FINE ART & CUSTOM FRAMING
since 1966
Galerie Nader, Years of experience, years of excellence
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FINE ART & CUSTOM FRAMING since 1966 Galerie Nader, Years of experience, years of excellence
Our Web Site Moved to:
http://www.galeriedartnader.com/galery/catalogue/index.aspx |
|
Genres
Abstract ----------------------------------------------- Themes
Daily/Urban Life
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Lecture to Dallas Museum of Art 5 April 1997 by Dr Frantz Large Introduction
"Vom herzen zu herzen" "From the heart to the heart" (Ludwig Van Beethoven)
"Grau ist alle Theories,grun nur das Lebenbaum" "Grey are all theories\ The tree of life alone is green! (Goethe, Faust)
The sudden burst on the international scene, or, to use the words of Selden Rodman,the rebirth of Haitian Art, the almost instantaneous enthusiasm caused by its birth constitute one of the most peculiar events in the history of art. Indeed, one gets the impression of being witness to the emergence of a latent life which was expecting but a signal to manifest itself, like those Rara Bands which only need the blow of a whistle to burst out on the streets, bodies writhing with abandon; it's the bursting out of a lush nature, which, with the audacious vitality of young forms, grows at a dizzying speed, grips and wraps itself in all kinds of nooks and crannies, and blossoms- next to the most bizarre beings, whether they be elfin, or monsters- a fantastic menagerie rendered with an uncanny sense of fruition. As this showcase piles in canvas upon canvas the sorriest rif-raf of things painted ever- the eye stumbles sometimes on the most heartbreaking, the most authentic masterpiece. The amazing thing about the history of art in Haiti is the fundamental lack of respect, not to say disdain, for classical aesthetics and for the three main stages of the evolution of civilization: Pre-classical, classical, and the decadent phase. Or, rather, if those stages exist in Haiti, they co-exist and mingle with a dreadful abandon. At the very moment when a given newspaper article announces the death of art in Haiti and elaborates on its causes: repetition, commercialization, inexorability of aesthetic laws, and so on, something news bursts forth under the sun of this fantastic island. Somewhere on a country side hill or between the walls of a voodoo temple, it is from the fingers of a Lafortune Felix or a Stevenson Magloire,a new life that sprouts and burgeons, with such a vitality that we had thought forever lost, and the enchantment once again is new and the Haitian adventure goes on. It may well be that what they have called the Haitian Miracle, a miracle which one of haiti's great men summarized once and for all in a proud motto: "I spring forth from my ashes" It is this miracle to which we, today, take the pleasure of inviting you to witness.
I. This everlasting miracle can only be explained by the coexistence, all through its history, of three forces.These three forces can by symbolized by three elements: The candle, the snake and the cow. The candle, is, first of all, the torch, which from the very first moment. will project a crude light on the American theater. The snake is the all-powerful African god, Damballah, which will gather in its wake a long parade of other gods. At last, the cow, is the basket of the peasant women, it is the feeding milk which will nurture whole generations of Haitians, but it is also by identification the heart of Haiti, these masses of peasants, who, after having stupefied the world by casting off by themselves the chains of slavery will give birth to one of the most original forms of art one could ever lay eyes on.
The torch was there, glowing on August 22, 1791, at Bois-Caiman, a small village on the outskirts of Cap-Haitian where, in the course of a voudoun ceremony, a group of slaves under the command of Boukman, one of the high priests of the time, solemnly took a vow that would seal eternally the faith of an entire people: "To live freely or to die." A month later in the plantations of the north it was an immense fire, such that the flames would be visible from the neighboring islands. Boukman will be killed in combat and his head carried on a stake in triumph, but the uprising will not be crushed. Then will come to the fore, one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of mankind, Toussaint Louverture, whom Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology will inscribe in his revolutionary logbook, and to whom Wordsworth will dedicate a sonnet. Toussaint will try to establish a firm hold on the revolution.Surrounding himself with a white administration, reestablishing the practice of religion, he will attempt to open the colony to international trade, particularly american. Napoleon will not forgive him for that. Arrested for treason, Toussaint will spend the rest of his life in a french prison cell. Later on, in Sainte- Helene, Napoleon, himself a prisoner, will regret his mistake: "I should have let him govern." What would have happened, indeed, if Bonapart instead of sacrificing to St. Domingue 60,000 of his best soldiers, had used the cream of troops, namely Haitians, available at the time? No one knows,but one thing remains:the bloody routing of the French troops in St. Domingue meant the death of Napoleon's dream of an American Empire.A few years later,he would sell Louisiana to the United States. In the meantime, Dessalines, the successor of Toussaint, by taking off the white from the French tricolor flag, would create a new nation. Almost immediately thereafter, a scission of capital importance will tear apart the freshly cemented Haitian unity. In the northern part of the country, general Henri Christophe, self-proclaimed King Henry, will direct cyclopean constructions, such as the Citadel, and most of all, will leave to his people a heritage of rigor and discipline that will be,among other things, the trademark of a whole school of art, the School of Cap. In the south, instead, under the leaderships of General Petion and of his successor Jean-Pierre Boyer, we shall witness the edification of a republic, liberal enough, that will leave its imprint on the history of the Americas by giving to Simon bolivar the necessary military infrastructure which will allow him to free Latin America. Bolivar will show his lack of gratitude towards haiti, by not inviting its delegates to the first Congress of Panama. Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his "A General in his Labyrinth" will reproach him of this fact. In truth, Bolivar could have hardly acted differently. Thomas Jefferson, the president of the USA, was adamantly opposed to the invitation. This quasi-unanimous rejection of haiti can explain the sorriest decision Boyer ever made concerning the future of his country. Since all the countries in the world associated in linking the concept of Haiti's international recognition to a formal agreement with France,(these days it is conditioned on an agreement with the World Bank), President Boyer will agree to pay to France a so-called debt of Independence, which, continually re-evaluated through a series of governments--at once laughable, pathetic and troublesome, will lead inescapably to the occupation of Haiti in 1915 by the US Marines. Again Haiti renews its tradition of a succession of Chiefs of State, some hated like Elie Lescot, represented here by Philome Obin, running away from the angel of democracy--sharks in the Haitian iconography were supposed to symbolize the thieves of the government--others celebrated like the" immortal Dumarsais Estime", symbolically represented here by the vodoun-priest painter Hector Hippolyte. And then comes, of course, Francois Duvalier--Duvalier the ethnologist, Duvalier the initiated voodoun practitioner who will in the end only use vodoun for power-- Duvalier at least, if we choose to believe Seldon Rodman, by cutting off the country from the rest of the world, will allow the incubation and blooming of all sorts of arts , one more audacious and original than the other. On February 7, 1986, the church bells toll for the Duvalier Dynasty. Jean-Claude (BabyDoc) and his wife Michele Bennett left the country.Four years after,a young priest would be literally carried to the presidency by the utterance of this simple motto: "Macoute pa Ladann!"-- macoutes are out! The brutal interruption of President Aristide's mandate by the still powerful and latent Duvalierist forces amongst the army, and the uninterrupted list of murders will naturally lay the grounds for a "moral" intervention, the second, of the American forces in Haiti. One of the last-and most famous victims of the duvalierist forces is the artist Stevenson Magloire, tortured to death by Macoutes at the age of 30 years, shortly before Aristide's return.This death shows that many problems in Haiti remain to be solved. Nevertheless, the fate of Haiti will not leave the rest of the world indifferent . Now, as before, the destiny of the first two independent nations of the New World remain tied together indissolubly.
The Snake
There is a subtext to official history that has not been written and is still being wrought every second at the peak of our mountains by the rhythm of our congas and our vaccines. It is the story of the tribes, which, 2000 leagues from their motherland, are striving to find their original gods. They will find them, first and curiously enough, in the spirits of the Other. The assimilation of catholic spirits is one of the most curious and amazing phenomenon in the history of the African presence in America. But in the history of Dahomey, the most prosperous and structured state of Occidental Africa, it is hardly original. In truth, the majority of the most important spirits of the Rada Rite, the main one in Haitian vodoun, the ones that are called "grands loas" are imported spirits. The significant headway made nowadays by Protestant missionaries in Haiti can only be tied to this tendency. If you can't beat the white man, join him and in the process convert to his Gods. In conversations with the new converts, hardly any allusion is made to the spiritual advantages of such a conversion, but accounts of illnesses suddenly cured, of irreductible enemies brought to reason, of American visas miraculously attained, abound. The formal expressions may be different but the voodoo way of belief is still strongly pervasive. Another topic of curiosity in Haitian voodoo consists of the veve. Whereas - and Andre Malraux will make the comment - the pictorial representations of the Gods do not exist in Africa, why then the priest of those Gods brutally torn apart from their altars, will see the need to conceptualize their distinct characters to the point of creating this sacred flow of movement that are in fact the veve, attaining what Kant, in his "aesthetique," calls the point of equilibrium between form and concept? Several explanations exist about this particular art form. One of them is the guerilla idea of being able to just decamp and move out of the sanctuary, a concept that was of the utmost importance when one reflects on the blatant ostracism that from the start plagued the new religion. Notwithstanding this explanation, I wish to advance another theory: Just like the Chromos, veves are a form of crystallization of primal beliefs - essential elements of ritualization, they allowed from the belief of 100 African tribes and the indigenous tribes of Haiti, the materialization of the religious unity indispensable to the edification of a nation. From the uprising of the rejected of every race, creed and color,(there is the story of a white britisch officer worshipped as a spirit in the South of Haiti ), voodoo is in fact one of the most eminently revolutionary forces that could ever be.
The cow, or the eruption of the people in Haitian art can be inscribed to a date: May 19, 1944, when, under the direction of Dewitt Peters, a conscientious objector who studied in Paris under Fernand Leger, the Art Center was opened in Port-Au-Prince. In a manifesto issued the next year, the founders of the Center said: "The role of the Centre D'Art in Haiti is not primarily that of a school. Its organizers have agreed that there are two kinds of artists in Haiti: those who merely need encouragement and technical assistance, and those who need definite training in order to develop their talents." Those who need merely encouragement and assistance - the so-called "primitive artists" - were to open a new chapter in the history of Art. And their genius would bloom in the decoration of the walls of a building which Malraux has called the Sixtine Chapel of the naive art. We are talking about the Episcopal Church of Port-Au-Prince, the Church of the Holy Trinity. From 1949 to 1951 the Chapel will be decorated by nine Haitian artists. The following is the curriculum vitae of some of them: Philome Obin, 56 years old, formerly bureaucrat, formerly barber, formerly coffee speculator. Castra Bazile, 26 years old, ex-engraver and clay moulder; Gabriell Leveque, 26 years old, former farmer; Wilson Bigaud 19 years old, former clay sculptor; Prefet Duffaut, 22, former builder of boats
The apse was divided into four panels. For the center panel, the choice of the organizers would be an artist from the north, Pholome Obin. At the time , Obin was 56 years old, and he had already painted the" Crucifixation de Charlemagne Peralte pour la Liberte". Purity and luminosity of colors, supreme austerity of lines coupled with a symbolical grandeur are the main characteristics of this painting, which from the very beginning was regarded by the connoisseurs as a masterpiece. This masterpiece paved the way for the request of another crucifixtion. The solemn rhtym of the whites draws attention to the central motif, the Christ, which Obin, weary of breaking tradition, has presented as a mulatto with a long mane. Very traditional also and very dignified are the two old ladies at the foot of the cross; Marie Magdelene instead is a petite mulatto woman who isn't making any effort to hide her sorrow. There is in the group of women somelthing of the pathos of the classical masters, of Andrea Mantegna or Giovanni Belini, for instance, but the similarites stop here, and the small character who, a few steps from the cross, turns his back to it, expresses well the cut that happens the very moment one looks behind the body of the tortured. What we see brushes away from all the traditional representation of the drama of the crucifixation. The crowd as it so happens with Obin, will not have the privilege of contemplating its savior, and in fact, do they even care? We would look in vain by watching those men and women grouped in orderly fashion at something which would resemble a communion or at least some kind of sympathy. There is only here the distant and respectful curiosity of an average Good Friday crowd who have for the occasion put on their best Holiday clothes. This terribly down-to-earth and pragmatic aspect of the message will besides explode in the very organization of the piece. Air barely circulates between the compact groups of characters and the horizontal of the cross is not enough to resist the multiplicated assault of the verticals. Doors give way to doors, their rhythm signalled here and there by an anonymous silhouette. But this embryonic allusion to space stops brutally before the impenetrable mass of the hill that encloses everything, forbidding any excursion of the eye to infinity. Within this stuffy and rectilinear universe, no room for reverie, no escape toward a possible yonder. The colors become warmer as they recede, gleaming to the eye and making the canvas seem smaller and the poor Christ whose instrument of torture barely brushes the sky is one of the most cruel and pathetic ever painted. At the foot of this anonymous featureless Christ, something touching is happening, however.A little girl is crying, the only being in this ruthless universe to express some kind of emotion. It is Marie-Magdelene, the one that the scriptures called prudely the other Mary, who, before the tragedy, has washed the feet of Christ Redemptor, and who is all alone with her sorrow. This mulatto woman does not belong to any world, neither the one of the two mannequins frozen next to her, nor the one of the crowd which at a respectable distance, has already rejected her. And it is thanks to this small human presence, so miserable and all alone, thanks also to this great popular hum that sweeps through, no matter what, from the thatched huts, from the blooming tree, and mostly from the big mountain that closes up everything, that this painting- more unforgiving than a play by Holbein- has the means of reaching out and talking to us. Philome Obin was later to be called the patriarch of haitian art. What happened to his life after this commission would blatantly demonstrate that if you are 56, you've just got the perfect age to make it. As a matter of fact he would live another 35 years of fame, unceasingly painting, and once on awhile receiving foreigh visitors, most of them extemely wealthy like Aristotle Onassis and his wife, the former Mrs. Kennedy, Richard Burton and his wife Elizabeth Taylor who would be among his numerous admirers, and of course, buyers. Obin was also the founder of a school which he himself proudly baptised "The school of the north," a school which, like all that is Capois, carries the style of the Iron King Christoph--precisional design, fluidity of color, and rigidity of construction are its most evident characteristics, characteristics which are generally embellished from the conceptual point of view by a quasi-obsessional desire to render space. among other things by efforts at linear perspective. Let's go back to the Holy Trinity Chapel Next to the Crucifixtion of Obin, Castera Bazile, formerly Dewitt Peters' yardboy, was to paint the ressurection of Christ. Everything moves--everything gravitates around the majesty of the savior.true Christ pan-creator, the only still character in the middle of the quadruple crown formed by his adorers, the roofs of the houses, the crest of the hills, and finally the angels of paradise. Obin's sad Christ barely touched the sky; Bazile's Christ is already holding court, separated from the earth by the green cocoon of the hills. The richness of the palette is surprising-spreading itself from the earth-tones at the bottom to the vibrating hues of the top and the gold of the crowns- luminous prelude to the stars with which Gabriel Leveque has sparkled his paradise. Everything with Obin drags us down to earth; everything with Bazile shoots us up to the sky, where the rhythm of the folds of the robes and of the streaks of the clouds seem to exhale a hymn to the glory of god. The forefinger of God, the conclusion of a line that starts from the bottom of St. Peter's tunic is the apex of this genuine baroque symphony, where a yardboy immortalized forever his dreams of eternity. However, this deployment of splendor doesn't succeed in distracting the handful of kids from their decidedly animated soccer game. Of Castera Bazile we see here the tragical self-portrait.His quasi-mystical fate. unique among haitian masters, will inspire grandiose architectural works depicting Christ and his court with a oddly Byzantine accent. His humanity expressed in bright, more vivid colors than those of the school of the north will lead to magnificent representations of haitian scenes. A whole group of painters, arbitrarily labelled as the School of Jacmel will be inspired by him. The commission of two other murals, the Temptation of Christ and the Procession of the Cross was awarded to a 22-year-old boy, Prefete Duffaut. He would paint his Procession to the Calvary as a hallucinatory evocation of his birthplace, Jacmel-in fact, the first of innumerable imaginary villages which. reproduced and copied infinitely have become part of the universal imagination. The sinuous lines leap along the canvas; what might be a street curves and re-curves among the most fantastic architecture. Unbelievably violent colors juxtaposed with shamelessnss, amazing symbols--stars, spider webs--drawn from who-knows-what part of the sanctuary of ritual conjurations, make unforeseen and disconcerting entrances into the canvas. But truly the most disconcerting part of the whole business is that all this--lines, colors, symbols--hold together, in just as solid a construction as long ago the little fisherman Duffaut would carefully prepare to resist the winds and waves. When he got his commision, the Last Supper, Wilson Bigaud had just turned 19. After the work was completed, it was obvious that it bore the stamp of a genius. In his suffocating atmosphere, with leafless trees bathed by crude omniprescent light, there seems to be an effort to gather all kinds of selfish, voracious manifestations of life. We see processions, cockfighters, rara bands, drummers; inside all that, prisoners of their long bodies, and rendered with utmost mannerism, two extraterrestial figures easily identified as Christ and his mother, exhcange a long and soulful glance. The representation of Christ is particularly pathetic; the absence of temporal, racial and sexual identity may express the unbearable tragedy of a 19-year-0old genius whose sexual ambiguity had already made him an outcast. Again from Bigaud, the extraordinary self-portrait of the artist in carnival clothing. Why, at the bottom of this splendid attire, does he feel the need for the ridiculous tennis shoes? Was it a way to show a vulnerablility that all the wonders of clothing could not mask? The later works of Bigaud, before his breakdown, show that this prodigy child was at the eve of realizing something truly fantastic. In fact, his last works shows that the laws of rhythm, of graphic and chromatic equilibrium, of light distribution held no more secrets for him.
It is unfortunate that one of the greatest artists of the time, and I would add without hesitation, of all time, could not participate in the realization of the frescoes. The once-acknowldged genius Hector Hyppolite (in the words of Dewitt Peters)was discovered too late. But was he really discovered? Here starts the mystery, because when it comes to him, everything is mystery. What we know is just as incredible as what we don't know. What we do know is that he was met in a totally accidental fashion by Dewitt Peters, awestruck by the decoration of a bar. Coincidence? Not according to the artist, to whom the invitation to come to the Centre d'Art was not at all a surprise:his Mistress-Goddess La Sirene had predicted it to him. She had also warned him of two other things: First, that he would be famous the world over, and second, that he would not live to enjoy his fame. Both of these predictions would come true: Hector Hyppolite would become famous, and this fame would be due to one of the great characters of the time, Andre Breton, then known as the Pope of Surrealism. In front of Hypolite's paintings,Breton would say:Hypolite has a secret.I will always repeat that,for us,surrealists,The Secret is everithing. These apparitions speak to us like the Egyptian stellae that they are so reminiscent of- and retain-through all the itineraries travelled by them- their profound solmenity. One thing is, those characters never appear alone; around them, it is mostly explosions of colors, coming from the curtains, the flags, the birds, and then those flowers, which, as one senses confusedly, are not there for us, but for Them-for those entities coming from the depth of time, that they nurture with the same tenderness which the Egyptian divinites lavish after five thousands years on the repose of their kings at rest. The flat and luminous colors come to inscribe themselves inside the lines with the precision of a jeweler carving a precious stone.As to the forms, they seem to follow the instructions of amysterious screenwriter staging his background. In 1948, Hector Hyppolite died after three years of a life devoted to women, alcohol, painting, and of course, his mistress la Sirene. A few months later, the Parisian public would discover the unforgettable stare of Mistress Erzulie. A few years later, Andre Breton, on his deathbed, was being treated to a slide show of the works of Hector Hyppolite; on the eve of his greatest voyage, he was trying once again to discover the clues to the mystery.
With St-Brice,we become privy to a strange,worrisome,life we are the privileged witnessed of,of the birth of strange beings,which, at the conclusion of a quasi-democritian process,look at the surrounding word with a surprising look on their faces. The universe of St. Brice is a terrible one; instead of a divine creation, we witness the uninterrupted fermentation of shapes and forms not yet defined. Fundamentally, pantheist and animist, Robert St.Brice is one of the most powerful vitalist painters ever. Form, instead, is defined clearly in the work of the St. Soleil school, and particularly, Prosper Pierre-Louis, one of the most gifted practictioners of this school of thought. Living illustrations of the Hegelian theory of religious evolution, his canvasses are definite counterpoints to african sculptures. His gods, not individualized, are only powers, but at the opposite of St.Brice's gods, these are forces captured at the final stage of their maturation. Fully clothed with their formal attire, and surrounded with their corresponding symbols and iconic manifestations, these forces are localized at the meeting point of man and animal. Those images have the quiet and ferocious energy of African wild beasts; they seem to have the intelligence of men, but an intelligence without any kind of moral connotation. The gods of Hector Hyppolite have a name; we know their history, their tastes, their moods. Not so with the spirits that Prosper Pierre St. Louis hurls at our perception and which can not be looked at too long without a kind of scruple and unmitigated fear. Because one should not forget that this art, the most brutal and pitiless ever, is first of all a sacred art.
"The greatest naif alive" in the words of Andre Malraux, and it refers to a voodoo priest who lives a few miles from Port-au-Prince named Andre Pierre. Malraux says also of Andre Pierre that he paints like a miniaturist of the Middle Ages. With the patience and meticulousness of the old masters, this voodoo priest recreates scenes and images of the Haitian pantheon. A true Hesiod of Haitian mythology, he sets up in full light the inextricable universe of his gods, each one draped in his own attire. With him, everything comes to light. Legba has opened the barrier of the unknown; the natural and the supernatural are indissolubly tied. When in 1945 the Museum of Modern Art of New York decided on the advice of Selden Rodman to make the acquisition of one of his paintings, the Magic Table, Enguerrand Gourgue was 16 years old. But he has told me several times that he had been painting long before that. If his works bear indubitably the seal of voodoo, which he knows well, his approach to this religion will be fundamentally different from the one of Hectory Hippolyte, Andre Pierre, or of a St. Brice. Indeed, just like Wilson Bigaud, E.G. is a tormented soul; of voodoo, he will perceive mostly the tragic side, the terrible loneliness of man, defenseless in front of the inexorable forces that oppress him. There is a touch of Cranach, of Grunewald with this man whose hard-edged graphism portrays, swimming in a light that seems to come from beyond the grave, forms that are as terrifying as the powerful brushes that stratify them. Like Bigaud, he has ventured to show us other things: A schoolgirl, a worker, a peasant. His love for Goya, of the marvelously human side of Goya, will lead him to Spain in the quest for a different esthetic. But, while his lines curve and his light softens up, never disappears the fundamental unrest, which, I can testify to it, never will leave him. The uneasiness of a state of importance- absolutely Sopoclean- of man facing the invisible powers, dwells in the works of this painter.
In December 1981, then a medical doctor in Marbial, small locality in the southeast of Haiti, the tam-tams, I remember would resound unceasingly for three days and three nights. A few miles from there was dying the most famous and unhappiest son of this town,the painter Celestin Faustin. Because, famous, Celestin would very soon be, and I predict that every day his fame will grow- if genius must lead fatally to glory. Unhappy, Faustin will also be from the beginning. Because, destined from his early youth to the most redoutable of the goddesses, Erzulie Dantor, Faustin will never accept that consecration, neither besides will he accept his homosexuality, which he will always see and blame as a vengeance of the gods. And it is true that one must have lived from a very tender age in haiti, to comprehend the degree of latent terror that these canvases contain. Because here the entire space is hallucinated. The tone is sometimes of a violent red, it is more often than not blue, but this color, in principle, the most reposeful, carries a worrisome connotation, since it is also the color of the fearless Erzulie Dantor. Here, nothing is pure, nothing is serene. The outstretched arms seem to curse; architectural forms are crushing us; there is not a fragment of the canvas that doesn't ooze an odor of sulfur, not a corner of escape, not a zone that doesn't lead to another word just as malevolent, just as malefic. Man, isolated, lost in the pain of his wounds, looks for his safety, and all he finds is terror, and finally inexorable condemnation. With Bigaud, Faustin and Gourgue, we are watching, in the very midst of the sacred art, the emergence of something peculiar: subjectivsm. Man, lost in a universe on which he holds no grasp, dares to voice his revolt. His stare, which says no, turns itself toward the surrounding word. And what he finds is sometimes pleasant--cockfights, scenes of cooperatives, religious ceremonies. What he sees is, more often than not, absolutely painful. Carlo Jean-jacques shows us winos lagging behind emaciated children. Bernal Wah carries out to abstraction the dogged exasperation of his lines. There is also Manes Descollines who will find at the end of a rope the answer to the existential question that has ceaselessly haunted him. To this so-called realism of cruelty can be opposed however, two styles. One is the fantastic--jungles and beasts of Bigaud, of Bresil and a thousand others. The other is the School of Beauty. The charge has been made about these artists' sophistication,and stubborn research, in a word haunted by hunger and fear, of a vapid and finally insulting beauty. At the most, they have been blamed for negotiating our culture. It was forgetting too soon that one of the fundamental aspects of this culture is precisely the search for an afterlife of pure magic beyond the presence of an everyday, sometimes terrible reality. And what the Bernard SeJourne, the Jean-Rene Jerome and the Simil have in store for us is first of all a hymn to black beauty. Through these shivering lights, through these transparencies, throught the exaggerated stretching of the lines, it is also a message that is being delivered. The message of a small people who, confronting a situation apparently without solution, knows how to strive with the same courage it showed against oppression and slavery, to the extent of carrying beyond its borders the torch of Liberty- and who knows how to say no to misery and despair. Believe me, ladies and gentlemen, the haitian adventure is far from over. Instead, it's only just begun, and we remain convinced that this adventure, born out of a streak of freedom in the sky of our Americas, inscribes itself strongly in the fate of these Americas- and that the historical alliance made on a battlefield of Georgia between my nation and the first nation of this Continent, will constitute the formidable ram against which will crush themselves the avatars of the millineum to come_and ,therefore,the indissoluble stamp of our Destiny. Thank you. |
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