Introduction: Reinterpreting the Haitian Revolution and Its Cultural Aftershocks

En me renversant, on n'a abattu à Saint Domingue que le tronc de l'arbre de la liberté des noirs; mais il repoussera par les racines, parce qu'elles sont profondes et nombreuses.

(In bringing me down, all that has been cut in Saint Domingue is the trunk of the tree of black freedom; but it will grow again from its roots, for they are deep and numerous.)

—Toussaint Louverture, 1802

Dans l'ombre de Toussaint Louverture, le genie de la race, je déclare qu'en me renversant on n'a abattu que le tronc de l'arbre de la paix; il repoussera par les racines parce qu'elles sont louverturiennes.

(In the shadow of Toussaint Louverture, the genius of the race, I declare that in bringing me down all that has been cut is the trunk of the tree of peace; it will grow again from its roots because they are Louverturian.)

—Jean-Bertrand Aristide, 2004

Was there a more theatrically eloquent moment in the whole of Haiti's bicentenary year than Jean-Bertrand Aristide's pathos-rich first speech after going into exile in the Central African Republic? With the unblinking conviction of a method actor, Aristide took on the role that he had long prepared himself for, that of the "Louverturian" martyr, a part that has been handed down from one political generation to the next since 1804.

According to Vodun belief, the souls of the dead return to Guinea, to eternal rest in mother Africa, and in a strange way Aristide's journey back to the Old World bore some of the qualities of that mythical return: a "dead" president, a political phantom, finding welcome, solace, and rest in the ancestral homeland. What irony, too, that in embarking on this passage to Africa, Aristide should have to pass through Toussaint Louverture International Airport; it was as if the journey had to be made in the name of the great predecessor. And of course, that is precisely the meaning that Aristide's speech sought to imprint on the whole episode. Listening to that broadcast in March 2004 in Trinidad, one could hear something ghostly about his rhetoric; as he said, he was "in the shadows" of Toussaint Louverture, a repetition, a revenant of Haiti's past. For years, Haiti's intellectuals have been telling us that Haitian history is cyclical or circular, an eternal return to the starting point, and the events of 2004 brought striking material proof of this: not only Aristide's shadowing of Toussaint but also the return to Haitian soil of troops from France and the United States, the great nemeses of the nation.

To the Haitian people and to Aristide himself, Toussaint is known as the Great Precursor. However, given the endlessly circular movement of Haitian history, we must ask ourselves what exactly is Toussaint the precursor to. To be a precursor is to be a forerunner, one who runs ahead and prepares for the arrival of someone or something else. In Toussaint's case, this something else that he precedes and prepares for can be nothing else but the actualization of the radical promise of the revolution: a modern, functioning postcolonial state, a society based on justice and equality—a living refutation of European ideas of black racial inferiority. The still-unbroken cycle of Haitian history has yet to deliver that to which Toussaint was precursor. In this sense, all Haitian presidents have been precursors, great or otherwise.

One never has to look far for irony in Haiti; irony litters its history and permeates its culture at virtually every level. How ironic, for instance, that Toussaint and Aristide should both use the metaphor of the tree in a land now notoriously denuded of its forests. How ironic that Aristide should reinvoke the tree metaphor in 2004, a year that brought apocalyptic floods, the rain sweeping down to the plains from the bare, treeless mountains.Small Axe frames its project of Caribbean self-investigation around a different, if similar tree metaphor. We do not know if Bob Marley was thinking of...