Interestingly enough, the 1937 Massacre is the only relevant historical reference in relation to a shared history in the works by Haitian creators such as Edwige Danticat (The Farming of Bones, 1998). Apart from that, and especially in the visual arts, I have found a symptomatic limbo in terms of Haitian-Dominican related works from Haitian visual artists in the same vein as in the conclusions drawn by León-Francois Hoffmann with respect to literature, quoted above. Maybe because exceptions confirm rules, Hispaniola (2009), a mural-like painting by Frank Zephirin, presents the Duality of the island in a redemptory manner, surrounded by a heart made of tiny flowers and representing Haiti as the masculine force and the Dominican Republic as the feminine principle in full white, but also as La Siréne or Mami Watta, or Santa Marta la Dominadora, a powerful loa of Dominican Vodou equally revered, respected and feared by devotees on both sides of the island. The Two Queens (1995) by Charo Oquet, equates Yemayá and Queen Elizabeth. This self-explanatory work is a strategic epistemic intervention also reproduced in her Mami Watta performance series, where the symbols of Africaninspired elements are juxtaposed with Western aesthetical cannons. Santa Marta la Dominadora has protected Charo Oquet since she painted her first canvas. The ancestral siren emerged in her studio in New Zealand to then rapidly disappear into the hands of a collector. Later, Oquet rediscovered her in the house of a friend’s collection of African arts publications where Mami Watta was represented with red-haired and a blue torso. The chromolithograph, reproduced in a compilation of African art at the Smithsonian, reappeared to her some time later in the Mercado Modelo of Santo Domingo, located in “el pequeño Haití” (Little Haiti). The image, made by a devoted German husband in the 19th century spoused to a female snake charmer, is an irreplaceable element in the altars of the cautiously named “Popular Religion,” so-called whenever people wish to avoid saying “Dominican Vodou.” The term, coined at the beginning of the 1990s by the Dominican and Puerto Rican anthropologists Soraya Aracena and José Francisco Alegría Pons37 after years of living with the people in a 37 “4. […] That as an “evolving” and continuous process, DominicanHaitian syncretism has created and recreated a new formula (or cultural pattern) that includes Dominicas and Haitians equally.” […] 5. That this double process of syncretism has given rise to a third
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batey, is for some still controversial. Fascination for Santa Marta la Dominadora, the giver of material goods, personal power and beauty, the one who achieves impossible loves, irrevocably linked the destiny of Charo Oquet with that of her ancestors. The most popular of all loas of the Dominican Vodou pantheon,38 the wife of Saint Elias, the Baron of the Graveyard, met her once again in the fire of the fearful beings, Petró of Batey La Ceja, in the throes of Gagá, where she arrived over a decade after having painted that first canvas in her Antipodean studio. Oquet dedicated her thesis to this experience and was awarded a Summa Cum Laude in the Visual Arts degree of Florida International University. She also devised a series of altars that were extensively exhibited in southern Florida at the beginning of this century. It is evident that the liberating force of this “second” series of altars is the distinction from her previous work of the deliberately chaotic juxtaposition of elements from the three African religions predominant in Miami, these being Cuban Yoruba, Haitian Vodou and Dominican Vodou. In the first series, Oquet photographed herself with the camera on automatic in front of her own recreation of popular altars, in an act of intimacy that, after the explosion of the second series and the exhibition in the Ambrosino Gallery in 1999, could very well be classified as timid. The power of Santa Marta impregnated syncretistic order: Dominican-Haitian. Due to this order, Gaga is not governed by the Haitian cultural symbolism (completely) but by the Dominican: thereby already becoming a “product” on Dominican soil, by Dominicans (Josefa, Vichin, Marta, Rafaelito, etc.) and for many Dominicans. Participation in “The Family”, the “Fami” (in Haitian Creole), in other words in the social (the Dominican family), cultural and religious order of the Dominican demonstrates this”.[…] “8. That, said in this way, we postulate a Dominican Vodou and a separate Vodou that follows a Haitian socio-religious direction.” (Note: underlined in the original text). José Francisco Alegría Pons and Soraya Aracena: Gagá y Vudú en la República Dominicana. Puerto Rico-Santo Domingo, Ediciones El Changó Prieto, 1993, p. 62. 38 “Santa Marta: She is the one of the big djabs (devils) who comes from Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo is a mystic country, the same land as Haiti. She works with a snake when she comes out. She runs the snake all over. The snake works the same as Damballa Flambeau, but it’s more hot than La Flambeau. It’s bigger than that. Bizango can’t stop her. Shanpwel can’t stop her. Santa Marta has a child. A djab who never gives his name. Only his wife knows. The spirit only listens to him. If he told her “Don’t do something,” she wouldn’t do it. They are on a bridge, or something like a piece of mountain. They control it. Nobody can come near. No Haitian ever had this spirit. If someone had it, I’ve never seen it. I saw it in a dream. I always see it in a dream.” A quote by Pierrot Barra in: Cosentino, Donald J., Vodou Things. The Art of Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise. 1998: 27.
each piece with the voluptuousness of fire, that power intensifying in the bodies of those celebrating Gagá by means of the bottle, uplifted by rum and beer. The photographic series that documents the four days and nights when Oquet accompanied the Gagá procession, an exceptional place of communion of frontier insularity, reveals a serenity of social science, a gaze taken up more by the domestic than the spectacular nature of the dance of trance, more interested in the iconography of the costumes than in the set of gestures that complement or inspire them. Academic curiosity can be substantiated by more than one reason, to discover the genesis of the Saint-Domingue condition, a concern that motivated her to delve into Dominican history, to which she did not have access, since she had been educated in American schools. The recognition of this other reality, that of Gagá, where “you can´t easily tell who is Dominican and who is Haitian,”39 also greatly solved her childhood intrigue provoked by the Haitian washerwomen with their naked breasts at the banks of the river Massacre, on the border, where she lived her first years. “I wanted to understand how it was possible that our country could have massacred the Haitians.40 Since, as an adult, I could never live in the Dominican Republic, where I was horrified by the latent racism –my mother is Black, although she brought us up to marry a white man, like she did– and neither could I live in Haiti, I submerged myself 39 Unless stated otherwise, italics represent a quotation from Charo Oquet. The source of this information comes from a series of dialogues on the subject of Dominican-Haitian relationships I have carried out with the artist since 1995 to date. (See Lockward, Alanna, Charo Oquet: Quiero que me identifiquen como miembro de una comunidad Buena (I want them to identify me as a member of a Good community). Listin Diario, Santo Domingo, Friday 21 August 1998, p. 8C). 40 The Massacre of an indeterminate number of Haitians, ordered in 1937 by the dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, governor of the Dominican Republic for 31 years, is an open wound in relations between the two peoples. The claim to “Dominicanize” the border only had a handful of opponents, most protestant ministers, an indifference that traditional historical writings attribute to the antagonism caused by the 22 years of Haitian political and military rule in the period between 1822 and 1844, when the Dominican Republic proclaimed its independence. Other Dominican historians emphasize that this dominance was a product of a consensus between the privileged classes of both peoples. The agreement to divide land of the only island in the Caribbean with these characteristics dates back to 1936, as a result of the negotiation between the president Vincent and Trujillo, who added new clauses to the version of 1929 by the American occupation authorities (Haiti 1915-1934, Dominican Republic 1916-1924). The year following the ratification of this agreement, Trujillo ordered the massacre.
in this research in Miami, where I met great Haitian intellectuals, artists and activists. I travelled to Haiti in 1997 with the hope of finding this place between the two peoples, where they lived together with Dominicans, but I didn’t find it, like I never found it as a child, on the border.” The siren’s song of Mami Watta invited her to look for salvation in her own blood, where she lives, and compares the threads of blame or shame in the pentagram of a song with many voices, whose inconclusive genealogy was described by C.G. Jung in his proverbial enumeration of the lessons of Paracelsus,41 and where the followers of Santa Marta La Dominadora deploy her universal psychic powers. Although the journey of Jung omits, the reasons for which I leave up to the experts, any reference of Mami Watta or any archetype represented in African religions,42 the myth, fundamental for the astrophysical principles of healing proclaimed with iconoclastic fervor by Paracelsus, is transformed in the work of Charo Oquet, not only in a paradigm of AfroAmericanism, as described by her champion, Robert Farris Thompson, but beyond that into an unparalleled legacy of Dominican, Haitian and Caribbean art. We should also celebrate with greater conviction that this intimate longing to understand historic blame or shame that has guided Oquet in the arduous, prolific terrain of self41 “Of course, this is not the place for a detailed study of the relations of the Melusina of Paracelsus with the serpens mercurialis. I only wished to show, on the one hand, that some premises of alchemy in Paracelsus have possibly been influenced and to indicate, on the other hand, that the longing of the Ondina for revivification and salvation has its counterpart in the real substance that is hidden in the sea and shouts for liberation.” C. G. Jung: Paracélsica; 2nd edition. Barcelona: Editorial Kairós, 1995, p. 67. The alchemists, and Paracelsus just as much as the others, often found themselves before the dark abyss of ignorance and impotence, so that they had to make do, according to their own confessions, with revelation, illumination or useful dreams. For these reasons they need a “helping spirit”, a familiaris, whose incantations we already find in magical Greek writings. The figure of the snake in the revelations of God and of the spirit in general is a universal type. Paracelsus does not seem to know anything about prior psychological conditions. He relates the appearance and transformation of Melusina with the effect of the Scaiolae who intervene, with the impelling forces that come from homo maximus. These are subordinate to the Work that has as its goal the elevation of man to the sphere of Anthroposophy.” Ibid: 103-104. 42 Some European oral traditions of the archetype of the siren are: Yorkshire Legends and Traditions of Wells (England). The Silkie Wife (Shetland and Orkney Islands). The Mermaid Wife (Shetland Islands). Water Demons (Scotland). Brauhard’s Mermaid (Germany). Holy Lake near Neuhoff (Germany). Brother Nickel (Germany). The Water Maid (Germany). Lorelei (Germany). Melusina (Germany). Water Nixes, The Water-Man, and His Wife (Poland/Germany). The Merrow (Ireland). The Water Snake (Russia).
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