Istwa Nou

Elie Lescot inherited two things from the Vincent years that pointed in opposite directions. One was the campaign against Vodou, run with the Catholic clergy, which raided temples and destroyed what it found in them. The other was a rising scholarly enthusiasm for Haitian folklore, for the dances, the songs and the beliefs of the peasantry, studied and defended above all by Jean Price-Mars. The two could coexist because officials drew a line between spiritual practice and public performance. A ceremony held for the spirits was superstition to be stamped out. The same drumming and the same steps, described in an ethnographic paper or staged for an audience, were national culture. Haitian intellectuals in the capital lived on both sides of that line with varying degrees of comfort. Price-Mars's daughter Marie-Madeleine moved in the circle of women organising for rights in these years, so the contradiction was not a distant one. It ran through the family.

Stenio Vincent was opposed to Vodou throughout his presidency, and in his last year in office he put the state behind the antisuperstitious campaigns the Haitian Catholic Church was running. The effect was to make the practice criminal. What followed was a new wave of violent repression aimed at ceremonies, at temples and at the objects used inside them. It is worth being exact about what was being suppressed. Vodou is the religion the majority of Haitians serve, assembled in the colony out of West and Central African traditions by people who had been shipped across the Atlantic against their will, and the revolution that made Haiti a country drew on it for its organisation and its oaths. The Haitian state and the Roman Catholic Church, working together, were suppressing the spiritual life of the population that state governed. Lescot inherited the campaign in 1941 and carried it further. While it ran, holding a ceremony in the open was an act of defiance.

Count what was stacked into a single production. A woman wrote it. Its subject was a woman who had fought in the revolution and been executed for it. The songs and dances in it came out of Vodou, and they came out of research and practice carried on by women. Any one of those would have been unusual on a Port-au-Prince stage. Together they amounted to a claim about who owned Haitian culture and who was entitled to perform it. The year sharpened the claim. Sténio Vincent had governed from 1930 to 1941 and handed power to Élie Lescot, who took office in 1941 and would hold it until 1945 by rewriting the constitution around himself. Both men courted Washington, and both treated Vodou as a problem of national image. In that season a hall in the capital paid to watch Haitian women sing their own religion inside their own history. It was cultural sovereignty performed without permission.

Years after the Rex performance Emerente de Pradines set out the line she worked by. When she performs Vodou songs and dance, she said, it is true and it is real; what is absent is the ceremony and the calling of the spirits, and that absence is what makes it folklore. The distinction protected the sacred while making a version of it available for a stage. Other people used the same distinction for other ends. Politicians, leftist organisers, intellectuals and women's rights campaigners in the Haiti of the 1940s put professionally choreographed spiritual performance to work as proof of national authenticity, useful in tourism, in inter-American diplomacy and in personal advancement, while still rejecting the truth of the practice itself. The dance was welcome in a hotel ballroom. The ounfò was still being pulled down. De Pradines held both halves at once and kept the part that mattered out of the transaction.

Emerente de Pradines was a dancer, a choreographer and a Vodou practitioner. She began at the Rex Theatre in August 1942, playing the goddaughter of Sanité Bélair in Perez's drama. It was her first play, as it was Perez's, and she said long afterward that she sang her first two folk songs in it, and that nobody had ever sung their folklore on a stage before. Take the claim at its full size. The first public theatrical performance of Haitian folk music came inside a play written by a woman of the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale about a woman who had commanded troops in the revolution, staged in a commercial theatre in Port-au-Prince. No government cultural programme and no folklore festival got there first. The music of the Haitian majority reached the national stage in the hands of women, and it arrived inside a story about a woman the French had shot.