The author at Ti Mouillage outside of Jacmel, Haiti, November 2002.
Jacmel
in all my dreams
By
Michael Deibert
“At
All Hallows Eve, the Guédé spirits of the dead overrun the countryside and
towns,” wrote the Swiss anthropologist Alfred Métraux in his pioneering 1958 study Le Vaudou
haïtien.“Clad in black and mauve, people possessed by them may be met not
only in the sanctuaries but also in the markets, public places and on the
roads.”
The
name given to a family of vodou lwa (spirits) that embody the power of
death and fertility (and the interlocking relationship between the two), the
pantheon of Gede (as it is spelled in Haiti’s native Creole language) also give
their name to Fèt Gede, the time on 2 November when, as Métraux noted,
the power of the spirits and those “ridden” (possessed, if you will) by them
burst forth from the peristyles (temples) of Haiti’s vodou faith and into its
cemeteries, streets and squares.
In
November 2002, I was living in Haiti and the country was, as is often the case,
in the thrall of a political crisis that would see the ouster of a despotic
president a year and a half later. Various political factions stood, daggers
drawn, waiting for the final dénouement.
As the political situation deteriorated and Fèt Gede approached, a friend
from New York came to visit me, and we decided that we would spent part of the
weekend outside the southern town of Jacmel, where I rented a cottage by the
ocean.
Haiti’s
history may have been a relentless drumbeat of tumult, but Jacmel, looking out
to the sea and ringed by mysterious, looming mountains, its colonial
architecture falling into deliquescent disrepair and wreathed in dripping
greenery, had always seemed to maintain some semblance of equilibrium among the
chaos.
After
the decisive defeat of the French by Haiti’s revolutionary forces at the Battle
of Vertières on 18 November 1803 and the declaration of Haiti’s independence on
1 January 1804 (the second nation in the Western Hemisphere after the United
States to do so), Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared himself emperor before being
slain in October 1806. After the death of Dessalines, Haiti’s black and mulatto
tensions erupted anew, with Henri Christophe controlling the north and crowning
himself King Henry I, building an extraordinary palace, Sans-Souci, modeled on
Versailles, and a massive fort, Citadelle Laferrière, from which to survey the
entirety of the northern plains. In the south, Alexandre Pétion ruled a
mulatto-dominated government of a less imperial nature and gave refuge in
Jacmel to South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar as the latter plotted his
campaign to liberate his own region from Spanish colonial rule.
Jacmel
remained one of Haiti’s most iconic towns, hosting its most colorful carnival
and serving as the setting for, among other books, René Depestre’s 1988 novel Hadriana
dans tous mes rêves, a magic realist and often intensely poignant tale of
eroticism and vodou.
For
me, at least, especially during my early years in Haiti, the city was always
associated with an eccentric American named Selden Rodman.
A
writer and critic born in New York City in 1909, Rodman had written a play, The Revolutionists, about
Haiti’s slave uprising and along with De Witt Peters, had opened the Centre
D’Art, Haiti’s first professional art school, in 1944. He had helped
supervise the covering of the interior of Port-au-Prince’s Cathédrale Sainte
Trinité with stunning murals by eminent Haitian painters like Wilson Bigaud and
Philomé Obin depicting Biblical scenes such as a black John the Baptist and a
near-nude Adam and Eve with an apple and a snake in between them. On my first
visit to Haiti in 1997, I wandered
around the steaming, fume-choked lanes of anba lavil, as Haitians call
downtown, and strolled into the chapel, mesmerized by the art I found there.
[The Cathédrale Sainte Trinité was destroyed in Haiti’s January 2010
earthquake].
After
that first trip, I returned to New York, where I was living at the time, and
eventually looked Rodman up and took the bus out to visit him at his home in
Oakland, New Jersey. Elderly but still vigorous, he shared rum punch with me
after he came into his ranch-style home from a game of tennis. The house, which
he shared with his wife Carole, was adorned from floor to ceiling with Haitian
canvases, exquisite examples of work by painters such as Stevenson Magloire,
and Magloire’s mother, Louisiane Saint Fleurant, one of the members of the
highly regarded Saint-Soleil art movement in Haiti. Still quite lucid, he
regaled my with stories of his years in Haiti, and spoke fondly of the rambling
colonial house he had maintained for years on Jacmel’s Rue du Commerce which,
after he had stopped visiting regularly, had been turned into a guest house,
the Hotel Florita. Speaking to him, I had the sensation of being in the
presence of a living link to Haiti’s past. As I left him with his memories in
the gathering dusk to head back to Brooklyn, I wondered how much of his soul
the old man had left back in Haiti.
During
my years living in Haiti, first as a correspondent for Reuters and then as a
freelance journalist, I developed a deep affection for Jacmel, and frequently
stayed at the Hotel Florita, which often appeared otherwise nearly unoccupied.
Eventually, along with a French photographer friend, I began renting a small
beach cottage in the town of Ti Mouillage just outside Jacmel, where I would go
on weekends to seek respite from Haiti’s chaotic political climate, swimming in
the Caribbean or reading in a hammock amid the incessant crashing of waves
nearby.
So
it was to Jacmel my friend and I decided to travel on Fèt Gede. After spending much of 1 November in the Grand Cimetière
in Port-au-Prince - a sign at whose entrance helpfully reminded Souviens—Toi
Que Tu Es Poussiere (Remember you are dust) - interacting with Gede
adherents in various states of exultation, we drove south, through a light rain
in the mountains that eventually cleared to reveal Jacmel, glittering like a
jewel by the sea.
We spent much of that evening at a vodou ceremony in the
countryside, returning to Ti Mouillage
to fell asleep to the churning sea. Awakening the next morning, we drove into
Jacmel. We parked our car and approached the Hotel Florita.
As
we walked through the hotel, on this day eerily empty, all the doors and
windows were open and white curtains fluttered in through the doors on the
breeze from the Bay of Jacmel, as if airing out before its owner returned from
a long absence. The moss and vines in the courtyard hung with melancholy, and
my friend and I kept close to one another as we walked through the rooms and
looked down from the balcony onto a deserted street.
After
returning to Port-au-Prince, and following a drive during which we both felt
compelled to comment on the the melancholy, sapient aura that filled the house
on Rue du Commerce, we found out that Selden Rodman had died the very afternoon
we were walking through the Florita. Perhaps, we thought, the presence we had
felt had been the ghost of Selden Rodman, after all, come back at long last to
Haiti to be among the lwa on this of all days.
