The Sexual Politics of Empire by Durban Erin L.;

Author:Durban, Erin L.; [Erin L. Durban]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2022-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

DÉZAFI AND ALLEGORIES OF U.S. IMPERIALISM IN HAITI UNDER THE DUVALIER DICTATORSHIP

Integrated into this most essential Haitian belief system [of Vodou], the zombie offered a fitting vehicle for intellectuals interested in affirming their commitment to Haiti's popular culture as well as an ideal metaphor through which to condemn Haiti's social and political ills. The zombie thus proved highly exploitable as a literary device and, perhaps more significantly, proposed a distinctly Haitian contribution to the world of francophone literature.

—Kaiama L. Glover, Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (2010)

Dézafi is characteristic of the late twentieth-century spiralist movement in Haiti—dense, abstract, chaotic yet rhythmic, and fundamentally concerned with the human condition—in which Frankétienne and this novel played a significant role.9 It is about those whose “life [is] worse than being in a coffin” (Frankétienne 1975, 26): self-imposed shut-ins terrified of being re-enslaved and zonbi endlessly laboring on a rice plantation with a ruthless overseer, Zofè. Frankétienne describes their abject existence in excessive and grotesque terms that produce a kind of miasmic mise-en-scène that literary scholar Kaiama L. Glover calls “sensorily offensive and even nauseating” (2010, 158). The regime of terror represented by the novel refuses to be contained in the pages of the book.

The plot turns on the relationships between the megalomaniac zonbi master Sintil, his daughter Siltàna, and the zonbi Klodonis who is “a young student whose educated ‘impudence’ threatens [Sintil's] power…. In so ‘zom-bifying’ [Klodonis], [Sintil] effectively issues a warning to any and all who would oppose him, and so solidifies his control over Bois Neuf” (Glover 2010, 61). Sintil's power, however, cannot be absolute even though the world of his creation is seemingly inescapable. Siltàna becomes enamored with Klodonis and troubled by his lack of reciprocation. Since her gendered domestic duties include feeding the zonbi on the plantation, she feeds Klodonis salted broth to free him from his unresponsive and unfeeling zonbi state. He, in turn, brings the other zonbi to consciousness by distributing salt, and they rise up to slay Sintil and Zofè. Instead of a celebration for what might seem like an act of justice, however, the novel ends with the caution that there will always be another Sintil, another Zofè, another regime of terror in the making. “In order to chase away paralyzing indolence, lethargy, and death, we must—everywhere and at all times—learn to live for the sharing of salt” (Frankétienne and Glover 2013, 73).

Scholars of Francophone literature describe Klodonis as a hero who over-throws Sintil's tyrannical order. However, Glover—drawing on the literary criticism of Régis Antoine—offers another reading that aligns with my interpretation. She remarks that for Antoine, the figure of the zonbi is “the antithesis of characters marked by ‘the idea of happiness and the will to live fully’…in accordance with ideas of collective liberation…. He thus understands the zombie as polar opposite of the romanticized hero portrayed in the Indigenist novel and of the noble peasant extolled in Indigenist theoretical writings” (Glover 2010, 57). Glover builds on this by noting that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.