Towards the end of Dany Laferrière’s Vers la sud (2006)—published in English as Heading South in a translation by Wayne Grady in 2009—Missie Abel, a young woman from a wealthy French family living in Port-au-Prince, meets the son of the domestic servants for sex in the toilets of an exclusive restaurant. The pair are overheard by the headmistress of an elite school. In a novel which—as we shall see—performs a plurivocal literariness, shifting between different styles for the starkly different socio-economic brackets in Duvalier’s Haiti, the respectable European ‘novel of manners’ is torn asunder at this point as the bourgeois world of appearances and the repressed realm of cross-racial, interclass desire surface in on one another. Like in Memórias where the priest is discovered in bed with the ‘Gypsy’, the realms of order and disorder collide. Yet Heading South shows how sexual relations remain rigorously structured by the race and class politics of neoliberal Haiti. In this chapter I argue that in Heading South a form of social and economic informality facilitates sexual engagement between Western women and young Haitian men at the same time that it prevents resource redistribution through formal wages or benefits, or indeed the resource sharing that would attend formal relations such as marriage. In Heading South, Western women travel to Haiti for sex with young men of colour whom they fetishise, but they also express the endemic racism of capitalist society, which functions to foreclose any possibility of formal, equitable, consensual relations between them. The result is a kind of social informality where structural racism and its attendant economic disadvantages are concealed by interracial sexual relations. Whereas Quijano has shown how race is an economic category constructed under colonialism but which has outlived it (534), I suggest that under the contradictions of neoliberalism it becomes necessary to obscure the economic category of race at the same time as it is exploited as part of the regime of accumulation.

For the Warwick Research Collective (WReC), Tayeb Salih’s 1966 novel Season of Migration to the North is a text which “link[s] political oppression to the farther shores of the erotic” (93). But they contend, “an adequate interpretation of this nexus is yet to be produced – indeed it is notable that this has in large been circumvented in the existing discussion” (93). The linking of politics and eroticism is a common theme across various literatures, but we see it appear with high frequency in (post)colonial fiction and criticism, such as Mayotte Capécia’s Je suis Martiniquaise (1948), Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966), Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), Oonya Kempadoo’s Tide Running (2001), and Dany Laferrière’s Heading South (2006). The fact that contemporary discussions of these texts fail to grapple with the relationship between the erotic and the political perhaps reveals something about the discourse of sexuality in a postcolonial context. In Alenka Zupančič’s reading of the work of Jacques Lacan, the erotic is in fact what disguises the essential negativity of sexuality as such. The pleasure of eroticism can therefore be substituted, or sublimated, for various other pleasures. If we put this in the context of cultural representation, we will see that representations of sexuality can often be read as displacements of other political content, such as unequal gender or racial dynamics. The representation of sexuality in Heading South reveals much about the exploitation of labour in neoliberal Haiti.

The changing representation of sexuality through the above list of texts bears out Fanon’s crucial point in Black Skin, White Masks, which is that the categories of sexuality and race are both economically determined and therefore in the final analysis historical. Writing on Je suis Martiniquaise, for example, Fanon himself shows how Jean Veneuse’s sexuality is deeply bound up with a desire to resolve the contradictions of his hybrid subjectivity—a condition overdetermined by the ideology and material unevenness of colonial hegemony. By contrast, Laferrière’s representation of the influx of Western sex tourism into Haiti; the consequent reorientation of local people’s energies overwhelmingly towards servicing this economy; the proliferation of casual, often exploitative, sexual relationships with asymmetrical power dynamics; all register the specific velocities of Haiti’s imbrication in the neoliberal world-economy during the later years of Jean-Claude Duvalier’s dictatorship. Whilst WReC suggest that Salih, writing under conditions of late imperialism, makes connections between the political and ‘the further shores of the erotic’ (my emphasis), I suggest that Laferrière inverts this model. The representation of casual and exploitative sexual relationships which draw the Haitian workforce away from the urgent task of (re)building their nation after nearly two centuries of repression is in fact a displacement of a characteristically neoliberal exploitation of labour. What will also be of interest to us here is Laferrière’s representation of the partial engagement with a culture and economy that the sexual relation affords and how this asymmetrical relation reveals the persistence of colonialist fears of miscegenation. This partial engagement is analogous to the partial economic relation of neoliberalism—its tapping of the energy of ultra-low wage workforces without the imposition of liberal reforms, for example. In this coexistence of the ‘structural adjustment’ of Haiti to a modern service economy, with the colonial-era fears of racial miscegenation, we see the combinatory logic of neoliberalism.

The idea that sex tourism is a form of economic informality, and generates a form of social informality, brings us back to the work of Cândido and Schwarz discussed in the previous chapter. Attempting to import Cândido’s and Schwarz’s ideas of informality to Haiti will irk some scholars—these ideas were formed in response to unique regional phenomena in nineteenth-century Brazil and have no purchase in contemporary Haiti, some will argue. But the fact that the young Haitian men, Charlie, Fanfan, and a group of sex workers known as the Magic Boys, shuttle between the different social realms of Haiti—the international beachfront hotels, the Ambassadorial compound, their working-class homes in which they receive their sexual partners, the tennis clubs—shows that there is a similar narrative dynamic in Heading South to that captured in Memórias. As I will show below, the huge supply of casual labour provided by the coexistence of slave and wage economies in nineteenth-century Brazil persists in Haiti due to the coexistence of deregulated capitalism (imposed repeatedly by the IMF, World Bank, and supported by various U.S.-backed coups) and a large illicit economy of “child domestic slavery”; “human trafficking”; “sex-tourism, organ theft, and child pornography” (Lionnet 231). To find work, the young men in the novel must move between the realm of the “small and very concentrated elite” (Hallward xiii), and the “deathworld” of a “turbulent and changing world-system” that exists alongside it (WReC 68). As in Brazil, then, an intermediate class of workers—neither victims of modern slavery and trafficking, nor members of the elite—must move between the worlds of order and disorder, as Cândido has it.

Haiti as a contact point for the bourgeois world and its dialectical counterpart is encoded in the fabric of the narrative. In the original French, Vers le sud subtly performs an idea of a universal French literariness. “While it captures the voices and subjectivities of its [Global] Northern protagonists”, argues Lionnet, Laferrière’s style “neglects to convey the idioms and accents of Haiti’s population” (234). Lionnet finds Laurent Cantet’s 2005 film adaptation “succeeds in ways that Laferrière’s original text does not”, by providing “francophone and creolophone articulations” (234). I would suggest, however, that Laferrière uses the French language and European modernist tropes in order to perform their failure to capture Haitian reality. The simple French that Fanfan uses to narrate himself in the novel’s first lines recalls a modernist Bildungsroman such as Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but at the same time suggests that this is not a book to be taken seriously as ‘literature’:

J’ai dix-sept ans (on me donne facilement beaucoup plus à cause de ma taille et de mon caractère taciturne) et je vis à Port-au-Prince, sur la rue Capois, près de la place du Champ-de-Mars. J’habite avec ma mère et ma jeune sœur. Mon père est mort, il y a quelques années. Ma mère est encore très belle. De grands yeux liquids, des pommettes saillantes et un sourire triste. Une sorte de beauté tragique, très prisée chez les hommes. (7)

Phrases such as ‘beauté tragique’ seem out of place in such a simple, economical, exposition passage. The same false ring can be heard in a subsequent argument between Fanfan and his mother, which takes place entirely in a mannered French (rather than Haitian Creole) and sees each character neatly articulates opposing philosophical positions, as in an English Novel of Ideas such as Middlemarch:

Verse

Verse — Tu comprends, Fanfan, c’est grâce à elle si ta sœur peut fréquenter cette école. C’est une vraie chance pour nous que Maryse aille à cette école… Bien sûr, si ton père était là, cela aurait été different, mais il n’est pas là et je dois me débrouiller toute seule. Heureusement qu’il m’avait acheté cette machine à coudre Singer, sinon je ne sais pas comment j’aurais pu faire. Mme Saint-Pierre est une providence pour cette maison, et c’est sûrement ton père qui nous l’a envoyée. Où qu’il soit, je sais qu’il s’occupe de nous… — C’est pour ça que tu passes la nuit à coudre les robes de Mme Saint-Pierre sans être payee… (15)

Fanfan’s mother is a caricature of grateful servitude here, which Fanfan castigates in a voice of bourgeois rationalism: ‘why do you consent to your own exploitation?’ The almost folkloric element of the dead father who has left the family a Singer sewing machine feels imported as well, given that deceased mothers are a far more common trope in the Caribbean novel.Footnote 1

Laferrière describes a concrete struggle—the exploitation of a single mother’s domestic labour in hugely difficult economic circumstances—in the style(s) of a literary form which has historically attended such economic circumstances. For Caribbean critics like Sylvia Wynter (but also Ian Watts, Simon Gikandi, and Maurice Vambe) the European novel is the quintessential cultural form of global capitalist modernity, an edifice built by the exploitation of slave labour in plantation colonies such as Haiti. Laferrière therefore gestures towards the aspects of Haitian reality that this form fails to capture, and this project is bound up with his representation of sex. In a particularly horrific scene which, it should be mentioned before going any further, depicts sexual assault, the wealthy Christina admonishes her high-achieving daughter June’s apparent lack of interest in boys. June will later rape the domestic servant, Absolom. Much of the scene dispassionately relates what Christina observes, as she looks on with joy as her daughter—to her mind—comes of age: “June, sa June, est en train de baisser froidement le pantalon d’Absolom”; ‘June, her June’ (47). At one point the narrative observes Absolom’s “sexe chauffé à blanc”, his ‘white hot penis’, literally whitewashing his pain and the fraught racial history of the island (47). Here more than anywhere else in the novel we feel the dissonance of a cataclysmic event mediated by a form which ignores or represses the trauma. I elaborate below on how such a scene might be shaped by the exploitation of labour in Haiti. By situating a terrible event in a narrative voice largely controlled by a French-speaking, bourgeois woman, Laferrière reveals the tensions between francophonie strategies of representation and postcolonial reality. For Oana Sabo, this very tension has animated much of Laferrière’s fiction. In 2013, Laferrière was elected a chair of the prestigious Académie française, which “explicitly embraces an ideology of language defense and promotion” (129). “[T]he académie has sought from its beginnings to render the French language pure and eloquent, as an official standard for all” (128). Laferrière’s work has “achieved consecration through national and international literary prizes” (128), he has “accept[ed] the French language as a vehicle to reach global audiences” (130), and most recently as a member of the académie, he has “inscribe[d] his name and works in the longue durée of French culture” (Sabo 129). But at the same time he “sets his works in Québec, Haiti, and the United States, considers French a colonial language, and critiques the term francophonie” (128). Laferrière “does not attempt to smooth the contradiction between his transnational positioning and the national character of the académie” (129), and we see this tension in a bourgeois mother gleefully narrate her daughter assaulting a domestic worker—here bourgeois French consciousness is attacked for its detachment from the pain of transnational precarity even when it occurs in full view.Footnote 2

The bourgeois lives—the tennis club, the ambassadorial estate—rendered in francophone language and literary conventions in the novel, and the harsher material realities that this style displaces or obscures, create a shifting and uncertain register. Heading South thereby moves between what Cândido calls the realms of order and disorder in a deeply divided society. Even when we see cross-class conquests, sex work, or sexual assault, the measured French of the narrative creates the same pervasive unseriousness that Cândido observes in Memórias. The apparent informality of such a materially divided society where a large labour surplus must criss-cross the city in search of casual work is what creates this ostensibly unserious aesthetic. Just as in nineteenth-century Brazil where cheeky young freemen, perhaps descended from slaves or the persecuted indigenous community, mixed with the respectable women and did them favours, the same sense of relaxed and tolerant racial and class harmony might seem to obtain in place of extramarital interracial casual relationships like Laferrière’s Haiti. But as we have seen above, Laferrière subtly undermines this sense of relaxation, of the Caribbean as a place where nothing serious could possibly happen, by making the realities that global capitalism obscures protrude into the French cultural forms he works within.

Caribbean Fiction and Neoliberalism

I take Heading South to be exemplary of the deep impact that neoliberalism has had on the Caribbean region. To show why this is the case, it will first be necessary to explain how the world-economic model of neoliberalism (discussed in the Introduction) manifested specifically in the Caribbean, and some of the cultural registrations of this. As we have already discussed, neoliberalism has increasingly come to denote a deeply contradictory and obfuscatory social logic with a broad range of economic, political, and cultural manifestations. But neoliberalism began life as a specific set of liberal economic policies, the first of which began to be implemented in the core capitalist countries in the early 1970s. In the wake of “the suffocating torpor of the stagflation that brought the long postwar boom to a wimpering [sic] end”, neoliberalism constituted “a seemingly new and quite different regime of capital accumulation” (Harvey 252). “Set in motion during the severe recession of 1973–1975 and further consolidated during the equally savage deflation of 1981–1982 (the “Reagan” recession), the new regime is marked by a startling flexibility with respect to labour processes, labour markets, products, and patterns of consumption” (Harvey 252). For the ‘regulationist’ school of economics, this lurch towards ‘flexible accumulation’ constitutes an attack on regular routines of both blue- and white-collar work inaugurated in American factories at the beginning of the twentieth century but widely popularised during the postwar boom in the core capitalist nations:

Fordism is based on the mass production of homogeneous products, using the rigid technology of the production line with dedicated machines and standardised (‘Taylorist’) work routines which secure increased productivity through economies of scale, the deskilling and homogenisation of the labour force, and the intensification of labour. (Clarke 73)

According to the regulationists, however, business leaders, economic think tanks, and politicians decided in the late 1960s and early 1970s that “without the discipline of redundancy and mass unemployment on the workforce there was no possibility of overcoming the stagflationary crisis of the period and carrying out the economic restructuring necessary to meet the challenge from Japan and the Far East” (Costello, Michie, and Milne 62). In order for capitalism to overcome its postwar crisis, then, capital accumulation had to become much more flexible and the intransigent demands of the workforce for liveable wages and benign labour routines had to be crushed. Caribbean nations felt the full force of this onslaught, and we will see shortly how this attack on organised labour played out in the region and the impact this had on Caribbean fiction. First, however, we need to follow Neil Lazarus in introducing a necessary caveat into this narrative of the neoliberal ‘casualisation’ of labour (Nationalism and Cultural Practice 32).

For Lazarus, “it is important for us to counter the tacit First Worldism” of the ‘regulationist’ narrative (Nationalism and Cultural Practice 32). As we have seen, the regulationist narrative assumes that the casualisation of labour stems from an attack on routinised, Fordist labour practices. But it is crucial to note that these sometimes relatively benign structures of working life were never globally dispersed. In the wake of decolonisation, postcolonial governments sought to recover from the sclerotic effects of colonialism and build their newly independent nations through widespread civil engineering projects. These projects promised to orient the young nation’s workforce towards highly socially constructive labours—the building of roads, hospitals, and schools. But sooner or later these projects would be forestalled either by barefaced military coercion as in Churchill’s invasion of Guyana in 1953; by covert action as in the U.S.-sponsored coup in Chile in 1973; or through the use of ‘soft power’ and economic incentive as in South Africa’s implementation of the neoliberal Growth, Employment and Redistribution plan in 1996. All of this in order that the core capitalist nations might retain the formerly colonised world as a source of cheap labour. Very little of the ‘Third World’, then, has ever enjoyed a time when much of its workforce was employed in the deep, horizontal, comradely labour which brings about the redistribution of wealth and the material construction of an egalitarian nation. So whilst the paring back of the state, the privatisation of public space and assets, and the casualisation of labour, was felt across and the international division of labour, postcolonial nations had much less public infrastructure, many fewer enabling civic institutions, a much smaller progressive bourgeoisie, to fall back on. As Lazarus puts it, “[t]he thirty years from 1968 to the present have borne witness, then, not just to the crisis of postwar Fordism and the collapse of the welfare state, but to the global reassertion and consolidation of “the logic of unilateral capital” ” (Amin qtd. in Lazarus 34).

What Laferrière’s representation of sexuality and labour in the neoliberal Caribbean facilitates, then, is a reflection on the combination of different sorts of labour from different phases of global capitalism. The ‘global reassertion and consolidation of “the logic of unilateral capital” ’ to which Caribbean nations were subject so shortly after decolonisation resulted in a concatenation of these nonsynchronous forms of labour—the colonialist echoes of the paternalistic domestic labour of Charlie’s family and the clientelist seamstress work of Fanfan’s mother, combined with neoliberal service economy labour in Haiti’s hotels, and the shadow service economy of the labourless, pleasureless work of sex that many of the island’s young men are engaged in.

It is by reading Caribbean fiction in these terms of combined and uneven development that we are able to counter what Lazarus calls the First Worldism of the regulationist school. Such theories, Lazarus argues, “lay undue stress on the portentousness and “radical novelty” of contemporary social and economic developments” (Nationalism 35). Exemplary of this tendency, for Lazarus, is the work of Martin Jacques, who “wrote that “[o]ur world is being remade. Mass production, the mass consumer, the big city, big-brother state, the sprawling housing estate, and the nation-state are in decline[”]” (qtd. in Lazarus, Nationalism 35). What this narrative occludes, however, is the experience of capitalism in the periphery of the world-system. For in these places there was no mass production or mass consumer to change, but just people who had worked in and around the estates of the colonial bourgeoisie only to be thrust into hotels. As Lazarus writes:

In trying to think about the historical phenomenon or experience being addressed here, it is helpful first of all to examine the content of the term “our” that Jacques deploys so cavalierly in his first sentence. For it is clear that the subjects of “our world” do not include those people in the core capitalist countries – demarcated by their class position, from “industrial heartland” to “rust belt” to “silicon valley” – whose livelihoods and security have been undermined by the new strategies of resurgent post-Keynesian capitalism. Nor does “our world” include the subaltern classes from the “Third World” – those “massed up workers,” as A. Sivanandan has described them in his devastating and largely unanswerable critique of the social vision animating “New Times” – “on whose greater immiseration and exploitation the brave new western world of post-Fordism is being erected.” For in Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, and Kenya, the tide of poor people – landless peasants or “rural proletarians” – flooding from the countryside to the cities in search of jobs continues to rise exponentially. (Nationalism 35–6)

As various critics have noted, the experience of these ‘massed-up workers’ in the periphery of the world-system is inextricably bound up with the ‘accordionisation’ of different forms of labour—the awkward coexistence of casual service economy work with paternalistic domestic labour on the grand estates of American diplomats or the last remaining members of a settler bourgeoisie. Lazarus usefully glosses Michael Rustin’s argument to this effect:

[“the New Times” intellectuals’] conception of Thatcherism as inaugurating and enforcing a categorical break with the Fordist-Keynesian welfare state is both too extreme and too schematic. “Post-Fordism” – the term functioning as a key signifier of Thatcherite Britain for the “New Times” thinkers – “is better seen as one ideal-typical model or strategy of production and regulation, co-present with others in a complex historical ensemble, than as a valid totalizing description of an emerging social formation here and now.” In these terms, post-Fordist production is integrated with Fordist and other forms of production in both the core capitalist states and the peripheral formations of the world system[.] (40–1)

What neoliberalisation produces then is the combination of different sorts of labour—clientelist, service economy, and paternalistic—in the case of Haiti. The sexuality is a displacement for the coerced but apparently labourless work of sex which disguises the lack of real value creation. But the ‘work’ of sex is also itself a displacement of the truly coerced work going on in Haiti which is the ultra-low wage manual labour.

Interclass and interracial and sexual relations are a common theme across Caribbean fiction, but as Molly Nichols notes, the relationship of sexuality and political economy is little discussed in scholarship on the region. Yet political economy and sexuality have been brought together in texts from across the Caribbean’s different language communities and regions. To justify my decision to discuss ‘the Caribbean’ as a single unit within the periphery of the world-system, I look briefly at Oonya Kempadoo’s 2001 novel Tide Running, written in English and set in Tobago—a location represented within the novel as peripheral even to Trinidad. The novel features a relationship between a young Tobagan man, Cliff, and a couple, Bella and Peter. Readers will likely sense the stark inequality between the couple and Cliff—Bella is from affluent origins in Trinidad and is married to the wealthy European corporate lawyer Peter, while Cliff is a poor and precariously employed twenty-year old whose main occupation is his involvement in the island’s minute domestic fishing industry. The intimacy and proximity experienced between these two parties functions to obscure or displace the fact that they are from opposing sides of the international division of labour, and a fully equitable relationship is structurally impossible.

In order to demonstrate Laferrière’s intervention in this kind of fiction, I want to gesture towards how Tide Running’s own grasp of sexuality and labour is less coherent. For Nichols, while the novel “carefully negotiates” questions of intimacy and exploitation, and thus “opens up […] possibilities” for complexity and, ultimately, revolutionary resistance to capitalist modernisation, “they are eventually foreclosed” (148). While this foreclosure is due to “the violence of the state” for Nichols, I would suggest the novel effects a more grievous repression of political content by instead pathologising Cliff. At the novel’s climax Bella and Peter begin to suspect that Cliff is stealing from their opulent house. Cliff absconds and is eventually arrested and beaten (hence Nichols’s focus on state violence), but before we can dwell on the question of whether Cliff is innocent of theft but has fled due to fears of police brutality, or whether he is guilty but was driven to his crimes due to the massive inequalities of Tobagan society, the young man goes on a rampage in which he escapes from custody and steals a car. This portion of the narrative is delivered as a flurry of schizophrenic writing, with the implication that Cliff is suffering from some form of kleptomania and is unable to control his pathological urge to steal and destroy property. On my reading, there is insufficient evidence in the text to suggest Cliff has been driven to this—which is to say that Tide Running does no work to represent Cliff’s predicament as structurally influenced or determined.

As a final point of useful comparison with Heading South, I suggest that where Tide Running is successful in proffering some resistance to modernisation is in its representation of Cliff’s non-sexual labours which are never quite subsumed by capital—in contradistinction to the sexual labour of young men in Heading South. With Nichols’s reading we are afforded the opportunity to read Tide Running in Adornian terms, as a moment in which the potential for resistance to capital is offered, if ultimately shut down as all resistance—for Adorno—finally is. While the Tobagan landscape, and Cliff’s connection with and mediation of it, is at least partially authentic and ‘untainted’ by the violence of extraction, in Nichols’s reading, I want to query this point and suggest instead that if we can locate any authentic, unreified, or only partially reified consciousness in the novel, it is in Cliff’s immature, transitional consciousness of the labours of the fisherman Stompy and his sister Lynette in which he performs an adjunct role.

Cliff describes his work helping Stompy not in abstract terms but as a form of absorption in the socio-ecology of Tobago. After leaving home early one morning, Cliff describes his stance and aspect within his environment rather than the actual tasks he performs:

Road cooler under me feet. Still chewing me bread slow, carrying me shirt on one shoulder. I clean out the yampy from me eyes, scrape inside me noseholes. Past Masta Barbar closed-up shop and Arnold Minimart. Past the junction, community centre, Bingey Rumshop, the school. All still closed-up. Reach the end-a the village by Mystery Tombstone, turn down to the sea. Breeze quiet on this side. Fine-fine leaves on the big tamarind tree only trembling. Out past the point, white caps frisking and winking but in the bay by the jetty, the sea just lapsing. Little fishing boats rocking, dipping side to side. A yacht anchored and the big old trawler still there, the one the fella live on. Tide up. Only a small strip’a sand beach showing, rainbow colours moving on a engine-oil patch. Stompy at the end of the jetty fixing and loading, he big tough belly shakin’ as he thump the gas container down in the boat. (7)

While engaged in assisting Stompy, Cliff feels himself a part of the space and rhythm of the island: as he moves across the bay he notes subtle shifts in the wind and movement of the trees (whose name—of precolonial origin—he knows). Yet when he actually witnesses the manual labour that Stompy must perform without his assistance, Cliff’s language lapses into abstraction: ‘fixing and loading’. Here I am making the same distinctions as those that Neil Lazarus reads in Anita Desai’s Village by the Sea, whereby we note “the abstracting quality of the language used to describe Hari’s work – the hoeing and digging and pulling are relatively unanchored as real activities” (77). “It is evident”, argues Lazarus, “that he [Hari] is already thinking of his efforts here in terms of exchange- rather than use-value”, which is “determined by its aim, mode of operation, object, means, and result”, in contradistinction to the production of exchange-values wherein “qualitative factors are homogenised, de-particularised and rendered comparable” (Marx qtd. in Lazarus 77–8). Thus Cliff is engaged in the island’s local economy, but his consciousness is in a transitional state from the adjunct, use-value oriented labour of the young apprentice, to the exchange-value-oriented labour of one of the island’s principal fisherman which constitutes part of the ‘ground bass’ of production in a region ever more tightly bound into the world-system.

Even while working hard out in the bay, Cliff observes his surroundings as a functional totality. By performing the task of fishing as part of the island’s division of labour, Cliff’s consciousness becomes attuned to the otherwise invisible rhythm and function of the Tobagan lifeworld:

Behind him [Stompy] the flat sand-line, a green band-a hills behind grey coconut-trunk matchsticks, then the smooth morning-blue sky. Bright colour pirogues all round the jetty tippling like floating insects, bowed bamboo fishing-poles like whiskers dipping. They all listening to the lonesome zinc roof at the end-a the jetty preaching down to them. Swarmed to the lights in the night, then morning ketch them still scatter round the jetty-end, tipping and listening to the preacher roof over the old diesel pumps. Pelicans and gulls does come and join the congregation, stirring them up, diving into the sea and clapping they wings when the roof sing out. On a afternoon, boys’d be jumping off the jetty, splashing and whooping back at the roof while the boats watch on. (9)

Yet Tide Running demonstrates how this kind of work is increasingly contingent in Tobago—something done in a transitional phase, not to full participation in use-value production, but to the kinds of informal, sexual work, fully subsumed within the international division of labour, that Cliff (and the characters in Heading South) will go on to perform. Later when Cliff and his younger brother Ossie visit Bella and Peter at their house, Ossie proudly declares that he is unencumbered with the kind of work that Cliff seems to enjoy:

Verse

Verse ‘Nah. I ain’ get nuthing yet. Cliff does go out fishing with a fella, Stompy. Not me, nah. Roasting in da hot sun all day, making you skin black and crispy, hand hard like leather, all you mouth crack up. Every chances he get, he like to go by the sea. There in it like a fish. Da’ na’ for me nuh!’   ‘So you don’t like snorkelling and so on?’   ‘Sea is fuh fish. Not for me. I like jumping jetty wit’ dem boys, but dat is it.’ (52)

Here Ossie reveals himself to be part of the group of boys who Cliff observes jumping off the jetty as he works out at sea. From the perspective of this group of young people, not (yet) tasked with a job, manual labour takes the body too close to the natural world—exposing the former to the sun, but also threatening to turn one into some ostensibly lower form of life (‘sea is fuh fish. Not for me’.). Ossie has internalised the idea that use-value labour is hard (but, crucially, hard to no end; he views Cliff’s work as entirely voluntary) and uncivilised. This approach to use-value production has been instilled by the economic restructuring of the Caribbean region whereby labour was oriented away from the much-feared socialist or social democratic and nationalistic projects of building infrastructure and equitable civic institutions, and towards the production of exchange-value for the world market particularly in the form of tourism.

In light of this, Tide Running does suggest that Ossie’s main activities, namely idleness and hypersexuality, are reframed as forms of work in Tobago. After Cliff and Ossie’s mother learns that Ossie has had many sexual encounters with women from across the island, she describes him as “servicing” the town, a slippage that invokes the neoliberal service economy in which Caribbean workers were increasingly occupied after the IMF structural adjustments of the region. In the imaginary of neoliberalism, the racialising traits of idleness and hypersexuality can be made to perform a function in the world-economy. Indeed, in his sexual relationship with Bella and Peter, Cliff will be drawn away from fishing and the sea and into the role of fetishised object of the wealthy couple’s desire. To them, Cliff is part of the Tobagan ecology that they consume from the ‘demand’ side of the international division of labour.

An informal economy of sex work therefore appears in Tide Running as part of its manifest content. I want to argue, however, that other texts—particularly Heading South—have been more successful in representing the way the informal sector is produced and then exploited, an apparently aberrant socio-economic form arising in the (semi-)periphery which is nonetheless drawn back into the international division of labour.

Informal Aesthetics in Heading South

Haiti is one of the most unevenly developed nations. The stark contrast of garrisoned hilltop suburbs such as Petionville and the township of Bidonville clinging to the hillside beneath is comparable to that between Alexandra township and the surrounding wealthy suburbs in Johannesburg. A single street or wall is the faultline between two different worlds: “The poor live in a world of radical and permanent insecurity, on the very edge of survival and with nothing to fall back on”, while “members of the elite inhabit a parallel but very different sort of insecurity; barricaded behind walls of paranoia and contempt” (Hallward 3). Yet there is also a perverse intimacy between these two camps. “According to the IMF’s “trade restrictiveness index,” Haiti’s economy is four times more open than that of Canada or the US; Haiti, Oxfam notes, “now has one of the most liberal trade regimes in the world” ” (Hallward 6). After the recently elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide was deposed in a US-backed coup in 1991, an unelected government backed by USAID, and the US National Endowment for Democracy swept in to impose “a neo-liberal economic agenda” which would “bring Haiti into the new world order appendaged to the US as a source for markets and cheap labor” (Regan 12). A number of Haitian and US businesses are thus dependent on the Haitian working-class.

The relationship of Haiti’s transnational elite to domestic labour is one of both dependency and fear. Such intimacy and distance, seen here as part of world-systemic inequalities, corresponds to Fanon’s structural understanding of racism in Black Skin, White Masks. For Fanon, structural divisions barricade people within their respective races. “The white man is sealed in his whiteness. The black man in his blackness”. For Fanon, this creates a terrible struggle to overcome the psychological distortions of what Hegel called the ‘master-slave dialectic’. “The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level” (3). The “desire to be suddenly white”, the desire to be “acknowledged not as black but as white” indexes, for Fanon, the only form of “recognition” available within the psychic world of a modernity constructed on slavery with only partial subsequent economic reorganisation (45). At the same time, Fanon observes the racist myth of the “sexual potency” of people of colour. “Our women are at the mercy of Negroes” (122). For Bhabha, these are examples of “the insatiable fear and desire for the Negro” (xxiv). We see this tension between fear and desire play out in a scene of Heading South where various tourists are questioned about their engagement with local sex workers after the death of Legba, a young man from the north of Haiti. Brenda, a woman from the United States, reveals during this questioning that her husband paid Legba to have sex with her (128). Legba is cast as an object of desire, casual contempt, and pity all at once: “my husband took pity on this young man who hadn’t had anything to eat for two days”; yet this same man freely uses racist epithets, “that’s the way he talks, but he isn’t racist or anything. In our town that’s how everyone talks about black people” (128). In the ensuing scene, Brenda describes Legba’s body as an object of consumption, and in heavily racialised terms. Like Kurtz ‘going native’ and losing his mind in the Belgian Congo, Brenda’s reason is destabilised by this interracial encounter: “I was in a kind of trance, hypnotized by Legba’s firm yet trembling skin” (131). The sexual encounter, like the economic one, is hugely unequal. This is not an exchange or an embrace, but rather Brenda is simply consuming the body for which her husband has paid: “I was irresistibly drawn to this body that seemed like it was being offered to me on a platter” (131). The entire passage slides irrevocably towards the focal point of Brenda’s desire which is “his black cock, so long, so tender, [which] made me completely lose control of myself”, bearing out Fanon’s claim that “In relation to the Negro, everything takes place on the genital level” (Laferrière 131, Fanon 121).

Her husband has to encourage her into this encounter, and afterwards she weeps. She recalls in questioning that this was her first orgasm. Here we see how the psychological situation described by Fanon occurs within a context of Haiti’s dependent role in the neoliberal world-system. For Laferrière himself, the American sex tourists “feel abandoned because they’re no longer valued in their own society, so they go south” (Martin and Kamara 86). There is an extent to which Brenda’s marriage seems to require the intervention of a young man from the South. The fact that sexual encounters with Legba can help the function of an American marriage implies a dependency of core capitalist institutions on the unregulated space of Haiti. In the 1980s, says Slaughter, “the erosion of the industrial manufacturing base in the advanced Western economies sent governments (particularly the Reagan administration) “casting about for a politically painless way to address the growing trade deficit” between East and West” (Alford qtd. in Slaughter 41). In buying sex for his neglected wife from Legba, Brenda’s husband sources cheap labour from abroad to help sustain his marriage and the productive capitalist monad of the American family. The condoning of sex tourism is an extra-legal example of the ‘openness’ of Haiti described by the IMF. But the fact that this section of the novel takes the form of a collection of police interviews following Legba’s murder shows the opacity of the country as well. The spaces, gaps, and contradictions between these women’s overlapping testimonies ignore or obscure what Mudimbe calls “la chose du texte” (183), the concrete conditions beyond certain ‘Western’ textual representations. This is an example of the “structural occlusion” that Graeme Macdonald says characterises spaces of production in the world-system (6). Brenda’s husband’s racism, and the evident mortal danger posed to people in Haiti’s transnational informal economy, gesture towards the pervasive environment of difficulty and exploitation. Again, the privileged narrative voice, here, is of an American subject, foreign to Haiti and broadly ignorant of its reality. But the terrible events gestured towards, just outside the immediate experience within the narrative, give a sense of the actual situation beyond.

The racism articulated by Brenda’s husband plays a major role in separating the different spaces of Laferrière’s Haiti. We see this as Charlie attempts to traverse the uneven socio-economic landscape of Port-au-Prince. Charlie is the son of a family who live in service to the British Ambassador. He is sexualised at his first mention in the narrative—“Charlie quit school during second term for one very simple reason: he was too beautiful to spend the whole day cooped up in a classroom”—and he exploits his perceived desirability to enter the more restricted spaces of the city (47). “Charlie’s parents are poor but respectable”, so when Charlie learns they are being insulted and abused by the Ambassador’s unpleasant niece, Missy Abel, he schmoozes his way into the exclusive tennis club she frequents (48). The scene is premised on the idea that Charlie can soften Missie’s behaviour (perhaps towards Black people generally) through a sexual relationship. This is an example of what Karen Fay Yaworski sees as Laferrière’s “critique of racism” at the expense of a “reinforcement of sexism” (24). This notwithstanding, Charlie uses sexuality to smooth his path across the barriers of Haitian society, many of which are maintained by his fellow working-class Haitians who have internalised the country’s brutally European hierarchy of prestige. Upon arrival at the tennis club, Charlie recruits one of the gardeners to help him identify Missie:

Verse

Verse   “Who’s that girl there?” Charlie asks the gardener who is standing beside him.   “Mademoiselle Abel… She just got here… She’s a good player, but she’s got a lousy personality.”   “How do you know that?”   “Ha! When she loses, she shouts insults at everybody, even the umpire.”   “I’d like to speak to her.”   “Why? You doing something for her?”   “No, I just want to speak to her.”   “I doubt that’s possible, my friend”. (53)

As a worker at the tennis club, the gardener dislikes Missie’s elitist behaviour, but at the same time he cannot imagine a working-class man of colour would have an appointment with her unless he was ‘doing something for her’. The idea of the two talking as equals seems impossible to him. The barman inside the clubhouse expresses the same misgivings:

Verse

Verse   “Whisky,” Charlie says.   The barman looks at him.   “I don’t recall seeing you here before.”   “It’s the first time I’ve been here … and it won’t be the last.”   “Forgive me, my friend, but I doubt that very much. This is a private club, that’s why it’s called the Circle, you see? Either you join, or else you have to be invited here by one of the members. Otherwise….” (54)

Through these two working-class figures who share some comradely feeling with Charlie, yet cannot conceive how he (and, implicitly, they) could ever approach a white bourgeois woman like Missie as an equal, we see the “primarily economic” roots of a racial “inferiority complex”, and “subsequently, the internalization—or, better, the epidermalization—of this inferiority” (Fanon 4). Through this tranquil, oblique dialogue, which again takes the form of the European novel of ideas, Laferrière begins to tease out the de facto class and colour bar that exists in Haiti.

Eventually the barman agrees to help Charlie encounter Missie:

“Ah, I get it,” he says with a smile of complicity. “You want to talk to her…They’ll all be coming here tonight to dance … But you have to be a member to get in. During the day you can come in here no problem, but at night it’s impossible. I can tell by looking at you that you’re no slouch with the ladies, but I’d be very surprised if that one would have anything to do with the son of a servant … But let me think for a bit”. (55)

Here ‘smiles of complicity’ amongst men make Charlie’s entire conquest feel like a game. Charlie’s attractiveness is acknowledged, as well as the pervasive classism and racism which stand in the way of his success. The joviality of the scene, the idea that this might all be a boys’ game, conceals the very real racism and classism that Charlie faces in his movements through the various spaces of Haitian society. The fact that Charlie hopes to negotiate the de facto colour bar of Port-au-Prince through his perceived sexual desirability reduces the social dynamic of Haitian society to a game and half conceals concrete race and class relations behind sexual ones. Here we see a Haitian iteration of the playful malandroism of Memórias.

After charming his way into the tennis club again, Charlie seduces Missie. Such is her desire-fear of him, Missie descends through the circles of Haitian society to Charlie’s “miniscule room” (64) to confront him about their fling:

Verse

Verse He starts tidying up the room, then changes his mind at the last moment. He decides to wait for Missie sitting on his narrow, iron bed. She comes in. “Hello.” “Hello.” “Excuse me for bothering you at home like this, but I didn’t sleep last night.” “Ah!” “I don’t understand what right you have to think of me that way,” she says coldly. […] “It’s because I’m afraid of voodoo.” He bursts out laughing. […] “No,” he says, “I don’t use voodoo for things like this.” (64–5)

So far we have seen how various bourgeois women have fetishised young Haitian men. Here we see the racism at the opposing dialectical pole of that attraction. Missie is worried that Charlie, in all his exoticism, wields some kind of dark magic that she calls ‘voodoo’. “Voodoo”, for Timothy Landry,

was propelled into the Western imagination by U.S. literature and film. William Seabrook’s 1929 publication of The Magic Island and the 1932 release of the film White Zombie profited from racist, pejorative, and exaggerated images of black magic, skull-laden altars, bloody sacrifices, and staggering zombies. (3)

Missie’s idea that Charlie might use ‘voodoo’ to manipulate her is clearly rooted in these racist notions. But there is a suggestion, in this scene, that metaphysical concerns about ‘voodoo’ displace more material concerns. Before Missie enters his ‘miniscule room’, Charlie decides against tidying up, or improving the appearance of his modest dwelling. Indeed he deliberately performs this modesty by receiving her on his ‘narrow’ iron bed. Later, he only partly reassures Missie that he would not use ‘voodoo’ for seduction, implying that he does use it for other purposes. In both cases, Charlie never disavows or conceals his class position or his cultural inheritance of Vodun. Charlie is perhaps aware that it is both his class and his ethnic and cultural difference that attracts-repels Missie. His tiny, messy room, and his association with precolonial cosmologies, are strengths rather than weaknesses in this cross-class, cross-cultural exchange. Much like when Leonardo Filho continues to play pranks on the neighbour in the presence of Dona Maria in Memórias, or—as we shall see in Chap. 5—when Kamĩtĩ performs ‘African-like’ rituals in his healings of wealthy Aburĩrians, the playful informality of this interclass mixing is premised on—but half conceals—deep and troubling class divisions.

The thing Missie, or bourgeois women in Haiti, is actually afraid of in her casual encounters with young men is played out in another section of the novel. A French journalist known as M.R. who is covering an art exhibition in Petionville—an exclusive suburb of Port-au-Prince—is taken by the artist Jacques Gabriel to visit the Prophet Pierre in the bohemian city of Croix-des-Bouquet just north of the capital. While there M.R. is subjected to a mysterious ritual. I quote at length to give the reader the full account of the ritual, and a real sense of its exoticism:

[A] song splits the air[. …] A formless emotion grips my heart. I feel as though I’m in another world. Somewhere far from Petionville and its mundane concerns. The young man is leaning against a post and singing about a woman from Artibonite whose husband (Sole or Soleil or something) is gravely ill. A choir of young voices accompanies the woman in her distress. The man hovers between life and death, between night and day. But the woman is brave, she fights to save her man. Then the young man goes on to sing several folk songs that tell about the misery of peasants’ lives.

Suddenly there is a sacred song: “Papa Legba ouvri barye pou mwen…” I sense a new energy flowing from the choir. The girls’ voices climb higher and higher, as though announcing the arrival of an eminent personage. In fact it’s the Prophet, who has just appeared at the door (as the Prophet, or Legba) wearing ceremonial robes. His face is even graver than it was at our arrival. The voices reach their highest pitch and then descend slowly into silence.

“The painting is finished,” the Prophet says laconically, making a sign to the young man to bring it out. […] [A woman] breaks into a sacred chant. […] I can’t make out the words. Most of them seem to be of African origin. Her flesh ripples. She scowls menacingly. […] A terrible god is knocking at the door. He cannot break into our circle. Suddenly the woman slumps down in a corner, exhausted. She looks like an unstrung marionette. The audience breathes. Ogou, the terrible god of fire, couldn’t spoil the party. […] [T]he magnificent but terrifying painting is revealed to us. All in mauve. […] All of us are in the painting. There are three figures at the centre: the Prophet in the middle, Jacques Gabriel on his left and the journalist, wearing a white wedding gown, on his right. […] “You are witnesses to the mystical marriage of the Prophet Pierre, living and domiciled in Croix-des-Bouquets,” says Jacques Gabriel in a serious and authoritative voice, “and of M.R., living and domiciled on Paris. This marriage is performed by the will of the gods, some of whom are here present”. (107–9)

The group has been brought here by the artist Jacques Gabriel, a figure who “seems able to cross the barriers of social class with ease” (98). He functions here as a local informant who draws the narrative focus ‘far from Petionville and its mundane concerns’ and across the barriers of Haitian society into a very different place. Within the narrative consciousness, this is what Cândido would call the pole of disorder—a place where the social symbols (rituals, language, dance) are alien to the viewer. It is the dialectical counterpart to the ordered bourgeois life of Missie, Petionville, and the American women, but it is the realm that they fetishise and are often compelled to engage with. Jacques Gabriel later clarifies that M.R. has been wedded, not to the Prophet, but “Legba, the god who guards the border between the visible and invisible worlds” (110). Legba is also the name of the murdered young man with whom Brenda shared a relationship. This Legba also sits on the border between the visible and invisible worlds of Haiti, the shadowy realm of sex work and murder, and the bourgeois world of Petionville. Order and disorder. For people like Brenda and Missie, the pleasure of an unregulated and permissive place like Haiti is that one can dip into the realm of disorder without serious consequences. But while Brenda attempts to maintain a casual sexual relationship with Legba, M.R. becomes betrothed to him. In this scene then, Legba achieves a symbolic act of revenge for the casual exploitation of the island by external forces. The informal, jocular tone of the encounters between Charlie and Missie, or between the Magic Boys and their clients, is gone. There is a sense of symbolic redress for the casual nature of the relationships between the ruling class—domestic and international—and ordinary Haitians, by imposing upon the former a matrimonial commitment to Legba.

It is this kind of commitment, and its redistributive implications, that Missie truly fears. It is the idea that a casual, and primarily sexual, relationship might become more serious and thereby entail financial commitments. Fanon understands this when he says that for Jean Veneuse in Je suis Martiniquaise, his goal is to “marry white culture, white beauty, white whiteness” (45). Missie fears that this is Charlie’s desire, to permanently infiltrate the garrisoned world of Petionville. In light of this, we can see that the pervasive informality of parts of the novel where young men flirt with bourgeois women functions to obscure or displace the deep inequalities of Haitian society and maintain them as such. If we find the idea of exchanges between Haitians and international elites cheeky or funny, we cannot possibly believe that they might ever be equals. The apparent unseriousness of the novel obscures its most troubling truth.

Haiti’s Informal Economy in the World-System

Despite the apparent power of Charlie’s sexuality in the novel, the casual sexual relationship with Missie has a concrete function within Haiti’s extremely inequitable political economy. It emerges that the relationship means Missie is seldom at the Ambassador’s house, and her abuse of Charlie’s parents has stopped (69). Charlie’s family are therefore able to remain working as domestic servants in a bourgeois home. Charlie’s sexual activities are a form of labour that allows his parents to continue at their albeit exploitative posts. Through stealth and strategy, Charlie is able to bring about change in the circumstances of poor Haitians. Such a low bar for social change reflects President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s programme of modest infrastructural investment that would create “poverty with dignity” (Hallward 33). But this interdependency of the shadow or illicit economy and the more formal world of Haiti—dramatised throughout the novel—is altogether more problematic in the case of the Magic Boys. The Magic Boys are three friends, Chico, Mario, and Gogo, who all apparently spend their time accruing as many sexual partners as possible (118–19), but it is later revealed that this behaviour is a crucial part of the financial success of the hotel and beach bar where they sit for hours and attract the attentions of tourist women. In light of Molly Smith and Juno Mac’s emphasis on the internality of sex work to neoliberal capitalism (9), I seek to illuminate the occluded labour performed by the Magic Boys in Haiti’s economy. When we first encounter these young men they appear to be idle customers at the beach bar ordering food and drink, but it gradually becomes clear that this is effectively their place of work:

Verse

Verse “A ham sandwich and a glass of pomegranate juice,” Gogo calls out.   “Same for me,” says Chico, “but make mine a real thick sandwich, Albert…I had a hard night last night and I need to regain my strength…Okay?”   The barman says nothing.   “Ah, don’t be like that, Albert,” Mario teases. “Everything’ll be all right …This is better than being in jail, isn’t it? Nothing to complain about …. Give us a smile, just a little one …. You know, I’ve never seen Albert smile…”   “What would you like?” Albert says to him archly.   “All right, Albert, you win. No smile today, either …. So I’ll have a malted, lots of ice …. I have to go up to Number Eight in a few minutes.”   “Ah, you’re doing Mrs. Wenner this morning!” Chico cries merrily. […]   “Hey, guys!” says Mario. “I’ve got to go to Number Eight; someone give me pointers[.] […]   “She’s not as bad as Mrs. Hopkins,” throws in Chico, seriously, “the widow in Number Six. She spent three hours talking to me like I was her son before jumping my bones.” (118–19)

Again, the light-hearted tone here disguises an uncomfortable reality. As we will see in a moment, the boys are part of Haiti’s informal sex tourism industry which is actually an integral part of the regional economy. The boys’ apparently humorous references to regaining their strength between shifts disguise the fact that this a real form of labour in the Haitian economy.

Laferrière shows the conditions under which this informal economy has flourished. Just down the beach from this scene sits the failing Hibiscus Hotel, owned by the beleaguered Mauléon, a working-class New Yorker who has toiled for years in factories in order to be able to come to Haiti and work in the tourist industry. On the brink of having to sell his hotel and return home (112–14), Mauléon sees the interactions between the tourist women and young Haitian men at the beach bar, and glimpses the economic possibilities of this:

he notices a curious exchange taking place a hundred metres down the road: sitting on the porch of another hotel is a woman who appears to be in her fifties, sipping a coloured drink, when a young man of sixteen or seventeen crosses the sun-drenched road and approaches her table. […] However, they don’t stay for long. The woman empties her glass, picks up her handbag, and the two of them head off down the beach.

Mauléon watches them for a moment as they enter the water. […] What interests Mauléon is that they didn’t head straight off to one of the rooms, but went instead to the sea. The sea that knows no age. In the presence of that turquoise eternity, fifty years is not that far off from seventeen. (116)

Mauléon realises that what the Caribbean Sea, what the fetishised Haitian ecology, represents for tourists is a libidinal space in which all barriers to potential pleasure are lifted—even laws which usually circumscribe matters such as the age of a partner or commercial activities are apparently forgotten about when wading into ‘the sea that knows no age’. The financial potential of this situation becomes clearer to Mauléon in the following passage:

Verse

Verse Mauléon waits for a while before going over the speak to the barman. […]   “That couple who just left?”   Yes, of course he knows them. […]   [“the woman] is from Quebec… When they get cold up there they come down south to get warm. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg and every day is sunny. They come for a week or two and stay for a month, two months, even six months…And every year they come back.”   “Why?”   The barman leers at him.   “Because of them,” he says, pointing to a group of young men horsing around on the beach. […] He suddenly feels as though a light has been turned on in his head. He quickly says goodbye to the barman. “That’s just what I need,” he tells himself when he is back on the road. He won’t ban those magic boys from the hotel, he’ll put up with them, he’ll welcome them, he’ll even invite them. They’re a real gold mine. (116–17)

Mauléon recognises that the Magic Boys can effectively be exploited as a natural resource. I mentioned above Neil Lazarus’s idea that neoliberalism features a resurgence and consolidation of the free market imperatives of capitalism that were scaled back in the postwar Keynesian compromise. We see informal labour conditions intensify in neoliberal Haiti from the end of the Duvalier dictatorship onwards, and it is these conditions that are registered by texts like Heading South. One commentator that has done much to elucidate the ‘casualisation’ of labour in the Caribbean is Jeb Sprague. Throughout his writings, Sprague makes the point that “[c]apitalist globalisation is causing structural changes to the Caribbean’s political economy” (‘Global capitalism, Haiti, and the flexibilisation of paramilitarism’ 747). Sprague draws on Harvey’s definition of ‘flexible accumulation’ in a way that resonates with Cooper’s concept of casual labour: “ ‘[f]lexibilisation’ in this context refers to how the operations or components of a process are changed to meet the advanced needs of the social and material reproduction of global capitalism, increasing or diminishing, redeploying and reassigning with ease” (‘Global capitalism, Haiti, and the flexibilisation of paramilitarism’ 748). This came about, in the Caribbean context, because in the mid-twentieth century:

Powerful states, such as the U.S. helped facilitate the international operations of associated capitalists. Yet state officials, especially in many “developing nations,” sought at times to manage or control (at least partially) industries operating in their nation. In developing regions such as the Caribbean, managers (often pressured by movements from below or influenced by different political currents) began promoting policies meant to incubate domestic production, albeit through limited forms of import substitution industrialization and partial state ownership of some economic sectors, such as mining. (Sprague, “From International to Transnational Mining” 75–6)

However, “[a]s capital began to transnationalize during the closing decades of the twentieth century,” writes Sprague:

it sought to break free from national restraints and regulations. As Robinson (1996) observes, during this period, new political arrangements of polyarchy came about: as segments of local and foreign dominant groups pushed for tightly managed electoral systems in which political contestation was narrowly confined to competing elites. […] These groups, as part of an emergent global power bloc, have promoted development through the fragmentation of national economies and insertion into global circuits of accumulation. Neoliberal restructuring, for example, through privatization and austerity measures, has opened further space for global networks of production.

[…]

Consistent with many other global industries, mining has been reorganized along increasingly flexible lines. Capitalist production has become more attuned to fluctuating markets, reflected in the rise of operational intervals, where mines shutter and then reopen at a faster pace. […] Through capitalist globalization, the very labor power of workers has become incorporated into transnational value chains[.] (Sprague, “From International to Transnational Mining” 76)

The effect of the imbrication of Caribbean nations in the neoliberal world-economy, then, was an orientation of labour away from much-needed civil (re)construction projects in the wake of colonialism, US(-backed) occupations, military juntas, and so on, and towards the production of value for what Sprague calls transnational capital. As Sprague puts it most clearly:

the US and other major powers have pursued policies conducive to transnational capital and to the emergence of local TCC groups in the Caribbean. TCC interests are often enshrined through US policies. Operating through the world’s major superpower, US state policymakers over recent decades have consistently worked to facilitate conditions beneficial to the TCC, rather than nationally oriented capital. (“Global capitalism, Haiti, and the flexibilisation of paramilitarism” 749)

Set during the early years of Haiti’s imbrication in what Sprague calls the transnational world-economy, and written when the impact of this was visible, Heading South registers the reorientation of Haitian labour. In the wake of the deindustrialisation and environmental exhaustion of colonialism, and the atomisation of the workforce during the early years of the ‘Washington Consensus’, Haiti presents very few opportunities to generate either use- or exchange-values through orthodox means such as collective labour or resource extraction. In an economy that is increasingly geared towards services such as tourism, hotels, cruises, domestic servitude, and other jobs for an atomised and casual workforce, one of the few remaining ways to generate value is to rely increasingly on what critics such as Harvey call ‘fictitious capital’, such as intangible things like sexuality and eroticism which can be drawn into ‘the transvaluation of all values’ and exploited for profit. Mauléon enacts this transvaluation by referring to the young men as a ‘gold mine’, and as ‘magic boys’ who mystically and apparently, without any input of manual labour, represent and generate a form of value in this economy.

Thus, Charlie’s and the Magic Boys’ labours are entirely reoriented, but furthermore the very concept of work appears to have undergone a structural adjustment, here. To return to the scene where Chico, Gogo, and Mario are at the beach bar, we see how these young men consider their very sexuality to be performing a kind of work:

Verse

Verse   “What am I going to do?” says Mario, sounding a bit frightened.   “You could go down to the Arts and Crafts Institute and learn how to do a real job, like carpentry or mechanics.   The three boys turn in perfect synchronicity towards the barman.   “Albert,” says Chico, “what we are doing is a real job.” (121)

There are various ways of interpreting this: for Paul Gilroy, this might be considered an emancipatory rejection of labour itself and an embrace of what he considers to be work’s opposite: leisure. For Gilroy, this kind of gesture is typical of Black cultural expression:

In these cultural traditions, work is sharply counterposed not merely to leisure in general but to a glorification of autonomous desire which is presented as inherent in sexual activity. The black body is reclaimed from the world of work and, in Marcuse’s (1972) phrase, celebrated as an ‘instrument of pleasure rather than labour’. Sexuality stand [sic] therefore not only as an area of conflict in its own right, but as a symbol of freedom from the constraints of the wage. (273)

But Heading South bears out Laura Chrisman’s critique of Gilroy’s antinomy between work and leisure (76). For Charlie, Fanfan, and the Magic Boys, sex is both leisure and work, but it is the only work that they do. To assume that this rejection—or, more accurately, this lack of opportunity—to work is emancipatory is to reject the urgently felt necessity to labour in a socially productive way in a region as unevenly developed as the Caribbean. As Chrisman says of Gilroy’s antinomy between leisure and work: “what I find questionable is the equation of ‘wage labour’ with ‘labour’, so that the critique of capitalist wage-labour structures is becomes [sic] a rejection of productive labour itself, or self-realisation through labour” (76). What we see in the casual sexual relationships of Charlie and the Magic Boys, then, is an orientation of their labours towards Haiti’s neoliberal service economy. In the text, sexuality both displaces and overwrites manual work, which is analogous to the structural adjustment of the Haitian economy away from socially constructive labour and towards fictitious capital. As Mauléon thinks to himself as he wonders how to rescue his failing hotel, “[h]e knows full well that the solution will have to come from his head, since he has nothing whatsoever in his pockets” (115).

Order and Disorder

Through the Magic Boys, then, Laferrière shows the interdependence of the informal illicit economy of sex work and the island’s formal transnational economy. Retracing our steps, the jovial informality of the exchanges between Haiti’s young men and a transnational elite can now be seen as examples of this highly unequal encounter. In the novel, the exchange between these two classes takes the form of sexual relations. The fun salaciousness of this kind of exchange partially conceals what is actually a dangerous and inequitable situation unique to the grim realities of Haitian neoliberalisation. The death of Legba which occurs in the interstices of the increasingly fragmentary narrative is an example of an event from the ‘deathworld’ of the Haitian shadow economy which the francophone novel tradition cannot directly convey. Laferrière makes this point most clearly towards the end of the novel when Madame Saint-Pierre, the headmistress of an elite school, overhears a sexual encounter between Charlie and Missie in the toilets of an exclusive restaurant. Throughout the novel, as shown above, a self-consciously literary style has characterised the bourgeois narrative consciousnesses and spaces of Haiti. Meanwhile, highly graphic sex scenes, murder inquiries, and mysterious rituals populate an apparent zone of disorder. By situating a sexual encounter between Missie and Charlie in a milieu of bourgeois respectability, Laferrière collapses these two reified styles into one another. The order of the elite world of which this restaurant is a part is established in the opening lines of the chapter:

Cela faisait des mois que Mme Saint-Pierre n’avait pas mis les pieds au Cercle Bellevue. Elle allait retrouver Christina assise tout au fond, à moité cachée derrière ces grands paravents japonais. On se demande où ces deux-là (une Française et une Américaine) s’étaient-elles rencontrées? Selom Mme Sain’t Pierre, c’était à une soirrée à l’ambassade des États-Unis organisée par Harry, le mari de Christina. (203)

It has been months since Madame Saint-Pierre set foot in the Bellevue Circle. She is there now to meet Christina, who is sitting at the back, almost hidden behind a pair of large Japanese screens. It may seem odd that these two women, one French and the other American, should even have met. According to Madame Saint-Pierre, it was at a soirée at the American Embassy, organized by Harry, Christina’s husband. (169)

There is an obvious shift of register here. Laferrière uses free indirect discourse from a narrative perspective which has a willed naivete. The idea that it would be ‘odd’ for two members of Port-au-Prince’s tiny elite to have met before is patently absurd, and given the degree of social interpenetration already witnessed in the novel, it seems a churlish remark. The accumulation of minute details (the large Japanese screens), which will continue throughout the chapter, is a feature of Balzacian high realism, as is the mapping of the social entanglements of the characters.Footnote 3 This world, and its representational mode, will soon be ruptured like a large Japanese screen:

[Missie and Charlie] are given a good table; the maitre d’ knows Missie. They sit. Missie immediately gets up and goes to the washroom. She has just spied the principal of her school, Madame Saint-Pierre, sitting at a corner table chatting with June’s mother. The eyes of every businessman in the room follow her speculatively as she crosses the room. She walks slowly towards the back, not wanting to appear to be fleeing, her pert bum bouncing under the red silk above her long legs. Every cognac-soaked man who sees her knows in a second that it is a perfectly formed bum, and that anyone who could attain it, cup it in his hands, would remember that moment for the rest of his life. And all of it going to that little shithead, Charlie, who now, after waiting a few minutes, is tapping at the door to the women’s washroom. Missie, smiling and looking nervous, opens the door to him, a tube of lipstick in her hand. Charlie enters and, without a word, pushes her into the narrow enclosure bathed in blue light. He kisses her with his mouth wide open, and his hands feel for her body. […] [T]he magnificence of her superb ass with its two tender orbs is revealed to him in its full glory. His penis is already insistent with a surge of fresh blood. With one hand he feels beneath Missie’s ass and unerringly finds the hot, moist entrance to the tightest little vagina on the planet. He parts its fragile lips and, with a single, swift thrust, enters her. […]

“What’s going on in there?” a shrill, vexed voice suddenly calls out. “Are you ever going to come out? Do you think the rest of us can wait indefinitely?”

“It’s Madame Saint-Pierre, my school principal!” (182–4)

We can see the drift of the register from the formality and literariness noted above, to the graphic sex scene. The same narrative voice that describes the businessmen leering at Missie as an external phenomenon is the voice that will immediately go on to sexualise her as well. This same voice then calls Charlie a ‘shithead’, participating in the homosocial envy for Missie, before following the pair into the toilets to relay their intercourse. We are shocked back into the discreet environs of the restaurant by Madame Saint-Pierre knocking at the toilet door, making us register the rupture that Missie and Charlie’s sex has caused. But this rupture was also continuous with the ostensibly literary narrative voice. What seems to be a formal environment, narrated in an apparently high literary style, in fact contains much that it would rather repress. Just as Charlie, Fanfan, and the Magic Boys must move between the different worlds of Haiti—between its order and disorder, between its visible and invisible economies—the narrative voice perceptibly drifts in the same way.

After Madame Saint-Pierre returns to her table and tells Christina about what she just witnessed, the pair trade stories about the mysterious events that have occurred in Haiti recently:

Verse

Verse   “Do you see that woman over there, at the table near the window?”   “Who? … Oh, her! … I’ve never seen her before…”   “She’s a French journalist … I’ve heard a really amazing story about her … A friend of Jacques Gabriel’s told me about it. She took part in a voodoo wedding without knowing that she was the bride. And Legba was the groom. Yes, you heard me: Legba. Can you imagine? A journalist comes here from Paris to write an article about Port-au-Prince, and ends up marrying a voodoo god. What a country! You get so totally disheartened that you want to hang yourself, and then you hear something like that! Where else can you see gods marrying mortals?” (192)

Overhearing Missie and Charlie in the toilets prompts the pair to recall other recent ruptures to the garrisoned bourgeois conception of Haitian reality. Through the two women’s reportage, a constellatory structure of fantastical events begins to emerge, urging the reader to reassess the novel—its cross-linkages between half-glimpsed strange occurrences, the realities which might underlie what the novel has actually revealed.

In scenes such as this where a sex scene bursts into an exclusive restaurant, or a domestic servant is raped in a bourgeois household, Laferrière shows how the repressed elements of Haitian society—its shadow economy of sex work, its exploited workers, its violence—are internal to the deregulated capitalist world-system in which Haiti is imbricated. They are produced by it, and they are unevenly integrated into its basic mechanics. Throughout the novel we see a shift between registers and points at which they collapse in on one another, corresponding to the constant oscillation between the worlds of order and disorder that is the basic social experience in a peripheral zone of capitalism. It will of course be objected that the world of ‘disorder’, as Cândido has it, is a Eurocentric notion which associates capitalism with order and its antecedents or malcontents with disorder. In ‘dialectic of malandroism’ it is the realm of Rio’s imperial elite that is ordered while the world of slavery and the informal economy is disordered. This is, to some extent, true, and it would be a gesture of cultural relativism to say that the two broad classes are abstractly equivalent. However, in Heading South Laferrière shows that the ‘disordered’ world is in fact internal to formal capitalism.

The formal articulation of Laferrière’s text registers what Deckard and Shapiro call the process of “neoliberalization” as it unfolds in the (semi-)periphery of the world-system and is a signal of the (semi-)peripheral aesthetics we uncover in attending to forms of economic informality (15).