Abstract
The biologist Merlin Sheldrake has named the tendency for humans to privilege plants to the exclusion of fungi “plant-centrism.” Connecting Sheldrake’s claim to critiques of the Caribbean plantation system, this article argues that plant-centrism is inherent in plantation logic. While cash crops depend on fungal processes and networks, fungi are rarely acknowledged except where they lead to disease. They constitute a subterranean underside to plant production and, by extension, the plantation system. Working against plant-centrism, this article examines representations of fungi in Alejo Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World. Rather than overdetermining fungi as signs of decline, disease, and corruption, the article argues that the novel’s decomposers materialize antiplantation sentiment even as they underlie plantation grounds. Ultimately it suggests using fungi to reassess the novel’s scenes of ruination, recognizing that decomposition is a condition of possibility for new growth.
In general, descriptions of Caribbean landscapes have tended to emphasize the islands’ prolific vegetation, the abundance of which has astonished foreigners from Columbus onward. Columbus wrote on his first voyage to Hispaniola that the mountains were “full of trees of endless varieties, so high that they seem to touch the sky, and I have been told that they never lose their foliage.”1 What he would not have known is that these towering trees do not emerge from fertile soil alone—tropical soils are actually quite poor—but rather that forests depend on detritivores like fungi and bacteria that break down leaf litter into usable forms. In other words, growth and decay are two sides of the same coin; the striking flora of tropical landscapes depend on an equally striking network of subterranean organisms dedicated to their decomposition.
What might a poetics of tropical decomposition look like? Derek Walcott, the Saint Lucian Nobel laureate, offers a brief example in his poem “The Swamp”:
Playing on the written word growth, he finds within its letters the word rot. Rot then echoes in the consonant root, suggesting the inextricability of roots, rot, and growth in the ecological syntax of the swamp.3 His wordplay suggests that the wetland operates by a dialectic of growth and decay, a constant cycle in which fungi play a crucial role.4
Walcott is unusual among Caribbean poets for this meditation on fungal rot. By and large, the landscapes of the region have been defined in the centuries following Columbus’s landfall by their potential for plant growth. Indeed, the islands of the Caribbean became metonyms for particular forms of plant life during the colonial period, their identities so closely associated with (mostly imported) cash crops that entire landmasses became known simply as the Sugar Islands. Through this transformation, the islands’ capacity for vegetal production was co-opted by European imperial powers so that plant reproduction became a critical component of settler colonization, racialized labor regimes, and economic accumulation.5 Plants became part of the progress narratives of colonial empires while detritivores remained largely unexamined.6 As Ghassan Hage has shown, routine decomposition is all too easy to ignore, even though “everything is decaying all the time.”7
In implying the interdependence of fungi and flora, Walcott suggests a counternarrative. Beyond the empirical accuracy of such a claim, it offers interpretive possibilities in a region devastated by the plantation system’s human and environmental violence. His wordplay implies that we might read for signs of rot within growth while also reading for how growth emerges out of rotten and rotting geographies. Taking Walcott as a point of departure, my project is twofold: first, to show how plant-centrism, which categorically excludes fungi, inheres within Caribbean plantation logic; and second, to explore how processes of fungal decomposition might subvert plantation forms. In doing so I will offer a case study in Alejo Carpentier’s 1949 historical novel The Kingdom of This World, whose fictionalization of the Haitian Revolution depicts insurgent fungi as poisons and agents of decay. Rather than overdetermining fungi as signs of decline, disease, and corruption, I argue that decomposers resonate with antiplantation sentiment even as they underlie plantation grounds. Ultimately, I suggest using fungi to reconceive the novel’s scenes of ruination, recognizing that decomposition is a condition of possibility for new growth.
Plant-Centrism and Plantation Logic
Scientifically, Walcott is correct to suggest that rot is inherent in growth. Matter must decompose in order for new organisms to form. Indeed, the condition of rot is archetypal of the tropics, where heat and moisture facilitate rapid cycling of nutrients through fungal and bacterial decomposition.8 Yet the agents of decomposition, the fungi and bacteria that break down matter into its constituent parts, are typically overlooked by what the biologist Merlin Sheldrake has called “plant-centric perspectives.”9 These dominant perspectives center on the visible growing world of flowers, shrubs, and trees, ignoring the fungal fruiting bodies and subterranean mycelia at their roots. In particular they fail to recognize the ancient connections between plants and fungi, symbioses founded on the association of mycorrhizal fungi with the roots of approximately 90 percent of all vascular land plants.10
Drawing on Sheldrake, I want to suggest that plant-centric perspectives excluding fungi are inherent in plantation logics. Katherine McKittrick has described “plantation logic” as the structuring principle that emerged from colonial plantations in the Caribbean.11 Plantation logic is rooted in racialization, dispossession, cruelty, and exploitation, processes by which the geographies where Black people were “planted” in the Americas became construed as “the lands of no one.”12 As McKittrick notes, plantation geographies became overdetermined as spaces of Black death, a logic that persists today in the forms of unlivable cities and environmental racism.13 The plantation system’s violent exclusion of Black and Indigenous peoples from the category of humanness went hand in hand with the exploitation of soil nutrients and tropical ecologies. To say that its logic was plant-centric is to say that it privileged export crops over all other forms of life, including the lives of the enslaved Africans who labored on those crops and the Indigenous peoples dispossessed from their lands.
The logic of the plantation system required radical simplification: the reduction of people to labor and of nonhuman life to cash crops.14 In the plant-centric settler colonies of the Caribbean (sometimes called plantocracies), complex human and nonhuman ecosystems alike were subordinated to a handful of lucrative plant species. Fungi, barely studied at the time of settler colonization and still understudied to this day, had no place within the schema of plantation logic, structured as it was by the processes (or “descriptive statements”) of exclusion and reduction.15 Plantation logic subsumed diversity to monoculture. As the people kidnapped from widely divergent nations were collapsed into the category of “Black” in the New World, complex ecological networks were yoked to the production of a single plant (or, sometimes, a small number of cash crops cultivated in polyculture). Plantation logic considered the enslaved Africans who worked in plant cultivation outside the category of Man, placing them into forced intimacy with nonhuman lives.16 To say that these colonial societies were plant-centric is to say that they were organized so intensively around the cultivation of a few plant species that they privileged their production above the lives of the Black laborers and the nonhuman organisms that facilitated their growth.
Yet commercial plantations have always depended on fungal metabolic processes. Mycorrhizal fungi constitute a subterranean underside to plant growth and, by extension, the plantation system. These species decompose leaf litter, provide nutrients, and facilitate communication through networks some have termed the “Wood Wide Web.”17 In this sense, reading for fungi is a way of getting at the roots of the plantation system, so to speak. Their metabolic work has always been a condition of possibility for the viability of the commercial plantation system, yet their lifeworlds were nearly invisible to colonial planters.
Fungi in Caribbean plantation societies have historically become salient to humans only when they threaten profits through disease and decay. For instance, the fungus Moniliophthora perniciosa, which causes witches’ broom disease, is known for its devastation of Caribbean cocoa plantations.18 Although fungal pathogens may align with exploited workers’ antipathy to the cash crop system, they may also require added labor from those workers, placing laborers in an ambivalent relation to fungal invasion.19 In general the process of rot (which can be realized by fungi and bacteria alike) has been read figuratively as the unraveling of colonial ambitions toward growth, progress, and profits. As Joan Dayan notes in her study of Haitian literature, “Fecundity and the sweet smell of rot, exaltation and sacrifice, the sexualization of the tropics: metaphoric notions of abundance and decay typify both the language deployed in the description of the tristes tropiques and of the women in them.”20 Rot is part of the exoticized mythos of the so-called torrid zone, a region whose tropical climate European colonists associated with the threats of disease, decay, and moral laxity.21
One way of considering the ambivalent roles of fungi in plantation geographies is along the lines of Sylvia Wynter’s dichotomy of plot and plantation. She contrasts the geographies of the plot, where enslaved Africans were permitted to grow food plants to sustain themselves, and the plantation, where export crops were cultivated for profit. In one sense the plot supports the superstructure of the plantation because it allows the labor force to survive. But in another it nourishes the development of a new folk culture based on traditional cultivars like yams, becoming “a source of cultural guerrilla resistance to the plantation system.”22 Wynter does not discuss fungi, and there is little historical evidence to suggest that these were significant to the African diasporic cultures of the enslaved laborers in the Caribbean. Yet I want to suggest that their role is similar to that of the ambivalent position of the yam in the plot. Acting like the literal base to the superstructure of the plantation, fungi sit at the roots of cash crops, facilitating their growth. But fungi can also destabilize the plantation system by blighting its cultivars, poisoning its aristocrats, and decomposing its forms. Like Walcott’s “growth” and “rot,” these oppositions are inextricable.
Indeed, decomposition is one of the critical ways in which fungi participate in the making (and unmaking) of human history. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey explains, “While roots are a generative metaphor for cultural origins, decay is the material way in which we know history has passed and thus is key to the articulation of time and nature itself.”23 Ann Stoler has called attention to another of Walcott’s poems, “Ruins of a Great House,” to entreat scholars to examine “the rot that remains” in colonized landscapes. While “rot” here is not necessarily explicitly tied to fungi, these species contribute significantly to the decomposition of organic matter.24 In Walcott’s poem rot persists on the grounds of a defunct lime plantation long after the perpetrators of the violence that occurred there have died. Stoler reads this rot as a sign of imperial ruins, conceived as an ongoing process.25 Rot traces bygone matter, marking the space of its disappearance. At the same time, Stoler incites us to see rot and ruins more broadly as “epicenters of renewed claims, as history in a spirited voice, as sites that animate new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and unexpected political projects.”26 Decomposition in this context becomes a helpful way of seeing how the substance of the past, rather than being a static testament, can be reconfigured into new forms of living matter. This is particularly true in postplantation geographies, where organic matter has historically been the substrate of imperial control. To emphasize detritivores is not simply to engage in the “scholarly glorification of ecological ruins” but rather to differentiate between imperial geographies of extraction and more livable alternatives.27 It is to think with decomposing materials, following Kristina Lyons, through their “relational vulnerabilities, cyclical process, and potentiating force.”28 Fungal and bacterial decomposition allows postplantation matter to take on new forms, helping extractive landscapes to become otherwise.
The Mushroom at the Beginning of the Revolution
The transformative potentiality of fungi plays a critical role in the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier’s fictionalization of the Haitian Revolution. Published in 1949, The Kingdom of This World (El reino de este mundo) dramatizes the life of the slave-turned-maroon Makandal, who is believed to have poisoned Creole planters in the years preceding the revolution.29 My intention in returning to this classic novel is to offer a case study of what a method of reading for fungi can reveal. The Kingdom of This World demonstrates the power of a fungus to disrupt the logic of a plant-centric plantation society and to alter literary form. The subterranean structure of the mycelium figures the invisibility of Black environmental knowledges, spiritual practices, and political projects to white planters in colonial Saint-Domingue.
The vegetal landscapes of the novel could be roughly divided into two categories: the formal geometries of manicured estates and the mountainous wilderness zones that proliferate at their edges.30 The contrast between these two geographies, along with the disparity between the wealthy landowners and the enslaved laborers who inhabit them, is the driving engine of the novel’s structure; through their alternation, these dyads create a sense of narrative rhythm that propels the text. Yet, amid these oscillations, the bulbous fruiting bodies of strange fungi spill out of the story’s wild reaches and into the aristocratic world of the planters, warping the seemingly rigid organization of the novel’s narration and blurring the lines between the animate and the inanimate. Indeed, these poisonous fungi wreak havoc on the class structure of the society that the novel represents, plummeting landed aristocrats into destitute poverty and elevating enslaved people to the rank of high nobility. Through their powers of shape-shifting and sporal proliferation, the fungi insert the supernatural into the text’s imaginary, making marvelous events thinkable within its literary landscape. As they infiltrate the island with a lethal poison that materializes the fantasy of class mobility within its rigidly stratified society, the fungi also generate mobility in the category of the human, thus rendering Macandal’s interspecies metamorphosis conceivable for Carpentier’s (presumably European) readers.
This fungal intrusion occurs against the backdrop of a plant-centric colonial society where aristocrats have constructed an economy and culture on the basis of imported cultivars. The principal crops of Monsieur Lenormand de Mézy’s plantation are sugar, coffee, cacao, and indigo, none of which is indigenous to the island of Hispaniola.31 These colonial transplants domesticate the landscape of the estate, transforming its local particularities into the model form of a French colonial plantation.32 While Carpentier offers little description of the sugar fields themselves, we should imagine that these are grown in monoculture in the form of a Euclidean grid, in keeping with the conventions of French colonial plantations in Saint-Domingue.33
Against this plant-centric backdrop, I want to think about Macandal’s poisoning campaign as the mushrooming of the possibility of revolution.34 As a verb, “to mushroom” means to increase or develop rapidly, suggesting the way in which a troop of mushrooms can spring to the surface overnight. Anna Tsing has described “the flushes of mushrooms that come up after a rain” as “an over-the-top bounty; a temptation to explore; an always too many.”35 Carpentier’s novel is pervaded by excess, an overflowing quality that exceeds plant-centric logic. The appearance of the mysterious toxic fungi will make thinkable Macandal’s ability to exceed his human form as well as that of Saint-Domingue’s society to be radically transformed by revolution.36
All of this begins with a foraged fungus. The enslaved Macandal, who has recently lost his arm in a sugar mill accident, is instated in a new capacity as cattle herder. At the margins of the plantation geography he engages in the “arts of noticing” his botanical surroundings.37 Carpentier describes the awareness he cultivates of the diverse life in his midst:
Before daybreak he drove [the cattle] out of the stables, heading them toward the mountain whose shady slopes were thick with grass that held the dew until morning was high. As he watched the slow scattering of the herd grazing knee-deep in clover, he developed a keen interest in the existence of certain plants to which nobody else paid attention. Stretched out in the shade of a carob tree, resting on the elbow of his sound arm, he foraged with his only hand among the familiar grasses for those spurned growths to which he had given no thought before. To his surprise he discovered the secret life of strange species given to disguise, confusion, and camouflage, protectors of the little armored beings that avoid the pathway of the ants. His hand gathered anonymous seeds, sulphury capers, diminutive hot peppers; vines that wove nets among the stones; solitary bushes with furry leaves that sweated at night; sensitive plants that closed at the mere sound of the human voice; pods that burst at midday with the pop of a flea cracked under the nail; creepers that plaited themselves in slimy tangles far from the sun. One vine produced a rash, another made the head of anyone resting in its shade swell up. But now what interested Macandal most were the fungi. There were those which smelled of wood rot, of medicine bottles, of cellars, of sickness, pushing through the ground in the shape of ears, ox-tongues, wrinkled excrescences, covered with exudations, opening their striped parasols in damp recesses, the homes of toads that slept or watched with open eyelids. The Mandingue crumbled the flesh of a fungus between his fingers, and his nose caught the whiff of poison.38
I quote at length to register the granular detail of this description, which nonetheless leaves the species in question anonymous (with the exception of the carob tree, a foreign cultivar). These florae exist outside the rationality of European taxonomies and hierarchies; their complexities must be touched, seen, and smelled to be known. Such “spurned growths” (“plantas siempre desdeñadas”39) are literally marginal to the plantation system in their geographical positioning, and yet they contain the key to its undoing through the fungal poison that Macandal identifies by scent. The fact that they are exterior to colonial systems of knowledge and land ownership does not imply that they are unintelligible; to the contrary, they abide by their own subtle rhythms that require careful, patient observation to decipher.
Using scent as a means of identification, Macandal associates the fungi he encounters with a wide variety of uses. The odors of “wood rot,” “medicine bottles,” and “sickness” suggest their roles as decomposers, remedies, and toxins, respectively. The fungi also provide services to nonhumans, acting as the “homes of toads.” What is most remarkable about these fruiting bodies is their ability to shape-shift, taking on the various forms of ears and ox tongues, wrinkled skin and “striped parasols.” Their diversity of shapes foreshadows the variety of animal forms that Macandal will take on after he leaves his human body. Meanwhile, their clandestine character figures the covert set of knowledges into which he and his fellow enslaved Africans have been initiated and whose complexities remain opaque if not entirely invisible to their captors.
Time in this description is peculiarly dilated. While the scene is staged as though it took place in a single morning, Macandal acquires a depth of knowledge that would have required months or even years to amass. Carpentier suggests that Macandal acquires this expertise empirically by observing the flora with all his senses, whereas historical accounts of Makandal’s poisoning campaign claim that his techniques drew on creolized knowledge with roots in Africa.40 Nonetheless, what Carpentier provides with this account is a sense of Macandal’s profound immersion in his natural environment, an acute attention to life systems that serves his needs and helps him resist the colonial plantation system. This captivation is powerful enough to warp the novel’s sense of time in the same movement by which it alters Macandal’s own consciousness.
There is a certain excess in the anonymity of the vegetation, an ability to signify beyond the capacities of language even as it appears within linguistic terms. “Camouflage,” “secret life,” and “anonymous seeds” protect the identities of the plants and fungi; in Glissantian terms the language respects their “right to opacity.”41 The impenetrable quality of these descriptions is in sharp contrast to the extensive body of literature on cash crop cultivation from the discipline of agronomy. Through the presence of unnamed living beings, the text makes space for what it cannot state outright, providing a sort of botanical wish fulfillment in response to Macandal’s hatred of the Creole planters. Indeed, the spontaneous growth of the toxic fungus performs a substitution for what he cannot achieve: the regrowth of his amputated arm. By emerging unbidden from the earth, the toxic fungus restores his lost potency and allows him to act out the desire to poison the livestock and the Creole planters of the countryside.42 In this vein, one can think of the fungus as a manifestation of the novel’s botanical unconscious, the organic means by which the landscape materializes the unspoken (and unspeakable) drives of its enslaved inhabitants. At the same time, it works against the plant-centric economy of the plantation, representing an inscrutable other to the hypervisibility of cash crops in its landscape and imagination.
After verifying the toxicity of the species with the help of a seasoned expert, Maman Loi, Macandal begins to deploy the weapon against his enemies and runs away from the plantation.43 Once unleashed from the symbiotic ecosystem in which it has emerged, the fungus exerts an uncanny agency. Consider the language of its spore-like spread: “The poison crawled across the Plaine du Nord, invading pastures and stables. . . . The most experienced herbalists of the Cap sought in vain for the leaf, the gum, the sap that might be carrying the plague.”44 Erudite plant knowledge acquired from European education is no defense against the onslaught of the unidentifiable fungal plague; soon, “putrefaction had claimed the entire region for its own.”45 This sweeping statement speaks to the rapid conquest of the toxin, which appears to act as a free agent of fungal dominion. The term putrefaction suggests that the fungus has somehow decomposed the entire region, converting the matter of the colonial landscape into rot. Although the reader may reasonably infer that the fugitive Macandal is responsible for its dissemination, this knowledge does not negate the apparent autonomy of the poison’s spread.
The dispersed pattern of the fungus’s dissemination prefigures the rebellious network of enslaved Africans that will ravage Lenormand de Mézy’s plantation years later, murdering his mistress and leaving him to die in exile. Like a network of fruiting bodies connected by a subterranean mycelium, the underground organization of the insurgency is invisible to the aristocrats. In the rebellion, as in the poisoning, nonhuman objects (namely, conch shells) spring to action across the island in synchronized, uncanny animation. Put differently, the revolution begins to mushroom.
At the same time, the fungus alters the structure of Carpentier’s narrative, denaturing its tidy oscillations between rationalized plantation landscapes and tropical wilderness zones. Harvested from the untamed monte, it infiltrates the bodies of the Creole aristocrats at the heart of plantation geographies.46 In doing so it begins to undermine the rigid stratification of colonial society. The poisoning decimates entire families of Creole aristocrats, converting the cultivated landscape of the Plaine into “the domain of worms” while making the marooned Macandal into the legendary “Lord of Poison.”47 Likewise, the revolt three decades later will leave the planter exiled and impoverished while his former slave Ti Noël is ultimately able to return to Haiti as a free man. This uprising, sparked by the fungus, will also transform the plantation from an orderly machine into ruins, breaking down the distinction between its rational planning and the tropical wilderness at its periphery. In this derelict environment, foraging skills become critical as plantations and provision grounds alike are abandoned. The novel’s conversions of passive fungus into autonomous agent, plantation into wilderness, planter into pauper, and maroon into nobility make possible another kind of transformation: the metamorphosis of Macandal beyond the boundaries of his human form.48 By breaking down the separation between the animate and the inanimate, the descriptions of sporal contagion render species distinctions so porous that Macandal can “[recover] his corporeal integrity in animal guise.”49 He transforms into mammals, birds, fish, and insects, using these various forms to watch over the plantation after he has left its bounds.50 When he is eventually captured and sentenced to execution in the town square of the Cap, the enslaved Africans maintain that he has become an insect and flown away, while the Creole onlookers believe that he has perished in the flames.51
The expansive quality of fungal growth allows us to imagine these two alternate histories at once. Sheldrake writes evocatively of the logic-bending capacities of fungal expansion: “Imagine that you could pass through two doors at once. It’s inconceivable, yet fungi do it all the time. When faced with a forked path, fungal hyphae don’t have to choose one or the other. They can branch and take both routes.”52 In other words, fungi operate with a both/and logic by growing in a pattern that confounds either/or thinking. This is a logic that infuses Carpentier’s text, entreating readers to accept two conflicting accounts of the execution scene at the same time. The story of his metamorphoses becomes conceivable after the fungus has undone the binaries dividing humans from nonhumans and plantations from wilderness, not to mention European planters from enslaved African laborers. While Carpentier himself would not have been familiar with the growth pattern of fungal hyphae, such a reading becomes possible through the practice of reading with fungi.
Fungal life appears again in the novel after the Haitian Revolution has taken place. On the citadel above Le Bonnet de l’Évêque, “A lush growth of red fungi was mounting the flanks of the main tower with the terse smoothness of brocade, having already covered the foundations and buttresses, and was spreading polyp profiles over the ocher walls.”53 In this context the fungus once again acts independently of human agency, this time “mount[ing]” the tower in the same way that an enemy army might besiege its walls. It is unlikely that it is of the same species as Macandal’s poison (neither is described by name); nonetheless it fulfills a complementary role within the landscape of the text by eroding the oppressive structure of the citadel. In other words, it decomposes its matter, making its constituent parts available for reabsorption into new forms. Its presence recalls the earlier fungal plague while prefiguring the downfall of Henri Christophe’s regime, and it assumes the texture of brocade in mockery of his French baroque style. Fungus appears once more in the novel immediately before the king’s suicide in his mountain mausoleum. This time it stains the citadel the hues of rust and blood, an omen of his imminent death.54
More than a simple foreshadowing device, the reappearance of the fungus in each of these critical moments materializes the ambient forces of social unrest among the Haitian people as a tangible marker of their submerged rage. Like the visible fruiting bodies of a fungus whose presence indicates the vast subterranean mycelium by which they are connected, the audible murmurs of social discontent in the novel are but a fraction of the larger buried mass of human resentment at the widespread conditions of enslavement and postemancipation racial injustice. The representation of this will as an enigma to the planters signals its enmeshment with the other underground force they fail to comprehend: Vodou. As Lenormand de Mézy realizes after the burning of the Cap, “The slaves evidently had a secret religion that upheld and united them in their revolts. Possibly they had been carrying on the rites of this religion under his very nose for years and years, talking with one another on the festival drums without his suspecting a thing.”55 Evidently the spiritual practices of the enslaved Africans are as opaque to the planter as the fungal poison that Macandal unleashes on the countryside.56 In other words, this network of antiplantation forces is hidden in plain sight. Carried on beneath the detection of the plantocrats, the religiously inflected political organization only warrants notice when it mushrooms into full-blown revolt.
Ruins, Decomposition, Futurity
The novel’s depiction of the Haitian Revolution concludes with scenes of ruination, a literary choice that has been read as a sign of Carpentier’s pessimism about Haiti’s future.57 Scholars have pointed to Carpentier’s elision of the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines and to his caricatural portrayal of the monarch Henri Christophe, suggesting that “Haiti was more appealing to him as an abstraction” than a reality.58 These are compelling arguments for the exoticizing character of Carpentier’s representation, a tendency which is borne out in the fact that the poisonous fungus is nowhere to be found in the historical record.59
Yet, in the spirit of thinking past Carpentier’s own partial conception of Haitian history, I want to reconsider the novel’s scenes of rot and ruination as sites of organic potentiality. What if we reconceived of the “domain of worms” into which the Plaine du Nord is converted as a compost pile of sorts, in keeping with Donna Haraway’s conception of compost as a form of sympoeisis, “becoming together”?60 Worms, like fungi, are decomposers of organic material that break down the plantation into its constituent parts so that they might be reorganized into new forms. What if “putrefaction” were a mark of possibility rather than corruption, a sign of multispecies intertwining as human institutions fall apart? My aim in suggesting this angle is not to become complicit in Carpentier’s own conception of Haitian history, which elides the perspectives of the Haitian people themselves, but rather to read his pessimistic account against the grain to make space for reimaginations of postplantation geographies.
In this vein, I want to reconsider the passage in which Ti Noël returns to the site of the plantation after the Revolution:
By the three ceibas that formed a triangle he knew that he had arrived. But nothing was left there, neither indigo works, nor drying sheds, nor barns, nor meat-curing platforms. All that remained of the house was a brick chimney once covered with ivy, which, lacking shade, had pined away in the sun; only a few flagstones buried in the mud told where the warehouses had stood; of the chapel, all that was left was the iron cock of the weathervane. Here and there stood fragments of wall which looked like the thick, broken letters of an alphabet. The pines, the grape-vines, the European trees had disappeared, as had the garden where, in olden days, the asparagus had raised its pale stalks, and artichokes had hidden their hearts in thick leaves amid the scent of mint and rosemary. The plantation had turned into a wasteland crossed by a road.61
What Carpentier describes as a “wasteland” is a radical reordering of the plantation geography, one in which European cultivars like pines, grapevines, asparagus, artichokes, mint, and rosemary have given way to a climate to which they were never suited. What remains are ceiba trees, a native Caribbean species so sacred to Vodou practitioners that its wood may not be cut.62 As the composition of the agricultural complex has fallen apart, a new syntax has taken its place, one signaled by the alphabet-like letters formed by the fragments of wall. In fragmentation, evidently, a new, unfamiliar grammar has emerged, one whose forms are not yet decipherable.
This is a scene of ruination, to be sure, but one whose elements, like letters of the alphabet, can be arranged to form new meaning. While decomposers are not named, they have evidently been at work in transforming the landscape, undoing the plant-centric economy signaled by the bygone indigo works, drying sheds, and barns. Stripped down to its constituent parts, this geography is ready to be remade into a new home for Ti Noël. In other words, its undoing makes possible an alternate futurity. It is a site of survival, not of thriving; the abject room he builds from the ruins is so small that he needs to enter on hands and knees, and he struggles to subsist on unripe fruit. After the sack of Sans-Souci, he supplements the makeshift shelter with goods from the palace, including three volumes of the Grande Encyclopédie, an upholstered armchair, and a green silk dress coat belonging to Henri Christophe. Half mad, he imagines himself the leader of a new administration. While Carpentier presents these visions with barbed satire, I read Ti Noël as agglomerating the ruins of bygone regimes into new forms, creating a heterogeneous collage through which he envisions himself as the leader of “a peaceable government.”63 This is the work of recomposition that follows decomposition: a creative assemblage of the past into new material and symbolic forms.
When surveyors come to the plain to reinstate forced labor, Ti Noël follows the example of Macandal and leaves his human body. Having taken part in the transformation of the landscape, he himself transforms into a bird, a stallion, a wasp, an ant, and then a goose. When he eventually renounces life altogether, the metamorphosis of the landscape is completed:
The armchair, the screen, the volumes of the Encyclopédie, the music box, the doll, and the moonfish rose in the air, as the last ruins of the plantation came tumbling down. The trees bowed low, tops southward, roots wrenched from the earth. . . . From that moment Ti Noël was never seen again, nor his green coat with the salmon lace cuffs, except perhaps by that wet vulture who turns every death to his own benefit and who sat with outspread wings, drying himself in the sun, a cross of feathers which finally folded itself up and flew off into the thick shade of the Bois Caïman.64
Having labored to reconfigure the ruined plantation landscape into a new form, Ti Noël allows his own matter to be recycled through digestion by the vulture, whose flight into the forest suggests new possibilities beyond the ecology of the plains. Meanwhile the detritus of bygone regimes is uprooted from the earth, allowing new lives to mushroom from its matter.
While some critics have interpreted the conclusion of Carpentier’s novel as defeatist, reading with fungi suggests an alternate decompositional potentiality. Such a reading is in keeping with Stoler’s claim that “to think with the ruins of empire is to emphasize less the artifacts of empire as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime than to attend to their reappropriations and strategic and active positioning within the politics of the present.”65 It also resonates with McKittrick’s question: “If the plantation, at least in part, ushered in how and where we live now, and thus contributes to the racial contours of uneven geographies, how might we give it a different future?”66 Fungi do not answer this question, at least not in terms that we can understand, yet they point to one element of such resignification. Inhabiting postplantation geographies means embracing processes of decomposition, knowing that rot must break down the past for new growth to take root.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the reviewers for their constructive engagement with my work. I presented a version of this article at the 2022 Black Environmentalisms Symposium at Yale University and received valuable feedback from a number of participants. I am also grateful to Pierre-Elliot Caswell for his comments on an earlier draft and to the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration and the Yale Environmental Humanities Program for funding the postdoctoral fellowship during which I completed this research.
Notes
As Elizabeth DeLoughrey notes, the word root derives from rot (“Yam, Roots, and Rot,” 70).
The context for this description is a tone of horror: the swamp is “more dreaded/than canebrake, quarry, or sun-shocked gully bed”; its forms comprise “fearful, original sinuosities!” Rot is marked as sinister in Walcott’s poetic imaginary, where it becomes associated with the unraveling of human consciousness (Collected Poems, 1948–1984, 59).
For more on progress narratives and nature, see Tsing, Mushroom at the End of the World, 5–6.
Kathryn Yusoff describes Blackness as “a historically constituted and intentionally enacted deformation in the formation of subjectivity, a deformation that presses an inhuman categorization and the inhuman earth into intimacy” (Billion Black Anthropocenes, xii). Monique Allewaert uses the term “parahuman” rather than “inhuman” to describe the position of Afro-Americans within colonial ontologies, explaining that they were not easily categorizable within the legal frameworks of the time (Ariel’s Ecology, 6).
Similarly, Sophie Chao has documented the conflicting relationship of oil palm workers to fungal pathogens in an Indonesian context (“Beetle or the Bug?,” 480–82).
In some cases, fungi can decompose leaf litter at a higher rate than bacteria. Pascoal and Cássio, “Contribution of Fungi and Bacteria.”
While Carpentier’s translator Harriet de Onís uses the spelling Macandal, Makandal predominates in the historical literature. I use the two spellings to differentiate between Macandal the character and Makandal the historical figure.
These roughly correspond to Wynter’s dichotomy of plot and plantation. Although the wilderness zones that Carpentier describes are not designated as sites of food cultivation, they offer opportunities for foraging that allow the enslaved and marooned Africans to carry on traditional ethnobotanical practices.
Acevedo and Strong, “Catalogue of Seed Plants of the West Indies”; Carpentier, Kingdom of This World, 26.
I am drawing on Jill Casid’s formulation of French colonial landscaping as “grafting and drafting” (Sowing Empire, 30–31).
Because Carpentier uses the Spanish term hongo, which can refer either to a fungus or to a mushroom (its fruiting body), I use the terms fungus and mushroom interchangeably. Carpentier, El reino de este mundo, 30.
To be clear, interspecies metamorphosis is already thinkable within Vodou cosmology. Yet, for Carpentier’s presumably European readers, the fungus serves as the agent of translation between European and Haitian epistemologies, creating a precedent for material transformation that makes Macandal’s metamorphosis more legible.
In her excellent analysis, which bridges Haitian and European epistemologies, Allewaert traces the history of macandal packets (magical amulets related to the Central African nkisi) across the Atlantic. In reading the Mémoire of Sébastien-Jacques Courtin, the judge who sentenced Makandal to death, she shows that African diasporic fetishes like the ones he used were understood as poisons by colonial authorities. Courtin lists bones, nails, strangler fig roots, and “etc.” as ingredients. Whether this “etc.” category includes fungi is not clear (Allewaert, “Super Fly,” 459–69).
Allewaert has written extensively on dismemberment in the colonial Caribbean. She explains, “Afro-Americans drew on the brutal colonial circumstance of dismemberment to produce models of personhood that developed from the experience of parahumanity and in relation to animal bodies” (Ariel’s Ecology, 6–7). These models, rather than recuperating the category of the human, conceived of alternate modes of being. Indeed, this complex relation to nonhuman ecologies finds expression in the text vis-à-vis Macandal’s eventual metamorphosis into an insect.
It is striking that the name “Maman Loi” translates to “Mother Law.” Her knowledge of Vodou encompasses a set of laws that govern the workings of the natural world. In the novel, these laws transcend the laws of the colonial government.
I use Carpentier’s Spanish term monte here because it carries a particular meaning for the Cuban author in the context of the Afro-Cuban Regla de Ochá religion. It is the title of the anthropologist Lydia Cabrera’s book El monte. Rather than referring exclusively to the geography of the mountain or hill, monte can also describe any source of healing herbs, one that may be as small as an urban yard in Havana. Cabrera writes, “No hay negro, pues, que para la salud de su cuerpo y de su alma, no recurra al monte” (El monte, 68). (There is no black man, then, who does not turn to the monte for the health of his body and his soul.) In the context of the novel, the monte is a wilderness zone notable for its abundance of useful flora to be foraged.
In this sense, the fungus facilitates the aesthetic strategy of “marvelous realism” that Carpentier proposes in the novel’s prologue, even as its conspicuous absence from the historical record undermines his claim to Latin American regional exceptionalism. Historical sources that describe Makandal’s poisoning campaign name wild herbs or stolen arsenic as the toxins in question. Those who describe herbal poisons mention derivatives of the Manchineel tree as a natural poison; the civilian assessor Dr. Rufz de Lavison also suggested manioc juice as a potential source of poisoning in nearby Martinique. Skeptics point to the large quantities of these substances that would be needed to cause death in humans, as well as to the prevalence of infectious disease such as cholera, yellow fever, and dysentery in the French colonies at the time, whose effects could easily be mistaken for poisoning. What is important to remember in considering this debate is that poisoning had a different meaning for diasporic Africans than it did for planters in Saint-Domingue; what was called poisoning by the colonists encompassed a broad array of spiritual and medical practices among the enslaved and marooned population. Savage, “‘Black Magic’ and White Terror,” 644–45; Fick, Making of Haiti, 66; Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 92–94.
The capaciousness or flux in the representation of Macandal’s bodily forms is in keeping with Tiffany Lethabo King’s interpretation of Black fungibility as not only an index of Black death but also “as a site of deferral or escape from the current entrapments of the human” (“Labor of (Re)reading Plantation Landscapes,” 1024).
Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert claims that while Carpentier presents these two contradictory interpretations of the execution scene, he tacitly assumes his readers will know that Macandal has actually died rather than transformed into an insect, as suggested by his caricatural descriptions of Vodou rituals elsewhere in the novel (“Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows,” 126). While I agree with her categorization of this representation as a “product of its time,” I also believe that the success of the novel’s “marvelous realism” depends on the reader’s suspension of disbelief at the possibility of such supernatural events as Macandal’s metamorphosis.
While Carpentier mocks the planter’s ignorance of the enslaved Africans’ religion and culture, he too betrays a lack of understanding in his exoticization of their rituals. Carpentier himself does not appear to recognize that the fungus is facilitating the novel’s “marvelous realism”; he believes that he is depicting something essential about the place itself. Yet the fungi disseminate by a logic of their own, operating in ways that exceed his control. Indeed, if we return to Glissant’s idea of the “right to opacity,” then the poisonous fungus (whose species we never learn) plays an important role in protecting the opacity of Makandal himself. That is, we see the limits of Carpentier’s own knowledge of the practice of macandalism, into whose mysteries he has never been initiated. The fungi stand in for events beyond his comprehension, their anonymity a mark of his outsider status. As Annaliese Hoehling argues, “Rather than residing inherently in the mystery of a geography or in an ‘othered’ set of rituals or beliefs, the marvelous real occurs upon recognition of a gap as a gap” (“Minoritarian ‘Marvelous Real,’” 264). The fungus marks the incongruousness of Carpentier’s Eurocentric epistemology with that of the Haitian people he encounters, sprouting up at the limits of his understanding. At the same time, it provides readers with a model of spontaneous growth and metamorphosis to substitute for their presumed lack of familiarity with Haitian cosmology. In this sense, the fungus is the medium of imperfect translation between the imaginaries of Carpentier’s readers and his subjects, resembling, in this sense, the communicative capacities of subterranean mycorrhizal networks.
Paravisini-Gebert, “Haitian Revolution in Interstices and Shadows,” 122; Léger, “Faithless Sight,” 87.
It seems more likely to be drawn from a European imagination, where fungi played an important role in pre-Christian folklore and religious practices (Comandini and Rinaldi, “Ethnomycology in Europe,” 347).
