15183: LeGrace on Haitian Identity

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: LeGrace Benson <legrace@twcny.rr.com>

In studying the art of Haiti, I look at the questions raised in the
discussion
of Haitian psychology and Haitian identity from the standpoint of
perceptual/cognitive investigations. This approach views "psychology" and
"identity" as multiplex processes unfolding over time for both individuals
and
social aggregates, rather than as objects with stable definitions.  To try
to
get some grasp on this complex situation, I have used what I call the
"Haitian
Long Conversation." That is, the material and verbal "show and tell" as
conducted over centuries of discourse and making, crossing territories and
waters, converging in Haiti and dispersing back across waters and
territories.
Thus, for example, Hector Hyppolite, Edouard Duval-Carrie, or Barbara
Nesin each make use of the iconography of Ezili or Ogou, yet even a
superficial
overview of the psychology or personal identity of each yields great
contrasts
among them. Moreover, one lived in Haiti all his life (except for brief
sojourns to Cuba and Harlem). One grew up in Haiti and now divides his
time
between Miami and Port-au-Prince. The third spent some time in Haiti as a
child, but lives in the United States, visiting Haiti yearly.  Each is
unmistakably a Haitin artist, their working a work distinctively Haitian
art.
Their works, growing out of aspects of the Haitian Long Conversation and
reciprocallay entering back into it and modifying it, are nonetheless
accessible to viewers who will never see anything else of Haiti. yet the
viewers will see and to some extent understand something of Haiti. This
process
can easily be exemplified by any number of other Haitian painters,
musicians,
dancers, poets, novelists or filmmakers. Let us add the ironworkers of
sculptures or fences, the basket weavers, the furniture makers. Memories,
communicated person to person, generation to generation are key.

For an excellent discussion of how memory operates in the creation of
personal
and national-ethnic identities, see Kwame Anthony Appiah's "You Must
Remember
This," a review of Avishai Margalit's The Ethics of Memory in the 13 March
2003
issue of The New York Review of Books.