Dessalines in Historic Drama and Haitian Contemporary Reality

Qui donc ira jeter des fleurs
Au Pont Rouge
A Vertières
Au Champ de Mars
Les offrandes coulées dans la honte
Blessent.

—René Philoctète, Poèmes des îles qui marchent, 2003

From 1791 to 1804, under the leadership of Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Haiti gained its independence and the life juices of liberty became blood of our blood and flesh of our flesh.

—Jean-Bertrand Aristide, United Nations speech, 1996

After his decisive victory at the battle of Vertières, on 18 November 1803, Dessalines obtained from General de Rochambeau the surrender of the forty-thousand-strong French army, sent by Napoléon Bonaparte to Saint Domingue to restore slavery. This victory of the "black Jacobins" opened the way to Haiti's independence, which was proclaimed a few weeks later, on 1 January 1804. Boisrond-Tonnerre, Dessalines's secretary, wrote in classical French, and solemnly read the Declaration of Independence, abjuring the French nation in the name of unity. On this glorious day, the illiterate Papa Desalin violently exhorted in Creole those gathered in Gonaïves's central square to continue fighting to the last breath for their freedom. The leaders of the new state alternately used French in official texts and declarations and Creole in speeches addressed to the populace. If liberation had to be glorified in the language of the "true cannibals" (the French) in order to make it known to the world, it was simultaneously articulated in Creole, the language of the majority of the revolutionaries, and the national language during the revolution. Thus, from the birth of independent Haiti in 1804, the bilingual educated minority, who legitimated French as the language of power, imposed a linguistic dichotomy attached to certain forms of communication. "The exclusive use of French in the nation's official discourse [appeared] 'natural'"¹ and, consequently, set apart the small elite from the mass of Creole-speaking and illiterate peasantry. Moreover, the reverence for the French language, a colonial legacy, revealed the elite's "cultural ambivalence" and ambiguous sense of identity that have persisted to this day.² But whatever the linguistic medium used, it was the relentlessly violent rhetoric used by Dessalines and Boisrond-Tonnerre against the former colony and potential traitors to the new country's unity that history would remember. The Haitian Revolution had been carried out to abolish slavery and, consequently, obliterate the power of the whites. Thus, at the beginning of the republic, the question of racial identity would prove to be crucial.

In the words of the 1805 constitution, to be black, a generic color that included the gens de couleur (mulattoes) and the nouveaux libres (blacks), amounted to Haitian citizenship. According to Thomas Madiou, one of Haiti's first historians, Dessalines was aware that in order to create a unified nation, the curse of blackness had to be eliminated not only by getting rid of the whites but by establishing a "precious concord" and "happy harmony" between the noirs and jaunes (blacks and yellows).³ The key to the young nation's unity and invincibility lay in transcending epidermal differences. Also crucial were the economic factors of land distribution and income allocation from the sale of agricultural products. Thus, from the early days of the republic, the issues of language, pigmentation, and economic justice would bitterly divide the country and be at the forefront of Dessalines's agenda. Within two years of Haiti's independence, the ruin of the infrastructure, the lack of governmental institutions, the racial antagonisms, and the greed of the elite would lead the General Emperor to his demise. Facing economic chaos and mounting civil unrest, Dessalines, the sole custodian of the will of the people, became increasingly despotic, exercising power in a ruthless way that replicated the colonial pattern of domination and slavery.⁴

Exactly two hundred years later, on 18 November 2003, on the day of the celebration of the bicentenary of the battle of Vertières in Cap Haïtien, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in a "vibrant speech" in Creole punctuated with French, exclaimed, "Our ancestors...