West Indies

An archipelago between southeast North America and northern South America, separating the Caribbean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean and including the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Bahama Islands. The original inhabitants were Caribs and Arawaks. Several of the islands were sighted and explored by Columbus during his voyages of 1492-1504. The first permanent European settlement was made by the Spanish on Hispaniola in 1496. During the colonial period the English, French, and Dutch also laid claim to various islands, and the United States acquired Puerto Rico and part of the Virgin Islands in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

West Indian West Indian adj. & n.

 

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An archipelago, including the Bahamas, the Greater Antilles (including Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola—the Dominican Republic and Haiti—and Puerto Rico), the Lesser Antilles, and other islands, curving 2500 mi (4000 km) from Yucatan Peninsula and southeastern Florida to northern Venezuela and enclosing the Caribbean Sea. Situated between latitude 10° and 27°N and longitude 59° and 85°W, in the zone of the northeast trade winds, the West Indies have a subtropical and predominantly oceanic climate, with even warmth and steady breezes. Temperatures vary little from season to season, ranging from means of 80–85°F (27–29°C) in July to 70–78°F (21–26°C) in January at sea level. Freezing is unknown, and the hottest temperatures rarely exceed 90°F (32°C). Precipitation ranges from a low of 25–50 in. (64–127 cm) a year on low-lying islands and drier coasts up to 300 in. (7.6 m) on the highest peaks, which are almost perpetually cloud-capped. At lower elevations, rainfall is erratic from year to year and from season to season, but reaches a maximum in the summer and fall, when the northeast trades are replaced by light, variable winds. This is also the season of hurricanes, destructive tropical cyclones which sweep west and northwest across the Caribbean, sparing only the southernmost islands. The winter months are generally dry, and there is frequently a shorter dry season in July or August. See also Tropical meteorology.

The West Indian flora is chiefly derived from Central and South America, but there are a number of endemic species, notably palms; many mainland plants failed to colonize the islands, which are floristically poor. The effect of isolation and small size is evident in the meager character of West Indian fauna. Animal species are limited; there are few mammals and no large ones, except for domesticated animals and, especially on Hispaniola, feral cattle, goats, pigs, and horses.

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West Indies is the general geographical term for the many islands of the Caribbean, the largest of which are Cuba, Hispaniola (politically Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. After Columbus' landing on San Salvador in 1492, Spain claimed the whole region. Sugar plantations were established and black African slaves introduced. The first inroads into the Spanish monopoly came when Spain, in the early 17th cent., was still struggling to put down the Dutch revolt in Europe. English settlement started at St Kitts (1623) and Barbados (1627), followed by Antigua and Montserrat (1632), Anguilla (1650), and the conquest of Jamaica in 1655 by a Cromwellian expedition. Meanwhile, France had acquired Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635), Grenada in the 1640s, and had established a foothold on the western part of Hispaniola. Dutch settlements were on Curaçao and St Eustatius in the 1630s. Control by European governments was fitful and the West Indies gained its reputation for piracy and buccaneering.

The 18th cent. saw incessant warfare between the colonial powers, towns repeatedly sacked, and islands taken and retaken. Tobago changed hands so often that its inhabitants were said to live in a state of betweenity: at one stage, Charles II, who did not have it, granted it to the duke of Courland. At the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, Britain retained Grenada, Dominica, St Vincent, and Tobago at the expense of France. When British sea power wobbled during the War of American Independence, the French and Spanish took Grenada, Montserrat, St Kitts, St Vincent, and the Bahamas, but had to return them at the treaty of Versailles in 1783, retaining only Tobago.

During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, Britain added Trinidad from Spain (1802) and St Lucia from France (1814). By this time the West Indies were beginning to lose some of their economic importance to Britain, and the West Indian lobby some of its influence in Parliament. The slave trade was abolished in 1807 and slavery in the British empire in 1833. British rule in Jamaica was shaken by a rising in 1865, and the governor Edward Eyre recalled in disgrace, but control was reasserted.

Since the Second World War, the great majority of West Indian islands of any size have become sovereign states. In 1945 only Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic were independent. In 1958 the British introduced the West Indian Federation, long an aspiration, to improve political and economic co-operation, but it rapidly fell victim to inter-island rivalries. The Federation was wound up in 1962. Jamaica and Trinidad then became independent, followed by Barbados (1966), Bahamas (1973), Grenada (1974), Dominica (1978), St Lucia (1979), St Vincent (1979), Antigua (1981), and St Kitts and Nevis (1983). Two of the enduring legacies of British colonialism are the use of the English language and an awesome addiction to cricket.

Literary production in the French West Indies (here meaning the present départements d'outre-mer of Martinique (M), Guadeloupe (G), and French Guiana (Gu) ), may be divided into a number of relatively distinct phases, each dominated by one segment of the ethnically and socially diverse population of the societies concerned. [For Haiti, see separate entry.]

1. 1635-1789

The earliest writing on the French West Indies—notably père du Tertre's Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les Français (1667-71) and père Labat's Nouveaux voyages aux îles d'Amérique (1722)—consisted essentially of narrative descriptions by visitors or semi-permanent residents of the islands' terrain, flora and fauna, their rapidly disappearing authochthonous Carib population, and their transformation, beginning with the settlement of the first French colons in 1635, into fully fledged plantation societies based on slavery by the end of the 17th c. Before 1789 virtually no writing was produced either by the established local white population (here referred to as Creoles) or by the gens de couleur libres (free people of mixed European and African descent, also known as mulattos), who came to form a French-speaking intermediate stratum between the whites and the Creole-speaking slave population. Only at the very end of this first period did a West-Indian-born writer, the white Guadeloupean Nicolas-Germain Léonard (1744-93), produce any substantial body of writing (Idylles morales, 1766; La Nouvelle Clémentine, 1744). He, significantly, spent almost all his life in France, returning to his native island for a three-year stay in 1784, on the basis of which he published what is, historically, the first work on the French West Indies by a French West Indian writer. Its title, Lettre sur un voyage aux Antilles (1787), indicates that the perspective adopted is still essentially that of a visitor from metropolitan France.

2. 1789-1848

A distinctive white Creole literature—distinctive in vision if not in style—first emerged in the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era. Although slavery (abolished in 1794 but reimposed in 1802) survived, this period gave the local whites a sharpened sense of what separated them from France; it inspired a series of novels and other works dedicated to the defence of slavery and the society that rested on it against mounting abolitionist pressure in France. Representative writers are the poet Poirié de Saint-Aurèle (G), author of Les Veillées françaises (1826), Le Flibustier (1827), and Cyprès et palmistes (1833), and the novelists Louis Maynard de Queilhe (M) (Outre-mer, 1835) and Jules Levilloux (M) (Les Créoles, ou la Vie aux Antilles, 1835). The latter, who may have been a mulatto, is perceptibly more liberal on the question of miscegenation than other writers of the period. Dominated by reactionary and openly racist white writing, the post-1815 period also witnessed the emergence, first expressed in the pamphlet De la situation des hommes de couleur libres aux Antilles françaises (1823), of a progressive mulatto voice committed to the acquisition of full French citizenship for the gens de couleur libres (eventually secured in 1833) and, by extension, to the liberation of the black slave population (finally decreed in April 1848.)

3. 1848-1900

After 1848, and still more after 1870, the political power of the white Creole élite was threatened by the mulatto middle classes who, identifying with republican France, demanded that the West Indian colonies be assimilated as départments into the métropole. Its economic strength also weakened. The white élite succumbed to virulent hatred of mulattos, blacks, and their republican allies in France, and in G. Souquet-Basiège's Le Préjugé de race aux Antilles françaises (M, 1883)—he meant the prejudice of nonwhites against whites rather than the reverse—produced a minor classic of racist paranoia. The fears and resentments of the old élite are also amply represented in Rosemond de Beauvallon's novel Hier! Aujourd'hui! Demain!, ou les Agonies créoles (G, 1885) and, more light-heartedly, in the novels of René Bonneville (M) (La Vierge cubaine and Le Triomphe d'Églantine, both 1899). The outstanding literary work of the second half of the 19th c. is, however, Atipa, roman guyanais, published in 1885 under the pseudonym Alfred Parépou by an unknown (but evidently non-white) Guianese writer. Written in Creole, the expressive qualities of which it sets out systematically to defend and illustrate, it offers a vivid and mordant picture of colonial society in Guiana in the early years of the Third Republic.

4. 1900-1930

With this exception, the non-white population, be it rising mulatto or still-subordinate black, produced no significant literature until the early 1900s. When eventually it did so, it was largely in imitation of local white writers. They, in their turn, derived their styles and language, together with much of their vision, from alien models, either Parnassian poetry (the leading practitioners of which, Leconte de Lisle and Heredia, were at least fellow Creoles) or the novels and travel writings of Lafcadio Hearn, whose Two Years in the French West Indies and Youma (both 1890) inspired much French West Indian writing between 1900 and 1930. The white Creole élite produced one minor poet of talent in Daniel Thaly (M), author of, amongst many other works, Lucioles et cantharides (1900) and (Le Jardin des tropiques (1911), and one of genius in Alexis Léger (G), the future Saint-John Perse, whose Éloges et autres poèmes both takes over and totally transfigures some of the leading preoccupations of white Creole writing of the late 19th and early 20th c. The modes of white Creole poetry were followed all too sedulously by mulatto poets such as Victor Duquesnay (M) (Les Martiniquaises, 1903) and Oruno Lara (G) (Sous le ciel bleu de Guadeloupe, 1912); these were the leading figures, along with Thaly, of the regionalist or, less kindly, ‘doudouiste’ school (after the stereotypical figure of la doudou, the smiling, sexually available mulatto woman who haunts their poems) that dominated French West Indian writing from 1900 to 1930, and for which the reviews La Guadeloupe littéraire (1907-9, edited by Lara) and Lucioles (M, 1926-7, edited by Auguste Joyau and Gilbert Gratiant) briefly provided a focus. If regionalist poetry disappoints through its sterile exoticism and superannuated forms and language, the pre-1930 novel [see also Maran] is of greater interest. Novels such as Oruno Lara's Questions de couleur (1923) and Suzanne Lacascade's Claire Solange âme africaine (M, 1924) display an assertive racial self-consciousness that is commonly held to have been absent from non-white French West Indian writing before the mid-1930s.

5. 1930-1960

The view that an ‘authentic’ French West Indian literature (or, more broadly still, ‘black’ literature in French) ‘began’ with the publication of the manifesto Légitime défense (1932) and the single number of L'Étudiant noir (March 1935) now seems a simplistic exaggeration. It cannot be doubted, however, that the intellectual ferment [discussed more fully in the entry négritude] born of the first sustained contacts in Paris in the 1930s between black African and black and mulatto West Indian students resulted in a literature that was fundamentally different in themes, tone, style, and above all quality from anything else that preceded it. With some exaggeration, Pigments (1937) by the Guianese poet Léon Damas has been described as the first work by a French West Indian in which the writer actively advertises his non-whiteness. It is, more precisely, the first work in which a distinctive French West Indian style is brought to bear on themes distinctly and wholly French West Indian. In Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Aimé Césaire (M), deploying the full panoply of négritude themes with unequalled passion, intensity, and poetic inventiveness, created the first undoubted masterpiece of French West Indian writing, the catalytic effect of which continues to be felt to this day.

The new literature gathered momentum in Vichy-dominated Martinique between 1940 and 1943. The review Tropiques, edited by Césaire and with Suzanne Césaire and René Ménil as leading contributors, brought together poetry, folk-tales, and anthropological and other texts which, for the first time, proclaimed the cultural and psychospiritual specificity of the French West Indies. Insisting on their fundamentally ‘African’ character, they called in question the assimilationist assumptions both of French colonialism and of the over-whelming majority of black and coloured French West Indians. Yet the transformation of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Guiana into départements of France in 1946 initially had no stronger supporter than Césaire himself; for the next ten years he attempted to reconcile the anti-assimilationist dynamic inherent in his poetry (Les Armes miraculeuses, Soleil cou coupé, Corps perdu) and in the ideology of négritude as a whole with the assimilationist political praxis imposed on him by his role as Communist député for the Fort-de-France constituency of Martinique.

Up to the mid-1950s the most characteristic French West Indian writing—notably the novels of the Martinicans Joseph Zobel (La Rue Case-Nègres), Rafaël Tardon (Starkenfirst, 1947, and La Caldeira, 1948), and Léopold Sainville (Dominique, nègre esclave, 1951)—viewed French West Indian history as a continuous struggle against slavery, colonialism, and racism which, it was implied, departmentalization had brought to a successful conclusion. At the same time Frantz Fanon (M) pointed, in Peau noire masques blancs, to the presence of unresolved socio-political and psychological conflicts beneath the ‘mask’ of constitutional integration into metropolitan France, and uncomfortably suggested that the assimilationist impulse, far from being a solution, might actually be the source of the multiple alienations of black and coloured French West Indians. A growing unease surfaces in the early poetry of Édouard Glissant (M) and Guy Tirolien (G) (Balles d'or, 1961), and in the poems, written in both French and Creole, of Sonny Rupaire (G), later collected in Cette igname brisée qu'est ma terre natale (1971). The publication of Césaire's Lettre à Maurice Thorez in 1956, his break with the PCF, and subsequent founding of the autonomist Parti Progressiste Martiniquais in 1958 may be said to mark the end of the post-1946 departmentalist ‘honeymoon’, in Martinique at least. Though the majority of French West Indians have continued, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, to support departmentalization, most French West Indian writing since 1960 has, with differing degrees of intensity and from a diversity of political and ideological viewpoints, called that status increasingly into question.

6. 1960-1990

Amidst the considerable bulk of writing produced in the French West Indies since 1960 a number of salient patterns can be discerned. In the first place, it is apparent that poetry has lost the central position it enjoyed during the ‘heroic’ period of the négritude movement between 1935 and 1960. Since Ferrements (1960), Césaire's poetic output has been slight and somewhat disappointing. While the work of Serge Patient (Gu), Georges Desportes (M) (Cette île qui est la nôtre, 1973, and Semailles de pollen, 1985), Élie Stephenson (Gu), Henri Corbin (G) (Plongée au gré des deuils, 1978; La Lampe captive, 1979; and La Terre où j'ai mal, 1982), and Ernest Pépin (M) (Au verso du silence, 1984) has many merits, it does not mark a major advance in terms of theme and language over the poetry of the 1940s and 1950s. More interesting are those poets such as Joby Bernabé (M), Monchoachi (M) (Dissidans, 1976, and Nostrom, 1981), and Hector Poullet (G) (Mi zanfan péyi la, 1967, and Pawól an bouch, 1982) who, following the notable example of Gilbert Gratiant (M) (Fab' Comp` Zicaque, 1958), have used Creole as their principal medium of expression.

Drama, though restricted by the shortcomings of local performing facilities, has made a notable advance through the plays of Césaire, Daniel Boukman (M), Maryse Condé (G), Vincent Placoly (M), and Ina Césaire (M). Once again Creole has been used with great effect, by Georges Mauvois (M) in his pioneering play Agénor Cacoul (1966) and, more recently, by Sonny Rupaire (Somanbile, 1987), Joby Bernabé, and Ina Césaire (L'Enfant des passages).

But it is undoubtedly the novel that has been the dominant genre in French West Indian writing since 1960. During the 1960s most fiction was broadly realist in character and, following the pattern of the 1950s, drew from an intense examination of the French West Indian past (notably slavery) an essentially optimistic vision of the future that is reflected in the titles of two of the best novels of the decade, Bertène Juminer's Au seuil d'un nouveau cri (Gu, 1963) and Glissant's Le Quatrième Siècle, the ‘prequel’ to his equally forward-looking La Lézarde of 1958. A broadly optimistic view of the French West Indian past, present, and future is likewise to be found in the sequence of novels written jointly or severally by Simone Schwarz-Bart (G) and her metropolitan French husband André [see also Etchart].

From 1970 onwards, however, as the distinctive identity of the French West Indies appeared to many observers to be crumbling beneath the combined pressures of emigration, unemployment, and the replacement of the traditional economy and culture by goods, mentalities, and life-styles imported from the métropole, an insistently pessimistic note entered French West Indian fiction. This is reflected in the salience of the word ‘mort’ in the titles of many of the most characteristic novels of the decade: Placoly's La Vie et la mort de Marcel Gonstran and L'Eau-de-mort guildive, Glissant's Malemort, and Mère la mort and la Meurtritude by the then Martinique-based metropolitan novelist Jeanne Hyvrard.

Novels of the 1980s have been ambivalent in tone and often experimental in form and language. The examination and reconstruction of the distant and recent past have been continued in Daniel Maximin's L'Isolé Soleil (G), Glissant's La Case du commandeur and Mahogany, Placoly's Frères volcans, and Raphaël Confiant's remarkable ‘re-creation’ of Martinique under the Vichy régime, Le Négre et l'Amiral. Other novelists of interest are Xavier Orville (M), Max Jeanne (G), and Ernest Moutoussamy (G), whose Il pleure dans mon pays (1980) and Aurore (1987) give voice for the first time to Guadeloupe's East Indian minority. A striking feature of French West Indian fiction since 1960 has been the large number of novels written by women, most of them, for reasons that remain obscure, Guadeloupean women: Schwarz-Bart, Michèle Lacrosil, the prolific and highly popular Maryse Condé, Jacqueline Manicom, Myriam Warner-Vieyra, Sylviane Telchid, Lucie Julia, Maryse Romanos, and Giséle Pineau. To them may be added the Martinicans Suzanne Dracius-Pinalie (L'Autre qui danse, 1989) and Marie-Reine de Jaham, whose La Grande Béké (1989) provides a late-20th-c. example of white Creole writing.

Novels have been written entirely in Creole by Raphaël Confiant (Bitako-a; Kod-yanm; Marisosé), but the most important development stylistically and linguistically is the potent and subversive fusion of French and Creole that he and Patrick Chamoiseau (M) (Chronique des sept misères; Solibo magnifique) have developed in their fiction. The link between fictional practice and broader ideological, cultural, and political issues is made evident in Glissant's massive Le Discours antillais (1981), in which the concept of antillanité is developed as a counter both to ‘Eurocentric’ assimilationism and ‘Afrocentric’ négritude. The concept, first developed in the short-lived Acoma (M, 1971-3) edited by Glissant, has received further elaboration in the review Carbet (M, founded 1983) and in the important manifesto Éloge de la créolité (1989) by Chamoiseau, Confiant, and the influential Creole linguist Jean Bernabé (M). Before 1970 there was, in a sense, no French West Indian literature, only books by French West Indians: the award of the Prix Goncourt to Chamoiseau's Texaco in 1992 marked the coming-of-age of an authentic French Caribbean style.

[Richard Burton]

Bibliography

• J. André, Caraïbales: études sur la littérature antillaise (1981)
• B. Ormerod, An Introduction to the French Caribbean Novel (1985)
• R. Toumson, La Transgression des couleurs: littérature et langage des Antilles, 18e, 19e, 20e siècles (1989)
• M. Rosello, Littérature et identité créole aux Antilles (1992)

Archipelago between North America and South America curving from southern Florida to Venezuela.

• It is a popular resort area.
• Several of the islands were discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492.

The importation of Africans into the Caribbean area as slaves began in the sixteenth century but expanded greatly after 1640 when the islands became a major source of sugar and workers were needed for the plantations. Most of these people came from the various tribes along the coast of West Africa from present-day Senegal to Nigeria. The white planters looked upon Africans with disdain and developed the opinion that they had no religious life, that they were at best bearers of a set of heathenish superstitions. Such was not the case. While a few of the Africans were Muslims, the majority were followers of the West African religious system, which with relatively minor alterations from tribe to tribe pervaded the area from which the slaves were taken.

The West African system acknowledged a supreme divine power but found its more personalized expression in the various deities responsible for the harmonious operation of the natural world. In the West Indies the major deities included Shango, Ogun, and Eshu (in Trinidad) and Legba, Erzulie, and Damballah (in Haiti). The Haitian deities (loas) were of two varieties: those of African origin (Rada) and those of Haitian origin (Pétro). Rites were constructed for both.

There was also a belief in fate, which to a large extent determined the course and eventual destiny of the individual. A person's future could be seen through divinatory practices. Also, by propitiating the messenger to the Gods, who carried words of the individual's fate, that fate could be altered to one more favorable. The religion was led by priests and priestesses (variously termed in the different islands), who performed the rites for the higher deities; medicine men, who dealt with lower evil spirits (the cause of disease and harm to individuals); and sorcerers, who were supposed to attack tribal enemies but sometimes, for a price, attacked individuals with their magical powers. The sorcerer (obayifo) worked clandestinely at night. People wore amulets to protect themselves. The priest supplied the amulets and often worked to counter the effects of the sorcerer.

In Africa, this religion permeated tribal life. Religious practice included obeah (magic), "possession" of certain people by the deities (similar to mediumship), and communication with and guidance from ancestor spirits.

In the New World, such religion was at best distasteful to the European understanding; it was often despised by the ruling elite. However, some of the planters did not hesitate to make use of obeah to manage the workers. To prevent theft of crops, for instance, they sometimes adorned trees around the edge of a banana or orange grove with miniature coffins, old bones, bottles of dirty water, and other obeah objects. Then the workers would not enter and steal. As late as 1908, a case of obeah was reported in a Jamaican journal: "The cause célèbre at Half-way Tree Court, Jamaica, recently, was the case of Rex V. Charles Donaldson for unlawfully practicing Obeah. Robert Robinson, who stated that he was a laborer living at Trench Pen, in the parish of St. Andrew, stated that on Tuesday, the 8th ult., he was sitting down outside the May Pen cemetery on the Spanish Town Road. He was on his way from work, and had a white handkerchief tied around his head. He was feeling sick, and that led him to sit down. While there sitting the prisoner came to him. He did not know the man before, but he began by asking him what was the matter. Witness replied, 'I am well sick.' The prisoner said, 'No, you are not sick; you havetwo ghosts on you—one creole and one coolie.' Witness told the prisoner to go away and was left. He next saw prisoner on Wednesday 9th. He came to him at Bumper Hall, where he was working, and he said to him, 'Man, how you find me here?' 'Oh,' replied the prisoner, 'if a man is in hell self I can find him; I come for you to give me the job?' Witness then inquired, 'What job?' and accused told him he wanted to 'take off the two ghosts.' He would do it for £25, and he 'killed' for any sum from £25 to £50. He had worked for all classes—white, black, coolie, Chinese, etc. Witness said he did not give him any 'good consent' at the time, but reported the matter after the accused left to Clark and Wright, two witnesses in the case. Clark told him he must not scare the man but go home. On Thursday, the 10th, the defendant came to him at his yard at French Pen. The accused told him he would come back to him to take off the ghost. He also told him to get a bottle of rum and 5s. He (witness) consented to the arrangement. The defendant began by taking off his jacket. He then opened his 'brief bag' and took out a piece of chalk. The accused then made three marks on the table and took out a phial and a white stone. The phial contained some stuff which appeared like quicksilver. He arrayed his paraphernalia on the table. They consisted of a large whisky bottle with some yellow stuff, a candle, a pack of cards, a looking-glass, three cigarette pictures, a pocket knife, etc. The accused also took out a whistle which he sounded, and then placed the cards on the table. He then asked for the 5s. which was given to him. He placed the coins on the cards around a lighted candle. The pint of rum which he (witness) had brought was on the table and prisoner poured some of it into a pan. He went outside and sprinkled the rum at the four corners of the house. Accused came back in and said, 'Papa! papa! your case is very bad! There are two ghosts outside. The creole is bad, but the coolie is rather worse. But if he is made out of hell I will catch him.' The prisoner then began to blow his whistle in a very funny way—a way in which he had never heard a whistle blown before. He also began to speak in an unknown tongue and to call up the ghosts." [The following dialogue is taken from court proceedings regarding the case.]

Mr. Lake—"Aren't there a lot of you people who believe that ghosts can harm and molest you?"

Witness—"No, I am not one.

" Mr. Lake—"Did you not tell him that a duppy [Jamaican ghost] struck you on your back and you heard voices calling you?"

Witness—"He told me so."[Continuing, witness said he had seen all sorts of ghosts at all different times and of different kinds also].

Mr. Lake—"Of all different sexes, man and woman? " Witness—"Yes; any man who can see ghosts will know a man ghost from a woman ghost."

While it empowered those who practiced it, African religion had to be practiced undercover, and as a result it underwent some changes. For example, it took on an overlay of Christianity of whatever variety was dominant on the plantation. In Haiti, Voudou resulted from obeah's association with French Catholicism. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, Santeria emerged its mixing with Spanish Catholicism. In Brazil, Macumba is a result of its mixing with Portuguese Catholicism.

African-based religions gained significant favor in the West Indies because of their role underlying the various rebellions by which the slaves gained their freedom. Today, they survive in competition with the dominant Catholicism or Anglicanism. They are reemerging despite several centuries of negative writing by outsiders.

African-derived Caribbean religion entered the United States at the time of the Haitian slave rebellion in 1908 and in the years to follow. Voudou eventually became established in New Orleans and the surrounding countryside. During the twentieth century, and especially as immigration laws have eased during the last generation, numerous people have moved to America from the Caribbean, carrying their faiths with them.

Sources:

Bisnauth, Dale. History of Religion in the Caribbean. Kingston, Jamaica: Kingston Publishers, 1989.

Denning, Melita, and Osborne Phillips. Voudoun Fire: The Living Reality of Mystical Religion. St. Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Publications, 1979.

Deren, Maya. Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti. New York: Chelsea House, 1970.

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - Vestindien

Deutsch (German)
n. - Westindien

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮איי הודו המערבית‬

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Summer Classics West Indies