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Echoes of Past Revolutions: Architecture, Memory, and Spectral Politics in the Historic Districts of Port-au-Prince

Abstract This article explores the life history of Ulrick Rosarion, a Haitian federal prosecutor who built his career during the Duvalier dictatorship. Rosarion lived his entire life in a small house of downtown Port-au-Prince, in a neighborhood formerly inhabited by the Black middle-classes that gained prominence in the political and administrative sphere during the dictatorship (1957-1986). Rosarion was also a writer who produced four books of nationalist poetry. Based on interviews and readings of his literary production, and beyond, through an exploration of architectural forms and material remnants echoing the dictatorship, this paper explores how an idealized version of the dictatorship today haunts the political landscape of Haiti. Moreover, this article argues that the state takes on a sensual form that allows for the diffusion and/or rupture of past ideologies.


Echoes of Past Revolutions:
Architecture, Memory, and Spectral Politics in the Historic Districts of Port-au-Prince Vincent Joos "When you look at the trees, you will see in their swaying, the invisible and mystical body of the spirits. When you listen to the wind groaning over the countryside, it will be their voices cursing you." Jacques Stephen Alexis, Les Arbres Musiciens (1957: 359) Alexandre Pétion's house in downtown Port-au-Prince.

National Mythologies and Urban Memory
Rue de l'Enterrement is a one-mile paved street that links the largest cemetery of the country to the oldest house in Port-au-Prince, where Alexandre Pétion 1 was born in 1770. The two-story brick building is fissured and boarded up, and its front yard is invaded by derelict cars. A caretaker lives in a small room on the left side of the house and spends most of his time hanging out with the younger men who run a small auto-parts business from the front yard, or with the women who sell dry goods along the fence of the house. As the caretaker explained to me when I visited this house on a hot afternoon of September 2013, the building and surrounding area are key sites of Haitian history that should be better preserved: 1 Pétion was a revolutionary leader and the first President of the Republic of Haiti from 1807 until his death in 1818.
While mentioning these historical narratives, the caretaker talked about the question of skin color and power in Haiti. He used the settings of the house, its state of decrepitude, to suggest that the government has abandoned the people living in downtown Port-au-Prince, the majority of whom are black Haitians. In this narrative, Pétion, the first president of the Republic of Haiti (1807-1818) betrayed Dessalines, here seen as the egalitarian leader of black Haitians. Like many people, the caretaker believed that racial categories still largely shaped social, political, and economic exclusion in Haiti. What interests me here are not the still powerful legacies of colonial systems of race-based exclusion, which is outside of the scope of this article and has already been well analyzed (Labelle 1978, Trouillot 2012b, Daut 2015, Giaferri-Dombre 2007. Rather, I want to explore the relations between the built environment, the historical narratives its spurs and shapes, and political discourses. This article tracks how politics and social issues are felt by people who have been abandoned by the government and international institutions after the devastating 2010 earthquake that took the lives of more than 300,000 Haitians. The type of conversation I had with the caretaker of Pétion's house often takes place in the city center, in the neighborhoods adjacent to the National Palace. The statues of national heroes and the national history museum on the Champ de Mars, the main plaza of the capital, along with the institutional buildings and residences of formerly powerful figures that dot these streets, create what sociologist Geneviève Zubrzycki calls a "national sensorium" -a space where visual and material culture embody polyvalent national mythologies that, in turn, shape present understandings of the state functions and capabilities. As Zubrzycki argues, national mythologies are "created, congealed, and disseminated in multiple sites and through manifold sensory media" (2011: 21). In Haiti, Pétion and Dessalines appear in books, plays, radio shows, and oral narratives.
Their statues and images are omnipresent in the downtown neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, and the streets, houses, buildings they once used or inhabited are still haunted with their presence. Their bodily remnants are encased in the same marble tomb at the National Mausoleum, right in the heart of the former colonial city.
These multiple and polyvalent presences structure varied patterns of nationalistic discourse and action and "endow [them] with emotional force" (2011: 37).
This article ethnographically tracks these political afterlives in the urban environment in order to understand how people narrate and imagine their political world through the use of both material and immaterial elements.
I am especially interested in the figure of dictator François Duvalier who ruled the country from 1957 to 1971, as his presence is forceful in the central neighborhoods of the city. Duvalier used what James Ferguson called "supernatural messianism" where he blended references to Catholicism and Vodou religion to encourage a cult around his persona. In a famous 1964 propaganda pamphlet entitled "Le Catéchisme de la Révolution," we read that "Dessalines, Toussaint, Christophe, Pétion, and Estimé are five distinct Chiefs of State who are substantiated in and form only one and the same President in the person of François Duvalier" (Fourcand 1964: 17). In other words, "chiefs of state" do not die, they have various afterlives that allow them to haunt the political landscapes of their nation. Their spectral presence in the political landscape of Haiti can be invoked as agentive forces that structure specific discourses and practices.
Downtown Port-au-Prince used to be, and to some extent remains, the residential area for the small black middle-class that formed the backbone of the first Duvalier dictatorship (1957)(1958)(1959)(1960)(1961)(1962)(1963)(1964)(1965)(1966)(1967)(1968)(1969)(1970)(1971). François Duvalier's presence is not acknowledged by any monuments, besides his desecrated grave in the Grand Cimetière. However, in the same area of the city, the state employees' humble houses, along with the places where Duvalier hid during his internal exile (1954)(1955)(1956) (Mangonès 1992: 848). In brief, the front entrance of the shotgun, which is traditionally the entry point into the house for visitors, is barricaded, and guests enter the courtyard through a thick metal door opening onto the left gallery of the house.
Ulrick Rosarion's house on Rue de l'Enterrement (Aland Joseph, August 2015) Colonial map of Port-au-Prince. Rosarion's house is located in the former colonial grid (blue dot on map), on Rue de l'Enterrement.
The paint was peeling away and the back walls of the house had been seriously damaged by the 2010 earthquake. The two most spacious upstairs and downstairs rooms, located in the back of the house, were not used for this reason. Besides the heavy protective armature surrounding the house and rendering it secure, almost bulletproof, nothing indicated the house belonged to a family where many men had worked in the highest spheres of the government. It was a house cherished by the people who inhabited it and who liked to speak about its history and functions. Sécurité Nationale, or Militia of National Security Volunteers-precisely because they were supported by the state and yet functioned as a paralegal system of "volunteer militia." His condemnation was not a moral one, however, even though it is common knowledge that the Macoutes detained, tortured and killed thousands of people without trials. The state and its servants should all be under the rule of law, according to Mèt Rosarion, but nothing was ever said about the nature of these laws. I will never fully know to what extent he was complicit in the waves of brutal arrests and mock trials that punctuated the Duvalier eras, and later, during the violent coup years (1991)(1992)(1993)(1994). Nor will I know his margins of choice and his role during the periods of intense political violence that have plagued the country since 1957. From the documentation I found on him, Rosarion stands as an ambiguous jurist who both supported and worked against Duvalier, once using anti-communist laws against Christian activists in the early 1980s, once using anti-corruption laws to sue Jean-Claude Duvalier right after his 1986 ousting.
Rosarion wrote extensively about Haitian history in French, in the form of metric poetry and theater plays. One of Rosarion's many manuscripts with one of his favorite poems entitled "These Martyr Women"

Specters of Duvalier
François Duvalier was born in 1907 in Port-au-Prince. His father, a justice of the peace, and his mother, an employee at a bakery, were part of the then-disadvantaged black middle-classes who were barred from positions of power in a state mainly controlled by a wealthy light-skinned elite, referred in Haitian Creole as milat (Nicholls 1975). Duvalier grew up during the American occupation of Haiti (1915Haiti ( -1934  Though his dictatorship would only amount to a self-serving kleptocracy, this polyvalent set of values and his aura of an intellectual close to his people still shape many narratives associated to him. Ulrick Rosarion, like many Duvalierists, picks and chooses fragments of Duvalier's life to eulogize him and to craft narratives that stand as "unofficial, subaltern histories, rather than a nebulous 'midway point' in between myth and history genres" (Rasmussen 2009: 571). Indeed, Rosarion's accounts of the lives of Haitian political figures are not a mix between 'objective' historical research and imagined narratives, but rather interventions made of selected and concealed materials that have the goal of asserting the cultural and political identity of his family. As Michel Rolph Trouillot has famously argued, there is a silencing of history in the making of sources and creation of archives, which is redoubled with the exclusion of certain narratives of the official corpus of histories that constitute the "past" (Trouillot 1990). In a way, Rosarion's poems and plays are an attempt at shedding light on questions of race and class that are silenced in the narratives that frame Duvalier only as a mad leader.
In the many stories Rosarion told about François Duvalier, the narrative of a man hunted by the men of President Paul Magloire was the most recurrent. Rosarion's house was a crucial element of this narrative. After the ousting of Dumarsais Estimé from power by a military junta led by Magloire in 1950, key members of the toppled government either left the country or went into internal exile. By the mid-fifties, Duvalier was the head of the political opposition and carefully prepared his ascent to power. During this two-year period, Duvalier moved incognito in Port-au-Prince, once disguised as a "myopic, moon-faced woman" to reach the house of one of his allies (Abbott 2011: 51). Ulrick Rosarion liked to recall this era, when, as a young man, he witnessed François Duvalier arriving at night in his house. His father, Léandre Rosarion, also worked for the government during the Estimé presidency, and was an early political ally of Duvalier. As Ulrick Rosarion often explained, "the Revolution was plotted in this house!" The first time I visited his house in September 2013, Rosarion showed me his own bedroom, in which every object seemed tied to his own political and career trajectory. "You see the bed I'm sleeping on? It was offered to my father by François Duvalier, who slept in this very bed when he came to hide in our house. He would also come here during his presidency, at times he felt threatened." The simple, steel-framed bed was a key part of the informal tours Rosarion sometimes gave to his visitors. This unremarkable object had been moved downstairs after the earthquake, from the upstairs back room where Duvalier used to occupy when hiding in this house. Rosarion took me upstairs a couple of times to show me the exact place where Duvalier slept. This aspect of Rosarion's narrative perpetuates Duvalier's own practice of establishing himself as a mysterious and impenetrable figure, especially through a subverted use of Vodou religion. As Paul Christopher Johnson has shown, secretism, or "the active invocation of secrecy as a source of a group's identity, the promotion of the reputation of special access to restricted knowledge, and the successful performance or staging of such access," was a key method of Duvalier to maintain himself in power (Johnson 2006:421 (Abbott 2011). He promised investments in agricultural infrastructure, democratic pluralism, trade union rights, a free press, and a new system of wealth redistribution (Ferguson 1987 His presence, perceptible in material remnants, such as a fractured tomb in the Grand Cimetière, a small iron-framed bed and papers signed by his hand, is felt even more strongly through a certain asceticism and a precise idea of how the black middle class should behave and think. It is akin to what Gérard Barthélémy named Duvalierism without Duvalier, an ideology based on a return to the values of the early François Duvalier and a refusal of "macoutism," seen as a totalitarian derivative of the regime (Barthélémy 1989). It would be hard to define what middle class means in today's Haiti; however, the ethos associated with this term powerfully traverses Rue de l'Enterrement. Thus, the spectral aspects of the black middle classes-an ethos of hard work and humility and a good dose of brash nationalism-filter their way into the present. The humble houses of former statesmen and the mythico-histories where François Duvalier's violence, paranoia, and greed are silenced allow for the nostalgia of a "pure" Duvalierism, seen as the "noiriste" philosophy purged of its dictatorial and terrorist aspects, is far from uncommon in Port-au-Prince and resonates through the material traces it left in the city.

Specters of 1946
When referring back to Estimé and the 1946 revolution, as he often did, Mèt Rosarion referred to the intellectual and political breakthrough of middle-class, black Haitians who entered the Estimé government after years of exclusion during the American occupation. During his four-year tenure, Estimé supervised large urban planning projects that left their mark on the capital's landscape, by commissioning, for instance "the construction [in Port-au-Prince] of a chic waterfront development along a wide boulevard that included 57 pavilions, plazas, and parks, complete with an artificial lake and a reflecting pool" (Payton 2018: 16). These propelled Haiti in its second independence and offered, to quote historian Millery Polyné, "a rich and organized radical culture that has challenged the structures of political and economic power and influence in Port-au-Prince" (2013: 165). The actors of this cultural revolution -socialists, Marxists, Noiristes -come from different political currents, but nonetheless propose new forms of sovereignty and national identity to Haitians.
After the end of the occupation in 1934, "two intimately woven ideologies" stemming from the nationalist folkloric movement of the 1920s emerged (Nicholls 1975: 662). "L'école des Griots" was an intellectual school founded by François Duvalier, Lorimer Denis and their elder Louis Diaquoi. The school's journal Les Griots became the main organ of racial nationalists. The group founded its racial and social thinking on the works of Price-Mars, considered their "Evangelist", but used blackness, African origins and Vodou to make claims about the biopsychological nature of the Haitian Geist. Duvalier and Denis, as the main political activists of this group, wrote extensively about a collective personality based on essentialist African attributes, such as docility and savagery, that fully achieved its potential under "a dictatorship which works for order, truth, and the common good," as stated in a Les Griots editorial of 1938 (cited by Dash 1998: 76). This romantic view of Haitian collective sensibilities distorted and simplified the peasantry's folklore to assert a very urban and class-based notion of black power, and established simplistic racial binaries to circumnavigate questions of class inequality.
La Fontaine Musicale, built in 1949 for the Bicentennial Exposition commissioned by Estimé (Joos, January 2014) François Duvalier, to a lesser extent, would use the urban landscape to assert the noiriste ideology and to make sure that he would be remembered once gone. The statue of the Unknown Maroon of Saint-Domingue, depicting a runaway slave and placed on the Champ de Mars in 1967, allowed Duvalier, for instance, to inscribe his regime in the practice of maroonage. Declaring the defiance and independence of Haiti vis-à-vis major economic power was however purely symbolic, as the regime depended heavily on U.S. funds. Duvalier himself would pretend to be "the last maroon, president for life of the Republic" in the speech he pronounced at the statue's inauguration. As mentioned above, Duvalier presented himself as the reincarnation of both the early revolutionary heroes Pétion, Christophe, Dessalines, Toussaint, and of president Estimé. All these past chiefs of state are materially present in the capital in the form of statues, but not only these. Pétion and Dessalines are buried together in the National Mausoleum located at the southern tip of the Champ de Mars, while Dumarsais Estimé's remains are buried in a mausoleum in the heart of the former Bicentenaire neighborhood. His remains were transferred there in 1968, and the mausoleum inaugurated in 1968 by Duvalier and his guard.

Writing the Revolution and Practicing Anti-Revolutionary Politics
Downtown Port-au-Prince physically centralizes key material elements that provide tangibility to subaltern histories. The mausoleums and monumental graves of the Grand Cimetière, the state buildings and the Dessalines military barracks, the schools named after revolutionary heroes, the statues and museums, the elaborate villas of past leaders and the modest houses of state employees form an environment that allows for the unfolding of "banal nationalism" where the "existence of the nation is taken for granted" (Zubrzycki 2011: 57;Billig 1995). This banal nationalism also unfolds through political performances, such as the discourses of

Why so many blanks and absurdities
In the wake of our age?
What fate guided us among so many wrecks?
Look at our gardens, our fields, our houses, They bear the weight of their cruel absence Never our heart will heal (…) Have pity upon us from where you are For our saddened fields nothing is certain without you For in the future may our harvest be better Our children happier, and the sun more radiant.
On us, have pity, Generals.
The poem may describe the situation of the early 1980s, of Baby Doc's ideologically soft Duvalierism that had lost the memory of the ideals and struggles of Dessalines and Louverture. Written in 1983, at a time when most people in Haiti were dealing with the ecological and economic ravages of Duvalierism, this poem implores the generals to return to the political landscape.
Rosarion wrote about the demise of revolutionary ideals and about the sad state of his country, but nonetheless actively participated in the repressive political apparatus of the Haitian state. While he called for democracy, freedom and justice in his poems, he simultaneously presided over farcical trials. In the early eighties, for instance, Rosarion was involved in a parody of justice. In his "Report on the August 1981 trial and November 1981 appeal of 26 political defendants in Haiti," lawyer and human rights activist Michael S. Hooper relates the mass arrests that led to the exile of many Haitian journalists and scholars and details a parody of a trial, over which Ulrick Rosarion presided. As Hooper writes: "On August 25, 1981, twenty-six people were tried and convicted in Haiti for arson and plotting against the internal security of the state (…) The verdict was handed down at 5:00 A.M. Twenty-two of the defendants were sentenced to fifteen years at hard labor and four to one year in prison (…) In political cases particularly, the Haitian justice system offers virtually no protection to the individual who falls out of favor with members of the government. The trial of 26 people in 1981 was in part in response to these criticisms, from human rights groups and others, that no political prisoners are ever brought to trial. It was, in fact, the first political trial in Haiti, since the Duvalier family came to power in 1957. Ironically, this trial, as much as any incident in the last several years, illustrates the extent to which the rule of law has broken down in Haiti." This trial was deemed "in accordance with Haitian Law by the U.S. Department of State" and marked a new era in Duvalierism: the growth of judicial powers that gave a legal facade to political terror in order to maintain the Reagan administration's support, which supplied financial aid to Haiti until 1987. The civilian judicial body, which was severely weakened during the first years of the Duvalier regime to the benefit of a powerful Military Jurisdiction and later of the militias (Trouillot 1990: 151), made a tragic come-back through a budgetary surge and through the enactment of legal decrees that authorized the possibility of trials where only regime officials, such as Ulrick Rosarion, could speak (Holly 2011). On Tuesday, August 25, 1981, the twenty-six political opponents were led to court in handcuffs and had to walk through double rows of military police armed with Uzi guns, who threatened and ridiculed them. The plaza in front of the Palais de Justice was encircled by Tontons Macoutes, and most of the people sitting in the tribunal were armed and were taking notes on who was attending the trial. The twenty-six defendants were mostly between 20 and 40 years old and members of the hard-working middle class of Haiti (including an accountant, a secretary, a cartoonist, a   chauffeur, a zoologist, a tailor, etc.). At the trial, they learned that they were accused of something they never participated in-arson and plotting against state security-and were condemned a few hours later to fifteen years of hard labor. Three people got a one-year prison sentence, which was often similar to the death penalty in those days (Nérée 1988). The Hooper report is chilling and presents a Kafkaesque trial where existing criminal codes and laws were invoked to silence political opponents. With this new form of political repression, the arbitrary and expedited justice of the Macoutes entered the legal sphere of the state, and organized trials that reflected its blind practice of "justice." In this sense, being a guardian and servant of the law strictly meant to obey the whims of the dictator and his henchmen.

The King's Two Bodies
In 1926, Louis Borno, then president of the Republic of Haiti and fervent collaborator of the American occupants, inaugurated the National Mausoleum where the remains of Pétion and Dessalines were reburied.
This was a symbolic gesture that sought to show that mulattoes and blacks were reunited under the presidency of Borno and that his own regime followed in the footsteps of these great revolutionary heroes. However, the Haitian state was mainly governed and funded by the Americans. Likewise, in 1968, François Duvalier ordered the reburial of Dumarsais Estimé. A colorful mausoleum was built in the Bicentenaire neighborhood and Estimé's remains were reburied there. When he passed in 1953, while in exile in New York, his opponent Paul Magloire, then president of Haiti, organized state funerals. Estimé's body was exposed at the Bicentenaire in an open casket to signify that noirisme was gone for good, according to historian Matthew Smith (2009: 160).
Reburying Estimé was a way to reclaim his legacy at a time when the Duvalier regime became a full-fledged kleptocracy funded by the United States and the state a mere tool for maintaining a small elite in power.
As Katherine Verdery has shown, reburials of political leaders allow for identification with their life stories and for a rewriting of history. Words can be put in the mouths of the dead, and even if their ideologies were polyvalent and ambiguous, the dead have a single body and a single name and can "present the illusion of having only one significance" (Verdery 1999: 29). Duvalier posed as the heir of Estimé in order to further this illusion of national unity and ideological continuity with the noirisme he professed in his youth. Duvalier, who became president for life in 1964, wanted to establish a dynasty and wanted his regime to outlast him.
The Duvalier regime lasted 29 years, and its longevity cannot only be explained by the use of state violence or by foreign interventions that kept the Duvaliers afloat in order to prevent the fall of Haiti into the communist camp. The subaltern histories and their materialization in monuments, graves, and buildings acted as forces naturalizing state politics and rendering a certain idea of the Haitian nation palpable.
1926 Inauguration of the National Mausoleum (credit: Digital Public Library of America) In The King's Two Bodies, Ernest Kantorowicz traces the medieval origins of English state authority in a doctrine that conferred a visible and invisible body to the king. According to this doctrine, two bodies coexist in the person of the king: a mortal "body natural" with physical attributes, and a "body politic" that incarnates at once "the government, the office, and majesty royal" (Lewis 1958: 453).) Also called the "mystic body," the body politic organically joins the king and his subjects "together as head and members" (Kantorowicz 1957: 316). The mystic body evokes the failures and mortality of the natural body by making the king's decisions permanent.
The king never dies and only passes the kingdom on to another when his natural body passes away. The body politic always survives and goes on to live conjoined with the natural body of the new king. This doctrine of the crown as a double body mainly applies to the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods of English history, but nonetheless sheds light on the perennial nature of the legal systems of secular states and political values everywhere. While doing fieldwork in the streets adjacent to Haiti's National Palace, I could not help reflecting about the striking similarities between the English kings' bodies, and the "corps naturel et corps mystique" of Emperor Jacques Dessalines, whose remains have been buried in different parts of this administrative and residential neighborhood of Port-au-Prince. Dessalines' presence, however, extends beyond the legal framing of the crown's body politic as understood by Kantorowicz. Today, this small town, which was once the first Black capital of the Americas, remains a center of political contestation and a major site of Vodou pilgrimages.
When I visited this place for the first time with my friend and field associate Aland Joseph, we met Monsieur Bob, one of the tour guides who brings (mainly local) tourists to the forts. Monsieur Bob also holds the keys of the two kay spirituel -spiritual houses -of Dessalines and his wife, Empress Marie-Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur (see Figure 2). The kay spirituel are 6x6 ft. (1.8x1.8m) houses where Dessalines and his wife had private ceremonies for the lwa, the deities of Vodou religion. "When they kneeled down on their knees and fe ti sevis lwa pa yo [had a small ceremony for the lwa]," as Monsieur Bob explained, "their mystical bodies were leaving their natural bodies. The mystical body is visible too. When Dessalines was assassinated on the Pont-Rouge, his wife saw his mystical body in the kay spirituel. She saw him dying. He died with her. She knew he was dead before getting the news from Port-au-Prince." (Joos, Field Notes September 14, 2013).
The dualistic view of humans, where the body and the soul are separate yet intertwined, and the idea of the soul leaving the body after death traverse a wide range of religions in Haiti. However, the Vodou interpretation of life and afterlife emphasize the presence and agency of multiple spiritual bodies. After his passing, Dessalines became a powerful lwa who is generally associated with Loko Atisou, a key mystical figure of the Revolution and one of the most important lwa of the Rada family 4 (Jenson 2012: 615;Gaffield 2015: 202). As such, Dessalines is not only a historical actor who is glorified for defeating the French and paving the way to independence, he is also an active spiritual force whose agency extends far beyond the realms of religion. And once again, the most important material proof of his duality that he left behind are two simple worship houses that are today used to convey certain versions of the Dessalianian past.
Left: Kay Spirituel of Claire-Heureuse Dessalines; Right: Kay Spirituel of Jean-Jacques Dessalines As Michael Largey puts it, the myths created around important political figures enable people to experience historical ideas "through metaphors that allow for multiple interpretations in the present" (2006: 69). As such, Dessalines as lwa -Ogou Desalin -is "a brave and selfless warrior pitted against the forces of slavery, as well as a gruesome reminder of the peril of attempting to bring about social change in the face of determined resistance" (2006:70). While agreeing with Largey about the political potency of contested historical narratives that emerge through religious practices, I argue that the presence of political leaders who reshaped Haiti is felt beyond the realm of myths and spiritual practices. It is felt in the material traces they left behind, in the places and houses they inhabited, or in the monuments where they are celebrated or desecrated. As Rodrigo Bulamah has shown, this presence of political figures is also felt in the realm of daily life, as ancestors -zansét -, which refers to a native category that refers both to deceased family members and revolutionary heroes (Bulamah 2019). Zansèt left a kind of heritage in the form of material remnants that allow, at a ritual level, for the rethinking of relations between places, living and spiritual bodies, and at a quotidian level, for discussions and reinterpretation of history.
While Haitian revolutionary and counter-revolutionary leaders activated telluric political machineries to eliminate opponents or buy allegiances, the vast majority of them also took titles: Emperor, King, President for Life. They used political symbols and spaces-statues, street names, the National Palace, the golden crown of Emperor Soulouque or the many material markers of power that are today displayed in the Museum of National Pantheon in the very heart of the capital-to ensure the legacy of their political practices and ideas.
The bodily remains of political leaders, their immaterial presence in the form of a "corps astral" (etheric body) or in the form of Lwa (Voudou divinities, such as Ogou Dessalines) and their enduring materiality in the form of houses, books, codes of laws, etc. are as important as the corpus naturale of the mortal political leader. In the meantime, these ethereal legacies that I have attempted to read in verses of vernacular poetry are carried by the social body that enables what Clifford Geertz names the "inherent sacredness of sovereign power" (Geertz 1983). But understanding the city, country and traces of political power as texts is not enough, and does not render the complexity of polyphonic embodiments of the state.
As anthropologist Uli Linke suggests, the diffuse presence of the state is to be seen in more than its symbolic, discursive or imagined cultural forms. "Political worlds have a visual, tactile, sensory and emotional dimension: the life of the state has a corporal grounding" (Linke 2006: 206). When Mèt Rosarion sobbed while stating the name of his favorite president, there was more than the "effect or symptom of the ideo-symbolic machinations of national discourse" at play. His visible emotions pointed to an ambiguous embodiment of a collective national culture that could not be enclosed in a readable system of political signification. In other words, the state enters our subjective experiences and moves in our bodies in seemingly imperceptible ways.
It has an emotional force that has the power to hinder critical visions from arising. It partially enters our gaze and nourishes our anxieties, notably by relying on outward signifiers, such as race and class identification.
Through the life story of Mèt Rosarion, I have shown the complexity and plurivocality of revolutionary poetics and ideologies, nationalist feelings and ambiguous positions vis-à-vis realpolitik through the conflicting values at play in one man's state career and of its material traces. Port-au-Prince cityscape encapsulates political forces that presently haunt the country and that could make a forceful comeback. However, these affective forces, carried through material remnants, symbols, and images, are not linearly structuring political projects, rather they bring the forefront ruptures and ambiguities. As Ananya Roy suggests by borrowing Walter Benjamin's notion of "dialectics as standstill," the ruins and remnants of past political projects expose the ruptures and disenchantment contained in a materiality that bears witness to history (Roy 2011). Rather than trapping citizens in a given political project, the sensual state -or national matters -also open the possibility of alternative futures by allowing us to discuss, see and feel ideologies at a standstill.