Sixth Proposition
(On the Process of the Mythological and Semiotic Vulgarization of Human Reality)
In returning to the original source of the myth, one must go over with a fine-toothed comb an eminently magical process that, over the course of the last three centuries, has allowed for the designating of Europeans of different ethnicity (Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Dutch, Danish, etc.) as “Whites”; of the indigenous peoples of the Americas “discovered” by Columbus in the Western hemisphere (Arawaks, Tainos, Caribs, Ciboneys, Mayas, Incas, Aztecs, Quechuas, Guaranís, etc.) as “Indians”; and of sub-Saharan Africans (Sudanese, Guineans, Bantus, Congolese, Angolans, etc.) as “Negroes,” “mixed-race,” “Mulattos,” and “people of color.” Under the effect of what amounts to an absurdly fantastical inversion of the hierarchy of form and substance in our species, it somehow became commonplace to insist on a causal relationship between the skin color, facial structure, and follicular attributes of various human groupings, on the one hand, and their particular cultural and natural developments on the other. As a function of these racializations of colonial conflicts, the essence of African ethnicities was reduced to a fantasy of the “inferior nature of the Negro,” while the essence of the ethnic groups emerging from Europe was elevated to the no-less-fantastic notion of the “superior nature of the white man.” Through this simultaneously mythological and semiotic vulgarization, the institution of slavery invented social types in the Americas so as to assure its own prosperity. The disguising of souls accompanied the occultation of certain geographical areas: the “West Indies” in the place of the mythical Orient that obsessed Columbus, “America” in the place of Colombia (the admiral’s star having dimmed next to that of Amerigo Vespucci). Everything happened as if the enterprising masters of colonization needed, in the magical realm, to put masks both on their field of action and on the protagonists of the triangular crossings that were mobilizing men on three continents (Europe, Africa, and the Americas).
Seventh Proposition
(False Identity)
Haiti, like the other “discovered” lands of the Americas, entered into modern history caught up in this game of masks (white, black, Indian, mulatto, etc.)—that is to say, with a false identity. At the very bottom of the pit that is the reification of men, within the boundaries of death and the separation of the passions, at the tail end of the tragedy of being, is where one encounters the existential time and place of the zombie. Without a personal life or civil status, registered with the local cemetery, torn from the bosom of the family, of the church, of pleasure, dance, sex, friendship, and life itself; bound day and night by the purely physiological and physical exigencies of harsh labor, the zombie adds a fourth episode to the three classic scenarios of black history: brute idiots with backs bent to till the earth; oversized children to be evangelized; angry Black Power militants meant to be rehabilitated en masse. Within the frame of this ternary destiny governed by the basic barbaric/civilized binary, the zombie represents the ultimate biological fuel—that which remains of Caliban after the loss of his identity, his life having been cut literally in two, his gros bon ange of muscular effort condemned to forced labor in perpetuity and his petit bon ange of knowledge and enlightenment, of innocence and imagination, forever exiled in the first empty bottle within reach.
Eighth Proposition
(Portrait of the Zombie)
These are the elements most critical to fully understanding this sub-Negro—this broken being with neither memory nor vision of the future, with neither needs nor dreams, without roots to bear fruit, without the balls to get a hard-on, this object adrift in the kingdom of shadows, far from the salt and spices of freedom . . .
It would make sense, at this juncture, to provide an outline of those traits most common to beings trapped in a zombified state: zombies are recognizable by their glassy-eyed gazes, the nasal intonation of their voices, their vacuous expressions, and the fog that envelops their thoughts and words; by their halting manner of walking while looking straight ahead, indifferent to people, animals, things, and plants; by the fact that they instantly degrade everything and anything around them, even without making the slightest bit of contact.
Ninth and Final Proposition
(Zombiehood and Dezombification)
In living its zombified state to the bitter end, might there be a fresh light of authenticity and freedom waiting at the end of the tunnel for whatever is left of that man or woman? Alas, everything would seem to indicate that there is no possibility for solidarity in that desert with neither salt nor sympathy that is zombification. There is no common interest or passion among zombies. Neither the disdain nor the hostility of other “races” inspires them to forge any sort of alliance. Let us join what’s left of our animated bodies together to take action in the name of freedom! are words one is unlikely to hear come out of a zombie’s mouth. Zombiehood has no future. Even if one were to stuff a bunch of zombies full of sea salt, they would not find anything better to do than to hightail it to the nearest cemetery. Once there, just like Lil’ Joseph’s crew from Colombier, they would use their teeth and nails to dig into the rocks and dirt, all for the supreme satisfaction of liquefying—once settled back in the earth—into so many stinking carcasses!
Corollary
Why zombies—and zombification—in the Haitian imagination? Is the myth of the subhuman something that belongs to the Fourth World of my country? For whom or for what is the creature a scapegoat? In a society with a pretty low coefficient of law and liberty, does the zombie’s absolute uncertainty amount to a mystical manifestation of the extreme desperation of the human condition that is life on my little half-island?
That night, reading over all that pseudo-Sartrean jargon mixed up in my vengeful and ludicrous third-worldism, I stopped short, filled with an anxiety that seemed to presage a heart attack.
What about Hadriana Siloé in all of this?
Absent the extraordinary flesh-and-bones zombie who had eluded me for more than thirty years, all I was doing was rambling on about the zombie myth and splitting the finest of metaphysical hairs. There was only one question that really needed to be answered: by what lapse of reason, begetter of monsters and of the living-dead, had the marvelous flesh and the sun-filled dream of an adolescent love story been transformed into a shadow wandering across the century?
In the margins of my draft of the essay, I had written in red pencil:
Enough with these supposedly keen insights on the mythology and sociology of decolonization. For the second time in this life, Hadriana Siloé is knocking at your door in the middle of the night. Get up and bring your beloved back to her childhood home!
6
Four more fruitless years of my life had transpired from the night I gave myself that directive to the moment I managed to go back over every detail of the Siloé Affair. In 1976, I was invited to teach at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. The campus was set on the site of a former colonial plantation that clung to a hill, contained within a luxurious neighborhood bearing the lovely name Mona. Barely moved into the bungalow I had been assigned to, losing myself in endless contemplation of the island, I experienced a feeling of fullness and well-being matched only by the wonderment I had felt in those long-ago days when Hadriana was alive. For the first time since leaving Jacmel, I was able to think without sadness about all those years of failure and guilt that stretched behind me in the swirling elsewhere of Haiti and had taken me on a frantic quest for the young girl. I finally stopped living her memory as an experience of mourning and nostalgia. I was no longer personally tortured or wounded by the misfortunes of my homeland or by the overall lack of goodness in the world.
As I wandered around campus or up and down the sunny, laughing hills of Kingston, I no longer felt compelled to tell myself every fifteen minutes: If you turn to the right, after fifty yards, you’ll run into Hadriana Siloé, as I had done so many times in streets around the world, from Rio to Paris,
from Prague to Hanoi, from Tangier to Dar es Salaam, from New York to Kyoto, from Havana to Valparaíso. I had been given the opportunity to teach a course called “The Aesthetics of American Magical Realism” to a group of young people—they were overflowing with imagination and humor, glistening with jovial and liberated intelligence, with probity and intellectual creativity, and free from any remote-controlled pantomime directed by some state force operating in their individual consciences.
In earlier days, under less hospitable skies, I had found myself stuck in a sort of “zombie cocoon,” surrounded by false colleagues and friends, given a false university chair, looking into the “preprogrammed” eyes of false students. My classes back then had left me broken, exasperated, short of breath, my mind and body bled dry by an all-encompassing socialism.
In Mona, silos of joy and hopefulness rose up within me. The beautiful students—black, blond, and everything in between—drank up my words while letting their rosy tongues roam sensuously across their moist lips. They crossed their legs high on the thigh, exposing themselves to the yearnings of my frustrated single man’s lust with their fleshy curves ready for the most delightful plowing. At the end of the class, laughing and tittering merrily, a swarm of warm and tender young girls would cluster around my podium, closing in insistently with their sweet feminine embrace, offering all sorts of brilliant observations on the role of the marvelous and the beautiful in the formation of Caribbean culture. These courses helped me rid myself of the old adolescent anguish that clung to my skin, and to integrate the painful memories of Jacmel into my adult self. With each class, I felt as if I had regained fresh vitality for renewed creation. I would go back to my bungalow energized enough to go jogging, to play some tennis, or to go swimming, buoyed by a feeling of sated physical love and glorious victory over loneliness.
Early one morning, sitting down to my desk, I noticed with relief that I was finally ready—that is, without the usual feeling of distress, and using the French language—to make my peace with the natural, the comical, the playful, the sensual, and the magical aspects of Jacmel’s painful past. I, who until then had not written anything but ridiculous pastiches of other people’s poetry—I was able to write, in a single breath, a long poem, of which one stanza ended up perfectly foretelling what was to happen just a few months later:
Once, many years
before the death of my body,
I was dead in spirit,
laid out stone-dead,
my dreams adrift
like a bridal veil
spiraling in the wind,
all my senses were dulled,
suddenly one of our islands brought me back
to the madness of a woman,
to the time of Hadrina Siloé,
the mirror that takes root
in an almond-shaped sun.
On that morning, with the great looking glass of poetry in hand, I took a different path in my thinking about Jacmel. The flammentod (stirrings) of a rediscovered adolescence set a fire in my memory, producing the chapters of this chronicle. I wrote the first thirty pages in a single stroke. At last I had the key with which to make sense of the dramatic events of 1938. But in those days of intense creation, I never for a single second considered the possibility that my voyage through the world of words would put me on the real path to finding the false-dead woman who, after a thousand detours throughout the world, had been harnessed to my existence for the past forty years. On Wednesday, May 11, 1977, at six in the evening, at the University of the West Indies in Mona, I was finishing up my aesthetics class when Hadriana Siloé entered silently into the amphitheater through one of the doors in the back. I immediately recognized her gray-green eyes—sharp, almond-shaped, with the same beaming, sun-filled gaze I remembered. The oval of her face, the fruit of her mouth, the honey of her hair, the brightness of her flesh had ripened with age—in the prime of her life, she possessed charms as irresistible as those that had enthralled me as a youth. What I felt on seeing Hadriana in my classroom simply cannot be compared to anything else that has ever happened to me. I was trembling from head to toe in a state of near-religious rapture, immersed in the sensory drunkenness of my whole being, lips and imagination suddenly aflame, a raging charge infusing my remarks on the techniques by which Caribbean writers perceived and expressed the supernatural of everyday life in their literature. My students were amazed and thought for a moment that I had entered a transcendental state, all to show them the true qualities of the supernatural and the beautiful within our literature.
“I hope very soon to be able to convince you,” I exclaimed, exalted, trembling, “that there exists, perhaps at this cultural crossroads more than anywhere else, a ‘metaphysics of beings and places’ that obeys the strange logic of dreams! The other evening, when I told you about the story I’d finished the night before, I said that its oneiric epicenter was a manor house where there lived a woman who, more beautiful than the very world we inhabit, had never ceased to embody, in my eyes, the secrets of eternal beauty. I told you the story of Hadriana Siloé, but wasn’t able to give you any recent news about her life or her death. You shared in my impossible hope to someday hear her unravel, in her own words, the mystery of her ‘evaporation’ on January 31, 1938. Hosanna! Our dream has come true. Hadriana Siloé is among us! Her beauty shines at the back of this very room!”
The class joined me in a round of thunderous applause. A number of young men and women carried her, triumphant, up to my podium, which she bathed in her radiance. We all had tears in our eyes. We decided on the spot to have a party in her honor. She opened her home to us, in the hills of Kingston, up in the Blue Mountains. It became a veritable game among my students to phone their many friends and to try to find a band ready to enliven the party with the songs of Bob Marley. We headed off separately in an explosion of joy after making plans to reunite at Hadriana’s home at nine o’clock.
Once the students had left, we found ourselves alone together, face-to-face, she and I, caught up in the wonder of our reunion. Without speaking a word, we left the classroom hand in hand. A harmonious backdrop of seagulls and stars welcomed us into the warm night. We walked in silence along the well-lit lanes leading to my bungalow. We had too much to say to one another. We did not know where to begin. Bursts of love passed through me like the piercing flash of headlights. Fear of ridicule stirred in my guts with a terrible force. The campus’s stately, tropical trees passed by in a blur, like rays from the wheel of destiny that guided our stumbling steps. I dove in, eyes closed:
You came and thus did the fire rekindle itself
The shadow yielded, the cold below frosted
And the earth covered itself with your fair flesh.[2]
“Patrick, I pray I haven’t misunderstood.”
“Hope has arisen from the smoke . . .”
“. . . and the dust,” she said. “Please don’t let this be a dream.”
Our hands stopped trembling. We turned to one another, opening the floodgates of the years to the waves of our caresses. To this day, Hadriana and I are incapable of explaining how we managed to cover those hundred yards of grass leading up to the bungalow. Perhaps our kisses, passionate and ravenous, created some sort of protective railing along the steep slope that led to my bed. From the first moment it was good—dizzying, delicious, wild.
Following the unforgettable celebration organized for us by Kingston’s youth, the sun rose to the sound of our orgasms on Thursday, May 12, 1977—a day as blue as the mountains that have sheltered our passion ever since. When we awoke later that afternoon in Hadriana’s home, I let her read my tale of her extraordinary past. She then opened her desk drawer and handed me the chronicle of her zombie adventure, exactly as she had lived it from Saturday the twenty-ninth to Monday the thirty-first of January, 1938.
_______
2. Paul Éluard, “Death Loves Life,” in The Phoenix (Éditions Seghers, 1954). Return to text
Third Movement
Chapter Six
Hadriana’s Tale
You depart to that deep place of the dead, neither struck by wasting sickness,
nor having won the wages of the sword . . .
—Sophocles, Antigone
1
I died on the night of the most beautiful day of my life: I died on the night of my marriage in the Saint Philippe and Saint Jacques Church. Everyone thought I had been struck down by the sacramental Yes that burst out of me. It was said that I had been swept away by the fire of my consent, overcome by the depth of its power and truth—that I had been done in by my own bridal passion.
Truth be told, my false death had begun half an hour before I cried out in the church. Before the bridal party departed to head to the church, I was already completely ready to leave. I took a final look at myself in the sitting room mirror. Let’s go, Hadriana! said a voice inside me. It was excessively hot, and at the base of the stairs, amidst the affectionate chattering of my bridesmaids, I mentioned how thirsty I was.
“I’d love a glass of ice water.”
Mélissa Kraft immediately volunteered to go get me one, but I did not give her the chance. In my full bridal regalia, I charged toward the pantry—speeding through the manor as I had always done. I was faster than my friends. Had someone anticipated my last-minute thirst? A pitcher of lemonade awaited me on the oak dresser, plain as day. I poured myself a tumbler-full, then a second, then a third, drinking each glass to the very last drop until my thirst was entirely quenched. In the heat of that nuptial oven, the cool lemonade was intoxicating. For days, making the most banal gestures had felt as exhilarating as the wedding itself. The emotions of every moment thrilled me.
Hadriana in All My Dreams Page 9
