22248: erzilidanto: Haiti according to Hochschild by Wanda Sabir (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Erzilidanto@aol.com

http://www.sfbayview.com/060204/hochschild060204.shtml

Haiti according to Hochschild

by Wanda Sabir
Gen. Jean Jacques Dessalines

In the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine this past Sunday, an article appeared
by Adam Hochschild on Haiti. An excerpt from his book, "Bury the Chains,"
which will be published by Houghton Mifflin in January 2005, starts out
promising, yet quickly - within sentences, shifts into a deluge of propaganda which
paints the Haitian revolution as one led by bloodthirsty savages, who brutally
conquer their enslavers then continue the legacy of bloodletting for two
centuries forward in a series of coups and self-destructive violence to self and the
land.

By the time the readers get to the last paragraphs where Haiti’s first
democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, is mentioned, along with
America's destabilization efforts and the important example Haiti sets for the
region, one's sentiments have been strongly steered toward the white
imperialists who, according to Hochschild, suffered horribly at the hands of African
brutes.

Hochschild uses slave owners’ accounts of the events of 1791, that meeting on
the mountain with Boukman and Fatiman and 200 representatives from
surrounding plantations and elsewhere in the narrative. What's implied is that the
African faith is "uncivilized," a perception that is reinforced to this day in most
depictions of Vodun in Haiti and abroad.

In subsequent passages, the image of debauchery and decadent values practiced
by the Europeans lead one to assume that the battle for African freedom is
inevitable, even though Hochschild attributes much of the eventual success of
Africans soldiers over the French and British to illness and poor strategy, not
to the superior military prowess of generals like Jean Jacques Dessalines and
the bravery of the Haitian people. Toussaint L'Ouverture is the convenient
focus of the treatise, as he is the only general who had anything to do with the
Europeans, thus more Eurocentric documentation.

Toussaint actually bargained with the revolutionaries not to harm the white
family who had freed him and for whom he worked, according to Hochschild, and
out of respect they humored him. However, none of this regard was shown to the
general when after negotiating with French, he ended up in a cold, damp
prison, where he died in April 7, 1803. How's that for loving thy enemy?

Dessalines, on the other hand, had nothing to do with the French, whom he
didn't trust. What's wrong with loving Black people, which is the symbol of the
Haitian flag, the blue and red of the French flag minus its menacing whiteness?
Hochschild writes briefly of the differences between the poor Kreyol speaking
Africans and the French speaking majority middle-class, non-slave mulattos,
then tries unsuccessfully in one sentence to draw a parallel between the events
of 2004 and those of the insurgency movement on the ground in Haiti 200 years
earlier, which, according to his references, was a multinational one
including "control of rival warlords and their heavily armed followers."

For me, the true hero of the Haitian revolution was Dessalines, who knew the
white man's whip and believed in the sovereignty of his nation and that of all
African people throughout the Diaspora.

I don't even get a sense of the inhumanity of slavery in Hochschild's
article. Yes, the data is there; however, the tone doesn't reflect its horror. One
doesn't see people; it's as if the evidence were stripped away. Granted, a few
African generals are mentioned by name, but the majority - men, women and
children - remain anonymous, therefore easier to dismiss no matter how tragic their
demise.

Firsthand accounts surround the conqueror's removal. Hochschild paints a very
brutal war and an even more brutal enslavement. He writes, "West Indian
slavery was, by every measure, far more deadly than slavery in the American South.
Cultivating sugar cane by hand was - and still is - one of the hardest ways of
life on earth." If this is so, then the rebellion was inevitable.

Never does Hochschild admit that the Europeans got what was coming to them,
that they deserved everything the Africans threw at them. Instead, he spends
lots of time analyzing the conquering general Toussaint.

Is the implication that African people cannot rule themselves? President
Aristide seemed to be doing just that before the coup in February, backed by the
United States and other Western nations, removed him from power. And though
Hochschild does mention the payment of money by the Haitian government at cannon
point to former plantation owners, he does not state the destabilizing effect
the demand for 90 million gold francs - $21.8 billion today - had on the
country, money President Aristide has asked returned, with interest.

The account is clearly anti-African; one could even find herself feeling
sorry for the Europeans who clearly are the victims in this version of the story.
Considering Hochschild's book, "King Leopold's Ghost," and how well-documented
and presented that tale was - my alliance never shifted from oppressed to
oppressor as I read it - I was disorientated by the obvious political angle in
this latest work.

What happened to objectivity? Hochschild's slanted account gives credence to
the media frenzy that justifies Aristide's “coup-nap” and Haiti's failed
democracy. Is his soon to be released work, "Bury the Chains," what Noam Chomsky
discusses in "Media Control," "the manufacture of consent in spectator not
participatory democracies"? We'll have to read it and see for ourselves.

Post-9/11 America is a place where certain elite or intellectual classes
support state sponsored campaigns of misinformation, much of it fabricated, so
that power and control stays in the hands of the few.

Wanda Sabir, M.A., the Bay View’s long time arts editor, also writes for the
Oakland Tribune and teaches college-level English composition and literature.
Email her at wsab1@aol.com. Haitian attorney Marguerite Laurent has also
commented on Hochschild’s story. Read her critique at www.sfbayview.com.