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  • Afterword
  • Dany Laferrière (bio)
    Translated by Martin Munro (bio)

Two hundred years already! Where did the time go?

I am on a TGV train leaving from Brussels, where I have just participated in a roundtable on the sleep-inducing question of "francophonie," and I am now going to Lyon, to some library in the center of town, to discuss the French language and its certain death (it's only a matter of what day) with some citizens of Lyon who are visibly shaken at the impending arrival of such a catastrophe. And whom do you think they are calling on to save their language at the last minute? Blacks, of course. Toussaint, never one to bear grudges, a man who also loved the French language—unlike the prickly Dessalines—would have been happy to know that France is today looking to us to give them a hand in their predicament. Not so fast, I say, because I can't guarantee a thing. I'd really like to help a former colonizer regain the memory of the good-old colonial days, but not at the expense of my personal business. This is the twenty-first century and the past is past.

I take out my computer, because now is the only free time I have to write this afterword. I notice that I forgot to recharge the battery last night, which means that I have an hour, not a minute more, to get the job done. This is not really a hardship, because my trip to Trinidad last year was at once pleasant and moving (here comes the ticket collector, back in a minute) during the Haitian Bicentenary conference.

It seems to me that it would be more interesting to mark out the traces of a fabulous past during the turbulent present that the country is going through. Instead of looking [End Page 202] to Dessalines and Toussaint again, let's show these people what has happened to one of their descendants. I am sure that one afternoon at the Fort de Joux, Toussaint—in spite of everything, confident of Haiti's independence—must have asked himself if his dream would last until the twenty-first century. Yes, but in what state? To find out, he would have only to read the essays in this journal. The editors would have only to mail a copy to Abricots, the small town of the southwestern tip of Haiti where the Tainos and later the old blacks would take their final refuge after death. I don't have the exact address, but Toussaint is there for sure.

Let's take one of the many descendants of these warriors who created Haiti's modern epic. That sounds a bit Hollywood, I know, but I am still amazed that no major film has been made about the revolution. We are talking about the greatest empire of modern times, the Napoleonic empire, put to its knees by a handful of slaves. That seems to me quite something. And if the businesspeople are worried about losing their shirts on this seemingly risky enterprise, I am convinced that if one were to dredge, even lightly, the troubled waters of this colonial past where a minority (the masters) were in complete control of the bodies and souls of the majority (the slaves), one would find plenty of seedy stories (sexual, of course) involving black men and white women or white men with black women to spice things up and pull in the crowds, which can't get enough of a good bedroom story. And for the romantics, you could easily unearth some tragic love stories set against the background of fires, revolution, and yellow fever.

Instead of forever thinking of Haiti in terms of its extremes and its reassuring clichés (the repugnant bourgeoisie, the proud peasantry, the corrupt politicians, and the exploited proletarian masses), let's try for once to follow this country according to the life of an ordinary citizen, one who is difficult to classify economically, socially, or even politically. Who could be such a citizen? Only a writer can fit all of these criteria. And in this sense, I feel much closer to the tricked...

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