Is The Sea History? The Marine Life of Recent Haitian Fiction
Where are your monuments, your battles,
martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is history
Derek Walcott, “The Sea is History” (1979)
Walcott’s poem contrasts land-based European notions of history with the marine, or submarine history of the Caribbean. For the European, history is something to be dragged from the seas, memorialized and concretized on the land in statues and books. For the Caribbean, the land is by contrast marked by historical absence—there are few memorials or monuments that attest to the trials and triumphs of the past. Instead, he insists, it is in the sea that historical memory is located, in the depths and shadows that are in a sense timeless. This history is “all subtle and submarine,” characterized by death—of the men “with eyes heavy as anchors/who sank without tombs”—but which also contains in it the seed of the new future that the poem writes of, “of History, really beginning” in the “salt chuckle of rocks, with their sea pools.” Walcott’s idea of the sea as not just a metaphor of history, but its only possible embodiment is echoed in Kamau Brathwaite’s equally famous statement that across the Caribbean, “The unity is submarine,” an idea taken up by Edouard Glissant, who cites both Walcott and Brathwaite in the epigraphs to his Poétique de la relation (1990). Glissant’s view of Caribbean history is clearly influenced by this image of submarine convergence, of underwater roots “floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches” (Caribbean Discourse 67). Therefore, to refer to the conference theme, the sea in Caribbean literature and thought is often the means by which connections are made, physically, culturally, and historically.
This paper analyzes several recent Haitian works of fiction in which the sea is a prominent feature, and seeks to understand why there is a marked shift toward the littoral and the marine in these works. For sure, since at least the nineteenth century and through the indigenist period, the land was evoked as a marker of national (and often racial) authenticity—think of Manuel in Gouverneurs de la rosée or Hilarion Hilarius in Compère Général Soleil as two obvious examples of characters drawn to and fatally attached to the land. The paper discusses recent examples of novels situated by the sea and argues that the movement away from indigenist-inspired romantic notions of the land has accelerated following the earthquake, an event that literally and metaphorically shattered the notion of the land as a marker of solidity and security. Novels discussed include Jean-Claude Charles’ De si jolies petites plages, Emile Ollivier’s Passages, Yanick Lahens’ Dans la maison du père, Dany Laferrière’s L’énigme du retour, Marvin Victor’s Corps mêlés, Kettly Mars’ Aux frontières de la soif, and Lyonel Trouillot’s La belle amour humaine.
Is The Sea History? The Marine Life of Recent Haitian Fiction
Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs?
Where is your tribal memory? Sirs,
in that grey vault. The sea. The sea
has locked them up. The sea is history
Derek Walcott, “The Sea is History” (1979)
Walcott’s poem contrasts land-based European notions of history with the marine, or submarine history of the Caribbean. For the European, history is something to be dragged from the seas, memorialized and concretized on the land in statues and books. For the Caribbean by contrast, the land is marked by historical absence—there are few memorials or monuments that attest to the trials and triumphs of the past. Instead, he insists, it is in the sea that historical memory is located, in the depths and shadows that are in a sense timeless. This history is “all subtle and submarine,” characterized by death—of the men “with eyes heavy as anchors/who sank without tombs”—but which also contains in it the seed of the new future that the poem writes of, the sense “of History, really beginning” in the “salt chuckle of rocks, with their sea pools.” Walcott’s idea of the sea as not just a metaphor of history, but its only possible embodiment is echoed in Kamau Brathwaite’s equally famous statement that across the Caribbean, “The unity is submarine,” an idea taken up by Edouard Glissant, who cites both Walcott and Brathwaite in the epigraphs to his Poétique de la relation (1990). Glissant’s view of Caribbean history is clearly influenced by this image of submarine convergence, of underwater roots “floating free, not fixed in one position in some primordial spot, but extending in all directions in our world through its network of branches” (Caribbean Discourse 67). Therefore, to refer to the conference theme, the sea in Caribbean literature and thought is often the means by which connections are made, physically, culturally, and historically. Indeed, over the last thirty years or so, broader Caribbean theoretical discourse has been characterized by notions of marine or submarine “ungroundedness, relationality and mobility,” rather than the “fixity, stability and definition” that are more commonly associated with land-centered ideas of identity and culture (McCusker, “Writing Against the Tide?” 42). The growth of Atlantic studies has only further intensified the theoretical interest in the sea as a metaphor and vehicle for forms of identitary, historical, and cultural fluidity and movement.
This paper analyzes several recent Haitian works of fiction in which the sea is a prominent feature, and seeks to understand why there is a marked shift toward the littoral and the marine in these works. For sure, since at least the nineteenth century and through the indigenist period, the land was evoked as a marker of national (and often racial) authenticity—think of Manuel in Gouverneurs de la rosée or Hilarion Hilarius in Compère Général Soleil as two obvious examples of characters drawn to and fatally attached to the land. The paper discusses recent examples of novels situated by the sea and argues that the movement away from indigenist-inspired romantic notions of the land has accelerated following the earthquake, an event that literally and metaphorically shattered the notion of the land as a marker of solidity and security.
In a paper entitled “L’ancrage à la terre chez quelques auteurs de la littérature haïtienne,” Gary Victor writes on the theme of the land in Haitian writing. For an author, he writes, the land is more than a material entity; it is a site of memory, closely related to the imaginary, a place of feelings and myths. Most fundamentally, he writes, the land is related to identity, it is the “place of the desire to be. Site of the emergence of its true self” (1). The land can also be a site of conflict, “a mixture of fascination and repulsion, a forced clinch between love and hate, tradition and modernity, between proper attachment and flight” (1). Similarly, the attachment to the land can become a form of imprisonment for the individual and the literary imagination, “being captured by myths with as a corollary the impossibility to see and question reality” (1).
The shifting, often contradictory meanings ascribed by Victor to the land appear at various points in Haitian literary history. The nineteenth-century imperative to defend the romanticized land gave way in the mid-twentieth century to more skeptical visions of the land and the nationalist meanings associated with it. This shift was signaled in the movement from the mystical, allusive, grounded poetry of indigenists like Léon Laleau and Carl Brouard to novels of exile, and the concomitant uncertainty over ideas of identity and its relation to the land. A paradoxical period of forced exile and literary liberation, the post–1946 dispersal of many of Haiti’s intellectuals into exile was the point at which the Haitian novel began to turn away from the indigenist imperative to write of nation, race, and the essential connection to the land. As Dash says the period from 1946 to the fall of the Duvaliers in 1986 instigated a “rethinking of the discourse of authenticity and a reevaluation of the fixed ideas of otherness, elsewhere, and exile” (“Exile and Recent Literature” 455).
Exile and dictatorship ruptured the apparently natural connection between authors and the land. The apogee of Marxist-indigenist writing and of the literary veneration of the land as a maternal guarantor of identity comes at the end of Alexis’s Compère Général Soleil when the hero Hilarion returns from the Dominican Republic and lies dying on the Haitian side of the river that separates the two nations. Falling to the “cool ground of the native land” (283), and seeing “Old Brother Sun” rise over Haiti (288), Hilarion reconnects with the natural elements and in particular the land, which are closely connected with Alexis’s vision of Haitian authenticity. Echoing the death of Manuel in Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la rosée, Hilarion dies slowly under a century–old mahogany tree (289). The final scene’s exhilarating mix of natural imagery, the political symbolism of the rising red sun, and the dying exile’s regret that he will never see again the “towns, villages, and fields of Haiti, the domain of Ayiti Tomas” (350) is one of the most memorable statements of the apparently unbreakable bond between Haitian identity and the land. It also marked more or less the death of the messianic trope in Marxist–indigenist writing, and with it the end of the close connection between nature, nation, and identity.
The Duvalier dictatorships and the subsequent exile of many prominent authors led inevitably to reconsiderations of the relationship between the land and identity. The land seems to bear the effects of the broader repressive, life-sapping regime. In Émile Ollivier’s 1991 novel Passages, the land is a restrictive, unhomely space, marked by decay and decline, “deserted” by water (17). Ollivier’s novel echoes the opening scenes from Gouverneurs de la rosée, in which are presented the life–sapping effects of drought on the land and the people: “We will all die […] and she thrusts her hand into the dust […] the dust runs between her fingers. The same dust that the dry breath of the wind blows over the devastated field” (13). However, in contrast to predecessors like Roumain and Alexis, Ollivier presents no comforting myth of the land, no solution to the ecological devastation of Haiti other than to leave the land. In Ollivier’s novel, as in other works of exile, the alienated and impoverished people are inevitably drawn to the sea, which is not presented positively as a sign of freedom or escape, but as the site of historical return, as one of Ollivier’s characters suggests: Christopher Columbus had come by sea; all the ills of this people had always come from the sea: the slave ships, the freebooters, General Leclerc’s armada, the American occupation, hurricanes, smallpox, syphilis, AIDS. … Did the ghost of the Genoese still, after five centuries haunt the unconsciousness of this people? The conquest is at the root of all their suffering. (220)
The sea, as Walcott suggests, is indeed history, though in this case it is a source of historical suffering, which returns over time in waves, and which somewhat paradoxically draws the people back to it, in desperation to escape that sea-borne history. A similar idea is suggested in Yanick Lahens’s 2000 novel Dans la maison du père, in which the narrator says that Haitians have “never much liked the sea, thinking that it has brought all of our misfortunes” (73). She is however drawn to it, and liked to walk along the shore feeling it lapping on her feet, saying that she liked the sea as she liked dance: “I liked its mysteries of foam, salt, and water. My eyes wide open, I dreamt of its fantastical and violent disorder so far away. Of its violent poetry. […] The idea of life and death in this watery womb of the world became a salutary dream that enchanted me” (73).
This idea of the sea as a source at once of dread and enchantment reappears in certain prominent works written since the earthquake. As the critic Mark Anderson writes, nothing shakes one’s worldview as much as a natural disaster, and disaster is essentially a “rupture or inversion of the normal order of things” (1). An earthquake in particular destabilizes the notion of the solidity of the land, and with it is apparently ruptured the “natural” connection between the land and identity, for such an event “sweep[s] the ground from beneath our feet and reduc[es] to rubble our literal and conceptual edifices” (Anderson 1). One senses in some post-earthquake works a similar feeling of the idea of the land as a solid guarantor of identity being further weakened, and a consequent relocation to the coast, the littoral, and the sea.
For example, In Makenzy Orcel’s Les Immortelles (2010) the young prostitute says that all she ever wanted, was to be on a bus on an “endless highway […] with the sea rolling endlessly before my eyes” (118). Marvin Victor’s Corps mêlés (2011) begins with the narrator’s birth scene, which takes place in the sea: her grandfather is “taken by an excess of trance or drunkenness” and insists that the mother be taken to the shore, for “only the sea could deliver that which it had started” (16). The land is implicitly sterile and unable to give new life, while the people’s origins are related to the sea, particularly in the case of the godmother, who traces their origins to the seas off the African coastline, which explains for her “our hatred of the sea, that secular hatred that leads us all to turn our backs on its turbulent immensity, another way perhaps of letting ourselves be all the more consumed by it” (18). At the end of Kettly Mars and Leslie Péan’s Le prince noir de Lillian Russell, the protagonist Henri takes to the sea again, leaving behind the various attempts to tie him down and categorize him on the land. It seems significant too that in the context of post-earthquake writing from Haiti, Henri should end the novel at sea, unable to return to Haiti. The sea offers to him a source of solidity and reassurance that he does not find on the land. He finds in the sea’s depths “the answers to all the questions that I ask myself” (329). The sea is a maternal entity, related to time. “In its breast,” he says, “sleep my past lives and those to come” (329).
Gary Victor’s Le sang et la mer (2011) opens with the protagonist’s dream of an apocalyptic surge of water, whereby the sea invades the coastal village where she and her brother were born, then boards a large truck that reminds her of the container she and her brother took to the city, and which then takes the form of a shark that is shocked by the misery it sees in the slums of Port-au-Prince. In the dream, the protagonist persuades the sea not to destroy the slum, and the movement of the sea echoes the rhythm of the blood that flows from her internal wound (11). As such, the dream asserts in cryptic form the themes of the novel: the great and tragic migration of country people to the city, and the resultant susceptibility of the urban poor to the effects of nature, which is itself, as in for example Victor’s previous novel A l’angle des rues parallèles, a potentially deathly, vengeful entity. As the protagonist reflects, the journey to the city inside a container was like that inside the “hold of a slave ship, where human bodies amalgamate, cemented together by sweat and excrement” (43), in other words, another traumatic crossing, a repetition of the people’s history of exile and forced transportation. The destination is itself a deathly place—the mountainsides covered with a “grey carpet” of buildings that resembles a cemetery (44).
A journey is undertaken in the opposite direction—from city to the sea—in Kettly Mars’s Aux frontières de la soif (2013), during which the author figure Fito realizes that he had been “obsessed by Port-au-Prince and its despondency,” and considers the trip to be like “escaping from prison” (105). The journey is a reaffirmation of place, and a reconnection with nature. The blue sea guides the travelers to their destination; and coconut and banana trees, oaks, and flowers line the route, while the dense vegetation of the hillsides “seemed to open up to let them pass” (106). The visual images of nature are accompanied by the “song of the sea,” a rhythmic sound that rises and falls with the movements of the waves and the wind (107). Their destination is Abricots, the small town at the end of the south-western peninsula of the country, and a kind of hidden haven, “the secret” as the narrator describes it (106).
The destination is in fact the same as that of the narrator of Dany Laferrière’s 2009 work, L’Énigme du retour. In Laferrière’s book, the narrator travels to Abricots as part of his process of mourning for his dead father. To Laferrière’s narrator, Abricots is also something of a secret, the place thought of as “paradise” by the Arawaks (L’Énigme du retour 297). As in Mars’s novel, Abricots is a place to which the protagonist escapes the city, and renews his connection with a forgotten Haiti, and the natural world, the trees touching the sea, the red fish wriggling in the fishermen’s boats, the children devouring sweet mangoes, the “languorous life of the time before Columbus” (L’Énigme du retour 297). In both cases, too, Abricots seems to exist in another time. Mars’s narrator describes the colonial cemetery, and the “sense of peaceful eternity” that existed there (108). Significantly, the precise recording of time that occurs when writing of the city is replaced by more vague, impressionistic mentions of time that draw on the position of the sun and the changing effects of the light (cf Danticat, below). For instance, when they arrive at Abricots, the narrator writes of the sun tilting already toward the horizon,” and how it was a “moment of warm and golden light” that signaled the “first quivers of the shadows” (109). Unsure of whether he is in a “real time” in Abricots, Laferrière’s narrator steps into this world he has long dreamed of, reposing in this pre-Columbian haven for three months to cure himself of the rhythms of urban life, to no longer think of his existence as a constant alternation between polar opposites, winter and summer, north and south, and to discover at last “spherical life,” as he puts it (L’Énigme du retour 297, 298). Cradled by the “old Caribbean wind,” he sleeps with a smile on his face, like he did when he was a child living with his grandmother, a time that “has finally come back” (L’Énigme du retour 299, 300).
The association of the sea with notions of timeless culture and being is also a theme in Lyonel Trouillot’s La belle amour humaine (2011), which opens with a scene of fishermen returning from a day’s work to their village homes, where there is a collective “obsession” or “illness” related to the sea. The men take to the sea every morning and return in the evening with “stories of the sea in their mouths, the smell of the sea on their clothes, images of the sea in their eyes, and their footsteps, when they walk, sway to the rhythm of the sea” (60). The sea figures in the folk tales and the proverbs that reflect the community’s intimate bond with it. The sea is more than a site of work and identification; it is also associated with danger, and potential death, as it is in Edwidge Danticat’s Claire of the Sea Light (2013), which is also the first of Danticat’s full-length works to be situated away from the city, and specifically on the coast.
In this way, Danticat reflects the tendency evident in Laferrière’s L’énigme du retour and Trouillot’s La belle amour humaine to turn away from the city and revisit the small coastal communities, a move that also involves a certain revision of the idea of the land as the primary marker of national(ist) identity and a reconsideration of the sea, and the people’s particular relation with it.[1] In the Acknowledgments section of the book, Danticat thanks her family in Léogâne “those gone and those still there, for introducing me and reintroducing me to the sea” (241). Léogâne was of course at the epicenter of the earthquake, though it has been relatively neglected in terms of media attention and relief support. With the memory of the destructive potential of the land so raw, one imagines that she revisits the sea as a natural element with which the people have an ancient and in many ways unchanging relationship, and around which lives and identities have long been shaped. In many ways, Danticat’s novel is about light: the effects of the sea light in particular on the life of a community and an individual; light as a natural agent that is ever-changing yet permanent and predictable (again, as opposed to the degraded land); bringing light to problems, enlightenment; and lightness and clarity, implied in the very name Claire. One senses too that through the narrative Danticat is also returning to the sea and the light, that perhaps like Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse she is seeking to rediscover what one critic calls “the lost light of early summers and the lost rhythms of the sea” (Dunmore, “To the Lighthouse”). That light and those rhythms persist, and have a durable quality that Claire apparently senses as she runs from the false security of the land back to the sea and the light, a movement that the author herself undergoes, and which appears to echo her post-earthquake conviction that life, and any worthwhile creative work, are risky, uncertain, and ultimately “dangerous” endeavors.
To turn to the sea in a time of crisis is then as Walcott suggests to return to the marine, oceanic beginnings of modern Caribbean history and being. In the contemporary Haitian context, it is also, I would ultimately argue, an anti-apocalyptic move, a means of resisting notions that these are the end times for Haiti. In this way, the various moves toward the sea in recent Haitian fiction recall Antonio Benítez Rojo’s claim that the culture of the apocalypse is a culture of the land, of Europeans for whom the sea is a “forgotten memory” (The Repeating Island 11). The culture of the Caribbean, in contrast, is he says not terrestrial but “aquatic”: “a sinuous culture where time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar […] a chaos that returns, a detour without a purpose” (The Repeating Island 11). In these regards, the turn to the sea is a return to a sort of historical home, the past that is also always the source of the new; perhaps—and this is admittedly an optimistic interpretation—in these marine narratives there is the seed of something new, a faint sense amid the uncertainty of History, as Walcott said, “really beginning” (or re-beginning).
[1] See Elizabeth DeLoughrey’s argument that the rise of “ocean studies” marks out a “route away from the territorialism of the nation-state” (“Heavy Waters” 705).