Better Late than Never: The Relations of Sex and Power in The Kingdom of This World

In The Kingdom of This World (cue the Hallelujah Chorus running through my head indefinitely), Alejo Carpentier uses sex in multiple ways to show the power dynamics of the Cap Français. Some are more surprising than others.

The main way in which he uses sex is as a show of power. M. Lenormand de Mézy keeps Marinette, a mulatto washer, as a pseudo-wife until he marries again. After losing his second wife, “He suffered from a perpetual erotomania that kept him panting after adolescent slave girls, the smell of whose skin drove him out of his mind” (Carpentier 54). On the night of the slave uprising, he went out “with the idea of forcing one of the girls who slipped in[to the tobacco shed] at this late hour to steal some leaves for their father to chew” (66). The man seems to almost be addicted to sex, but he uses it as a way of asserting his dominance as master.

Once the power dynamic shifts and the slaves revolt, however, they use sex to show their own power. On the night of the rebellion, Ti Noël slips away from the crowd and into the house, because “For a long time now he had dreamed of raping Mlle Floridor” (68) After the slave revolt is smothered, Carpentier reveals that “The Negroes had violated nearly all the well-born girls of the Plaine” (71). The slaves turned the tables on the plantation owners and used sex to show their new (albeit short-lived) dominion.

Sex is also used to show Macandal’s power. His “deep, opaque voice made him irresistible to the Negro women. And his narrative arts, when, with terrible gestures, he played the part of the different personages, held the men spellbound” (13), and upon his triumphant return, he is described as having “testicles like rocks” (37).

However, even as Mézy uses sex to show his power, the slaves have sex even more than he does. One instance is around Christmas, when Mézy is more lax with discipline and the slaves might “slip by night into the quarters of the newly purchased Angola woman whom the master was going to mate, with Christian ceremony, after the holidays” (40). Sex is casually mentioned often, and could potentially be viewed as the slaves trying to have power of their own. There is one example of this that puts Mézy and Ti Noël into stark contrast; while Mézy has a philosophical discussion with his wife on the slaves’ reactions to Macandal’s execution, “Ti Noël got one of the kitchen wenches with twins, taking her three times in a manger of the stables” (47). This could be Ti Noël searching for an outlet for his feelings regarding the execution after having to hide them from the plantation owners.

While sex seems to be used as a symbol of power in The Kingdom of this World, it also can be used as a symbol of sought power or rebellion.