Create Dangerously

CHAPTER 10

It was a testy interview and part of it still lives on in cyberspace via a clip on YouTube. The art historian Marc Miller asks the twenty-one-year-old graffiti artist, painter, musician, and one-time film star Jean-Michel Basquiat about his roots.

“You’re what?” demands Miller. “Haitian-Puerto Rican?”

“I was born here,” answers Basquiat, “but my mother’s fourth-generation Puerto Rican. My father comes from Haiti.”

“Do you feel that that’s in your art?” continues Miller.

“Genetically?” Basquiat interrupts.

“Yeah,” replies Miller. “Genetically or culturally?”

“Culturally?” Basquiat wonders out loud, almost as if speaking to himself. “I guess so.”

“Haiti’s of course famous for its art,” Miller adds.

“That’s why I said genetically,” Basquiat replies while fidgeting and looking away, “because I’ve never been there. And I grew up in, you know, principal American vacuum. Television mostly.”

“No Haitian primitives on your wall?” asks Miller.

“At home?” asks Basquiat, picking up a trace of Miller’s sarcasm and running with it. “Haitian primitives? What do you mean? People? People nailed up on my walls?”

“I mean paintings,” Miller answers, chuckling. “Paintings.”

“No, no no,” counters Basquiat. “Just, you know, typical prints you find in any home in America. Well, some homes in America. Nothing really special.”

If young Basquiat had had any Haitian primitives on his walls-paintings or otherwise-one of them may have been the Haitian painter and Vodou priest Hector Hyppolite, a spiritual forebear.

Legend has it that when Hector Hyppolite was a young man, a spirit came to him in his sleep and told him that one day he would become a famous artist. Born into a family of Vodou priests, Hyppolite was no stranger to the spirits nor they to him. While waiting for this prophecy to materialize, Hyppolite traveled to Cuba to work in the sugarcane fields, then went as far as Ethiopia on a freighter, and later, when he returned to Haiti, apprenticed himself to a shoemaker, painted Vodou temples, houses, and furniture, and sketched colorful postcards that he sold to occupying U.S. marines and then painted the barroom door that would eventually change his life.

In 1943, the American watercolorist Dewitt Peters was driving through the tourist-friendly village of Montrouis with his friend the Haitian novelist Philippe Thoby-Marcelin when they spotted the colorfully painted birds and flowers on the “Ici la Renaissance” saloon door. Peters was about to open an art school and gallery (Le Centre d’Art) in downtown Port-au-Prince and was on the lookout for such talent. Enter Hector Hyppolite, who was offered the opportunity to move to a middle-class neighborhood in Port-au-Prince to concentrate solely on his art, but instead chose to settle in a seaside slum called Trou de Cochon (Pig’s Hole), where he ran a Vodou temple and a boat-building business and in three years produced more than six hundred canvases.

Hyppolite’s early fans and collectors were legend. André Breton, the father of French Surrealism, declared that Hyppolite could revolutionize modern art. The Tony Award-winning dancer and choreographer Geoffrey Holder created a ballet inspired by Hyppolite’s life, which the Alvin Ailey Dance Company still performs. A young Truman Capote, in a December 1948 Harper’s Bazaar magazine article, lavished praise on Hyppolite’s work even while calling the artist ugly and “monkey-thin.”

Hyppolite’s looks fared a lot better with the American art collector Selden Rodman, who worked alongside Dewitt Peters and saw Hyppolite often at the Centre d’Art. Rodman could also have been describing young Basquiat when he wrote of Hyppolite, “His wiry hair parted in the middle and shaved around the ears, flared sidewise untrimmed with the effect of a dusty, magnetized crown… [C]ould he be descended from one of those Arawak sand painters who inspired the vèvè?”

The vèvè is a ceremonial drawing, an outlined emblem that is meant to call forth spirits. It is often sketched on the ground, with cornmeal, before Vodou ceremonies. Each Vodou spirit or lwa-spelled loa in older texts-is identified with a particular vèvè. The vèvè of the goddess of love, Erzulie Freda, is usually a heart. The vèvè for Baron Samedi, the guardian of the cemetery, is a cross on top of a tombstone. Ogoun, the god of war, is represented by linked squares, which suggest a protective shield. Legba, master of the crossroads, is a crossroad with singularly embellished direction markers. The vèvè sketches are usually transient-they vanish underfoot at the ceremonies-except when sewn on sequined ceremonial flags that have stepped so far out of their ritual realm that they are now used on trendy designer purses and clothes. Like some of Hyppolite’s early work, a few of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s drawings and paintings bring to mind vèvès.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, twelve years after Hyppolite’s death, Basquiat’s childhood could not have been more different from Hyppolite’s. Hyppolite was born dirt poor in a rural section of Haiti. Basquiat was born into a middle-class immigrant family in urban America. Where Hyppolite’s exposure to art was mostly limited to the practical and decorative-brightly painted houses, Vodou temples, Masonic lodges, boats, and camions called tap taps-Basquiat often visited museums with his mother and, if Julian Schnabel’s biopic of Basquiat is to be believed, young Basquiat saw his mother cry before Pablo Picasso’s Guernica while a golden crown appeared halolike on his head. Basquiat had his own pass to the Brooklyn Museum at a very young age and was a visual vampire. Bored and haunted, he left home as a teenager and lived on the streets of Manhattan, where he began taking hard drugs and painting cryptic phrases on downtown walls.

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 spelling of L’Ouverture’s self-designated last name-which is most often spelled Louverture-makes L’Ouverture a figure that is closer to Legba, the master of the crossroads, “the opening,” the one through whom we enter. Near the word HAITI in the painting is the word SALT, which is, according to Haitian legend, what one gives to zombies in order to liberate them from their eternal bondage, to make them human again.

Toussaint L’Ouverture reappears with a black hat and sword in Basquiat’s 1983 painting Toussaint L’Ouverture Versus Savonarola. Here Basquiat enrolls the Black Spartacus to battle the Italian priest and destroyer of so-called immortal art. Who wins that battle in Basquiat’s mind? Perhaps one day this painting may inspire some type of avant-garde video game.

Haiti, like Puerto Rico and the continent of Africa, was obviously both in Basquiat’s consciousness and in his DNA, but they were not there by themselves. Basquiat did not belong to any fixed collective. He freely borrowed from and floated among many cultural and geographic traditions. Like many other culturally mixed, first- or second-generation Americans, his collectivity was fluid. He was symbiotic and syncretic in the same way that Hector Hyppolite’s Vodou paintings were, mixing European Catholicism and African religious rites and adapting them to a world made new by the artist’s vision or, in both Hyppolite’s and Basquiat’s case, visions.

In digging deeper for a Haitian influence in Basquiat’s oeuvre, one might identify as Ogoun his arrow-wielding men or as a tribute to Baron Samedi and Erzulie his heart-covered skulls and crosses. But even if this were undeniably true, even if Basquiat were, like Hyppolite, purposely drawing vèvès and other visual tributes to the lwas, he was also trying to repel ghosts, much like the sad and frightened-looking young man in the painting of that name. A young man who seems almost split in two, wearing a cross (or is it an ankh?) around his neck, while leaning on an old man’s cane, like Legba, the gatekeeper, the lwa who mediates between the world of the spirits and the world of mortals, the god who stands at physical and spiritual intersections, the one to whom one has to say to be allowed safe passage, “Papa Legba, please make a way, open the gates for me.”

The bottom half of the young man’s body in To Repel Ghosts is claimed by an unfinished heart. Might it belong to Erzulie, the Haitian goddess of love, who often demands ritual marriage to promising men, something to which Hyppolite might have been more amiable than Basquiat? Hector Hyppolite would never think of repelling his ghosts. He welcomed them. They had chosen him, inspired him. They had nurtured his art. Maybe they’d done the same for Basquiat, but something may have been lost in the translation and Basquiat may not have been able to recognize or understand them.

Basquiat died of a drug overdose in 1988 at age twenty-seven. Perhaps if he had lived, he would have learned to embrace these types of ghosts, among his many others. We never got to see, for example, how Basquiat’s brief and much-anticipated trip to the Ivory Coast might have affected his work. He might have altered his style a bit (or not) or he might have changed directions completely, becoming the poet he’d told friends he wanted to be. Hyppolite too might have changed styles or direction had he not died of a heart attack in 1948 at age fifty-four. Who knows where the spirits might have led them both? Or maybe they had fulfilled their missions and had nothing more to do or say, or create.

In Vodou, it is believed that when one dies, one returns to Ginen, the ancestral homeland from which our forebears were taken before being brought to the New World as slaves. Ginen stands in for all of Africa, renaming with the moniker of one country an ideological continent which, if it cannot welcome the returning bodies of its lost children, is more than happy to welcome back their spirits. In Vodou, it is also believed that possession, trance, is an opportunity for the spirits to speak to mortals and the person who is in trance, or possessed, becomes the vessel, the chwal or divine horseman or horsewoman, through whom the spirits speak. Both Basquiat and Hyppolite were in a type of trance, divine horsemen, possessed, as their hyperproductivity shows, by spirits they were seeking to either welcome or repel. Possession, however, is not supposed to last a lifetime. Neither the body nor the mind could bear or sustain it.

It may be that Basquiat knew this all too well. When Marc Miller asked him about the Haitian primitives who should have been nailed to his walls, perhaps all Basquiat could think of was the primitive in the mirror, the anonymous inventor, who was plucked from obscurity and turned into a god only to be continually called crude, naive, savage, and later even “a Madison Avenue Primitive,” as he was labeled in a November 9, 1992, review by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker. Gone, except in these perhaps misunderstood shapes and forms, maybe the Madison Avenue primitive is now side by side with the Trou de Cochon primitive, if not in some collector’s storage space, then in their common ancestral Ginen, or possibly, in a few cheap prints nailed to some young artist’s wall.