Introduction

I have chosen "The Haitian Hills" for the title of this blog in tribute to the 1946 novel written by Philippe Thoby-Marcelin and brother Pierre ,"The Beast of the Haitian Hills", which tells the story of an urban storekeeper who moves to the country side to make peace with his late wife. Almost immediately the protagonist, Morin Dutilleul, finds that the tradition and superstition of his new environment are far more powerful than originally anticipated. At the risk of depending too heavily on this prominent early Haitian work for inspiration, I will provide a quote from the editors of Time in their 1964 preface to the publication:

"Haiti--the western third of the island of Hispanola--has always been an enigma. The distinctive quality of its culture is sometimes clearly evident (it was the first constitutional state to be set up, peopled and governed by Negroes, for example), but more often the diffrences lie hidden in the deepest currents of communty life, in the villages where the ordinary daily routine presents a baffling exterior that an outsider can scarcely hope to penetrate. It is a land half cultured, half primative, with lingering traces of Continental courtliness dating back to the French rule of the 19th Century, mixed with vague residues of African tribal usages and quaint borrowings from other West Indian islands, the whole heavily overlaid with powerful superstitution."

During my three months in Bayonnais, Haiti, I hope to penetrate the surface of the enigmatic culture, to make some friends along the way, and to lend a helping hand whenever possible.