The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth Century French Studies (review)

The recent bicentenary of Haitian independence has stimulated scholarly interest not only in contemporary Haiti, but also, as this volume shows, in the largely neglected area of nineteenth century Franco-Haitian relationships. As Nick Nesbitt's engaging opening essay reminds us, the failure to apply the rights of man to the colonial context compromised the French Revolution and the European Enlightenment ideals that underpinned it. According to Nesbitt, the unique contribution of the Haitian Revolution was to redress the imbalance between equality and liberty that had characterized the French, English, and American revolutions. Nesbitt's laudable desire to integrate Haiti into these debates slips at times into a glorification of 'these African slaves' that borders on romantic idealization. It is perhaps because of this tendency to idealize 'the slaves' and Haitians in general that the essay's most promising and pertinent question—that of the 'utility of a revolution that paved the way' for Haiti's two centuries of injustice and dysfunction — remains tantalizingly unanswered. In his lively reading of Baron Roger's novel Kélédor (1828), Christopher L. Miller offers a more Atlanticist interpretation of nineteenth-century French attitudes towards slavery, and argues that, in proposing that France end the slave trade, abolish slavery, and use Africa (not the Caribbean) as the site of a more benign plantation system, Roger offers one means of achieving a common nineteenth century aim: that of erasing the memory of Haiti. Doris Y. Kadish's close readings of the abolitionist novels of Sophie Doin constitute an attempt to rescue Doin from the oblivion to which French literary history has condemned her. As Kadish argues, Doin offered sympathetic representations of Haiti, in a way that 'gave a voice' to both women, and 'persons of color'. In his original piece, Daniel Désormeaux interprets Toussaint Louverture as the 'first of the black memorialists,' and reads Toussaint's memoirs with reference to other such writing in France in the nineteenth century. Albert Valdman reflects on the forms and status of Creole language at the time of the revolution, and for all his skill concludes with many unanswered questions on language change and difference in the nineteenth century, his analyses frustrated by a lack of reliable textual sources. Deborah Jenson provides an extremely well-researched essay on the trope of kidnapping in Haitian history, starting with a detailed account of the events leading up to Jean Bertrand Aristide's departure from Haiti in February 2004, and then flashing back in history to the 1802 exiles of Toussaint Louverture and his family. Of all the essays in this volume, Jenson's makes the connections between the past and present most tellingly, and in her conclusion she admirably resists the temptation to place Aristide unequivocally as one more victim of negative foreign influence in Haiti. The most contentious of all the articles is Chris Bongie's lengthy, skilfully composed critique of Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy of plays. Bongie's critique is based on what he sees as the progressive marginalization of the Haitian revolutionary figure Baron de Vastey in Walcott's plays, which according to Bongie is evidence of Walcott's collusion with the 'mulatto legend' in Haitian historiography. Because, Bongie says, Walcott focuses his critique on black Haitian despots like Christophe and Dessalines, the playwright subscribes to a view of Haitian history that favours and promotes the more 'civilized' values of the lighter-skinned elite. In this essay, Bongie seems to lay bare his own disappointment with Walcott as a 'black man' who is not black enough, a postcolonial author who will not play the game of the postcolonial public intellectual. Although he never quite admits it, Bongie's entire argument is founded on his awareness of Walcott's skin tone, and a reductivist idea of its related complexes. The Haitian Revolution was about demolishing myths of race, not perpetuating them.