Haiti's being in the news, to understate things awfully much, has reminded me that two Harlem Renaissance authors, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, developed a great interest in that nation.
An anthropologist as well as a fiction-writer, Hurston wrote the study: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. It was reissued in 2008.
Hughes wrote a play, Troubled Island, which concerns the Haitian rebel leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who helped defeat the army Napoleon had sent to Haiti and who later became emperor of Haiti. His dates are 1758-1806. Later, the composer William Grant Still and Hughes (as librettist) collaborated on the opera, Troubled Island.
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