29886: Durban (pub): Deibert review of Bell's Toussaint Louverture Biography (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

Lance Durban <lpdurban@yahoo.com> posts this book review from the Miami
Herald:

BIOGRAPHY | TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE
MYTHICAL MAN
THE NOVELIST HUMANIZES THE PERSON BEHIND THE LEGEND OF HAITI'S
INDEPENDENCE
BY MICHAEL DEIBERT
Toussaint Louverture: A Biography. Madison Smartt Bell. Pantheon. 352
pages. $27.

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/entertainment/books/16500645.htm
Novelist Madison Smartt Bell's new biography of Haiti's independence
hero Toussaint Louverture attempts to lift the veils of romance and
symbolism from one of history's most compelling figures to examine the
man beneath. It largely succeeds in its long overdue re-examination of
one of the central individuals of that tumultuous nation's earliest
days.

Perhaps no figure in Haitian history has been as much wrapped in myth
and legend as Louverture, and Bell, author of a trilogy of historical
novels chronicling some of the major personalities of the Haitian
revolution, goes a long way toward humanizing the character of the
freed slave whose challenge to the armies of the European powers would
eventually result in the only successful slave rebellion in history and
the establishment of an independent nation in 1804, a victory
Louverture never lived to see.

Though Bell's initial descriptions of Haiti's pre-Columbian
civilization are somewhat pedestrian, he soon hits his stride in
detailing the complicated and often absurd color scale of the
slave-holding society into which Louverture, claimed by some to be the
descendant of an Arada king, was born as ''Toussaint Bréda,'' after the
Bréda plantation where he was enslaved. He chose the moniker Louverture
-- ''the opening'' -- many years later.

Freed from slavery 17 years before the outset of the Haitian revolt,
Louverture was, Bell reminds us, ''a member of a very small group: free
blacks who owned slaves as well as property.'' Why and how he sought to
make common cause with other like-minded rebel leaders such as
Jean-Francois Papillion and Georges Biassou -- masterfully resurrected
from historical obscurity by Bell -- forms one of the book's most
intriguing questions.

At times leaning heavily on the work of the anthropologist Gérard
Barthelemy and historian Gerard Laurent, Bell illuminates many of the
long-forgotten minutiae of the Haitian revolution. If he may
occasionally be faulted for belaboring some of his points -- the
description of a minor 1796 skirmish outside of the city of
Port-de-Paix drags on for many pages -- he nevertheless must be saluted
for his elucidation of the effect that Louverture's blending of
European and African styles of command and authority had on Haiti's
independence struggle.

Seeking to counter the misconception that the leaders of Haiti's revolt
were ''a gang of supposedly ignorant, illiterate and generally
uncivilized blacks,'' Bell brilliantly evokes the bitter eloquence of
the writing of Haiti's revolutionary leadership, as is evidenced in a
passage from a July 1792 letter signed by the rebel generals
Jean-Francois and Biassou (as well as, curiously, Louverture's
14-year-old nephew Belair) to the representatives of the French
government: ``Under the blows of your barbarous whip we have
accumulated for you the treasures you enjoy in this colony; the human
race has suffered to see what barbarity you have treated men like
yourself -- yes, men -- over whom you have no right except that you are
stronger and more barbaric than we are. For too long we have borne your
chains without thinking of shaking them off, but any authority which is
not founded on virtue and humanity, and which only tends to subject
one's fellowman to slavery, must come to an end, and that end is
yours.''

The Louverture we see in these pages comes across as resilient, brave
and politically savvy , switching allegiance between French and the
Spanish colonial forces with dizzying speed and eventually uniting the
entire island under his rule before being shipped off to ignoble exile
and imprisonment in France by Napoleon's brother-in-law, General
Charles Leclerq. With Louverture spirited out of Haiti and imprisoned
in a jail amidst the Jura Mountains, Bell writes movingly of the petty
humiliations the courageous Louverture was forced to endure at the
behest of the pint-sized French tyrant: Stripped of his military
uniform and given peasant rags to wear, fed meager rations and given
inadequate heating during a brutal French winter, Louverture died in
prison in April 1803.

When Bell attempts to bring Louverture's legacy up to the present day,
his footing is less sure, and he unquestioningly repeats popular myths
regarding Haiti's recent history that, coming after such detailed and
comprehensive analysis of its distant past, strike the reader as
disappointingly facile. One is left wishing that Bell had displayed as
much interest in the nuances of the democratic struggle in Haiti's
second century as he did in its outset, but the overall effect doesn't
diminish the value of what has come before.

Despite its imperfections, though, the biography serves as a
well-researched and timely reminder that Haiti's political travails are
no recent phenomenon, and that human beings, however symbolic they may
become, are creatures of complex motivation, not easily summed up by
the empty sloganeering that has characterized much of the recent debate
on Louverture's tormented homeland. Before there was the legend, there
was the man, and Bell's book does all students of Haiti a favor by
bringing a bit of him back to public consciousness.

Michael Deibert is the author of Notes from the Last Testament: The
Struggle for Haiti.