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Stella: The Epic Saga of the Haitian Revolution by Adriana Umaña Hossman

2016; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cal.2017.0028

1080-6512

Mary Grace Albanese,

Cuban History and Society

Reviewed by: Stella: The Epic Saga of the Haitian Revolution by Adriana Umaña Hossman Mary Grace Albanese (bio) Stella: The Epic Saga of the Haitian Revolution. Trans. Adriana Umaña Hossman. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2014. Reading Émeric Bergeaud’s foundational epic Stella in October 2016 is an unsettling experience. Haiti’s first known novel, posthumously published in Paris in 1859, trades in the celebratory rhetoric of valiant battles, celestial bodies, and fertile landscapes. How different this country is from the version of Haiti that darkens contemporary headlines. In the wake of the 2010 earthquake, the cholera epidemic, and Hurricane Matthew, today’s fictive Haiti is far from heroic. Instead, it vacillates between two equally pernicious poles: that of perpetual victim (no report on Haiti seems to be complete without the tagline “poorest country in the Western hemisphere”) and wicked maker of its own misery (a phenomenon which historian Westenley Alcenat has identified as a “pathology” of blame. Haiti is a country, not an allegory, and all of these figurations—from nationalist hero to helpless victim to sickened corruptor—tell us more about Western prejudices than they do about the first black republic. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in criticizing these prejudiced narratives, famously argued: “Haiti is not that weird. It is the fiction of Haitian exceptionalism [End Page 938] that is weird.” And indeed contemporary Western dismissals of Haiti are not just racist. They are frankly bizarre, from Pat Robertson’s claim that Haiti made a pact with the devil to weather forecaster Jennifer Delgado’s assertion that Haitian deforestation was caused by hungry children eating trees. Is this what progress looks like, David Brooks? Though devoid of both Satan and arboreal appetite, Stella, too, is a bit weird. As such, it reveals the limitations of both Western dismissal and blind nationalist valorization. Merging Western allegory with Haitian Revolutionary historiography, the novel metonymizes the independence struggle within the tale of two enslaved brothers—Romulus and Remus, a black and a mulatto. When their mother (“the African”) is raped and murdered at the hands of “the Colonist,” the rival brothers join forces to fight for Haitian freedom, harnessing the iconography of revolutionary heroes such as Vincent Ogé, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines. Guided by Stella, a blonde virgin who bears the gift of liberty from France, Romulus and Remus establish Haitian independence, avenge their mother’s death, and eliminate racial prejudice. Luis Duno-Gottberg and Adriana Umaña Hossman’s introduction provides a useful, if highly condensed, context for Bergeaud’s novel, tracing some of the major aesthetic and historical developments that shaped Stella. Particularly strong is their reading of Haitian foundational myths through Lethière Guillaume Guillon’s painting Le serment des ancêtres (which provides the edition’s cover image). Working within an introduction of barely eleven pages, however, a number of their claims remain underdeveloped. Haiti’s complex racial politics are only sketchily adumbrated (Marlene Daut’s magisterial Tropics of Haiti provides a more nuanced perspective). Although the editors perfunctorily place Stella within a Haitian literary genealogy, they should have more thoroughly attended to the political conditions that drove so many Haitian writers to publish in Paris (a comparison between Stella and Pierre Faubert’s 1856 Ogé might have been useful here; also useful may have been an account of the Haitian panic triggered by the reign of the Emperor Soulouque). The introduction would also have benefited from an analysis of the novel’s troubling politics of gender and sexuality (for this, the reader might look to Lesley Curtis and Christine Munchen’s 2015 translation of the novel). Hossman’s translation is fluid, lively, and largely accurate, however it is too lightly footnoted and the editorial apparatus (mainly portraits and historical paintings) remain decorative rather than informative (maps especially would have been a useful addition, given the novel’s itinerant structure). Because many of the notes appear in Bergeaud’s French original, the editors could have also more clearly differentiated their interventions from those of the original author. Of greatest consequence, however, is the (likely accidental) elision of Haitian Kreyòl from the novel. Although Stella is—like most pre-twentieth-century Haitian literary production—written...