Towards an Intellectual History of Possession: Reading “ la crise ” as a Textual Space in Vodou and André Breton’s Haitian Lectures and Nadja

Introduction

This article focuses mainly on what have come to be known as André Breton’s “Haitian Conferences” ¹ and his 1928 novel Nadja, along with the embedded topic of spirit possession in Haitian Vodou. I will look closely at Breton’s work in light of more recent scholarship, which includes: J. Michael Dash on the “Surrealist Ethnographers”; Irene Albers’s work on Leiris’s representations of Zar possession in Ethiopia; João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman’s Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, a compilation of essays on methods for “contemporary anthropological observation” (Rabinow, 2007: 107); and Terry Rey and Karen Richman’s theoretical reconsiderations of syncretism in Haitian religion. Respectively, Dash and Albers examine the intersection between literary theory and ethnography in French writers who travelled to Martinique, Guadeloupe and Haiti. ² In his 2007 article entitled “Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist ethnographers and the Francophone Caribbean,” Dash notes the lack of scholarship on the French intellectuals’ presence in the Caribbean:

While the impact of the Surrealist intellectuals’ exile in the U.S. is well documented, one would be hard put to find, even in French, a thoroughgoing examination of this period of the interaction between a French literary avant-garde and Caribbean writers. […] When the Surrealists’ travel through the Caribbean is mentioned, the tendency is to concentrate exclusively on André Breton and generally ignore the passage of Surrealist dissidents such as Pierre Mabille, Michel Leiris, and Alfred Métraux, who inaugurated a form of writing that Glissant in 1956 calls a welcome combination of literature and ethnography. (Dash, 2007: 84)

Dash identifies and resurrects texts about which little has been written, or which have been largely ignored by contemporary scholarship; he re-inscribes them in the context of more widely read work, such as Métraux’s ethnography of Vodou. As Dash’s article indicates, there is a lack of understanding not only on the relationship between French and Caribbean intellectuals in the early twentieth century, but also on the relationship between ethnography and literature in the Caribbean intellectual context. Maryse Condé’s 2001 article on Marxist poetics in the French Caribbean entitled “Fous t’en Depestre; Laisse dire Aragon” points not only to the need for scholarship, but also to a certain negligence associated with such lacunae. Condé writes: “The literary episode, which is the theme of this article, serves to illustrate the relations between French literature and francophone literature. They are at best, relationships of ignorance, of indifference” (Condé, 2001: 177). ³

Another backdrop for this article is recent scholarship that emphasizes an intimate—even if not comfortable—relationship between European and Caribbean thought systems, a scholarship that offers insight into an instance of transatlantic dialogue that included the Caribbean, and more specifically Haiti. In political philosophy and intellectual history, Susan Buck-Morss, Sibylle Fischer, Nick Nesbitt, Valerie Kaussen, and David Scott explore the idea that Haiti, while not explicit in Enlightenment discourse, at least informed it. Buck-Morss writes: “There are thus multiple, quite mundane reasons for Hegel’s silence [in regards to Haiti], from fear of political repercussions, to the impact of Napoleon’s victory, to the hazards of moving and personal uprootings. […] But there is no doubt that Hegel and Haiti belong together” (Buck-Morss, 2009: 20). In anthropology, meanwhile, Terry Rey and Karen Richman note that in the context of Haitian religion, by the time the African slaves had arrived in Saint–Domingue, the “European” element had informed the “African” one; in other words, the worshiping practices of those Central Africans who became slaves destined for the Caribbean had undergone processes of hybridization, noting that “[a]t the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution in 1791” (Rey and Richman, 2010: 384), most probably their religious practices had already undergone a “Kongolese appropriation of Catholicism”—an “Afro-Catholic synthesis” (2010: 387). Similarly, in speaking of the notion of pwen in Vodou, they identify a European etymology: “Pwen is based upon the French word point. Its French provenance is a reminder of the dynamic contribution of European magical knowledge and thought to Haitian religion, a contribution that scholars have generally overlooked in their quest to uncover African ‘survivals’” (2010: 392). I cite the above examples of the points of contact between “European,” “African,” and “Caribbean” epistemologies to underline the interpenetration of thought systems, which serves as a backdrop to this essay’s consideration of the various iterations of the notion of possession as they appear in the French and Caribbean discourses of the early to mid-twentieth century.

A final framework for this article addresses the relationship between subjectivity and traumatism. In his ruminations on “Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the Camp,” Richard Ek suggests that as the “camp” ⁴ as domiciliary reality imposes itself on humanity, replacing that of the “city,” so too “displacement and desubjectification” (2006: 363) create notions of identity that are better adapted to the reality of migration, and quasi-perpetual disarticulation. In this article, through the notion of possession, I explore Ek’s assertion and especially his conception of “displacement and desubjectification,” which link domiciliary displacement to the disintegration of identity. My proposition is to show how both the vocabulary and the theory that come to be associated with what I will call the act of possession in Breton’s work engage a reflection that accounts for Ek’s notion of identity, one that is based on movement rather than on origin, one that does not assume permanence, but accounts for frequent instability. To do so, I look at two aspects of his writing: how both before and during his first contact with Haiti, he was interested in alternative states of being; and second, how these alternative states related to desubjectification. I will also consider possession, and its associated lexica, as an intellectual notion, a trope that appears in the discourse of European intellectuals during the World Wars. I compare it to the considerations of possession within the context of a Vodou Weltanschauung, or what Claudine Michel describes as a “global vision of the world” (in Coates, 2006: 182).

The disciplinary methodology that I will employ in my analysis of all the texts in this article will be literary. I also should note that my rereading of Breton’s Haitian lectures drew me back to Nadja. The result surprised me. I realized that the Vodou cultural text might itself be a theoretical framework through which to reread Breton’s novel. In his recent transcultural study of possession, Craig E. Stephenson advocates for the reconsideration of possession, not as a “mental disorder,” as it was designated in 1992 by “the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” but rather as “a potential epistemological break, part of psychiatry’s attempt to culturally contextualize its discourse and treatment models” (Stephenson, 2009: 3, 73–74). Stephenson asks: “Could possession provide an idiom through which psychiatry might reflect upon and rectify its diagnostics?” (2009: 74). Stephenson explains the intimacy, followed by the divorce, between psychology and anthropology:

At the Clark Conference in 1909, Franz Boas carefully manoeuvred anthropology away from the essentialist tendencies of psychology and psychoanalysis. A century later, in a similar manner, many Western anthropologists attempt in their writings to describe possession in non-Western settings without lending it a psychological description, because they find a tendency to pathologize inherent in psychological language. (Stephenson, 2009: 66)

Stephenson’s argument is that in the estranged couple that anthropology and psychology form, psychology would stand to gain from a renewed rapprochement with the social sciences. Acknowledging the extremely exoticizing and deprecating language that Carl Jung uses to describe possession (2009: 48), Stephenson re-examines Jung’s work to extract from it Jung’s interest in implementing possession as a methodology in “Western” psychoanalysis (2009: 118). That said, although Stephenson’s work has as its goal to recuperate a Jungian notion of possession, the role of Jung’s work in his book is fairly marginal; rather, it is the concept of possession—accounts of possessions in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe—that takes centre stage. If at the turn of the twentieth century, for psychologists, the primary site of study for the Self’s Other was analysis of the intimate psychic space of the human individual, and for the anthropologists, the Other constituted ethnographies of communities mostly outside of Euro-Canada, the Euro-United States, or Europe, then Stephenson points to the fact that possession is a form that bridges both conceptions of othering, and at best has constantly troubled the disciplinary divide between psychology and anthropology:

I connect Jung’s concept of possession explicitly to its etymology, to the forceful image of selfhood sitting in its own seat and of the suffering inherent when selfhood experiences itself unseated by something “Other”. (Stephenson, 2009: 3–4)

The historical context that Stephenson outlines with regard to European and North American scholars’ interest in possession emphasizes the fact that “Western” discourse is dually familiar and uncomfortable with the concept of possession.

In a sense, this article’s approach is to show how, on the one hand, Breton’s work delineates rigid frontiers between the terms that form binaries such as religious/secular and city dweller/“peasant” (Breton, 1999b: 153); on the other hand, Breton’s work is, as Erika Bourguignon points out, extremely at ease with the concepts associated with possession: “The notion of ‘possession,’ or ‘spirit possession,’ appears to be so familiar to Americans that a definition seems hardly necessary” (Bourguignon, 1991: 1). In other words, what is at stake is not whether or not the characteristics of possession ² exist in a given culture, but rather the names that the given group give to the phenomena associated with possession. Bourguignon writes:

This disagreement leads to the question of just what we might mean by “abnormal” or “pathological,” a difficult subject on which only limited agreement exists. We might begin by asking: Do the people among whom possession trance occurs consider it “abnormal”? Do they say the person who experiences such a state is “crazy”? Do they say, “Something must be done about this so that he can go back to functioning like a normal person?” […] The answer must be that in some societies, under some circumstances, it is considered a “bad thing” to go into possession trance and something must be done about it. In other places, going into possession trance is considered a fine and desirable thing. (Bourguignon, 1991: 8)

Thus, this article meanders through various nodes of the transnational production of the concept of possession as it relates to Breton’s work, Haitian Vodou, and contemporary theories on subjectivity.

A Historical Context: Rapture and Revolution in Breton’s Haitian Lectures

In the following considerations of Breton’s work within the context of his visit to Haiti, I propose that the concept of possession as considered by Breton’s Surrealist aesthetics is one that not only points out affinities between Haitian and French thought systems, but also renders problematic the binary that posits the interiority of a body’s psychological space against the exteriority that underlies an individual’s commitment to social action. It is important to emphasize the “event” that Breton’s visit to Haiti represented, for it accompanied, if not catalysed, the overthrow of President Elie Lescot’s presidency, which took place within a month of Breton’s visit. In an interview with Lucienne Serrano, René Depestre, one of the young Haitian poets, who was in Breton’s entourage during the visit, explicitly explains how Breton’s visit to Haiti was capital to both Breton and Depestre:

Such a creative effort had to engender a popular Surrealism, a phenomenon that surprised Breton, in 1945, at the moment of his time in Haiti. The founder of learned Surrealism, which resembled German Romanticism, discovered with joy that Surrealism was a historical given of the consciousness of all men. One could find it, in its religious forms, with the Haitians, for example. Such a discovery would delight Breton. I was a witness to his rapture: Breton, under our very eyes, learned that Surrealism could be lived on a daily basis by millions of human beings, and all the while the same frame of mind had been up until then a movement of European intellectuals. (Depestre, 1998: 144–145)

Although in the quotation Depestre does not specify how Surrealism and Vodou relate to each other, he accounts for their similarity, as well as for the momentous occasion that Breton’s visit represented.

Breton’s Haitian lectures may be found in the third volume of the French edition of his complete works, published by Gallimard in 1999. Marguerite Bonnet, the editor of the third volume, in collaboration with Etienne-Alain Hubert, Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas and José Pierre, provides extensive notes on the historical context in which Breton delivered the lectures in Haiti. I take this much time to point out the contribution of the notes to the reading of the lectures for they put in evidence three factors: first, the enthusiastic welcome and espousal of Breton’s Surrealist poetics by Haitian poet-activists such as Depestre and Clément Magloire–Saint–Aude; second, Breton’s reciprocal enthusiasm in responding to the Haitian poets’ political engagement; and third, Breton’s allusions to Vodou.

The notes take the form of two short essays, which underscore the exaltation of Breton on the part of Haitian intellectuals and the youth, as well as Breton’s reciprocal enthusiasm for the combination of aesthetics and revolutionary spirit that he witnessed amongst the Haitians with whom he came into contact during his trip (Bonnet, 1999: 1214–1219, 1227–1228). Breton arrived in Haiti on 4 December 1945, welcomed by Pierre Mabille, who, in Depestre’s words, was “the Cultural Attaché for free France, [who] had the pleasure of introducing his old friend” (Bonnet, 1999: 1216). Especially of interest for our purposes is Breton’s arrival speech, “Speech at the Savoy Club of Port-au-Prince,” delivered on 5 December 1945 and published immediately afterwards in a special edition of the Haitian poets’ literary magazine La Ruche (The Beehive), and the first of eleven planned conferences on poetry, of which only seven took place; the junta interrupted the schedule (Bonnet, 1999: 1217). The first lecture was entitled simply “Surréalisme,” and took place on 20 December 1945 as a public reading at the Rex Theatre in front of “avant-garde intellectuals,” and “feverish youth” (Bonnet, 1999: 1214–1215, 1217–1218, 1227). Bonnet explains that the publication of the first speech led to the Haitian government’s seizure of the magazine and the imprisonment of certain of its editors, including Depestre, in turn provoking a student demonstration that led to the fall of President Lescot.

I paraphrase Bonnet et al.’s notes so as to emphasize a volatile context that informs Breton’s re-articulation of Surrealist ethics and aesthetics before Haitian audiences. Bonnet quite explicitly suggests that Breton’s first two public appearances in Haiti would have actively contributed to the political events. The notes send the reader to an October 1946 article with Jean Duché in which Breton explains that it is first and foremost “the misery, followed by the patience, of the Haitian people [which] were at their height,” that led to the overthrow of the government (1999: 592). They also mention another 1946 interview with Jean Bedel entitled “How without wanting it André Breton made a revolution in Haiti,” which appeared in the literary journal La Minerve (Minerva) on 7 June 1946 (Bonnet, 1999: 1217). After the coup, for most of his trip Breton remained “constrained to prudency, almost never leaving Pétionville”; and “the tone and content of his talks became more and more didactic” (Bonnet, 1999: 1218).

That said, Bonnet is rather explicit in suggesting that at least at first, Breton might have seen his own interest in the instability of the Haitian social and political situation in 1945:

This first talk […] took place in public, with its goal to restore to the image of Surrealism all of its dimensions, including its revolutionary aspects, as if to provide a relay to the intellectuals of Haiti. (Bonnet, 1999: 1227–1228)

Regardless of whether or not Breton saw the precariousness of the Haitian political situation as a means to realize the full political ambitions of his Surrealism, Breton’s first public appearances in Haiti reveal that the French intellectual was delighted by the eager welcome of the young Haitians, and was deliberate in his consideration of Haitian Vodou in relation to Surrealism. Whether or not he performed a “rhetorical enthusiasm” to foment revolution is questionable; but the text of his conference on Surrealism reveals what Depestre characterizes as an “enraptured” response to Breton’s exposure to Haitian Vodou. ³

Surrealism’s Unresolved Challenge

Given the contexts described above, Breton’s discussion of the history of Surrealism as one at pains to resolve the disparity between ethics and aesthetics becomes relevant. I intentionally use short fragments of Breton’s 20 December 1945 conference to summarize his ruminations on the evolution of Surrealist thought in the earlier decades of the 1900s. His words reflect a concern between the interiority and exteriority of human experience as it relates to “the right of peoples to do for themselves” (Breton, 1999b: 162). Speaking in Haiti in December 1945, Breton notes retrospectively that until 1925, Surrealism had still been in its “intuitive stage.” For it to enter its “reasoning phase,” it would need a “particularly emotional traumatism,” which would come in the form of France’s “colonialist war against Morocco” (1999b: 162), a war that would underscore the French government’s disrespect of a citizen’s right to political self-determination (1999b: 162). It is “dialectical materialism” that becomes the tool by which Surrealism will find its “reasoning phase,” in which the avant-garde art movement will apply the “non-conformism” (1999b: 162) of experiments in alternative somatic states (1999b: 160) to a world “outside of itself” (1999b: 160). Breton hopes that experiments in the unconscious will find their articulation in Marxist politics. He believes that non-conformity, whether aesthetic or political, might bring together the bourgeois origins of most of the Surrealists with those French citizens of “working class origins,” “thus allowing the artist and the proletariat to unite in their resistance against ‘national egoisms’” (1999b: 160).

Breton manifestly scoffs at “the almighty power of thought, regarded as capable of emancipating and freeing itself by its own means,” “a belief system” which he finds “very detrimental” (1999b: 160). However, he also recognizes that “the plunge of the lost body into the unconscious” (1999b: 160), which characterizes one of the principal modalities by which Surrealism as a “poetic then artistic movement” (1999b: 154) operated, is too intimate, too affective an experience to be of social, and especially political, import:

The years that followed, in fact, the first World War, sanctioned by a treaty, in our eyes again accentuated the permanent disharmony and reinforced the causes of the conflict, and the Surrealist activity remained confined to its first theoretical givens. (Breton, 1999b: 162)

He finds contemptible “the almighty power of thought,” which inhibits the movement from finding a better way to bridge the gap between somatic non-conformity—that is, alternative explorations of the use of the human body and its psyche—and collective, political non-conformity. Thus, the problematic that Breton puts forth in his lecture on Surrealism in Haiti is that of the disparity between Breton’s fascination with Freud’s methodologies (1999b: 156) and a Marxist dialectical materialism (1999b: 162). It is the conceptual chasm between the body’s psychical capacities and the individual’s responsibility to a larger collective body that troubles Breton.

Generally speaking, the recurring theme of Breton’s talk is how the individual—especially the individual who is European or North American—can deal personally, socially and politically, with the traumas of modernity, especially the dislocation of urban life and the violence of the World Wars:

The passer-by, always in a rush in big American or European cities, is in this way a perpetual dupe. He knows no longer from where he comes, and even less so, where he goes. He has everything to relearn from the Haitian peasant. (Breton, 1999b: 153)

In reflecting on the First World War, Breton wonders at how the human subject is left to deal with the disruption and disillusion “where the first World War had left us, and the tabula rasa that it had rendered of the acknowledged values of our youth” (1999b: 159). He begins his conference with the conclusion that the Haitian “peasant” has found a spiritual equilibrium of which the European or North American are devoid:

If we consider the human condition in Haiti under this angle in relationship to what it is in countries that consider themselves to be the avant-garde of all that is technical progress, I do not hesitate in thinking that it is on the side of the latter that spiritual misery and the most pressing of distresses resides. (Breton, 1999b: 152)

His deduction is based in a discussion of three belief systems to which he has been exposed—Christianity, “indigenous religions,” and Vodou (1999b). So in a sense, what Breton does in his lecture on Surrealism is to re-examine the movement in the presence of Vodou as cultural system.

Surrealist Crisis ⁴ and Vodou Possession

I will now turn to Breton’s treatment of the moment of possession in Vodou ritual as he has observed it, and his comparison of the Vodouisant moment of possession to the avant-garde practices of 1919 in which he and his friends participated:

[…] crises, otherwise known as nervous phenomena created by autosuggestion, which a certain number of my friends presented in rapid succession, by the simple contagious effect that one person, who played the initiatory role, had on several of my friends. These bouts of possession, which I managed to observe with some regularity, night after night over several months, took as their stage my apartment in Paris. (Breton, 1999b: 158)

Breton is intent on distinguishing his Surrealist experimentation from possession in Vodou:

It goes without saying that at least in its genesis, the observed crises differed fundamentally from the Haitian “crises of the loa”. Devoid of any religious foundation, it took place in a strictly experimental context. (Breton, 1999b: 159)

Breton’s discourse is at best exoticizing, and at worst condescending, a point that will be discussed later. For the moment, I am interested in how Breton’s comments on Vodou possession fit into a broader intellectual history. Given the fact that Breton deliberately couches his discussion of Surrealism within the context of an explicit scepticism about religion, or rather “cults”—for he calls both Vodou and Christianity “cults” (1999b: 152)—he is nonetheless at pains to dissimulate his fascination with Vodou possession. The “attitude” of which Breton speaks in the citation below is that which offers up “the plunge of the lost body into the unconscious” as a means of relief from the psychological grief that “a period of extreme intellectual and moral disarray” entailed (1999b: 160):

I so obstinately clung to this attitude that it provided the conclusion of the book: Nadja, published in 1928 […] I like to think that Haiti [like a jewel] is set ⁵ like no other place in the world:

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.”

Hypnotic sleep also confirmed the idea that mental automatism, far from being a trap, is the ideal means by which we may act upon life through the intermediary of language, that this language be oral or written, graphic language, just as that of song or dance. The Verb, if it has been placed “at the beginning”, must maintain the power to recreate everything. (Breton, 1999b: 160)

Part of Breton’s enchantment with both the “crise” in Surrealism and “possession” in Vodou is that they provide a physiological processing of trauma. Ellen Corin’s work on trauma explores the “ex-centricity of the subject”: she proposes that “[w]hatever the context, narratives suggest that something rises from within the subject’s experience and destabilizes it, shaking the lived world at its roots” (Corin, 2007: 273). In extremely different contexts, what Breton observes in both forms of convulsive somatic behaviour is an aesthetics that enables the desubjectified subject to represent the trauma of its psychic displacement. Breton writes:

That said, I am far from wanting to mark any superiority in favour of that which livened up, in a strongly disorganized way, the small group that we formed. I insist that it is in and of itself significant, if not to say heraldic, that at that time, in our dispositions of spirit and of heart, in the dire state of despair in which the first World War had left us […] we were able to rediscover the gesture, which for centuries had elevated the Haitian peasant beyond slavery and the overwhelming reason that would have made it seem that all was lost. (Breton, 1999b: 159)

Although Breton does not directly compare the hopelessness of his group of friends during the First World War to the despair incurred by the slave trade and slavery, his text does recognize that the “gesture” of the young French men’s “crise” has been preserved throughout the generations in Haiti. ⁶

As I have already noted, Dash traces the writing process of the “Surrealist ethnographers,” with particular interest in how a sense of instability plays itself out in their works. For example, in the case of Breton’s Martinique charmeuse de serpents, he notes “self-doubt and anxiety in the effort to produce a stable travel narrative” (Dash, 2007: 87). While Breton’s privileged displacement as a member of an elite class (to which he hints both in the above quotation and in his aforementioned self-identification as a “non-worker” [Breton, 1999b: 162]), and the modesty associated with his desire not to convey a sense of “superiority,” may be questionable, there is nonetheless legitimacy to his argument that “crise” and “possession” serve to process a traumatic event.

Nadja as Mèt Tèt

In an effort to further excavate Breton’s own admission in his first Haitian conference that possession in Haitian Vodou is exceptionally similar to the “convulsive beauty” of his 1928 novel Nadja, I read Nadja solely in light of scholarship on Haitian Vodou. Leslie G. Desmangles writes:

Possession indicates to the société that, in spite of the remoteness of his permanent home, the loa is also one who comforts his serviteurs in the anxieties and the defeats of their lives and that, at the root of the cosmos, goodness always endures. Even with their poverty, their hunger, their failures, peasants know that they are rewarded by the cosmic power of the loas, who are capable of bestowing on their serviteurs the hope of a bright future. The intimate relationship that a possessed serviteur establishes with a loa through the mediation of the vèvès accords him many benefits. The loa who mounts a serviteur soothes his particular fears and helps him in his personal losses. (Desmangles, 2006: 47)

In a sense, the argument could be made that the narrative instance of Nadja, the eponymous muse of Breton’s novel, is the male narrator’s lwa mèt tèt, for as Max G. Beauvoir points out:

Possession by the lwa most commonly occurs during Vodoun ceremonies; but it may also take place at any time—especially in stressful situations. Furthermore, a frequent type of possession is associated with the sleep state. Recognized as a valid and legitimate form of cultural expression, possession is seen as a way to free the individual inhibitions and frustrations; it acts as a psychic outlet. (Beauvoir, 2006: 129)

Thus, using Vodou cosmology as a theoretical lens, it could be argued that Nadja is the narrator’s mèt tèt, or the opposite, that the narrator of the novel is Nadja’s mèt tèt, that they alternately possess each other.

In his 20 December 1945 conference on Surrealism, Breton refers to possessions in Europe prior to the seventeenth century (Breton, 1999b: 151). Stephenson’s exploration of possession as a Jungian construct of the psyche suggests that in the century leading up to the Loudun possessions in France in the 1630s, “[a]s the body became the target of diabolical attack, the terms ‘possession’ and ‘obsession’ which had been used almost synonymously, diverged in meaning. […] Hence, an obsessive spirit was thought to assail, haunt, harass a person from the outside, while a possessing spirit was considered to have taken up residence inside the body […]” (Stephenson, 2009: 14). In this regard it is interesting to note that René Descartes “was born sixty kilometres east of Loudun at La Haye in 1596,” although “[b]y the time of the possessions of Loudun, he was living in permanent and peripatetic exile in the Netherlands” (2009: 17). Stephenson argues that Descartes’s thought privileged reason as a means to dominate any outside influence that may invade the space of reason. Breton’s stance, as we have seen, is not necessarily the opposite, but rather privileges the concept that reason is by no means an all-powerful tool, that possibly the flight of reason in the moment of “la crise”—of possession—might have beneficial repercussions for the human subject, who has little or no control over the assault of such mass human traumas as slavery or world war.

Nadja was written before Breton’s visit to Haiti. The novel unfolds in three movements—or at least, there are two full-page breaks that visually create for the reader three distinct parts. The first part constructs imagery around vision (the word “eyes” is mentioned on almost every page of the first part) and sleep, or “Nap Period” (Breton, 1960: 31); in addition, the narrator names alternative somatic states such as “the hallucinatory image of the words in question” (1960: 27); he describes a situation in which he “begin[s] corresponding with Paul Eluard, whom I did not know by sight” (1960: 27); he describes “psychoanalysis, a method I respect and whose present aims I consider nothing less than the expulsion of man from himself, and of which I expect other exploits than those of a bouncer” (1960: 24). It is on the last page of the first of the three parts of the text that the narrator fully introduces Nadja: “Nadja’s appearance on the scene” is “an event” related to the narrator’s own self-exploration (Breton, 1960: 69; 1964: 60). Her name appears earlier on when the narrator refers to “Nadja” as a text: “(Could it have been otherwise, once I decided to write Nadja?)” (Breton, 1964: 23). In the second part, the narrator describes his rapture with Nadja, his rendezvous with her, her fickle behaviour and her final disappearance. When present, Nadja and narrator, whom at one point she names “André?,” share such an intimate psychic space that they become a “we” so powerful that they are convinced of the inevitability that they will leave behind them physical proof of their encounter. It is at this point that she implores him to write a novel about her, about them (Breton, 1964: 117, 100). He describes her withdrawals from his presence as “a whirlwind” (Breton, 1964: 136; 1960: 114), and she acknowledges that in the end, for him she will only be a “trace,” yet a trace whose “resonance” remains for the narrator “so grand” (Breton, 1964: 137; 1960: 115).

Throughout the novel, various narrative voices intertwine: that of a narrator fully conscious of his experience with Nadja and trying in hindsight to make sense of it, the voice of a narrator fully enthralled by Nadja, and other voices including those of the narrative instances of Rrose Sélavy, Robert Desnos (Breton, 1960: 31), Fanny Beznos (1960: 55), and even Rimbaud as representing “the extremely deep and vivid emotion” (1960: 51). ⁷ In the third part, the narrator makes sense of his encounter with Nadja: he explains that despite his rapture for her, they had never really got along (1960: 157). Due to “the eccentricities in which it seems she had indulged herself in the hallways of her hotel,” she had been interned in an asylum (1960: 136). Thus, in a sense, the novel may be described as an incantatory ritual—in which the first and third parts lead the narrator in and out of his “crise,” his “possession.” That said, it could also be argued that the narrator goes in and out of the states of crisis, for the narrative voice of consciousness returns frequently enough in the second part to dismiss the possibility that the entire second part represents a written trace of the “crise.”

Both the first and third parts use vocabulary related to theatre: the narrator goes to the “Théâtre Moderne” (Breton, 1964: 43); he speaks to its director (1964: 51); at the end, he is disappointed by the Théâtre Moderne’s work (1964: 177); he refers to the opening, closing and reclosing of the “Théâtre des Deux-Masques”/“Théâtre du Masque” (1964: 180); and finally, he describes his encounter with Nadja as “[a] short interval—negligible for a hurried reader and even for any other, but, I must say, enormous and priceless for me” (Breton, 1960: 148).

Karen McCarthy Brown describes the theatrical aspect of possession, which both Breton’s novel and Vodou ritual share:

Once the spirit is in charge of the horse, the crescendo of energy stops and people settle in to watch the possession performance. The term “possession performance” is not used here to indicate that there is anything false or contrived about these visits from the spirits. Vodou priest and priestess alike condemn the occasional person in their midst who may pran poz, act disingenuously as if possessed. The term is used rather to indicate what has often been noticed about possession in the Vodou temple: it has a theatrical quality. (McCarthy Brown, 2006: 13)

In a similar vein, Irene Albers’s work looks at one of Breton’s contemporaries, and someone with whom he collaborated in the early days of Surrealism. In her article entitled “Mimesis and alterity: Michel Leiris’s ethnography and poetics of spirit possession,” she discusses liberation, theatricality, and spirit possession as they relate to Leiris’s ethnographic work on Zar possession in Ethiopia in the 1930s. It is also important to indicate Leiris’s connection to Haiti in that he visited Alfred Métraux there in 1948 (Dash, 2007: 91). She writes:

Re-enacting the Other leads to a liberation from its power by means of imitation. It is shown that this corresponds to Leiris’s own retrospective studies of the zar cult as a cathartic externalization of alterity and as a theatre of alterity. […] In Leiris, the conjuring (as well as the therapy) becomes a literary domain, whereas the banishment of the phantom is the domain of theory or research. Talking as one who is possessed and talking about possession, inseparably linked in the diary, are associated with discourses of autobiographical self-description and ethnographic description of otherness, of “expérience poétique” and “étude ethnologique.” (Albers, 2008: 271)

In Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics (2007: 23), Boris Wiseman likewise underscores the interpenetration of scholarly disciplines to describe Leiris’s work as theatrical:

My point is not to reduce one experience to the other, but to enlarge the context in which we view each, and reintegrate the “aesthetic” phenomenon that is a theatrical performance into a broader network of interconnected experiences, sometimes seemingly far from aesthetics. By the same token, one may view the shamanistic cure as a form of “lived theatre”, to borrow a phrase coined by Michel Leiris to describe Ethiopian ceremonies of Zar possession. The result is what one may think of as “ethno-aesthetics.”

The above quotations in recent scholarship point to the complementarities between the two seemingly different poles of the encounter between Breton, Métraux and Leiris and Vodou.

I turn my attention to Albers’s work because she considers the theatricality of the “crise,” or of “possession,” as a coping mechanism, as both Desmangles’s and Breton’s respective interpretations, cited above, suggest. Given the above considerations, Breton’s proposition in the Haitian lectures, while maladroit in rhetorical utterance, in its message is legitimate. As we have already seen, he compares the lived experience of the First World War to that of slavery; and, as mode of relief to the trauma, he describes the body’s total immersion into the unconscious. Yet, even before visiting Haiti, he had already considered the healing aspects of the “crise” in his novel Nadja, whose narrator describes Nadja’s world as one “where everything so rapidly assumed the appearance of a rise, a fall” (Breton, 1960: 135). Finally, he explains that her eccentricities were due to an unrestricted use of “liberty” and of “human emancipation”:

[…] and this because human emancipation—conceived finally in its simplest revolutionary form, which is no less than human emancipation in every respect, by which I mean, according to the means at every man’s disposal—remains the only cause worth serving. Nadja was born to serve it […]. (Breton, 1960: 143)

It is interesting to note that both Leiris and Breton, who collaborated together on the publication Minotaure in the late 1930s (Bernal, 2008: 42), each in his own way, conjugate both ethnographic and literary iterations of the notion of possession. In a sense, just as Rey and Richman’s article employs “Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in his grounding of the human experience in the body” (Rey and Richman, 2010: 383), it would not be surprising that Leiris and Breton, who were contemporaries of Merleau-Ponty, would also be informed by an academic discourse that was interested in the body.

To push my suggestion of the interpenetration of thought systems further, let us consider Eric Matthews’s reading of the relevant intellectual lineage leading to Merleau-Ponty:

The most powerful single influence in introducing Hegel’s philosophy, and a Hegelianized Marxism, into France was a Russian émigré named Alexandre Kojève, who lectured on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris from 1933 to 1939. These lectures attracted the attention of a number of leading younger intellectuals of the time, including Merleau-Ponty […]. (Matthews, 1996: 110–111)

As seen in the earlier part of this article, if Buck-Morss argues “Hegel and Haiti belong together” (2009: 20), and given the intimacy of the Parisian intellectual world to which Merleau-Ponty, Breton and Leiris circulated in the 1930s, it is not surprising that Breton, Métraux, Leiris, and Georges Bataille, whose Les Larmes d’Eros (1961) showcases Vodou ceremony, pay attention to a “phenomonology of spirit” that marvels in the body. Moreover, if “Hegel was an acute observer of the rupture of social life that we now call modernity” (Buck-Morss, 2009: 6), then Breton’s focus on the “crise”/“possession” as a means for both Europeans and Haitians to deal with the sociopolitical “crises” is also related to the small, but influential philosophical lineage to which the French scholars belonged. Thus while Condé characterizes the scholarly interest in the relationship between the French and Caribbean intellectuals as one of indifference, a study of the affinities between the Surrealist “crise” and Vodou possession reveals an entire intellectual discourse that is common to both a Haitian and a French intellectual way of being, one that pre-dates Métraux, Leiris, and Breton’s visit to the Caribbean.

I would like to return to the idea of theatricality in possession and Albers’s suggestion that Leiris conceived of it as a sort of catharsis. Without rejecting Albers’s claim, I add to the notion of catharsis the idea that possession is synechdocal: the lwa inhabits the human subject and the human subject partially suspends his or her consciousness so as to allow that of the lwa to cohabit his or her body. Unlike catharsis, the spectator is not separate from the performance; rather, the member of the audience becomes the performer. Colin (Joan) Dayan writes that “the possessed gives herself [or himself] up to become an instrument in a social and collective drama” (Dayan, 1997: 19). Just as the possessed person contains the spiritual power of the visiting lwa, so does the Vodou objet d’art incorporate spiritual power. As Donald Cosentino (1996: 12) explains:

A Vodou clairvoyant is said to have the gift of the “eyes,” which is the ability to discern spiritual power, pwisans, where others only see matter. […] [I]t is the magic within an object which validates its status as sacred art. The magic is often metonymic, residing in some particular aspect of the work. . . .

Spiritual power does not just reveal itself through the material object, whether it be the human being or the materiality of the object of art; rather it becomes a part of the individual. Art in Vodou is not devised as a simile for spirituality, or as a representation of an emotion; instead, it impels the interlocutor to become a part of spirituality. Art’s role in Vodou is as much one that reveals intellectual truths, as it is one that “bring[s] about healing transformations.” Put otherwise by McCarthy Brown (1996: 67), “konesans refers to sacred knowledge, the knowledge of how to heal.” In Breton’s opening essay to Surrealism and Painting, he writes of the “varying degrees of sensation” which “correspond to spiritual realizations” (2002: 1). Here, Breton’s Surrealism seems to conceive of art as sensation, and the human being who engages in it, seeks it out, might also go so far as to embody it.

Theories of Today: “Subjectivities”

In this context, possession as seen in Vodou as cultural text or in Breton’s novel only reinforces Wiseman’s notion of “ethno-aesthetics” (2007: 23) or Dash’s articulation of “Surrealist ethnographers.” Of interest in this regard is João Biehl, Byron Good and Arthur Kleinman’s Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, a compilation of essays on methods for “contemporary anthropological observation” (Rabinow, 2007: 107). Although Haitian Vodou does not figure as a subject of their volume, I hope to suggest that their theories exemplify the role that the “crise” of “possession” may have in enabling a body in crisis to speak for itself. In “Return(s) to Subjectivities,” in Michael M.J. Fischer’s epilogue to the collection, we read that “our high-technology age” and a globalized space that is increasingly “nonstate” call for a return to subjectivities, in other words a distancing from favouring knowledge systems by which the human state is assumed to be stable, or as Kleinman and Fitz-Henry state:

Scholars have frequently invoked this notion of a unified human nature as the rationale for universals of all kinds, and it continues to be used as a justification for Western ethical discourse, which assumes a static, generalized subject that does not vary with changing historical circumstances, cultural contexts, or sociopolitical institutions. (2007: 52)

In Darren Staloff’s Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding (2007), he not only includes a global context for the American Enlightenment, but also provides a thorough history of the important role that Haiti played in differentiating between the politics of the three statesmen, notably Adams and Jefferson. Staloff also vividly summarizes the attitude in which the Enlightenment discourse regarded the supposed supernatural beliefs of pre-Enlightenment Europe. What strikes me in the following passage is that the vocabulary resonates with our above discussions of possession in Haitian Vodou, and Breton’s discussions of an aesthetic for the twentieth century:

Historians describe the impact of this worldliness [that of the Enlightenment] as a process of disenchantment. The word has the peculiar virtue of reminding us just how enchanted the worldview of the preceding centuries had been. Comets, earthquakes, volcanoes, and even severe storms were not natural phenomena but portents of divine wrath and judgment. Ghosts walked the earth, and demons possessed the bodies of human victims. Satan was not a symbol of evil but a real, active presence—Martin Luther once reportedly threw an inkwell at him. Miraculous and supernatural cures for a variety of ailments were an accepted part of conventional belief. […] The central goal of the Enlightenment’s metaphysical disenchantment was to subject such time-worn and traditional beliefs to ridicule as childish superstitions. (Staloff, 2007: 14)

Fischer’s epilogue speaks of the necessity in the contemporary age to honour all human expressions, and he emphasizes that the terrains that are considered exotic in European discourse—a bit like Staloff’s invocation of an almost legendary dystopic time before “the Enlightenment”—are no longer to be found in communities different from our own. The need to de-marginalize the study of all subjectivities—that is, all expressions of the self—whether seemingly objectively rational or seemingly irrational is quintessential to enabling Ek’s “displace[d] and desubjectifi[ed]” bodies (Ek, 2006: 363) to possibly create “a (re)constructed platform for individual, social, and civic selves” (Fischer, 2007: 425).

Building on Ek’s phrase, I characterize the “being” which resembles that about which Ek, Fischer or Rabinow speak as a desubjectified subject. If Fischer suggests that “the returns to subjectivity might be guarantors of privacy, ethical and social responsibility, and monitoring of integrity (of the body, accountability, civic community),” Rabinow is more sceptical in regards to the possibility that such a desubjectified subject might actually be able to act “responsibly,” at least when “the term ethics appears promiscuously in the most surprising couplings—business ethics, baseball ethics, bioethics” (Rabinow, 2007: 103):

because we live in a modernity in which the future appears as contingent, the ethical actor cannot know the future chain of consequences of his actions. This situation leads to a dilemma: Either we do not act (but then who takes responsibility for the consequences of inaction?), or we act responsibly, knowing that we cannot know the stochastic results of our actions. Today, we are conscious of accepting risk, and ethics, at least until now, has not been able to provide any criteria for this situation. It has provided only procedures and values. Hence, the cost of a responsibility-based ethics may be its impossibility. (2007: 104)

In other words, how does a desubjectified subject do anything, much less take responsibility? In a sense Rabinow’s article responds to Stephenson’s advocacy of a psychoanalysis that looks to the social sciences for amelioration of its own practice. That said, Rabinow rejects the infusion of psychoanalysis into anthropology, for as he points out, it has already been attempted, and it serves to “ablate them [anthropologists] from their own cultural prejudices” (2007: 99). Instead, he advocates for an “immediate history,” an “anthropology of the actual” (2007: 109), by which “authors” facilitate to the maximum the voices of those along whose side they study: “To write immediate history well, authors should not speak for those they aim to present but should seek a mode through which interviewees could speak for themselves” (2007: 111). For Rabinow, anthropology thus becomes less about studying “culture” than about “self-formation.” The example that Rabinow examines, and offers up as possibly enacting such “anthropology of the actual” (2007: 109), is that of Thucydides On the Peloponnesian War. Rabinow concludes his article: “[…] we are wise to ponder how a text written twenty-five hundred years ago remains such a keen deictic tool” (2007: 117). Rabinow’s process is one that aims less at achieving a cohesive subject, or subjectivity, but rather strives towards representing the moment.

Stephenson provides an etymology of the word “possession,” relating it to psychology (2009: 117):

In English, “to possess” denotes “to hold as property”, “to own”, “to occupy”; like the French posséder, it derives from the Latin possidere, from potis meaning “able” and sedere, “to sit”. The metaphor in the concept of possession is that a being claims space and sits in a position of capability […] The goal of psychotherapy is that the patient should become “self-possessed.”

Thus if the contemporary age, as Fischer puts forward, “will not require subjectivity to be located only within the body” (Fischer, 2007: 425), Rabinow implies that the anthropological process is less about locating the “subject” (in a certain identifiable “culture”), than in describing the “singularity of events” (2007: 117). For Stephenson, possession is directly related to “selfhood sitting in its own seat and of the suffering inherent when selfhood experiences itself as unseated” (2009: 3). Like Thucydides, who “was no longer an actor in these events; he was in exile but immediately adjacent to things,” it seems that what is at stake for Rabinow is less about location or identity than it is about being “unquestionably reflective while remaining contemporary to the events themselves” (2007: 116). In a sense, then, might possession itself be a means by which an individual speaks and/or embodies its dislocation, while the interpretative aspect that accompanies the process of possession, that offered by those close to the individual possessed—whether mambo, houngan, or anthropologist—be one that enables the community (that of the hounfor, that of the academe) to reflect on the events? In other words, is to be self-possessed less related to subjectivity and identity than to the process of reflection on events that one undergoes?

So while the experience of the desubjectified subject may quite possibly be unable to act responsibly faced with “a contingent but onrushing future” (Rabinow, 2007: 103), and if, as Rabinow suggests, “ethics” and “responsibility” are in crisis (2007: 104), if possibility there is, the only way to take inventory of what might be new paradigms that desubjectified subjects might employ to ensure an ethics for the future management of society is quite simply to listen. Rabinow acknowledges that for the anthropologist, as for the historian or the philosopher, finding a “form of inquiry […] appropriate for studying practices in their immediacy rather than cultures in their atemporality” (2007: 111) is challenging in a time in which authority and objectivity are in crisis. As Kleinman and Fitz-Henry point out, such concepts “[…] still largely fail to account for the enormous complexity of human social experience—war, genocide, structural violence, poverty, and displacement—and the highly nuanced subjective states that those experiences engender” (Kleinman and Fitz-Henry, 2007: 53). Rabinow thus encourages anthropologists to “find conceptually deictic forms—forms that would once again make immediate history a tool for bringing particularity and generality into more fruitful, mutually informing relationships, obliging the reader to take up an active and prudential stance toward the issues under deliberation” (Rabinow, 2007: 116). ⁸

In writing on Zar possession cults among Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, Eliezer Witztum, Nimrod Grisaru and Danny Budowski identify Zar “as a diagnostic category, either as the explanatory model in the Ethiopian community [in Israel] or as a culture-bound syndrome in terms of Western diagnostic systems” (Witztum et al., 1996: 224). Whether in medicine, literature, or ethnography, the discussion of possession might be a “contemporary one,” in the sense that Clifford Geertz gives to the term: “Contemporaries are persons who share a community of time but not space: they live at (more or less) the same period of history and have, often attenuated, social relationships with one another” (Geertz, 1973: 365). In this way, possession, whether in Breton’s work or in the text of Haitian Vodou ritual, is a contemporary experience that links Haitians to the French, and even Haitians and the French to Israelis and Ethiopians. Bourguignon (1991: 31) writes:

The argument suggested here is: Possession trance, by offering a decision-making authority in the person of a medium, revealing the presumed will of the spirits, allows persons oppressed by rigid societies some degree of leeway and some elbow room. As such, possession trance may be said to represent a safety valve, of sorts, for societies whose rigid social structures cause certain stresses.

In an increasingly transnational and interconnected space, might it be that societies are no longer as distinct as they used to be? Or rather that contemporary pressures on the individual are such that “rigid social structures cause certain stresses” in societies that have a long history of naming and/or of being designated as practising “possession” as such, as well as in societies that have a less comfortable history with assigning “possession” to characterize a repertoire of behaviours common to the society. In a time that Ek refers to as “the return of the camp” (2006: 363), dispossession and dislocation are more and more ubiquitous; and we can thus expect that the notion of possession to address problems of dispossession will be more and more important. Thus, within the present discussion of the relevance of global crises to the notion of identity, Haiti and Breton, I argue, are absolutely relevant.

What interests me is how the notion of possession as it is conceived of in Haitian Vodou and in Breton’s work fits into the above propositions. In the conclusion to their edited volume entitled Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel explain that they have chosen essays that provide an “emic perspective, that of the insider” (2006: 134):

In this multicultural and multinational world—“worlds,” to be precise—it is enormously important to allow multitudinous voices to reveal themselves, particularly if they have been violently silenced down through the centuries.

Their propositions reiterate that subjects speak for themselves, and that they speak in the present tense: possession, or “crisis,” is a privileged moment of such speaking. Desmangles explains, furthermore, that “[d]uring the period of possession, the serviteur, […] embodies the cross symbol of the vèvès, the zero-point of contact between the sacred and the profane world” and his or her “body is the vertical line whereby the revitalizing forces of the universe flow to the société” (Desmangles, 2006: 48). Thus, possession is a mode by which the desubjectified subject may find a means to express itself in the face of an ever-destabilized global reality.

In a sense, then, possession is dispossession revitalized. At the very least, it is a lens through which to explore otherness, a sort of displacement within, which represents the displacement of the insular, the displacement that fragments the body—the human body, the collective body, body as narrative, the body as cultural text. It is a means to explore how the traumatic experience—whether that of migration, of psychosis, or those of geo-political and historical impediments—might be transcended if only momentarily within Wiseman’s notion of “ethno-aesthet[ic]” representation. While it is true, as Albers points out, that both Breton’s and Leiris’s work reveals exoticist and primitivist representations, she also suggests that studying the modes of Leiris’s exoticism is revelatory of ways in which an individual learns to know both his or her own culture as well as that of another (2008: 275–276). So while scholars such as Edouard Glissant judge the messages of Surrealism harshly (1997: 742), Dash affirms that writers such as Breton and Leiris also “inaugurated a form of writing that Glissant in 1956 calls a welcome combination of literature and ethnography” (Dash, 2007: 84). Thus, in the same vein, my intent has been not to judge Breton’s work, but rather to listen to Breton in his own words.

Possession, Pwen, and Writing

I now turn to another lens through which we may conceive of possession: possession as a representational form that helps the individual to negotiate “displacement and desubjectification” (Ek, 2006: 363). If the body in Vodou spirit possession is the place where human and lwa meet and dislodge the human of its corporeal residency, then the body becomes a location that registers that which passes through it. How, if at all, may we compare the experience of possession to that of writing? Toward answering this question, I turn to Glissant’s considerations of writing as they might relate to his notion of Martinican “dispossession” (Glissant, 1997: 834).

When Glissant writes that “Haitian Creole is practically unharmed by the passage. The painted sign is its ancestral residence” (1997: 460), he notes a difference between literary production coming out of Haiti and Haitian writers and that of Martinique and Martinican writers. The context of Glissant’s statement is to expand upon Haitian writers’ comfort with the written form, noting with dismay that for Martinicans, the “passage” from the oral to the written form has been more difficult than for the Haitians. In her book entitled African Novels and the Question of Orality, Eileen Julien proposes that scholars of African literature have imposed the false binary of orality/writing. She writes, “For many practitioners of African literature and criticism, continuity has meant most often a search for a heritage from oral traditions to the new literatures written in European and African languages, the ‘passage from orality to writing’” (Julien, 1992: 4). Glissant’s italicized use of the word “passage” renders ironic the erroneous notion of the relationship between oral and written communication as evolutionary and civilizing, a derogatory connotation according to which, for the European colonizer, “Blacks and other people of color could not write” (Gates, 1995: 217) for “[…] writing, according to Hume, was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human” (1995: 218). Glissant’s use of the word “passage” in association with writing also invokes the tragedy of “The Middle Passage” or “la Traversée.”

To better understand how writing, passage and possession are related, let us now look more closely at the modalities of possession as articulated in Vodou. Réginald O. Crosley (2006: 7) writes:

In Haiti, the components of man are known as kò kadav, gro [gwo] bon anj, and ti bon anj, which correspond to the body, the semedo, and the selido of the Dahomeans and the body, the moyo, and the mfumu-kutu of the Bantu or Bakongo. In Dagaraland, Burkina Faso, we have the body, a soul or body double called sié, and a third component which is a spirit or a God.

For a Vodouisant, both the gwo-bon-anj and the ti-bon-anj are manifestations of a person’s soul; however, the gwo-bon-anj corresponds more closely to a Christian concept of soul and the Freudian concept of psyche, and the ti-bon-anj to personality. Since in Vodou “the energy of matter is common to all living matter,” then, we may think of the gwo-bon-anj and the ti-bon-anj as parts of a totality (Deren, 1970: 25). The gwo-bon-anj is an element of the universal life force, or the supreme God of Vodou, Bondye. Desmangles (1992: 66) describes the gwo-bon-anj as follows:

The first compartment […] is the immortal, cosmic spirit of Bondye, which is manifested in the body […]. It is a life-force, an internal dynamism planted within the body that serves as its shell. It derives its subsistence from, and is an offshoot particle of Bondye; it is sustained and molded by the same “stuff” from which creation flows.

In contrast, the ti-bon-anj “is personality, conscience, the moral side of one’s character […] it is that element in a person which is the physical manifestation of his or her gwo-bon-anj” (Desmangles, 1992: 67). Both Desmangles and Deren explain that one can imagine them as twins in which the gwo-bon-anj is “the metaphysical double of the physical being [or ti-bon-anj]” (Deren, 1970: 26). The ti-bon-anj as “physical being” is the individual personality that performs actions in society.

The above description of the tri-partite conception of the human in Vodou cosmology not only emphasizes “the non-material components of the person—that is, his or her two souls” (Crosley, 2006: 7), but also draws attention to the cohabitation of various modes of consciousness. To the two souls that reside within the human body, during the moment of possession, a third resident manifests itself, the lwa, which traverses the human body displacing either the gwo-bon-anj or ti-bon-anj that resides within the carnal body, the kò kadav.

In a sense, the kò kadav becomes a proscenium, a canvas, across which varied voices—ti-bon-anj, gwo-bon-anj, lwa—leave their imprint. Regardless of whether one is a Vodouist or not—whether one believes or not in the spiritual power of the three phenomena—the three manifest themselves as distinct narrative voices that play themselves out on the stage that is the human body. If for Leiris and Brown there is a theatrical aspect to possession in which the body performs for observers, I would also propose that this body is itself a stage on which various phenomenological entities perform. By phenomenological actor, I mean an entity—in this context the ti-bon-anj, gwo-bon-anj, or lwa—that speaks in its own right, that represents its own individual subjectivity. In this way, the kò kadav becomes a place: a place that is traversed, a place occupied by various entities, some denizens that are displaced (gwo-bon-anj and ti-bon-anj) and those that invade and dislodge (the lwa).

In so far as the kò kadav becomes a place, we may relate possession to Glissant’s poetic endeavour. Although Carine Mardorossian’s article has nothing to do with Vodou, the discourse she invokes when tracing a genealogy between Frantz Fanon and Glissant complements our present discussion of Vodou possession. Mardorossian invokes Michelle Praeger’s description of Glissant’s “creolized aesthetic” as a “poetics of location” in which “one finds in Glissant’s work a discourse of geographical continuity meant to compensate for the nonhistory of the Caribbean” (Mardorossian, 2009: 23). Further on, Mardorossian writes:

One would think that a cultural model that embraces mutability and the coming together of cultures may necessarily be more lukewarm in its critique of the effects of colonialism. Yet, as Fanon’s and Glissant’s interventions both illustrate, insight into cultural heritage as a site of interaction need not compromise on one’s condemnation of the “dépossession” resulting from colonial and neocolonial relations. (2009: 23)

Mardorossian’s text directly relates a poetics of location to Glissant’s notion of dispossession; in a sense, they act as a call and response to one another, where colonial and postcolonial dispossession call upon the poet to create the Glissantian poétique de la relation, which for Praeger applies to locations, “symbolic sites through which the relationality of the modern world is discussed and embodied” (Mardorossian, 2009: 23). If the phenomenological actors in the poetics of possession are the ti-bon-anj, the gwo-bon-anj, and the hundreds of lwa privy to descending upon the human body, then they act in much the same way as do the figures of speech that the poet uses to give life to words. In a sense, the kò kadav, like the morpheme or the phoneme, is nothing more than a signifier waiting to receive its meaning from a relational experience that depends on location.

The emphasis that I have put on the kò kadav as location may initially seem contrary to the notion that the corporeal body in Vodou is like a “horse” which the lwa “mounts”—the often erratic mobility with which a horse is associated contradicts the notion of body as domicile, and yet, it is precisely that: the body in Haitian Vodou is a domicile in continual displacement whose denizens are also continually displaced to make way for the spirits. In a sense, it is Derrida’s flying signifier, constantly on the move, continually the vehicle of meanings that are both complementary and contradictory, a medium for the “mutability and coming together of cultures” (Mardorossian, 2009: 23).

In his recent Cannibal Modernities, Luís Madureira (2005: 6) advocates the reading of texts that reveal a “latticework of uneven and subtle continuities,” which in turn enable “readings of nonwestern modernisms to be submitted to a thoroughgoing re-evaluation” (2005: 2). Breton is from the “West,” but as Dash points out, the Caribbean is not necessarily “non-western.” Dash refers to Geertz, who speaks to Lévi-Strauss’s dismissal of the Caribbean as a space not pure enough in its exotic distance from European culture, whereas Leiris’s interest is to explore “Haiti and Martinique” as “mirrors in which the everyday provides zones of interaction, a ‘théâtre vécu,’ involving self and other” (Dash, 2007: 91):

It is precisely because it was such a complex mirror of real and unreal, of unpredictable images and displaced originals, that Leiris could sense in this act of self-exploration the interactions of global modernity. The destabilizing and creolizing Caribbean, with its desubjectifying possibilities, becomes an ideal site for Leiris’s self-ethnography.

Dash’s “desubjectifying possibilities” recast Ek’s and Rabinow’s notions of the desubjectified subject in a more hopeful light.

In her recent work, Kaiama L. Glover speaks of identifying new centres in considerations of Caribbean discourses. She writes of the role her book Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon plays in literary theory on Haiti:

Haiti Unbound fills, then, a rather astonishingly empty place in the assessment of postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics. Affirming the presence of a spiral-based aesthetic in major prose and fiction works […], I frame my analyses here in an interrogation of the criteria for inclusion in New World traditions, considering the manner in which new centers and margins have been created in the already peripheralized space(s) of the Americas. (Glover, 2010: xi)

Similarly, this article hopes to have offered yet another way of centring (or decentring) discourses on the physical and intellectual encounters between Breton, Haiti, Haitian Vodou, and theories of subjectivities as related specifically to possession. By using possession in Haitian Vodou as a theoretical counterpoint for a textual analysis of Breton’s first Haitian conference and the novel Nadja, I hope to have shed light on a short-lived, yet important piece of the architecture that constitutes the eventful encounter of Breton with Haiti. In L’aperto: L’uomo e l’animale, Agamben asks: “What does ‘mastery of the relation between nature and humanity’ mean? That neither must man master nature nor nature man” (Agamben, 2004: 83); and later on in his article on Agamben, Ek explains that the “state of emergency in society […] requires the suspension of the normal order to resolve” (Ek, 2006: 365). I have hoped to suggest that in its own way possession is a “highly deictic form” that brings “immedia[cy]” to a subject’s narration of himself, herself, or itself (Rabinow, 2007: 116), and, more importantly, might be a conceptual space that is far more contemporary than it might on first glance seem.