Haiti's Literary Legacies

Romanticism and the Unthinkable Revolution

Kir Kuiken, Deborah Elise White, Kir Kuiken, Deborah Elise White

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781501366338
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria latinoamericana y caribeña

The essays gathered in Haiti's Literary Legacies unpack the theoretical, historical, and political resonance of the Haitian revolution across a multiplicity of European and American Romanticisms, and include discussion of Haitian, British, French, German, and U.S. American traditions. Often referred to as the only successful slave revolt in history, the revolution that forged Haiti at once fulfilled, challenged, and ultimately surpassed Enlightenment conceptions of freedom and universality in ways that became crucial to transnational Romanticism, yet scholars and historians of Romanticism are only beginning to take the measure of its impact. This collection works at the intersection of Romantic and Caribbean studies to move that project forward, showing the myriad ways that literatures of the Romantic period respond to-and are transformed by-the Revolution in Haiti. Demonstrating the Revolution's centrality to romantic writing, Haiti's Literary Legacies urges an enlarged understanding of Romanticism and of its implications for the political, historical, and ecological genealogies of the present.

1 The Shadow of Voltaire: Early Haitian Literature and the Claims of Intertextuality

Chris Bongie

Un spectre épouvantable en tous lieux me poursuit ….

Que veut cet habitant des ténébreux abîmes?

Que vient-il m’annoncer?

—Voltaire¹

At a meeting of the Port-au-Prince town council on December 10, 1791, there appeared before the municipal officers a certain Sieur Clemanson fils, owner of a plantation in the hills to the south of the town. Capital of the West Province of the French colony of Saint-Domingue, Port-au-Prince was in a state of chaos, a good part of it having burned to the ground three weeks before, after the collapse of a peace treaty signed on October 23 that had brought a momentary end to the armed insurrection launched by free people of color (gens de couleur libres) in late August, at precisely the same time as the slave revolt in the North. The plantation owner’s deposition testifies, in miniature, to the renewal of hostilities in the West between white and free colored citizenry, but also to the complexity of a struggle in which some white settlers had, for a variety of reasons, allied themselves with the gens de couleur and in which both the warring parties were committed to preserving the institution of slavery. On the 8th of the month, Clemanson fils declared,

citizens of colour, numbering from ten to twelve, arrived at the Clemanson plantation, headed by two white men, one of whom calls himself “little Voltaire” [dont l’un s’appelle le petit Voltaire]. Upon their arrival, they took hold of the negress Theresa, and wanted to force her to reveal the whereabouts of the white men and women whom they knew to be on the said plantation. They tied her down and put a rope around her neck, and it was only upon the urging of the other slaves that they let her go.²

The planter’s deposition then goes on to describe the violence perpetrated by “the mulattoes” (les mulâtres) as they took control of the plantation, and the desperate flight of his family as they sought refuge in the bushes.

This archival anecdote serves as a telling reminder of why the free colored insurrection of 1791 has proved so difficult to incorporate into “the story of the only successful slave revolt in history,” to cite the subtitle of C. L. R. James’s 1930s play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture. Fought in the name of equal rights for all free citizens in Saint-Domingue, and expressly committed to the preservation of a colonial system grounded in the rule of slavery, this was an uprising in which the colony’s slaves were viewed as mere pawns, subject to disciplinary violence as here, or strategically deployed against the whites as, most famously, in the case of the so-called Swiss—several hundred armed slaves integrated into the free colored army but then deported from the colony in the immediate aftermath of the October peace treaty, an act of appeasement on the part of leaders of the insurrection that would quickly become “a symbol of free colored perfidy … in the propaganda war of the revolution.”³ The encounter at the Clemanson plantation testifies amply to these fraught relations between insurgent “citizens of color” and the slave population, while the story’s momentary focus on the négresse Thérèse also serves to remind us of the violently gendered dynamics of what was a highly masculinized struggle for human rights. But for our purposes, what is of primary interest here is the figure of the “little Voltaire,” positioned by the plantation owner (whether in reality or for rhetorical effect) at the head of this band of free colored citizens. The presence of this white collaborator serves as a veritable allegory for the problematic explored in this chapter: namely, the role played by Voltaire in helping shape what Kevin Olson has referred to as the “political imaginary” of the 1791 free colored insurrection, with its contradictory commitment to human rights and the rule of slavery.⁴

In what follows, I retell in some detail the story of this insurrection and its aftermath, focusing in particular on two archival documents in which intertextual references to Voltaire’s tragedies play a key role in the performative displays of literacy whereby leaders of the free colored movement laid claim to the recognition of their equal rights as citizens. If the primary goal of my chapter is simply to flesh out an episode of the Haitian Revolution that is often reduced to a footnote (and a discomfiting one at that, given its evident limitations when it comes to the project of universal emancipation), this historical narrative also opens out onto two cautionary arguments about the legacy of what I will be calling “(the other) 1791.” First, in relation to the ongoing reconsideration (and valorization) of early Haitian literature that has become integral to our understanding of nineteenth-century Haiti, the archival material considered in this chapter establishes genealogical links between (the other) 1791 and the emergence of the Haitian literary field following upon independence in 1804, and in so doing suggests that we attend to the ways in which this literature does not simply break with but remains haunted by the particular “set of sociopolitical processes of differentiation and hierarchization” that shaped the free colored imaginary.⁵ Second, in relation to figurations of identity that are both central to and questioned by (a particular articulation of) Black Studies, I suggest that looking back at the political demand for recognition that was a characteristic feature of the free colored imaginary is a useful exercise when it comes to thinking about the structural challenge of any rights-based politics of recognition in the present, namely, that “the entry fee for legal recognition,” as Alexander Weheliye notes, “is the acceptance of categories based on white supremacy and colonialism, as well as normative genders and sexualities.”⁶ While this second cautionary argument is one that will be touched upon only at the end of the present chapter, the following section prepares the ground for the first, introducing a particularly well-known Haitian text from 1804 that will serve throughout as the touchstone for our investigation of the literary legacies of (the other) 1791.

* * *

Nowhere are the genealogical links between (the other) 1791 and the founding documents of postindependence Haitian literature, as mediated through the figure of Voltaire, more evident than in the Proclamation of April 28, 1804, signed by Jean-Jacques Dessalines, which justified the elimination of most of the “white Frenchmen” who had remained in Haiti after the declaration of independence on January 1. “The hour of vengeance has arrived,” Dessalines proclaimed to his fellow Haitians, “and the implacable enemies of the rights of man have suffered the punishment due to their crimes.” Any unregenerated Haitian who “thinks he has not fulfilled the decrees of the Eternal, by exterminating these blood-thirsty tigers [tigres altérés de sang]” is called upon to leave the country:

Indignant nature discards him from our bosom; let him hide his infamy far from hence; the air we breathe, is not suited to his gross organs; it is the air of liberty, pure, august, and triumphant.

Yes, we have rendered to these true cannibals [vrais cannibales], war for war, crime for crime, outrage for outrage; yes, I have saved my country; I have avenged America [j’ai vengé l’Amérique].⁷

This act of vengeance, which should cause the “tyrants, usurpers, scourges of the new world [fléaux du nouveau monde]” to tremble, has also, Dessalines stressed, had the salutary effect of drawing together “two classes of men, born to cherish, assist, and succour one another” but “whom the refined duplicity of Europe for a long time endeavoured to divide.” These two classes, conceived of here in the hyper-racialized terms of “Blacks and Yellows” (Noirs et Jaunes), have been rendered “for ever one, indivisible, and inseparable,” made “but one family” through this sacrificial rite of passage, their “perfect reconciliation sealed by the blood of our butchers.” Bloody vengeance enacted by all members of the Haitian “family” lays to rest the long history of social divisions evident in the civil war of 1799–1800 between the forces of Toussaint Louverture and André Rigaud, or in the differing trajectories of slave revolt and free colored insurrection in 1791. Indeed, the Proclamation itself performatively enacts this unification of the “two classes of men” at its conclusion, where Governor General Dessalines’s name as signatory is followed by that of his newly minted secretary general, Juste Chanlatte, responsible for the certified copy (“Le Gouverneur général, / Signé, DESSALINES. / Pour copie conforme, / Le Sécrétaire général, / Juste Chanlatte.”). A figure of some prominence during the free colored insurrection of 1791, Chanlatte had only just returned to Haiti from years of exile in the United States,⁸ and his presence as under-signatory confirms the union of two classes that is being proclaimed in the body of the text.

As has only recently been recognized, the rhetorical force of the Proclamation was enhanced by the intertextual deployment of lines from Voltaire, most particularly from his New World tragedy Alzire (1736), a searing indictment of Spanish colonialism in the Americas, which contemplates the legitimacy of armed indigenous resistance to settler colonial rule while opting in the end for a “civilizing discourse” of acculturation, in a predictable recourse to “colonial paternalism” that serves to regulate “the impassioned rhetoric of political liberty and cultural autonomy that dominates the rest of the play.”⁹ Dessalines’s claim to have “avenged America,” for instance, echoes that of the Inca warrior Zamore, who, three years after being left for dead by his Spanish torturers, returns to Lima with a band of comrades who share his hatred of...