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 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Wax Heads”
The chapter opens as Ti Noël, an enslaved man, and his enslaver, Monsieur Lenormand de Mézy, make purchases in Cap Français. Lenormand de Mézy is confident in Ti Noël’s ability to select a horse. Ti Noël rides the unbroken stallion into the market, where his master gets a haircut and Ti Noël thinks about the similarity between the wax heads sporting wigs in the window and the calf heads on display in the butcher shop next door. In a nearby shop are etchings: One features a king being received by a Black man seated on a throne. Ti Noël, illiterate and unable to read the inscription, asks the shopkeeper whom it depicts. He is told that it is the king of his country. Ti Noël recalls the stories about African kings told by Macandal, another enslaved man: “Kings they were, true kings, and not those sovereigns covered with someone else’s hair” (7). He and Lenormand de Mézy return home along a sea road.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “The Pruning”
Macandal is a Mandingo enslaved person from Guinea who works in the sugar mill with Ti Noël. He is well-known for his deep voice and his oratory powers: He describes the cities of his native continent, where rains obey the wise men and gods regularly reveal themselves to men. When a horse turning the mill falls, Macandal, grabbing the sugar cane, loses his left arm.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “What the Hand Discovered”
After having lost his arm, Macandal begins to herd cattle. In doing so, he explores the underbelly of the grass and notices the plants and mushrooms that the cows ignore. Ti Noël visits him, and together, they spend time with the witch Maman Loi. When they catch a dog from Lenormand de Mézy’s pack, Macandal rubs its snout “with a stone dyed yellow by the juice of a mushroom” (15). It spasms and dies, and Macandal tells Ti Noël that “the time has come” (15); then he runs away. Lenormand de Mézy searches for him to make an example, but he is not found.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary: “The Account”
Ti Noël is hurt by Macandal’s disappearance and wonders if he is unimportant to his friend. However, Maman Loi brings him a message from Macandal, and the two men meet in a cave that looks like an apothecary. Macandal has been in contact with enslaved people from numerous plantations and has a task for Ti Noël: to bring him two milk cows. When Ti Noël does, it is implied that Macandal poisons them. Ti Noël blames their death on an accident, telling his enslaver that “animals brought from distant countries were prone to mistaking the grass they ate” (19).
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
These chapters chiefly introduce the protagonist and two other primary characters: Ti Noël, Macandal, and Monsieur Lenormand de Mézy. The enslaver is portrayed as somewhat powerless: He does not know how to choose a horse or work his land. Rather, he relies on the expertise of enslaved people while he has his hair done. Ti Noël and Macandal know that the rulers of their native African countries are not so helpless: They undergo ritual circumcision, fight in their own wars, and commune directly with their gods. They thus express disgust for Lenormand de Mézy’s pastimes, including croquet and confessing himself to a priest, all of which strike them as effete. From the beginning, the novella thus establishes a tension not only between the enslaved Haitians and the enslavers but also between their respective belief systems, Catholicism Versus Vodou.
Racial Violence Under Enslavement and the resulting antipathy toward enslavers is a large theme in these first chapters, and it is developed through macabre imagery. Ti Noël thinks of the likeness between his enslaver’s head and the severed heads of calves; it is strongly suggested that he would like to see his master’s head similarly severed and served on a platter. However, it is not Lenormand de Mézy but Macandal who suffers bodily harm: His arm is severed by the sugar mill in a gruesome reminder of the violence of enslavement as an institution.
The severing of Macandal’s arm is an early turning point in the narrative as it is the first indication that the enslaved characters will turn on the enslavers. It is suggested that without his arm, Macandal becomes more attuned to natural forces, as in his keen observation of grasses and mushrooms. This attunement introduces the theme of The Power of Nature and segues into magical power with the assistance of the witch Maman Loi. When he tells Ti Noël that “it is time” (15), he means that it is time to go to war and use his magical knowledge of nature against the foolish enslavers.
