Haiti continued - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 202

' Je descends, indécis, sans indices
Feutré, ouaté, loué au ras des poles.'
We sat there talking into the small hours. Next morning, in the aeroplane, I met a dapper little Mulatto
acquaintance, to whom I mentioned the poet's name. He smiled tolerantly: ' Magloire-Saint-Aude? Un
garçon d'excellente famille . But he does nothing, nothing at all, and he's always abominably dressed.
Nothing, that is,' he continued as his shoulders and eyebrows lifted in a shrug, 'except write those poems
of his. Et il est noctambule dans l'âme .'
[1] It has been admirably told by Selden Rodman in his book Renaissance in Haiti (Pellegrini & Cudahy,
New York), a long and thoughtful essay which traces, with the help of numerous plates in colour and
monochrome, the sources of the phenomena and examines in detail the work of the individual painters. It
is one of the most lucid and readable books on an artistic movement that have appeared for a long time
and one which, in its explanation of the tie-up between primitive painting and the history and social and
political trends of Haiti, furnishes invaluable sidelights on the whole Republic.
[2] I came across a faint but interesting survival of this business of hunting runaway slaves with specially-
trained dogs—a practice that occurs with surprising frequency in the history of the Antilles—in one of
the Windward slands. 'Fido's such a clever dog,' our hostess observed after dinner, 'he can always tell
when a black man's hanging about, even in the dark; he just goes on barking until they leave.' Roused by
the sound of its name, an appalling brute materialized at her elbow, and lowered a heavy Bismarck-like
head into his mistress's mauve lamé lap. My sympathies immediately went out to his nocturnal quarry.
'But,' she went on, 'he never makes a sound if a white person comes up the drive. Not a sound. Does 'oo
then, clever boysie-woysie?'
[3] A number of extremely interesting portraits of contemporary Haitian notables by this school—so
dirty, alas, that some of them are hard to make out—hang in the National Museum and the Chamber of
Deputies in Port-au-Prince.
[4] I searched in an old Royal Almanach for the name of this page. It was Numa Desroches. Could this
be the name of the earliest of all Haitian primitive painters? The picture is unsigned.
[5] At the dissolution of Christophe's kingdom, this tropical Almanach de Gotha seems to have vanished
completely. Robbed of his determination and his iron will, none of these ephemeral honours remained.
Today there is not a trace of them.
[6] Tabou and Dialogues de mes Lampes .