1890s–1944: (Ici la Renaissance: From Rouzier’s Dismissal to DeWitt Peters’s Discovery, and the Peasant Artists Who Painted to Please Their Lwa): In the 1890…

1890s–1944: (Ici la Renaissance: From Rouzier’s Dismissal to DeWitt Peters’s Discovery, and the Peasant Artists Who Painted to Please Their Lwa): In the 1890s, Sémextant Rouzier, Haiti’s geographer-historian, disposed of the fine arts in a sentence — they were generally neglected, a few musicians and artists possessed remarkable talent but unfortunately received very little encouragement. Rouzier undoubtedly never gave a thought to the intricate cornmeal vèvè being traced on the floors of countless ounfò, or considered the rhythm of elaborately carved Petwo and Rada drums as music in its purest form. Music had always flowed through Haitian veins — toddlers swung instinctively to the beat of a compas, a bamboche without music was to a Haitian like a repast without wine to a Frenchman. Turn-of-the-century poets flowered profusely, their language French and their style that of Victor Hugo and Lamartine. In 1927, Émile Roumer, Jacques Roumain, Daniel Heurtelou, and Philippe Thoby-Marcelin founded the Revue Indigène, and Haitian literature and poetry achieved an exciting new dimension — novelists wrote of, if not for, the people. Roumain’s Gouverneurs de la Rosée received international acclaim, the Marcelin brothers became the first Haitians to win the Latin American novel contest in 1943, and Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi Parla l’Oncle awakened the country’s pride in its own rich folklore, its wise yet pungent Creole proverbs and its Vodou songs. Jean Brierre’s spontaneous poems prepared the way for intensely Haitian poets such as Hamilton Garoute and Paul Laraque — two officers of the Garde as well as poets of the avant-garde. The renaissance of Haitian art did not unfold until after World War II, when DeWitt Peters, a California artist who came to Haiti during the war to teach English, founded the Centre d’Art in 1944. Just as the artisans of Chartres worked solely for the greater glory of God, peasant artists had been painting to please their lwa — on poto mitan and ounfò altars, with chicken feathers dipped into cans of house enamel, creating curving images of Danbala and mystical symbols — and the lwa must indeed have been pleased.