Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists): Vodou Street Sculpture at the Grand Rue, Port-au-Prince
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Atis Rezistans (Resistance Artists)Vodou Street Sculpture at the Grand Rue, Port-au-Prince
Port-au-Prince is a city of make-do tactics, get-by strategies, ad hoc tools, and craftily wrought machines—a city, like so many in the underdeveloped slums of the global capitalist planet, that seems to marvelously, imaginatively scrape by using the discards and still-ripe refuse of the overdeveloped, those who possess so abundantly one discards simply from boredom, or when one tires of an object still useful, finding it no longer necessary or attractive, though very much still alive and vital, use still lingering within its material remains. And in Port-au-Prince, the Grand Rue neighborhood, like so many other poor neighborhoods in and around the capital (Lasaline, Belair, Kafoufe, Pele, and Sitey Soley), resourcefully lives off the too-often heaping mounds of thrown-off objects (donated or simply discarded) by North American neighbors and perhaps even more affluent, adjacent countries in other parts of the Caribbean. The Grand Rue, like so many impoverished neighborhoods in Haiti’s capital, survives through the willed intelligence and creative production of local bricoleurs, those wily workers and indefatigable day-laborers who frequently produce without pay and grab what is available or near at hand in order to optimistically (or desperately) build what is needed. Infused as it is with the lore and lyric, proverbs and rituals, symbols and myths of Vodou, a syncretic religion born of the cataclysmic yet creative “new world” clash of African slaves (of Ibo, Yoruban, Congolese, and Fon origin), of the “master’s” French Catholicism, and the Tainos’s and Carib’s indigenous beliefs, this process of creative production is a wildly resourceful tool for survival in the daily perilous encounters confronted by those living precarious lives in spite of poverty, despite disease, with hunger, and too often, also, against the odds. It is a will to thrive through an imaginative Vodou bricolage. And the Grand Rue Sculptors are Haiti’s bricoleurs par excellence.
The Grand Rue Sculptors: Haiti’s Bricoleurs
By Vodou bricolage, I am referencing the syncretic forms of art that draw on the long, historical, cultural reservoir of the African diasporic religion, but also imaginatively layer spiritual and material forms through raw and recycled matter; and it is a coinage that theoretically adopts the term bricolage as elaborated by anthropological and cultural critics from Claude Lévi-Strauss (in La Pensée sauvage / The Savage Mind) to Jacques Derrida (“Structure, Sign, and Play”) to Dick Hebdidge (“Subculture”) to Gilles Deleuze and [End Page 419] Félix Guattari (L’Anti-Œdipe). In this essay, I first overview the cultural and philosophical definitions of the term, tracing its intellectual genealogy within French structuralist and poststructuralist thought, especially, before conceptualizing the synergistic, syncretic, and hybrid term Vodou bricolage and then applying it to the ecletic sculptures created at the Grand Rue Galerie. Within this intellectual genealogy, I am most interested, however, in the ways that the term is conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari who define bricolage as the characteristic mode of production of the schizophrenic producer (7–8). As Deleuze and Guattari explain, “The schizophrenic is the universal producer,” in which “there is no need … to distinguish between producing and its product” and in which “the pure ‘thisness’ of the object produced is carried over into a new act of producing” (7–8).
In The Savage Mind, French structuralist and anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss defines the “bricoleur” as one “who works with his [or her] hands and uses devious means compared to those of a craftsman”: the bricoleur is an artist who creates with the materials available, but also participates in the “mytho-poetical nature of ‘bricolage’” that is the creative imagination in language, objects, and myths (16). Predicated on the intellectual distinction of nature and culture, naïve and civilized, but also deconstructing these paradigms as ones always already discursively constructed—as Derrida astutely notes in the important and early poststructuralist essay “Structure, Sign, and Play” from Writing and Difference—Lévi-Strauss distinguishes the “savage” from the “civilized” mind, yet also significantly notes that the same structural elements persist across cultures regardless of its...
