In All My Dreams | World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl
World championship: Dessalines pa ap pran gol.
2020, Acrylic on Canvas, 7.5 ft x 16 ft
“World Championship: Dessalines Pap Pran Gòl”, which translates to “World Championship: Nobody Scores on Dessalines” is inspired first and foremost by a passage from the carnival scene in René Depestre’s 1988 novel Hadriana In All My Dreams. In this passage, the Haitian revolutionary Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who led the world’s first successful slave rebellion, is playing a game of ping-pong against “Generalissimo” Stalin. The ball they hit back and forth across the table changes “from black to white to yellow to red in accordance with whichever world championship was being disputed”.
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl. Detail 1
When I first read Hadriana In All My Dreams, I was conducting research for my undergraduate degree project in architecture at RISD in 2011. My project focused on the preservation of Le Manoir Alexandra, a historic building in Jacmel, the seaside town that plays an important part in Haitian culture and history. Jacmel, and Le Manoir Alexandra in particular, also serve as the setting of Depestre’s novel. This got me thinking about the relationships between architecture and literature and wondering what I might learn – and what I might create – from Depestre’s work of fiction. After experiencing the devastating earthquake of 2010 and the overwhelming influx of foreign aid that followed, I was both shocked and outraged by the ways powerful countries discussed the fate of Haiti—often without the involvement of Haitian people. It felt indecent and sad, considering the revolution for which Dessalines and his fellow Haitians sacrificed so much to set in motion. As an architect, I was attuned to the ways this foreign aid intervention play out in the flood of well-intentioned but problematic proposals for architectural reconstruction.
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl. Installation Shot at Barnard College’s Louise Mc Cagg Gallery (2020)
In my visual interpretation of Depestre’s carnival scene, I take the opportunity to question the complex power relationships that have shaped, to varying extents, Haitian history and society. The Haitian emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines is stretched out on the canvas, in the foreground, gripping a ping-pong paddle. Hadriana, Depestre’s protagonist, a white woman from France raised in luxury in Jacmel, lays unconscious, opposite Dessalines, on the bottom left corner of the canvas.
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl. Detail 2
Clustered above Hadriana’s head are symbols of the string of recent foreign interventions that have severely impacted Haiti over the last few decades: the UN seal, the Venezuelan flag, and particularly poignant in the context of New York City, the good old Stars and Stripes. The painting’s main characters are surrounded by sketches depicting the lively carnival of Jacmel. Small figures are holding protest signs either celebrating or rejecting Hadriana (or “Nana”, as she is called in the novel). Le Manoir Alexandra, Hadriana’s family home in Jacmel, stands in the background, unaffected by the tumult taking place below its regal balconies, a potent commentary on who has the privilege to observe, discuss, and decide in contemporary Haiti.
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl
2020, Acrylic on Canvas, 7.5 ft x 16 ft
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl | Detail 3
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl | Detail 4
“The two petite fathers of their people showed equal dexterity as they volleyed
a human head back and forth, the head having been shrunken using a technique
invented by the Jivaros.”
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl. Detail 6
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl. Detail 7
“This masked occasion had convoked three centuries of human history to my sister’s wake. Figures sculpted from the purest marble and figurines of rotten wood had come together to dance, sing, drink rum, and refuse death., kicking up the dust on my village square, which, in the midst of this general masquerade, took itself for the cosmic stage of the universe. ”
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran Gòl. Detail 5
World Championship: Dessalines Pa Ap Pran gòl was part of the “In All My Dreams” exhibition which made its public debut at Barnard College’s Louise Mc Cagg Gallery (February 21-March 14 2020).
Photography: Midge Wattles (studio portraits) & Matt Harvey (gallery installation shots)
