“I Need Many Repetitions”: Rehearsing the Haitian Revolution in the Shadows of the Sugar Mill

History does not belong only to its narrators, professional or amateur. While some of us debate what history is or was, others take it in their own hands.

—Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past

“Remember what you are,” Lili said, “a great rebel leader. Remember, it is the revolution.”

—Edwidge Danticat, “A Wall of Fire Rising”

At the threshold of colonial Saint-Domingue and the republic of Haiti lies the story of Bois Caïman. Multiple variants of the story all tell of a summer night in 1791, when enslaved and maroon Black men and women gathered in the Caïman woods to plan a revolt against the colonial slave system. The meeting involved a religious ceremony led by Boukman Dutty and an unnamed mambo to serve the spirits and fortify the commitment to revolt.¹ Within a few days, the sugarcane fields of Saint-Domingue’s northern provinces were ablaze, the processing machinery wrecked, and the owners dead or fleeing. The uprising left the economic heart of the world’s most brutally profitable colony in what C. L. R. James describes as “a flaming ruin,” one that would burn for nearly thirteen years before culminating in the declaration of the free Black Republic of Haiti (88).

Competing historical narratives have proliferated around the Bois Caïman ceremony: as part of a narrative of lost possession for French contemporaries, the ceremony was denigrated as savagery and witchcraft; as part of a narrative of freedom for Haitians, the ceremony was celebrated as the origins of a revolution whose signal achievement—the establishment of a free republic—would presage future Pan-African and Pan-American liberation movements.² In the last few decades, the story of Bois Caïman has been recast by a minority of evangelicals as a scene in the unfolding drama between God and Satan on a cosmic stage.³ For these Haitian and United States evangelicals, Bois Caïman represents not a signal achievement but rather an originary catastrophe, in which Boukman calls on pagan spirits to free the enslaved in exchange for the future nation’s loyalty, prompting the devil to draw up a contract for Haiti’s soul.⁴ And it is this demonic possession of Haiti that, for these evangelicals, guarantees all that follows, casting the 2010 earthquake and its long-term devastation as just the latest evidence that Haiti, since its conception, has embodied a spiritual, social, and economic catastrophe without end.⁵

As evangelicals’ influence on Haitian politics increased throughout the 1990s, a minority of Haitian evangelical leaders made repeated attempts to disrupt the national commemorations of the Bois Caïman ceremony, urging their followers to help exorcise the devil from Haiti by symbolically cleansing the site and converting Boukman (posthumously, of course) to Christianity.⁶ Their decision to crystallize a public crusade around the commemoration suggests the original ceremony’s enormous importance to Haiti’s national history, as a moment when the enslaved irrevocably took the matter of their history in their own hands.⁷ To insist (as some evangelicals do) that those were Satan’s hands is to attempt to exorcise history, to expel a spiritual tradition of Vodou from the national body that also serves as a vital mode of everyday historiography.⁸ The Bois Caïman ceremony ultimately resisted any easy containment promised by conventional models of commemoration, which seek to formalize a simplified relationship of the present to the past. As if to underscore this point, the evangelicals’ efforts to disrupt the commemoration were aimed not primarily at the main event itself but rather at the months-long rehearsals and preparations made by the commemoration’s organizers, suggesting that the contests over the performance of historical narratives is, at its core, a struggle over how to rehearse history in everyday life.⁹

If Haiti’s postcolonial history involves the protracted struggle of the state and its elite against an overburdened and disavowed poor majority, then much of this struggle plays out symbolically in rehearsals of the revolution and its heroes—rehearsals that are also contests over the...