Maison Coloniale, by Jimmy

Les oeuvres de la Mémoire

from Soul in a Bottle by Madison Smartt Bell

History had never stopped happening in Haiti. The Revolution seemed to have taken place only yesterday. That phenomenon was partly explained by the compressed sense of time of an oral culture, and partly by the fact that Haitians, by means of their religion, had regular opportunities to meet the spirits of the revolutionary dead face to face, and partly by the other fact that nothing had really happened, politically speaking, since the Revolution-- the same patterns had kept on repeating themselves, over and over, as one feudal baron replaced another.