Preface

History shapes all of us . . . Memory or history runs human blood through the river of time.

Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

In the late 1970s, the postmodern novelist and self-proclaimed plagiarist/pornographer Kathy Acker was offered eight hundred dollars to write a one-hundred-and-twenty-page porn novel. She complied with Kathy Goes to Haiti, one of the most linear and conventionally narrated of her many eclectic works of fiction. "For her it was an experiment in blandness," wrote British novelist and Acker friend Jeanette Winterson in the 14 May 1989 London Times. According to Winterson, with Kathy Goes to Haiti, Acker wanted to see just how much one could "reduce a novel to its most basic components and still have something to say." Acker herself would later explain in a 1989 stage interview with Winterson that she wrote Kathy Goes to Haiti primarily for money, but also to "stick a knife, a little one, up the ass of the novel." The result is a fictional travelogue in which we journey through Haiti with a twenty-nine-year-old, New York-based artist who, like the author, is named Kathy. As soon as Kathy arrives in Haiti, landing at what she terms "Jean-Claude Duvalier Airport," she's constantly bombarded by men who want to be her lover. Of all the fellows, including cabdrivers, students, and businessmen, who take great pains to convince her that "women in Haiti don't go around alone," Kathy falls for Roger, the youngest in a family of northern mulatto robber barons. Kathy nevertheless becomes extremely attached to Roger, with whom she has most of the sex in the book. When Roger leaves Kathy, at both his wife's and father's request, she ends up visiting a Vodou priest who "shows Kathy to herself." As clichéd as all this sounds, it's certainly not as bland and reductive as Acker might have intended. Especially since Acker's exploration of Haiti isn't solely limited to this novel. Based on her other writings, it's obvious that Acker had actually made a trip (or several) to Haiti or at least had an affinity for the place. In her 1988 novel, Empire of the Senseless, in which terrorists roam through a postapocalyptic Paris, one of the narrators pays tribute to Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture for using Vodou "to defeat Western hegemony." Louverture is also quoted, saying something worth pondering now, at this commemorative yet difficult moment in Haitian history: "If self-interest alone prevails with nations and their masters, there is another power. Nature speaks in louder tones than philosophy or self interest."

By the time Kathy arrives in Haiti in the late 1970s, pre-AIDS and post-Papa Doc, she's already trailing a number of notable ambient scribes who have made the island nation their subject. As Graham Greene's Brown confesses to one of his guests in The Comedians, even though Haiti was no longer a tourist paradise during the Duvalier era, it still offered a few possible adventures to a person of imagination. One only has to scan the many sun and sex narratives of unattached travelers, though, to realize that a large draw of a Haitian vacation would have been a local romance or sex romp. However, what makes Kathy's adventures less than common is the lack of pretense and the extensive amount of space rendered to the quickly repetitive details of sexual acts. No doubt this was meant to satisfy the specific requirements of the porn press, which had commissioned this work. Still Acker does not miss the opportunity to poke fun at these types of treks, which can hastily slip from totally libidinous encounters to passionate affairs of the heart. The heart that is hardest to conquer though is that of Haiti itself. For there is no one Haiti, as Kathy quickly learns, but several. And only when she stops seeing "combinations of things she's never seen before" and begins to take in fragments of ordinary...