Toussaint Louverture - Madison Bell [156]
On the road from Port-au-Prince to Leogane there is a hounfor, or Vodou temple, arranged as many of them are to confront the outside world with the powers of both the right and the left hand. As in many spiritual traditions, in Vbdou the work of the left hand is considered to be sinister, while the work of the right is beneficent and healing. The average houngan, or Vbdou priest, is obliged, for the usual reasons, to “work with both hands.”
In this particular hounfor, if one stands in the center and faces the courtyard, the road, and the world to which the road leads, one has the Chanm Ginen (chamber of the pacific mysteries of Africa) on one's right hand. The motto above the door reads Dieu qui donne et Dieu qui fait (God who gives and God who makes), a phrase which recalls Toussaints favorite proverb, Dousman ale Iwen. On the left hand is a more dangerous room with the motto Fok nan pwen, which means “There would have not to be any for me not to get some.”
The qualities invoked by these mottoes are found together— though not mixed in our common understanding of a mixture—in most Haitians, and can be sharply polarized according to the need of an occasion. Certainly they were sharply polarized from time to time, and according to need, in the personality of Toussaint Louverture. Like most Haitians, he served more than a single spirit: Bondye or Gran Met, analogous with God the Father and Creator in the Christian faith; and various Iwa imported from Africa, some beneficent, some less so. A powerful strain of charismatic Christianity, completely compatible with the pacific, benevolent Esprit Ginen, runs through his career almost from the start. In the summer of 1793 he expressed his preference of the power of love to the power of force: “we receive everyone with humanity, and brotherhood, even our most Cruel enemies, and we pardon them wholeheartedly, and it is with gentleness that we coax them back from their errors.” Nine years later in the Fort de Joux, his sense of the tragedy of his own situation moved him to evoke Christ's crown of thorns.
Toussaints Christianity, though perhaps inconstant, was not feigned. The record shows that very often he was animated, powerfully, by a Christian spirit. Still, while one considers the forbearance and moderation he mainly exercised, one must also recall that many of the atrocities Dessalines committed under Toussaint's rule were probably done with Toussaints tacit approval, if not on his secret order.
For a citizen of what we are pleased to call the First World, the apparent contradictions of Toussaint's personality can be difficult to resolve. Within Haitian culture, there are no such contradictions, but simply the actions of different spirits which may possess one's being under different circumstances and in response to vastly different needs. There is no doubt that from time to time Toussaint Louverture made room in himself for angry, vengeful spirits, as well as the more beneficent Iwa.
The name which he chose for himself, Louverture, implies that his being was ordered by Attibon Legba, the Hermes-like figure who keeps the gates and crossroads. But Legba has his sinister analogue, an inverted reflection called Malt' Kalfou—Master of Crossroads—who has a great capacity for violence and betrayal. Through Malt' Kalfou, Legba