Click
an area of the map for world news.
:
|
From the
March 2002 issue of
World Press Review
(VOL. 49, No. 3)
Arts
'Royal Bonbon'—Entranced
and Entrancing
Isabelle
Potel, Libération (left-wing), Paris, France,
Jan. 2, 2002
Great creative
minds have dreamed of it. Eisenstein had a screenplay that never
became a film; it was one of Orson Welles’ aborted ideas.
In the heart of a twisted mountain range, towering above the
Haitian village of Milot, stand the romantic ruins of Sans Souci
palace, built early in the 19th century by the visionary black
monarch Henri Christophe.
Higher and even less accessible in the mountains, this ruler
built a citadel to defend his Northern Kingdom—a massive,
soaring citadel that Haitians have venerated for two centuries
as both proof of their greatness and sanctuary for their well-peopled
imagination. This is where Christophe was buried after his suicide,
although nobody knows exactly where. For decades, people in
Haiti have talked about making a film “up there,”
a film about a past whose hold on Haiti’s present is so
strong that, some say, it compromises Haiti’s future.
Filmmaker Charles Najman put together a French-Canadian-Haitian
crew and temporarily took over the Sans Souci site, the most
valuable national treasure of a poor country that’s getting
poorer. For six weeks last fall, Najman used the Cap-Haïtien
region, in the north of the island, as the backdrop for a drama
titled Royal Bonbon—from the name of one of King Christophe’s
personal guards—a film that certainly doesn’t resemble
any previous creation.
By the dim light of dawn, a bus carrying the film crew moves
along a chaotic track full of tap-taps [Haiti’s bush taxis].
In the shadows, quick-striding pedestrians, bicycles, mopeds
carrying three passengers pass by precariously built huts and
shacks.
The bus is heading for Bassin Diamant (Diamond Hollow), a site
lost in the remote mountains, where a voodoo ceremony is supposed
to take place. Najman has managed to get a “voodoo permit”
to shoot the event, which consists of a white piece of paper
covered with writing reminiscent of the pictorial inscriptions
of Antonin Artaud.
Under gigantic breadfruit trees lies a waterhole the size of
a swimming pool. Blocking the path to the pool is a big rock,
upon which, motionless, meditates the mambo (voodoo priestess)
Angélique Fénelon, the “Marquise of the zanj
(spirit),” her prominent cheekbones slashed by two lightning
bolts painted there.
The head of the camera crew, Josée Deshaies, is restless.
The sun is going to leave the priestess’ face before Josée
can shoot unless the celebrants go ahead and push their little
boat loaded with offerings out into the middle of the pond—and
the middle of the camera angle. Angélique is crooning
an ancient melody in Creole. Then the drummers arrive, women
with dazzling headscarves, and a character named Complot (Plotter)
who directs the dance. The voodoo can wait until the filmmakers
are ready, but once the ritual gets going and the space is filled
to overflowing with entranced and writhing bodies, nothing can
stop it, and the filmmakers have to do the best they can.
Later, the extras dress up as Nègres marrons (slaves
who fled the plantations and found refuge in the forest), pulling
on hoods and smearing motor oil over their bodies, and slip
between the trees, their torches lit. Najman, steering a course
between ethnology and fiction, is making reference to the revolt
that started in the Bois Cayman (Alligator Woods) on Aug. 14,
1791, which led to the abolition of slavery and later to Haiti’s
independence in 1804.
The country became the first black republic in the world, after
having rudely repulsed Napoleon’s expeditionary army, led
by Gen. Leclerc. An event that this displaced people, ripped
out of Africa to die in the thousands at sea or in the cane
fields under French whips, will never forget.
After writing a book and making several documentaries in Haiti,
Najman returned to the island to shoot what you could call a
tale of madmen. Haiti is always expecting a messiah, or at least
a messenger. It’s not unusual to run into wandering loonies
convinced they are Dessalines [Jean-Jacques Dessalines, a liberation
hero who became the first ruler of independent Haiti] or this
very same King Christophe, who Haitians see as an enlightened
despot who left behind “something of beauty” where
so many have left nothing.
In the film, an ex-soldier turned wheelbarrow man, played by
the poet Dominique Batraville, is gripped by an insanity inspired
by Christophe and goes off to spout nonsense in the majestic
surroundings of Sans Souci and the Citadel, accompanied by a
street kid (Benji, “discovered” among the orphans
of Cap-Haïtien) and by a peasant farmer whom the new “monarch”
makes his aide-de-camp (Ambroise Thompson, an elderly man of
a supernatural beauty who was a tourist guide back when tourists
still came to Haiti). The wheelbarrow man leaves the tracks
of his shaky, hesitant appeal throughout the film, adorned with
a baroque crown and evoking a kind of Ubu.
“Here,” says Najman, “I have found something
that reminds me of the Jewish villages of Poland, with the fairy-tale
imagination of the shtetl and a dizzy philosophy of joy in the
midst of misery. Haiti’s relationship with its history
is neurotic; its memory is haunted. This is what interests me—this
memory in the skin, lodged in the body—not a historic retelling.
And also a kind of communal, egalitarian, free, childlike utopia,
which stands for something real here. History has remained frozen,
confiscated by a narrow elite that drives around in air-conditioned
cars. To juxtapose the immensity of a citadel with the cracked
vision of a man who comes from nothing, from nowhere, means
to restore history’s dream, means to get inside the head
of a man who dreams of the grandeur of that history.”
On the aesthetic plane, Najman has created a mental space that
is totally sealed off, a stylized, phantom-filled space that
rejects naturalistic reportage and refers to the real country
only when the very personal whims of the filmmaker call for
it. “Think of it as a cross between [French anthropologist
and director Jean] Rouch and [German filmmaker Werner] Herzog,”
Najman jests.
Today, once again, the king is dead. Around his mortal remains
the peasants of Milot stand at a respectful distance. A cry,
a chant, erupts. “The Duchess of Pointed Hat is in top
form.” Najman says with satisfaction after the scene is
shot, “To my mind, the peasants are Haiti’s aristocrats.
It was completely natural to portray them as the king’s
court in the film. We witnessed scenes where people spoke to
Dominique as if he were really Christophe.” These real
aristocrats call each other, quite seriously, “Duke Marmalade”
or “Count Lemonade” and dance the minuet and the quadrille.
Najman found a group of musicians who’ve kept this musical
tradition alive (it’s a mix of African rhythms, flute music,
and old French melodies). Later, the village children parade
around, singing, “Cocoyer pour tout moun, allons-y,
Alonso”—“Coconuts for everybody, let’s
go, Alonso,” invoking Jean Vigo, Jean-Luc Godard....[“Allons-y,
Alonso,” a play on words from Godard’s film Pierrot
le fou].
Later, the king pronounces in Creole, “Anfin enmi yap
avansé. Yo anba ponyet nou, nap fout yo on leson pou
listwa...nou pral krazé yo...jus souf mwen bout.”
Freely translated this means, “The French had better get
ready for a surprise.” Which French? Napoleon or Najman?
The Haitians immediately grasp the actor’s intentional
ambiguity and burst out laughing. Batraville puts it this way:
“In this film I was about 90 percent successful at saving
the soul of Haiti, which is fading away.”
That’s the problem. Because the film uses Haiti’s
heroic past but turns it completely around, it risks trampling
on Haitians’ highly developed sensitivities. The re-examination
of history can only haunt a country that is sinking deeper into
economic quicksand and must suffer the advice of well-meaning
foreigners. Is it this brutal past that retards economic development?
Or is it the ruling classes who speculate on the country’s
poverty to enrich themselves with international subsidies. The
graffiti on Haiti’s walls that used to say “Viv
Titid” [Long live Titid, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s
nickname] now proclaim “A ba Aristide cochon”
[Down with the Pig Aristide].
What or who exactly is to blame? Is it Haiti’s double linguistic
allegiance—French for the educated, Creole for everybody
else? Or is it the rampant emigration that deprives Haiti of
its skilled workers (one-third of Haitians live abroad)? Or
American policy, which opposes the local cultivation of rice
in favor of American-grown rice?
Some accuse voodoo, which has survived both colonialism and
modern capitalism, and whose increasingly open vitality seems
rather to be saving Haiti from despair. Others point to the
anarchic refusal of a people fed up with drudgery and any kind
of system. Between Western-style progress and the totalitarian
Blackness ethic of the old Duvalier dictatorship, Haiti is searching
for its path.
Najman, in his contact with this repeatedly traumatized people,
traces the work of memory in its most inaccessible and radical
dimension. 
|
|
|
