Jeremy D. Popkin the AUTHOR AS COLONIAL EXILE: “MON ODYSSÉE”
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée” Jeremy D. Popkin THE AUTHOR AS COLONIAL EXILE: “MON ODYSSÉE” he revolution in France’s colony of Saint-Domingue that began in 1791 Tled to the frst complete abolition of slavery in 1793–1794 and to the creation, in 1804, of the independent black nation of Haiti. It also gave birth to a new kind of author: the colonial exile.1 Violently ousted from their privileged positions, white plantation-owners used their command of literacy to cast themselves as victims of the upheaval that had forced them to fee. Enlightenment authors such as Voltaire and Rousseau had cast themselves as defenders of the oppressed, and, in Rousseau’s case, as victims of oppression in their own right; the colonial exiles of the 1790s insisted on their victim status, but did so in order to justify a system of racial hierarchy in which they had held superior status. They used their personal narratives not only to denounce the black insurgents who had destroyed their plantations but also to accuse the French revolutionary politicians who, in the eyes of these authors, had triggered the slave uprising through their utopian fantasies about human rights. Authorship, in these texts, became a mechanism for disseminating a new, more aggressive racism epitomized in a notorious passage of Francois- Rene de Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme, which asked, “Qui oserait encore plaider la cause des Noirs après les crimes qu’ils ont commis?”2 1. The historical literature on the Haitian Revolution has exploded in recent years. For overviews of the period’s events, see Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Jeremy D. Popkin, A Concise History of the Haitian Revolution (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). More specialized studies include John Garrigus, Before Haiti: Race and Citizenship in French Saint-Domingue (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Jeremy D. Popkin, You Are All Free: The Haitian Revolution and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Philippe R. Girard, The Slaves Who Defeated Napoleon: Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian War of Independence (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2011); and Deborah Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative: Politics, Sex, and Manuscripts in the Haitian Revolution (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011). 2. Chateaubriand, Génie du christianisme, cited in Yves Bénot, La Démence coloniale sous Napoléon (Paris: La Découverte, 1991) 246. The Romanic Review Volume 103 Numbers 3–4 © The Trustees of Columbia University 368 Jeremy D. Popkin Paradoxically, however, even as they defended slavery and racial prejudice, the exiled colonists of Saint-Domingue contributed to the development of a form of authorship that would, in the twentieth century, come to be associated with campaigns for human rights and for the right of colonial subjects to speak back to the metropole. These authors, together with their contemporaries who lived through the Revolution in France itself, were among the frst in the French tradition to produce examples of what we can call witness literature—frst- person accounts of extraordinary public events that had drastically affected their authors’ private lives in ways that were assumed to be typical of the fate of large numbers of contemporaries—in French literature.3 The growing interest in more recent examples of French witness literature, such as the texts of French Holocaust survivors, and in genres such as the testimonio in other languages,4 suggests the importance of taking a more serious look at the witness literature of the revolutionary era, both as literature and as a source of historical insight. At the same time as they helped inaugurate the tradition of the author as witness to history, the memoirs by colonists from Saint-Domingue anticipated a uniquely Caribbean tradition of exile literature. As Martin Munro has written in his Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature, “Haitian literature has a longstanding, sophisticated tradition of migrant writing,” produced by authors driven from their homeland by the threat of violence. The writings of exiles from Haiti and from the Caribbean more generally, “whether they mourn for an irrecuperable history or celebrate the beginnings of a new epoch, have shared an essential preoccupation with the effects of exile and displacement on groups and individuals, on historical consciousness, on memory, on sense of place and time, on culture, on language, and on the imagination in general,” Munro concludes.5 The authors Munro has in mind are, of course, twentieth- and twenty-frst-century exiles of African ancestry, but his description can also be applied, paradoxically, to the writings of the Caribbean’s frst wave of 3. On the concept of witness literature, see Renaud Dulong, Le Témoin oculaire: Les Conditions sociales de l’attestation personnelle (Paris: Editions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1998). For the use of frst-person narratives in contemporary human-rights struggles, see Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 4. The classic essay on Latin American testimonio literature is John Beverley, “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio (Testimonial Narrative),” in Georg M. Gugelberger, ed., The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996) 23–41. 5. Martin Munro, Exile and Post-1946 Haitian Literature: Alexis, Depestre, Ollivier, Laferrière, Danticat (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007) 28, 254. The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée” 369 exiles, the white colonists driven out of Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution, and especially to the remarkable text I discuss here, the anonymous manuscript “Mon Odyssée.” Authors from Saint-Domingue who lived through the revolt against slavery in France’s most important colony make up a small but highly interesting subset of the revolutionary period’s writer-witnesses. Despite the colonies’ economic importance to France, the events there were by defnition peripheral to the metropolitan experience. At a time when the population of France was engaged in a dramatic struggle for liberty and equality, the white colonists in Saint-Domingue found themselves in the awkward position of lamenting the fall of a world based on slavery and racial inequality. These writers were nevertheless conscious that what they had seen and experienced was of fundamental importance, not just for French readers, but for the self- understanding of the broader Atlantic world that had been constructed, over three centuries, on the basis of slavery and racial difference. The eyewitnesses to the revolution in Saint-Domingue were the frst whites to be confronted with the possibility of the violent overthrow of the slave system and with the inversion of a hierarchy that had privileged their racial group over others. At the same time, these witnesses’ vivid accounts often nuance historical narratives that have, for the past two centuries, continued to rely on a small number of offcial documents. Among other things, for example, these writings highlight many instances of mutual aid across racial lines that disappear when the Haitian Revolution is described as a confict between hostile racial groups. Although we can hardly sympathize with these white witnesses’ defenses of slavery and racial privilege, their stories have much to tell us about the struggles over those issues in the colonies.6 Most of the texts in this corpus of colonial witness literature have no literary pretensions, but one author of this period turned his story into a highly self- conscious and innovative literary experiment with no other equivalent from the period on either side of the Atlantic. This work, titled “Mon Odyssée” by its heretofore anonymous author, who has recently been identifed as Jean- Paul Pillet (1772/73–1832),7 has been known only through an incomplete and 6. For an analysis of the frst-person memoir literature produced by whites from Saint- Domingue, see Jeremy D. Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution: Eyewitness Accounts of the Haitian Uprising (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 7. The French genealogists Bernadette Rossignol and Philippe Rossignol, following up on clues provided in my own article “Un Homère de l’émigration saint-domingoise: ‘Mon Odyssée,’” Dix-Huitième Siècle 43 (2011): 391–403, have identifed the author and his family: “‘Mon Odyssée,’ l’auteur et sa famille,” Généalogie et Histoire de la Caraïbe, http://www.ghcaraibe.org/articles/2012-art09.pdf. I would like to thank Philippe Rossignol for forwarding me a copy of this article. 370 Jeremy D. Popkin not entirely accurate English translation published in 1959 under the title of My Odyssey.8 Even this partial translation makes it clear that “Mon Odyssée” is an exceptional text and its author a remarkable individual who devised an original strategy of self-representation to meet the challenges of recounting his extraordinary experiences. Once the original French text is available, “Mon Odyssée” will be a vital reference in discussions of the development of frst- person authorship in the French tradition, in the history of literature about the Caribbean, and, because of its defense of slavery and racism, in the corpus of Francophone littérature maudite.9 The manuscript of “Mon Odyssée” is now conserved in the library of the Historic New Orleans Collection, a small private museum. The manuscript consists of two leather-bound volumes, which together with a third volume titled “Histoire d’un amour, ou Époques érotiques de mon Odyssée” make up what the author called his “Bagatelles littéraires.” The frst volume of “Mon Odyssée” contains six “livres,” or books, devoted to the author’s experiences during the Haitian Revolution; the remaining two livres of the narrative are in the second volume, while the “Histoire d’un amour” consists of a collection of poems retracing a love story that the author presents as a fctional recasting of his actual experiences.10 According to the dedication addressed to the author’s 8.