Figure 2.1. Painting by Dominique Fontus, 1994.
Haitian Sovereignty
A Brief History
The question this volume poses, Who owns Haiti?, is, of course, a provocative one. In this chapter, I approach the question by drawing on my book Haiti: The Aftershocks of History in order to offer some ideas about how we might think about the long-term history of Haitian sovereignty. I’m interested in particular in some of the ways that Haitian history allows us to encounter the present and possibly rewrite the future. Only through a sustained engagement with Haiti’s history will we be able to develop approaches suited to the present and nourish different directions for Haiti. Engaging with Haiti historically is key to understanding the layered practices, structures, and discourses that shape its realities. That is true for any society, of course. But it is particularly urgent and necessary in Haiti because of how it is constantly misrepresented and misunderstood (Dubois 2012).
Retracing the history of Haiti’s contested sovereignty invites us to think about some deep and disturbing ironies of history. How is it that a country that so importantly pioneered and developed ideas of sovereignty has seen its sovereignty so persistently undermined both by conflicts within and by pressures from outside? How is it that this particular nation has seen its sovereignty and the self-sovereignty of its people undermined and refused?
Part of the answer to this question is that there is of course a fundamental relationship between Haiti’s powerful demand for sovereignty through its revolution and the consistent refusal of recognition and respect for that sovereignty. As Michel Rolph Trouillot (1995) argued in his classic work Silencing the Past, Haiti’s revolution and Haiti’s mere existence profoundly challenged not only the reigning political order of the day but also the very structures of thought that dominated—and in many ways still dominate—understandings of world history. Trouillot’s intervention in that work was driven by a strong sense that there were serious and immediate consequences to the fact that many actors found it nearly impossible to think about and with Haiti in a productive way. “Haiti disturbs,” my colleague Jean Casimir (2001) likes to say, and that is because a real engagement with its history as global history forces us to reconsider and challenge many of the commonplace thoughts—I might even say ruts—in which we find ourselves embedded. Really finding a different way of thinking about Haitian sovereignty requires us to look at the broader order from a perspective rooted in the country’s history and use the ideological and cultural resources that history has produced for thinking about the world.
Haiti’s long-term political history has been studied in rich detail, notably in the magisterial work of Claude Moïse (1988). Approaching this history means understanding not only particular events but also the long-term sedimentation of structures of perception, thought, and action. Our means of access to history must be multiple and open: A history of Haiti told only through traditional written sources inevitably limits and even distorts that history. And we also have to think about the many ways history can and should be told. In this sense, this chapter outlines the central role humanistic and cultural knowledge must play in all discussions about policy toward Haiti.
My goal is to offer some ways of using a broad understanding of Haitian history as a way to better understand the present and nourish different kinds of futures. I’ll try and show that the fundamental political problems that have shaped Haiti’s history since 1804 are rooted in the remarkable events of the Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804. That revolution was both a local and a global event, a true world-historical moment in ways that are increasingly acknowledged today. One useful way for us to think about the Haitian Revolution is as perhaps the most radical (and therefore one of the most important) assertions of a right to sovereignty in modern history. Even more so than the American and French Revolutions with which it was intertwined, the Haitian Revolution posed a set of absolutely central political questions. It did so in a way that was illegible to many and forcibly repressed by others. But any true analysis of modern political history, not only of Haiti but of the world, has to grapple with the implications of this revolution for core concepts surrounding sovereignty.
The French colony of Saint-Domingue, the pinnacle of the Atlantic slave system and the richest of the plantation colonies of the Americas, was based on a radical refusal of sovereignty to the majority. Ninety percent of the population of the colony was enslaved—more than half of them African born, many of them recent arrivals in the colony at the beginning of the revolution in 1791—and were not considered legal or political subjects in any sense. They were chattel—property, in other words—and were refused any possibility for self-sovereignty. This order was based on a complex but powerful set of racial ideologies that emerged out of and were buttressed by the Atlantic slave system. At the core of these ideologies was a kind of dialectic that enabled the simultaneous celebration of a capacity for free action and sovereignty on the part of certain groups while simultaneously denying that same capacity to others. The colony’s system of racial thinking was based on a set of arguments about the fundamental incapacity of a group that was defined by its skin color to successfully exercise sovereignty over itself. The story here is certainly complicated, and the Haitian Revolution played a central role in the transformation and solidification of racial ideologies during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But the key point is that the slave plantation system out of which Haiti emerged was one of the most extreme (and for a time one of the most successful) mechanisms for the mass denial of sovereignty in the history of the modern world.
It is thus not surprising that those who set about courageously, brilliantly, and systematically destroying this system starting with the 1791 slave insurrection crafted particularly strong and powerful assertions of the right to self-sovereignty and, in time, to national sovereignty. Building on the work of Trouillot (1995), I have argued (Dubois 2004a, 2004b) that in the Haitian Revolution we can find the true origins of modern discourses of human rights, that Haiti was the place where the assertion of true universal values reached its defining climax during the Age of Revolution. Enslaved people who were considered chattel rather than human beings successfully insisted first that they had the right to be free and then that they had the right to govern themselves according to a new set of principles. Their actions were a signal and a transformative moment in the political history of the world. The Haitian revolutionaries propelled the Enlightenment principles of universalism forward in unexpected ways by insisting on the self-evident—but then largely denied—principle that no one should be a slave. They did so at the very heart of the world’s economic system, turning the most profitable colony in the world into an independent nation founded on the refusal of the system of slavery that dominated all the societies that surrounded it in the Americas (Dubois 2004a).
These events were the foundation upon which all of Haiti’s subsequent history was built. The conflicts and aspirations born of revolution have shaped and defined the political history of the country. There has never been stasis, of course, and each generation in Haiti has remade history in changing economic, environmental, and global political contexts up to the present day. Yet the basic problems the Haitian Revolution posed are still there in all these struggles. The Haitian Revolution has haunted and spurred forward different generations as an event whose conflicts and contradictions have been replayed, though never in precisely the same way, during the past 200 years.
Let me try to offer a few tentative answers to the larger question of this book by breaking down the question of sovereignty into a few smaller, perhaps more manageable parts: 1) Who owns the idea of Haiti? 2) Who owns the Haitian state? and 3) What insights do longue-durée Haitian social and cultural structures have to offer about these questions?
I’ll offer some answers to the first question by thinking through the long-term impact and legacies of the reaction to the Haitian Revolution outside the country’s borders. I’ll then turn to question two by offering some thoughts about the central issues at work in the long-term history of the country’s political institutions. I’ll offer some thoughts about the third question by focusing on what Jean Casimir has called the counter-plantation system that emerged in Haiti through and after the revolution. Understanding this system, I’ll suggest, is really the key to understanding the foundations and future of Haitian sovereignty. Within each of these main currents and critical countercurrents, I’ll be calling attention to the aspects of the latter legacies that seem to me to be the most valuable. These are worth comprehending and nourishing in constructing new Haitian futures.
Reaction
The Haitian Revolution posed a profound threat to the world order as it was. Though the history of revolt against slavery was as old as slavery itself and though maroon communities in several Caribbean islands had secured their freedom, the scale of the success in Haiti was stunning and transformative. Jean Casimir (2001) sometimes describes Haiti as an entire nation of maroons, and in a way this best captures the radical threat the country posed. It changed the terms of the debate about slavery everywhere, and it changed the terms of the imagination of what was possible. It was an inspiration and example to the enslaved and was carried throughout the Atlantic world in news, song, and performance. It was also a powerful example in part because it was based in important ways on alliances between the enslaved and radical whites who embraced the revolution. That aspect of the period is often overlooked in favor of easier, racial readings, but in fact understanding the Haitian Revolution chiefly through the lens of race limits and circumscribes its true political and ideological meaning.
The reaction among power holders in the world, who at the time were deeply invested in maintaining the slavery system, was, not surprisingly, hostile. Jefferson was only one among many who clearly articulated a desire to contain what he called the “cannibals of the terrible republic” (Matthewson 2003, 97–101). He put in place a policy of diplomatic nonrecognition that lasted until 1862. And as is well known, France only acknowledged Haiti’s independence in 1825 in exchange for the payment of a large indemnity. The payment of this indemnity and the interest on the loans taken out to service it sapped the Haitian treasure for nearly a century (Matthewson 2003; Brière 2008).
As important, though, are the intellectual and discursive reactions, which began a long history of condescending and willfully distorted portrayals of Haiti. There is, I would argue, no country on earth that has been burdened with the same kind of obsessive critique and negation as has been directed at Haiti for the last two centuries. This discourse is a kind of labyrinth, taking many forms, some of them easy to identify and undo, others much more insidious. Racism and racialist readings of Haitian history—which have often shaped historical narratives produced in the country—are a part of this legacy. Such representations of course were reconfigured and reactivated at different moments, particularly during the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934. Scholars have studied and confronted these representations in increasingly rich and careful ways (see notably Ramsey 2011). This work is critical, for the only way to begin to emancipate ourselves from these visions is to study the enemy carefully—a difficult task, since often these racialized representations infuse even the most well-meaning depictions of the country.
There were, however, always countercurrents to this hostility, notably in African American thought and practice in the United States. Intellectuals, antislavery activists, and artists persistently offered an alternative vision of Haiti. Indeed, large groups of African Americans immigrated to the country in the 1820s and again in 1861. Among the latter group was James Theodore Holly, founder of Haiti’s Episcopal Church. One trace of the important place the country of Haiti played in the African American imagination is the presence of a neighborhood called Hayti in Durham, North Carolina. Founded in the decades after the Civil War, this community of African Americans likely took on this name as a way to express pride in its autonomy and independence (Dean 1979).
The second of the legacy of the Haitian Revolution is the country’s political institutions and practices. Their early history was deeply shaped by the broader context of hostility. Haiti’s early leaders were paranoid, but they had many good reasons to be given the international reaction to their very existence. The new nation’s political culture was deeply shaped by the idea that freedom was fragile and that both old and new enemies might well attempt to reestablish slavery. The refusal of both France and the United States to recognize Haiti diplomatically and the widespread racist representations of the country and its revolution were constant reminders of this threat. The question was how to best protect the country and solidify its autonomy.
Toussaint L’Ouverture first confronted the problem during the revolution. The solutions he developed were maintained by post-independence Haitian leaders including Jean-Jacques Dessalines, Henry Christophe, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. Their strategy was to establish a secure foundation for self-defense and economic autonomy by maintaining the plantation economy. Only through the production and sale of plantation commodities, these leaders insisted, could they maintain an army, build forts, and foster alliances with foreign powers that would keep Haiti safe.
To the Haitian people, their leaders offered this deal: In order to be preserved, freedom had to be circumscribed. What that meant was that these leaders insisted that most of the population continue working on plantations. Though working conditions were clearly an improvement from those of slavery, they fell far short of the kind of freedom and autonomy most of the formerly enslaved envisioned for themselves. Leaders beginning with L’Ouverture responded to this resistance with various forms of coercion, often violent, and developed a militarized and autocratic set of institutions that they justified as necessary for the protection and preservation of Haiti’s independence.
The most famous symbol of this approach is the Citadelle Laferrière built by Henry Christophe: a vast fortress, visible from miles away, meant to withstand a new invasion by the French and just as much to stand as a forceful symbol of the determination of Haitians to remain free. Some of the stones used to build this fortress were literally carried from old plantations and sugar works from the plain below by former slaves rounded up to do the work under conditions many contemporaries described as brutal, even a new kind of slavery.
As Robert Fatton Jr. has argued, these early styles of governance laid the foundations for a long-term tendency in Haiti toward regimes constructed around militarism (almost all nineteenth-century presidents were generals first), and political authoritarianism (Fatton 2007). But though it was always under pressure and circumscribed, there is also a long tradition of Haitian parliamentarianism going back to the Pétion regime. Even Christophe’s regime, which is often lampooned because of his construction of a local Haitian aristocracy, can more usefully be seen as a creative attempt to forge a kind of coalition government out of an extremely diverse and fragmented leadership class in the North. At certain moments in Haiti’s history, the parliaments were in fact sites of intense and vivid opposition. One clear case of this is during the 1840s, when a liberal opposition to Boyer—who was hated, among other things, for his private and nonconsultative signing of the 1825 indemnity with France—found voice in the Parliament and in Haiti’s burgeoning press. The African-born Félix Darfour wrote passionately and brilliantly against Haiti’s colorist political order, and a 24-year-old named James Blackhurst, inspired by the ideas of Saint-Simon, created a cooperative farm. In 1843, the liberal opposition began a mass uprising, one that a British observer described as being “unparalleled in history” because of the startlingly peaceful way it was carried out. “Democracy,” another observer wrote, “flowed full to the brim. And what democracy!”(Dubois 2012, 123).
This 1843 Parliament-infused revolution was followed by an even more remarkable mobilization among peasants in the South, led by Acaau, which showcased inventive forms of political discourse and symbolism that grew from grassroots organizing among small farmers. These two revolutionary groups from north and south came into conflict, and ultimately the reformist hopes of a younger generation were dashed. But the democratic forms of mobilization that would repeatedly be used in Haiti’s political history were clearly present during this period. The same could be said of the period of the 1880s, when the intellectual and statesman Anténor Firmin pursued an ultimately failed bid for president.
This tradition of resistance and opposition continued when the United States occupied Haiti in 1915. Opposition came first from members of Parliament who resisted the rewriting of the Haitian constitution, prompting the U.S. Marines to shut down and muzzle the Haitian Congress. And then it came from the Caco uprising, which was led by rural elites, including Charlemagne Péralte. The movement was highly democratic in character and held large meetings in the countryside to develop strategy. The Cacos saw themselves as inheritors of the traditions of the Haitian Revolution, and indeed they organized themselves both in military and political ways that drew on the traditions of those ancestors. Just as they had shut down Congress, the U.S. Marines shot Péralte and ultimately crushed his movement. The marines exposed and photographed his dead body and then distributed the photograph among the population as a message to stop resisting. But even the story of that image—which was rapidly reappropriated and ultimately became a symbol of remembrance and resistance—hints at the powerful ways a politics of hope for democracy and autonomy persisted in Haitian communities (Schmidt 1995; Gaillard 1982).
This is all critical to remember so that we can better understand something that Jean Dominique articulated in a beautiful essay called “La fin du marronage haïtien” (1985). Dominique argued that the grassroots democratic organizing that led to the overthrow of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 in fact tapped into a very long and deep tradition of political imagination and practice. When we forget that history, we also let go of a set of powerful precedents and intellectual resources through which we can imagine the future of Haitian democracy not as something that has to be invented or imported but instead as something that simply needs to be cultivated from within the country’s own diverse traditions (Smith 2009).
The Counter-Plantation System
These oppositional and alternative forms of politics were rooted in a larger cultural and social system. This system is, in fact, the most significant and most radical product of the Haitian Revolution. While understanding the other legacies of the revolution that I have described here is critical to understanding the many constraints and pressures placed on Haiti’s people both from the inside and outside, understanding the counter-plantation system in its full complexity—a task Jean Casimir undertook in 2001—is ultimately, I would argue, the most critical analytical task before us. It is out of an engagement with this system that we can best think collectively today about what Haiti is and should be.
The counter-plantation system that was built by the formerly enslaved began during the Haitian Revolution. This group was—we must remember—majority African born, and many of them had in fact been in the colony just a few years by the time the revolution began. In the years before the revolution, about 40,000 enslaved were brought to the colony each year, so in 1791 there may have been as many as 100,000 people or more for whom enslavement was just a very brief part of longer lives of freedom in Africa followed by freedom in Saint-Domingue and then Haiti. In creating the counter-plantation system, they drew on multiple sources: African forms of agricultural organization, family structure, and spirituality; the example of maroon communities; and the spaces of autonomy built within the plantation world. Many of these individuals were at the forefront of the military and social struggles of the revolutionary period, including as leaders. Macaya and Sans-Souci were both African born, for instance. They made use of the interstices the independence conflict opened up to craft a new way of life on the plantations where they had once been slaves (Dubois 2004a).
The system, one that of course has parallels in all other post-emancipation societies in the Americas, was based on not simply dismantling the plantation but also setting up structures that were organized to avoid its return in any form. From the perspective of this majority, a plantation was still a plantation whether its profits were meant to fend off the French or not. So they turned their backs on the plantation-based projects of their early political leaders, taking control of the land and putting it to their own uses. The counter-plantation system was the most radical production of the Haitian Revolution, since it insisted that only through a complete transformation of the social and economic order could real freedom actually be attained. Its creators refused the idea state leaders advanced that they had to accept serious limits on their liberty in order to preserve it. They built their own kind of Citadelle through a set of social institutions rooted in individual land ownership anchored in a set of broader family and community institutions.
On that land, they did all the things that had been denied them under slavery: They built families, freely practiced their religion, and worked for themselves. They grew food for themselves and for local and regional markets, but they also found that coffee, once a plantation crop, could also be successfully grown on small family farms and could bring in money they could use to buy other goods from the towns. That combination guaranteed rural Haitians a better life, materially and socially, than that available to most other people of African descent in the Americas throughout the early nineteenth century. Over time, despite opposition from certain leaders and the institution of laws meant to save the plantation, rural Haiti was largely transformed into a space divided into small landholdings, a space of striking social and political autonomy. And despite many attempts—including those made during the 20-year U.S. occupation of Haiti—efforts to rebuild plantations in Haiti have largely met with failure.
Along with Casimir, the greatest analyst of this “counter-plantation” system was Georges Anglade, the noted Haitian geographer who was lost in the earthquake of 2010 and whose work brilliantly explores all the layers and complexities of this system (Anglade 1982). What he and others have shown is that the counter-plantation system was actually economically viable, producing the coffee exports that sustained the Haitian economy in the nineteenth century while also providing all the food needed for the country’s population. The relative success of this system can perhaps be summarized by one crucial fact: During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, few people left Haiti. The country was instead a significant magnet for immigration. People came from as close as other parts of the Caribbean, including Guadeloupe and Martinique, and as far away as Europe and the Middle East. Thousands of African Americans also made the journey to Haiti in the 1820s and early 1860s. Many of these migrants become part of Haiti’s rural communities (Dubois 2012, 93–94, 153–156; Dean 1979).
Writing the history of the counter-plantation system is a complicated challenge. Hostile outsiders and Haitian political leaders have left behind ample archives for us to grapple with. The rural population of ex-enslaved people, the majority of them African born, who created a new Haiti in the early nineteenth century left far fewer written traces. In fact, it is in many ways easier to write the history of the involvement of the enslaved in the Haitian Revolution than it is to write the history of the post-independence rural Haitians. If we limit ourselves to written texts, we end up depending essentially on the laws and pronouncements such as the Code Henry or Boyer’s Code Rural that were meant to contain and reverse the counter-plantation system.
But we do have a series of archives that we can delve into to understand these systems: land tenure practices; family structures; Haitian Vodou songs, which often refer to and reflect on the cultural construction of this system; and other cultural and social practices. The Haitian Creole language, in its forms of address, its proverbs, its ways of condensing ideas of morality, and its analysis of power, also offers up a rich archive of ways of seeing and being. So too does Haitian art. All of these cultural forms offer up resources for confronting Haiti’s current challenges. We need to engage with them, because if we are to create a participatory future in Haiti we need a fully participatory analytical and methodological framework.
Both outsiders and many Haitian thinkers have long misunderstood the counter-plantation system as an atavistic form of retreat, as subsistence or worse. In fact, though, it is nothing of the sort. Rather, it is a historically crafted response to a very particular historical experience: that of having successfully destroyed slavery and the plantation and having systematically set about making sure it never returned. It is not a system of escape, but rather a system of engagement that is based on an absolute commitment to maintaining autonomy and dignity as the basis for an engagement without the broader world. It is nourished by the vivid and realistic memory that for a long time many in the world saw Haitians only as victims or potential laborers at the bottom of the global economic order. It is a consistent refutation of that vision and a cultivation of something else: another political imagination, one that continues to deeply challenge the world as it is, reminding us that it is not the world as it must be.
Conclusion
Let me conclude with a painting that I think crystallizes the themes I have explored here. It is from 1994, done by an artist named Dominique Fontus, and represents the arrival of U.S. troops into the town of Jacmel. The central actor of the painting, or so it seems at first, is the U.S. soldier who is disarming a local army officer. The U.S. soldier shows with his hand what is to happen: Time to put your gun down. The Haitian soldier is acquiescing, putting his gun down, and—strikingly—his hat is midair, seemingly propelled off his head by some unknowable force, symbolizing the end of his power.
But who is really acting here? The painter suggests that the U.S. soldier is in fact just a refraction of a bigger political battle: In front of him the Lavalas rooster is decisively defeating a bloodied Duvalierist pintade, or guinea fowl. The bigger political battle is also depicted in the painting by the arriving demonstration, which is effectively backing up—or perhaps forcing the hand of—the U.S. soldier. Though this, too, is ambiguous, since behind the demonstration is a U.S. army jeep. Is it just following the demonstration, watching it, or encouraging it? None of this is particularly clear: Who is really acting? Visible actions are being driven by less visible ones, and power articulated openly depends on other forms of power. The painting captures all the ambiguity of this moment when Haitian sovereignty is being expressed through the actions of a foreign soldier. But what makes the painting truly remarkable is that in the midst of this scene is placed an interlocutor for us as the viewers: the woman to the left. We don’t know who she is, why she is there, how she is involved. Related to the soldier who is being disarmed? Part of the demonstration or just standing by? Is she, perhaps, the painter Dominique Fontus? Whoever she is, she is standing and thinking, asking a question of her own, it seems, and asking a question of us. And we can perhaps imagine her asking: Who owns Haiti?
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