1971, April 21: (The Death of François Duvalier: The Evening After Sunset Behind La Gonâve, the Desounen Performed by Oungan Edner Day, the Mèt-Tèt Implored …

1971, April 21: (The Death of François Duvalier: The Evening After Sunset Behind La Gonâve, the Desounen Performed by Oungan Edner Day, the Mèt-Tèt Implored to Retire, and the Mo-Tèt Transferred to Jean-Claude by Candlelight): In the evening hours of April 21, after the sun had plummeted behind La Gonâve and night had fallen, the president seemed restless and tried to speak, but the words were not clear. Minutes later, the term of the président-à-vie had reached its end. Now came the time of the oungan. In the ounfò of the Cul-de-Sac it was whispered that to Edner Day fell the task of performing the last rite called Desounen. First tracing on the floor a large cross in maize flour the length and breadth of the body, then climbing past the silent doctors and nurses, under the dead president’s sheet and astride the frail and wasted little corpse, the oungan implored Duvalier’s lwa — the Mèt-Tèt who had so often driven away the Gwo Bonanj — to retire and leave the dead in peace. Only then could the soul be shriven and the Mo-Tèt safely transferred to the head of Jean-Claude, standing mute and awed by the light of the candle at the foot of his father’s bed. When the body seemed to shudder ever so slightly — some thought it tried to rise and shake its head — they knew the Mèt-Tèt had departed. Papa Doc had gone to Ginen. The Desounen — the Vodou rite of separation performed over the corpse of a président-à-vie by an oungan straddling the body in the presence of doctors and nurses and a teenaged heir, the spiritual power of the dead ruler ceremonially extracted and implanted in his son — was the most authentic act of political succession Haiti had witnessed since Dessalines’s generals divided his dismembered republic at his assassination: a transfer of power conducted not through constitutional mechanism but through the oldest technology of legitimation the Haitian people possessed, the lwa themselves enlisted to ratify what no election and no constitution could make real — that a nineteen-year-old boy now carried in his head the Mo-Tèt of the man who had ruled Haiti for fourteen years, and that the spiritual continuity of the regime was therefore unbroken.