THE GRAVITY OF REVOLUTION: THE LEGACY OF ANTICOLONIAL DISCOURSE IN POSTCOLONIAL HAITIAN WRITING, 1804-1934. A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. by Michael Castro Reyes January 2014 © 2014 Michael Castro Reyes THE GRAVITY OF REVOLUTION: THE LEGACY OF ANTICOLONIAL DISCOURSE IN POSTCOLONIAL HAITIAN WRITING, 1804-1934. Michael Castro Reyes, Ph. D. Cornell University 2014 This dissertation examines the lasting consequences of the anticolonial, antislavery discourses of the Haitian Revolution on the way in which postcolonial Haitians understood the narrative structure of their national history from Independence (1804) to the end of the American Occupation of Haiti (1934). In this study Haitian intuitions of historical time are apprehended through an analysis of nineteenth and early twentieth century Haitian literary and historical works. These texts are scrutinized with respect to (a) formal narrative features such as truncation, ellipsis, elision, prolepsis and analepsis which reveal an implicit understanding of the disposition of the metahistorical categories of “past,” “present,” and “future” and (b) the analysis of the explicit reflections on history provided by narrators or authors. This dissertation argues, primarily, that the event of the “Haitian Revolution” (1791- 1804) was fundamental to Haitian understandings of the emplotment of the whole of Haitian history. Chronologically “past” and “future” events were transformed so that they would be legible as analogical “recurrences” of the revolutionary past; when such manipulations proved difficult, the recent past was sometimes elided altogether. This was possible, in part, because Haitian postcolonialism was imagined as immanently precarious and thus remained dependent on revolutionary discourses of anticolonialism and radical antislavery. Also important was the analeptic, explicitly anticolonial fantasy of historical erasure in “restoring” the Amerindian name of “Haiti” to what had been the French colony of “Saint-Domingue.” The national history thus came to be underwritten by an impossible anachronistic return to the time of the fifteenth century Amerindians at the moment of Independence. This dissertation alleges that Haitian historical time depended upon, and remained largely bound by, this significant anticolonial contradiction. Drawing upon this metahistorical analysis, I ultimately argue both that Haitians’ experiences of time in this period are not compatible with “modernity” as it is understood by conceptual historiography, and that the accepted accounts of the historical development of nationalism cannot explain the rise of this sentiment in Haiti. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Michael Reyes earned his Bachelor of Arts in French Education from the University of Arizona in 2005. After having spent one year teaching English in elementary schools in Nîmes in the south of France as part of the Teaching Assistant Program, he began his graduate work at the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University in 2006. Throughout his years as a graduate student, Dr. Reyes served as an instructor of record for the Department of Romance Studies and taught all courses of the French language sequence as well as an introductory course in French literature. During a brief exchange with the École Normale Supérieure of Letters and Human Sciences in Lyon, France, Dr. Reyes also taught communicative English language courses. While at Cornell University, Dr. Reyes was honored with several awards. He received an honorable mention for his teaching from the Department of Romance Studies and was granted a Provost’s Diversity Fellowship which enabled him to conduct research and study the Kreyòl language in Québec, Canada. Dr. Reyes has presented his research on nineteenth century French and Haitian literature at professional conferences in the United States, Canada, and Haiti, including the Nineteenth Century French Studies Conference and the Haitian Studies Conference. He has also been published in the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History. His dissertation, The Gravity of Revolution: The Legacy of Anticolonial Discourse in Postcolonial Haitian Writings, 1804-1934, was supervised by Dr. Laurent Dubreuil. v To my grandparents vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would have been impossible without the supervision and support of my committee chair, Dr. Laurent Dubreuil. His ideas on language, postcolonial thought, literature, and the role of risk-taking in literary criticism and thought have been immensely influential in the development of many of the ideas that I have worked through in this dissertation. Beyond that, however, his counsel and his support in those moments of uncertainty and self-doubt were critical in demystifying the entire process of writing a dissertation. His criticism and critiques were timely, thoughtful and, above all, helpful in pushing my thinking forward. In directing my own graduate students in the future, I hope that I can strike the careful balance of directed autonomy, high expectations, and relentless support that I found in Professor Dubreuil. I am also profoundly indebted to the other members of my dissertation committee, Drs. Natalie Melas and Marie-Claire Vallois. Professor Melas’s early critiques of a seminar paper helped encourage me to continue work on Stella and help give my dissertation a direction in those first steps. Subsequent meetings with her also helped to generate new ideas for research and allowed me to discover scholars whose work intersected with my own. Many thanks also to Professor Marie-Claire Vallois whose outpouring of positive feedback and encouragement was so critical. Her varied bibliographic recommendations were also crucial to my understanding of, among other things, the cultures of the plantation zone and of the place of women within this space. A dissertation also requires a surprising amount of day-to-day administrative support and I consider myself particularly lucky to have fallen into the extremely helpful and capable hands of the staff in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell. At every step of the process Rebecca Davidson, our graduate field assistant, provided invaluable support; her responses to my emails (of which there were many) on everything from administrative deadlines to filing procedures were warm and seemingly calibrated to provide just the perfect amount of detail. Briefly, I would like to thank the skilled reference librarians at Olin and Kroch libraries at Cornell who helped me to track down rare digital and print materials on Haiti. Many thanks also to my colleague and fellow graduate student, Alex Lenoble, for his encouragement, conversation, and his equally deeply felt appreciation of Haitian literature and culture. Finally, at a personal level I would also like to take a brief moment to thank all of those close to me without whose support this project would never been possible. Thank you to my husband, Brian Houtman, who has been so giving of his time in helping me to think through my ideas, and whose poignant questions often forced me to clarify my positions. Thanks also to my lifelong friend, Maria Francis-Moullier, who has read over, listened to, or debated portions of this dissertation as it has transformed from a thought into a reality and who has always supported me through the growing pains of transitioning from student to scholar. Thank you to my grandmother, taken from us too soon, who instilled in me a lifelong love of scholarship and of the importance of education. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS PRELIMINARY SECTIONS Biographical Sketch v Dedication vi Acknowledgements vii Table of Contents viii BODY OF THE DISSERTATION Introduction 1 Chapter 1 – Nothing but a Bark Canoe: Stella and the Difficulties of Narrating the Haitian Revolution 25 Chapter 2 – Inheriting ‘Haiti’: Temporal Reconfigurations of the Amerindian in Literature of the Greater Nineteenth Century 131 Chapter 3 – The Gravity of Revolution: Interrogating the Limits of Revolutionary Discourse in Early Twentieth Century Haitian Literature 238 Epilogue 339 Bibliography 353 viii INTRODUCTION Rethinking the Haitian Nineteenth Century Few Haitian literary works from the nineteenth century are remembered to this day. Even fewer are read. To be sure there have always been justifications serving to excuse one’s divestment from this “minor,” “imitative,” largely French-language literature from within and without the Caribbean nation. After all, could the writings produced by former slaves of the nascent nation and their descendants possibly ascribe to the status and signifying potential of literature, as we understand it, in the context of French literature? What could the reflections of novelists, playwrights, and poets, writing, often in admiration, of the anticolonial revolution (1791-1804) that severed France’s connection to the most lucrative of her sugar colonies and withdrew Haiti from the transatlantic network of human depravity that we benignly call slavery possibly hope to teach us about the postcolonial, about the relationship to history of a people “transplanted” to another land, about the kind of narratives that allow such a heterogeneous people to imagine the bonds out of which to form a collectivity? And really do the works of the French Romantic poets such as Victor Hugo’s Bug Jargal (1826) or Alphonse de Lamartine’s Toussaint Louverture (1850) not suffice to impart upon us an intuition of the importance