Hadriana in All My Dreams

by René Depestre

In order to deal with that double inevitability, Christ himself (if ever he let himself get mixed up in Haitian affairs) would be as armless as the Venus de Milo.”

it somehow became commonplace to insist on a causal relationship between the skin color, facial structure, and follicular attributes of various human groupings, on the one hand, and their particular cultural and natural developments on the other. As a function of these racializations of colonial conflicts, the essence of African ethnicities was reduced to a fantasy of the “inferior nature of the Negro,” while the essence of the ethnic groups emerging from Europe was elevated to the no-less-fantastic notion of the “superior nature of the white man.”