Columbus, the Scapegoat, and the Zombie: Performance and Tales of the National Memory in Haiti

Abstract

In 1992, Haiti did not commemorate the fifth centenary of the Discovery of the New World at all. While the Dominican Republic constructed a Lighthouse to Columbus in Santo Domingo, as we examined in Chapter 5, the Haitian cultural politics did not engage with the event, not even in reaction against their Hispanic neighbor. This is quite understandable if we think of the country at the time had just endured the violent coup of Géneral Raoul Cédras, in September 1991, eight months after Jean Bertrand Aristide had been democratically elected president of Haiti. Cédras had the full support of the Bush (senior) administration and of the militaryCIA forces, sent on the island. From 1991 to 1994, when Aristide returned from exile and was reinstalled in power with the support of the Clinton administration, the country went through a period of upheaval, tensions at all level of the society and massive migration. In such a difficult context, public commemorations were certainly not on the agenda.