The Emasculated Possession: The Photographic Representation of Haiti

Abstract

A distressed woman throws her face and arms back in anguish, her eyes appear to see nothing but an inner torment, she is lost and oblivious, hands reach out to steady her and a black man stands behind in a suit and tie, staring dispassionately at the camera. He appears uncaring, controlling and sinister, in dress reminiscent of the infamous dictator Papa Doc Duvalier. Behind them are the blurred figures of a crowd, some sitting on small, odd buildings, some standing and behind them the smudged, dark mountains that surround Port-au-Prince. This is the uncaptioned pre-title page double spread photograph in Bruce Gilden's book, Haiti.1(Photo 1) Any knowledge of Haiti would allow an instant and prosaic reading of this photograph. The incident takes place in the National Cemetery in downtown Port-au-Prince, Haiti and the small buildings are sarcophagi. It is a funeral and the woman is a relative or friend of the deceased. In Haiti, the bereaved physically manifest their grief during the interment. The man standing behind her is a master of ceremonies, employed to accompany the funerals, which leave Rue de l'lnterrement hourly on Thursday afternoons. But how this uncaptioned photograph is read is an entirely different thing. There is a keen polarization of the sexes in the photograph. The man sternly holds our gaze, possesses himself, oblivious to the distress around him, whilst the woman is abandoned, ravished by external forces and possessed by all, beside herself. Gilden uses deep psycho-sexual dramas to hold our attention and feed our ambivalence to both Haiti and the concept of blackness itself. The photograph combines both deep fears of the black masculine-linking it to an indifference towards death, a lack of sentimentality and an innate brutality-and the black feminine, linking it to an indifference to morality, a lack of composure and an uncontrollable sexuality. These encoded mythologies are just a few of a pantheon of terrifying scenarios that stalk the white world whenever it encounters blackness, and are interminably reproduced and replicated through the representation of Haiti. These encodements do not exclusively refer to Haiti, but use the country as a mythological epicenter for Western racist and colonial anxieties. When Columbus first discovered the island of Hispaniola, in 1492, it was inhabited by Taino Indians of the Arawak tribe. The peaceful Tainos were soon enslaved by the Spanish invaders and set work in gold mines. After 30 years of slavery fewer than a thousand Tainos were left alive on the island. Most were worked to death, many had taken their own lives, and some had taken to the mountains to live in secret encampments. By the beginning of the 16th century the Spanish, having decimated the indigenous population, began to import black slaves to Hispaniola. By the mid-16th century, over 20,000 black slaves had been shipped from Africa. In 1697, the island was divided by the Treaty of Ryswick and the French took hold of the Western third of Hispaniola, calling it SaintDomingue. The French continued the import of African slaves to work in their newly founded sugar plantations. By 1790, the number of slaves in Saint-Domingue had reached at least half a million. The colony was one of the richest, crudest, and, unbeknownst to the French, most unstable colonies in the Caribbean. On arrival in Saint-Domingue, the French were always careful to members of the same African nation divide to avoid dissent. The policy was to split, whenever possible, groups of slaves who spoke the same language. Religious ritual, namely Vodou, became the sole arena within which the slaves could find common ground and solidarity. Vodou originates from the traditional beliefs of 14th century Africa. It is a synthesis of many West and Central African religious practices, crossed with residual Taino beliefs and superficially ornamented with Catholicism. Vodou was both the inspiration and precipitation of the long fight for Haiti's independence. …

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