Voodoo Fascism: Fascist Ideology in Arna Bontemps's Drums at Dusk
2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/melus/30.3.155
ISSN1946-3170
Autores Tópico(s)Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
ResumoAma Bontemps wrote two novels about slave revolts: Black Thunder (1936) and Drums at Dusk (1939). Virtually unknown in comparison with Bontemps's 1936 retelling of Gabriel Prosser's 1800 slave revolt in Virginia in Black Thunder, Drums at Dusk chronicles the violent opening salvos of the Haitian War of Independence from the perspective of the island's French colonists. Taking a decidedly melodramatic look at bourgeois colonial decadence, Bontemps relates the romantic and revolutionary intrigues of Diron, a young French idealist and member of the Les Amis des noirs, who believes in the universality of the principles of the French revolution. Bontemps conveys the intertwined fates of both brutal and ambivalent slave owners and government officials, as well as a young ingenue newly arrived in Haiti from France and consigned to a life of romantic ennui and eventual physical degradation at the hands of her fellow colonists. Near the end of the novel, as the colonists fall prey to the nameless slave's violent retribution, the aged Toussaint L'Ouverture joins the fray in order to play what amounts to a bit part in Bontemps's novel. Perhaps the reduced role of the black revolutionary hero is one of the reasons that the better known of Bontemps's two novels of slave rebellion is Black Thunder. The Virginian black revolutionary hero Gabriel Prosser of Black Thunder finds no peer in Drums. Perhaps this is also why what little critical work has been done on Drums is driven by a negative comparison with the novel's predecessor. By foregrounding any critical investigation into Drums at Dusk with the question of whether or not the novel presents as positive an image of the black revolutionary hero as does Black Thunder, Bontemps's critics ignore what his foray into Haitian his
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