Elizabeth Taylor is holding a Black baby. She is surrounded by a cheerful group of equally dark and beautiful children, the look on her face is that classic mix of sumptuous self-awareness and relaxed camera pose. The year is 1967 and the scene is part of a short documentary about an American political drama film set in Haiti, shot in Dahomey, future Benin. The production is as surreal as the story it portrays: a Hollywood movie based on a novel, a book inspired by real events, an ensemble cast gathered in a replacement country where even the kids are for hire.
Haitian history is overwhelming, the whole of it. Any jump cut will land you in a troubled, intricate, fascinating, world-changing chapter: the slave trade and the Code Noir, Vodou and the enlightenment, L’Ouverture, the revolution, the forever debt, the wars and partitions with the Dominicans, Papa Doc, Baby Doc, the democratic 90’s and the military coups, the missing French reparations, the new century disorder.
Graham Greene’s novel, The Comedians, is one of those random cuts where local secrets become universal symbols.
The Caribbean as a backdrop for white people’s dramas and burdens was not a new book concept, but in its ultimately unsuccessful film adaptation, the juxtaposition of truth, fiction, celebrity, geopolitics, and violence created a singular and peculiar object of cultural history – a transmedia narrative, if you will, in which Taylor, her real life husband and fictional lover Richard Burton, along the likes of Alec Guinness, James Earl Jones, and Greene himself end up conjuring an expensive and detailed West African replica of the absurdity of Haitian dictatorship and colonial heritage.
When two instruments in an orchestra play simultaneous pure tones at sufficient intensity, a third tone nobody is playing emerges, perceived as the sum or the difference of the two frequencies. These are often called ghost tones.