“People talk,” Tante Zi went on. “They say that everything they say to you ends up written down somewhere.”
Because she was my elder, my beloved aunt, I bowed my head in shame, wishing I could apologize for that, but the immigrant artist, like all other artists, is a leech and I needed to latch on. I wanted to quote the French poet and critic Stéphane Mallarmé and tell her that everything in the world exists to end up in a book. I wanted to ask her forgiveness for the essay that in my mind I was already writing. The most I could do, however, was to promise her not to use her real name or Marius’s.
She was silent again, momentarily comforted by that tiny compromise. I changed the subject, asking if she wanted to go swimming. Just to relax her body a little, I said, before the return trip back to Port-au-Prince. I thought she would say no. She had turned me down before. Still I hoped that she might surprise me and say yes.
“I can’t,” she began, and then corrected herself. “I don’t want to.”
A large cloud lingered above, casting a hint of gray over us. But it was still sunny over the water, the waves glittering as though taunting the fogginess above.
“Some people come back from the other side of the water, don’t they?” She said, her eyes still fixed on the water. “You’re proof of that, non?”
She raised her hands high in the air, aiming them at the twinkling sea as if to both scold and embrace it.
“They do,” I said.
“Why didn’t Marius come back?” She seemed to be asking both me and the sea.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“It’s stupid to even ask,” she said, scratching the short gray hair under the white kerchief that covered her head. “How could any of us know the answer to something like that? Only the sea and God know. Right?”
“Right,” I echoed, still treading carefully after her rebuke.
“I suppose I should be glad we didn’t lose him at sea,” she said.
With her eyes still on the water, she got up and peeled off her milky white clothes. Wearing only her red bra and dark panties, she walked toward the ocean for an afternoon swim.
CHAPTER 7
Bicentennial
Two hundred years had passed since the Western Hemisphere’s second republic was created. Back then, there were no congratulatory salutes from the first, the United States of America. The new republic, Haiti, had gained its independence through a bloody twelve-year slave uprising, the only time in the history of the world that bond servants successfully overthrew their masters and formed their own state.
The two young nations had several things in common. Both had been heavily taxed colonies, and both had visionary leaders whose words had the power to inspire men to fight. Compare, for example, Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the tree of liberty as one that must be “refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants” with that of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture who, as he was captured by the French and was being taken to his death, declared, “In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty. . . . It will shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many.”
The fact that the United States of America was not more supportive of its smaller, slightly younger neighbor had a great deal to do with L’Ouverture’s roots, which were African and which were now planted in America’s backyard. Thomas Jefferson, who had drafted the declaration that defined his own nation’s insurgency and who had witnessed and praised the French Revolution, knew exactly what revolutions meant. Their essence was not in their instantaneous bursts of glory but in their ripple effect across borders and time, their ability to put the impossible within reach and make the downtrodden seem mighty. And he feared that Haiti’s revolt would inspire similar actions in the United States. “If something is not done, and soon done, we shall be the murderers of our own children,” Jefferson wrote about the potential impact of the Haitian uprising.
Haiti’s very existence highlighted the deepest contradictions of the American revolutionary experiment. The U.S. Declaration of Independence stated that all men were created equal, but Haitian slaves and free men and women of color battled what was then one of the world’s most powerful armies to prove it. Yet how could the man who wrote about freedom in such transcendent terms have failed to hear echoes of his own country’s revolutionary struggle, and victory, in the Haitians’ urgent desire for self-rule? Possibly because as a slaveowner and the leader of slaveholders he couldn’t manage to reconcile dealing with one group of Africans as leaders and another as chattel. So Haiti’s independence remained unrecognized by Thomas Jefferson, who urged Congress to suspend commerce with the nascent nation, declaring its leaders “cannibals of the terrible republic.”
Timothy Pickering, a senator from Massachusetts who had served as John Adams’s secretary of state, wrote to Jefferson to protest his refusal to aid the new Haitian republic. “Are these men not merely to be abandoned to their own efforts but to be deprived of those necessary supplies which for a series of years, they have been accustomed to receive from the United States, and without which they cannot subsist?” Pickering asked.
Yet the United States had benefited greatly from the colonial strife next door. Broke after its Haitian defeat, France sold a large region, 828,000 square miles, from the western banks of the Mississippi River to the Rocky Mountains, to the United States for fifteen million dollars. The Louisiana Purchase would prove to be one of the most profitable real estate transactions ever made, nearly doubling the size of the United States at a cost of about four cents an acre. Alexander Hamilton said Napoleon would not have sold his claims except for the “courage and obstinate resistance [of the] black inhabitants” of Haiti.
It would take six decades for the United States to acknowledge Haiti’s independence. During that time, Haiti continued to be considered as a possible penal colony for the United States or as a place (à la Liberia) where freed blacks could be repatriated. By the time Abraham Lincoln recognized Haiti’s independence in 1862, America was already at war with itself over the issue of slavery. Burdened by its postindependence isolation and the hundred million francs in payment it was forced to give France for official recognition—an amount estimated to be worth more than twenty-two billion U.S. dollars today, which some Haitians, including the former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, have insisted should be repaid—Haiti began its perilous slide toward turmoil and dependency, resulting in a nineteen-year U.S. occupation and three subsequent interventions in the past hundred years.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson predicts what might happen to the U.S. political system in a worstcase scenario. But his words turned out to be a more accurate prophecy for America’s plundered neighbor. “The spirit of the times . . . will alter,” Jefferson wrote. “Our rulers will become corrupt. . . . The shackles . . . which shall not be knocked off at the conclusion of war will remain on long, will be made heavier and heavier.”
Perhaps, had it been given a fair chance at its beginning, Haiti might have flourished and prospered. If that had been the case, Haiti might have celebrated the bicentennial of its independence with fewer shackles. Instead, in January 2004, Haiti observed the two-hundredth anniversary of its independence from France in the midst of a national revolt. In the Haitian capital and other cities throughout the country, pro- and antigovernment demonstrators clashed. Members of a disbanded army declared war on a young and inexperienced police force. Mobs of angry young men, some called chimè (chimeras) by their countrymen and others ironically echoing Thomas Jefferson and calling themselves lame kanibal, the cannibal army, battled one another to determine whether the then Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide—worshipped by chimeras and reviled by the cannibal army—would remain in office or be overthrown.
A few weeks later, Aristide departed in the early hours of a Sunday morning. By his account, he was kidnapped from his residence in Port-au-Prince and put on an unmarked U.S. jet, which took him to the Central African Rep
ublic, where he was practically held prisoner for several weeks. By other accounts, he went willingly, even signing a letter of resignation in Haitian Creole. What remains uncontested is that as he began his life in exile, Aristide recited for the international press the same words that Toussaint L’Ouverture uttered on his way to mortal exile in France: “In overthrowing me they have only felled the tree of Negro liberty. . . . It will shoot up again, for it is deeply rooted and its roots are many.”
Haitians in and outside of Haiti were not surprised that, in Haiti’s bicentennial year, Aristide chose to link his exit with such a powerful echo from the past. After all, there has never been a more evocative moment in Haiti’s history—even though neglected by the world—than the triumphant outcome of the revolution that L’Ouverture and others had lived and died for exactly two hundred years earlier. Though Haiti’s transition from slavery to free state was far from seamless, many Haitians, myself included, would rather forget the divisions that followed independence, the color and class biases that split the country into sections ruled by self-declared oligarchs and monarchs who governed exactly as they had been governed, with little regard for parity or autonomy.
In The Kingdom of This World, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier allows us to consider the possibility, with which his own Cuba would later grapple, that a revolution that some consider visionary might appear to others to have failed. Through the eyes of Ti Noël, no king or ruler but rather an ordinary man, we get an intimate view of the key players in an epic story that merges myth and lore, magical realism with historical facts. Here we encounter some of the most memorable architects of the Haitian revolution, along with some fictional comrades they pick up along the way. We meet the one-armed Makandal, who is said to have turned into a million fireflies, or in other accounts a mere insect, in order to escape his fiery execution by French colonists. We also meet a Jamaican expatriate, Bouckman—most commonly spelled Boukman—who presided over the stirring Vodou ceremony that helped transform young Toussaint L’Ouverture from a mild-mannered herbalist to a heroic warrior. And of course we come to know King Christophe, a former restaurateur, who later shoots himself with a silver bullet, but not before forcing his countrymen to experience “the rebirth of shackles, this proliferation of suffering, which the more resigned began to accept as proof of the uselessness of all revolt.”
Though Ti Noël does not remain among the resigned for too long, he is certainly tested through his disheartening encounters with those who have shaped his country’s destiny. Like Haiti itself, he cannot be fully defined. At best one might see Ti Noël as a stand-in for the novelist Carpentier. Born of a Russian mother and a French father, Carpentier shows with his skillful handling of this narrative how revolutions assign us all sides, shaming the conquerors and fortifying the oppressed, and in some cases achieving the opposite. For even if history is most often recounted by victors, it’s not always easy to tell who the rightful narrators should be, unless we keep redefining with each page what it means to conquer and be conquered.
Of Carpentier’s Cuba, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida Point, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being. . . . Could we induce her to join us in granting its independence against all the world?”
In a prologue to the 1949 edition of The Kingdom of This World, Alejo Carpentier describes how during a trip to Haiti, he found himself in daily contact with something he called the real maravilloso, or the real marvelous.
“I was treading earth where thousands of men eager for liberty believed,” he wrote. “I entered the Laferrière citadel, a structure without architectonic antecedents. . . . I breathed the atmosphere created by Henri Christophe, monarch of incredible undertakings. . . . With each step I found the real marvelous.”
The real marvelous, which we have come to know as magic realism, lives and thrives in past and present Haiti, just as Haiti’s revolution does. The real marvelous is in the extraordinary and the mundane, the beautiful and the repulsive, the spoken and the unspoken. It is in the enslaved African princes who believed they could fly and knew the paths of the clouds and the language of the forests but could no longer recognize themselves in the so-called New World. It is in the elaborate vèvès, or cornmeal drawings, sketched in the soil at Vodou ceremonies to draw attention from the gods. It is in the thunderous response from gods such as Ogoun, the god of war, who speak in the hearts of men and women who, in spite of their slim odds, accept nothing less than total freedom.
Whenever possible, Haitians cite their historical and spiritual connection to this heroic heritage by invoking the names of one or all of the founders of the country: Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. (The latter’s fighting creed was Koupe tèt, boule kay—Cut heads, burn houses.)
“They can’t do this to us,” we say when feeling subjugated. “We are the children of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Henri Christophe, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines.”
As President Aristide’s opportune evocation of Toussaint L’Ouverture shows, for many of us, it is as though the Haitian revolution was fought less than two hundred days, rather than more than two hundred years, ago. For is there anything more timely and timeless than a public battle to control one’s destiny, a communal crusade for self-determination?
The outcome, when it’s finally achieved, can be nearly impossible to describe. It certainly was for one Haitian poet, Boisrond Tonnerre, who was given the Jeffersonian task of drafting Haiti’s declaration of independence. To do it appropriately, he declared, he would need the skin of a white man for parchment, the man’s skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen.
At the August 1791 Vodou ceremony that would launch the more than decade-long fight for independence, the god of war Ogoun was summoned in song and a pig was sacrificed in Ogoun’s honor.
“The machete suddenly buried itself in the belly of a black pig, which spewed forth guts and lungs in three squeals,” Alejo Carpentier writes in The Kingdom of This World.
Then, called by the name of their masters, for they had no other, the delegates came forward one by one to smear their lips with the foaming blood of the pig, caught in a wooden bowl. . . . The general staff of the insurrection had been named. . . . And in view of the fact that a proclamation had to be drawn up and nobody knew how to write, someone remembered the goose quill of the Abbé de la Haye, priest of Dondon, an admirer of Voltaire who had shown signs of unequivocal sympathy for the Negroes ever since he had read the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
Would the Abbé lend a hand and a pen? was the burning question.
Eventually, a proclamation was drawn up and a revolution was launched, with or without the Abbé’s goose quill.
CHAPTER 8
Another Country
The sea was walking the earth with a heavy heel. . . . The folks in the quarters and the people in the big houses further around the shore heard the big lake and wondered. The people felt uncomfortable but safe because there were the seawalls to chain the senseless monster in his bed. The folks let the people do the thinking. If the castles thought themselves secure, the cabins needn’t worry
—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
In Zora Neale Hurston’s visionary 1937 novel, Janie Crawford and her boyfriend, Tea Cake, a day laborer, refuse to evacuate their small, unsteady house before a deadly hurricane batters the Florida Everglades, near where I currently live.
“Everybody was talking about it that night. But nobody was worried,” wrote Hurston. “You couldn’t have a hurricane when you’re making seven and eight dollars a day.”
It turns out you could have a hurricane, and other disasters too, even if you’re making considerably less than that.
And if you manage to survive that hurricane, you might end up with nothing at all. No home. No food or water. No medical care for your sick and wounded. Not even body bags or coffins for your dead.
Americans have experienced this scenario before. Not just in prophetic literature or apocalyptic blockbuster movies, but through the very real natural disasters that have plagued other countries. Catastrophes that are eventually reduced to single, shorthand images that, if necessary, can later be evoked. Take, for example, visions of skyscraper-size waves washing away entire crowds in Thailand and other Asian countries devastated by the December 2004 tsunamis. Or remember Sophia Pedro, the Mozambican woman who in March 2000 was plucked by a South African military helicopter from the tree where she had clung for three days and then given birth as the floodwaters swirled beneath her? And let’s not forget Haiti’s September 2004 encounter with Tropical Storm Jeanne, which left three thousand people dead and a quarter million homeless. In that disaster, patients drowned in hospital beds. Children watched as parents were washed away. Survivors sought shelter in trees and on rooftops while corpses floated in the muddy, contaminated waters around them.
As I watched all this unfold again on my television set, this time in the streets of New Orleans in the summer of 2005, I couldn’t help but think of the Bush administration’s initial response to the Haitian victims of Tropical Storm Jeanne the year before Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans: sixty thousand dollars in aid and the repatriation of Haitian refugees from the United States back to the devastated region even before the waters had subsided. New Orleans’ horrific tragedy had been foreshadowed in America’s so-called backyard, and the initial response had been: “Po’ man ain’t got no business at de show,” as Zora Neale Hurston’s Tea Cake might have put it.