PREFACE

Baron de Vastey and Post/Revolutionary Haiti

On 1 January 1804, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue became the newly independent state of Haiti. Some twelve years of revolutionary struggle had led to this declaration of independence, the culminating moment of ‘the only successful slave revolt in history’, as the Caribbean scholar C. L. R. James admiringly characterized the events of 1791–1803 in his The Black Jacobins (vii), first published in 1938 and still ‘easily the most influential general study’ of the Haitian Revolution (Geggus, 2002, 31). For James, the revolutionary transformation of colonial Saint-Domingue into postcolonial Haiti, and of former slaves into ‘a people able to organise themselves and defeat the most powerful European nations of their day’ (vii), stood as the very model for a successful struggle against imperial (and capitalist) rule across the globe in the twentieth century, and especially for those of his comrades in Africa who were only then starting out on the ‘long and difficult road’ leading to a place and a time when the ignorant dreams of ‘the imperialists envisag[ing] an eternity of African exploitation’ would be decisively interrupted, as they had been in 1804 by ‘the men, women and children who drove out the French’ (316, 314, 294).

With his insistence, in The Black Jacobins, ‘that the story he had to tell was deeply relevant for the world in which he lived’ (Dubois, 2004, 2), James showed a rare willingness to situate the Haitian Revolution at the front and centre of world history, to draw it out from the tenebrous margins and respectfully listen to an event of global significance that had long been, and would continue to be, ignored or trivialized ‘in written history outside of Haiti’, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in his influential analysis of ‘the general silence that Western historiography has produced around the Haitian Revolution’ (1995, 96, 97). For Trouillot, writing in 1995, this ‘silencing of the revolution’, which ‘also fit the relegation to an historical backburner of the three themes to which it was linked: racism, slavery, and colonialism’ (98), was a historiographical fact that had yet to be effectively addressed: the ‘popular reedition’ of The Black Jacobins in 1963 had, admittedly, facilitated the emergence of an ‘international counter-discourse’ that ‘fed on the historiography produced in Haiti since the nineteenth century’ and that would be ‘revitalized in the 1980s’ by a handful of historians who ‘insisted on the central role of the Haitian Revolution in the collapse of the entire system of slavery’, but, Trouillot cautioned, even at the close of the twentieth century, ‘the impact of this counter-discourse remains limited’ (104–05).

In the twenty years since Trouillot made those forceful claims about the enduring ‘silence that surrounds the Haitian Revolution’, the situation has changed dramatically, with a veritable explosion of interest in ‘what happened in Haiti between 1791 and 1804’ and how it ‘contradicted much of what happened elsewhere in the world before and since’ (106–07). The revolutionary sequence of events that led to the Haitian declaration of independence is now being claimed across a range of academic disciplines as an event of world-historical importance, one that exceeded the limits of the American and French Revolutions in its ‘affirmation of the natural, inalienable rights of all human beings’ (Hallward, 11), and that thereby ‘rescued the idea of universal human history from the uses to which white domination has put it’ (Buck-Morss, 74). The former slaves’ decisive victory over their French masters is being newly heralded by philosophers and historians, literary and cultural critics, postcolonial and francophone theorists, practitioners of American Studies, of Afro-diasporic and transatlantic studies, to name but a few of the disciplinary sites that are being reshaped by a growing awareness of the centrality of antislavery revolutions in general, and the Haitian Revolution in particular, to any understanding of our ineluctably colonial past and of our ever more globalized (and neo-colonial) present.

The emerging interdisciplinary field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies thus constitutes a significant and sustained intervention in the centuries-long silencing of its world-historical object of study. However, despite the new attention being paid to the Haitian Revolution, its immediate aftermath remains in the historiographical shadows, offering as it does a seemingly disappointing vista that fails to match the transformative expectations raised by ‘the idea of 1804’ (Nesbitt, 2005). Only months after the revolutionary forces led by Jean-Jacques Dessalines had defeated Napoleon’s army and declared their independence, many of the remaining French in the country were rounded up and massacred as a potential fifth column; soon thereafter Dessalines transformed the newly independent nation into an Empire (hardly the form of government most conducive to the flourishing of the natural, inalienable rights of one and all). Within two years the Emperor was himself dead, victim of a conspiracy organized by Alexandre Pétion and Étienne Gérin, ‘two of the mixed-race generals Dessalines had relied on to drive the French out of the South Province’ (Popkin, 2012, 145). In the months following upon Dessalines’s assassination on 17 October 1806, ‘one and indivisible’ Haiti split into two rival governments, neither of which could be said to stand in an exemplary relation to the revolutionary values of freedom and equality: the State of Haiti to the North, led by Dessalines’s second-in-command, Henry Christophe, who would be proclaimed King in an 1811 constitutional amendment; and the Republic of Haiti to the South, led by Pétion, who would be consecrated as President-for-life by the Constitution of 1816. Between 1806 and 1820, Haiti would find itself in a state of on-and-off civil war (mostly off after 1812), which would end only with the fall of Christophe in 1820 and the reunification of the country under the rule of Jean-Pierre Boyer, who had succeeded Pétion upon the latter’s death in 1818. During this entire time, the declared independence of Haiti had been looked upon by the rest of the world as an aberrant, unrecognizable fiction. Only in 1825 would this independence be formally acknowledged, when the French provisionally ‘granted’ it to the men, women, and children who had defeated them twenty years before, ‘unilaterally imposing heavy indemnities on the black republic as the price for France’s official recognition of Haiti’s independence’ (Bongie, 2008, 46).

The sequence of events leading from the emancipatory moment of 1804 to the ignominious manumission of 1825 would appear to offer little more than yet another discouraging example of what happens to revolutionary politics when the universal, in order to become operational, gets incarnated in ‘a “concrete universal”—a nation, a leader’—and merges with ‘particular hegemonies’ (Debray, 128). It is no doubt tempting, in the face of this confounding merger of the universal and the particular, to speak in general terms of ‘the futile Haitian uprising’ (Chatterjee, 54), or to linger over troubling specifics such as the 1804 massacres and claim that they ‘instantly gave Haiti a sulfurous reputation that it has, to a large extent, yet to shake’ (Girard, 2011, 323). It is the guiding assumption of this book, however, that we would do better to think about what came after the Haitian Revolution not (simply) in terms of a rupture or ‘fall’ from grace, but (also) as a frustratingly yet productively ambiguous continuation of the revolutionary project. This continuation that is always also a discontinuation is precisely what I am gesturing toward with the slash in ‘post/revolutionary’.

If we turn our gaze away from what has been lost, and engage in the often disheartening but critically necessary work of examining the processes through which the reality of universal emancipation dissolves into (and haunts) ‘particular hegemonies’, then Haiti’s revolutionary aftermath becomes a site of tremendously great interest, even though (or precisely because) it stands in such a problematic, dis/continuous relation to the emancipatory process from which it emerged. When considering the Haiti(s) of Christophe and Pétion, no definitive conclusion can be drawn, no founding consensus can be reached, of the sort that underwrites the burgeoning field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies with its understandably affirmative emphasis on ‘the universal truth of human emancipation unleashed in the events of 1791–1804’ (Nesbitt, 2008, 80). Speaking of Christophe’s kingdom, for instance, one prominent contributor to this field has rightly noted that ‘even scholars who defend Christophe’s program of self-improvement and hard work appear to be at a loss when it comes to assessing his legacy’ (Fischer, 2004, 246). To engage with post/revolutionary Haiti is to be, and to recognize oneself as being, ‘at a loss’, to take this inconclusive condition as the point of departure for both scholarly and partisan assessment of ‘the first post-slavery nation in the modern world’, and to move forward with a self-critical awareness that ‘there are obvious and important counterpoints and disjunctures in any story about either the power of Haitian antislavery or the limits of Haitian freedom’ (Ferrer, 65).

Nowhere is this haunting dis/continuity more in evidence than in the formation of the Haitian literary field during the years 1804 to 1825. The emergence of a national literature in Haiti is notably dependent upon the consolidation of the post/revolutionary state (or, as of the end of 1806, the rival states of Christophe and Pétion). Early Haitian literature, while proudly cultivating the memory of universal emancipation and reiterating its promise, deferentially answered the particular needs of the regime(s) in power and committed itself to ‘concrete’ polemics (Christophe v. Pétion, ‘black’ v. ‘coloured’, nouveaux libres v. anciens libres, North v. South, ‘constitutional’ monarchy v. ‘democratic’ republic, etc.) that appear to betray this memory and that promise. It is a literature that is all too evidently in a ‘scribal relation to power’ (Bongie, 2008, 33): it is the product of scribes, writers whose intellectual and creative production cannot be thought apart from the institutional framework within and by means of which it was conceived. The manifestly scribal identity of these writers has caused them to be sorely neglected by literary critics—understandably so, given the latter’s disciplinary investment in an ‘ideology of the aesthetic in which (good) Art becomes the supposed antidote to (bad) factionalism’ (91). Gaining ascendancy precisely in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, this ideology can envision Haiti’s post/revolutionary corpus as nothing more than the obligatory but distasteful point of departure in an appealing meta-narrative of ‘literary emancipation’, in which, little by little, ‘literature succeeded in freeing itself from the hold of the political and national authorities that originally it helped to establish and legitimize’ (Casanova, 37). Only if we tactically renounce this ideology and the comforting stories that it tells us about ‘(good) Art’ does it become possible to re-envision the work of early Haitian writers, no less than the governmental practices of the post/revolutionary state, in a way that does not blindly defer to a moralizing rhetoric of negative evaluation (failed regimes, failed texts), but that prepares for the difficult work of giving them their due, and of doing so precisely by not subjecting them to our own understandable, if historically conditioned, desire for ‘autonomous’ literary and cultural production.

Without a doubt, the most prominent Haitian man of letters to emerge in this period was Baron de Vastey (1781–1820), chief publicist and ideologue for the Christophean regime, the King’s ‘most efficient and most devoted collaborator’ (H. Trouillot, 1972, 84), ‘the most representative spokesman of the new Haiti’ (G. Lewis, 254). One early twentieth-century traveller to Haiti, contemplating the ruins of Christophe’s kingdom, suggested that ‘were it not for the Baron de Vastey we should have to be content with incredible legends, and with our own interpretation of scanty facts, while the inner thoughts of the King would remain mysterious’ (Niles, 276–77). The appraisal, for all its hyperbole, nicely conveys the prominent mediatory position this ‘coloured’ scribe (the legitimate son of a French father and a free woman of colour) occupied in relation to his ‘black’ sovereign. What this exoticizing appraisal cannot convey, to be sure, is the richness of Vastey’s anticolonial vision, which is nowhere more evident than in his astonishingly prescient invocation of a decolonizing world in which ‘five hundred million black, yellow, and brown men, spread across the surface of the globe, are claiming the rights and privileges that they received from the author of nature!’ (1816c, 14) It is this visionary anticipation of the insights of twentieth-century anticolonialism, combined with his closeness to political power, that no doubt helps explain why twentieth-century authors such as Derek Walcott and Aimé Césaire were so viscerally drawn to the figure of Vastey in their attempts at giving poetic expression to post/revolutionary Haiti in plays such as, respectively, Henri Christophe (1950) and La tragédie du roi Christophe (1963).

Between 1814 and 1819 Vastey published nine books under his own name, and several others from this period can be readily attributed to him on internal evidence (for overviews of Vastey’s oeuvre, see Bongie, 2008, 111–18 and 227–37, as well as the entries for him in the Bibliography of the present volume). Along with a number of what can be identified, if only for the sake of analytic convenience, as ‘minor’ works, dating from 1815–16 and in large part directed against Christophe’s rival Pétion, Vastey published four ‘major’ interventions. Of these, three would be quickly translated into English as part of a well-conducted media campaign in Britain on behalf of the Christophean regime: Réflexions sur une lettre de Mazères (1816; trans. 1817, Reflexions on the Blacks and Whites), Réflexions politiques sur quelques ouvrages et journaux français, concernant Hayti (1817; trans. 1818, Political Remarks on Some French Works and Newspapers, Concerning Hayti), and Essai sur les causes de la révolution et des guerres civiles d’Hayti (1819; trans. 1820/1823, An Essay on the Causes of the Revolution and Civil Wars of Hayti). Vastey’s work, whether in translation or (less frequently) in the original French, would be broadly disseminated on both sides of the Atlantic in the late 1810s, and almost invariably applauded by Anglo-American commentators as offering admirable ‘specimens of native black genius’ (‘History’, 74), and helping to sate, in the words of one of Vastey’s translators, ‘the lively interest which every specimen of Haytian Literature is calculated to excite in the generous bosoms of British and American Philanthropists’ (Vastey, 1817a, 11).

The one major work of Vastey’s that was not translated during his lifetime was his first, Le système colonial dévoilé, published in October 1814. In its ninety-seven pages, Vastey introduced virtually all of the cultural, political, and historical concerns that would be developed at greater length in his later publications, and that—inasmuch as they anticipate so many of the central concerns of twentieth-century anticolonial and postcolonial thought—do not simply meet but significantly challenge the expectations of the philanthropists who took such a ‘lively interest’ in Vastey’s work during his lifetime. In The Colonial System Unveiled, we first encounter the proud affirmations of black identity and of the African origins of civilization that would be expanded upon in his 1816 Réflexions, which so often reads like a Négritude manifesto avant la lettre, provoking one recent mainstream historian to identify Vastey as, if not ‘the first black supremacist—then the first writer, at any rate, to try to rewrite cultural history with an aim to remove what he saw as a white bias’ (P. Johnson, 320). It is in Colonial System, moreover, with its close readings of Euro-American racial science and colonial legal texts, that we first encounter Vastey’s ‘quite unparalleled, for the time, attention to the ways in which European writers exercise control over the colonial world through textual acts of representation’ (Bongie, 2008, 229), a prescient sensitivity to the workings of colonial discourse that finds its most focused expression in the 1817 Réflexions politiques, where Vastey engages in a detailed refutation, one might even say deconstruction, of French representations of Haiti. And it is in this first book of his, above all, that one gets a sense of Vastey’s nascently ‘third-worldist’ vision of the Haitian Revolution as an emancipatory site of anticolonial struggle, a ‘national war’ in which ‘the French were on one side and the natives [indigènes] on the other’, to cite the decidedly Fanonian characterization of the final stages of the revolution that Vastey provides in his last book, the 1819 Essai, which he himself characterized as the first attempt to produce ‘a general history [of Haiti] written by a native [indigène] of the country’ (37, 1).

Furthermore, it is in this trailblazing intervention that Vastey introduces, and most memorably develops, the concept that is at the heart of all his writings, and that is featured in its title: ‘the colonial system’. The book’s title not only ‘invites a comparison with Fanon’—as was pointed out some two decades ago by the historian David Nicholls (1991, 108), author of what was until very recently the only scholarly article devoted to Vastey—but even more obviously anticipates the adamantine insights of Aimé Césaire and Jean-Paul Sartre into the systemic nature of colonial and neo-colonial domination in such works from the 1950s as Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism and Sartre’s ‘Colonialism is a System’. Vastey’s Colonial System can legitimately be considered the first systemic critique of colonialism ever written, certainly from the perspective of a colonized subject. This critique is rendered all the more powerful, moreover, because it is supplemented by, and indeed inseparable from, one of the most movingly detailed invocations of slavery and its atrocities to be found in the entire canon of antislavery literature. In what is certainly the most original and striking section of Colonial System (1814b, 40–61), Vastey provides a detailed inventory of the names of well over a hundred ex-colonists and the horrifying crimes they perpetrated against their human property; the names of these perpetrators rise phantom-like from the pages of his book, pursued by the ghosts of those they slaughtered, the ‘shades of the dead’ (les mânes) whom Vastey exhumes and interrogates in order that their silenced stories might be heard (35). Even his own white grandfather is entered into this list of perpetrators, and his current whereabouts on the other side of the Atlantic specified, that the ghosts of slavery might all the more easily catch up with the old man, a certain Pierre Dumas, former resident of Marmelade, ‘and at present a property owner in France, at Marcilly-sur-Seine in the department of Marne’ (70–71).

For all these reasons, the translation for an English-language audience of this neglected document in the history of the struggle against colonialism and slavery is long overdue. That no one has ever undertaken the task of translating this seminal work and reintroducing it to a contemporary audience is all the more surprising given the massive amount of salvage work that has been performed in relation to colonial-era Afro-diasporic writers over the past several decades. The absence until now of any such translation and, more generally, the still pervasive ‘silences surrounding Vastey’s work’ (Daut, 2012b, 51), can be attributed in large part, as I have already suggested, to the impossibility of disentangling Vastey from his ‘scribal relation to power’: from, that is, his hegemonic subject-position as a self-styled publiciste for Christophe (1817b, xxiii)—a position that is nowhere more evident than when he proudly confirms that the 108 pages of his 1815 anti-Pétion diatribe, Le cri de la conscience, were written at the express command of the King’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Comte de Limonade (1816a, 4–5). Notwithstanding the wide and approving reception of Vastey in radical antislavery circles in his own time, and the fact that he anticipates, in so many ways, the anticolonial politics (and poetics) of a Césaire, a Sartre, a Fanon, Vastey is a figure who resists being translated into, and marketed as, an essentially free-floating (Afro-diasporic, Black Atlantic…) author, of the sort who can satisfy our understandable desire for ‘autonomous’ cultural production that has been ‘freed from its former condition of political dependency’ (Casanova, 37). Rather than attempt such a difficult, and misleading, act of translation, the wager of the salvage work being performed here is that Vastey is well worth considering on his own terms, and that attending to these scribal terms might allow us, in Deborah Jenson’s words, ‘to articulate a literary life of postcolonialism that falls between the cracks of the Euro-American modern ideal of the autonomous literary author—a status inaccessible to the marginalized literary producers of the early postcolonial state—and the “nostalgic culturalism” that is a hallmark of contemporary literary recreations of early postcoloniality’ (6). Neither a recognizable author nor a producer of ‘authentically’ Haitian culture, Vastey as scribe exemplifies the discomfiting, interstitial forms of ‘literary life’ that flourished in post/revolutionary Haiti.

This wager of looking ‘between the cracks’, in order to engage with what flourished there rather than lament what is lacking, is one best made collectively. For that reason, in order the more effectively to (re)introduce Vastey to English-language audiences, this bicentenary translation and critical edition of Colonial System includes newly commissioned essays written by scholars who are at the forefront of a resurgence of interest in him: Marlene Daut, Doris Garraway, and Nick Nesbitt, whose published work on Vastey (Daut, 2012a, 2012b; Garraway, 2012; Nesbitt, 2013, 173–91) provocatively disrupts the ‘formulas of silence’ to which he has been subjected by literary critics and historians alike, throwing new light on his little-known life, recuperating his important but forgotten role in the transatlantic abolitionist public sphere, and insisting upon the stylistic and conceptual complexities of an oeuvre that has consistently been addressed, if at all, in terms of its ‘limitations’ (Dash, 1994, 531). These three interventions—along with the introductory materials at the front of this volume and my own close reading of Colonial System at the back—should, if our wager is met, provide a compelling impetus for the further study of Vastey in particular, and post/revolutionary Haiti in general, as an unsettling supplement to the burgeoning field of Haitian Revolutionary Studies (returning to my point of departure in this Preface) and its principled insistence on treating the revolutionary sequence 1791–1804 as ‘the most accomplished political event of the Age of Enlightenment’ (Nesbitt, 2008, 12).

Given the conspicuously Anglo-American provenance of a good deal of the work currently being produced in this emerging interdisciplinary field of study (see Sepinwall, 2009, 2013), it is our hope, finally, that translating Vastey’s work into English will complement and help promote ongoing efforts to render him more visible in his own language and his own country, be it through the production of French-language critical editions that would establish his corpus as one of ‘the foundational texts of our francophone literatures of the South’ ( Jonaissant, 201), or through the dissemination of popular editions of his work in Haiti itself, a project that was initiated last year by the Société haïtienne d’histoire, de géographie et de géologie with its publication of a paperback version of Le système colonial dévoilé (Vastey, 2013). As the President of the Société, historian Michel Hector, notes in the Preface to this reedition, there has been in Haiti a ‘persistent silence maintained around this book and the other works of Baron de Vastey’. Notwithstanding occasional surges of interest in him over the past two centuries—one of the country’s most eminent literary historians during the American Occupation, for instance, went so far as to affirm that a knowledge of Haitian history was incomplete without studying Vastey (Vaval, 1933, 129; ‘On ne connaît point l’histoire d’Haïti si l’on n’a pas fréquenté chez Vastey’)—he has remained for the most part a largely repressed figure in his native land (rather than, as elsewhere in the world, a simply forgotten one), for reasons that I will expand upon in the opening paragraphs of the Biographical Sketch that follows directly upon this Preface. It remains an open question as to how much, if at all, this situation will change with the first publication of a work by Vastey in Haiti since his brutal murder almost two centuries ago, but clearly there is a willingness on the part of at least some individuals and institutions to give new consideration to the anticolonial vision of Vastey and its categorical opposition to ‘all concession, all compromise that would have permitted the old metropolitan power to maintain any sort of influence on the development of the new nation’ (M. Hector, 2013, 16).

Indeed, as Jean Casimir suggests, in an essay first published in October 2012 in the Haitian daily Le nouvelliste and included in the reedition of Système, revisiting the work of ‘the most important ideologue’ of the nation’s independence and listening to its ‘unconditional condemnation of colonialism’ may be especially illuminating at this very juncture in history, given the ‘increasingly less informal trusteeship being imposed upon the Republic of Haiti’ (2013, 17): the interminable ‘stabilization’ efforts of a UN mission established in the aftermath of the 2004 coup; the predatory advances of disaster capitalism in the wake of the 2010 earthquake; the neoliberal commandments of a ‘militarized, privatized, NGO-ized foreign aid apparatus’ (Schuller and Morales, 7), to name but a few of the forms this trusteeship and its assault on Haitian sovereignty has lately taken in that vanguard country ‘where people broke the chains of imperial domination not at their weakest but at their strongest link’, and where they continue ‘to pay the sort of price that anyone familiar with these chains would expect’ (Hallward, xxxiv). Whether in its French original or the English of this bicentenary translation, Vastey’s Colonial System—despite its scribal complicities and post/revolutionary particularities, or precisely because of them—stands revealed today as a pioneering testament to the overbearing weight of those chains, and a timely reminder of the still haunting possibility of their breaking.