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Journal Pou kat gwo Mapou Frisner Augustin, Vodou master drummer, 1949-2012 Lénord Fortuné, master rasin musician, 1965-2011 of And for Clothaire Bazile, wherever you are… These artists created splendor out of the oldest traditions of Haiti. Rasin fon; fwi bon. Haitian If the roots are deep the fruit will be good. Studies VOLUME 18, NUMBER 2 FALL 2012 COPYRIGHT © 2012 JOURNAL OF HAITIAN STUDIES ISSN 1090-3488 GUEST EDITOR: Roberto Strongman ASSISTANT GUEST EDITORS: Paul Humphrey & Eric Heuser CONTENTS 4 Détour d’Haïti: A Prologue Roberto Strongman INTRODUCTION 8 An Interview with Robert H. McCormick, Jr. Roberto Strongman DÉFENSE ET ILLUSTRATION DU VODOU 14 From “Voodooism” to “Vodou”: Changing a US Library of Congress Subject Heading Kate Ramsey 26 Replacing the Term “Voodoo” with “Vodou”: A Proposal Leslie G. Desmangles 28 Media Alerts Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Kate Ramsey 34 Mama Lola’s Triplets, Haiti’s Sacred Ground, and Vodou Quintessential’s Lesson Claudine Michel 51 La couleur de l’aube de Yanick Lahens : cette horrible béance obscure Marie-Agnès Sourieau 64 “Children” of the Gods: Filming the Private Rituals of Haitian Vodou Charlotte Hammond 83 ‘Chevauchés des dieux’ : Mambos et Hassides dans l’œuvre schwarz- bartienne Kathleen Gyssels HAITI WITHIN THE ARCHIPELAGO 100 Servants Turned Masters: Carlos Esteban Deive’s Viento Negro, Bosque del Caimán, and the future of Hispaniola Maria Cristina Fumagalli 119 Gods, Gender, and Nation: Building an Alternative Concept of Nation in Four Novels by Mayra Montero Paul Humphrey 135 De isla en isla : diálogo entre tres poetas afro-caribeñas Prisca Agustoni de A. Pereira 150 (Auto)Biographical Victories: An Analysis of the Culinary and the Literary in Maryse Condé’s Victoire, les saveurs et les mots Sarah Mosher MAGICAL REALISM 168 Dans le sillage d’Alejo Carpentier et de García Márquez : le réalisme magique dans Eau de Café de Raphaël Confiant Arzu Etensel Ildem 179 A Heart of Kindness: Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring Laura Salvini HAITIAN THEATRE 194 Le théâtre populaire selon Franck Fouché : éclatement dramaturgique et résistance haïtienne Mélissa Simard 210 An Introduction to The Blue of the Island by Evelyne Trouillot Robert H. McCormick, Jr. 213 Le Bleu de l’île (The Blue of the Island) Evelyne Trouillot Translated by Robert H. McCormick, Jr. RESEARCH NOTES 266 Creolist Michel DeGraff: A Profile of Commitment, Advocacy, Excellence, and Hope Flore Zéphir REVIEWS 274 Trading Places: Colonization and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century French Culture, by Madeleine Dobie Review by Alessandra Benedicty 27 The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, by Kate Ramsey Review by Celucien L. Joseph 281 Cric? Crac!: Fables de La Fontaine racontées par un montagnard haïtien et transcrites en vers créoles, by George Sylvain Reviewed by Fatoumata Seck 286 Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean, edited by Faith Smith. Review by Kersuze Simeon-Jones, University of South Florida The Journal of Haitian Studies, Volume 18 No. 2 © 2012 DÉTOUR D’HAÏTI: A PROLOGUE Roberto Strongman University of California, Santa Barbara In working on this issue, it became clear to me how much contributors, subscribers, and editors of Journal of Haitian Studies rely on the journal as a vehicle for a type of scholarly travel to Haiti, in addition to its academic content. As one of the guest editors for this issue, I often felt the articles whirling about me. I, in the eye of storm, thrown into a spiralist descent in which the /r/ consonance of reading, writing, and revising recomposed into a sort of return. Whether as children of the soil or scholars of the country and its wonders, Haiti has marked our lives and we long to go back to that site of affective and intellectual imprinting. If we are being honest with ourselves, we might confess to the shock and even the disappointments of our recent returns. Everything has changed after the earthquake, the hurricanes, the Aristide administrations, and the Duvaliers. The Haiti of today is not the one we left behind. Our desires are frustrated and circuitous, trapped in the motions of a storm whose counterclockwise motions always bring us back to twelve but which will take us very far from our intended destination. In the tempest of this issue, our travels to Haiti will take us invariably elsewhere. In our theoretical descent towards Haiti, we look out of the airplane window to see a new Haiti, diffuse, its peninsulas stretching out like arms connecting it to other islands and mainlands. Disorientation as a quality of return permeates Caribbean discourse from Cesaire’s Cahier to Glissant’s Le Discours Antillais. In both texts, the idea of retour is unachievable and, at least in Glissant’s case there is a realization of its impossibility and a drive towards an acceptance of errance (wandering) as a mode of living. Far from being a fatalistic and depressing condition, this détour involves a prise-de-conscience on the part of the exiled West Indian that forces him to transform the diasporic locale into a new homeland. Moreover, awareness of the reality of détour forces the West Indian scholar to question origins and empowers him to understand the work of nostalgia that propelled him to seek a return in the first place. Césaire finds an island in the Adriatic with a similar sounding name to his native land: Martinque has its counterpart in Prologue 5 Martinska. Glissant also seriously plays with/in language as he elegantly encodes the elliptical nature of this quest for home in the near homonymy of retour/détour. In the process, Glissant also ends up seeing his homeland of Martinique all over the Antilles. Retour leads to détour. The first section,Défense et Illustration du Vodou, reiterates the important role that language has in our conceptualization of reality and presents to us a number of articles that defend Vodou from its detractors and illustrate its complexity. While most of the second half of the section does fulfill our wish to return to Haiti, the first half curiously takes us to Washington D.C. and more precisely, to the US Library of Congress which is housed there. The history of imperialism in the Western Hemisphere forces us to land on the capital of the US to assure proper recognition to the spiritual practices of Haitians. By ensuring proper spelling of the religion, one important battle has been won. Will lobbying for proper representation in US television and media be next in our future travel plans? After this layover, we resume our flight to Haiti. Flying over the archipelago, we are able to appreciate Haiti’s central location within it, its political, literary and broad cultural import for the lands and peoples of the Antilles. We learn about Montero, a Cuban who lives in Puerto Rico and writes of Haitians in the Dominican Republic. A bit further on, blackness creates a dialogue between Haitian, Cuban, and Puerto Rican female poets. As we continue ahead onto the next section, we consider how a genre that has defined the literary production of Spanish speaking Latin America, Magical Realism, has in fact deep Haitian roots, having been developed there by Cuban Alejo Carpentier, in large part through his exposure Vodou communities. This section investigates the resurgence of this genre in Jamaican, Colombian, and Martinican novels and through this détour we are able to consider the centrality of Haitian cultural history for the multi-lingual literary expression of the entire continent. This is our return. And we would not have been able to arrive here without having experienced several well worth reroutings. We return to Haiti through a play by a Haitian playwright: Le Blue de l’île by Evelyne Trouillot. But this return is fleeting. He allows our feet to briefly touch Haitian ground before whisking us away in a truck to the Dominican Republic, along with some sugar cane cutters en route to the bateyes. As editor of this issue, I would like to present these détours and diversions as strategies that can be deployed to understand Haitian identity not by returning directly to Haiti-as-source-and-origin but by navigating through alternative routes. These redirections might surprise and disappoint us but when these feelings subside, we gain new vistas on 6 Roberto Strongman our desired destination as well as acceptance and knowledge of our own location, an understanding of our past and a measurement of our growth. Building on the theories of Glissant and the poetry of Césaire, I propose that we use these détournements, as regenerative strategies for establishing new bonds with Haiti and our current locations. It is my hope that this issue of JOHS might help us to consider détour as a strategy that can help us regain the sense of newness necessary for us to experience a Haiti that is always in a state of becoming and that constantly forces to move beyond memories. We are ready for take off! Sit back and enjoy these readings of our “Détour au Pays Natal.” INTRODUCTION The Journal of Haitian Studies, Volume 18 No. 2 © 2012 INTRODUCTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT H. MCCORMICK, JR. Roberto Strongman University of California, Santa Barbara R.S.: The idea for this issue of JOHS was conceived at Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland in 2011, during the last year of your tenure as a professor there. Some of the papers published here are revised versions of presentations at the Caribbean Unbound conference, but many are papers that were conceived anew subsequent to that academic gathering. As such, this issue is not a collection of conference proceedings, but the written record of a loose association of scholars which constellated around the conference.
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