Edouard Duval-Carrié

Haitian-American painter Edouard Duval-Carrié often explores in his work the indigenous, European, and African cultural heritage of his homeland to create vernacular visual languages reflecting this identity mosaic. Bananne combines allusions to the naïve painting associated with the island’s pre-colonial tradition (in the flat geometric patches), the ornamentality of French colonial baroque (in the flower and lacework decorative motifs), and Afro-descendant memory (in the representation of banana trees). Combining etching and painting, this piece in shades of dark blue refers to the many decades in which Haiti’s economy depended almost entirely on the export market of natural resources such as bananas, coffee, and sugar. Those plantations depended on the forced labor of hundreds of thousands of enslaved people of African descent. The trafficking of enslaved people was also a significant source of income for the country. In addition, on the journey from the African continent to Europe, these people were often fed bananas, as this was the cheapest fruit. In Bananne, the dark depiction of a bunch of bananas framed by a series of European-style ornaments represents the commodification of the fruit and—by extension—the bodies of enslaved people, for the benefit of Europeans.