Revisiting a powerful account of the psychology of colonialism and neocolonialism by Haiti’s Jean Price-Mars.
Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parle l’oncle (in English, Thus Spoke the Uncle), is among the most piercing accounts of the psychology of colonialism and neocolonialism, anticipating, by decades, those celebrated studies of the colonized mind by Frantz Fanon, Ngugi wa Thiongo, and others.
Published in 1928, Ainsi parle l’oncle was written during the first United States military occupation of Haiti (1915-1934) in response to the anguished crisis of racial and cultural identity suffered by Haiti’s elite under US rule. A physician, diplomat, and intellectual,
Price-Mars was a member of that elite. For Price-Mars the Haitian elite were afflicted with a “collective bovarysme” (“bovarysme collectif”). The phrase is borrowed from the philosopher Jules de Gaultier and his studies of Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary (1857). In the novel, the main character, Emma Bovary, lives a life of delusion and lies, living an escapist fantasy of bourgeois existence far beyond her own modest and humble realities. The delusion and fantasy of the Haitian elite, Price-Mars charges, is that they are ‘“Colored’ Frenchmen” who have spent their lives since the Haitian revolution “copying” and “identifying” with France, embracing French culture so as to distance themselves from Africa, and from the stain of slavery. This is, in essence, the elite's “collective bovarysme,” a phenomenon akin to the production of “Afro-Saxons” and “mimic men” in the Anglophone Caribbean, or Fanon’s better known formation of “black skin, white masks.”
During the US military occupation, the dreams and delusions of the Haitian elite were shattered. The notorious story is told that when US Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was briefed on Haiti before the decision was made to take over the first Black Republic, his response was, “Dear me, think of it, Niggers speaking French!” For the occupation forces, all Haitians, French-speaking or not, were simply “niggers,” and were treated as such. Certainly, the Haitian masses suffered the most under US rule: they were massacred, forced into chain-gangs, and their villages razed. But the elite were made to grovel before the US authorities, publicly humiliated, arrested and jailed for protesting, silenced by martial law, and denied the social privileges that they thought were their birthrights.
It was because of these humiliations under US occupation that the elite turned from France to Africa, and from the rarefied salons and the shaded libraries of Petion-ville ( a segregated bastion of Haiti’s upper-classes located in the hills above Port-au-Prince) to the rich terrain of the Haitian countryside. Ainsi parle l’oncle emerged from this moment. Price-Mars sought to restore the dignity of Haiti and its people, the people who, in the “process of historic events” “humanized” the “American archipelago” and secured their place in the world. He did this by assembling the facts of Haitians social life.
Ainsi parle l’oncle is an extended study of Haitian folklore and popular beliefs. It discussed the legends, proverbs, songs, and sayings of Haiti’s masses. It was among the first studies to celebrate the vodun religion as something other than a barbaric cult, and Price-Mars recovered the deep historical ties between Haiti and Africa, asserting the African foundations of Haitian culture and society. He also excoriated the Haitian elite for disavowing Africa, Blackness, and the Haitian peasant in favor of a deluded, delusional, and dangerous embrace of Europe and European “civilization,” at the expense of the Haitian masses.
The book became a foundational text for the Indigéniste movement, a radical, nationalist literary movement protesting the US occupation. Indigénisme was an important influence on the development of Negritude, as well as for Haiti’s later noirisme movement, and in both Price-Mars was a venerated figure.
Today, Haiti is currently in the midst of yet another US occupation, albeit one in Blackface, fronted by neocolonial negro proxies from Kenya, Barbados, Jamaica, and other locations within the African world. Sadly the contemporary Haitian elite seem to be replaying the same role of their predecessors, succumbing to a new collective bovarysme. The collective bovarysme of today’s Haitian elite is not found in the delusion of France, but the dreamworld of the United States. They have bought into the fantasy of neoliberal governance and the free market theology pushed by the State Department, USAID, and the National Endowment for Democracy. And unlike 1915, there are few figures like Jean Price-Mars who have broken through that terrible colonial illusion of identity.
We reprint the preface to Jean Price-Mars’s Ainsi parle l’oncle below, with the hope that today’s collective bovarysme can be shattered and Haiti can once again be restored to sovereignty, and dignity.
So Spoke the Uncle/Ainsi parle l’oncle
Jean Price-Mars
We have nourished for a long time the ambition of restoring the value of Haitian folk-lore in the eyes of the people. This entire book is an endeavor to integrate the popular Haitian thought into the discipline of traditional ethnography.
Through a disconcerting paradox, these people who’ve had, if not the finest, at least the most binding, the most moving history oath world—that of the transplantation of a human race to a foreign soil under the worst biological conditions — these people feel an embarrassment barely concealed, indeed shame, in hearing of their distant past. It is those who during four centuries were the architects of black slavery because they had force and science at their service that magnified the enterprise by spreading the idea that Negroes were the sum of society, without history, without mortality, without relegation, who had to be infused by an manner whatsoever with new moral values, to be humanized anew. And when under the protection of the crises of transmutation given birth in the French Revolution, the slave community of Saint Domingue rebelled whilst reclaiming the status which no one thus far had recognized, the success of its demands came all at once a difficulty and a surprise for it — the difficulty, unacknowledged moreover, of the choice of a social order and the surplus of adaptation by a heterogeneous mass to the stable life of free work. Evidently the simplest voice for the revolutionaries badly in need of national cohesion was to copy the only model that they comprehended. Thus, for better or for worse, they inserted the new groupings into the disclocated framework of the dispersed white society and this was his the Negro community of Haiti donnned the old frock of western civilization shortly after 1804. From that moment with a constancy that no defeat, no sarcasm, no perturbation has been able to weaken, she tried her utmost to realize what she believed to be her superior destiny in shaping her thought and sentiments, by drawing closer to her former mother country, by copying her, and by identifying with her. What an absurd and grandiose task! A difficult task, if ever there was one!
But it is this curious approach that the metaphysics of [Jules] de Gaultier calls collective bovaryism, meaning the faculty of a society seeing itself as other than it is. Is this not a strangely productive attitude if this society finds within itself the incentive to a creative activity that elevates it beyond itself because then does not the faculty of conceiving itself as other than it is become a stimulus, a powerful motor which urges it to overthrow obstacles in its aggressive upward path. Is this not a singularly dangerous course if this society, dulled by impedimenta, blunders in the ruts of dull and slavish imitations, because then it does not appear to bring any tribute to the complex play of human progress and will serve sooner or later as the surest pretext for nation impatient for territorial expansions, ambitious for hegemony, to erase the society from the map of the world. Despite spurts of recovery and flashes of clairvoyance, it is by the use of the inferior approach to the dilemma that Haiti sought a place among peoples. The chances were that her experiment would be considered as devoid of interest and originality. But, by an implacable logic, as we gradually forced ourselves to believe we were “colored” Frenchmen, we forgot we were simply Haitians, that is, men born of determined historic conditions, having collected in their minds, just as all other human groups, a psychological complex which gives to the Haitian society its specific physiognomy. Since then all that is authentically indigenous — language, customs, sentiments, beliefs— have become suspect, tarnished by bad taste in the eyes of elites smitten with nostalgia for the lost mother country [France]. With very strong reason the word Negro, formerly a generic term, acquired a pejorative meaning. As for the term “African,” it has always been, it is the most humiliating affront that can be addressed to a Haitian,. Strictly speaking, the most distinguished man of this country would much prefer that one find him to bear some resemblance to an Eskimo, a Samoyed, or a Tunguse, rather than remind him of his Guinean or Sudanese ancestry. It is imperative to see with what arrogance some of the most representative figures of our milieu evoke the efficacy of some bastard relationship. All the turpitudes of colonial promiscuities, the anonymous shame of chance encounters, the brief pairings of two paroxysms have become titles of esteem and glory. What can be the future, what can be the worth of a society where such aberrations of judgment, such errors of orientation are transformed into constitutional sentiments? A hard problem for those who reflect and who have the task of meditating on the social conditions of our milieu! In any case it will appear to the reader how temerarious was our venture of studying the value of Haitian folk-lore openly with the Haitian public. Our audacity will seem even clearer when we confess that we conceived of the plan for this book originally in the form of popular lectures. In fact, we offered the lure of two conferences on the part of the subject that we thought would most appeal to the public love for the new and the different. For others we judged it more advisable to retain the form of a monograph. Then, we modified the original plan and we reunited all the essays in this book. We confess without hesitation that the whole mass of folk-lore, the modalities of popular beliefs, their origins, their evolution, their actual practices, the scientific explanations which flow from the system have been the problems that have most sharply activated our research. That is why they have been given a more important place in this volume. Are the solutions to which we have subscribed definite? We are far from claiming this. The scientific world is eternally worried that the conclusions of the study of biological phenomena based upon the most recent methods and acquisitions of science will be considered as other than tentative. At least we are striving to utilize the most learned works possible in aiding us to comprehend the essential modalities of our subject. We hope that others will plough the same furrow and spread even more seeds…
But, one may ask, what purpose is served in going to so much trouble over minute problems with interest only a small minority of mankind living on a very small part of the earth’s surface?
Perhaps this is reasonable.
We will take the liberty, however, of doubting the either the exiguity of our territory, or the small numbers of our people, problems with concern the behavior of one group of men, are sufficient grounds to warrant the indifference of the rest of humanity. Besides, our presence on a point of the American archipelago which we have “humanoid,” the breach that we have made in the process of historic events in order to secure our place among men, our fashion of utilizing the laws of imitation in order to make ourselves model borrowers, the pathological deviation which we have inflicted through collective bovaryism by conceiving of ourselves as other than what we are, the tragic uncertainty that such a step stamps on our evolution at the moment when imperialism of every order disguises its lusts under the appearance of philanthropy, all of this gives a certain configuration to the life of the Haitian society and, before darkness falls, it is not futile to collect the facts of our social life, to assess the gestures, the attitudes of our people, however humble they may be, to compare them to those of other peoples, to examine their origins, and to situate them in the general life of man on the planet. They are the evidence, the deposition of which cannot be negligible in judging the value of a part of the human species.
Such is, in last analysis, the essence of our venture and whatever may be its reception, we wish that it be understood that we are aware of its inadequacy and its precariousness.
Jean Price-Mars, Petionville, December 15 1927
Jean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l'oncle (essai d'ethnographie), Compiègne (France): Imprimerie de Compiègne; New York: Parapsychology Foundation, 1928.
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