THE COLONIAL RELATION in René Philoctète's Monsieur De Vastey

EPILOGUE: COLONIALISM AFTER SOVEREIGNTY: THE COLONIAL RELATION IN RENÉ PHILOCTÈTE’S MONSIEUR DE VASTEY (1975) C’est un penseur, Monsieur de Vastey!… Un guerrier, Monsieur de Vastey! Un héros même, Monsieur le baron de Vastey! —René Philoctète, Monsieur de Vastey If the Haiti of Walcott, Miller, Césaire, Hammerman, and Rodman, is a Haiti isolated by its own leaders, Philoctète’s Monsieur de Vastey shows a country highly connected to and controlled by its formal colonial occu- pier, France, as well as by other regional powers with interests in Haiti, including the United States and Great Britain. Although Philoctète por- trays these countries as manifestly interested in the country, his depiction of the essential connectedness of Haiti to the rest of the world does not revel in blame. The play embraces a central understanding of the colonial relation as necessarily global, enabling its author to simultaneously critique both Haitian political leaders and the world powers that circumscribed their abilities to effectively lead the country. Philoctète shows that one can engage in this kind of analysis without asserting one defnitive cause for Haiti’s ongoing political woes. He paints Haiti’s dire political and eco- nomic problems as directly connected to an amorphous form of neo- colonialism without either viewing Haitian rulers as mere bystanders in © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017 183 M.L. Daut, Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism, The New Urban Atlantic, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-47067-6 184 EPILOGUE: COLONIALISM AFTER SOVEREIGNTY … their own destruction or scapegoating the Haitian people. Monsieur de Vastey, thus, achieves a more relational critique of the effect of global capital world power on Haiti, one that demonstrates, as in the real Baron de Vastey’s words, “Our internal problems derive, therefore, from both exterior and interior political intrigues” (RP 66). Although Philoctoète did not write political essays or involve him- self overtly in Haitian politics, he acknowledged that his theatrical works were infuenced by the inherently political literary philosophies of Bertolt Brecht. Brecht, a famous playwright most well known for Mother Courage and Her Children (1939) and the collaboratively written Three Penny Opera (1928), believed that the theatre should not cause specta- tors to become lost in fantasy to the point of forgetting reality. Instead, he argued that staged dramas should compel audience members to refect and act on the political struggles of the present. In his essay, “The Epic Theatre and its Diffculties” (1927), Brecht wrote: “The essential point of the epic theatre is perhaps that it appeals less to the feelings than to the spectator's reason. Instead of sharing an experience the spectator must come to grips with things” (129). Philoctète told an interviewer in 1992: “My best play is, in my opin- ion, Monsieur de Vaté [Vastey].1 I write a Brechtian kind of theater. My plays might appear as historical but, rather than historical, my theater is in fact political, and it announced the fall of Duvalier” (62).2 Philoctète here suggests that Monsieur de Vastey is not solely a play about a historical moment involving Baron de Vastey nor is it a play only about the anguished downfall of Henry Christophe, but rather it is a play about the Haiti of Philoctète’s era, one tyrannized by the regime, frst, of François Duvalier (1907–1971), and then of his son, Jean-Claude Duvalier (1951–2014). The rising up of the people against Christophe in the play, thus, foretells the rising up of the Haitian people against Baby Doc Duvalier in February 1986, eleven years after the publication and frst staging of Monsieur de Vastey. The tyranny of the Duvaliers, like the coup d’état against Baby Doc, was not created in a vacuum, something recognized in Philoctète’s play 1 The unnamed transcriber of the interview spells Vastey’s name phonetically. The “s” is ordinarily silent. 2 Philoctète was the author of three other plays, Rose morte (1962), Boukman, ou le rejeté des enfers (1963), and Escargots (1965). EPILOGUE: COLONIALISM AFTER SOVEREIGNTY … 185 if it is to be read as an allegory for dechoukaj.3 As Christophe’s downfall becomes imminent, Philoctète’s Monsieur de Vastey notes: “And everyone wants at least a little bit, even the smallest wing […] they will hide their policies with seemingly innocent phrases: la francophilie, for exam- ple. Or even better: French for everyone! Chinese therapy! Americanness! Germanness! And in a distant era, we will even come to know Canadianness. Like Thrombosis, Cirrhosis, Tuberculosis, Arteriosclerosis, Avitaminosis. The entire clinic, yes! And the therapy, naturally….Then the death…the dividing up, le repartimento…” (64). This is a trenchant critique of a new form of colonialism that infects a country like a disease that only further colonial actions, disguised in the vocabulary of “aid,” can quarantine, treat, and heal, after quartering and killing the patient, of course. Quartering Haiti was apparently exactly what the neocolonial doctor had ordered. Philoctète’s Vastey says that the world powers are all ready to pounce on Haiti and each will settle for just “a tiny little thigh… or once again the neck… or the feet….the throat…the guts” (64). Centering his focus on Baron de Vastey, rather than on the more well-known fgures of Christophe and Dessalines, may be what allows Philoctète to offer a much less isolationist account of the pitfalls of political leadership in a postcolonial (read: neocolonial) world. Vastey’s appearance in the starring and title role of the play upsets the aesthetic and political logic of the theater of Haitian independence as the history of so many “strong black men” who led the masses into freedom since Vastey could not have been considered either a leader or a part of the larger masses of enslaved and formerly enslaved Africans, who together helped to achieve Haitian independence. Instead, Philoctète’s rendition of a sovereign, independent Haiti centers on Baron de Vastey’s attempt to preserve the Haitian monarchy amidst both internal and external threats. This artfully complicates the idea that the theater 3 The ousting of Jean-Claude Duvalier (called Baby Doc) by the Haitian people was called dechoukaj, which, in the words of Laënnec Hurbon, “was not merely the cleaning up or eradication of the macoute network, the nighttime eye of the terror infltrating every cranny of this society. It was above all the expression of a desire to rebuild the nation on a foundation radically different from that of despotism” (Comprendre Haïti 8). Explaining the more socio-linguistic origins of the term dechoukaj itself, Amy Wilentz writes, “‘Dechoukaj,’ like many other Haitian political slogans, is a word that comes straight out of Haiti’s farm culture. It means to uproot a tree, to pull it out of the ground, roots and all, so that it will never grow back, and you do it when you are clearing a feld to plant” (53). 186 EPILOGUE: COLONIALISM AFTER SOVEREIGNTY … of Haitian independence necessarily involved dramatizing the contest not only between the French military and Dessalines’s armée indigène but also the split between the people, usually described as enslaved Africans, and those who led them. Monsieur de Vastey neither attempts to narrate the overthrow of Henry Christophe through the people nor to tell the history of Haitian independence with “a narrative of emancipation in which black agency and universal intent were central” (Kaisary 2). Instead, Vastey is painted in Philoctète’s play as a “thinker,” and a humanist (the British Consul calls him “an intellectual, above all” [94]), who is deeply worried about the meaning of civil unrest for Haiti, not solely because of his loyalty to Christophe, but also because of the future implications of a coup d’état, especially one encouraged and supported by foreign powers. There is a cyclical analysis involved in Philoctète’s Vastey-centered version of early Haiti’s history that allows us to focus on the ideological meanings we might derive from this form of staging Haiti’s sovereignty. In contrast to the plays of Haitian independence under examination in Chapter Four, Philoctète’s Monsieur de Vastey, performs a reading of Vastey’s writing, not merely to presage the downfall of Duvalier (as Philoctète alluded to in the abovementioned interview), but to critique the role of what Brenda Gayle Plummer (1988) has called “the great powers” in setting the stage for continuous political unrest in Haiti. This relational understanding of Haitian sovereignty is itself a new narrative in certain ways. Haitian historical analysis tends to be dominated by the concept of “blame,” whether that blame is directed toward “the West” or toward the Haitian people themselves. Philoctète’s tale serves neither of these narratives. On the contrary, the play probes the essential interconnectedness of people and their worlds to produce a more humanist vision for Haiti that is hopeful, even if the source of that hope seems unreasonable, misdirected, or unclear. It is Philoctète’s embrace of the uncertainty of the future, a sense of the opacity of political as well as personal life, that makes Monsieur de Vastey the most compelling and black humanist drama in the twentieth-century theater of Haitian independence. * Few studies exist of the oeuvre of René Philoctète, none of whose works were printed in their entirety beyond Haiti until 2003, when his novel Le Peuple des terres mêlées (1989) was translated into Spanish as EPILOGUE: COLONIALISM AFTER SOVEREIGNTY … 187 Perejil by Mireia Porta (Glover 23).4 Even though Philoctète’s works may not have circulated very far beyond the borders of his country during his own life (in contrast to the works of Césaire, Rodman, and Walcott), it is his play, Monsieur de Vastey, which properly puts the downfall of Henry Christophe into relational, comparative perspective, both historically and politically.

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