Word: haitianize
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...mystifying group of performers seems to have wandered into the wrong theatre: a wriggling quartet which calls itself "Kurt Jons and His Dancers," and which makes a half-hearted and misplaced attempt at some exotic Haitian dances...
...Trujillo, giving up the presidency does not necessarily mean giving up power. His countrymen learned that much in 1938. The year before, Trujillo's soldiers butchered thousands of Haitians who had settled on Dominican land near the Haitian border. The massacre made the regime so unpopular with other American governments that Trujillo decided to "retire" for a while, installed a puppet President for the 1938-42 term. * But the Benefactor's dictatorial grip remained as tight as ever...
...Voegeli picked the subjects to be painted. Two American directors of Haiti's Centre d'Art, DeWitt Peters and Selden Rodman, assigned and supervised the work. The artists were bound to be influenced by the sugary religious chromos imported from Europe and tacked up in thousands of Haitian homes. Rodman kept insisting that they also incorporate Haitian scenes of the sort they generally paint. The result is an arresting but badly integrated mixture of "pious" and "native" art, made vital by rich colors and the intermittent lightning of individual inspiration...
...Devil is black, or else dark red, like Damballa [a voodoo deity]." Philome Obin prayed every day before going to work on the center panel above the altar, stuck a chromo cliche "Eye of God" in one corner and painted a strangely feminine, death-rigid Christ crucified in a Haitian street. Castera Bazile, the only one of the Haitian muralists with a monumental sense of figure composition, used a similar street scene for his Ascension, made his angels look like flower petals in a whirlwind...
Living Roots. Some critics call Prefet DuFaut's Temptation unconsciously Byzantine; others can see no sign of Christian elements in it. Wilson Bigaud, who attends voodoo rites more often than church, made his Wedding at Cana a lively Haitian party dominated by a Christ with a weak, drained face and a mighty hand ("He is praying that the miracle will be a success," Bigaud says). Leontus' Annunciation, boldly composed to fill a difficult, wedge-shaped corner, has a full measure of the urgency that marks the cathedral's best murals...