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TRANSOCEANIC STUDIES Ileana Rodríguez, Series Editor All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 2 Prophetic Visions of the Past Pan-Caribbean Representations of the Haitian Revolution Víctor Figueroa THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBUS All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2015 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Figueroa, Víctor, 1969– Prophetic visions of the past : pan-Caribbean representations of the Haitian revolution / Víc- tor Figueroa. pages cm. — (Transoceanic studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1277-6 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9382-9 (cd-rom) 1. Caribbean literature—History and criticism. 2. Literature and revolutions—Caribbean area. 3. Haiti—History—Revolution, 1843. 4. Haiti—In literature. I. Title. PN849.C3F55 2015 809'.89729—dc23 2014039542 Cover design by Janna Thompson-Chordas Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Caslon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. To Anne, with deep love All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Contents 2 Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Kingdom of Black Jacobins: C. L. R. James and Alejo Carpentier on the Haitian Revolution 32 Chapter 2 Between Mackandal and Tembandumba: Luis Palés Matos’s Haitian Poems 64 Chapter 3 Between Louverture and Christophe: Aimé Césaire on the Haitian Revolution 94 Chapter 4 A Tragedy of Success: Derek Walcott’s Haitian Heroes 126 Chapter 5 Maroons in the Tout-Monde: Edouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint 166 Chapter 6 An Afrocentric Theodicy of Liberation: Manuel Zapata Olivella’s Changó el gran putas 196 Conclusion The Spirit of the Haitian Revolution in the Caribbean 237 Notes 249 Works Cited 275 Index 291 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Acknowledgments 2 I thank my colleagues, friends, and students at Wayne State University for their help and support in the completion of this project. Special gratitude goes to Walter Edwards and Wayne State University’s Humanities Cen- ter, for their research fellowships and strong support for the Liberal Arts, and to the Office of the Provost at Wayne State, for the Career Develop- ment Chair grant—their financial support and the time for writing provided by their grants were tremendously helpful in my work on this manuscript. Many thanks also to Ileana Rodríguez, Malcolm Litchfield, Lindsay Martin, and the readers and staff at the Ohio State University Press, for their faith in this book. My family and friends in Puerto Rico and across the United States constitute the best web of support anyone could ask for. And my dear Anne, Frankie, and Phoebe made the long days of research and writing more than endurable: they actually made them fun. Chapter 1 of this book includes a revised version of my article “A King- dom of Black Jacobins: Alejo Carpentier and C. L. R. James on the Hai- tian Revolution,” which was published in Afro-Hispanic Review (Vol. 25, No. 2: Fall 2006); it is reprinted here with permission. Chapter 2 includes a revised version of my article “Between Africa and Puerto Rico: Haiti and Lyric Self-Fashioning in the Poetry of Luis Palés Matos,” published in Latin American Literary Review (Vol. 35, No. 70: July-December 2007); it is reprinted here with permission. Chapter 3 includes a revised version of my article “Between Louverture and Christophe: Aimé Césaire on the Haitian Revolution,” published in The French Review (Vol. 82, No. 5: April 2009); it is reprinted with permission from The French Review; permission conveyed through Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. I thank the three journals for the permissions to reprint that material. · ix · All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 2 Introduction Haitian Revolutions Toward the end of his classic historical study, The Black Jacobins, the Trinida- dian writer C. L. R. James boldly suggests that “West Indians first became aware of themselves as a people in the Haitian Revolution” (391). There is probably much truth in those words, for there are few other events about which the three largest linguistic regions of the Caribbean (Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone) have produced acknowledged literary masterpieces. Perhaps only the “discovery” by Columbus, in 1492, has given rise to a similar number or works of comparable quality and breadth in all three languages. Not surprisingly, one of the two events represents the official beginning, and the other one of the most significant and dramatic challenges, to the colonial system and logic that came to dominate the history of the Caribbean. However, if James’s words are true, then West Indian (Caribbean) self- awareness is a very perplexing and fragmented phenomenon indeed, since the Haitian Revolution has been a site of conflicting readings through- out the centuries. One might describe the revolution as a floating signifier within the Caribbean region, one that writers and artists appropriate and fill with their own preoccupations and obsessions, until the event is unavoid- ably clouded by the very approaches that also articulate it for readers. · 1 · All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. 2 Introduction It is to the analysis of several of those multiple representations that this book will devote itself, focusing on how the Haitian Revolution has been approached and depicted in literary works from the Caribbean region in the twentieth century, and how intellectuals from the region have translated that important event into sometimes broader, sometimes narrower social and cultural preoccupations arising from the writers’ specific contexts. The writers that I will explore in the following chapters are among the Caribbe- an’s most fundamental, sometimes foundational literary voices. In fact, most of them have already acquired that (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) status of modern classics: Aimé Césaire (Martinique), C. L. R. James (Trinidad), Luis Palés Matos (Puerto Rico), Alejo Carpentier (Cuba), Derek Walcott (Saint Lucia), Edouard Glissant (Martinique), and Manuel Zapata Olivella (Colombia). It is to be expected that an event of such radical significance and symbolic import—the only successful slave revolt in world history—should have made such a deep impact in the Caribbean imaginary. Beyond the foundation of an independent Haiti and the clear demonstration that a determined group of slaves could challenge and defeat an imperial power, the Haitian Revolution had multiple concrete, material repercussions throughout the region. Those include but are not limited to: the occupation of the neighboring Dominican Republic by Haitian armies (first briefly in 1801, then from 1822 to 1844, with repeated attempts later on), which would greatly affect the tense relations between the two countries; the diaspora of French colonists and their sugar production technology, which was transplanted to neighboring territories, particularly Cuba, the island that would take Haiti’s place as the main Carib- bean sugar producer throughout the rest of the nineteenth century; slave revolts in the other French Caribbean colonies, followed by renewed repres- sive measures on the part of the metropolis, which after abolishing slavery in 1794 would reinstate it again from 1802 until 1848; and the U.S. purchase of Louisiana as part of Jefferson’s agreement of noninterference with Napoleon. Thus, the reader of the diverse pan-Caribbean accounts of the revolution encounters a complex web of recurrent problems and questions intertwined with a multifarious diversity of views on the cultural, social, and political 1 implications of the event. Beyond its material and symbolic implications, the revolution itself is a fascinating, epic, moving story, whose fundamental episodes I will attempt to outline here. The revolution was preceded by centuries of slave resistance, in which one must highlight the heroic figures of the maroon slaves, who would escape to the mountains and create isolated communities that sur- All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Introduction 3 vived and thrived in spite of the attacks of colonial authorities. One of those maroons, Mackandal (died 1758), designed one of the first organized con- spiracies against the slave-owners; for months the food and supplies of plan- tations were poisoned, until the authorities captured Mackandal and burned him alive. It is speculated that Mackandal was an houngan, a Vodou priest, and it is undeniable that the syncretistic religion played an important philo- sophical and tactical role in the development of slave resistance. Another possible houngan, Boukman (died ca. 1791), is known for organizing in 1791 a ceremony in Bois Cayman that sparked the