In October 1937, the dictator Rafael Leónidas Trujillo initiated a murderous rampage against the Haitian people who lived and worked along the border that divides Haiti from the Dominican Republic. A military man, Trujillo owed at least some of his training to the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924. It was during that time that the Marines tutored the national army that Trujillo would use to seize control of the country in 1930.
Aggrandizing as a peacock, Trujillo lent his name not only to municipal works but also to his country's capital city Santo Domingo, which was renamed Ciudad Trujillo in 1936. Writing for The New Yorker in 1945, Oden and Olivia Meeker compiled a list of Trujillo's titular train: "Benefactor of the Fatherland, Founder and Supreme Chief of the Partido Dominicana, Restorer of Financial Independence, First Journalist of the Republic, and Doctor Honoris Causa in the Economic Political Sciences." There is enough source material in that enumeration to make a satirist levitate.
René Philoctète's (1932-1995) was a galvanizing figure in Haiti's literary community. A founding member of both the Haitian Littéaire as well as the Spiraliste movements, Philoctète published, often at his own expense, three novels, ten books of poetry, and a collection of short stories. While respected in his homeland, Philoctète has attracted scant attention from the outside world. Perhaps Linda Coverdale's dexterous translation will reintroduce Philoctète to a clutch of adventurous readers, but unless it finds a home in the academy—on the syllabi of post-colonial classes, for example—the book's unevenness along with its impressive verbal repertoire virtually guarantee its lack of commercial viability. After all, marred works of art that have no truck with their commercial brethren are a hard, hard sell.
Massacre River derives its title from a river that forms a natural boundary between French-speaking Haiti and the Spanish-speaking Dominican Republic. In the 17th century, the river was the site of a battle between France and Spain; the two countries would leave their mark on the island long after they had given up their colonies. Wending through Philoctète's verdant novel, one encounters, for better and for worse, an author intent on squeezing beauty out of just about every line. Remembering, however, the history of the island, which “only the accidents and interests of colonization had cleft in twain,” one may intuit why the author's craft is, at times, belabored.
From the time when Christopher Columbus left behind a delegation that preyed upon the Taino natives up through the author's lifetime, the island of Hispaniola has been roiled by violence and rapacious rulers. While history is good at recounting horrors, and journalism makes tangible the personality of the victim, art not only allows the two sides to fuse, but, in this case, it asserts the right of a downtrodden people to participate in the courtrooms of world culture. Because one feels the press of this desire, and because the author succeeds more times than not at illuminating thousands of unattended graves, when his comet forsakes him the skies grow unseasonably dark.
As it happens, Massacre River opens with a deformation of nature, a “raptor-kite” flying over a small town; the shadow it casts is a herald of the obfuscation of sanity that's to follow:
Since five o'clock in the morning, a bird -- to be honest, no one knows what it is -- has been wheeling in the sky over Elías Piña, a small Dominican town near the Haitian border.This lengthy quotation offers a good indication of the pull of Philoctète's writing. Unlike some of the later sections in the book, where the balance of magic to realism flops numbingly to the side of the former, everything in the above excerpt is well tuned. The unusual phenomenon in the sky is stitched to a number of salient details: the local boss for whom it is a companion; the cross that portends the failure of the church as well as humanitarian organizations, like the Red Cross, to condemn the slaughter; and the machine-like manner in which people in the throws of bloodlust become indifferent to suffering. Likewise, the flight of fancy at the end of the excerpt, where the artist expends all of his resources to combat the nefarious contraption, is grippingly vivid.The children think it's the kite the local boss sometimes flies to kill time. The adolescents would love to straddle it for a joy ride. The adults don't seem worried about it, but deep down, they're hoping the thingamajig will go away …
Suddenly, the bird hangs motionless, wings spread. Its shadow carves a cross that cuts Elías Piña into quarters. No sound leaves its throat. No one twitter or chirp. The bird is mute….
[The] bird takes life easy in the village sky. An elderly hunter armed with buckshot peppers it with a hale of pellets that rebound in an arc to the ground, squashed flat.
There is no blood in the bird …
No one attacks the machine with impunity….
Only Roberto Pedrino, a vacationing sociology student … tries to appease the creature's anger, by playing the mandolin. But his fingers on the instrument's strings shrivel up to their roots. Undaunted, with his teeth Roberto César Pedrino plucks chords from the instrument—any chords at all!—that tangle, squeak, whistle, flounder.
The local boss to whom the above passage refers is Señor Pérez Agustin de Cortoba. As the bird hangs over the village, Cortoba gives it a drowsy smile. Sitting on his veranda, falling in and out of sleep, he dreams about his former Haitian mistress, “his negrita,” Emmanuela, who left him to return to her native land. Cortoba, who, later, leads the machete-wielding mob that massacres the Haitians in Elías Piña, bathes himself in violence while ruminating over the body of Emmanuela:
Each time he strikes, Emmanuela's long, slender legs grip, girdle, press, squeezing his huge beige body dry. And the machete cuts capers, turns somersaults. The machete pirouettes. Snicker-snack! And slashes, sunders, severs, shears. A bladder bursts. The air, abruptly, unleashes a multiplication of entrechats and—big surprise—strikes home. Don Agustin whimpers. Don Agustin slobbers. Don Pérez Agustin de Cortoba y Blanco gabbles like a goose. A vagina foams, contracted in pain. Slack jawed, heart pounding, Don Agustin staggers around with Emmanuela's legs scrapping his ribs. The machete snips, slits, struts its stuff.The “y Blanco” pendant on Cortoba's name refers to his leader's obsession with race. In the novel, this is codified in Trujillo's proclamation that the Dominican people are “the blancos de la tierra”—the white people of the earth. Noting that this proposition leads to a “mirror syndrome,” whereby, each day, “fourteen out of fifteen Dominicans spent hours consulting mirrors,” the author ridicules this proposition, which was especially ludicrous given that, not only has the Dominican Republic known its share of miscegenation, but it is said that Trujillo wore makeup to lighten his appearance. The tautness of the above passage, particularly with regard to its effective use of personification in the description of the machete's activity, is often what is missing in the book's countervailing example of Dominican and Haitian relations, embodied in the marriage of Adèle and Pedro Brito.
Bringing to mind William Blake's famous observation that “Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell,” the events that surround Pedro Brito's scrabble to save his Haitian wife are the least satisfying in the book. In general this is due to the ecstatic overtones that the author uses to organize his protagonists' dialogue and observations. Here is an example of the couple's stilted conversation; sensing the oncoming violence, Pedro informs his wife that he must leave home to confer with his comrades:
“The dawn is dangerous, Pedro,” she had said.Comparing this passage to the previous ones, it's clear that the author's use of personification has run amok. Pedro's remark about “A state of beauty” draws too much attention to the author's craft, which is already teetering under the weight of Adèle's observation. Though one may be tempted to side with Pedro in ascribing Adèle's overblown musings to the fact that she hasn't taken her medication, there are instances when the narrative is also muddied when tracking Pedro by himself. After speaking with his companions, we are treated to this paean:
“Don't get upset, Adèle. I must speak to the others.”
“But dawn kills, its thorns are hidden, but dawn kills. It's called the dawn fever, just as there is flower fever, saint's fever, spring fever—
“Está bien, Adèle. I'll be careful. But you, don't you forget your sedative.”
“They hand out pills like candy, but my head's all colors of grey.”
“They're good for your nerves, you know that!”
“My nerves are in a state, as the saying goes.”
“A state of beauty, I'd say.”
And the workers had gathered together. The flesh of workers is common flesh. It gleams red in the light of dawn. Closes up shop at night. Always faithful to what it firmly believes, it cannot believe that night should lay down the law. The flesh of workers is both a political statement and the rattle of chains. It has the force of law when the law has floundered.While Pedro and his fellows may be of one accord in condemning their government's campaign of violence, to suppose that they are always faithful to what they believe is to render them one dimensional.
Although Trujillo wanted to believe that an abyss separated the Dominican and Haitian people, his flunkies could not identify their adversaries by sight alone. To separate friend from foe, it's reputed that they used the word “perejil,” the Spanish word for parsley, as a litmus test. Sitting next to a Haitian woman on a bus that's returning them from work, Pedro tries, unsuccessfully, to teach a woman next to him how to pronounce the word with a Spanish inflection:
A hand alights on Pedro Brito's arm. A cold, trembling hand … It's the hand of the young woman whose cracked voice is still repeating: “Perejil …” The l has sucked up the i. The e has kicked out the r. The word has stuck in her throat. The young woman coughs … The word is about to commit outright murder, all by itself. Pedro places his big callused hand over the cold hand of the unknown woman gripping his right arm and says, calmly: Perejil. The negrita murmurs: “Perejil.” The p bumps into the l someplace and the word goes head over heels. No doubt about it: another mouth that will prove completely useless and deserving of decapitation. “jPerejil!” the Guardia will shout. Her i will telescope into the j … the commandant will start yelling. “Kill her!”Propping this quote alongside the weaker passages cited earlier -- with their forced aesthetic manner and baggy generalizations -- the difference in the intensity and leanness of the prose is unmistakable. By and large, most of the novel's shortcomings seem to have occurred because the author wanted more than to implement the sharpness of a satirical blade, which answers blood for blood. (Indeed, in one of the book's most powerful sections, the author mixes the carnage in the streets with the cuisine being served in Haiti's presidential palace, where the representatives of government fritter away the night in separate ballrooms.) Whereas Philoctète should have had the gall to act in the manner of say, Thomas Bernhard, and leave us without respite, he succumbed to the impulse to dilute his vision with a dose of fizzy loftiness. As depressing as it may sound for a book about genocide, Massacre River suffers from an excess of good will.
Christopher Byrd is a writer living in New York. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Believer, The Wilson Quarterly, and Bookforum.
