Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 185

They are astonishing pictures. The influences that lie behind them are manifold and diverse. The
dwindling hangover of African traditions, the painted drums and banners of Voodoo, the obsessive,
kris -like writhings of the serpent of Damballah, the multi-coloured plumage of the globe-shaped Congo
charms, the heraldic and geometrical precision of the maize-flour vévérs , and the horned head-dresses, the
bats' wings and the great animal masks of carnival are some of the most apparent. To these must be added
the sleek formalism of religious oleographs from Europe and Latin America, cinema posters, the covers
of dime-magazines, and the omnipresent portraits of the Haitian heroes. These things are all registered
and remembered in brains that abound already with the miracles of Voodoo and Wanga and Christianity
and the deeds of the great Lwas, the loups-garous , Haitian battles, zombies and African fairytales, while
all round them, as a permanent and unconscious background, lie the mountains, the forests, the intricate
forms of the leaves, the sea and the luminous thin atmosphere of Haiti.
The pictures that emerge from this maelstrom of currents prove once more the overwhelming primacy
in the Haitian mind of the imaginary world over the real. Less than a quarter of them are recordings or
transpositions of what lies before the painter's eye, and portraits are scarcely attempted. There is a pro-
found unconscious wisdom in this choice of themes, a true feeling for the limitations of their scope, and
a reluctance to force it beyond itself into alien channels. One has the feeling, too, that many of the land-
scapes—the cross-roads or crowded markets or those wooded mountain-sides with their dazzling angular
scaffolding of roads—are inventions or memories. The others are all, as it were, literary: the recording of
a great event in Haitian history, as in the case of Philomée Obin—a procession of heroic rebels, the funer-
al of a patriot, an historic incarceration, a ball—or an imaginary scene drawn from religion, mythology,
folklore or magic. Once the subject is chosen, nothing—absolutely nothing—daunts these artists, and the
paint is applied with the strength, conscientiousness and diligence of a grown man, and all the intrepidity
of a child; and, with regard to any academic rule of thumb, with a flair for the combination of colours and
a pristine and almost miraculous heterodoxy that make the observer gasp.
What is it in these primitives, apart from the bewildering fearlessness in the application and the jux-
taposition of colours, that gives one such pleasure? Much of it comes from delight in the fact that the
painter has not been compelled with gritted teeth to break the shackles of proportion and linear perspect-
ive. It comes from his very unawareness of these bonds, from the fact that he is unfettered, free, has never
worn chains and does not know that they exist.
These painters reflect the brilliant colours of their habitat, and their pictures are filled with an aura that
appertains to the worlds of dream and nightmare; even if it is only a picture of a plate of tropical fruit by
Cédor, or a fish stretched on a dish of sliced vegetables by Bazile, or a barnyard scene by Auguste where
the animals cluster like prehistoric cave figures. Many of the group pictures—market-places, wakes, Voo-
doo ceremonies, bamboches , the pursuit of runaway slaves—are packed with tiny figures placed among
hills and trees and stilted palm roofs, as though they had been cut out and glued on, so immobile are they;
or so agitated that each animal and manikin is whirling, leaping or gesticulating in an epileptic and in-
dependent access of activity which has suddenly been frozen into silence and immobility by the baleful
stare of Medusa. Such are the pictures of Rigaud Benoit, André Bouchard and Wilson Bigaud. Very often
the themes are religious, legendary or hermetic or drawn from the mythos of Black Magic. The bodies of
angels project through coal-holes in the clouds, archangels fly by on magic carpets, the Blessèd Virgin ap-
pears transfigured in the sky; serpents writhe; a mermaid-tailed minotaur, by Gourgue, coiled among the
ironmongery of Voodoo on a grey table in a green claustrophobic chamber, fires white cataracts of light
from its eye-sockets; a wizard or a Houngan, ensconced among his triangles and magic circles, conjures,