Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination by Toni Pressley-Sanon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination by Toni Pressley-Sanon Angela Watkins Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination. By Toni Pressley-Sanon. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017. ISBN 0-8130-5440-7. 192 pp. $74.95 hardcover. In Istwa across the Water: Haitian History, Memory, and the Cultural Imagination, Toni Pressley-Sanon foregrounds her examination of cultural production and cultural memory in the African diaspora within three theoretical concepts: tidalectics (the figurative ebb and flow of water that symbolizes the transatlantic dispersal of enslaved Africans and the resulting physical/metaphysical displacement), La Marassa (the sacred twins in Haitian Vodou), and istwa (history, story, and memory).1 Tracing the origins of enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) to Dahomey (present-day Benin) and the Kongo, Pressley-Sanon explores how African belief systems were sustained and redefined in the New World despite the attempted erasure by slave owners and colonists. At times poetic in her explanation of the African diaspora as both fractured and reinvented in an attempt to be made whole, Pressley-Sanon reimagines the capture and survival of enslaved Africans and the transformation of cultural practices that preceded slavery. Beginning with the significance of Haiti's bicolor flag, legendarily created by removing the French flag's white stripe—which, according to Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, had once symbolized the white, slave-owning population of Saint-Domingue (1–2)—Pressley-Sanon contextualizes the fight for independence during the Haitian Revolution as the reclamation of African roots among free and enslaved people of color and the (re)invention of Haitian identity. According to the author, the blue and red of the Haitian flag, which represent the Black and mulatto populations, respectively, also symbolize "two lwa who were invoked most strongly during the Haitian Revolution: Èzili Dantò and Ogou Feray" (1). Bolstered by faith in the African deities from whom they sought guidance and protection, the insurgents defeated their oppressors. [End Page 208] In her book, Pressley-Sanon examines storytelling as an integral part of African and African diasporic culture. She recalls the story of Bokofio, which Melville Herskovits writes about in Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom (1938) after an anthropological field study in the 1930s. Bokofio is taken on a treacherous journey before he is freed and allowed to return home. Pressley-Sanon presents three scenarios through which the story may be understood. She reinscribes the protagonist as someone uprooted from his homeland as a result of the transatlantic slave trade, who is taken to new lands and forced to adapt to a new way of life. Alternatively, she interprets Bokofio's "return" as the physical return to Africa after the end of slavery, in reference to documented cases in which newly freed people were sent back to their native land. Finally, she suggests that Bokofio's return to his homeland is an allusion to the belief that after death the souls of enslaved Africans return to Ginen, the spiritual underworld. She argues that both the oral tradition and the material culture specific to certain regions of the African continent and its diaspora reveal a deeper understanding of how enslaved people "died to one way of being as a result of their contact with the transatlantic slave trade [and] were also reborn to another" (11). According to Pressley-Sanon, the forced assimilation involved the act of forgetting (due to the passage of time or as a survival technique) or maintaining one's cultural beliefs by adopting Western religions and practices as a guise. Pressley-Sanon focuses on material culture in explaining tidalectics in terms of the cyclical nature of history, specifically focusing on how the past informs the present and the recognition of contemporary iterations of bondage and racial oppression. She also explores how these ruptures, as a consequence of chattel slavery, led to a fusion and reinterpretation of various African cultural practices. For example, she refers both to a performance group in Haiti whose costumes consist of cords that represent the power of bociọ, sculptures crafted "to 'work' for their owners to shield them against harm and function in conjunction with vodun [sic] energies to protect humans and...