Katherine Dunham - Island Possessed

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-20912
Copyright 1969 by Katherine Dunham
All Rights Reserved

eISBN: 978-0-307-81984-0

v3.1

This is a book written with love, dedicated to my husband, John Pratt, and to the Republic of Haiti, explaining, I think, many things about this author and about that island.

Katherine Dunham first went to Haiti in 1936, when she was granted a Rosenwald Fellowship to study primitive dance and ritual in the West Indies and Brazil. A graduate student in anthropology, and already a successful dancer and choreographer, she found in Haiti endless variations of her two interests. For more than thirty years, she has returned again and again, and as one reads Island Possessed, understanding grows as to why and how Haiti is indeed her spiritual home.

She learned of the bloody history and chaotic politics of the island in the early days of its independence and met many of its leaders. She recognized patterns of culture and behavior which are found in areas of the New World that were strongly influenced by the African slaves brought from the Old World. She came to know well the Haitian peasants, the backbone of the country, and developed a deep and abiding affection for them. She soon realized that the strongest influence, the unifying and vitalizing force, was vaudun, or voodoo, and she was initiated into the first class, or group, of vaudun, the lav-tte. Much later she returned to find herself an honorary member of the second degree, the canzo or trial by fire. The first initiation ceremony, and her own thoughts and reactions during it, make up a large and important part of this haunting memoir.

Through the years Miss Dunham has taken her dance company around the world to innumerable countries, has received awards and decorations in many places, has produced, choreographed, and danced in films, on Broadway, and in opera as well as the recitals of the Dunham School and the Dunham company of dancers, singers, and musicians. She has written many articles, some short stories, and two books, which were published in America, in Mexico, and in France.

Several years ago she bought a historic plantation, Habitation Leclerc, once presided over by Napoleons sister Pauline. In recent times she has not returned to Haiti often, preferring to spend more time in her home in Dakar, Senegal. It was there that, gathering, sifting, and reliving her memories of Haiti, she wrote Island Possessed.

It was with letters from Melville Herskovits, head of the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University, that I invaded the CaribbeanHaiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad, passing lightly over the other islands, then Haiti again for the final stand for the real study.

When I arrived in Haiti, not long after the exodus of the Marines, there were still baptized drums hidden in hollow tree trunks and behind waterfalls. President Stnio Vincent paid deference to folklore for the sake of the growing interests of tourists in the island, but an air of secrecy clothed all the serious ceremonies and it was not the policy of the first government after the Occupation to sponsor young women visitors in investigations that might verify to the world outside what has been a crucial problem to Haitian statesmen since the independence: the irreconcilable breach between the thin upper crust of the Haitian litewho would have liked to be rulers of the land, participating in the revolution only to get rid of the Frenchand the bubbling, churning ferment of the black peasants, who really were by numbers and by historical content and character and humanness, I was to find, the true Haitian people.

Being a first on the scene helped. Seabrook with his Magic Island had been a great handicap because the lite were offended, not so much by the text, which, compared to much that has been written about Haiti, isnt so vilifying, but by the illustrationsgrotesque impressions not only of the peasants, which wouldnt have mattered, but of the lite. Officially, Seabrook was not to return to the island and I believe he never did, though that might have been his own decision. Harold Courlander had been there and Melville Herskovits had just published the first serious and sympathetic study of the people and their social structure. They were white and male, these writers. Of my kind I was a firsta lone young woman easy to place in the clean-cut American dichotomy of color, harder to place in the complexity of Caribbean color classifications; a mulatto when occasion called for, an in-between, or griffon actually, I suppose; most of the time an unplaceable, which I prefer to think of as noirnot exactly the color black, but the quality of belonging with or being at ease with black people when in the hills or plains or anywhere and scrambling through daily life along with them. Though the meaning of the word negritude has never been completely clear to me, here in the country of the conceiver of the concept, reflecting on my early years, I know that I must have practiced, preached, and lived it. Lopold Sdar Senghor, President of Senegal, has interpreted and reinterpreted the word negritude over the years, but unlike Aime Csaire, who coined the word, he has never rejected the word itself. Senghor in his book Libert #1Ngritude et Humanisme defines negritude as unite pluraliste which remains the ideal of humanists today.

For myself, I insist upon the meaning of negritude as the effort to create a community of men, who happen to be black but must belong to the world around, no matter what kind or color. It is a word I feel to be redundant in most of its uses. Especially for English-speaking people it is hard not to feel undertones of nationalism and narcissism, and I do not admit to a spiritual or cultural poverty in black people which would make it necessary to coin a word or system of thinking of oneself outside the human division.

My first stop-off at Haiti on the way to Jamaica, Martinique, and Trinidad had been brief. It was June, the summer rainy season and the season for honoring ancestors. I stayed just long enough to be escorted about the countryside by Price-Mars and Ren Piquion, to be entranced by starched white suits and old-world courtesies, to be stunned by dirt and poverty, to deliver some of the letters from Melville Herskovits, but not the one to President Vincent, about which I was shamefully remiss, delivering it only at the end of my return stay of a year. I have never known if it was shyness, the spirit of independence, some political attitudes slowly but surely forming, or a protective sixth sense that kept the letter among my valuable papers. Perhaps I was afraid of being drawn in another direction, away from sources and into superficialities. And in that case this book would never have been written, so many things would never have happened, and I would, more than likely, not be embroiled in the sorcery and sociopolitics of Africa.

I had time to receive a few callers, to look over the sparkling bay from the hills of Ptionville, and to fall deeply in love with the possessed island without knowing why. I had as a base then, as later, during my long stay, the tiny one-room cupola on top of the Hotel Excelsiora Bemelmans dream.

Of my first day in Port-au-Prince I have two memories. One is the pink sugar-cake cathedral that never ceases to draw attention whether the voyager arrives by sea or air. It is set as a sort of pale coral vaginal opening leading into the mountains, to Canap Vert and Ptionville and La Boule and God knows where else I may not have seen. Scattered around this Delphic beauty without rhyme or reasonexcept to torment touriststhe slums of Port-au-Prince extended at that time from Pont Beudette to Carrefoursthat is, what might be called the suburban area from the left of the bay in the center of which the cathedral nestles to the extreme right which follows the other protective arm of the bay, in the direction of Source Leclerc, which I was to know later. There is a magnificent royal palm grove just on the ocean, the truly painful beauty of which sheltered ordure, yaws (skin syphilis) infested parents and babies, stray cats too clever to be caught, skinned, and eaten, pigs holding bones together with skin (how do they find the calcium to produce the bristles that fringe their bony razorbacks? Some people say by rooting in graveyards). The slums extended past cribs run by my now dear friend Madame Nadier, past the swimming pool and tennis courts of caste- and color-restricted Club Thorland, past the mud huts of Carrefours, then well south on to the uncharted roads to the next city of any size, Logane. They were slums unequaled in parts of the world which I have known since then, and they are hard to rival in Lima, Peru, of not so long ago, the favelas of Brazil, massed sampan river housing in Hong Kong, or the clusters of tin and paper huts bordering a bridge on the road to Rufisque, just outside Dakar in Senegal, West Africa.