1926–1937: (Communists and Griots: Roumain’s Party, Price-Mars’s Ethnography, Lorimer Denis’s Kokomakak, and the Young Doctor François Duvalier): While Haiti…

1926–1937: (Communists and Griots: Roumain’s Party, Price-Mars’s Ethnography, Lorimer Denis’s Kokomakak, and the Young Doctor François Duvalier): While Haiti was effortlessly slipping back into old politics, Haitian intellectuals grouped on opposite sides of the fault lines of class and color were reexamining the country’s problems. One group, stimulated by the worldwide intellectual infatuation with Marxism, was communist — as early as 1926 Jolibois fils made a written overture to Moscow which the Comintern wisely ignored, and in 1930, under sponsorship of the French party, the Haitian Communist Party was organized by Jacques Roumain in concert with Max Hudicourt. Vincent locked up Roumain for revolutionary activities in fall 1934, releasing him two years later, and a presidential decree of November 19, 1936, outlawed the communists and all their works. Roumain’s Haitian associates included Jacques Alexis, cofounder with René Depestre of the radical review La Ruche, Jean Brierre the wild-eyed young poet of the Grande Anse, and Jules Blanchet — all elite literary intellectuals of much talent, and like virtually every Haitian communist of any significance in years to come, with the conspicuous exception of Alexis, mulâtres. French Marxism had little appeal, however, for a new breed of bourgeois noir intellectuals and bureaucrats, products of the occupation and — though they would hardly have admitted it — of General Russell’s effort to create a noir middle class, who were seeking Haiti’s roots in Africa. The leaders of this movement, which coalesced in 1937 under the name of Les Griots, were Jean Price-Mars, whose ethnographic studies had illuminated Haitian religion, language, and folklore; Lorimer Denis, the tall, forbidding, Voodoo-steeped, black-clad professor from the Cap with his stout kokomakak; and Dr. J.-C. Dorsainvil, author of the Manuel d’Histoire d’Haïti read by generations of schoolchildren. Another Griot was François Duvalier, an ultra-nationalist young doctor already steeped in Haiti’s history, who was writing obscurantist articles in equally obscure publications. The self-assumed mission of the griots was to re-examine Haiti in the light of African origins, consciously turning their backs on European heritage and seeing in Voodoo essential sources of Haitian literature, art, and folkways — their votaries, virtually all noirs, spoke of themselves as authentiques, in slighting contrast to mulâtres who were not noirs and could therefore never be authentiques. Although neither group could perceive it, communists and Griots were already in competition for a power base among the urban poor, and the Griots and their followers, avowedly anti-elite and anti-mulâtre, were a true movement of masses against the classes — something the Communist Party, because of its members’ elite origins, could never quite become. On the other hand, the griots and their heirs and followers were to realize at least one revolution and for some thirty-five years, in peculiarly Haitian fashion, inherited the earth.