The Kingdom of this World, written by French-born Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949, is a cosmologically immersive novel of Haitian society and its ruptures during the Haitian Revolution. Carpentier sought to evoke the texture of 18th century Haiti through exploration of what he termed lo real maravilloso, or the marvelous real. Through the eyes of its central character Ti Noel, we encounter historical figures like Mackandal, Boukman, Henri Christoph, Pauline Bonaparte, and General Leclerc. However, Carpentier all but ignores the political dimensions of the revolution in favor of the social, the spiritual and ultimately, the liberatory.

We pair The Kingdom of this World with C.L.R. James’ historical masterpiece, The Black Jacobins. The reading is productive, in that both cast Black Haitians as historical protagonists in their liberatory struggle for emancipation; both attend to the dialectic of the Atlantic encounter, and both explore the tragedies and contradictions of Haitian independence. However, these texts are, in multiple dimensions, inverses of one another.

We talk about vodou and the enlightenment, agency and structure, history and literature, and Carpentier’s excellent prose (masterfully translated into English by Harriet de Onís).

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The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier

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