12691: AFTER THE DANCE: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Eliab1804@aol.com

Los Angeles Times
August 11, 2002 Sunday  Home Edition
SECTION: Book Review; Part R; Page 7; Features Desk

HEADLINE: AFTER THE DANCE: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti, By
Edwidge Danticat, Crown Journeys: 160 pp., $16

MICHAEL HARRIS, Michael Harris is a regular contributor to Book Review.

Haiti is "a country where people are poor in money perhaps, but rich in
culture," a festival organizer in Jacmel, a southern coastal city, tells
Edwidge Danticat, who left Haiti at 12 (almost 22 years ago) when her family
moved to the United States.

"Carnival is our chance to show our kind of wealth." Readers of Danticat's
fiction--the novels "Breath, Eyes, Memory" and "The Farming of Bones" and the
short-story collection "Krik? Krak!"--may be initially disappointed that this
book is a travel piece, commissioned for the Crown Journeys series. (The
publisher's idea: to send great writers to places they know or would love to
visit and have them take a walk and write about it.) Yet Danticat makes
Haiti, at least Jacmel at Carnival time, a place we'd like to visit--a
considerable feat, given that nation's image. For generations, almost
everything we have read about Haiti--from Graham Greene's "The Comedians" to
Madison Smartt Bell's slave-revolt novels to news reports of atrocities and
refugees--has reinforced our idea of the place as a sink of violence, poverty
and hopelessness.

Danticat had a personal reason for going to Jacmel, the site of Haiti's most
famous Carnival celebration, in the winter of 2001. As a child, she was
discouraged from attending Carnival. Well-meaning relatives warned her of the
dangers of crowds of drunken revelers, of zombies and demons, of dirty old
men who would squeeze young girls "like sponges." She wanted to experience
the festival without the fear--and, in so doing, discovered that the exorcism
of fear is Carnival's very purpose.

One of the sources of longtime dictator Francois "Papa Doc" Duvalier's power,
Danticat says, was his ability to twist this usually benign magic in his
favor. He would often dress in black like the Vodou god Baron Samedi, lord of
cemeteries, "reminding all Haitians that he literally held the key to the
cemeteries and could decide at will who the next inhabitants would be."

More commonly, Carnival costumes and masks are meant to reassure as well as
scare. A chaloska, a character "in military garb with a protruding mouth and
claw-like teeth," Danticat says, is "based on an actual military officer,
Charles Oscar Etienne, who terrorized Jacmel in the early 1900s." Children
are taught to say: "Chaloska, I'm not afraid of you; you're a human being."

Carnival "zombies" elicit the same response. Danticat recalls, as a child,
hearing a radio report that zombies had been seen wandering in Haiti's
northern mountains. Her aunt concluded that they were "former political
prisoners ... who were so mentally damaged by dictatorship-sponsored torture
that they had become either crazy or slow." The aunt "doubted that any
relatives would go and get them, for fear of being locked up themselves."

Political messages simmer on the surface of the celebration. Some Carnival
characters are slaves and masters from French colonial times. The most
popular float at the 2001 event portrayed a U.S. Coast Guard cutter
intercepting a raft of Haitian refugees, many of whom "drowned." A song
blared, "We are selling the country in U.S. dollars," within earshot of the
U.S. ambassador.

On the other hand, one of the heroic characters of a past carnival is based
on a U.S. Army sergeant, Sam Makanani, who rode into town in his Humvee
during the 1994 invasion to reinstate President Jean-Bertrand Aristide and
collar the military government's goons. "The Cowboy," like the chaloska, has
been immortalized in papier-mache masks.

Danticat tells us more than we need to know about the origins of Carnival in
antiquity. Haiti is interesting enough. She walks through cemeteries, farms
and one of the country's few remaining forests. She talks to preachers,
vendors, musicians, poets and the organizers for whom Carnival has become a
way of life. She quotes writers we should know better, such as the
Jacmel-born novelist Rene Depestre. Finally she joins the dancers, sloughing
off her childhood fears to participate in "explosions of rapture and beauty
in a country that is not supposed to have any joy."