South Central Review, 2015
Issue: 1
Volume: 32
Publication Date: 2015
Publication Name: South Central Review
IN 1948, ANDRÉ BRETON WROTE AN ESSAY that discussed his first encounter a few years prior with the paintings of Hector Hyppolite at the Centred’ Art in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.Breton, noting Hyppolite’s role as a Vodou priest, described his strong impression that the artist had, “an important message to communicate, that he was the guardian of a secret.”Breton’swords express a certain contradictory sense about Hyppolite and his painting, in which the urgent, important message is simultaneously a mystery that must be safeguarded or even withheld. As this essay will examine, the same contradiction lies at the heart of Breton’s broader efforts to relate Haiti and its traditions to surrealism’s evolving politics,and it widely relates to ongoing ideological debates within the movement as it evolved in post-World War II Europe. The history and culture of Haiti and Vodou held a central position within Breton’s turn to myth and esotericism in the mid-1940s, and informed his creative projects on secret initiation and utopia as political tools of freedom and the imagination. Yet Breton generally demonstrated a reluctance to write or speak directly about Haiti and Vodou.
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