 So welcome to the last week of the semester has the mic too loud To it's okay Good, okay Welcome to the last week of the semester as you know this being arts one you're only halfway through But still you can give yourselves, I know that's on the back and congratulate yourselves for getting this far So today We're gonna continue with this little mini series on Haiti different Takes on or representations of the Haitian revolution The books you are to have read Derek Walcott Only Christophe Is actually a trilogy this is part of this trilogy I'm gonna talk about why you have photocopies and PDFs in a minute and a may says a The tragedy of King Christophe can someone shut that door actually please. Thank you so much We will have fewer pictures from my Haitian holidays this time But here's a picture that you've seen before the Citadel again, I'm personally But I'm personally and I think I share this fascination with these authors fascinated with this Building this monument if it is a monument, we might want to talk about what's the difference between a building and a monument in some ways, I think all the four books that we have read now about Haiti are likewise Trans fixed by this building the Citadel La Feria in in northern Haiti Today the metaphor for the for the talk For the for this lecture if last week it was a tour of the ruins This week. It's a brush with the archive I'm gonna be talking about archives and what our case do what I case are What we can get out of our case or what we add in or project into our case I'm gonna start however with a section of last week's lecture, which as I said, I'd I'd roll over On on ruins, but there's a lot of continuity with with this week's lecture, so it fits equally well here I think then going to talk about the archive or archives talk about context Talk a little bit about post colonialism about sovereignty and about about writing and again much like ruins and I want to suggest I suppose the archives are sorts of ruins or maybe ruins are sorts of archives that there's a similarity between between the two There's gonna be a little bit of repetition a little bit of fragmentary in us Here as we wander through these various texts and and context and so on this the image that you have here is actually of the Archivo de las Indias in Seville in Spain, which is the archive that That was built up during the period of Spanish colonization of the Americas It's still this extraordinary resource for anyone studying the colonial Americas, so it has all the has everything from let's see letters Addressed to Inconobility on behalf of the king of Spain this sort of high-level communication to a sort of accounting reports of what ships went out and what fleets Who is allowed and who is not allowed to go to the Americas on these fleets The material that was sent out but more importantly brought home and accounting for the the silver and so on also criminal cases for instance of mutiny and People who broke the various rules and laws that the govern the imperial project It looks very tidy in this picture. I can tell you the one to you're in there and you order up these boxes It soon becomes you seem to see there's a certain innate untidiness messiness fragmentary in us again to archives I Have I've I've shown you this slide or one very similar to it last week I guess this is my general contention For these couple of weeks lecture Again, you can you can take it and leave it in some ways I don't think you have to buy into this notion in order to Think carefully about or appreciate these texts, but this is sort of underlying what I'm trying to say That one of the interesting thing about these ruins the ruins of Sons of sea on the one hand and the Citadel on the other Is that when it suggests there are three literary cannons built on them the Latin American boom which I talked about? last week Francophone Caribbean literature and Anglophone post-colonial literature. I won't be talking so much about those cannons This week, but I'm going to be talking about two representative figures in a make his César and Derek Walcott and then a sort of corollary to this claim Therefore that the hemisphere's literature replays a legacy of violence and domination reimagining the material traces of history of revolutions So first of all ruins and this is as I say this was in the Slide show last week, but we didn't get to we didn't get to talk about it So I'm going to talk about it now. And so this does include some of my Some of my Holiday snapshots as it were this is this is what passes for public transport in Haiti It's called a tap tap. It is as you see basically a pickup truck with a little roof but on the pickup part and you sort of squeeze into there with chickens and shopping from market or wherever else other people are taking and The thing will wait until it's full or actually until you think you think it's full and then another half an hour goes by and Five or six more people get in and you realize that your your understanding of what full is is rather different from that of the of the driver As it happens as we were as we were headed to Milot from Cabellet Jean one of the tires blue So this was office. This didn't take anyone by any great surprise But we had a sort of half a pit stop while the driver and his aid to the guy who the little kid basically collected the money jumped out and quickly patched up the tire and Put put in the spare tire and so on and there's something about Well, what I want to suggest here is the continuing Ruination of Haiti, but this is not just a historical issue. This is I mean you can see it's sort of dusty road It's also the main road between two of the most important settlements in northern Haiti a transport is barely functioning to some extent There's a history of economic. This is this is I guess a symptom or a sign of a history of economic ruination over the last 200 years or so and this is a Colony that had been the richest colony in the car in the Caribbean There have been France's richest colony the source of much of its its wealth The as I suggested last week there's a number of reasons for this sort of historic Ruination one of them the indemnity that the independence the post-independence post-revolutionary Haitian government was forced to pay to France for the for supposedly stealing France's property away from which by which was meant the slaves essentially so an indemnity for Self-liberation there are other ruins of course, you know about the the earthquake of a couple of years ago which accentuated as much as anything else the pre-existing fragility of the social infrastructure But ruins are also Concerns very much of all all of these texts again trio Carpentier Walkout and and says there as this is this is a slice of last week's lecture these these quotations actually taken from From Carpentier from the Kingdom of this world Tino else that down on one of the cornerstones of the old mansion now a stone like any other stone for those who did not remember so I mean what's interesting there I think is The way in which ruins on the one hand are seen as a sort of prompt for memory But on the other hand There's a kind of complicity between ruination and memory and it becomes a point at which the ruins simply become material simply become matter and Memory can't supplement them or can't recreate what these things once were But also the notion in the second quotation here the ruins through a pleasant shade over the abundant grass And if one dug in the dirt a little it was not unusual to find a marble era stone ornament or an oxidized coin I'm interested there in two things One the uses to which ruins could be put when a when a building or fortification or palace and in these cases becomes ruined It becomes open for a whole other series of possible uses. I mentioned football and And snogging last time Which is probably a word none of you use but then we are making out. I don't know what you guys say But but here so here it becomes a possibility of shade of rest in the mansion to which way when it was a mansion T noel To T noel's access to it, of course have been strictly Controlled and now to some extent things become opened up metaphorically as well as literally and then the way in which ruination enables kind of strange Conjunctures of things that weren't meant to be together suddenly come together Things are separated out, but also come together in different ways So you get this kind of list of marble here stone ornament oxidized coin brought together by the forces of history and ruination. I'm interested in the way in which ruins and I think again walk-out and and Césaire as well as Carpentier Interested in in ruins on the one hand ruins suggest absence What was once here and is no no longer the ruins are a fragment Of what had previously been a whole or a totality So, you know though some of the walls are gone or the roof is gone or whatever This is actually in this instance and in terms of the ruins we're looking at now This is probably more obvious with Sans-Sous-Cis which is in some ways more ruined than Than the Citadel la Ferriere, but but even so you go into the fortification There's also other absences not just the material absences but the absence of the court of The people of the whole sort of social order and social arrangements and social relations that were For which this ruin served a particular purpose I Guess it's purpose itself in some ways that is what is absent When something becomes a ruin and no longer fulfills the function that it once did So there's a sense of absence. This is a trace again. This is linked to a notion of Memory it's a trace of what is gone or been left behind or or been superseded in in some way Walcott Walcott talks about this at some stage as well. He talks about Ruins page 60 He says this is the Archbishop Braille speaking Hold this life precious to tell history and children remembering us in queer languages by cracked columns In dusty aisles where weeds are memory signatures our breed shall learn how men like you to St. Braille desaline Dead led their own people from embarrassment to insolence breaking their former masters on their knees So the idea that the ruins aid memory For something that is that is gone memory signatures On the other hand ruins we could also think about in terms of presence in some ways ruins of what you don't expect It's ruins of what stubbornly persists persist Ruins are I mean the sort of classic notion of coming across the ruin in the in the tropical jungle for instance The sort of Indiana Jones fantasy to some extent, but it's something unexpected out of place persistent Precisely when that whole social order is has left to sort of stubbornly present you trip over it perhaps you stub your toe on the on the on the materiality on the on the stones themselves So it's a trace is kind of both present and an absent to some extent it kind of mediates between Presence and absence and perhaps precisely because of that it be they become ruins. I think become subject to Interpretation on the one hand people ask questions of ruins. What what's it doing here? What was this society like that left this ruin behind How do we understand this? How do we what do we do with the ruin today and Should we or should we know there's a whole notion of reconstructing putting the ruin back together That these are fragments that can be recomposed In some ways and I think I think both walk up and says that I'm interested in that in fact we'll see in a minute that the very figure for the way in which walk up understands what he is doing as a writer and artist in In terms of pulling fragments back together again Ruins therefore also signs they become they become texts Something to be read And as that process as we treat ruins as signs or as text They become to some extent Less material or dematerialized they always point to something else something beyond them or we treat them as though They point something else There's something beyond them. So and they're the the hinge between past and present. They're both very present very materially present And they're a legacy of what what came passes this way of a sort of hinge We're always in between is interesting and again in it says there. We notice almost Quite literally the ruin of the Citadel Serves as the hinge for this play. This is a this is a to act a to act play The first act ends on page 45 With a long speech by Henri Christophe It's a speech about the Citadel it's That this is what this people that has to want to gain to achieve something against faith against history against nature I'm starting on page 44 Imagine on this very unusual platform turn towards the North magnetic pole And walls 130 feet high and 30 feet thick Lime and bagasse lime on bull's blood a Citadel. No, not a palace not a fortress to guard my property No, the Citadel the freedom of a whole people And then there's this in talking about it and imagining it in in giving us the image of this Christophe also imagines it becomes strangely Alive Look, no, look. It's alive sounding out. It's horn in the fog So this is notion of the Citadel is kind of reversed ship lighting up the night cancelling out the slave ship charging over the waves and Then the so the speech ends let my people my black people salute the tide smell of the future So this is kind of the ruin or the Citadel becomes for Christophe this sign of the future Meanwhile, we're reading it as a sign of the past again It's this hinge and then we get the vision the stage direction a vision of the Citadel stands out illumined against a double chain of mountains and that's the that's the That's the cutoff point, right? That's the transition The the end of act one and the beginning of of act two I'm interested in the way and I think that That these guys also are of the relationship between ruins and modernity and modernization The way in which modernity or progress development if you like we put all these things in Imagine all these things in inverted commas in scare quotes of some sort require Ruining destroying what's come before it's not a creative destruction destruction of the process of modernization Inevitably leaves ruins behind it. It's inevitably Transformation of remaking or remodeling if you like but it leaves these traces of what has been remade and remodeled And and these these books are these place. I want to suggest to you are very concerned with those Traces what's been left behind have we left behind sufficient or have we not left behind sufficient of what came before? and then the way relationship between ruins and power In which ruins are used to underwrite or support a notion of power a notion of I don't know Also a notion of sort of cultural Importance the Haitians very proud of these these ruins and they talk about them in terms of the I don't know the pyramids For instance that they're the sign that This is that the in Haiti this could be achieved that the sign of the undertakings and the the power of of the Haitian people hence it the the ruin becomes a sort of a national symbol and put on stamps and and Bills for instance as well But they're also a reminder of the fact that power is Temporary the power comes to an end I'm going to give you a little bit later. I'm going to show you the full poem by Shelly Ozimandias And we'll talk about that a little bit Ozimandias is a is a poem a famous poem about a ruin in In a desert in the in the Middle East there's a ruin with writing upon it too, which I think is kind of interesting and we'll talk about whether it's warning or or boast whether it's It's pride or vain glory I suppose So ruins also remind us that On the one hand that nothing is permanent except for on the other hand impermanence itself, right? They're sort of a a sign or a way of thinking about history itself as a Process and of course the violence which is integral which is an integral part of that history That what gets destroyed what gets crushed what gets smashed to use again a term which comes up in these in these Plays and then at the end of last week. I would have given you more resources. So these are more resources for last week's Lecture a couple of books that you might want to have a look at one about Alejo Carpentier Ciala James Trio talked about him. I think it's a very famous Take on the on the Haitian Revolution the black Jacob man and quite a nice little book on on ruins by a guy called Peter Fridger And then of course arts one open as you are endlessly open resource As I said, I wanted to show you this This poem By Percy Shelley English romantic Poet I met a traveler from an antique land who said too vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert near them on the sand half sunk shattered visage lies This frown and went wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that it's sculptor well those passions red. So this is Well, I mean I'm interested in this point in part because it brings together the various things That I'm trying to bring together in this in this lecture It brings together notion of the notion of the archive this is a record of a particular ruler a particular social order and It brings together the ruin of course there's a poem about a ruin It brings together. It also has notions of sovereignty or kingship of power forms of power Questions of artistry through the relationship between the sculptor And the king the sculptor well those passions read It brings together notions of context because we or recontextualization because this is a ruin which is in In what was once an empire and now is portrayed or given us as a as a desert and questions of post-colonialism, okay, this is after the Empire has vanished Which yet survived stamped on those lifeless things the hand that mocked them and the heart the fit and on the pedestal so we've got the image of the pedestal a base to the ruins of this shattered portrait of In power of imperiousness My name is Odie madness king of kings look on my works. You mighty and despair. There's this meant to be an ironic comment then now the what had been this projection of Almost infinite power is now shown to be mocked to be undercut by history by the history that is that has ruined it Or is it telling us well? We still know the name of Ozzy Mandeus somehow he survives or something of him survives His ruination precisely because of the fact that this ruin stubbornly persists even after the Empire has disappeared Nothing beside remains around the decay of that colossal wreck boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away okay, so Let me talk a little about the the archive or notions of archives Which is I suppose yes the metaphor if you like that I hope brings together some of the My thoughts on these texts today. This is them I've used this picture before too. I use this picture to illustrate the cannon I mean, but it could equally be thought about as illustrating An archive it's a collection of rather disparate materials actually Books, but also I don't know telephone boxes papers Photograph there's sort of rough organization or categorizations. We've got the I don't know if I was an IKEA shell so it looks a bit like I Forget the IKEA name for that particular sort of square shelving There's there seems to be some kind of basic organization But it's also the sort of detritus of a life things get sort of stuffed in there when you got no nowhere else to to put them and Of a material of different kinds So I suppose if before I suggested that I put this forward as a image for the cannon and I'm putting The strength the same image forward as a as an image for the archive. We might ask what's the relationship between the two of them I? suppose One of the notions is that the archive is thought of as more capacious, right there the archive you want things get bundled into at the archive irrespective of Of supposed quality whereas the cannon with the notion of the cannon is The best has been thought and said right the notion of the can is a certain aesthetic as well as physical durability and that I think that's At least the image or the notion of the two differ in that way An archive is a is a collection a collection of texts, but not just text different kinds of hybrid as I suggest many genres Which it deposit sometimes Sometimes deposit intentionally as with the achiever las indias which I saw before that sort of part of the record keeping of the bureaucratic Imperial state Sometimes unintentionally things are still gathered up and there's a There's usually a mix between those two modes in which materials Enter an archive You know libraries for instance they gather they buy up the papers of authors and they may be anything in there Anything from bus tickets to letters to manuscripts and so on so forth They usually bought in as a job lot and then it's the duty of the Archivist or the librarian to try and sift through and sort through them and and give them some kind of order Archive is cut as a kind of record a historical record And again if you go into an archive you have a sense of the the text as object Of course archives on the one hand that they're full of silences In the sense the trio talked about silences and silencing the past not everything Makes it into the archive certain things are less likely than others to make it into the archive So for instance and and and those differences in what makes it into the archive very often determined or influenced by social status for instance or by power relations Everything that I don't know a nobleman or king for instance writes is much more likely to get into the archive than the kind of things that I don't know Ordinary people peasants and then peasants of course don't have the same kind of access to writing in the first place So these the archive tends to be in this is perhaps a similarity with the can I tends to have a certain preponderance or bias towards particular voices or particular types of material or material that's produced by particular types of people but precisely because of the kind of messy way in which the archive is often put together other things sneak in and so and enable us to rethink perhaps The canon or rethink the kind of stories we tell about history through in investigating the archive But there's a question here about what we're doing I think and Why we're doing what we're doing In something like arts one that's why it's often suggested to be a great books course, so it's a course that follows the canon Rather than the archive. I put it to you that these are not great books I'm trying I'm gonna be trying to convince you of the The worth of reading books that are not great in particular I think the the walk-off book is not a particularly the walk-off plays not particularly great book these are these are Books these are texts. I think which are more of a struggle than some of the texts the other texts you've read in this course and I suggest Quite specifically these probably more of a struggle for a number of different reasons It's not just about quality, but they're more of a struggle than the the carpentier. I think but I do think that These texts are important even if they're not great Because they help us understand things perhaps that great books might not Help us understand, but it's it's as a result. It's no great Coincidence or accident that you're reading these two books On PDF or someone seems got the the library edition of the of the walk-off But but essentially you're reading them in in PDF the The play the Henri Christophe the Derek walk-off play that's his first place first extant play he really when he was 19 Some of you are probably 19 Oh Kind of precocious young man wasn't he but it but it says it's his first play which which wasn't published for For a long time. It becomes it gets collected much later in this in this trilogy someone I I read someone's blog that said of course walk-off play was from it's from 2002. It's not It's from 1949 But it becomes but there's a sort of lag And it's in his publication and that's kind of interesting It's so he publishes a sort of I don't know yet dust from the archive when it gets to be served up with these other two plays Which are also about about Haiti And likewise that you know the the César the César is probably a little more Closer to canonical, but it's this is decided to get the second hand on the internet You know this is long out of print this this translation at least of The of the text In some ways these are both both of these plays are I'm going to talk about this a little further when I talk about context that the artifacts of a particular moment in time that in the The archives their ruins of their own in their own way that the artifacts I'm going to suggest of a particular moment of time in the night late 1940s to early 1960s a particular post-colonial decolonial moment So the question is what are we doing reading this what uses can What uses is the archive put why why would one want to read a Book that is not great. We might also ask why one. Well, why would want to read a great book? Pleasure enjoyment or I don't know a cultural capital or something Why would one want to read a not great book and what kind of things that we get out of that? More generally what kind of uses does the archive put I want to suggest that both these plays that's what they're doing They're kind of investigating that they're using this material the hasten revolution Because they think they can make it speak in some way to their what was their contemporary context again in the 1940s 50s early 60s They're trying to bring it to life And give life to this This otherwise dead more or less forgotten history trying to order it organize it Manipulate it in different ways and it's interesting to think about the different ways in which the three texts I guess the three fictional texts work with history the ways in which carpentier and walk up and says Try to give voice to history in different ways and with different conclusions, and I'm going to suggest that César and Walker derive actually radically different conclusions from the activation reactivation remaking of the archive in these two plays and Then yeah, the archive is unconscious whereas as ruin what Freud talks about ruins as a figure for the for the unconscious as something to dig down to uncover Something that you've repressed or forgotten for some reason, but the archive also serves as a kind of collective Unconscious to so so how to deal with it? We we we make it tell stories We we provide narratives or we make it perform. We make it speak in different ways And I think that's what's happening here with these two with these two Plays this whole question of how to deal with past text how to deal with a kind of legacy of both the canon and the archive I think is is crucial to both these plays and we see it we see now I guess this is Walker's relationship more with the With the Canon than with the archive, but but we see it in his use of epigraphs for instance page 7 the very the play The play opens In a very unplay like manner There's no This is not given to any particular speaker. I'm not entirely sure. I mean if we if we were to stage this play We might ask how would we do it? Would we have a narrator? Speaking these initial lines or do we kind of leave them as part of the play text But not part of the play the performance itself Lines from from Hamlet the cease of majesty dies not alone But like a golf just draw and so on lines is only from Hamlet about ruination Each small and X-men petty consequence attends the boisterous ruin an interesting notion as well are talking excessively a ruin that talks excessively, but so Walker's kind of appropriating These little snippets of Shakespeare. Why is he doing that? What's he doing with that? Is it a form of legitimating his own play which of course? Dramatizes the Haitian Revolution according to forms, which are very much those of Jaggedy and at least Elizabethan drama. Okay, let me talk a little about Context or context again, I'm interested in it here to start off with in the in what we could call the The paratex to use a fancy term which I mean the the texts That are kind of on the margins of the text Do they are they actually part of the text or not part of the text as with that Shakespeare quotations that Is that part of the play or not part of the play as an epigraph does that belong? to What follows or is it sort of set apart to one side of what follows well in these two plays like other play text we have these The at the beginning we have so this is pages. It doesn't even have a page number I guess it's page three is I'm the unnumbered page three of the of the wall cut We have a record of the play's performance and Who the Who the cast were in the initial performance actually it's kind of interesting because it's a doubled performance So the play was first produced in the St. Lucer's Guild at St. Joseph's Confront in Castro St. Lucer in 1949 Direct whoever thought it was from 2002 obviously hadn't read this particular paratext, right Directed by Derek Walcott costumes by Alex Walcott It was later produced at Hans Crescent London in 1952 Directed by Errol Hill and designed by Carol Chang the castles as follows and so on so forth This doubling is interested interesting normally we just get the first production But it's actually more weight is given not to the first production to a subsequent production So the first production was in St. Lucer, which is where Derek Walcott's from a small island in the Caribbean But somehow more stress is given to a subsequent production three years later in London the Colonial metropolis center, but that very journey. I think is what's being is part of what's being underlined here The journey from the periphery to the metropolis The fact that this is a play that doesn't just Sort of live and die or Peter out in the periphery But it's presented in the heart of London Hans Crescent London in 1952 with them. It's actually interesting if we if you see the cast list because many of these actors or many of the people who acted in this 1952 performance go on to be very important figures in Caribbean writing George Lamming for instance is a very important writer from Barbados But also Earl John and Errol him Errol Errol Hill from Trinidad so what you have in London and this so this is put on by What I think is sort of a cultural center for Commonwealth And or colonial intellectuals in London who all come together in London from their different Home territories Trinidad Barbados St. Lucia in the case of of Walcott and And and use try to think or use London as a place to rethink their relationships with each other That could so it's interesting the communication from Barbados to St. Lucia or Trinidad to Barbados passes through London And then they will later return to in many cases at least though they'll return to the Caribbean to the colony or the post colony and live out their Their lives their writing lives there that the case of Walcott is there's a lot of towing and throwing in Walcott precisely it's to and throwing between central periphery is interesting Then in the case of the case of says there we get a little bit less information But simply that and this is again on an unnumbered page Page or what would be page six a tragedy of crink king Christopher's first performed by the Europa studio at the Salzburg Festival Salzburg Austria August 1964 directed by Jean-Marie Sarron I know much less about the the staging or the circumstances of that performance again It's interesting that it's not first put on in Martinique, which is where says as says there's from Or Haiti in some ways Haiti is an alibi for both of these both of these plays, but neither these plays in some ways are really about Haiti It's kind of interesting to me that it's not put on in France first either put on in Austria I'm not entirely sure why or how that happens. So this question of Displacement or translation between geographical or geopolitical translation between center and periphery is interesting to me But again also the moments in which the context in which these plays are produced the early 1950s which in in And the Anglophone Caribbean is a period of much discussion about the forms of Governorship the forms of rule for the Caribbean which at this point is still part of the British Empire But there's a brief notion of a West Indian Federation. In fact many of people who are associated With the institution at which this this play is put on subsequently become leaders in this brief West Indian Federation and then in 1964 what I'm going to talk a little bit later about the context of the early 1960s for for says air context of decolonization And so rewriting the map the imperial post mirror imperial imperial map of the world But let me talk a little bit about the the two authors themselves So this is a may say there I guess in his younger days 1913 to 2008 I said before born in Martinique another small island of the French Caribbean He goes to Haiti in 1944 and I think it's May to December 1944 He's already a writer and an intellectual he gets invited To give I think some lectures in Port-au-Prince So gets invited to Haiti is only just a year after Carpentier goes to Haiti Well, there's a sort of nexus of the mid to late 40s going on here when these these writers and artists are kind of discovering or rediscovering Haiti Walcott doesn't actually physically go to Haiti Which is kind of I don't know if that's What difference that that makes but but say that goes to Haiti spends about five or six months In Haiti now a little bit longer seven or eight months if it's made to December I know you can count I can't count however many months it is doing May and December right that many months He spends in Haiti Mostly in Port-au-Prince but not solely in Port-au-Prince of course he visits Capitaine and of course he visits the Citadel so we have again although he doesn't he doesn't write so much about the that journey and although his play doesn't come out until Twenty years later his first performance is 1964. It's been brewing. I want to suggest In the mid 1940s about the same time as as Carpentier is in Haiti What's interesting is that he comes back from Haiti Immediately or almost immediately the following year he joins the French Communist Party and It's elected first of all mayor for Fort de France, which is the capital of Martinique and Then a deputy to the French assembly Martinique is part of the French Empire at that stage and has direct representation to to Paris and says there is also almost immediately in 1946 one of the main authors of A law which turns places like Haiti, but not just Haiti Réunion and French Guyana Guyan Into departments of France You may know that so Martinique is still Martinique is as much part of France as Paris is as a result of this law It's one of the so-called département outre-mer Overseas departments of France and which is a Pretty much a unique System it's not the case for the British former colonies for instance in any way And Césaire is behind this or is one of the people who writes this law one of the people behind this behind this This move so I think there are a number of interesting things that we can say about that one is I mean someone says that Césaire arrived in Haiti in 1944 a poet and Returned home later that year a politician He continues writing of course. In fact, I mean that's how come you know He writes the play which is first put on in 1964 But there's some move or transition or translation or remaking of himself if you like remodeling of himself as politician as A result of his sojourn his stay in Haiti as a result I want to suggest in part of his encounter with these ruins his encounter with the Citadel the legacy the physical material legacy of Henri Christophe I saw there's this introduction of Politics and that the lesson he seems to have learned in Haiti Is very different from the lessons the others Suggest for the solution to For what should happen to former French colonies so in this he's very different from somebody that will be reading next semester France panel And in fact he gets a lot of stick he's a communist because it was sticked from I guess nationalist independentists for Enabling this sort of closer integration of the colony into the French state So he also so these are a couple of other books that he he writes He writes a book called no book of return to the native land interesting He writes it it's rewritten remodeled itself as a 1939 version in 1947 version Which bookend or either side of the trip to Haiti In which he comes up with the concept for which he's best known Which is the concept of negritude? blackness notion of black identity and Black cultural identity I suppose another book that he writes another play that he writes is Un Tempette a tempest which is very directly a remaking of Shakespeare's the tempest Shakespeare's play being a sort of allegory in some ways of colonial relations of the relations between center and periphery and stays there rewrites it from What I'll call what let us call a post-colonial perspective And then just before the break the so a couple of a couple of quotations one from this notebook of return to the native land Where where he is introducing the idea of this idea of negritude. He links it directly to Haiti Haiti when negritude rose for the first time and stated that it believes in its humanity So the the the origin or the emergence of this concept For says there is Haiti and the Haitian Revolution and I want to there's a sort of verbal resonance with the way in which he talks about or describes the the citadel in In this in this play page Page 45, it's the it's the end of Act 1 which I've already Quoted to you to some extent This people forced to its knees needed a monument to make it stand up. There it is risen a watchtower And the resonance is I put in the the French there because the resonance is clearer that it's the same the same Frey the same verb and the same expression is being used in both of these cases Even though it's translated as a rose in the one case and would stand up on the other hand. There's something about this Arising it standing up emergence getting on its own feet that that says there sees both in terms of the the citadel this ruin this fortification under only Christophe and in terms of this concept this idea of negritude of The notion of sort of I don't know black self-fashioning I suppose Okay, I think we've I'll move on to Derek Walcott after our little break things I Wanted to pick up a couple things from the Twitter stream and then something which I wanted to say and forgot to say But now I've remembered So the first on the Twitter stream I guess two things who are that seem to be interesting to me is one a little discussion about great books And what makes great books and why we're reading great books and so on Let me say I Think there's an ongoing Perhaps perennial discussion in arts one as to whether That's what we're doing or to what extent that's what we're doing or what we should be doing and so on whether the purpose here is To give you something like the great books of mostly Western culture from 2000 BC to the present or Whether we are or to the extent to which we're also kind of questioning those kinds of notions or bringing in other things I'm sure those are questions that Canon should be followed up in seminars and that your seminar leader seminar leaders would be Interested in your thoughts about especially as we're thinking about remaking and remodeling this particular theme in for next year There's a lot that could be Said about that and then second I guess there's a little bit of discussion about ruins and ruination In interesting ways. I think that came through on the on the Twitter feed. I encourage That and I encourage your fascination. I encourage Yes, I hope I managed to share some of my own Fascination with with ruins with you. It's something that I think increasingly the last few years people have Been thinking about and talking about in different ways I also want to suggest and this is the thing that I forgot to say But it has to do with What I was calling these paratex these little bits of the beginning or even before the beginning of these two players the cast list in Omni Christophe of the what was not actually the first Not actually the first incarnation or the first performance and the little note about the first performance here Because there's something there's a way in which a play text is always Only a trace itself where we miss the Performance we're missing precisely what makes it a play we have a sort of record or archive of something that Comes into being or came into being In the way. It was originally envisaged at least at some other point 1952 1949 1964 and which may which we may be able to reactivate and if we put on our suggesting What would we do if we were to put on a performance? Which is always I think a question you should be asking when you're reading a play text Which may be reactivated and come into being again if we were to go to or put on or or see a performance But the the play text is in some ways not the thing itself It is the the trace the ruin the memorial the archive of some other thing which can never perhaps be fully Captured for different reasons and in different ways Okay, let me say something about Derek Walcott So don't walk us still alive Born in in 1930 so a little bit younger than Then stays there Or for that matter than Carpentier Born in St. Lucia, which at the time was a British colony. He went to a very He went through a sort of I don't know What do you call it sort of prototypical? Imperial colonial education He went to what was a sort of replica of a British boarding school, but in in the colonies and and and for For the Colonials Hence a certain hence it's always he's sort of showing off but also I was gonna say showing off his grasp of Well, we could the Western Canon if you like with this kind of Shakespearean re-purposing or Shakespearean frame or form or That he's giving to He's giving to the the Haitian Revolution But also he's dealing with the culture that The colonial or one aspect of the culture that the colonial situation has given him, right? These are you know, this is part of the material that he has to work with So hence the need I think for a sort of inversion and again Cezaire does something similar Certainly in a play like Un Tempe, right working with the legacy of the colonial culture the culture of the of the colonizers to sort of write back there's a Famous book or sort of famous book the Empire writes back as a way of thinking about post-colonial culture and post-colonial Writing which itself of course is a remaking or remodeling of the Star Wars film So he comes from St. Lucia. He goes for a very sort of traditional. It's a middle-class family his mother's a teacher Goes through this very British educational System he founds the Trinidad Theatre Workshop in 1959 is a bit of some Isle and hopping and in in the West Indies in the Caribbean in 1950s again, he writes this play when he's 19. I think it's extraordinary He in 1992 he wins the the Nobel Prize Amongst the books that he's written another one which is a direct if you like remaking or remodeling a book called Omeros Which is a remaking of the odyssey? from a post-colonial Caribbean Stamble standpoint and then a book of essays which I think is quite interesting which is called what the twilight says which includes His Nobel lecture As you may know if you're awarded the Nobel Prize you Have to go off to Stockholm in the depths of winter actually I think it's December or something that They have the presentations of the the prizes you have to do a number of things You have to make a banquet speech and then you also have to give a seminar so give a longer lecture and And all these things if you go to the Nobel Prize site you can see Records archive right of all the all the things that people say in their banquet speeches or given their lectures I'm not entirely sure if the scientists also have to give lectures Anyway, if you win the Nobel Prize for literature, this is what you have to do Just so you're prepared and and ready when that time comes So in his Nobel Prize and it's usually an opportunity to reflect upon What your how you envisage what you're doing it's a sort of meta? critical theoretical a moment and Walkout Walkout speaks quite interesting partly because it actually speaks a lot about ruins and And he suggests he comes up with this definition of Antillian arts or Caribbean arts Let's say is this restoration of our shattered histories our shards of vocabulary Iroquipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off for the original content the continent. Sorry So the notion that as a writer as an artist you're always working with these fragments these traces these shards of of Language of vocabulary of history And you're trying but but the object is a restoration of reconstruction rebuilding of these of these ruins And there's something I think this is echoed to some extent even in this very early play obviously the Nobel Prize lectures from 1992 Even in this first play of his first ex-dom play we have here page 99 Kristoff himself, I think it is who is speaking And my own paralysis creeps somewhere between my will and my regret There are broken statues on my tongue So this notion of of the of the ruins of the fragments of these material fragments On his tongue as a vocabulary elsewhere Vasti talks about a vocabulary of ruin in this play dead stale civilizations Breeding in my brain You if you could walk you could see the Citadel immediately the Citadel is invoked right so it does this metonymic Sinec docic Connection right that the the Citadel in some way stands in for I think for a wall cut all these Fragments that make up the raw material with which the Caribbean the Antelian Writer or artist has to work with could see the Citadel the soldiers have left it There's dust settling in the armory shafted beams of dust rising like history in the chapel I think this came I think Miranda mentioned this in the in the on the on the Twitter stream this notion of The Kristoff is already envisaging the Citadel as a ruin a proleptic Ruination, which is a very actually very sort of common Or not uncommon notion That comes at least from the 18th 19th century for instance the the guy who designed the louvre in Paris Was a noted painter of ruins and the louvre and he paints a picture of the louvre ruined So and part of the plan of the louvre is that it will look good ruined But this is also part of the Nazi architecture to incidentally That the Hitler envisaged what the Nazi monuments would look like ruined that they would continue to exert some kind of presence some kind of power like Ozymandias even when surrounded by desert by wasteland Some more complications of the notion of ruination and culture and so on so But back to the notion of Context then these these texts and perhaps all texts I want to suggest will require a double reading But perhaps the especially these ones as play text As records of of a performance They require we read them We they immediately I suggest indicate in quite specific in particular ways Their own context of performance Although they've they get to that through the sort of detour through Haiti I mean that's what I suggested before that that Haiti is in some ways an alibi or An excuse now excuse alibi is better word than excuse An alibi for both word both writers there They're interested in Haiti as a way in which it helps them think about Something else maybe I'll agree but Anyway, there's something in which Haiti Both is and is not it's a bit like these ruins It's a sort of trace or a sign of something else to some extent So we've got we've got to understand and think about what they're trying saying about Haiti But we've also got to understand what they're trying to point to at the same time and that what they're doing is a play of sort of D and recontextualization of Taking a Haitian history, which is not theirs after all neither of these two authors of themselves Haitian but they feel a certain sympathy or resonance or Kindred, I don't know what so that sounds far too I don't know what that sounds far too Sweet or something kindred spirit or something, but they feel a certain Identification and a troubling identification I think or a troubled identification with the Haitian experience and the Haitian revolutionary experience and perhaps again particularly a certain troubling Identification even against their will with Henri Christophe and perhaps his entourage I'm going to suggest later the particularly importance of the figure of Vashti who is the writer In in this whole scenario, especially for for Walcott, but but there's a certain sense of which they're reading in They're reading their own situation into their reading of of Henri Christophe and of the Haitian revolution Why did I stick in a bit of French? I was just showing off I suppose that's That's a French philosopher literary theorist critic Jacques Derrida is the one of the only I only know two sentences in French. This is one of them The other one I'll tell you the other one if you wish on core in a force if we would add to a very more Republican That's the mark he desired another effort if you really want to be Republican. It's a it's a slogan for permanent revolution So this is but this is Derrida in the upper door text, which is there's nothing outside of the text it It'll be complicated to Work through exactly what he's trying to say with that but one of the things I think that we can See him saying it's how texts lead to other texts And it's not a simple question of there's a text and there's a context of sort of you know the history Which will explain the text that we're reading, but there's a complicated play of histories and narratives and texts which we never quite fully get out of and It's interesting. I think that these this texture and context are never Fully in sync again. So one isn't just the key for the other. We see that perhaps in part most clearly With the Cezaire this sort of delay Between his Haitian experience which I was suggesting was biographically and personally So important to him he goes to Haiti a poet comes back a politician and a delay of 20 years Before he produces the the play itself So in reading these texts, we're trying to also read the play between Texts and context between different forms of text which is also a question about the relationship between Words and things some of the which I was trying to talk about a little bit Last time the kind of thinginess of things and the texts or discourses or narratives or the words in which we try to understand those things Okay, let's talk about post-colonialism. So it's a term I've already used a number of times today and And last week What do we mean by by post-colonialism? Well, I'll give you a couple of Quotations a quick couple of moments from The the text themselves right here. This is page nine we get we start off with Or pretty early on we actually still don't start off with this commentary we start off with this kind of allegory of the cock fight in in Cezaire's Play but then we have the commentator dressed like a European gentleman of the period who provides What seems to be a sort of narrative explanation or introduction to I guess the context if you like of What we're about to see the performance we're about to see in which he gives Something like a capsule history of the Haitian revolution Or what has led up to the point at which the play will start Christophe Forte the French playing an Eminem part in the struggle for liberation of his country under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture Once independence has been gained and Haiti was born from the smoldering ashes of Saint-Domingue Once a black Republic had been established on the ruins of the fairest of white colonies It was only natural the Christophe the naturalness of that Transition of course is what it's going to be questioned throughout the play only natural the Christophe should become king Should become one of the dignitaries of the new state He became in all his glory general Christophe the much feared and highly respected commander of the northern province I Guess in in its most sort of basic or literal form what we're thinking about is the shift from a Colonial experience to the point at which the nation-state or the nation-state is born The independent sovereign nation-state we're going to talk about sovereignty before one of the things we see in both these plays and in trio and To a lesser extent I think in cup and tea is the messiness of the whole process Cup and he avoids the messiness partly by giving us the perspective from T Noelle and So all these kind of palace intrigues Left behind or at least we get a different kind of messiness. We are the messiness of ruination on the ground. I suppose Whereas both these plays because they're about the Circle or they're focused upon the leadership circle even though it says that begins with these peasants and cockfights We get these all these names come in desaline and as well as Louverture and Petion and as well Christophe and so on and so forth, right? It may be it may be hard to follow Because the Haitian revolution is not a it's not one thing I think it is trio was talking about revolutions in the revolutions, but but but we can multiply it Still further. It's a whole it's a long process in which in some ways the chatting that the leaders or those who would become the leaders of Haiti are chatting a History that hasn't been tried before but that's part of the reason But I think I think we can also suggest that the the post coin experience is often felt to be So it's a messy this notion of self-liberation is never quite as clean-cut as it may be hoped and we see that of course today in Places like Libya in places like Afghanistan or wherever right the so-called nation building is not a simple matter in in any In any circumstance so so we're in this sort of post-revolutionary post post-colonial moment And then the question of how this is achieved so the walk-up Quotation that the general believes the price of freedom is blood So the role of the role of violence to counter violence, I suppose I've been talking about the notion that the Colonization of the colonial history of Latin America and the Caribbean Is about violence and destruction and therefore a consequent? Ruination then the question is well In what way says it how does one confront that violence is it through violence and do you perpetuate? What kind of what kind of patterns get perpetuated as a point at which? Which no, I forget which character it is Oh, it's vastly Talks about monotonies of history We are finished majesty. We were a tragedy of success. That's page 105 so one of the questions about Post-colonial or post-coloniality or the post post-colonial if you like is what is new what changes and what doesn't change? So post doesn't really mean after But it's also an indication of the legacies of the colonial Experience and colonial culture and so on that the continuum even after notional independence Let me give you a little bit. I don't know a little sort of historical Context if you like periods of decolonization in the Americas more or less With some significant exceptions By between 70 76 and 1825 Most of the the continent is at least notionally independent It's some significant exceptions especially in the in the Caribbean Not only the and angle phone and francophone Caribbean, but also for instance Cuba Cuba is Cuba doesn't become independent until 1898 essentially And Puerto Rico as well partly because the Caribbean the Caribbean islands were such money makers for European Empires they They it was much harder to get them to relinquish their their grip of them So it's I suppose a first wave of decolonization starting in in in North America in the United States and and then most the rest of Latin America becomes at least formally independent by the mid 1820s and Then you get another and more global I suppose wave of decolonization in the aftermath of the the Second World War Perhaps starting with India Or the Indian subcontinent South Asia and then this is you've got a little map here of the charts the really rather rapid series of Decolonizing movements in the 1960s Late 1950s 1960s and early 1970s So a massive transformation in at least the formal political governance of what have been the European territories Over this period and the early 1960s, which is the point at which Cezares Play Was was performed with was ridden and performed is I suppose out of the epicenter of apex or particularly intense Moment and again, that's also going to be the context for Finance thinking that we're going to read about next semester So but one of the things that arises in these both of these two slightly different waves of decolonization One of things is the mismatch or The question of the difference between political emancipation political liberation on the one hand and what we could call a sort of cultural Emancipation or cultural liberation on the other it's one thing for a state to emerge I don't know Bolivia or Colombia or Ghana or whatever it may be and declare its its political sovereignty and It's I know that it's a republic or whatever It's another thing to deal with the cultural legacy So for instance in Latin America for the most part most people continue speaking Spanish for instance, which is the language imposed brought with the the colonizers with the Brazils in Portuguese So it's much harder to Reinvent remake remodel if you like Refound a sense of cultural tradition, I suppose But there are attempts so often around the question of renaming in the in the first instance. So Saint-Domingue becomes Haiti So We see endless other instances of this in in Africa for instance So Rhodesia becomes Zimbabwe for instance this are trying to shake off the the names which have been Forced upon or given to The territory all the different towns and cities that were literally sort of written into the map of the colonial map, but we also see that in terms of personal names and there's discussion of this in As discussion this in in César the names Or actually is it in Thank you. I Get a little confused between them sometimes Myself which I can't find for the moment Anyway, there's a there's a discussion about the The names well, I think it is in I think it is in César because there's a discussion of the discussion of the kind of semi-ridiculous names the Henri Christophe gives his his his court, right? there's a Duke of Marmalade and a Duchess of lemonade and so on and so forth and On the one hand, there's there's something sort of strange and excessive and almost comic about that on the other hand they point out or someone points out well, you know the The English have that would they don't don't say this but they could they could have said they English at their earl of sandwich for instance and so forth right there There's nothing particularly Yeah It's no more odd in our names are always odd to some extent in some ways these names that they provided Just as odd as the names that they've inherited then there's also a question of that of course their real names are Now lost the real names cannot be found again So I'm this is the same sort of notion that leads To Malcolm X to call himself that right the notion that that his all he has is his slave name All he has is the name given him by the The colonizer that the X is a is an absence, but that also leads others to try and more creatively I suppose or creatively in a different way trying to try to give Give themselves other names Cassius clay becomes Muhammad Ali for instance so there's this question of dealing with what what seemed to be on what might seem to be on the face of it the most basic Aspects of identity who am I? How do I call myself? How am I called? Comes under question and becomes difficult a difficult question to answer under post colonialism So question of renaming refounding the emergence of nations and nationalisms, but then also the fact that That these nations are also arbitrary or these national boundaries are also arbitrary to a large extent At least as arbitrary as the names that are given them and so hence you get division and partition you get that in someone like India South Asia where you get India then Pakistan and Bangladesh And we see that in Haiti as well as we get the division between the south and the north where Only Christoph becomes becomes king So it's about negotiating the colonial past and the post colonial Present and some of the questions some of the other questions that arise I think about well how to how to ground legitimacy in the new in the post-colonial Era if there may be an agreement that the the colonization is a legitimate is founded on violence but how to rediscover or remake or rethink What legitimacy political and cultural logistical legitimacy Look like in a in a post-colonial order. I think that's what these plays a very much about So the kind of politics of Identity and who gets to who gets to say who gets to speak for the nation? who may be To identified with the colonial past is that about Racial markings as well. I mean that's one of the things that that sets the pits Christoph against the southern mulattoes but also the it's also part of his Distrust of his archbishop right Question of yeah, it is authenticity whatever authenticity might be what kind of justification can that be? How does one discover or invent an authenticity or authentic traditions What templates okay? What kind of models are available for? thinking about and imagining post-colonial politics or culture again in Haiti there's there's almost none At the end of the 18th century. This is this is an unheralded event essentially especially as a slave Revolution by the time it comes to the 1940s 1950s Haiti becomes one Model all the albeit a model to avoid for both Walcott and Césaire, so you've got negative models or templates the one wants to avoid as well as The possibility of models that one might want to follow The question of whether under the conditions of post-colonialism you can you can sort of invert the relationship between dependents and independence between Metropolis and periphery Turning Europe into a sort of Periphery there's a notion here at some point in In Césaire's play that of placing Haiti a kind of geo political geo historical center of things the page 73 Delirious classes vastly speaking Well, well Magni has just suggested a palace for a Congress is talking about songs to see a palace for a congress of all the Sovereigns of the world who deigned to take a little trip to Haiti in the notion of the little trip to Haiti as being a transformative experience as it was for carpentier and as it was for Césaire and vastly replies why not delirious clouds overhead at our feet the seafoam vomited out by two worlds That's where God has put us our backs to the Pacific Before us you were up in Africa on either side the Americas why this extraordinary Concretion of ours is situated the confluence of all the world's tides at the focal point of every ebb and flow And what a view it offers on all sides So reimagining and repositioning Haiti the Caribbean Post-colonial world more generally not at the margins of a map of a mental cultural political map in Which I know Paris London Berlin wherever Washington are at the center But now repositioning things so the Hades is at the very center of a confluence of all the tides of the ebb and flow I think there's also a Concern here, which will come back in Fanon as well about the psychology of the post colony What kind of effects the legacy of of colonization has on the ways that people think and feel right on there? psychic as well as social and cultural Structures and the concern about simply repeating again, so the phrase the monotonous of history is from is from Walcott and then concerns also all about I guess whether under post-colonial conditions one is simply repeating or mimicking Colonial ratio relations of power And if in that repetition something new is happening or not so so there's quite a theory of I guess post-colonial mimicry And I think that these these texts also speak to that both in their form in the way that for instance the way that for instance Walcott in some ways is mimicking or giving back the kind of education that he's received at the exclusive I think it's St. Mary's College in St. Lucia, but sufficiently that there's also some kind of anxiety or ambivalence that well if this young 19-year-old St. Lucia can do this then there's no necessarily innate connection between this kind of cultural competence and Either the color of one skin or the place that one one comes from Okay sovereignty by which I mean By which I mean a number of things but but amongst which the The principle of rule the principle of order in a particular territory And also in these two places that that revolves around kingship Many different modes or principles of rule or Models are proposed Christoph is offered the Presidency of Of Haiti, but he refuses it because it's not sovereign enough in some ways. It's not powerful enough It's just a fraud because this the sovereignty is actually located elsewhere in the is withheld. It's located in the In the council So it revolves here in both cases around the question of kingships. We get in and says they're actually A moment of the scene of coronation. We get the scene the point at which the king is the king is anointed The king is declared it's as a form of words or sort of incantation or invocation Excellency this is the president of the council of state by the grace of God and the constitutional law of the state there's sort of twin appeal to these twin authorities divine and And legal we proclaim you but but this is a this comes from no, there's nothing before only the first There'll be nothing after only the first incidentally. Well, there's no only the second only the third we proclaim you only the first Sovereign of the islands of let or to gnave and the other adjacent islands destroy of tyranny regenerate I think that's an interesting term that comes in there and benefactor of the Haitian nation first crowned monarch of the new world so That has an interesting mix there in that ceremony and that's ceremonial ritual crowning a mix of of novelty originality first crowned King of the new world and Trying to draw upon our invoked traditions constitutional law divine right for instance But then the notion sort of mediating them that this is a regenerator. There's gonna be a reworking a combination of both novelty and tradition in walk up the The process by which Christoph becomes king is a little bit Different it though. We don't have this right of institution in the same way There's this Braille suggests only God makes kings then Christoph says I'll be a king because in some way sovereignty already Flows in me. There's no sort of sovereignty as a flow I think it's interesting and then they kind of manipulate the crowd through the soldier and so on and it's almost a kind of I don't know resigned or Recognition or so I am king as it as if that had happened That's recognized only after the fact not in the moment itself, so we don't have the moment of crowning as we do in in Cézair we have this sort of postdoc after the fact recognition of so I am king So this is a picture of Christoph himself by the way So some of the issues here as I say the forms of rule kingdom or republic What's at stake there and yes the question of legitimacy legitimacy through? Institutional donation legitimacy through at least the show of public acclaim, which is what's being suggested in in walkout legitimation legitimation through Through Qualities personal qualities. I mean in some ways. That's what Christoph has going for him There's no there can't be an appeal to a bloodline, right? I am the legitimate heir of x y or z He's a former cook He's a former slave So it's a question of you know, how does one earn one's legitimacy is being played out here How does one earn the right to? Exceed to the position of sovereignty. There's a in both in all three texts We've looked at right. There's this tension between different principles of Authority especially church and state so this tension between Christoph Ambril There's the question of so another way another way of Defining sovereignty comes from a theorist called Karl Schmidt who said sovereign is he who decides on the exception so There's a notion that the characteristic of the sovereign of the King the head of state or whatever is that they can say the rules No longer apply So for instance the here in Canada when on the one hand when what's his name Trudeau invokes the War Powers Act in Quebec Okay, normally we're suspending we're suspending the law So there's something about being in the sovereign which is both you're both at the apex of a legal system But you're also to one side of it and you can say it no longer applies or even just the rather more banal Version of when the governor general prerogues parliament for instance in the last couple of years is a suspension of the normal rules and we see the ways in which Christoph both tries to establish a legal order, but also establish the fact that he is To one side of it an exception or all the person who can decide upon the exception sovereignty is also very much associated here with the production of monuments above all the Citadel itself and Declarations so words and things and the ways in which monuments are decorations and decorations Assume a sort of assume a Assume a physical or material presence, and we're gonna look at that in a minute when I talk about Writing again. I want to I mentioned this before these are both top-down perspectives these two players so that to some extent of the Yeah, the revolution or the post-colonial Refoundation viewed from above But they also trouble that hierarchy These are these are writers who are unsure or All worried about the particular ways in which The in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution sovereignty is expressed or Established I think but they're concerned with how does it emerge and then yes how it crumbles I say so Christoph provides a sort of a parable in a very brief fairly compressed scope period of time of the emergence of Form of post-colonial sovereignty and its and its ruination its disappearance. It's It's withering away Who gets to decide and how that's the fundamental question of the sovereign And so where and how and why does the claim sovereign power wither or Crumble away and I think it's in in the relationship with writing And this is why again, especially I think for for for Walcott Vasty becomes the Baron de Vasty becomes a key character so we see so these quotations are both taken from Walcott and The the first one is he's talking to he's talking to Walcott, you know, I cannot read What so what so Vasty is is crafting the declarations The Christoph will make Vasty is on the one hand a secretary on the other hand. He's an intellectual and a writer So Vasty in some ways the figure for for Walcott himself I think and so there's a certain question of that the way in which Vasty is on the one hand implementing the commands But there's a problem that in writing them down they're also He's also relinquishing control of his own power. He's diluting his own Sovereign power to some extent, you know, I cannot read reread them. Are they intact? I hope you've not obscured plain fact in a smoke of Latin expressions So there's this concern for what writing does to power at the at the heart of Walcott's play and then you get this whole thing in which in a I know a sort of Replay of Othello or something you get this Vasty becomes his kind of Iago figure in which he plants he where he plants on the one hand so suspicion in in Christoph's mind, but he does it through this interplay of letters and what Letters that are legible to Christoph himself. I cannot read it And so this this suspicion that arises. What if it is a trick of Vasty's So we're returning to the question of literature literature now and they expand a version just as letters as writing as what is written down And and in this the Baron de Vasty again comes to the fore. This is a book that de Vasty publishes you see a cap on re in 1814 under the In the kingdom on Christoph's kingdom De Vasty who at least some people suggest is the first post-colonial intellectual by the way But but what's interesting here is the relationship between the dictator as the person who dictates In the in the sense that you speak in someone else writes and ascribe the person who who writes down The way in which sovereignty or state power is crucially dependent upon the letter upon upon writing But also therefore through writing that power to some extent escapes And on the other hand the relationship, okay to what extent does the writer the post-colonial intellectual class particularly? necessarily sell some part of his soul to power as the the post-colonial state becomes Patron in Latin America certainly this whole question is Explored at length in a sort of sub-genre of novel called the dictator novel of which the best example is A is a book called either supreme which I recommend to you all So says that I walk and I think are both worrying about writing and the relationship between writing and power is Writing always subservient to dependent upon power and on the other hand is power always subservient and dependent to Writing both are attempting. I'm suggesting to leverage the Western archive To use the archive the cultural archive as a resource To do something with this textual tradition that they've Inherited but I want to suggest there's two very different responses and and I guess one of the questions I want to ask is to what extent is visible in the two different plays So says there becomes a writer politician So says there's response as it were is to try to fuse writing and politics writing and power closer together When he comes back from Haiti joins the Communist Party becomes a deputy in the French In the French assembly, whereas Walker becomes increasingly suspicious of power and politics increasingly attempts to distance what he does from From any sort of any political project, I want to I want to ask a couple of final questions Which I suppose which revolve around the idea of tragedy So what is the tragedy of only Christophe? For a mace says there is it the same as the as the tragedy For Walcott that what he calls a tragedy of success Is there's the same tragedy? I want to just it's a different tragedy and that the differences are to do with their differing relations to and views of the relationship between writing and and power and then I'll finally give you Should you have time and inclination a few Resources you could over Christmas break when you're not writing your essay follow up with okay Farewell