Jean-Bertrand Aristide presents Toussaint L’Ouverture. The Haitian Revolution (review)

Terry Eagleton has presented Jesus, and Slavoj Žižek introduced Robespierre. Now one of the latest additions to the Verso ‘Revolutions’ series sees Jean-Bertrand Aristide prefacing an extremely welcome selection of Toussaint Louverture’s writings, many of which are presented here in English for the first time. Toussaint’s iconicity and transcultural portability have been clearly demonstrated in recent years, but knowledge of him has depended on myth and legend. The Haitian revolutionary has consequently been subject to a remarkable flexibility, often conscripted to seemingly contradictory causes. Rich archival and manuscript sources might permit access to a more ‘historical’ Toussaint, but this material remains, as Nick Nesbitt states in a note in this volume, ‘vast’ and ‘dispersed’ (p. xliii). This new volume — including excerpts of correspondence, proclamations and other key documents, such as the 1801 Haitian constitution and the self-exculpatory memoir drafted by Toussaint in his cell at Joux — provides therefore a very useful introductory anthology. The choice of préfacier is an astute one: as President, Aristide regularly evoked Toussaint in his speeches to signal a political genealogy and to indicate his vision for the possible futures available to the Haitian people. His introduction to this volume — underlining the ‘political, theological and economic legacy’ of Toussaint (p. vi) — is very much a continuation of this logic and an exploration of parallels between his own trajectory and that of Louverture. The preface explores three key strands. First, engaging with Toussaint’s motivation and objectives, Aristide explains that the revolutionary’s project sought to abolish both physical slavery and ‘mental slavery’. The aim is to relate Toussaint’s struggle for dignity and prosperity to the state of contemporary Haiti, denouncing those who undermined the potential of the 2004 Bicentennial to serve as a reminder of the country’s historical significance. Aristide finally outlines Toussaint’s legacy, both theological and social, and relates this to a concluding 10-point manifesto privileging reparation, restitution and debt cancellation. Nick Nesbitt’s brief but incisive note on the texts selected outlines the uniqueness of the material he has assembled. In Nesbitt’s terms, the extracts presented allow the reader to explore ‘one of the most astounding instances of political subjectivation’, a process that reveals Toussaint’s emergence not simply as a military tactician but also as one of the first thinkers to reflect on and, more importantly, initiate processes of ‘global decolonization and the destruction of plantation slavery’ (p. xxliii). This is a significant volume, providing essential reading for those interested in the emergence of (Francophone) postcolonial thought, as well as more generally in the limitations and blind spots of any account of the Age of Revolution that reduces the events in Saint-Domingue to some sort of exotic sideshow. A clearer indication of sources of certain items would have been welcome, but this is a minor detail. More importantly, what emerges from the texts gathered here are the crises, contradictions and compromises inherent in Toussaint’s project — summed up in Nesbitt’s terms as ‘a single, non-negotiable struggle: the universal, immediate and unqualified emancipation from slavery of all human beings’ (pp. xxliii–iv).