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2 0 0 8 S A M L A COON V E N T I O N S T UDEN T E SSAY P RI Z E UN-SILENCING THE PAST: BOISROND-TONNERRE, VASTEY, AND THE RE-WRITING OF THE HAITIAN REVOLUTION1 MARLENE L. DAUT UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

It is by now rather well known in academic circles that the Haitian Revolution has been “silenced” in academic scholarship and in popular history for the past two centuries. Michel-Rolph Trouillot was among the first to point out the damning implications of these silences when he insisted that the “silencing” of the Haitian Revolution is only “a chapter within a narrative of global domination.” It is “a part of the history of the West,” he says, “and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world” (Silencing 107). Acknowledging that these silences exist has proved to be extraordinarily important to any understanding of Haitian history, literature, and/or society since, as Michel Foucault has indicated, the key to controlling a people’s “dynamism” (“Film” 25) is to control its memory and to “stifle” its history (“Film” 28). The real world implication of these silences is that by erasing the Haitian Revolution and imposing a different “framework” (Foucault, “Film” 28) it is not just Haitian history, but the Haitian people themselves who have been erased. The quite remarkable stories of Vincent Ogé, Toussaint L’Ouverture, André Rigaud, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henri Christophe, and Alexandre Pétion, have been replaced in the world’s memory by the more treacherous recent histories of people known only by the names of Papa Doc, Baby Doc, and Aristide. As a result, the country that was once known for its art, culture, and even science (McClellan 4), and was once the very symbol of black nationalism, is now known only for what Joel Dreyfuss has called “the phrase”—the “poorest country in the western hemisphere”—and for

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the brutal and legendary violence of the tonton makouts (Dreyfuss 1; Braziel 128, 150). If bringing forward the perspective of Haitians themselves is one way in which to rectify the silences of the past and thereby create and/or uncover a “counter-memory” (Foucault, Language 113-65), then it is the last part of Trouillot’s statement that has continued to be obscured by much of the scholarship on the Haitian Revolution. In order to “bring forward the perspective of the world,” what is needed remains a type of history or story-telling that takes more into account than just “officially” documented narratives—normally, those produced by the colonizing culture—but also those histories, both written and oral, that come from colonized and formerly colonized peoples.2 Though including Haitian authors within this discourse might seem like common sense, the striking reality is that many Haitian writers have been disregarded or dismissed by historians and literary critics based upon their skin color, class, or political and/or ideological affiliations. Since every source is “an instance of inclusion” the other part of which is exclusion (Trouillot 48), to dismiss Haitian authorship on these grounds is to fail to recognize that no historian can escape the charge of bias because the biases are inscribed into the sources themselves. An example of this kind of “inclusion” versus “exclusion” (Trouillot 48) occurs in the work of the late historian David Nicholls. In “‘A Work of Combat’” Nicholls points to the Haitian historians Thomas Madiou and Beaubrun Ardouin’s tomes of the Haitian Revolution, but is equally quick to point to their position as “mulattoes,” in effect, casting a shadow of doubt over their authority as historians by suggesting that they subscribe to what Nicholls has referred to as “the mulatto legend of history” (16).3 Nicholls’ larger claim in his vast body of work on Haiti is that independence in the country has been continuously threatened by “deep divisions” based on “colour distinctions” that have helped to create, if not encourage, the country’s misery (Dessalines 7-8). Nicholls’ highly influential argument is, in fact, just a mere echo of the racialist thought concerning Haiti in the texts of nineteenth-century U.S. American and European writers. Nineteenth-century authors who wrote about Haiti often promulgated or at the very least accepted this myth of “Haitian exceptionalism” (M. Trouillot, “Odd” 8) or the idea that Haiti was a strange and disturbing country whose inhab-

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itants “were hardly sensible” of the prejudices and “defects” in their literature (Harvey 223) and where “black Peter was exterminating black Paul” (Carlyle). Charles Mackenzie, the former British consul to Haiti, for example, openly contested Haitian authorship when he suggested that the Baron de Vastey’s writing on the abuses of the French colonists toward their slaves before and during the Revolution were “exaggeration[s] to which excited passions give birth” since he had never “met with any person who could of his own knowledge declare that such was a fact” (2:8). Mackenzie suggests that declarations made by slaves or the revolutionists themselves were not enough to prove “a fact” since they were based on “passions” rather than “reason.” In an article entitled “Mulatto Literature” and published in the U.S. American journal, The Albion, the author writes that the literature of Haiti “is chiefly of a very light description, fitted rather for amusement than for high culture” because the “negro is a pleasure-loving being” and the “French-Haytian Mulatto,” the negro’s “brother,” was “sprung from volatile sources.” According to this author racial mixing is what makes Haitian literature the very “embodiment of volatility” (326). The celebrated French abolitionist Victor Schoelcher, too, had something to say about racial prejudice in Haiti when he accused the Haitian poet and playwright Pierre Faubert of having falsified the revolutionary history of the country to promote mulatto accomplishments in order to maintain caste divisions (2:228).4 This wholesale belief in and at times promotion of antagonisms in Haiti based on color prejudice was and remains an effort to exploit the country’s government as simply one avenue towards better exploiting the country’s resources.5 These statements by Schoelcher, Mackenzie, Harvey, and our unnamed American author were not attempts to help the Haitian government to improve the material situation of the Haitian people nor did they reflect simple prejudices, rather they were what we might call after Trouillot “shield[s] that masked the negative contribution of the Western powers to the Haitian situation” (“Odd” 7). On the other hand, while Nicholls writes with sympathy and care about Haitian history, because he attributes much of the country’s political problems to color prejudice in Haiti among Haitians he unwittingly ends up reinforcing the idea that at bottom it is the Haitian people themselves (and particularly those of mixed-race) who are at fault.

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As J. Michael Dash (1998) and Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1990), along with Laënnec Hurbon and Brenda Gayle Plummer have pointed out, stereotypes of Haiti and Haitians have real consequences. The idea that Haitians are horribly corrupt and racially prejudiced has led to the belief that they have no one to blame but themselves for their material condition. This last point is readily demonstrated by a headline in the Miami Herald which read: “World’s Oldest Black Nation ‘Ruthlessly Self-Destructive’” (qtd. in Dow 4). As Noam Chomsky has written in another context, in order for the dominant power to “justify what it’s doing” it has to become or remain “racist” and “blame the victim” (qtd. in Farmer 217). An example of this kind of “blaming the victim” comes from John R. Beard’s The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture (1853). Beard wrote that color prejudice in nineteenth-century Haiti stemmed from the days of the Haitian Revolution and had “retarded” Haiti’s progress in the “arts” and “paved the way for a renewal of strife and bloodshed” (144). In Beard’s work it is the Revolution itself and not slavery and colonialism that have prevented the “arts” from developing in Haiti and have set the stage for racial antagonisms. Many nineteenth-century European and U.S. Americans authors, even with all of their rallying cries against slavery and color prejudice, were actually a part of the same system of hegemony that promoted color prejudice and inequality which they decried in the Haitian government.6 The biases attached to Haitian authors, mulatto or black, would not be worth mentioning if the designation had not produced an unfortunate lack of recognition for the writings of these authors. This lack of recognition has resulted in both a “formula of erasure” and a “formula of banalization:” either they did not really write these narratives (a charge often made against Toussaint [Désormeaux 135])7 or even if they did, their narratives are not really that important (Silencing 96).8 The silencing of the past of the Revolution that Trouillot so eloquently describes is, therefore, merely a reflection of the silencing of the histories of the past written by many of the revolutionary “actors” themselves. For who can deny the existence of a colonial legend of the past, a colonial legend of the past that was promulgated most notably by ex-colonists and travel writers, including Bryan Edwards, Etienne Déscourtilz, the colonist Gros, and Moreau de Saint-Méry, whose texts have formed the basis for much of the early historiography of the Haitian Revolution?9

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In an effort to consider what Vévé Clark has called the other side of history” (241), in this essay I examine the ways in which two early nineteenth-century Haitian historians, Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776-1806)10 and Pompée Valentin, the Baron de Vastey (17811820),11 created, responded to, and reshaped narratives about the Haitian Revolution in order to ensure that in the words of the nineteenth-century Haitian novelist, Eméric Bergeaud (1818-1858), the “truth would come out” (vii). I also uncover the ways in which these Haitian authors used the Revolution to enter into larger debates about slavery, color prejudice, and nation building. By turning to the rarely considered stories told of the Revolution by two of Haiti’s earliest writers, I place on display the manifold ways in which they attempted to both unsilence the past and prevent the further silencing of it. I also hope to unsilence the past of early Haitian letters by re-writing these “lost” histories back into the francophone and Caribbean literary traditions, and ultimately, the wider literary tradition of the Atlantic World. It is a re-writing rather than an integration because the works of Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey were a part of the historiography of the Haitian Revolution circulating in the Atlantic World until at least the end of the U.S. Civil War.12 Through an examination of Boisrond Tonnerre’s Mémoire pour servir à l’histoire d’Haïti first published in 1804 and the Baron de Vastey’s Le Système colonial dévoilé published in 1814,13 I show how these early Haitian authors took it upon themselves to ensure that the colonists alone would not write Haiti’s history. This re-writing involved an intense consideration of the power of the press to shape international opinion about Haiti. These authors also hoped to create the country’s own national “state memory” that would preserve the nation’s collective “black memory” for future generations (Hanchard 48). In other words, Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey were both “collectors and manufacturers of collective memory” (Hanchard 47) since they hoped to transmit information about a past in which they were actors to those who were not.14 Through the creation of distinctly Haitian histories of the Revolution, both Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey constructed a lieu de mémoire or site of memory (Nora 7) that was desgined to legitimate the authority of the state. These histories or political memoirs would enable them to build upon the horrors of the past by turning the Haitian Revolution into the nation’s origin story rather than a grue-

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some cautionary tale. These are stories of the Revolution that are not told from the healthy distance of putative historical objectivity, but rather from the intimacy that comes from living through tragic experiences. These lived-experiences, in turn, become the “evidence” that buttress both authors claims to writing the truth in the vein of what Joan Scott has called “the evidence of experience” (Scott 382).15 The literary critic Matthew Clavin has written, however that we should approach the biographies and narratives of the Haitian Revolution that circulated in the nineteenth-century Atlantic World with caution. He argues that whether written by “British abolitionists or French proslavery zealots, American merchants or Haitian politicians” (6),16 these narratives “fall into one of two ideological camps” (2). He says that “[p]roslavery authors warned of a repetition of the “‘horrors of St. Domingo’” while abolitionists proposed a “radically different reading” in which they found slave holders and “white soldiers culpable [. . .] arguing that whites who brutally enslaved Africans sowed the seeds of their own destruction” (2). Moreover, Clavin finds that this desire to narrate the grotesque events of the Haitian Revolution coincided with the rise of the “Gothic romance at the turn of the nineteenth century” (4). Thus he argues that biographers, chroniclers, and story-tellers of the Revolution “capitalized” on the idea of these events as a “Gothic tale” in order to feed the desires of the nineteenth century reading public for sensationalistic stories. He indicates that these authors also used the events as a didactic tool to either promote or encourage the end of slavery, urging their readers to believe that they were performing an important public service (25). While it is true that nineteenth-century Haitian writing on the Revolution shares many of the elements of European and U.S. American writing on the events—a stated “unwillingness to publish their work” (Clavin 6), insistence on their impartiality (Clavin 8), desire to authenticate the narrative by claiming personal experience (Clavin 10), and the gothic conventions of “indescribability,” “Gothic scenery,” and “voyeurism” (Clavin 18)—I do not think that it is appropriate to suggest that Haitian authors wrote in this way merely to entertain, instruct, or improve salability (Clavin 12). In other words, while I agree that many U.S. American and European writers published these kinds of works because “the market demanded them” and because “the journey ‘delighted’ them” (Clavin 29), the same cannot be said of Haitian authors without nuance or qualification. To say so

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is to discount the very serious post-colonial project of writing back to the dominant discourse in which many early Haitian authors were vibrant and vocal participants and of which they were also the creators. These early Haitian authors were engaged in a deliberate project of nation building whereby they understood that the nation could not have multiple and competing origin stories, but rather that the origin had to be “fixed” (Brennan 51), and they believed that it had to be “fixed” by Haitians themselves. I offer, therefore, that a more appropriate register with which to view these early Haitian narratives is that of the post-colonial. This is particularly so because unlike their U.S. American and European counterparts Haitian authors were operating within a “global discursive sphere” (Nesbitt 38) to which they did not have access. This lack of access is illustrated by the sheer number of U.S. American and European texts that were published on the Haitian Revolution compared to the relatively miniscule number of Haitian texts produced and/or published. This disparity in publications is a fact that did not go unnoticed by Vastey who observed that “[t]he majority of historians who have written about the colonies were whites, colonists even.” Vastey goes on to suggests that “now that we have Haitian printing presses [. . .] we can reveal the crimes of the colonists and respond to the most absurd calumnies, invented by the prejudice and greed of our oppressors” (95).17 For both Boisrond-Tonnerre and Vastey the recording and subsequent publication of these histories constituted a powerful reversal of power relations whereby Haitians could finally force access into the “global discursive sphere” through print rather than purely through violence. Vastey, in particular, believed that he could speak for the former slaves and others who could not speak for themselves and understood the collection of these facts as a part of a serious and urgent undertaking whose goal was to “awaken the ashes of the numerous victims whom [the French colonists had] precipitated into the tomb, and borrow their voices to unveil [. . .] heinous crimes” to the public (Système 35). Ever since its apparition in the late eighteenth-century, the Haitian memoir has had as its principal aim the refutation of the popular notion that the Haitian revolutionists,18 both slave and free, were the perpetrators of violence and betrayal and the French planters and colonists the unfortunate victims. The stated aim of the Haitian political memoir of the late eighteenth-century, as in its early nineteenth-

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century counterpart, was to refute the historical record being produced by European authors in the vein of what David Scott has referred to as “vindicationism” (83). The notion that the insurgents were barbarians who were simply out for white blood was incredibly widespread among the French colonists of Saint-Domingue in the late eighteenth-century. In 1792, for example, the governor general of Saint-Domingue, Philibert François-Rouxel de Blanchelande, wrote of the free people of color in the colonial journal, La Feuille du Jour : Up until this point, I have used gentle and moderate tactics to remind you of your duty; your conduct proves that I have presumed too much of you [. . .] Instead of embracing those who once made all of France esteem you, and the entire colony cherish you; What avenue have you taken? That of true scoundrels, who dare everything, because they believe they have everything to gain. (1-2)20 Blanchelande refers here and throughout his article to the numerous insurrections of the free people of color against the colonists and the royalists, admonishing them for “betraying” France in supposedly siding with the slaves. However, Blanchelande’s statement also attempts to induce feelings of guilt on the part of the free people of color by suggesting that France has only ever “cherished” and “esteemed” them and that, as a result, it was the “duty” of the free people of color to remain loyal. Blanchelande’s public admonishment of the free people of color as traitors of the French and responsible for the revolt of the slaves represents the government’s official position towards them, but also reflects widespread public opinion in not only France but also in the United States and the rest of the Americas. Laurent Dubois writes, “Many of the accounts of the event [the insurrection of 1791] that were soon produced and disseminated throughout the Americas and Europe presented tales of savage and unthinkable atrocities committed by the slaves” (Dubois 110); while Jeremy Popkin tells us that Descriptions of the insurrection in the local press followed a rigid ideological formula [. . .] the white colonial orthodoxy emphasized the cruelty and destructiveness of the insurgents whose actions were categorized as crimes against the paternal plantation owners. (Popkin 514)

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Gordon S. Brown notes that “American newspapers almost always expressed sympathy for the colonists and horror at the revolt” (51). Early Haitian authors had good reason to be concerned about these narratives. The depicti...