Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times

By Martin Munro

In Tropical Apocalypse, Martin Munro argues that since the earliest days of European colonization, Caribbean—and especially Haitian—history has been shaped by apocalyptic events so that the region has, in effect, been living for centuries in an end time without end. By engaging with the contemporary apocalyptic turn in Caribbean studies and lived reality, he not only provides important historical contextualization for a general understanding of apocalypse in the region but also offers an account of the state of Haitian society and culture in the decades before the 2010 earthquake. Inherently interdisciplinary, his work ranges widely through Caribbean and Haitian thought, historiography, political discourse, literature, film, religion, and ecocriticism in its exploration of whether culture in these various forms can shape the future of a country.

The author begins by situating the question of the Caribbean apocalypse in relation to broader, global narratives of the apocalyptic present, notably Slavoj iek's Living in the End Times. Tracing the evolution of apocalyptic thought in Caribbean literature from Negritude up to the present, he notes the changes from the early work of Aimé Césaire; through an anti-apocalyptic period in which writers such as Frantz Fanon, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Édouard Glissant, and Michael Dash have placed more emphasis on lived experience and the interrelatedness of cultures and societies; to a contemporary stage in which versions of the apocalyptic reappear in the work of David Scott and Mark Anderson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Aug 6, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813938219

Martin Munro

Martin Munro is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Literatures at Florida State University.

Book preview

Tropical Apocalypse

HAITI AND THE CARIBBEAN END TIMES

Martin Munro

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Munro, Martin

Tropical apocalypse : Haiti and the Caribbean end times / Martin Munro. pages cm. — (New world studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3819-6 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3820-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3821-9 (e-book)

1. Haitian literature—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Haiti—In literature. 3. Apocalypse in literature. 4. Apocalypse in motion pictures. 5. Haiti—Social conditions. 6. Religion—Haiti. 7. Psychic trauma—Caribbean Area. 8. Literature and history—Caribbean Area. I. Title. II. Title: Haiti and the Caribbean end times.

PQ3940.M863 2015

840.9’97294—dc23

2015007794

NEW WORLD STUDIES

J. Michael Dash, Editor

Frank Moya Pons and Sandra Pouchet Paquet, Associate Editors

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1The Duvaliers and Apocalyptic Memory

2Utopian Ends: Aristide and the Apocalypse

3The Chimères and the Haitian Antihero

4Religion, Nature, and the Apocalypse

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I AM VERY grateful to Cathie Brettschneider and everyone at the University of Virginia Press for their support and professionalism. I have benefited greatly over the years from the guidance and example of Celia Britton and Michael Dash. Thanks and love as always to Cheralyn, Conor, and Owen. Sections of the book have been published as the following articles: The Apocalyptic Creole, from Dessalines to the Chimères, Diaspora: A Journal of International Affairs 17.1 (Spring 2008 [2013]): 105–20; "Exile, Return, and Mourning in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal and L’Énigme du retour," Irish Journal of French Studies (2013): 87–109. My thanks to the editors of those journals for allowing me to reproduce the work here. Also, grateful thanks to Peter Doig for the use of his work on the book’s cover.

Introduction

WHEN THE earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, 2010, amid the chaos of fallen buildings, dead bodies, and general panic, citizens of Port-au-Prince were heard to cry that it was the fin du monde, the end of the world. To many, it was an apocalyptic moment, a cataclysmic end, but without the promise contained in biblical versions of the apocalypse of a new and better beginning. This was therefore a very particular apocalypse, one that had been prepared for, indeed prophesied to some degree in religious and political discourse, the arts, and culture more generally for decades, perhaps centuries. For Haitian and broader Caribbean history were founded on the apocalyptic meeting of Europeans and Amerindians—the latter being quickly exterminated by the former. Subsequent Haitian and Caribbean history has been shaped by the no less apocalyptic reality of plantation slavery and colonialism, and their enduring legacies. This book is about that history, and the quite singular apocalypse that has long been part of Haitian and Caribbean reality. It is written in a sense in the shadow of the earthquake, which stands as the terrible conclusion to Haiti’s centuries-long apocalyptic history. The apocalypse in this context relates to the biblical sense of the final destruction of the world, the end of the present age, and to the meaning of the Ancient Greek term apocálypsis, which refers to a revelation, the uncovering of something hidden. Apocalypse is in this sense something of a polyvalent term, one that is used at times symbolically, as a narrative tool to think of human and societal relationships to time and place; at others, the apocalypse is a means of understanding the lived reality and narrating of disaster; while at others still, it is an ideologically charged concept, related to long-standing conceptions of Haiti as a failed, ill-starred nation, for example in political or religious discourse, where it may be used to justify Western economic, military, and political interventions. In some cases, Haitian authors refute these representations of Haiti and present distinctly anti-apocalyptic narratives of time, place, and nature. More commonly, however, the apocalyptic narrative is generated as it were from the inside, as a means of understanding (and surviving) the particular movements of history that have created the disasters of the present.

History seems to create a particular relationship with death that is expressed in the Haitian proverb Nou mouri déjà, nou pa pè santi—we are already dead, we don’t fear the odor of death. In a sense, the world and life came to enslaved Africans through death, the deadening nonexistence of the plantation. Such a conception of death (and life) is not that far removed from the apocalyptic thought of modern-day evangelicals and explains to some extent the stoic fatalism—often interpreted as innate resilience—that underlies much of the history of the Haitian people, and in particular their reactions to the 2010 earthquake. It is this polyvalent quality that characterizes Haitian apocalyptic narratives, and that distinguishes them from, for example, the southern apocalyptic imaginary, defined in a recent work as a field of reference, drawn from the cosmology of southern evangelical Protestantism, that maps the apocalyptic possibilities of cataclysm, judgment, deliverance, and even revolution onto the landscape of the region (Hoefer 4). While, as chapter 4 of this book shows, evangelical Protestantism is a significant element in propagating apocalyptic ideas in contemporary Haiti, the other chapters demonstrate the range and complexity of Haiti’s apocalyptic imaginary, and show that the Haitian and Caribbean apocalypse has its own particular meanings and paradoxes, for instance in the ways in which the state functions (or does not function), and most notably in the sense that the apocalypse has endured for centuries, and that the end times have no apparent end.

WHILE IT was a national, localized event, the Haitian earthquake may be read as a particularly devastating instance in a contemporary, global moment that seems to throw up new apocalyptic scenarios almost by the day: tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, food crises, riots, financial markets collapsing. In his recent work Living in the End Times, Slavoj Žižek offers a vision of the contemporary globalized world on the cusp of an apocalyptic breakdown. This moment is heralded by the prominence of what he calls his four riders of the apocalypse, which are: the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions (x). For Žižek, the coming apocalypse is inevitable, but is something that the world ignores and tries desperately to not think about (xi). To explain this general reticence to face up to the apocalyptic truth, he uses the psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known scheme of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (xi).¹ One can see, he says, the same five figures in the way the world’s social consciousness thinks of the forthcoming apocalypse (xi). The first reaction, he says, is one of ideological denial: there is no fundamental disorder; the second is exemplified by explosions of anger at the injustices of the new world order; the third involves attempts at bargaining (‘if we change things here and there, life could perhaps go on as before’), and when the bargaining fails, depression and withdrawal set in; finally, after passing through this zero-point, the subject no longer perceives the situation as a threat, but as the chance of a new beginning, or as Mao Zedong put it: ‘There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent’ (xi–xii). In other words, Žižek sees finally in the coming apocalypse an opportunity to do away with the old order and to create what he calls an emancipatory subjectivity (xii). As such, this apocalypse has, at least potentially, a redemptive quality; it is a narrative with a teleology and built-in process that takes the subject and the society from one state considered to be undesirable to another that is seen as being ideal, almost utopian in its emancipatory potential for the individual living freely in the germs of a communist culture (xii).

The Four Riders of the Caribbean Apocalypse

This book is less about the global apocalypse that Žižek envisions than the apocalyptic history and actuality of a region—the Caribbean—that one might say was born out of the apocalypse, and whose subsequent history has turned in further apocalyptic cycles, in which nature and human agency conspire to create a quite particular experience of time and place. The birth of the modern Caribbean was brought about in conditions that both recall and modify Žižek’s characterization of the four riders of the apocalypse. There are no doubt more than four harbingers of the apocalypse in the Caribbean, but it is instructive to work with Žižek’s model as this allows the present inquiry to ultimately zoom out as it were and place the apocalyptic Caribbean in relation to the broader world.

In both cases, there is an ecological crisis that is an almost inevitable consequence of the economic system: in the Caribbean, this ecological disaster dates back to the earliest days of European colonization, and is exacerbated by the region’s susceptibility to natural disasters.² On many islands, contacts with Europeans led to the near decimation of the indigenous Amerindian population, while the forests were cut down and the land cleared for European crops and livestock by the early 1600s. In the French colony of Saint-Domingue, colonists wrote in the eighteenth century of the environmental damage caused by plantation agriculture. Planters complained to the French government that the only wood they could use for building was found on mountain summits, and while Versailles proposed a reforestation program, colonists were more concerned with the profits they could reap quickly in sugar and coffee than with the less lucrative business of growing timber. By the end of the century, planters had already observed how deforestation had led to a drastic decrease in rainfall, which in turn lowered the levels of nearby rivers (Garrigus 116–17). Thus was set in motion a cycle of environmental decay that makes Haiti an extreme case of the ecological crisis of the Caribbean, a crisis felt to varying degrees in all the islands of the region. Genocide and ecocide were complementary projects in the Caribbean, as Derek Walcott writes in Omeros: Seven Seas would talk/bewilderingly that man was an endangered/species now, a spectre, just like the Aruac/or the egret, or parrots screaming in terror/when men approached, and that once men were satisfied/with destroying men they would move on to Nature (300).

The second rider of the Caribbean apocalypse—slavery—is intimately connected to the first, and is something of an undead ghost from the past that haunts every apocalyptic turn in Caribbean history. Slavery was instituted once the native populations had become, as Walcott says, specters, eradicated from the landscape that was itself changing and deteriorating rapidly. Among its many effects was the creation of societies structured by death: slavery was a system that killed, through disease, malnutrition, overwork, and violence. White planters were far from immune to the deadly instability of plantation societies: epidemics of tropical diseases decimated the white population, to the extent that in Kingston, Jamaica, from 1722 to 1774 there were nearly 18,000 funerals and only 2,669 baptisms (Brown 2). In Jamaica and other plantation societies, the whites’ accumulation of property and wealth and the renewal of family and social networks as well as the slaves’ conception and representation of their own existences in cultural forms stemmed in significant ways from high mortality and the lingering presence of the dead (ibid. 4). It is this lingering, deathly presence that is perhaps slavery’s most enduring legacy, and which is felt still in the apocalyptic present, where the codes and sanctions of slavery always resurface and find new places to inhabit (Dayan 194). In particular, the notion that people could be possessed and owned by others and exist as human chattels to be passed around, damaged, or consumed in effect eliminated the very idea of personhood for the enslaved (ibid. 195). In such a situation, because the living never truly live, The dead do not die. They haunt the living, both free and unfree, African and European [and] still speak in the present landscape of terror and ruin (ibid.).

The present landscape is indeed haunted by the undead memory of slavery, by great swathes of people living a kind of social death (Patterson 22), and by colonially inherited systems of law, governance, and society that reproduce in commuted form figures that live, as slaves did, by and through the body, and in a self-destructive cycle that leads such figures to seek social and historical revenge through inflicting damage not on the elites but on those that resemble them the most directly. It is no coincidence that when such post-slavery figures assembled themselves into organized groups in Haiti they adopted or were given names that evoke their haunting, undead qualities: the Tontons macoutes and the Chimères. The former, the notorious private militia of the Duvalier presidents, were named after the Creole bogeymen figures who would kidnap errant children in the night and keep them in their knapsacks, while the latter, the organized gangs hired from the urban slums to support Jean-Bertrand Aristide and the Lavalas party, are named after shadowy monsters, or else composite mythological beings, only partially human. In both cases, the names indicate the ghostly nature of the militiamen and suggest that they are manifestations of the unfinished past, phantoms born of the enduring legacy of slavery in the Caribbean.

The third rider of the Caribbean apocalypse is a consequence of the second, and relates directly to one of Žižek’s categories, what he calls the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions (x). In this regard, the Caribbean has a long history; slavery and colonialism instituted color and class hierarchies that to a large extent continue to shape social structures. These inherited structures are exacerbated and indeed bolstered by contemporary local and global economic dynamics that further widen the divides in Caribbean standards of living. Those working in the global economy are increasingly living almost in a different world from those in the sprawling slums that blight even the most prosperous Caribbean countries. Stark economic differences are reflected in the organization of space, in the growth in gated communities—secluded colonies of the relatively wealthy, and signs of the fear and mistrust that are born of the radical differences in standards of living between communities within single Caribbean nations.³ It is the entrenched social divisions as much as the redundancy of postcolonial regimes that have created what David Scott calls the dead-end present, the sense that despite, or indeed because of, the earnestly progressive ideologies of early Caribbean postcolonial regimes—radical nationalisms, Marxisms, Fanonian liberationisms, indigenous socialisms—the various anticolonial projects across the region have stalled radically (Conscripts 1). In many ways, the free community of valid persons envisioned by the Guyanese poet Martin Carter seems as distant and unattainable as at any time in modern Caribbean history (qtd. in ibid. 2). In Scott’s withering critique, the perpetuation of social divisions and exclusions is due to the acute paralysis of will and sheer vacancy of the imagination, the rampant corruption and vicious authoritarianism, the instrumental self-interest and showy self-congratulation that have characterized governance in the postcolonial Caribbean (ibid.). Almost everywhere, he adds, perhaps recognizing the apocalyptic direction in which many Caribbean societies are headed, the anticolonial utopias have gradually withered into postcolonial nightmares (ibid.).

The fourth rider of the Caribbean apocalypse is the crisis of criminality that pervades virtually every society in the region. This crisis is closely related to political failings, and is as much a question of the failure of the state and of the law as it is a matter of criminality per se. Caribbean people are no more naturally inclined to criminality than anyone else, but there exists in many places a potent and dangerous mix of social and economic division, unemployment, low salaries, limited access to education, weak state institutions, corrupt and ineffectual policing, and other factors that have combined to make the Caribbean the site of a crisis that touches every level of society, and which led for example to the declaration of a state of emergency in Trinidad in 2011. Security is one of the boom businesses in the Caribbean, as the wealthy seek to protect their property and families with personal guards, themselves hired from the poor and paid a minimum wage that barely covers their food and living costs in economies with spiraling inflation. It appears significant too that one of the most common crimes across the Caribbean is kidnapping, an act that seems to have historical resonances, and to underscore the importance in Caribbean history of owning and appropriating bodies, stealing them, and using them as a form of currency.⁴

Each of these four riders of the Caribbean apocalypse is closely connected to the others, both in a cause-and-effect way and in a more complex circular, reciprocal relationship that perpetuates the apocalyptic cycle. The ecological crisis is a direct result of slavery, which left a legacy of social division and color and class complexes, which fuels the wave of criminality, which is also a result of the ecological crisis, which has led in many countries to urbanization and the creation of the urban slums in which criminality thrives. Add to this external factors such as the global financial crisis and the rising cost of food, and natural factors such as the region’s susceptibility to earthquakes, droughts, floods, and other events, and one has a particularly precarious situation, and a sense that the region stands at the edge of an apocalyptic abyss that is deeper and more long-standing than the one envisioned by Žižek for the Western world. One feels indeed that the Caribbean has been at or around this point since the earliest days of colonialism and that in some ways it has been living its own version of the end times for centuries.

Caribbean Literature and the Apocalypse

It is no surprise therefore that one finds in Caribbean literature, and regional culture more generally, images of the apocalypse and strands of millenarian thought that reflect quite directly the historical reality of the region. One might say that the most important issue in the development of Francophone Caribbean literature in particular has been the conceptualization of the region as a site for romantic fantasies of liberation or more precisely of redemptive or revolutionary apocalypse (Dash, Postcolonial Eccentricities 33–34).⁵ In Aimé Césaire’s work, for instance, the Caribbean is often presented as the negative pole of the triangular circuit (83); while Europe has power and resources and Africa has culture and history, the Caribbean for Césaire is kind of void, an apocalyptic site that is marked by absence and emptiness. One senses with Césaire that he lived still in the apocalyptic history instigated in the earliest days of slavery and colonialism. What remains for you from former times, he asks in one poem, before offering his own response: Exploded sky flayed curve/of flogged slaves’ backs/grief treasurer of the trade winds/shut book of spells forgotten words/I question my mute past (255). The apocalyptic islands are thus characterized by silence and forgetting; and yet at the same time and in that very silence history is everywhere perceptible.⁶

One could say that Césaire’s epic work, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, is shaped around an apocalyptic movement that bears some comparison to Žižek’s adapted model of the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (xi). While Žižek writes of an impending apocalypse, Césaire’s has already taken place and is ongoing. This is why Césaire, at least in this poem, in a sense skips the denial stage: the reality around him makes it impossible to deny that the apocalypse has occurred and that its effects are still being felt. Thus, Césaire’s poem begins with anger, and with images of the Caribbean that suggest strongly the poet’s apocalyptic vision: he writes of the hungry Antilles, the Antilles pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited with alcohol, of letting free monsters, of a historical and contemporary disaster and, more obliquely, of the putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed venereal sun (35).

Again, because the apocalypse has already taken place, there is little sense of Césaire addressing the next stage of Žižek’s model of grief: bargaining. There is to be no bargaining with a history that has already occurred. Instead, the speaker seems to lapse at times into the next stage, depression, which is due at once to the historical and contemporary forces that have brought about the apocalypse, and to the inertia and apathy of the people. The crowd he writes of is detoured from its cry of hunger, of poverty, of revolt, of hatred, and appears to him so strangely chattering and mute (ibid.), and the speaker seems caught at times in a similar state of depressed, voiceless inertia. Toward the end of the poem, Césaire moves strikingly into the final stage of Žižek’s model: acceptance. In one memorable sequence, he seems to go beyond hatred, depression, and the other stages of grief to a state of acceptance that suggests a kind of healing:

I accept . . . I accept . . . totally, without reservation . . .

my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify

my race pitted with blemishes

my race a ripe grape for drunken feet

my queen of spittle and leprosy

my queen of whips and scrofula

. . . . . . . . . . . .

I accept. I accept. (73)

This acceptance of history and race in effect prepares the way for the final, triumphant images of the speaker and his country standing now, . . . hair in the wind, my hand puny in its enormous fist and now the strength is not in us but above us (77). The poem closes with the word verrition, which as Dash argues, means to scrape clean or sweep away and contains the words vérité (truth) and vert (green), suggesting a fresh, green truth that explodes from this fiery conflagration (Postcolonial Eccentricities 38). In effect, Césaire arrives at a point similar to that foreseen by Žižek, who writes that after passing through the zero-point of anger and depression, the subject no longer views his situation as a threat, but as the chance of a new beginning (xii). In Césaire’s case, this new beginning is the result of a process whose apocalyptic nature exists in the poem’s imagery, its movement through its various stages, and in the underlying idea that the new beginning must follow the end of the previous order. What can I do? he asks at one point in the poem, before replying, One must begin somewhere. Begin what? The only thing in the world worth beginning: The End of the world of course (55).⁷

Similar images of apocalyptic endings and beginnings appear in the work of many of the other major figures in Caribbean writing; indeed it could be argued that the apocalyptic aesthetic is the most fundamental practice of twentieth-century French Caribbean literature in particular (Joseph 28). Derek Walcott, like Césaire, writes of the legacies of apocalyptic history and asks: who in the New World does not have a horror of the past, whether his ancestor was torturer or victim? Who, in the depth of conscience, is not silently screaming for pardon or for revenge? (What the Twilight Says 39). Walcott’s Adamic perspective on Caribbean history, one that neither explains nor forgives history, and which abandons any desire to find redemption or justification in history, is essentially a response to (and also one way out of) the common problem of the perceived lack of history, for when he does look back he, like the others, sees in the seeded entrails of the slave a new nothing, a darkness (ibid.). Amnesia, Walcott says is the true history of the New World (ibid.). These factors create what he sees as the essentially bitter tone in New World poetry: In such poetry there is a bitter memory and it is the bitterness that dries last on the tongue. It is the acidulous that supplies its energy. The golden apples of the sun are shot with acid. The taste of Neruda is citric, the Pomme de Cythère of Aimé Césaire sets the teeth on edge, the savour of Perse is of salt fruit at the sea’s edge. . . . For us in the archipelago the tribal memory is salted with the bitter memory of migration (41). Walcott sees in all great New World poets a rejection of ethnic ancestry and a faith in elemental man, a kind of post-apocalyptic figure with his memory erased, a second Adam, as he names it, who will mark a beginning similar to that envisioned by Césaire, and the re-creation of the entire order (40).

In a similar vein, Antonio Benítez-Rojo considers the plantation, the New World apocalyptic site par excellence, to have been, he says, the womb of my otherness, in other words the matrix from which was born the new in the New World (Three Words Toward Creolization 54). The plantation is Benítez-Rojo’s old and paradoxical homeland, whose foundation he imagines in positively apocalyptic terms as the big bang of the Caribbean universe, whose slow explosion throughout modern history threw out billions and billions of cultural fragments in all directions—fragments of diverse kinds that, in their endless voyage, come together in an instant to form a dance step, a linguistic trope, the line of a poem, and afterward repel one another to re-form and pull apart once more, and so on (ibid.). In Benítez-Rojo’s version, no doubt the most utopian of those considered here, the apocalyptic moment produces therefore a great energy, in which he sees almost exclusively new birth, new cultural forms, and a source of endlessly creative reproduction.

Indeed, Benítez-Rojo goes even further by arguing that the apocalypse is an alien concept to the Caribbean. Writing of the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, Benítez-Rojo contends that with the world at the edge of a nuclear catastrophe the Cubans defused the moment by refusing to consider it in apocalyptic terms. This was a revelatory moment for Benítez-Rojo; he identifies it as the time he reached the age of reason (The Repeating Island 10). The children of Havana had been evacuated and a grave silence had fallen over the streets and the sea (ibid.). While the state bureaucracy searched for news on the radio or issued communiqués, two old black women passed by Benítez-Rojo’s balcony, walking in a certain kind of way (ibid.). While he cannot describe precisely this way of walking, he says that there was a kind of ancient and golden powder between their gnarled legs, a scent of basil and mint in their dress, a symbolic, ritual wisdom in their gesture and their gay chatter (ibid.). Watching the two women, Benítez-Rojo says, he knew at once that there would be no apocalypse (ibid.). The swords and the archangels and the beasts and the trumpets and the breaking of the last seal were not going to come, he writes, for the simple reason that the Caribbean is not an apocalyptic world; it is not a phallic world in pursuit of the vertical desires of ejaculation and castration (ibid.). The notion of the apocalypse, he argues, is not important in Caribbean culture, but is a product of ideological propositions articulated in Europe and which the Caribbean shares only in declamatory terms, or, better, in terms of a first reading (ibid.). The culture of the apocalypse is, he argues, a culture of the land, of Europeans for whom the sea is a forgotten memory (11). The culture of the Caribbean, in contrast, is not terrestrial but aquatic: a sinuous culture where time unfolds irregularly and resists being captured by the cycles of clock and calendar. . . . A chaos that returns, a detour without a purpose (ibid.).

While there is something seductive in Benítez-Rojo’s evocation of the Caribbean as an anti-apocalyptic site, the region’s history often tells a different story: there have been many instances of dictators creating, to use Benítez-Rojo’s own term, phallic worlds, and of political systems based on apocalyptic systems of for or against, honor or blood, death or glory. Also, important aspects of Caribbean culture, not least the literary and theoretical texts discussed here, bear the imprint of apocalyptic thought, which is as Dash says more deeply ingrained in Caribbean thought than Benítez-Rojo is willing to concede (Postcolonial Eccentricities 35). It seems finally something of a conceptual leap for Benítez-Rojo to take from the apparent insouciance of two elderly women in a time of crisis a sweeping theory of Caribbean culture.⁸ The fact that they are identified as black women suggests too that there is a kind of internal exoticism at play, that Benítez-Rojo is projecting onto them qualities and ways of thinking that he believes he sees, but which must to some extent be a product of his own imagination and the social and cultural distance that exists between the women and him, a distance that is suggested by his looking down on them from his balcony, as a spectator.⁹

Nevertheless, Benítez-Rojo’s reconsideration of the apocalyptic vision of the Caribbean is indicative of a broader movement in regional thought in the post-Negritude era, which in general terms places the emphasis more on lived experience than on mystical conjurations of the past, and this in turn led to less markedly apocalyptic versions of Caribbean reality, at least in works of literature.¹⁰ In the French Caribbean, for example, following Césaire, there was a decisive movement away from apocalyptic poetry to engaged, phenomenological thought and more markedly realist fiction.¹¹ Frantz Fanon was largely responsible for this shift, notably in Peau noire, masques blancs, in which he trenchantly critiques Negritude’s mystical, African elements, and also more implicitly its apocalyptic strain, figured in the following quotation in the reference to the apocalyptic Césairean tropes of explosive, sudden changes and absolute truths. The explosion will not take place today, he announces in this text. I do not come armed with decisive truths. My consciousness is not traversed by essential flashes of lightning (25).¹² Fanon further distances himself from Negritude’s apocalyptic strain in his indirect critique of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous essay Orphée noir, published in 1948, four years