36 pages • 1 hour read
Alejo CarpentierThe Kingdom Of This World
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1949A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Santiago de Cuba”
Ti Noël and Lenormand de Mézy arrive in Cuba. Lenormand de Mézy enjoys the atmosphere of Cuba where he begins to “divide his time between cards and prayers” (57). He sells many enslaved workers to pay his gambling debts. Aging, he fears death is coming soon. Ti Noël prays to another god: Santiago, the marshal of storms.
Part 2, Chapter 6 Summary: “The Ship of Dogs”
Ti Noël sees a ship of dogs leaving the port and is told that they are being sent “to eat blacks” (59). The Dufrené family arrives in Santiago, and Ti Noël receives word from Haiti. The narrative he hears focuses on Pauline Bonaparte, who traveled to Haiti with her husband as a beautiful young woman. She had read about the colonies and was excited for her life there. In their new home, she allowed one enslaved man, Soliman, to bathe and massage her, knowing he was “tormented by desire” (63). Life in Haiti was a dream—until one day, her hairdresser began to vomit blood.
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Saint Calamity”
This chapter continues the story of Pauline Bonaparte. In the face of an epidemic, she fled with Soliman and her husband, Leclerc. When Leclerc fell ill, she followed Soliman’s advice and began performing Vodou rituals and prayers to protect herself from disease: They burned “incense, indigo, and lemon peels” and offered orations to Saint Calamity (66). Finally, after Leclerc’s death, she left Haiti with a bag of her belongings, including an amulet to Vodou god Papa Legba.
Part 2, Chapters 5-7 Analysis
These chapters depart from the narrative perspective of the novella thus far by focusing on a white character, Pauline Bonaparte, who is not motivated by power and cruelty, as are most of the white characters of the text. Rather, she is motivated by a search for pleasure and fun, although she is still cruel, if less directly so. In particular, she represents a new iteration of the link between sexuality and Racial Violence Under Enslavement, weaponizing her sexual unavailability as a white woman to “torment” Soliman.
Nevertheless, the Dufrenés’ enslaved workers say that Pauline’s departure marked “the end of good sense” (69), which suggests that there is something unique about her perspective. Her willingness to embrace Vodou and her amulet of Papa Legba indicate that she, unlike other white characters, saw that her own god was losing power. Lenormand de Mézy’s prayers to that same Christian god in the face of his inevitable death emphasize this point. Pauline’s presence thus develops the theme of Catholicism Versus Vodou by depicting the former as stale and impotent. Nevertheless, her adoption of Vodou does not help her; she eventually leaves Haiti a widow, implying a fundamental incompatibility with the region that she shares with the other white characters.
The juxtaposition of her story with that of the dogs implies that incompatibility is tied to a strengthened Black presence and resistance; these dogs arrive to “eat Blacks” but fail, coinciding with another upswelling of resistance among Haiti’s enslaved population. Nevertheless, the commentary of the Dufrenés’ enslaved workers suggests this is not an unambiguously positive development; they see the situation in Haiti as deteriorating considerably. By contrast, colonial Cuba features a reckless carnival atmosphere, with men like Lenormand de Mézy as ignorant as ever of the backlash their actions could provoke.
