This is a trailer for the exquisite Achantè, a short film-portrait of Haitian Vodou made by Emily McMehen and Geoffry Sautner (aka Mazibel Productions) in collaboration with a small international production team and four Vodou communities in the South of Haiti. Emily showed an earlier version of the film at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale. More information about this hypnotically beautiful film can be found here.
Zombies Counter Recession
Here’s a link to a recent BBC business news article about how an organization of apocalyptic cannibal zombie emulators have become involved in attempts to regenerate a local shopping mall in Reading.
In the article a representative from the Local Data Company – which collects nation wide data on the use of retail and leisure premises – tells the BBC “Shops are having to change their use – distinction is the key word – consumers really want something different from their High Streets.” So it looks like your local run-down shopping mall may soon be filled with gyms, crèches, art galleries and zombie emulators, “putting the heart back into the High Street”.
(Zed Events, the company that organizes the zombie apocalypse emulation activities, is currently looking for would-be zombies who will be eradicated by the other fee-paying participants. They are charging a fee of £119.00 for the pleasure.)
1804 and Its Afterlives (Part Two)
This is the second of a three-part summary of the excellent 1804 and Its Afterlives conference that took place at Nottingham Contemporary on December 7th and 8th 2012 as part of the events program accompanying the Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou exhibition. Video recordings of the sessions can be found on the above link. The focus here is on salient points from the talks that touch upon issues of direct relevance for the Zombi Diaspora narrative and the Ghetto Biennale.
Saturday 8th (Day Two, Morning Session)
This session was introduced by Philip Kaisary, assistant professor of Law at the University of Warwick who has written about representations of the Haitian Revolution in the work of Aimé Cesaire and C.L.R. James from the perspectives of human rights discourse and historiography. He spoke briefly about “the extraordinary diversity of the Haitian revolutions afterlives” not only in literature but also in film, music and dance, these latter being the focus of the morning’s papers.
The first speaker was Michael Largey, Professor and Chair of Musicology at the University of Michigan and author of Vodou Nation: Haitian Art Music and Cultural Nationalism (2006) whose paper – ‘1804 and Musical Memory: Occide Jeanty and Recombinant Mythology in Haiti’ – explored how Haitian art music has been used to underscore concepts of nationalism there. In Vodou Nation he claimed that elite Haitian composers employed “modes of cultural memory to engage issues from Haitian history as a way to make significant claims about Haiti’s place in the world”. Today he spoke about one such mode, “recombinant mythology”, to show how “mythological ideas” have a powerful shaping influence on how Haitians understand their political realities. He focussed on Haitian military band director Occide Jeanty (1860 – 1936) who was seen by Haitian audiences as a defender of the Haitian nation during the 1915-1934 US military occupation. In order to understand the importance of Jeanty it is necessary to develop a historical model that examines “legendary accounts of his life that have been infused with Haitian myths”. “Myth and history” he says “are elements of larger discursive processes that forge relationships with the past”.
A Pig’s Tail
At long last Leah Gordon & Anne Parisio’s inspirational film A Pig’s Tail (1997) is up on Vimeo. Thanks for that!
There have been several references to the story of the Haitian pig here at Zombi Diaspora. It is the “same pig” that Reginald Jean Francois spoke about in his story about the 2004 defacing of the replica of the Florentine Boar by UN troops in Haiti. The story resonates very strongly with Colin Dayan’s talk at the 1804 and Its Afterlives conference discussed in the previous post, especially in terms of the competing justifications and rationales for animal slaughter/sacrifice. The description of the ceremonial welcoming of the all-new American pig to the island sounds like the kind of legal ritual she has been writing so insightfully about. It is also, on a more optimistic note, probably the ancestor the the ‘hybrid’ pig she encountered when she was last in Haiti.
Although it was “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s Tonton Macoutes who carried out the extermination program, we should note too the central role played by USAID, whose director from 1977-79, two years prior to the total eradication of the creole pig from the country, was Lawrence Harrison also mentioned by Dayan, who in the interview linked to in the previous post and elsewhere, argues for a “cultural revolution” in Haiti (and Benin) to totally eradicate Vodou from the minds of its people on the grounds that it “gets in the way of democratic governance, social justice and prosperity”. The irony of this claim is made painfully clear by the Haitian’s interviewed in Leah and Anne’s film who explain how the Haitian pig helped them put their children through school, pay for medicine, buy land or build a house. As A Pig’s Tail shows so well, the pragmatic realms of utility and mysterious realms of the sacred are not so easily separated in Haiti.
Great to see once again the meeting of Edgar Jean Louis, Vodou priest and flag-maker, and Andre Pierre, the person who taught him the way of the spirits who is one of the key painters exhibited in Kafou exhibition.
1804 and Its Afterlives (Part One)
This is the first of a three-part summary of the excellent 1804 and Its Afterlives conference that took place at Nottingham Contemporary on December 7th and 8th as part of the events programming accompanying the Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou exhibition. Video recordings of the sessions can be found on the above link. I will focus here only on salient points from the many inspiring talks that touch upon issues of direct relevance for the Zombi Diaspora narrative and the work of the Ghetto Biennale.
Friday 7th (Day One)
The keynote lecture – ‘The Gods in the Trunk (or Writing in a Belittered World)’ – was given by Colin Dayan, author of Haiti, History and the Gods (1995) and the recent The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (2011). Her talk offered “a context for reconfiguring our understanding of the supernatural…that asks: What could we feel if we could feel what we experience sufficiently?” Prompted by her knowledge and experience of Vodou practice she questions the meaning of justice, the reach of cruelty and the uses of reason within the generally decorous and polite academic discussions of ‘humanism’, ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘human rights’, in an attempt to “breach the gap between body and mind, dead and living, human and non-human”.
Her focus on the language of ‘humanism’ and ‘humanitarianism’ has bearings for earlier posts that have addressed post-earthquake disaster relief as a form of neoimperialist violence that masks and intensifies the suffering of the populations it claims to be aiding. As I have argued in a forthcoming text for the Transmission annual on Catastrophe, the militarization of aid in post-earthquake Haiti was an intensification of the strategic utilization of humanitarian aid as part of an ongoing neoliberal strategy that has been undermining the possibility of Haitian popular sovereignty since the Duvalier era. There is a kind of humanitarian wall built around Haiti that hides and prevents access to the real violence being waged there in the interests of a tiny international, capitalist elite. The systematic suppression of Vodou, despite not beginning with it, seems to intensify during periods of occupation, significantly during the US occupation of 1915 to 1934, the UN occupation beginning in 2004 and the second phase of US occupation that began after the earthquake in 2010. President Martelly’s recent repeal of Article 297 of the Haitian constitution, and the arrest of Ougan Zaza and nine other participants at the annual Bwa Kayiman ceremony this year, suggest that a renewal of the anti-Vodou program may be underway. At the same time, as Reginald Jean Francois’ account of the defacing of the Florentine boar in Plaza Italia by UN peace-keepers in 2004 suggests, there are aspects of the MINUSTAH mission that exceed ‘pure’ security and stability objectives.
Dayan began her lecture with a question – “What is the particular terrain for human cruelty and who gets to command its shifts in terms of species and race?” – which she contextualized in terms of a turn towards a “political metaphysics” of the sacred which affirms the “concreteness of Vodou practice” and attemptins to locate “in granular and theoretical registers” the “often invisible nexus of animality and human marginalization”. In a gesture evocative of the ‘surrealist ethnogapher’ Michel Leiris’ 1938 essay The Sacred in Everyday Life, Dayan proposes that “the unlikely and extraordinary are part and parcel of the commonplace” and “how rituals thought bizarre become ordinary”. She asks how we might re-figure our understandings of the supernatural to include “everyday practices of casual cruelty and commonplace harm” sketching out a landscape of that “defies reason” and “skirts transcendence”.
Dayan based her talk on Haitian novelist Marie Vieux Chauvet’s trilogy Amour, Colère, Folie (“Love, Anger, Madness”), completed and first published in 1969, but unavailable until 2009 due to fears of reprisal against Chauvet’s family by representatives of the Duvalier regime. Focussing on the final novella of the trilogy – Madness – Dayan uses Chauvet’s works to stage a series of fundamental ethical and historical questions about what we consider to be human, and what happens when the poles of magical and the juridical, supernatural and rational are ritually reversed. “Are we prepared” she asked “to re-adjust ourselves to a conception of human life that turns our own reality upside down?” Within what she calls the “precincts of Chuavet’s fiction” that exist in the nightmare landscape of Duvalier’s Haiti, “the immediate thing is the supernatural” and the real is “no more than a symbolization of events in the world of ritual”. In such circumstances “the most incorporeal is re-cast as reasonable” and this “relentless acceptance of unreality” Dayan claims is a necessary part if Haitian history and crucial to its mythology.
Dayan addresses the management of “societal refuse” in which distinctions are drawn between “the free and the bound, the familiar and the strange, the privileged and the stigmatized”. There was something very Bataillian about this formulation of “an unreal rationality of racism” depending for its power on “the conceptual force of the superfluous, what can be rendered as remnants or waste or dirt”. Given Dayan’s response to the show’s curator Alex Farquharson’s question about ‘the abject’ during the Q&A session, and her evident aversion to ready-made and over-used theoretical terms that often work to cover-over and obscure the very things they claim to be addressing, I propose this reference with some circumspection. Bataille is undoubtedly a philosopher whose concepts (like ‘formless’, ‘transgression’, ‘dépense’, ‘sovereignty’ etc.) have been used in precisely this fashion in respectable academic and artworld circles for many years now. That said, I think it is worth re-stating here the general thesis of a polarity of the sacred in which the impure elements are associated precisely with filth, waste and other forms of repellent ‘base matter’ that threaten, unsettle and destabilize those modes of “civility, consensus and rationality” upon which academic claims to decency are made. The Psychological Structure of Fascism, for instance, written in 1934, attempts to account for the role of imperative ‘pure’ forms of heterogeneity (loosely, the sacred) in the formation of Fascistic totalitarianisms, that depend upon the violent suppression and elimination of material (human, animal or otherwise) deemed unclean, abhorrent and ignoble. Bataille was concerned particularly with the affective register of sacred forces, going so far as to suggest that “the object of any affective reaction is necessarily heterogeneous”. Informed by Alexander Kojève’s lectures on Hegel which he was attending at the time of writing, he developed an idiosyncratic, psychoanalytically inflected account of the master-slave dialectic, deeply resonant with Dayan’s reading of Chauvet. According to Bataille “the heterogenous nature of the slave is akin to that of the filth in which his material situation condemns him to live” while “that of the master is formed by an act of excluding all filth: an act pure in direction but sadistic in form”.
As those familiar with Bataille’s work will know, the spectacle of sacrifice and the “making of the sacred” were fundamental concerns for him, as they are for Dayan. “In the spectacles of sacrifice that concern me today” she said “to be disposable is not having the capacity to be dispossessed, to be nothing more than dispensable stuff”. With this in mind she made reference to the medieval law of the deodand, literally a “thing given up to God” symbolizing “forfeiture and power, loss and gain” and “an object or thing that becomes endowed with intent and malice and thus must be sacrificed or forfeited to the state, church or king”. Then, in a gesture which recalls the thought experiment known in consciousness studies as ‘the zombie problem’, she asked us to “imagine that this thing-like-thing returns in the shape of things that look like humans but are really evacuated of all characteristics that make social personhood possible…just at the moment that their life, their resistance is most present and visible”. For Dayan Wilson Bigaud’s portrait of a bull – Conflicts and Tensions (1957) – exhibited in the Kafou show captures what this thing-like-thing, that is so filled with spirit, might be.
Saving the Legacy of C.L.R. James in Dalston
Congratulations due to everyone involved in the C.L.R. James Legacy Project for the small but important victory of keeping the name of the author of a classic account of the Haitian Revolution – The Black Jacobins – on the library he inaugurated over twenty years ago.
Over the last decade local activists have been fighting ongoing struggles with Hackney council to prevent the eradication of monuments which hold the memory of Black history and the story of multi-racial political solidarity in the borough, such as new plans to close Centerprise, the community bookshop and Black cultural centre founded in 1970.
An earlier struggle was the attempt save Dalston theatre, home of the legendary Four Aces club site – which has been documented brilliantly by Winstan Whitter in Legacy in The Dust – one of the first explicitly cross-cultural social centres in East London, now site of the new C.L.R. James library.
Zombie Metaphor II: Video
Here’s a link to the video recording of the Zombie Metaphor talks that took place at Nottingham Contemporary on November 7th. There were some technical problems which meant the talk started a little late. The introduction begins at about 9:50.
Bitter Cane
Thanks to Kamal Joory for pointing out an interesting coincidence between Jacques Arceline’s excellent 1983 documentary about life in Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship Bitter Cane and a key scene from Romero’s 1978 Dawn of the Dead.
As the four surviving protagonists of Dawn survey the empty shopping mall that has become their prison-home, they reflect on why the zombies keep coming back.
Francine – “They’re still here”
Stephen – “They’re after us. They know we’re still in here”
Peter – “They’re after the place. They don’t know why. They just remember. Remember that they want to be in here.”
Francine – “What the hell are they?”
Peter – “They’re us that’s all. There’s no more room in hell.”
Stephen – “What?”
Peter – “Something my granddaddy used to tell us. You know Macumba? Voodoo. Grandad was a priest in Trinidad. He used to tell us “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.””
It’s the only reference to voodoo, and by implication Haiti, in the film. As I suggested in the talk I gave before the screening of Dawn at Nottingham Contemporary two weeks ago, in the apocalyptic cannibal zombie movies that emerged after Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, the Vodou sorcery explanation of zombiedom tended to recede into the background of the narrative, as the ‘plague of unknown origin’ took over.
But in the actual background of this scene from Dawn is a J.C.Penny store, which at that time of the film’s production was selling consumer goods made in Haiti under unimaginably exploitative, sweat-shop labour conditions. One informant in Bitter Cane, a worker at the TMT clothing factory, then supplying garments for J.C. Penney and GAP stores in the US – a young woman who lives without electricity or running water in one of the shanty towns in Port-au-Prince that emerged alongside the US owned clothing manufactories – explains how, for her $2.64 daily wage, she has to achieve a production quota of 720 bras. If she doesn’t make the quota, she doesn’t get paid. To make it she has to start work at 7 am and work without a break of any kind until the evening. But it’s worse than that…In order to get and keep a job women are expected to sleep with the bosses. And if the bosses don’t enjoy it for some reason, they get fired.
Another important coincidence for the zonbi diaspora narrative is that the the first popular depiction of folkloric Haitian zombies in modern literature – Willam Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) – were rural peasants who had been brought to the city by their master to work at the HASCO sugar manufactory.
Founded in 1912, HASCO (the Haitian American Sugar Company) was the largest industrial sugar manufacturer at the time of Seabrook’s sejourn in the county. HASCO’s production methods differed from the traditional feudal system which had involved large-landholders controlling large numbers of tenant farmers. Instead they employed wage-laborers and used industrial production methods which eventually eroded the traditional agricultural economy and forced thousands of newly landless peasants into the cities looking for work. In 1915 HASCO’s operations were threatened by anti-American political unrest which prompted the first full-blown US military occupation of the country. During the occupation the US military re-introduced forced labour (corvée) to the country which was used to build an infrastructure that would ready the country for foreign investors.
Bitter Cane details the structures of political economy in Haiti during 1970’s in which HASCO continued to play a central role. The capitalist plantation system introduced by HASCO set a precedent for foreign business and industry in Haiti. Most of Haiti’s fertile land, often rented from the big Haitian landowners, is used by foreign companies to grow cash crops for export. Meanwhile most Haitians no longer have land on which to grow their own food and are forced into dependency on foreign food aid. Under Jean Claude Duvalier the Haitian government introduced the Food for Work program in which landless peasants were put to work to build roads and other infrastructure in much the same way they had worked in the corvée system during the US occupation. Workers would be paid two sacks of flour and a gallon of oil per month. The food was supplied by US charities like Catholic Relief Services and CARE, establishing a pattern of charitable complicity with the exploitation of the Haitian people by foreign capitalist interests, which, as we have seen, continues unabated today.
One of the great ironies of the current phase of zonbi diaspora – the mass zombie emulations that began in 2001 and now attract thousands of ‘undead’ participants – is that one of the major issues they raise awareness and charity for is world hunger.
New Fete Gede video by Alex Louis.
Here is a new video by Alex Louis from Tele Geto and Ti Moun Rezistans.
Alex is currently looking for a video arts program that he can apply for. Please let me know if you have any ideas about this.
The Tele Geto Sign Painting Video
This video was shot during the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in December 2011. It documents the painting of a sign I commissioned for a special Ghetto Biennale tap-tap truck, intended to promote Ti Moun Rezistans’ Tele Geto project during the event.
Invisible Mirrors 
