Haiti

  The U.S. authorities also alarmed many Haitian intellectuals by proposing that English should become the main language of instruction in all of the country’s schools. This was a step too far even for their most steadfast collaborators, including Louis Borno. In one of his few gestures of resistance to the U.S. authorities, Borno insisted that Haitian students be taught in French, and he took the forward-thinking step of allowing Kreyòl to be used in schools as well. The U.S. attempt to impose English on Haiti struck many as a bald attempt at cultural imperialism, stoking the rising resentment about their policies. Such a change, after all, would have represented a kind of cultural amputation: the entire tradition of Haitian political thought and literature, not to mention the country’s laws, were in French. Once it had been a colonial language, but now it was a national one, an integral part of Haiti’s history and culture. Many saw it as a crucial link with the broader world, allowing Haitians to “to join hands with the world’s intellectual elite,” as one thinker put it. Indeed, anger at the U.S. occupation pushed many Haitians to affirm their cultural links with France more strongly than ever before. Haitians renarrated their revolution by emphasizing the alliance with French republicans that made it possible. “The first time that a man of the black race was ever a citizen, he was a French citizen,” the ex-general Alfred Nemours proclaimed in 1919; “the first time that a man of our race was ever an army officer, he was a French officer. And our birth certificate, where is it found? Was it not in France, in the Declaration of the Rights of Man?” The former colonizer was now a useful counterweight to the new empire. Even as the United States gained increasing cultural importance in Haiti, many resisted the trend, a fact symbolized perhaps most clearly in the realm of sports: among the Caribbean countries that were occupied by the United States, Haiti is the only one that never took up baseball, sticking instead with the more European and Latin American game of soccer.27

  By the time the Service Technique opened its long-awaited flagship school at Damien in 1929, resentments over U.S. educational and cultural policies had been mounting for years, creating a highly combustible situation. When students angry about losing scholarships went to see Dr. Freeman, who was serving as the principal of the school, the encounter summed up everything that frustrated Haitians about the system. The discussion took place through a translator: after seven years of running a major educational initiative in Haiti, the well-paid and powerful Freeman had not learned either French or Kreyòl. Smoking a pipe, he briefly listened to the students but then broke in and told them that he was free to change scholarship policies as he saw fit. When the students pressed him, Freeman got angry and, waving his arms, told them that they could leave the school if they wanted: they would be easy to replace. When he learned that the students were planning to march to Port-au-Prince, Freeman attempted conciliation: there was no need to walk to town, he told them, when they could use the institution’s bus. He had not yet realized that something serious was going on. Indeed, he was mystified by the resistance he encountered. These were, after all, supposed to be the most trusted and loyal of the new class of educated Haitians the United States was aiming to produce.28

  Freeman’s surprise is itself surprising: he seemed blind to the fact that for all the buildings, roads, and schools the Americans had constructed, the U.S. presence was still seen by Haitians as an occupation. A commission sent by the U.S. government the following year to evaluate the educational project in Haiti, however, saw clearly where the problem lay. “Had there been less of a disposition to deal with the island as a conquered territory and more to help a sister state in distress,” the commission wrote—less “enforced control” and more “helpful cooperation”—perhaps the unrest could have been avoided. Having spoken with many Haitian teachers and students, the group argued that it had been a mistake to overwhelmingly emphasize vocational training, and insisted that U.S. teachers should not be paid out of the Haitian treasury. Their report, however, was ignored, and none of its recommendations were adopted.29

  Many Haitians were ultimately disappointed, and often infuriated, by an education policy they saw as racist and high-handed. By the mid-1920s, political leaders such as Dantès Bellegarde who had once been willing to work with the United States had turned vociferously against the occupation. And by the early 1930s, it was difficult to find anyone at all who would speak up on behalf of agricultural education. Despite initial goodwill and massive investment—of Haitian money—over the course of several years, the project had failed, largely because it was so disconnected from the population’s own vision of the kind of education they needed and wanted. In April 1931, one legislator demanded to know why there were still so many overpaid U.S. teachers working at Damien’s and other schools. Perhaps a few of these foreign experts were truly needed, he admitted, but it was time to send most of them home and replace them with the many competent Haitians who could just as easily do the job. “What do these experts do?” he asked bitterly. “Experts in grass, experts in cooking, experts in everything and nothing, experts in strangulation—they’re sucking the blood of the people.”30

  * * *

  For Haiti’s elites, much of the shock of the U.S. occupation was the long and intimate experience it gave them of American racism. Haitian society had its own intricate forms of social hierarchy, based on skin color, education, and wealth. But for many in the U.S. forces, all Haitians—light-skinned and dark-skinned, uneducated and accomplished alike—were simply “Negroes” or “niggers.” Over the course of the occupation, the attitude of the Americans was a constant source of bitterness that profoundly shaped the Haitian social experience. While there was some congenial contact between U.S. troops and Haitians, there were also perpetual tensions, even at the highest levels. Some of these were the result of simple culture shock: U.S. officials, for example, found it odd and amusing that before the start of meetings, Haitian cabinet members might engage in erudite discussions about recent surrealist poetry and similarly unexpected subjects. Others involved more serious snubs, such as an incident when the entire Haitian government was kept waiting for an official mass to begin because of the absence of two marine officers, who in the end never showed up. In their daily lives, meanwhile, Haitians often found the behavior of U.S. troops racist, rude, and uncouth. One evening, a drunk marine threw rocks down on guests listening to a garden piano recital being given by a Haitian who had recently returned from studying at the Paris Music Conservatory. Confronted with such provocations, some young residents answered with violence, ending up in street fights with the occupying forces. Others responded with pugnacious humor, turning the initials of the Marine Corps, USMC, into derisive tags such as “Use Sans Moindre Contrôle” (“has no self-control”) or “Un Salaud Mal Costumé” (“a badly dressed jerk”).31

  Much of the tension involved what Haitians saw as a patent hypocrisy on the part of the occupiers regarding race and sex. At a reception for Franklin Roosevelt in 1917, for instance, U.S. officers had danced with Haitian women but commanded their wives to remain in another room to avoid having to dance with Haitian men. American authorities worried constantly about relationships between Haitian men and white women, even as the occupying soldiers created a boom in prostitution and often lived openly with Haitian mistresses. Marine Captain John Houston Craige later recounted the story of one soldier who went on a killing spree in Port-au-Prince, shooting several Haitians after a local woman broke up with him. “Chiquita and her like seldom get into official reports,” Craige wrote, “but they have a way of influencing affairs for all of that.”32

  At the same time, for many Haitian elites, the shock of occupation was also a shock of recognition. American attitudes toward Haiti’s population and culture, they realized, often uncomfortably paralleled their own. Before the occupation, many had celebrated the United States as a model of economic and political progress; now, the brutal reality of the American regime forced them into a period of soul-searching. Ultimately, the two-decade-long occupation pushed
a generation of thinkers to revise their understanding of their own society, spurring new literary and cultural movements that reshaped the intellectual landscape of twentieth-century Haiti.33

  “A nationality defends itself not only through political action,” opposition leader Georges Sylvain wrote in 1918, “but through all the expressions of its thought, which rebels against destruction, against violent absorption.” In the face of U.S. occupation, he argued, Haitians needed to study their history to “illuminate the quality and true meaning of our intellectual production.” A true political transformation in Haiti, Sylvain insisted, would come only through a cultural transformation. His ideas got a wide hearing: by 1921, his group, L’Union Patriotique, boasted six thousand members.34

  Musicians were among the first to respond to the call. The singer Candio, who in 1915 had teased the occupation’s opponents, soon changed sides and wrote a popular song whose chorus declared: “With faith, hope, work, and unity / Down with the occupation … Haiti will remain a nation.” The Haitian composer Occide Jeanty, meanwhile, wrote a celebrated orchestral piece called simply “1804.” It drew on classical and modern influences, as well as on the music of Haitian Vodou, to celebrate Jean-Jacques Dessalines’s revolutionary heritage. Jeanty conducted it weekly in outdoor concerts on the Champ de Mars to rapt audiences, until the U.S. authorities realized that it had become an antioccupation anthem and banned him from performing it.35

  Over the course of the 1920s, the energy of opposition fueled the development of an increasingly dynamic public sphere. Doctors, lawyers, and teachers created professional organizations, while workers of all stripes—tailors, shoemakers, typographers—founded unions. Several feminist groups came together to lobby for suffrage rights for women and other legal and political reforms. There was no official political outlet for these activities: the U.S. refused to hold legislative elections, and the government insistently harassed the opposition. In 1921, President Dartiguenave had decreed that it was illegal to criticize the Haitian government or the U.S. officials working with them. But the new law could not close the floodgates. There were so many people in the Port-au-Prince jail who had been arrested for writing and publishing articles critical of the government, one U.S. visitor quipped, that you could start an excellent school of journalism there.36

  President Borno kept a close eye on opponents: his personal archives include a series of letters written by antioccupation activists to their supporters outside the country, intercepted by the police and never delivered. Borno’s government also moved to eliminate the traditional lifetime appointments of Haitian judges, many of whom openly opposed the occupation. All these repressive measures, however, only emboldened the opposition. They attacked the occupation regime, and at the same time, they looked past it. Though no elections were scheduled, they campaigned anyway, speaking to the Haitian population and developing political platforms that aimed to tackle the pressing questions of the day: deforestation, environmental protection, immigration, taxation, policing. By creating a political movement independent of the government imposed by the United States, they sought to demonstrate that a democratic order was indeed possible in Haiti.37

  The Haitian opposition also carried out a vigorous international campaign aimed at embarrassing the United States and connecting with anti-imperial activists elsewhere. Dantès Bellegarde, who was relieved of his government position when he began speaking out against occupation policies, made himself into a sort of roving ambassador for the opposition, convincing a number of international organizations to pass resolutions demanding that the United States withdraw from Haiti. His activism culminated in an eloquent speech to the League of Nations in which he denounced the occupation’s hypocrisy and pointed out the damage that it was doing to America’s reputation worldwide. A French newspaper applauded Bellegarde’s “spirited attack on American imperialism,” though it also remarked that most members of the assembly did not want to listen to the message: instead of giving the Haitian speaker “the homage which his courage and talent deserved,” they were absorbed in the task of “tracing little figures on sheets of paper.” But while diplomats doodled, activists worldwide took note. Bellegarde participated in several Pan-African Congresses alongside luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois and the Senegalese politician Blaise Diagne, arguing that the United States was promoting the idea of “Haitian inferiority” in part as a way of justifying the disenfranchisement of African Americans. He and other Haitian activists also developed ties with the NAACP and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, which sent a delegation to Haiti and later published a book arguing that an occupation based on the use of force was doomed to fail.38

  While Bellegarde connected with supporters in Europe and the United States, the energetic activist Joseph Jolibois traveled as a representative for L’Union Patriotique from the Dominican Republic to Argentina, stopping in nearly every Latin American country along the way. In Nicaragua, where U.S. marines had been fighting against resistance forces led by Augusto Sandino—and where they had also begun bombing civilians, as they had done in Haiti—he found a particularly sympathetic audience for his denunciations of American imperialism. Like Pétion a century before, Jolibois sought to connect Haiti’s battle for independence with that of other Latin American nations. The difference, of course, was that in Pétion’s time, Haiti had struggled against a European empire and had seen the United States as a potential ally and an inspiration. Now, Haitian activists increasingly regarded the United States as the most dangerous empire of all.39

  World-traveling intellectuals like Bellegarde and Jolibois were key members of the opposition, but within Haiti itself, the thinker who truly defined the cultural awakening of the 1920s was the teacher and scholar Jean Price-Mars, whose writings became a touchstone for generations of Haitians. Price-Mars claimed a venerable ancestry: he was descended from Jean-Baptiste “Mars” Belley, the African-born man who had represented Saint-Domingue at the French National Convention in 1794 and played a crucial role in the revolution. As a child, Price-Mars had grown up at the crossroads of two religions: his father was a Baptist, converted by African American missionaries, while his grandmother, who largely raised him, was a fervent Catholic. This background made him notably ecumenical: throughout periods of intense religious conflict, Price-Mars often urged Haitians to seek out “compromise and reconciliation” between their different religious traditions.40

  From 1896 to 1902, when he was in his early twenties, Price-Mars studied on a government scholarship at the Sorbonne and the Collège de France. Wandering into a bookstore one day, he picked up a book by the prominent French social theorist Gustave Le Bon, who had created a typology of human races ranging from “primitive” to “superior,” with Africans at the bottom and Europeans at the top. As Price-Mars later recalled, he “revolted against the injustice and insolence of such a judgment,” and—like Firmin and Janvier before him—became determined to use “scientific truth” to battle such prejudices. He saw Haitian history itself as a powerful refutation of Le Bon’s theories, proof that an oppressed group of Africans could successfully transform their own society. On returning to Haiti, Price-Mars gave a lecture that exemplified the intellectual approach he would develop over the coming decades. Haitians, he argued, suffered from internalizing the racist ideas directed at them by outsiders. In order to productively confront their social and political problems, they first needed to understand and accept that they were the equals of any other people. “Let us persuade ourselves that we are men like other men,” he declared.41

  Price-Mars’s belief in the value of Haitian history and culture eventually led him to spend his weekends wandering the countryside, speaking to rural residents about language, music, kinship, and religion. On one of these excursions in 1918, he experienced firsthand the dangers of the U.S. occupation: he was detained by soldiers, and he might have ended up in a corvée labor team somewhere were it not for his status as a well-respected teacher. But he continued his wor
k in the countryside, determined to provide a detailed ethnographic account of Haiti’s rural way of life, which he believed should serve as the major reference point for a nation in search of itself.42

  Price-Mars’s ethnographic work, and particularly his readiness to treat Vodou as a subject worthy of serious study, was groundbreaking. Foreign visitors had produced many accounts purporting to describe the “superstitions” of Haiti’s population, but Haitian intellectuals had tended to avoid the topic. “We bear very little resemblance to the primitive peoples of Africa, either in physical beauty, spirit, or intelligence,” one writer had declared in 1905, explaining that Haitians had more in common with the “Latin part of the white race.” Former president François Denys Légitime, speaking in 1911 at a congress in London, had likewise suggested that if Haiti still harbored “a few traces of African fanaticism,” it was “only a lingering relic of ancestral traits which a people does not easily suppress.” Even Price-Mars’s close friend Dantès Bellegarde insisted that Haiti was an “intellectual province of France” and that Vodou was a brake on progress and an all-too-easy justification for racist attitudes. Haiti “would cut a poor figure,” Bellegarde declared, if she “divested herself of her French culture and presented herself naked as a little savage” among neighbors clothed in “the magnificent finery of their Western Civilization.”43

  Price-Mars, however, urged Haitians to completely rethink the way they related to their culture. In his classic 1928 book So Spoke the Uncle, he drew on his ethnographic work and on a broad range of anthropologist theorists, including Anténor Firmin, to decry the “disconcerting paradox” of Haitian life. Haitians had a past, he said, that was “if not the most beautiful, then certainly the most engaging and moving in the history of the world”—the “transplantation of a human race to a foreign land.” And yet they reacted with “an embarrassment barely concealed, indeed shame,” when confronted with the fact of their African roots. They were ensnared in the slaveholders’ ideology, which presented blacks as “cast-offs of humanity, without history, without morality, without religion.” Price-Mars lamented that having overthrown slavery and colonialism, the “black community of Haiti clothed itself in the rags of western civilization.” Ever since 1804, the country’s leaders had sought to improve Haiti by copying France. “An absurd task, if there ever was one!” Price-Mars exclaimed.44