The Haitians

A Decolonial History

Jean Casimir, Laurent Dubois

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469660493
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia de Latinoamérica y el Caribe

In this sweeping history, leading Haitian intellectual Jean Casimir argues that the story of Haiti should not begin with the usual image of Saint-Domingue as the richest colony of the eighteenth century. Rather, it begins with a reconstruction of how individuals from Africa, in the midst of the golden age of imperialism, created a sovereign society based on political imagination and a radical rejection of the colonial order, persisting even through the U.S. occupation in 1915. The Haitians also critically retheorizes the very nature of slavery, colonialism, and sovereignty. Here, Casimir centers the perspectives of Haiti's moun andeyo —the largely African-descended rural peasantry. Asking how these systematically marginalized and silenced people survived in the face of almost complete political disenfranchisement, Casimir identifies what he calls a counter-plantation system. Derived from Caribbean political and cultural practices, the counter-plantation encompassed consistent reliance on small-scale landholding. Casimir shows how lakou, small plots of land often inhabited by generations of the same family, were and continue to be sites of resistance even in the face of structural disadvantages originating in colonial times, some of which continue to be maintained by the Haitian government with support from outside powers.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Perspective

If we don’t sit

on the same hill

we won’t see

the same plain

—Frankétienne, Voix Marassas, 1998

Current theories on the emergence of the modern state rarely take note of the fact that this institution was born and consolidated thanks to the absorption of the almost immeasurable wealth extracted from the American colonies (Quijano 2000).¹ The Europeans who discovered the continent believed that they had a right to its riches. And today, dominant theories see still no reason to recognize that the Americas have made any significant contribution to European modernity. As Sylvia Wynter reminds us, the sixteenth-century Scottish theologian John Mair declared that the very nature of the conquered—those he called savages and pagans—justified the right of the conquerors to seize lands that belonged to no one: terra nullius (Wynter 2003, 283, 291). The conquerors also saw these people as having no history.

My main interest is not how and why the political forces of Hispaniola, Saint-Domingue, and Haiti besieged Haitians, whether indigenous peoples, African ethnicities kidnapped by slave traders, or the agricultural laborers of the nineteenth century. Though I analyze the implantation of the modern state and engage with questions explored in European thought, I look at this thought from outside rather than following its gaze. Europeans, a majority in their homelands, study their history and their states without much taking into account the considerable contributions of those majorities that, since 1492, they have exploited without restraint. Yet, whatever the qualitative importance we might concede to them, Europeans are a tiny minority among us. They do not significantly influence the daily social relations or the private lives of our population. Studies of European modernity have been carried out for five centuries without considering the significant contribution of the colonies. I invite readers to place Haitians at the center of their thinking and to recognize the role of external influences without getting distracted by their logic and the norms derived from that logic. The focus here is on the logic and norms of behavior of Haitians themselves.

The actions of the colonial empires were an accident of history. They set in motion choices on the part of the colonized populations that were founded on their own collection of knowledges, practices, and aptitudes. Within the colonial context, the popular majority found a way to express itself, one way or another. They embarked on their own journey, even when this journey led to collective suicide or gradual extermination. The Haitians of yesterday, and of today, are the architects of their own history. That history was not produced by those who came from overseas—the moun vini, those who arrived from elsewhere. Haitians think for themselves and by themselves.

Since the imperial state—that state that possesses colonies—was born in Europe and did not emerge within the Haitian context, I refer to the “state in Haiti,” which is not to be confused with “the Haitian state.” My goal is not to describe how the formation of overseas colonies sought to shape Haitian reality in order to contribute to the happiness and well-being of Europeans. Instead, I show how local society stubbornly preserved its specificity and therefore its sovereignty. I start from the premise that the people are by definition sovereign and do not need any help in expressing and asserting their own principles.

The republican state was not born in and through empire, but outside and against it. Following Fustel de Coulanges, we can say that power flows less from the point of a lance or a gun than from the work of human beings and of juridical and political institutions (Kriegel 1998, 68–70). In Haiti, real power—and therefore, stability over the long term—depends on the work of human beings carried out within local institutions. In contrast, in the spheres of government power and its administration, there are only crises, unpredictable changes, and constant fluidity: kingdoms, republics, empires, constitutions upon constitutions, coup d’états, elections, and so on. Meanwhile, without batting an eyelid and with little fuss, rural institutions and the civil society have combined to create national life and ensured its peaceful continuity.

The modern state that governed the colony from 1492 to 1791 was not interested in the well-being of the Haitian population. It was only after the gathering at Bois Caïman, three centuries after Christopher Columbus’s remarkable discovery, that this well-being became a focus. That changed the course of history. The revolt that began in 1791 led to the consolidation of a social movement that ultimately created a nation. Unsurprisingly, that nation turned its back on the modern colonial state, or else simply ignored it. The French, the local privileged classes, and the international community worked hard and used every means at their disposal to stop the Haitian population from taking command of what we can consider an essential human pursuit—that of seeking a better life. The result was an institutionalized disjuncture. On the one hand was the trajectory of a nation seeking a better life, defined on its own terms; on the other were public authorities seeking to prevent the population from gaining access to the resources necessary to fulfill their aspirations for well-being. The authorities considered the aspirations of the population irrelevant.

If readers ask what I have learned from writing this book that I now offer to them, my answer is that above all, in how I live my personal life, I no longer see my ancestors as former slaves.² I don’t even think of them as a dominated class. Their misery is only the most superficial aspect of their reality. It is the reality that colonialists prefer to emphasize, along with those among them who oppose the cruelty of some colonists but don’t ultimately reject colonization itself. Having finished this book, I have come to realize that my ancestors, as individuals and as a group, never stopped resisting slavery and domination. I am the child of a collective of fighters, not of the vanquished. I have chosen to venerate them, to honor these captives reduced to slavery and those emancipated as a reward for their service to colonialism. I do so despite their errors and their occasional failures. As María Lugones has written, “If we think of people who are oppressed and not consumed or exhausted by oppression, but also as resisting or sabotaging a system aimed at molding, reducing, violating, or erasing them, then we also see at least two realities: one of them has the logic of resistance and transformation; the other has the logic of oppression. But, indeed, these two logics multiply and encounter each other over and over in many guises. I want to consider them here in the two moments of resistance and oppression” (Lugones 2003,12).

Until the U.S. occupation in 1915, the majority of Haitians were part of a mass of workers that the slave trade had deposited on the island. But through my research I have found that they always refused the forms of social reproduction demanded of them by the triangular trade and the international commerce that substituted for it later on. They avoided it as much as possible and refused dependence on the market and the way it used the human labor it required. The working class escaped the precarity created by the squalid slave trade by institutionalizing the conditions necessary for their own natural reproduction and well-being. They did so firmly, and on their own. They built their own economic and social system, leaving behind the hell of the plantation slavery forced on them by colonial modernity. They protected themselves and survived, overcoming their oppression by developing a form of sovereignty that enabled them to challenge colonial modernity. Before 1791, they never allowed slavery to appropriate their bodies and their spirits. After 1804, they refused attempts to re-enslave them. From the moment in August 1791 when they took the emblematic oath at Bois Caïman, they began to create their own modernity. Their struggle drew sustenance from the memories of even the most miniscule victories. They always maintained their willpower, and they never gave in. By following this path, they constantly nourished the power of their communities to surpass their unthinkable present. They cherished even the most modest gains they obtained.

I define the Haitian Revolution as the destruction of a slave system through the creation of a national community. Women played a fundamental role in the foundation of this new community, which was based on a family structure embedded within a broader social environment created precisely to ensure this structure could flourish (Casimir 2009, 185). This is the most beautiful Haitian creation: the simultaneous invention of a nation, of the conditions for its social and economic existence, and of the institutions that could guarantee its survival. The reflections I offer here are meant to open the way for what I dare hope will be the contribution of the emerging generation of thinkers: the codification of our way of re-existing, despite the infinite turpitudes imposed on us by the modern West from 1492 to the present day (Mignolo and Gómez 2015). In this book, I show how we were able to re-exist by reconstructing our sovereignty and the institutions that supported it, and by prioritizing them over our relationships with the outside world.

Toward a History of Haitians

In 1492, Christopher Columbus took possession of a continent whose riches surpassed his imagination. He arrived on the island of Ayiti, armed with his cross and his sword, and decided to call it Hispaniola. To build this Little Spain, he annihilated the indigenous people and destroyed a way of life 7,500 years old (Moscoso 2003, 293). So when, two centuries later, French pirates supported by the corsairs of King Louis XIV took over the western side of the island, they had to repopulate it. This small territory became Saint-Domingue.

Father Jean-Baptiste Labat was one of the first European historians of the Caribbean. Throughout his work, he describes the attitude of the French nobility as they implanted themselves in the New World, and the casualness with which they used what they perceived to be their right to conquest: “Monsieur the Comte de Cerillac was informed of the great profits that the property-owning Lords of the islands made every day, and wanted to take part. But since there were no more islands to conquer from the Caribs, he thought it would be easier to buy one that was already inhabited. His gaze fell on Grenada, which was already owned by Monsieur du Parquet” (1742, 5:164).

Two calamities—the appropriation of the resources of Saint-Domingue and its repopulation through the slave trade—shaped the modern history of Haitians. Starting in 1697, France governed this territory, where it amassed isolated individuals, without history, tradition, or knowledge of the place in which they found themselves.

The French seized the property of others, as well as the laboring populations, even as they trumpeted the sanctity of private property. France saw the history of their transatlantic possessions as simply a tropical unfolding of their own society. They determined the present and future of this new geography. They abolished its past. The space belonged completely to them. The French transformed the savages they found there, and those they controlled in the colonial space, into primitives, assigning themselves the duty to civilize these savages and bring them into a contemporary, and civilized, way of life. By appropriating the history, and the time, of these conquered populations, they instated themselves as the prototype their victims had to copy. Those lives that unfolded in a non-European past became superfluous and perishable (Mignolo 2015, 280). Their only vocation lay in supporting the metropolitan future. In this space of barbarism, the right to conquest went hand in hand with that of eradicating the memory of peaceful populations. It was they, rather than their exterminators, who were presented as savages. The only reason for these unfortunates to exist was so that they could be useful to their murderers (Vázquez 2011, 4). Outside of this contribution, their past and their traditions, their spirituality and their emotions, their knowledge and their memories, were all emptied of meaning. Nothing of what the indigenous people or the captives possessed was given any value, other than their energy as laborers.

France possessed the capital and the labor force, which it believed it could administer as it wished. Through its inexhaustible discourse of self-adulation, echoed by its intermediaries in the colony, France congratulated itself for the reality it had created through its successful use of force, from which it derived its presumed monopoly over knowledge itself. Yet, what it conceived of as an inevitable form of control over what it saw masked the vitality and functioning of a multiplicity of other realities. France was largely unable to understand these realities, or at least disdained and underestimated them.

The Haitians of the contemporary world were born in these circumstances, in which a conquering France constructed a project that did not correspond to the way of life of the people it conquered or reduced to slavery. As soon as they disembarked, these captives began to build a new world, at the antipodes of France and the French.

If I seek to understand the state that implanted itself on the territory from 1697 to 1915, it is not because I want to determine how Spain conceded a portion of territory, which did actually not belong to it, to France, or how it came to be that France and Europe attained such dominance in the history of Ayiti (or of humanity). I am not interested either in explaining whether one or another imperial army could have won during the English and Spanish invasions of Saint-Domingue during the 1790s. Even the civil wars that followed during the nineteenth century and the vagaries of governments during this period do not retain my attention. The fact that force is used to gain power does not determine people’s way of life.

My quest is to understand how Haitians have been able to exist, subsist, and live in the midst of political structures that completely exclude them from participation. The goal of the colonial administration was to force the new social actors it created in the colonial context to cohabit with one another, one way or another. I sketch the contours of the society that organized itself in response. To attain its objectives, the colonial administration proclaimed regulations it declared would secure the submission of those reduced to slavery. I argue that, in response, the vanquished developed their own vision of the world through a process of negotiation with those who dominated them. The state bureaucracies did take note of the projects of the captives. But they deliberately misrepresented them in order to eliminate the alternative possibilities they represented, or else sought to render them invisible. I am interested in uncovering these alternative possibilities, produced by the oppressed in an effort to recuperate their power to make their own decisions, to grant themselves autonomy and control over their lives. The forms of resistance the oppressed set in motion enabled their survival and re-existence (Mignolo 2014). The policies of the government powers, in contrast, aimed to convert the oppressed into perishable and disposable merchandise, to produce them with the express intention of consuming them as inputs into the commercial system.

From my point of view, the relationship between the dominators and the dominated creates a single, stable system of power relations. This system, strictly speaking, is what constitutes the modern colonial state. The administrative machinery of this state, under the direction of its legislative, judicial, and executive powers, seeks to render invisible and irrational the institutions of resistance created by the oppressed. In order to do this, those in charge of the colonial structure of control and governance seek to monopolize the label “state” and eradicate the popular forces that defy their official policies. But the social reality is actually constituted through these two contradictory processes. It transmits the visions of both the conquerors and those who resist conquest. The challenge for the researcher is to extract the vision of the vanquished from historical circumstances in which the vanquishers worked constantly to silence and destroy the elaboration of even the most basic means of expression on the part of the colonized.³

To discover the origins of the Haitian nation, I must go beyond the concept of the state as a simple administrative structure of control and management. Instead, I see within this state the imbrication of conflicting political wills, each of which seeks to establish a model of living that is incompatible with the other. In my conception of the state, what is more important than the administrative structure and forms of governance are the norms of the system of social relations that this political-administrative machine seeks to control. These norms are what guarantee an infinite reproduction of the system, and of the obstacles to its management.

The imperial perspective sees what has to be managed and the administrative structure through which it is to be managed as a unified totality. In metropolitan society, the rulers and subjects generally are seen as part of one, single nation. The world of the conquered, in contrast, includes at least two nations. My goal in this study is to avoid posing the question of...