The Way Through Africa: A Study of Africanism in Haiti

Abstract

The rise of Africanist ideology in Haiti is a classic example of the way a yearning for the ideals of national liberation and cultural autonomy could congeal into politically absolutist solutions. According to Frank Kermode’s definition this meant the degeneration of literary fiction into the ‘sequence of radically unchangeable gestures’ implied by myth. The emergence of the Griot movement in the 1930s and its theories of racial determinism provides the link between literary activity and authoritarian politics that emerged in post-Occupation Haiti.

Fictions can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive. In this sense anti-Semitism is a degenerate fiction, a myth … Myth operates within the diagrams of ritual, which presupposes total and adequate explanations of things as they are and were; it is a sequence of radically unchangeable gestures¹