American Imperialism's Undead

The Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism

Raphael Dalleo

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780813938936
• eBook ISBN: 9780813938950
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

As modern Caribbean politics and literature emerged in the first half of the twentieth century, Haiti, as the region's first independent state, stood as a source of inspiration for imagining decolonization and rooting regional identity in Africanness. Yet at precisely the same moment that anticolonialism was spreading throughout the Caribbean, Haiti itself was occupied by U.S. marines, a fact that regional political and cultural histories too often overlook. In American Imperialism's Undead, Raphael Dalleo examines how Caribbean literature and activism emerged in the shadow of the U.S. military occupation of Haiti (1915-34) and how that presence influenced the development of anticolonialism throughout the region.

The occupation was a generative event for Caribbean activists such as C. L. R. James, George Padmore, and Marcus and Amy Jacques Garvey as well as for writers such as Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and Alejo Carpentier. Dalleo provides new ways of understanding these luminaries, while also showing how other important figures such as Aimé Césaire, Arturo Schomburg, Claudia Jones, Frantz Fanon, Amy Ashwood Garvey, H. G. De Lisser, Luis Palés Matos, George Lamming, and Jean Rhys can be contextualized in terms of the occupation. By examining Caribbean responses to Haiti's occupation, Dalleo underscores U.S. imperialism as a crucial if unspoken influence on anticolonial discourses and decolonization in the region. Without acknowledging the significance of the occupation of Haiti, our understanding of Atlantic history cannot be complete.

1“The Independence So Hardly Won Has Been Maintained”

C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti

C. L. K. JAMES wrote the most important English-language history of the Haitian Revolution — and arguably the most important book of international anticolonialism from the first half of the twentieth century — as a text very much in dialogue with its 1930s context. As David Scott puts it: “What makes The Black Jacobins the exemplary and lasting work of historical criticism that it is, is the self-consciousness with which James connects the story of Toussaint Louverture to the vital stories of his — that is James’s — time” (Conscripts 10). Scott alludes to James’s frequent discussion of his motivation for writing The Black Jacobins as a desire to prophesize what James calls in a preface to the 1963 edition the “coming emancipation of Africa” (vii). The best-informed scholars of James, including Scott, Robert Hill, and Anthony Bogues, cite the Italian invasion of Abyssinia and this threat to the sovereignty of the only African nation not under European control as the crucial motivation for The Black Jacobins; in Grant Farred’s words, “The Black Jacobins was conceived as an extended critique of the imperialist Italian invasion of Abyssinia” (115).¹ That invasion and the International African Friends of Ethiopia (later reconfigured as the International African Service Bureau, or IASB) that James helped form in response were undoubtedly crucial to his political development. But the Abyssinia crisis began at the end of 1934; James says that he carried out his research on Haiti for six months, beginning in 1933.² The final product that would become The Black Jacobins was certainly composed with the invasion of Abyssinia in mind, but this event occurred too late to be credited for the book’s conception. The catalyst for James’s initial interest in the Haitian Revolution, then, remains a mystery that pointing to the Abyssinia crisis cannot solve. Why did James want to write about Haiti in particular — not Africa, not his native Trinidad — in the early 1930s?

We know that James had begun to think about Haiti in Trinidad before moving to London in 1932, that he undertook research in the Paris archives in 1933, and that his findings would be dramatized in the play Toussaint L’Ouverture (written in 1934 and performed in 1936) and then published in the extraordinary history The Black Jacobins in 1938. Yet the origins of James’s interest in Haiti remain surprisingly cloudy. James himself is especially elusive about what set in motion this research: “I had decided — God only knows why, I don’t; and I rather doubt if even He would too — that I would write a history of Toussaint L’Ouverture. Why? I don’t know. . . . I had made up my mind, for no other than a literary reason, that when I reached England I would settle down to write a history of Toussaint L’Ouverture” (“How I Wrote The Black Jacobins” 67). Stuart Hall similarly frames James’s interest in Haiti as something of a mystery: “What I don’t know is precisely when James began to be interested in Haiti. It doesn’t figure in his earlier writing. And yet very shortly after he comes to England, in 1932, he travels to Paris to immerse himself in the archives, almost as if it’s one of the reasons for his coming to Europe in the first place. He must have been thinking about it; he must have known about it” (18).

James, Scott, Farred, and Hall all address the act of contextualization, even as they call it into question. Scott, Farred, and Hall insist on the “self-consciousness” with which James constructed The Black Jacobins, while James expresses less certainty about his motivations. Scholars and critics may confidently insist on which are the “vital stories” that frame the writer’s context, the things the text itself shows that the writer “must have known about.” But what about the stories the text silences? What about the mysteries that careful archival reconstruction can’t solve, the things Hall admits we “don’t know precisely”? What do we do when a historical event seems so obviously to have influenced a writer — to have laid the foundations for that writer to arrive at his topic of investigation — but the writer himself avoids virtually any mention of this event, and in fact, almost obsessively offers other explanations? How can we find evidence of causality when all we have is absence? Sometimes so much has been written about an event — or a text — that it seems like all questions about it have been answered; sometimes the most obvious and essential questions have not yet been asked. Finding answers may not always be possible, but looking for them can open up new ways of seeing.

I want to hazard an explanation for James’s interest in Haiti for which I have been able to find no proof. But perhaps, as postcolonial studies teaches us, this absence — what Michel-Rolph Trouillot might call this “archival silence” — is the story. Interrogating such a silence requires methodological creativity and flexibility. When James first began to think about Haiti, the fears that would later be evoked by the threat to Abyssinian sovereignty had already been realized in the Caribbean. From 1915 to 1934 — the years during which James began work on his history of the Haitian Revolution — Haiti, the second nation in the Americas to have successfully overthrown colonial domination, was occupied by the United States. My hypothesis is twofold: first, that James’s interest in Haiti was mediated by that occupation, making The Black Jacobins part of the international fascination with all things Haitian sparked by U.S.-disseminated narratives of Haiti;³ and second, that the silence about this context (and repeated preference to point to Africa as the book’s inspiration) reflects just how threatening the occupation was to the vision of anticolonialism that animates The Black Jacobins. Scholars of anticolonialism and pan-Africanism have not adequately engaged with this ambiguous event, an occupation that lasted for almost two decades and significantly shaped the visions of imperialism and resistance for those who lived through it. A fuller understanding of the contexts of texts like The Black Jacobins must account for how the U.S. occupation of Haiti stands at the outset of pan-African anticolonialism, inspiring, initiating, and enabling it even as Haiti’s loss of sovereignty would hang as a shadow over all of the discourses of decolonization that followed.

Writing about absence presents obvious challenges, but as Sibylle Fischer shows in Modernity Disavowed, it is not impossible. Fischer examines how the successful Haitian Revolution haunted nineteenth-century planter discourse:

[Modernity Disavowed] started as a study of nineteenth-century Caribbean literatures and the beginnings of national cultures. Eventually I came to feel that at the core of many literary texts and literary and cultural histories there is a certain mystery: a suspended contradiction, an unexpected flight of fantasy where one might have expected a reckoning with reality, an aesthetic judgment too harsh to be taken at face value, or a failure to deal with what we know to have been the main issues of concern. I came to think that there were more, and more complex, connections between these odd moments and the “horrors of Saint Domingue” than the cursory references to the fears of the Creole population in most literary histories suggested. To be sure, the fear of a repetition of the events in Haiti led to denials of their transcendence and the suppression of any information relating to them. But silence and fear are not beyond interrogation. . . . [T]he impact of an event that is experienced as antagonistic or even traumatic cannot be measured merely by looking at explicit statements. (ix–x)

In Fischer’s work, the Haitian Revolution becomes the silent, silenced center of the nineteenth-century Americas. That silence began to be filled in the twentieth century, especially by works like The Black Jacobins.

James’s history contains a different silence at its center. The radical historian’s desire to make this story from Haiti’s past relevant to his present has been amply noted: the 1938 preface to The Black Jacobins references the Spanish Civil War and the Russian Revolution, and allusions to the coming decolonization of Africa appear throughout the text. Furthermore, The Black Jacobins is exemplary in its attentiveness to the struggles of blacks against dehumanization, inequality, and oppression. His descriptions of the situation facing those who would become Haitian revolutionaries deliberately evoke the white supremacy of his day: “The difficulty was that though one could trap them like animals, transport them in pens, work them alongside an ass or a horse and beat both with the same stick, stable them and starve them, they remained, despite their black skins and curly hair, quite invincibly human beings; with the intelligence and resentments of human beings” (James, Black Jacobins [1938] 5). Yet despite James’s attention to the contemporary resonances of his story, his only mention of occupied Haiti comes in a single paragraph, five pages from the end of the 1938 edition, which is edited out of the 1963 reprint. The 1938 edition of The Black Jacobins includes a description of how “in 1915 . . . America pounced on Haiti” but that because “the tradition of independence was too strong . . . the American marines had to evacuate the country” (311). Even this reference downplays the impact of the occupation and presents it as a momentary threat quickly overcome; James further casts this event as part of the past rather than his present by incorrectly giving 1931 rather than 1934 as the end date of the occupation. But this single paragraph lets us know that James could not help but be aware of the uncertain status of Haitian independence in his own lifetime, even if most of his energies are spent diverting attention away from that reality.

The U.S. occupation of Haiti was, from a global marketing standpoint, the best and worst thing to happen to Haitian culture. The occupation brought Haiti and its culture to the forefront of U.S. consciousness, with Broadway plays, best-selling travel narratives, and zombie movies all circulating images of Haiti — frequently represented in exotic and racist ways — throughout the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. This omnipresence of Haiti, well documented in Mary Renda’s Taking Haiti, was not limited to any one group: black and white audiences alike responded — though often in different ways — to all things Haitian. Harlem Renaissance luminaries like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Haiti during the occupation and wrote about their experiences. Renda describes how for these African Americans, “discussions of Haitian history and culture” provided hope of “unsettling . . . hegemonic interpretations of American identity” (264). Representations of Haiti implicitly justifying the foreign intervention as well as counternarratives disputing the dominant versions circulated widely during this period and helped define perceptions of the Caribbean in the United States and beyond.

In the context of this national obsession with Haiti, West Indians in the United States found themselves mediating their own identities and experiences as Caribbean people through these images of Haiti. The Jamaican Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) and Banjo (1930), which I discuss in more detail in chapter 3, feature black characters who are mostly non-Caribbean, with the exception of Ray, a Haitian, who is one of the few characters to appear in both novels. McKay moved to the United States in 1912; he was in Harlem during a period in which black intellectuals there were actively debating the U.S. military presence in Haiti, and in fact, Home to Harlem includes commentary on both the Haitian Revolution and the U.S. occupation. One of the other major West Indian intellectual figures in the United States during this time period, George Padmore — who would become one of James’s closest collaborators while The Black Jacobins was being written, and who will be the subject of my sixth chapter — similarly found his attention drawn to Haiti. Padmore regularly references the U.S. occupation in his writing and would publish the pamphlet Haiti, an American Slave Colony in 1931. James’s The Black Jacobins thus fits into an international surge in interest in Haiti sparked by the occupation, especially among people of the African diaspora. Yet unlike McKay or Padmore, James, so concerned with the lessons of Haitian history for his present context, has surprisingly little to say about contemporary Haiti.

It would be one thing if James had simply ignored the present status of Haiti, which by the time The Black Jacobins was first published in 1938 was no longer occupied by the United States (though neither was Haiti totally autonomous, as a treaty and constitution ratified during the occupation allowed the United States to maintain control of Haitian finances and foreign affairs until the National City Bank of New York collected in full the debt payments that it had forced Haiti to accept during the occupation). But like the anxious disavowals Fischer notices characterizing planters’ responses to the Haitian Revolution, James at times seems to be deliberately writing around the specter of the occupation. One of his first published essays, from a 1931 issue of the Beacon, is positioned as a refutation of an earlier article on black inferiority yet opens with a strange discussion of Japan’s occupation by U.S. Marines. The essay begins by mentioning the article to which James is responding, then states:

Perhaps before going any further it should be just as well to take a glance at certain aspects of the history of the subject. Gobineau at once springs to mind. It was in the year 1853 that Gobineau published the first volume of his famous work, On the Inequality of Human Races. . . . Doubtless Gobineau as a student of race and culture was very interested in the accounts brought back by Commodore Perry of that backward people, the Japanese, whom the Commodore first in 1853 and again in 1854 visited and brought once more into contact with Western civilization. The Japanese at this time were still a mediaeval people who, living out of touch with Europe, had apparently remained stationary for three hundred years — a living proof of Gobineau’s theory. Gobineau unfortunately died sometime in the seventies, but some of those very Marines who in 1854 marched through the streets of this backward country must have been alive in 1905 to see Japan, having mastered with amazing quickness and completeness the culture and organization of Europe, administer such a beating to one of the most powerful of Western nations that her power has ever since been one of the cardinal factors in any consideration of world affairs. No nation in history has ever done what Japan did in those fifty short years. So much for the capacity to absorb. (6)

James brings up Japan to argue that while its occupation was used in the mid-nineteenth century as evidence of Japanese inferiority, the fifty years since then had seen Japan thoroughly disprove this idea. Unmentioned but lurking behind this story of marine occupation must be Haiti; the fact that James moves from marines in Japan to later in the essay invoke Toussaint Louverture and James Weldon Johnson as proofs of black achievement further amplifies this haunting effect. James even attests to Johnson’s accomplishments by quoting from the Nation, the publication that had famously featured Johnson’s 1920 articles opposing the U.S. mission in Haiti. To not directly name what was still an ongoing occupation in the face of all of these signifiers associated with it — U.S. Marines, Toussaint, Johnson, the Nation — suggests an almost exaggerated avoidance of the topic.

This same tendency to auspiciously write around the occupation occurs in the rare instances where James does address the contemporary situation in Haiti. James’s first public presentation of his research on the Haitian Revolution in his play Toussaint L’Ouverture (performed in London in March 1936, a little more than a year after the occupation ended in August 1934) includes this author’s note in the playbill:

The independence so hardly won has been maintained. The former French colony of San Domingo, to-day Haiti, is a member of the League of Nations, and Colonel Nemours, its representative, a man of colour, presided over the eighth assembly of the League. The closest and most cordial relationship exists to-day between white France and coloured San Domingo. The French take a deep interest in a people whose language, cultural traditions and aspirations are entirely French. The Haitians look on France as their spiritual home and many of them fought in the French army during the war of 1914–1918. The play was conceived four years ago and was completely finished by the autumn of 1934. (45)

The play, in other words, was “completely finished” while Haiti was still under U.S. military control, and before the Walwal incident in November 1934 prompted Emperor Haile Selassie to go to the League of Nations in January 1935 to protest Italian aggression. James does not mention Abyssinia as context but instead emphasizes Haiti’s uninterrupted freedom as well as its current status as equal member in the world of nations.

The evidence James offers of Haiti’s continuous independence actually speaks to the nation’s embattled status. Haiti’s admission to the League of Nations came in 1920, at the height of occupation. This seemingly paradoxical situation, in which Haiti could be recognized as an independent nation-state even as it was clearly not sovereign, would become evidence of the League’s bankruptcy for a generation of anticolonial activists discussed in chapter 2 and would force a reconsideration of political independence as a sufficient goal for national liberation. James was well aware of the League’s limitations, and it was by no means an institution he would ordinarily admire. Pamphlets and leaflets produced during the Abyssinia crisis by the Independent Labour Party of which James was a member (and a primary propagandist on Abyssinia) routinely emphasized that “The League of Nations . . . is NOT an instrument for peace but is dominated by CAPITALIST GOVERNMENTS.”⁴ In World Revolution in 1937, James would write of “the Abyssinia question stripping to rags the drapery of the League of Nations” (12). Haiti in the 1920s had been this same sort of test case for critics of the League.

Alfred Nemours (whom James credits in the foreword to t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 “The Independence So Hardly Won Has Been Maintained”: C. L. R. James and the U.S. Occupation of Haiti
• 2 Harlem and Haiti: West Indian Radicals, International Communism, and the Occupation
• 3 “A Romance of the Race, Just Down There by Panama”: Claude McKay, Eric Walrond, and the Exoticized Caribbean
• 4 Gendering the Occupation: The Universal Negro Improvement Association, Black Female Playwrights, and Haiti
• 5 Afroantillanismo, the Marvelous Real, and the Occupation: Alejo Carpentier from Cuba to Paris to Haiti
• 6 Haiti Goes Global: George Padmore and Pan-African Anticolonialism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index