A Literary Psychoanalytic Study of Postcolonial Haiti

History and the desire for survival, the manifestation of the unconscious is present not only in matters of love and violence but also in matters of religion. Shabani (2018) reported Dr. Macleod’s find regarding: “Une Noire sacrifice son infant … Une affaire de vaudou?” (16) [Black woman sacrifices her child … Voodoo law] (18). It brings insight into the cultural unconscious in matters of faith and practice.

There is violent image reported in the practice of the faith among Haitians, blood sacrifice. In voodoo witchcraft, there is the omission of names which contributes to the silence of the victims and the misconceptions about God and belief in higher power.

In analysis, Dr. MacLeod discover the repressed expression of a woman named Emma who reflect her view’s about slavery as an obsession. “She also gains an awareness of the weight of shame and how its informed silences around that period: “Personne n’en parle parce que cela fait trop house, trop mal” (171) [No one talks about it because it’s too shameful, too hurtful] (188).

For Emma, talking about slavery in the present would imply a critique, introspection and recognition of racial bias that some authority figures, like Dr. MacLeod, are not willing to do.” To reflect on the politic side of things and how the slaves contributed to the economic success of today’s great nations and the reverse of them all on the slave inhabited countries, Shabani (2018) reported the words of Emma in her encounter with Dr MacLeod “je m’en allais par les rues promener ma rage de Négresse, sur les quais de Nantes, de Bordeaux et de la Rochelle.

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J’arrêtais les passants, des ivrognes le plus souvent, pour leur demander s’ils savaient combien de sucre, combien de sang, combien d’esclaves, combien de lait de Négresse il avait fallu pour constuire une seule ville d’Europe. (131). [I went out into the streets to take my black woman’s rage for a walk, on the docks of Nantes, of Bordeaux, and La Rochelle.

I stopped passersby, most often drunkards, to ask them if they knew how much sugar, how much blood, how many slaves, how many black women’s milk had been needed to construct just one European country] (146).” Whether it is in the mind of the academician and/or the schizophrenic Haitian, the unconscious is dominant. How psychoanalytic theory can be utilized by anticolonical and postcolonial theorists to explain the past and the present is in away the concern of this dissertation.

I aim to inform a critique of essentialist fantasies of race and civilization to what degree that the past may continue to hunt one in the present and contribute to one’s inability to move on positively despite everything opportunity that may be at their disposals.

Warwick Anderson, Deborah Jenson and Richard Keller (eds.), [Duke University Press, 2011] “the editors of unconscious Dominions: Psychoanalysis, Colonial Trauma, and Global Sovereignties’ describe their interest in psychoanalysis and colonial history as a ‘strange enthusiasm’”. Following Psychoanalytic models, I want to making psychoanalysis a causative factor in the traumatization of numerous narrative pieces of literature that I use in this dissertation. I wat to look at post-colonial theorist and their critiques. I want to reflect on the Ethnohistory of colonialism period as well as the postcolonial understanding.

I want to focus on the psychoanalytic subject that was enmeshed with postcolonial understanding of the Haitian fabric as a nation of immigrants.

McLeod, S. A. (2015). Unconscious mind. Retrieved from https://www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html.

However possible, I will look at the psychoanalytic theories in a creative tension with indigenous frameworks for understanding why people do what they do. Then I will look at the legacy of slavery to comprehend the lasting effect and suggest a method of overcoming to enjoy lasting love, the pursuit of faith and political stability.