gods, a great deal of fusion among deities and rituals took place, all of which formed what became known as vaudou, or “voodoo” in the French Caribbean, from the Fon word vodû for god or spirit (Métraux 21). This was the bedrock for the slaves’ psychological and physical endurance, and later of their revolutionary force, first in the Maroon Wars in Jamaica and then in the Haitian Revolution, the only successful national slave revolt in human history. Alejo Carpentier’s novel El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World) runs parallel to the Haitian Revolution and includes a number of key historic events and figures in its fictional narrative. Carpentier himself, born in 1904 in Lausanne, Switzerland, to parents of French and Russian heritage who had emigrated to Cuba, was raised in Havana, but spent a decade in self-exile in France in the 1930s, during which he was in contact with both the surrealists

Afro-Caribbean Belief Systems and the Neo-Baroque Novel 141 and the Guatemalan author Miguel Ángel Asturias. He was also fascinated by African cultural traditions in the Caribbean: his first novel, Ecué-Yamba-O (1933) was an exploration of Afro-Cuban traditions, and a prolonged visit to Haiti in 1943, during which he met the Haitian writer Jacques Roumain and other figures, inspired him to write El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World), his second novel, which was published in 1949, sixteen years after the first. It was in this book that Carpentier reached a remarkable literary cross- road, combining elements of African and French culture, surrealism, “the marvelous real” (“lo real maravilloso”), considered the forerunner of magic realism, and the baroque into a single narrative. The specifically neo-baroque character of the novel, as well as its tremendous force, results from the juxtaposition of the decadence and empty refinement of French culture and religion during the Ancien Régime with the vitality, complexity, and existential power of African ways and beliefs at the precise moment when the two peoples were locked in a war to the death. No matter how bizarre the occurrences in the book, however, the underlying reality of the struggle is never compromised by fantasy: rather, hallucination and reality exist simultaneously. Despite the irony and grim hu- mor that permeate the novel, its neo-baroque exuberance is deadly serious. Carpentier’s prologue to The Kingdom of This World is key to understanding the novel. He describes his voyage to Haiti and the intense effect that both its ruins—including Sans Souci, the palace of King Henri-Christophe—and its people had on his imagination as he experienced this “maravillosa realidad,” or “marvelous reality” (El reino de este mundo 1). For Carpentier, Haiti and its history vastly surpass the inventions and artifice of the French and European tradition of fantastic literature, be it surrealism or De Sade, Alfred Jarry or even Lautréamont. As an example, he compares the tired monotony and repetitive- ness of Tanguy’s forced surrealism with the mysterious jungle luxuriance of the paintings of the Afro-Chinese Cuban artist Wifredo Lam. A true sense of the marvelous, he affirms in a later essay, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” needs to grow out of faith: “[T]he phenomenon of the marvelous presuppos- es faith. Those who do not believe in saints cannot cure themselves with the miracles of saints” (86). This is the circumstance he found in Haiti, in which he was “in daily contact with something that could be defined as the marvelous real” (86). The critic Federico Acevedo notes that this was the first time Car- pentier, or indeed anyone else, had ever used the terms “marvelous” and “real” as a unified phrase (Acevedo x). Carpentier then extends his interpretation of the “marvelous real” to include all of the Americas, which he believes are still in search of their own cosmogonies (Kingdom, 4). The confluence of literary tendencies in The Kingdom of this World makes it one of the key novels of mid-century Latin America. The term “magic realism”