Haiti
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Guggenheim grant enabled Maya Deren to finance travel to Haiti to pursue her interest in voodoo. Katherine Dunham wrote her master’s thesis on Haitian dances in 1936, which may have influenced Deren’s interest. In Haiti, Deren not only filmed many hours of voodoo ritual, but also participated in them, and adopted the religion. Her book, Divine Horsemen: the Living Gods of Haiti (1953), is considered a definitive source on the subject. However, the accompanying documentary remained incomplete in her lifetime and was edited and produced by Teiji Ito and his wife Cherel Winett Ito (1947-1999) in 1981, twenty years after Deren's death. All of the original film, wire recordings, and notes are held in the Maya Deren Collection at Boston University. |
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A country in the Caribbean.
In the midst of the French Revolution (1789–99), slaves and free people of color launched the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), led by a former slave and the first black general of the French Army, Toussaint Louverture. After 12 years of conflict, Napoleon Bonaparte's forces were defeated by Louverture's successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines (later Emperor Jacques I), who declared Haiti's sovereignty on 1 January 1804—the first independent nation of Latin America and the Caribbean, the second republic in the Americas, the first country to abolish slavery, and the only state in history established by a successful slave revolt.
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