The Marvelous Takes to the Streets: Surrealism and the Haitian Revolution of 1946

Abstract: This essay explores the impact and consequences of André Breton's 1946 visit to Haiti, where he gave a series of public lectures on modern art and poetry in general and surrealism in particular, to an enthusiastic audience of young writers and artists, some of whom had started an agitational newspaper, La Ruche , which became an organ of surrealist-inflected radical opposition to the Élie Lescot dictatorship. Seizing the opportunity that Breton's presence and words provided, the young men of La Ruche incited a mass uprising that within five days miraculously overthrew the regime. From its earliest days, the European surrealist movement advocated the dissolution of colonialism within a generalized struggle for revolutionary transformation, but never had there been a decisive revolt whose leading activists had announced an affinity with surrealism. However, their kind of surrealism, like that of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and others associated with the Martinican journal Tropiques , often differed from the Parisian tendency. Some convergences and divergences of a specifically Black Caribbean surrealism with Breton's, from Martinique to Haiti to Cuba, are discussed here, as well as Marie Vieux-Chauvet's later satirical critique, in the wake of the subversion of the 1946 revolution by the military and the rise within a decade of François Duvalier's tyranny, of what she saw as Haitian poets' tendency to exaggerate their poetic efficacy in the world. Yet Jacques-Stephen Alexis's conception of the "Haitian marvelous real," which views deep-rooted indigenous poetic and artistic traditions as harmonious with social transformation, points toward the realization of a Caribbean surreal.