Bodies and Bones: Feminist Rehearsal and Imagining Caribbean Belonging

Conclusion: Rehearsing and Proxy-formance

Conclusion: Rehearsing and Proxy-formance Long ago, they were supply fleshed. But then, all meat fell away from the bone. Some teeth and hair remained. Someone should examine their story. After all, it’s not that they dwindled into dust altogether. Besides, these bones could make more than music. They’re a fire-tried instrument. —Mahadai Das, “Bones” My conception of rehearsal emerged while writing about the three masculinist representations of the Haitian Revolution, two of which are plays, discussed in chapter 2 of this volume. I extended theatrical understandings of rehearsal to help myself understand how we deal with the past. How I dealt with the past. These three texts written by twentieth-century, non-Haitian Caribbean men, who in their own ways defined Caribbean studies, were instrumental in developing my initial interest in rehearsal as a potential methodology for exploring Caribbean pasts. Each text revisits the event of the Haitian Revolution from various perspectives. These differences expose the rich details of this historical moment. The novels and the play explore men as founding fathers, as part of a twentieth-century recuperation of Caribbean masculinity, with women as peripheral, though sometimes complex, characters who complicate male lives and leadership. The kaleidoscopic shifts from one text to the next helped me see the dynamism of Haiti’s revolution not just in and of itself but as a Caribbean revolution, given that it shares, in hindsight , similarities with revolutions to come, such as Cuba (1959–present) and Grenada (1979–1983). These texts raised exciting questions on the transactional or negotiated nature of belonging while exposing important analytical gaps regarding gender and sexuality in regional representations. When actors rehearse a play, they generally work with a set text. What actors do to transform the text is rehearse. They transform 168 Conclusion meaning through pauses, inflections, and/or body movements. These subtle shifts alter the text, often giving it numerous meanings . Rehearsing the Haitian Revolution through these texts not only reveals differing interpretations, foci, and investments in or attachments to particular notions of history but also exposes the paradox of rehearsal as that of preparing for an ideal (the horizon) and embodying and cultivating a different way of being and belonging, while existing in the status quo of colonial (neocolonial and globalized) economic structures. Rehearsal became an engrossing way of distilling the legacies of the past. When reading Césaire’s play, which characterizes Christophe as a fatherly autocrat, I was able to make connections to other Caribbean leaders such as François “Papa Doc” Duvalier (Haiti) and Eric Williams, “father” to the independent nation of Trinidad and Tobago. Duvalier began his career as a medical doctor, which earned him the sobriquet “Papa Doc,” while Williams, trained as a historian, left his academic post and worked to ameliorate the consequences of colonialism in his native Trinidad. Duvalier ascended to power in 1957 on a wave of populist goodwill and remained head of state until his death in 1971; Williams transitioned from leader of the People’s National Movement, the party he founded, to the first prime minister of an independent country, remaining in power from 1962 to his death in 1981. Ultimately, Duvalier ’s benevolence was undermined by his cult of personality, ambition, and state terror, but Williams, as Rex Nettleford comments, governed with intellectual and academic acuity, wit, and gossip. The knowing hand of the father is embedded in each example, and while Williams did not condemn twenty thousand of his compatriots to their deaths with the building of Citadelle La Ferrière as did Christophe, nor execute thirty thousand of his own citizens like Papa Doc, he is indeed a rehearsal of the stern sometimes misguided father of Césaire’s play. These are men of undeniable strength and fortitude, though they are not always wise. Their potency and vigor, fused with a paternalistic philosophy of governance , cements the notion of the nation as a family guided by a stern and knowing father. The revolutionary idea, in this case, is that the father is black. Black Caribbean patriarchy is a contested endeavor, since most households are not structured as a mating couple but as family systems. These layers indicate that representations of family and governance repeatedly reproduce gendered hierarchies of belonging. As my work progressed, I became more interested in building on the ideas in Wilson Harris’s essay “Judgment and Dream” and his 169 Conclusion novel The Infinite...