3 results
3 - Gade nan mizè-a m tonbe: Vodou, the 2010 Earthquake, and Haiti's Environmental Catastrophe
- from Catastrophes and Commodity Frontiers
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- By Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, Vassar College
- Edited by Chris Campbell, Michael Niblett
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- Book:
- The Caribbean
- Published by:
- Liverpool University Press
- Published online:
- 06 June 2017
- Print publication:
- 31 December 2016, pp 63-78
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Summary
In overthrowing me, you have cut down in Saint-Domingue only the tree of liberty. It will spring up again by the roots for they are numerous and deep. – Toussaint L'Overture, 1803
I say your mother has called upon Bwa Nan Bwa
Don't you see the misery I'm going through?
Oh, my mother has called upon Bosou Bwa Nan Bwa
Don't you see the misery I'm going through?
Resign yourself Oh Resign yourself, Adyw!
Don't you see the misery I've fallen into?
– Vodou song to Bwa Nan BwaIn Alan Lomax's compilation of Haitian music – Alan Lomax in Haiti, released in 2009 by the Smithsonian Institution – there is a song performed by Francilia, a Rèn Chante or song leader in Vodou, dedicated to the lwa or spirit Bwa Nan Bwa (Tree in the Woods), asking him to look upon the misery his people are mired in. Francilia's plaintive Vodou song, with its poignant faith in the powers of the lwa to bring succour to their devotees in their wretchedness, reminds us that Haiti's faith in Vodou – already tested by the nation's severe environmental predicament – entered a period of crisis in the wake of the January 2010 earthquake and its aftermath of death, crippling injuries, and epidemic. Her song sadly underscores the reality that Haiti's severe deforestation, the loss of 98 per cent of its trees – of the musician trees and sacred mapous that filled its once abundant forests and formed the natural habitat for Bwa Nan Bwa – had been the most tragic expression of the economic, social, and religious quandary the nation of Haiti had faced before the January 2010 earthquake.
In the discussion that follows, I trace a somewhat circuitous route – from Haiti's environmental predicament (the fate of its trees), through the ongoing cholera outbreak and the crisis of faith unleashed by the January 2010 earthquake, and back to the trust in the lwa conveyed by Francilia and her song to Bwa Nan Bwa – seeking to bring to the fore the connections between Haiti's environmental crisis, its contribution to the deepening of the impact of the 2010 earthquake, and the nation's foundational religious faith.
12 - Colonial and postcolonial Gothic
- Edited by Jerrold E. Hogle, University of Arizona
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 29 August 2002, pp 229-258
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Summary
Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed round him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men.
Joseph Conrad, Heart of DarknessThe Gothic - as Walter Scott observed in his commentary on Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto - is above all the “art of exciting surprise and horror.” The genre’s appeal to readers, in Scott’s view, comes from its trying to reach “that secret and reserved feeling of love for the marvelous and supernatural which occupies a hidden corner in almost everyone’s bosom.” As it happens, this “literature of nightmare” (MacAndrew, Gothic Tradition in Fiction, p. 3) was, from its earliest history in England and Europe, fundamentally linked to colonial settings, characters, and realities as frequent embodiments of the forbidding and frightening. This mixed genre was still less than forty years old when Charlotte Smith – the eighteenth-century poet and novelist admired by so many in her time, including Jane Austen – set her novella “The Story of Henrietta” (1800) in the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, where the terrors of the heroine’s situation are exacerbated by her atavistic fears of Jamaica’s African-derived magicoreligious practice of Obeah and the possibility of sexual attack by black males. By the 1790s Gothic writers were quick to realize that Britain’s growing empire could prove a vast source of frightening “others” who would, as replacements for the villainous Italian antiheroes in Walpole or Radcliffe, bring freshness and variety to the genre. With the inclusion of the colonial, a new sort of darkness – of race, landscape, erotic desire and despair – enters the Gothic genre, and I here want to show and explain the consequences of that “invasion” throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
34 - Caribbean literature in Spanish
- Edited by F. Abiola Irele, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Simon Gikandi, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature
- Published online:
- 28 March 2008
- Print publication:
- 01 January 2000, pp 670-710
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Summary
The literatures of the three hispanophone islands of the Caribbean – Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico – are the oldest in the region. Their origins can be traced back to an Arawak oral tradition rich in myth and legend – gathered in all its vividness by Spanish Friar Ramon Pané in his Relación acerca de las antigüedades des los indios, las cuales, con diligencia, como hombre que sabe su idioma, recogió por mandato del Almirante (1571) (An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, Gathered Diligently by a Man Who Knows Their Language; Chronicles of the New World Encounters, 1999) – that speaks of a worldview centered on a harmonious relationship between religion, culture, politics, and patterns of work and exchange. Pané, who lived in Hispaniola from 1494 to 1499, gathered a rich trove of myths, beliefs, and aboriginal religious practices that constitute most of what we know of the Amerindian lore of the Caribbean. Together with the many descriptions found in Spanish chronicles of the dancing and singing rituals known as areitos, through which the Taínos recorded their history and reconstructed through drama salient episodes of everyday life, they offer glimpses of rich cultural traditions lost through the impact of warfare and the virgin soil epidemics that decimated the aboriginal population of the Caribbean. The picture they convey, of a society dependent on a simple economy of subsistence agriculture and fishing, survived the devastation and environmental assault of European conquest and colonization to make an important contribution to Puerto Rican, Dominican and, to a lesser extent, Cuban rural cultures, laying the foundation for traditions of resistance that would later serve as a counter world to the economy of the plantation.