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. Althéa de Puech Parham, trans. and ed., My Odyssey (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959). Hereafter cited as MO. 9. Together with Anja Bandau of the University of Hannover in Germany, I am working to publish a critical edition of the French text of “Mon Odyssée,” to be published by the Société française d’étude du Dix Huitième Siècle in 2014 in the series “Lire le Dix- Huitieme Siecle.” I would like to thank Duncan Parham of Highlands, North Carolina, for the permission he has granted us to make this document from his family papers accessible to a larger audience. 10. Historic New Orleans Collection, Puech Parham papers, ms. 85–118-L. The English translation, My Odyssey, is also divided into eight books, but the translator and editor, Althéa de Puech Parham, made substantial cuts in the text, converted numerous verse passages into prose, rearranged the order of some of the material, occasionally inserted lines that are not in the original, and omitted most of one of the books in the manuscript (book 5, which is entirely in verse in the original). Books 5, 6, and 7 in the English version of My Odyssey are all parts of book 7 in the original manuscript; Puech Parham put part of the manuscript’s book 6 at the end of the section of book 7 that she converted into her own book 6. In addition to these major changes, the English version is also riddled with mistranslations and misreadings, some of which are understandable as misunderstandings of words whose meaning had changed over the century and a half between the writing of the original manuscript and the publication of the translation, but others of which have no simple explanation. Thus, for example, where the manuscript on page 172 reads, “A dix heures précises,” the English version gives “Precisely at ten thirty” (My Odyssey 111). Some of the reasons for the rearrangements and cuts in the English version of My Odyssey are made clear The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée” 371

mother that precedes the manuscript’s frst book, the text brings together pieces written at various times and in various places during the 1790s, revised “de manière à former un tout qui pût offrir quelque intérêt à la lecture” (MO 1:3). Judging from the author’s reference to his “quinze longues années de malheur,” beginning with the outbreak of the slave insurrection in 1791, this act of compilation would have taken place in 1806 (MO 1:10). The preface to “Histoire d’un amour” complains that the author had to work in a room “où les rigoureux frimats de l’Amérique du nord pénétrent par cent crevasses,” suggesting that the manuscript was written out in a northerly location (“Histoire” 2). Althéa de Puech Parham, the translator and publisher of the 1959 English version of My Odyssey, was a descendant of a Saint-Domingue family named Puech, but it now appears that the manuscript was not written by any of her own ancestors, and it is not clear how it came to be among her family papers. Details provided by the manuscript’s author correspond to documented evidence about Jean-Paul Pillet, a young man born in Saint- Domingue in 1772 or 1773, who was living in France when the Revolution broke out and who returned to his native island with his mother and sister in the summer of 1791. By this time, his biological father, François Pillet, had died and his mother, Jeanne Renée Charlotte de Mondion, had remarried to a certain Antoine Chabert, a military offcer stationed in Fort Dauphin whom the author identifes in the text only as his “beau-père.” The decisive clue that makes it possible to establish Pillet’s identity appears in book 1 of “Mon Odyssée,” where the author gives the name of the ship on which he, his mother, his sister, and two other young women sailed from Bordeaux to Saint-Domingue in July 1791 (MO 1:27). The passenger list of the ship, the Bouillant, which is conserved in the Archives nationales, does indeed include such a group, giving their names as “dame Chabert de Mondion, agée de 38 ans, S[ieu]r Pillet son fls, agé de 18 ans, De[moise]lle Pillet, sa flle créole, agée de 17 ans, Dlle Pinard, créole, agée de 17 ans, et Dlle Des Bazals, créole, agée de 17 ans.”11

in Puech Parham’s correspondence with her publisher, the Louisiana State University Press. Acting on the advice of the well-known American expert on Haiti, Selden Rodman, the press insisted that Puech Parham shorten the text, rearrange some of the passages, and above all turn most of the poetry in the original into prose because, in Rodman’s view, the author’s verses were “little more than poetic exercises” (Robert Y. Zachary, editor, Louisiana State University Press, to Parham, July 11, 1957, in HNOC, Puech Parham papers, carton 2). 11. Archives nationales, Col. F 5 b, r. 43. I would like to thank Pierre Boulle for alerting me to the existence of this document. According to the Rossignols’ research, Jean-Paul Pillet’s sister’s name was Louise Désirée Fortunée Pillet. 372 Jeremy D. Popkin

Although the full manuscript of “Mon Odyssée” has not yet been published, one passage from the work has achieved iconic status and is cited in virtually every recent scholarly publication on the Haitian Revolution. In this passage, the author describes the courage and cunning of one of the black insurgents he encountered in 1791, whose “accoutrement me faisait juger devoir être un des principaux chefs” (MO 1:51). The black fghter attempted to shoot the author, and when he was foiled and captured, he tried to talk himself out of being executed by telling the author, in Kreyol, “C’est diable qui sé entré dans corps à moi. Moi bon nègre: mais, ça vous voulez, diable malin trop” (MO 1:51). Once the prisoner realized that his death was unavoidable, “il se mit à rire, chanter et badiner. Tantôt il nous injuriait d’un ton furieux, tantot il se moquait de nous d’un air goguenard. Il donnât lui-même le signal, et reçut la mort sans crainte et sans se plaindre” (MO 1:53). Historians have been irresistibly drawn to the next lines of the text, which encapsulate the mixture of French revolutionary ideas and African beliefs that they see as the inspiration for the slave uprising: “Nous trouvâmes dans une de ses poches des pamphlets imprimés en France, remplis de lieux communs sur les droits de l’homme et la sainte insurrection. [. . .] Il avait sur l’estomac un petit sac plein de cheveux, d’herbes et d’ossemens. C’est ce qu’ils appellent un fétiche; avec cela ils se croyent à l’abri de tout danger; et c’est sans doute à cette amulette, que notre homme dut l’intrépédité que les philanthropes appelleront philosophie stoïcienne” (MO 1:53).12 This passage conveys the author’s ability to bring the drama of the Haitian Revolution to life, and his capacity, at least in this instance, to transcend the barrier of race and portray a black man as a fully rounded human being, capable of courage and resourcefulness and able to maintain his dignity even in the face of death. The passages in Kreyol in “Mon Odyssée” are among the

12. For scholarly use of this passage, see Dubois, Avengers of the New World, 102– 3; Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008) 36; Kate Ramsey, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 44; Jenson, Beyond the Slave Narrative, 51. For an accurate English translation of the passage, including the lines of verse omitted in the Puech Parham translation, see Popkin, Facing Racial Revolution, 79–80. This passage is the only eyewitness source from the period that claims that printed revolutionary pamphlets circulated among the slave insurgents. Although this claim was often made in general terms by spokesmen for the white colonists, there is little solid evidence to support it. Because the historians who have cited this passage have relied on the 1959 English version of My Odyssey rather than the original manuscript, they have all copied one of the English version’s signifcant errors: the phrase “sainte insurrection” is translated in My Odyssey as “sacred Revolution.” The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée” 373 earliest records of how the language was spoken, and the line cited suggests that the black man it describes was trying to use the vodou notion of possession by spirits or lwa to escape punishment. The English version of this passage on which historians have relied obscures, however, one of its most remarkable features. The 1959 translation omits thirteen lines of verse in the middle of this passage that are critical for understanding the author’s construction of both his adversary and himself. The thirteen omitted lines of poetry in the middle of this iconic passage of “Mon Odyssée” point to the most important literary characteristic of the work: the fact that its author fancied himself not just a writer but an imaginative poet, and that a substantial part of his work is in verse. The verse passages in “Mon Odyssée” are not incidental ornaments to the story: they are essential to its structure. It is, of course, not an accident that the author borrowed his title from Homer and compared himself to Odysseus. In so doing, he invests with universal signifcance his specifc experience as a Saint-Domingue colonist still hoping to return to his “fugitive Ithaca” in the Caribbean (MO 1:4). To be sure, the author of “Mon Odyssée” often mocked his own claim to heroic status. In the verse passage in his description of the encounter with the black insurgent, he does compare his chase after the man to Achilles’s pursuit of Hector, but only to mention his “personne étique” and to attribute his running ability “à ce Grec du faubourg St. Marceaux, / Qui nous croyant des apprentis héros, / Chaque matin, dans sa rage olympique, / Nous fesait faire un cours de gymnastique” (MO 1:52). Nevertheless, the verse passage also connects the author to the great tradition of European literature and to Paris, the center of French culture. He thereby establishes himself as a representative not just of Saint-Domingue’s endangered planter class but of Western civilization itself. The alternation of prose and verse in “Mon Odyssée” has some literary antecedents, but it is, to my knowledge, unique in the frst-person witness literature of the revolutionary period, on both sides of the Atlantic.13 Even if his talents are insuffcient to earn him a place in the pantheon of the period’s poets, our author’s work nevertheless represents a remarkable innovation in the memoir tradition. The shifts from prose to poetry and back again allow him to describe his experiences in multiple registers. The prose passages are often relatively straightforward accounts of the specifc events in the author’s life. The poetic passages, however, allow the author to give those experiences a wider resonance, as we have just seen in the case of the verses included in his

13. On the literary antecedents of Pillet’s work, see Anja Bandau, “Une odyssee sans retour: le texte et ses modèles,” dans Anja Bandau and Jeremy D. Popkin, eds., . « Mon Odyssee : Épopée d’un colon de Saint-Domingue, par Jean-Paul Pillet ». 374 Jeremy D. Popkin passage about his combat with the black insurgent. Had the author compared himself and his black adversary to Achilles and Hector in his prose account of their encounter, his writing would seem pompous and stilted. By shifting to poetry, he signals to readers that he is entering the realm of imagination, where not everything he says is to be taken literally. In addition, the conventions of poetry allow him to bring together a variety of images that would be jarringly discordant in prose. Besides depicting his opponent as Hector, he describes the feeing black man as a rabbit too scared to look behind himself; in addition to imagining himself as Achilles, he recalls his days as an “apprentice hero” suffering his instructor’s “Olympic rage,” and, in addition to recalling ancient Greek heroes, he invokes the comical fgure of his short-tempered Greek athletic instructor. The verse interpolations in “Mon Odyssée” not only enable the author to give a stereoscopic account of his experiences but also allow him to dramatize the process of construction and reconstruction by which brute experience is changed into autobiographical memory. In his prose writing, the author of “Mon Odyssée,” like most memoirists, proposes a straightforward version of the “autobiographical pact”: he asserts that he is doing no more than recounting his experiences as they actually occurred. When he shifts to poetry, however, he is very visibly reconsidering and recontextualizing those experiences. We do not need to believe that he recalled scenes from the Iliad as he and his black adversary were engaged in their life-and-death combat, or that he suddenly realized how his Paris gymnastics lessons were proving their value, much less that he managed to cast those thoughts in a complex rhyme scheme.14 The verse interlude demonstrates, however, that he returned to this particular autobiographical episode afterward, and that, through a process resembling free association, he found himself reading into it meanings that could not have been apparent to him at the time. “Mon Odyssée” is thus the creation of a gifted author who succeeded in giving his memories of the revolutionary period in Saint-Domingue a unique and original literary form. “Mon Odyssée” also stands out among the eyewitness accounts of the Haitian Revolution because of its length and complexity. Most of the other frst-person testimonies from the period recount just one episode, but “Mon Odyssée” covers the entire sequence of events from the beginning of the slave uprising in August 1791 to the abandonment of the struggle by the British and the white colonists in 1798.15 “Mon Odyssée” is a genuinely transatlantic narrative, with scenes set in France, in various parts

14. The thirteen lines of verse in this scene fall into a complicated pattern: aabcbcddeffee. 15. Another recently discovered personal account that spans an even longer period (1789–1809) is Jean-Claude Nouët, Claude Nicollier, and Yves Nicollier, eds., La Vie Aventureuse de Norbert Thoret, dit L’Américain (Paris: Éditions du Port-au-Prince, The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée” 375 of Saint-Domingue, and in the United States, where the author, like many of his countrymen, took refuge in 1793–1794 and again in 1798. Although it is unquestionably a work of imaginative literature, “Mon Odyssée” is at the same time a historical document. Many of the details in the author’s story are confrmed in other sources from the period, although the author often brings them to life in a unique way. In view of the 2010 disaster in Haiti, for example, one cannot fail to be struck by the vividness of his description of an earthquake in Cap Français in 1793: “Les femmes à demi nues, et hors de leurs sens, se croyaient à la fn du monde. Les enfants et les domestiques joignaient leurs cris aux hurlemens des chiens, aux hennissemens des chevaux. Trois secousses, à peu de distance l’une de l’autre, redoublèrent la terreur, le désordre et le tumulte; et personne n’osa rentrer dans sa maison, de crainte d’y être écrasé sous les décombres” (MO 1:127). This passage about the earthquake also illustrates another feature of “Mon Odyssée” that distinguishes it from the other memoirs of events in Saint-Domingue, namely, the author’s highly self-conscious and complex self-portrayal. After describing the quake, he adds, “Ce fut un spectacle bien nouveau pour moi, que ce tremblement de terre, et puisque j’en suis sorti sain et sauf, je ne suis pas faché d’en avoir été témoin, afn de pouvoir en parler avec connaissance de cause” (MO 1:127–28). The author was not just a witness to events but also a chronicler of his own reactions, and his self-portrait contains many surprises. Although Pillet never mentions his own name, he tells us that he was slender, with curly hair. We learn that he enjoyed music, dancing, and fne food; he mentions La Cuisinière bourgeoise and Le Cuisinier parfait, two well-known cookbooks of the era, as “livres précieux que tout homme de bien doit avoir dans sa bibliothèque” (MO 1:242). He appreciated female company, but he is also the only memoirist of the period to describe the enjoyment he occasionally took in passing for a girl. Of one such incident, he wrote, “Je fus pris pour ce que je n’étais pas: mais cette nouvelle erreur me fatta plus que la première” (MO 1:25). At the same time, our epicurean cross-dressing narrator had no fear of the rigors of war: he could march or ride all day in the hot sun, sleep on the hard ground at night, and stand up to enemy fre. In the course of “Mon Odyssée,” the author runs the gamut of emotions, from joy and levity to horror and anger. He was capable of interrupting a lament over the lost riches of the colony with an apostrophe to one of its most famous products: “Ô précieux café, bienfesante liqueur! / Tu réveilles mes sens, tu soutiens mon courage: / Des présens de Bachus [sic] je chéris la douceur; / Mais avec eux tu reçois mon hommage!” (MO 1:195). While his sense of humor pervades the manuscript, he was also capable of conveying the horror

2007). I would like to thank Heidi Holst-Knudsen for sharing a copy of this remarkable document with me. 376 Jeremy D. Popkin of the race war in the colony. The verses in which he recalls how a Spanish soldier refused him assistance during the massacre of the French whites in the city of Fort Dauphin in July 1794 recall survivors’ bitter condemnations of bystanders in other mass killings: “Qui le croirait! Ce soldat inhumain, / Au même instant où je le prie en vain / De prolonger ma fragile existence, / Entend sonner l’Angelus qui commence. / Dévotement il tourne alors les yeux / Et pousse au ciel ses sacrilèges voeux. / Laches guerriers, hypocrites coupables, / Sauvez mes jours, secourir vos semblables; / Et quand bientôt le ciel vous jugera, / Cette action alors vous servira / Plus que vos voeux et vos longues prières, / Vos capucins et vos jeûnes austères” (MO 2:26–27). While “Mon Odyssée” is thus a highly individualized literary production, it is at the same time the story of a colonial Everyman. Its author might well have sat for the portrait of the typical white colonist reproduced in so many accounts of the period, which emphasized their mercurial nature, their generosity and love of pleasure, their spirit of independence, and their strong racial prejudices. The experiences recorded in “Mon Odyssée” are typical enough of those of the author’s group during the Haitian Revolution to make his individual story a testimonio, a record of collective as well as individual experience; indeed, there are many passages where he uses the collective pronoun “we” rather than the singular “I.” Like many colonists, Pillet was a member of a transatlantic family that had spent time in both Saint-Domingue and in France. Although he repeatedly identifes the colony as his birthplace and inserts enough passages in Kreyol into his narrative to show that he was fuent in that language, his story begins in France, where he was living until he returned to the Caribbean with his mother and sister in mid-1791. The reason for the family’s decision to return to Saint-Domingue at this moment is not spelled out in his account, but it may have been related to the feeling, shared by many Saint-Domingue colons, that public opinion in the metropole was turning against them, as shown by the passage of a controversial law of May 15, 1791, that broke the colonial color bar by granting political rights to free men of color born to free parents.16 “Mon Odyssée” faithfully refects the colons’ conviction that the French revolutionaries were determined to free the slaves and incite them to destroy the slaveholders. In Bordeaux, he claims, he was told, “Assez longtemps vous futes maitre / Votre esclave à son tour doit l’être. / C’est naturel. Et dût le fer / Anéantir toute la race / De ces colons, qui font les grands, / Il faut que les nègres soient blancs, / Et se carrent à votre place” (MO 1:28). It is unlikely that anyone in France would have expressed himself so openly in favor of abolition and social upheaval in the colonies in the spring of 1791; the

16. On the law of May 15, 1791, see Popkin, You Are All Free, 36–38. The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée” 377 author’s insistence on the virulence of metropolitan abolitionism is an example of how he reshaped his actual experience to ft the collective narrative that the colonists constructed about themselves. In Saint-Domingue, the author’s family was part of the plantation-owning class of grands blancs. Judging from his description, the family’s property was probably on or near the island’s north coast, in the Terrier Rouge parish between the colony’s main city of Cap Français and the smaller port of Fort Dauphin (MO 1:36). It would appear from Pillet’s story that he could not have had much real acquaintance with prerevolutionary life in Saint-Domingue, since he says he spent most of his youth in France, returning to the colony just one or two days before the start of the slave insurrection on August 22–23, 1791 (MO 1:29, 32), but this does not keep him from writing an extensive justifcation of the slave system: “Je vis, partout, les nègres gras, bien portans et joyeux,” he asserts, claiming that they were worked less hard than laborers in France (MO 1:39). According to his account, the slaves were well housed, well fed, and provided with medical care. The fact that they went about half naked was no sign of mistreatment: “Ces heureux Congos / Qui sans façon, ne portent sur le dos / Que la robe de la nature” were better off than the whites, who had to swelter in their European-style clothes (MO 1:39). The whippings to which slaves were subjected, the author claimed, were far less painful than critics pretended, and in any event they were necessary, since “l’affricain, à peine civilisé, peut être considéré comme un enfant, et doit être traité de même” (MO 1:69). As evidence of the blacks’ attachment to their masters, he described the calinda or dance party his family’s slaves held to celebrate his own arrival on the plantation, transcribing in Kreyol the verses they improvised for the occasion and providing one of the frst descriptions of the “banza [. . .] une moitié de Calbasse attachée au bout d’un baton, et sur quoi on a tendu quatre ou cinq cordes,” or, in other words, of the instrument we now know as the banjo (MO 1:41–42). Like the other plantation-owners in Saint-Domingue’s North Province, the author and his family were taken by surprise by the outbreak of the slave uprising that began on the night of August 22–23, 1791. “Le lendemain de mon arrivée, je partageais avec ma famille les douceurs d’un excellent déjeuner, lorsqu’un courier vint remettre à mon beau-père [. . .] une lettre pleine des nouvelles les plus affigeantes. Les esclaves, séduits par des emissaires envoyés de France, avaient incendié les habitations voisines du Cap, après en avoir assassiné les propriétaires, sans distinction d’age et de sexe,” he writes (MO 1:43). As in the passage describing the duel with the black insurgent, the prose description of the family’s fight from their plantation is interrupted by a lengthy verse passage that is omitted from the English version of My Odyssey. “Le soleil dévorant, au milieu de son cours, / Accablait de ses feux la troupe fugitive / Des femmes, des enfants, la voix triste et plaintive / Du ciel à chaque 378 Jeremy D. Popkin pas implorait le secours. / Vains clameurs! La torche a frayé son passage; / Déja de toutes parts la famme se propage, / Et des fertiles champs dévore les trésors: / Déja de toutes parts le nègre sans remords / Au feu dévastateur joint la faulx du carnage. / Oh! quel peintre pourrait retracer le tableau / Qu’offrait en ce moment la campagne déserte!” (MO 1:44–45). Whereas the prose narrative is a straightforward account of the white population’s fears and defense measures, the author’s poetry frames their experience in broader terms, implying that nature itself, so generous before the uprising, had now turned against them, and that even heaven had left them to their fate. Once again, the contrast between prose and verse allows the author to avoid weighing his descriptive passages down with rhetoric too emphatic to suit an account of personal experience, while still allowing him to deploy the style noble in his poetry to heighten the effect of his narrative. Wrenched from his family home by the slave uprising, Pillet found himself plunged into the struggle to preserve the colony. According to his account, he served as his stepfather’s aide-de-camp in the campaign against the black insurgents. The third book of “Mon Odyssée” describes his involvement in the political quarrels that divided the island’s whites in 1792 and that were the prelude to the assault launched by the French general François-Thomas Galbaud and the sailors in Cap Français harbor against the republican civil commissioners Léger-Félicité Sonthonax and Etienne Polverel on June 20, 1793, the event that provoked the frst offcial French offer of freedom to the colony’s slaves.17 Like most of the whites in Cap Français, the author of “Mon Odyssée” and his family fed to the United States on board the ships that had been in Cap Français harbor at the moment of the crisis of June 20. Book 4 of “Mon Odyssée” is a self-contained narrative about one of his experiences as a refugee, when he joined some other young Frenchmen to form a dance band and played a concert in Elizabethtown, New Jersey. Specifc as Pillet’s encounters with Americans were, he at the same time manages to convey the strangeness of the new culture that all the Saint-Domingue refugees had to adjust to. When the French dancers called for a waltz, he wrote, the American matrons “couvraient leurs yeux avec leurs mains. [. . .] Peste! C’est qu’on ne plaisante pas ici pour la décence. Une demoiselle peut bien se promener seule avec un jeune homme, jusqu’à minuit, et courir partout sans sa mère; mais valser, f donc!” (MO 1:175). The later books of “Mon Odyssée” continue to relate individual experiences that nevertheless were widely shared among the white colonists. The nostalgia for lost possessions and style of life expressed in book 5, which consists

17. For a detailed account of the events leading up to the journée of June 20, 1793, and its consequences, see Popkin, You Are All Free. The Author as Colonial Exile: “Mon Odyssée” 379 entirely of poetry and which is largely omitted from the 1959 translation of “Mon Odyssée,” was certainly common among them. Books 6 and 7 fnd the author back in Saint-Domingue, where he returned in 1794 and stayed until 1798 to rejoin the struggle against the now-emancipated blacks. He survived the horrendous massacre of French refugees in the Spanish-occupied city of Fort Dauphin in July 1794 and then escaped to join the British, who occupied a good part of the colony from 1793 until 1798 and who enlisted many of the French colonists to fght alongside them. Book 8 describes his impressions of American life after his return to the United States in 1798, after the British withdrawal from Saint-Domingue. Throughout his manuscript, the author of “Mon Odyssée” thus uses his two levels of discourse—prose and poetry—to tell two stories: one about his individual misadventures and the other about his group, the dispossessed white colonists of Saint-Domingue. While the literary and historical interest of “Mon Odyssée” is undeniable, one may question whether its author truly had the ambition to be recognized as a writer. A number of his fellow colonists arranged for the publication of their works almost as soon as the events they recounted had taken place, either in Saint-Domingue itself, in France, or in the United States. By contrast, the various “books” of “Mon Odyssée” are addressed to a small circle of family and friends, and the recopied manuscript, as I have shown, was prepared for the author’s mother. In his preface, the author disclaims any intention to compete with Homer, despite having borrowed his title, saying that the Greek poet was inspired by the Muses, while he would call on his snuffbox: “qu’au besoin ton sel sterenitoire [sic] / a mon cerveau donnant un choc subit / Vienne m’ouvrir et m’aiguiser l’esprit” (MO 1:14–15). In spite of his self-deprecating tone, however, there is no doubt that the author took his authorial project seriously. The manuscript features epigraphs from such literary fgures as Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux and Jean-Baptiste Louis Gresset, and its books are prefaced with “arguments” summarizing their contents, as in standard editions of epic poems. Explaining how he had reworked the verses in the third section of his manuscript, the author writes, “J’ai cru devoir entrer dans ce détail, parce qu’il se pourrait que le hazard ft sortir cet ouvrage des mains de la personne qui me l’a demandé” (“Histoire d’un amour,” preface). In the absence of any details about the author’s life in the United States other than the facts that he married in New York in 1803, had eight children, and died in 1832, it is impossible to know why his story did not see the light of day for a century and a half after it was written down. However, despite the author’s feigned modesty, he was conscious of his talents and certainly saw himself as a man of letters with a potential audience reaching beyond his immediate family. The racial prejudices that frequently surface in “Mon Odyssée” pose another problem. They put the author in the category of other auteurs maudits, such as Sade and Céline. Unlike those authors, however, the creator of “Mon Odyssée” 380 Jeremy D. Popkin did not set out to defy the conventional values of his time. For all his originality, he refected the prevailing assumptions of the period. It was only in 1788 that the frst French abolitionist group, the Société des Amis des noirs, had been formed to challenge the assumptions about the legitimacy of slavery and the inferiority of blacks that had previously pervaded French society. Although we can hardly share our author’s regret for the disappearance of Saint-Domingue’s cruel slave society, we can recognize the sense of loss that affects anyone who fnds his entire world suddenly shattered and himself thrust into exile, far from his home. The black slaves had every right to rise up against the oppressive system that had made our author’s privileged transatlantic existence possible, but we can still acknowledge the trauma expressed in the author’s recollection of a night in Elizabethtown, when he was jolted awake by the noise of one of his companions falling out of bed: “Je me crus encore à St.-Domingue, et je sautai hors de mon lit, en criant aux armes. Je croyais les nègres maitres de la maison, je croyais le feu dans la ville, je croyais . . . que ne croyais-je pas?” (MO 1:177–78). At the end of the last “book” of Mon Odyssée, after having provided an amusing catalogue of the oddities of American life, including descriptions of a quilting bee, an adult baptism ceremony in the Delaware River near Philadelphia, and a mortally boring afternoon tea, Pillet concludes, « Quant à moi, me voilà désormais si bien revenu de mes préjugés nationaux, que n’était ces Diables de libellistes à gages qui, nous injurient chaque jour à tant la sottise, ne laissent pas que de me remuer la bile, je renoncerais à lancer la moindre épigramme contre eux, fût-ce même celui à peau de charbon, qui nous a, si incivilement, fait déguerpir du logis par les fenêtres, au risque de nous casser les jambes ou les bras ». Should we read this passage as a sign that the author, after his adventures in France, in Saint-Domingue, and in the United States, had abandoned the prejudices so strongly expressed in the earlier installments of his work? In the absence of other information about his life, it is hard to say; after all, in 1806 he did recopy the the lines he had written denouncing the blacks in 1793. But he also decided to settle in the northern part of the United States, where slavery was already being gradually phased out, rather than in the south, where it would continue until 1865. In any event, the author of Mon Odyssée had learned that there were many other ways to structure a society besides the racialized colonial order he had memorialized in his witness account.

University of Kentucky