1957, September: (They Have Gone Mad: Duvalier’s Peroration, the Roll Call of Every Commune, and La Gonâve’s 18,000 Votes from a Few Hundred Inhabitants): Du…

1957, September: (They Have Gone Mad: Duvalier’s Peroration, the Roll Call of Every Commune, and La Gonâve’s 18,000 Votes from a Few Hundred Inhabitants): Duvalier’s leitmotif on one celebrated occasion was they have gone mad — they dared to keep Duvalier, most popular of the candidates, in outer darkness, and the mad coalition had decided that the masses of the Northwest, the North, the Artibonite, the Southwest, the Grand-Anse, the middle classes of Port-au-Prince, the intellectuals, the professors, the teachers, the students had nothing to say. Then came the peroration: Men and Women of Duvalier, you my thousands and ten thousands, you of the heroic North, worthies of Dérac, Phaëton, Maribaroux, you of Vallière and Monbin Crochu, you of the Cap, Fort Liberté and Ouanaminthe, renowned valiants of Limbé, thousands from the Northwest, you of Port-de-Paix, the Môle, of Jean-Rabel, unconquerable phalanxes of the Artibonite, invincible all and you of Belladère, Hinche, Mirebalais, Lascahobas, oh my cohorts, Marigot unyielding, Cayes-Jacmel, Côtes de Fer, well-named Jérémie which evermore adorns the steely poems framed from love of Estimé, Dame-Marie, Anse d’Hainault, lucid South of Cayes, of Cavaillon and of Aquin, lucid South of Nippes, Coteaux — have you understood? They would decide without us. They have gone mad. Why Duvalier omitted La Gonâve cannot be explained: in the forthcoming election, its few hundred inhabitants were to deliver 18,000 votes. The speech — a roll call of every commune in the republic, each place-name freighted with the historical memory of insurrection and resistance, the whole construction building toward a single accusation repeated like a Vodou invocation — was the most effective piece of political oratory Haiti had heard since Fignolé’s Creole harangues, and it performed the essential rhetorical operation that would define the Duvalier regime: the transformation of a candidacy into a cosmology, the identification of one man’s ambition with the collective destiny of every noir in every village, so that to oppose Duvalier was not merely to oppose a candidate but to betray the entire geography of Haitian blackness.