Art practice in Haiti has been called a “vocation” of refusal. The Caribbean thinker Edouard Glissant wrote that Haitian art was a practice of visual orality, one where the “painted symbol coexists with the oral sign.” There have been various schools and traditions in Haitian art. The Haitian Revolution as a founding event looms large in all of them. One school is composed mostly of self-trained artists associated with vodou, a syncretic religion drawing from aspects of distinctive African spiritual practices and French Catholicism. As a religion, vodou can be understood in part as an embodiment of historical stories and experiences. The work of history has been so strong in Haitian art that critics have identified a tradition in which history is a thematic deployment. The artist André Pierre (1916–2005) belongs to this tradition as well as to the artistic tradition that was identified in 1956 by Jacques Stephen Alexis as “marvelous realism.” This latter tradition draws from history, sometimes reworked through Afro-diasporic spiritual interventions. This is the case of Pierre’s 1990 painting Retour Des Esprits Guinen Après La Guerre d’Indépendance d’Haiti (Return of the Spirits of Ginen After Haiti's War for Independence).

The Haitian Revolution was a dual one. In the first instance it was led by the formerly enslaved Toussaint L’Ouverture and a revolutionary army of enslaved Black men and women—a political process similar in many ways to other revolutions of the period. It began in 1791 with the Bwa Kayiman vodou ceremony in the northern section of what was then the French colony Saint-Domingue and culminated in 1801 with a constitution that ended racial slavery. However, the island remained a French colony until the second part of the dual revolution—the struggle against French colonialism led by Jacques Dessalines and the Indigenous army, which ended in 1804 with the Declaration of Independence. At that point the colony of Saint-Domingue became Haiti—the island’s indigenous name.

The dual Haitian Revolution was the only revolution that abolished racial slavery. It created the first independent Black republic in the Americas during the so-called “Age of Revolution” in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It was therefore the most radical revolution of this period. Neither the French Revolution of 1789 nor the American Revolution of 1776 abolished racial slavery. As such, it also inspired artists in the African diaspora population: between 1937 and 1938, the African American artist Jacob Lawrence created a series of 41 paintings chronicling the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture; Andre Pierre took up the subject of revolution in Return of the Spirits to Ginen.

Pierre first painted the spirits of the vodou religion, known as lwas, inside sacred calabashes. In the 1940s he worked with the American filmmaker Maya Deren, who was in Haiti conducting research for her seminal book and documentary Divine Horsemen. Through this collaboration, Pierre encountered the Center for the Arts, the central arts organization in Haiti at that time. There he was encouraged to turn to oil on canvas. A vodou priest as well as an artist, Pierre has declared that he “paints to show the entire world what the vodou religion is. Because three-fourths of the terrestrial globe thinks that vodou is diabolical.… Before I paint, I take this canvas and I put it on the easel. I wait for inspiration before describing it on earth. I sing a song and then I describe what … I sing on the canvas.”

In Return of the Spirits to Ginen, as in many of his works, Pierre humanizes the lwas. They are dressed in finery, ball gowns, and epaulettes, and many wear the colors of the Haitian flag. They are led by Ogou, the spirit of war. Almost beside him is Ezili Danto, the female sprit who, in Pierre’s words, “brought back the Kongo packet,” a container filled with herbs and other ritual vodou religious objects. The painting’s title presents a different historical narrative about the dual Haitian Revolution. Pierre’s vision foregrounds the revolution for independence. For him the struggle against racial slavery had folded into the struggle to achieve independence from France. After the former had succeeded, the lwas returned to Ginen, where enslaved Africans hoped they could establish freedom upon jumping overboard while crossing the Atlantic, or after dying on plantations in the Americas. In Pierre’s visual narrative, the lwas fought the dual revolution: they defeated the French, they gave the former enslaved of Haiti the strength and fortitude to defeat one of the most accomplished European armies of the period—that of Napoleon. In 1801 before sending his army to restore racial slavery in the colony, Napoleon said to his commanding general, “Rid us of these gilded Africans and we will have nothing more to wish.” Napoleon did not know that these Africans would call on the vodou lwas to fight with them against his army.

Thus, Return of the Spirits of Ginen is part of both the vodou and the historical schools of Haitian art. In Pierre’s vast corpus it is perhaps the most seminal of these genres. As a historical painting, it is grounded in the aesthetics of the marvelous, in which there is a “the piling up of the visible.” It is a visual language in which art reveals the possibility of another historical truth.

In 2026, as we reimagine the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution and Independence, this painting points to another independence, one that was not mired in the contradictory paradoxes of the demands for liberty that left racial slavery untouched.