Letter from Noah

Dear Alejo Carpentier,

I have been reading your book The Kingdom of This World and have a few questions for you regarding it’s intended meanings. Firstly, when Ti Noël returns to the old plantation of Lenormand de Mézy he remembers how the plantation used to be, where the warehouses, chapel and a mansion were. While most of the book talks about figurative cycles of politics and life, what significance is there to discuss about Ti Noël’s cycle of movement? When Ti Noël returns to the plantation the narrator that he “sat down on one of the cornerstones of the old mansion, now a stone like any other stone for those who did not remember” (106). This part seems to say that Ti Noël is in a cycle of thinking about his home rather than in a cycle of returning to home. He does, of course, return home, but because he thinks about it, not just because he happens to end up there. I feel like this is a critical point in your book; it is half way through and it explains that everything that happens is because people think about the same things, that they do not come up with new ideas. This leads to the cycles of politics and life that allow one group of people to control another group of people, such as Lenormand de Mézy controlling the slaves on his plantation.

My second question takes place at the Citadel La Ferrière when “every day in the middle of the parade square several bulls had their throats cut so that their blood could be added to the mortar to make the fortress impregnable” (114). The bulls here seem to represent the people that are oppressed and, while they may not be getting slaughtered, always have their well being sacrificed to make someone else more powerful. Why is it that one person must suffer in order for another to grow; why can the two peoples not live in unison to help one another? After Ti Noël lays a brick down almost at midnight the narrator says that “Nevertheless, construction was going on” (115). So the book wants us to believe that forcing people into work is an efficient way to build the world. It wants me to expand my views beyond the politics that I grew up with and beyond the politics I believe in. Thank you for considering my questions and I hope you will reply.

With gratitude,

Noah Hill