A child calls out marraine in every act and refuses the ending

Marie, the goddaughter in Perez's play, has no clear existence in the historical record. Perez most likely invented her. Between the songs, the dances and the fast talk about troop movements, the filleule keeps reminding the hall of a fact the military histories leave out, which is that the woman giving battle orders was somebody's marraine, her godmother, answerable for a child's upbringing and soul. Sanité Bélair was shot by the French in October 1802. The play cannot change that and does not try. What it does is put the word marraine in a child's mouth in every act, so the death keeps being interrupted by the voice of the person who came after. Their fates were tied together by the writing. A godmother is a claim on the future, and the future in this play will not stop calling her name, which is one way of saying the past cannot be executed while somebody is left to answer for it.

The war produced demands for independence, and it also produced stronger colonial states. For Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium the African territories mattered more after 1945 than they had before, and interventionist policy was pushed with new energy. Laissez-faire economics had governed until the early 1930s, the depression brought state management in its place, and the war settled the argument in favour of intervention. Africa's contribution to European recovery was judged essential, which meant European governments running colonial economies directly. In the British territories this is called the second colonial occupation, running from about 1945 into the early 1950s. The postwar lines were drawn accordingly. African nationalism became a serious force at the precise moment colonial administrations became most determined to invest in, develop and defend what they held. In many places colonial rule had lasted little more than two generations. The empires assembled in the 1890s were meant to last considerably longer than they did, and by the 1950s London and Paris had worked out that economic influence could outlive political administration.

SHADA removed peasants from their land by force. Houses were pulled down and fruit trees decades old were cut at the base. By 1943 the company had cleared 47,177 acres. At its greatest extent it held over 100,000 hectares of Haitian ground, which is close to the reach of the plantation system the revolution had destroyed nearly a hundred and forty years earlier. Rubber now stood where cane had stood. The land was worked for export under foreign direction, the people on it drew wages for labouring on fields they had owned, and the logic was the one their ancestors had fought a thirteen year war to break. What had changed was the empire giving the orders and the crop it wanted. Depletion ran through the soil first and then through the people living on it, since a family stripped of its trees and its plot has nothing left to draw down except itself.

A year after the campaign that proclaimed Haiti a hotbed of magic, Jacques Tourneur's film I Walked with a Zombie reached the screen. Its premise was that zombies kept until then by priests had taken advantage of the disorder to escape, so that anyone walking in the countryside risked meeting one at the edge of a cane field. The figure of the living dead, brought back from the grave and stripped of will, carried the terror of the picture. The timing is the interesting part. A Haitian government campaign against the religion supplied the raw material for an American entertainment about that religion, and the film then circulated back as evidence of what Haiti was. For those who serve the spirits, being made into a zombie is the worst punishment there is, since it reduces a person to a slave, which is the exact condition the religion grew up against.