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DEBORAH JENSON
NICK NESBITT
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
6
39
CHRIS BONGIE
70
DORIS Y. KADISH
108
131
ALBERT VALDMAN
146
DEBORAH JENSON
162
DEBORAH JENSON
DEBORAH JENSON
DEBORAH JENSON
NICK NESBITT
NICK NESBITT
NICK NESBITT
What can such a one-sided vision of the rule of law as always already
(rather than potentially) evil mean for a place like Haiti (or Rwanda, or
the Congo . . .), where the rule of law hardly can be said to exist at all,
where law is not the complex relation of an individual to a universally
valid norm, but is instead no more than the direct expression of violent
domination (whoever has the machine guns and torture chambers is
right)? Contemporary Haiti is the apotheosis of the deformalization
and derationalization of law into a permanent state of emergency and
the arbitrary and unpredictable wielding of raw power.9 Again and
again, the history of Haiti demonstrates the radical insurgency of un
free subjects against the forces of violence and domination, but the fact
that Haiti is the greatest historical instantiation of the insurgency
Hardt and Negri rightly celebrate has never been enough to ensure that
those subjects can realize their full human potential as autonomous,
creative subjects, that after their insurgency they will not be taken out
of their beds at night and assassinated or thrown into jail without re
course to justice. Why must Haitians again and again assert their radi
cal insurgency against "constituted power" in the face of a seemingly
unending and total state of crisis? Only a critical analysis of the multi
ple, ambiguous, and contradictory forms of constituted power in that
nation over the past two centuries, rather than its absolute vilification,
could begin to supply an answer. In the two centuries since its founda
tion, the history of Haiti has become the development and perfection
of a system of total exploitation by a tiny elite and the most absolute
lack of popular sovereignty and governmental mediation imaginable.
While one must resist any fetishization of the rule of law, which must
always remain subordinate to the process of democratization, and
which must always coexist alongside the possibility of civil disobedi
ence, the rule of law nonetheless remains a necessary element in the
of it any less partial. See Negri on Negri: In Conversation with Anne Dufourmentelle
(New York: Routledge, 2004).
9.
This process was theorized by Carl Schmitt and implemented by the National So
cialists. Schmitt's classic (and analytically brilliant) attacks on rational law, parliamen
tarism, and "lifeless" universalism occur in works such as The Crisis of Parliamentary
Democracy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) and The Concept of the Political (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1976). See William Scheuermann's study of
Schmitt's Frankfurt School critics Otto Kirchheimer and Franz Neumann for a defense
of rationalized universalistic law as an unfinished project of modernity. Between the
Norm and the Exception: The Frankfurt School and the Rule of Law (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1994). For an overview of Schmitt's thought, see Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy:
An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso, 2000).
NICK NESBITT
11
democratization.10 11
process of
In contrast with its glaring absence in
contemporary Haiti, in 1804, in a veritable Benjaminian "flash . . .
never [to be] seen again, " the progress of universal human emancipa
tion became a localized, concrete reality that denied the brutal rule of
arbitrary force and subjugation, abolishing slavery immediately and
unconditionally, and inventing and launching the global process of de
colonization that continues unfinished today.11
It is only because the human mind can conceive of the universal,
without ever entirely grasping it, that we have progressed toward, for
example, a universal ban on slavery. This is not to claim that there has
been progress in an absolute sense. Such a claim would be hollow and
meaningless in the face of the many historical failures and ideological
manipulations of the idea of human rights. Jacques Mourgeon's brief yet
dense study Les droits de lhomme offers an overview of the historical
development and instantiation of human rights, attacking in particular
the idea that there has been any absolute progress in their implementa
tion since 1789.12If, as he claims (and he cites no statistics), since 1945
the number of underdeveloped countries has increased from 77 to 133,
the number of individuals living beneath the poverty line, hunger, in
fant mortality, and illiteracy have all increased (50), if massive cases of
genocide have continued unabated, if all this and more is true, is one
then justified in concluding that "the problem is no longer one of
knowing whether here or there one can find rights emerging from the
void . . ., but if in all cases the power brought to bear by and enlarged by
their claim does not use their justifications to rein them in" (53)?13 Such
a conclusion conflates what I think are two separate issues: the (always
partial and contingent) advancement of human rights in any specific
10. Franz Neumann forcefully argues this point in his article "The Concept of Polit
ical Freedom," in The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and
Legal Theory [Glencoe, IL: 1957). See also Between the Norm and the Exception, 196-97.
11. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
12. Jacques Mourgeon, Les droits de lhomme (Paris: PUF, 2002). Further references
to this and all other texts cited more than once will be made parenthetically in the text.
13. This and all other translations from the French are my own, unless otherwise noted.
Viewing human rights from the standpoint of a jurist, Mourgeon claims that the utility of
human rights exists only when they gain obligatory force from their inclusion in a consti
tution (Les droits de lhomme, 68). Such a claim ignores precisely the decisive intervention
of the slaves involved in the Haitian Revolution. The slave with a copy of the Declaration
of the Rights of Man in his shirt pocket, like Toussaint Louverture before 1801, had no con
stitution to enforce his claims, yet these claims nonetheless brought about enormous his
torical change. See Alth Parham, My Odyssey: Experiences of a Young Refugee from Two
Revolutions. By a Creole of Saint Domingue (Louisiana State University Press, 1959), 34.
12
case and the critique of subsequent new and different forms of their de
nial that arise with historical events. It passes over the fact that many
historical changes have occurred precisely because the claims of human
rights were pressed and imperfectly advanced, and the relative (and still
incomplete) decrease in human enslavement since the eighteenth cen
tury offers us perhaps the least ambiguous case of this advancement.
Given the suffering it engendered and its historical aftereffects in
an (economically and juridically) impoverished country, does the Hai
tian Revolution demonstrate historical progress in social justice?14
Kant asked the same question about the French Revolution in his 1798
text "Contest of the Faculties," and responded that it was precisely not
the contingent violence and incompletion of the Terror, all the failings
and shortcomings of such an event that should retain our attention.
Rather, Kant claimed, the progress brought about by the French Revo
lution lies in its construction of a universal idea of freedom, an idea that
negated the local, communitarian politics of race, ethnicity, and nation
to interpellate all those innately endowed with the capacity to under
stand its logic. Kant asks the question "Is the human race continually
improving?" and in offering a positive answer to this question, Kant
presumes precisely what remains first to be demonstrated: that hu
manity actually exists as an immanent totality. Instead, Haiti and the
case of slavery as an attempt at radical de-humanization posit human
ity as no more than an immanent possibility to be conquered: amid the
violence and destruction of enslavement and war, humanity remains
only an idea of which we can conceive, and thus produce historically
(we can become human).15
Kant maintains that one can in fact obtain a "prophetic" vision of
human history "if the prophet himself occasions and produces the
events he predicts" ( 177). He finds just such an event in the French Rev
olution: for all its violence and bloodshed, its "misery and atrocities,"
it has aroused a "sympathy" that proves "a moral disposition within
the human race" (177). The Haitian revolutionaries who had labored as
slaves, making cane grow in the fields and transforming it into sugar
and rum, knew all about labor, and "producing an event [one] predicts. "
Farming is perhaps the prototypical event in the history of humans'
14. An earlier version of the following five paragraphs appeared in Nick Nesbitt,
"Troping Toussaint," Research in African Literatures 35/2 Spring 2004|.
15. Immanuel Kant, "The Contest of the Faculties" in Kant: Pohtical Writings, trans.
H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970, 1991], 176-90.
NICK NESBITT
13
NICK NESBITT
15
1989).
261)
21.
Rousseau's critique of Grotius and Diderot is not a critique of natural rights per
se, but rather the unmasking of their manipulation of a logical category (the "natural")
as mere ideology (the domination of the weak by the strong called the "natural right to
property" or the defense of monarchy the right to "security"). Although Rousseau docs
ground his understanding of human nature via the "natural' qualities of self-preserva
tion and pity, understood as universal human attributes, this human nature can only be
more than a logical possibility in the modern world if it is developed as "political right, "
as the subtitle to the Contrat social puts it, since the state of nature is forever lost to us.
Cited in The Autocritique of the Enlightenment, 68.
NICK NESBITT
17
NICK NESBITT
19
have drawn the speaker, no matter what his position, into enormous
logical contradictions. This becomes evident in one of the few ex
changes on Saint-Domingue before 1793 where les droits de l'homme
are in fact evoked. A decree of the Assemble gnrale de la partie
franaise de Saint-Domingue on March 28, 1790 attempts to set forth
the basis of the colony's right to make its laws independently of the
Mtropole [in essence, to maintain the slave-holding plantation sys
tem). The colonial Assembly affirms this right based on its nonidentity
with France: Saint-Domingue is "too little known by France, from
which it is vastly separated" and is marked by "the difference of cli
mate, of the kind of population, of social morays and habits" (4). Fur
thermore, however, the decree argues that to deny this distinction be
tween the Mtropole and its colony would undermine the very basis of
the Constitution and its Dclaration: "The national Assembly could
not decree laws concerning the regime internal to Saint-Domingue
without contradicting principles that it had consecrated in its very first
decrees, notably in its declaration of the rights of man" (4). The colo
nial Assembly thus defends its local hegemony based on a universal no
tion of human rights, but in order precisely to maintain the exclusion
of others (slaves) from those rights.
Those whites, mulattoes, and free blacks who did wish to transform
the colonial system immediately grasped such contradictions, but re
fused to take the fateful step (universal emancipation) that would move
beyond them, continuing to call only for the extension of civil rights to
nonslaves. In a letter and decree of December 8, 1791, a group of sol
diers and commissioners in Croix-des-Bouquets (among them Ption)
called for the extension "of political rights in favor of persons of color,
based on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen"
(250).25 In a letter of December 14, the members of this rebel army of
"white and colored citizens" wrote to the Civil Commissioners sent to
Saint-Domingue by the National Assembly to attack "the so-called
General Assembly" because it failed to represent the (supposed) ma
jority of the "French people of Saint-Domingue": mulattoes and free
blacks (244). While calling for the extension of universal constitutional
rights to include themselves, they refused to see that the partiality of
their own claimexcluding as it does slavesinvalidates the logical
25.
Letter of December 21, 1791: "Rponse des Commisaires nationaux civils, aux
personnes runies la Croix-des-Bouquets" in Troisime suite des pices justificatives
relatives aux troubles de Saint-Domingue. No. 166. (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale!
ground of their argument: "The law obligates only those who have con
sented to it.. .. All people should be represented. This is a constitu
tional principle fully recognized by the National Assembly. People of
color and free blacks should thus have their own representatives in the
Colonial Assembly" 244).
The Republican Commissioners Mirbeck, Roume, and Saint-Lger
respond point by point to these demands, and their "logical" rebuttal
covers the naked power and domination of authority with the "voice
of reason" (251). While they admit that the Dclaration "contains the
exposition of eternal truths, which are no less evident in Constantino
ple and in Hindoustan than in France, . . . nevertheless, one sees slav
ery with the Turks, . . . Indians are divided by castes, and Israel was di
vided into tribes." Certainly, France is lucky to have recognized the
universality of rights: "Happy is the nation that, like France, finds it
self mature enough to affix the foundation of its constitution to the
rights of man and citizen." Alas, they sigh, these rights are wonderful
in theory, but a colony is
Separated from the center of the Empire by the vast Ocean, ... popu
lated by whites, blacks, freed persons, by slaves and by the admixture
of whites and blacks,-.. ,bythenatureofitspopulation,[it]necessitates
a local constitution in relation to the state of existence of slaves, and
the political state of those who already enjoy civil rights, and who de
mand a citizen's activities. (253)
NICK NESBITT
21
bermas had to argue for the continued relevance of an event that, after
intensive investigation over the course of two centuries, seemed in
creasingly irrelevant as the generation of May '68 settled into the com
fort of Mitterandisme.26 If my aim here is similar, it is for the opposite
reason: we know comparatively little of the Haitian Revolution, de
spite the fact that it has never receded from public consciousness
throughout the African Diaspora. It has remained actively "silenced"
and largely "unthinkable" in Western discourse, as Michel-Rolph
Trouillot has argued, since the moment it began to unfold in 1791.2-7 A
search of the Cornell library database on the historiography of the
French Revolution reveals over three hundred and fifty Library of Con
gress subject headings alone, and well over 7,000 individual volumes.
A similar search for Haiti reveals twelve subject headings and a grand
total of 235 volumes (many of them duplicates) on the events of 17911804.
In France, this silencing of history is even more striking. Walking
from bookstore to bookstore on the rue des coles a month before the
Bicentennial of Haitian Independence, I could find not a single work on
the Haitian Revolution in stock in any of the famous stores that line
that street (Gibert, Compagnie, etc.) until I reached the niche post
colonial bookseller L'Harmattan, where I finally found three dusty vol
umes: one from 1960 (Csaire), and the other two reprints from the
nineteenth century (Schoelcher, Lacroix).28 What are the causes of the
Revolution and how did it proceed? Compared with the plethora of
written documents that have driven French Revolutionary scholarship
for two centuries, much of this period will remain forever unknown to
scholars.29
Writing in 1988, Habermas renews Kant's identification of the
world-historical importance of the French Revolution in the idea it put
forward: "There seems to be only one remaining candidate for an affir
mative answer to the question concerning the relevance of the French
30. Michel Foucault, "Qu'est-ce que les Lumires?" In Dits Et crits II, 1976-198&
(Paris: Gallimard Quarto, 2001!, 1506.
31. The work of the historian Yves Bnot is one of the few rebuttals to this scholarly
silence, a silence all the more striking when one considers the number of studies of asim
ilar watershed event in French colonial history, the Algerian War.
32. As such, it was of course not free of its own contradictions, the most glaring be
ing the reimposition of forced labor by Toussaint and, subsequently, Christophe, as well
as the Revolution's failure fully to enfranchise women, whose freedom remained the
merely negative one not to be enslaved.
NICK NESBITT
23
Domingue, "is broadening its horizons in the New World. . . . One day
the sun will shed its light on no one but free men among you; the rays
of the star that spreads light will fall no more on irons and slaves."33
In a few short years, the ideology and events of the French Revolu
tion transformed the world of the slaves of Saint Domingue, who be
came through their own exertions both citizens of France and subjects
of a global culture of the Enlightenment, as C.L.R. James first recog
nized. Toussaint Louverture was the articulate voice of this transforrrfation. Again and again, Toussaint grounds his and his colleagues' ac
tions on the universal rights put forward in 1789. "The liberty that the
[French] republicans offer us you say is false," he writes at the moment
he abandons his alliance with the Spanish in 1794. Once the French re
public had abolished slavery, there could be no ambiguity possible: "We
are republicans and, in consequence, free by natural right. It can only
be Kings whose very name expresses what is most vile and low, who
dared to arrogate the right of reducing to slavery men made like them
selves, whom nature had made free."34 In 1798, as the Directory aban
doned the advances of the Revolution and prepared the way for Na
poleon, Toussaint wrote to them of "the oath that we renew, to bury
ourselves under the ruins of a country revived by liberty rather than
suffer the return of slavery" (Black Jacobins, 195).
Toussaint asserts that the reimposition of slavery is not a matter of
local concern for a small Caribbean community of Africans at the
boundaries of the known world. Rather, he enjoins the Directory to
"not allow our brothers, our friends, to be sacrificed to men who wish
to reign over the ruins of the human species." While we can no longer
share the unqualified certainty of the Enlightenment that a concrete
"human species" underwrites any absolute notion of progress, this crit
ical spirit should not blind us to the fact that such a universal notion
did in fact drive historical progress in the 1790s toward the universal
abolition of slavery. The Declaration of the Rights of Man had become
a reality for the slaves of Saint-Domingue, and Toussaint affirms un
ambiguously that its universal prescription of a right to freedom based
on reason ("principle"), is the grounds of their actions:
33. Abb Grgoire, "Lettre aux citoyens de couleur et ngres libres de SaintDomingue" (Paris: Imprimerie du patriote Franois, place du Thtre Italien, 1791), 10,
12.
34. Cited in C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint Louvertuie and the San
Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1989), 155.
These Enlightenment ideas did not spring miraculously into Toussaint's mind. Fluent in both Creole and French, he actively dictated and
rewrote all of his letters with a team of French secretaries until they
forged them into the prose of the Enlightenment. Nor was Toussaint
the passive pawn of his French secretaries. Deborah Jenson has shown
how he actively managed public perception of the events in SaintDomingue as a veritable "spin doctor" of the age of Enlightenment.35
Toussaint subscribed to French papers such as the Monitem, and in
terviews with him appeared there in turn throughout the second half
of the 1790s ("Spin Doctor?" 5). The contemporary account of one
French witness (himself a white plantation owner hostile to Toussaint)
is particularly re vealing as to how this largely illiterate former slave ac
tively transformed himself into one of the most famous public figures
of his time: "I saw him in few words verbally lay out the summary of
his addresses [to his secretaries], rework the poorly conceived, poorly
executed sentences; confront several secretaries presenting their work
by turns; redo the ineffective sections; transpose parts to place them to
better effect; making himself worthy, all in all, of the natural genius
foretold by Raynal."36 While one of the great figures of the Enlighten
ment, as C.L.R. James points out, unlike any of the great theorists of
liberty of his time (Paine, Jefferson, Raynal, Robespierre, Danton), Tous
saint had lived the formative years of his life as a slave, and this expe
rience allowed him, alone in the 1790s, "to defend the freedom of the
35. Deborah Jenson, "Toussaint Louverture, Spin Doctor?: The Haitian Revolution
in the French Media" (Unpublished article, 2003).
36. Cited in "Spin Doctor?" 8.
NICK NESBITT
25
independently of experience, because they make one able to say more about the objects
that appear to the senses than mere experience would teach . . . and make assertions that
contain true universality and strict necessity" (127-28). As I will argue in the remainder
of this paragraph, this last sentence could stand as an abstract formulation of precisely
what occurs in Haiti, where emancipation is forced to occur as a "strict necessity" whose
truth is independent of all (prior) experience. Whether Kant is actually correct about the
existence of pure a priori judgments (and I don't believe that he is) is beside the point for
the historical interpretation I am putting forward here. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure
Reason, trans. Paul Geyer and Alan W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997).
NICK NESBITT
27
43. In his preface to Misres des Lumires, Sala-Molins rightly asserts that "to read
the texts of the Enlightenment without them [the 'negro' slaves], is to .. . limit univer
sal philanthropy to the universality of my own neighborhood" (15) and calls on readers
to "read the texts of the Enlightenment while situating themselves on the side of the
black slaves" (17). The bulk of his text is preoccupied precisely, however, with the white
European thinkers of the Enlightenment; although Sala-Molins ventriloquizes the black
slaves, he tends to reduce them to the role of reactive victims, "those who must. . . suf
fer in their bodies and souls" (26). Louis Sala-Molins, Les misres des Lumires: Sous la
raison, l'outrage (Paris: Laffont, 1992). While he intentionally remains within the same
francocentric perspective as Sala-Molins, Yves Benot offers a compelling critique of Sala
Molins's failure to examine the historico-economic structure underlying the Enlighten
ment eri tique of slavery (105). Benot, La Rvolution franaise et la fin des colonies, 17891794 (Paris: ditions La Dcouverte, [1987], 2004).
44. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History, and the Gods. (Berkely: University of California
Press, 1995), 204.
45. In this sense, 1 think that Aravamudan's argument, in its focus on what he calls
NICK NESBITT
29
NICK NESBITT
31
NICK NESBITT
33
the form of the state" (Transformation of the Public Sphere, 120). Sim
ilarly, one might say of Habermas himself that his analytical excision
of the plebian sphere, while initially paying lip service to the possibil
ity that it might have functioned as a realm "of enlightenment," "de
motes" it to function, silently, as the mere subjective corroboration of
the bourgeois public sphere.
If Habermas merely silences and ignores the "plebian" sphere,
Hegel's analysis is infected by his view that the "rabble" [Pbel] in mod
ern society remains subject to the mere "contingencies of public opin
ion, with its ignorance and perverseness, its false information and its
errors of judgment" (Philosophy of Right, 317). Public opinion, for
Hegel, remains forever cut off from participation in universal truth, a
truth accessible in this view only for a scientifically trained bureau
cratic elite. Ineluctably, "the people [ein Volk] is deceived by itself.'1
This is precisely where the Haitian Revolution he analyzes elsewhere
so insightfully (but as a mere imperfect moment in the march to uni
versal freedom) stands as a radical demonstration that, in SaintDomingue, all members of society (insofar as slavery and the planta
tion determined social life in Saint-Domingue in its totality) were
actually and already (singular, antagonistic) participants in the under
standing and realization of a universal truth. Those slaves that en
lightenment thinkers thought unfit to grasp the universal concept of
freedom actually and explicitly demonstrated their understanding
when they acted to make the Dclaration des droits de lhomme live
up to its own universal claims.
When news of the French Assembly's declaration first spread to the
colonies, these putatively inhuman slaves were able immediately to
ask exactly the right question: Who is the subject of these "universal"
human rights? If the answer"We are!"was obvious, if not to their
"owners," to them and to us, they simultaneously perceived the con
tradiction between this insight and their own suffering and juridical
and social exclusion. The news of the French Revolution came to SaintDomingue in part via the huge influx of French sailors constantly
arriving there, bringing news from Europe as interpreted from those
sailors' predominantly exploited, proletarian standpoint. In 1789 alone,
"710 vessels brought 18,460 mariners to the booming French colony"
(Common Wind, 50). This nomadic community constituted a quasi"enslaved" underclass formed by the violence of subaltern life on
board seagoing vessels, one of violent conscription, utter subordina-
NICK NESBITT
35
tion, and strict, often arbitrary discipline.58 Sailors on shore in Port-auPrince outnumbered both the white and free colored citizenry.59 These
sailors, often remaining on the island for weeks and months, interacted
extensively with the petit blanc and urban slave population of SaintDomingue as they set up stalls on the wharves to barter goods they had
brought from overseas (Dsciiption topographique, 315).
Of course, news also arrived in the form of print. One British trav
eler describes the feverish excitement that greeted the unloading of a
mailbag in a West Indian port:
On the packet making the harbour it caused a crowd not unlike what
you may have seen at a sailing or rowing match upon the Thames. Each
wishing to be first, and all eager to learn the reports, the vessel was be
set on every quarter before she could come to anchor, and the whole bay
became an animated scene of crowded ships and moving boats. Many
who could not go to the packet as she entered the harbour, repaired on
shore to be ready, there, to meet the news. The people of town, also,
thronged the beach in anxious multitudes. All was busy expectation.
Impatience scarcely allowed the bags to reach the office. (Cited in
Common Wind, 129)
61.
Dumorier, "Sur les troubles des colonies, Et l'unique moyen d'assurer la tran
quillit, la prosprit et la fidlit des ces dpendances de l'Empire" (Paris: Didot Jeune,
1791), 31. Because of their desire to inflame public opinion against the abolitionists, such
comments certainly need to be read critically, and Benot dismisses such attacks on the
Amis des noirs as "grotesque" (Rvolution franaise et la fin des colonies, 138). Ironi
cally, though, it is often the defenders of slavery and the plantation order who tell us the
most about the circulation of such discourse, since abolitionists sought to blame the
colonists' violence and blindness, rather than the ideas of the Revolution, for the unrest
in Saint-Domingue.
NICK NESBITT
37
tent of the Dclaration and the Assembly's refusal to extend its bene
fits to the slaves in its colonies.62
We know that when Sonthonax declared the abolition of slavery on
August 29,1793, the first article of his decree stipulated that "The Dec
laration of the Rights of Man and Citizen will be printed, published,
and displayed wherever need be."63 Though we will never know how
many Af ro-Haitians read these postings or had someone else read them,
enough testimony remains to be certain that the declaration was dis
cussed, analyzed, critiqued, and internalized by the hundreds of thou
sands of members of this public sphere. No censure of revolutionary
texts even attempted to limit their flow into Saint-Domingue until De
cember of 1789 [Rvolution franaise, 138). The Metropolitan planter's
Club Massiac had only limited success in preventing free blacks and
mulattoes from traveling to Saint-Domingue, and despite futile at
tempts to secure the ports to the flow of printed and oral information,
news of the Revolution fueled wild rumors of the abolition of slavery
that spread throughout the island's nervous plantocracy during the fall
of 1789 jCommon Wind, 66-69). Perhaps, then, the October 31, 1789
issue of the influential paper Les Rvolutions de Paris also made its way
there, where planters, mulattoes, and blacks alike could read: "Philos
ophy calls the blacks to liberty every day; from the first word that it pro
nounced in their favor, their freedom became necessary, ft's a fruit of
the tree, it must by rights fall when it is ripe" (cited in Rvolution
franaise, 128).
Joan Dayan describes a public realm of theater that came to exist
under Toussaint Louverture by the late 1790s, a now-official public
sphere "adapted ... to the social and political transformations of the
colony" [Haiti, History and the Gods, 186). To what degree did this of
ficially sanctioned public sphere further the discussion of human rights
in the years leading up to the final defeat of the French in 1802-1804?
Such fragmentary evidence of the existence and functioning of a pub
lic sphere that cut across all classes of society in Saint-Domingue con
tradicts, at the very height of the Enlightenment, the contention that
the bourgeois public sphere was limited to a literate elite. Haitian
62. "All decrees of the Assembly . . . uniformly purport, that all regulations [on slav
ery] should originate with the Planters themselves. After having declared that all man
kind were born equal, . . . they sanctioned a decree that gave the lie to the first principles
of their constitution. " Inquiry into the Causes of the Insurrection of the Negroes in the
Island of St. Doming (London:J. Johnson, 1792], 2.
63. Toussaint Louverture: La Rvolution franaise et le problme colonial, 213.
38
slaves forced their way into this discussion from 1789 on and thor
oughly radicalized the terms of the debate.
As a radical extension of the process of enlightenmentunderstood
as the uncoerced public use of human reasonthe Haitian Revolution
was both a grandiose success and failure. While I have argued that it en
acted a globalization and reconceptualization of the concept of univer
sal human right, its ultimate limitation lay in the historical conditions
of that process. Since Haitian slaves could only participate in this
global discursive sphere by asserting their rights through vi olence, they
ultimately remained trapped with the logic of the very will to power
that the public use of intersubjective, communicative reason in the En
lightenment hoped to overcome. The paradox of the Haitian Revolu
tion is that the slaves of Saint-Domingue could only participate in the
Enlightenment attempt to restrain social antagonism by means of hu
man reason through recourse to absolute violence. While this paradox
came to haunt the Revolution before it was even completed, it should
not blind us to the substantive contribution of the Haitian Revolution
to the progress of human enlightenment and emancipation.
The Haitian invention of decolonization and universal emancipa
tion was a momentous rupture in being, one that obliterated the slave
holding logic of eighteenth-century global capital. It was an effect of
a concrete universal articulated in a highly specific historical and ex
istential situation; it pursued the construction of immanent human
possibilities that remain largely unfulfilled today. The fidelity to the
universal truth of human emancipation unleashed in the events of
1791-1804a promise that remains to be fulfilled amid the violence
andpolitico-economic dysfunction that is contemporary Haitibegan
the difficult construction of an unqualified and universal freedom first
concretized not in Philadelphia in 1776, nor Paris in 1789, but in the
new state of Haiti on January 1, 1804.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
Forget Haiti:
Baron Roger and the New Africa*
The Haitian Revolution was indeed a turning point in history. Like
the Hiroshima bomb, its meaning could be rationalized or repressed
but never really forgotten.
David Brion Davis1
39
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
41
two hundred years later, after the coup d'tat of March 2004 ended the
presidency of Jean-Bertrand Aristidewho had demanded reparations
(or restitution) from France for the nineteenth-century payments Haiti
had made, Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie became the first
French minister to visit Haiti since independence. The new Haitian
leader, Grard Latortue, dropped the "ridiculous" demand for pay
back.10
The novel that I will analyze in this essay, Baron Roger's Keldor,
histoire africaine (1828), suggests, I think, a strategy for forgetting Haiti
and for dominating (a part of) the world (Africa). Everyone knows that
the only way to get a persistent tune out of your head is to hum another
one in its place; Roger's Keldor methodically substitutes Africa for
Haiti in hopes that France can change its colonial tune: end the slave
trade, abolish slavery, forget the Antilles, and turn Africa into a pro
ductive "garden."
Colonial Saint-Domingue would prove hard to forget; it had been
essential to the French Atlantic economy. As the recipient and con
sumer of the largest share of enslaved Africans, Saint-Domingue be
came the most productive colony ever known. The simplicity of the
triangular Atlantic system was just as the Abb Raynal described it in
the title to Book XI of his Histoire des deux Indes: "Europeans go to
Africa to buy farm laborers [cultivateurs] for the West Indies." The fa
mous triangular trade brought European products and cowry shells to
the coast of Africa, where captives were bargained for; those who sur
vived the Middle Passage were sold for a profit and provided labor that
made further profits. In the French islands of the Caribbean, slaves were
not sold for cash, however. Instead, colonial products (denres colo
niales) such as sugar, cotton, indigo, and coffee were loaded into the
slave ship, even though one ship could hold only one third the value of
the humans that had been sold; other ships had to carry the balance
of the profits back to France. The returns from the initial investment
in the slave trade were compounded by the continuing productions of
10.
Joseph Guylcr Delva, "French Defense Minister Visits Troops in Haiti/' Reuters,
April 15, 2004 (info@intemsion2000.com); and Joseph Guyler Delva, "Haiti Drops $22
Billion Claim Upon France," Reuters, April 19, 2004 (info@intervision2000.com). See
also "Dominique de Villepin Port-au-Prince," Le monde, March 27, 2004; Elaine Sciolino, "About-Face in France: Government's Out, Then It's In," The New York Times,
March 31, 2004. On the call for reparations see Dionne Jackson Miller, "Aristide's Call
for Reparations From France Unlikely to Die," Inter Press Service News Agency
(http://ipsnews.org), March 12, 2004.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
43
24. Madame de Stal, "Mirza ou lettre d'un voyageur," in Oeuvres de jeunesse (Paris:
Desjonqures, 1997), 162.
25. Vincent Carretta, Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the En
glish-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: The University Press of
Kentucky, 1996), 296, n. 62. Olaudah Equiano himself supported the opening of Africa to
European, post-slave-trade commerce; in this narrative he looks back on his homeland
with "an evaluating, entrepreneurial eye" (Geraldine Murphy, "Olaudah Equiano, Acci
dental Tourist," Eighteenth-Century Studies 27/4 (Summer 1994]: 557).
26. Georges Hardy, La mise en valeur du Sngal, 1817-1854 (Paris: Payot, 1921),
117.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
45
Africa.27
46
30. The figure 680 is Philip Curtin's, an average covering the years 1821 to 1830; cited
in Brasseur, "Le Sngal," 385, n47. Boubacar Barry gives a figure of "at least. . . 1,000a
year between 1814 and 1831 (S.AST, 139). Barry has vehemently contested Curtin's over
all statistics on the slave trade.
31. See Marcel Dorigny, "Sismondi et les colonies: un maillon entre Lumires et
thoriciens du XiXe sicle? " in Bnot and Dorigny, eds., Rtablissement de l'esclavage,
475.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
47
French.32
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
49
1820-1851: analyse et documents Paris: Karthala, 2000), 37; see Jennings, French AntiSlavery, 13.
48. Manchuelle, "Le rle des Antillais," 379. Melvin Kennedy says that the depor
tees were a group of 260 merchants "The Bissette Affair," 51.
49. Dozon rightly emphasizes the "unprecedented" nature of this "return" (Frres et
sujets, 76). On Bissette, see Chris Bongie, Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of
Post!Colonial Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 19981, 262-87.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
51
African culture. Jomard, an enthusiastic reviewer for the journal of the '
Socit de Gographie saw in Roger's novel not only a fine exemplifica
tion of what the new science of geography could be, that is, something
with "newer and more accurate colors" than the old "arid geography of
nomenclature." He also was pleased that Roger dared to write against
the grain of dominant thought by providing "facts" that could help "re
spond to the detractors of the blacks. " On this point the reviewer is both
perspicacious and prescient: he argues that the "philosophical minds"
of the day are increasingly "inclined to deduce from the differences
among races not only an inferiority of intelligence and of the faculties,
but also a sort of social incapability." It is true that scientific racism, as
wc would call it, was on the increase; the rise of physical anthropology
and the perception of "inequality" among "races" seemed to go hand in
hand.50 Roger dissented. To argue against slavery and the slave trade in
1828 was to be part of a certain small, elite movement; but to go further
and militate against all prejudice based on skin color, in 1828, was a
far lonelier position, with very few allies (possibly including Claire de
Duras). It is certainly a far cry from Mrime's Tamango, which history
has made the most canonical text on the French slave trade.
Jomard showed little curiosity, however, about the literary form
that Roger had taken the trouble to concoct: "for this work is novelistic in form only." And although Jomard said he had discussed the work
with Roger directly, he apparently failed to ask one of the most perti
nent questions: Did this Keldor person really exist?51 Roger himself
does nothing to bolster the reader's belief in Keldor's existence: no
mention of how Roger met him, nothing.
Keldor is a "triangular" text, representing and reflecting on all
three sides of the French Atlantic system that the slave trade made pos
sible, and calling for a reform if not an abandonment of the triangle it
self. Roger wants to represent the West Indies and their plantations as
corrupted by slavery and damned; and his new Africawith its "gar
dens" and its "Negro workers flocking willingly from all the sur
rounding countries" (K 201)as the alternative. This willingness of
Africans to participate is of course key to Roger's plan; without it, he is
50. See Cohen's chapter on "Scientific Racism" in The French Encounter, 210-62.
51. [Edme-Franois] Jomard, "Analyse de l'ouvrage intitul Keldor, histoire afri
caine, par M. le baron Roger," Bulletin de la socit de gographie 58 (February, 1828):
62,63,64.
30.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
53
CHRISTOPHER L MILLER
55
As early as his fifth note, Roger describes the kind of project he is pro
moting:
At Saint-Louis-du-Sngal... colonization has been experimented:
more than forty plantations [sic] have been started; useful crops that are
fit for the climate have been introduced. This territory already has all
the earmarks of a great outpost [tablissement], with great success,
which interests not only France, but also the sciences and all of hu
manity. Now it is up to enlightened public opinion, to capital, and to
the powerful industry of Europe to do the rest. Then culture, commerce,
and civilization will soon conquer the interior of Africa. (K, 210, n. 5,
emphasis added)
Reading the novel as it presents itself, then, this footnote gives the so
lution to a problem that has not yet been fully posed to the reader: the
problem of slavery and the slave trade. Roger's note lays down the tele
ology of the narrative that follows, and Keldor's story has only to con
firm that truth.
KELDOR AND ATLANTIC REVOLUTIONS
Keldor opens in the wake of an African war that took place in 1796 and
thus in the wider Atlantic context, at the time of both the French and
the Haitian revolutions. But West Africa, the Senegambia in particular,
was having its own revolution: a Muslim theocratic revolution, which
is the setting for the first parts of this novel. In both Haiti and West
Africa, these revolutions were of course related to the slave trade. Al
though certainly a minority in comparison to Africans from Kongo or
Dahomey, Africans from the Senegambia who, like Keldor, were vet
erans of the Muslim Revolution in West Africa could certainly have
been among the slaves who rose up and fought in the Haitian Revolu
tion.58 And both of these black revolutions were simultaneous with
and connected to the French Revolution, with its complex and unre
solved attitudes toward colonialism.
As the narrative of Keldor opens, the Almamy (from the word
58.
According to John Thornton, "60 to 70 percent of the adult slaves listed on in
ventories [in Saint-Domingue] in the late 1780's and 1790's were Africa born" and came
"overwhelmingly" from the Lower Guinea coast region and the Angola coast area, in
cluding the Kongo kingdom. Thornton argues that African veterans of wars in Africa
"may prove to be the key that unlocks the mystery of the success" of the Haitian Revo
lution. Thornton, "African Soldiers in the Haitian Revolution," The Journal of Carib
bean History 25/1 and 2 (1991|: 59, 74; on the Senegalese in Haiti, see 72.
56
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
57
lims.61
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
59
the same crops [denres] as those African slaves who had been ripped
out of Africa. Blessed be the prince who works such marvels in the in
terests of humanity ! May the French prosper! May God and His prophet
look kindly on their noble enterprise! (80-81, emphasis added!
The old man's vision thus provides, from the mouth of an African, com
plete sanction for Roger's plans as governor. The calls for an end to the
inefficiency and brutality of the triangular trade are answered. As book
three concludes, the old man further predicts Keldor's return to Sene
gal to fulfill the prophecy. The rest of the novel is therefore predeter
mined, and the hero has only to go through his paces around the At
lantic. This device serves to accentuate the unnecessary nature of the
horrors that the narrator is about to recountthe Middle Passage and
the brutality of slavery in the islands; we have already been told that
these things are obsolete.
66.
WilberforcewaspublishedinFrench, with a preface by Madame de Stal, in 1814;
Clarkson's The Cres of Africa was translated in 1821. Alexander Falconbridge, An Ac
count of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa (London: J. Phillips, 1788); the passage
that Roger quotes is on pp. 24-25; I have not located the French translation that Roger
seems to be citing. On British dominance in abolitionism, see Debbasch, "Posie et
traite," and Serge Daget, "France, Suppression of the Illegal Slave Trade, and England,
1817-1850," in The Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Origins and Effects in Europe,
Africa, and the Americas, ed. David Eltis and James Walvin (Madison: University of Wis
consin Press, 1981), 194.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
61
110) .
67.
See Khama-Bassili Tolo, L'intertextualit chez Mrime: l'tude des sauvages
(Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications, 1998), 234-39.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
63
This rhetoric collapses the distance and the absence that were fun
damental to the organization of the Atlantic triangle: slaves and their
68. Cf. Vergs, Abolir l'esclavage, 118.
69. The utopian dimensions of abolitionist thought are explored at length by Vergs
in Abolir l'esclavage. Dozon rightly points out the traces o Fouirism and Saint-Simonism in Roger's experimental and utopian thinking (Frres et sujets, 73).
suffering were invisible to French people, out of sight and out of mind.
Voltaire's phrase, and Roger's after it, destroys that structure of bonne
conscience. And Roger goes beyond standard abolitionist phrases here:
by placing blame on European civilization itself, comparing its en
lightenment to a destructive flame, Roger anticipates the rhetoric of
twentieth-century nationalism.70
The Americas cannot be the abolitionist utopia that Roger has in
mind; that belongs back in Africa. So melodramatic events work to ex
pulse Keldor from the Pryras plantation. He joins the army of Tous
saint Louverture, which has invaded the Spanish part of the island, and
Keldor joins the Haitian Revolution, in progress. By hitching his story
to the Haitian Revolution at this point in its progress, Roger connects
with a Toussaint who was at the height of his powers and ambitions,
not only "the supreme authority," but "the only authority in the
colony" at that point (late 1800 and early 1801).71 Even Napoleon had
to briefly recognize Toussaint's power by naming him captain-general
(then rescinding the decision).72 Within Keldor, the figure of Tous
saint resonates across the Atlantic with that of the visionary African
Almamy and his Muslim revolution in Senegal. But he also, curiously,
bears some resemblance to Roger himself. Toussaint, like Roger, was
an abolitionist, but a social conservative who kept the plantation sys
tem intact "at all costs" and sought out white colonists as economic
partners; his labor regime was almost as despised as slavery itself by his
compatriots. (Toussaint had been freed before 1776 and reportedly had
owned a dozen slaves himself.73) If Toussaint's rural masses were "con
demned to remain as 'salaried' workers under a 'slave-type' plantation
regime," if his rural code "emptied [the workers'] freedom of any prac
tical substantive meaning," the situation sounds a lot like Roger's
scheme for African "gardens" and indentured labor.74 Toussaint's rep
resentation, in his memoirs, of Saint-Domingue under his command
70. Cf. RenMaran, preface to Batouala: vritable rom an ngre (Paris: Albin Michel,
1965 [1921)]: "Tu btis ton royaume sur des cadavres" (11).
71. Carolyn E. Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Be
low (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 206.
72. David Patrick Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2002), 223.
73. Pierre Pluchon, introduction to Pamphile de Lacroix, La Rvolution de Hati
(Paris: Karthala, 1995), 17. This book includes the entire text of Lacroix's Mmoires pout
servir l'histoire de la rvolution de Saint-Domingue (1819). On Toussaint's manumis
sion, see Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies, 230, n. 30.
74. Fisk, The Making of Haiti, 207, 213, 250, 214.
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
65
66
79.
In one of his endnotes, Roger assures us that two such expeditions, repatriatin
Africans from Havana to Africa, took place, in 1819 and 1822 (263, 5n).
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
67
started by the French" (199). "Solid houses . . . which put our thatched,
mud huts to shame," "a center of industry and civilization whose use
ful influence will gradually spread throughout this entire part of
Africa" (200). Roger's revision of the Atlantic triangle is completed in
these final passages, as the voices of Keldor and Roger finally converge:
I have seen these colonial farms, worked by the hands of free men! Sene
gal and Saint-Domingue together refute the prejudice that said that
such projects were impossible (11). Here are working Negroes who have
flocked voluntarily from all the surrounding countries ... to hire out
their time and their strengths! They are all thinking of one thing:
the products manufactured in France that they can take home with
them. . . . And what an indescribable pleasure it is to recognize here,
already naturalized, almost all the useful and lovely plants that I had
seen in the Antilles! . . .Hail to the garden of Richard-Toll! . . .May this
advantageous [intressante] and noble enterprise prosper! Lord! Hear
my fervent wish: protect these projects, these efforts which pure and
philanthropic intentions alone have inspired! Let these territories, fi
nally delivered from the homicidal exactions of the slave trade, take
their place among civilized nations . . . and let Europe gloriously expi
ate her crimes against Africa! (201-203, emphasis added)
To give Roger his due, we should leave him with full credit for his de
votion to the abolition of slavery. This canbe seen in another encounter
with the Baron, eight years after the publication of Keldor. In 1836 the
Revue des colonies, published by the Martinican gadfly Cyril-Auguste
Bissettewhose deported disciples had been among Roger's laborers
at Richard-Tollpublished a transcription of a recent debate in the SO. * * * * *
SO. See Franois-Xavier Verschave, La Franafrique: le plus long scandale de la
Rpublique (Paris: Stock, 1998); Baadikko Mammadu, Franafrique, l'chec: l'Afrique
postcoloniale en question (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2001); and Dozon's comments on "La
Franafrique" in Frres et sujets, 339-48.
81. Michel-Rolph Trouillot eloquently describes this process in his Silencing the
Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).
CHRISTOPHER L. MILLER
69
Chambre des Dputs. And here we find Roger's voice among the par
ticipants. This reappearance of Roger thus reflects a curious reversal of
the racial roles normally assigned to the oral and the written; now the
European voice is being printed by the (part) African, Bissette. Roger
was a founding member of the Socit franaise pour l'abolition de
l'esclavage in 1834. During a period when abolition was making little
headway, as the Chambre de Dputs was debating the status of the
colonies, the Baron forced its attention to a more urgent matter. If we
are going to discuss the colonies, he argued, "it is a duty for the friends
of humanity ... to bring your attention back to the great question of
the abolition of slavery. . . . Gentlemen, I wish only that our silence not
be construed as an abandonment of the sacred cause to which we have
devoted ourselves." He demanded a response from the minister of the
colonies, in the "interest of the black slaves" as well as "of course" that
of the French planters.82 Roger's persistent "interest" in the abolition
of slavery would have to wait twelve more years to be realized.
CHRIS BONGIE
70
CHRIS BONGIE
71
73
vision certainly has its appeal, especially during this bicentennial year
of Haiti's independence, as the country suffers through yet another ci vil
war and yet another "humanitarian" intervention (read coup dtat) on
the part of its former colonial and neocolonial overlords. Bruce King
has summed up that appeal in his positive appraisal of Drums and
Colours as a work of "skeptical humanism." The lesson of that play,
according to King, is that "History teaches that all races and nations
are alike, that revenge is wrong, that empires and personal life end in
failure and tragedy" (DWCL, 138). This skepticism is, for a critic like
King, the sure sign of an aesthetic and intellectual maturity: "the best
writers of the independence generation," he goes on to explain, "were
skeptical, partly because they were products of Modernism and dis
trusted political rhetoric, but also because their experience of life
and themselves had already warned them" (my emphasis). Although a
writer like James provides ample evidence of the existence of another
Modernism, one better equipped to extractbe it misguidedly or not
some rather less tragic meaning from "the most successful emancipa
tory movement of modern times, the anticolonial struggle,"6 it may
well be that there is an integral link bet ween what passes for the "best"
writing among critics who, like King, still care to discriminate between
texts according to aesthetic criteria and the sort of all-embracing skep
ticism with regard to historical and political change that infuses Wal
cott's oeuvre from its very outset. Whether one agrees with King's as
sessment of what constitutes the "best" in Caribbean writing, his
characterization of the skeptical outlook of Drums and Colours (which
is, ironically enough, the only one of the three plays that evidences any
optimism with regard to historical progress) certainly seems an apt de
scription for the Trilogy as a whole.
And yet, "prescient" as Walcott's emphasis on what one character
in Henri Christophe refers to as the "monotonies of history" appears,
there is also something deeply reductionist about it. One might well
ask, "If that's all there is to say about History, and about Haiti, then
why bother saying it (much less saying it again several decades later) ? "
We get a sense of this reductionism in the provocatively brief preface
to the Trilogy that, apart from the simple act of yoking the three plays
together, constitutes Walcott's sole new contribution. The cursory
tone of this "Foreword" comes across most dramatically in the third of
6. Terry Eagleton, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003),
CHRIS BONG1E
75
CHRIS BONGIE
77
found their way into English as part of the "Haiti fever" that gripped
abolitionist circles during that decade,-13 as the publisher of the English
translation of Rflexions sur une lettre de Mazres dramatically put it,
Vastey's
is perhaps the first work by a Negro, in which the energies of the mind
have been powerfully excited and have found a proper scope for action,
where sentiments favourable to freedom and independence could be
avowed without the immediate terror of the scourge, the axe, or the gib
bet, and where in fact this long oppressed race have been suffered to say
a word in their own defence.14
Regardless of the dubious provenance of this claim, it is certainly
the case that many of the moves one associates with twentieth-century
anticolonial thinkers are already to be found in Vastey's writings. When
it is mentioned at all, his work has thus invariably been characterized
in passing by historians and critics as "third-worldist,"15 and, more
specifically, linked to Ngritude and Fanon.16 As Dash states, in
Vastey's work one finds a great many "sentiments which could easily
belong to any militant ngritude writer of the mid-twentieth-century "
[LI, 4). Assertions of Haiti's African identity crop up frequently in his
writings. Regardless of the darkness or lightness of their skins, Haitians
are all "children of Africa" (Cri, 27), forming part of a "we" that is "of
African descent, and that has nothing in common with the French" [RP,
15). Notwithstanding the evident pride in this marginalized cultural
la patrie, ou les intrts de tous las Haytiens (Cri) n.d. (1815?),- Rflexions sur une lettre
de Mazres. . .sur les Noirs et les Blancs.. . [Maz) 1816; Rflexions addresses auxHaytiens de la partie de lOuest et du Sud, sur lhorrible Assassinat du Gnral Delvare . . .
IR AHI n.d. [1816]; K flexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux franais, con
cernant Hayti {RP) 1817; Essai sur les causes de la rvolution et des guerres civiles
d'Hayti {Essai) 1819. (All but the last two were published in Cap Henry by the King's
printer, P. Roux; the last two were printed at the Imprimerie Royale situated on the
grounds of Christophe's palace, Sans Souci.) Unless noted otherwise, all translations
from the French are mine.
13. See Karen Racine, "Britannia's Bold Brother. British Cultural Influence in Haiti
During the Reign of Henry Christophe (1811-1820), " Journal of Caribbean History 33/
1-2(1999): 130.
14. Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites: Remarks upon a letter addressed by M.
Mazeres.. .toJ.C. L. Sismonde de Sismondi. . . (London: J. Hatchard, 1817), 10.
15. Rgis Antoine, La tragdie du roi Christophe d'Aim Csaire (Paris: Bordas, 1984),
16.
16. The "issues dealt with by the nineteenth-century Haitian, in [Systme colonial
dvoil] and in his other works, are remarkably close to the preoccupations of the twen
tieth-century Martiniquean" (Nicholls, "PW;" 108).
19).
18. Peter I-Iallward, Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the
Specific (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 40.
CHRIS BONGIE
79
CHRIS BONGIE
81
CHRIS BONGIE
83
10), a figure of dirt and disorder. Ption is "filthy [ordurier] in his pri
vate life" [Essai, 68]), a mimic man ("more French than even the
whitest of Frenchmen"), a "Haitian Brutus" reduced to "aping" Chris
tophe [Cr, 15,17). Vastey's pamphlet Cri dla patrie, undoubtedly his
most concerted attack on Ption, concludes with an explicit appeal to
the language of scapegoating, advising Haitians in the South to "chase
him far from you; anathematize him like a monster, like one struck
with the plague, for he will transmit contagion and death to you!" (29).
Lacking an external threat, the community, confronted with the real
ity of its own violence, must ritually expel the scapegoat, who is both
different and the same, "neither too foreign nor too familiar . . . differ
ent enough to dread and loathe, yet enough of a mirror-image to be a
credible point of displacement for one's sins."23 The parts of Vastey's
work that we find difficult to read today are one long attempt at differ
entiating Christophe from Ption (without reducing that difference to
a matter of race, black versus mulatto), at legitimizing the former and
demonizing the latter, separating the dirty from the clean, and im
proper from proper mimeticism (Christophe, by turning Haiti into a
kingdom, with Princes, Barons, Counts, and so on, was simply "fol
lowing the footsteps of our forefathers, imitating all that the world has
produced in the way of wisdom and greatness" [Essai, 153]). Ption's
death in 1818 changes nothing. In Vastey's last book, from 1819, the
place of Ption is taken by his successor, Boyer, but even more obvi
ously by the Republic's own publicists, pamphleteers like Colombel
and Milcent who were themselves intent upon anathematizing in print
their Northern double, Vastey.
Tragedy, as Vastey knew,24 and as Ren Girard has taught us, is a
form of cultural expression that, through the re-enactment of sacrifi
cial violence, provides its audience with a sense of imaginary closure,
a belief in a collective identity that is achieved through the expulsion
of what seems Other but is actually uncannily the Same. Of course,
without a final act, a dnouement that "reaches its end," tragedy
threatens to degenerate into exactly what it was meant to guard
against. Rather than putting an imaginary end to the violence of Haiti's
civil wars, the repetitive, shapeless, directionless mass of Vastey's writ23. Eagleton, Sweet Violence, 279.
24. "Ption dares to call the results of his maneuvers and intrigues with the French
a comedy; I confidently predict that it is in fact a veritable tragedy, of which he is the
principal actor, the dnouement is reaching its end, we are at the fifth act, already count
less arms are raised to punish him for his vile treachery!" [Cri 19).
85
ings runs the risk of simply exemplifying and prolonging that violence.
What can we learn from a violence that cannot "reach its end"? This is
the question that the "unreadable" parts of Vastey's oeuvre force us to
consider. For Haitians, who have suffered through two hundred years
of the violence of civil war masquerading as national "independence,"
it remains a burning question, as the recrudescence of this violence in
Haiti's bicentennial year bears terrible witness, with the minions of the
so-called Convergence dmocratiquehatingiorpower with Aristide's
equally thuggish chimres in a conflict aptly characterized as the strug
gle between "two rotten buttocks in a torn pair of trousers."25
And, at least if we are to believe Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's
claims in Empire that we are all living in a time of "omni-crisis," this
burning question takes us far beyond the streets of Port-au-Prince and
Cap-Hatien. The global(ized) time of "omni-crisis" is one in which
the history of imperialist, interimperialist, and antiimperialist wars is
over. The end of that history has ushered in the reign of peace. Or really,
we have entered the era of minor and internal conflicts. Every imperial
war is a civil war, a police actionfrom Los Angeles and Granada [sic]
to Mogadishu and Sarajevo. (189)
87
Paul Farmer, Uses of Haiti, 2nd ed. (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2003],
CHRIS BONGIE
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CHRIS BONGIE
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CHRIS BONGIE
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tie song with the Chorus and Peasants in which he asserts that "They
cannot take oui faith from us, / We, who suffered many things, / All
the soldiers, guns, and drummers, / All the emperors and kings" (434,
Walcott's italics).
If, as Walcott states in the first sentence of his taciturn Foreword,
"the writing of these plays spans an arc of nearly forty years, " then the
sanctioned reading of that arc would unquestionably he to see in Wal
cott's turn toward the "people" an evolution in his thinking and in
his poetic craft: from the at times oppressive mimeticism of Henri
Christophe, and its "high Elizabethan Jacobean style," to the more
"original" style and approach of The Haitian Earth. It is this evolution
ary reading of the "arc," predictably enough, that the back cover blurb
for the Trilogy encourages, by informing us that in these plays Walcott
"carved ... a sounding room for his own maturing voice"; on this read
ing, the Trilogy as a whole can be made sense of autobiographically, as
charting the emergence of the "real" Walcott, master of his literary craft
andas an added bonus"right-on" spokesperson for the wretched of
the earth, from the ashes of his adolescent play and its pointedly
mimetic excesses. And yet we cannot, I think, be satisfied with this
stark, and stock, opposition between "immature" and "mature" writer,
any more than we can with the appealing distinction between Christophc's "kingdom" and Pompey's "country." The evolutionary reading
of these plays is troubled, falters badly, not onlyin an argument that
others will be better prepared to make than Ibecause of the obvious
gender biases that inform Walcott's counter-foundational fiction about
the Haitian people (I am thinking here of the revealing way in which the
unity of the "country" is allegorized in terms of a union between a mu
latto prostitute and the good-hearted black man whose love redeems
her37), but by the second significant difference between the first and the
last play of the Trilogy. This second difference becomes especially visi
ble in Walcott's seemingly needless emphasis on the same historical
anachronism with which Henri Christophe endsan anachronism that
is, if anything, reinforced in The Haitian Earth.
The soldier who has witnessed Yette's act of sticking pins in her lit
tle Christophe-surrogate informs the king that "She prayed for victory
37.
An extremely relevant point of reference here is Elaine Savory's 1986 critique of
the "macho" overtones of Walcott's work from the late seventies and early eighties; see
"Value Judgements on Art and the Question of Macho Attitude: The Case of Derek Wal
cott," Journal of Commonwealth Studies 21/1 (1986!: 109-19.
CHRIS BONGIE
97
Haitians share the same country and the same (African) origin (158). In
Haitian Earth Walcott makes much the same claim about the unity of
the Haitian people, the need to transcend the North-Negro/South-mulatto divide that Vastey identifies as a colonial (mis)representation of
Haitian realities, but he does so by taking the division as realas well
as, it should be added, by repeatedly associating the figure of the mu
latto with mixed (Euro-African) racial and cultural origins, something
Vastey pointedly refused to do. The final play of the Trilogy veritably
feasts upon the words "black" and "mulatto," offering them up as a de
finitive "solution" to the mystery of Haiti's civil wars: this is the ver
sion of History that both Drums and Colours and The Haitian Earth
convey, translating what was in reality a much more fluid and complex
state of affairs into a fixed opposition. In an indirect manner, this re
sponded to Walcott's own anxieties in the 1950s and 1960s about his
"mulatto" identity (well chronicled in the much anthologized poem "A
Far Cry from Africa") and his related distaste for what he contemptu
ously referred to in his 1974 essay "The Muse of History" as the "new
magnifiers of Africa, " the "glorif iers of the tom-tom" ( WTS, 42,44). Wal
cott fails to resist the dichotomization of history that Vastey in his own
work constantly argued against. Indeed, his fictional Vastey, as we will
now see, in the closing twist of my argument, becomesin the transi
tion from the first to the last play of the Trilogya sacrificial victim of
this hardening of racial lines in Walcott's understanding and represen
tation of the Haitian Revolution and its aftermath.
Walcott's representation of Vastey suffers a major sea-change in the
transition from Henri Christophe, where he plays a prominent role, to
The Haitian Earth, where he is emphatically marginalized. In the first
play, Vastey is, significantly, not identified as either a black or a mu
latto. He plays the role of lago to Christophe's Desdemona-less Othello,
a character of motiveless malignancy. His first appearance in the play
emphasizes the Machiavellian dimension to his character. He advises
Christophe, who is infuriated at Dessalines for having seized power im
mediately after news of Toussaint's death reached Haiti, to play "the
"chessboard of history . . . with duplicity, / Until you are King by the
hand of history" (28)a bit of conniving advice that the more forth
right Christophe rejects. Vastey is Christophe's duplicitous propagan
dist, a willing tool of power, whom Christophe describes as the only
person who understands his "nigger search for fame" (65-66). Cynical
and mercenary ("1 am tired of war; I want a little money. / But I'd make
war to get money" [30]), Vastey takes center-stage in Part Two of the
CHRIS BONGIE
99
to have initiated his king into the world of literature (indeed, into world
literature). The first scene builds on negative representations of writ
ing in Part One, such as when Vastey, who is talcing dictation from
Christophe, asks the then-Commissioner of Internal Affairs under
Dessalines to look at the "copy" of a document he is to sign, and
Christophe, after noting "You know I cannot read," inquires whether
it is intact: "I hope you have not obscured plain fact / in a smoke of
Latin expressions?" (31). Ashamed of the fact that he is up to his neck
in paper, Christophe then imagines himself "bleed[ing] ink, so many
papers, white men's ways" (32). Writing is here associated with the un
original world of the copy, a deceptive power to conceal reality, the
"smoke" of dead languages, a black fall into a white world. This nega
tive vision of writing and reading is brought to a head in the account of
Brelle's downfall in Part Two, which Vastey manages to bring about by
exploiting the illiteracy of Christophe and his entourage: having given
an attendant two letters bearing "the postmark of the south," and hav
ing made sure that he cannot read (78), Vastey orders him to put the let
ters in Brelle's vestments when the archbishop is not looking. Vastey
then suggests to Christophe (in an alliterative language that has, from
the outset, signaled his rhetorical, manipulative relation to language)
that the archbishop is "perhaps plotting piety with Ption "(81) and ad
vises that Christophe have Brelle's vestments searched. After finding
the forged letters, the king does entertain the possibility that he is be
ing tricked by Vastey ("1 cannot read it. But what if it is / A trick of
Vastey's" [85]), but nonetheless ends up murdering the sanctimonious
archbishop for his supposed treason.
If the power to manipulate reality through reading and writing is
thus, in this penultimate episode of the play, brought to the fore, in that
same episode we get a glimpse of another literacy, one that makes pos
sible not a negative manipulation of reality but a positive understand
ing of it, indeed a poetic understanding. Having handed over the two
letters to the attendant, Vastey awaits Christophe in the throne room.
The king enters, commenting on the sound of church music that is
coming from an adjacent room:
When I hear madrigals, requiems,
It is so much like constructing citadels, chteaux,
Or, sometimes, Vastey, in the labyrinth brain,
The theme runs out its threads likewho was itTheseus,
That book you read me, descending down the spirals of the ear . .. (79)
CHRIS BONGIE
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DORIS Y. KADISH
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DORIS Y. RADISH
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2.
See Benot Joachim, "L'indemnit coloniale de Saint-Domingue etla question des
rapatris," Revue historique 246 (1971): 359-76; Lydia Polgreen, "200 Years After
Napoleon, Haiti Finds Little to Celebrate," New York Times, January 2, 2004, 3; Yvan
Debbasch, "Posie et traite: l'opinion franaise sur le commerce ngrier au dbut du XIXe
sicle," Revue franaise dhistoire doutre-mer 48 (1961 ): 311-52; Lon Franois Hoff
mann, Le Ngre romantique: personnage littraire et obsession collective (Paris: Payot,
1973); Doris Y. Kadish, "Prsentation," in Sophie Doin, La famille noire, ou la Traite et
lesclavage, suivie de trois nouvelles blanches et noires (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2002), ixxxxv.
ture, she will assure that "truth will shine through for all classes."3
Looking closely at the plot and characters in three worksthe novel
La famille noire and two short stories, Blanche et noir and Noire et
blancthis essay examines how Sophie Doin placed Haiti at the cen
ter of a new vision of abolitionism that gave a voice to both persons of
color and women. The importance of doing so for both groups cannot
be emphasized enough. At stake for blacks was nothing less than their
very humanity: a recognition that they were feeling, thinking human
beings endowed with the same moral and intellectual capacities as
whites. For women, the stakes were similarly high. Historians such as
Karen Offen and James Smith Allen have observed that, unlike English
or American feminists in the nineteenth century, who sought political
rights, women in France defined equality largely through writing as a
gesture of autonomy. For women of Dorn's generation, social cohesion
required complementary roles for men and women: public and politi
cal for men, moral and intellectual for women.4 To claim, as I do here,
that Doin deserves consideration for having exercised the moral and in
tellectual authority of female authorship is not to say that she thereby
stands as a first-rank author, feminist, or figure in the abolitionist
movement of the 1820s. But by wielding her authority as a writer at the
particular historical moment when she wrote, when the French public
was still largely indifferent toward and uninformed about the horrific
conditions of the slave trade and slavery, she did enter the fray in at
tempting to affect how the French viewed Haiti and abolitionist causes.
Works such as hers functioned to affirm the rightness of the Restora
tion's recognition of Haiti and build confidence in the black republic's
future. Doin is also worthy of study as representative of the many mi
nor women writers who similarly wrote about blacks in the 1820s. For
too long scholars have looked at the treatment of blacks in this period
through the prism of a few famous authors such as Claire de Duras and
Victor Hugo, whose perspectives are then assumed to be the only or
most representative ones. Study of an admittedly minor author like
Sophie Doin has the potential to illuminate a broader range of attitudes
toward Haiti and blacks held by writers of her time.
This essay also looks at a number of other, nonliterary authors to
3. Doin, La famille noire, 6. All translations are mine.
4. Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700-1950: A Political History (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000), 90-91; James Smith Allen, Poignant Relations: Three
Modern French Women (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 178-80.
DORIS Y. KADISH
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DORIS Y. RADISH
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DOIUS Y. KADISH
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black man. She thus stands as a model of the will to liberate herself,
nonviolently, from the racist conventions of her society, to achieve a
humanity free of prejudice and based on love, and to participate in the
founding of a new multiracial Haitian society.
In Noire et blanc, Doin attributes feminine authority to black and
white women alike. Nelzi is not a mere passive recipient of Charles's
love and gratitude for having rescued him at the time of the revolution.
Like Boyer, whom Doin implicitly praises in La famille noire, Nelzi
fights to forge and cement her ties with France in the person of her
beloved Charles. Moreover, like the enlightened Haiti that Phnor's
son also emblematizes, Nelzi is an apt and eager student, to whom
Charles is able to teach the natural sciences, arts, religion, and other
subjects that will make her an equal intellectual partner in the future.
Mme. de Senneterre, like Mme. de Hauteville, Pauline, and Merville,
is a model of tolerance and compassion. Not content merely to embody
benevolent attitudes, she actively exerts her influence in French soci
ety in order to assist a black woman and to combat social inequality
and injustice in France.
In La famille noire, Phnor's wife Nala shoulders a heavy narrative
and symbolic burden. Her initial sacrifice in the futile but noble at
tempt to save Phnor's mother sets the tone for her moral exemplarity
and her profound devotion to the ideal of motherhood. Subsequently
she works diligently, acts intelligently, and faces with courage and de
termination the task of surviving under often insufferable conditions.
In keeping with her irreproachable character, she is granted the exalted
charge of bringing forth Phnor's son, the symbol of the future of Haiti.
As the maternal source and creator of this son, she thus shares in the
authority exercised in other ways by the four other main narrative
agents: the fictional white abolitionist author, the white male aboli
tionist Merville, Phnor, and his son. The importance of Nala's Afri
can origin cannot be overlooked. Prefiguring the early twentieth-cen
tury notion of ngritude, Doin posits Africa as the ultimate source from
which Haitian identity derives.
Along with shared authority between men and women, Doin's writ
ing develops to a significant extent the notion of authority shared be
tween whites and blacks. In Blanche et noir, Domingo, the black pro
tagonist, exerts moral authority through his conduct, both with blacks,
as a participant in their fight for freedom, and whites, as the rescuer of
Pauline's father. His actions thus go against two common pro-slavery
views: first, that whites were responsible for giving blacks their free-
DORIS Y. RADISH
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DORIS Y. RADISH
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Visually privileging the mulatto figure of Ption over the black figure
of Dessalines, the painting indicates a diagonal line descending from
God the father toward Ption, not toward Dessalines (Grigsby, 221).
That privileging corresponds to the sense of privilege that in real life
the painter enjoyed and can be related to his persistent attempt to ob
tain legitimacy from his white father.
Matters are far different in the abolitionist rendering of similar dra
matic scenes involving men of two races that occur in the final pages
of two of Doin's works. At the end of Blanche et noir, Lopold and
Domingo stand before Pauline, presenting her with the choice between
returning to France with a white man or living in Haiti with a black
man. As Lopold promises to join with her "on the steps of the altar"
(Doin, 94), Pauline interrupts him to announce her choice to remain in
Haiti. Instead of bowing to the white, religious authority evoked in
Lethire's painting, Domingo, in the closing scene of Blanche et noir,
"remained bowed for a long time before his divinity" (Doin, 94), his
wife Pauline. It is Pauline with whom he is living happily, twelve years
later, at the end of the story, "when the republic of Haiti was gloriously
established on solid ground" (Doin, 94). The degree to which both black
men and white women are empowered in this scene contrasts sharply
with the privileging of the white father and his elite mulatto son in
Oath of the Ancestors.
In La famille noire, the beach scene occurs when Merville's ship
leaves Haiti. As Phnor's son kneels, with arms outstretched, in affec
tion toward his protector, both men look upward toward the sun shin
ing down benevolently upon them. "My God! exclaimed the Black, pro
tect my father! My God! spoke Merville, grant your benediction to this
regenerated being! Watch over his destiny and the destiny of Haiti!"
The last sentence of the novel"And you, Haiti ! may your splendor be
not only a brilliant meteor, but an immortal beacon of salvation and
freedom!"is followed by a lengthy footnote praising the Christian
king who, by recognizing Haiti's independence, sanctifies the regener
ation of this oppressed race of men. It ends, "May his protective hand
stretch out equally over all Blacks who still suffer!" (Doin, 68). As in
DORIS Y. RADISH
121
Oath of the Ancestors, two men of different races appear beneath the
benevolent eye of a God whose transcendent powers parallel those posjsessed on earth by the white patriarchal figures of fathers and kings.
Lethire's and Doin's works are ultimately very dissimilar, however.
Lethire aspires to be recognized by and be a part of the patriarchal sysi tern he evokes. Doin, in contrast, calls into question its oppression of
the downtrodden. Although she respectfully acknowledges the powers
of God and the white king, she places greater emphasis on human
agency, and especially the shared strength that educated black Haitians
and enlightened white Europeans can derive from relationships of re
spect and reciprocity.
Ironically, the Lethire family history comes closer to the novelist's
vision than to that of the painter. Lethire's son Lucien, who brought
Oath of the Ancestors to Haiti in 1822, chose to define himself as a
"man of color" and to remain in Haiti, where he married a Haitian
woman (Grigsby, 224). Like Domingo and Phnor's son, Lucien Lethi
re, whose death occurred several years after his return to Haiti, had
faith in the future of the former French colony. Like Pauline he made a
conscious choice to pick an uncertain but hopeful future in Haiti over
a secure and established life in France. And like Phnor's son, he pre
sumably believed that the place for the educated man of color was on
Haitian, not on French soil. Those choices, whether real or fictional,
are indicative of how much the kind of black agency that abolitionists
sought to promote differed from the recognition passively received
from white fathers that Oath of the Ancestors implies.
The first of the published sources that Doin refers to in the footnotes
of La famille noire that I wish to discuss is Lhistoire de la catastrophe
de Saint-Domingue, a work that embodies a similar notion of shared
authority as that which occurs in Doin's texts. The structure of Bouvet
de Cress's work recalls that of literary works like Ourika in which a
white European provides prefatory remarks followed by a story in the
voice of a black; in the case of Ourika, a white doctor's words are fol
lowed by those of the ailing black woman whom he is attempting to
cure. Similarly, in Lhistoire de la catastrophe de Saint-Domingue,
Bouvet de Cress introduces the author of the work he is publishing,
who, as noted earlier, can be identified as a black writer in the entourage
of Henry Christophe, Juste Chanlatte.
Why Bouvet de Cress chooses to identify Chanlatte only in a foot
note and only as "M. J. C.," or why Chanlatte opts to identify himself
DORIS Y. KADISH
123
as its root cause the culpable conduct of whites: "On whom should the
blame fall, the responsibility for these disasters, if not on those who
provoked them?" (Bouvet de Cress, 82-83). In contrast with the fre
quently quoted condemnation of the revolutionary events that Duras
enunciates in Ourika, or the implied reprobation Hugo expresses by
emphasizing the ferocity of the black rebels in Bug-Jargal, Chanlatte
points to the mistreatment of slaves as the salient feature of Haiti's
tragic past.
The emphasis on intellectual achievement as the solution to Haiti's
future is another common thread in the writings of Doin and the author
of Lhistoire de la catastrophe- de Saint-Domingue. But whereas Doin
only touches on black intelligence by giving Domingo voice and agency
in Blanche et noir, by bringing out Nelzi's intellectual capacities in
Noire et blanc, and by designating Phnor's son as a future writer at the
end of La famille noire, Chanlatte dwells on this subject at great length
in his work, providing a long catalogue of the arguments upon which
Doin and other abolitionists could draw in making the case for Haiti's
promise for the future. His plea to the French to provide "zealous teach
ers" (Bouvet de Cress, 10) to guide Haitians on the path to enlighten
ment announces the pedagogical function assumed by Merville. His
praise for those new Haitians who succeed in manifesting "sparks of
genius and erudition" (Bouvet de Cress, 19-20) recalls Phnor's son.
And, most importantly, his faith in the intellectual and artistic future
of Haiti, like Doin's, is unshakable: indeed, he envisions the moment
when true civilization and creativity will stem less from Europe than
from "the virgin energy, joined with the merit of experience and in
struction" of the New World (Bouvet de Cress, 29).
Bouvet de Cress's role in promoting acceptance of Haiti comple
ments Chanlatte's. By coordinating the publication of the work, pol
ishing the writing, and writing a series of lengthy footnotes, he explains
that his purpose is "to teach our political dreamers who count money
for everything and the blood of their compatriots for nothing that it is
physically impossible and morally stupid to take back Saint-Domingue
through the force of arms and thus pointlessly expose the French army
to danger again in this torrid climate" (Bouvet de Cress, vi-vii). He
also states that he is fulfilling a promise made some twenty years ear
lier to "the youngest of the sons of Toussaint Louverture, my friend, on
an island in the western ocean" (Bouvet de Cress, 70). It is highly prob
able that in his capacity as official printer for the navy, Bouvet de Cress
had close familiarity with colonial affairs; and thus it is not surprising
DORIS Y. RADISH
125
11.
Peter J. Kitson, "'Bales of Living Anguish': Representations of Race and the Slave
in Romantic Writing/' ELH 67/2 (2000): 522.
DORIS Y. RADISH
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DORIS Y. RADISH
129
phrases like "ce commerce odieux" [this odious trade] that do not ap
pear in the original version (Cri des Africains, 6). There are also fre
quent uses of a more emotive language in the French translation, pre
sumably better suited to the stylistic expectations of French readers at
the time, and especially, perhaps, to humanitarian-minded women.
Significantly, although the text of Georgiana's poem does not appear in
either the original or translated versions of Clarkson's text, Cri des
Africains does include a complete poem in a footnote entitled "Ro
mance," which the translator presents as "an imitation of the poem
that Mungo Park recites through the mouth of his hostesses" (Cxi des
Africains, 14-15). As an example of the emotive language used in the
French translation of Clarkson's work one finds "Ask any man in Eu
rope . . .whether he does not consider war as one of the greatest plagues
with which the human race can be visited" (Clarkson, The Cries of
Africa, 4) translated as "Ah! quel est l'Europen qui. . . n'a pas dit dans
son coeur que la guerre est le plus grand des flaux qui puissent affliger
la malheureuse humanit " [Ah! what European has not said in his heart
that war is the greatest plague that can afflict suffering humanity]
(Clarkson, Cri des Africains, 4). Doin's text, relying not on the original
but on the translation of Clarkson's text, echoes this tone, with the ad
dition of myriad rhetorical flourishes including repetitions, exclama
tions, antitheses, and any other stylistic tool capable of touching the
heartstrings of the sensitive reader. For example, "Quelle pouvantable
effronterie! Eh! quel fruit doivent tirer de tant de meurtres, d'infamies
et de cruauts les Europens insatiables?" (Doin, 14). [What astonish
ing insolence! Ah! what benefit can the insatiable Europeans draw from
so much murder, infamy, and cruelty?] Interestingly, this is one of the
passages in Cri des Africains to which Doin refers the reader. The com
bination of a reference to an objective source and this flowery language
may seem incongruous to us today; but for Doin it was undoubtedly
just another instance of drawing on multiple strategies to achieve a
common goal and of refusing to see the literary and nonliterary as di
chotomous forms of writing.
Sophie Doin positioned Haiti at the center of an abolitionism that gave
a voice to both persons of color and women. She accomplished this task
in various ways. They include providing first-hand accounts, telling
touching stories, identifying black authors, mediating between edu
cated and popular audiences, putting graphic material into a form suit
able for women, and modifying texts through translation for different
130
DANIEL DESORMEAUX
The first black general of the French army, Toussaint Louverture, who
died in captivity in 1803, at Fort de Joux, is, like many great lords and
army generals, an "author" of authentic memoirs. It is this work, rarely
commented on, poorly read, but often cited and contested for two
centuries, that a former Haitian lawyer exiled in Paris, Joseph SaintRmy (1815-1858|, took on the task of publishing in Paris in 1853 with
the bookseller-editor Pagnerre. Saint-Rmy was a former republican
mayor, an editor of Lamartine's works, and a political opponent of Louis
Bonaparte, who had previously brought to the attention of the same
Parisian audience a biography of Toussaint Louverture and an edition
of the memoirs of Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776-1806).1 One could
easily critique Toussaint Louverture for having positioned himself as
the first of the Blacks, but it would be difficult to contest the fact that
he was, even before the publication of Boisrond-Tonnerre's memoirs,
the first of the black memorialists, in the specific sense that the prac
tice of memoir writing has acquired through centuries of French his
tory.2
Marc Fumaroli's analysis of memoir writing in early modern France
offers a useful lexicographical foundation for contextualizing Tous1. See Joseph Saint-Rmy, Vie da Tbussaint-lJ Ouverture (Paris: Moquet, Librairiediteur, 1850), and Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, Mmoires pour servir lhistoire d'Hati
(Paris: Saint-Denis, Prvt and Drouard, 1851).
2. Boisrond-Tonnerre was the author of the act of the Haitian independence, secre
tary and advisor to the emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines. See Boisrond-Tonnerre, M
moires pom servir lhistoire dHati (reprint) (Port-au-Prince: ditions Fardin, 1981),
vi-vii. Joseph Saint-Rmy (1813-1856) was the biographer of the generals of the Haitian
revolution and editor of Boisrond-Tonnerre's (1851) and Toussaint Louverture's ( 1853 ) re
spective memoirs under the Second Empire.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.
131
132
DANIEL DESORMEAUX
133
of the state, between an official function for knowledge and a free field
of knowledge. Certain critics have remarked that this compromised po
sition of historiography in effect causes the witnesses and above all the
actors in the great events of French monarchical history to regard his
toriography negatively, as a genre incapable of impartiality. Hence the
alternative of memoirs.
THE WORD "MMOIRE"
The noun "mmoire," in its masculine and feminine usages, signifies
numerous different things in French. Among the meanings of the
feminine term cited in the 1874 Grand dictionnaire universel are the
"reputation one leaves after one's death, " and "Gratitude, resentment,
memory of what was well or poorly received." hi jurisprudence, the
memoir involves "Rehabilitating a person's memory, annulling a
defamatory judgment against him." A curateur la mmoire was "A
person charged with defending the memory of a deceased individual."
The meanings of the masculine term include "The documents with
which one writes history," and "A written account of the events that
occurred during a man's lifetime, and in which the author played a role
or of which he was a witness. " In the juridical domain one speaks of de
fense memoirs, that all parties to a lawsuit must sign before they are
presented to a judge. Fumaroli notes that the works of ancien rgime
memorialists constitute "memoirs" in the juridical sense, since they
involved calculating the enormous debt that the writer felt he owed the
state. Also, war memoirs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
indirectly evoke the unreimbursable nature of the debts contracted
during the momentous negotiations and military campaigns waged
victoriously under a monarch's banner. The model of writing adopted
by the memorialists of the ancien rgime and by Toussaint Louverture
himself seems influenced by all these meanings.
TOUSSAINT, MEMORIALIST?
My intention here is not to claim just any symbolic status for the
posthumous work that is incontestably, as we will sec, by Toussaint
Louverture, but to situate the memorialist's initiative in the history of
a literary genre that was considered from the beginning of the eigh
teenth century in Europe to be "specifically French."5 To contextual5. See the crucial, erudite work of Marc Fumaroli on the history of the genre, no-
DANIEL DESORMEAUX
135
not hide the fact that Toussaint's Mmoires, without being inauthentic,
proceed from a sort of translation from oral to written French that was
the work of Martial, a mulatto officer in the army of Saint-Domingue
who was also in captivity at Fort de Joux. He does not give us a precise
account of the state of the text written by Toussaint. Litcrarily, Tous
saint's Mmoires were not particularly ambitious, and when SaintRmy came up against occasional problems of rhetoric, he avoided mak
ing changes to the original text, in order to preserve its authenticity:
Today, I could in my turn have furthered the work of Martial Besse, and,
by digging down into my own scholastic memories, have found some
turns of phrase to decorate the Mmoires that I am publishing. Isn't this
how people proceed with respect to the crowd of contemporary mem
oirs with which the bookstores are inundated every day? But I thought
that in a work destined, so to speak, to catch the literary merit of an old
negro in flagrante delicto even though this negro had never had a hu
manities educationit would be better to maintain the integrity of the
text, even to the detriment of my own patriotic amour propre. (19-20)
DANIEL DESORMEAUX
137
1670), a war marshal who served under three kingsHenri IV, Louis
XIII, and Louis XIVare the work of Thomas du Foss, based on the
recollections gathered by a former officer. The posthumous memoirs
of the Duke of Nevers are more of a collection of heteroclite docu
ments, gathered and published after a forty year wait by Martin le Roy
de Gomberville.10 11 Yet another example would be the memoirs of a cer
tain Gaspard de Saulx, Lord of Tavannes, which had been compiled by
his son Jean de Saulx in 1657. If Isaac Louverture, Toussaint's legitimate
son, also attempted this type of direct succession of paternal memory,
his "memoirs," which are published as an appendix to Antoine Mtral's
1825 Histoire de lexpdition de Saint-Domingue,11 do not have the in
trepid tone, the degree of exaltation, or the warrior's brilliance that
characterize the memoirs of true historical actors. In this regard one
can say that Toussaint Louverture's Mmoires, published thirty years
after those of his son, could have suffered as a result of this temporal
lapse to the degree that Isaac Louverture's rather timorous contribu
tion would have seemed to lead the reader to a trivial familial biogra
phy rather than an illustrious life, or at least to a genealogical legend
that contained none of the stuff of historical protestation.
In Toussaint's Mmoires, the upstanding ancien rgime military
man seems torn between two models: chivalrous heroism (the model
of spectacular action that would speak for itself ), and an acute sense of
honor (the aristocratic model in which the desire to write his illustri
ous life and increase his renown has become a spiritual quest).12 On the
one hand, like every good memorialist who feels betrayed by the state,
Toussaint does not hesitate to settle his "accounts" with the French
government:
If I wanted to count all the services I have rendered to the Government,
I would need several volumes and I would never finish, and [instead] as
compensation for all my service I was arbitrarily arrested in SaintDomingue like a criminal, garrotted, led on board without regard for my
rank and for what I have done, without any proper care. Is that the re-
10. See Fumaroli, "Les mmoires au carrefour des genres en prose," in La diplomatie
del'espiit, 187-88.
11. See the "Mmoires et notes d'Isaac Louverture" in Antoine Mtrai, Histoire de
lexpdition des franais Saint-Domingue: sous le consulat de Napolon Bonaparte,
1802-1803, reprint (Paris: Karthala, 1985).
12. See Philippe Aris, "Pourquoi crit-on des Mmoires?" in Nomi Hepp and
Jacques Hennequin, Les valeurs chez les mmorialistes franais du XVIH sicle avant
la Fronde (Paris: ditions Klincksieck, 1979), 12-20.
But on the other hand, the first black memorialist of the French
army will go beyond these claims. Following the example of French
aristocratic memoirs, which as Fumaroli has shown were strongly in
fluenced by Saint Augustine, Toussaint recognizes at a certain moment
that it is no longer enough to have carried out great exploits to be as
sured of posthumous glory. This is represented in the memorialist's re
signed choice to finally turn his back on the monarch's -justice (Napo
leon's justice) in order to submit himself to providential justice:
Because I am black and ignorant, I should not be counted among the sol
diers of the Republic, or have merit, or justice, and if I do not have them
in this world, I will have them in the other,- I know that my enemies
[were] sought out and paid in all areas of the colony to find or make up
lies about me; but man proposes and God disposes. 88)
DANIEL DESORMEAUX
139
DANIEL DESORMEAUX
141
DANIEL DESORMEAUX
143
It becomes difficult to put forth the idea that the one who should
have introduced Toussaint Louverture's memoirs perfectly grasped the
symbolic sense and historical stakes of this particular genre. SaintRmy was not a historian and even less a politician. He was rather a
precursor to Antnor Firmin and Paulus Sanon, jumping from physi
ology to anatomy, by way of ecology and logic. Through this positivist
posture, Saint-Rmy sought to fight racist discourse on its own terms.
This approach is symptomatic of the scientific aspirations of an entire
field of Haitian thought that was dedicated to countering the racist an
thropology of the nineteenth-century:
Initially positioning their arguments against the backdrop of Genesis,
where all is doubt and confusion, the colonists went on to invoke sci
ence against the black race. Let them now tell us: On what investiga
tions did they found their criteria? What Negro skulls did they palpate,
measure, weigh? (11)
DANIEL DESORMEAUX
145
TOUSSAINT'S TOMB
Undertaken in mourning and historical displacement, the Mmoires
are never a banal autobiography in which the author simply speaks of
his life. All memorialists, in writing their memoirs, seek to inscribe
their place in history and to commit a political act. Toussaint is no ex
ception. His real tomb may have been destroyed, rebuilt, it may even
have disappeared for good. He still retains this memorable tomb. Even
though it is infrequently visited, it is unforgettable, ineffaceable. Toussaint's political will resides symbolically in his Mmoires. But it is not
a will in the common sense of a list of goods passed down to ungrate
ful heirs. It is above all a moral lesson, exemplary last words addressed
to posterity, a hidden model of an illustrious life, an exercise in justifi
catory reflection on times gone by, a requisition against the history that
remains to be carried out. It is his only real tomb. These are his words
that he engraved, like an epitaph, with the dignity of a man of action
who has nothing else with which to fight against despair. Toussaint
Louverture remains probably the only Haitian statesman who left
"true" memoirs. Or at least, this late reader of illustrious lives is the
only one who was conscious of his place in history. One finds no moral
fuzziness in his Mmoires, but the spectacular actions of a military
man. As long as those who succeed him do not have the superstitious
feeling that they can be seriously judged by posterity, and thus by his
tory, we will never again know an epic phase in the construction of this
new country. For no nation can be built legitimately on a self-sufficient
faith in the present. Only a rational and enthusiastic belief in the fu
ture, as in the history of the past, can prevent social stagnation, and to
an even greater degree, nonchalance and shameless exploitation in the
political sphere.
Translated by Deborah Jenson and Molly Krueger Enz
ALBERT VALDMAN
INTRODUCTION
In his novel, Master of the Crossroads, which depicts social interac
tions in Northern Haiti on the eve of independence, Madison Smartt
Bell attempts to recreate the linguistic context of the revolutionary
struggle by interspersing short dialogues in what he assumes to be the
Creole spoken at that time. However, as the examples below show, de
spite the orthographic variants (indicated in boldface characters}1 his
forms illustrate the standard norm of the present day language, namely,
the speech of monolingual speakers from the Port-au-Prince area
(SHC)2:
1. Bell's Creole approximates Standard Haitian Creole. It deviates from that variety
by errors of forms, e.g. *zaviio (the asterisk marks erroneous forms| instead of zaviion,
*chaval instead of chwal or cheval and, particularly, spelling variants which are due to
the fact that he intended to follow the orthographic conventions of colonial texts, e.g.
noir instead of nwar (assuming Bell wishes to show a pronounced r|, batt instead of
bat, main instead of men. See Master of the Crossroads (New York: Pantheon Books,
2000), 732. Except for 'anou for annou and the acute accent over the e's, the first sen
tence shows correct use of the officialized SHC spelling, termed IPN (Institut Pda
gogique National). Adherence to IPN spelling would yield: Annou ale chache manje. By
and large that spelling makes use of French orthographic conventions, e.g. nasal vowels
are represented by sequences vowel + n and /u/ is spelled ou. Exceptions are the consis
tent use of k for /k/, gfor /e/ instead of , en for the nasal vowel /e/, wfor/w/ and y for
1)1.1 will be using the IPN spelling for constructed or cited present-day form, as well as
for fieldwork data, Otherwise, I will reproduce cited form with the original spelling
whose mirroring of pronunciation varies greatly.
2. The unmodified term Creole refers to an unspecified variety of the language. Spe
cific varieties will be abbreviated as follows: SHC = Standard Haitian Creole,- NHC
the Creole spoken in northern Haiti, especially the Cape Haitian region; LAC = Lesser
Antilles Creole; SDC = the language in use during the colonial and immediate post-in
dependence periods.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.
146
ALBEKT VA1DMAN
1H/
Se chaval-ou? (235)
M'gagne zaviro nan main moin. (235) I have the rudder in my hand.
These sentences are meant to provide a realistic image of the lan
guage spoken in the northern plains where the slave revolt that
spawned Haitian independence took place. They fail to do so, however,
because of significant differences between what I term SaintDomingue Creole (SDC) and the present-day standard variety.
In the first part of the article, I will provide samples from first-hand
sources from the late colonial and early independence period that in my
opinion better reflect the speech of Saint-Domingue plantocratie soci
ety, at least that found in the north of the colony. In the second part, I
will attempt to recreate the linguistic situation of colonial society by
broadening my sources to include particularly relevant data from an
tebellum Louisiana.
EARLY CREOLE TEXTS
The distinguished Haitian linguist Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain to whom
we owe the first solid description of SHC guardedly placed the birth of
the language off the northwest coast of Hispaniola, on Tortuga Island, a
den for Dutch, English, and French pirates who preyed upon the Span
ish galleons loaded with the gold and silver of the Incas and Aztecs that
sailed through the Windward Passage between Cuba and Hispaniola.
Creole was born, she declared, when an African slave tried to speak
French with his freebooter master and mutual accommodation ensued.3
This somewhat romantic view of the genesis of Creoles is reduc
tionist in several ways. First, language contact is not a one-on-one af
fair, but involves the interaction of whole social groups. If pirates
owned slaves, it was not primarily as cheap labor but as captured chat
tel to be sold. Second, the agro-industrial sugar plantations required an
extensive infrastructure that could not be improvised in the pirate
stronghold of Tortuga Island, nor in the buccaneer establishments
across the Windward Passage on the coast of Hispaniola where pairs of
Europeans (matelots), sometimes aided by a white bondsman (engag)
3.
See Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, Le crole hatien: morphologie et syntaxe (Portau-Prince: by the author; Wetteren: DeMeester, 1936), ISO.
ALBERT VALDMAN
149
our belly
my body
my blood
his trade
Jesus remained quiet
(kept his mouth quiet)
here is your child; child,
vous
here is your mother
In the oft reproduced song "Lisette quitt laplaine, " which I cite in
two versions, contained in Moreau de Saint-Mry14 and Ducoeurjoly,
respectively, the structure N + a + pronoun occurs systematically.
Moreau de Saint-Mry
Ducurjoly
10. See Anon., Idylles et chansons: ou, essais de posie crole, par un habitant
dHayti (Philadelphia: Edwards, 1811). Reproduced in Edward L, Tinker, "Gombo Cornes
to Philadelphia," in Proceedings of the American Antiquarians Society 67 1957): 4976. For an earlier anthology and a fuller citation of "Lisette quitt laplaine," see Deborah
Jenson, "Mimetic Mastery and Colonial Mimicry in the First Franco-Antillean Creole
Anthology," The Yale Journal of Criticism, 17/1 (2004): 83-106.
11. Serge Denis, "Notre crole" in Nos Antilles (Orlans: G. Luzeray, 1935): 378.
12. S. J. Ducurjoly, Manuel des habitants de Saint-Dominique suivi du premier vo
cabulaire franais-crole (Paris: Lenoir, 2 vols., 1802).
13. Moreau harshly chides the Swiss traveler for his pidiginizing representation of SDC.
14. Frdric Moreau de Saint-Mry, in Description topographique, physique, civile,
politique et historique de la partie franaise de l'Ile Saint-Domingue (Philadelphia:
"chez l'auteur"; Paris: Dupont, 2 vols., 1797-1798 [nouvelle dition entirement revue
et complte sur le manuscrit, Paris: Socit de l'histoire des colonies franaises, 1958]),
places the creation of this song in the late 1750s and attributes its authorship to a certain
Duvivier de la Mahautiere, who at the time of his death was a member of the Port-auPrince council (1565).
ALBERT VALDMAN
151
But the text that most closely reflects speech is a postcolonial oneact play authored by Chris tophe's secretary and court poet, Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers, to celebrate a visit by the king to Cape Hai
tian, Lentre du Roi dans sa capitale en janvier 1818.15 Chanlatte
displays remarkable linguistic virtuosity by portraying various social
categories with different speech varieties: bourgeois and noble charac
ters are made to speak French, a British officer a foreigner's broken
French, and the two main protagonists, the maid Marguerite and the
tinsmith Valentin, Creole. In the extract below, Valentin describes the
song he intends to compose in honor of Christophe to his lover, Mar
guerite, and then responds to Marguerite's reproaches:
Toujours comme a to faire mo reproches qui ebir coeur mo. Avia
dij to forg dans tte to mille chimres, milles imaginations qui pas
gangn ni queue ni tte. Eh! Comment mo capable bli Marguerite,
belle pitit fille cilala qui ha mo coeur li aqu main li? non, cher zami
mo, a pas possibe, mo va aim to toujours.
You are always making these reproaches that break my heart. And now
you are forging a thousand wild dreams, a thousand wild notions that
15. Juste Chanlatte, Comte de Rosiers, P entre du Roi en sa capitale en janvier 1818
(Cap Hatien, imprimerie royale de Sans-Souci, 1818).
The various texts from the late colonial period cited above demon
strate clearly that about a century after the establishment of the pearl
of the Antilles, Creole was far from constituting a mongrelized ren
dition of French, a pidgin. It had become a fully constituted and rulegoverned language with its own autonomous grammar. Indeed, that
conclusion emerges from the most thorough description of SaintDomingue by the self-labeled Creole, Moreau de Saint-Mry, despite
his use of the term "jargon":
This jargon is extremely precious, such that intonation expresses most
of the meaning. It also has its own genius (may you permit this word to
a Creole who believes that he does not use it in vain), and what is cer
tain is that the European, however much he is used to it, however long
he may have resided in the islands, never masters its fine points. (85)
ALBERT VALDMAN
153
ALBERT VALDMAN
155
ALBERT VALDMAN
157
The expressions bouche qui douce and langue qui doie evoke the
term used today to label the more prestigious variety of SHC used by
the bilingual elite, kreyl swa "silky Creole."
AFRICAN LANGUAGES IN COLONIAL
SAINT-DOMINGUE
The nonpreservation of African languages in Haiti constitutes a puz
zling aspect of plantocratie society from a linguistic point of view. In
Saint-Domingue, the slaves constituted the overwhelming majority of
the populationmore than 90 percent of the some 500,000 inhabitants
at the end of colonial rule. The high death rate and low birth rate in the
servile population required constant importation of new slaves. As is
demonstrated by current immigration patterns in the United States,
the constant renewal of an immigrant group helps to preserve the func
tional use of its language and guarantees its maintenance. The constant
resupplying of new slaves, the bossais, should have helped maintain the
African languages as a means of communication and expression within
subgroups of the slave population.
The formation of maroon communities also would seem to have
ALBERT VALDMAN
159
ALBERT VALDMAN
161
vowel (e.g., fa, "juice"; zyeu, "eyekem, "heart"), absent from the
speech of monolingual SHC, are widely attested in NHC. In some
sense, NHC serves as a reservoir for older forms that have disappeared
from SHC, some of which reflect SDC.
There are, however, some profound structural and lexical differ
ences between SDC and both varieties of Haitian Creole that suggest
either that major changes occurred in the course of the century that fol
lowed independence, or that there indeed existed a variety of Creole
spoken by the monolingual field slaves.28 The most important of these
is the loss of case distinction in the pronominal system, as opposed to
the SDC distinction between a subject form and one that serves as both
object and isolation form, for example, SDC mo and mo or moin ver
sus m/mwen for Haitian Creole.29 Also, in NHC the third-person sin
gular pronoun is i/y, e.g. i di, "he/she says"; papay (papa a i), "his, her
father. " Could some of these differences represent survivals of the pu
tative gros crole or are they the result of linguistic change? Finally, a
question that has not been discussed in the literature is whether dur
ing the colonial period there were dialect differences between the Cre
ole of the north and those of the other parts of Saint-Domingue. The
absence of texts that can be traced specifically to these latter regions
makes it impossible to answer that interesting question.
DEBORAH JENSON
1.
On the 13 Prairial An XI, the Ministry of War notified the First Consul of docu
ments found in Toussaint Louverture's jail cell at Fort de Joux after his death. The note
read "I have the honor of sending you the papers we found on Toussaint Louverture after
his death in the folds of a handkerchief that covered his head." Archives nationales AF
IV 1213,22. All translations from Creole (spelled Kreyl in Haiti), French, and Toussaint
Louverture's idiosyncratic French are mine unless indicated otherwise.
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.
162
DEBORAH JENSON
163
BICENTENNIAL KIDNAPPINGS
January 2004 was supposed to have inaugurated a year of celebration
and commemoration of the 1804 Independence of Haiti and its global
legacies of self-emancipation and nineteenth-century decolonization.
Instead; by the Fall of 2003 the crisis in Haitia crisis of economics,
politics, and human rightshad developed to the point that in the days
leading up to January 1, leaders of most CARICOM (Caribbean Com
munity) nations and of all non-Caribbean nations except South Africa,
had pulled out of the proposed celebrations. Not just business elites but
a preponderance of Haitian intellectuals of all political colors (includ
ing many members of the Haitian diaspora) had called for boycotting
bicentennial events to protest perceived corruption and ineffectiveness
in the government of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.2 When South African
President Mbeki did arrive for the bicentennial, equipped with a naval
vessel, ambulances, and a small army of body guards, he was scathingly
chastised by the press in South Africa for conflating the populist legacy
of Aristide with that of Nelson Mandela. There were reports, never de
cisively confirmed or disproved, that the helicopter of Mbeke's advance
guard was fired upon as it moved toward the commemoration site in
Gonaives,3 the port city where the Independence had been proclaimed
in 1804.
Gonaives entered the spotlight again on February 5 when a group of
former Aristide supporters, radicalized by what they believed had been
the government-sponsored assassination of their leader, Amiot M
tayer, in September 2003, took over the police station with murderous
force and declared the city "liberated." This was the continuation of a
2. The Haitian Studies Association in the U.S. issued a nonpartisan "Declaration of
Principle on the Human Rights Situation in Haiti" in December 2003, involving a refusal
to hold its annual conference in Haiti until abuses were rectified. See Kathleen M. Balutanksy and Marie-Jos N'Zengou-Tayo, "Decrying Repression in Haiti," January 8,2004
(http://www.haitipoIicy.org). Many Haitian writers and artists, including Franktienne,
Gary Victor, Lannec Hurbon, Dany Laferrire, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot boycotted
all official celebrations of the Haitian Independence, stating that "In the face of this slide
toward totalitarianism, we, artists, writers, intellectuals, and educators, declare: that we
refuse to associate ourselves with official celebrations through which the government
seeks in vain to legitimize itself. This refusal to associate ourselves with the government
is not an opposition to Haitian unity, but on the contrary a defense of it." See "Des in
tellectuels ct artistes hatiens sc dmarquent du bicentennairc d'Haiti," Agence Alterpresse (http://www.medialternatif.org), October 1, 2003.
3. See "Haitians Shoot at Mbeki's Chopper," BBC News (http://news.bbc.co.uk),
January 2,2004.
164
.213, 25.
DEBORAH J E N S O N
165
sporadic local rebellion that had opened the gates of Gonaives' prison
in August 2002, releasing into its ranks the likes of Joseph Jean-Bap
tiste, better known as Jean Tatoune, who had been a leader of the sin
ister paramilitary organization "Fraph" after the overthrow of Aris
tide's first government in 1991 and a key participant in the 1994
Raboteau massacre in Gonaives.
What was unanticipated by most observersconceivably by the
Mtayer contingent of the local Gonaives group itselfwas the speedy
arrival over the border from the Dominican Republic of new anti-Aris
tide forces, equipped with armored vehicles and other military equip
ment. These contingents were led by a handful of men with earlier
U.S.-funded paramilitary training,4 some of whom, notably Louis Jodel
Chamblain, had striking records of murder, corruption, and drug traf
ficking from the .1991 to 1994 military junta5 and even back to the fi
nal years of the dictatorship of Jean-Claude Duvalier.6 Although these
"rebels" appeared to materialize spontaneously and were welcomed by
some segments of the Haitian population, in subsequent weeks Sena
tor Dodd called for an investigation into claims that they had been re
ceiving training and funding in the Dominican Republic from the U.S.based International Republican Institute.7
This was the beginning of a bicentennial "rebellion" that quickly
threatened to tip Haiti into outright civil war. The international com
munity raised the alarm, and CARICOM, working in tandem with the
United States, France, and Canada, was authorized to mediate a power
sharing arrangement among the differing suitors to power in Haiti's
political future. CARICOM failed to reach an accord with Haitian po
litical opposition groups distinct from the rebels, including the Demo
cratic Convergence and the Group of 184, who refused any solution in
volving Aristide. Aristide negotiated, but also issued statements that
4. "For instance, it is widely known that the leadership of the so-called Haitian
rebels, Guy Philippe, Emanuel Constant, and Jodel Chamblain, were all trained at the
U.S.-held Manta airbase in Ecuador." J. Damu, "Why Haiti? Why Now7?" The Final Call,
March 15, 2004.
5. See Jim Defede, "Rights Abusers Going Free from Haitian Prisons," The Miami
Herald, March 4, 2004.
6. "Among their leaders were some notorious names, such as Chamblain, who ran
death squads in the last years of Jean-Claude 'Baby Doc' Duvalier's dictatorship in the
late 1980s." Michael Christie, "Rights Dilemma as Mass Killers Win Haiti Revolt,"
Reuters (http://www.reuters.com), March 1, 2004.
7. See Ron Howell, "Probing U.S. Ties to Haiti Coup," Newsday, March 17, 2004.
DEBORAH JENSON
167
The violence of Haitian paramilitary repressions is called "dechoukay" or "uprooting" in kreyl, and in the early months of 2004,
few could argue that the tree of peace was not being shaken within an
inch of its life in Haiti. Kidnapping itself became a common form of
crime in the even more economically desperate aftermath of the regime
change.21
Aristide's allegations of kidnapping, whatever their ultimate truth
or falsity, made history. Creole linguist Bryant Freeman called Aris
tide's highly disputed February 28 Creole resignation letter "one of the
three most important historic documents in the history of Haiti."22
(The other two are, in Freeman's estimation, the 1793 proclamation by
French Commissioner Sonthonax abolishing slavery in the colony of
Saint-Dominguethe first French abolition of slaveryand a treach
erous 1801 proclamation issued by Napoleon in both Creole and
French, urging the former slaves to welcome the Napoleonic army with
open arms.) Aristide's letter is written in free verse, characteristic of
the evangelical rhythms of much of his public address. Here is the mid
dle paragraph, followed by my translation:
Asw a, 28 Fevriye 2004, mwen toujou deside
Respekte e f respekt Konstitisyon an.
Konstitisyon an se garanti lavi ak lap.
Konstitisyon an pa dwe nwave nan san Pp
Ayisyen.
Se pou sa, si asw a se demisyon m ki pou evite
Yon beny san,
M aksepte ale ak espwa va gen lavi e non lanmo.23
21. The new kidnappings are primarily of members of the Haitian elite by members
of the Haitian underclass. A journalist who investigated this phenomenon concluded
that kidnapping originally had become a political "industry" under Aristide himself, as
a means of quelling dissent. "Under Mr. Aristide, corrupt police and gang members
linked to the deposed leader were also involved in the kidnapping industry. They would
target specific members of wealthy families in retaliation for political slights. But the
current incidents are what security experts call 'fast-food kidnapping' or 'kidnapping
lite.'" Maria Jimenez, "Abductions on the Rise in Haiti as Poor Grow Desperate," The
Globe and Mail, April 1, 2004.
22. Jennifer Byrd, "KU Prof Asked to Translate Aristide's Statement," Lawrence Jour
nal-World, March 11, 2004. A photograph of Aristide's actual letter is available in "Aris
tide's Resignation Letter," CNN (http://edition.cnn.com), March 2, 2004.
23. A transcribed version of Aristide's original letter in kreyl is posted on Ann Pale,
"Graphic of Original Aristide Resignation Letter Available Online" (http://haitifor
ever.com/forum/viewtopic.php?=783), March 6, 2004.
DEBORAH JENSON
171
DEBORAH JENSON
173
36.
J.-B. Labat, Voyage aux isles (Chronique aventureuse des Carabes, 1693-1705)
(Paris: ditions Phbus, 1993), 222.
DEBORAH JENSON
175
lantic slave trade are Willem Bosman's Kidnapped, Enslaved, and Sold
Away, and John Newton's Kidnapping and Retaliation.37
The kidnappings that haunted the family history of the Louvertures
are both exemplary and exceptional. Toussaint's father, said to be de
scended from Arada chieftains, had been sold to slave traders in his cap
tivity as a prisoner of war, rather than randomly kidnapped. Toussaint
himself was a Creole slave, meaning that he belonged to the relatively
privileged category of those born in the colonies. The motif of kidnap
ping in the Louverture family therefore first crops up in some lesserknown episodes involving Toussaint's two elder sons, Placide (whose
paternity has often been disputed but also effectively defended)38 and
Isaac Louverture.
Born in 1781 and 1782 respectively. Placide and Isaac were sent in
1796, at the expense of the Directory in recognition of Toussaint's mil
itary service, to the cole de Liancourt in Rochechouart, France, a
school for military orphans and the sons of colonists; in 1798, the Lou
verture boys were transferred to the Collge de la Marche in Paris. The
Directory gave responsibility for their formal and personal education
to the abbot Coisnon, with whom Toussaint corresponded regularly,
with considerable warmth and respect. Coisnon in turn corresponded
with the president of the Executive Council of the Directory, forward
ing Toussaint's letters and reporting on the progress of his children.39
This relationship between the Louvertures, Coisnon, and the French
government shifted dramatically with the coming to power of Napo
leon Bonaparte.
Tensions between Napoleon and Toussaint concerning the Louver
ture children begin to come to light in the curious story of a kidnapping
plot uncovered by the French police in 1800. Historian David Geggus
summarizes this plot by a Creole migr in London, Pierre-Victor Malouet, involving another celebrated black military leader from SaintDomingue, Jean Kina, who was then in London:
37. These texts are anthologized in The Atlantic Slave Trade, ed. David Northrup
(Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1994).
38. No records suggest that Toussaint himself ever made a distinction between
Placide and the other children of his marriage with Suzanne Simon Baptiste. See Alfred
Nemours, Histoire de la descendance et de la famille de Toussaint Louverture (Port-auPrince: Imprimerie de Ttat, 1941).
39. In a letter dated 9 Nivse An 7, addressed to the president of the Executive Coun
cil of the Directory, Coisnon assessed the Louverture boys' academic strengths and noted
that he "hastened to send on to him" a recent letter from Toussaint. Archives nationales,
F7 6266.
The episode may not have been quite as chimerical as it seems, how
ever. As early as 1804, a biography of Toussaint stated that he and Gen
eral Maitland had agreed to try to remove the boys from an educational
arrangement in which they were effectively hostages. It is not clear
whether the following quote refers to Malouet's plan specifically or to
some other dialogue between Toussaint and the English regarding the
status of his sons:
One other express engagement of a most interesting nature, [that] Gen
eral Maitland concluded with Tousant, . . . was, that he promised, if
possible, to enveigle [sic] his two sons from those who had charge of
their education, he went to Hamburgh [sic] for that purpose, and en
deavoured to perfect his intentions by deputation, in vain: this disap
pointment became a source of anxiety for their parent, still he was sat
isfied with the attempt: had it succeeded, Tousant [sic] no doubt would
have proclaimed the independence of that colony... these children
were a barrier thereto.41
DEBORAH JENSON
177
Contrary to Toussaint's wishes, when Huin, accompanied by d'Hbcourt, arrived in Bordeaux, he was placed under strict police surveil
lance as a potential kidnapper and denied all access to the Louverture
boys. Police correspondence initially indicated that the abbot Coisnon
had communicated Toussaint's request for the repatriation of his son,
but in later correspondence, Coisnon denied that there had been such
a request, and specified that he would guard the boys from any contact
with potential kidnappers.43 In effect, under the guise of protecting the
boys from kidnappers, the French government had become the kid
napper of the young Louvertures.
The status of the boys as hostages was again confirmed when
Placide was taken out of school to accompany a French military expe
dition led by the admiral Gantheaume in 1800-1801. The expedition
was supposed to be headed for Saint-Dominguea destination that the
presence of the son of Toussaint Louverture would have confirmed to
observers.44 According to Isaac Louverture in his 1818 memoir, Plac de
had been used on this trip, against his will, as a military decoy. Isaac ex
plained that Placide had been on admiral Gantheaume's vessel as "aidede-camp to general Sahuguet, with the firm belief that he was going to
Saint-Domingue, whereas, without suspecting it, he was actually be
ing used to mask the true goal of a naval expedition bringing reinforce
ments to the army in Egypt. "4S The French police itself had noted in an
42. Letter from Toussaint Louverture to General Bonaparte, First Consul of the
French Republic, 10 Messidor, An VIII, Archives nationales, F7 6266.
43. An unsigned report entitled "Les enfants de Toussaint Louverture" on stationery
from the Ministry of the General Police, 15 Vendmiare An X, Archives nationales, F7
6266, noted that Coisnon had received orders from Toussaint to return his children to
him, but then concluded "This fact is absolutely false."
44. See "Les enfants de Toussaint Louverture," op. cit.
45. Isaac Louverture, Mmoires dIsaac Louverture in Histoire de l'expdition des
fianais Saint-Domingue by Antoine Mtrai (Paris: Karthala, 1985), 228. The simu
lated destination" of Saint-Domingue on this expedition was confirmed in the police re
port of 15 Vendmiaire, An X, op. cit.
46. The Ancien moniteur, April 1799,639.
47. This poem is published in Joseph Borom's well-documented article "Louanges
de Napoleon Bonaparte par un fils de Toussaint Louverture," Revue de linstitut Napo
lon 133 (1977): 169.
DEBORAH JENSON
179
180
DEBORAH JENSON
181
Magon, entered, on the 18th of this month, the harbor of Brest. Tous
saint Louverture was on board the vessel the Hero with his family."51
The passage on the Hero was Toussaint's last time spent with his
family (including Placide, who had insisted on accompanying him into
prison, but whose filial piety was rewarded not with his father's com
panionship but with a cell in the prison of Belle-Isle). Toussaint was
sent on alone to the imposingly somber Fort de Joux in the Jura. Prob
ably the earliest French account to qualify Toussaint's departure as a
kidnapping was a letter from the hapless Leclerc, who was losing
ground militarily every day, to Napoleon on June 11 1802: "Toussaint
is kidnapped. It is a great step, but the blacks are arm ed and I need forces
to disarm them."52 On August 25 he reiterated this point, with a tone
of desperation rather than triumph: "It is not enough to have kidnapped
Toussaint, here there are two thousand leaders to kidnap" (217).
Toussaint hoped to change Napoleon's mind and secure his release
by dictating his Mmoires, which he gave to the general Caffarelli, aidede-camp to Napoleon, during his visit of September 16,1802. Caffarelli
noted that this memoir had been "dictated before my arrival at the Fort
de Joux to a secretary of the sub-prefecture."53 Toussaint apparently no
longer had access at that point to a secretary, as he requested that Caf
farelli insert one text written in his own hand.54 This passage still ex
ists at the end of one copy of the Mmoires, written with the same
purely phonetic orthography found in all Toussaint's handwritten
texts, from an early letter written to a French agent to these final writ
ings.55 Caffarelli reported that on his visit of September 27, he found
the prisoner "trembling with cold, and sick, he was suffering greatly,
he found it difficult to speak" (Histoire de la captivit et de la mort de
Toussaint Louverture, 242). At this same meeting Caffarelli returned
51. Gazette de France, July 19, 1802.
52. Letter by Leclerc to Napoleon, June 11,1802, in Paul Roussier, ed., Lettres du gen
eral Leclerc (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1937), 171.
53. General Nemours, Toussaint Louverture fonde Saint-Domingue la libert et
lgalit (Port-au-Prince: Imprimerie du Collge Vertires, 1945), 90.
54. "Toussaint Louverture au Fort de Joux (1802), Journal du general Caffarelli" in
the Nouvelle revue retrospective 94 (10 April 1902): 4. A photograph as well as a tran
scription of this text can be found in the Lettres du General Leclerc, ed. Paul Roussier
(Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1937), 349-50.
55. See the handwritten letter o invective from Toussaint to Sonthonax, 24 of the
month noted by Toussaint with what seems to be the abbreviation for "Rpublique,"
"Rep.," An VI, Archives nationales, AF III 210, 36. This letter confirms that Toussaint's
final texts were consistent, not only in spelling but also in rhetoric and imagery, with his
earlier writing.
DEBORAH JENSON
183
prisoner and took away " all the written and blank papers existing in his
room. . . . He seemed deeply affected by the removal [l'enlvement] of
these papers" (89). After this final literary enlvement, we hear no more
from this great leader of the blacks. Toussaint Louverture was found
dead in his cold dungeon in April 1803, wearing in a headscarf his final
attempts to tell his story.
KIDNAPPING AS TROPE
Srinivas Aravamudan has argued that the Haitian Revolution involved
a "tropicalization" of the Enlightenment. This movement of ideas from
Europe to the tropics is evident, he asserts, in "reading lessons'' based
not so much on the verifiable consumption of literal texts as on "mo
bile dramatizations of the abstract process of literacy"58 such as the
general renown of the abb Raynal's paradigm of a "new Spartacus."
Kidnapping presents a more violent "mobile dramatization" of intercultural movement. And kidnapping as intercultural movement is ar
guably at the very foundations of what we associate with the idea of
"civilization," as the name "Europe" itself comes from a mythological
scene of a sort of Europeanization by kidnapping.
The name "Europe" derives from the myth that the Phoenician
princess Europa, wandering along a beach, was persuaded by Zeus, dis
guised as a snowy white bull, to ride upon his back. The ride turned into
an abduction/ravishmcnt, as Zeus carried the princess across the
Mediterranean to Crete, where she became the mother of Minos, Lord
of Crete. Norman Davies points out that among the connotations of
Europa's ride is the movement of knowledge and reading practices from
East to West, locating the cultural identity of Europe in a sort of kid
napping, ravishment, and familial merger of crosscultural influences:
"Zeus was surely transferring the fruits of the older Asian civilizations
of the East to the new island colonies of the Aegean," writes Davies.
"Europa's ride provides the mythical link between Ancient Egypt and
Ancient Greece. Europa's brother, Cadmus, who roamed the world in
search of her, . . . was credited with bringing the art of writing to
Greece."59 On a mythological level, the origins of European civiliza
tion lie not in a founding nationalist scene, but in an involuntary hy58. Srinivas Aravamudan, Ttopicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 289.
59. Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996), xvi.
DEBORAH JENSON
185
63.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide, "Statement by President Jean-Bertrand Aristide," Black
World Today, May 31, 2004.
Contributors
Chris Bongie
YFS 107, The Haiti Issue, ed. Deborah Jenson, 2005 by Yale University.
187
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