Student Essay #3
Tropicalization and the Body: Process of Haitian Colonization on the Human Form
by James Caruso
In Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, the Martinican poet and politician grapples with the hardships of his return to the Caribbean after studying in Paris. Happy to leave the confining colonial structures of Martinique that limited his development in writing and language, Césaire used his French education to actively push against European conventions of racism against Blackness. His interactions with other Black thinkers in 20th-century Paris allowed Césaire to see the interconnectedness of African diasporic peoples within the movement of Négritude.1 A movement advocating for a form of Pan-African identity in the francophone Caribbean was Césaire’s framework toward resistance against the colonial enterprise which enslaved and displaced Africans in the Caribbean, stripping them of their identities in relation to space, religion, language, and traditions. Négritude allowed for Césaire and his counterparts to reclaim a sense of African identity that was lost in French colonial processes, as well their contemporary disavowal of French economic and political dominion.
Césaire connects Caribbean identity to the fantastical landscapes he remembers growing up in Martinique, and uses natural imagery to claim a sense of Caribbeanness and Négritude within a French-colonized space. Césaire’s 1939 return to Martinique presented him with the opportunity to critically examine notions of self and belonging as a Martinican in a French world. In his long form poem, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, Césaire asks the self-directed question of “who and what are we?” when discussing Caribbean peoples.2 He responds,
I have looked and looked at trees and so I have become a tree and this long tree’s feet have dug great venom sacs and tall cities of bones in the ground
I have thought and thought of the Congo and so, I have become a Congo rustling with forests and rivers…3
Césaire’s identity takes the form of the vegetation around him, connecting him not only to the ground of the Caribbean, but also to a place of his ancestors, as the Congo was one of several major regions of Africa where enslaved people were captured and shipped to the Americas.4
Césaire shares this connection between the natural environment and the self with visual artists from the Caribbean. Already working with visual artists during his lifetime, such as Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, the influence of Césaire’s written works remain indelible among artists in the Caribbean today. The surreal imagery that arises in Césaire’s written works lend to the creations of fantastical forms that can be centered around African diasporic identity. Works such as Edouard Duval-Carrié’s Cargo Bounty (2016) create clear representations of the natural world in a hybrid state with humanity, bringing forward important questions on place and belonging for Haitian artists in a postcolonial context. Visual representations of human-nature hybrids in Haitian art reclaim space and create new meanings of belonging for diasporic peoples. The connection to nature counters the historical influence of French colonial enterprise by unifying the metaphysical and spiritual connections between humans, nature, and identity.
The connection between the African diaspora in Haiti and the natural environment of the Caribbean stem from processes of coloniality throughout the Caribbean. The razing of the territory for sugar plantations and the killing of indigenous peoples via disease or dagger led to a massive overhaul of not only the population of the Antilles, but also the physical landscape which colonial settlers used for their new enterprises. The island of Hispaniola, the first to be reached by European colonizers, was said to have a population of between one million and three million indigenous inhabitants prior to European colonization.5 The indigenous Taíno population in Hispaniola dropped dramatically to the point of near extinction, with estimates as low as two hundred Taíno people on the entire island by 1514.6
The destruction of Hispaniola corresponded with the introduction of African peoples of different linguistic groups and locations of origin, as well as the introduction of new plant species coming from tropical regions of Africa and Asia. As Caribbean art historian Krista Thompson points out, colonized islands in the Caribbean were subject to “colonial transplantation”: the razing of the indigenous environment and the transplanting of “new agricultural specimens that [colonizers] deemed beneficial to the propagation of the colony, whether as food crops for settlers, slaves, and sailors or as cash crops for export.”7
The transplantation of plants from tropical regions of Africa and Asia are present in the works of Haitian artists. Like Césaire, these visual artists find themselves immersed in the fantastical landscapes of the Caribbean. Popularized through colonial literature and the natural world around them, contemporary Haitian artists will use tropical representations of plant life to connect the Haitian experience of colonial transplantation to the contemporary political and economic hardships faced by those living in Haiti.
The process of displacement undergone by Haitians is chronicled in Duval-Carrié’s La Traversée (2016). As the first piece that visitors will encounter upon walking into the exhibition En Voyage: Hybridity and Vodou in Haitian Art, La Traversée provides viewers with a visual representation of the displacement of people, plants, and religion during the Atlantic slave trade from Africa to the Caribbean. Duval-Carrié’s depiction of vodou loa traveling across a vast ocean highlights the ways in which spiritual beliefs traveled with enslaved Africans to the Caribbean, and in the process gained unique traits and identities that continuously shift in new contexts.
The inclusion of an anthropomorphic mapou tree, a species of which originates in Mauritius and grows across tropical regions in Africa, exemplifies the importance of plant life in the context of Haitian vodou and the displacement of peoples. Existing within oral histories of Haiti is the claim that the mapou tree was brought to the island not by the European colonizers, but rather by enslaved Africans, who used the tree to retain connections to the spiritual power that the tree held in West African religions.8 In Haitian vodou, the mapou tree is regarded as a natural materialization of the pòto-mitan, the entryway for loas to interact with the human world. Placed above a vèvè, the pòto-mitan is the vertical road that comes out from the ground to allow for loa to pass through, and can be represented through any verticality stemming from the earth — just as the mapou tree. With a root system that grows out from under the ground, the mapou tree resembles a vèvè and pòto-mitan, with the curled roots and long trunk evoking the image of the intersection between the world of the spirits and the world of the living.9 The mapou tree exemplifies how processes of displacement allowed for new spiritual meanings of the natural world to arise out of new connections between nature and humans in Haiti.
Duval-Carrié’s Cargo Bounty further exemplifies the interconnectedness of Haitian plant life and humanity, as it combines notions of identity to the presence of vegetation that arrived in Haiti through colonial processes. From the palm leaves that create a collar around the figure’s neck to the sugar cane comprising its torso, Cargo Bounty illuminates the connection between displaced peoples and plants in Haiti. The parallel processes of displacement from varied homelands to the Caribbean lent to a new coexistence between imported plants and people, creating a space embedding themselves in the new Caribbean environment. Neither sugar nor palm are native to Haiti, yet both play a role in the formation of the humanoid figure, just as Haitian identity is formed through the combination of African, indigenous, and European backgrounds via colonialism. In highlighting the relationship between humans and nature, Duval-Carrié creates a Haitian figure that is the result of colonial processes of displacement and recreation.
The turn to the natural world is important in creating self-visualized representations for Haitian artists, who recognize the colonial practices that brought both humans and plants to the Caribbean islands. The ability to squarely pin one’s ancestry to a specific group was stripped from the incoming African slaves, thus leading to new understandings of being and belonging in today’s context. For Césaire, grounding one’s identity with the natural world was imperative to the Négritude movement, as it allowed for those within the Caribbean to form connections to a Pan-African identity. Césaire writes,
my negritude is not an opaque spot of dead water over the dead
eye of earth
my negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
it reaches deep down into the red flesh of the soil
it reaches deep into the blazing flesh of the sky
it pierces opaque prostration with its straight patience.10
By positioning his own Négritude within earthly elements rather than manmade structures, Césaire challenges the notion that identity is formed through institutions, and states that Négritude stems from a relationship to the earth, the sky, and one’s own patience in uncovering a sense of Négritude in the Caribbean.
The importance of roots is also a subject that finds its place in Haitian art and Caribbean identity. In Césaire’s Notebook, identity stems from the earth, with the earth acting as an incubator for one’s identity to grow. In Cargo Bounty, the anthropomorphic plants come alive as a being standing in contrapposto, evidenced by the left foot of the figure being slightly forward from the other. The feet of this figure, speckled with dirt and sprouting with new root systems, suggests that the human-plant hybrid has grown into one through the new resilience between the nonnative plants. In the tropical Caribbean climate, the transplanted species growing together highlight processes of growth within a new context. Now in full bloom, the figure uproots itself and gains the ability to move freely as a conglomeration of different plants, and thus a conglomerate of different peoples and places of origin.
The hybridization of humans and plant life is also seen in Bruno Chrysler’s Untitled (1999). The figure of an uprooted tree, whose limbs are branches and thus a part of the greenery around it, is both in direct contrast with the vegetation surrounding them while simultaneously an active part of the natural landscape. The butterflies perched atop these limbs further unites the figure’s place in the landscape, as the native insects reveal a new interconnectedness to Haiti’s reconstituted natural world. The prominence of the figure within the visual space of the canvas not only highlights the importance of the figure, but also indicates the figure as essential to this tropicalized landscape. The human-plant hybrid comes alive in this painting, which grounds the figure within a lush green landscape and provides viewers with a glimpse into the mountainous Haitian countryside.
André Naval’s Jungle Foliage 2 (1983) presents the viewer with a version of this idealized Haitian plant life, filling the pictorial space of the canvas with richly colored foliage of tropical plants that can be found in Haiti. Although most of the plants in the image are not identifiable, the leaves that frame the right side of the painting are based off the colocasia genus of vegetation. Commonly known as “Elephant-ears,” the colocasia family of plants is native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, and the edible roots may be used in for medicinal purposes or food.11
These tubers became a part of Haiti’s natural landscape via colonization and the movement of people and plants to the Caribbean, with their roots thriving in the soil of the tropical Caribbean islands. The Elephant-ear foliage in Jungle Foliage 2 places the transplanted tropical plant into the visual imagination of Haiti, as it represents not only commonplace foliage, but also the process of French colonization. The Elephant-ear takes on greater meanings in its inclusion of Duval-Carrié’s Cargo Bounty, in which the human-plant form sees the Elephant-ears as the feet and legs of Duval-Carrié’s hybrid figure. As the colocasia represents the legs of the figure, it is inherently connected to the land, and therefore is connected to ancestral spirits in relationship to Haitian vodou. In doing so, Duval-Carrié and other Haitian artists reimagine the creolized Haitian identity not only through the movement of plants over time, but also through the ways in which nature from around the globe is inherently tied to human experience and the formation of identity based on ancestry and belonging.
If the natural world acts as a medium for the exploration of identity and belonging in the Caribbean, then one must consider the importance of the environment in Haiti and the Caribbean as it pertains to lived experiences. As anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown states when describing the importance of the earth in Haitian vodou:
…the products of the earth, the things that push up from down under, as well as the surface conditions of earth and water, are loaded with meaning. They must be read as carefully as cards laid out for divination because they provide clues to the state of the living, the ancestors, and the spirits.12
It is clear as to why Haitian artists and Caribbean writers include references to the natural world and emphasize the relationship between humans and the environment. Products of the earth allow for Caribbean artists and thinkers to maintain a connection between the spiritual and human worlds, which places emphasis on the spirits of ancestors and deities. For those living in Haiti, the colonization of land, people, and plant life forged an inherent connection between the three, each adapting to a new space at the same time as the others. Representing the human-nature connection in artworks cements this connection within the context of the visual in the Caribbean. The works of Duval-Carrié, Naval, Chrysler, and countless other Haitian artists allow for the viewer to contemplate the complexity of colonial processes and the formation of a distinct Haitian identity that can be reinterpreted through the human-nature hybrid forms.
1 Mirielle Rosello, “Aimé Césaire and the Notebook of a Return to My Native Land in the 1900s,” in Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, trans. Mirielle Rosello and Annie Pritchard (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1995), 21.
2 Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, trans. Mirielle Rosello and Annie Pritchard (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1995), 93.
3 Ibid, 95.
4 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House Inc., 1984).
5 Jaques Nicolas Léger, Haiti: Her History and Her Detractors (New York: Neale Publishing, 1907), 19.
6 Bartolomé De Las Casas, An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, ed. Franklin W. Knight, trans. Andrew Hurley (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2003), 6.
7 Krista Thompson, An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography, and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 40.
8 Karen E. Richman, “Peasants, Migrants and the Discovery of African Traditions: Ritual and Social Change in Lowland Haiti,” Journal of Religion in Africa 37, no. 2 (2007), 377.
9 Karen McCarthy Brown, Tracing the Spirit: Ethnographic Essays on Haitian Art (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1995), 16.
10 Césaire, Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, 115.
11 Riva Berleant-Schiller and Lydia M. Pulsipher, “Subsistence Cultivation in the Caribbean,” New West Indian Guide 60, no. ½ (1986): 16.
12 McCarthy Brown, Tracing the Spirit, 16.