benedictytowards an intellectual history of possession reading la crise as a textual space in vodou...

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Alessandra Benedicty NadjaTextual Space in Vodou and André Breton's Haitian Lectures and

'' as ala criseTowards an Intellectual History of Possession: Reading ''

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Towards an IntellectualHistory of Possession:Reading ‘‘la crise’’ as aTextual Space inVodou and AndreBreton’s HaitianLectures and Nadja

Alessandra Benedicty

Abstract: This article focuses mainly on what are known as Andre Breton’s ‘‘HaitianConferences’’ (1945–1946) and his 1928 novel Nadja, along with the embedded topic ofspirit possession in Haitian Vodou. My proposition is to show how both the vocabularyand the theory that come to be associated with what I will call the ‘‘act of possession’’ inBreton’s work engages a reflection that accounts for fragmented notions of identity. Idraw on anthropological theories of subjectivity to put the accent on the destabilizingexperience of the contemporary, globalized human subject. To do so, I look at twoaspects of Breton’s writing: first, how both before and during his first contact with Haiti,he was interested in alternative states of being; and second, how these states related tothe disintegration of identity. I will also consider possession, and its associated lexica, asan intellectual notion, a trope that appears in the discourse of European intellectualsduring and after the World Wars. I compare it to the considerations of possession withinthe context of a Vodou Weltanschauung.

Resume : Cet article se propose d’explorer les conferences qu’Andre Breton adonnees en Haıti en 1945-1946 d’une part, et son roman Nadja (1928) dans le cadre de lapossession dans le Vaudou haıtien d’autre part. Mon objectif est de montrer comment levocabulaire et la theorie associes a ce que nous nommerons ‘‘l’acte de possession’’ dansl’œuvre de Breton implique une reflexion qui prend compte des notions de l’identite

Corresponding author / Adresse de correspondance :Alessandra Benedicty, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, United StatesEmail: [email protected]

Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses41(2) 280–305

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humaine contemporaine. Je ferai appel a des theories de la subjectivite qui mettentl’accent sur l’experience destabilisante du sujet humain mondialise. Deux aspects del’œuvre de Breton m’interessent particulierement : premierement, comment avant etpendant son premier contact avec Haıti, il s’est interesse aux etats d’esprit alternatifs ;ensuite, comment ces etats refletent une desintegration de l’unite identitaire. Partant dupostulat que la crise identitaire trouve un echo dans l’œuvre de Breton dans le contexted’un Weltanschauung vaudou, je montrerai que la possession et son lexique constituentun trope recurrent dans le discours des intellectuels europeens de l’entre-deux guerreset de l’apres guerre.

KeywordsVodou, Haiti, spirit possession, Breton, Surrealism

Mots clesVodou, Haiti, crise de possession, Breton, surrealisme

Introduction

This article focuses mainly on what have come to be known as Andre Breton’s ‘‘HaitianConferences’’1 and his 1928 novel Nadja, along with the embedded topic of spirit pos-session in Haitian Vodou. I will look closely at Breton’s work in light of more recentscholarship, which includes: J. Michael Dash on the ‘‘Surrealist Ethnographers’’; IreneAlbers’s work on Leiris’s representations of Zar possession in Ethiopia; Joao Biehl,Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman’s Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, acompilation of essays on methods for ‘‘contemporary anthropological observation’’(Rabinow, 2007: 107); and Terry Rey and Karen Richman’s theoretical reconsiderationsof syncretism in Haitian religion. Respectively, Dash and Albers examine the intersectionbetween literary theory and ethnography in French writers who travelled to Martinique,Guadeloupe and Haiti.2 In his 2007 article entitled ‘‘Le Je de l’autre: Surrealist ethnogra-phers and the Francophone Caribbean,’’ Dash notes the lack of scholarship on the Frenchintellectuals’ presence in the Caribbean:

While the impact of the Surrealist intellectuals’ exile in the U.S. is well documented, one

would be hard put to find, even in French, a thoroughgoing examination of this period

of the interaction between a French literary avant-garde and Caribbean writers. [ . . . ]

When the Surrealists’ travel through the Caribbean is mentioned, the tendency is to con-

centrate exclusively on Andre Breton and generally ignore the passage of Surrealist dis-

sidents such as Pierre Mabille, Michel Leiris, and Alfred Metraux, who inaugurated a

form of writing that Glissant in 1956 calls a welcome combination of literature and eth-

nography. (Dash, 2007: 84)

Dash identifies and resurrects texts about which little has been written, or which havebeen largely ignored by contemporary scholarship; he re-inscribes them in the context

Benedicty 281



of more widely read work, such as Metraux’s ethnography of Vodou. As Dash’s articleindicates, there is a lack of understanding not only on the relationship between Frenchand Caribbean intellectuals in the early twentieth century, but also on the relationshipbetween ethnography and literature in the Caribbean intellectual context. Maryse Con-de’s 2001 article on Marxist poetics in the French Caribbean entitled ‘‘Fous t’enDepestre; Laisse dire Aragon’’ points not only to the need for scholarship, but alsoto a certain negligence associated with such lacunae. Conde writes: ‘‘The literary epi-sode, which is the theme of this article, serves to illustrate the relations between Frenchliterature and francophone literature. They are at best, relationships of ignorance, ofindifference’’ (Conde, 2001: 177).3

Another backdrop for this article is recent scholarship that emphasizes an intimate—even if not comfortable—relationship between European and Caribbean thought sys-tems, a scholarship that offers insight into an instance of transatlantic dialogue thatincluded the Caribbean, and more specifically Haiti. In political philosophy and intellec-tual history, Susan Buck-Morss, Sibylle Fischer, Nick Nesbitt, Valerie Kaussen, andDavid Scott explore the idea that Haiti, while not explicit in Enlightenment discourse,at least informed it. Buck-Morss writes: ‘‘There are thus multiple, quite mundane reasonsfor Hegel’s silence [in regards to Haiti], from fear of political repercussions, to theimpact of Napoleon’s victory, to the hazards of moving and personal uprootings.[ . . . ] But there is no doubt that Hegel and Haiti belong together’’ (Buck-Morss, 2009:20). In anthropology, meanwhile, Terry Rey and Karen Richman note that in the contextof Haitian religion, by the time the African slaves had arrived in Saint–Domingue, the‘‘European’’ element had informed the ‘‘African’’ one; in other words, the worshipingpractices of those Central Africans who became slaves destined for the Caribbean hadundergone processes of hybridization, noting that ‘‘[a]t the outbreak of the Haitian Revo-lution in 1791’’ (Rey and Richman, 2010: 384), most probably their religious practices hadalready undergone a ‘‘Kongolese appropriation of Catholicism’’—an ‘‘Afro-Catholicsynthesis’’ (2010: 387). Similarly, in speaking of the notion of pwen in Vodou, they iden-tify a European etymology: ‘‘Pwen is based upon the French word point. Its French pro-venance is a reminder of the dynamic contribution of European magical knowledge andthought to Haitian religion, a contribution that scholars have generally overlooked in theirquest to uncover African ‘survivals’’’ (2010: 392). I cite the above examples of the pointsof contact between ‘‘European,’’ ‘‘African,’’ and ‘‘Caribbean’’ epistemologies to underlinethe interpenetration of thought systems, which serves as a backdrop to this essay’s consid-eration of the various iterations of the notion of possession as they appear in the French andCaribbean discourses of the early to mid-twentieth century.

A final framework for this article addresses the relationship between subjectivity andtraumatism. In his ruminations on ‘‘Giorgio Agamben and the Spatialities of the Camp,’’Richard Ek suggests that as the ‘‘camp’’4 as domiciliary reality imposes itself on human-ity, replacing that of the ‘‘city,’’ so too ‘‘displacement and desubjectification’’ (2006:363) create notions of identity that are better adapted to the reality of migration, andquasi-perpetual disarticulation. In this article, through the notion of possession, I exploreEk’s assertion and especially his conception of ‘‘displacement and desubjectification,’’which link domiciliary displacement to the disintegration of identity. My proposition isto show how both the vocabulary and the theory that come to be associated with what I

282 Studies in Religion / Sciences Religieuses 41(2)



will call the act of possession in Breton’s work engage a reflection that accounts for Ek’snotion of identity, one that is based on movement rather than on origin, one that does notassume permanence, but accounts for frequent instability. To do so, I look at two aspectsof his writing: how both before and during his first contact with Haiti, he was interestedin alternative states of being; and second, how these alternative states related to desub-jectification. I will also consider possession, and its associated lexica, as an intellectualnotion, a trope that appears in the discourse of European intellectuals during the WorldWars. I compare it to the considerations of possession within the context of a Vodou Wel-tanschauung, or what Claudine Michel describes as a ‘‘global vision of the world’’ (inCoates, 2006: 182).

The disciplinary methodology that I will employ in my analysis of all the texts inthis article will be literary. I also should note that my rereading of Breton’s Haitianlectures drew me back to Nadja. The result surprised me. I realized that the Vodoucultural text might itself be a theoretical framework through which to reread Breton’snovel. In his recent transcultural study of possession, Craig E. Stephenson advocatesfor the reconsideration of possession, not as a ‘‘mental disorder,’’ as it was designatedin 1992 by ‘‘the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Man-ual of Mental Disorders,’’ but rather as ‘‘a potential epistemological break, part ofpsychiatry’s attempt to culturally contextualize its discourse and treatment models’’(Stephenson, 2009: 3, 73–74). Stephenson asks: ‘‘Could possession provide an idiomthrough which psychiatry might reflect upon and rectify its diagnostics?’’ (2009: 74).Stephenson explains the intimacy, followed by the divorce, between psychology andanthropology:

At the Clark Conference in 1909, Franz Boas carefully manoeuvred anthropology away

from the essentialist tendencies of psychology and psychoanalysis. A century later, in a sim-

ilar manner, many Western anthropologists attempt in their writings to describe possession

in non-Western settings without lending it a psychological description, because they find a

tendency to pathologize inherent in psychological language. (Stephenson, 2009: 66)

Stephenson’s argument is that in the estranged couple that anthropology and psychologyform, psychology would stand to gain from a renewed rapprochement with the socialsciences. Acknowledging the extremely exoticizing and deprecating language that CarlJung uses to describe possession (2009: 48), Stephenson re-examines Jung’s work toextract from it Jung’s interest in implementing possession as a methodology in ‘‘West-ern’’ psychoanalysis (2009: 118). That said, although Stephenson’s work has as its goalto recuperate a Jungian notion of possession, the role of Jung’s work in his book is fairlymarginal; rather, it is the concept of possession—accounts of possessions in Africa, theAmericas, Asia, and Europe—that takes centre stage. If at the turn of the twentieth cen-tury, for psychologists, the primary site of study for the Self’s Other was analysis of theintimate psychic space of the human individual, and for the anthropologists, the Otherconstituted ethnographies of communities mostly outside of Euro-Canada, the Euro-United States, or Europe, then Stephenson points to the fact that possession is a form thatbridges both conceptions of othering, and at best has constantly troubled the disciplinarydivide between psychology and anthropology:

Benedicty 283



Possession not as a disorder, but as an epistemological break.

I connect Jung’s concept of possession explicitly to its etymology, to the forceful image of

selfhood sitting in its own seat and of the suffering inherent when selfhood experiences

itself unseated by something ‘‘Other’’. (Stephenson, 2009: 3–4)

The historical context that Stephenson outlines with regard to European and NorthAmerican scholars’ interest in possession emphasizes the fact that ‘‘Western’’ discourseis dually familiar and uncomfortable with the concept of possession.

In a sense, this article’s approach is to show how, on the one hand, Breton’s workdelineates rigid frontiers between the terms that form binaries such as religious/secularand city dweller/‘‘peasant’’ (Breton, 1999b: 153); on the other hand, Breton’s work is, asErika Bourguignon points out, extremely at ease with the concepts associated with pos-session: ‘‘The notion of ‘possession,’ or ‘spirit possession,’ appears to be so familiar toAmericans that a definition seems hardly necessary’’ (Bourguignon, 1991: 1). In otherwords, what is at stake is not whether or not the characteristics of possession2 exist ina given culture, but rather the names that the given group give to the phenomena asso-ciated with possession. Bourguignon writes:

This disagreement leads to the question of just what we might mean by ‘‘abnormal’’ or

‘‘pathological,’’ a difficult subject on which only limited agreement exists. We might begin

by asking: Do the people among whom possession trance occurs consider it ‘‘abnormal’’?

Do they say the person who experiences such a state is ‘‘crazy’’? Do they say, ‘‘Something

must be done about this so that he can go back to functioning like a normal person?’’ [ . . . ]

The answer must be that in some societies, under some circumstances, it is considered a

‘‘bad thing’’ to go into possession trance and something must be done about it. In other

places, going into possession trance is considered a fine and desirable thing. (Bourguignon,

1991: 8)

Thus, this article meanders through various nodes of the transnational production of theconcept of possession as it relates to Breton’s work, Haitian Vodou, and contemporary the-ories on subjectivity.

A Historical Context: Rapture and Revolution in Breton’sHaitian Lectures

In the following considerations of Breton’s work within the context of his visit to Haiti, Ipropose that the concept of possession as considered by Breton’s Surrealist aesthetics isone that not only points out affinities between Haitian and French thought systems, butalso renders problematic the binary that posits the interiority of a body’s psychologicalspace against the exteriority that underlies an individual’s commitment to social action.It is important to emphasize the ‘‘event’’ that Breton’s visit to Haiti represented, for itaccompanied, if not catalysed, the overthrow of President Elie Lescot’s presidency,which took place within a month of Breton’s visit. In an interview with Lucienne Ser-rano, Rene Depestre, one of the young Haitian poets, who was in Breton’s entourageduring the visit, explicitly explains how Breton’s visit to Haiti was capital to bothBreton and Depestre:




Such a creative effort had to engender a popular Surrealism, a phenomenon that surprised

Breton, in 1945, at the moment of his time in Haiti. The founder of learned Surrealism,

which resembled German Romanticism, discovered with joy that Surrealism was a histor-

ical given of the consciousness of all men. One could find it, in its religious forms, with the

Haitians, for example. Such a discovery would delight Breton. I was a witness to his rapture:

Breton, under our very eyes, learned that Surrealism could be lived on a daily basis by mil-

lions of human beings, and all the while the same frame of mind had been up until then a

movement of European intellectuals. (Depestre, 1998: 144–145)

Although in the quotation Depestre does not specify how Surrealism and Vodou relate toeach other, he accounts for their similarity, as well as for the momentous occasion thatBreton’s visit represented.

Breton’s Haitian lectures may be found in the third volume of the French edition ofhis complete works, published by Gallimard in 1999. Marguerite Bonnet, the editor ofthe third volume, in collaboration with Etienne-Alain Hubert, Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas and Jose Pierre, provides extensive notes on the historical context in whichBreton delivered the lectures in Haiti. I take this much time to point out the contribution ofthe notes to the reading of the lectures for they put in evidence three factors: first, theenthusiastic welcome and espousal of Breton’s Surrealist poetics by Haitian poet-activists such as Depestre and Clement Magloire–Saint–Aude; second, Breton’s reciprocalenthusiasm in responding to the Haitian poets’ political engagement; and third, Breton’sallusions to Vodou.

The notes take the form of two short essays, which underscore the exaltation of Bretonon the part of Haitian intellectuals and the youth, as well as Breton’s reciprocal enthu-siasm for the combination of aesthetics and revolutionary spirit that he witnessedamongst the Haitians with whom he came into contact during his trip (Bonnet, 1999:1214–1219, 1227–1228). Breton arrived in Haiti on 4 December 1945, welcomed byPierre Mabille, who, in Depestre’s words, was ‘‘the Cultural Attache for free France,[who] had the pleasure of introducing his old friend’’ (Bonnet, 1999: 1216). Especiallyof interest for our purposes is Breton’s arrival speech, ‘‘Speech at the Savoy Club ofPort-au-Prince,’’ delivered on 5 December 1945 and published immediately afterwardsin a special edition of the Haitian poets’ literary magazine La Ruche (The Beehive), andthe first of eleven planned conferences on poetry, of which only seven took place; thejunta interrupted the schedule (Bonnet, 1999: 1217). The first lecture was entitled sim-ply ‘‘Surrealisme,’’ and took place on 20 December 1945 as a public reading at the RexTheatre in front of ‘‘avant-garde intellectuals,’’ and ‘‘feverish youth’’ (Bonnet, 1999:1214–1215, 1217–1218, 1227). Bonnet explains that the publication of the first speechled to the Haitian government’s seizure of the magazine and the imprisonment of cer-tain of its editors, including Depestre, in turn provoking a student demonstration thatled to the fall of President Lescot.

I paraphrase Bonnet et al.’s notes so as to emphasize a volatile context that informsBreton’s re-articulation of Surrealist ethics and aesthetics before Haitian audiences. Bon-net quite explicitly suggests that Breton’s first two public appearances in Haiti wouldhave actively contributed to the political events. The notes send the reader to an October1946 article with Jean Duche in which Breton explains that it is first and foremost ‘‘the

Benedicty 285



misery, followed by the patience, of the Haitian people [which] were at their height,’’that led to the overthrow of the government (1999: 592). They also mention another1946 interview with Jean Bedel entitled ‘‘How without wanting it Andre Breton madea revolution in Haiti,’’ which appeared in the literary journal La Minerve (Minerva)on 7 June 1946 (Bonnet, 1999: 1217). After the coup, for most of his trip Bretonremained ‘‘constrained to prudency, almost never leaving Petionville’’; and ‘‘the toneand content of his talks became more and more didactic’’ (Bonnet, 1999: 1218).

That said, Bonnet is rather explicit in suggesting that at least at first, Breton might haveseen his own interest in the instability of the Haitian social and political situation in 1945:

This first talk [ . . . ] took place in public, with its goal to restore to the image of Surrealism

all of its dimensions, including its revolutionary aspects, as if to provide a relay to the intel-

lectuals of Haiti. (Bonnet, 1999: 1227–1228)

Regardless of whether or not Breton saw the precariousness of the Haitian political sit-uation as a means to realize the full political ambitions of his Surrealism, Breton’s firstpublic appearances in Haiti reveal that the French intellectual was delighted by theeager welcome of the young Haitians, and was deliberate in his consideration of Hai-tian Vodou in relation to Surrealism. Whether or not he performed a ‘‘rhetorical enthu-siasm’’ to foment revolution is questionable; but the text of his conference onSurrealism reveals what Depestre characterizes as an ‘‘enraptured’’ response toBreton’s exposure to Haitian Vodou.3

Surrealism’s Unresolved Challenge

Given the contexts described above, Breton’s discussion of the history of Surrealism asone at pains to resolve the disparity between ethics and aesthetics becomes relevant. Iintentionally use short fragments of Breton’s 20 December 1945 conference to summar-ize his ruminations on the evolution of Surrealist thought in the earlier decades of the1900s. His words reflect a concern between the interiority and exteriority of humanexperience as it relates to ‘‘the right of peoples to do for themselves’’ (Breton,1999b: 162). Speaking in Haiti in December 1945, Breton notes retrospectively thatuntil 1925, Surrealism had still been in its ‘‘intuitive stage.’’ For it to enter its ‘‘reason-ing phase,’’ it would need a ‘‘particularly emotional traumatism,’’ which would comein the form of France’s ‘‘colonialist war against Morocco’’ (1999b: 162), a war thatwould underscore the French government’s disrespect of a citizen’s right to politicalself-determination (1999b: 162). It is ‘‘dialectical materialism’’ that becomes the toolby which Surrealism will find its ‘‘reasoning phase,’’ in which the avant-garde artmovement will apply the ‘‘non-conformism’’ (1999b: 162) of experiments in alterna-tive somatic states (1999b: 160) to a world ‘‘outside of itself’’ (1999b: 160). Bretonhopes that experiments in the unconscious will find their articulation in Marxist poli-tics. He believes that non-conformity, whether aesthetic or political, might bringtogether the bourgeois origins of most of the Surrealists with those French citizensof ‘‘working class origins,’’ ‘‘thus allowing the artist and the proletariat to unite in theirresistance against ‘national egoisms’’’ (1999b: 160).




Breton manifestly scoffs at ‘‘the almighty power of thought, regarded as capable ofemancipating and freeing itself by its own means,’’ ‘‘a belief system’’ which he finds‘‘very detrimental’’ (1999b: 160). However, he also recognizes that ‘‘the plunge of thelost body into the unconscious’’ (1999b: 160), which characterizes one of the principalmodalities by which Surrealism as a ‘‘poetic then artistic movement’’ (1999b: 154)operated, is too intimate, too affective an experience to be of social, and especiallypolitical, import:

The years that followed, in fact, the first World War, sanctioned by a treaty, in our eyes

again accentuated the permanent disharmony and reinforced the causes of the conflict, and

the Surrealist activity remained confined to its first theoretical givens. (Breton, 1999b: 162)

He finds contemptible ‘‘the almighty power of thought,’’ which inhibits the movementfrom finding a better way to bridge the gap between somatic non-conformity—that is,alternative explorations of the use of the human body and its psyche—and collective,political non-conformity. Thus, the problematic that Breton puts forth in his lecture onSurrealism in Haiti is that of the disparity between Breton’s fascination with Freud’smethodologies (1999b: 156) and a Marxist dialectical materialism (1999b: 162). It is theconceptual chasm between the body’s psychical capacities and the individual’s respon-sibility to a larger collective body that troubles Breton.

Generally speaking, the recurring theme of Breton’s talk is how the individual—espe-cially the individual who is European or North American—can deal personally, sociallyand politically, with the traumas of modernity, especially the dislocation of urban lifeand the violence of the World Wars:

The passer-by, always in a rush in big American or European cities, is in this way a perpe-

tual dupe. He knows no longer from where he comes, and even less so, where he goes. He

has everything to relearn from the Haitian peasant. (Breton, 1999b: 153)

In reflecting on the First World War, Breton wonders at how the human subject is left todeal with the disruption and disillusion ‘‘where the first World War had left us, and thetabula rasa that it had rendered of the acknowledged values of our youth’’ (1999b: 159).He begins his conference with the conclusion that the Haitian ‘‘peasant’’ has found aspiritual equilibrium of which the European or North American are devoid:

If we consider the human condition in Haiti under this angle in relationship to what it is in

countries that consider themselves to be the avant-garde of all that is technical progress, I do

not hesitate in thinking that it is on the side of the latter that spiritual misery and the most

pressing of distresses resides. (Breton, 1999b: 152)

His deduction is based in a discussion of three belief systems to which he has beenexposed—Christianity, ‘‘indigenous religions,’’ and Vodou (1999b). So in a sense, whatBreton does in his lecture on Surrealism is to re-examine the movement in the presenceof Vodou as cultural system.

Benedicty 287



Surrealist Crisis4 and Vodou Possession

I will now turn to Breton’s treatment of the moment of possession in Vodou ritual as hehas observed it, and his comparison of the Vodouisant moment of possession to theavant-garde practices of 1919 in which he and his friends participated:

[ . . . ] crises, otherwise known as nervous phenomena created by autosuggestion, which a

certain number of my friends presented in rapid succession, by the simple contagious effect

that one person, who played the initiatory role, had on several of my friends. These bouts of

possession, which I managed to observe with some regularity, night after night over several

months, took as their stage my apartment in Paris. (Breton, 1999b: 158)

Breton is intent on distinguishing his Surrealist experimentation from possessionin Vodou:

It goes without saying that at least in its genesis, the observed crises differed fundamentally

from the Haitian ‘‘crises of the loa’’. Devoid of any religious foundation, it took place in a

strictly experimental context. (Breton, 1999b: 159)

Breton’s discourse is at best exoticizing, and at worst condescending, a point that will bediscussed later. For the moment, I am interested in how Breton’s comments on Vodoupossession fit into a broader intellectual history. Given the fact that Breton deliberatelycouches his discussion of Surrealism within the context of an explicit scepticism aboutreligion, or rather ‘‘cults’’—for he calls both Vodou and Christianity ‘‘cults’’ (1999b:152)—he is nonetheless at pains to dissimulate his fascination with Vodou possession.The ‘‘attitude’’ of which Breton speaks in the citation below is that which offers up‘‘the plunge of the lost body into the unconscious’’ as a means of relief from the psy-chological grief that ‘‘a period of extreme intellectual and moral disarray’’ entailed(1999b: 160):

I so obstinately clung to this attitude that it provided the conclusion of the book: Nadja,

published in 1928 [ . . . ] I like to think that Haiti [like a jewel] is set5 like no other place

in the world:

‘‘Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.’’

Hypnotic sleep also confirmed the idea that mental automatism, far from being a trap, is the

ideal means by which we may act upon life through the intermediary of language, that this

language be oral or written, graphic language, just as that of song or dance. The Verb, if it

has been placed ‘‘at the beginning’’, must maintain the power to recreate everything. (Bre-

ton, 1999b: 160)

Part of Breton’s enchantment with both the ‘‘crise’’ in Surrealism and ‘‘possession’’ inVodou is that they provide a physiological processing of trauma. Ellen Corin’s work ontrauma explores the ‘‘ex-centricity of the subject’’: she proposes that ‘‘[w]hatever thecontext, narratives suggest that something rises from within the subject’s experience anddestabilizes it, shaking the lived world at its roots’’ (Corin, 2007: 273). In extremely




different contexts, what Breton observes in both forms of convulsive somatic behaviouris an aesthetics that enables the desubjectified subject to represent the trauma of its psy-chic displacement. Breton writes:

That said, I am far from wanting to mark any superiority in favour of that which livened up,

in a strongly disorganized way, the small group that we formed. I insist that it is in and of

itself significant, if not to say heraldic, that at that time, in our dispositions of spirit and of

heart, in the dire state of despair in which the first World War had left us [ . . . ] we were able

to rediscover the gesture, which for centuries had elevated the Haitian peasant beyond slav-

ery and the overwhelming reason that would have made it seem that all was lost. (Breton,

1999b: 159)

Although Breton does not directly compare the hopelessness of his group of friends dur-ing the First World War to the despair incurred by the slave trade and slavery, his textdoes recognize that the ‘‘gesture’’ of the young French men’s ‘‘crise’’ has been preservedthroughout the generations in Haiti.6

As I have already noted, Dash traces the writing process of the ‘‘Surrealist ethnogra-phers,’’ with particular interest in how a sense of instability plays itself out in their works.For example, in the case of Breton’s Martinique charmeuse de serpents, he notes ‘‘self-doubt and anxiety in the effort to produce a stable travel narrative’’ (Dash, 2007: 87).While Breton’s privileged displacement as a member of an elite class (to which he hintsboth in the above quotation and in his aforementioned self-identification as a ‘‘non-worker’’ [Breton, 1999b: 162]), and the modesty associated with his desire not to conveya sense of ‘‘superiority,’’ may be questionable, there is nonetheless legitimacy to hisargument that ‘‘crise’’ and ‘‘possession’’ serve to process a traumatic event.

Nadja as Met Tet

In an effort to further excavate Breton’s own admission in his first Haitian conferencethat possession in Haitian Vodou is exceptionally similar to the ‘‘convulsive beauty’’of his 1928 novel Nadja, I read Nadja solely in light of scholarship on Haitian Vodou.Leslie G. Desmangles writes:

Possession indicates to the societe that, in spite of the remoteness of his permanent home,

the loa is also one who comforts his serviteurs in the anxieties and the defeats of their lives

and that, at the root of the cosmos, goodness always endures. Even with their poverty, their

hunger, their failures, peasants know that they are rewarded by the cosmic power of the loas,

who are capable of bestowing on their serviteurs the hope of a bright future. The intimate

relationship that a possessed serviteur establishes with a loa through the mediation of the

veves accords him many benefits. The loa who mounts a serviteur soothes his particular

fears and helps him in his personal losses. (Desmangles, 2006: 47)

In a sense, the argument could be made that the narrative instance of Nadja, theeponymous muse of Breton’s novel, is the male narrator’s lwa met tet, for as Max G.Beauvoir points out:

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Possession by the lwa most commonly occurs during Vodoun ceremonies; but it may also

take place at any time—especially in stressful situations. Furthermore, a frequent type of

possession is associated with the sleep state. Recognized as a valid and legitimate form

of cultural expression, possession is seen as a way to free the individual inhibitions and

frustrations; it acts as a psychic outlet. (Beauvoir, 2006: 129)

Thus, using Vodou cosmology as a theoretical lens, it could be argued that Nadja is thenarrator’s met tet, or the opposite, that the narrator of the novel is Nadja’s met tet, thatthey alternately possess each other.

In his 20 December 1945 conference on Surrealism, Breton refers to possessions inEurope prior to the seventeenth century (Breton, 1999b: 151). Stephenson’s explorationof possession as a Jungian construct of the psyche suggests that in the century leading upto the Loudun possessions in France in the 1630s, ‘‘[a]s the body became the target ofdiabolical attack, the terms ‘possession’ and ‘obsession’ which had been used almostsynonymously, diverged in meaning. [ . . . ] Hence, an obsessive spirit was thought toassail, haunt, harass a person from the outside, while a possessing spirit was consideredto have taken up residence inside the body [ . . . ]’’ (Stephenson, 2009: 14). In this regardit is interesting to note that Rene Descartes ‘‘was born sixty kilometres east of Loudun atLa Haye in 1596,’’ although ‘‘[b]y the time of the possessions of Loudun, he was livingin permanent and peripatetic exile in the Netherlands’’ (2009: 17). Stephenson arguesthat Descartes’s thought privileged reason as a means to dominate any outside influencethat may invade the space of reason. Breton’s stance, as we have seen, is not necessarilythe opposite, but rather privileges the concept that reason is by no means an all-powerfultool, that possibly the flight of reason in the moment of ‘‘la crise’’—of possession—might have beneficial repercussions for the human subject, who has little or no controlover the assault of such mass human traumas as slavery or world war.

Nadja was written before Breton’s visit to Haiti. The novel unfolds in three move-ments—or at least, there are two full-page breaks that visually create for the reader threedistinct parts. The first part constructs imagery around vision (the word ‘‘eyes’’ is men-tioned on almost every page of the first part) and sleep, or ‘‘Nap Period’’ (Breton, 1960:31); in addition, the narrator names alternative somatic states such as ‘‘the hallucinatoryimage of the words in question’’ (1960: 27); he describes a situation in which he‘‘begin[s] corresponding with Paul Eluard, whom I did not know by sight’’ (1960:27); he describes ‘‘psychoanalysis, a method I respect and whose present aims I considernothing less than the expulsion of man from himself, and of which I expect other exploitsthan those of a bouncer’’ (1960: 24). It is on the last page of the first of the three parts ofthe text that the narrator fully introduces Nadja: ‘‘Nadja’s appearance on the scene’’ is‘‘an event’’ related to the narrator’s own self-exploration (Breton, 1960: 69; 1964:60). Her name appears earlier on when the narrator refers to ‘‘Nadja’’ as a text: ‘‘(Couldit have been otherwise, once I decided to write Nadja?)’’ (Breton, 1964: 23). In the sec-ond part, the narrator describes his rapture with Nadja, his rendezvous with her, herfickle behaviour and her final disappearance. When present, Nadja and narrator, whomat one point she names ‘‘Andre?,’’ share such an intimate psychic space that they becomea ‘‘we’’ so powerful that they are convinced of the inevitability that they will leavebehind them physical proof of their encounter. It is at this point that she implores him




to write a novel about her, about them (Breton, 1964: 117, 100). He describes herwithdrawals from his presence as ‘‘a whirlwind’’ (Breton, 1964: 136; 1960: 114), andshe acknowledges that in the end, for him she will only be a ‘‘trace,’’ yet a trace whose‘‘resonance’’ remains for the narrator ‘‘so grand’’ (Breton, 1964: 137; 1960: 115).

Throughout the novel, various narrative voices intertwine: that of a narrator fully con-scious of his experience with Nadja and trying in hindsight to make sense of it, the voiceof a narrator fully enthralled by Nadja, and other voices including those of the narrativeinstances of Rrose Selavy, Robert Desnos (Breton, 1960: 31), Fanny Beznos (1960: 55),and even Rimbaud as representing ‘‘the extremely deep and vivid emotion’’ (1960: 51).7

In the third part, the narrator makes sense of his encounter with Nadja: he explains thatdespite his rapture for her, they had never really got along (1960: 157). Due to ‘‘theeccentricities in which it seems she had indulged herself in the hallways of her hotel,’’she had been interned in an asylum (1960: 136). Thus, in a sense, the novel may bedescribed as an incantatory ritual—in which the first and third parts lead the narratorin and out of his ‘‘crise,’’ his ‘‘possession.’’ That said, it could also be argued that thenarrator goes in and out of the states of crisis, for the narrative voice of consciousnessreturns frequently enough in the second part to dismiss the possibility that the entire sec-ond part represents a written trace of the ‘‘crise.’’

Both the first and third parts use vocabulary related to theatre: the narrator goes to the‘‘Theatre Moderne’’ (Breton, 1964: 43); he speaks to its director (1964: 51); at the end,he is disappointed by the Theatre Moderne’s work (1964: 177); he refers to the open-ing, closing and reclosing of the ‘‘Theatre des Deux-Masques’’/‘‘Theatre du Masque’’(1964: 180); and finally, he describes his encounter with Nadja as ‘‘[a] short interval—negligible for a hurried reader and even for any other, but, I must say, enormous andpriceless for me’’ (Breton, 1960: 148).

Karen McCarthy Brown describes the theatrical aspect of possession, which both Bre-ton’s novel and Vodou ritual share:

Once the spirit is in charge of the horse, the crescendo of energy stops and people settle in to

watch the possession performance. The term ‘‘possession performance’’ is not used here to

indicate that there is anything false or contrived about these visits from the spirits. Vodou priest

and priestess alike condemn the occasional person in their midst who may pran poz, act dis-

ingenuously as if possessed. The term is used rather to indicate what has often been noticed

about possession in the Vodou temple: it has a theatrical quality. (McCarthy Brown, 2006: 13)

In a similar vein, Irene Albers’s work looks at one of Breton’s contemporaries, andsomeone with whom he collaborated in the early days of Surrealism. In her articleentitled ‘‘Mimesis and alterity: Michel Leiris’s ethnography and poetics of spirit posses-sion,’’ she discusses liberation, theatricality, and spirit possession as they relate toLeiris’s ethnographic work on Zar possession in Ethiopia in the 1930s. It is also impor-tant to indicate Leiris’s connection to Haiti in that he visited Alfred Metraux there in1948 (Dash, 2007: 91). She writes:

Re-enacting the Other leads to a liberation from its power by means of imitation. It is shown

that this corresponds to Leiris’s own retrospective studies of the zar cult as a cathartic

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externalization of alterity and as a theatre of alterity. [ . . . ] In Leiris, the conjuring (as well

as the therapy) becomes a literary domain, whereas the banishment of the phantom is the

domain of theory or research. Talking as one who is possessed and talking about posses-

sion, inseparably linked in the diary, are associated with discourses of autobiographical

self-description and ethnographic description of otherness, of ‘‘experience poetique’’ and

‘‘etude ethnologique.’’ (Albers, 2008: 271)

In Levi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics (2007: 23), Boris Wiseman likewiseunderscores the interpenetration of scholarly disciplines to describe Leiris’s work astheatrical:

My point is not to reduce one experience to the other, but to enlarge the context in which we

view each, and reintegrate the ‘‘aesthetic’’ phenomenon that is a theatrical performance into

a broader network of interconnected experiences, sometimes seemingly far from aesthetics.

By the same token, one may view the shamanistic cure as a form of ‘‘lived theatre’’, to bor-

row a phrase coined by Michel Leiris to describe Ethiopian ceremonies of Zar possession.

The result is what one may think of as ‘‘ethno-aesthetics.’’

The above quotations in recent scholarship point to the complementarities between thetwo seemingly different poles of the encounter between Breton, Metraux and Leiris andVodou.

I turn my attention to Albers’s work because she considers the theatricality of the‘‘crise,’’ or of ‘‘possession,’’ as a coping mechanism, as both Desmangles’s and Breton’srespective interpretations, cited above, suggest. Given the above considerations, Bre-ton’s proposition in the Haitian lectures, while maladroit in rhetorical utterance, in itsmessage is legitimate. As we have already seen, he compares the lived experience of theFirst World War to that of slavery; and, as mode of relief to the trauma, he describes thebody’s total immersion into the unconscious. Yet, even before visiting Haiti, he hadalready considered the healing aspects of the ‘‘crise’’ in his novel Nadja, whose narratordescribes Nadja’s world as one ‘‘where everything so rapidly assumed the appearance ofa rise, a fall’’ (Breton, 1960: 135). Finally, he explains that her eccentricities were due toan unrestricted use of ‘‘liberty’’ and of ‘‘human emancipation’’:

[ . . . ] and this because human emancipation—conceived finally in its simplest revolution-

ary form, which is no less than human emancipation in every respect, by which I mean,

according to the means at every man’s disposal—remains the only cause worth serving.

Nadja was born to serve it [ . . . ]. (Breton, 1960: 143)

It is interesting to note that both Leiris and Breton, who collaborated together on the pub-lication Minotaure in the late 1930s (Bernal, 2008: 42), each in his own way, conjugateboth ethnographic and literary iterations of the notion of possession. In a sense, just asRey and Richman’s article employs ‘‘Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology in hisgrounding of the human experience in the body’’ (Rey and Richman, 2010: 383), itwould not be surprising that Leiris and Breton, who were contemporaries of Merleau-Ponty, would also be informed by an academic discourse that was interested in the body.




To push my suggestion of the interpenetration of thought systems further, let us considerEric Matthews’s reading of the relevant intellectual lineage leading to Merleau-Ponty:

The most powerful single influence in introducing Hegel’s philosophy, and a Hegelianized

Marxism, into France was a Russian emigre named Alexandre Kojeve, who lectured on

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris from

1933 to 1939. These lectures attracted the attention of a number of leading younger intel-

lectuals of the time, including Merleau-Ponty [ . . . ]. (Matthews, 1996: 110–111)

As seen in the earlier part of this article, if Buck-Morss argues ‘‘Hegel and Haiti belongtogether’’ (2009: 20), and given the intimacy of the Parisian intellectual world to whichMerleau-Ponty, Breton and Leiris circulated in the 1930s, it is not surprising that Breton,Metraux, Leiris, and Georges Bataille, whose Les Larmes d’Eros (1961) showcasesVodou ceremony, pay attention to a ‘‘phenomonology of spirit’’ that marvels in the body.Moreover, if ‘‘Hegel was an acute observer of the rupture of social life that we now callmodernity’’ (Buck-Morss, 2009: 6), then Breton’s focus on the ‘‘crise’’/‘‘possession’’ asa means for both Europeans and Haitians to deal with the sociopolitical ‘‘crises’’ is alsorelated to the small, but influential philosophical lineage to which the French scholarsbelonged. Thus while Conde characterizes the scholarly interest in the relationshipbetween the French and Caribbean intellectuals as one of indifference, a study of the affi-nities between the Surrealist ‘‘crise’’ and Vodou possession reveals an entire intellectualdiscourse that is common to both a Haitian and a French intellectual way of being, onethat pre-dates Metraux, Leiris, and Breton’s visit to the Caribbean.

I would like to return to the idea of theatricality in possession and Albers’s suggestionthat Leiris conceived of it as a sort of catharsis. Without rejecting Albers’s claim, I add tothe notion of catharsis the idea that possession is synechdocal: the lwa inhabits thehuman subject and the human subject partially suspends his or her consciousness soas to allow that of the lwa to cohabit his or her body. Unlike catharsis, the spectator isnot separate from the performance; rather, the member of the audience becomes the per-former. Colin (Joan) Dayan writes that ‘‘the possessed gives herself [or himself] up tobecome an instrument in a social and collective drama’’ (Dayan, 1997: 19). Just as thepossessed person contains the spiritual power of the visiting lwa, so does the Vodou objetd’art incorporate spiritual power. As Donald Cosentino (1996: 12) explains:

A Vodou clairvoyant is said to have the gift of the ‘‘eyes,’’ which is the ability to discern

spiritual power, pwisans, where others only see matter. [ . . . ] [I]t is the magic within an

object which validates its status as sacred art. The magic is often metonymic, residing in

some particular aspect of the work. . . .

Spiritual power does not just reveal itself through the material object, whether it be thehuman being or the materiality of the object of art; rather it becomes a part of the indi-vidual. Art in Vodou is not devised as a simile for spirituality, or as a representation of anemotion; instead, it impels the interlocutor to become a part of spirituality. Art’s role inVodou is as much one that reveals intellectual truths, as it is one that ‘‘bring[s] abouthealing transformations.’’ Put otherwise by McCarthy Brown (1996: 67), ‘‘konesans

Benedicty 293



refers to sacred knowledge, the knowledge of how to heal.’’ In Breton’s opening essay toSurrealism and Painting, he writes of the ‘‘varying degrees of sensation’’ which ‘‘corre-spond to spiritual realizations’’ (2002: 1). Here, Breton’s Surrealism seems to conceiveof art as sensation, and the human being who engages in it, seeks it out, might also go sofar as to embody it.

Theories of Today: ‘‘Subjectivities’’

In this context, possession as seen in Vodou as cultural text or in Breton’s novel onlyreinforces Wiseman’s notion of ‘‘ethno-aesthetics’’ (2007: 23) or Dash’s articulationof ‘‘Surrealist ethnographers.’’ Of interest in this regard is Joao Biehl, Byron Good andArthur Kleinman’s Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, a compilation of essays onmethods for ‘‘contemporary anthropological observation’’ (Rabinow, 2007: 107).Although Haitian Vodou does not figure as a subject of their volume, I hope to suggestthat their theories exemplify the role that the ‘‘crise’’ of ‘‘possession’’ may have inenabling a body in crisis to speak for itself. In ‘‘Return(s) to Subjectivities,’’ in MichaelM.J. Fischer’s epilogue to the collection, we read that ‘‘our high-technology age’’ and aglobalized space that is increasingly ‘‘nonstate’’ call for a return to subjectivities, in otherwords a distancing from favouring knowledge systems by which the human state isassumed to be stable, or as Kleinman and Fitz-Henry state:

Scholars have frequently invoked this notion of a unified human nature as the rationale for

universals of all kinds, and it continues to be used as a justification for Western ethical dis-

course, which assumes a static, generalized subject that does not vary with changing histor-

ical circumstances, cultural contexts, or sociopolitical institutions. (2007: 52)

In Darren Staloff’s Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and theAmerican Founding (2007), he not only includes a global context for the AmericanEnlightenment, but also provides a thorough history of the important role that Haitiplayed in differentiating between the politics of the three statesmen, notably Adams andJefferson. Staloff also vividly summarizes the attitude in which the Enlightenment dis-course regarded the supposed supernatural beliefs of pre-Enlightenment Europe. Whatstrikes me in the following passage is that the vocabulary resonates with our above dis-cussions of possession in Haitian Vodou, and Breton’s discussions of an aesthetic for thetwentieth century:

Historians describe the impact of this worldliness [that of the Enlightenment] as a process of

disenchantment. The word has the peculiar virtue of reminding us just how enchanted the

worldview of the preceding centuries had been. Comets, earthquakes, volcanoes, and even

severe storms were not natural phenomena but portents of divine wrath and judgment.

Ghosts walked the earth, and demons possessed the bodies of human victims. Satan was not

a symbol of evil but a real, active presence—Martin Luther once reportedly threw an

inkwell at him. Miraculous and supernatural cures for a variety of ailments were an accepted

part of conventional belief. [ . . . ] The central goal of the Enlightenment’s metaphysical dis-

enchantment was to subject such time-worn and traditional beliefs to ridicule as childish

superstitions. (Staloff, 2007: 14)




Fischer’s epilogue speaks of the necessity in the contemporary age to honour all humanexpressions, and he emphasizes that the terrains that are considered exotic in Europeandiscourse—a bit like Staloff’s invocation of an almost legendary dystopic time before‘‘the Enlightenment’’—are no longer to be found in communities different from ourown. The need to de-marginalize the study of all subjectivities—that is, all expressionsof the self—whether seemingly objectively rational or seemingly irrational is quintes-sential to enabling Ek’s ‘‘displace[d] and desubjectifi[ed]’’ bodies (Ek, 2006: 363) topossibly create ‘‘a (re)constructed platform for individual, social, and civic selves’’(Fischer, 2007: 425).

Building on Ek’s phrase, I characterize the ‘‘being’’ which resembles that aboutwhich Ek, Fischer or Rabinow speak as a desubjectified subject. If Fischer suggeststhat ‘‘the returns to subjectivity might be guarantors of privacy, ethical and socialresponsibility, and monitoring of integrity (of the body, accountability, civic commu-nity),’’ Rabinow is more sceptical in regards to the possibility that such a desubjectifiedsubject might actually be able to act ‘‘responsibly,’’ at least when ‘‘the term ethicsappears promiscuously in the most surprising couplings—business ethics, baseballethics, bioethics’’ (Rabinow, 2007: 103):

because we live in a modernity in which the future appears as contingent, the ethical actor

cannot know the future chain of consequences of his actions. This situation leads to a

dilemma: Either we do not act (but then who takes responsibility for the consequences of

inaction?), or we act responsibly, knowing that we cannot know the stochastic results of our

actions. Today, we are conscious of accepting risk, and ethics, at least until now, has not

been able to provide any criteria for this situation. It has provided only procedures and val-

ues. Hence, the cost of a responsibility-based ethics may be its impossibility. (2007: 104)

In other words, how does a desubjectified subject do anything, much less take responsi-bility? In a sense Rabinow’s article responds to Stephenson’s advocacy of apsychoanalysis that looks to the social sciences for amelioration of its own practice.That said, Rabinow rejects the infusion of psychoanalysis into anthropology, for ashe points out, it has already been attempted, and it serves to ‘‘ablate them [anthropol-ogists] from their own cultural prejudices’’ (2007: 99). Instead, he advocates for an‘‘immediate history,’’ an ‘‘anthropology of the actual’’ (2007: 109), by which‘‘authors’’ facilitate to the maximum the voices of those along whose side they study:‘‘To write immediate history well, authors should not speak for those they aim to pres-ent but should seek a mode through which interviewees could speak for themselves’’(2007: 111). For Rabinow, anthropology thus becomes less about studying ‘‘culture’’than about ‘‘self-formation.’’ The example that Rabinow examines, and offers up aspossibly enacting such ‘‘anthropology of the actual’’ (2007: 109), is that of ThucydidesOn the Peloponnesian War. Rabinow concludes his article: ‘‘[ . . . ] we are wise to pon-der how a text written twenty-five hundred years ago remains such a keen deictic tool’’(2007: 117). Rabinow’s process is one that aims less at achieving a cohesive subject, orsubjectivity, but rather strives towards representing the moment.

Stephenson provides an etymology of the word ‘‘possession,’’ relating it to psychol-ogy (2009: 117):

Benedicty 295



In English, ‘‘to possess’’ denotes ‘‘to hold as property’’, ‘‘to own’’, ‘‘to occupy’’; like the

French posseder, it derives from the Latin possidere, from potis meaning ‘‘able’’ and

sedere, ‘‘to sit’’. The metaphor in the concept of possession is that a being claims space and

sits in a position of capability [ . . . ] The goal of psychotherapy is that the patient should

become ‘‘self-possessed.’’

Thus if the contemporary age, as Fischer puts forward, ‘‘will not require subjectivity tobe located only within the body’’ (Fischer, 2007: 425), Rabinow implies that the anthro-pological process is less about locating the ‘‘subject’’ (in a certain identifiable‘‘culture’’), than in describing the ‘‘singularity of events’’ (2007: 117). For Stephenson,possession is directly related to ‘‘selfhood sitting in its own seat and of the sufferinginherent when selfhood experiences itself as unseated’’ (2009: 3). Like Thucydides, who‘‘was no longer an actor in these events; he was in exile but immediately adjacent tothings,’’ it seems that what is at stake for Rabinow is less about location or identity thanit is about being ‘‘unquestionably reflective while remaining contemporary to the eventsthemselves’’ (2007: 116). In a sense, then, might possession itself be a means by whichan individual speaks and/or embodies its dislocation, while the interpretative aspect thataccompanies the process of possession, that offered by those close to the individual pos-sessed—whether mambo, houngan, or anthropologist—be one that enables the commu-nity (that of the hounfor, that of the academe) to reflect on the events? In other words, isto be self-possessed less related to subjectivity and identity than to the process of reflec-tion on events that one undergoes?

So while the experience of the desubjectified subject may quite possibly be unable toact responsibly faced with ‘‘a contingent but onrushing future’’ (Rabinow, 2007: 103),and if, as Rabinow suggests, ‘‘ethics’’ and ‘‘responsibility’’ are in crisis (2007: 104),if possibility there is, the only way to take inventory of what might be new paradigmsthat desubjectified subjects might employ to ensure an ethics for the future managementof society is quite simply to listen. Rabinow acknowledges that for the anthropologist, asfor the historian or the philosopher, finding a ‘‘form of inquiry [ . . . ] appropriate forstudying practices in their immediacy rather than cultures in their atemporality’’(2007: 111) is challenging in a time in which authority and objectivity are in crisis.As Kleinman and Fitz-Henry point out, such concepts ‘‘[ . . . ] still largely fail to accountfor the enormous complexity of human social experience—war, genocide, structural vio-lence, poverty, and displacement—and the highly nuanced subjective states that thoseexperiences engender’’ (Kleinman and Fitz-Henry, 2007: 53). Rabinow thus encouragesanthropologists to ‘‘find conceptually deictic forms—forms that would once again makeimmediate history a tool for bringing particularity and generality into more fruitful,mutually informing relationships, obliging the reader to take up an active and prudentialstance toward the issues under deliberation’’ (Rabinow, 2007: 116).8

In writing on Zar possession cults among Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, EliezerWitztum, Nimrod Grisaru and Danny Budowski identify Zar ‘‘as a diagnostic category,either as the explanatory model in the Ethiopian community [in Israel] or as a culture-bound syndrome in terms of Western diagnostic systems’’ (Witztum et al., 1996:224). Whether in medicine, literature, or ethnography, the discussion of possessionmight be a ‘‘contemporary one,’’ in the sense that Clifford Geertz gives to the term:




‘‘Contemporaries are persons who share a community of time but not space: they live at(more or less) the same period of history and have, often attenuated, social relationshipswith one another’’ (Geertz, 1973: 365). In this way, possession, whether in Breton’s workor in the text of Haitian Vodou ritual, is a contemporary experience that links Haitians tothe French, and even Haitians and the French to Israelis and Ethiopians. Bourguignon(1991: 31) writes:

The argument suggested here is: Possession trance, by offering a decision-making authority

in the person of a medium, revealing the presumed will of the spirits, allows persons

oppressed by rigid societies some degree of leeway and some elbow room. As such, posses-

sion trance may be said to represent a safety valve, of sorts, for societies whose rigid social

structures cause certain stresses.

In an increasingly transnational and interconnected space, might it be that societies areno longer as distinct as they used to be? Or rather that contemporary pressures on theindividual are such that ‘‘rigid social structures cause certain stresses’’ in societies thathave a long history of naming and/or of being designated as practising ‘‘possession’’ assuch, as well as in societies that have a less comfortable history with assigning ‘‘posses-sion’’ to characterize a repertoire of behaviours common to the society. In a time that Ekrefers to as ‘‘the return of the camp’’ (2006: 363), dispossession and dislocation are moreand more ubiquitous; and we can thus expect that the notion of possession to addressproblems of dispossession will be more and more important. Thus, within the presentdiscussion of the relevance of global crises to the notion of identity, Haiti and Breton,I argue, are absolutely relevant.

What interests me is how the notion of possession as it is conceived of in HaitianVodou and in Breton’s work fits into the above propositions. In the conclusion to theiredited volume entitled Haitian Vodou: Spirit, Myth and Reality, Patrick Bellegarde-Smith and Claudine Michel explain that they have chosen essays that provide an ‘‘emicperspective, that of the insider’’ (2006: 134):

In this multicultural and multinational world—‘‘worlds,’’ to be precise—it is enormously

important to allow multitudinous voices to reveal themselves, particularly if they have been

violently silenced down through the centuries.

Their propositions reiterate that subjects speak for themselves, and that they speak in thepresent tense: possession, or ‘‘crisis,’’ is a privileged moment of such speaking. Des-mangles explains, furthermore, that ‘‘[d]uring the period of possession, the serviteur,[ . . . ] embodies the cross symbol of the veves, the zero-point of contact between thesacred and the profane world’’ and his or her ‘‘body is the vertical line whereby therevitalizing forces of the universe flow to the societe’’ (Desmangles, 2006: 48). Thus,possession is a mode by which the desubjectified subject may find a means to expressitself in the face of an ever-destabilized global reality.

In a sense, then, possession is dispossession revitalized. At the very least, it is a lensthrough which to explore otherness, a sort of displacement within, which represents thedisplacement of the insular, the displacement that fragments the body—the human body,

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the collective body, body as narrative, the body as cultural text. It is a means to explorehow the traumatic experience—whether that of migration, of psychosis, or those of geo-political and historical impediments—might be transcended if only momentarilywithin Wiseman’s notion of ‘‘ethno-aesthet[ic]’’ representation. While it is true, asAlbers points out, that both Breton’s and Leiris’s work reveals exoticist and primitivistrepresentations, she also suggests that studying the modes of Leiris’s exoticism is reve-latory of ways in which an individual learns to know both his or her own culture as wellas that of another (2008: 275–276). So while scholars such as Edouard Glissant judgethe messages of Surrealism harshly (1997: 742), Dash affirms that writers such asBreton and Leiris also ‘‘inaugurated a form of writing that Glissant in 1956 calls a wel-come combination of literature and ethnography’’ (Dash, 2007: 84). Thus, in the samevein, my intent has been not to judge Breton’s work, but rather to listen to Breton in hisown words.

Possession, Pwen, and Writing

I now turn to another lens through which we may conceive of possession: possession as arepresentational form that helps the individual to negotiate ‘‘displacement and desubjec-tification’’ (Ek, 2006: 363). If the body in Vodou spirit possession is the place wherehuman and lwa meet and dislodge the human of its corporeal residency, then the bodybecomes a location that registers that which passes through it. How, if at all, may wecompare the experience of possession to that of writing? Toward answering this ques-tion, I turn to Glissant’s considerations of writing as they might relate to his notion ofMartinican ‘‘dispossession’’ (Glissant, 1997: 834).

When Glissant writes that ‘‘Haitian Creole is practically unharmed by the passage.The painted sign is its ancestral residence’’ (1997: 460), he notes a difference betweenliterary production coming out of Haiti and Haitian writers and that of Martinique andMartinican writers. The context of Glissant’s statement is to expand upon Haitian writ-ers’ comfort with the written form, noting with dismay that for Martinicans, the ‘‘pas-sage’’ from the oral to the written form has been more difficult than for the Haitians.In her book entitled African Novels and the Question of Orality, Eileen Julien proposesthat scholars of African literature have imposed the false binary of orality/writing. Shewrites, ‘‘For many practitioners of African literature and criticism, continuity has meantmost often a search for a heritage from oral traditions to the new literatures written inEuropean and African languages, the ‘passage from orality to writing’’’ (Julien, 1992:4). Glissant’s italicized use of the word ‘‘passage’’ renders ironic the erroneous notionof the relationship between oral and written communication as evolutionary and civiliz-ing, a derogatory connotation according to which, for the European colonizer, ‘‘Blacksand other people of color could not write’’ (Gates, 1995: 217) for ‘‘[ . . . ] writing, accord-ing to Hume, was the ultimate sign of difference between animal and human’’ (1995:218). Glissant’s use of the word ‘‘passage’’ in association with writing also invokes thetragedy of ‘‘The Middle Passage’’ or ‘‘la Traversee.’’

To better understand how writing, passage and possession are related, let us now lookmore closely at the modalities of possession as articulated in Vodou. Reginald O.Crosley (2006: 7) writes:




In Haiti, the components of man are known as ko kadav, gro [gwo] bon anj, and ti bon anj,

which correspond to the body, the semedo, and the selido of the Dahomeans and the body, the

moyo, and the mfumu-kutu of the Bantu or Bakongo. In Dagaraland, Burkina Faso, we have

the body, a soul or body double called sie, and a third component which is a spirit or a God.

For a Vodouisant, both the gwo-bon-anj and the ti-bon-anj are manifestations of a per-son’s soul; however, the gwo-bon-anj corresponds more closely to a Christian concept ofsoul and the Freudian concept of psyche, and the ti-bon-anj to personality. Since inVodou ‘‘the energy of matter is common to all living matter,’’ then, we may thinkof the gwo-bon-anj and the ti-bon-anj as parts of a totality (Deren, 1970: 25). Thegwo-bon-anj is an element of the universal life force, or the supreme God of Vodou,Bondye. Desmangles (1992: 66) describes the gwo-bon-anj as follows:

The first compartment [ . . . ] is the immortal, cosmic spirit of Bondye, which is manifested

in the body [ . . . ]. It is a life-force, an internal dynamism planted within the body that serves

as its shell. It derives its subsistence from, and is an offshoot particle of Bondye; it is sus-

tained and molded by the same ‘‘stuff’’ from which creation flows.

In contrast, the ti-bon-anj ‘‘is personality, conscience, the moral side of one’s character[ . . . ] it is that element in a person which is the physical manifestation of his or her gwo-bon-anj’’ (Desmangles, 1992: 67). Both Desmangles and Deren explain that one canimagine them as twins in which the gwo-bon-anj is ‘‘the metaphysical double of thephysical being [or ti-bon-anj]’’ (Deren, 1970: 26). The ti-bon-anj as ‘‘physical being’’is the individual personality that performs actions in society.

The above description of the tri-partite conception of the human in Vodou cosmologynot only emphasizes ‘‘the non-material components of the person—that is, his or her twosouls’’ (Crosley, 2006: 7), but also draws attention to the cohabitation of various modesof consciousness. To the two souls that reside within the human body, during themoment of possession, a third resident manifests itself, the lwa, which traverses thehuman body displacing either the gwo-bon-anj or ti-bon-anj that resides within the car-nal body, the ko kadav.

In a sense, the ko kadav becomes a proscenium, a canvas, across which variedvoices—ti-bon-anj, gwo-bon-anj, lwa—leave their imprint. Regardless of whether oneis a Vodouist or not—whether one believes or not in the spiritual power of the three phe-nomena—the three manifest themselves as distinct narrative voices that play themselvesout on the stage that is the human body. If for Leiris and Brown there is a theatricalaspect to possession in which the body performs for observers, I would also propose thatthis body is itself a stage on which various phenomenological entities perform. By phe-nomenological actor, I mean an entity—in this context the ti-bon-anj, gwo-bon-anj, orlwa—that speaks in its own right, that represents its own individual subjectivity. In thisway, the ko kadav becomes a place: a place that is traversed, a place occupied by variousentities, some denizens that are displaced (gwo-bon-anj and ti-bon-anj) and those thatinvade and dislodge (the lwa).

In so far as the ko kadav becomes a place, we may relate possession to Glissant’s poe-tic endeavour. Although Carine Mardorossian’s article has nothing to do with Vodou, the

Benedicty 299



discourse she invokes when tracing a genealogy between Frantz Fanon and Glissantcomplements our present discussion of Vodou possession. Mardorossian invokesMichelle Praeger’s description of Glissant’s ‘‘creolized aesthetic’’ as a ‘‘poetics of loca-tion’’ in which ‘‘one finds in Glissant’s work a discourse of geographical continuitymeant to compensate for the nonhistory of the Caribbean’’ (Mardorossian, 2009: 23).Further on, Mardorossian writes:

One would think that a cultural model that embraces mutability and the coming together of

cultures may necessarily be more lukewarm in its critique of the effects of colonialism. Yet,

as Fanon’s and Glissant’s interventions both illustrate, insight into cultural heritage as a site

of interaction need not compromise on one’s condemnation of the ‘‘depossession’’ resulting

from colonial and neocolonial relations. (2009: 23)

Mardorossian’s text directly relates a poetics of location to Glissant’s notion of dispos-session; in a sense, they act as a call and response to one another, where colonial andpostcolonial dispossession call upon the poet to create the Glissantian poetique de larelation, which for Praeger applies to locations, ‘‘symbolic sites through which the rela-tionality of the modern world is discussed and embodied’’ (Mardorossian, 2009: 23). Ifthe phenomenological actors in the poetics of possession are the ti-bon-anj, the gwo-bon-anj, and the hundreds of lwa privy to descending upon the human body, then theyact in much the same way as do the figures of speech that the poet uses to give life towords. In a sense, the ko kadav, like the morpheme or the phoneme, is nothing morethan a signifier waiting to receive its meaning from a relational experience thatdepends on location.

The emphasis that I have put on the ko kadav as location may initially seem contraryto the notion that the corporeal body in Vodou is like a ‘‘horse’’ which the lwa‘‘mounts’’—the often erratic mobility with which a horse is associated contradicts thenotion of body as domicile, and yet, it is precisely that: the body in Haitian Vodou is adomicile in continual displacement whose denizens are also continually displaced tomake way for the spirits. In a sense, it is Derrida’s flying signifier, constantly on themove, continually the vehicle of meanings that are both complementary and contradic-tory, a medium for the ‘‘mutability and coming together of cultures’’ (Mardorossian,2009: 23).

In his recent Cannibal Modernities, Luıs Madureira (2005: 6) advocates the reading oftexts that reveal a ‘‘latticework of uneven and subtle continuities,’’ which in turn enable‘‘readings of nonwestern modernisms to be submitted to a thoroughgoing re-evaluation’’(2005: 2). Breton is from the ‘‘West,’’ but as Dash points out, the Caribbean is not neces-sarily ‘‘non-western.’’ Dash refers to Geertz, who speaks to Levi-Strauss’s dismissal of theCaribbean as a space not pure enough in its exotic distance from European culture,whereas Leiris’s interest is to explore ‘‘Haiti and Martinique’’ as ‘‘mirrors in which theeveryday provides zones of interaction, a ‘theatre vecu,’ involving self and other’’ (Dash,2007: 91):

It is precisely because it was such a complex mirror of real and unreal, of unpredictable

images and displaced originals, that Leiris could sense in this act of self-exploration the




interactions of global modernity. The destabilizing and creolizing Caribbean, with its

desubjectifying possibilities, becomes an ideal site for Leiris’s self-ethnography.

Dash’s ‘‘desubjectifying possibilities’’ recast Ek’s and Rabinow’s notions of the desub-jectified subject in a more hopeful light.

In her recent work, Kaiama L. Glover speaks of identifying new centres in considera-tions of Caribbean discourses. She writes of the role her book Haiti Unbound: A SpiralistChallenge to the Postcolonial Canon plays in literary theory on Haiti:

Haiti Unbound fills, then, a rather astonishingly empty place in the assessment of

postcolonial Caribbean aesthetics. Affirming the presence of a spiral-based aesthetic in

major prose and fiction works [ . . . ], I frame my analyses here in an interrogation of the cri-

teria for inclusion in New World traditions, considering the manner in which new centers

and margins have been created in the already peripheralized space(s) of the Americas.

(Glover, 2010: xi)

Similarly, this article hopes to have offered yet another way of centring (or decentring)discourses on the physical and intellectual encounters between Breton, Haiti, HaitianVodou, and theories of subjectivities as related specifically to possession. By using pos-session in Haitian Vodou as a theoretical counterpoint for a textual analysis of Breton’sfirst Haitian conference and the novel Nadja, I hope to have shed light on a short-lived,yet important piece of the architecture that constitutes the eventful encounter of Bretonwith Haiti. In L’aperto: L’uomo e l’animale, Agamben asks: ‘‘What does ‘mastery of therelation between nature and humanity’ mean? That neither must man master nature nornature man’’ (Agamben, 2004: 83); and later on in his article on Agamben, Ek explainsthat the ‘‘state of emergency in society [ . . . ] requires the suspension of the normal orderto resolve’’ (Ek, 2006: 365). I have hoped to suggest that in its own way possession is a‘‘highly deictic form’’ that brings ‘‘immedia[cy]’’ to a subject’s narration of himself, her-self, or itself (Rabinow, 2007: 116), and, more importantly, might be a conceptual spacethat is far more contemporary than it might on first glance seem.

Notes

1. I am indebted to J. Ryan Poynter for making me aware of Breton’s ‘‘Haitian Conferences’’ and

for encouraging me to relate them to my work on contemporary Haitian literature. I’d also like

to thank Terry Rey, Christian Flaugh and David Laserre for editing my work.

2. For more on the literary and philosophical genealogies between Andre Breton, Aime Cesaire,

Rene Depestre, Michel Leiris, and Pierre Mabille, please see J. Michael Dash, Jean-Claude

Michel, Nick Nesbitt, Timothy J. Reiss, Aliko Songolo, and Gary Wilder’s work.

3. Besides Andre Breton’s Nadja, for which I use Richard Howard’s 1960 translation, and

Giorgio Agamben’s The Open: Man and Animal, for which I use Kevin Attell’s 2004 trans-

lation, all translations are mine.

4. Agamben’s work looks most prominently at the ‘‘camp’’ of the Holocaust in Europe; however,

given his discussion of the challenges of humanitarianism, for example in Homo Sacer: Sover-

eign Power and Bare Life (1998 [1995]: 133), it is plausible to understand Ek’s reference to

Benedicty 301



the ‘‘camp’’ as both a metaphor and a contemporary reality. Agamben has been criticized for

an ‘‘‘aestheticization’ of politics in his writing’’ (De la Durantaye, 2009: 12).

5. Erica Bourguignon acknowledges symptoms similar to ‘‘possession,’’ but characterizes as

‘‘possession’’ only those groups of people that self-identify with the word: ‘‘Nevertheless,

if we speak in very general terms about dissociation, fugue states, multiple personalities, faint-

ing, functional epileptic seizures and other behavior of an apparently hysterical type, then the

behavior is probably universal and occurs in all societies; however, it should not properly be

referred to as ‘possession’ states’’ (10). For his part, Gilbert Rouget’s comparative analysis of

ethnographic work on phenomena similar to possession throughout the world, includes termi-

nology such as ‘‘crisis’’ (6–7, 38), ‘‘ecstasy’’ (4), and ‘‘trance’’ (38).

6. It may also be that Breton’s elation in his conference is due to the fact that he is speaking in

December 1945, after the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied powers, May 1945.

7. Gilbert Rouget explains the usage of the word ‘‘crise’’ in the French context: ‘‘Three words

constantly recur in texts describing possession cults: possession (of course), trance, and crisis

(crise). But all authors do not use the last two terms in the same way. Some talk mainly of

crisis: Michel Leiris (1958) and Andras Zempleni (1966) in particular, in their descriptions

of possession in Ethiopia and Senegal respectively. [ . . . ] The word crise is used to denote

sometimes a convulsive form of trance, sometimes the paroxysmic aspect of trance when it

displays periods of variable intensity, sometimes the onset of trance if it is characterized by

a moment of more or less distressing agitation, and finally sometimes—and this last is a very

different usage—to refer to the troubled period a given individual may undergo, and which

will lead him to seek an outlet in possession’’ (38). Given the initial collaborations between

Breton and Leiris, it would make sense that Breton would use the word ‘‘crise’’; that said,

Alfred Metraux uses the word ‘‘possession’’ and Breton’s work pre-dates either of Rouget’s

references. As discussed above, it seems that Breton might intentionally be using the word

‘‘crise’’ to designate the secular act in which he is engaged, and ‘‘possession’’ to denote a more

‘‘religious’’ aspect of Vodou.

8. Breton uses and italicizes the word ‘‘sertie,’’ which refers to the ‘‘setting of a stone or of a

jewel.’’

9. Breton proposes that the concept of the somatic crisis has been newly re-discovered in Europe

by the Surrealists: he explains that the ‘‘Jesuits and Jansenists’’ had already experimented with

alternative somatic states (Breton, 1999b: 160).

10. I’d like to keep the idea of ‘‘incantation,’’ which emphasizes the element of body and song,

somewhat lost in the translation.

11. Here, having never engaged in the ethnographic process myself, my interest resides in the dis-

courses that anthropologists, historians, literary scholars, psychologists, religious studies scho-

lars, and writers employ to study culture, identity, possession, subjectivity, and self-possession.

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