Bicentennial blues.

I caught up with Marilyn Houlberg last November in Port-au-Prince. We had co-curated "The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou" exhibition for the Fowler Museum in 1995 and subsequently stayed au courant of Vodou's ever-evolving scene. Now I was curating a couple of exhibitions at the Fowler in honor of the bicentennial of Haitian independence on January 1, 2004. I needed to appraise bicentennial plans and get some pulse on the disastrous turn of events in the Black Republic. I also needed to go shopping for drapo (Vodou flags), and no one keeps a keener eye on that market than Marilyn.

Marilyn and I also shared some serious religious obligations. We were in Haiti during the Days of the Dead (October 31-November 2), sacred to Papa Gede, lwa (Vodou divinity) of death and sexuality (also larceny, mayhem, lewd jokes, lascivious dancing, public drunkenness, and a host of other god-gone-wild activities). He is "Master of Our Heads" (as Vodouists call their divine patrons), since both our fathers were born on Gede's birthday, Halloween. Over years of observing him give the finger to fate, we know Gede most nearly embodies the spirit of the Pep Ayisan (Haitian people) and best expresses their art and philosophy. Besides, Gede is a hell of a lot of fun.

Marilyn was staying at the decidedly downscale Park Hotel, across from the similarly down-scale Champs Mars, Port-au-Prince's town square. There was no doubt which room was hers. Cardboard gods with doll heads and sequined bodies were clustered around her doorway, twisted in unspeakable agonies. No, these were not cut-out posters for Mel Gibson's Passion. They were lwa, fabricated in the style of Pierrot Barra, late master of market detritus, whom both of us had patronized--though come to think of it, Pierrot would have found lots to appropriate from Gibson's flagellated god. Barra returned to the "Isle Beneath the Sea" (as Vodou calls its heaven) hl 1999, but the Iron Market is jammed with his wannabees, pasting sequins on mutilated Barbie dolls in hopes of capturing a few of his bereft customers. Most of their work is execrable, though the stuff around Marilyn's doorway was pretty good.

One sculpture in particular stood out: a black-haired woman with arms and eyeballs raised to heaven, her torso engulfed in vibrant cardboard flames. For aficionados of pre-Vatican II Catholic kitsch she is Anima Sola: the only soul who will always remain in Purgatory because she mocked Christ on his way to Calvary (how that legend escaped Gibson's appropriation we'll never know). In Vodou, her image is recognized as "Mayanet," hottest sister of the already hot earth-mother lwa Ezili Danto. Mayanet's manifestation in a Vodou ceremony is fairly rare but always remarkable for her spastic writhing. I quickly discerned from the statue, as well as the iconography embroidered on drapo piled nearby that market runners were feeding Marilyn's new passion: collecting Mayanets.

From her doorway one also observed three or four middle-aged guys oiling their hairy chests around the micro-pool. They resembled that hapless Kazakh played by HBO comedian Ali G: mustachioed geeks sent on ambiguous foreign missions by some ministry too broke to pay for a genuine tourist hotel. Who knows why these guys were staying at the Park, or what they were trying to buy or sell? It was all so Graham Greene-ish, which is precisely my point. Greene's novel The Comedians, published during Papa Doc Duvalier's reign of terror, gave Haiti a kind of existential chic it's never lost. As a hotel friend (and white Vodou initiate) opined on the balcony of the Oloffson, Greene's favorite hotel, "Haiti used to be a cabinet of curiosities, then a political and religious theater, and now, a drugstore." The last reference is to "White Lady" (a.k.a. crack cocaine), as ubiquitous as street candy.

Tourism, of course, has long since died. Pick up any standard Caribbean tour guide, and Haiti isn't even indexed. It seems to exist solely in digital images of riot and mayhem run on CNN or in the Times. Even the best popular art in the world, or the most extravagant religious ceremonies, can't trump those images, the reality of Haiti's intense poverty; or the bum rap it gets for AIDS. That being so, I was surprised to find tourists there and to discover that many more were expected by year's end. They would be lured down by scheduled plans for the bicentennial party on New Year's Eve.

There really is no need to hype the bicentennial of Haitian independence. It celebrates a genuinely stupendous moment in Black Atlantic--no--world history. The first and only successful national slave revolt. Toussaint Louverture, the former Ewe slave, outfoxing Napoleon. Jean-Jacques Dessalines ripping the white from the tricouleur to create a new flag for Freedom. This is the stuff of epic, of opera, and there were big plans to make it so. A cobbler from Cap Haitien had sewn a huge macoute (shoulder bag) to contain the billions of Euros demanded from France in reparation for the money it had extorted from Haiti after the Revolution as compensation for its lost chattel (i.e., the self-emancipated Haitian people). The macoute stood empty on the steps of some abandoned ministry.

But Jean-Bertrand Aristide's government, beleaguered on all sides, was planning a world-class bamboche, hoping a wild party might change its fortunes. The bicentennial celebration would proclaim a new "Fun Haiti," reclaiming a tourist reputation lost since the days of Papa Doc. Heads of state from all over the world were invited. Wyclef Jean, the Haitian American rap artist, would entertain the crowd.

These expectations were not as naive as they might sound. In Haiti, parties matter. Regimes rise and fall on Carnival lyrics. Government razzmatazz was fanned by Newsweek International (Nov. 3, 2003), which advised its millions of readers to "boogie down" in Portau-Prince on New Year's Eve:

   Vibrant, tropical, and oh-so-unpredictable,
   the capital of the world's first
   black republic will be one big party in
   the build-up to the 200th anniversary of
   the country's independence on Jan. 1,
   2004. Boogie down in the main square
   opposite the presidential palace, where
   live bands will have hundreds of thousands
   of Haitians hopping all night.
   Book a room at the enchanting gingerbread-style
   Hotel Oloffson of Graham
   Greene's The Comedians fame.

Champs Mars, where Newsweek suggested you "boogie down," seems particularly well named for the Roman god of war, more nearly resembling a battlefield than a park. But the government was cleaning it up. New plastic gym sets had been installed. A huge national flag flew from a towering brass pole, looking very impressive when floodlit at night. (The Palais National nearby more or less guarantees a steady flow of electricity). Across from the Palais, the Quartier General, a graceful, white, colonnaded building in classic eighteenth century style, had been designated as the site for a grand exposition celebrating the bicentennial, and the brilliant Haitian American artist Edouard Duval-Carrie commissioned as its curator.

This was a dream-come-true for Edouard. For a long time he had imagined translating his art into monumental spaces, of becoming the Michelangelo for Vodou International. In 1992 he was an official visitor to the "Global Reunion of Vodun Cultures" held in Ouidah, the Beninois exit port for many slaves bound to St. Domingue. He immediately saw the artistic opportunities: "I wanted to put antennas on the beach where the slave ships loaded. You know the spirits of the dead go back to Africa ... but sometimes you get lost in the middle of the sea. So I made these antennas for the spirits of the dead to be planted on that beach. I never got to do this project, but the idea was there" (Brown 1995:77).

As if anticipating his bicentennial appointment, Edouard has progressively imaged Haiti's history, his art reflecting its surreal and often obscene acts like a mirror on the ceiling in a whorehouse. His voice, like his art, grows ever more urgent:

   I am a chronicler of my times ... It's
   imperative that someone should do it, at
   least that way there will be some images
   of what happened during the experience
   ... the situation gets more dramatic
   every day. The United States, the major
   power on this planet, is ready to invade
   this tiny country, and of course ... they're
   going to make us pay for it down to the
   last bullet.... (Villasante 2000).

Edouard planned to transform the Quartier General into a historical phantasm. Giant posters chronicling the "Divine Revolution" would be hung between its outside colonnades. One interior room would include a quilted portrait gallery of Haiti's presidents from Dessalines to Aristide, a Warholian refiguration with each president famous for fifteen minutes. In another room drapo would be hung, cartooned with images from Edouard's paintings of life in colonial St. Domingue. These drapo, sewn by the atelier of Jean-Louis Edgar, one of Haiti's most famous sequin artists, re-imagine Revolutionary history through one of Vodou's most glamorous objects of devotion. Parts of Edouard's Quartier General show were scheduled to be re-installed at the UCLA Fowler Museum, together with a "Salute to the Gods" flourish of Vodou drapo in the museum's Galleria space.

There has been something of a revolution in the art of drapo-making over the last decade. As these ritual flags have become hot items in the E-Bay/international art mart, a host of new designers have begun experimenting with new images and techniques. In an abrupt shift from what had been an exclusively male art form, several of the new designers are women, the most celebrated being Myrlande Constant. Marilyn and I met Constant at her downtown atelier, where she was sitting barefoot on the parlor floor sewing yellow fringe on a drapo several times larger than any I'd seen before. In the middle of her shimmering black behemoth, Constant had stitched a woman engulfed in a sea of sequined flames. Mayanet! The flag had been commissioned by Marilyn, though in dimension and theme it seemed more appropriate for the Vatican--a sepulchral covering, perhaps, for the macabre fantasy tomb commissioned from Bernini by wicked Pope Alexander VI.

I had come to buy a flag for the exhibition, though the museum's acquisition budget was far smaller than Houlberg's or the Pope's. Constant's walls were hung with recent creations, most invoking either La Sirene or Papa Gede. Her choices are instructive. Both divinities play outside the deck. La Sirene is the Mami Wata of the Vodou pantheon. She's Iwa achete, meaning her services can be bought like an expensive Vegas whore, both bitch goddesses playing for double or nothing.

While everyone craves Sirene, no one loves her. But everyone loves Gede. Presiding over the Dead, he's the repository of our common history, and by that right, grand patron of the Bicentennial. So I bought Myrlande's Gede drape for the Museum (Fig. 1). There is no mistaking his divinely dissolute presence: top hat, smoking jacket, and those signature sunglasses with the single lens--some say because the penis has but one eye. Her Gede is playfully naturalistic: Necktie flapping in the breeze, this god of sexuality is down on his knees, pants unzipped and ready for action.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Everywhere you looked in Haiti, Gede was on the move. In the Vodou temples he was castrating black goats to brass-band renditions of "Jingle Bells." RAM, the in-house band over at the Oloffson, was rapping Gede lyrics for excited journalists and Peace Corps types. But Gede's real stage was down in the streets. There were daily demonstrations for and against Aristide, the Liberationist Catholic priest turned populist president. Some said Titid (the president's nickname) was the Antichrist. Some said he was Gede. Both had their points, though the anti-Titidists certainly lived in the fancier houses.

The rest is history. The demonstrations grew more intense. Narco-bandits took over several towns in the north and were sweeping toward the capital with little opposition (in a fit of millenarian optimism, Titid had abolished the Haitian army). Bicentennial celebrations were cancelled. No one boogied in the Champs Mars--and in February 2004, Titid was whisked out of Haiti in what many denounced as a US-engineered political kidnapping. Whether pro- or anti-Titid, it was hard not to see parallels between his kidnapping and that of Toussaint Louverture, who was traduced into exile and later killed on orders from Napoleon.

In the wake of the Aristide's dubious flight, the narco-bandits, whom American journalists kept calling "freedom fighters," overran Portan-Prince and almost immediately attacked the installation at the Quartier General. The New York Times printed a photo of these "heroes" burning the posters on the exterior of the Quartier, which they had claimed were "voodoo" objects. Edouard was in Miami when his exhibition was trashed. Over the phone he called the vandals "Boeotians." I had to check the dictionary to discover that Boeotians were inhabitants of a city-state northwest of Attica, reputed to be dull and stupid. It seemed appropriate that the artist would borrow a term from ancient Greek mythology to describe this contemporary political disaster. For in Haiti the gods are still in control, and will not let the Boeotians have the last word. Edouard has recommissioned and remade pieces for "Divine Revolution," the second bicentennial exhibition of his art, which will open on October 9, 2004, at the Fowler Museum of Cultural History.

Madison Smarrt Bell, author of two powerful novels on the Haitian Revolution, has written a fitting epitaph for the botched bicentennial:

   Now, in 2004, Toussaint's dream has
   been betrayed again, as Toussaint was
   betrayed when Haiti was made a
   pariah state by surrounding colonial
   powers who maintained slavery for
   another hundred years. As for average
   Haitians--barefoot, starving, illiterate,
   and possessed of a dignity and fortitude
   to make the angels bow their heads--they
   have seldom had anything from
   any government but abuse and exploitation
   (2004:45).

If there's a single person who best fits Smarrt Bell's description of the "average Haitian," it must be Andre Pierre. Near the end of our trip, Marilyn and I went to visit him in Croix des Missions. He is now past 90, and looks it. He's the last survivor of the second generation of that miraculous florescence called the Haitian Renaissance. A friend of Maya Deren. Heir to Hector Hyppolite, who first painted the Iwa on canvas. Now his contacts to that old world of Le Centre d'Art are gone. He can barely see. He smiles benignly, but I would be truly surprised if we met again.

We talked for an hour about little things like life, death, and what it all might mean. Retakes from The Matrix, when Keanu and Fishburne consult the Oracle, who turns out to be an old bubi from New Jersey who knocks off these terrific koans while baking chocolate-chip cookies. With his blind eyes, Andre Pierre peers into the Heart of Nothing-which is also Nirvana: "Nothing is nothing to fear," he says. And then adds, "The Soul is Dust," half-closing his eyes. No false hopes. Buddha reclines into sleep. But Buddha cackles too. Suddenly he remembers who we are and brings out the framed "Lifetime Achievement Award" we presented to him on behalf of the Fowler Museum in 1993. I give him a bottle of Cinq Etoile Barbancourt rum, which he asks me to place on his Vodou altar. I do that with a prayer for my granddaughter Carlotta, who was born that very morning in faraway Chicago.

At the end of our visit Andre Pierre shows us the canvas he's painting (Fig. 2). The Iwa are fuzzy, out of focus like those final Halloween photos in Diane Arbus's Album. The vision remains, though the hand trembles. As we're leaving he asks for 500 gourdes (about 20 dollars). Ninety years and still hustling. I am reminded of a favorite cartoon by Gahan Wilson. A little showman in a candy-striped jacket and straw hat is dancing before an audience composed entirely of shrouded skeletons. Grim reapers. He's clicking his heels, but cadavers don't laugh. Wilson captions it, "The sudden realization that despite our best efforts, all is lost." The dancer is Gede, but so are the skeletons. They won't stop grabbing for him, and he won't stop dancing. What a metaphor! What a reality!

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

PS: With lessons from my favorite god in mind, I announce my retirement as an editor of African Arts. It's been great fun. I intend to remain an avid reader and occasional contributor to these pages. But after a sixteen-year stint as editor, it 's time for others to click their heels.

McCarthy Brown, Karen. 1995. Tracing the Spirit: Ethnographic Essays on Haitian Art. Davenport, Iowa: Davenport Museum of Art.

Smarrt Bell, Madison. 2004. "Two Masks of Haitian History," La Rampa (June).

Villasante, Carlos de. 2000. "Edouard Duval-Carrie in Conversation with Carlos de Villasante." <www.miamiartexchange .com/pages/2000/11/19_deVillasante.html>.