White fright

So, with that overly judgey and self-righteous last post in mind, I did exactly what I criticized people for doing: after six years of totally neglecting it, I got back into Haitian history. Inevitable.

Somewhere between watching Max Chancy's 60s documentary Haïti, J'accuse (sorry, non-francophones, it's in French) and rewatching The Serpent and the Rainbow (based on a book I've unfortunately not read), I found myself blown away by how a certain idea about blackness has gone through the spin cycle of history and resurfaced somewhat twisted and warped in American pop culture. If you're unfamiliar, The Serpent and the Rainbow is an 80s Wes craven film, set in Haiti on the eve of the US-orchestrated overthrow of "Bebe Doc" Duvalier. Though not by any means a great film, Serpent and the Rainbow has the unique benefit of offering a different perspective on the zombie genre than the traditional American line of George Romero et al., the latter of which has less (though not entirely nothing) to do with race and more with a certain Western Marxist class critique. Serpent and the Rainbow, on the other hand, returns the genre to its race-based tribal roots, so to speak. It also makes zombification less of an allegory and more of a reality, since the premise of the film is that Haiti's Tonton Macoutes, Duvalier's secret police, use voodoo as a tool to control the helpless native population.

What I found fascinating about this premise is that it falls right into what Chancy says about the Duvalier regime: through constant, systematic terror, both Duvaliers not only managed to quell dissent, but in fact to internalize fear within each citizen, psychologically and politically paralyzing the population. For anyone who's ever studied a political cult of personality, this is nothing new -- Stalin did the same thing, sucking even sane and stable satellites like Czechoslovakia into whirlpools of self-inflicted bloodshed, and ensuring that a morally and fiscally bankrupt regime could essentially run on empty for a span of decades without any significant popular revolt. But what Chancy points out is that it is precisely the race factor that kept white Western superpowers unwilling and uninterested in interfering with this brand of fascism. Voodoo lent an exotic, quasi-mystical air to the whole thing, making it seem like some quaint ethnographic feature of the Haitian atmosphere, rather than a tool in the hands of a Western-educated dictator.

But that last bit should not be ignored. The Duvaliers weren't savage jungle warlords; they were degree-holding, university educated, cosmopolitan rulers. And whether or not the Papa of the dynasty was actually insane (there's certainly room for speculation, given his poor health and bizarre behavior), it's clear that he milked the "voodoo" angle for all it was worth -- calling his secret police, essentially, "The Boogeymen," and declaring himself Baron Samedi. We Westerners can laugh at this primitive nonsense all we want... until we remind ourselves of our own leaders' proclivities for ingratiating themselves into native cults. For all of our love of fetishizing, exoticizing, and Hollywoodizing the black other, the religion and power dynamic at home is all too similar.

So, back to Serpent and the Rainbow, where the white man (Bill Paxton) and the white man's system (democracy) rides in on its shining white horse and saves the day. Of course. It's the late 80s, apartheid is finally crumbling, we're all singing "Ebony and Ivory," and life is good. Okay. Well, cut to 2009, when, on the eve of electing a black president, the kids of this great nation are playing a little game called Resident Evil 5:



Serpent and the Rainbow redux! White man and pretty light-skinned black woman fighting zombies created by political instability! "Africa" is shorthand for anywhere with poor black people!

Now, I'm not saying I didn't play and enjoy RE5. I did, because it was a good game, and the absorbingly cinematic quality greatly contributed to that goodness. But there's no doubt that the image of blackness it presents -- machete-wielding, bile-colored blood-spewing, inherently susceptible to evil -- is uncomfortable at best. It reminds me, again, of what Chancy says about Haiti: cycles of corruption, violence, fascism, all of it is seen by Westerners as a matter of "negritude," i.e., a "black thing." And even when there is some attempt at a neo-colonial critique, as with the nefarious Umbrella Corporation and distinctively Aryan Albert Wesker orchestrating the zombie outbreak in RE5, the ultimate takeaway (featured on all the interface graphics) is that of contagion in the form of hideously mutated blood. Because what the Progenitor virus does to (white) Wesker is make him a near-invincible superman; what it does to the black population of "Africa" is turn them into ooze-dripping, brainless killing machines. Uh, nice. So, we're back to basic miscegenation and eugenics all over again -- dovetailing perfectly with the explanation for the mechanics of zombification in Serpent and the Rainbow: "It's a powder... a poison... that runs through the skin... to the soul."