He of the Trees

8/12/2019 He of the Trees

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H e o the TfeesNa ture, Environment, and Creole Religiositiesin Caribbean Literature

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

All misfortune comes from the cut trees, they have cut them down, even the calabash trees, even the trees of Ogou.

M arie Chauvet, Fonds des negresIN H ITI N VODOU , the l a, or spirit known as Loco, the chiefof Legba'sescort, is known as heof the trees. He governs the tree or temple centerpost that serves as channel for the lioa, the divine life forces of Vodou, toenter into comm union with their human servi teurs through the phenomenon of possession. Loco and his conso rt , Ayizan, are, as Maya Derendescribes them in D ivine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, the moralparents of the race, the first houngan and man bo (priest and priestess ofVodou), whose chief responsibility is that of imparting to humans theknowledge of ko nnesans on which the future of the race depends. They arealso Vodou's first healers, as it was Loco who discovered how to d rawtheir properties from the trees and to make the best herbal charms againstdisease and Ayizan who protects against malevolent magic (Deren 148).Together they represe nt the belief in Vodou that spiritual maturity restson the understanding of the necessary balance between cosmic forces andthe natural world.Loco and Ayizan, together with Osain, their orisha counterpart inCuba's Regia de Ocha, and Palo Monte (the practices commonly knownas Santeria ), offer a path to an ecocritical reading of the relationshipbetween the Caribbean folk and nature, and of the representation of th isrelationship in Caribbean literature. Osain, the patron of curanderos(folk or herbalist healers), is the master of the healing secrets of plants, thedeity of el m o nt e- th e Cuban forest or bush: All the ewe [plants orherbs] is the propertyof Osa in, and without enlisting hisaid beforehand,it is not possible to do any work in Santeria (Gonza lez-Wippler 55).Osain defines the parameters of the bon d between man and his natural

183 He of the Trees environment- the most crucial relationship in African-derived religionsas Santeria, like Vodou and Rastafarianism, is a religion that integrateshuman concerns with spiritual forces. t has been described as an

earth religion, a magico-religious system tha t has its roots in nature andnatural forces a system that seeks to find the divine in the mostcommon, ordinary things . . . All that Santeria wants to do is to embracenature, but in so doing it embraces the soul of all things (GonzalezWippler 4, 23).

My primary concern in this essay is to trace how some salient works ofCaribbean literature have art iculated the relationship between Caribbeanpeoples and their environment, as seen through the prism of Africanderived Caribbean religiosities. It uses the figure of the houngan, the priestand healer, as t he focus of an ecocritical reading of several examples ofthe twentieth-century Caribbean novel, such as Alejo Carpentier's TheKingdom of This World, Marie Chauvet's Fond des negres, and MayraMon tero's In the Palm of Darkn ess. My main focus in these readings istha t of add ressing the articulation of an environmentalist thoug ht linkedto religiosity in the Caribbean novel as revealed through the examinat ionof the role of the houngan (or related figures) as protector of the balancebetween natur e, the spirits, and manas chief conservator, so to speak.A secondary concern is that of how these novels interpret the threat to theCaribbean environment posed by increased pollution and development asa menace to Creole religiosities themselves, whose connection to nature istransformed as landscapes change and the trees that are fundamentalto Loco's role as healer disappear.

In the Car ibbean region, the relationship between man and naturewas determined early in postencounter history by the ecological traumarepresented by the esta blishment of the sugar plantat ion. Pre-plantationArawak culture-as described in Spanish chronicles and most vividly inFriar Ramon Panes Relaci6n acerca de las antigiiedades de los indios (Anccount of th e Antiquities of the Indians, 1571)- was dependent on asimple economy of subsistence agriculture and fishing centered on a harmonious relationship between religion, culture, politics, and patterns ofwork and exchange (Paravisini-Cebert, Caribbean Literature 670).Panes collection of Arawak myths and legends ar ticulates poignantly thesymbiotic r elationship between man, nature, and the gods that was thefoundat ion of pre-Columbian Caribbean cultures: man worked alongwith nature to prod uce the crops and claim the fish needed for the welfareof the community, and this labor was accepted as a pleasing offering bytheir principa l deity, Yocahu, provi der of yucca and fish.


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184 Lizabeth Paravisini-GebertAlthough devastated by warfare and the virgin soil epidemics that dec

imated the aboriginal population, the Arawak worldview survived thewreckage and environmental assault of Euro pean conquest and colonization to eventually lay the foundation for traditions of resistance thatwouldserve as a counterworld to the economy of the plantation. In early colonialtexts, such as Friar Bartolome de las Casas's Brevisima relacion acercade la destruccion de las Indias (A Brief Account of the Devastation ofthe Indies, 1522), the Arawak native emerges as a noble savage living inharmony with the environmen t the Indian as classic hero an image towhich Caribbean writers will return again and again in search of symbolsof preconquest, pres lavery cultural wholeness. Las Casas's concern withthe question of how to incorpora te the Arawaks into the Spanish nationas subjects with rights and prerogatives- the central focus of both theBrevisima and his Apologetica historiasumaria (General Apologetic History,1575)- brought him to an early understanding of how, from its inception,Spanish expansion in the Cari bbean region was dependent on the economic, political, and cultural exploitation of the native populations andnew environments (Paravisini-Gebert, Caribbean Literature 671-7 2).

Throughout the Caribbean, this exploitative expansion found its mostefficient form in the economy of the plantation. Caribbean societies, EricWilliams has argued, were both cause and effect of the emergence of themarket econom y; an emergence which marked a change of such worldhistorical magnitude, that we all are, without exception still ' enchanted'imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic in its bewitched reality (quotedin Wynter 95). This change was both demographic and ecological. Thousands of African slaves were brought to the new world with the sole aim ofmaking it possible to produce a luxury crop for the interna tional marketin plantations that required the complete transformation of the Caribbean'stro pical landscape. The Caribbean sugar plantation grew at the expenseof the dense and moist tropical forests that needed to be cleared to makeway for the new profitable crop. This rapi d deforestation led to soil depletion, landslides, erosion, and climatic changes that included significantdecreases in levels of moisture and rainfall (Grove 64- 70). The resultingenvironmental degradation was exacerbated in many areas of the Caribbean by ungulate irruptions- the introduction of domestic grazing animalsalien to the pre-encou nter Caribbean environment- that transformed thecultural and social landscape. Together, these rapid environmental changesbrought about an ecological revolution, an abrupt and qualita tive breakwith the process of environmental and social change that had developedin situ (E. Melville 12).

185 He of he TreesSylvia Wynter has argued, however, that despite the seemingly irrevo

cable consequences of this ecological revolution- despi te the apparentvictory of the forces of the plantation and the emporium- there remains atension in Caribbean history and culture between the forces of the plantationand an equally powerful cultural and environmental drive to return to theplot system of subsistence agriculture- the indigenous, autochthonoussystem- that characterized the cultures of both the original Arawak andCarib inhabitants of the region and of the African slaves brought forcefullyto provide labor in the plantations. She bases her t heories on the work ofGuatemalan novelist Miguel Angel Asturias, who defined this clash as onebetween the indigenous peasant who accepts that corn should be sownonly as food, and the Creole who sows it as a business, burning do wnforests of precious trees, impoverishing the eart h in order to enrich himself (Wynter 96). Wynter, in her turn, saw the plot system which in theCaribbean was reinforced by the planters' practice of giving the slavesplot of lands on which to grow food to feed themselves- a s the focus ofresistance to the market system and market values (99). Holger Henkehas argued, following Wynter, that these provision grounds to be foundmost commonly on the edge of the remaining forests- became the livingproof to the enslaved African of wolman's ability and vocation to livein natural harmony and in harmony with nature (63). The plot systemmay thus be read lthough this is a point that neither Wynter nor Henkedevelops a s the foundation of a specific approach to nature and environmental conservation in the Car ibbean that would allow the return to apre-encounter ecological balance.

Wynter contends that the art iculation of this tension between plot andplantation with its environmenta l implications- is at the core of thedevelopment of Caribbean literatures. Her reading of Victo r Reid's NewDay and Herbert De Lisser's Revenge: A Tale of O ld Jamaica- tales thataddress the 1865 Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaic underscores historicaland textual anxieties that are closely tied to the environment and religion,and to the possibility o f recovering the roots of history in the oral tradition of the plot-oriented folk. Reid's novel, in a pivotal scene centering ona Kumina ceremony, portrays Bogle, the rebellion's leader, as an ancestorgod who conveys the peasantry's desire for the recovery of their connection to the land; De Lisser, in his turn, as a defender of the colonial class,demonizes the peasantry's aspirat ions by embodying them in the figure ofthe voodoo priest as false revolutionary leader, both in Revenge and inhis better-known novel The White Witch of Rose Hall (Paravisini-Gebert,Wh ite Witch ). In both cases, however, the link between Creole religiosity


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186 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebertand the plot is manifest. Henke underscores this connection in his studyof the provision grounds as places where all elements of a free wolman'slife came together in a condensed form, especially those religious ritesabhorred by the Caribbean plantocracy that played such an import ant

function for the stabilizatio n of internal social order among the slavepopulation (63).

Wynter 's essay predates the development of ecocritical approaches tothe reading of literature, but she nonetheless pinpoints the basic dichotomythat underlies pan-Caribbean approaches to writing about nature andenvironmental conservat ion: that the political, economic, racial, and religious elements associated with the development of the plantation economy(and the tourism that follows in its wake) will be most fund amentally atwar with their counterpa rts on the side of the plot system of agriculture. tsuggests an ecocritical stance that pits colonialism versus independence;an international market economy versus a locally driven subsistence economy; European culture versus Creole culture; the anthropocentricism ofChristianity versus the man/nature symbiosis of autochthonous Caribbeanand African-derived religious practices; the land cleared for either plantationor golf course versus the forest. Questions such as the role of the physicalsetting in the plot of a novel; the consistency of the values expressed in thetext with ecological wisdom; how the metaphors of the land influence theway it is treated; how the text articulates the people's relationship to thenatural world, among others, have been addressed in the Caribbean fromone or the other of the positions suggested by Wynter (Glotfelty, LiteraryStudies xix). Caribbean writing ha s always been deeply engaged withthe landscape, with the creat ion of geographically rooted narrativeswhere the environment takes a central role in determining the possibleideologies available to a character (Poirier 15-16 ).

Take, for example, the various characters in Hamel, the Obeah Man, alittle-known two-volume work published in 1827 (see Paravisini-Gebert,Colonial and Post-Colonial Gothic ). Set in Jamaica, the novel traces thecareer of Roland, a white preacher whose teachings about the equality ofman and attempts to lead a slave rebellion (elements that place him on theside of the plot system) are corrupted by his underlying desire to forciblymarry the daughter of a local planter and side with the supporters ofthe plantation system. The novel's unknown author, unambiguously proplantation, denounces Roland's unnatural desire to overthrow the planters'legitimate social order by turning him into a villain of Gothic dimensionswhose fevered mind twists increasingly towards violence as the tale progresses, culminating in nightmare desperation (Lalla 10). A Eurocentric

187 e of the Treesnarra tive haunted by the then recent memory of the Haitian Revolution,the novel finds a somewhat implausible hero in the black Obeah man,Hamel, who is m ade to move from an early enthusiastic revolutionaryfervor to the denunciat ion of the cause of revolutionary freedom. Hamel,a black man linked to his ancestral culture through the practice of Obeah,ultimately turns his back on civilization and sets out on a solitary journeyto Guinea, leaving behind the plot/plantation dichotomy. In this ability toretreat to a mythical (and still forested) African homeland, he is luckierthan his fellow characters, the Gothic unnaturals who must re main inthe contradictory space between loyal subject and vengeful rebel, thetainted product of the undisciplined sexual passions of their white fathersand the savage inheritance of their non-white mothers, literally strandedbetween the plantation an d the plot (Lorimer 681-84).

Hamel, the Ob eah Man is of interest in our context because of theways in which the text makes clear the almost deterministic connectionsbetween geography, race, class, and ideology in writ ing about the Caribbean, and because of the ways in which it equates ideology with specificreligious practices and stances concerning the land and its forests. n thegeographical space of Caribbean literature, where cha ractersmust chooseallegiances to either the plot or the plan tation or remain stranded in acontradictory, ambiguous no-man's land, the religious leader emerges asthe tro ubled art iculator of environmental ideology. Roland, a white manand a Christian priest, is to rn between his impulse to help the enslavedpopulation regain its connection to the land and his will to wed the plantat ion heiress, and is consequently demoni zed. Hamel, an Obeah manand therefore the focus of the planters' fears of slave insurrection, is madeto disavow his natural allegiances to the plantation workers and theirdream of a plot of land and flee to Guinea. They are both in a way definedby their relation to the land- to the plantation, the plot, or the mythicalgeograph y of the ultimate provision ground, Lan Guine e,Hamel's flight to Guinea allows the text's anonymous author to sidestepthe novel's most problematic issue: that of the implausibility of making apractitioner of O beah, by definition a subversive figure, the spokesmanfor the defense of the plantation system. The practice of Obeah, seen byBritish colonial a uthorities as a threat to the stability of the plantationand the health of colonial instit utions, had been outlawed in most BritishCaribbean islands early in the eighteenth century, after being perceived asone of the few means of retal iat ion open to the slave population. O beahmen such as Hamel, moreover, were seen as po tential leaders who coulduse their influence over the slaves to incite them into rebellion, as had


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188 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebertbeen the case in the Jamaican rebellion o f 1760. Edward Long, a s AlanRichardson underscores, had discussed th'e role of a famous obeiah manor priest in the Tacky Rebellion in his History o Jamaica (1774), a worknotorious for its virulent racism, and stated that among the 'Coromantyns'(slaves shipped from the Gold Coast) the 'obeiah-men' were the 'chieforacles' behind conspiracies and would bind the conspirators with the'fetish or oa th' (Long 2:451- 52, 473).The history of slave rebellions in the Caribbean can be read as the articulation of the tensions between plot and plantation that Wynter describes.Slave rebellions l ike the establishmen t of maroon communities by runaway slaves that functioned as spaces t o preserve cultural and religiouspractices ad as their goal the return to familiar patterns of interactionsbetween the transplanted Africans and the land inhabited by the spirits.Like Obeah, the practices of Ha itian Vodou- the array of practices thatMichel Laguerre has called the collective memory of the [African] slavesbrought to t he sugar plantations of Haiti (3 grew in intensity a s thecolony's accelerated rate of production during the mid- to late eighteenthcentury redoubled the massive migrat ion of thousands of men and womento a new and unfamiliar world marked by their brutal exploitation andear ly deaths in the plantations of Saint Dom ingue.

Like the Obeah-inspired rebellions in the British West Indies, the HaitianRevolution (1791-1804) would be rooted in the commonality of religiousand cultural prac tices centered on Vodou, and its beginnings would bemarked by a pact between the revolutionary leaders and the Vodou lwaor spirits. The links between religion and the uprising were establishedearly through the slaves' belief in the powers of their legendary leaderMakandal to predict the future and tra nsform himself into various animals-attributes conferred by the lwa, or spirits, which served him well inhis clandestine war against the French colonists. The connection betweenreligion, the upr ising, and the environment emerged out of Makandal'sidentification with the forest and its vegetation, which yielded to him thesecrets of the po isons that constituted his chief weapon against Frenchplanters. His reputation as a houngan, or Vodou priest, therefore, grew inproportion to the fear he instilled in the French settlers that his knowledgeof the poisons, spells, and other subtle weapons he deployed against thewhite population had its source in magica l powers linked to mysteriousAfrican practices and a supernatural symbiosis with the forest.

Makandal's link to the forest and the lwa is central to Alejo Carpentier'sfictionalized r endition of the history of the Ha itian Revolution, The Kingdom o This World (1949), where he is portrayed as an houngan of the

189 He o the TreesRada rite, the Lord of Poison, invested with superhuman powers as theresult of his possession by the major gods (Kingdom 36). He is simultaneous ly endowed with the supreme authority bythe Rulers of the OtherShore to exterminate the whites and create a great empire of free blacks inSaint Domingue and with the power of Loco and Osain, having masteredthe herbs and fungi of the forest- the secret life of strange species givento disguise, confusion, and camouflage, protectors of the little armoredbeings that avoid the pathways of the ants (23). In this portrayal, knowledge of the powers hidden in nature is bestowed on Makandal as a sign ofhis blessing by the gods of Africa who have followed those who servethem across the waters to a new land.

Carpent ier's reading of this pivotal moment in Cari bbean history iscomplex and ultimately flawed (see Paravisini-Gebert, Haitian Revolution ). His reading of t he ecological implications of French colonialismand of the failure of the environmental project behind the Haitian Revolution, however, is of pro found interest in our context. Carpent ier's descriptions of the Ha itian landscape in The Kingdom of This World underscorethe ecological wreckage the plantation and the Revolution have left intheir wake:

But around t he turn in the road, plants and trees seemed to have dried up, tohave become skeletons of p lants and trees in earth which was no longer r edand glossy, but had taken on the look of dust in a cellar.There were no brightcemeteries with little tombs of white plaster like classic temples the size of doghouses. Here the dead were buried by the side of the road on a grim, silentplain invaded by cactus and brush. At times an abandoned roofon four polestold of the flight of it s inhab itants from malignant miasmas. Everything thatgrew here had sharp edges, thorns, briers, evil saps. (108)Carpentier's despoiled ear th is a cruc ial element in a meditation on

Haitian history that has as its focal point the failure of the Revolution'sleaders to imagine a landscape without the plantation. If indeed, as Wynter'swork suggests, the slave leader's natural role would be that of leading hisor her people away from the structures of the plantation and into thenatural order of the provision ground at the edge of a protective forest,

then Carpentier's text, resting as it does on Spenglerian notions of everrepea ting cycles of freedom and tyranny in history, leaves little hope thatthe land of Haiti can recover from the devastation of the plantation. HisMackandal, the houngan who called for battle in the name of the lwa,dies leaving the Revolution in the hands of leaders incapable of redressingthe natu ral balance that wou ld have returned the land to the people and


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190 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert 191 He o the Treestheir gods. Boukman, who early in the novel had stated that a pact hadbeen sealed between the initiated on this side of the wate r and the greatLoas of Africa to begin the war (66), disappears from the text, dismissedintwo lines tha t speak of how his corpsewas left to rot and feed thecrows.Toussaint never emerges from the shad ows. The magnificent but weakChristophe is the only one to get his full due in the text, where he is depictedas a mimic man, striving to become an ersatz French aristocrat, a parody ofa French king who has learned too well how exploitat ion and forced laborare the paths to power and glory. The Cristophe of The Kingdom o ThisWorld is a cardboa rd figure who denies his people the pleasures of the communa llabor of the coum bite by returni ng them to the pre-Revolutionarypatterns of forced lab or they had experienced in the plantation.

It is in the treatment of Dessalines, however, that Carpentier's hopelessness concerning the Hai tian land and its peop le surfaces most startlingly.The one page dedicated to the most uncompromisingly ferocious of theleaders of the Revolut ion (Dayan 21)stresses his connection to the Africangods,1 but it fails to address the efforts he made to redefine land o wnership in Haiti, a pro ject th at most pro bably led to his death (Dayan 26 ).Carpent ier does not addr ess either Dessalines' attempt to destroy falseproperty titles,''' or the violence with which he tried to carr y ou t whathas been called an impossible reform of the ment ality of the ruling classes, and p erhaps his own mentality' (Dayan 27).

Dessalines' efforts at legislating the redistribution of land were centra lto the project of restoration of the Haitian landscape to a harmon iousbalance with its peop le. His decrees sought both to validate the formerslaves' claim to p roperty and to give them access to the land inhabited byth eir god an underta king that was at once political, religious, and ecological. Carpentier's text underscores the connection between Dessalines'ferocity and adherence to the lwa but erases the other aspect of this communion with the gods- his role in trying to assure Haiti 's would-be peasantry access to a family plot of land, an heritag that could serve as afoundation for a new society and offer a home for the familial lwa.

In Hai tian literatu re, as in the count ry's history, the environmental crossroa ds that the Revolution failed to negotiate successfully- and tha t hasbecome since then the burden of the people, the ir lwa, and their houngans- has become a cent ral leitmotif. This is hardl y surprising, as the devastation brought upon the Hait ian landscape by con tinued deforestationhas become the country's most glaring socioeconomic problem. As H aitientered the twenty-first century, the country's extreme defor estation, andthe concomitant soil erosion, dro ughts, and disastro us flash floods, have

ravaged the count ryside and led to its critical environment al condition .Haitian writers, understand ing t he centra lity of the environ mental situation, both as a historical reality and as a metaphor for addressing thishistory in literature, have made it a cornerstone of the development of thenational novel. In Jacques Roumain's Masters o the Dew, a seminal textin the development of the Haitian n ovel, the hero, Man uel, return s afteryears of wor king on the Cuba n sugar plantati ons to the village of FondsRouge on ly to find it parched and dying from a drought caused by deforestation. Mired in a violent dispute over inheritance of the land, the villagers must come together if they are to find a solution to their ecologicalcrisis. Led by their revered lwa Papa Ogoun, who counsels dur ing a Vodouceremony tha t the villagers must dig a cana l to bring water from the stillforested mountains where the vein is open, t he blood flows, Manuelrealizes tha t a coum bite, a bringing together of labor of all the villagers,will be necessary to accomplish the task. Despite Manu el's untimely death,the villagers unite and a thin th read of water advanced, flowing throughthe plain, and the peasants went along with it, shouting and singing(Ro umain, Masters 190 ).

Th e importance of Haiti's deforestation to the development of Ca ribbean literature in general can only be adumbrated here. In Marie Chauvet'spowerful meditation on H aiti's history, Amour, colere, et folie, her clearsighted narrator describes how the devastation caused by deforestationthreatens the peasantry's hold on that heritage th at was Dessalines' legacy:

t has been raining without check, and what is worse is that the rains came afterthe intensive clearing of the woods. Monsieur Long's electric saw has been buzzing witho ut interruption for the last fifteen days. A tree falls every five minutes.Yesterday, I took a long wa lk down the length of the coast to take a look at thedam age. I saw huge trees falling to the gro und, making the most a wful noise,as if they were roaring before lett ing out their last breath . . . Avalanches of soilstream down the m ountains, forming mo und s below. There is no longer anycoffee, except in our memories. Mr. Long is no longer in terested in coffee. Henow thinks of noth ing but the expo rt of lumber. When the lumber is gone, he' llgo afte rsomething else. May be he'll start exporting men. He can have his pickfrom among the beggars and easily ship them out. (132; my translation)Chauvet's condemnation of the neocolonial (American) forces complicit

in Haiti's twentieth-century deforestation finds its way into her tw o mostimporta nt novels. In mour she dissects the forces that led to the ecological revolution produced by defores tation as a factor in H aiti's interna lpolitics and international economic relationships. In Fonds des negres, on


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192 Lizabe th Parauisini-Gebertthe other hand, she turns her gaze to the peasa ntry itself and its relationship to the land and to the lwa who inha bit it.

This relationship, asJoan Dayan has brilliantly analyzed in Haiti, History,nd the Gods, is mediated by an houngan, Papa Beauville, who has him

self been complicit in the deforestation of Haiti th rough selling his ownland, bringing upon himself the vengeance of the vodo u gods (Chauve tquoted in Dayan 93). His path to redemption partly spearheaded by hisefforts to bringa young newcomer from the city into the path of the godseffortlessly weaves together religious (Papa Beauville), political (Facius),gender (Marie-Ange), and environmenta l concerns in a progression towardthe restoration of the land to the peasant ry. As Dayan argues:

Tho ugh Marie-Ange wonders if such belief brings resignation, Facius assures herthat hisstruggle to help the poor people inthe countryside to reclaim their landfrom the thieving urban bourgeois by for ming a coopera tive is not inconsistentwith servingt he gods. Far from weakening the willor inhibiting successful rebellion, vodou remains the necessary basis for political action. (92)Haiti's enviro nmenta l dilemma- in which history, ecology, religion,

literature, and po litics intersect- speaks eloqu ently to writers across theCarib bean. Ha iti'ssymbo lic position as the region 's first republic and as aland whose history has been emblematic of the economic and politicalvicissitudes that have plagued other islands in the area gives the embattlednation a centra l position in Caribbean discourse. It's ecological conundrum, in the han ds of Carib bean writers, becomes , as we have seen inCarpentier, the focal point for meditations on t he region's enviro nmentalquandary, such as we find in Mayra Montero's 1995 novel, Tu, la oscuridad (In the Palm of Darkness).

In the Palm of D arkness is an avowedly environmentalist novel- theregion's first. It nar rates the tale of American herpetologist Victor Grigg,who, with the aid of his Hai tian guide, the devoutly Vodouist ThierryAdrien, is on a quest for an elusive and threatened blood frog, extincteverywhere but on a dangerou s, eerie mountain near Port -au-Prince. Inthe volatile and bloody setting of the Haitian mountains, controlled byviolent thugs, Montero uncoversa haunted postcolonial space built uponthe interstices between Grigg's scientific perspective and Adrien's animisticVodou-inspire d worldview. Montero uses this dichotomy to unveil howthe extinction of species is the direct outcome of an environmental collapseas the forests that were the frogs' ha bitat disapp ear. She shows, concomitantly, how the troubled landscape of H aiti- and th e very environmenton which the H aitian people depend for surviva l -peopled with zom bies

193 He of the Treesand other frightening, otherworldly creatures who have escaped the controlof the houngans, has decayed precipitously due to political corruption,violence, instit utional terror, murd ers, bru tality, and religious turmoil.

Using the Vodou principle of an organic relationship between humansand the environment as a point of depar ture, Montero portrays the frustra ting search for the elusive Eleutherodactylis sanguineus as a voyage tothe center of a Caribbean darkn ess where cor rupt neocolonial forcesthreaten the very environmental context that makes possible the religiosityof the Haitian people. In her exploration of the propagation and extinction of speciesin the natural world, paralleled by the narrative of how themysterious forces of nature govern the fate of all living creatures, Monteroextends the link between humanity's spiritual relation to the naturalworld to human vulnerability in environ ments that are pushing species tothe verge of ext inction. The possible existence of the last remaining specimens of the Eleutherodact ylis sanguineus in Haiti' s Mont des EnfantsPerdus, the Mount ain of Lost Children, points to the lost innocence tha tthe despoiling of nature implies for Caribbean societies.

In her essay The Great Bonanza of the Antilles, Mayra Monterowrites of how she suspected in some way, even at [an] early age, tha tthere was a philosophy in the [Afro-Caribbean] cults of Ocha, Palo Mont e,Vodo u, and Espiritismo de Cordon tha t in one way or anot her expressedan integral conception of the world a concept of man and of his organicrelationship with the world (Mo ntero 197 ). In the magic-religious worldof her texts as in those of many Caribbean writers- the plot often revolvesaround fund amental ru pture s in this relationship between nature andman, the healing of which becomes the task of the houngan, Obeah man,santero, or similar priestly figure.

In Divine Horsemen, Ma ya Deren identifies the protection of the parameters of the relation ship between spirits and humans the basis of Vodo uas a religion- as the fundamental role of the hounga n or manbo. As sheexplains, writing about the phenomenon of possession:

Thus the possessed benefits least of all from his own possession. He may evensuffer from it in material loss, in the sometimes painful, always exha ustedphysical aftermath . .. But since the collective consists of ordinary men w itha normal interest in their personal welfare, it is dependent upon its a bility toinduce in them a moment of extra-ordinary dedication ifit is to have access to therevitalizing forces that flow from the center . . . In the growing control accomplished by the ordeals and instructions of initiation, and in the prospectivevigilance of houngan and societe, he is reassured that the personal price need


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194 Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

not be unpredictable or excessive. In the principle of collective participation isthe guarantee that the burden shall, in turn, be distributed and shared. (276)I cite Deren in some deta il here because she articulates a fundamental

notion of Haitian Vodou, and by extension of Santeria, Obeah,and othe rcreolized religious practices: the idea of the protective function served bythe houngan as the one who controls the balance in the reciprocal relationship between the spirits and the humans who serve them. This prot ectiverelationship, in practice as well as in literature, is projected upon the landand its forests. In Erna Brodber's Mya l (1988), for example, the devastat ing extent of the spirit thievery committed against Ella is externalizedthrough a hurricane whose victims are cata logued primarily as trees: tensof thousands of coconut trees and breadfruit trees join the 1,522 fowls,115 pigs, 116 goats, five donkeys, one cow, and one mule destroyed by thestorm. Mass Cyrus, the Myal man whose healing o f Ella has unleashedthe rage of this storm on the unsuspecting landscape, can only excuse hisact by trusting in the regenerative power of nature and pleading his need toprotect his grove- his right to protect "his world," which contains his healing plant s and trees against destructive forces bro ught "from foreign."Mass Cyrus's faith in the regenerative power of nature reflects Brodber'sexperience with the seemingly never-ending capacity of the Caribbean'stropical vegetation to renew itself if given half a chance. t provides astance simultaneously ecological and political- that provides a contextfor the representation of the houngan, santero, quimboiseur or Obeah manas a figure that has sought to reconcile the tumult, violence, and destabilization of Caribbean historical experience with the balance, stru ggle forsurvival, and the physical and mental health tha t emerge out of the livingcontact with the spiritual forces that accompanied African slaves on theirAtlantic Passage. The endurance of Loco "he of the trees," as MayaDeren calls himexemplifies the indispensable protection of the environment needed to guarantee the survival of principles and practices vital tothe continuity of Caribbean cultures.

As the wri ters discussed in this study- from the anonymous author ofHamel to Brodber m ake clear, however, the question of environmentalpreservat ion in the contemporary Caribbean is ultimately, as it has beensince Dessalines failed in his efforts at radically altering patterns of landownership in Haiti, a political one. The Creole religions of the Caribbeanmay articulate the environmental tenets of their belief systems nd writersmay echo them- in vain until these not ions enter the realm of politicaldiscourse and lead to concerted conservationist action. Recent events in

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195 He of the TreesHaiti and the Dominican Repub lic have demonstrated the tragic complexity of the region's ecological quandary.On 24 May 2004, the H aitian village of Mapou- named a fter a treesacred in Vodou practices was washed away by a deadly torrent producedby two weeks of cont inued heavy rains. Sweeping through Mapou andother villages and hamlets clinging to the deforested hills near the borderbetween Haiti and the Dominican Republic among them Fond Verrettesand Jimani the floods and mudslides left around three thousand peopledead in their wake. M ore than eleven thousand families were displacedwhen their homes and shanties were buried under the rushing walls of mud(Weiner and Polgreen). Crops were destroyed, goats and pigs d rowned,the water wells contaminated by decomposing bodies, and the villagesisolated by the destruction of the roads. Epidemics were expected.

While roughly five feet of rain fell Sunday and Monday, the water ran downland denuded of trees, over th in soil eroded by decades of slash-and-burnfarming. The rainfilled rivulets and rivers, running so hard down the steep andtreeless slopes, until the raging muddy waters reached the valley that shelteredMapou and engulfed it. (Weiner, "Floods")

The trees, newspapers around the world reported, had been cut for charcoal in a country that relies on wood for cooking and other activities.The rich topsoil had long since been washed to sea. In Guadalajara for apolitical summit of European and Latin American leaders, Haitian primeminister Gera rd Lato rtue echoed the international concerns over the connection between the dead ly flash floods and his country's massive deforesta tion: "The deep cause of this situation is the deforestation of Haiti. Wehave lost more than 80 percent of forest because people like to use woo dcharcoal as a source of energy" ("Haiti's Deforestat ion" ).

"Like to use woo d charcoal as a source of energy" is perhaps not themost accurate w ay of describing a situation in which most of Hait i's 8million people depend on charcoal to cook because there is no electricity,gas, or kerosene outside major cities and towns. It is a stance that b lamesa desperate populat ion that has endured two centuries of political corruption, mismanagement, and greed for a process that began long before theyfound their death s in the choking mud. "Most people here work theear th, but the most desperate take the trees to make charcoal, which sellsfor a few pennies a pound at market," Fernando Gueren, a survivingfarmer from Mapou, told a ew York Times reporter. "When they takethe trees, there's nothing left to drink up the water. They wreck the land tosurvive" (Weiner, "F loods") .


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196 Lizabe th Paravisini-GebertAfter the recent floods, however, even the trees are gone from M apou:First villagers chopped down hardwoodslike mahogany and cherry.T hen theywent after mango and avocado t rees, destroying a food source. The sprawlingmapou trees were cut as a last resort. Followers of voodoo, Haiti's official religion, believe the trees are repositories of a pantheon of spirits and hold ceremonies and sacrifices in their shade. Andmapous usually indicate the presenceof spring water. In some dry patches of the count ry, only legends of the mapouremain. (Dodds 11)

My grandmother used to tell me stories abo ut the map ou trees andhow th ey should always be respected for the power that they had with thespirits, Dereston Jean -Louise, a Mapou survivor, told Paisley Dodds, areporter from the Los Angeles Times but that was a different time. Peopleare poorer now and a lot of us don't have cho ices (11). They also don 'thave the help and comfort of their houngan who was among the hundredsburied under the mud. He and his ounfort or temple, made from scrapwoo d collected from the felled trees nearby, had been swept away by thewaters. With them, it seemed, went all remaining faith and hope. Myfamily's all dead, said Pedro Nisson, a youngtr aditional healer who hadwatched his fam ily drown. When the rains came, the people tried to fleeto th e hills, but the water dr ove them back. It's impossible to see how wewill make it through the days to come (Weiner. Floods ).

The H aitian government, bankrupt and overwhelmed, had few solutions to offer. We can't go on like this, Prime Minister LaTortue toldreporters in Guadalajara. When I return I have plans to speak with thegovernment to invite stu dents in a re-forestation project ( Haiti's Deforestation ). He vowed to create a forest protection unit made up offormer soldiers of the demob ilized Haitian Army (Weiner and Polgreen).

No Haitian leader, however, has ever visited Mapo u. For the poor,there is no government, said Lilie Jean-Baptiste, a survivor of the floodsin Mapou who used to eke out a living growing cassava and now feels thatthe land is cursed : The only governm ent of Haiti is God (Weiner,Haitian Village ).Without a concerted government-led effort, the Haitian

people may have to tru st to God and their lwa.Note

1. His victory was the result of a vast coalition entered in by Loco, Petro,Ogoun Ferraille, Brise-Pimba, Caplaou-Pimba, Marinette Bois-Cheche, and allthe deities of powder and fire (Carpentier 109).

PA RT

Aesthetics o the Earth

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He of the Trees