Ariel's Ecology: Plantations, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics

5. Involving the Universe in Ruins: Sansay's Haitian Anabiography

  Involving the Universe in Ruins Sansay’s Haitian Anabiography Counterfactuals In the opening scenes of Leonora Sansay’s travelogue Secret History () as well as the novel sometimes attributed to her, Zelica (), the Haitian revolutionary general Henri Christophe sets Saint-Domingue’s capital city Cap François on fire.1 In Zelica, some of the white creole women fleeing the fire sit “in mute anguish” on the mountains that rise behind the city “and contemplate the city, which appeared from the [mountain] heights that crowned it to float on the sea—that sea was calm as a mirror, reflecting in one broad blaze the golden light of the sun.”2 If this vision of the city is typical of the hallucinatory splendor that often burnished colonial accounts of tropical locales, that this appearance gains luster through the reflected light of sun and fire makes clear that such rhapsodic visions of colonial landscape are chimerical. The colony of Saint-Domingue had been embroiled in a colonial war since a massive slave uprising in , and the mountains from which these white women would contemplate the scene were themselves part of this war zone. The hills and low mountains enclosing Cap François figure centrally in both Secret History and Zelica, the plot of the latter text tracing white women’s passages into and out of Haitian mountains “tee[ming] with danger” but where their persons and their sense of their agency was transformed.3 Sansay often refers to these mountains and to other geographical features by proper names—Plaisance, for instance.4 Mansuy’s  plan of Cap François also notes the mountainous terrain, and among other promontories , he indicates a peak called “Morne Lory” and, across town, a street skirting the hills is designated as “Rue du Morne.” In fact, Morne was not a proper name, nor was it a nominalization of the French adjective for gloominess (Figure ). Morne and mornes are creole words, nouns   INVOLVING THE UNIVERSE IN RUINS that designate the mountains and hills that rise behind Caribbean beaches and coastlines, which Betsy Wing describes as the “savage and lifepreserving land” where maroons “took refuge” and also waged war against the American colonies’ plantation economies.5 Les mornes, then, designate spaces at the borders of plantations and plantation metropoles where Afro-Americans and their allies drew on the particularities of the terrain to resist and even incapacitate the order of the colonial plantation zone. It might seem as though the resistance to the plantation form that emerged in les mornes was simply that of human beings who used nature Figure . Mansuy’s Plan of Cap François, . Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. INVOLVING THE UNIVERSE IN RUINS   to achieve exclusively human political ends, but Glissant’s as well as Derek Walcott’s figuration of the agency of the mornes suggests that the AfroAmerican aesthetic and political traditions that grew from this resistance do not presume agency as a purely human phenomenon. Moreover, Zelica ’s opening makes clear that at least some of the time eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial writers also recognized that les mornes testified to the enmeshment of (para)human and nonhuman agencies. Immediately after presenting the mountain as a promontory from which colonial landscapes might be contemplated, organized, and appreciated, Sansay’s narrator dissolves this vision. In fact, she suggests that it is impossible to view this scene at all, as the Haitian general Henri Christophe ordered the detonation of a powder magazine causing the “mountain . . . suddenly to open,” upon which “thick clouds of smoke darkened the atmosphere , and changed the brilliant light of the sun to the obscurity of midnight; whilst a noise . . . roaring at its base, was re-echoed through the caverns, resembling the last effort of expiring nature involving the universe in ruin.”6 Sansay’s representation of a Haitian general and the Haitian landscape as producing a lot of nothing is consistent with critical accounts that focus on the unthinkability of a disavowed Haitian Revolution, but this description also encodes the transformation of Cap François and its environment that was set into motion on February , , by Christophe, a bit player in Secret History who emerges as a quasi-romantic hero in Zelica. Christophe was born a slave in Grenada and later was part of a French battalion that fought in Georgia on behalf of the colonists during the U.S. Revolutionary War. He was commanding...