The Kingdom of This World

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The Kingdom of This World

by Alejo Carpentier

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in Haiti and Cuba from the 1750s to the early 1820s; published in Spanish (as El reino de este mundo) in 1949, in English in 1957.

SYNOPSIS

Told largely from the perspective of Ti Noël, a creole slave on a sugar plantation in the north of Haiti, the novel tracks the massive upheaval caused by the antislavery insurrections, the end of slavery and colonial rule in Haiti, and the nation’s early years as an independent republic.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Alejo Carpentier was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1904, two years after his mother, a Russian pianist and language teacher, and his father, an architect from France, immigrated to Cuba. He received his secondary education in France, and then returned to Cuba to study architecture in Havana. When his father abandoned the family, Carpentier left architecture school and worked as a journalist to support them. Through his work, he traveled widely and became increasingly engaged in anti-imperialist and anti-fascist struggles in the Caribbean and in Europe. He lived for many years in France, Cuba, and Venezuela, returning to Cuba after the 1959 revolution. He published many essays, short stories, poems, and articles, but is perhaps best known for his novels Music in Cuba (1946) and The Kingdom of this World (1949). The Kingdom of This World is remarkable for its introduction of the “marvelous real” into the novel’s literary language and content, as well as for its treatment of the politics, culture, and economics of slavery.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The significance of the Haitian Revolution for Carpentier and for many others in the Caribbean and Latin America cannot be overestimated. While the eighteenth century saw many remarkable revolutionary struggles, this one was distinct in that it not only sought independence from a colonial power, but also freedom from slavery for 80 percent of its population. This achievement meant that, as Franklin Knight argues, the new republic had to destroy and rebuild its entire socioeconomic base, a “high price” for independence (Knight, p. 196).

Colonization of the Caribbean (1492-1780)

The island of Hispaniola was the site of the original New World settlement established by Columbus for the Spanish Crown in 1492. In 1509-10, the first sugar mills were built on the island, and by 1615 the first exports of Caribbean sugar reached Spain. In 1595, when the indigenous Carib and Arawak peoples were nearly decimated by disease, exhaustion from their slave labor in the mills, and malnutrition, Spain began to grant asientos (agreements) to enslave and import Africans to the Caribbean. By 1640 France had settled the islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, and most of the Caribbean had fallen under the control of the British, Dutch, French, or Spanish. The latter part of the sevnteenth century saw many conflicts and wars between the European powers. By 1670 Spain had ceded

POLITICAL DESIGNATIONS

Free persons of color (affranchis): All persons of black heritage born free or emancipated. They constituted a large and vocal minority in Saint-Domingue, with diverse and changeable political affiliations.

Mulattoes: All those born to a white parent and a non-white parent. The colonial authorities in Saint-Domingue had 128 different designations for the racial composition of those deemed non-white.

Maroons: Those who were never enslaved or who escaped slavery and survived in the mountainous or deserted areas of the island. In 1751 they numbered around 3,000.

Grands Blancs (Big Whites): Owners of large plantations and high functionaries in Saint-Domingue; many were from the French nobility, and a large number of them did not live in Saint-Domingue. They were most frequently pro-monarchy, pro-slavery, and pro-political rights for the free persons of color.

Petits Blancs (Small Whites): The plantation overseers, merchants, and lower functionaries. Mostly middle-to lower-class French or Creole (of French heritage, but born in Latin America), the petit blancs often competed with mulattoes and other free persons for jobs and resources. They were most frequently pro-republican, pro-slavery, and opposed to equality for the free persons of color.

Governor: The head of the bureaucratic administration in Saint-Domingue; answered to the King and oversaw the Assemblies and the Military, He was based in the capital of the Northern Region, Cap Français.

Estates General/National Assembly/National Convention/Constituent Assembly: Legislative bodies of the French government. The Colonial Assembly: The overarching Assembly within Saint-Domingue. When they drafted a Constitution that broke with the French National Assembly, the regional and social factions within the Colonial Assembly began to pull apart.

Jamaica and the Cayman Islands to England, and in 1697 it ceded western Hispaniola to France in the Treaty of Ryswick. At this time, the western section of the island was called Saint-Domingue, and the eastern, Santo Domingo. More territorial wars erupted between the European countries from 1739 to 1763, which ended in France’s losing control of some areas but managing to retain its hold on Saint-Domingue (later called Haiti).

Saint-Domingue was a very valuable possession. By 1780, several decades after the novel opens, it had become the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean. Joan Dayan writes that Saint-Domingue was “known for its splendor, profligacy and greed” (Dayan, p. 144). During the latter part of the eighteenth century, the French Caribbean surpassed all other exporters of sugar, including the British, exporting 141,089,831 pounds in 1789 alone (Knight, p. 114). The colony produced 40 percent of France’s foreign trade, and provided crucial customs revenue. It was also a strategic naval base.

Regional divisions and race relations

Saint-Domingue was governed in three administrative “units” that were divided geographically, politically, and socially: northern, western, and southern. The northern was the most economically powerful region, with the greatest number of large plantations (8,000) and the biggest slave population; it extended across the Plaine du Nord, was separated from the other regions by a mountain chain, and had Cap Français (“Le Cap”) as its capital. The western administrative unit was the stronghold of the petits blancs or “small whites,” and extended across the Arti-bonite Valley to the town of St. Marc and south to Port-au-Prince. The southern region was the least populous and most rugged of the three regions. It was home to many free persons of color and to a sizable mixed-race population.

By 1791 the total population of the colony was 520,000, of which 452,000 (86 percent of the total) were slaves (the majority of whom were black, with a small minority of mulattos), 28,000 were non-white free persons, and 40,000 were white (Knight, p. 367). The colony of Saint-Domingue was administered by a bureaucracy and a military whose heads answered directly to the French king. There were Provincial Assemblies, but they had to answer to the legislative bodies in France, to which the colonies sent their own deputies.

The late seventeenth century marked the systematization of slavery under the Code Noir, or Black Code. Passed by the French King Louis XIV in 1685, it established the legal conditions for the treatment of slaves, who were defined under the Code (and in other legal documents concerning slavery) as property. The Code covered such items as the amount of food considered subsistence level for a slave, the “humane punishment” of slaves, and permission to free slaves. This permission was revoked in 1721, after which slaveowners would be charged a heavy fine for emancipations. During the latter half of the eighteenth century, many of the planters openly defied the Code Noir, starving the slaves and devising brutal devices to torture them, including structures specifically designed for the torture of pregnant women or small children.

The most rapidly growing group in Saint-Domingue was that of the free persons of color, who ranged from wealthy plantation owners and merchants to newly freed slaves and subsistence farmers. Along with their status came considerable obstacles, even for the wealthiest free persons of color. Their liberty was often tenuous, and they were much more legally and socially restricted than the poor whites, often their closest competitors for jobs and political power. Free persons of color could inherit property, serve in the colonial militia and the police forces, and marry whites in the earlier part of the eighteenth century. These rights were denied them later in the century, when the community grew in wealth and size and was viewed by the white colonists as a potential economic and political threat. As the white colonists increased their numbers and power, they began proposing more racially discriminatory policies, even suggesting that the “half-castes” be banished to the mountains. In 1758 mulattoes were legally prohibited from wearing European clothes or armor, gaining or using titles, and meeting together, even for weddings or dances.

Murmurs of discontent (1750-91)

The Kingdom of This World opens in the 1750s. Although the colonists of Saint-Domingue were then at the peak of their economic, social, and political power, a rebel slave movement threatened to undermine the island’s prosperity and relative stability. The period from 1754 to 1758, for example, was marked by large-scale poisoning scares linked in part to the slave rebel leader Macandal. Historians are divided about how much these scares reflected actual conditions and how much they were a product of white paranoia. With the public execution of Macandal in 1758, many of the rebels were isolated and the antislavery resistance seemed mortally weakened. Nevertheless, with the stirrings of revolution in the United States, and the dispatch of a mulatto regiment to the American revolutionary war, the colonials continued to fear the possibility of a slave revolution.

France itself had a similar fear—that the colonials would themselves make a bid for independence from France. This constituted a grave economic and political danger for the French, one that prompted them to try to co-opt the free colored community as their barrier against the white planters’ ambitions for independence.

In 1788 and then again in May of 1789, France’s general assembly convened to make radical changes in the French system of government; this sparked counter-movements for the preservation of the old, monarchic system, both in France and in Saint-Domingue. The French Revolution, which began in 1789, triggered the creation of competing revolutionary and counterrevolutionary militias and governing bodies throughout Saint-Domingue. On August 26th, 1789, the French National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The questions of citizenship and nationality that emerged from this declaration provoked two basic questions for the colonies: First, were the slaves to be defined as human beings or as property? This query stemmed from the inclusion of slaves in the colonists’ population estimates, which dictated the number of deputies that would represent them in the French Assembly. Second, what was the legal status of mulattoes? The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen led to debates over enfranchising mulattoes whose parents were both free, a proposal voted into law on May 15, 1791. In Saint-Domingue, however, the colonists refused to honor this so-called “May Decree,” and the colonial deputies broke from the Assembly. Ultimately, the Decree was rescinded under pressure from the colonists and from the French “maritime bourgeoisie.”

Revolution in Saint-Domingue (1791-1803)

In the midst of the conflict between the colonists and the French government, the slaves of the Northern Plain launched a massive uprising in August 1791. More than 1,000 plantations were burned in just over one month, and, before the colonial militia was able to contain the revolt, hundreds of whites and thousands of slaves had been killed. One of the early leaders of the movement was a slave named Ti Noël from the Lenor-mand de Mézy plantation in the Northern Plain. Other leaders of this revolt included the former slaves Jean-François and Georges Biassou, the future King Henri Christophe of independent Haiti, and Vincent Ogé, who led a mulatto delegation to Paris in 1791 and returned to Saint-Domingue determined to have the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen apply to the free persons of color. Another rebel slave, Toussaint L’Ouverture, played a critical role in the history of the country. Toussaint was from the North, where he quickly rose to lead the rebel forces there.

In September 1792, when France’s Republican Commissioners Léger Felicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel arrived in Saint-Domingue to fight the insurrection, they faced two battles. The first, against the rebel slaves, aimed to bolster the system of slavery, which was the economic mainstay of the bourgeoisie who supported the French Revolution. The second, against the royalists, was to ensure the republicans’ authority in the colony. The whites and mulattoes were initially united, but, as the news that the French revolutionaries had executed King Louis (January 21, 1793) reached Saint-Domingue, the whites split into royalist and revolutionary factions, with most of the mulattoes siding with Sonthanax, for the moment. Over the dissent of the royalist faction, largely composed of the petits blancs, Sonthanax enforced the May Decree.

Meanwhile, France’s enemy, Spain, offered the leaders of the rebel slaves assistance and arms, in exchange for their agreement to fight off the French. Biassou and Jean-François consented, but Toussaint agreed only on the condition that his forces could fight independently and for the French monarchy. Sonthanax thus faced a dual challenge, the force of the counter-revolutionaries and the force of the Spanish-backed slaves. Surrounded in Le Cap, Sonthanax decreed the abolition of slavery on August 29, 1793. Meanwhile, the rebel slaves of Saint-Dominigue used the continuing wars between the European powers that had Caribbean colonies (France, Spain, and England) to strategic effect, managing to gain the equipment, training, and opportunity to challenge the counter-revolutionary forces. In the spring of 1794, after winning many victories for the Spaniards, Toussaint left the Spaniards and joined ranks with the French. He had continued to play all sides, building up his army, and at one point swearing his allegiance to the British forces who had invaded and taken from the French most of the colony’s western region, as well as the islands of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Lucia. In mid-1794, after hearing that the French general assembly had passed a decree abolishing slavery, Toussaint turned on Spain and England with his own forces, banding with the French republicans, then under the leadership of Commissioners Etienne Laveaux and Sonthanax. Spain left first in 1795, followed by England in early 1798. After the mulattoes colluded with the royalists to oust the republicans, Toussaint defeated their combined forces and drove out the royalists. In 1796 he was declared Assistant Governor by Laveaux. At this point, Toussaint was in control of the entire north and west of Saint-Domingue, with the mulatto general of the colony’s free persons of color, André Rigaud, in control of the south. Fearing that France would attempt to reimpose slavery, Toussaint pushed Laveau and Sonthanax to return to France, which they did over the next year, leaving Toussaint to turn his attentions to the south. By 1800 Toussaint’s forces had defeated the French, British, Spanish, and even Rigaud, to gain control of all of Saint-Domingue. In 1801 Toussaint was proclaimed governor-general and began the painful task of reconstruction. His principal assistants in this endeavor were the generals who aided him in battle, Henri Christophe and Jean-Jacques Dessalines.

In the same year Toussaint reached a compromise with France, by which his country would be completely self-governed and yet would still be part of French territory. Fearing that Toussaint was moving towards independence, Napoleon sent his brother-in-law, General Victor-Emmanuel Leclerc, to depose Toussaint, Christophe, and Dessalines. The Napoleonic army captured the ports, but the three Saint-Domingue leaders fought a guerilla-style war, aided by the yellow fever that devastated Leclerc’s army. Henri Christophe led the burning of Cap Français and Jean-Jacques Dessalines the burning of St. Marc. Toussaint was soon kidnapped by the French authorities and imprisoned in France, where he died in April 1803. For the others, the news that slavery was to be restored rallied the black population against a weakened and sick Ledere army. When Ledere died, the virulently racist General Donatien Rochambeau waged an even more single-minded campaign of “extermination,” but ultimately was defeated by Dessalines and his generals. On January 1, 1804, Dessalines declared Saint-Domingue to be independent and renamed it Haiti, after the name given the island by its pre-Columbian inhabitants, Ayti.

Republic of Haiti

Dessalines’s declaration of independence had immediate repercussions for antislavery and independence movements throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, though fear of reprisal by the European powers prevented the Haitian leaders from becoming involved in other anticolonial struggles. In October 1804 Dessalines had himself crowned Emperor. In early 1805 he ordered the massacre of many whites in Haiti, possibly because he feared the reinstitution of slavery, possibly as a continuation of the race war begun by Ledere and Rochambeau, or possibly because of his own racial hatreds. It was Dessalines who made it illegal for whites to own property, declaring that all citizens at the time he took over, whether mulatto or black, were “black.” Internationally, his republic was highly regarded for its non-interventionist foreign policy and for its goal of economic autonomy for Haiti, principles that the future King Henri Christophe would attempt to build on in the creation of his new society.

On October 17, 1806, the autocratic Des-salines was ambushed at Pont-Rouge and shot dead, after which Christophe was named acting chief of the government. Determined to instate himself as sole ruler, Christophe denounced mulatto leader Alexandre Pétion’s proposal of power-sharing and declared war on him. This conflict marked the beginning of 14 years of civil war. During this discord, the south was again divided from the north and was governed as a Republic, with Pétion as its head of state. The north became a kingdom under Christophe.

For many in both the north and south, post-independence life replicated the structures and conditions of slavery, though now in a society ravaged by wars and disease. The reign of Christophe turned out to be an ill-conceived imposition of European court life upon an impoverished and physically devastated country. After 14 years of civil strife, economic deprivation, and enforced labor conditions that drove many to their death, Christophe’s subjects rebelled, marched to the royal palace (called Sans Souci—“without care”), and burned it into ruins. Christophe killed himself in the palace in October 1820, during the worst of the insurrections. Nevertheless, Christophe’s attempt to institute a black kingdom based on the European model has been regarded by many as admirable, part of a noble enterprise that had astonishing successes as well as tragic failures.

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World moves from the early 1750s to 1820, opening in Cap Français (Le Cap), the northern capital and wealthiest city in Haiti. Structured in four parts, the novel depicts the background to the slave revolts and the wars for independence, the Napoleonic invasion of the island by generals Victor-Emmanuel Ledere and Donatien Rochambeau, the dictatorial reign of King Henri Christophe, and the aftermath of his death. The narrative focuses on the experiences of three characters: Ti Noël, the central protagonist of the novel; Pauline Bonaparte Ledere, the wife of General Ledere and the sister of Napoleon; and Pauline’s black masseur, Soliman, later a servant to the family of Henri Christophe.

Part One opens as Ti Noël, a slave on the plantation of Monsieur Lenormand de Mézy, escorts his master through Le Cap on a horse-buying trip. Greeted by the governor on his way to the barber shop, Lenormand de Mézy wields the influence and prestige of a large plantation owner, or a grand blanc (big white). Barber-shop symbols of the French monarchs are contrasted with the print, on display in the neighboring book shop, of an African king, whose image corresponds to the descriptions of the kings there as warriors whose “precious seed distended hundreds of [women’s] bellies with a mighty strain of heroes,” descriptions related to Ti Noël by his friend, the Guinean-born slave Macandal (Car-pentier, The Kingdom of This World, p. 14).

Subsequent chapters deepen this contrast by placing Macandal’s evocations of African history and religion alongside the imitation-French society created by the colonists in Saint-Domingue. In these chapters, Macandal conjures the cultural fusion and worldly sophistication of pre-colonial Africa for Ti Noël through descriptions of the metal-workers’ art, painted drums, fortresses, and markets. These descriptions are intercut with those of the arduous sugar-mill work being done by Macandal and Ti Noël. As these images of Africa unfold, Macandal’s hand is caught in the rollers, dragging his whole arm into the mill. His arm must be amputated, and, now incapacitated for heavier labor, he becomes the cattle pasturer. Macandal takes advantage of his relative freedom and his access to the livestock to test the properties of the plants and fungi he finds. He takes Ti Noël to meet Maman Loi, a Vodou priestess and healer with remarkable powers, who teaches them many of the curative and fatal qualities of the local plants. Macandal then disappears, assuring Ti Noël that it is with a plan in mind.

Later, Ti Noël is alerted by Maman Loi that he must meet Macandal, then learns that Macandal has been planning a full-scale slave revolt. Through drumming, clandestine meeting sites, and call-and-response songs, Macandal has set up a communication network throughout the northern plain and even over the mountains into the Artibonite valley, by means of which the slaves can contact each other and gain spiritual strength for the battle against the white planters. When he returns to the Lenormand de Mézy plantation, Ti Noël begins to poison the animals. The poisoning spreads from plantation to plantation, sending the owners into a panic. Soon many of the plantation owners and their families are mysteriously dying, including Madame Lenormand de Mézy.

Many slaves are tortured by their owners or by vigilantes who are searching for the source of the poisoning. Finally, under torture, a slave gives up Macandal’s name, triggering a massive search by the soldiers of the Le Cap army garrison and by some of the planters and their employees. They capture Macandal, then stage his public execution. Believed by the slaves to be capable of conjuring the Vodou gods and of changing his form at will, Macandal becomes a legendary heroic figure on this occasion. After being captured, he is bound to a stake over a roaring fire, from which he momentarily frees himself and escapes into the crowd. Macandal is forced back into the fire but the crowd does not notice this, and is convinced of his “remaining in the Kingdom of this World” (Kingdom of This World, p. 52).

Part Two opens 20 years later, in 1791, shortly after the death of the second Madame Lenormand de Mézy, as the master’s new lover, the talentless actress Mademoiselle Floridor, is brought to the plantation. The degeneracy of the planter class is suggested through the increased brutality of Lenormand de Mézy’s treatment of the slaves and through the alcoholic and malarial ravings of Mademoiselle Floridor. The scene shifts to a gathering at the Bois Caiman [Caiman Woods], a secret meeting spot for the rebel slaves in the woods of Morne Rouge [Red Hill]. The Jamaican revolutionary, Daniel Bouckman, explains that a law has been passed in republican France requiring that Negroes be given their freedom, but that the monarchist landowners of Le Cap have refused to honor the law. Bouckman further declares that a pact has been made between the “great Loas [gods] of Africa” and the “initiated” in the Caribbean to begin a war for freedom from the planters. The group swears their allegiance to Boukman and names the general staff of the revolution, who declare that the signal will be given eight days later.

Reflecting bitterly on the slaves’ bid for political freedom, Lenormand de Mézy hears the “Call of the Conch Shells,” the signal for the start of the insurrection. As he hides, the slaves overrun his house, drink his wine, and rape his mistress. The rebels are captured and Bouckman is killed. Lenormand de Mézy begs the governor to spare the lives of Ti Noël and his other slaves, intending to sell them in Havana, but the governor calls for the “complete, absolute extermination of the slaves, as well as of the free Negroes and mulat-toes” (Kingdom of This World, p. 78).

The governor’s fears unsettle Lenormand de Mézy, and talk of the “secret religion” of Vodou makes him question every drumbeat and song he hears among the slaves. Gathering his possessions, including his slaves, Lenormand de Mézy boards a ship for Santiago de Cuba, encountering a spectrum of white refugees from Haiti, ranging from French plantation owners like himself to musicians, priests, and artisans. As his master settles into the expatriate life of leisure in Santiago, Ti Noël is drawn to the Cuban churches and culture. He feels greater affinity with the baroque Catholicism and Afro-Cuban influences he encounters there than with those of the French-style churches of Le Cap. From a distance, Ti Noël learns that the struggle against the planters has continued unflaggingly in Haiti, provoking the French to bring in troops and dogs to defeat the revolutionaries.

The perspective then shifts to that of Pauline Bonaparte Ledere, as she journeys from Europe to the French Caribbean with her husband, the general in charge of the French counter-revolutionary forces. While General Ledere arrives in Haiti armed with the gunpower and manpower of the Napoleonic army, Pauline comes armed with her own battalion of outfits and accessories, as well as exotic ideas about the Caribbean absorbed through theater outings and stories in France. Pauline’s superficial concerns control the action that follows. Her desire to travel overland to the French port city of Brest in a litter delays the departure of the entire army, and once on the ship she basks in the lustful and servile attentions of the male officers. She romanticizes the French Caribbean, focusing on the landscape, the music and dances, and the fruits, while disregarding Leclerc’s rising concern about the clashes between slaves and planters. She employs Soli-man, a former bath-house attendant, as her masseur, bather, and personal servant. As with the army officers, she stokes Soliman’s sexual desire for her. The racial divide between Soliman and those officers is made clear by the difference in her behavior with them, for while she takes several officers as lovers, she allows Soliman only to kiss her feet. Though Pauline’s relationship with Soliman is intimate and even dependent, her powerful position as white mistress is tacitly reinforced.

When the plague sweeps through Haiti, General Ledere sends Pauline, her maids, and Soli-man off to the island of Tortuga, where she lives an even more luxuriant life, until Ledere arrives, seriously ill with the yellow fever. Pauline consults Soliman, and ultimately allows him to take over care of her husband from the European doctor. She participates fully in Soliman’s prescribed remedies, praying with him, finding and preparing curative herbs, dedicating all her energies to treating her husband. When he dies, Pauline nearly goes insane. She voyages with his coffin to Rome, carrying an amulet to Papa Legba, Vodou god of the crossroads, from Soliman.

Pauline’s departure marks the beginning of the government of French army officer General Donatien Rochambeau, a government dominated by hedonism and corruption. Rochambeau’s cruelty shows itself when he publicly tortures and executes blacks, whom he feeds to his dogs, and when he rapes the infant daughters of slaves in order to terrify the population into submission.

Part Three shifts back to Santiago de Cuba, where Ti Noël has purchased his freedom from a Santiago plantation owner who won him in a card game from the now-dead Lenormand de Mézy. He travels back to the now-independent kingdom of Haiti, ruled by King Henri Christophe. Returning to the plantation, he discovers that it is in ruins. Now an old man, Ti Nod stumbles upon the officers of King Henri Christophe’s army, dressed in their Napoleonic-style uniforms. He follows them to Sans Souci, the royal residence. Pausing to contemplate it, he is briefly imprisoned, and then forced into labor with other men, pregnant women, and children. The laborers form a long procession of brick-carriers up to the Citadel La Ferrière. Ti Noël remarks to himself that the residence and fortress that he and the other captives are forced to build are “all the product of a slavery as abominable as that he had known on the plantation of M. Lenormand de Mézy” (Kingdom of This World, p. 122). Nevertheless, the majority of the Haitians view the fortress as a monument to a king of their own race, and as protection—physical and spiritual—against future military onslaughts by France.

When the building is nearly finished, Ti Noël is allowed to escape and he immediately sets off for his former home. He passes through Le Cap, where he finds the city absorbing the death screams of Corneille Breille, who was Henri Christophe’s favored priest until he asked permission to return to France. Henri Christophe sentences Breille to be buried alive in the archbishop’s palace.

The scene shifts back to a church service being performed for Henri Christophe, who is palpably anxious. His presentiment is justified when the specter of Corneille Breille can be heard and partially seen. The vision leaves the king paralyzed on the floor, sending him into a fever from which he never fully recovers. Later, in the palace, with the help of Soliman, who is now his valet, the king stands at a window and witnesses his troops in disorder. He moves into the throne room, and from there listens to the sounds of drumming and of the spreading of the fires in his dairies and sugar-cane fields, regretting that he modeled his republic and court life after European examples and repressed the Vodou practices. As Sans Souci burns, and it becomes clear that the drumming communicates the messages of a full-scale revolt, the king shoots himself in the head and dies. The remaining members of the royal family escape to Rome, where Soliman, who has remained with them, dies.

The action now shifts back to Sans Souci, where Ti Noël, having led the sack of the royal palace, is furnishing his home with the loot. He wears a green silk coat that belonged to King Henri Christophe and a straw hat folded into a bicorne, and moves about his old master’s plantation playing with items snatched from Sans Souci. He talks to himself, believing that he is king and that the animals that wander onto the plantation are gifts from his people.

At this moment, the arrival of surveyors on the property marks the beginning of a new republic. This new republic institutes forced labor, and again makes corporal punishment legal. The republic is run by a new biracial aristocracy that implements the same system of social caste and titles as the Europeans did. Fearing that he will be forced into slavery again, Ti Noël decides to shake off his “human guise,” as Macandal used to do, and to turn himself into a series of animals.

In the novel’s final chapter, Ti Noël assumes the form of a goose, initially admiring the principle of equality in all geese. However, when he attempts to join the other geese, they shun him. Ti Noël takes this as a sign that he must be brave enough to face the world as a human being. He experiences a revelation, one which impresses upon him the weight of his responsibility to “the Kingdom of this World.” Recognizing that it is only in this world that “man finds his greatness, his fullest measure,” Ti Noël declares war against the unjust new “masters,” then disappears in the “great green wind” that sweeps over the entire plain (Kingdom of This World, p. 185).

Vodou and resistance

Many historians link the organization of the Haitian slave revolt to the clandestine meetings at which the slaves practiced their outlawed Vodou rites. They also attribute the strength of the slaves’ resistance, both physical and cultural, to the religion’s role in the slaves’ social organization, as well as to its mythical and spiritual dimensions. Carpentier’s treatment of Macandal’s escape, presented both as a miracle of transformation and as the collective delusion of a distracted crowd, reveals the role of faith and vision in these events.

Vodou is a dynamic set of religious beliefs and practices, derived from multiple cultural and religious sources in west and central Africa. These beliefs and practices were transformed by the enslaved, who were influenced by Catholicism, Masonic rites, and indigenous American belief systems and practices. As an outlawed set of religious practices for much of the colonial (and even the post-colonial) period, Vodou has by necessity been an improvisational, highly responsive, religion. Altars were often scratched into the ground or built from found objects that could be used to erase their traces as quickly as they created them. In the scenes in which Macandal, and later Bouckman, invoke the spirits, Carpentier accentuates the interaction of Vodou with the natural world. Both Ti Noël and Macandal possess the power to shape-shift into animal forms, reflecting a belief of Vodou practitioners: “In Vo-dun [Vodou], all beings can take spiritual or physical form at will, and such transformations are under the control of human beings” (Belle-garde-Smith, p. 15). Underlying this belief is the idea that the human and the divine are not sharply divided realms. In fact, in Vodou ceremonies, the spirits of divinities or ancestors may inhabit the body of the participant, called “the horse.” The spirit is said to “ride” the person, entering this world from another across the threshold of the body.

Sources and literary context

Carpentieri presentation of the mafor events and figures in the novel reflects his meticulous historical research. He investigated the minute details of the political, economic, and cultural lives of as many people touched by the Haitian revolution as possible, from the plantation slaves and maroon figures who led the insurrections, to the transient visitors to Le Cap, to the Jesuit priests and Napoleonic army figures. Even in the case of the minor characters or incidental references, the details are often drawn from written historical accounts, sometimes imaginatively redrawn to render certain effects. One historian who is explicitly mentioned in The Kingdom of This World is Moreau de Saint-Méry, a leader of the grands blancs, who figures as a fringe character in the novel. His Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique (originally published in 1797) describes the execution of Macandal:

les efforts violens que lui faisaient faire les tourments de feu, arrachèrent le piton et il culbuta par-dessus le bucher
[the torment of the fire made him strain violently, uprooting the stake and somersaulting above the fire.]
(Saint-Méry in González Echevarría, p. 133; trans. V. Sams)

Literary critic Roberto González Echevarría compares this passage with Carpentier’s description of the dying Macandal: “howling unknown spells and violently thrusting his torso forward. The bonds fell off and the body of the Negro rose in the air, flying overhead” (Kingdom of This World, p. 51). González Echevarría discusses many such examples of this “recasting” of historical descriptions, in which Carpentier transforms detail and tone to yield an alternate vision of the “reality” in his nonfiction sources.

Helping to achieve this alternate vision is the baroque style of his prose—in Carpentieri view the proper style for the Latin American novel. Concerned with wordplay and wit, it is also a complex style that gives rise to clever and sometimes purposely ambiguous images. When Ti Nöel transforms himself into a goose, for example, the novel describes his behavior in a way that makes an indirect comment on human nature:

Ti Nöel employed his magic powers to transform himself into a goose… . But, when he attempted to take his place in the clan, he encountered sawtoothed beaks and outstretched necks that kept him at a distance. He was made to keep to the edge of the pasture. … In view of this Ti Noel tried to be circumspect, and not draw too much attention to himself, to approve the decisions of the others. His reward was contempt and a shrugging of wings.
(Kingdom of This World, pp. 182-83)

Two authors in particular, Ramiro Guerra y Sánchez and Fernando Ortiz, have profoundly influenced Carpentier (González Echevarría, p. 44). Their work focuses on Cuba’s African-based religions and on the economic and cultural aspects of the sugar and tobacco plantations. Car-pentier’s own research into African-based religious and musical practices frequently explores their historical dimensions and repercussions. It also demonstrates his participation in the prim-itivist movement of the 1920s and ‘30s. Involving painters, musicians, writers, and ethnographers, this movement aimed to evoke the primeval essence of national identity. Usually this essence was conceived of in ethnic terms, which put blacks and Indians into the limelight. Whereas before the region’s black population, for example, had been thought of as springing from backward societies, it now gained status as an authentic, pulsating force at the forefront of the area’s movements for independence.

Lo real maravilloso

The Kingdom of This World is held by many to be the first novel of “marvelous realism” (also known as “magical realism”) in Latin American literature. Taking the term from art critic Franz Roh, who used it to describe German expressionist art in the 1920s, Carpentier uses the term not to define a “style” of writing, as is widely believed, but a mode of being, or a “marvelous reality” that is unique to Latin American culture and experience. Since Carpentier was part of the group of Surrealist writers and artists active in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, his conception of the marvelous has often been aligned with this movement, whose practitioners sought to produce fantastic images in literature by drawing on the unconscious and by juxtaposing words and images in startling ways. However, in his prologue to the first edition of this novel, Carpentier dismisses the Surrealist vision of the “marvelous,” which he scathingly describes as a cultivated fusion of random objects and stylistic tics. He argues that the fantastic should be understood as an inherent part of reality, rather than as a subversion of that reality.

CARPENTIER ON “THE MARVELOUS REAL”

“I will say that my first inkling of the marvelous real came to me when, near the end of 1943, I was lucky enough to visit Henri Christophers kingdom—such poetic ruins, Sans-Souci and the bulk of the Citadel of La Ferrière, imposingly intact in spite of lightning and earthquakes; and I saw the still-Norman Cape Town, the Cap Français of the former colony, where a house with great long balconies leads to the palace of hewn stone inhabited years ago by Pauline Bonaparte. My encounter with Pauline Bonaparte there, so far from Corsica, was a revelation to me,”

(Carpentier in Zamora and Faris, p.84)

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

History repeats itself

In 1943 Alejo Carpentier took a trip to Haiti that made a deep and lasting impression upon him. The country was revisiting many of the conflicts that had concerned it 150 years earlier, conflicts that Carpentier would describe in The Kingdom of This World. In the novel, for example, Haiti (or Saint-Domingue) was under the political and economic control of a foreign power, France. Similarly, in 1943 Haiti had just emerged from an extended occupation by a foreign power, this time, the United States. The U.S. military presence, which had begun in 1915 (during World War I) in part to counter a sizeable German colony there, and in part to quell civil unrest and establish a U.S. foothold in the Caribbean, did not end until 1934. And it was not until 1941 that U.S. officials in charge of Haitian economics and finance finally left the nation. Most Haitians welcomed their departure.

The much-resented U.S. military occupation of Haiti had important consequences for Haitian political culture well into the mid-20th century. Showing a “marked preference” for mulattos over blacks, the Americans filled the supervised Haitian bureaucracy with mulatto officials and statesmen (Skidmore and Smith, p. 303). This did little to alleviate the racial tensions, familiar to readers of Carpentieri novel, that had plagued Haiti since colonial times. The elevation of the mulattoes by the despised U.S. occupation forces, combined with a pan-Caribbean surge in black nationalism (known as noiñsme, from noir, the French word for “black”), led to the sweeping 1946 political triumph of the black middle class in Haiti. New president Dumarsais Estimé quickly replaced the mulatto political elite with blacks, which outraged Haiti’s mulatto population. Accused of exacerbating hostilities between Haitians of different colors, Estimé was ousted in a coup in 1950, the year after Carpentier published The Kingdom of This World.

Essential to the noiriste movement was a focus on the African heritage of black Haitians. This included the Vodou religion, which both mulattoes in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular worked hard to suppress. The practice of Vodou had been outlawed in Haiti, in fact, and in 1941-42, the years immediately preceding Car-pentier’s visit to the country, the Roman Catholic clergy embarked upon a vigorous “anti-superstition” campaign designed to eradicate Vodou entirely. Critics saw this campaign as a Eurocentric attack upon the folk culture of the black mafority, the latest attempt by French culture (personified by the mulatto elite) to destroy the African heritage in Haiti. With the rise to power of black national leaders in 1946, the validity of the Vodou tradition in Haitian culture began to be accepted, even by some of the clergy, although it must be said that such acceptance did not mean approval.

Noirisme also directly influenced the way in which Haitians looked back on their history. The mulatto elite had preferred a vision of the hard road to Haitian independence as one built primarily by mulatto heroes, people like Vincent Ogé, Alexandre Pétion, and André Rigaud. The noirists elevated black leaders like Toussaint L’Ouverture, King Henri Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. This new recognition encouraged a revival of interest in all forms of black culture in Haiti—Vodou, as mentioned, art, music, and literature.

Reviews

The Kingdom of This World was very well received in Latin America and elsewhere, not only by critics but also by other writers. Novelists from Carlos Fuentes (see The Death of Artemio Cruz , also covered in Latin American Literature and Its Times) to Gabriel García Márquez (see One Hundred Years of Solitude) to Salman Rushdie cited it as influential on their work. In France, where the novel was published as Le Royaume de Ce Monde, the magazine Americas reported that it was rated the “Best Book of the Month” by the Reader’s Society (Walker, p. 36). Writing for the Atlantic, Phoebe Adams called the language of the novel “poetic” (Adams, p. 84). In his column for the Saturday Review, John Cook Wyllie took issue with the vigor of all this applause, arguing that the praise lavished on the book was overzealous. But he went on to describe the novel as having “a nervous and exciting excellence, as of a Haitian drum, high-pitched because of the heat, communicating something of the frenzy as well as the words of the message” (Wyllie, p. 26).