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Jean-Marc Duplantier
Haiti
February 2004
Dispatch from Haiti
In December 1803, the Louisiana Purchase was formally ratified at a ceremony in New Orleans. A few days later, on January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed Haiti a free and independent republic. The Haitian revolution put an end to Napoleon's colonial ambitions in the Americas and precipitated his decision to sell Louisiana to the United States. In both America and Haiti, plans have been in the works for years to celebrate these interconnected bicentennials, and in both countries current political events have cast a shadow over the celebrations.
Just before my wife and I came to Haiti in January, we attended the Louisiana Purchase bicentennial celebration in New Orleans. On January 1, Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide gave a speech in Gonaïves, the site of Dessalines's proclamation of Haiti's independence. About six weeks later Gonaïves was again the site of a revolution: a band of insurgents took over the police station in the town, drove off the national police, and proclaimed their independence from the ruling party.
Both sides in Haiti's current conflict are using the patriotic rhetoric of the anniversary to advance their cause: Aristide, the former Catholic priest and advocate of liberation theology, sees himself as the true heir to the revolution-he has erected large billboards on which he is explicitly compared to Dessalines-and he boasts of his continuing efforts to bring a measure of justice and equality to Haiti's desperately poor people. The anti-Aristide movement, a broad coalition of businessmen, students and other civic groups, sees Aristide as yet another in a long series of brutal dictators imposed upon them. They have been holding large demonstrations on a daily basis-in spite of attacks by the police and gangs of "chimères," the popular name for Aristide's mercenary henchmen.
I have been dodging demonstrations by both sides as I do research in several libraries in Port-au-Prince. I am tracking similar literary activities in Haiti and Louisiana from the 1860s, and I have already made some rather interesting discoveries. As racial relations in antebellum New Orleans deteriorated, many of the city's free people of color moved to Haiti. These were a proud people, determined to maintain their cultural links with Louisiana and to advance the abolitionist cause. Haitian newspapers of the 1860s promoted a charitable fund for the widow of John Brown, published letters of support from Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine, and kept track of the progress of their "frères d'outre-golfe" in New Orleans as they fought for the Union and took leadership roles in the Reconstruction government of the state. These Haitian papers also published a long series of articles on the literary activities of Louisiana's free people of color.
These old connections between Haiti and Louisiana are not unrelated to today's politics. Ten thousand refugees from Haiti settled in Louisiana in the years after the Haitian revolution, reinforcing the French and Creole languages and the Creole culture of New Orleans. Just as the conquered territories of Texas, Florida and California have seen what amounts to a cultural re-colonization by hispanophone migrants from the Caribbean and Latin America, perhaps we in Louisiana might look to our brothers in Haiti for another infusion of our threatened language and culture.
Photo Caption: [Rara.jpg]: "The Haitian carnival "Rara" is similar to the New Orleans tradition of the "Second Line."
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