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Jean-Marc Duplantier
Haiti
August 2004
See Previous Submission
Time in the Promised Land
I returned to Haiti at the beginning of April after a six-week trip home to wait out the recent political violence and the ensuing coup d'état. My wife and I arrived in Haiti shortly after American, French, Canadian and Chilean troops landed to fill the vacuum of power left in the wake of president Jean-Bertrand Aristide's departure, and a sense of weary resignation seems to be widespread, both here and in the international community. The UN troops that took the place of the initial stabilization force--mostly soldiers from Brazil and West Africa--will be here for years to come, and a recent donors’ conference in Washington secured more than a billion dollars in redevelopment grants and loans. But the thorny issue of how to include Aristide's party in upcoming elections has not been resolved, calls for reviving Haiti's disbanded military are being suppressed, and a fight over how to institute a truly democratic régime looms on the horizon. The presence of foreign troops on Haiti's streets during this, the 200th anniversary of the country's independence, resonates with deep historical irony.
My research has gone well since my return. Because of the many interruptions in the school year caused by the political crisis, the libraries and archives that I am using stayed open for most of the summer. I have made some interesting discoveries having to do with the relations between Haiti and Louisiana during the mid-nineteenth century, a time when today's migration pattern was reversed: free Blacks were fleeing from the oppressive racial atmosphere of pre-Civil War America and moving to the promised land of Haiti. Several hundred free black Creoles from Louisiana arrived in Haiti in 1859 and 1860. Many of these Louisianians were second or third generation immigrants from Haiti whose families sought refuge in New Orleans after the Haitian revolution. But with the deterioration in race relations in New Orleans and other francophone regions of the state, some of these Creole families chose to return to Haiti. At a time when Haiti was not officially recognized by the United States, Haiti sent Emile Desdunes, a free black New Orleanian who had been educated in Haiti, to serve as council to the city. Desdunes was also authorized to act as an emigration agent, and he organized the 1859-1860 emigration from New Orleans and other francophone parishes in the state.
In 1861 Joseph Colastin Rousseau, one of the recent immigrants from Louisiana, published a long serial article entitled "Souvenirs de la Louisiane" in a prominent Haitian newspaper. Written for a Haitian audience, this essay offered an extensive summary of Louisiana's French-language literature. It also introduced Haitians to their long-lost Creole cousins and explicitly sought to renew the cultural links between Haiti and Louisiana.
Most of the writers that Rousseau described, black and white, were Louisianians of St. Domingue extraction. In many ways, the 1859-60 immigration was a homecoming for Haiti's long lost sons and daughters. Rousseau's essay flirts with the early Pan-African ideas that were circulating in the Atlantic world at that time. But he also argues for a more particular Creole solidarity, a unity among a far-flung people based on cultural, historical and linguistic links:
These blood brothers [Haitians and Louisianians] are further united by their shared iron shackles of racial prejudice: it is a common bind that sanctifies their suffering as it unites them; it is a common wound that inspires a pure and heartfelt solidarity. Their children will grow up together under the same roof, and their love for one another, arising from this new situation, will grow stronger each day until these two peoples, united by fate, become a single great family.
Rousseau predicts that these recent immigrants to Haiti will build a new identity based upon the heritage of slavery and suffering that they share with Haitians. Yet his reading of Louisiana's French-language literature also anticipates recent calls for Caribbean thought and writing that is based not on traditional western notions of identity as a rooted sense self and other, but rather on the provisional and non-hierarchical structures of hybridity and alterity--a créolité or antillanité in the parlance of contemporary theorists of Caribbean literature.
Rousseau plays upon the highly stylized romantic notions of the tragic poet as he describes the white writers of Louisiana. Unappreciated, consumed by their artistic drive, and mocked by their materialist neighbors as useless dreamers, these poets sacrificed themselves on the altar of their own work. He then offers a rather too humble assessment of the literature of Louisiana's hommes de couleur libres. The essay describes the free-black poets of Louisiana as the poorer, less educated and less accomplished imitators of Louisiana's white poets. But these white poets were themselves the pale imitations of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. By copying the copiers these free black poets created figurative space in which they were able to inscribe their own inability to write as themselves. Theirs imitation necessarily failed to measure up to the model and therefore became, to borrow the terminology of the post-colonial literary critic Homi Bhabha, both copying and mimicry-- a literature that is "almost the same but not quite…almost the same but not white."
And so it is, paradoxically, in their similar imitation of French literature that Louisianians and Haitians established and maintained a common cultural ground. These literatures shared copybook strategies. Diagnosing the destructive side of this cultural "bovarysme" has been the standard way to read both Haitian and Louisiana literature of the ninenteenth century; forced to copy French literary models, the argument goes, these francophone writers never found an original voice in which to express their unique situation in the world. My work seeks to undermine this argument by demonstrating the ways in which imitation disrupts the very notions of identity that were often denied these writers. The bovaryst writers of Haiti and Louisiana may not have established a unique literary voice or a deeply rooted identity for their people, but they did produce an interesting and complex challenge to the entire identitarian paradigm, a paradigm that that seems to be loosing its grip upon today's hybrid, multiethnic world. Whereas this copybook romanticism may have been an embarrassment to the black nationalists of the Négritude movement, it might be re-read today as an early attempt to come to terms with the rootless, copied, "Creole" nature of the post-colonial world.
In my research I have cast a wide net, looking not only for specific literary connections between Haiti and Louisiana, but also seeking to understand how similar literary trends played out in both places. The incredibly rich libraries of Haiti have yielded many interesting discoveries, and I have been able to read extensively in the little-known literature of nineteenth-century Haiti. I have also made extensive contacts in the Haitian literary community and I have been invited to present a paper at a conference on Haitian literature in the southern town of Jacmel in December.
Each day as I ride downtown in a bus to go to the library I pass a massive 200-foot-tall unfinished monument to the Haitian revolution that Jean-Bertrand Aristide planned to dedicate earlier this year. It has instead become a monument to other things: to some, it represents Aristide's failed leadership; to others, it is a constant reminder American neo-imperialism; and to still others it has become a monument to both the great promise in, and ultimate failure of, the ideals of the Haitian Revolution.
Haiti's future course is currently being directed from Washington. While it is difficult to imagine Haiti directly resisting American power in the region, perhaps the Haitian people might find a ray of hope in their growing influence in American politics. Ironically, the most important upcoming votes for Haiti's future will be cast not in Haiti but in Miami's "little Haiti" neighborhood in November. My research has shown that in the face of great political and cultural hegemony, Haitians have found creative ways to resist domination and to make their voices heard. I hope that this remains true today.
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