22613: DeGraff: Fwd: "Avengers of the New World. The Story of the Haitian Revolution" (Laurent Dubois) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Michel DeGraff <degraff@MIT.EDU>

Book Review From the Times Literary Supplement
http://www.the-tls.co.uk

Avengers of the New World
by  Laurent Dubois

Success at a price
	A review by Nick Caistor

This year sees the 200th anniversary of the independence of Haiti,
after the only successful revolt by slaves in world history. At
the start of 2004, the then President of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand
Aristide, wanted to celebrate the event by demanding more than
$21 billion in "reparations" from France, which had been the colonial
power in the country. Haiti's political opposition wanted to commemorate
the anniversary by getting rid of President Aristide.

The opposition were the winners of this particular battle. Aristide
was forced from power at the end of February. French, American
and other troops were deployed to keep the peace. At the beginning
of this month, the United Nations began to take over the restoration
of institutional rule, but its special representative Reginald
Dumas has already said that the UN will probably need to stay
for twenty years, because the task will be no less than "to create
a state".

In this timely, painstaking narrative of the circumstances surrounding
the original Haitian revolution and struggle for independence,
Laurent Dubois offers valuable suggestions as to why the slaves'
success did not lead to the construction of a viable state. Despite
the freeing of almost half a million black slaves, the victory
was won, Professor Dubois concludes, at the cost of "a nation
founded on ashes". After at least 100,000 people died in the revolution,
Haiti's chances of establishing a democracy were "run up against
autocratic and militaristic political traditions, and the social
and racial conflicts of the revolutionary years would continue
unabated".

Dubois begins his book with an overview of how Haiti became a
French colony, and the growth of the plantation economy, based
on sugar cane, tobacco and coffee (half of the world's entire
supply), that made it the most profitable European colony in the
eighteenth century. The Haitian population was already widely
split: the white plantation owners and officials on one side,
the slaves on the other. The latter were brought from many different
regions of Africa, and deliberately dispersed again in the colony
in order to try to keep them subdued despite their vastly greater
numbers. But as the eighteenth century progressed, there were
also increasing tensions in the metropolis. Rousseau and other
Enlightenment figures challenged the basic assumptions of slavery,
and affirmed every person's right to be regarded as equal before
the law. The Haitian planters immediately saw this as a threat
to their way of life and their profits, and sought on the one
hand to prevent such subversive ideas from propagating in the
colony, on the other to try to convince those fighting for power
in metropolitan France that equality should not spread as far
as the plantations.

The main part of Dubois's thoroughly researched narrative concerns
the fifteen years between the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and Citizen in 1789 and the successful expulsion of the French
and the declaration of Haitian independence in 1804. He uses personal
testimony and public record to detail the debates raging in France
and Haiti, as well as outlining the fluctuating fortunes of the
armies of freed slaves as they fought against, not only the French,
but the British and the Spanish in their efforts to secure freedom.

Dubois prefers to describe the forces in play rather than make
heroes of the revolutionary leaders, from Boukman and the 1791
insurrection begun at Bois Caiman to the revolutionary generals
Toussaint L'Ouverture and Dessalines. This can lead to a lack
of emphasis that tends to flatten the contours of the narrative,
but it does not mean that the author is afraid of reaching definite
conclusions, as with his final judgement on Toussaint: "(He) had
turned himself into a dictator, and the colony he ruled over into
a society based on social hierarchy, forced labour, and violent
repression". Dubois's is a laudable attempt to avoid "exoticizing"
Haiti, by insisting on dealing with the events surrounding the
slave revolt as mainstream history and as part of metropolitan
debates. But this approach can make Dubois play down some of the
particularities of the Haitian situation. For example, the value
of voodoo, not only as a cultural expression of the slaves' roots
in Africa, but as a means of helping them achieve their freedom
by providing the positive sense of social cohesion denied to them
almost everywhere else, is more than merely picturesque.

The international community simply denied the new country's existence.
It was not until 1825 that France recognized Haiti -- after exacting
crippling indemnities -- and it was only forty years afterwards
that the United States, in the middle of its own Civil War, opened
relations with it. Haiti was regarded as a pariah state, and dropped
out of all the debates that were shaping nation states in the
mid-nineteenth century. Although in an epilogue Dubois makes a
case for Haiti inspiring arguments for and against slavery, the
new republic was abandoned on the margins of history for much
of the next two centuries, capturing attention only when violence
and institutional collapse brought it into the news. Laurent Dubois's
patient study offers a valuable glimpse into the complexities
of the creation of modern Haiti that supplants the usual commonplaces
on this "first black republic".

Nick Caistor is the author of Mexico City: A cultural and literary
companion (2000).


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