Island Beneath the Sea by Isabel Allende
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Real Code Noir

My only direct knowledge of Haiti comes from my marginal involvement in the attempted Haitian coup of 1970 against ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier. The failed survivors took to sea in several small ships, ran out of fuel, and asked for humanitarian assistance from the Coast Guard. My ship was diverted from training in Guantanamo Bay and ordered to tow the rebel vessels to Roosevelt Roads, a naval base on Puerto Rico.

I, as an expendable junior officer, was assigned to take command of the larger of the Haitian ships, few of whose crew spoke English, and all of whom I suspected, irrationally, of being Tonton Macoutes, who would rather kill and eat me than allow themselves to be interned by the U.S. Navy.

My first task was to inspect the ship to ensure we had collected all the small arms. Because the generators were out of action, there were no lights; so I had to creep around the the lower deck compartments with a flashlight. Opening the door to the main hold I caught a human shape about 30 feet in front of me, arms outstretched as if crucified, legs dangling limp, with a rope around its neck. Beating a quick retreat back through the watertight door, I took a few deep breaths before re-entering the compartment.

Instead of a bloated face and tortured body, what I found was an old-fashioned deep-diving suit, with its brass helmet, hanging stiffly on its assigned hook. Relief was overcome by feelings of stupidity and embarrassment lest any of the Haitians had seen me. But the practical lesson was also clear: voodoo works - especially in the dark, and particularly when you’re out of your depth. So I do have a sense of recognition reading Isabel Allende’s tale of oppression and voodoo revenge.

Haitian voodoo fascinates me in its functionality. It is an underground culture that demonstrates how powerful the human drive to create cultural tradition actually is when people are ripped from their familiar societies. And it scares hell out of white people - for approximately the same reason, namely it represents a humanity that can’t be extinguished by power.

This is worrisome to those in charge for precisely the reasons given in Allende’s book, which are identical to those generating my fear on the Haitian ship. It’s not just a fear of loss of control, as in the Haitian slave rebellion of the early 19th century for example. It is also the more fundamental dread that one is living in an alternative reality, an unknown darkness, which might exert itself at any moment. In other words, that one is actually captive in an alien spiritual as well as physical universe.

Voodoo syncretism, its assimilation of fragments of the various cultures it comes in contact with (much like the English language in this magpie-like tendency, it occurs to me), is its strength. It is sufficiently familiar to white people because it uses some Christian symbols like the cross and the Virgin Mary. But it is simultaneously alien and threatening because it treats these symbols as what they are - enigmatic signs - and connects them with other symbols and rituals, not as dogmatic assertions or fixed creeds but as further ‘floating’ signs.

This is not the European way. It may not be the African way either. But it does create a coherent society with its own customs, language and social structure that are impervious to the culture around it. It is a product of intellectual ingenuity, artistic creativity, and spite.

Voodoo itself, therefore, is a continuous rebellion - not just against racial oppression but also against any attempt to fix the character of either human beings or human society. It undermines the established, the official, the approved, and the powerful (and thus the Code Noir, the laws of slavery). As such it is quite rightly feared. It is simultaneously there and not there, entirely real and entirely mythical, solid and ephemeral. Or a hanged man and a diving suit.

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