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228 Villes, Poèmes The Postwar Routes of Caribbean Creolization —j. michael dash La ville est, au sens fort, ‘poétisée’ par le sujet: il l’a fabriquée pour son usage propre . . . il impose a l’ordre externe de la ville sa loi de consommateur d’espace. — michel de certeau, L’invention du quotidien In his 1958 study of Haitian Vodou Alfred Métraux made the following observation: “People are prone to suppose that the purest and richest traditions are to be found in the remotest valleys. The little I was able to see of rural Voodoo convinced me that it was poor in its ritual compared to Voodoo of the capital. Simplicity of rite is not always a guarantee of antiquity . It is often the result of ignorance and neglect” (1972, 61). The conclusion of this celebrated Swiss ethnographer that Haitian popular religion was more dynamic and sophisticated in Port-au-Prince as opposed to the Haitian countryside is a startling one given the fact that Haitian Vodou has always been associated with remote spaces and atavistic impulses. It is equally surprising given that his research was conducted in 1944, a time when a conservative identity politics in Haiti had unproblematically fashioned rural Vodou as the wellspring of authentic Haitianness. Métraux’s discreet critique of the mythification of religious authenticity points to the larger issue of the appropriation of rural landscapes as sites of cultural authenticity and national identity. In Haiti and elsewhere, territorializing metaphors of pristine wilderness are at the base of concepts of fixed homelands , dreams of return and the imaginative recovery of stable origins. Métraux’s argument is that urban spaces are more useful sites of enriching cultural encounter than exclusionary locales of containment and homogeneity in the remote and primordial wilderness. From the 1940s he seemed to be suggesting that the margins of urban space are not zones The Postwar Routes of Caribbean Creolization 229 of alienation and exile but ideal creolizing sites of modern transnational contact outside of narrow identitarian politics. Métraux also is making a larger point about how popular ritual is meant to be understood. He argues that it is the “dynamic aspect” of Vodou that should be studied. For him it was “a religious system born fairly recently from a fusion of many different elements” and therefore should not be investigated in terms of cultural survivals and a “search for origins” (Métraux 1972, 61). Métraux is not interested in predetermined meanings and cultural monoliths but in the enriching cultural entanglements of the present. This observation regarding Haitian popular religion was made at a time when Métraux’s friend, the French surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris, who was also in Haiti, made similar observations regarding the spatial dynamic nature of Caribbean cultural encounter. For Leiris what was remarkable about the Caribbean was that it spawned a culture of intersections and encounters whose predominant sign was that of the urban crossroads. Caribbean “ground” was not located in remote interiors but at the destabilizing intersections of roadways where people and vehicles pass constantly. In his 1948 lecture, “Antilles et poésie des carrefours ,” he points to what he calls the “poetic” importance of urban contact and collision in Caribbean culture. “What I find seductive first of all in the expression ‘crossroads’ is that it is taken from the vocabulary of the roadway . Nothing more down to earth, more everyday, than the crossing of roads and streets that we call a crossroads . . . a place which seems to me to be nothing short of the symbol of poetry itself” (Leiris 1992, 71). The crossroads becomes, for Leiris, a transgressive space that allows for the clash of familiar and unfamiliar, which produces the poetry of the unpredictable. The destabilizing of the subject in this zone of convergence exposes him or her to the poetic beauty, the magical potential in the everyday and the previously familiar. Leiris seems to be suggesting a new way not only of looking at travel and cultural contact but of pursuing an ethnography of non-native societies that lack a monolithic essence but are modern, protean , and diverse. The unsettling space of the crossroads, in which no symbolic order can permanently establish itself, is the zone of risk for the subject forever at the mercy of the assault of unpredictable reality. Culture and space are intimately connected in Leiris’s crossroads poetry, which he imagines in terms of the Spanish ritual of...

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