Friday, April 4, 2014

Ozymandias vs Ouroboros

On a trip through Australia, Dutch author Cees Nooteboom once wondered about the relation of men to the land. His mind kept wandering back through time, an eraser rubbing the veneer of civilization away, or as he himself put it: “those who want to see history will always see history, will see beneath the asphalt the newly discovered land.” I can't help but think of the Situationists when reading that: sous les pavés, la plage – beneath the paving stones, the beach. Nooteboom wonders whether it is not the land discovering the people, instead of the other way around. He senses here, in this youngest of continents, the gravity that is the essence of history, which is “not so much the inevitable course of the Marxists but the suction of the vacuum.”

This suction of the vacuum is what I kept feeling when I read Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World. Set amidst the power struggles of the Haitian Revolution, this novella is like an insidiously romantic old photograph, like the vague smears left by a voodoo spirit traversing the Hispaniolan island. Though Carpentier mostly follows the fate of one slave called Ti Noël, he moves restlessly across race and class, bunking for a while with Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's little sister who was the wife of the French general stationed in Haïti (then Saint-Domingue), and with King Henri-Christophe, the first Black King. Carpentier seems both unable and unwilling to keep the narrative tight and tidy. From the start, there is a sense of general unhinge to the story, a sense that every footstep set will be doubled back upon. Indeed, to an ignoramus like me, the names of the various black rebel leaders blur into one another: Macandal, Bouckman, Henri-Christophe. Never has a novella so clearly shown what George Orwell preached in Animal Farm - that the revolters of today will be the tyrants of tomorrow. Ti Noël, after a brief stint in Cuba, comes back with a heart brimful with hope to gaze upon the first Negro-led nation, and is shocked to see the blacks whip and flagellate the other blacks. “It was as though, in the same family, the children were to beat the parents, the grandson the grandmother, the daughters-in-law the mother who cooked for them.” It was the demise of a dream.

The slave Ti Noël, after getting away from the oppressors, returns to the plantation of his former owner, which has been abandoned. The land has again become just that: land, acting blithely unaware of what it once was. Surely, some of it should have remained, should have been carved in the sands and soil. What Ti Noël finds instead are “fragments of wall which looked like the thick, broken letters of an alphabet,” but it is an alphabet which no longer spells out anything.

The plantation had turned into a wasteland crossed by a road. Ti Noël sat down on one of the cornerstones of the old mansion, now a stone like any other stone for those who did not remember.

Snakes and synecdoches

It is tempting to think of Nooteboom's “suction of the vacuum” working as in television sitcoms, always returning to the status quo; it is tempting to talk of the lifespan of the lifeless place, being born from the infinity of death, and returning back to it after a while; it is tempting to hold up the evidence of this plantation, this once-again unwrit land, and wave it in the face of the revolutionaries (as well as the modern technocrats) who believe in progress. However, as is often the case, the truth seems to be somewhat more nuanced. While the plantation itself is gone, we are nevertheless left with a number of synecdoches or symbols of it. The iron cock of the weathervane is the last remnant of the chapel, and a brick chimney has stood firm where once a house was. Ruins that now need a narrator to be linked to their past. You can see the struggle: the decay of time aims for the void, for the inner circle from which the universe supposedly sprung, while at the same time men aim for the infinite expansion of that universe. Whereas the Marxists believe that human force outdoes the force of the universe, those standing atop ruins know better. UNESCO is short for Tragedy and Heartbreak, for the loss of the hope of generations, for yet another failed attempt.

All that civilization is is a spoke in the revolving wheel of cyclical time.

It is therefore no surprise that snakes and serpents feature heavily throughout the book. There is talk of “King Da, the incarnation of the Serpent, which is the eternal beginning, never ending,” as well as the Cobra of the holy city of Whidah, “the mystical representation of the eternal wheel.” Da is short for Damballa, the Vodou God of the Sky, the primary Vodou God. Snakes and serpents feature prominently throughout many religions across the globe. Most (in)famously, the snake in the Garden of Eden seduced Adam and Eve into taking a bite of the apple. This event was the introduction of sin but simultaneously the introduction of time, it was the Kingdom of Heaven tumbling down to earth. Earth, which is another thing the snake symbolises. Stealthily and steadily, it creeps along, always touching base. Most of all, though, the snake is associated with cycles and renewal. It sheds its own skin to be born again, and is often represented as a circle, biting its own tail. The snake is therefore the great adversary of any revolution, a symbol of inevitability, of always ending up back where you began. Indeed it begs a question Carpentier dutifully asks: “Could a civilized person have been expected to concern himself with the savage beliefs of people who worshipped a snake?” Probably not.

Perhaps it is to such a background that we can understand why King Henri-Christophe, that first of Black kings, was more inspired by Napoleon than by endemic rulers and gods. He wanted to make his mark upon place and time, and in the north of Haïti, near Milot, he had his slaves built him a palace and a citadel. The Citadel La Ferriere, which Carpentier calls “a mountain on a mountain”, rose above the palace Sans Souci. Henri-Christophe chose elevation, that easiest of symbolisms, to help him on his way to immortality, to help him stand “on his own shadow”. Now, two hundred years later, as you might guess, all that is left of those palaces are ruins. A UNESCO heritage site. Suitable for photographs only.

There is something tragic about that. Apart from all manner of other things, the many leaders of the Haitian revolution left a string of capitals behind them: Cap-Haïti, Milot, and Dessalines (then Marchand), before finally deciding on Port-au-Prince. These former capitals seem forever ruined, living not, like Henri-Christophe, on their own shadow, but under a shadow of fame and grandeur that will always eclipse them, the way the palace Sans Souci and the mountain-on-a-mountain citadel still tower above the small town of Milot. These places seem to exist only as a chapter in a history book. It is hard to fathom that people still live and die there.

Finally, the Eagle

Happy are those who read only one chapter of life. Those who depart at the birth of empires bear with them the impression of their perpetuity; those who die at their fall, are buried in the hope of their restoration; but do you not realize what it is to see the same things unceasingly,—the same alternation of prosperity and desolation, desolation and prosperity, eternal obsequies and eternal halleluiahs, dawn upon dawn, sunset upon sunset?

- Machado de Assis, Life (1921)


Alejo Carpentier, born and raised in Cuba, knows all of this better than I do, of course, and he concludes his narrative in absolutely breathtaking fashion. The words to follow can only come from an old man, Ti Noël, who, with “beclouded eyes”, has seen everything and has finally given in to “this endless return of chains, this rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt.” More than a century later, men like Sartre and Fanon would suggest the opposite, that only revolt is useful, but these words ring far away and faint in the face of Carpentier's story. They ring faintly, too, perhaps, in the headlines of today, in the endless struggles of African countries fighting for freedom. In two incredible paragraphs, Carpentier caught the beauty of this fight as well as its ultimate resignment and futility:

He lived, for the space of a heartbeat, the finest moments of his life; he glimpsed once more the heroes who had revealed to him the power and the fullness of his remote African forebears, making him believe in the possible germinations the future held. He felt countless centuries old. A cosmic weariness, as of a planet weighted with stones, fell upon his shoulders shrunk by so many blows, sweats, revolts. Ti Noël had squandered his birthright, and despite the abject poverty to which he had sunk, he was leaving the same inheritance he had received: a body of flesh to which things had happened.

Now he understood that a man never knows for whom he suffers and hopes. He suffers and hopes and toils for people he will never know, and who, in turn, will suffer and hope and toil for others who will not be happy either, for man always seeks a happiness far beyond that which is meted out to him. But man's greatness consists in the very fact of wanting to be better than he is. In laying duties upon himself. In the Kingdom of Heaven there is no grandeur to be won, inasmuch as there all is an established hierarchy, the unknown is revealed, existence is infinite, there is no possibility of sacrifice, all is rest and joy. For this reason, bowed down by suffering and duties, beautiful in the midst of his misery, capable of loving in the face of afflictions and trials, man finds his greatness, his fullest measure, only in the Kingdom of this World.

Throughout mythology, the conflict between the eagle and the serpent is a constant one. The serpent is bound to earth while the eagle soars in spiritual flight. In light of all this, when after all his toils Ti Noël is last spotted by that “wet vulture who turns every death to its own benefit,” that is exactly the way it should end. Death should not come any other way. Like his country, the slave succumbs to the vacuum.

Ouroboros, Greek for tail-devouring snake, might be the most famous version of the snake that symbolizes the circular. Ozymandias, the Greek moniker for Ramesses II, is the ruler best remembered for not being remembered. Shelley's poem on Ozymandias has become synonymous with the inevitability of time. Like the eagles and vultures gnawing on Ti Noël's bones, Ozymandias signifies that even if you are remembered through time, you have no control over how and why. King Henri-Christophe's grand kingdom might have faded away, but he will be remembered in Carpentier's precise and poetic diction.

If history is truly the cruel mistress it sometimes seems, our protagonist Ti Noël will be born again shortly after resting his weary bones, perhaps on the other side of the island, the other side of the battlefield, and the other side of the revolution. Like the unfolding of Pandora's Box, his memory will have shed everything of that tired past except hope. Hope will stick to him forever, in its short one-syllable, four-letter incarnation, refusing to elaborate upon itself, defined only vaguely as somewhere between the Serpent and the Eagle, incorporating both Ouroboros and Ozymandias.