The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints by Philip Kaisary (review)

Given the marked rise in scholarly interest in Haiti since the turn of the century, and notably since the bicentenary of the Haitian Revolution, it is perhaps surprising that there has been to date no comprehensive account of literary representations of the revolution. Philip Kaisary’s book on that theme is therefore a welcome addition to the corpus of Haiti-related literary criticism. Well-written and engaging throughout, it studies a number of works written about the revolution since the 1930s, in addition to works of visual art.

The analysis and, indeed, the book are divided along the lines indicated in the book’s title. The first part of the book engages with “radical” interpretations of the revolution by Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Langston Hughes, René Depestre, Jacob Lawrence, and Kimathi Donkor. In the second half, the author critiques the “conservative” perspectives of Edouard Glissant, Alejo Carpentier, Derek Walcott, and Madison Smartt Bell. Given such a stark, dualistic division in the structure and thematic focus of the book, one might have expected a more rigorous definition of what is meant by the terms “radical” and “conservative.” Yet Kaisary’s discussion of these concepts remains rather vague; he writes, for example, that the “radical responses inscribe a readiness to acclaim revolution as a means by which egalitarian and ameliorative social transformation might successfully be actuated” (3), whereas the conservative works “convey visions of obscurity, tragic circularity, senseless violence, and history as eroticized fantasmics” (2).

The title points to another important issue: the term “literary imagination” is not clearly defined, particularly in relation to time or place. Is this a universal concept that cuts across time, place, race, and nation, encompassing all and, indeed, universalizing the understanding of the revolution? It seems remarkable in this regard that there is only one Haitian author (Depestre) dealt with at any length. Moreover, even in this case, the work in question—Un Arc-en-ciel pour l’occident chrétien— is something of an anomaly in Depestre’s work, not to say in broader contemporary Haitian writing, in its more straightforwardly positive or indeed “radical” representation of revolutionary figures and, crucially, of race. More commonly, in Depestre as in virtually every other major Haitian author of the last half-century, race or “blackness” tends not to be mobilized in the way Kaisary celebrates in Césaire and the other radical artists. Think, for example, of figures as diverse as Marie Vieux-Chauvet, Émile Ollivier, Dany Laferrière, and Lyonel Trouillot, who have all displayed a marked reticence to use race as a vehicle for radical cultural politics.

The reason for this, of course, lies in the particular history of Haitian intellectualism. The evolution of noirisme, and the consequent perception that racial thinking was dangerous, led many Haitian authors to largely abandon race as a viable medium of expression for radical political and social thought. Thus, large swathes of Haitian writing—the authors mentioned above, but also newer figures such as Marvin Victor, Makenzy Orcel, and James Noël—do not readily fit the radical/conservative model that Kaisary sets up. Indeed, many do not engage extensively with the revolution at all in their rethinking of what constitutes a radical perspective on Haitian society and politics. History shows that the radical can transform swiftly into the conservative, so that such a dualistic understanding of history appears untenable in relation not only to the revolution, but also to the long history of Haiti since 1804.

It is therefore unfortunate that, despite the book’s many virtues and the author’s undoubted critical skills and best intentions, the radical/conservative binary that structures the book seems largely to exclude Haitian writing itself. In a work that decries the “silencing” of the revolution, there is a certain inadvertent quieting of Haitian authors. The book undoubtedly makes a valuable contribution, though one senses that...