Free and French in the Caribbean by John Patrick Walsh

Author:John Patrick Walsh [Walsh, John Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Caribbean & West Indies, General, Political Science, Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, Historiography
ISBN: 9780253008107
Google: OGDibrp3txsC
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2013-04-12T01:09:53+00:00

A Haitian Itinerary and a Turn to Political Life

In the spring of 1944 Césaire embarked on his first visit to Haiti. The Allied blockade of Martinique and Guadeloupe had ended only nine months earlier, allowing him to accept an invitation from Pierre Mabille, then Free French cultural attaché in Haiti, to give a series of lectures.9 The centerpiece of the tour was the Congrès International de Philosophie in Port-au-Prince, organized by the Société haïtienne d’études scientifiques and Camille Lhérisson, on 20–24 September 1944.10 René Depestre, the celebrated Haitian poet, recalled Mabille’s generosity and commented that Césaire’s lecture tour was “a major event in our life.” Depestre also remembered that “intellectuals such as Carpentier [the Cuban playwright who visited in 1942] . . . opened windows in the oppressive system of Lescot, in the obscurantism of his men.”11 This reminiscence offered a unique perspective on a stifling political climate, one under which a group of students struggled mightily. According to Gérald Bloncourt, a prominent activist, as the end of the war approached “things were heating up.”12 Having become increasingly dictatorial since his presidency began in 1941, Élie Lescot was granted a mandate to extend his term from five to seven years. The new term began just as Césaire arrived in May. Jacques Roumain, also a writer, politician, and communist activist, had recently returned from Mexico City, where Lescot had appointed him chargé d’affaires. Roumain had just finished the manuscript of his masterpiece, Les Gouverneurs de la rosée, when he died in August, a short three months into Césaire’s trip.13 The return of the gravely ill Roumain, who was already an icon in Haiti, may have emboldened student and artist communities to demonstrate more actively against the repressive policies of the Lescot administration.14

Over a period of seven months, Césaire charmed his audiences and, according to Bloncourt, “paved the way for Wifredo Lam and André Breton” (Bloncourt and Löwy, 97). The Cuban painter and the French surrealist poet were major intellectual figures who alighted on Haiti, following not only in the footsteps of Césaire but also writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. According to Depestre, it was Breton who, a year after Césaire’s visit, sparked the circle of activists, including Jacques Stephen Alexis and his cohorts at the journal La Ruche. Mabille invited Breton to give five conferences, including a famous speech on 20 December 1945 at the Rex Theater in Port-au-Prince, where Lescot sat in the front row along with several members of his administration and the military.15 In his lively account of the speech, Depestre wrote of Breton’s “contagious lyricism”: “the scandalous and subversive atmosphere that had characterized surrealism in the heroic period of its Parisian era was created at the Rex. From the moment André Breton began to speak, we knew that the time was ripe in Haiti to unleash, before the event and mutatis mutandis, a terrific May ’68 in the tropics!”16 The Haitian government seized the January 1946 edition of La Ruche

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