Kiskeya-Lan Guinee-Eden: The Utopian Vision in Haitian Painting

Abstract

Visiting Haiti at the beginning of this decade, one could see that paradise paintings were popular. Every art dealer major or minor had a stock of them. Street vendors hawked them by the dozens to tourists, and in the Centre d'Art in Port-au-Prince one whole room was filled to capacity with racks and bins of them. They were as easy to find as a Madonna in Rome, probably with roots as deep. The notion of Eden, a condition of real or imagined past, and the notion of utopia, a hope for the future, are drawn together in the present of certain of these Haitian works. Their mood is not unlike that of the stoic landscapes of Nicholas Poussin, where idyllic vegetation and peaceful skies surround tragic events, or harbor half-concealed, endangering evil. For a scant decade and a half after the 1804 Declaration of Haitian Independence, Henry Christophe, a general during the war who became ruler of the northern portion of Haiti, attempted to direct the creation of a New Order in the World. His efforts and ideas were not unlike those that generated the many planned communities in England and the United States in the nineteenth century. His conception included a comprehensive and detailed legal code; structures of governance; provisions for education, including art, music academies, and libraries; establishment of a religion and of religious toleration; support from agriculture and commerce; and a defense system to protect the new order from fresh incursions of the old in the form of Napoleon's army. As had other utopian schemers, he planned for these social structures to be housed in suitably stately buildings, laid out in an appropriate spatial order. Numa Desroches depicted the methodical array of walls and stairs and windows of Christophe's Palais Sans Souci in the years of its new splendor. The remains of the most stunning and dominating of these edifices of the New Order outlasted the short-lived kingdom, in time becoming emblematic of a country that was Black and selfgoverning. Jacques-Richard Chery's painting of 1958 commemorates the building of the Citadel.