Reading the Past and Present

In terms of Haitian matter I've been reading the new book edited -- and autographed -- by the magnificent Prof. Laurent Dubois and Julius S. Scott, Origins of the Black Atlantic: Reweriting Histories (2010 - Routledge). Its ToC includes the not-so-easy-to-find seminal essay on the military aspects of the Haitian Revolution, "African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution," by John K. Thornton, which we wish so much we'd read while working up the Haitian Revolution for The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.  At times it feels nearly like we've entered an alternate historical world, how much more easily hard-to-obtain materials are available, even in a year or two after you could have used them.  When I first began swotting up West African history and culture toward the end of the 1980's, there was so little available in English, and particularly published by U.S. publishers, particularly in trade -- especially when you went to the religions.  Is that ever different now!

I'm also reading Thornton's 1998 work, The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatiz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684 - 1706.

Coincidence?  Not really, I suppose.  Kongo and Angola are looming ever larger for the future.

The Kongolese Saint Anthony is a difficult book for me to read. Its difficulty is not caused because it is a history of one of the few well-documented with primary source text documents in the history of the Kingdom of Kongo. The difficulty is that everyone, who is Kongolese, bears Portuguese, i.e. European names. So I keep visualizing the characters in Portugal, which is such a different geography from the Kongo, there on the edge of Europe, bounded by the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.


This difficulty is reminiscent of the perceptual shift problems I experienced reading Vernor Vinge's wonderful SF work, A Deepness in the Sky (1999) with the 'Spiders,' their culture and civilization. My trickster mind insisted on perceiving them as humans, and their world earth-like. Vinge had wonderful play with this, which play enriches the reader's experience of reading, not only the novel, but the world. So much so did Vinge play with this that the humans on the space ships seem more alien, less human, than the 'Spiders.' He must have so enjoyed knowing how readers who wanted to comprehend his novel as completely as they could, couldn't have that total immersion reading experience. We have to consciously remind ourselves what we are "seeing" on the page isn't what it really is.
It's a teaching experience for the reader as well, teaching the reader that her perceptions can so easily be wrong, and insistently wrong, even when she knows better.