Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [49]
Like Hyppolite, Basquiat was extraordinarily prolific during his short career, and before settling primarily on canvas both men used all types of tools and surfaces from spray paint (Basquiat) to chicken feathers (Hyppolite), doors (both Basquiat and Hyppolite), bed frames (Hyppolite), helmets (Basquiat), and mattresses (Basquiat). Whether any mystical dreams had led him to that conclusion we don’t know, but a teenage Basquiat had announced to his Haitian father that he would be “very, very famous one day.”
Because he was a lifelong sèvitè, a devotee of Vodou, an older and more mature Hector Hyppolite—who was fortynine years old when he was “discovered”—saw his art as a gift from the lwas and carefully tried to balance its demands and rewards. The canvas, for Hyppolite, was just one more space in which to serve the lwas, and when he served them properly they rewarded him with ideas for paintings.
Later, as his career flourished, Hyppolite would continually consult with the spirits, requesting their consent to remain an artist, especially as his hectic engagement with his art began to leave less time for his work as a Vodou priest, or hougan (spelled ougan in today’s Creole).
“I haven’t practiced vaudou [an alternative spelling of Vodou] for a while,” he told Selden Rodman, during one of the collector’s visits to the artist’s dirt-floored, palm-frond shack. “I asked the spirits’ permission to suspend my work as a hougan, because of my painting. . . . The spirits agreed that I should stop for a while. I’ve always been a priest, just like my father and my grandfather, but now I am more an artist than a priest.”
In a collective religion like Vodou, Maya Deren wrote in Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, “to create a physical statement (whether a painting or a drum beat) . . . would require an individual at once saint and artistic genius.”
Why?
Because, wrote Deren, “virtuoso is the province of divinity. Only the loa are virtuosi.”
Also believing this, even though he was possibly the most famous Haitian artist of his time, Hector Hyppolite painted as though he were what Maya Deren labeled an anonymous inventor, a member of a collective run by the gods.
Though he didn’t always cite the island nation as a direct influence, Basquiat was certainly aware of, if not Hyppolite, certainly Haiti. Basquiat was perhaps asked about Haiti as much as he was about Puerto Rico and the continent of Africa, about which he told Demosthenes Davvetas of New Art International, “I’ve never been to Africa. I’m an artist who has been influenced by his New York environment. But I have a cultural memory. I don’t need to look for it, it exists. It’s over there, in Africa. That doesn’t mean that I have to go live there. Our cultural memory follows us everywhere, wherever you live.”
It is perhaps out of a similar cultural memory that many of Basquiat’s Haiti-related paintings emerged, paintings like Untitled 1982, which has HAITI printed in bold letters on the canvas. Above the word HAITI is a partially masked face and Basquiat’s signature crown, floating beneath the word LOANS, highlighting Haiti’s massive debts and tracing the history of those debts from the conquistador Hernán Cortés to Napoleon Bonaparte, whose first name is crossed out, down to one of the leaders of the Haitian revolution, Toussaint L’Ouverture, whose name is underlined. Even Basquiat’s choice of that particular