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The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination: Radical Horizons, Conservative Constraints

2015; Penn State University Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/complitstudies.52.4.e-1

1528-4212

Grégory Pierrot,

Much of the attention Haiti has received in the last decade from English-language scholars has focused on the impact of the Haitian Revolution and its immediate aftermath on the cultures of the Atlantic world. Fewer have explored the influence of the event on Atlantic culture and politics in the twentieth century. Philip Kaisary's book is one such contribution to a fuller assessment of the place Haiti occupies in Western culture at large. In his study of the use of the Haitian Revolution in works by an international cast of twentieth-century artists—most of them writers, but also two visual artists—Kaisary is interested in the ways in which "artists and intellectuals have metamorphosed and appropriated this spectacular corner of black revolutionary history" (3).The book's subtitle announces its organizing logic: in Part One, Kaisary discusses works of "radical restoration of Haitian history … in which black agency and universal intent were central," namely Martinican Aimé Césaire's poem Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, and play La tragédie du roi Christophe, Trinidadian C. L. R. James's history book The Black Jacobins, American Langston Hughes's play Emperor of Haiti and opera Troubled Island, and Haitian René Depestre's Un arc-en-ciel pour l'Occident. Part One ends with a study of African American artist Jacob Lawrence's Haiti-inspired paintings as well as British painter Kimathi Donkor's, which he contrasts with a line of Caribbean, African, and European stamps representing (or failing to represent) Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint Louverture. In Part Two, Kaisary focuses on "conservative retrievals … [that] convey visions of obscurity, tragic circularity, senseless violence, and history as eroticized fantasmics" (2), such as Martinican Edouard Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint, Cuban Alejo Carpentier's El reino de este mundo, Saint Lucian Derek Walcott's Haitian Trilogy, and American Madison Smartt Bell's own trilogy of Haitian Revolution novels, All Souls' Rising, Master of the Crossroads, and The Stone that the Builder Refused (although Kaisary does not directly discuss the third novel).Kaisary aims to show how pervasive the memory of the Haitian Revolution remained in the twentieth century among artists of the Atlantic world. He does so in clear, concise, and agreeable prose, often with great insight. Yet in the process he reveals tensions inherent within his organizational conceit. Writings on the Haitian Revolution are often divided broadly between those that celebrate the endeavor and those that lament it. Within those two groups infinite variations can be found, depending on the events and people discussed, and the influence of the authors' historical, political, and cultural extractions and goals. Kaisary proposes to split overall celebratory accounts further between radical and conservative assessments of the Revolution.The radical readings of the revolution that he supports "conceive revolution dynamically, valorize its link to progress, and share a determination to perceive in the Haitian Revolution lessons for the possibilities of the liberation of the colonized subject" (3). As Kaisary suggests, they therefore stand in contrast to texts steeped in the skepticism expressed by David Scott in Conscripts of Modernity, his reassessment of The Black Jacobins. For Scott, James himself suggests in his book that presenting and understanding Louverture as a doubting, skeptic hero in the tragedy of Enlightenment is more useful to the postcolonial era than understanding him as a romantic avenging agent of progress. Kaisary's stance owes something to a certain critique of postmodern thought that sees its skepticism about grand narratives as a factor of political passivity. This is of course a valid concern—notably expressed by Chris Bongie about Glissant's writings in terms very similar to Kaisary's.Kaisary is mostly concerned with literature, yet his inclusion of the historical writings of James and visual arts in the works he analyzes here suggests that his sense of the literary imagination is rather broad. This opens up a conversation that appears central to Kaisary's project. His point of view is not far from what historian Herbert Butterfield once dubbed the "whig interpretation of history," a tendency to read and justify historical events backwards in the light of current notions of progress, creating in the process teleologies often truer to ideology than to events. Butterfield argues that skepticism and disillusion are the technique and mission of the historian, who must strive to render the utter complexity in the confluence of contexts, intents, and actions, systemic and individual, that make up historical events. According to Kaisary, radical texts must emphasize those aspects of the revolution that confirm its universalist character. This imperative appears at times to lead to contradictory assessments, not least when the topic of historical accuracy is discussed. Kaisary justifies the liberties Langston Hughes takes with the historical record in Emperor of Haiti because they contribute to the rehabilitation of Jean-Jacques Dessalines; thus, although "the play fails to convey the complex conflicts present in revolutionary Saint Domingue and Haiti," "Hughes's play and libretto should be considered remarkable for the creation of a Dessalines who is really an amalgam of Toussaint, Dessalines, and Christophe, a figure of uncompromised black national identity and his literary elevation as a tragic protagonist" (45; 51). Yet he also judges negatively Derek Walcott's play Henri Christophe because "for all its talk of 'History,' the real, confusing, messy and tragic-historical context in which Dessalines and Christophe had to govern is almost entirely absent. In its place, the aesthetic reconstruction of Dessalines and Christophe as tragic heroes dominates" (145). A few pages earlier, discussing Glissant's Monsieur Toussaint, he judges it "very demanding of its readers and theatergoers, both in terms of the play's form and level of historical knowledge with which the play assumes the audience is familiar" (112). Although such romantic devices as "heroic uniqueness" have long been common in rabidly negative texts about the Haitian Revolution, Kaisary excuses them when they are used to "vindicate the actuality of black agency in colonial history" (10). Yet he deems skepticism toward the romanticization of the Revolution necessarily conservative.In his introduction, Kaisary asks judiciously if one could "contend that for the northern nations to acknowledge the Haitian Revolution and its implications would require the dismantling of an entire canon of conservative mythologization on the history of Atlantic slavery …" (12). The author implies that Scott's brand of skepticism is best deployed against those historical events already constituted as Western grand narratives. Should one look at the Haitian Revolution—whose overall international reputation remains ambiguous to this day—with the same critical tools one would use to study the French Revolution, which has long been part of the Western myth of progress? As the book demonstrates, this question has occupied a central and complex position in the writings of those twentieth-century authors already knowledgeable about Haitian history. Your own answer to this question will likely dictate how you judge Kaisary's provocative book.