Specters of Marx, Hegel, and Columbus too: Haunting and Historicity in the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands

• In Event: Mapping Routes Through the Haitian-Dominican Borderlands

Abstract

This essay offers a close reading of morality tales of theft and debt in relation to processes of commodification in “phantomatic” sorcery narratives about capricious baca spirit demons collected in Banica, Elias Pina, a small town in the Haitian-Dominican frontier. In particular, it seeks to relate haunting stories about spectral dogs which hounded a young man named Hegel; to tales of worker theft told by Columbus, an elderly former mayor who managed and profited from a large peanut oil plant during the Trujillo regime. Drawing upon Derrida and Graeber’s work on debt, mourning and the commodity fetish, the essay seeks to relate the dual narrative threads in these tales, of death (since the demons in the first version were taken to be restless spirits); and debt (since in the second they were said to be vehicles of subaltern class resistance as workers stole product at the plant to compensate their paltry salaries during a time of elite enrichment, a version which conjures up and seeks to rectify a history of crony capitalism and state predation during the Trujillo regime). These are also border-crossing narratives, since the potent agency of the bacais centrally related to the zonbi, a man-made evil sprite said to emanate from Haiti, and one that can only be pacified through Haitian magic. These stories are also reflective of a moral vocabulary which fashions debt as both the basis of social exchange, as well as congealed histories of odious past transactions and economic predation. The essay is based on oral histories taken in multiple trips to Elias Pina from 2008-2014.

Author

• Robin Lauren H Derby, University of California/Los Angeles