Haiti

  ALSO BY LAURENT DUBOIS

  A Colony of Citizens

  Avengers of the New World

  Soccer Empire

  Metropolitan Books

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  Copyright © 2012 by Laurent Dubois

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data

  Dubois, Laurent, 1971–

  Haiti : the aftershocks of history / Laurent Dubois.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8050-9335-3

  1. Haiti—History. I. Title.

  F1921.D83 2012

  972.94—dc23 2011020162

  First Edition 2012

  eISBN 978-0-8050-9562-3

  * Historians often refer to the free people of color as “mulattoes,” but that can be misleading, since not all were of mixed European and African ancestry. Skin color was certainly important: light-skinned men and women gained certain social privileges thanks to the fact that they were considered closer to being white. But there were also free people with no European ancestry, and some who were African-born but had managed to gain freedom and grow wealthy in Saint-Domingue. Officials at the time, and historians writing since, often use the term “free blacks” to describe the latter group, but here I will use the general term “free people of color” to designate all those people in the colony who were partly or wholly of African descent and were not slaves.

  * The return of the masters to their former plantations resulted in some remarkable scenes. In the late 1790s, one French visitor who was seeking to reestablish control over a family-owned plantation found that although he was welcome to stay on the property that he considered his, the workers were no longer interested in serving him. When he asked for food, they told him that there were some potatoes ready to be harvested in the field: he could help himself. The visitor was shocked by the cheekiness of the response, though it was in many ways remarkably humane, even hospitable. The former slaves didn’t take revenge or refuse his presence; they just made it clear that times had changed, that they were no longer bound to obey his commands, and that they were now all living on the land together as equals.19

  * The French were not the only ones to execute their prisoners. Dessalines’s forces responded to Rochambeau’s atrocities by hanging their white captives on the hills outside Le Cap in view of the French troops. Marcus Rainsford, an Englishman who wrote about the conflict, included in his book two parallel engravings illustrating the cycle of violence. One shows a French soldier pushing a black prisoner into the water, with a French tricolor flag overhead; the other depicts the hanging of a white officer by black troops under a palm tree. The second engraving is regularly reproduced as a representation of the Haitian Revolution, but the first is usually left out. Outside the country, Haiti’s independence is all too often remembered as a case of blacks indiscriminately killing whites. But in Haiti itself, Rochambeau’s brutality has never been forgotten.30

  * There is an interesting debate about precisely why Christophe picked the name Sans-Souci for his palace. Many have assumed that it was a reference to the great palace of the same name in Potsdam, Germany. But Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot argues that it may have been a different kind of homage: to his onetime enemy Sans-Souci, the Kongo-born officer he ambushed and killed in 1802. In naming his palace Sans-Souci, Christophe might have intended to bury the memory of his former enemy even deeper and make sure his time on the wrong side of the war would be silenced: now, the name itself would conjure up only an image of the king’s grandeur, and not of his earlier treachery. Indeed, argues Trouillot, there is a chance that the palace was literally built on top of Sans-Souci’s grave, or at least very close to it.18

  * The European influence on Christophe’s court extended to his patronage of the arts. He created an academy of painting and drawing at Sans-Souci and funded a theater in his capital whose repertoire included Voltaire’s play Zaïre, the most popular French drama of the eighteenth century.22

  * Based on Dumesle’s account, subsequent writers developed a fuller picture of what became known as the Bois Caïman ceremony, for the woods in which it was held, and recent historians have discovered a series of new archival sources that seem to confirm that a religious ceremony indeed took place in the week before the insurrection. Today, it is broadly considered Haiti’s founding event: the moment when the seed of liberty was planted, leading first to the abolition of slavery and eventually to full independence from France. The Bois Caïman ceremony is also understood by many who practice Vodou as a generative moment for the religion as well.5 However, in part because of this, it has also become the focus of evangelical groups in Haiti, many of whom consider the ceremony itself to have been the moment when a “pact with the devil” was made that has haunted the country ever since. The notion was made famous in the United States by Pat Robertson in the wake of the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti, but he was simply repeating a view that is prevalent among many evangelicals, both missionaries working in Haiti and Haitians themselves. Indeed, several attempts have been made to exorcise the site where the ceremony is believed to have taken place, as well as to poison a tree—considered sacred by Vodou practitioners—located there.

  * Soulouque’s attack on the Dominican Republic had ironic consequences: justified by him as a way of preventing foreign control on the island, it ultimately had the opposite effect. Some of those who resisted the Haitian invasion began lobbying for a return to Spanish colonial status, and in March 1861 the president of the Dominican Republic officially restored the country to Spain. Having become independent from Spain when it was taken over by Haiti in 1822, then independent from Haiti in 1844, the Dominican Republic was now once again in the hands of a European power.

  * It is difficult to know whether the use of such poisons had been directly observed, or whether Boyer’s lawmakers were themselves reacting to one of the many rumors about Vodou that circulated in nineteenth-century Haitian society. Whether zombification was real or not, its incorporation into the legal code of Haiti served—in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—to confirm to outside observers that the country was apparently full of dangerous, even murderous, religious practices.

  * The distinction was lost on a reporter from the Washington Post, who described “wild-eyed” dancers “falling to the floor palpably voodooed,” and explained that they “weren’t professionals but girls and boys from the bush” who had “worked themselves into an incipient jungle fever” backstage.70