The Theater of the Haitian Revolution / The Haitian Revolution as Theater

The theatre had come to a town without theatres, and as a theatre would have to be created, they took advantage of a heaven-sent opportunity. Since its platform would make a good stage, the guillotine was moved to a nearby yard, where it was taken over by hens, who roosted on top of the uprights. The boards were brushed and scrubbed to remove all traces of bloodstains, an awning was stretched between the trees and rehearsals began of the work which was the most popular of their whole repertoire, as much because of its world-wide fame as because some of its couplets had provided a foretaste of the revolutionary spirit—The Village Soothsayer by Jean Jacques.

—Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral

Alejo Carpentier, who was obsessed with the theatrical dimension of history, provided in this depiction of the revolution's impact on Guadeloupe this wonderful metaphor of the revolution as theater. The guillotine is scrubbed of blood, since its platform is meant to serve as a stage for a French theater company to perform a play by Jean Jacques Rousseau. This magical representation of the collision of history and fantasy, real and surreal, may provide a useful way to analyze recent events in Haiti. The bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution has provided an occasion for a tragicomic restaging of the events that led to the declaration of Haitian independence in 1804. Was not one of the most vocal opposition groups, led by a Middle Eastern businessman, called the "group of 184"—one zero short of 1804? Did not Jean-Bertrand Aristide, when arriving in Bangui, declare, "They have cut down the tree of peace but it will grow again"—a near repeat of the very words Toussaint Louverture spoke when he was kidnapped by General Leclerc in 1803? Did not Prime Minister Latortue, in a moment of Dessalinian fervor, proclaim a new era for Haiti in Gonaïves and declare that Guy Philippe's band of human rights violators was an army of national liberation? And was not the then French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin thinking of reversing Rochambeau's defeat when he sent French troops into Haiti two hundred years after they were forced to leave?

Let us turn away from this contemporary scene of deadly spectacle, away from the stage of 2004, which is scrubbed clean and occupied by opportunist actors and misguided mimic men. Let us consider instead the meaning of the event C. L. R. James described in his 1962 appendix to The Black Jacobins as that moment when "West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people"—the Haitian Revolution.¹ James remains one of our best guides to the revolution, since he was acutely aware that between 1791 and 1804 a revolutionary ideal had entered the New World and that the Caribbean had become one of those explosive borders of enlightened modernity. As James vividly reminds us in Black Jacobins, the Haitian Revolution would take the French Revolution further than was ever intended, carrying it to its radical conclusion. "Reaction triumphed" in Paris, as James points out, but in Saint Domingue

[The slaves] had heard of the revolution and had construed it in their own image: the white slaves in France had risen, and killed their masters, and were now enjoying the fruits of the earth. It was gravely inaccurate in fact, but they had caught the spirit of the thing. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.²

Despite James's view that these first "West Indians," who were not the original inhabitants of the region but the revolting slaves of Saint Domingue, had "caught the spirit of the thing," that the Haitian Revolution was a nodal point in a global interactive history, we continue to see it as an exceptional moment in a simple, heroic foundational narrative for Caribbean anticolonial resistance. The universalist radicalism of the Haitian Revolution became effaced for a metropole that retreated from a radical emancipatory project and pressed on with its colonial adventures in the nineteenth century. "The spirit of the thing" became equally lost to the rest of...